Category Archives: History

The Fascination of Holidays

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This fascinating bit of ephemera came into the house not long ago. Fascinating to me, anyway: a list of holidays in various countries. The front.

The back.

It isn’t very large — about 5¼ x 4¼ inches — and is a page in a 2022 calendar produced by an international logistics firm. Holidays of 28 nations and the Hong Kong SAR. Why those? Maybe those are the countries in which the company does business.
Anyway, it’s good for browsing, a sort of mini version of endlessly interesting The American Book of Days or (more accurately) The International Book of Days.

So I browsed some February holidays. Shaheed Day, for example, two days past now for this year. I’d never heard of it. There’s quite a back story.

“This major public holiday in Bangladesh is always celebrated on February 21st,” notes Office Holidays.

“Known as Shaheed Day, ‘Ekushe’ (21st), Language Movement Day, Martyrs’ Day and ‘Shôhid Dibôs’ in Bengali, this day commemorates those who lost their lives in the struggle for the Bengali language in 1952.”

Eh? The holiday’s origin goes back to the old East Pakistan days, it seems. Soon after independence from the UK, the Urdu-speaking bosses in Karachi (Islamabad didn’t exist yet) went about trying to suppress the Bengali language in East Pakistan.

Naturally, the Bengalis resisted, and things came to a head on February 21, 1952, when police killed a number of students at a pro-Bengali language protest. That was like pouring gasoline on the situation, and eventually (a few stubborn years later), West Pakistan threw in the towel when it came to Bengali language suppression.

Also, much more recently, UNESCO made February 21 International Mother Language Day, for what that’s worth. A lot of mother languages are dying out. Recently, the last known native speaker of Yaghan, one of Chile’s indigenous languages, died at 93.

February Presidents

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Almost forgot about “Presidents Day,” as AP recommends it be styled (no apostrophe). It’s fairly forgettable, especially when it’s an ordinary work day. As I’ve mentioned before, there isn’t any agreement among the several states about exactly what’s being celebrated, or what it should be called, though federal law specifies Washington’s Birthday.

Not such a bad thing, I believe. It’s Washington we’re honoring, not Kim Il-sung. Lockstep not required.

Those U.S. presidents born in February include not only Washington (22nd, N.S., 11th, O.S.) and Lincoln (12th) but also Ronald Reagan (6th) and famed short-timer William Henry Harrison (9th).

Of course, Washington and Lincoln get most of the attention. Often in the same image. This series dates from 1865. For obvious reasons.

Not an array that you see much any more in popular images of these presidents. The Victorians had different sensibilities, after all. The second one at least is an albumen print after a painting by Stephen James Ferris (1835-1915), a Philadelphia engraver, etcher, illustrator and portraitist.

Charlotte 2017

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Has it been five years since I visited Charleston? It has. Seems like an age ago, but so does everything before about two years ago. Still, it was a good trip, and it reminds me that I ought visit that part of the country again.

To facilitate my visit to Charleston, I flew in and out of Charlotte, driving from there. That was another place I’d never been but, interestingly, had been writing about as a real estate market for a few years at that point (I don’t any more).

I was able to spend a few hours looking around downtown Charlotte, which is actually known as Uptown Charlotte. It was a hopping real estate market at the time, with a lot of construction.Charlotte 2017
Charlotte 2017

Along with fairly recent developments, such as this apartment tower (VUE, completed in 2010).Charlotte 2017

I also spotted some Uptown Charlotte artwork, such as “Grande Disco” (1974) by Arnaldo Pomodoro, a Milanese sculptor who’s still alive, at last report, at 95.Charlotte 2017

It’s in a plaza near the intersection of Tryon and Trade streets. At the four street corners of that intersection are four sculptures — allegories representing Commerce, Industry, Transportation, and The Future, by Raymond Kaskey.

I only have presentable pictures of two of them. Apparently this is Commerce, which was kicked off in the area in the 1830s when gold was discovered.
Charlotte 2017

For Industry, a woman wearing textiles. Because that was an early industry in the region. More about the sculptures is at an article published by WCNC the same year I visited.Charlotte 2017

I can’t track down this memorable image, and I didn’t take notes, but it was on a brick wall not too far from Tryon St. Maybe it’s gone now.Charlotte 2017

Something that’s definitely not on Tryon St. any more, but it was when I wandered by in 2017: a memorial to Judah Benjamin.Charlotte 2017

“Though Benjamin had no connection to Charlotte — his only tie was a week he spent hiding there after the end of the Civil War — the United Daughters of the Confederacy presented the granite monument to the city [in 1948], choosing the spot of his supposed few days in hiding,” Smithsonian magazine says.

