Gil Hahn's Blog, page 5

Not Even Wrong

If you want to understand the hostility that greeted the Irish Catholics who immigrated to the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century you need only consult the headlines in recent daily newspapers. On April 23 just past, the New York Times carried a story under the headline “Far From the Sea, Another Crisis Of Migration” that told of the hostility – expressed through arson and vandalism – of portions of the resident population in Germany, Sweden and other nations of Europe...

Inevitability

All the events of the past shape our experience of the present, yet some past events are so significant – such as the Civil War in America – that we cannot conceive of subsequent history or our present experience would not have been materially different if the past had been different.  As a result, we tend to look at the at the significant events in the past the necessary precedent of subsequent history and our present experience.  This is quite logical, and it conforms to our under...

Hate Speech

The legacy of the Civil War has been making a lot of news in recent months. Foremost has been the summary expulsion of a chapter of ΣΆΈ from the University of Oklahoma when some of its members were found to have been singing songs filled with racial epithets and threats of lynchings. More recently, the Supreme Court heard arguments on a lawsuit resulting from the refusal of the State of Texas to permit the Sons of the Confederate Veterans to offer a vanity license plate that featured the imag...

Use and Abuse

Every so often someone with a political agenda will invoke in tones of patient sweetness and reason the so-called lessons history as a cudgel with which to instruct those with an opposing political agenda about the errors of their ways. One interesting aspect of this phenomenon is that those who purport to correct the errors of others usually misstate the facts of history at least as egregiously as those whom they would instruct.

The one that has caught my attention most recently is "4 Huge Di...

Volcabulum; or, The Rogue’s Lexicon

I am enjoying Lyndsay Faye’s The Gods of Gotham, a detective thriller set in New York City in the year 1845. One of the characters is George Washington Matsell, who was in fact the chief of the New York City Police Department that had been recently created.

In 1859 Chief Matsell (by then no longer chief) published Volcabulum; or, The Rogue’s Lexicon, a dictionary of the argot used by the criminal element in the city to speak openly with one another with reduced danger that they would be unders...

Communal Life Experiments and Experience

The growth of industry through the early nineteenth century and the vagaries of the business cycle reduced many factory workers, especially in Britain and France, to a perpetual state of near poverty. Large populations permitted factory owners to keep wages low, and when demand for their products diminished, the owners shut their factories and turned out the workers. These conditions prompted Robert Owen, a compassionate factory owner in Wales, and Charles Fourier, a social philosopher in Fra...

Chicago Vistas

Many visitors to the United States left descriptions of New York, but Chicago attracted attention as well, not in the least because of the pace at which it was growing. In 1850 it had a population of 29,960, and in 1860 it had a population of 109,260. One English visitor to the United States in the mid-1850s left a particularly vivid description.

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Chicago Vistas

Many visitors to the United States left descriptions of New York, but Chicago attracted attention as well, not in the least because of the pace at which it was growing. In 1850 it had a population of 29,960, and in 1860 it had a population of 109,260. One English visitor to the United States in the mid-1850s left a particularly vivid description:

Chicago is connected with the western rivers by a sloop canal – one of the most magnificent works ever undertaken. It is also connected with the Miss...

Steam Engine - Part 4

The other sources of power used for transportation and industry in 1860 were wind and water, but steam had advantages over these that were transforming various aspects of daily life. Wind provided the means by which large cargoes could be transported along the coast and across the ocean at relatively little cost. Indeed, until the advent of steam vessels provided an alternative and faster means of transportation afloat, the wind, the weather and the tide largely determined the duration of the...

Steam Engine - Part 3

At the engine, the steam goes first into a slide valve, which is like a flexible hose that feeds the steam first into one end of the cylinder, and then into the other. Within the cylinder, the steam pushes a piston back and forth. A rod attached to the piston and extending out through one end of the cylinder, transfers the back and forth motion of the piston to a crank that changes the back and forth motion into a rotary motion.

The crank, in turn, is attached to a device called an eccentric t...