Historically Speaking: Marriage as a Mirror of Human Nature

From sacred ritual to declining institution, wedlock has always reflected our ideas about liberty and commitment.

The Wall Street Journal

October 26, 2023

Marriage is in decline in almost every part of the world. In the U.S., the marriage rate is roughly six per 1,000 people, a fall of nearly 60% since the 1970s. But this is still high compared with most of the highly developed countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, where the average marriage rate has dropped below four per 1,000. Modern vie

History of Marriage

THOMAS FUCHS

ws on marriage are sharply divided: In a recent poll, two in five young adult Americans said that the institution has outlived its usefulness.

The earliest civilizations had no such thoughts. Marriage was an inseparable part of the religious and secular life of society. In Mesopotamian mythology, the first marriage was the heavenly union between Innana/Ishtar, the goddess of war and love, and her human lover, the shepherd Dumuzi. Each year, the high point of the religious calendar was the symbolic re-enactment of the Sacred Marriage Rite by the king and the high priestess of the city.

Throughout the ancient world, marriage placed extra constraints on women while allowing polygamy for men. The first major change to the institution took place in ancient Greece. A marriage between one man and one woman, with no others involved, became the bedrock of democratic states. According to Athenian law, only the son of two married citizens could inherit the rights of citizenship. The change altered the definition of marriage to give it a civic purpose, although women’s subordination remained unchanged.

At the end of the 1st century B.C., Augustus Caesar, the founder of the Roman Empire, tried to use the law to reinvigorate “traditional” marriage values. But it was the Stoic philosophers who had the greatest impact on ideas about marriage, teaching that its purpose included personal fulfillment. The 1st-century philosopher Musonius Rufus argued that love and companionship weren’t just incidental benefits but major purposes of marriage.

The early Church’s general hostility toward sex did away with such views. Matrimony was considered less desirable than celibacy; priests didn’t start officiating at wedding ceremonies until the 800s. On the other hand, during the 12th century the Catholic Church made marriage one of the seven unbreakable sacraments. In the 16th century, its intransigence on divorce resulted in King Henry VIII establishing the Anglican Church so he could leave Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn.

In the U.S. after the Civil War, thousands of former slaves applied for marriage certificates from the Freedmen’s Bureau. Concurrently, between 1867 and 1886, there were 328,716 divorces among all Americans. The simultaneous moves by some to escape the bonds of matrimony, and by others to have the right to claim it, highlight the institution’s peculiar place in our ideas of individual liberty.

In 1920, female suffrage transformed the nature of marriage yet again, implicitly recognizing the right of wives to a separate legal identity. Still, the institution survived and even thrived. At the height of World War II in 1942, weddings were up 83% from the previous decade.

Though marriage symbolizes stability, its meaning is unstable. It doesn’t date or fall behind; for better or worse, it simply reflects who we are.

Historically Speaking: The Many Ingredients of Barbecue

Native Americans, European settlers and African slaves all contributed to creating an American culinary tradition.

The Wall Street Journal

August 18, 2023

There are more than 30,000 BBQ joints in the U.S., but as far as the Michelin Guide is concerned, not one of them is worthy of a coveted star. Many Americans would say that the fault, dear Brutus, is not in ourselves but in the stars.

A 1562 illustration shows Timucua Indians roasting animals on a raised wooden platform, the original form of barbecuing.

The American barbecue—cooking meat with an indirect flame at low temperature over seasoned wood or charcoal—is a centuries-old tradition. (Using the term for any kind of outdoor grilling came much later.) Like America itself, it is a cultural hybrid. Indigenous peoples in the Caribbean and the Americas would place a whole animal carcass on a wooden platform several feet above a fire and let the smoke do the cooking. The first Spanish arrivals were fascinated by the technique, and translated a native word for the platform as “barbacoa.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (right) and Hubert Humphrey celebrate their election victory with barbecue, November 1964.

