JF Ptak Science Books – A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.

The Unbearbale Lightness of Nerves, Homer Simpson Hair, & Rhino Chins of the Renaissance, Part I

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1480

In the structured and orderly world of Renaissance painting and illustration I find the semi-wild, stringy, lonely, unruly strands of this and that, the minor elements of an artistic composition, to sometimes be most interesting. This is so mainly because they could be considered ephemeral pieces of the work, minor additions to a developed scene, not particularly necessary to the whole. But they there are, and sometimes they are highly unusual. In the larger scheme of things these elements can be background or foreground figures, sometimes added for the purposes of scale in what is supposed to be an architectural study–but there are times when these small figures, sometimes occupying perhaps a tenth of a percent of the illustrated scene or less, are given vast and vivid lives by what may have been an engraver desperate for a little artistic freedom. And so that’s why we see unusual aspects of the population peopling-up a city square scene, showing off a town hall or cathedral.

For example in the engraving Veduta della Piazza della SS Nunziata Statua Equeftre di Ferdinando Primo, Fonti, e Loggie Laterall by Giuseppe Zocchi (1711-1767) it would’ve been easier certainly to leave the plaza empty, but Zocchi doesn’t, filling in the empty spaces with several dozen people, most of whom are really rather busy. In addition to royal coaches and animated discussions, we can find a number of unusual images. There is a very curious sub-scene of a women with three children, one of whom seems to be falling, or leaping, the woman holding her hand straight out in front of her. Directly above them we can see a man pulling a small carriage with another person in it. Is this person a child? Are they elderly? Infirmed? And what about the (probably elderly) figure who we can half see, leaning their back against the equestrian statue, holding a staff? Why bother adding half of figure (from the rear)? Why on earth did Zocchi choose to add

characters like these when it would be substantially easier to show a gent walking with a stick? Is the artist expressing a little semi-invisible artistic freedom, or just using his powers of observation to make the commissioned part of the art more interesting? Or perhaps Zocchi has nothing whatsoever to do with these tiny figures—perhaps it is all the work of the engraver, who was responsible for translating Zocchi’s paintings into metal, adding these figures as he went?

I think it is fascinating! Perhaps what the story is here is that these were really just simple street scene, common street life, and the artist simply included them in the work? That would make them 18th century snapshots of common life in Florence, something that wasn’t ordinarily captured by very many artists at all.
What I’d like to look at today seems even more ephemeral than found people in town squares–it is, quite literally, the smallest bits of the artwork: the dissected tendons, the hair on the remaining skull of Death, the stubble on the chin of a rhinoceros, and to look at the great liberty and beauty with which these fragments are represented, particularly if they are lonesome, segregated things of high simplicity. Lean, articulated, severe, lonely, small elements.

The first example comes from Charles Estienne’s De dissectione partium corporis (“On the dissection of the parts of the human body”), which was printed in 1545 and which was very nearly the first truly extraordinary anatomy book, almost beating Vesalius to the punch, had it not been for some printing foibles. One of the illustrations that I’m focusing on is his dissection of nerves, the spindly, flowing ones being cutaneous nerves that supply skin sensation (thanks to Alex Baker for the correction!) , which look for all the world to be beautiful dendritical elements being blown by a breeze, maypole wrappings come undone, celebratory flags…something beyond tendons. I know that the artist and designer are simply trying to show the reader their structure and so it makes sense to display them like that, but they have a certain classical beauty in their representation that seems far beyond what might be considered necessary for the task at hand.

And the full image:

This is completely different from sparse and the orderly control of empty space; nothing at all like, say, the Sistine Chapel ‘before”, with its ceiling beautifully and lightly decorated with stars (I guess gold on a sea of deep blue?):

I have found a number of examples of little bits of hair dancing on the top of its head (or skull) as though the few strands were luxirant manes floating in oil like a halo around the lucky owner–but no, our artist (below) depicted one of Death’s mortal victories in vestigial Homer Simpson-like lonely hairs.

