The history of beauty: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘Eurocentric beauty standards really do dominate, and they essentially become global beauty standards. But whilst the dominant standard of beauty, female beauty in Western media may change slightly, the ideal of beauty that is usually held up is some sort of white cis thin woman. And that embodies that the prevailing fashion for beauty. Now, the key thing about beauty standards is they are meant to be unobtainable, so they always do have to shift... because the ideal beauty standard is consistently unobtainable, it can lead to all sorts of other effects like depression, body dissatisfaction, low self esteem and eating disorders...
I was thinking about the most dangerous product for beauty, I was thinking about Victorian hair tonics that actually use petroleum. So those examples of things like the wonderfully named Madame Fox’s Life for the Hair. So this is made from an extract of Bailey's and petroleum. This is essentially a dry shampoo… 1897, where a lady called Fanny Samuelsson she died after her hair caught alight during a petrol treatment at an upmarket salon in London. Now, there was an inquest behind this, and it was determined that the petrol in the product was so unstable, that the friction that was caused by rubbing her hair with a towel had led to spontaneous combustion.’"
If you pretend that beauty standards are eurocentric often enough despite their pre-dating contact with Europeans, many people will believe the lie
Blaming beauty standards for unhappiness is easier than blaming neuroticism and anxiety over status competition
Benjamin Franklin: portrait of a revolutionary | HistoryExtra - "‘What's interesting about our work is all the things they thought they knew that or that they learned that they didn't know. And that's exciting, you know, soldiers in Vietnam telling us our Vietnam series told them things. World War Two veterans before they passed away, saying, thank you, I was in the Pacific Theater, I had no idea what was going on. I went, I moved from one little spot of land in this biggest of all oceans to another little spot of land. Thank you for putting it together. And same with those in the European theater.’"
Too bad for the people who valorise personal experience
America’s Cold War culture boom | HistoryExtra - "‘This was an era where people really valued culture, as you say, they believed it mattered. What do you think that the consequence of that was?’
‘It made for very exciting debates. Because I mean, just to give you an example, one of the things that the American government and the governments of the liberal democracies, including the UK, and France wanted to do in the Cold War was to promote the idea that expression was free, in liberal democracies, that the state doesn't tell you what to write or what to paint, or what kind of movies to make, as opposed to in the Soviet Union, where there was an official aesthetic, socialist realism. And everybody knew that if you didn't adhere to that aesthetic, your work would be censored or banned. So the liberal democracies want to say to the world look, we don't tell painters what to paint. Okay, so we don't tell painters what to paint. Suppose a painter decides to make a painting by just throwing paint on a canvas on the floor. Is that a painting? Is that art? Suppose a composer composes a piece of music, which is consists of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, is that music? So there's a lot at stake because we have to show that freedom conduces to good art, not just crazy stuff. So it's fascinating to watch the rationales that are given to explain why the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock are painting and why the silent piece by John Cage's music, and that's fascinating to write about’"
Munich: the real history behind the new film | HistoryExtra - "‘It struck me when I was watching this film that anybody sat at home watching it, essentially is watching with the benefit of hindsight. We know what was to come. What are the challenges of creating a historical story like that and maintaining tension, for example, when we all know how it's going to end up?’
‘Well, you know, there is a school of thought that drama is better if you do know the ending, so that the Titanic exercises constant fascination with people, we know what's going to happen. I wrote a novel about Pompeii. I mean, you know, one knows what's going to happen. And oddly enough, waiting for it to happen. And wondering who's going to survive is quite an effective drama, in fact. The ancient Greeks, it's Greek drama, a Greek tragedy, where you know, what's going to happen and the chorus keep telling you this is going to end disastrously so there's no problem with that, I think...
