Today in History: "The Raven" first published

On January 29, 1845, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" was first published in the New York Evening Mirror:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore--
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door--
Only this and nothing more."

"The Raven" has been big in American popular culture, including a number of parodies (of varying quality). My favorite re-doing: "Near a Raven," a version that remains faithful to the original while being a mnemonic device for the number pi (3.14159...) to an amazing 740 places.

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Happy Birthday, University of Georgia

On January 27, 1785, the Georgia legislature approved a charter for the University of Georgia. The preamble said: “When the minds of the people in general are viciously disposed and unprincipled and their conduct disorderly, a free government will be attended with greater confusions and evils more horrid than the wild uncultivated state of nature. It can only be happy where the public principles and opinions are properly directed and their manners regulated.” (You can view the charter here.)

No other state had chartered a public university before this. (Other institutions of higher learning existed--Harvard, for example, had been around since 1636, almost a century and a half earlier--but they were private, not public, schools.) So the University of Georgia, chartered 222 years ago today, is the oldest state university, right?

Well, the University of Georgia didn’t accept its first student until 1801, sixteen years after it was chartered. Can it be a university without students? Does a professor talking in a classroom make a sound if there is no student there to hear her?

On the other hand, the University of North Carolina was not chartered until 1789--but it accepted its first student in 1795, six years before Georgia.

So which is the oldest state university: Georgia, which was chartered in 1785 but did not open until 1801; or North Carolina, which was not chartered until 1789 but opened in 1795?

This is a difficult question. My opinion is that you can’t have a university without students. The University of Georgia was just words on a sheet of paper until 1801, six years after the University of North Carolina was up and running.

The fact that I have two degrees from the University of North Carolina has nothing to do with my perspective on the matter. Instead, I base my opinion on a Georgia precedent. When was Georgia itself founded? On June 20, 1732, when the charter was signed? Or on February 12, 1733, when James Oglethorpe landed with his first colonists at Yamacraw Bluff? The Georgia General Assembly passed a law in 1909 that said February 12 should be observed as “Georgia Day,” marking the state’s founding. This means that, according to the state government, Georgia didn’t exist until there were colonists here. Using the same logic, universities don’t really exist until there are students on the campus.

So today we wish a Happy Founders' Day (as they call it in Athens) to the University of Georgia --the nation’s second oldest state university.

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Jane's back!

Hard to believe it's been less than two weeks since Jane Hamsher posted a heart-rending message at firedoglake : "In mid-December I was diagnosed with breast cancer for the third time. It's a bit more serious this time and treatment is going to have to be more extensive.... On Thursday I go in for surgery at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica."

We waited, read the frequent (but not frequent enough) updates, and waited some more. And today-- she's back! And ready to resume her share of the coverage of the Libby trial: "They tell me there's no reason I can't be in Washington DC on Monday morning, February 5, sitting at the Prettyman courthouse getting ready to watch Dick Cheney sweat, just like I promised."

Welcome back, Jane!

added later: Ed Darrell reminds us that Molly Ivins, though "still not dead," is not doing so well.

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Day 49: You Geaux Girls!

Why is it that some days I really don’t feel like running even a mile and then others it is absolutely no problem?

Yesterday, Mira and I ran about 8 miles and it was easy! It took us about an hour and twenty five minutes, which is not too bad except for that it means it will take us about two and a half hours to run the half marathon. Two and a half hours seems like a really long time!

Earlier this week, I had a hard time running 4 miles. What is the difference and how can I make it so that every day is as easy as it was yesterday?

I read an article in Runners World about “the bonk”. This is when your body or mind gives up and you want to stop. There are many reasons for this bonk, the most common being not eating enough to sustain energy and not drinking enough, which causes dehydration and slows gastric emptying, which in turn causes cramps.

Even after reading this article, this still does not make sense to me. Four hours before running four miles the other day, I had a hearty lunch full of vegetables and carbohydrates as well as about 8 bottles of water throughout the day. Yesterday I ran at 8 a.m. and had not eaten since the night before. I drank a glass of water before leaving the house, but did not drink during my run.

Maybe it is just all in my head. Maybe it is only my own misgivings that are holding me back. In that case, now that I know for sure that I CAN run 8 miles, I should also know that I will be able to run thirteen miles just as easily. It is just a case of mind over matter.

AT END OF WEEK 7:

Average miles run per week: 13
Most miles run in one day so far: 8
Hours spent in the gym/at the park: 65

$$ spent on gym membership: $90.00
$$ spent on running gear: $158.74
Running farther than I ever have before: priceless
(sorry couldn’t resist)

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John Wesley, evolutionist?

Jeremy Bruno recently posted Tangled Bank #71, the popular science blog carnival, at The Voltage Gate. Since many of the postings have a historical theme, especially to the 18th century, Bruno titled this edition of the carnival "Welcome to 1771!"

"As an idea, evolution was all but nonexistent in the 18th century," Bruno wrote, introducing a handful of relevant postings. Reading that sentence reminded me of an article I came across a few days ago in The Methodist Review (May 1924): "Why the Methodist Church Is So Little Disturbed by the Fundamentalist Controversy," by Philip L. Frick.

"A very interesting and suggestive phenomenon it is that, while some of the denominations of America are being shaken to their very foundation by the Fundamentalist controvery, the Methodist Church has so generally escaped," Frick wrote. He attributed this in part to the beliefs of John Wesley, generally considered the founder of Methodism: "Were John Wesley alive to-day, he would be considered a 'Modernist' regarding Evolution and the Bible.... Wesley believed that creation moves from the simple to the complex. He observed that there is a 'prodigious number of continued links between the perfect man and the ape.'"

