World History

An earlier GeoCurrents post mentioned Finns among the nationalities deported by the Soviets before and during World War II. As it turns out, the situation in the Finnish borderlands is rather more complicated than that. The territory between St. Petersburg and Helsinki is home to a number of ethnic groups whose histories range from cultural and linguistic assimilation to population transfer to outright ethnic cleansing.This post is from GeoCurrents

The carved outline of foot found on the removable deck planking of the late 9th century Viking Gokstad Ship bears mute witness to how at least one crew member passed the time during a long sea voyage. There are two foot outlines: a right foot carved across two planks and a weaker outline of a left foot on a single plank. The deck was made out of moveable pine planks that could easily be lifted if the crew needed to access the small hold for cargo storage or to bail out water. When the ship was first excavated in 1880, the planks were found scattered so we don’t know if the feet were originally next to each other or if they were carved independently. Even though the ship was excavated 133 years ago and has been in Oslo’s Viking Ship Museum since 1932, researchers only noticed the footprints in 2009 when moving the loose floorboards. Museum storage manager Hanne Lovise Aannestad thinks the carving was the work of a bored youth, much like kids these days might carve their initials into their desks. “My guess is that some time or another a person was bored and simply traced his foot with his knife. It’s a kind of an ‘I was here’ message,” says Aannestad. [...] Aannestad has measured one of her own feet against a tracing of the carved outline – because no one can actually step on the fragile floorboard, of course. The foot was smaller than hers, and even though people were generally shorter in the Viking days, this was probably a little person. “It could have been a young man. People were treated as adults much earlier in those days. They took off sooner than we would allow young boys to do today,” says Aannestad. They should add the shoe outline to the exhibit so visitors, especially kids, can compare their feet to that of a real Viking who lived and traveled in that ship 1100 years ago. The foot carving is not the first time a young man established a lasting connection to this ship. It was first discovered on Gokstad farm near the town of Sandefjord on the west side of the Oslo Fjord in 1880 by the two teenage sons of the farm’s owner. The hill was called Kongshaugen (meaning “The King’s Mound”), and one day the boys decided to see if the legends that a king was buried there with all his treasure might be true. Just after New Year’s when the ground was still frozen, the highly motivated youths climbed the hill and started digging. Although the name suggests the hill was a burial mound for royalty, there are many mounds named Kongshaugen that turn out to be just hills. This one turned out to have an elaborate Viking ship burial within. The news reached the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Norwegian Monuments and its then-president Nicolay Nicolayse managed to stop the amateur dig. He returned in the Spring and began a proper excavation from the side instead of the top down. You can read his 1892 account of the dig here. What he found was an oak clinker-built ship 76 feet long and 17 feet wide with 16 oar holes on each side of the hull. There was room for more than the 34 rowers, however. The ship’s maximum capacity was around 70. A scrap of white wool with red stripes sewn on was found in the front of the ship, possibly a fragment of the square sail. There was a birch bark-covered wooden burial chamber built at the stern of the ship behind the mast. Inside the burial chamber was a raised bed with the incomplete skeleton of an adult male, a man in his 40s around 5’9″ whose leg bones showed the marks of the cutting blows that probably killed him in battle. Blows to the leg were a common fighting technique in Viking times. Fragments of silk and gold thread stuck in the joists of the roof indicate the chamber was once draped with expensive textiles. There were grave goods, although none of the gold, silver, jewelry, precious accessories and armaments that usually accompanied a Viking ship burial. Those had been looted, probab

April 17, 1940. When enameled steel was sexy. "Electric Institute of Washington. Display of ranges in lobby at Potomac Electric Power Co. building." 8x10 acetate negative by Theodor Horydczak. View full size.

Guys gone wild, 1860s style. "Unidentified soldiers in Union uniforms holding cigars in each other's mouths." Ninth-plate tintype, hand-colored. Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs, Library of Congress. View full size.

