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A few things to remember, this fifth of November

By Philip Carter

As you prepare to gather round a bonfire and to ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ at fireworks, don’t forget (indeed, ‘remember, remember’) that you’re part of a well-established national tradition.

What’s now known as the Gunpowder Plot was uncovered on the night of Monday 4 November 1605 when Thomas Knyvett, keeper of Whitehall Palace, led a second search of the vaults under the House of Lords. There Knyvett’s party discovered Guy Fawkes—posing as one John Johnson, servant to Thomas Percy, and standing guard over 18 hundredweight (about 900 kg) of gunpowder. The discovery came nine days after Lord Monteagle had raised the alarm having received a letter from his brother-in-law (one of the plotters), warning him not to attend the state opening of parliament on Tuesday the 5th.

The connection between the plot’s discovery and bonfires was made immediately. On the evening of 5 November 1605 Londoners were encouraged to light fires to celebrate the king’s providential deliverance from the assassination attempt. Many did so: John Chamberlain, who lived near St Paul’s Cathedral, that night described a ‘great ringing and as great store of bonfires as ever I thincke was seene.’

Today the Gunpowder Plot is the early modern act of treason, but in truth it was one in a series of conspiracies—albeit one of spectacular ambition. That it became a fixture in the national calendar owed much to the plot’s value to protestants of the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries as a warning of what they saw as the threat posed by Catholicism.

From the outset, the Church of England was central to a celebration of God’s protection of a protestant monarch. Bells were rung and gunpowder sermons preached, while prayers of thanksgiving remained a part of the Anglican calendar until 1859. The modern trappings of the Fifth of November also emerged in the decades following the plot. In his diary entry for 5 November 1660 Samuel Pepys noted how fireworks, as well as fires, formed part of the celebrations that were ‘observed exceeding well in the City’. Two years later a Dutch visitor to London, William Schellinks, commented on the ‘great lot of fireworks … let off and thrown amongst the people.’

By this date the burning of effigies was also commonplace. On 5 November 1673 John Evelyn observed that ‘the youth of the city burnt the Pope in effigy after they had made procession by it’. A century on it was the plot’s best-known protagonist, Guy Fawkes, who was increasingly singled out—the Times newspaper reporting that ‘Guy Faux in his usual state was carried about the street in commemoration of the gunpowder plot’ (6 November 1788). By the nineteenth century, Fawkes (or the ‘guy’) had become, aside from the occasional politician, a fixture atop the bonfire. This remains the case, except at Fawkes’s former school—St Peter’s in York—where old boys are no longer burned in effigy.

The Fifth’s combination of flames, fireworks, dark nights, drink, and public celebration is, of course, a hazardous one. Concerns over possible disorder are as old as the commemoration itself. Those taking part in the first ‘fifth of November’, in 1605, were encouraged to do so as long as ‘this testemonye of joy be carefull done without any danger or disorder’. With the growing popularity of the ‘guy’, and the accompanying demands for pennies, came what the Times, in November 1802, described as ‘the great annoyance occasioned … by idle fellows who assembling a mob cause many depredations and disorders.’ Worse still was the Victorian fashion for ‘guy riots’, while public disorder among students in Oxford and Cambridge, and in parts of central London, remained commonplace until as late as the 1960s. Unless you’re spending it in Lewes, Sussex, or Ottery St Mary, Devon, your ‘Fifth of November’ will likely be a calmer affair—the modern ‘Bonfire Night’ now a preserve of families, charities, and community groups.

That for 400 years the emphasis has been on celebration—boisterous or otherwise—is due, of course, to Fawkes’s discovery and to the plot’s collapse. But it’s worth remembering one last thing this fifth of November: had the plan worked, its effects would have been enormous. As Mark Nicholls, Fawkes’s ODNB’s biographer, reminds us:

“Though a failure, the plot came very close to success … [and] the magnitude of Fawkes’s intended treason should never be underestimated. Ordnance records state that the 18 hundredweight of powder transferred from the cellar to the Tower of London was ‘decaied’, but modern calculations suggest that, decayed or not, few if any in the Lords that afternoon would have survived a combination of devastating explosion and the noxious fumes thrown out by the combustion of seventeenth-century gunpowder. Guy Fawkes, the experienced soldier, knew this only too well.”

In addition to the life of Guy Fawkes in the Oxford DNB, an audio version of his biography is also available.

Or download the podcast directly (under ‘criminal lives’).

Philip Carter is Publication Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, a collection of 58,780 life stories of noteworthy Britons, from the Romans to the 21st century. The Oxford DNB online is freely available via public libraries across the UK, and many libraries worldwide. Libraries offer ‘remote access’ allowing members to gain access free, from home (or any other computer), 24 hours a day. You can also sample the ODNB with its changing selection of free content: 190+ episodes of our biography podcast; a topical Life of the Day, and historical people in the news via Twitter @odnb.

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Image credit: Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder plotters, 1606, via Wikimedia Commons.

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Add a fourth year to law school

By Edward Zelinsky

President Obama has joined with other critics of contemporary legal education in calling for the reduction of law school to a two year program. The President and these other critics are wrong. Indeed, the remedy they propose for the ills of legal education has it exactly backward. Law school should not be shortened; it should be lengthened. The standard curriculum for a juris doctorate degree should be increased to four years.

Three considerations counsel the need for an additional year of law school:

First, there is today much more law to learn than there was in the past. There are today whole new fields of law which did not exist a generation ago, e.g., health care law. Moreover, within pre-existing areas of the law, the amount of law has expanded enormously over the last two decades.

Consider, for example, the area in which I write and teach, taxation. No one doubts that the current tax law is more complicated and extensive than the taw law in effect when I went to law school. Important subspecialties, e.g., pensions, partnership tax, and international tax, have grown in complexity and importance.

Many critics belittle the substantive business of legal education by dismissing my tax courses as theoretical or doctrinal. But my courses are where my students learn the law and there is much more law to learn than there was a generation ago.

Imagine a critic of medical education who looked at the explosion of medical science in recent decades and called for less medical schooling. That is precisely what the advocates of a two year JD program are doing.

Second, through expanded LLM programs, we are de facto creeping towards four years of legal education. In many areas of the law, such as tax, LLM degrees have grown in prominence. Several factors are fueling the expansion of LLM programs. Chief among these is that there is now more law to cover in a fourth year of law school.

Rather than the currently haphazard growth of LLM programs, it would be more sensible to require universally a fourth year of education for all law students.

Third, many of the same critics who favor a two year law school curriculum also support expanded clinical education for law students. Such expanded clinical education should not come at the expense of substantive legal education but in addition to it. One way of thinking about the proposed fourth year of law school is that it responds to the demand for more clinical education in light of the simultaneously growing need for more substantive legal education.

The most serious argument against a fourth year of law school is the additional cost it would entail. Legal education is already too expensive. Adding a fourth year would impart even greater urgency to task of controlling the expense of law school, just as there is currently great urgency to the task of controlling the costs of undergraduate education.

Today’s panacea for controlling educational expenses is technology, most prominently online courses. I’m skeptical of panaceas in general and this panacea in particular. However, there are areas in which law school faculties and administrations can genuinely achieve economies. There is nothing sacrosanct about current teaching loads or about the much noted growth of administrative outlays by institutions of higher education.

An ancillary benefit of a fourth year of legal education would, in the short run, be a reduction in the supply of law school graduates. A fourth year would also abate the job-related pressures students currently feel after the second year of law school by giving students another bite of the employment-related apple after their third year.

The world is more complicated than it used to be. For better or worse, the law’s complexity has grown apace. Well-trained lawyers in the 21st century will need to know more law than did their predecessors. A mandatory, universal fourth year of law school is the right response to the shortcomings of legal education in a complex world.

