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The Immigrant Chronicles Blog
almost anything about pre-modern life  

Horsepower, Original and Impressive

6/29/2022

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In 1837, Will drags Niklas out to see the new railroad between New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain, where Ardennes horses are pulling the railroad cars. By that time, there was a steam engine, but horses were used whenever the engine broke down.
​   Niklas recognizes the horse breed because he was in Napoleon’s cavalry, which owed its return from Moscow to Ardennes. Only these powerful, hardy horses were able to survive the cold and privations to keep pulling supply wagons through axle-deep mud and snow on the long march across Russia.
   The Ardennes are the root of all heavy draft breeds existing today. They are a true cold-blooded horse, a direct descendant of the Solutrian horse that roamed the basins of the Rhone, Saone and Meuse during the Paleolithic period. They are relatively unchanged since the last Ice Age, 15,000 years ago.
   The Ardennes have been war and draft horses for at least 2,000 years. Julius Caesar declares in his commentaries (58-48 BC) that "the horses of the second Belgium" are "rustic, hard and tireless" and he recommended their use "in heavy cavalry work."
   In the thousand years of Middle Ages, knights found the sturdy, compact, good-tempered Ardennes strong and tireless chargers, easily able to carry the weight of men in full armor into battle. In 1096 Geoffrey of Boullion, a nobleman from a region in the heart of the now-Belgian Ardennes Forest, rode off on crusade on his Ardennes stallion. 
    (Warren, of Akron, Ohio, made an excellent point in his comment on the original 2016 posting: "Very interesting. Some people think big draft horses are always slow-moving, but that's not true. They were magnificent war horses." Thanks, Warren!)

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3 Reasons to Revive the Age of Reason

6/23/2022

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Want some knowledge, freedom, and happiness? Today, almost everyone does, but these three goals of the Enlightenment were once highly controversial.
   They result from an idea central to Enlightenment thought, that reason could allow humans to understand the universe and improve their condition. Respecting and celebrating reason was so central to the Enlightenment that it is also called the Age of Reason.
   The Enlightenment was key to creating the modern world. Modern democracies, beginning with the American and French revolutions, are a direct result of the Enlightenment. Science, art, philosophy, and psychology all depend on Enlightenment thinking.
   Whether it was deciding children should be in school, slavery should end, or America was a good idea, the Enlightenment gave people new, more positive ways to see the world. It's time for an Age of Reason Revival, and if you agree, start by setting knowledge, freedom, and happiness (for yourself and others) as your goals. 
​"The most important decision you make is to be happy." --Voltaire, a founding voice of the Enlightenment
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The Plague among Children

7/30/2018

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This tragic scene of a child's death hung in my doctor’s office when I was a young woman. It is The Doctor, painted by Luke Fildes in 1891 in memory of his own son’s death at one year old. Something often forgotten about the pre-industrial era is the death rate from childhood disease.
    The first diphtheria vaccine was not produced until the 1920s. Before then, 100,000 - 200,000 cases occurred each year in the U.S. and 15,000 - 20,000 deaths. Called ”the Plague among Children,” diphtheria was once a dreaded disease, with frequent large-scale outbreaks. An epidemic between 1735 and 1740 in New England killed eighty percent of children under ten years old in some towns. In 1613, an epidemic of diphtheria in Spain was known as “El Año de los Garrotillos,” The Year of Strangulations. 
    In the 1830s, Europe was hit with waves of deadly diseases: scarlet fever, diphtheria, typhoid fever, typhus and cholera. To this one must add deaths from diseases with lower mortality rates, including measles and whooping cough, which as recently as this decade, 60 years after vaccines for them became available, still kill more than 300,000 children annually worldwide. 
   Vaccination programs have decreased the incidence of diphtheria; however, when vaccination rates drop, infection rates rise and serious outbreaks occur, as in the 1990s when an epidemic in Russia caused about 5,000 deaths.
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Paris. City of Light.

