What Is History? Part 19
The fact is that New England has been so busy writing history that it hasn't had time to make it, while the South has been so busy making history that it hasn't had time to write it. —Henry Tucker Graham
Never attribute to malice what is more obviously due to stupidity or sloth. —Oscar Handlin
Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise. —Francis Bacon
Past epochs never vanish completely, and blood still drips from all their wounds, even the most ancient. —Octavio Paz
A historical event is not the sum of its component factors but an indissoluble reality. —Octavio Paz
As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: You liberate a city by destroying it. —Gore Vidal
It takes money to make money. —Proverbial
In war, men are nothing; a man is everything. —Napoleon
Empires crumble. There are no exceptions. —Oscar Wilde
If you can't do it with one shot, don't do it at all. —H. Ryder Haggard
Did you know that hundreds of black people attended the funeral of General Bedford Forrest in Memphis but black people (and also Jews) were not allowed at Lincoln's funeral in Springfield? —Clyde Wilson
Nothing is so difficult as life, nor so strange. —Mary Johnston
An American president can wreck his country and blow up the world, but he cannot recreate either of them. —Chilton Williamson, Jr.
. . . if immigrationists truly believe that all American land today is rightly Indian land, then they should cease advocating immigration. After all, more people coming here will increase the number of "thieves" who are stealing Indian land! —John Vinson
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By the way, there is no reason for anyone to think that Rumi was gay.
@50 Allen Wilson
I am sorry if I did not understand you.
@51 Tell that to one of my professors who teaches at a prestigious University. I pointed out to him that the word for beloved is neuter in Persian so it is difficult to see who the beloved refers to. I took a course on Islam since I have my own prejudices towards it and wanted to learn something positive about it...but the way this guy taught it, I ended up having a worse opinion of it. This professor's agenda was to show that the Sufis were gay. It made me angry and as Mr. Salemi pointed out, such a class will end up imparting toxic ideas and turn people away from the humanities.
Gargi, @46: This is information I just pulled off the net. There is some controversy, but it is a fact that the Bible was the first printed book using a press with movable type.
"The first book ever to be put into print via press rather than arduous hand copying was the Gutenberg Bible. The print run began on 23 February 1455 in Mainz, Germany and ended approximately three years later, with an estimated 180 copies of the Bible put into print. The Gutenberg Bible was not entirely print – it was rubricated and illuminated by hand after it went through the press, but manufacture of the Bible took substantially less time than it would have in a conventional scriptorium.
It is said that Johannes Gutenberg, the Bible's namesake, chose to print the Bible in Vulgate, or common Latin, because he felt it would be more accessible to the people. The cost of the Bible, combined with literacy rates, make this claim somewhat dubious. It is more likely that he chose to print a certain version of the Bible because he knew it would sell well, and that many middle class Germans, his target market, would be more comfortable reading Vulgate than a more sophisticated version of Latin.
The Gutenberg Bible is remarkable for a number of reasons. It is quite clearly documented as the first book in the West to be put into print using a press and movable type, although there is some debate as to whether or not the Gutenberg was the first book ever printed globally, as some Eastern historians argue that the use of block print plates in China and Japan precedes the Gutenberg Bible. Since no strong evidence exists to support the use of movable type in China before the production of the Gutenberg Bible, it is generally accepted to be the first book ever printed.
Gutenberg's Bible revolutionized the society it was brought into, where a single book could take three years to reproduce in a scriptorium, thereby making reading material inaccessible to all but the most wealthy. Although the Gutenberg Bible incorporated hand illumination and binding, it was a tremendous step towards technological automation in Europe. A complete copy of the Bible has 1,282 pages, and most editions were bound in two volumes, rather than one. Of the 180 copies produced, approximately 45 were printed on vellum, and the remainder on paper."
Gargi, @47: 1)Gargi, I wasn't referring to admission standards (although that needs to rectified, too). I was referring to the quality of education. What is quality? What is the substance being taught and for what purpose? In the medieval universities the courses were theology, philosophy, law (civil and canon), and medicine. Students were taught about God, and the graduates made great contributions to the brilliant civilization that existed for a short time. The guild system of crafts and trade augmented the universities in its work, also. Are courses like sociology, African studies, women in history, communications, alternate life-styles, dumbdowned history, values clarification and self esteem, sex education, Darwinian evolution, Keynsian economics, etc., quality courses? What about the quality of the teacher in all of this? His abilities and knowledge (or lack thereof) has much to do with quality of education. What his sexual orientation? What about the dress codes in public schools? Oh, I'm sorry, I meant to say, what about the lack of dress codes in public schools? Where girls and adolescents are allowed to dress as if they were prostitutes. The system is not civililzing our children; the system is creating barbarians, no matter the latest fashion they dress themselves in.
You are not getting my point about "free education". It does not exist. Someone has to pay for it. In America, public schools are financed by property taxes or Federal grants. Therefore, not ever wanting to send any of my children to a public school because of its godless-materialistic atmosphere, I send them to a private school and must pay high tuition costs and other expenses. Still, I am forced to pay for public education, which I despise, because civil authorities rob me of my monies through property taxes. This is not just. It is tyrannical. Its a form of double jeopardy.
Well I went to both public school and to private school. My public school was not that bad, I guess it depends on where you go to public school in the USA. At the college level, I also have attended both public and private institutions.
