🐅🐅🐅 tiger tiger tiger taking out July; the rabbits of August will soon leap in, bringing us Swiss National Day
Archive for the ‘History’ Category
Tigers, rabbits, National Day
July 31, 2026Marjane Satrapi
July 26, 2026In The Economist issue of June 13th, in print; on June 11th on-line:
Obituary: Veil and beard and nuclear weapon
Marjane Satrapi set out to correct the West’s views of Iran
The author of Persepolis, an international sensation, died on June 4th, aged 56
Small worlds
July 23, 2026In recent news: the publication (on 7/6) of John D’Emilio’s latest book, Making Gay History: Memoir of a Scholar-Activist (Duke University Press). From Jonathan Ned Katz’s blurb:
a report from the trenches, a history of the struggle to create a history of sexuality, a personal history of political activism, the story of a [AZ: devoutly Catholic] smart boy from the Bronx who made himself into a pioneering, left, feminist, anti-racist gay, public intellectual.
Which prompts me to tell an anecdote about my man Jacques and me — and John D’Emilio. So my tale will of course begin with Larry Kramer, the author of the controversial novel Faggots, but more important to my tale, the founder of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, which means that through his ceaseless abrasive hectoring, he changed the world for the better and helped to save untold numbers of lives.
(There are brief accounts of Kramer and D’Emilio in my 7/21 posting “Two celebrated gays”)
Intellectual history
April 16, 2026In two parts. First, an appreciation of a piece of intellectual history written by Geoff Pullum:
Geoffrey K. Pullum, The prehistory of generative grammar and Chomsky’s debt to Emil Post, Historiographia Linguistica, October 2025
And then a puzzle about the source of the central idea in my very first academic publication (appearing in an extraordinarily obscure place):
Arnold M. Zwicky, Grammars of number theory: some examples, Working Paper W-6671, MITRE Corporation (Bedford MA), 20 November 1963 (available on-line here) — hereafter, GmNuTh
Another visit to Vienne en Isère
October 23, 2025A follow-up to my 10/21/25 posting “A world postcard”, about a card from the Librairie Lucioles (the Fireflies Bookstore) in Vienne en Isère, France. First, a bit more about the town of Vienne, with its Roman history. Then, a note on one particular feature of note, the Vienne Pyramid, an obelisk originally from the Roman circus in Vienne. Which leads to the extraordinary Vienne restaurant, Fernand Pointe’s La Pyramide, named after the circus obelisk. And then to e-mail from my old friend Benita Bendon Campbell, with a recollection of a lunch she and her husband had at the restaurant in 1971. So: from bookstore to Roman chariot races to food, glorious food.
Revolt against the bad guys
October 15, 2025From Joelle Stepien Bailard on Facebook on 10/5, passing on material from Tony Michaels’s Facebook page (“The Tony Michaels Podcast: Considered ‘The Rush Limbaugh of the Left’”), also from 10/5:
A Tony Michaels fabrication (see below)
Holy Romaine Empire
October 11, 2025🏳️🌈 👨❤️👨 🏳️🌈 National Coming Out Day, and also J&A Day, Jacques and Arnold’s wedding-equivalent anniversary (some explanation of that cooccurrence in an appendix to this posting)
The 10/8 Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip, posted here because it’s sweetly bizarre (true to the strip’s title), complex, and cleverly goofy (like the one in my 10/9/25 posting “The flannel frontier”); something to enjoy for a moment in the midst of terrible times:
(#1) A phonologically perfect pun (Caesar the salad punning on Caesar the emperor), the pun-like Holy Roman Empire (a German political entity) playing on Roman Empire (governed by the Caesars of Rome), and a phonologically imperfect pun (romaine the salad green punning on Roman) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
(The two salad puns are Wayno’s; Holy Roman Empire as a pun-like play on Roman Empire is an invention of the Roman Catholic church in Germanic lands in the early Middle Ages.)
The cartoon shows a Caesar (with laurel leaves) appearing before his people, cradling a humongous bowl of salad and waving a pair of salad servers like a weapon (Julius Caesar is often portrayed in Western art as wielding a sword). Next to him, a soldier utters a variant of the ceremonial greeting Hail Caesar! — celebrating not Caesar, but his salad.
Orange roses
September 7, 2025Sharon Gray of Bay Area Geriatric Care turned up yesterday with a surprise present for my 85th birthday: a big vase of orange roses (on the pinkish or peach side of the color), because those were the really big and beautiful roses she could find on the spur of the moment, without assigning any meaning to the color (though I’m a Princeton A.B., rah rah orange and black and all that), and indeed not knowing what the particular variety was named (you wouldn’t believe how many rose-growing companies there are in the world and what an encyclopedia of names they have registered for orange cultivars). Now located right in my line of sight as I type at my worktable:
Roses of the Orange 85th; for roses, orange seems to be the color of joy, enthusiasm, and desire, and that does feel like a good fit for me
Now, how the color orange came to be associated with Princeton is a remarkably tangled tale involving the Holy Roman Empire (the tale begins in 1163), the French region of Provence (the town of Orange), the Rheinland-Palatinate region of Germany (the town of Nassau), the Netherlands, and of course William-and-Mary, rulers of Great Britain and Ireland. Quite remarkably, oranges the fruit and the color orange have nothing to do with all this, or at least didn’t until Princeton (founded in 1746) adopted orange and black as the official colors for academic gowns in 1896, which is virtually yesterday in this context (I mean, my father and mother were born in 1914). What the story does have to do with is mostly the astounding rapacity of the great bulk of the ruling classes. I will attempt to fill in some of the details in a forthcoming posting, but today I just want to enjoy those roses.
The 5/26 New Yorker
May 24, 2025The latest issue of the magazine has two cartoons I want to pick out for comment, one (by Mick Stevens) because it’s an addition to Arnoldia, the domain of things with the name Arnold; the other (by David Sipress) because it’s a pointed comment on this alarming and dangerous time in my country.
Graphing and slavery
April 9, 2025An upcoming Stanford Humanities Center lecture:
“The Line Graph and the Slave Ship: Rethinking the Origins of Modern Data Visualization” by Lauren Klein of Emory Univ., on Tuesday 4/15, from 4–6 pm in Levinthal Hall and online
Summary: “The Line Graph and the Slave Ship” returns to the eighteenth-century origins of modern data visualization in order to excavate the meaning — and power — of visualizing data. Exploring two examples of early data visualization — the line graphs of British trade data included in William Playfair’s Commercial and Political Atlas (1786) and Description of a Slave Ship (1789) created and circulated by a group of British antislavery activists — this lecture will connect Enlightenment theories about visual and statistical knowledge to contemporaneous ideas about personhood and race.
I’m posting this as an example of the sort of fascinating research supported by the SHC, looking in fresh and unexpected ways at events, practices, and conceptualizations from many times, places, and social settings.