In the summer of 1938, Stalin had killed many, many millions of people, far more than than Hitler had. And was seen, certainly by the conservative establishment in Britain, as some far more menacing figure. And, you know, it was inconceivable to people that there would be something like the Holocaust, I mean, there there would be, that there would be Jewish people thrown out of jobs, treated as second class citizens, encouraged to emigrate, all of that was seen and abhorred by the rest of the world. But the concept that they actually might try to murder every single man, woman and child was beyond conception and imagining in 1938... it was less than 20 years since the end of the First World War, where 900,000 British men had been killed. And there was simply no appetite for fighting it again, and anything that could be done to try and stop it happening. If that meant that the Germans, 2 million ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia should, should go to Germany. Fine, let's do it. Another word for appeasement is really peace process. How do we find the sources of the conflict and somehow try and disarm?’"
Shining new light on medieval Europe | HistoryExtra - "This story of the Dark Ages that there was this 1000 year period after the alleged fall of the Roman Empire until the Renaissance has really been locked in the story of medieval European history, since the 14th century, since since Petrarch, since the originators of the Renaissance started to tell a story about themselves as having rescued knowledge and having shed light. And it's done a lot of harm. And we can talk a little about the harm in terms of, harm in terms of how we think about ourselves, harms in terms of how we tell the story of humanity, the story of Europe, harm in terms of how it's plugged into a lot of violence and a lot of dangerous things. But also, it's just wrong. We as professional historians, and really, as everyone we know who studies the Middle Ages, we just don't recognize the the picture of the Middle Ages that is so locked in, in modern consciousness, of this darkness of savageness, of simplicity, of isolation, we just see a much more vibrant, complex human messy world. And we wanted to tell that story and tell it in the way that could reach the most people possible."
This had little substantiation (basically the argument was that outside of Western Europe it wasn't Dark). Let alone evidence for "harm" in thinking of a collapse of the documentary record as the Dark Ages
Queen Victoria’s spy network | HistoryExtra - "‘Today the monarchy is supposed to be neutral. Was, was the same supposed to apply for Victoria?’
‘Absolutely not. So clearly, Queen Victoria is pursuing several quite political campaigns. As Rory says, It's partly about her Russophobia. But her other big political campaign is against leftists and anarchists and subversives. So in the 19th century, Britain has this fantastic tradition of providing political asylum, or providing refuge for all sorts of figures. Nationalists, like Mazzini, leftists like Karl Marx, London was kind of a menagerie of some of Europe's most colorful political figures. Queen Victoria hated this. All her relatives are writing to her from Europe saying, why are you hosting all these terrible people? And so there's a constant battle between her and people like Palmerston, people who are radically liberal, they want to support these revolutionaries. Victoria doesn't like it... She says, these, these evil Republicans must be exterminated. She doesn't, she doesn't mince her words at all. And that is clearly very, very different context historically and constitutionally from the world in which Queen Elizabeth reigns now, and it started to change after Queen Victoria. Edward the Seventh was a bit disappointed he didn't quite have his mother's influence. And gradually, it becomes more what we know today. But under Victoria, no, she was very happy and willing to meddle and manipulate, to interfere’
‘It's remarkably modern, in the sense that for 50 years through her reign, Victoria’s fighting this political battle over issues of asylum, issues of human rights, issues of political liberty, all the way through, through her reign. She's trying to promote European style secret policing. She wants, she wants revolutionaries in Britain to be put under close surveillance. And she also wants their rights to be changed, so every 10 years, a new piece of legislation is introduced into Parliament to try and throw these people out. Even in her last decade in 1894, she's bringing in something called the Aliens Act. But once again, every 10 years it's defeated. The British Parliament will not roll back on their liberal inclusive agenda of welcoming these revolutionaries from Europe.’...