I used to often baby sit a while back for the children of a very wealthy family. I was shocked to see what these kids were learning once they began attending the first grade--the kinds of language they began using and attitudes they were picking up. And these kids go to a very exclusive private school. So to a certain extent, it is unavoidable that kids will pick up bad things from other kids. Perhaps Catholic schools are a bit better--I attended Catholic school for elementary school.
Not everyone can afford private schools. What will happen to many children when no one is interested in Public School education and what is happening to it? What will happen to the kids who cannot afford anything but public school? I still believe in Public education in America. There are still good public schools in this country.
@Meng
The standards of the schools need to be improved by offering vocational education for those who are unable to make it through school. And for those who do not believe in public education and do not send their kids to public schools, there should be tax rebates.
My bosses who say 1% of Americans pay 50% of taxes are also not happy about the taxes they pay. It is hard for me to say where to draw the line.
J. Meng @ 53
Meng, a lot of that information that you quoted is just wrong. It sounds like it was written by an undergraduate doing a paper on Gutenberg for his intro-to-civ class.
First off, in 1453 NOBODY in the common people spoke Latin. The notion that Gutenberg published his Bible for them is a pious myth. Moreover, the cost of a folio Bible, whether handwritten or printed in multicolored inks and hand-illuminated as Gutenberg's was, would have been prohibitive to any common person at the time, even assuming that the ordinary common person was literate.
Moreover, Gutenberg was not acxtually the publisher of that book. He began the project, but took too much time, and his investors Fust and Schoeffer fired him and finished the job themselves. How much of the actual printing in the surviving copies of the Bible are Gutenberg's is a question still in dispute.
In addition, there was no "more sophisticated version in Latin" of the Bible at that time. There was an earlier Itala Latin text of the Scriptures that St. Jerome had improved when he made his Vulgate version, but that Itala text was hardly "more sophisticated." In fact, it would probably have been hard to locate a copy of the Itala version in 1453.
Moreover, Gargi is right about the Diamond Sutra. It is the oldest piece of printed material that survives, and dates from the 8th or 9th century. It's also true that there was some limited printing from moveable type in the Orient, but because of the ideographic nature of Chinese writing it proved essentially impractical there. The font would have consisted of literally thousands of separate characters. Its use in an alphabetic language is the great step forward.
Also, whoever wrote that quoted stuff doesn't know a thing about bibliophilic history. The Gutenberg Bible (sometimes called the Mazarin Bible) was most certainly NOT the first example of the use of moveable type in the West. There are number of early grammatical texts of Donatus that predate it, and even Gutenberg himself produced a few small devotional texts and Papal indulgences that are clearly older than his great Bible. No one could have produced a professionally perfect masterpiece of the printer's art, as the Gutenberg Bible is, on his first try.
Gargi, @56, You are on the right track with regard to vocational education. Liberals do not accept the objective reality that not everyone is born with the same capacities or talents, i.e., intellectual or practical. During the Middle Ages there were three levels of education: the parish grammar school, the Cathedral school (comparable to our high school), and university. At each level, specific subjects were taught, building on the previous curriculum. If a student showed capacities for the Cathedral school, he was sent there. The same dynamic was practiced at the Cathedral school to determine those recommended for university. With each advancement upward, so to speak, greater responsibilies were incurred, because education was seen as a means of producing good and responsible leaders for the good of society. Those who were not advanced to university, were usually apprenticed to masters of a craft or trade, returned to the farm,, etc. In other words, aptitudes were realistically appraised, not only for the good of the person, but for the good of the community.
You are correct, we need much more emphasis on vocational schools and less at the university level.
Joseph Salemi, @ 57, Thanks, Joe, for the information. However, my argument was really about the fact that Gutenberg's bible was the first book ever printed on a press with movable type (a letterpress). I guess, that's where the confusion begins and I apologize to all for not making it clear. The Diamond Sutra, was block printed according to the British Library. This is what the experts at the British Library tell us: "It was made in 868. Seven strips of yellow-stained paper were printed from carved wooden blocks and pasted together to form a scroll over 5m long. Though written in Chinese, the text is one of the most important sacred works of the Buddhist faith, which was founded in India."
By the way, the British Library experts admit that the Diamond Sutra was not the first block printed scroll, but the first dated one.
Also, according to different sources, such as Frances and Joseph Gies, in their excellent work, "Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel", the printing press facilitated a "torrent of information on a range of subjects available to a wide public."
Gargi, you must understand that just as there is a strong anti-white, anti-Western, and anti-Christian ageda being pushed in many humanities departments, so also is there a very strong pro-homosexuality agenda. What you say about the idiotic professor who insisted on reading the neuter Persian "beloved" as male is a case in point.
I teach Omar Khayyam's The Rubaiyat every fall semester in one of my classes. We use the Edward FitzGerald translation. The word "beloved" appears many times, with no suggestion as to whether this beloved person is male or female. I always lecture on the assumption that the beloved is a girl, simply because most popular editions of The Rubaiyat illustrate the text with a female figure. I have taken flak from other department members for this, who insist that the "beloved" has to be a male. I have told these department members to shut the swiving hell up, and mind their own business.
@31 Allen
I'm glad to hear that Six Sigma not effectual, but in the meantime, my wife is being forced into taking a reassignment complete with pay cut as a result of the champions and black belts hired by the board of the corporation which shall remain nameless. It is used to instill terror in the employees who cannot afford to be outsourced.
@61 Etienne: We also have experienced 'reassignment'. I wasn't affected personally, but people I knew were affected in very bad ways. One ex-supervisor wondered how the upper management could sleep at night. I guess it's easy when all you have in your eyeballs is dollar signs.