HistoricallySpeaking: How Fear of Sharks Became an American Obsession

Since colonial times, we’ve dreaded what one explorer called ‘the most ravenous fish known in the sea’

The Wall Street Journal

August 27, 2020

There had never been a fatal shark incident in Maine until last month’s shocking attack on a woman swimmer by a great white near Bailey Island in Casco Bay. Scientists suspect that the recent rise in seal numbers, rather than the presence of humans, was responsible for luring the shark inland.

A great white shark on the attack.
PHOTO: CHRIS PERKINS / MEDIADRUMWORLD / ZUMA PRESS

It’s often said that sharks aren’t the bloodthirsty killing machines portrayed in the media. In 2019 there were only 64 shark attacks world-wide, with just two fatalities. Still, they are feared for good reason.

The ancient Greeks knew well the horror that could await anyone unfortunate enough to fall into the wine-dark sea. Herodotus recorded how, in 492 B.C., a Persian invasion fleet of 300 ships was heading toward Greece when a sudden storm blew up around Mt. Athos. The ships broke apart, tossing some 20,000 men into the water. Those who didn’t drown immediately were “devoured” by sharks.

The Age of Discovery introduced European explorers not just to new landmasses but also to new shark species far more dangerous than the ones they knew at home. In a narrative of his 1593 journey to the South Seas, the explorer and pirate Richard Hawkins described the shark as “the most ravenous fishe knowne in the sea.”

It’s believed that the first deadly shark attack in the U.S. took place in 1642 at Spuyten Duyvil, an inlet on the Hudson River north of Manhattan. Antony Van Corlaer was attempting to swim across to the Bronx when a giant fish was seen to drag him under the water.

But the first confirmed American survivor of a shark attack was Brook Watson, a 14-year-old sailor from Boston. In 1749, Watson was serving on board a merchant ship when he was attacked while swimming in Cuba’s Havana Harbor. Fortunately, his crewmates were able to launch a rowboat and pull him from the water, leaving Watson’s right foot in the shark’s mouth.

Despite having a wooden leg, Watson enjoyed a successful career at sea before returning to his British roots to enter politics. He ended up serving as Lord Mayor of London and becoming Sir Brook Watson. His miraculous escape was immortalized by his friend the American painter John Singleton Copley. “Watson and the Shark” was completely fanciful, however, since Copley had never seen a shark.

The American relationship with sharks was changed irrevocably during the summer of 1916. The East Coast was gripped by both a heat wave and a polio epidemic, leaving the beach as one of the few safe places for Americans to relax. On July 1, a man was killed by a shark on Long Beach Island off the New Jersey coast. Over the next 10 days, sharks in the area killed three more people and left one severely injured. In the ensuing national uproar, President Woodrow Wilson offered federal funds to help get rid of the sharks, an understandable but impossible wish.

The Jersey Shore attacks served as an inspiration for Peter Benchley’s bestselling 1974 novel “Jaws,” which was turned into a blockbuster film the next year by Steven Spielberg. Since then the shark population in U.S. waters has dropped by 60%, in part due to an increase in shark-fishing inspired by the movie. Appalled by what he had unleashed, Benchley spent the last decades of his life campaigning for shark conservation.

Historically Speaking: The American Invention of Summer Camp

Since 1876, children have looked forward to their long vacation as a time to build friendships and character.

July  23, 2020

The Wall Street Journal

Hello Muddah, hello Faddah,/Here I am at Camp Granada…

With more than half of the country’s 14,000 summer camps temporarily closed because of Covid-19, millions of children are missing out on experiences that have helped to shape young Americans for nearly 150 years.

I went hiking with Joe Spivey/He developed poison ivy…

Hayley Mills plays twins who meet at summer camp in ‘The Parent Trap’ (1961).
PHOTO: EVERETT COLLECTION

The idea that a spell in the great outdoors builds character has ancient roots. The Spartans practiced a particularly rigorous form: When a warrior-in-training reached the age of 12, he was sent into the wilderness for a year. Those who gave up were barred from attaining full citizenship.