'All the best secrets are in the royal archive at Windsor. And this is a place that material is continually flowing into but it's like a black hole. Things are sucked in, but they never go out. But one of the duties of the British embassies around the world is to report on stories about the monarchy, send them into London send them to Buckingham Palace. One of the hotspots for this was the British Embassy in France because the French press absolutely love the British, the British monarchy. And they're always doing crazy stories about how Princess Anne had the whole Everton football team in in her bedroom. How the Queen Mother had died, had been replaced by a body double. All this stuff was being sent in by by junior diplomats in in British diplomats in France through the 70s and the 80s. And they never got any response. At one point they said oh, do you really want this stuff? Should, shouldn't we stop and immediately Buckingham Palace said no, we love this stuff. Send us more stories. This is what we read over the breakfast table'"
A murder mystery in 19th-century Dublin | HistoryExtra - "They actually ticketed, admit, admission. So they were reported to be hordes of people crowding the streets on both sides of the building, before each day of the trial, and they had policemen on the doors, making sure that people had tickets to get in. And I think it was inside, those days, of course, they chose to just pack them in as as much as they could... in 1857, it was not permissible for a wife to give evidence in court against her husband. There's one exception actually, if if the husband had been abusing her in any way... that ruling was not revoked until 1897"
The Age of Sail: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘The Admiralty didn't really officially allow women on board. But quite often, you'd have the wives of maybe your warrant officers or your gunners, your surgeons, etc, or other officers joined the ship, but they had to learn to share the cabins or the hammocks, etc. They had to share their food rations. They didn't get their own food rations, so that had to be split between them. But yeah, quite often, you would have women on board. There's a great story. I can't remember the ship. But essentially, she was due to be giving birth and she'd been in labor for something like 12 hours. So basically, the surgeon went and asked if they could fire a broadside in order that it would kind of shock her body pushing out this baby and she did. She ended up having a baby off the back of this broadside being fired. But yeah, so and there's a there's a great paper that was written recently that actually covers the the wife of one of the gunners. Looking after the midshipmen, kind of being a bit of a mother figure to the younger, younger kids. Well, kids on board. You'd have your powder monkeys, for example, who are very, very tiny children. They, the the powder monkeys were used to kind of run the gunpowder up from the magazine where the gunner was up to the gun crews, so tiny little nimble children with with buckets of gunpowder taking it up to for firing...
There's been some really interesting work carried out recently by a chap called Jeremiah Dancy, who's actually, he sat and went through all of the muster books of all of these ships, which must have taken, well, in fact, it did take years, and actually found out that the number of people that were pressed rather than volunteered is a lot less than we think. So more people volunteered than than we think. But essentially, you'd have these press gangs, as everyone knows them, going around these kinds of shipping, nautical towns, port towns, and finding people to crew, the navy. I mean, obviously, you're going from peacetime where you don't really need anyone to suddenly a period of war where you may need, what upwards of 20,000 men. And so you'd have these press gangs set up in towns, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Chatham, etc. But really, there's kind of this myth, I guess, where people think of the press gangs, going into pubs and going, you're coming with me, you look able bodied. Taking people away from their houses, etc. And well it did happen, and you'd have your landsmen who had never really been to sea before, but essentially you didn't you didn't particularly want them, you needed people who'd been to sea, who knew their way around the ship and understood how to to deal with the sails or heave on lines or fire guns if they could. So really, it was kind of those merchant navy men that you you would want. But you also had to be very aware that you didn't want to leave the merchant fleet with nobody… the King's Shilling is kind of this token you're given as a sign of impressment. And there's a supposedly a pub in Portsmouth where the landlady used to drop the shilling into the beer, meaning that when they drank it, they you know, the King’s Shilling is there and right, off to see with you. And it's a, it's a myth. It's a nice myth, but I don't think that's, I don't think you'd have been able to get away with it. To the extent that people think they did, but supposedly she recruited, like hundreds of people, for the Navy...
There is a lot of superstition and myth, at sea, even to this day, things like not being able to take bananas on board. I'm not quite sure where that one came from’"
The Gothic: from Dracula to The Shining | HistoryExtra - "‘It's the golden age of ghost stories, definitely the golden age of the emergence of these really modern myths, like the vampire. Vampires as this kind of effete aristocrat, appears in 1819. Clearly modeled on Lord Byron. And then he kind of recurs again with Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897...
