History

Tuesday

Stuart Evers

Journey of discovery: Beginning Middle End, by Valeria Luiselli, reviewed

From our UK edition

Valeria Luiselli’s previous novel Lost Children Archive (2019) was a formally inventive, highly erudite reworking of the American family road trip, a bravura performance that won both the Dublin Literature Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize. Her follow up, Beginning Middle End, is a formally inventive, highly erudite reworking of a European family road trip. The framework might be the same – even down to the inclusion of Polaroid pictures – but this is far from a pale retread of earlier themes. It is a visionary portrait of three generations of women, as well as the times in which we find ourselves. Mother and Daughter have escaped New York and are housesitting for the Pianist in Sicily.

Tuesday

Olivia Potts

All aboard for Paisley: a trip round unloved Britain

From our UK edition

‘Most people who have been to Crewe station have never been to Crewe.’ In a moment of serendipity, my train pulls into Crewe station at the exact moment I turn the page to begin the chapter ‘Changing Tracks’ in Chris Moss’s new travelogue Where Tourists Seldom Tread. In his Guardian column ‘Postcards from Britain’, Moss visits and reconsiders ‘improbable, bypassed and unloved’ destinations, such as Warrington, Gateshead, Paisley, Clacton-on-Sea – and Crewe, which my train from London has reached after no small delay. Moss is right, of course: I have travelled through Crewe more times than I have eaten disappointing Upper Crust baguettes, but I have never actually been into the town.

Thursday

Peter Wood

New York is built on the remnants of its past

When I walk across the Wakefield Avenue Bridge, high above the Bronx River, the Metro-North Railroad tracks and a long-abandoned patch of woods, I always stop to marvel. Fifty feet from the ground, the skeleton of a child’s bicycle hangs, its frame embedded deep in the tree trunk. Once upon a time, some little boy left his bike in the weeds and a seedling tree on its way skyward simply absorbed it. There’s a technical name for this: edaphoecotropism. It turns out the omnivorous tree beneath the Wakefield Bridge is not alone. A website devoted to “Trees Eating Things” – road signs mostly, but junked cars and even a rifle – serves a “community” of people who celebrate this diet. New York, like most cities, is built on the remnants of its past.

Thursday

Roger Kimball

The Smithsonian hates America

In the extensive coverage of this year’s July 4 celebrations in Washington, DC, it was often mentioned that 850,000 fireworks were detonated in the course of the evening. In fact, there were 850,001. For in addition to the extraordinary visual panoply on view there was a quieter but no less breathtaking detonation that day: the sobering 162-page report about the Smithsonian Institution issued by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council.

Wednesday

Max Jeffery

The truth about how the British Empire is taught in schools

From our UK edition

William Dalrymple says that children ‘don’t learn’ about the British Empire at school. It is an ‘elephant in the room’, he claimed on the Green party leader Zack Polanski’s Bold Politics podcast last week. This isn’t true. I learnt about the Empire at school. Studying A-level history a decade ago, we spent a year covering the Raj. The Indian Mutiny, 1857. The Amritsar Massacre, 1919. On viciously cold mornings, my teacher, Ms Pearmain, would open the windows and say that boys’ brains were slowed by comfort. It kept her lessons in my head. It would have taken Dalrymple a few seconds to do some research and realise his error. In schools which follow the national curriculum, lessons about the British Empire are prescribed by the government.

Sunday

Anastasia Brown

How Grandma Moses’s art shaped American history

Growing up on the border of Pennsylvania and Ohio, I am well acquainted with a good country fair – that uniquely rural convergence of rodeo games, fried food, barnyard smells and arts and crafts. Washington DC too is now relishing the American-ness of state fairs by hosting the Great American State Fair in the weeks leading up to the semi-quincentennial. And the Smithsonian American Art Museum has prepared a temporary exhibition celebrating a quintessential American artist who first debuted her works at state fairs in rural New York. That gallery is Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work, a collection of 88 paintings which will be in DC until July 12, and then heads on tour.