And the head coach wants no sissies/ so he reads to us from something called Ulysses…

But the modern summer camp can be traced to the Transcendentalist movement of the 1830s and ‘40s. Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson were ardent proselytizers for learning to live at one with nature. Their message resonated with the environmentalist Joseph T. Rothrock, who founded the country’s first sleep-away camp, the North Mountain School of Physical Culture, in 1876 near Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Rothrock believed he could take “weakly boys” from the city and rehabilitate them into healthy young men.

Ernest Balch was moved by ‘the miserable condition of boys from well-to-do families” who spent their summers living in hotels, rather than out in nature. He was still a Dartmouth College student when he founded Camp Chocorura in New Hampshire in 1881. Its emphasis on self-reliance and character-building became the blueprint for other summer camps.

You remember Jeffrey Hardy /They’re about to organize a searching party…

By 1918 there were over 1,000 in the U.S. Charles W. Eliot, a former president of Harvard, went so far as to declare in 1922 that summer camp was “the most important step in education that America has given the world.”

This would have been news to Britain, where Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout movement, had been running his own summer camp since 1907. But American camps were unique in their diversity, with options for every faith and political creed. The oldest camp for Black children, Camp Atwater, was founded in North Brookfleld, Mass., in 1921, at a time when summer camping was segregated; it is still going strong today.

Take me home, oh Muddah, Faddah…

Summer camp retained a wholesome image for decades. Films such as “The Parent Trap” (1961), starring Hayley Mills as separated twin sisters who are unexpectedly reunited at a summer camp, focused on innocent fun. But darker themes were coming. The “Friday the 13th” franchise, launched in 1980, has a higher body count than many war films, with much of the carnage taking place at the fictional Camp Crystal Lake.

Wait a minute, it’s stopped hailing /Guys are swimming, guys are sailing…

But summer camps continued to grow. By the mid-2010s, according to the American Camp Association, they were an $18 billion industry serving 14 million campers every year. The disappointment of missing camp this summer will hopefully make it even more joyful to return next year. As Allan Sherman’s beloved satire concludes: Muddah, Faddah, kindly disregard this letter.

Historically Speaking: The Delicious Evolution of Mayonnaise

Ancient Romans ate a pungent version, but the modern egg-based spread was created by an 18th-century French chef.

July 9, 2020

The Wall Street Journal

I can’t imagine a summer picnic without mayonnaise—in the potato salad, the veggie dips, the coleslaw, and yes, even on the french fries. It feels like a great dollop of pure Americana in a creamy, satisfying sort of way. But like a lot of what makes our country so successful, mayonnaise originally came from somewhere else.

Where, exactly, is one of those food disputes that will never be resolved, along with the true origins of baklava pastry, hummus and the pisco sour cocktail. In all likelihood, the earliest version of mayonnaise was an ancient Roman concoction of garlic and olive oil, much praised for its medicinal properties by Pliny the Elder in his first-century encyclopedia “Naturalis Historia.” This strong-tasting, aioli-like proto-mayonnaise remained a southern Mediterranean specialty for millennia.

But most historians believe that modern mayonnaise was born in 1756 in the port city of Mahon, in the Balearic Islands off the coast of Spain. At the start of the Seven Years’ War between France and Britain, the French navy, led by the Duc de Richelieu, smashed Admiral Byng’s poorly armed fleet at the Battle of Minorca. (Byng was subsequently executed for not trying hard enough.) While preparing the fish course for Richelieu’s victory dinner, his chef coped with the lack of cream on the island by ingeniously substituting a goo of eggs mixed with oil and garlic.

The anonymous cook took the recipe for “mahonnaise” back to France, where it was vastly improved by Marie-Antoine Careme, the founder of haute cuisine. Careme realized that whisking rather than simply stirring the mixture created a soft emulsion that could be used in any number of dishes, from the savory to the sweet.

It wasn’t just the French who fell for Careme’s version. Mayonnaise blended easily with local cuisines, evolving into tartar sauce in Eastern Europe, remoulades in the Baltic countries and salad dressing in Britain. By 1838, the menu at the iconic New York restaurant Delmonico’s featured lobster mayonnaise as a signature dish.

All that whisking, however, made mayonnaise too laborious for home cooks until the invention of the mechanical eggbeater, first patented by the Black inventor Willis Johnson, of Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1884. “Try it once,” gushed Good Housekeeping magazine in 1889, “and you’ll never go back to the old way as long as you live.”