I always have to confess, as a, you know, an earnest professor of literature, that the only reason I am a professor of literature is because of Stephen King's The Shining, which I read a, you know, a very kind of impressionable age. And also the film, which came out in 1979 was was a huge kind of impression on me, not because it's particularly gory or violent, just because of its, its sort of sense of menace’"
The Ottoman “Age of Discovery” | History Extra - "We also have to think about Ottoman rulers as being Renaissance princes. And the best example of this is Mehmet the Second, Mehmet the Conqueror, the one who conquers the Byzantine city of Constantinople, in 1453. In every regard, he is a Renaissance Prince, both in his his artistic tastes, and his literary tastes, and his cultivation of himself as in being someone in the, being modeled on an ancient ruler. He he has his historians compare him to Alexander. So so he's very conscious of what other European Renaissance princes are doing. He has some of the same portrait artists paint him, he has the same medallion makers, strike medallions for him. So the idea that Muslims would never have portraits or medallions made is quite silly… if we think about the knowledge that he gathers around him, the philosophers he gathers around him, he's very much a Renaissance Prince, as is his grandson, Suleiman... What the death knell was choosing the wrong side in the First World War… They also engaged in, they turned against many of the Ottoman values that had kept the Empire and the dynasty around for so long. When they committed genocide against the Armenian population. This was turning against the tolerance that had sustained the empire for nearly 600 years."
What can churches tell us? | HistoryExtra - "We spend quite a lot of time in Norfolk. And I read an obituary of a man who'd restored a very ancient church really off his own bat, at a place called St. Mary's in Houghton on the Hill, which is quite near Swaffham, but it's literally in the middle of nowhere. So in the summer, I went with my daughter, who's a theology student at the moment... we went to look at this church, and I mean it's a wonderful church. And he's restored it very beautifully. But what he's done inside, which is absolutely fascinating. This is a ninth 10th 11th century church. And he, he chipped away at the walls to get back to the original wall paintings. And he'd found such wonderful things that English Heritage and all sorts of people got involved. And the one that really catches your eye is on one side, is the Garden of Eden theme. And so you've got the, on one side, you've got the tree with the snake and Adam is sitting underneath it, and standing alongside it is God reaching out and embracing Eve and lifting her up. So my daughter, the reason having having made her go to Catholic schools, wants nothing to do with the Catholic Church, is cos she's a feminist. And then you look at this and you think, Oh, look, in the 10th century, people had a problem with that Daughters of Eve kind of line that women are all temptresses. And what did they do? On the wall of their church in the 10th century, they had God embracing Eve and casting out Adam. So you, it speaks to contemporary dilemmas in that sense, or contemporary arguments. We're not, you're not just kind of getting back into some dark, dusty, irrelevant bits of things. It connects both to the debates that we have at the moment. And they also connect, connect you as a person to those people"
Stranger danger? Xenophobia’s unexpected history | HistoryExtra - "‘There is a new term isn't there coined in the wake of the Second World War by Raphael Lemkin genocide. Could you describe how that comes about?’
‘Yes. So, you know, there's a, there are terms that are being coined to try to understand new phenomenon. And my argument about xenophobia is that it is in response to the second wave of globalization, that the notion that the stranger is an enemy is a catastrophe. If in fact, the world is globalizing, it means we're always going to be at war. Similarly, the term, the number of terms start to take 180 degree pivot backwards, right. So that anti-semite is at first a positive term, it becomes a very negative term. Racism is a positive term, it means you're proud of your race, until it becomes le racisme and it becomes bigotry against racism. Xenophobia, takes that same turn, starts out it's about them. Now it's about us. And Lemkin builds on that. He wants a term that will fill a gap because at that point, there was no term for or there was no law against, power, powers that discriminated against even murdered communities within their nation state. It wasn't a crime that international courts could deal with because it was internal...
Fanon… was a black psychiatrist, and he went to Algeria. And he came to this recognition, he said, you know, the French hate the Jews who hate the Arabs who hate the blacks. And I thought, and you could just keep going. So part of the notion of thinking about xenophobia is to challenge us, who's your stranger, who's the other anxiety that you have? Now, I would suggest that that is very different from the driven internal need for a hated other, which I say is the kind of pure xenophobia, that is the stuff that's driven by projection’"
How did this go into psychoanalysis?!