The Europeans began to barbecue pigs and cattle, non-native animals that easily adapted to the New World. Another important culinary contribution—using a ground trench instead of a raised platform—may have been spread by African slaves. The 18th century African abolitionist Olaudah Equiano described seeing the Miskito of Honduras, a mixed community of Indians and Africans, barbecue an alligator: “Their manner of roasting is by digging a hole in the earth, and filling it with wood, which they burn to coal, and then they lay sticks across, on which they set the meat.”

European basting techniques also played a role. The most popular recipes for barbecue sauce reflect historic patterns of immigration to the U.S.: British colonists used a simple concoction of vinegar and spices, French émigrés insisted on butter, and German settlers preferred their native mustard. In the American West, two New World ingredients, tomatoes and molasses, formed the basis of many sauces. The type of meat became another regional difference: pork was more plentiful in the South, beef in the West.

Although labor-intensive, a barbecued whole hog can feed up to 150 people, making it the ideal food for communal gatherings. In 1793, President George Washington celebrated the laying of the cornerstone for the Capitol building with an enormous barbecue featuring a 500-pound ox.

In the South before the Civil War, a barbecue meant a hog cooked by slaves. The choicest cuts from the pig’s back went to the grandees, hence the phrase “living high on the hog.” Emancipation brought about a culinary reckoning; Southern whites wanting a barbecue had to turn to cookbooks, such as “Mrs Hill’s New Cook Book,” published in 1867 for “inexperienced Southern housekeepers…in this peculiar crisis of our domestic as well as national affairs.”

In the 20th century, the slower rate of urbanization outside the North helped to keep the outdoor barbecue alive. As a Texan, President Lyndon B. Johnson used “barbecue diplomacy” to project a folksy image, breaking with the refined European style of the Kennedys to endear himself to ordinary Americans. The ingredients in Lady Bird Johnson’s barbecue sauce embraced as many regional varieties as possible by including butter, ketchup and vinegar.

Commercial BBQ sauces, which first became available in 1909, offer a convenient substitute for making your own. But for most people, to experience real barbecue requires that other quintessentially American pastime, the road trip. Just leave the Michelin Guide at home.

Historically Speaking: Saving Lives With Lighthouses

Since the first one was built in ancient Alexandria, lighthouses have helped humanity master the danger of the seas.

The Wall Street Journal

July 21, 2023

For those who dream big, there will be a government auction on Aug. 1 for two decommissioned lighthouses, one in Cleveland, Ohio, the other in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Calling these lighthouses “fixer-uppers,” however, hardly does justice to the challenge of converting them into livable

France’s Cordouan Lighthouse. GETTY IMAGES

homes. Lighthouses were built so man could fight nature, not sit back and enjoy it.

The Lighthouse of Alexandria, the earliest one recorded, was one of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World. An astonishing 300 feet tall or more, it was commissioned in 290 B.C. by Ptolemy I Soter, the founder of Egypt’s Ptolemaic dynasty, to guide ships into the harbor and keep them from the dangerous shoals surrounding the entrance. No word existed for lighthouse, hence it was called the Pharos of Alexandria, after the small islet on which it was located.

The Lighthouse did wonders for the Ptolemies’ reputation as the major power players in the region. The Romans implemented the same strategy on a massive scale. Emperor Trajan’s Torre de Hercules in A Coruña, in northwestern Spain, can still be visited. But after the empire’s collapse, its lighthouses were abandoned.

More than a thousand years passed before Europe again possessed the infrastructure and maritime capacity to need lighthouses, let alone build them. The contrasting approaches of France and England says much about the two cultures. The French regarded them as a government priority, resulting in such architectural masterpieces as Bordeaux’s Cordouan Lighthouse, commissioned by Henri III in 1584. The English entrusted theirs to Trinity House, a private charity, which led to inconsistent implementation. In 1707, poor lighthouse guidance contributed to the sinking of Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s fleet off the coast of the Scilly Isles, costing his and roughly 1,500 other lives.

Ida Lewis saved at least 18 people from drowning as the lighthouse keeper of Lime Rock in Newport, R.I.

