history

Upcoming silent film: D. W. Griffith’s America   Recently updated !

This entry was posted in Movies and tagged history music New Hampshire silent movies on by

On June 23, I’ll be back at the Plaistow Library to accompany the silent film America, made by D. W. Griffith. It will start at 6 PM and run about 2 hours and 20 minutes. Reservations are encouraged so the library knows how many people to expect.

The show is part of the events observing the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. There will also be a presentation on the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 9, held by the Plaistow Historical Society. As I’m writing, not much information is available on it, but it should be interesting.

Griffith is famous (or infamous) for his 1915 film Birth of a Nation, which presents the Civil War and glorifies the KKK. America, released in 1924, is about the American Revolution. Both films have spectacular battle scenes and stories focusing on individuals. Both have a mix of accurate history and made-up stuff. America culminates in a made-up battle at a made-up place, but the early parts of the Revolution (Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill) are presented fairly accurately. The film doesn’t have the same level of racial problems as the earlier film. There is a black servant, but he isn’t mocked or caricatured (though I’m pretty sure a while actor played him). Natives who fight for the British are called “savages.” Things like that happen in century-old movies.

Poster for the film "America" (1924)The chief villain is a Tory rather than anyone from Britain. Lionel Barrymore portrays Walter Butler, a real-life Loyalist officer, as a sadistic schemer with an evil grin, which he wasn’t in reality. The British regulars are generally shown as brave soldiers. I wonder if Griffith remembered that the maker of the 1917 Spirit of ’76 got a long prison sentence for making an “anti-British” movie when Britain was our ally in World War I. It may have seemed safer to show Tories doing nasty things. Even as it was, the British Board of Film Censors banned the film.

The story of the war is intertwined with a love story; a Patriot is in love with the daughter of a man who remains loyal to Britain. Both of them prove honorable in the end.

As usual, I’ll provide original, live music for the film.

Book discussion: Toscanini: Musician of Conscience

This entry was posted in Book discussion and tagged biography history music on by

Toscanini: Musician of Conscience was a huge reading project but worth it. It covers the long career of one of the most important orchestra conductors, the man who conducted the premiere of Pagliacci in 1892 and lived long enough to make long-playing records. He was a celebrity in Europe and the Americas and courageously stood up to Mussolini in his home country.

I must admit to skimming through parts of the book. His role in music and politics is most important to me, and I went quickly over parts dealing with his personal relations.

Toscanini was a top-rank conductor with an incredible memory, but I wouldn’t want to be a musician under him. He demanded the best from his musicians, and sometimes he could be extremely rude and unfair with them. On one occasion, he broke a violinist’s bow with his baton. At the same time, he recognized excellence.

In politics, if not at the podium, he was an enemy of tyranny. After a brief period of admiring Mussolini, he recognized that the would-be Duce was a brutal power-luster. In 1924 he refused an order to display Mussolini’s picture. On one occasion, when he refused to perform the Fascist anthem, a gang of Blackshirts beat him up as the police passively watched. In 1938 he left Italy and didn’t return until after World War II.

Sachs discusses his relationships with musicians who remained in Germany and Italy during the dictatorships. Withdrawing from the Bayreuth Festival was a painful decision for him. He condemned Wilhelm Furtwängler for continuing to lend his prestige to the Nazi government.

Sachs writes about an incredible number of affairs Toscanini had with women. He lets Toscanini look honorable for the most part, but I have to wonder. I didn’t see any mention of whether he ever got anyone pregnant; while he wasn’t an observant Catholic, he lived in a culture that was strongly hostile to abortion and even birth control. But as I said, I skimmed over those parts of the book, so I may have missed something.

My main complaint about the book is that its mentions of years are thin. I often had trouble figuring out in which year an event took place. That can be especially annoying if you’re using the book for reference.

This book isn’t a light weekend read, but it’s a fascinating look at an important musician and a courageous person. If you’re willing to commit the time, it’s an excellent book.

Book discussion: How Jesus Became God

This entry was posted in Book discussion and tagged books history religion on by

Christianity is a big part of our culture, and even non-Christians have to make some sense of it. I like Bart Ehrman’s treatments of Biblical research. He’s skeptical but not belligerent. I’ve previously read his Misquoting Jesus and enjoyed it. How Jesus Became God addresses questions I’ve been curious about: Why do Christians think he was God incarnate? What exactly do they mean by it? The average Christian isn’t sure, and the more you dig into the questions, the weirder it gets.