How the Greeks changed the world | HistoryExtra - "Greek is one of only three languages still in regular daily use in the world today, that has a continuous record of use in speech and writing, that goes back for more than 3000 years...
You can speculatively run all the way back to the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, and Odysseus on his ship, struggling to find his way back from Troy to his island home of Ithaca. Greeks, Greek shipowners apparently own the largest share of world cargo shipping of any single identifiable, gross national group in the world. It's something like 17% of world cargo shipping is Greek own. And I did this statistical check that is approximately 100 times the proportion of the Greek population as a proportion of the world's population. The Greeks are really made their mark in shifting goods by sea around the world. They were doing it 3000 years ago. They're still preeminent are doing it."
Sex work: a brief history | HistoryExtra - "‘Sex work is often called the oldest profession in the world, is that fair?’
‘Oh, is that fair. It’s one of the oldest. But the thing that you've got to remember is there's plenty of cultures and people that existed without money and without professions. So if you don't have money you don’t have professions, ergo, nobody needs to sell sex for for money, although I'm sure it's always been a really useful commodity. There were anthropologists in 1950s, actually, that did research on all tribal communities and tribal people. And they found that there was very, very little evidence of anyone selling sex because again, they didn't use money. But the figure of the medicine man and the midwife, were pretty much universal. So it would probably be more accurate to say that midwifery is the oldest profession. But you could definitely say that sex work is as old as money itself. And it's a very useful commodity.’...
‘What kind of stigma have sex workers faced in historical contexts?’
‘Much the same that they face today and continue to face. When you take a society that has quite repressive and misogynist attitudes around sex and around gender and around money, the figure of the sector worker is always going to be stigmatized in those terms. If you've got a culture that stigmatizes sex as dirty or naughty or shameful, the sex worker is the symbol of all of that. And it is the stigma that's the most damaging thing. It’s the stigma that causes the most damage. Because it's the stigma that forces people into silence. It's the stigma that stops people today, accessing help, getting support, being open and honest about what they're doing. And when you create shame, that's where you create a lot of danger...
No attempt to abolish it in the history of human experience has been successful. In fact, it hasn't kept anyone safer. It's not helped anybody that's being abused or trafficked. It just makes it harder for people because that's what happens is when you apply more criminal sanctions and more repression to an already marginalized group of people, but the sanctions that have been meted out are pretty tough.’...
‘Have there been any societies where selling sex hasn't been stigmatized or hasn't been subject to restraint and policing?’
‘I haven't found one if there is, which is rather depressing. Although what I will say is our own time is actually quite exciting...
In Edo, Japan, a woman was supposed to have three loyalties in her life: one to her father, one to her husband, and one to the sons that she would bear. That was your job. Is, you were, as a wife, you were domestic, you supposed to stay there, you have the babies, you are quiet, you are demure, you are all of those things. Wwhereas your husband, as long as he's supporting you can go and enjoy multiple mistresses. And even though the mistresses exist in a state of sexual slavery, arguably, they had more freedom than the wives. And that's the tension throughout the history of sex work, that it's really difficult to square these things. But ultimately, these were really brutal, patriarchal, capitalist societies.’...
‘Renaissance Italy, that sex work was put forward as a way of saving the population in quote marks from homosexuality’...
‘If men don't have access to sex, they'll do much worse. And they mean homosexuality, they also mean like violent assaults and sexual assault or cheating, or indulging in affairs or having, worst of all, having sex with other men's wives... I still see echoes of that narrative, you know, like whenever there's some incel has done something terrible, as always, inevitably, someone on social media that says, Well can’t they have sex with prostitutes, always. And it's that same attitude that the figure of the, that sex worker has to act as some kind of buffer for horrendous behavior. So we still use that kind of idea of like, well, if they don't have sex with sex workers, they're gonna go and beat up women...