In 1789, the U.S. adopted a third approach. Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, argued that federal oversight of lighthouses was an important symbol of the new government’s authority. Congress ordered the states to transfer control of their existing lighthouses to a new federal agency, the U.S. Lighthouse Establishment. But in the following decades Congress’s chief concern was cutting costs. America’s lighthouses were decades behind Europe’s in adopting the Fresnel lens, invented in France in 1822, which concentrated light into a powerful beam.

The U.S. had caught up by the time of the Civil War, but no amount engineering improvements could lessen the hardship and dangers involved in lighthouse-keeping. Isolation, accidents and deadly storms took their toll, yet it was one of the few government jobs open to women. Ida Lewis saved at least 18 people from drowning during her 54-year tenure of Lime Rock Station off Newport, R.I.

Starting in the early 1900s, there were moves to convert lighthouses to electricity. The days of the lighthouse keeper were numbered. Fortunately, when a Category 4 hurricane hit Galveston, Texas, on Sept. 8, 1900, its lighthouse station was still fully manned. The keeper, Henry C. Claiborne, managed to shelter 125 people in his tower before the storm surge engulfed the lower floors. Among them were the nine survivors of a stranded passenger train. Claiborne labored all night, manually rotating the lens after its mechanical parts became stuck. The lighthouse was a beacon of safety during the storm, and a beacon of hope afterward.

To own a lighthouse is to possess a piece of history, plus unrivaled views and not a neighbor in sight—a bargain whatever the price.

The Sunday Times: I don’t want to fight about it but this talk of US civil war is overblown

Experts on conflict predict unrest, but America has a long way to go before it is as divided as it was in 1861

The Sunday Times

January 9, 2022

Violence is in the air. No one who saw the shocking scenes during the Capitol riot in Washington on January 6, 2021, can pretend that it was just a big misunderstanding. Donald Trump and his allies attempted to retain power at all costs. Terrible things happened that day. A year later the wounds are still raw and the country is still polarised. Only Democratic leaders participated in last week’s anniversary commemoration; Republicans stayed away. The one-year mark has produced a blizzard of warnings that the US is spiralling into a second civil war.

Only an idiot would ignore the obvious signs of a country turning against itself. Happy, contented electorates don’t storm their parliament (although terrified and oppressed peoples don’t either). America has reached the point where the mid-term elections are no longer a yawn but a test case for future civil unrest.

Predictably, the left and right are equally loud in their denunciations of each other. “Liberals” look at “conservatives” and see the alt-right: white supremacists and religious fanatics working together to suppress voting rights, women’s rights and democratic rights. Conservatives stare back and see antifa: essentially, progressive totalitarians making common cause with socialists and anarchists to undermine the pillars of American freedom and democracy. Put the two sides together and you have an electorate that has become angry, suspicious and volatile.

The looming threat of a civil war is almost the only thing that unites pundits and politicians across the political spectrum. Two new books, one by the Canadian journalist Stephen Marche and the other by the conflict analyst Barbara Walter, argue that the conditions for civil war are already in place. Walter believes that America is embracing “anocracy” (outwardly democratic, inwardly autocratic), joining a dismal list of countries that includes Turkey, Hungary and Poland. The two authors’ arguments have been boosted by the warnings of respected historians, including Timothy Snyder, who wrote in The New York Times that the US is teetering over the “abyss” of civil war.

If you accept the premise that America is facing, at the very least, a severe test of its democracy, then it is all the more important to subject the claims of incipient civil war to rigorous analysis. The fears aren’t baseless; the problem is that predictions are slippery things. How to prove a negative against something that hasn’t happened yet? There’s also the danger of the self-fulfilling prophecy: wishing and predicting don’t make things so, although they certainly help to fix the idea in people’s minds. The more Americans say that the past is repeating itself and the country has reached the point of no return, the more likely it will be believed.