The full image (below) is called “Imago Mortis” (the World of Death) and appears in Hartmann Schedel’s Liber chronicum (more commonly known as the Nuremberg Chronicles), one of the greatest illustrated (or certainly the most lavishly illustrated) books of the 15th century. Printed by Anton Koberger in Nuremberg on 12 July 1493, the Liber chronicum was basically just that, a walk through the known and imagined knowledge of the mid-Renaissance with the great humanist Schedel acting in the role of conductor. There’s certainly much of interest and disinterest in this book; Schedel was not afraid to make a guess (and even a wild one) when facts didn’t fit or were unavailable. (For example, he famously re-used the same view of a city to illustrate different cities.) But for my lowly interests, its the hair of Death that interests me.

And just in case you don’t know the “Homer Simpson” reference:

Albrecht Durer does manage to come into play here, if not for some of his trees or the bits of string that he renders holding other bits aloft, but for his famous if not-terribly-original rhinoceros, which he had never seen though which he had seen images of, and for which he had taken the trouble to include the beast’s chin hairs:

And another example, this times for trees, in Carpaccio’s Mediations on the Dead Christ (Berlin), where we see the sparse and gangly dendrical-like bits on the trees on the hill in the background, as well as on the dead branch of the half-dead tree in the foreground:

This sparseness is almost there but not quite so in Bellini’s Stigmatization of St. Francis, which is in general a very dense composition with many competing elements, perhaps making the foreground weeds a little more singular:

This uniqueness extends too into the geological strata foreground of Mantegna’s Madonna of the Quarry, or rather to the shelf of ground on which the Madonna stands.

This sort of solitary expedition into spareness and quiet can be found in many places, if you just look for it; for example, in the bit of scrolled paper used as a small trompe l’oeil in Messina’s Salvator Mundi (1465):

a detail from

as can be seen in many paintings over the centuries…

End Part I.

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The Long Fight for Captializing the “N” in “Negro”

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1483

“I believe that eight million Americans are entitled to a capital letter.” W.E.B. BuBois

The history of the power of words is long and complex, and for the most part is on one side or the other of the political and social mirror, at least in the United States. Controlling the meaning of a word or phrase controls the idea which alters the way people approach it, defining the very heart of what may control the impulse for war or peace, which means that people may die as much for words as they will for ideas.

Sometimes the idea of control is even simpler than the word—it may be a simple letter.

Like the letter “N”.

Since the American Civil War (now in its 150^th year as of last month) when the use of the word “Negro” was used to describe African Americans, it appeared in print overwhelmingly with a small “n”. The idea was simple—to use a capital “N” would give a certain amount of respect and social diligence in referring to this race of people with a proper salutation; the small “n” minimized all of that, a symbol that these people were not worthy of having the initial letter of their race capitalized, and that because of their inferiority.

This was also the case with the word “Colored”, which was used in the decades before the Civil War and then lightly after that, giving way to for a short time to “Freedman” and then Negro–”Colored” appeared in print as “colored” in the vast majority of times.

The capital N was a rallying point, a common point of singularity for a large percentage of the Black population in the U.S.–and a very tiny percentage of the White population. We can deduce this because major papers such as the New York Times did not adopt a policy of using the capital “N” until 1930. And as a matter of fact the federal government documents printed “negro” small “n” beyond 1930, even though heavily lobbied to use the more enlightened and respectful “Negro”. The issue was evidently sidestepped throughout the Hoover administration.

There was in the country a racism so entrenched and engrained that African Americans were seen as being wholly unworthy of being dignified with a capital “N”, and it was the natural way of things. As the editor of the Eatonton, Georgia, newspaper Messenger said when asked about the capitalization issue, that he would not be a party to it, because “it would lead to social equality.”

And that’s just what everyone ws trying to avoid. And like the federal government, the control of the capital “N” extended into historical control as well. When W.E.B. DuBois wrote an article for the venerable American Historical Review, the editor, J. Franklin Jameson, refused to allow the use of DuBois’ capitalized “Negro”. As the editor of the Dictionary of American Biography, Jameson refused the capital “N” in the publication until it was terminally embarrassed into doing so, in 1937.

And so it goes, 60 or 70 years of fighting for the minimum respect of capitalization.

And this doesn’t even address the use of the reviled “n” word, which is a story unto itself. And in which there was also debate over the years as to whether or not that be capitalized.