Making mayonnaise was one thing, preserving it quite another, since the raw egg made it spoil quickly. The conundrum was finally solved in 1912 by Richard Hellmann, a German-American deli owner in New York. By using his own trucks and factories, Hellmann was able to manufacture and transport mayonnaise faster. And in a revolutionary move, he designed the distinctive wide-necked Hellmann’s jar, encouraging liberal slatherings of mayo and thereby speeding up consumption.

Five years later, Eugenia Duke of North Carolina created Duke’s mayonnaise, which is eggier and has no sugar. The two brands are still dueling it out. But when it comes to eating, there are no winners and losers in the mayo department, just 14 grams of fat and 103 delicious calories per tablespoon.

Historically Speaking: How We Kept Cool Before Air Conditioning

Wind-catching towers and human-powered rotary fans were just some of the devices invented to fight the heat.

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

What would we do without our air conditioning? Given the number of rolling blackouts and brownouts that happen across the U.S. each summer, that’s not exactly a rhetorical question.

Fortunately, our ancestors knew a thing or two about staying cool even without electricity. The ancient Egyptians developed the earliest known technique: Evaporative cooling involved hanging wet reeds in front of windows, so that the air cooled as the water evaporated.

The Romans, the greatest engineers of the ancient world, had more sophisticated methods. By 312 B.C. they were piping fresh water into Rome via underground pipes and aqueducts, enabling the rich to cool and heat their houses using cold water pipes embedded in the walls and hot water pipes under the floor.

Nor were the Romans alone in developing clever domestic architecture to provide relief in hot climes. In the Middle East, architects constructed buildings with “wind catchers”—tall, four-windowed towers that funneled cool breezes down to ground level and allowed hot air to escape. These had the advantage of working on their own, without human labor. The Chinese had started using rotary fans as early as the second century, but they required a dedicated army of slaves to keep them moving. The addition of hydraulic power during the Song era, 960-1279, alleviated but didn’t end the manpower issue.

There had been no significant improvements in air conditioning designs for almost a thousand years when, in 1734, British politicians turned to Dr. John Theophilus Desaguliers, a former assistant to Isaac Newton, and begged him to find a way of cooling the overheated House of Commons. Desaguliers designed a marvelous Rube Goldberg-like system that used all three traditional methods: wind towers, pipes and rotary fans. It actually worked, so long as there was someone to crank the handle at all times.

But the machinery wore out in the late 1760s, leaving politicians as hot and bothered as ever. In desperation, the House invited Benjamin Franklin and other leading scientists to design something new. Their final scheme turned out to be no better than Desaguliers’s and required not one but two men to keep the system working.

The real breakthrough occurred in 1841, after the British engineer David Boswell Reid figured out how to control room temperature using steam power. St. George’s Hall in Liverpool is widely considered to be the world’s first air-conditioned building.

Indeed, Reid is one of history’s unsung heroes. His system worked so well that he was invited to install his pipe and ventilation design in hospitals and public buildings around the world. He was working in the U.S. at the start of the Civil War and was appointed inspector of military hospitals. Unfortunately, he died suddenly in 1863, leaving his proposed improvements to gather dust.

The chief problem with Reid’s system was that steam power was about to be overtaken by electricity. When President James Garfield was shot by an assassin in the summer of 1881, naval engineers attempted to keep him cool by using electric fans to blow air over blocks of ice. Two decades later, Willis Haviland Carrier invented the first all-electric air conditioning unit. Architects and construction engineers have been designing around it ever since.

Fears for our power grid may be exaggerated, but it’s good to know that if the unthinkable were to happen and we lost our air conditioners, history can offer us some cool solutions.

Historically Speaking: The Ancient Origins of the Vacation

Once a privilege of the elite, summer travel is now a pleasure millions can enjoy.

The Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2019

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

Finally, Americans are giving themselves a break. For years, according to the U.S. Travel Association, more than half of American workers didn’t use all their paid vacation days. But in a survey released in May by Discover, 71% of respondents said they were planning a summer vacation this year, up from 58% last year—meaning a real getaway, not just a day or two to catch up on chores or take the family to an amusement park.