Predictions based on comparisons to Weimar Germany, Nazi Germany, the Russian Revolution and the fall of Rome are simplistic and easy to dismiss. But, just as there is absolutely no basis for the jailed Capitol rioters to compare themselves to “Jews in Germany”, as one woman recently did, arguments that equate today’s fractured politics with the extreme violence that plagued the country just before the Civil War are equally overblown — not to mention trivialising of its 1.5 million casualties.

There simply isn’t a correlation between the factors dividing America then and now. In the run-up to the war in 1861, the North and South were already distinct entities in terms of ethnicity, customs and law. Crucially, the North’s economy was based on free labour and was prone to slumps and financial panics, whereas the South’s depended on slavery and was richer and more stable. The 13 Southern states seceded because they had local government, the military and judicial institutions on side.

Today there is a far greater plurality of voters spread out geographically. President Biden won Virginia and Georgia and almost picked up Texas in 2020; in 1860 there were ten Southern states where Abraham Lincoln didn’t even appear on the ballot.

When it comes to assessing the validity of generally accepted conditions for civil breakdown, the picture becomes more complicated. A 2006 study by the political scientists Havard Hegre and Nicholas Sambanis found that at least 88 circumstances are used to explain civil war. The generally accepted ones include: a fragile economy, deep ethnic and religious divides, weak government, long-standing grievances and factionalised elites. But models and circumstances are like railway tracks: they take us down one path and blind us to the others.

In 2015 the European think tank VoxEU conducted a historical analysis of over 100 financial crises between 1870 and 2014. Researchers found a pattern of street violence, greater distrust of government, increased polarisation and a rise in popular and right-wing parties in the five years after a crisis. This would perfectly describe the situation in the US except for one thing: the polarisation and populism have coincided with falling unemployment and economic growth. The Capitol riot took place despite, not because of, the strength of the financial system.

A country can meet a whole checklist of conditions and not erupt into outright civil war (for example, Northern Ireland in the 1970s) or meet only a few of the conditions and become a total disaster. It’s not only possible for the US, a rich, developed nation, to share certain similarities with an impoverished, conflict-ridden country and yet not become one; it’s also quite likely, given that for much of its history it has held together while being a violent, populist-driven society seething with racial and religious antagonisms behind a veneer of civil discourse. This is not an argument for complacency; it is simply a reminder that theory is not destiny.

A more worrying aspect of the torrent of civil war predictions by experts and ordinary Americans alike is the readiness to demonise and assume the absolute worst of the other side. It’s a problem when millions of voters believe that the American polity is irredeemably tainted, whether by corruption, communism, elitism, racism or what have you. The social cost of this divide is enormous. According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project: “In this hyper-polarised environment, state forces are taking a more heavy-handed approach to dissent, non-state actors are becoming more active and assertive and counter-demonstrators are looking to resolve their political disputes in the street.”

Dissecting the roots of America’s lurch towards rebarbative populism requires a particular kind of micro human analysis involving real-life interviews with perpetrators and protesters as well as trawls through huge sets of data. The results have shown that, more often than not, the attribution of white supremacist motives to the Capitol rioters, or anti-Americanism to Black Lives Matter protesters, says more about the politics of the accuser than the accused.

Social media is an amplifier for hire — polarisation lies at the heart of its business models and algorithms. Researchers looking at the “how” rather than just the “why” of America’s political Balkanisation have also found evidence of large-scale foreign manipulation of social media. A recent investigation by ProPublica and The Washington Post revealed that after November 3, 2020, there were more than 10,000 posts a day on Facebook attacking the legitimacy of the election.

In 2018 a Rasmussen poll asked American voters whether the US would experience a second civil war within the next five years. Almost a third said it would. In a similar poll conducted last year the proportion had risen to 46 per cent. Is it concerning? Yes. Does it make the prediction true? Well, polls also showed a win for Hillary Clinton and a landslide for Joe Biden. So, no.

Historically Speaking: Women Who Made the American West

From authors to outlaws, female pioneers helped to shape frontier society.