Edward A. Zelinsky is the Morris and Annie Trachman Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Origins of the Ownership Society: How The Defined Contribution Paradigm Changed America. His monthly column appears on the OUPblog.

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Announcing the Place of the Year 2013 Shortlist: Vote for your pick

In honor of Oxford’s 20th edition of the acclaimed Atlas of the World, we put together a longlist of 20 places around the globe for our yearly Place of the Year competition. The votes have been tallied, the geography committee has provided their essential input, and the shortlist nominees have been decided upon. We had a strong list of contenders this year, but five places stood out above the rest.

Last week we highlighted the reasons our nominees made the cut for the longlist. But, we wondered, what do we really know about the countries behind the locales that made the biggest impact on history this year?  We compiled some indispensable facts from the Atlas of the World to dazzle your family and friends with. Check them out below, and cast your vote!

SYRIA

Since 2011 Syria has been locked in a bitter civil war.
The country was ruled by France after the collapse of the Turkish Ottoman Empire in World War I.
The World Bank classifies Syria as a “lower-middle-income” developing country.
Main resources are oil, hydroelectricity, and fertile land.
The official language of the country is Arabic.

Tahrir Square, EGYPT

Egypt is Africa’s second most industrialized country after South Africa.
Oil and textiles are the country’s main exports.
Almost all of the population lives in the Nile Valley and its fertile delta or along the Suez Canal
The influence of the Arab occupation of Egypt back in AD 639-42 was so great that most Egyptians today regard themselves as Arabs.
From 1882-1922 Egypt was under British rule.

View of Rio de Janeiro and Guanabara Bay from Corcovado Mountain.

Rio de Janeiro, BRAZIL

Brazil is the world’s fifth largest country.
The country is broken up into three main regions: the Amazon basin; the Northeast; and the Southeast Region, which is the most developed and densely populated of the three.
Agriculture employs 16% of the population with coffee being a leading export. Other products include bananas, citrus fruits, cocoa, maize, rice, soybeans, and sugarcane.
The leading religion in the country is Roman Catholic with 80% of the population practicing the faith.
In 2010, Dilma Rouseff  became Brazil’s  first female president.

The NSA Data Center, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Although only 0.7% of the population is employed in agriculture, the United States leads the world in farm production.
The United States is the world’s largest country in area with over 3.7 million square miles, and the third largest in population with over 313 million people.
California, with the high-tech electronics industries, is the top manufacturing state.
After the break-up of the Soviet Union it became the world’s only superpower.

Scenery from Ravnefjeldet, Nanortalik (Southernmost part of Greenland)

Grand Canyon, GREENLAND

Greenland is the world’s largest island
An ice sheet covers four-fifths of the land, making settlements confined to the coast.
The population sits at only 58,000 people.
The country was a Danish possession from 1380 until becoming a self-governed territory in 2009.

What other interesting facts do you know about the countries behind the contenders for place of the year? Most importantly, who deserves the honor of Place of the Year 2013? The winner will be announced 2 December 2013, but until then keep checking back for further insight into the geography and politics of the POTY contenders.

What should be Place of the Year 2013?




SyriaTahrir Square, EgyptRio de Janeiro, BrazilThe NSA Data Center, United States of AmericaGrand Canyon, Greenland








View Result



Total votes: 10Syria (4 votes, 40%)Tahrir Square, Egypt (0 votes, 0%)Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1 votes, 10%)The NSA Data Center, United States of America (3 votes, 30%)Grand Canyon, Greenland (2 votes, 20%)


Vote

Oxford’s Atlas of the World — the only world atlas updated annually, guaranteeing that users will find the most current geographic information — is the most authoritative resource on the market. The milestone Twentieth Edition is full of crisp, clear cartography of urban areas and virtually uninhabited landscapes around the globe, maps of cities and regions at carefully selected scales that give a striking view of the Earth’s surface, and the most up-to-date census information. The acclaimed resource is not only the best-selling volume of its size and price, but also the benchmark by which all other atlases are measured.

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Image Credit: (1) Photo of scenery from Ravnefjeldet, Nanortalik, Greenland by Jensbn. Made available by Creative Commons via Wikemedia Commons. (2) Photo of Rio de Janeiro and Guanabara Bay from Corcovado Mountain. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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                Related StoriesPlace of the Year 2013: Behind the longlistPlace of the Year: History of the AtlasAnnouncing the Place of the Year 2013 Longlist: Vote for your pick 

A close call: the victory of John Adams

Today marks the 217th anniversary of the start of the third election of the president of the United States on 4 November 1796. Still a young country, the election was center stage that year as George Washington decided to stop running. Many patriots were viable candidates, but John Adams had served as vice president under Washington and was an obvious choice for a candidate. In the following extracts from John Ferling’s John Adams: A Life, it becomes apparent that the choice to run was not an easy one for Adams or his wife, Abigail.

[In 1796], the immediate question that confronted Adams, however, was whether to stand for the presidency. There can be no question about his inclination, although he once again rehearsed the familiar pattern of doubt and equivocation. He spoke of retirement. It would be the “happiest Portion of my whole Life,” he said. He and Abigail could be “Farmers for Life,” living out their days in Quincy in “a very humble Style.” On the other hand, the new nation needed his service, he remarked. By early February he cautioned Abigail to keep their sons’ letters confidential lest they contain something that might injure him politically. A week later he acknowledged his weariness with politics, but he confided that he did not know how he could “live out of it.” After another week he was fretting over whether to serve four or eight years in the presidency.

The possibility that her husband might be elevated to the presidency could hardly have come as a surprise to Abigail. For the past eight years she had lived with the realization that he would become president immediately should Washington suddenly die, an event that seemed likely during two serious illnesses he suffered in the course of his tenure in office. But seeking the presidency was another matter, and Abigail was not happy with the prospect of several additional years of public service. It meant protracted separations from her husband; it also meant that she would be compelled to return to Philadelphia. She knew too that her husband would be exposed to barbs and calumny to a degree that would be difficult for him to withstand. She also feared for the health of her husband, who would be sixty-two years old when he entered office.

While it was a hard decision for Adams and his wife to commit to, he campaigned for the presidency and votes were cast by the electoral college from Friday, 4 November to Wednesday, 7 December 1796. The chances of all three candidates, Adams, Jefferson, and Pinckney, were fair, and there was much debate about who would be declared the victor.

The presidential electors met in their respective capitals about one week after Adams returned to Philadelphia. While their ballots remained sealed until February 8, it was impossible to prevent reasonably accurate word of their transactions from leaking out. By the third week in December it was agreed that Jefferson could not win. It was not clear, however, whether Adams or Pinckney would triumph, or whether the issue would be left to the House of Representatives. Over the next few days, more definitive word arrived. It seemed clear that Adams had been elected. At Washington’s final levee of the year, the First Lady warmly congratulated Adams, and told him of the president’s delight at his victory. Soon foreign diplomats began to call on the vice-president, a sure sign that they believed he would be Washington’s successor. But Adams did not admit what everyone else had been saying until the next to the last day of the year. He broke the news to Abigail in a radiant letter that contrasted sharply with those he had penned during the last month. “John Adams,” he wrote of himself in that missive, “never felt more serene in his life.”

