Four Pests Campaign

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250px-Tree-Sparrow-2009-16-02In 1958, Chairman Mao Zedong of China introduced his “Four Pests” hygiene campaign, meant to eliminate rats, flies, mosquitoes . . . and sparrows. He ordered the killing of sparrows because he believed they ate grain seeds and prevented farmers’ crops from growing.

Mao’s officials mobilized people in cities and in the countryside. Everyone was urged to bang on drums and clash pots and pans, to frighten the sparrows and keep them airborne until the birds dropped dead from exhaustion. Nests were destroyed, eggs broken, baby birds killed. The plan worked all too well. By 1960, sparrows—and a number of other bird species—were driven to near extinction.

The delicate balance of nature was upended, with tragic results. Crop-eating insects were able to thrive, unopposed. In particular, swarms of locusts—a favorite food of sparrows—stripped bare the fields and crops, and millions of Chinese people died of starvation. Later Mao removed sparrows from the list.

Here’s a short video about it. Warning, though. It’s pretty disturbing.

 

 

Play Ball

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138540180_wThe first intercollegiate baseball game occurred in 1859, between Amherst and Williams.

The rules were a little different back then. The game was played on a square rather than a diamond.

138540190_galleryPlayers didn’t wear gloves. The umpires and coaches wore tuxedos and top hats.

Also—the game ended only after a minimum combined score of 100 runs.

Amherst won, 66 to 32.138540230_gallery

 

Images: Top the 1873 Amherst team, middle, the original square shaped field, bottom, an 1880s Wesleyan team that just arrived by carriage, posing with the Amherst team. 
source: 
https://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/magazine/issues/2009spring/baseball

Dotty

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Polka dots were first named in 1855 after the popular new dance, the polka.

Ode to Syria

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Damask is a kind of fabric that is woven in contrasting textures. It was first produced in the twelfth century in Damascus, Syria.

Galileo’s Trial

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galileo_631I’m on a myth-debunking kick at the moment. (See my Friday post about how Manhattan really wasn’t sold to the Indians for twenty-four dollars.) Today’s story-behind-the story is about Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642).

This part is true: after observing one of Jupiter’s moons revolving around Jupiter with his new-and-improved telescope, he became convinced that his predecessor, Copernicus, had been right when he theorized that the Earth revolves around the Sun, rather than the other way around. In Galileo’s time, everyone believed that the Sun and all the planetary bodies revolved around the Earth, so this was a pretty Earth-shattering idea. Literally.

This part is also true: in 1632 Galileo published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, laying out his heliocentric (Sun-at-the-center) view. Galileo was arrested for heresy. In1633 the Church brought him to trial.

Now here’s where it gets murky. According to one version of the story, when faced with being burned at the stake, Galileo recanted his views and declared that the Earth stood still and everything revolved around it. As he left the courtroom, he is supposed to have muttered, “and yet it moves” (Eppur, si muove) under his breath.

It’s a fun story, the triumph of science over closed-minded church dogma, but there are other versions. Some historians have suggested that the Church was actually behaving rather reasonably toward Galileo, considering the era. Galileo was already a Renaissance rock star—close personal friends with the Duke of Medici, and earning a pension from the pope, Urban VIII. The pope had even given him permission to pursue his heliocentric studies, but cautioned him to state his findings as a theory rather than a universal truth, and to present arguments for and against his findings. The result was his Dialogue, where three characters debate the nature of the solar system. They’re a simpleton (Simplicius), a student, and a wise person. Simplicius offers the arguments put forward by the Church. That’s where Galileo got himself in trouble; the Pope—who saw Simplicius as a stand-in for himself—was deeply offended at being openly mocked. Kind of hard to blame the guy. (I did a blog here about fallen idols, great thinkers who might personally have been big fat jerks, and Galileo is on my list of candidates. Certainly he doesn’t seem to have been very diplomatic.)

According to still another version, Galileo’s arrest may have stemmed purely from politics. Recently, a new—old—biography of Galileo, written twenty years after Galileo’s death by the biographer, Thomas Salusbury, has resurfaced. All copies of the book were thought to have been destroyed in the great fire of 1666. But in this recent find—an incomplete, annotated proofreader’s copy—Salusbury claimed that there were political tensions between Rome and Tuscany. The pope had Galileo arrested not for religious reason, but for political ones–simply to spite the Duke of Medici.