Notes:
The major source of the information in this post comes the fantastic article by Donald L Grant (12/01/1975). “Some Notes on the Capital \”N\””, Phylon (0031-8906), 36 (4), p. 435, who did a splendid job of research. There’s also a bit of memory pulled from H.L. Mencken’s The American Language (4th edition), which was clear and concise, even though Mr. M. had a small social problem here and there with minorities. It must be said in his defense that the magazine he edited, The American Mercury, “always” used the capital N.

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The History of Important Things Pictured by their Shadows: the Wrights, Kill Devil Hills, 1901

JF Ptak Scienc Books Post 1485

In this history of picturing shadows this might be one of the most significant for early 20th century technology. After all, shadows in images weren’t necessarily a desired effect, and certainly it was seldom required, but this one, captured as a result of capturing something else, has survived.

This is one of the first popular reports on the Wright brothers’ first publication describing their experiments in flight., and it is buried in the middle of The Scientific American issue for 22 February 1902, months after the original publication. That initial report, published as “Some aeronautical experiments” published in the even-then-obscure Journal of the Western Society of Engineers (6 (1901) 489-510) seems to be the only source for this article, the Wrights keeping information about their experiments closely held. (For example, the next publication of theirs, “Experiments and Observations in Soaring Flight” would be published in the Journal of the Western Society of Engineers ,VIII, 400-417, in 1903.)

The editors of the Scientific American—and other magazines—were certainly skeptical when it came to claims of new sorts of flight, but the Wright case seems to have been thoroughly without question. Still the article on their article appeared in this issue of the magazine after stories on the reconstruction of the RedHeugh Bridge, reviving the Hudson River tunnel idea, steam boiler inspection, the Darien canal, variable speed gears for pumps, a new method of etching, “photographing by electric headlight”, mill flour in Sweden, domestic manufacture of Portland cement, improved rail joints, winter railroading in Alaska (and a few other bits), before we get to the article, which is just a half-page long.

Bit it is an important half-page, which include five photos of the fliers as well as descriptions of the control apparatus, which includes an observation of an epochal improvement to their aircraft, one of the most important in the history of aviation (if I am not mistaken):

“…responding to the slightest motion of the rudder”

That is to say changes were made to the rudder which paved the way to their 1902 experiments on the vertical rudder, which gave it a critical importance of keeping the aircraft aligned when coming out of a banking maneuver or climb rather and so on than for changing the direction of the aircraft; so when using the rudder in this way and wing warping for altering direction, their aircraft would became a truly flyable thing.

Notes:

Since this is outside my area I quote liberally from the US Commission on the Centennial of Flight for a more exact description of the difference of the gliders between 1901 and 1902:

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Famous Folks Leaning

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

I’m going to have to keep this category open while other famous leaners pop into my head. For right now, presently, right at this moment, I’ve only a few, but I’ve managed to break the leaning category into two segments: leaning, without aid; leaning, with aid (or leaning against or on something). Also for completely arbitrary reasons I’m excluding entire genres of people who must necessarily find themselves leaning for one reason or another: speed skaters, sailboat racers, acrobats, gymnasts, yoga folks, speed bike racers, rollerderbyists, and people leaning away from the dead or some other font of pity, and so on. No Medieval or Renaissance anatomist drones “leaning” into their cadavers with sharp tools (as in Mondino’s directing a dissection from the late 15th century), or the endless peasants leaning into their farm tools as they work or catch a quick nap in the images created by the Breughels, nor any series of Adams and Eves leaning hard into their bleak future after having accepted the bait that doomed humanity, leaning first towards and then away from the Great Fall. I just want relatively unexplained leaning, or leaning for the fun of it. And of course no leaning Towers of Pisa–and no lounging, as in the image of Man in the creation of man scene in the Sistene Chapel. And no half-body leaning, as with say the images of all of those portraits that were so beautifully done by Gerrit Dou, featuring his subjects playing with trompe l’oeil and perspective, leaning a bit out of windows, outwards towards the viewer, or kids blowing bubbles leaning against open windowsill (as in this from Frans van Mieris) or Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, The Soap Bubble (1739).

I’m just looking for people leaning, for no good reason. (First up was Robert Oppenheimer leaning away from the not-understood General Leslie Groves.)