The importance of vacations for health and happiness has been accepted for thousands of years. The ancient Greeks probably didn’t invent the vacation, but they perfected the idea of the tourist destination by providing quality amenities at festivals, religious sites and thermal springs. A cultured person went places. According to the “Crito,” one of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates’ stay-at-home mentality made him an exception: “You never made any other journey, as other people do, and you had no wish to know any other city.”

The Romans took a different approach. Instead of touring foreign cities, the wealthy preferred to vacation together in resort towns such as Pompeii, where they built ostentatious villas featuring grand areas for entertaining. The Emperor Nero was relaxing at his beach palace at Antium, modern Anzio, when the Great Fire of Rome broke out in the year 64.

The closest thing to a vacation that medieval Europeans could enjoy was undertaking pilgrimages to holy sites. Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, where St. James was believed to be buried, was a favorite destination, second only to Rome in popularity. As Geoffrey Chaucer’s bawdy “Canterbury Tales” shows, a pilgrimage provided all sorts of opportunities for mingling and carousing, not unlike a modern cruise ship.

The vacation went upmarket in the late 17th century, as European aristocrats rediscovered the classical idea of tourism for pleasure. Broadening one’s horizons via the Grand Tour—a sightseeing trip through the major classical and Renaissance sites of France and Italy—became de rigueur for any gentleman. The spa town, too, enjoyed a spectacular revival. The sick and infertile would gather to “take the cure,” bathing in or drinking from a thermal spring. Bath in England became as renowned for its party scene as for its waters. Jane Austen, a frequent visitor to the city, set two of her novels there. The U.S. wasn’t far behind, with Saratoga Springs, N.Y., known as the “Queen of Spas,” becoming a popular resort in 1815.

But where was the average American to go? Resorts, with their boardwalks, grand hotels and amusement arcades, were expensive. In any case, the idea of vacations for pure pleasure sat uneasily with most religious leaders. The answer lay in the great outdoors, which were deemed to be good for the health and improving to the mind.

Cheap rail travel, and popular guidebooks such as William H.H. Murray’s “Adventures in the Wilderness; or, Camp-Life in the Adirondacks,” helped to entice the middle classes out of the city. The American Chautauqua movement, originally a New York-based initiative aimed at improving adult education, further served to democratize the summer vacation by providing cheap accommodation and wholesome entertainment for families.

The summer vacation was ready to become a national tradition. In 1910, President William Howard Taft even proposed to Congress that all workers should be entitled to two to three months of paid vacation. But the plan stalled, and it was left to France to pass the first guaranteed-vacation law, in 1919. Since then, most developed countries have recognized vacation time as a legal right. It’s not too late, America, to try again.

Harper’s Bazaar: Buckingham Palace is opening a new exhibition exploring the life of Queen Victoria this summer

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Queen Victoria and to celebrate, Buckingham Palace has announced a special exhibition as part of its state opening this summer, co-curated by Dr. Amanda Foreman.

Harper’s Bazaar, May 7, 2019

by Katie Frost

A portrait of Queen Victoria by Thomas Sully

The exhibit will explore the life of the monarch and how she turned the once unloved palace into the royal residence we know today. Highlights will include a portrait of the young queen painted by Thomas Sully soon after she moved into her new home, along with Victoria’s personal insignia, the Star and Collar of the Order of the Bath.

Victoria moved into the palace in 1837 when she was just 18. It had been empty for seven years following the death of her uncle, George IV. After Victoria married Prince Albert and started a family, Victoria wrote a letter to the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, about her plans to revamp her family home. In it, she spoke of “the urgent necessity of doing something to Buckingham Palace” and “the total want of accommodation for our growing little family”, according to the Royal Collection Trust.

The Sunday Times: RV There Yet?

Writer and historian Amanda Foreman took her family on an epic motorhome adventure. Would it drive them all round the bend?

Crossing Devils Garden, Utah
Crossing Devils Garden, UtahANGELA HAYS

Imagining yourself behind the wheel of an RV and actually driving one are two completely different things. I discovered this shortly after we hit the road in our 30ft rental for a 1,500-mile odyssey from Denver, Colorado, to Las Vegas, Nevada. As soon as I pressed down on the accelerator, other faculties such as breathing and thinking stopped functioning. My husband, Jonathan, took over, and remained in the driving seat for the rest of the trip, while I quietly buried my pride beneath a pile of flip-flops and rain jackets.