Here’s where the story gets back on track: Galileo was already an old man, and he spent the rest of his seven years in relative comfort under house arrest just outside Florence, where he continued to experiment and to write until he died, seven years later.

On October 31, 1992, the Vatican formally admitted it was wrong to have condemned Galileo for his views.

 

 

 

Servitude

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U.S. Presidents Millard Fillmore and Andrew Johnson had once both been indentured servants. Johnson was indentured to a tailor, and ran away. Fillmore, indentured to a cloth maker, bought his freedom for thirty dollars.

Devourer of Books

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John Steinbeck’s original manuscript for Of Mice and Men was eaten by his dog, an English Setter named Toby.

Renters, Not Owners

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The_Purchase_of_Manhattan_IslandYou’ve probably heard–more than once—that the Dutch trader Peter Minuit bought the island of Manhattan from the Indians for sixty Dutch guilders’ worth of trade goods—about twenty-four dollars.

I hate coming across this story in kids’ history books. It intimates that the Indians were duped, or dumb enough to allow themselves to be swindled by the savvy Europeans, who bilked them out of plum real estate just by waving around some bright-colored beads.

In fact, the Lenapes were not one tribe, but multiple bands of smaller groups who moved seasonally around the modern five-borough area in search of fish, shellfish, birds, and deer. Because they tended to pack up and move with the seasons, they weren’t interested in the Europeans’ heavy equipment. Minuit was the head of a rag-tag group of about 270 fur traders and their families, nearly all of whom were employed by the Dutch West India company, whose primary motivation was to buy fur pelts from the Indians.

By 1626 the Lenapes were starting to get annoyed at the Dutch traders’ encroaching on their territory. But the Lenapes didn’t believe anyone actually had a right to own land. The land belonged to everyone. They perceived the transaction they made with the Dutch as an agreement to share the land.

The Dutch didn’t see it that way.

 

By Alfred Fredericks (Popular Science Monthly Volume 75/Brittanica) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Taxi!

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A jitney meant a nickel back in 1915. In Los Angeles, some people began charging fares to take passengers places, and these first taxis also became known as jitneys. They charged a jitney for the fare.

The Grim Tale of Guano

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I’ve done a lot of reading about guano. Bird poop. It was discovered to be a great, cheap alternative fertilizer for European crops, and during the nineteenth century its harvest and sale became a booming industry. I blogged here about how the guano may have been the source of the plant fungus that decimated the potato crops in the 1840s and led to the Great Hunger.

Charles C. Mann’s fascinating book 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, gives a thorough (and grim) explanation of the way the guano trade worked.

458px-DSCN5766-guano-glantz_crop_bFertilizer ships from Europe sailed to the Chincha islands, thirteen miles off the coast of Peru, where huge piles of sea bird poop were stacked as high as a twelve-story building. According to Mann, the islands gave off a stench that could be smelled long before a ship reached them. And nothing grew on the islands; the only living things were “bats, scorpions, spiders, ticks, and biting flies.” There was no drinkable water, and not a single plant on the barren, smelly, dry landscape.

Mining the guano was wretched work. Miners had to hack away at the guano, enveloping themselves in corrosive dust clouds. The poop was dumped through a long tube, where it dropped directly into the ships’ holds below, exploding into toxic dust that enveloped the ship. No one wanted to work in those miserable conditions. They tried convicts and African slaves, but the convicts killed themselves (and one another) and the black slaves were too valuable to “waste” in the mines, as life tended to be brutish and short for those forced to perform this awful work. The solution? Enslaved Chinese workers.

As many as a quarter million Chinese indentured workers were shipped there, to live in virtual slavery, in a horrific alternate Middle passage you don’t hear much about.

And it gets worse, if that’s possible. After awhile, guano traders didn’t bother to draw up contracts and dupe workers into thinking they were going somewhere else to work. They just began slave raids.

Easter_island_and_south_americaEaster Island in Polynesia, famous for its mysterious carved statues, was wiped out by guano slave raids. In 1862, a third of the  population (1000 men) was kidnapped in a slave raid and shipped to the Chincha Islands, where they were forced to work in the guano quarries. As many as 900 died there, and after a few countries protested, the remaining 100 were repatriated to the island, carrying disease with them. The rest of the population was then wiped out by disease.Ahu_Tongariki

 

 

top pic:  Guano mining in the Central Chinchua (Chincha) Islands, ca. 1860.
map: By Pascal at en.wikipedia [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons
statues: By Rivi (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons