Category: History

Jewish Medical Inventor Invested in Human Capital Because That “Could Never Be Taken from Me”

Louis Sokoloff’s son Kenneth authored, or co-authored, important papers on how patents aided invention in the 1800s.

(p. A21) Dr. Louis Sokoloff, who pioneered the PET scan technique for measuring human brain function and diagnosing disorders, died on July 30 [2015] in Washington.
. . .
. . . he leapt at the opportunity when he won a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, guided by his grandfather’s advice.
“He advised me to choose a profession, any one,” he wrote, “in which all my significant possessions would reside in my mind because, being Jewish, sooner or later I would be persecuted and I would lose all my material possessions; what was contained in my mind, however, could never be taken from me and would accompany me everywhere to be used again.”
. . .
Dr. Sokoloff’s wife, the former Betty Kaiser, died in 2003, and his son, Kenneth, an economic historian, died in 2007.

For the full obituary, see:
SAM ROBERTS. “Louis Sokoloff, Pioneer of PET Scan, Dies at 93.” The New York Times (Thurs., AUG. 6, 2015): A21.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date AUG. 5, 2015.)

The Good Old Days Were Grim

(p. A15) In “Progress,” the Swedish author Johan Norberg deploys reams of data to show just how much life has improved–especially over the past few decades but over the past couple of centuries as well. Each chapter is devoted to documenting progress in a single category, including food, sanitation, life expectancy, poverty, violence, the environment, literacy and equality.
In response to people who look fondly on the “good old days,” Mr. Norberg underscores just how grim they could be. Rampant disease, famine and violence routinely killed off millions. In the 14th century, the so-called Black Death wiped out a third of Europe’s population. Five hundred years later, cholera outbreaks throughout the world led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and even killed a U.S. president, James Polk.

For the full review, see:

MATTHEW REES. “BOOKSHELF; Bending the Arc of History.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., December 13, 2016): A15.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 12, 2016,)

The book under review, is:
Norberg, Johan. Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future. London, UK: Oneworld Publications, 2016.

When Winston Churchill Met Mark Twain

(p. C13) . . . [a] pleasant immersion in America’s political history is Mark Zwonitzer’s “The Statesman and the Storyteller: John Hay, Mark Twain, and the Rise of American Imperialism.” It is a story of a friendship that flourished in spite of differences about momentous issues of war, peace and national identity. All of Mr. Zwonitzer’s pages are informative and entertaining, but none are more so than those recounting the meeting between the 65-year-old Twain and a 26-year-old British parliamentarian at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan in 1900. Suffice it to say that Twain and Winston Churchill differed vigorously about the Boer War.

For Will’s full book recommendations, see:
George F. Will. “12 Months of Reading.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 10, 2016): C13.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed word, added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 7, 2016, and has the title “George F. Will on Stalin’s last spy.”)

The book recommended, is:
Tombs, Robert. The English and Their History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.

How Englishness Developed

(p. C12) . . . , “The English and Their History” by Robert Tombs, takes the reader through the entirety of English history–from the Angles and Saxons to the present day. Remarkably, Mr. Tombs limns over a millennia of history without putting you to sleep. And lurking throughout is a fascinating and timely concept: how Englishness as an identity developed through the centuries.

For Vance’s full book recommendations, see:
J.D. Vance. “12 Months of Reading.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 10, 2016): C12.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 7, 2016, and has the title “J.D. Vance on an epic history of England.”)

The book recommended, is:
Tombs, Robert. The English and Their History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.

Intellectuals Embrace Despair

(p. A23) Public conversation is dominated by people’s ahistorical insistence that this country is sliding toward decline. As Arthur Herman writes in his book “The Idea of Decline in Western History,” “The sowing of despair and self-doubt has become so pervasive that we accept it as a normal intellectual stance — even when it is directly contradicted by our own reality.”

For the full commentary, see:
Brooks, David. “The Age of Reaction.” The New York Times (Tues., SEPT. 27, 2016): A23.