Did I mention there were seven of us — including five children? Masochistic, perhaps, but my motivation in initiating this most ambitious of family holidays was sound. Last year, I wrote in The Sunday Times about the poisonous effect social media can have on families, and on girls’ self-esteem in particular. With four daughters — Helena, 16, Halcyon, 13, and 11-year-old twins Xanthe and Hero (15-year-old Theo completes the gang) — this is particularly pertinent to us.

We’re the Foremans: Amanda and family in their RV
We’re the Foremans: Amanda and family in their RVANGELA HAYS

The latest research offers hope, though. The best antidote to the rapacious demands of the internet, experts say, is its reverse — the power of lived experience. And so we decided to put that theory to the test by taking to the road.

Everything was new and exciting at first. Look, a herd of cattle blocking the road! Oh, we blew the electrics! It was when we left the cool mountain ranges of Colorado and descended into Utah, a dip that sent the thermometer climbing into the 30s, that reality took over.

We were heading for Moab and its two national and one state parks. Some of the best scenery in the totemic road-trip movie Thelma and Louise is here. I kept repeating this fact until Helena reminded me that they’d never seen the film and couldn’t care less. The atmosphere of the RV, already thick with sweat and hormones, was beginning to grow heavy. Knees and elbows were making contact where they shouldn’t.

Our first hike was through the Arches National Park, so named after the formations that stake the desert like a thousand oversized Durdle Doors. Our trail took us to Devils Garden, with its giant phallic pillars. Another led to Landscape Arch, the longest natural arch in the world. A peculiar tension emanates from it, as though at any second something will snap and the whole thing will collapse. I recognised the feeling.

Arches National Park lives up to its name
Arches National Park lives up to its nameALAMY

Three children claimed to be on the edge of survival by day’s end (heat, thirst, sand in shoe, etc). A night’s camping at Devils Garden did it for the rest.

The evening had started well. We ate under the starriest sky I’d ever seen. The intense blackness around us served to highlight the strange symphony of sounds wafting from the brush. After dinner, we sat in companionable silence, listening to the music of the desert. If we could have stayed that way until morning, the night would have been perfect. But shutting down an RV for the night requires concentration — not the futzing and farting about of a family of camping novices. By the time we had secured the awning, washed and put everything away, cleared the only escape route of detritus, converted the “dinette” into a quasi-bed large enough for a small person, or in our case reluctant twins, turned the banquette into a sofa bed (tricky with the seatbelt fittings running down the middle) and stashed the teenagers into the bunk above the driver’s seat, mercury had started rising in the worst way.

I lay on my side in the back alcove, feeling the grit between my toes and the sweat between my eyes, waiting for the inevitable blow-up. There was a yell, a thwack, and the RV started shaking on its plastic levellers. My husband and I leapt out of bed and turned on the lights. The children froze, the twins in mid-wrestle. Each returned sulkily to his or her place.

Once peace was restored, Jonathan and I listened for signs of a round two: was that it, or merely the first skirmish in a battle to the death? “It depends,” I said, “on whether we kill them first.”

“Where do we go from here?” Evita sang over the sound system as we headed to our next stop the following day. There were three more destinations to see before we arrived at the Grand Canyon. “This isn’t where we intended to be,” she warbled.

“Don’t listen to her,” my husband told the children, “she’s being a wuss.”

I was beginning to fear the wuss factor would end up trumping the wow factor. Your basic renters’ RV is essentially a tin can on wheels with a lavatory attached. By midweek we had wrecked the place. Only the desperate and foolhardy dared face the loo. Every spare inch of the RV was occupied by wet and drying clothes, creating a steam-room effect without the refreshing scent of eucalyptus.