Grandma Moses

Saturday

Peter Parker

The problem with ‘queer art’

In 1911, Duncan Grant’s “Bathing” went on display as part of a design scheme for the dining room of the Borough Polytechnic in Southwark. This large painting depicts a group of strongly muscled male bathers diving, swimming and hauling themselves into a boat. Only one of them is wearing a bathing slip, and while this kind of spectacle might have been familiar to anyone educated at a public school at this period, the art critic of the Times complained that it could well have “a degenerative influence on the children of the working class.” The picture now hangs in Tate Britain, and is used on the gallery’s website to direct people to an account of “Queer Life and Art.

art

Friday

Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul

Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul’s cocktail of choice for toasting the 250th

There’s something special about raising a glass with people you’ve built history with. For us, Dos Hombres has always been about friendship, craftsmanship and creating moments that bring people together. As America turns 250, we’ll be toasting to the freedom to build something of your own, the people who’ve been with you from the beginning and the simple joy of slowing down long enough to appreciate it all. Ingredients for one serving 1 oz Dos Hombres Blanco Tequila 60ml cranberry juice 1 oz Cranberry Juice (sweetened) 1/2 oz Aperol 1/2 oz Fresh Lime Juice Add all the ingredients into a mixing pitcher with ice. Shake well and strain into a large rocks glass rimmed with salt and chili powder.

Dos Hombres
Simon Jenkins

The making of America

The story of the United States was determined from the start by the manner of its birth. The original 13 English colonies may seem lost in the distant past. Yet it was their diversity that was the key to their union. The creation of the US reflected the tensions of 17th-century England, pitting the Puritan republicans of Massachusetts against the landed gentry of Virginia, Quaker New Jersey against Catholic Maryland. The Founding Fathers resolved these tensions by instituting the concept of states’ rights. Their Constitution was a tissue of compromise, yet it was robust. What served to unite 13 colonies still holds together the mightiest nation on Earth.

America
Christopher Caldwell

America is still an English country

Americans have been enjoined, as we approach our country’s 250th anniversary, to be a bit more grateful. Good advice. It is not just the freedom of speech and the purple mountains’ majesties we should be taking stock of. It is also our knack, in recent decades, for miseducating ourselves, failing to read the signs of the times, making wrong choices – and then profiting from the fallout. In the global financial crisis that ran for a decade after 2008, blunders in American financial engineering, from complex derivatives to mortgage-backed securities, bankrupted debtor countries and cost several others their sovereignty, most notoriously Greece.

england
Spectator Editorial

America at 250 remains an exceptional country

Who could ever have imagined what was being unleashed on the world when Thomas Gage ordered 700 Redcoats to march out from Boston and seize supplies in the town of Concord? Who could have dreamed, 250 years ago, what would be built by the descendants of those 56 men who put their names to the Declaration of Independence while gathered in the Pennsylvania State House? The United States of America turns 250 having enjoyed a near-uninterrupted run of success unmatched in world history. By her 100th birthday, the US was already master of an entire continent. By her 200th, she had won two world wars, invented the airplane, the atomic bomb and the transistor; created the motion picture and rock ’n’ roll; become the first automobile nation and put a man on the Moon.

Friday

Peter Frankopan

The real ‘Thucydides Trap’ Beijing and Washington must avoid

These are good times to be a scholar of the classical world. Last summer, Donald Trump issued an order that all federal architecture needed to be “beautiful,” noting that the Founding Fathers “wanted America’s public buildings to inspire the American people and encourage civic virtue.” George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had therefore “consciously modeled the most important buildings in Washington, DC, on the classical architecture of ancient Athens and Rome.” It was time to go back to these principles, said Trump. From now on “classical architecture shall be the preferred and default architecture for Federal public buildings” in the District of Columbia.

Thursday

Gage Klipper

Is it OK to be a horse guy?

Is it gay to be a horse guy? According to my parents, the answer, hilariously, is “yes.” I never grew up riding in a very professional or competitive manner because, as I recently learned as an adult, my parents thought it was just too gay. Everyone knows the stereotype of a horse girl. My parents certainly did, after raising two girls in the horse-show world. Linked to social privilege, emotional intensity and a bit of naivety, the horse girl eventually shifts the obsession with her horse into her boyfriend and becomes the caricature of a high-maintenance clinger. I can see why my parents wanted to avoid that type of socialization for their only son. But the stereotype isn’t all true (my sisters turned out normal.

