Last year, during the height of agitation over whether or not to tear down statues, the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Park came under scrutiny. The statue, dedicated in 1876, shows Abraham Lincoln freeing a slave who is crouched below him.
The statue’s subordination of the slave to a white man has spurred calls for its removal. And those calls led to the discovery of a previously unknown letter from famed orator Frederick Douglass.
Some research projects just don’t pan out. I’m going to tell you about one of mine.
Several years ago, for a course on the High Middle Ages, I decided to study primogeniture—the custom of handing property and titles down to the elder son (if there is a son). Primogeniture expanded across Europe in the Middle Ages. In many cases it replaced partible inheritance, in which property was divided among offspring, with daughters sometimes included.
This nation, like much of the world, owes an enormous debt to ancient Greece and Rome. Our political framework, our political philosophies, even our government buildings reflect theirs. Many of our noblest ideas descend from the thinking of Greek philosophers, and Latin words and concepts pervade our language. The epic and lyric poetry of the ancients, their public rhetoric, their art, their musings, their values, and their histories have shaped the way we think and write and govern.
That said, we tend to ignore an unpleasant fact: The ancients were almost constantly at war. To a large extent these societies were designed for war. (They also relied heavily on slavery, but that is a topic for another day.).
Here are two more stories about history I found in recent articles:. One is about the Chinese family, one about the fall of Rome.
The End of the Chinese Extended Family
Nick Eberstadt argues in Foreign Affairs that the past kinship patterns of Chinese will be forced to change. Surprisingly, they haven’t yet.
Reliance on an extended family has been a fixture of Chinese history over 2500 years, he says, and the change will be “absolutely momentous.” In spite of the well-known one-child policy (which ended in 2015), he doubts that the Chinese Communist Party realizes how severe the impact will be on economic growth. Eberstadt is a respected writer about population and demographics who works for the American Enterprise Institute.
OK, I’m not Jane, but she kindly offered her platform for a brief word on some historical research findings that otherwise would never see the light of day.
We live by proverbs (just ask your grandmother). These are more or less the rules of everyday life. What fascinates me is that some elements of everyday life have not changed over the past 4,600 years. My favorite ancient proverb (forgive me, wives) is the Sumerian “For his pleasure, he got married. On thinking it over, he got divorced.” Today we’ve shortened it to “Marry in haste, repent at leisure.”
Another we use today: “As I escaped from the wild-ox, the wild-cow confronted me,” which in the Bible is “It will be like a man who runs from a lion and meets a bear!” ( Amos 5, 19); or, as I heard so many times as a somewhat less-than-perfect child, “Out of the frying pan, into the fire/,” (More examples in the table below.)Continue reading “4600 Years of Proverbs”