From 1952 comes this conflation of two popular genres in the children's TV show "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet." Photo by Charlotte Brooks for the Look magazine assignment "Cowboys and Meteors." View full size.

Today's research snippet.Items from the Chalcis hoard - 14th/15thCBernard of Clairveaux 1090-1153 was a great letter writer. His epistles were frequently full of good advice as he saw it, pep talks and admonishments. Sometimes there were dark hints about the doings of others in society.Here are extracts from his letter to 'The Virgin Sophia, that she may keep the title of virginity and attain its reward.' His remarks on the state of high born royal women are often taken to be jibes aimed at Eleanor of Aquitaine, although no names are named and there is no outright proof."For if among men, virtue is rare – a rare bird on earth – how much rarer is it in the case of a weak woman of high birth? Who can find a virtuous woman? Much more a virtuous woman of high birth?""Let other women, then, who have not any other hope, contend for the cheap, fleeting and paltry glory of things that vanish and deceive. Do you cling to the hope that confounds not. Do you keep yourself, I say, for that far more exceeding weight of glory, which our light affliction which is but for a moment, worketh for you on high. And if the daughters of Belial reproach you, those who walk with stretched forth necks, mincing as they go, decked out and adorned like the Temple, answer them: My Kingdom is not of this world; answer them: My time is not yet come…""Silk and purple and rouge and paint have beauty, but impart it not. Every such thing that you apply to the body exhibits its own loveliness, but leaves it’s not behind. It takes the beauty was it, when the thing itself is taken away. For the beauty that is put on with the garment and put off with the garment, belongs without doubt to the garment, and not to wearer of it. Do not you therefore, emulate those evil disposed persons who, as mendicants, seek an extraneous beauty when they have lost their own. They only betray how destitute they are of an proper and native beauty, when at such great labour and cost of a study to furnish themselves outside with the many and various graces of the fashion of the world which passeth away, just that they may appear graceful in the eyes of fools. Deem it a thing unworthy of you to borrow your attractiveness from the furs of animals and the toils of worms; let your own suffice you. For that is the true and proper beauty of anything, which it has in itself without the aid of any substance besides. Oh! How lovely the flush with which the jewel of inborn modesty colours a virgin’s cheeks! Can have the earrings of queen’s be compared to this? And self discipline confers a mark of equal beauty. Household discipline calms the hall aspect of a maiden’s bearing, her whole temper of mind. It bows the neck, smooths the proud browsd, composes the countenance, restrains the eyes, repressive laughter, checks, the tongue, tempers the appetite, assuages wrath, and guides the deportment. With such pearls of modesty should your robe be decked. When virginity is girt with divers colours such as these, is there any glory to which it is not rightly preferred?....""You see women of the world burdened, rather than adorned with gold, silver, precious stones; in short, with all the raiment of a palace. You see how they draw long trains behind them, and those of the most costly materials, and raise thick clouds of dust into the air. Let not such things disturb you. They must lay them aside when they come to die; but the holiness which is your possession will not forsake you. The things which they wear are really not their own. When they die they can take nothing with them, nor will this their glory go down with them. The world, whose such things are, will keep them and dismissed the wearers naked; and will beguile with them others equally vain."

Forgive the scepticism, a claim is made on a yearly basis, but there is a story in today's Herald that the site of the Battle of Mons Graupius, the first recorded battle in Scottish history, between the Romans under Agricola and the native tribes under Calgacus in AD83/84, has been found. Despite stringent efforts by experts, the site of the battle between the Romans and the Caledonians – in either 83AD or 84AD – has never been conclusively identified. However, Mr Haseler believes his research strongly points to the battle taking place near Elgin, at Quarrelwood Hill to the north-west of the town. He is now asking that experts pay closer attention to the site and examine what he believes to be a possible Roman fort a short distance away. From his research and examining the formation of aerial crop circles, Mr Haseler believes he has discovered the fort just south of Elgin. "I knew the site was a really good candidate from looking at old maps, but I never thought I would find what appeared to be the ditches of a Roman fort staring out at me from the computer screen," he said. "I have looked and looked at the evidence, and everything fits. "I have been to the site, and it is just as described by the Roman writer Tacitus and, barring going up with a metal detector, which is clearly illegal, there is nothing else I can do but present the evidence I have for the public to decide." Hmmm. Anyway, full story here. More about the battle here.