Wilbur (?) Wright, 1901:

Albert Einstein, California, 1935:

General Ulysses Grant, 1863:

Batman, 1966 (but seriously, Heath Ledger’s Joker wound up doing a tremendous amount of leading in that movie):

And speaking of the leaning Joker, there’s always Dr. Caligari, who lives in a leaning world:

I’d love to hear from others who might have suggestions for other leaning people!

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Strange Things in the Sky Department: the Sky-borne Seat of All Wisdom in the 12th century

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1486

Hildegard of Bingen (ca. 1098-1179) was a polymathic religious visionary¹, composer and writer who was a well-know intellectual whose work attracted the attention of people at all levels, not the least of which were several popes In one version of the manuscript of her 150,000-word work, Scivias (Scito vias Domini, or “Know the Ways of the Lord” ) we find the following illumination, which is basically an image of the object that contains the nameless stuff of the human soul:

The image above—from the Wiesbaden manuscript and unfortunately only in a black-and-white, and found in Charles Singer’s From Magic to Science (1928)²–shows Hildegard’s vision of the soul entering the body. (There’s a wide range of opinion concerning how much influence Hildegard had on these images—some say that she sketched out the outlines, or directed the illuminator, or had some sort of hand in the construction of the image, all with varying levels of involvement.³)

It is an extraordinary thing, trying to represent what gives the human-ness to people as seen from a 12th-century perspective, and in Hildegard’s version/vision it is the soul, the very essence of the birth and death cycle of human nature. It is resident as we see within a special place in the sky, the “the wisdom of god” (Singer page 226), and it passes from the vault of heaven into the fetus while still within the mother’s womb. It is in this square, evidently, that the essential matter of the creator can be found, and within that structure can be seen the essence of the stuff of human nature that is about to pass into the developing fetus through the tube-like connection. As Singer writes, quoting (loosely?) from the manuscript: “down this [the tube] there passes into the child a bright object, described variously as ‘spherical’ and as ‘shapeless’ which ‘illuminates the whole body’ and becomes or developes into the soul.” (Singer, p. 226).

In the frontispiece to another ms of Scivias, we see Hildegard herself sitting and making a sketch on a wax tablet (a sort of Medieval chapbook, or hornbook, or slate/charcoal sketchpad that could be reused), showing that the images she created were the product of a higher source, of light from another metaphoric vault:

Notes

1. Hildegard said that she had these vision,s from a very early age, beginning at about 3.

2. This manuscript was removed from Wiesbaden during WWII and “sent to Dresden for safekeeping”, where it subsequently “disappeared”. “Destroyed” is more like it, as Dresden of course was the scene of an enormous firebombing campaign in the last days of the German involvement of WWII. There are still hopes that the ms lives somewhere in someone’s grandfather’s attic, perhaps taken in the third week of February 1945 as war booty, and then forgotten. “You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.” –Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

3. Historian of science Charles Singer and medical anomaly writer Oliver Sacks have both made strong cases for Hildegard to have been a migraine sufferer, though they do explicitly state that given that as the case it does not necessarily affect the vision that she had.

As found in the Wikiu article on Scivias:” Some authors, such as Charles Singer, have suggested that the characteristics of the descriptions of the visions and the illustrations, such as bright lights and auras, imply they may have been caused by scintillating scotoma, a migraine condition.[25] Oliver Sacks, in his book Migraine, called her visions “indisputably migrainous,”[26] but stated that this does not invalidate her visions, because it is what one does with a psychological condition that is important.[27] The resemblance of the illuminations to typical symptoms of migraine attacks, especially in cases where it is not precisely described in the text, is one of the stronger arguments that Hildegard herself was directly involved in their creation.[28]

It has also been suggested that the visions may have been due to hallucinogenic components present in ergot, common in that area of the Rhineland, at certain times of the year.[29]”

The contents of Scivitas:

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Atomic- , Vacuum- , & Solar-Powered Dirigibles with Built-in Airports–Bits of a Bad Historic Future

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1487

A post (“Nuclear Everything”) over at Dark Roasted Blend that featured a magnificent and stodgy atomic-powered zeppelin pushed me into this short visual note on differentially-powered airships, and then in general about airships with airports on them. (There’s a whole other category for planes-of-tomorrow that were so enormous that they had landing strips on their wings, but that’s another story.)