When the official tabulation was announced in February—ironically it was Adams, in his capacity as president of the Senate, who opened and read the results of the Electoral College voting—it was learned that Adams had garnered seventy-one votes to Jefferson’s sixty-eight. Pinckney finished in third place. As almost everyone had expected, Adams received every vote from New England, while Jefferson controlled the South, capturing fifty-four of that region’s votes to Adams’s nine. Nevertheless, Adams won the election in the southern and middle states. Jefferson lost Maryland to Adams, and the vice-president secured one crucial vote in both Virginia and North Carolina; moreover, Jefferson did not receive a single electoral vote from New York, New Jersey, and Delaware. Pinckney won two more votes than Adams in the middle and southern states, but he received eighteen fewer votes than the vice-president from the New England states. Clearly, some New England electors had conspired to reduce Pinckney’s strength, in the process depriving him of the vice-presidency. Had he received only a majority of the second ballots cast by New England’s electors, he would have been elected vice-president; had he received three-fourths of New England’s second-choice votes, he would have been the second president of the United States—and John Adams again would have been elected to the vice-presidency.

Several factors contributed to Adams’s victory. The country relished the peace and prosperity that had accompanied Washington’s presidency. In addition, after eight years of southern rule, many in the North must have felt it was their turn to control the executive branch. Furthermore, Adams believed that he had secured two or three southern votes that Pinckney might have won simply because “Hamilton and Jay are said to be for” the South Carolinian. A strong Federalist organization, especially in the burgeoning urban, mercantile centers, also aided Adams. Nor can the role of the French envoy be discounted. Adams spoke of the existence of three parties in the race, an English party, a French party, and an American party. It was to the Francophiles that Pierre Adet, minister to the United States since early in 1795, appealed when he unwisely campaigned openly for Jefferson. Both Hamilton and Madison believed that his actions hurt the Virginian’s candidacy. Still, Jefferson could have carried the election had he won the two pivotal electoral votes that Adams secured in Virginia and North Carolina. The Republicans carried both states by overwhelming margins, but Adams won the Loudoun-Farquier district in Virginia, western counties that long had exhibited hostility to the hegemony of the planter aristocracy. Adams’s one source of strength in North Carolina was in the commercial region along the coast, an area with historic mercantile ties to England. Had Jefferson won those two southern electoral districts, he would have defeated Adams seventy to sixty-nine.

John Ferling is the author of nine books and numerous articles on the American Revolution and early American wars, and has appeared in four television documentaries devoted to the Revolution and the War of Independence. His book A Leap in the Dark won the Fraunces Tavern Book Award as the year’s best book on the American Revolution and Almost a Miracle was named the New York American Revolution Round Table Best Book of 2007. He is also the author of John Adams: A Life.

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Image credit: Official Presidential portrait of John Adams, about 1792-1793. Portrait by John Trumbull. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Drone technology and international law

By Frederik Rosén

Drone technology presents us with a quantum leap in the history of seeing in war: a history moving from hilltops and watchtowers to the use of binoculars, balloons and airplanes and then on to radar, night vision, satellites…and drones. Drone technology brings us closer than ever to the battleground. It is a medium of proximity and visibility.

The legal controversies about the use of drones in armed conflicts primarily spring from the disputed lawfulness of targeted and signature killings, including constitutional and sovereignty issues. Yet the debates have failed to address the legal implications arising from the increasing surveillance capabilities of drone technology.

Let’s take proximity and transparency as our main point of departure to discuss drones and law. Drone technology triggers international humanitarian law obligations regarding precaution in attack. Belligerents have affirmed the obligation to take due care in attack for a long time, and it is enshrined in Article 57 of Add. Protocol 1 from 1977. The principle of precaution is considered customary international law. It forms a most critical component in international humanitarian law and in the military manuals of most states.

If military commanders have drones, then under international humanitarian law they are required to use them to the greatest possible extent for taking due care in attack. If a state possesses drone technology, and if the deployment of this technology may potentially reduce unnecessary harm from armed attacks, the state is obliged to employ the technology. This is not at all different from the obligation to pick up the binoculars before firing the shells. The obligation to use drones for precaution is logically not limited to drone attacks. It applies across all weapon systems. Even in the near future, ground attacks may no longer be lawful without engaging available drone technology for the purpose of precaution.

But it does not end here. The availability of drone technology for precaution also bears implications as to how the principle of precaution should be applied. The humanitarian legal obligation to take “feasible precautions” depends on what “feasible” is balanced against. The three conventional parameters here are: (1) precautionary measures vs. strategy considerations, i.e. the time to gather and process information, or whether precautionary steps may reveal tactics; (2) precautionary measures vs. personnel considerations, i.e. the risk to the soldiers and the operators of weapon systems; (3) the precautionary measures vs. materiel considerations, i.e. the risk to the weapon systems.

Since drone technology can be stealthy, quickly deployed, or deployed well ahead of an attack (as it mostly is when used for targeted and signature killings), most situations of weapon engagement by drones leave us with only the material considerations. Yet the price tag difference between a US$3 billion B2 bomber, the US$17 million Reaper, and the US$100,000 ScanEagle, is considerable and should make a difference for such calculations.

In another branch of international law, human rights law, the growing surveillance capability of drone technology also has implications. The European Court of Human Rights has several times found the convention applicable in situations where European states have exercised control over territories or persons in places remote from Europe. Combined with sophisticated weapon systems, drone technology suggests a capability for exercising a degree of control over territories and persons, which easily mirrors some of the cases where the Court has applied its convention. To be sure, drone technology sometimes allows for more effective control than boots on the ground.

Drone technology will develop at great speed. We will soon see surveillance capabilities and weapon technologies that we cannot yet imagine the full scope of. It is, however, certain that drone technology will become an increasingly powerful tool for controlling territories and persons, and will bring still greater transparency to armed conflicts. Drones will be increasingly robotized. Autonomous weapon systems raise many questions, yet notwithstanding the weapon aspect, the mere surveillance advantage of robotized drones flows directly into the main argument about how “seeing and knowing triggers obligations.”

It is as if drone technology lifts the “fog of war” from critical aspects of the use of armed force. We therefore need to think through the application of the laws of war in armed conflicts characterized by total visibility. Because drone technology is not only a game changer, it also triggers obligations.

Dr. Frederik Rosén is a research fellow at the Danish Institute for International Studies. His is the author of Collateral Damage: A Candid History of a Peculiar Form of Death (Hurst, 2014). Rosén has published widely on international security and warfare, and is the author of “Extremely Stealthy and Incredibly Close: Drones, Control and Legal Responsibility” in the Journal of Conflict and Security Law, available to read for free for a limited time.

The Journal of Conflict & Security Law is a refereed journal aimed at academics, government officials, military lawyers and lawyers working in the area, as well as individuals interested in the areas of arms control law, the law of armed conflict and collective security law. The journal aims to further understanding of each of the specific areas covered, but also aims to promote the study of the interfaces and relations between them.

Oxford University Press is a leading publisher in international law, including the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law, latest titles from thought leaders in the field, and a wide range of law journals and online products. We publish original works across key areas of study, from humanitarian to international economic to environmental law, developing outstanding resources to support students, scholars, and practitioners worldwide. For the latest news, commentary, and insights follow the International Law team on Twitter @OUPIntLaw.

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Image credit: Radar with red target blip and green sweeping arm. © axstokes via iStockphoto.

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White versus black justice

By Martha J. Cutter

My nephew Jake Silverman is a brainy, confident, energetic, and strong-willed six-year-old. He eats more food than I ever thought it was possible for a six-year-old boy to consume, loves my iPad with a passion, and sometimes has temper tantrums when he doesn’t get precisely what he wants. He already knows he wants to be a doctor, and I have no doubt that he will be an unruly teenager who will mature into a brilliant, handsome, and talented young man. At least that is my hope.