It was a dowdy thing, and I feel certain that the memorial was ignored by almost everyone until the summer of 2020. Then it got some attention.

“Steps away from the monument, a new Black Lives Matter street mural, commissioned by the city, burst into colorful view this summer [2020],” Smithsonian continues. “Around the same time, city workers finally extracted the Benjamin stone after a protestor spray-painted it with ‘BLM’ and took a sharp implement to it, though a spokesman says the city is ‘evaluating how best to preserve’ it.”

Tuross Head Tangent

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While looking into Australia-related matters today, since it’s Australia Day, I looked up Tuross Head. It’s a small village on the coast of New South Wales.

I already knew that, since just after Christmas 1991, I spent a few days nearby, guests of the hospitable Clark family, one of whom I knew in Japan. I spent a good while one day wandering around the fine coastline at Tuross, rocky shores enlivened by distinctly unfamiliar flora, though that doesn’t really show in my snapshots.Tuross Head 1991 Tuross Head 1991 Tuross Head 1991

More recently, as in today, Wiki informed me that one Eva Mylott (1875-1920) was born in Tuross Head. She was a popular opera singer from Australia, and also so happens to be Mel Gibson’s paternal grandmother, though she was never to know him, since she died when her own children were very young.

That’s her, in a photo from the collection of the State Library of New South Wales.

Then I started reading about her son, Mel’s father, Hutton Gibson (1918-2020). While he didn’t have the platform of celebrity, the elder Gibson had quite a career as a crackpot, back when that meant pamphlets and physical-medium videos or appearing on local radio or talking to people in person about your ideas. Just as the Internet has become a vast conduit of more or less factual information, so too vast eddies of crackpot nonsense now flow through it; but that’s a rant for another time.

Crackpot dad, eh Mel? There’s a Japanese proverb for this situation: kaeru no ko wa kaeru (蛙の子は蛙). Literally, a tadpole is a frog. The less poetic English — though it has some resonance, both as sound and emotionally as meaning — would be, like father, like son.

Tuesday Humor

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Up to balmy double-digit Fahrenheit numbers this afternoon, barely, as a brilliant sun reminded me that in January a sunny day usually means it’s cold as Swedish hell.

I didn’t know Dave Barry was still doing his annual humor piece, or even that he was still alive, but so he is on both counts. Found that out today.

In case the Washington Post is behind a paywall, here’s an essential nugget from Barry:

At this point these are the known facts about the pandemic in America:

Many Americans have been vaccinated but continue to act as though they have not.

Many other Americans have not been vaccinated but act as though they have.

Next, a joke that’s evidently begin kicking around a while. I spotted it this morning. I’ve put it, as they used to say in school, in my own words.

Just before he was appointed chancellor, Hitler — always with an interest in the occult — visited a fortune teller and asked her a number of questions, including what day he would die.

The fortune teller told him that he would die on a Jewish holiday.

“How do you know that?” an outraged Hitler demanded.

“Any day you die will be a Jewish holiday.”

Lawless Roads, A Greene Enthusiast & The Pecan-Shellers Strike

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Really nice sunset today, red-grays among the lingering clouds that had dropped snow earlier in the day. Too good, I decided, to capture in digital image form. Besides, it’s cold out there.

I picked up Lawless Roads again last night. It was the book I took with me to New York last month, reading about half. Very near the end of my outbound flight, a youngish fellow in the middle seat next to me spied the cover and told me he’d never heard of the book, even though he thought he’d read all of Graham Greene.

I told him it was one of his handful of travel books. He said he would find it and read it. We had to get off the plane pretty soon after that, so I didn’t discuss Greene any further with him. That may be just as well, since I’ve only read a few of his titles, such as The Quiet American, Journey Without Maps, The Third Man, and Travels With My Aunt. I liked all of them, but don’t count myself as an enthusiast.