The book quoted in the above passage from the Brooks commentary, is:
Herman, Arthur. The Idea of Decline in Western History. New York: Free Press, 1997.

Modern Technology Adds to Knowledge of Culture and Religion

(p. A6) Nearly half a century ago, archaeologists found a charred ancient scroll in the ark of a synagogue on the western shore of the Dead Sea.
The lump of carbonized parchment could not be opened or read. Its curators did nothing but conserve it, hoping that new technology might one day emerge to make the scroll legible.
Just such a technology has now been perfected by computer scientists at the University of Kentucky. Working with biblical scholars in Jerusalem, they have used a computer to unfurl a digital image of the scroll.
It turns out to hold a fragment identical to the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible and, at nearly 2,000 years old, is the earliest instance of the text.
The writing retrieved by the computer from the digital image of the unopened scroll is amazingly clear and legible, in contrast to the scroll’s blackened and beaten-up exterior. “Never in our wildest dreams did we think anything would come of it,” said Pnina Shor, the head of the Dead Sea Scrolls Project at the Israel Antiquities Authority.
Scholars say this remarkable new technique may make it possible to read other scrolls too brittle to be unrolled.
. . .
The experts say this new method may make it possible to read other ancient scrolls, including several Dead Sea scrolls and about 300 carbonized ones from Herculaneum, which were destroyed by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79.
. . .
The feat of recovering the text was made possible by software programs developed by W. Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky. Inspired by the hope of reading the many charred and unopenable scrolls found at Herculaneum, near Pompeii in Italy, Dr. Seales has been working for the last 13 years on ways to read the text inside an ancient scroll.
. . .
He succeeded in 2009 in working out the physical structure of the ruffled layers of papyrus in a Herculaneum scroll.
He has since developed a method, called virtual unwrapping, to model the surface of an ancient scroll in the form of a mesh of tiny triangles. Each triangle can be resized by the computer until the virtual surface makes the best fit to the internal structure of the scroll, as revealed by the scanning method. The blobs of ink are assigned to their right place on the structure, and the computer then unfolds the whole 3-D structure into a 2-D sheet.

For the full story, see:
NICHOLAS WADE. “Technology Unlocks Secrets of a Biblical Scroll.” The New York Times (Thurs., SEPT. 22, 2016): A6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date SEPT. 21, 2016, and has the title “Modern Technology Unlocks Secrets of a Damaged Biblical Scroll.”)

“Giving Peas a Chance”

(p. C1) Thank heavens Gregor Mendel was a lousy priest. Had he shown even the faintest aptitude for oratory or ministering to the poor, he might never have determined the basic laws of heredity. But bumbling he was, and he made a rotten university student to boot; his failures drove him straight to his room, where he bred mice in secret. The experiment scandalized his superiors.
“A monk coaxing mice to (p. C4) mate to understand heredity was a little too risqué, even for the Augustinians,” writes Siddhartha Mukherjee in “The Gene: An Intimate History.” So Mendel switched — auspiciously, historically — to pea plants. The abbot in charge, writes the author, acquiesced this time, “giving peas a chance.”
Love Dr. Mukherjee, love his puns. They’re everywhere. I warn you now.
. . .
Many of the same qualities that made “The Emperor of All Maladies” so pleasurable are in full bloom in “The Gene.” The book is compassionate, tautly synthesized, packed with unfamiliar details about familiar people.
. . .
But there are also crucial differences. Cancer is the troll that scratches and thumps beneath the floorboards of our consciousness, if it hasn’t already beaten its way into the room. The subject immediately commands our attention; it’s almost impossible to deny, and not to hear, the emotional clang of its appeal. In Dr. Mukherjee’s skilled hands, the story of this frightening disease became a page-turner. He explained its history, politics and cunning biological underpinnings; he traced the evolving and often gruesome logic underlying cancer treatment.
And in the middle of it all, agonizing over treatment protocols and watching his patients struggle with tremendous existential and physical pain, was the author himself.
There are far fewer psychological stakes in reading about the history of genetics. “The Gene” is more pedagogical than dramatic; as often as not, the stars of this story are molecules, not humans.
. . .
But any book about the history of something as elemental and miraculous as the gene is bound, at least indirectly, to tell the story of innovation itself. “The Gene” is filled with scientists who dreamed in breathtakingly lateral leaps.
Erwin Schrödinger in particular was one visionary cat: In 1944, he hazarded a guess about the molecular nature of the gene and decided it had to be a strand of code scribbled along the chromosome — which pretty much sums up the essence of DNA.