8/26/2017

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On this date in 1789, the declaration of "Droits de l'homme," The Rights of Man, were published in Paris. That makes it appropriate to remember that the city's nickname, “The City of Light,” comes from more than the Eiffel Tower, however brilliantly lit. 
    Paris was called ‘La Ville-Lumière’ because it was central to the Age of Enlightenment, and as such, at the heart of education, ideas and culture for all of Europe. The Age of Enlightenment may be said to begin with the 1687 publication of Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, which demonstrated a universe governed by natural, quantifiable laws. From Newton's laws, scholars understood that the universe was rational, comprehensible, and ordered. 
    The Enlightenment continued into the 18th and 19th centuries, with John Locke’s social contract theory, René Descartes’ embrace of reason and Voltaire’s crusade against superstition and prejudice. By applying systems of rationality to ethics, science, philosophy and politics, the Enlightenment laid the groundwork for the American and French Revolutions, as well as capitalism, religious toleration and human rights. 
   Enlightenment thinkers wanted to lead the world toward the light of progress and out of the long period of irrationality, superstition and tyranny that began with the Dark Ages via three pillars of thought: reason, science and empathy. When you think of Paris, “the City of Light” remember this intellectual legacy, one that we can all be proud to share.  

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Captured and Enslaved

8/19/2016

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The slaver Wildfire was intercepted off Cuba by the American Navy in 1860, freeing 519 starving survivors. It was well-documented by Harper’s Weekly, which published this engraving from a daguerreotype. Many countries south of the U.S. banned slavery before our Civil War, notably Mexico, 1810, although slave trade went on in Cuba until 1886 and in Brazil until 1888.  
My novel, 1836, has a lot to say about slavery, as it happens to be set in the year when slave traffic in the U.S. peaked. One of the awful details about that traffic is in the last paragraph of this post, along with a clue about why I am posting about this subject today. 
     By 1836, almost all of the U.S. slave traffic was internal, since the importation of slaves into the U.S. had been banned by Congress under Thomas Jefferson in 1808, and declared punishable by death in 1820. Smuggling continued, especially in New Orleans, where the pirate Lafitte brothers built a slave-smuggling empire with the help of the city and the notoriously corrupt New Orleans Customs House. 
   The last documented slave ship to bring slaves into the U.S. landed in Mobile Bay, Alabama, in 1859, just two years before the Civil War, but others may have eluded detection.
     In the early 1800s, most of the demand was moving south and west, to new cotton, sugar and rice plantations, breaking up families by selling off children as young as five. Eight, the age my grandson turns today, was considered optimum. In 1836, more than 120,000 slaves from Virginia alone were "sold down the river" into the Deep South. 
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Danke, Merci, Gracias, Dziękuję Ci, Tak

5/6/2016

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A monolingual country, like much of America today, is an historical oddity.
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​Let me shout out a big thank-you to my language consultants, Ewa Kapera (Polish), Steve Smith (German and Danish), Bill Zucker, (19th Century Danish), Christopher Norris, (Spanish), Anna Barnum (Dutch) and Rebecca Barnum (French). 
     A fun language fact for those of you with German-speaking ancestors – High German and Low German are generally considered two languages, rather than two dialects, High from the mountains, the highlands, and Low from the lowlands.
    My ancestors who are the historical basis for the main characters of 1836: Year of Escape came from near Cologne and spoke a Moselle Franconian dialect. Paul Riesdesel generously shared his knowledge of local dialects, which varied from village to village. A monolingual country, like much of America today, is an historical oddity. 
    If your own ancestors were immigrants to America, they probably had to navigate a new language or languages, not to mention accents and dialects. This, and my own love of language, were good reasons to salt my novel with expressions in other languages, adding to its linguistic richness and historical accuracy.  I promise it doesn't make 1836 hard to read, just more interesting.
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An Unlikely Villain, the Potato

4/25/2016

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​1836 was the first of many years of unseasonably cold summers in Ireland. No one knew what lay ahead, of course: by 1851, almost an eighth of Ireland’s population, a million Irish, would be dead from starvation or disease.
    Potatoes, originally from Central and South America, had become a staple crop across much of northern Europe, and as the blight spread, famine stalked all of the region. The hardest hit areas were those most dependent on one crop and those whose governments were negligent or cruel. Ireland and Sweden qualified on both accounts.
​   In 1836: Year of Escape, the family meets Irishmen who fled the failed 1798 Irish Rebellion, and in 1837, an Irish nun learns about the terrible summer of 1836 in a letter from her family. 
   This article from History Magazine tells what we know now about the potato disease that spread across Europe and devastated Ireland. 
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April 25th, 2016

4/25/2016

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    Rose Kleidon

    Never quit asking "Why?" This motto works out well for a researcher. 

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