Early in the book, Greene visits San Antonio, and mentions in passing the city’s pecan shelling industry, whose poorly paid and ill-treated workers were on strike at the time (early 1938).

One thing that struck me was the size of the industry: “Forty-seven pecan shelleries lying discreetly out of sight in San Antonio and they shell in a good year, twenty-one million pounds of nuts,” according to Greene.

“In the 1930s Texas pecans accounted for approximately 50 percent of the nation’s production,” the Handbook of Texas says, revealing an even larger industry than Greene thought. “San Antonio was the Texas shelling center because half the commercial Texas pecans grew within a 250-mile radius of the city.

“The pecan-shelling industry was one of the lowest-paid industries in the United States, with a typical wage ranging between two and three dollars a week. In the nearly 400 shelling factories in San Antonio the contracting system was prevalent; the large firms controlled the supply of nuts as well as the prices for shelling.

“Working conditions were abysmal — illumination was poor, inside toilets and washbowls were nonexistent, and ventilation was inadequate.”

It was a brief flowering for the labor movement in San Antonio, with mixed results, and in a few years the point was moot, with hand shellers generally replaced by machines. By the time I came along, all traces of the industry had vanished, at least as far as I knew. Its memory had vanished as well, again at least as far as I knew.

As labor actions go in San Antonio, that was one of the more memorable ones, yet somehow by the 1970s not even my former Wobbly high school U.S. history teacher, the spirited Mrs. Collins, mentioned it in class. She was from upstate New York, so perhaps had little knowledge of it herself. I had to hear about it from my Government teacher at UT Austin in the summer of ’81, who said he was an adherent of anarchism, but that’s a story for another time.

50 Francs, Luxembourg

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In the fourth or fifth grade, a number of us kids were looking at close range at a map of Europe being held up by one of our teachers, and she asked whether we could find Belgium on the map. I’m not sure why she picked that country. Maybe because it wasn’t one of the more famed places that one of us might conceivably know, such as the UK or France or (West) Germany. Maybe she wanted to show us that Europe had other places besides the big countries.

Boom! I pointed my finger right at Belgium. I might have even tapped the map accidentally. I think she was surprised, but she didn’t know my map gazing habits, especially the atlas included with our encyclopaedia set, but also road maps and whatever else we had in the house.

So I knew about the Low Countries. Even more interesting than Belgium, I thought, was Luxembourg. Tiny Luxembourg got to be its own country. How about that. As fascinated as I was with maps in those days, I might not have realized there were even smaller European countries, though of course I learned about them eventually.

In my currency envelope, I have a 50 franc note, long demonetized, from the Grand Duchy, dated 1961.
50 Francs, Luxembourg

It might actually be worth something in mint condition, but it’s worn and slightly torn, especially on the top edge of the note. That’s a sign that it was in one wallet for a long time, or a lot of wallets for a long time, with the note facing upward.

That’s Grand Duchess Charlotte on the obverse. She had a long reign, 1919 to 1964, and an even longer life, 1896 to 1985. Her grandson Henri is grand duke these days.
50 Francs, Luxembourg

The reverse depicts one-quarter of the area of Luxembourg. Just kidding. But it is a pretty small country after all (I wasn’t wrong as a kid), at a shade less than 1,000 square miles. Rhode Island is larger. So is Brewster County, Texas — actually more than six times the size of Luxembourg — as are a lot of other places.

50 Tyiyn, Kyrgyzstan

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A little-remarked consequence of the breakup of the Soviet Union: it spawned a lot of new currencies. Central Asia had a positive boomlet in new banknotes and coins in the early to mid-90s.

The effusion of notes included the production of my Kyrgyzstani 50 tyiyn note, part of a series (the country’s first) issued in 1993. The note made its way in recent years to an envelope in my possession, here in the heart of North America.50 Tyiyn, Kyrgyzstan

Fifty tyiyn is half a som, the base unit. The notes haven’t been withdrawn, but coins are apparently used for everything valued at 10 som or less these days. 1 som = about 1.2 U.S. cents, so I’ve got myself a theoretical sixth-tenths of a cent note.

No national heroes of the sub-som notes of this series, but an eagle on the (I think) obverse. The 1, 5 and 20-som notes feature an illustration of the Epic of Manas, a Kyrgyzstan work I have to admit being unfamiliar with until today.
50 Tyiyn, Kyrgyzstan

Ah, Kyrgyzstan. Most likely to be confused with Kazakhstan, at least here in the West. I have to add that it looks like Kazakhstan has some pretty nice coins.