Frick offers several Wesley quotations to prove this, the best being:

By what degrees does nature raise herself up to man? How shall she rectify the head that is inclined toward the earth? How change these paws into flexible arms? What method did she use to transform those crooked feet into supple and skillful muscle? The ape is this rough sketch of man; this rude sketch, an imperfect representation which nevertheless bears a resemblance to him and is the last creature that serves to display the admirable progression of the works of God.

Fascinating! But a little thought and investigation show us that this isn't quite what it seems.

First, Wesley didn't exactly write that passage. The quotation is from a book put together by Wesley titled A Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation: A Compendium of Natural Philosophy. As the subtitle suggests, this multi-volume work, first published in 1763, was largely a collection of the writings of others. (The book went through many later editions, growing in size each time. One of the later editions is available here.) As it happens, this quotation is from Charles Bonnet's Contemplation of Nature.

Wesley didn't write it, but his inclusion of it in the Compendium suggests an acceptance of evolution. But a second point: Even so, the quotation does not prove that Wesley was a "Darwinist." Darwin was a century later (Origins of Species was first published in 1859). In Wesley's day, many people were evolutionists, and he had no problem finding popular works that he could use for his Compendium. In addition to Bonnet's, there were, among others, Oliver Goldsmith's History of the Earth, and Animated Nature and Louis Dutens's Enquiry into the Origins of the Discoveries Attributed to the Moderns. Incidentally, Dutens's work, like Bonnet's, was originally published in French. Frick suggested that Wesley himself translated such works; maybe he did, but he didn't have to, as published English translations were generally available within a year or two of the original publication.

And Jean-Baptiste Lamarck would appear just a few years later.

It's not obvious that Wesley and other 18th-century figures who accepted evolution would have been comfortable with Charles Darwin, who not only introduced a mechanism (natural selection) for evolution but also made God superfluous to the process.

Philip Frick was right: The Methodist church was less affected by the Fundamentalist controversy of the early 20th century than were some other Protestant denominations. But Frick's discussion of Wesley as a "modernist" perhaps misses the mark a bit.

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They were giants in those days

David Kaiser, who writes at History Unfolding, presents the best tribute I've seen to Art Buchwald in "Death of a Giant." America has always needed people like Buchwald--and occasionally, as Kaiser shows, we've had them.

Thanks to Cliopatria's Ralph Luker for the reference.

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James Cobb on jaywalking professors

Over at Cobbloviate, James Cobb offers his own take (as is his wont; he seems to have his own take, always instructive and amusing, on many things) on the arrest a couple weeks ago of Professor Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. The respected historian from Tufts University was charged with jaywalking while attending the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Atlanta.

Cobb suggests that the professor should eschew future AHA conferences in favor of the friendlier meetings of the Southern Historical Association:

As a former president of this group who was elevated to that office a few years after being threatened with arrest at an SHA meeting, I can assure him that [had] his Atlanta experience occurred at one of our gatherings, he would have little reason for complaint, for he would have immediately become the object of much congratulation and backslapping and achieved what amounted to instant cachet with his new colleagues. It would further enhance his stature as a naturalized southerner, of course, if instead of complaining about his confinement with the “most deprived and depraved dregs of the American underclass,” he explained that he got along famously with his cellmates and may have even discovered a couple of long lost third cousins twice-removed while on the inside.

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my people!

from Scrutiny Hooligans, a Tar Heel blogger

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Today in history: Sherman heads to Georgia

On January 21, 1844, Lt. William T. Sherman, then stationed at Charleston, S.C., received orders to report to Marietta, Ga.

For the next six weeks, Sherman helped take depositions in Georgia and Alabama with respect to personal loses of horses and equipment by militia members from the two states that had fought in the Second Seminole War in Florida. During this assignment, the young 23-year-old officer had a chance to familiarize himself with the area of northwest Georgia that he would visit again 20 years later under vastly different circumstances.

"This Day in Georgia History" is a wonderful service from the University of Georgia's Carl Vinson Institute of Government. Georgia readers (and others), check it out!

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Today in History: Georgia Secedes

On January 19, 1861, delegates to a statewide convention in Milledgeville, Georgia, by a vote of 208-89, approved an ordinance "that the Union now subsisting between the State of Georgia and other States, under the name of the United States of America, Is Hereby Dissolved."

White Georgians at the time were pretty evenly split on the question of secession; in the popular vote for delegates to the convention, the immediate secessionists won by the thin margin of 44,152 to 41,632. (discussion here).

Five years later, Alexander H. Stephens, a member of the convention (and then vice-president of the Confederate States of America), talked about support for secession in the state:

In some of the mountain counties the Union sentiment was generally prevalent. The cities, towns, and villages were generally for secession. The anti-secession sentiment was more general in the rural districts and in the mountain portions of the State. Yet the people of some of the upper counties were very active and decided secessionists. There was nothing like a sectional division of the State at all. For instance, the delegation from Floyd county, situated in the upper portion of the State, was an able one, and strong for secession; while the county of Jefferson, down in the interior of the cotton belt, sent one of the most prominent delegations for the Union. I could designate particular counties in that way throughout the State, showing there was nothing like a sectional or geographical division of the State on the question.

In the Civil War, of course, secession lost big time.

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