Historically Thinking Al Zambone

It is without question the most lethal predator in the history of the planet.  It has killed more humans than any other single cause of death—something around 52 billion over the course of 200,000 years of human history. In 2022 alone, it probably killed 680,000 people—a number much reduced from the carnage it has caused in past centuries. This super-predator is the mosquito, which has since the time of the dinosaurs carried diseases in its tiny body that have destroyed nations and cultures, and altered the destinies of those who survived.



With me to describe the immense historical impact of the mosquito is Timothy C. Winegard.  He is Associate Professor of History at Colorado Mesa University, and author of the 2019 bestselling book The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator.



For Further Investigation



* A review of The Mosquito in Emerging Infectious Diseases

* The CDC Guide to Mosquitoes

* One of the earliest works of animation: How a Mosquito Operates, from 1912

* Two videos related to William Crawford Gorgas: one, from the Gorgas House Museum in Alabama, highlights his contribution to the building of the Panama Canal; the other is a one minute clip of a silent movie of Gorgas traveling on a train through the Canal Zone.



 



 

Just before 10 AM on Tuesday, June 9th, 1964, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, hundreds of people were gathered in First African Baptist, prepared to march to the new Tuscaloosa County Courthouse where they planned to drink from water fountains and use restroom facilities that were supposed to be only used by whites. Around the church were gathered hundreds of police, members of the Ku Klux Klan, and other deputized whites. At 10:15 AM, after the arrest of Reverend T.Y. Rogers, the pastor of First African Baptist, the police attacked the church. They beat those who attempted to leave with clubs and cattle prods. Then, the door being closed and locked, they brought up a fire truck, and blasted away the stained glass windows, filling the sanctuary in some places ankle-deep with water. Then they fired tear gas canisters through the windows, driving those within outside, where they were beaten, and over a hundred were hauled off to jail. 



This was Bloody Tuesday, now a nearly forgotten inflection point in the Civil Rights struggle, overshadowed by the concurrent campaign then ongoing in St. Augustine, by national events in the weeks to come, and by the violence of Selma in 1965. John M. Giggie had preserved the memories of Bloody Tuesday, and complex struggle of justice in Tuscaloosa in his new book Bloody Tuesday: The Untold Story of the Struggle for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa. 



John M. Giggie is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South at the University of Alabama. He is creator of "History of Us," the first Black history class taught daily in a public school in Alabama. Giggie is also director of the Alabama Memory Project, which seeks to recapture and memorialize the over 650 lives lost to lynching in Alabama, and a founding member of the Tuscaloosa Civil Rights History and Reconciliation Foundation.



 



For Further Investigation



* Three short essays on Bloody Tuesday by John Giggie:



“How Tuscaloosa’s Bloody Tuesday Changed the Course of History,” Time.com, June 7, 2024

Remembering Bloody Tuesday, Alabama Heritage, June 2024

The Tuscaloosa Campaign and Bloody Tuesday, Encyclopedia of Alabama





* Books on the Civil Rights movement on Tuscaloosa, related to subjects in the podcast, or mentioned in the podcast:



*

Clark, E. Culpepper. a href="https://a.co/d/05kUAPqh" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://a.

Does knowing a lot of facts about the historical past – say, of early America – make us feel closer to it? Or is something else required? How can we–as my guest puts it, “appreciate a bit better what it felt like to be alive then. Naturally,” he continues  “we can’t teach emotions to any who weren’t alive to experience them how Pearl Harbor felt in real time – let alone Fort Sumter or Lincoln‘s assassination – is not transmissible. The historian can only do so much.“ But how to convey not merely the intellectual weight but the emotional burdens that humans once carried–and that we might no longer understand?



My guest Andrew Burstein has done what he can to credibly bring early America closer to us in his new book Longing for Connection: Entangled Memories, and Emotional Loss in Early America. It is a work of history that is intricately plotted, connecting personalities and themes in a sort of great circular panopticon of early America, in which the reader sits at the orbital center of continual swirl and movement.  



Andrew Burstein is the Charles Phelps Manship Emeritus Professor in the Department of History at Louisiana State University. Longing for Connection is the latest member of a large-and hopefully happy- family of books.



 



For Further Investigation





* You really should read some Alexander Pope. Find more about him, and some of his poems here.

* Poor Edward Everett. No one ever reads his Gettysburg address. 