You see, Jake was adopted from Ethiopia by my brother (who is white), and so Jake is black. After the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin on 13 July 2013, I thought about all the black parents having talks with their teens, and about all the vicious racial crimes of the past that went unpunished. But I also thought about Jake, who in a decade will be almost the same age Trayvon Martin was when he went out to buy skittles and ice tea and never came back.

I have no doubt Jake will be a smart-talking, smart-aleck of a kid (like everyone else in my family) and when told to get out of the neighborhood he actually lives in, might just refuse. Will he be shot for this? It seems that being black in the United States allows vigilante-like acts by individuals who fear this blackness. In ten years, will skittles + ice tea + being black still = random acts of unpunished racial violence?

Street art protesting the acquittal of George Zimmerman. Artwork by Scott Peehl.

My neighbor’s white son was just sixteen last year when he stole his mom’s credit card, another neighbor’s car (which he hotwired and drove to Florida), and was pulled over for speeding on Daytona Beach. He was asked to show a driver’s license (he had none) and registration (upon which the officer realized the car was stolen). He had smoked some marijuana on the way down to Florida and when the officer said, “You are in big trouble, mister!” he sassed the officer, saying “Whatcha gonna do, call my momma?” at which point the officer threw him in the holding cell and left to in fact call his mother, my neighbor. My neighbor called her father, who had been a judge, who called a judge in Florida, and all charges (car and credit card theft, speeding, driving without a license, drug use, and possession of two ounces of pot he planned to sell in Florida) were ultimately dropped.

When I heard this story, I thought: yeah, so it goes, white privilege. If he was black, he might have been shot, detained, or imprisoned. But so it goes and goes and goes.

A rally in protest of the Trayvon Martin verdict. Photo: Greg Gilbert / The Seattle Times

The Trayvon Martin case is the Emmett Till of our time. Or at least it should be. Remember Emmett Till, who was beaten to death on 28 August 1955 by four white men because he supposedly wolf-whistled at a white woman? He was fourteen, and his body was bloodied beyond recognition; his momma bravely insisted on an open casket so that the world could see what had been done to her baby.

We do not know what happened on the evening of 26 February 2012 in Florida, beyond George Zimmerman’s words, for the only other witness to the violence is dead. But let us imagine that Trayvon Martin was a seventeen-year-old boy who liked some of the things other seventeen-year-old boys like, such as being a wise guy, swearing, and not always answering questions posed to him by adults (to say nothing of skittles and ice tea). Yet if he was a white teenager with these predilections, walking down the street in a hoodie, and was assaulted by a black man, would the black man have been found innocent of any crime? The statistics suggest not.

Drawing on data from the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports: 1980-2010, John Roman shows that when there is a homicide with one shooter and one victim who do not know each other and a firearm is used, “less than 3 percent of black-on-white homicides are ruled to be justified [self-defense].” Yet when the races are reversed, the percentage of cases ruled to be self-defense jumps to a staggering twenty-nine percent in non-stand-your ground states and to almost thirty-six percent in stand-your-ground states. This means that whites are ten times more likely to be able to kill a black stranger with impunity in the name of “self-defense” than if these racial roles are reversed. We might think of differential justice systems as a product of the past and of Jim Crow, but they are with us now, in the present moment.

So I mourn this verdict, this miscarriage of justice. It shows how divided and unfair our judicial system still is. We have one set of standards for crime and punishment of whites like my neighbor’s son and another set for Trayvon Martin, my (black) nephew Jake Silverman, and African Americans in general. Will it ever change? When will the scales of justice indeed be color blind? For they are clearly not. And so I fear for the future we all must live in, as well as the present we all must try to endure — together.

Martha J. Cutter is a professor of English and African American at the University of Connecticut. Since 2006 she has been the editor-in-chief of MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States and writes a quarterly column for the journal; her current column mediates on the Trayvon Martin Case and the “new Jim Crow”. Her articles on African American literature and mixed-race identity have appeared in many journals and several essay collections.

MELUS, a prestigious and rigorous journal in the field of multi-ethnic literature of the United States, has been a vital resource for scholarship and teaching for more than thirty-five years. Published quarterly, MELUS illuminates the national, international, and transnational contexts of US ethnic literature. The journal is sponsored by the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. Founded in 1973, the society endeavors to expand the definition of American literature through the study and teaching of Latina/o American, Native American, African American, Asian and Pacific American, and ethnically specific Euro-American literary works, their authors, and their cultural contexts.

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Image credits: (1) Street art protesting the acquittal of George Zimmerman. Artwork by Scott Peehl. Do not reproduce without permission. (2) A rally in protest of the Trayvon Martin verdict. Greg Gilbert / The Seattle Times. Do not reproduce without permission.

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Q&A with author Craig L. Symonds

There are a number of mysteries surrounding the Battle of Midway, and a breadth of new information has recently been uncovered about the four day struggle. We sat down with naval historian Craig L. Symonds, author of The Battle of Midway, newly released in paperback, to answer some questions about the iconic World War II battle.

There has been a lot written on the Battle of Midway over the years. What prompted your interest in this battle?

My editor at Oxford University Press, Tim Bent, urged me to take it on. Oxford has a series on “Pivotal Moments in American History” and Tim thought that Midway belonged on that list. I certainly did not disagree with him, but I told him that there were already several fine books on the battle—notably Walter Lord’s and Gordon Prange’s—plus an excellent recent book (by Anthony Tully and Jon Parshall) on the Japanese side of the battle.

Tim, however, wanted a book on Midway in the Oxford series, and he wanted one that would appeal to a broad general audience—an audience that, 70 years after the fact, did not know a lot about Midway and its importance. I am afraid that I also succumbed to his blatant flattery when he told me that however many books there were on Midway, none of them were written by me! There is no limit to an author’s willingness to be flattered.

Research is a key to writing any good history. More and more information has surfaced over the years. What information had come to light that provided you with a unique take on the battle? Or to put it another way, did any research lead to significant new information that could add to other views of the battle?

I think of all the sources I consulted, the oral histories left behind by the participants made the greatest impression on me and significantly influenced my narrative. When I read the transcripts of those oral histories I felt like I was in communication with the men who were there. Individually, each of them offers only a small glimpse into the overall story, but collectively they merge to form a dramatic narrative. In addition to the oral histories in the Naval Institute’s Collection, I found a rich trove of interviews at the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas, that I do not believe anyone else had researched. While I am at it, let me put in a plug for this museum which, because of its out-of-the-way location, too often gets overlooked. It is worth a visit.

You have referenced other works and other comments made on the battle. Most prevalent has been the idea that this battle was won because of some “incredible” luck or the result of a “miracle.” You argue that the battle was less a result of good fortune and more a result of the men and leaders present at the time. Could you elaborate a little?

Sure. I do not mean to discredit the idea that luck and fortune—even Providence—played a role in the battle. But I did want to emphasize that it was not all luck and chance. By asserting that the American victory at Midway was all, or even predominately, the result of luck, it demeans the bold decisions and brave actions of the participants. To some extent it was the Japanese, and especially Mitsuo Fuchida in his widely-read and influential book, who argued that the outcome of the battle was due to luck. He emphasizes how amazing it was that the one search plane assigned to the sector where the American carriers lurked was the very one that had engine trouble; he emphasizes the curious timing of the early arrival of the American torpedo planes that brought the Japanese CAP down to low levels; he writes about Nagumo’s fateful decision to delay a launch until he rearmed his strike planes; he notes the timing of the arrival of the Enterprise and Yorktown bombers. Those events allowed Fuchida to claim that the Americans did not beat the Japanese, they were just lucky! Parshall and Tully have shown how Fuchida was simply wrong on many of these issues, and I tried to show how some of those events (the engine trouble on the search plane, for example) were actually strokes of luck for the Japanese. Luck plays a role in all battles, but in the end, it is the men who win and lose them.