One of my favorite courtesans throughout history was the Greek courtesan Phryne, who was so famous and so good at what she did that we're still talking about today. She, she made so much money, that when Alexander the Great destroyed the walls of Thebes, she offered to rebuild it herself. She had enough money, I will just rebuild the walls of Thebes, but only on the condition that they put up a plaque that said, destroyed by Alexander the Great, rebuilt by Phryne the whore’"
Weird how in feminist Sweden and the sex-mad US, sex work still has stigma
Strange. I thought capitalism was invented in Europe in the 18th century
The same people who say that poverty leads to crime get upset when you point out that lack of sex causes some men to commit crimes. Maybe they think to explain is to justify - which makes sense considering how they talk about poverty and crime, and blaming society for crime
How Shakespeare inspired terrorists | HistoryExtra - "'The main language in the US probably wouldn't be English without Shakespeare being imported with with the early settlers... In Iran, in Egypt, in these key cultural hubs, it's not until the 19th and 20th centuries, that there really is an influx of translation. And in large part, it's because a resistance to Shakespeare is internal resistance to the British. So they translate sciences, for example, but they don't translate literature. And they tried to preserve their own language and culture by avoiding texts like Shakespeare's. In Algeria, for example, Shakespeare's translated not because he's English, but because he's not French...
‘In Afghanistan in 2005, Corinne Jaber visits Kabul to organise the performance of the first Shakespearean play in the city since the Soviets had invaded decades before. And women take part in this production. How are they treated by the Taliban?’
‘Women hadn't been allowed to work for six years when this performance took place, let alone act. And practically all of the cast of this Love's Labor's Lost had serious issues as a result. When it comes to the women, one’s thrown out of the family home and another gets death threats. Another one is stabbed in the neck, by it, by a family member, actually. But there's one that's particularly pointed, which is *something* who, who punched to the ground on her way home one night, and then her husband who's constantly receiving these calls, telling him to stop his wife from from acting, was eventually gunned down outside their house and killed and his body was mutilated.’...
‘You said something I found really interesting, which is Shakespearean comedy is most problematic to terrorists, but the tragedies provide the inspiration. Can you tell us a bit more about that?’
‘Yeah, it's it's a finding of the book, so to speak. I mean, it's not something I expected. But it seemed to me that the constant example, so Love's Labour's Lost in Afghanistan, there was a bombing at a Twelfth Night in Doha. There's a problem with A Midsummer Night's Dream in Iran. They're all comedies. And I thought for a moment, why is that the case? It seems to me that terrorists generally don't read the plays. And if they do, or if they, if they interact with them, they want to understand them. And actually, the thing that's harder to understand is a bit more of a threat. So, so tragedies have the more universal values we've been talking about and human traits. The comedies are essentially tragic comedy, Shakespeare is very fluid with genre. So he doesn't really just write comedy or just write tragedy, they're very this to some extent, tragic comedies, they still deal with big issues of life, but in a slightly more hidden way, whether that's hidden through the, the the humor or through the puns, or through the happy resolution, they still discuss some of these big issues. And I think that that mystique, so to speak, can be quite unsettling for for those who don't like Shakespeare, whereas the tragedies seem to present these prototypes of assassination, and usurpation and, and that can provide a more direct inspiration to somebody who wants to carry out an assassination or wants to, to usurp the power that they feel is being unjust.’"
Unfortunately he does not justify the claim about the US
The Irish famine: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "'It was triggered by a blight on the potato crop. At that stage, about 40% of the Irish people depended on potatoes, that was all they ate, it was their subsistence crop. So when blight came, it was quite serious. But the potato crop had failed a number of times before. What made this particular failure, special, unique and so deadly, was that this blight kept coming back, and it came back for seven consecutive years. And so even though Ireland had suffered from famines before, and indeed, after 1852, the longevity of this major, particularly deadly, when we talk about the famine, we generally date it from 1845, when the potato crop first failed, although excess mortality, the high levels of mortality did not really begin until the end of 1846. And we generally say the famine ended in 1852, when the Blight pretty well disappeared from Ireland...