* Some of the more closely related members of the Burstein family of books, many of them mentioned in the conversation, listed in order of publication: The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist; Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America's Romantic Self-Image; The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving; and Lincoln Dreamt He Died: The Midnight Visions of Remarkable Americans from Colonial Times to Freud

* For an intro to cultural history, you should listen to Episode 32

* Past episodes with a connection to this one are Episode 163: The ...

In 1978, along the shoreline of the Potomac River in Westmoreland County, Virginia, people began to see…something…out in the water. Whatever it was, it seemed snakelike. But then all such sightings ended–until, over a period of years in the early 1980s, sightings proliferated around Kent Island, situated in the very middle of the Chesapeake, the eastern end of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. The “monster” was soon named “Chessie”, and perhaps because of the cute name was characterized as being a friendly monster; and while no biological traces of it were ever discovered, “Chessie” became an icon of the environmental movement to save the bay. 



But what was the context for Chessie’s sightings?  What might suburbanization and taking recreation as seriously as labor have to do with seeing monsters in the water? And why did so many (including, as best as I can remember, myself) need to believe that Chessie was real? 



With me to discuss Chessie, and her life and times is Eric Cheezum, an independent historian, a resident of Maryland’s eastern shore, and the author of Chessie: A Cultural History of the Chesapeake Bay Sea Monster, which is–not surprisingly–the subject of our conversation today.



For Further Investigation



* David Halperin, Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO

* James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing

* Hal Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth Century American West

* WBAL-TV: "The legend of 'Chessie' is alive and well 35 years later"

* The Chesapeake Conservation Partnership on the sightings and importance of  "Chessie: The Chesapeake Bay Sea Monster"

From 987 to 1328, the Capetian family ruled France without interruption. Except that they weren’t really called the Capetians, and France was not yet really…France. And therein lies a story. Through the ingredients of ruthless high mindedness; enlightened guile; excellent marriages and often lots of them;  and sheer dumb luck, this one family created out of very uncertain beginnings the most powerful kingdom in Christendom. In the process they created institutions that lasted to the French Revolution, and sometimes beyond; instituted symbols and styles that epitomize Medieval Europe to subsequent generations; turned  a small town at a river crossing into one of the most fabled cities in human history; and in the process created France.



With me to discuss the Capetians is Justine Firnhaber-Baker, most recently author of House of Lilies: The Dynasty that Made France. Justine Firnhaber-Baker is Professor of History at the University of St. Andrew’s. She was last on the podcast in Episode 227, when she described and explained the Jacquerie, the French peasant’s revolt of 1358–which remains one of the most popular episodes of this podcast.



For Further Information



* Speaking of medieval queens, we've talked with Catherine Hanley about Matilda, arguably the one woman to rule England in her own right before Elizabeth I; and with Katherine Pangonis about the Queens of the Kingdom of Jerusalem

* And for the other half of the story, including more on Louis VII and Blanche of Castile, see my conversation with Catherine Hanley on the intertwining of the English and French dynasties

* The expulsion of the Jews was mentioned, so that means I should link to my conversation with Rowan Dorin on expulsion as a matter of medieval policy



 

On June 24th, 1947, a private pilot and fire suppression equipment manufacturer named Kenneth Arnold was flying south of Mount Rainier, bound for Yakima, Washington. At about 3 PM he saw a flash of light in the air to the north of the mountain, and subsequently he saw a long chain of flying objects passing in front of the mountain. He described them as having convex shapes, and this was soon changed to the term “flying saucer".



Arnold’s was in fact not the first UFO sighting following the Second World War; nor was it even part of the first wave of sightings of strange things in the sky. Yet something unprecedented did happen after 1947, not only in the United States, but around the world–not necessarily involving aliens, but very much involving humans. As Greg Egighian observes in his new book After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon, UFO sightings “have made people wonder, fret, question, probe, and argue. In that regard, they have revealed more about human beings than about alien worlds. And that is a story worth investigating.”



Greg Eghigian is a Professor of History and Bioethics at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Corrigible and the Incorrigible: Science, Medicine, and the Convict in Twentieth Century Germany and the editor of The Routledge History of Madness and Mental Health, among other works.



For Further Investigation



*

Greg Egighian suggests the following books for your UFO history reading list:

Matthew Bowman, The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill

David Clarke, How UFOs Conquered the World: The History of a Modern Myth

D.W. Pasulka, American Cosmic

Sarah Scoles, They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers

Garrett M. Graff, a href="https://www.amazon.