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The Fraying of the Chinese Extended Family . . . Benefits from Rome’s Fall

Chinese family

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.

I am interested in the Chinese family partly because extended-family patterns may have inhibited a Chinese Industrial Revolution around 1800. In contrast, England, with its nuclear families and a willingness to let young men and women work outside the family, became the source of innovative growth. (For more about the contrast in family patterns, see my post on “Marriage, Families, and Economic Growth.”) Now, back to China. Continue reading “The Fraying of the Chinese Extended Family . . . Benefits from Rome’s Fall”

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4600 Years of Proverbs

Sumerian cuneiform

By David W. Schnare

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”

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A Biblical Mystery . . . A Slave’s Early Prevention of Smallpox . . .

Book of Deuteronomy (1894)

Recently, I have been unable to do the kind of research I need in order to prepare features for this blog. But I do have the time and inclination to share with you some of the interesting stories about history that I see around me. Here are two, one a biblical controversy and one about a smallpox discovery.

A Precursor to the Book of Deuteronomy? 

The New York Times has written a fascinating story about a discovery even more exciting than the Dead Sea scrolls found in 1947—unless this discovery is a fake! The story goes back to 1883, when a dealer in antiquities claimed to have found fragments of the original book of Deuteronomy—far older than the Dead Sea scrolls, which go back to the third century BC. Continue reading “A Biblical Mystery . . . A Slave’s Early Prevention of Smallpox . . .”

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Was Thomas Campbell Duped?

Peasant in the Soviet Union

It is now accepted that Joseph Stalin perpetrated mass murder in the Ukraine Soviet Republic in 1932 and 1933. A famine occurred throughout the Soviet Union but the most severe impact was in the vital wheat-growing Ukraine because Stalin wanted to wipe out Ukrainian resistance to the Soviets.

“Farms, villages, and whole towns in Ukraine were placed on blacklists and prevented from receiving food,” writes Anne Applebaum in Britannica. “Peasants were forbidden to leave the Ukrainian republic in search of food.” Apparatchiks even entered homes and stole food.  (The Soviets could requisition as much food as they wanted from those who produced it.) Millions died.

Many Western observers visited the Soviet Union around that time, but few revealed the true conditions. Most famously, Walter Duranty received a Pulitzer Prize for his generally positive stories from the Soviet Union in 1931; the worst horrors were going on a year later, but he did not report them.

Thomas D. Campbell wrote positively, too, about the collectivization process in his 1932 book Russia: Market or Menace? Continue reading “Was Thomas Campbell Duped?”

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Rebel with a Cause

Nefertiti

I was a child when I learned about an unusual Egyptian pharaoh, Akhenaten. He worshipped a single god, Aten, the sun god. And unlike previous pharaohs, he brought to Egypt a more natural style of carving and sculpture, so different from the rigid, flat poses typical of Egypt’s past. (The carving above is of his wife, Nefertiti.) To many Americans in the 1950s, Akhenaten represented a foreshadowing of the monotheism to come, with perhaps a forewarning of Martin Luther as well, as Akhenaten was a rebel against the priestly establishment of 1350 B.C.

I have become reacquainted with Akhenaten while auditing a course in ancient Mediterranean civilizations at North Carolina State. It turns out that while Akhenaten’s impact on Egypt was fleeting, he has fascinated people, especially Europeans, for the past two hundred years.  “The Akhenaten myth . . . is a unique barometer exploring the fascination of the West with ancient Egypt,” writes a historian Dominic Montserrat. [1] Even Sigmund Freud was fascinated by Akhenaten. Continue reading “Rebel with a Cause”