Potatoes were very well suited to conditions in Ireland. They grew prolifically, even in the poorest of soil, and the Irish moderate climate was very well suited to their growth. So the poor people increasingly grew potatoes. And it was a good choice. It was very sensible, because potatoes, especially if combined with milk, and that was the basic diet, potatoes and buttermilk, is a highly nutritious diet. And what we think, is that before the Great Famine, the great hunger, Irish people were probably the tallest people in Europe, which is not how we think about people about to undergo a famine...
What made the Irish situation unique and so vulnerable? Was that in no other country in Europe, was such a high dependence on potatoes. And that's why when the disease appeared in Ireland, people were very worried because of the high dependence of the poor people on this one crop… In 1845, about 40% of the crop was wiped out, because it came relatively late in the season. And people could cope. You, as I said, people had suffered intermitted food shortages before. And so people did what they usually did. If they had a pig, they'd slaughter it, they'd sell it, they pawn their fishing tackle, they pawn their wedding rings, feeling that the following year would be good, as was the tradition. Again, what made this famine, this tragedy so awful, was that in the following year in 1846, the blight returned, but it was much more deadly, far more virulent. And in 1846, almost all of the potato crop was wiped out...
We don't know exactly how many people died. So, as historians, we tend to round it up. And we say at least one people, 1 million people died, 2 million people emigrated. So the space of six to 10 years, Ireland lost 25% of her population, which by any standards is shocking. And that probably makes the Irish famine, one of the most lethal famines in modern history, in terms of overall population loss. What we, what we also know, and this makes the Ireland almost unique, is that the population never recovered. So in 1841, we think the population was about eight and a half million and growing. By 1851, it was about six and a half million. By 1901, it was about four and the half million. And today, the population of Ireland is about 7 million. It's actually starting to grow. But even as we speak, today, the population of Ireland is smaller than it was in 1845. And again, that is shocking for a modern democracy’"
The Great Depression: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘The stock market crash is better understood as a symptom of a lot of structural economic dislocations than as the cause of the Great Depression, despite the fact that many narrative histories introduced the Great Depression with the stock market crash. But the consensus amongst most people who study this closely is that the stock market crash did not have much of a causative effect on creating the event we know as the Great Depression... The best estimate we have is that only about 2.5%, I repeat that, 2.5% of American households owned stock as of 1929. So the effects on the banking system and the credit system turned out over time to be quite severe. But the immediate effects were almost zero in the average American household... the United States stock market did not regain its 1929 pre crash levels, until 1954...
The summary word, the one word that sums up the essence of the New Deal’s changes is the word security. And in fact, that word appears in the title of what is, to this day, probably the single most famous and consequential piece of legislation that came out of the New Deal, the Social Security Act of 1935’...
‘If we use the usual metric, which is unemployment, that's the sort of the best rough and ready way to think about the beginning of the depression, the scale of the Depression, and then the end of it. And it ends in the United States only in 1941, which happens also to be the year which the United States entered World War Two. And those facts are not unrelated. That it was the massive, massive American federal government spending on war materiel and mobilization for the war that finally puts paid through the Depression. So as as late as the end of 1940, early 1941, the unemployment rate was still around 15, 16 17%. By 1942, it's about 3%. By 1943, it's invisible… World War Two put an end to the depression in a very dramatic fashion. And it did so by demonstrating the power of deficit spending, of government borrowing in order to stimulate the economy. The biggest New Deal deficit was about $6 billion in fiscal year 1936. The federal deficits in 1943, and 1944 were in the range of 70 and $80 billion. That deficit spending on a scale that was just literally unimaginable in the 1930s. Even people like Franklin Roosevelt could not imagine that it would be politically possible or economically feasible, to do deficit spending on that scale’"
So much for libertarians complaining that the New Deal was the problem and delayed the recovery and the government should just have gotten out of the way