When researching particular parts of the battle, and trying to answer some of the mysteries, did you find answers? Did you find that your research led you to other questions you didn’t expect, and if so, did you find answers to those, or do some of them remain unresolved?

Well, I found answers, to be sure, whether they are the final answers is another question. I suppose that to some extent there will always be issues that are left unresolved. There is, and always will be, a veil of uncertainty about what happened to the Air Group from the USS Hornet that morning. Researching was a real adventure for me because I found that one issue often led to another, and I felt like I was following a trail of clues. This is the way it is supposed to work, of course, but it was especially true in this project.

One aspect of the battle has been endlessly debated, and is referred to as “The Flight to Nowhere.” You make a convincing argument for the final and best analysis of the mystery. Plus you also had many actual participants that were on that flight support your conclusions. Can we ever be sure that this will conclude the mystery or are there still unresolved aspects that we will never know, for instance where all the After Action reports went?

Well, first, I am gratified that you find my explanation convincing. I actually resisted the argument that I eventually presented. Indeed, I fought pretty hard against it. I simply could not imagine why Mitscher would conceal the actual events, and how so many men would conspire to keep them secret for so long. And of course, there were always some who insisted until the day they died (Clay Fisher, for one) that the Hornet Air Group did not go on a “Flight to Nowhere.” I set out at first to argue that Fisher was right, but in the end, I was compelled by the evidence to conclude otherwise. Mitscher, I think, did what he believed was best for the country and for the service: first by seeking to find and destroy the supposed “second” group of Japanese carriers, and then by concealing events that would have cast the Navy in a poor light. It is hard to argue, even now, that he made the wrong decision.

As for the missing After Action Reports, one possibility is that Mitscher simply told the Squadron Commanders not to submit one; that he debriefed each of them orally, and then wrote—or ordered his staff to write—the only report we have from the Hornet. The other possibility is that the reports were submitted and that Mitscher had them destroyed, but that seems much less likely to me.

What was the hardest part of writing the book? Many of the key participants were not around any more. Did other people help in your research? Were other authors who did interview key witnesses helpful?

The hardest part was solving the puzzles you refer to above. This was much harder than doing the research or writing the book itself.

As to receiving help from others: I am very beholden to both those who went before me and to those still working in the field. Both Walter Lord and Gordon Prange left copies of all their interviews in their papers (Lord’s are at the Naval History and Heritage Command Library in the Washington Navy Yard; and Prange’s are in the Hornbake Library at the University of Maryland). In addition to interviews of American participants, they each commissioned Japanese-speaking researchers to interview the Japanese participants and then to transcribe those interviews into English. Those interviews, too, are in their papers.

In addition, contemporary scholars were very generous with their time and expertise. Two in particular, both of whom are acknowledged in the book, went well beyond normal collegiality and read the entire manuscript, offered insights and suggestions, and led me to sources I would otherwise have missed. These two worthies are John B. Lundstrom and Jonathan Parshall. I owe them much.

As I said before, many of the veterans of the battle are not around anymore to interview, but there are some still with us. Did any of them help shed light on missing facts? 

I must acknowledge that among the very first people I talked to after my editor at Oxford were William Hauser and John “Jack” Crawford, both veterans of Midway and avid champions of its memory. They actually came to see me at the Naval Academy where I was teaching, and urged me to do the book. Bill was on the cruiser Nashville up near the Aleutians, and Jack was on the Yorktown when it went down. (I tell the story of Jack’s role on the Yorktown in the book.) ther veterans, including Dusty Kleiss, provided information by e-mail. I had a very pleasant and lengthy lunch with Donald “Mac” Showers, who worked in Hypo during the battle and who helped me understand some of the details (and the tedium) of code breaking. Most of my “interviews,” however, were second hand in that I depended on the oral histories and typed interviews now in various archives.

The U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Yorktown (CV-5) being abandoned by her crew after she was hit by two Japanese Type 91 aerial torpedoes, 4 June 1942. Photo by US Navy. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Something about the Battle of Midway that is particularly interesting is the story of what happened to key participants after the battle. Why do you think that’s so important?

Since I argue that “people make history,” it seemed only right to follow those people—or at least some of them—into their lives after the battle to see what became of them. I was astonished to learn that Miles Browning, who was about as humorless a person as anyone, turned out to be the grandfather of a famous comedian. (If you don’t know who it is, buy the book! For that matter, buy it anyway.)

You are familiar with more than just the battle itself; you go into detail about events beforehand, including naval doctrine, and earlier carrier battles. Why did you do this?

No historical event exists in a vacuum, and it is always necessary to provide context and background, but I agree that this book provides more than usual. Still, I felt it was essential to provide this background to put the battle in its full doctrinal, strategic, and technological context. A complete account of the Battle of the Coral Sea, for example, explains the impact of that experience on Fletcher, Browning and Oscar (Pete) Pederson, among others. It also allowed me to introduce many of the characters early, to explain the role of swiftly changing technologies, and to explore the culture of each side that influenced the decision-making.

Intelligence played a key if not decisive role in the battle. How much was it an intelligence victory as well as a military victory?

For a while after the battle, the role of code-breaking remained a secret. Then when it was revealed, there was a tendency to exaggerate the role it played. From playing no role, it went (in some accounts) to explaining everything. The answer lies somewhere in the middle. While Joe Rochefort and his colleagues were absolutely essential to American victory, they did not provide Nimitz or anyone else with a complete blueprint of Japanese plans. That matters as we assess the battle, because if Nimitz had only small bits of intelligence available to him, his decision to act boldly takes on new importance. Rochefort could have been wrong, and another admiral besides Nimitz might have played it safe and waited to see. In the end, therefore, it was both an intelligence victory and a military victory.

Technology played a significant part as well. How much of the victory might be attributed to the technological advantage of things like radar?

The Japanese had a few technological advantages of their own: the longer range of their panes (mainly due to less armor), and especially their torpedoes—which actually worked! But the American possession of radar trumped them both. Being able to see the Japanese planes en route allowed the Americans time to prepare. If the Japanese had been able to do that at 10:20 on the morning June 4, the outcome might have been altogether different.

You write from a distinctly American perspective. Was there any reason you approached the subject from the American side rather than both sides?

I have two responses to this. The first is that I did try to include a lot of information about the Japanese: their culture, the political infighting among the various groups in the government and in the Navy, the personalities of the leading decision makers, and the emergence of their technology. Still, I focused more on the American side of the story because I felt the Japanese story had been told so well by Anthony Tully and Jonathan Parshall and did not think there was much that I could add to it. What I did include about the Japanese I included because I thought it was necessary to the narrative.

Why were some promoted and others not after the battle? Mitscher had already been selected for promotion to Rear Admiral. Did his performance at Midway affect his later assignments, and why was Joe Rochefort shelved afterward?

Spruance became Nimitz’s chief of staff after the battle, and almost certainly discussed the battle, and Mitscher’s role in it, with Nimitz privately. There is no evidence of this, but it is hardly likely in a close six month relationship between two men who literally lived together under the same roof, that the topic never came up. And Spruance knew that there was something fishy about Mitscher’s After Action report. He as much as said so in his own report. It is not impossible that Spruance or Nimitz, of both of them, actually confronted Mitscher about it afterward. In any case, they apparently agreed that there was nothing to be gained by dirtying the Navy’s laundry in public. But Nimitz did move Mitscher to a shore command, one that was not a step up from a carrier group commander. It was a kind of exile and it lasted for six months. After that “time out” Mitscher was restored to a sea command with the creation of the Fast Carrier Task Force under Spruance (TF 58).