And they remind me of things that just aren’t “right”, because these things just weren’t. I’m not sure why, but I’m drawn into an old story about the legendary Charlie Goodnight, Texas pioneer, one of the creators of the idea of the cattle drive (the Goodnight-Loving Trail), a man who lived an extraordinary and powerful life. He lived for a long time, too, from 1836 to 1929 (almost to the year of the birth of Larry McMurtry, who told a version of Goodnight’s story so spectacularly well in Lonesome Dove), well into a future so far advanced from the year of his birth that he could scarcely have imagined it. Anyway, towards the end of his life, in 1916, Goodnight had the idea of making a movie of the Old West that included a “final” Indian buffalo hunt. I’ve seen the film, and it is a fascinating, heartbreaking, wonderful/awful thing, that somehow might appeal to almost no one. It certainly didn’t appeal to the folks at the time looking for a cowboy film, because much like Mr. McMurtry’s cowboys, Goodnight’s reality didn’t much resemble the cowboys that the public wanted to see. In a sense Goodnight lived beyond the history that he so much helped to create, and that his old, passed “present” was something that the people in his future really didn’t want to recognize. Then of course one of the things that made it all seem “not right” to me was seeing a vignette of Goodnight entering into one of the scenes, in a car, making the whole thing a little spooky.

First up is this mammoth flying advertisement to both peace and war, a nuke-powered dirigible proposed by Eisenhower in 1953 as part of the Atoms-for-Peace push, a move which by this point was already entirely too late.

For some reason it was seen as a good idea to have a detachable convention hall built for the airship. \

And of course there is no greater element of a Something-for-Peace anything unless there was a competing idea, as seen in this mammoth Soviet atomic zeppelin, a ship completely absorbed in being bigger than the big thing that it already was:

At 300 metres this monster had room enough for virtually anything, though it didn’t have the retractable/detachable convention hall–it did however have a small airport.

Another dirigible approached the airport-on-board idea, but preferred solar power for its energy source.

The magnificent possible, 1924, saw another kind of airborn airport:

Guido Tallei’s 1932 Diri-Disk was a combination airplane/dirigible, and looked as though it could harbor an expansive airport on its NCC-1701-like wing, but didn’t, alas:

Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857-1835), the Russian/Soviet space pioneer who was nearly without peer (and who somehow survived the bloodlust of Stalin which sucked up and murdered so many of his scientific colleagues), stepped outside his spaceflight bubble to write about this monster with collapsing sheathing:

The Kueperle dirigible, planned in 1909, was nothing if not pretty, and pretty is pretty much what the whole thing consisted of:

And lastly, this example of the tracked airship–this must have been a popular notion because I’ve seen perhaps 15 different plans and I don’t spend much time at all reading in this area. But harnessing the power of the balloon or dirigible or (kite!) whatever to a track system seemed to be a good idea, once upon a time:

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An Alphabet of Anatomical Emotions and Feelings–Installment 1

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1488

In a developing thread on oddly-represented alphabets on this blog, this one is a little harder to fill than it seems. The rules are that all images must be some level of dissection (with the exception of the anatomical Durer), and not a simple artistic study of emotion, and that the images be at least 200 years old. Part I of this alphabet of emotion and feelings includes awe, burdensome, contempt, disappointment, empathetic, fear, guilt, hope, intrigue, joy, lonesome, majesty, pride, resentment, surprise, trust, vulnerability and wonder.

Awe

Giulio Casserio (ca. 1552-1616, anatomist) and Odoardo Fialetti (artist), Tabulae Anatomicae, published in Venice in 1627.

Burdensome

Juan Valverde de Amusci (ca. 1525-ca. 1588), Anatomia del corpo humano, printed in Rome in 1560.

Contempt

Giulio Casserio (ca. 1552-1616, anatomist) and Odoardo Fialetti (artist), Tabulae Anatomicae, published in Venice in 1627

Disappointment

Giulio Casserio (ca. 1552-1616, anatomist) and Odoardo Fialetti (artist), Tabulae Anatomicae, published in Venice in 1627.

Empathetic

Juan Valverde de Amusci (ca. 1525-ca. 1588), Anatomia del corpo humano, printed in Rome in 1560.

Fear

Jacques Gamelin (1736-1803), Nouveau receuil d’ostéologie et de myologie, published in Toulouse in 1779.

