From the Archives: The Great Silence
Whether you know it as Armistice Day, Poppy Day, Remembrance Day or Veterans’ Day, November 11 is a time to honor those who died in war and thank those who served.
The day of remembrance has its roots in the end of World War I. The war ended on November 11, 1918. When the word reached England that the the armistice had been signed, the country broke out into a spontaneous party. (The Savoy Hotel alone lost 2700 smashed glasses to the celebration.) No stiff upper lip allowed.
When the first anniversary of the Armistice drew near, dancing in the streets of a post-war world no longer seemed appropriate . Neither did letting the day go unnoticed. Some assumed that special church services were the proper response. Australian soldier and journalist Edward George Honey wrote a letter to the London Evening News suggesting a moment of silence “on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month”. He asked for “Five silent minutes of national remembrance…Church services too, if you will, but in the street, the home, the theatre, anywhere, indeed, where Englishmen and their women chance to be, surely in this five minutes of bitter-sweet silence there will be service enough.”
Honey asked for five minutes; he got two. King George V called for all Britons to stop their normal activities “so that in perfect stillness, the thoughts of every one may be concentrated on reverent remembrance of the glorious dead.”
If you can, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month–pause for a moment. If you can’t? Thank a veteran. Buy a poppy, if you can find one. Pray for peace.
This blog post courtesy of writing and reading friend Diana Holdsworth, who gave me the idea months ago.
From the Archives: The Peasants Are Revolting
2017 is the hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, commemorated in Big Fat History Books and innumerable posts by history bloggers. (I did my bit here and here.) There has been a certain somber tone to such commemorations, since the Revolution is tied in our historical memory with Stalinism, gulags in Siberia, the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, etc. It’s worth remembering that the Russian Revolution was born of deeply rooted discontent. Here’s a post from the archives to give us a little context.
Yemelyan Pugachyov
In September, 1773, three months before American colonists dumped tea in Boston harbor, Russian serfs in the Ural mountain region rose up and demanded emancipation from bondage.
Discontent had been brewing among the serfs since 1762, when Tsar Peter III passed legislation that many serfs (mistakenly) interpreted as the first step toward their emancipation. Several months later, Peter was murdered and his wife, later known as Catherine the Great, ascended the throne.
As far as the serfs were concerned, Catherine’s rule wasn’t so great. One of her first acts on ascending the throne was to annul Peter’s legislation. Instead of gaining their freedom, serfs suffered from increasing burdens of compulsory service and imaginative taxation. Serfs were even taxed for wearing a beard. (A sure fire way of solving the financial crisis. Write your congressman today.)
As conditions worsened, rumors spread that Tsar Peter wasn’t dead and that he would return to complete the emancipation of his people. Between 1762 and 1774, multiple imposters appeared claiming to be the murdered tsar. (I picture this as a variation on the line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “I’m not dead yet”.) The most successful of these pretenders was Yemelyan Pugachev, who led the serf revolt in 1773-4.
Pugachev was welcomed as a liberator by many serfs, who rose in the name of the “true tsar”, Peter III. Violent bands of serfs roamed the countryside. Landowning nobles were killed or put to flight. In the end, Pugachev’s Rebellion accomplished nothing. Pugachev was defeated by imperial troops a year after the initial rising and sent to Moscow in a cage. He was tried several months later and executed. Without its leader, the revolt collapsed.
Pugachev’s only permanent legacy was a historical adventure novella by Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, The Captain’s Daughter, in which Pugachev is portrayed as a larger than life romantic villain. (Pushkin also wrote a serious history of the revolt in which Pugachev is a thug “with no other merits, except for some military expertise and extraordinary audacity.” Poetic license is a wonderful thing.)
Pugachev’s Rebellion failed, but discontent among the serfs continued. Russian peasants revolted more than 500 times between Pugachev’s defeat and Tsar Alexander II’s edict declaring their emancipating in 1861.
Kepler’s Mother: A Scary Story for Halloween
The seventeenth century was a period of scientific revolution. Astronomers, like Galileo, worked out the motions of the planets and stars in the sky, and overturned the concept that the earth stood at the center of the cosmos.* Galileo, Newton and others created a new science of mechanics that applied the laws of mathematics to motion. Physicians explored the structure of the human body. The development of scientific instruments allowed students to see new worlds in a drop of water and scan the skies with a clarity not possible with the naked eye. Natural philosophers (the name used by scientists at the time) began to perform experiments in a way that could be verified by others.**
The seventeenth century was also the height of the European witch trials. Black magic, maleficum, was a capital crime, clearly defined by law. Between 1570 and 1680, roughly 110,000 people were tried for witchcraft in Europe and between 40,000 and 60,000 were executed. Most of the accused were women. One of the women accused was Katharina Kepler, the 68-year-old mother of German astronomer Johannes Kepler.
The charges against Katharina will sound familiar to anyone who has read accounts of the Salem witch trials. (And probably to anyone who has read accounts of European witch trials as well.) A woman who suffered from a chronic illness accused Katharina of poisoning her. The local schoolmaster reported that the illiterate Katharina constantly pestered him to read letters from or write letters to her famous son, and that on one occasion she entered his house though the doors were locked. A local matron reported, second-hand, that a young seamstress told her that Katherina had roamed the house late at night*** and offered to teach her (the seamstress) witchcraft. She was accused of killing various local animals by magic and of turning herself into a cat. Katherina vehemently denied the charges. The only charges she couldn’t plausible deny were 1) being old and 2)being difficult.**** Obviously prime witch material.
Her trial lasted six years.
In 1620, five years after Katharina’s ordeal began (!), at the height of his career, Johannes Kepler packed up his family, moved to the city where his mother was on trail, and took over her defense. He dissected the charges in a powerful, and groundbreaking, legal document. He attacked the reliability of many of the witnesses. He pointed out the fact that many of the accused acts–like entering someone’s house uninvited–could not necessarily be attributed to witchcraft. And that to do so would make any difficult old woman vulnerable to attack.***** He discussed the differences between natural and unnatural illness in scientific detail, with the authority of one of the great scientists of his age. He pointed out inconsistencies in the testimony. It took almost a year, but he ultimately succeeded in getting his mother acquitted.
Katharina died six months after her acquittal, no doubt worn down by her ordeal
At base, Kepler wasn’t that different than the men who tried his mother.**** He believed in magic. The division between magic, religion and science was not clear. Sir Isaac Newton spent as much time studying alchemy and interpreting biblical prophecies as he did on the scientific theorems for which he is famous. William Harvey, who discovered how blood circulates in the body, dissected a witch’s toad familiar, looking for the source of its supernatural power. Most witchhunters and demonologists were scholars and rationalists who believed in the importance of direct observation and were concerned with the question of what constituted reliable evidence . The investigation of witchcraft, magic and miracles was a much a part of the scientific revolution as the study of gravity and electricity.
Small comfort for cranky old ladies who liked cats and annoyed their neighbors.
*Or at least shoved it off balance. It takes a while for new ideas about the nature of reality to work their way through society. Consider the existence of the Flat Earth Society.
**It is only fair to point out that many of these breakthroughs had been anticipated by Islamic scientists during the Golden Age of Islam, most notably Alhazen, whose work laid the foundation for the scientific method.
***There is a reason they call them the witching hours.
****In her trial Johannes himself admitted that she “disturbs the whole of her town, and is the author of her own lamentable misfortune.”
*****As indeed they were.
******Except for that small detail of being a scientific genius.