Rochefort is a different story. He had never been popular in Washington where the Redmond brothers resented his independence and unwillingness to be a team player. Their views influenced Ernest King as well, and after Midway Rochefort was transferred to other duties. There has been a lot of discussion about Rochefort’s not getting the Distinguished Service Medal that Nimitz recommended for him. King disapproved the recommendation on the somewhat specious grounds that it was inappropriate to give one man a decoration to honor a whole command. Only years later, under President Reagan, did Rochefort’s descendants receive the medal.

Craig L. Symonds is Professor of History Emeritus at the United States Naval Academy. The Battle of Midway is now out in paperback. He is the author of many books on American naval history, including Decision at Sea: Five Naval Battles That Shaped American History as well as Lincoln and His Admirals, co-winner of the Lincoln Prize in 2009.

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                Related StoriesBuilding the hydrogen bombEric Orts on business theoryTen facts about Charles Darwin’s ten children 

Eric Orts on business theory

Business is one of the most powerful and influential institutions in our world today, but there has been relatively little theoretical work from scholars. With the increasing number of threats and challenge, now is a valuable time for questions to be asked regarding business theory. We sat down with Eric Orts, author of Business Persons, to discuss thinking critically about business institutions in a theoretical manner.

What is the most pressing or controversial issue in business theory right now?

There are a number of pressing issues in the field.

(1)    Increasingly, calls have been made for business to be part of the solution to global problems. This includes advent of “hybrid social enterprises” which combine a for-profit objective with a social or environmental agenda. In other words, they attempt to bring the discipline of profit-oriented business thinking to address large-scale problems by, for example, providing a new agricultural services, water sanitation technologies, or improved sustainable products. Many of these new business ventures focus on poor parts of the world – at a time when the divide between “rich” and ”poor” parts of the world is becoming more and more severe.

(2)     What social theories are informing current practices of executive compensation in large corporations and financial enterprises today?  Simplistic economic theories that reduce corporate governance to principal-agent models (“principals” conceived as shareholders and “agents” as managers) have become much too influential and have provided an underspecified justification for increasingly unequal levels of executive compensation. Recent levels of executive compensation, most notably in the United States which has been the main source of these theories, have been called “outrageous” and even “obscene” by many usually even-keeled commentators. But reforms recommended to date appear to be stuck with outdated theories. I argue that reasserting an essentially legal theory provides a more accurate and realistic account of social forces within corporations that conspire to create radically unequal pay structures without a convincing rationale. Law provides a means to correct these problems as well, if the political will to do so develops. Exploding the acceptance of the economic justifications may have practical value as well, even without outside legal change.

(3)    What legal rights should business firms be recognized to assert? This issue has broken through to widespread consciousness and concern after the decision by the US Supreme Court in Citizens United. How do business firms fit into conceptions of the role of business in politics? Should there be limitations imposed and, if so, what are they?  Another recent case in the US Supreme Court involves the potential responsibility of corporations as “legal persons” for violations of internationally recognized human rights, especially when the violations may occur in other jurisdictions than a corporation’s “home” country. These are very difficult questions, and they cannot be answered without a clear understanding of what exactly business firms are.

How has the thinking or approach evolved on business theory?

In the United States and many Anglophone countries – and to a lesser extent in continental Europe and elsewhere – the jurisprudential school known as “law and economics” has gained a stranglehold on most, if not all, of the leading law and business schools in the country. Those of us teaching mainly in business schools recognize that there are many important arguments and theoretical positions taken within the discipline of economics.

A great deal of damage has resulted, in my opinion, including the deregulation in the United States that culminated in the financial excesses that caused the Great Credit Crash of 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession. Entrenched professors are surprisingly resilient to change, though some (including the law-and-economics founder Richard Posner) have had the courage to look in the mirror and to recommend major change. The tenure system (which I support on other grounds) probably also has the tendency to make academia relatively impervious to challenge, even when their theories contribute to bad outcomes.   In the aftermath of the global financial crisis (or at least the last big one), I believe that there is now an opening for those of us who have been saying for awhile that the some of the emperors of economics have no clothes.

Good economics is essential for good law, but economics does not give all the answers to hard legal problems. To set the rules governing complex human organizations such as business firms (including large corporations) without considering other important perspective is neither useful nor correct. In the longer term, I would like to see law faculty (both in law schools and elsewhere in the university) return to some basic legal understanding and methodologies. The “law and” movement should include not only economics, but also ethics, politics, history, and sociology/anthropology.

Moreover, a focus only on economics often leads to a purely “instrumental” view of the world – as well as a very selfish one – that leaves no room for ethics and basic political principles (such as freedom of expression and human rights). We know that different theories are what change the world in the long term. They are a source of new hope for future generations and provide foundations for the development of human civilization as it faces new, global challenges.

What was the most popular discussion topic at a recent conference you attended?

I attended and chaired a session on the Fukushima nuclear disaster at the Wharton Global Forum in Tokyo in the spring. The presentations by major leaders of business and government who had to deal with this crisis in leadership positions were extremely interesting and poignant. Also, this disaster serves as an example of how some parts of the world can be immune to thinking about huge issues that occur elsewhere. The effect of Fukushima in Germany was significant, but in the United States, the issue has come and gone without much perceptible impact on public opinion.

What are you reading at the moment in your field?

I’m about to teach my courses in Corporate Law and Finance and in Responsibility in Professional Services as a visiting professor at INSEAD in France this fall and winter.   As a result, I’m reading some basic materials such as John Boatright’s edited Finance Ethics: Critical Issues in Theory and Practice (2010) and some other sources in an attempt to “globalize” and generalize my understanding. I’m also rereading some treatments of conflicts of interest as a generic problem in financial services and corporate governance. It will be an interesting shift for me from teaching graduate courses at Wharton in which approximately 60% are American to those at INSEAD where only approximately 8% will be American. But I’m sure that I will learn a great deal from the experience, as I have in the past during other opportunities to teach and attend conferences in other countries such as China, Brazil, and Indonesia.

What first attracted you to your discipline?

I decided to go to law school after studying government and political science in undergraduate and graduate school. A few law-related courses in graduate school convinced me that I wanted to study law seriously. I realized that law provides the most basic institutional foundation for many phenomenon that we now take for granted:  contracts, property, and business firms, as well as the more obvious constitutional structure of government and politics. I also worked as a paralegal at Skadden Arps in New York City when going to graduate school and learned that I really had no idea how the massively influential decisions about mergers and acquisitions of large companies occurred. In a sense, perhaps I began to realize that business and the structure of business held some of the most important questions for our time. I had other plans originally, but the life of the scholar and teacher has become my true calling.

What advice would you give to someone wanting to specialize in your field?

Consider the option of teaching law in a business school. I chaired the faculty search committee for Wharton’s Legal Studies and Business Ethics Department last year and was very happy to hire our three top candidates. I think that our good fortune owed in part to significant economic problems that US law schools are now facing. President Obama’s surprising comment weighing in on the side of reducing legal education to two years may increase this pressure going forward (especially if he retires from office back into the academic fold). I also believe that law should not be a subject that only future lawyers study. It is a fundamental institutional in its own right that functions as a kind of “legal matrix” that everyone should understand. I believe that our laws should not be left only to lawyers. I wrote Business Persons at a level that will be accessible to scholars and students working in other disciplines for that reason.

Eric W. Orts is the author of Business Persons: A Legal Theory of the Firm, which presents a foundational legal theory of business firms which is the first to embrace and explain the potential of benefit corporations and other “hybrid social enterprises.” Eric Orts is the Guardsmark Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is also a Professor of Management, faculty director of the Initiative for Global Environmental Leadership, and faculty co-director the FINRA Institute at Wharton. He will be a visiting professor at INSEAD in France in the fall of 2013. Read his previous blog post.