Thursday

Nigel Biggar

David Abulafia was a rare, truth-seeking historian

Death arrives on a day just like any other, often rudely unheralded. We all know that, but it never ceases to shock. So it was with news that David Abulafia had died on Saturday night. Notwithstanding his lifelong fascination with the Mediterranean, David was a Brexiteer in 2016 Readers of The Spectator will know him as one of the shockingly small number of professional historians who care enough about the historical truth – and the public’s perception of it – to risk woke ire in exposing ideologically fabricated history for the corrupting trash it is. So, last June here he was, in these pages, debunking yet another attempt to make the past a boring, narcissistic mirror of ourselves, by claiming that the "diverse" Vikings were sometimes black and Muslim.

david abulafia

Wednesday

Peter Jones

Only divine intervention can save Labour

From our UK edition

A party that can foretell the future stands a very good chance of success. Given Labour’s record of U-turns, they cannot even foretell the present. A state’s success in the ancient world depended on its mastery of natural resources: the more land and people you controlled, the more powerful you were. So states were frequently at war and naturally sought the favour of the gods – by consulting oracles, entrails and flights of birds, or striking lucky by means of dreams, omens, sneezes, odd events and suchlike. However, there were no guarantees. ‘A prophecy is the guess of a sensible man’ (Euripides), ‘No good has ever come from prophecy’ (Aeschylus). Menander hit the spot, when a character desired ‘A future not as I wish, but to my benefit.

Monday

Peter Jones

How the ancients anticipated the apocalypse

From our UK edition

What with the threat of global warming and nuclear war, the new year might start with a big bang. The Greeks were preoccupied with this possibility as well and called it the apocalypse (apokalupsis), meaning ‘uncovering’ or ‘revelation’. It has a long history behind it. The Greek farmer-poet Hesiod (c. 700 BC) introduced the idea of a sequence of five ages – golden, silver, bronze, heroic, iron, each worse than the other – repeated five times and ending in total destruction. In his magnificent On the Nature of the Universe, the Roman poet Lucretius (d. c. 55 BC), who was an atomist, described how a world made of atoms would slowly decay and crumble into ruin – which he thought nature was doing in his own time – but would then renew itself. The evidence?

Tuesday

Charles Cornish-Dale

Why are we so obsessed with Hitler’s penis?

We care about Adolf Hitler’s penis, as a society. Quite a lot, it seems. A British documentary claims, finally, to have solved the mystery of the Nazi leader’s schwanz – was it big or was it small? – and to have proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the famous chant of “Hitler’s only got one ball,” a favorite among British soldiers, wasn’t just an idle insult. The key evidence is genetic: a blood-stained piece of fabric from the Hitler bunker. The documentary filmmakers tested it against a sample from one of Hitler’s closest living relatives to make sure the blood was his. And it was. That meant his genome could be sequenced and then analyzed for genetic clues about his personality, health and, of course, his manhood.

Hitler

Thursday

Tucker Carlson

The strange death of England

Whatever happened to Britain, or the UK, or England, or whatever they're calling it? We can't even agree on what it's called. But what happened to England, the England that, if you're over 50, you grew up learning about, the England that controlled the world, the England that ran the largest empire in human history at the end of World War One?  Britain, which is an island in a pretty inhospitable climate, controlled literally a quarter of the Earth's surface – and not controlled in the way the United States controls the rest of the world with an implied threat or with economic ties through trade, but with administrators and people sitting at desks with eyeshades, counting things.

Peter Jones

What the newspapers reported in ancient Rome

From our UK edition

Nero’s personal amphitheatre, recently discovered near the Vatican, was praised to the skies in the ancient Romans’ ‘newspaper’. The historian Tacitus commented drily that it ought to carry stories of much greater historical merit. The ‘newspaper’ was the Acta Diurna (‘Daily Events’), written on papyrus by actuarii, posted up on an Album (whiteboard) in the Roman forum and elsewhere, and left for a few days before being taken down and put into storage for future reference (no copies survive). It was Julius Caesar’s ‘very first act as consul (59 bc) to ensure that the proceedings both of the Senate and of the people should be published daily’.

Tuesday

Andrew Irwin

The pedant’s progress through history

From our UK edition

No one likes a pedant. But over the past few millennia, people have shunned pedants, bores and know-it-alls for a wide range of different, often conflicting, reasons. They have been accused of obscuring the path to true philosophical knowledge and of putting learning on too high a pedestal; they’ve been regarded as unfit to be democratic leaders; too unskilled in the aristocratic virtues; too keen to rise above their natural class; and as stubborn impediments to a true comprehension of the divine. At times they’ve been deemed too unmanly and too feeble; at others, far too boorish, charmless, unable to think for themselves and probably horrible at parties. Arnoud S.Q.