On the prowl: a puma roams through Moab, Utah
On the prowl: a puma roams through Moab, UtahGETTY

A gentle rain accompanied our arrival at Bryce Canyon. Despite the name, it’s not a canyon at all, but a series of natural stone amphitheatres created by millions of years of frost-thaw cycles. Each one is filled with densely packed pillars and spires called “hoodoos”, which turn crimson and ginger in the sun. Our goal, as we set off from Ruby’s Campground, was to see the sun set over Bryce’s most famous amphitheatre, the hauntingly named Silent City. There was a whiff of mutiny in the damp air. Nothing obvious, but if I had suggested going back to the RV, no one would have complained.

We trudged through the pines towards Inspiration Point (by God, did we need some) in a long, straggly line. Glimpses of Silent City flashed through breaks in the trees. The hoodoos seemed not alive exactly, but immobile. I looked back and saw that the stragglers had stopped. They, too, were staring at the rocks.

At the Point, we waited in vain for a break in the clouds. Our son suddenly shouted: “It’s a peregrine falcon, I’m sure of it.” His sisters clustered around, taking photographs as the bird swooped and then banked hard into the air. “They do this to impress their mates,” Theo informed us.

Back at camp, we broke out the chocolate Oreos in celebration of Theo’s surprise expertise in all things avian. The rain also cleared in time for us to light the barbecue and go full-on carnivore. There wasn’t a peep from anyone that night.

Gorgeous: the Virgin River flows through Zion National Park
Gorgeous: the Virgin River flows through Zion National ParkALAMY

The next morning, we reached Zion National Park right on schedule, a first for us. This day was a hike through the Virgin River to the Narrows, where the orange-brown walls of the canyon rise 1,000ft, but the gorge is only 30ft across. The water was cold, the rocks slippery, providing ample opportunities for a whinge. None came. I noticed a subtle change as we waded upriver: the children were the ones out in front. That wasn’t all. Over the next few days, blisters that would have been incapacitating at the beginning of the trip were now displayed with pride.

The news that we were camping on the rustic side of the Grand Canyon, at the North Rim, didn’t faze anyone at all. The South Rim, which overlooks the Colorado River, gets 10 times more visitors and has two dozen main viewing points. The North is higher, colder, smaller, with just three principal viewpoints, and is so quiet that you can hear the trees rustling in the early-morning breeze. It means you have one of the great natural wonders of the world all to yourself. We could picnic among the most spectacular scenery without another person in sight.

If there was a wuss among the group, it was me. We had trekked to Cape Royal, where a wooded trail leads to a dramatic plateau that offers one of the widest panoramas of the canyon. The children were naturally drawn to the ledge, carelessly dangling their legs over the side. I was torn between wanting to capture the moment for ever and shouting at them to get back. Jonathan intervened. “It’s all right,” he said. “They are free.”

There wasn’t an ounce of regret when we dropped off the camper in Las Vegas. I doubt we will ever rent an RV again. Yet we ended the week feeling truly content. Without being sappy about it, to experience nature in its untrammelled state is to feel insignificant and uplifted in equal measure.

We came, we saw, and were conquered, happily.

Amanda’s guide to a stress-free US motorhome holiday
Do book your campground berths at least six months in advance. I’m not exaggerating.
Do find out what your RV comes with. Usually, it’s practically nothing.
Do check the depot for “left behinds”. We picked up a barbecue that way, and donated it back at the end.
Do bring physical maps with you — there isn’t much coverage out in the sticks. Praise be.
Do have a games bag with amusements that don’t need charging, such as playing cards, colouring books and chess.
Do take the desert heat seriously. Load up on hats, sunscreen, insulated water bottles and handheld fans.
Do make a list of chores. There should be no passengers on your trip, only crew members.
Don’t overpack.
Don’t attempt more than four hours’ driving a day. It’s not much fun for the people stuck in the back.
Don’t assume that you’ll be allowed to use your generator past 8pm. Plan your meals ahead of time.
Don’t leave out any food overnight. Nature is not your friend. Nature wants to swarm over your leftovers and/or eat you.
Don’t forget to check your water levels every day. Remember how disgusting it is when you flush the loo on a plane and nothing happens when the trap opens? Now multiply that by five.
Don’t expect kids to be as rhapsodic about the scenery as you are.