The Wall Street Journal

September 9, 2020

On Sept. 14, 1920, Connecticut became the 37th state to ratify the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote. The exercise was largely symbolic, since ratification had already been achieved thanks to Tennessee on August 18. Still, the fact that Connecticut and the rest of the laggard states were located in the eastern part of the U.S. wasn’t a coincidence. Though women are often portrayed in Westerns as either vixens or victims, they played a vital role in the life of the American frontier.

The outlaw Belle Starr, born Myra Belle Shirley, in 1886.
PHOTO: ROEDER BROTHERS/BUYENLARGE/GETTY IMAGES

Louisa Ann Swain of Laramie, Wyo., was the first woman in the U.S. to vote legally in a general election, in September 1870. The state was also ahead of the pack in granting women the right to sit on a jury, act as a justice of the peace and serve as a bailiff. Admittedly, it wasn’t so much enlightened thinking that opened up these traditionally male roles as it was the desperate shortage of women. No white woman crossed the continent until 17-year-old Nancy Kelsey traveled with her husband from Missouri to California in 1841. Once there, as countless pioneer women subsequently discovered, the family’s survival depended on her ability to manage without his help.

Women can and must fend for themselves was the essential message in the ‘”Little House on the Prairie” series of books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was brought up on a series of homesteads in Wisconsin and Minnesota in the 1870s. Independence was so natural to her that she refused to say “I obey” in her marriage vows, explaining, “even if I tried, I do not think I could obey anybody against my better judgment.”

Although the American frontier represented incredible hardship and danger, for many women it also offered a unique kind of freedom. They could forge themselves anew, seizing opportunities that would have been impossible for women in the more settled and urbanized parts of the country.

This was especially true for women of color. Colorado’s first Black settler was a former slave named Clara Brown, who won her freedom in 1856 and subsequently worked her way west to the gold-mining town of Central City. Recognizing a need in the market, she founded a successful laundry business catering to miners and their families. Some of her profits went to buy land and shares in mines; the rest she spent on philanthropy, earning her the nickname “Angel of the Rockies.” After the Civil War, Brown made it her mission to locate her lost family, ultimately finding a grown-up daughter, Eliza.

However, the flip of side of being able to “act like men” was that women had to be prepared to die like men, too. Myra Belle Shirley, aka Belle Starr, was a prolific Texas outlaw whose known associates included the notorious James brothers. Despite a long criminal career that mainly involved bootlegging and fencing stolen horses, Starr was convicted only once, resulting in a nine-month prison sentence in the Detroit House of Correction. Her luck finally ran out in 1889, two days before her 41st birthday. By now a widow for the third time, Belle was riding alone in Oklahoma when she was shot and killed in an ambush. The list of suspects included her own children, although the murder was never solved.

WSJ Historically Speaking: When We Rally ‘Round the Flag: A History

Flag Day passes every year almost unnoticed. That’s a shame—it celebrates a symbol with ties to religious and totemic objects that have moved people for millennia

The Supreme Court declared in 1989 that desecrating the American flag is a protected form of free speech. That ended the legal debate but not the national one over how we should treat the flag. If anything, two years of controversies over athletes kneeling during “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which led last month to a National Football League ban on the practice, show that feelings are running higher than ever.

Yet, Flag Day—which honors the adoption of the Stars and Stripes by Congress on June 14, 1777—is passing by almost unnoticed this year, as it does almost every year. One reason is that Memorial Day and Independence Day—holidays of federally sanctioned free time, parades and spectacle—flank and overshadow it. That’s a shame, because we could use a day devoted to reflecting on our flag, a precious national symbol whose potency can be traced to the religious and totemic objects that have moved people for millennia.

The first flags were not pieces of cloth but metal or wooden standards affixed to poles. The Shahdad Standard, thought to be the oldest flag, hails from Persia and dates from around 2400 B.C. Because ancient societies considered standards to be conduits for the power and protection of the gods, an army always went into battle accompanied by priests bearing the kingdom’s religious emblems. Isaiah Chapter 49 includes the lines: “Thus saith the Lord God, Behold, I will lift up mine hand to the Gentiles, and set up my standard to the people.”