On this date in 1891, U.S. President Benjamin Harrison settled a death penalty case from the remote Navassa Island by granting a commutation. Back in the 19th century, islands stacked high with guano were worth their weight in bird crap. The phosphate-rich dung piled meters-deep in some places, and could be mined for agricultural fertilization and for use in gunpowder and explosives. In 1856, Congress even passed a Guano Islands Act empowering skippers to plant the stars and stripes on any of these lucrative little turd reefs they happened to run across. That’s how the U.S. came to possess, for instance, Midway Island … and more than 100 other islands as well. Most of these claims have long since been ceded, but a few remain today. One of them is (still!) Navassa, a three-square-mile speck off the coast of Haiti, 100 miles south of Guantanamo Bay. Today, Navassa is uninhabited and administered by the Department of the Interior on somewhat disputable footing. (Haiti, just two miles away, also claims Navassa.) But in the late 19th century, its sweet, sweet guano was being extracted by a Baltimore-based firm known as the Navassa Phosphate Company. This operation employed 137 African-American laborers, moving groaning shitloads of product by raw muscle power under a blistering tropical sun … and under 11 white overseers. The nature of the assignment — an island very far from the nearest American settlement, with no other industry, community or settlement to repair to — made taking a job on Navassa almost like hitching on somewhere as a sailor: you were off to a little floating dictatorship, with no way out until the end of the contract. Navassa’s overseers turned out to have a taste for the cat o’nine tails, and worse. “The conditions surrounding the prisoners and their fellows were of a most peculiar character,” Harrison noted in his eventual commutation order. They were American citizens, under contracts to perform labor upon specified terms, within American territory, removed from any opportunity to appeal to any court or public officer for redress of any injury or the enforcement of any civil right. Their employers were, in fact, their masters. The bosses placed over them imposed fines and penalties without any semblance of trial. These penalties extended to imprisonment, and even to the cruel practice of tricing men up for a refusal to work. Escape was impossible, and the state of things generally such as might make men reckless and dangerous. Or, as a naval inspection judged it, Navassa resembled “a convict establishment without its comforts and cleanliness”: people being worked brutally to the bone during their contract, eating rancid rations and living in filth. Not surprisingly, Navassa’s “convict” laboring population rebelled in 1889, and in a vicious hour-long riot slew five overseers while maiming several others. Warships calling on the island shipped 18 back to face murder charges; ultimately, three black guano-miners were sentenced to death for the affair.* However, a huge clemency push spearheaded by the Baltimore-based black fraternal organization the Grand United Order of Galilean Fishermen raised the cry to spare the condemned men. Guano harvesting resumed after the riot, but was aborted in 1898 by the Spanish-American War; the Navassa Phosphate Company fell into bankruptcy, and although the U.S. later threw up a lighthouse on Navassa to aid Panama Canal-bound vessels, it’s been effectively uninhabited ever since. * The appeals arising from the Navassa conviction generated the 1890 Supreme Court case Jones v. United States, affirming Navassa’s American territoriality, and establishing Congressional jurisdiction over violations of U.S. law that didn’t take place in any particular state. This bit of jurisprudence has turned up all over the place in the century-plus since it was issued.

Washington, D.C., circa 1943. "Potomac Electric Power Co. substations. Brightwood station car barn." Photo by Theodor Horydczak. View full size.

July 1941. "Street scene in Chicago Black Belt." Old-school fixie. 35mm negative by Edwin Rosskam for the Resettlement Administration. View full size.