Guilt

Jacques Gamelin (1736-1803), Nouveau receuil d’ostéologie et de myologie, published in Toulouse in 1779.

Hope

Hans von Gersdorff (d. 1529), Feldtbůch der Wundartzney : newlich getruckt und gebesser, published in Strassburg in 1528.

Intrigue

Giulio Casserio (ca. 1552-1616, anatomist) and Odoardo Fialetti (artist), Tabulae Anatomicae, published in Venice in 1627

Joy

Lonesome

William Cheselden (1688-1752), Osteographia, or the Anatomy of Bones, published in London in 1733.

Majesterial

Bartholomeo Eustachi (d. 1574), from Tabulae anatomicae, printed in Rome in 1783.

Pride

In the category of “Holy Crap!” anatomical illustration surely Pietro Berrettini da Cortona (1596-1669) must be among its patron saints. His images are incredible, yelling and screaming for attention as they demand their space onthe printed page. Further, the man actually accomplished all o fthis in the early 17th century, his work no tbeing published for another 130 years or so. [Source: Tabulae anatomicae..., Rome 1741.]

Resentment

Albrecht Durer (1471-1528), Vier Bücher von menschlicher Proportion, published in Nuremberg in 1528.

Surprise

William Cowper, The anatomy of humane bodies, printed in Oxford in 1698.

Trust

William Cheselden (1688-1752), Osteographia, or the Anatomy of Bones, published in London in 1733.

Vulnerable

Magnus Hundt (1449-1519), Antropologium de hominis dignitate…, printed in Leipzig in 1501 by Wolfgang Stoeckel.

Wonder

Charles Estienne (ca. 1504-1564), De dissectione partium corporis humani libri tres, published in Paris and printed by Simon Colinaeus in 1545.

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Graphical Display of Information: Identifying Ships from the Air, 1942

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

“How Allied Pilots Recognize Japanese Warships from the Air”, a graphic that appeared in The Illustrated London News on 16 May 1942, displayed in silhouette the different sorts of Japanese warships that might be targets of allied planes. There’s a lot of data on this one long sheet of paper, showing minelayers, submarines, aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, subchasers, torpedo boats, training vessels and coastal defense ships–65 in all. It is a great display, presenting a great amount of data in limited space, clearly and concisely, and very easy to distinguish and read.

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Spaghetti Map of the Army-McCarthy Hearings, 1954

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1489

Some things are complex, and complicated and pretty–you don’t realize that they are this involved, exactly, because of the elegant way in which they are presented. An anti-gravity undertaking by Brunelleschi, in creating his dome, was an enormous challenge, solved with circles within circles, a series of nine of them enclosed in a polygon, the result being one of the most beautiful and iconic achievements in the history of architecture (and engineering).

And then sometimes things are complicated and complex and look and behave that way, their messiness outdistancing their own necessities.

Which gets us now to this game, a mass of entwined spaghetti, which was a tongue-in-cheek poke at the Army-McCarthy Hearings of the spring of 1954, a popular review in the tradition of Thomas Nast that is very effective.. The “Army” was the U.S. Army, and the “McCarthy” was Senator Joesph McCarthy, of Appleton, Wisconsin, a man who was about at the end of a short, meteoric career of vast unsubstantiated accusation, discord, lies and fraud. The hearings were supposed to sniff out Communists in the Army and the defense industry, because that’s what McCarthy did, being a rabid impersonator of a man with a decent mission. The hearings were long, involved, and traveled nowhere fast although much ground was covered.

The bottom line to the whole affair was that as the first televised Senate hearings, McCarthy drew a huge audience, estimated at some 80 million people over the course of the event. And what happened was that “Tail-Gunner Joe” (an appellation he gave to himself that among many other things in his personal and public life were exaggerations) found out that he was seen better int eh minds of Americans when he was not being televised. In short, he was outed for many as a crude, threatening liar, and his career of ruining people in his quixotic quest for deeply-rooted Commies was about over when the last lights in the hearing room went out.

Joe McCarthy would be dead in about three years, his liver failed, evidently (as his biographers say) from too much drink. He was a dangerous and divisive man, but one who had many friends and supporters to keep him re-elected and in power. (He was a darling of the Kennedys, being a favorite of Joe Kennedy, the godfather of Robert Kennedy’s first child, and one who dated two of the JFK’s sisters. Being Catholic and a vehement Commie-hunter went a long way with Joseph Kennedy, who had his own set of issues with power and rule.)