For the full review, see:
JENNIFER SENIOR. “Books of The Times; In Molecular Pursuit of the Genetic Code.” The New York Times (Mon., MAY 9, 2016): C1 & C4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date MAY 8, 2016, and has the title “Books of The Times; Review: Siddhartha Mukherjee’s ‘The Gene,’ a Molecular Pursuit of the Self.”)

The book under review, is:
Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Gene: An Intimate History. New York: Scribner, 2016.

Bourgeois Ideology Caused the Great Enrichment

(p. A13) What accounts for the wealth and prosperity of the developed nations of the world? How did we get so rich, and how might others join the fold?
Deirdre McCloskey, a distinguished economist and historian, has a clarion answer: ideas. It was ideas, she insists–about commerce, innovation and the virtues that support them–that account for the “Great Enrichment” that has transformed much of the world since 1800.
. . .
. . . , this monumental achievement was caused by a change in values, Ms. McCloskey says–the rise of what she calls, in a mocking nod to Marx, a “bourgeois ideology.” It was far from an apology for greed, however. Anglo-Dutch in origin, the new ideology presented a deeply moral vision of the world that vaunted the value of work and innovation, earthly happiness and prosperity, and the liberty, dignity and equality of ordinary people. Preaching tolerance of difference and respect for the individual, it applauded those who sought to improve their lives (and the lives of others) through material betterment, scientific and technological inquiry, self-improvement, and honest work. Suspicious of hierarchy and stasis, proponents of bourgeois values attacked monopoly and privilege and extolled free trade and free lives while setting great store by prudence, enterprise, decency and hope.

For the full review, see:
DARRIN M. MCMAHON. “BOOKSHELF; The Morality of Prosperity; Grinding poverty was the norm for humanity until 1800. It changed with the rise of values like tolerance and respect for individual liberty.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., June 13, 2016): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 12, 2016.)

The book under review, is:
McCloskey, Deirdre N. Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital, Transformed the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

King Henry I Might “Have Liked Being Buried Under a Car Park”

(p. A4) LONDON — Looking for a dead medieval king? You might want to check under a parking lot.
That theory, at least, is on the minds of archaeologists and historians in Reading, about 40 miles west of London, who this week will begin searching for the high altar of the abbey founded by King Henry I. They believe that the altar — and, they hope, the king’s remains — could be under the parking lot of a local prison, near the abbey ruins. The area around a nearby nursery school will also be searched.
Nearly four years ago, archaeologists discovered King Richard III’s grave under a parking lot in Leicester, about 100 miles northwest of London, on the site of a former monastery.
. . .
John Mullaney, a historian who is part of the team undertaking the search, said that archaeologists knew “within a few yards” where Henry was probably buried. He said the team would use ground-penetrating radar to search the area around the prison, and around a nearby nursery school.
. . .
As to whether a former monarch would roll in his grave at the prospect of spending eternity under a parking lot, Mr. Mullaney was philosophical.
“I’m afraid that England is a nation of car drivers,” he said. “We are a small country and most people travel by cars, so we need lots of car parks. Henry was a reforming king and would have been fascinated by the idea of cars and transport, and may well have liked being buried under a car park.”

For the full story, see:
DAN BILEFSKY. “The Search Is On for King Henry I, Who May Be Buried Under a Parking Lot.” The New York Times (Tues., JUNE 14, 2016): A4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JUNE 13, 2016, and has the title “Search Is On for King Henry I, Who May Be Buried Under a Parking Lot.”)