Ehrman accepts the existence of the historical Jesus but says he never claimed to be divine. His status gradually grew after his death. Jesus’s followers believed he had risen from the dead, so he was the “Son of God” in some sense, at least after his resurrection. By steps which Ehrman traces, the idea expanded. First he gained special status after the resurrection; then he was anointed of God through his ministry, then from his birth, and at last from the beginning of time. Many variations of these views existed side by side, with their advocates calling each other heretics. The Nicean Council tried to standardize the belief, but it wasn’t till years later that Christianity mostly settled down to the currently standard view.

Cover of How Jesus Became GodThis view is that Jesus is God but isn’t God the Father; that God is one but also three; that the Son was begotten of the Father but always existed from the beginning of time. Make sense of that if you can. For most Christians, these details don’t matter, but early Christians thought that if they didn’t get Jesus’s nature exactly right, they might go to Hell for blasphemy. Apparently God is full of mercy but will torture believers forever if they don’t pass a theology quiz.

Ehrman notes that the only Gospel in which Jesus claims to be a divine being is John, which scholars think was written later than the others. If he really made such claims, he notes, it’s strange that Matthew, Mark, and Luke don’t mention them.

In Ehrman’s view, Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher, expecting the world to end soon and be replaced by the Kingdom of God under his leadership. He thought he was a Messiah but not a divine being. There were many others like him. Ehrman thinks the reason Christianity was so successful was that Jesus’s followers had “visions” of him as a resurrected person. He uses the term as a neutral one, not taking a position on whether they were real or not. There comes one of the problems with the book: it promotes a compartmentalized way of thinking. Ehrman refuses to take a stand as a historian on whether the resurrection happened or not.

He writes: “Religious faith and historical knowledge are two different ways of ‘knowing.’ This effectively grants equal validity to both. Elsewhere he claims, “University intellectuals almost never speak of ‘objectivity’ any more, unless they happen to live on the margins of intellectual life.” If objectivity is impossible, if research and bald assertion have equal epistemological status, then anything goes.

Ehrman’s description of the official Christian (or at least Catholic) position on Jesus’s nature makes it sound even crazier than I had thought. He argues convincingly that Jesus probably didn’t have a proper burial but was just thrown on a pile of bodies; that was what the Romans did with crucified people. But if Jesus wasn’t buried in a tomb, there couldn’t have been an empty tomb to find. The whole account unravels, yet Ehrman won’t say that the claims of Jesus’s recognition are groundless fantasy.

These notions aren’t harmless stories. As Ehrman notes, Christian authorities have had many people tortured and executed for heresy. The Jewish people were persecuted for centuries for killing the immortal God. Nonsense should be called out as nonsense when it affects people’s lives.

Even so, How Jesus Became God is very readable, and Ehrman’s explanation of the development of Christian beliefs is fascinating. If that’s a subject that interests you, I think you’ll like the book.

The prosecution of “The Spirit of ’76”

This entry was posted in Movies and tagged history liberty silent movies on by

The World War I years were the worst in the United States’ history for freedom of speech. Eugene Debs was sentenced to ten years for opposing US participation in the war. Charles T. Schenck got the same for distributing petitions against the military draft, and censorship advocates today applaud Judge Holmes’ equation of his advocacy with “falsely shouting fire in a theatre.” There was also a movie that got its creator a federal prison sentence. What did this film do? It celebrated the American Revolution. That made it anti-British, at a time when Britain was our ally in the war.

Poster for Spirit of 76If that sounds insane, it is. Under the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, the federal and local governments stomped on freedom of expression as never before or since, and the Supreme Court said it was fine. Still, The Spirit of ’76 is a weird case. The film was released on May 28, 1917, the month after the USA entered the war. Chicago censors made him cut some scenes depicting British atrocities. It opened in November in Los Angeles; I don’t know if it was seen anywhere during the intervening time. The Los Angeles showing included the censored scenes.
(more…)

Bothsidesism now

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged history liberty on by

In a world dominated by political tribalism, you’re expected to condemn things the other group does while excusing your group for doing the same thing. If you apply the same standards to both, you’re mocked for “bothsidesism.” Hypocrisy is an obligation.

Many of the things which Trump has done have precedents in previous administrations; he’s just carried them to their outer limits. Democratic and Republican presidents alike have conducted wars not declared by Congress. After a mysterious meeting in the Biden White House, Amazon put some books on the “Do Not Promote” list. The ACLU actively supported Biden’s attempt to write off student loans, which would have been a federal expenditure by executive decree.
(more…)