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Image credit: US Supreme Court. Image Credit: Uschools University Images, istockphoto.

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                Related StoriesReinvention of hybrid business enterprises for social goodIn the footsteps of Alfred Russel Wallace with Bill BaileyBuilding the hydrogen bomb 

In the footsteps of Alfred Russel Wallace with Bill Bailey

By George and Jan Beccaloni

On Sunday 29 July 2013, we headed off to Wallacea for three weeks to assist comedian Bill Bailey with a documentary he is presenting about Alfred Russel Wallace. George, the Natural History Museum’s Curator of Orthopteroid Insects, acted as the Historical Consultant. Jan, the Natural History Museum’s Curator of Arachnida and Myriapoda, made a video diary and took photos of our exploits for the Museum’s Wallace 100-related events in 2013.

We have known Bill for about four years, and although his is not a scientist by profession, he’s very interested in natural history (birds in particular) and is a big fan of Wallace. He often goes to Southeast Asia on holiday and it was on one such trip, many years ago, that he read Wallace’s book The Malay Archipelago and became captivated by its author.

Wallacea is the heart of the region Wallace called the Malay Archipelago, and it includes the large weirdly-shaped island of Sulawesi, as well as Lombok, Sumbawa, Flores, Sumba, Timor, Halmahera, Buru, Seram, and many smaller islands — nearly all of which are part of Indonesia. Wallacea is named after Wallace and is a biogeographical transition zone between the Australian region to the east, and the Oriental region to the west. The islands in it contain a mix of Australian animals (mostly marsupials, e.g. cuscus), and Oriental animals (placental mammals, like macaque monkeys, wild pigs and tarsiers). The Wallacean islands never had dry land connections to the main land masses, so it has few animals which find it difficult to cross stretches of open ocean (e.g. land mammals, land birds, or freshwater fish of continental origin).

During our three weeks in Wallacea we visited three of the most important Wallace-related places in the whole of the Malay Archipelago: Sulawesi, Halmahera, and Ternate. It was on Sulawesi that Wallace received his first ever letter from Darwin, starting a chain of correspondence which would ultimately lead to his theory of natural selection being co-published with him. The “earthquake-tortured island of Ternate”, as Wallace charmingly called it, is the place from which he posted his famous ‘Ternate paper’, which detailed his theory of natural selection, to Darwin in 1858. Halmahera, which is a large island very close to the much smaller island of Ternate, was where Wallace actually discovered natural selection whilst in a malarial delirium, and is home to the most incredible of the 5000 of so species of animals new to science which Wallace collected in the Malay Archipelago, i.e. Wallace’s standardwing bird of paradise, Wallace’s golden birdwing butterfly, and Wallace’s giant bee. We were fairly likely to see the first, less likely to spot the second, and very unlikely to come upon the third.

* * *

Our first stop: Sulawesi, a weirdly-shaped island in Indonesia. As we drove from the airport to the hotel, we were struck by the similarity of Sulawesi to Fiji — a highly humid, verdant and lush island, with numerous palms and towering volcanoes. One of the volcanoes had a plume of smoke emerging from the crown, which we should have taken as a warning of what was to come.

The following morning, we experienced our first earthquake! We rushed out of our hotel room and headed for the emergency stairs. Our room was on the 9th floor so it was a long way down. As we rushed bare footed (there had been no time to put on foot wear) in fear of our lives, we felt that we were almost literally following in Wallace’s footsteps. He wrote about an earthquake he experienced near Manado in The Malay Archipelago, although unlike us, he had found the experience fairly amusing!

We emerged into the hotel lobby covered with thick dirt from the emergency stairs and dressed only in night attire. The hotel staff tittered politely behind their hands at the sight of two dirty and semi-naked orang putih (that’s Indonesian for white people). The tremors, which we discovered later were 5.1 on the Richter scale, had finally stopped, and so we reluctantly went back to our room. We discovered later that it was the first earthquake of the year, and that some of the staff had been a bit scared.

After the excitement of our arrival, we made our way to Tangkoko National Park, located North-east of Manado on the northern tip of Sulawesi. It was here in 1859 that Wallace came to collect the strange maleo bird (Macrocephalon maleo) which used to nest on the black volcanic sand beach there. Maleos are unique amongst birds in that they bury their eggs in a deep hole and leave them to hatch. There is no parental care and the young are able to fly and forage for themselves soon after they have burrowed their way to the surface of the sand.

The eggs are huge — 5 times the size of a chicken’s egg — and they are (unfortunately) a favourite food of the local people. Egg collecting, together with the hunting of the birds and habitat destruction, accounts for the fact that the maleo is now an endangered species. It is now extremely rare at Tangkoko and no longer nests on the beach where Wallace says that many hundreds came to lay their eggs. It was a special experience to stroll along the black sand peppered with white coral fragments and imagine Wallace walking just ahead of us.




David, George, Bill
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David Attenborough (left), George Beccaloni (centre) & Bill Bailey (right) in the Central Hall of the Natural History Museum, London. Photo by Jan Beccaloni.

Wallacea
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The heart of Indonesia. Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons

Manado
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View of Manado with active volcano in distance. Photo by George Beccaloni.

Manado
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View of Manado with active volcano in distance. Photo by George Beccaloni.

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Bill Bailey greeted by a local Manado boy. Photo by George Beccaloni.

Tangkoko Beach
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Tangkoko National Park. Photo by George Beccaloni.

Macaque
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Photo by George Beccaloni.

Bill Bailey and Macaques
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Photo by George Beccaloni.

Tarsier
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Photo by George Beccaloni.

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Bill Bailey tries on some forest flowers for size. Photo by George Beccaloni.

Local Sulawesi House
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The local 'restaurant'. Photo by George Beccaloni.

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Fricassee of bat being cooked. Photo by George Beccaloni.

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Bill Bailey eating the fricassee. Photo by George Beccaloni.

Ternate
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Bill Bailey with Ternate in the distance. Photo by George Beccaloni.

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The building that the local people think is on the site of Wallace's house. Photo by George Beccaloni.

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Bill Bailey in Wallace Alley. Photo by George Beccaloni.

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The building we think might be on the plot where Wallace's house once stood. Photo by George Beccaloni.

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Ternate at sunset. Photo by George Beccaloni.

We spent few days with Bill at Tangkoko to look for some of the other peculiar animals which are endemic to Sulawesi and which are relatively easy to see there. We were fortunate to have close encounters with the rare Sulawesi black crested macaque (Macaca nigra), only 2,000 of which still survive and which are tragically eaten as bush meat by the locals. Although fearsome-looking with their fiery-coloured eyes and massive teeth, crested macaques are actually rather gentle creatures which are more interested in peering at their reflections in shiny surfaces and checking us out, than being aggressive.

We were also very keen to see the nocturnal spectral tarsier (Tarsius tarsier). Our guide took us to a tree which is visited by tourists at dusk, in order to view the tarsiers up-close-and-personal. Initially, we were rather sceptical that we would see any animals there, because there was a queue of people waiting by the tree, cameras in hand. However, our fears were unfounded because the tarsiers that hang-out there are totally habituated, and are very used to noise and the light from camera flashes and torches. Plus, we had not accounted for their biggest passion in life — tasty, big, fat, green bush crickets. The guide placed one on a branch outside the tarsier’s lair, and in the blink of an eye, a tarsier had leaped out from inside the tree and grabbed the poor cricket. It then took it back to the safety of its tree hole home, and greedily gobbled it down with relish!