Hiring a six-berth RV sleeping six for 10 days in November, picking up in Denver and dropping off in Las Vegas, starts at £830, including one-way fee, with Road Bear (roadbearrv.com). A 10-day fly-drive package from Denver in October costs £1,225pp for a family of six, including RV hire (bon-voyage.co.uk). A World on Fire by Amanda Foreman is published by Penguin

Family ties
Have you successfully bonded as a family on holiday? Or had a disaster? Tell us and you could win a £250 holiday voucher; see Letters for details. Email travel@sunday-times.co.uk

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/how-to-survive-an-rv-motohome-road-trip-through-utah-colorado-denver-las-vegas-nevada-america-with-the-family-q2j9hvnlg

WSJ Historically Speaking: The Gym, for Millennia of Bodies and Souls

Today’s gyms, which depend on our vanity and body envy, are a far cry from what the Greeks envisioned

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

Going to the gym takes on a special urgency at this time of year, as we prepare to put our bodies on display at the pool and beach. Though the desire to live a virtuous life of fitness no doubt plays its part, vanity and body envy are, I suspect, the main motivation for our seasonal exertions.

The ancient Greeks, who invented gyms (the Greek gymnasion means “school for naked exercise”), were also body-conscious, but they saw a deeper point to the sweat. No mere muscle shops, Greek gymnasia were state-sponsored institutions aimed at training young men to embody, literally, the highest ideals of Greek virtue. In Plato’s “The Republic,” Socrates says that the two branches of physical and academic education “seem to have been given by some god to men…to ensure a proper harmony between energy and initiative on the one hand and reason on the other, by tuning each to the right pitch.”

Physical competition, culminating in the Olympics, was a form of patriotic activity, and young men went to the gym to socialize, bathe and learn to think. Aristotle founded his school of philosophy in the Lyceum, in a gymnasium that included physical training.

The Greek concept fell out of favor in the West with the rise of Christianity. The abbot St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), who advised five popes, wrote, “The spirit flourishes more strongly…in an infirm and weak body,” neatly summing up the medieval ambivalence toward physicality.

Many centuries later, an eccentric German educator named Friedrich Jahn (1778-1852) played a key role in the gym’s revival. Convinced that Prussia’s defeat by Napoleon was due to his compatriots’ descent into physical and moral weakness, Jahn decided that a Greek-style gym would “preserve young people from laxity and…prepare them to fight for the fatherland.” In 1811, he opened a gym in Berlin for military-style physical training (not to be confused with the older German usage of the term gymnasium for the most advanced level of secondary schools).

By the mid-19th century, Europe’s upper-middle classes had sufficient wealth and leisure time to devote themselves to exercise for exercise’s sake. Hippolyte Triat opened two of the first truly commercial gyms in Brussels and Paris in the late 1840s. A retired circus strongman, he capitalized on his physique to sell his “look.”

But broader spiritual ideas still influenced the spread of physical fitness. The 19th-century movement Muscular Christianity sought to transform the working classes into healthy, patriotic Christians. One offshoot, the Young Men’s Christian Association, became famous for its low-cost gyms.

By the mid-20th century, Americans were using their gyms for two different sets of purposes. Those devoted to “manliness” worked out at places like Gold’s Gym and aimed to wow others with their physiques. The other group, “health and fitness” advocates, expanded sharply after Jack LaLanne, who founded his first gym in 1936, turned a healthy lifestyle into a salable commodity. A few decades later, Jazzercise, aerobics, disco and spandex made the gym a liberating, fashionable and sexy place.

More than 57 million Americans belong to a health club today, but until local libraries start adding spinning classes and CrossFit, the gym will remain a shadow of the original Greek ideal. We prize our sound bodies, but we aren’t nearly as devoted to developing sound mind and character.

WSJ Historically Speaking: A Brief History of Lemonade

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

The lemonade stand has symbolized American childhood and values for more than a century. Norman Rockwell even created a classic 1950s drawing of children getting their first taste of capitalism with the help of a little sugar and lemon. Yet like apple pie, the lemonade stand is far older than America itself.

The lemon’s origins remain uncertain. A related fruit with far less juice, the citron, slowly migrated west until it reached Rome in the first few centuries A.D. Citrons were prestige items for the rich, prized for their smell, supposed medicinal virtues and ability to keep away moths. Emperor Nero supposedly ate citrons not because he liked the taste but because he believed that they offered protection against poisoning. Continue reading…