Ancient Rome added a practical use for standards—waving, dipping and otherwise manipulating them to show warring troops what to do next. But the symbols retained their aura as national totems, emblazoned with the letters SPQR, an abbreviation of Senatus Populusque Romanus, or Senate and People of Rome. It was a catastrophe for a legion to lose its standard in battle. In Germania in A.D. 9, a Roman army was ambushed while marching through Teutoburg Forest and lost three standards. The celebrated general Germanicus eventually recovered two of them after a massive and bloody campaign.

In succeeding centuries, the flag as we know it today began to take shape. Europeans and Arabs learned silk production, pioneered by China, which made it possible to create banners light enough to flutter in the wind. As in ancient days, they were most often designed with heraldic or religious motifs.

In the U.S., the design of the flag harked back to the Roman custom of an explicitly national symbol, but the Star-Spangled Banner was slow to attain its unique status, despite the popularity of Francis Scott Key’s 1814 anthem. It took the Civil War, with its dueling flags, to make the American flag an emblem of national consciousness. As the U.S. Navy moved to capture New Orleans from the Confederacy in 1862, Marines went ashore and raised the Stars and Stripes at the city’s mint. William Mumford, a local resident loyal to the Confederacy, tore the flag down and wore shreds of it in his buttonhole. U.S. General Benjamin Butler had Mumford arrested and executed.

After the war, the Stars and Stripes became a symbol of reconciliation. In 1867 Southerners welcomed Wisconsin war veteran Gilbert Bates as he carried the flag 1,400 miles across the South to show that the nation was healing.

As the country developed economically, a new peril lay in store for the Stars and Stripes: commercialization. The psychological and religious forces that had once made flags sacred began to fade, and the national banner was recruited for the new industry of mass advertising. Companies of the late 19th century used it to sell everything from beer to skin cream, leading to national debates over what the flag stood for and how it should be treated.

President Woodrow Wilson instituted Flag Day in 1916 in an effort to concentrate the minds of citizens on the values embodied in our most familiar national symbol. That’s as worthy a goal today as it was a century ago.

WSJ Historically Speaking: Mercy in Victory Is as Ancient as War

Photo: MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY/EVERETT COLLECTION

Photo: MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY/EVERETT COLLECTION

All wars involve suffering and bloodshed, but not all defeats must lead to death or living hell. One reason why next week’s 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War invites national commemoration instead of civil unrest is that, from the outset, the chief Union protagonists consciously promoted the ideal of victorious restraint toward the vanquished South.

When Gen. Ulysses S. Grant met with Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee on April 9, 1865, the Union commander showed he understood that winning the peace would be as important as winning the war. His conditions for surrender included allowing Lee’s men to keep their sidearms for protection, as well as a horse or a mule for the spring harvest. For his part, Lee urged his men to accept their defeat with dignity and to return home for good.

In later years, for all the disappointments that followed during Reconstruction, Grant’s foresight at Appomattox remained a touchstone for peace and rapprochement, helping keep the spirit of unity alive.

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Smithsonian Magazine: The British View the War of 1812 Quite Differently Than Americans Do

Photo: Bettmann/CORBIS

Photo: Bettmann/CORBIS

As we look forward to celebrating the bicentennial of the “Star-Spangled Banner” by Francis Scott Key, I have to admit, with deep shame and embarrassment, that until I left England and went to college in the U.S., I assumed the words referred to the War of Independence. In my defense, I suspect I’m not the only one to make this mistake

For people like me, who have got their flags and wars mixed up, I think it should be pointed out that there may have been only one War of 1812, but there are four distinct versions of it—the American, the British, the Canadian and the Native American. Moreover, among Americans, the chief actors in the drama, there are multiple variations of the versions, leading to widespread disagreement about the causes, the meaning and even the outcome of the war.

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