The diurnal bear cuscus (Ailurops ursinus) proved to be a much more elusive quarry. Sulawesi is the western-most place in the world where marsupials such as cuscuses occur and we only caught a glimpse of a pair which sleepily gazed down at us from the top of a tall tree.

From the animals’ stomachs to our own, one of the many great things about travelling to the more remote parts of the world, is the opportunity to sample the local cuisine. Wallace ate a great many weird-and-wonderful things during his travels in the Malay Archipelago, and he often writes with great enthusiasm about his culinary experiences. Whilst in Sulawesi (Celebes) he was invited to the house of a chief. He writes:

“The dinner was excellent. Fowls cooked in various ways, wild pig roasted, stewed and fried, a fricassee of bats, potatoes, rice and other vegetables, all served on good china, with finger glasses and fine napkins, and abundance of good claret and beer, seemed to me rather curious at the table of a native chief on the mountains of Celebes.”

All seems unremarkable in this description, until you spot the ‘fricassee of bats’!

Of course, being a game type of chap, and wanting to experience as much as he could of Wallace’s travels, Bill Bailey accepted an offer to try this local ‘delicacy’. We travelled up the road from the lodge where we were staying, to a traditional sturdily-built thatched wooden house. A small fire was constructed in the nicely-swept dirt backyard, and a spicy ‘gravy’ of coconut milk, spices, and chillies was prepared in a large metal pot, before the unfortunate bat (which are sold in the local markets) was popped in. After being simmered for 20 minutes or so, the bat was ready. (The species of fruit bat prepared for the meal is a common and geographically widespread one.)

Bat is considered by the locals to taste very much like rat, but given that this flavour ‘benchmark’ is unfamiliar to most Europeans, one needed to sample the bat for one’s self. Bill ate a decent sized portion. Chewing on the wing membrane, he remarked that it was like eating a musty old umbrella. Being one to try most things at least once (George decided to gracefully decline) I found that it wasn’t as bad as imagined — it tasted very much like ostrich, or a cross between chicken and liver. I have to say that I was glad not to have to eat my way through the entire dish!

* * *

The “earthquake-tortured island of Ternate” (as Wallace called it in The Malay Archipelago) is a small island off the north-east coast of Sulawesi. It consists of a large volcano (Mount Gamalama, 1,715 m), which is only inhabited around the base and is forested all the way to the crater. The volcano erupted violently in 1840 wiping out most of the town. The last more modest eruption was a few months before we arrived and the ash closed the airport for several days. This was a sobering thought, given that you can clearly see the volcano from any part of the island, and it looked a stone’s throw away from the back of our hotel.

For Wallace fans, Ternate is a ‘must’ to visit, because it was on this island (or possibly on the neighbouring island of Halmahera) in February 1858 that Wallace discovered the process of evolution by natural selection, whilst laying incapacitated with fever. After he had recovered enough to put pen to paper, he wrote an essay explaining his theory and posted it from Ternate together with a covering letter to Charles Darwin in Kent, England.

Wallace rented a house on Ternate for three years, which he used as a base to return to after voyages to distant islands in search of rare specimens. This house has become legendary, and although many have tried to locate it, the site of it is still a bit of a mystery. Wallace writes that from his house, “five minutes’ walk down the road brought me to the market and the beach, while in the opposite direction there are no more European houses between me and the mountain.” He continues “just below my house is the fort, built by the Portuguese.” This fort is called Benteng Oranye and it was built by the Dutch in 1607 on the foundations of an earlier Portuguese structure.

Some have identified a house currently owned by a Chinese family as Wallace’s residence, but it has the wrong orientation to the mountain, is too far from the fort, and the front garden is too large. We used the landmark of the fort to orientate ourselves and found a plot across the road and up-hill of the fort which is about the right size as the one that Wallace’s house would have occupied (his house was 40 feet in width and had a garden on either side of it). The width is of great relevance, because plots of land on which houses are built tend not to change in size over time. This plot is now occupied by a new two storey building owned by “Adira Finance”. It will probably never be possible to be 100% certain whether this is the actual site of the house, but we felt a step closer to finding the Wallace holy grail.

This article was adapted from George and Jan Beccaloni’s blog posts on the Natural History Museum website.

George Beccaloni is Curator of Orthopteroid Insects and Director of the Wallace Correspondence Project at the Natural History Museum, London. He was the co-editor of Natural Selection and Beyond: The Intellectual Legacy of Alfred Russel Wallace with Charles H. Smith. Jan Beccaloni is Curator of Arachnida and Myriapoda at the Natural History Museum, London.

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Image credits: All images courtesy of George and Jan Beccaloni, apart from the map of Wallacea, Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons.

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Is big data a big deal in political science?

By Michael Alvarez

Not a day passes when I don’t see something in the news about big data. Sometimes the stories will be about some interesting new big data application. For example I recently read about the WeatherSignal app that is collecting weather data from smartphones. And of course there has been a lot in the news lately about the big data and privacy, such as news reports that the National Security Agency has been using data to model the social connections of some Americans.

Given all of the discussion in the media about big data, it’s important to ask if the buzz surrounding big data is meaningful for social science, especially in my own discipline of political science. In some ways it seems that big data isn’t fueling a revolution in political science because some political scientists have been using machine learning methods for decades. A quick visit to The Penn State Event Data Project Website shows how Phil Schrodt and his colleagues have long been using machine learning methods to develop and analyze relatively large datasets of political events. University of Georgia’s Keith Poole has been using multidimensional scaling methods for decades to study roll call votes from the US Congress. Both Schrodt and Poole have long been important figures in the development of political methodology, and their work has many of the exact attributes that characterize big data — the use of computationally-intensive techniques to analyze what to social scientists are large and complex datasets.

But while there has been this long tradition in political science for big data-like research, there is no doubt that political scientists encounter larger and larger datasets with increasingly complex structures. Good examples of some of these big data applications appear in the current Political Analysis virtual issue, Big Data in Political Science. In article after article, we see that political scientists are using innovative new big data techniques and methods to collect data and test hypotheses.

For instance, Berinsky, Huber and Lenz show how Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk can be used for the recruitment of subjects for field experimentation. As field experiments are an important methodology that many social scientists use to test many different behavioral theories, Berinsky, Huber, and Lenz show how large-scale field experiments can be accomplished at low cost. This illustrates how new big data approaches are being applied to develop new means of collecting data for political science research problems.

So is big data a big deal in political science? The answer is neither yes nor no. Political scientists have long conducted research that sure looks like what we now call big data. It is also the case that we are seeing more and more work that uses large datasets and machine learning approaches. My guess is that these trends will continue, since political scientists are seeing interesting new research opportunities with social media data, with large aggregations of field experiment and polling data, and with other large-scale datasets that just a few years ago could not be easily analyzed with available computational resources.

R. Michael Alvarez is a professor of Political Science at Caltech. His research and teaching focuses on elections, voting behavior, and election technologies. He is editor-in-chief of Political Analysis with Jonathan N. Katz. A new virtual issue ‘Big Data in Political Science’ from the journal shows how Big Data tools are being used in cutting-edge political science research, and how political methodologists are contributing to the Big Data revolution.

Political Analysis chronicles the exciting developments in the field of political methodology, with contributions to empirical and methodological scholarship outside the diffuse borders of political science. It is published on behalf of The Society for Political Methodology and the Political Methodology Section of the American Political Science Association. Political Analysis is ranked #5 out of 157 journals in Political Science by 5-year impact factor, according to the 2012 ISI Journal Citation Reports. Like Political Analysis on Facebook and follow @PolAnalysis on Twitter.

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