10 Dinars, Croatia

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Seasonal lights are going dark around here, but as of this evening anyway, a cluster of five houses that includes mine still displays colorful lights: two houses on my side of the street and three on the other side. I suspect that at least one of my neighbors wanted to keep them up past Orthodox Christmas, which seems like a good reason to me.

Time to make the acquaintance of Roger Joseph Boscovich, S.J., (1711-87) or as they write in Croatia, Ruđer Josip Bošković. Or, as the man of the Enlightenment he surely was, Rogerius Iosephus Boscovicius, because Latin is where it was at.

He was on the obverse of all of the 1991 transitional currency after the independence of Croatia, from 1 dinar to 50,000 dinars. I have a 10-dinar note.10-dinar note Croatia

A native of Dubrovnik, though known as Ragusa in those days, “[Boscovich] developed the first coherent description of atomic theory in his work Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis, which is one of the great attempts to understand the structure of the universe in a single idea,” writes Fairfield University. “He held that bodies could not be composed of continuous matter, but of countless ‘point-like structures.’ ”

Funny, I remember discussions of atomic theory always starting with John Dalton, so maybe Boscovich’s ideas count as a precursor, or maybe textbooks in the English-speaking world are loath to give him the credit he deserves. I’m not enough of a historian of science — not at all — to know. Atomic theory must of seemed a radical notion 200 years ago in any case.

The article calls Boscovich “a physicist, geometer, astronomer and philosopher.” His Wikipedia entry calls him a “physicist, astronomer, mathematician, philosopher, diplomat, poet, theologian, Jesuit priest, and a polymath.” Whatever the aptness of those terms, clearly a weighty intellect. Who’s really a polymath any more? Anyone?

In 1994, Croatia retired its dinars in favor of a currency called the kuna, and so far has kept it in the face of the euro. These days, one kuna fetches about 15 U.S. cents.

On the reverse, Zagreb Cathedral. It’s horizontal on the note but certainly vertical in Zagreb. I’d hope so anyway.10 dinar note Croatia

In full, Zagreb Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, first completed in 1217 but destroyed by the Mongols not much later in that same century. Oops. It was rebuilt not long afterward, and at least the Ottomans didn’t destroy it, though earthquakes have done damage over the years, including as recently as 2020.

First Thursday of the Year Musings

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Little wind today, which made the outdoors marginally better to experience. But not much. Tonight will be really cold, an illustration of the superiority of the Fahrenheit scale for everyday use, with 0 degrees being really cold and 100 degrees really hot.

I can’t remember exactly when I read it, but years ago there was an item in Mad magazine lampooning the midcentury notion — the quaint notion, as it turned out — that Americans were going to have a surfeit of leisure time in the future, including a vast expansion of the number of holidays. Millard Fillmore’s birthday was a suggested holiday.

Well, that’s tomorrow, and I have to work. That idea about leisure time didn’t pan out anyway. But I will acknowledge the 13th president’s birthday, because why not. Besides, I paid my respects to President Fillmore in person recently.

Today’s also a good day to acknowledge the expansion, ever so slow, of the public domain, eking out growth despite the rapacious efforts of certain media oligopolists whose mascot is a rodent. Works published in 1926 are now in the public domain.

I’m happy to report that The Sun Also Rises is one of those works, to cite one of the better-known novels of 1926. I could have quoted it previously, and in fact I have, relying on notions of fair use. Now all the words are freely available, no questions asked.

“Here’s a taxidermist’s,” Bill said. “Want to buy anything? Nice stuffed dog?”

“Come on,” I said. “You’re pie-eyed.”

“Pretty nice stuffed dogs,” Bill said. “Certainly brighten up your flat.”

“Come on.”

“Just one stuffed dog. I can take ’em or leave ’em alone. But listen, Jake. Just one stuffed dog.”

“Come on.”

“Mean everything in the world to you after you bought it. Simple exchange of values. You give them money. They give you a stuffed dog.”

“We’ll get one on the way back.”

“All right. Have it your own way. Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault.”

Speaking of life between the wars…

If that song doesn’t make you smile, what will?