Edgar Speyer Was Entrepreneur Who Created Innovative London Tube Infrastructure

(p. A13) Before World War I, Edgar Speyer headed the London branch of the German-based Speyer banking conglomerate. Among other things, he was a great lover of music. His mansion on Grosvenor Square was a cynosure for composers– Debussy, Elgar, Richard Strauss, Schoenberg–all of whom availed themselves of the luxuries of the house, playing or conducting their work in private performances. “We live even more elegantly than kings and emperors,” Grieg wrote, referring to the mansion’s suite of rooms for visitors.
Not all of Edgar Speyer’s interests were so ethereal. The British Speyer branch was a key source of railroad finance, and Edgar himself was best known for creating–in partnership with Charles Yerkes, a Chicago entrepreneur–the London tube system, with its innovative “deep-tube” design. Edgar persisted in expanding the system despite its precarious finances and for many years functioned as its chief executive.
. . .
The Speyer bank, Mr. Liebmann tells us, had roots going back to the 14th century, at the threshold of a long surge in international commerce. New forms of paper–bills of exchange, letters of credit and much else–allowed traders to leverage up their businesses quite remarkably. Over time, houses like those of Baring, Rothschild and Speyer shifted out of their traditional-goods trading for the higher volumes and higher fees available from trading just the paper claims. The Speyers were known as the leading investment and trading house in Frankfurt, Germany, usually ranked just behind the Rothschilds in the Jewish financial imperium.

For the full review, see:

CHARLES R. MORRIS. “BOOKSHELF; Second Only to the Rothschilds; Speyer banks funded the London underground, placed the first Union Civil War bonds in Europe and built the Madeira-Mamore railroad.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Jan. 26, 2016): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Jan. 25, 2016.)

The book under review, is:
Liebmann, George W. The Fall of the House of Speyer: The Story of a Banking Dynasty. London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 2015.

Franklin Was Appalled by the Boston Tea Party, But Was More Appalled by British Arrogance

(p. A13) When George III assumed the throne in 1760, Franklin was full of praise for his “virtue” and “steadiness.” Many American associates considered him somewhat sycophantic.
Mr. Goodwin’s assessment is gentler. “Franklin was a proud Briton, but he was not starry-eyed.” By 1770 he was frustrated by Britain’s “treatment of her American colonies as one giant farm and forest of raw materials.” His relations with Lord Hillsborough, secretary of state for the colonies, became venomous. Lord North, the prime minister, icily ignored him. Franklin began to produce anonymous satires rebuking British attitudes toward America.
The nadir came in December 1773, when word reached London of the Boston Tea Party. Incensed, the king’s Privy Council summoned Franklin to Westminster. He was already in bad odor for having leaked impolitic correspondence from the royal governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson. The Privy Council chamber was, on this occasion, packed with counselors and curious members of the public. Other than Edmund Burke, they were hostile. Franklin stood grimly motionless as the solicitor general pounded the table and subjected him to “an hour-long verbal assault.” The council roared approval as he accused Franklin of acting for “the most malignant purposes.” The American had “forfeited all the respect of societies and of men.”
The humiliation of Benjamin Franklin gratified the grandees of George III’s government, but the episode epitomized their arrogant maladministration. Franklin was hardly an anti-British zealot. He favored reconciliation and might have been an effective mediator had he been respected and trusted. Franklin was so appalled by the Boston Tea Party that he offered to personally repay the East India Co. That this rather Anglophilic colonial served as the Privy Council’s whipping boy demonstrates how obdurate the government had become.
Franklin’s revenge was served hot. He left England in March of 1775 under threat of arrest. Twenty months later he arrived in France, where his diplomacy would deliver a mortal blow to Britain’s American empire.

For the full review, see:
JEFFREY COLLINS. “BOOKSHELF; A Revolutionary Loyal to Britain; Franklin’s years in France resulted in military aid and recognition of American independence. His time in London? Slightly less successful.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., March 11, 2016): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 10, 2016.)

The book under review, is:
Goodwin, George. Benjamin Franklin in London: The British Life of America’s Founding Father. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016.