[Image source: LIFE magazine, 21 July 1954, page 42.]

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Nazi Propaganda on Propaganda: on British “Atrocity Propaganda” (1938/9)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1490

As a small cog in the machinery of the Nazi Big Lie, this short sheet (supposedly written by a ” Theodore Kesselmeier”¹), outlines a campaign of British anti-Nazi psychological warfare, and was written around 1938/9. It is written in a book review format whose aim was the 1938 publication by Sidney Rogerson², Propaganda in the Next War, which was an alert (described as “brilliant” by John A. Pollard in The Public Opinion Quarterly for Autumn 1945) to the British government to establish central coordinating offices for information and communication for what the author felt to be the impending war with Germany. In many ways Rogerson was responding to an enormous flood of information coming out of Germany about its own impending future, from the election and seizure-of-power by Adolf Hitler, to books like Ewald Barnse Raum und Volk im Welkriege (translated into Germany Prepares for War) of 1933, and on and on, a growing high tide that was without end. (Even from the most base popular study of Germany’s desires, for example, looking at every issue of the Illustriete Zeitung (Leipzig) from 1933 to 1939 as I have done, it is overwhelmingly obvious that Germany was preparing for the next war. The case is made constantly and boldly in the magazine, which served in a way as Germany’s version of LIFE magazine.) [This item is available for purchase through our blog bookstore, here.]

But the “reviewer” finds the Rogerson work insulting and militaristic, hateful; an attack upon Germany. He/they write(s) that the book is an offense, and part of an effort of “the cold-blooded and unrestricted manner in which Britain has prepared this latest war against Germany”. This part is odd because even at this late date, and given what the knew about the German war aims, Great Britain had done very little about preparing for war even until Munich.

I have a number of these propagandistic pieces that came out of Germany at this time, some of which have been written about on this blog, and it seems no surprise now to see how many of them paint Germany as a victim of the war aims of the countries nearby: Poland and Czechoslovakia were both presented as late as 1938 as having designs on Germany. This is just one of many examples of Nazi propaganda on propaganda, issues of lies within lies to the secret house of even-more-inner lies. For example, this incredible map showing the Czech threat to Germany, above [source] and the shrinking pamphlet, left [source].




[page 2 is in the “continued reading” section, below.]

Notes:

1. I suspect that “Kesselmeier” was the nom de plume of a section of writers laboring away in the dream factory of the psych-ops part of the Nazi war machinery. It is much easier to produce reports when you have an entire group of people working on the project without need for the benefit of proof–or, for that matter–of truth.

2. Rogerson’s entry in Who’s Who: “Publicity and Public Relations Consultant and author. Born 22^nd of October 1894. Son of the Reverend S. Rogerson. B.A. in Modern History 1916; Served in the European War;

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JF Ptak

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Bad Ideas — Militaria — Perception — Perspective
Tree Rings of Soldiers’ Uniforms, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Aside from the strong impact that this 1918 image [the original available at our blog bookstore, here] makes, the enormous mounds of clothing of captured German solders that were routinely handled as part of their processing, it struck a deeper chord to an older image still (that we’ll see below). The photograph seems threatening to me, even though the action taking place in it wasn’t, it was mundane–the men, who I believe are German POW’s, are processing the clothing for disinfection and cleaning. But the size of the mound reminds us of the magnitude of the numbers of the dozens of millions who were killed during WWI, as well as the millions who were taken prisoner. What remains to be said about this image is how often that pile of clothing was replaced: is it a monthly, or weekly, or daily pile? My guess is that it was more daily than anything else, if for no other reason than there is an enormous oil lamp in the background of the photo, suggesting that the process went on all day and into the night. My initial reaction is that this pile was replicated often during any given month….

And the image it reminds me of are those made of the enormous mounds of buffalo hides, piles readied for shipment away from the Plains by rail.

I am in no way suggesting that the prisoner were skinned like the buffalo, not in any way. But they do bear a resemblance in the way that thousands of men or buffalo could be represented in such a compact space, flattened husks of the living thing, gross representations of big numbers.

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JF Ptak

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Militaria — Photography — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at — World War I