I meant to post this last Friday but uhhh things got a little raw last week. But good news! I took a break from mainlining romance novels and now it’s time for Who’s That Pokemon Vol. 3, EUNUCHMON-GO Edition, an update to the observations gleaned from that dataset of 700 castrati I was messing around with 9 months ago, which I have been meaning to write up for several months, and am now sufficiently motivated to do so by the inspiration of /u/hansolospiritanimal last Saturday.

Major developments:

1. Current castrati headcount as of the 9th: 1337, which is a funny number I just realized when I typed it. Almost doubled though!

2. “Database” has been moved from a spreadsheet made of sweat, tears, and garbage to a pretty functional database (not in scarequotes) using a web app called Fieldbook. Shoutout to Fieldbook, which, while missing some pretty big features still because it’s young, is very easy, very clean, exports in CSV without being a fuss, and is like 4000% better than Access. If you have wanted a product that was a team-based database option on the Web, you should check it out. If you have wondered if databases can help you in your research, but like, don’t want to learn SQL, also check it out. It also has an API if you want to integrate a simple database into some other web application.

3. Moving to Fieldbook has allowed for Glorious Teamwork! /u/Lady_Nefertankh and I have been pooling our castrati, and we both use different methods to find them, which is very handy. She tends to focus on libretti, and I tend to focus on church and court, so we’re scraping from two different angles, which is awesome. What’s the most exciting though, is sometimes when I go to add someone from some church roster and find she’s already found the guy in a libretto somewhere! And now we have a more complete picture of his life. DOPE.

So how do the previous frameworks hold up on double the data?

First hypothesis under the microscope, the rate of adoption of the phenomenon and its decline, please consult this labeled graph which I have made in Plotly.

Frankly I’m surprised how well the original sketch of the timeframe held up, which means the data sample Lady and I are collecting might be decently random and representative… 1640 remains a very significant date for when people decided to castrate children, although it is no longer one of the peak years. I also maintain the decline started earlier than is written in the history books, probably about 1780 was the last year any significant number of boys were castrated.

Which means the Napoleonic-Code-Killed-Castrati theory is still thoroughly crap, and the Romantics-Killed-Castrati theory is also increasingly suspect, as the decline was already very much in motion by the time Romanticism hit opera (which was a bit later than it hit all the other arts.) I think musicologists have been muddled on this because there were an okay number of castrati working still in the 1780s, because all the adult professionals didn’t instantly die because more castrati weren’t being made, but by the time the romantic stuff hits opera full swing around 1800 or so, there’s a slim number of castrati around at a working age, and people go “oh look Romanticism killed them.” But they apparently had their foots out the door already. There are only two possible ways to read this - one, the actors who made castrati (parents, advisory musical professionals) were like Jandek levels of avant and were able to read a new emerging musical period right at its start and predict that the castrato voice would be unwanted in 10-20 years (them being “unwanted” in the Romantic movement is actually suspect itself, I have decent evidence that they were still wanted and people were certainly still trying to hire them). Or two, the risk/reward balance for the castration of one or more of your sons no longer made sense for another reason. Which I haven’t been able to satisfactorily provide a reason for.

Second hypothesis up on the table, their geographic origins. We still only know the birthplace of about half of the castrati in the database, but still, pretty good. Consult these blobby heatmaps:

• Through all time map
• Early Castrati (born before the decade 1630)
• Full Swing Castrati (born in the decade 1630 and after, but before 1770)
• Late Castrati (born the decade 1770 and after)

So the core of my previous observations has held up, which again I am trying to act nonchalant about. But they are: Italy took over the castrato economy over time; your best odds of finding a future castrato are to visit one of the Northern cities; and Southern Italy never dominated the castrato scene, as has been previously mis-reported. The dominance of the Neapolitan conservatories has certainly muddled the perception of where castrati “come from”, but after I’ve tracked down all the published sources I can on the rolls of the conservatories (the archives for the Neapolitan conservatories are actually still undergoing reprocessing right now, and godspeed to them, reprocessing an entire archives is virtually unheard of, but hey, at least they survived the war, unlike the records the the Royal Chapel in Naples) it seems that a lot of those student castrati were being pulled from outside the area. But a few new observations: early castrati were an even more diverse pan-Euro crowd than previously recorded, and oddly Spain never entirely dropped out of the castration economy. Also I found two Maltese guys which is neat.

NEXT TIME ON DRAGON BALL Z:

After a suggestion from The Lady, I am tagging all the castrati with their jobs, to answer such questions as 1) how many castrati never worked in opera and only worked in the church, 2) how many never worked in the church and only did secular work, 3) how did these ratios change, 4) how many worked in a court for some period of time, and other such questions.

I am in the process of writing up something more substantial on the "Nuclear Election." In the meantime, I have written a quick blog post to answer a question I've been getting over and over again: Does the President have the unilateral ability to launch nuclear weapons? The answer, which many apparently find surprising, is "yes." This new blog post of mine describes the historical issues that led to this being the case: The President and the bomb.

This news story about the Castillo at Chichen Itza is making the rounds. I just wanted to share what I posted on /r/history that hopefully clarifies why this is important.

While finding pyramids built one on top of the other is common in the Maya region, researchers have used tri-dimensional electric resistivity tomography to discover the earliest construction of the famous Castillo pyramid at Chichen Itza. It was known there was one earlier pyramid beneath the exterior of what we see today, but this newly found pyramid may help shed some light on the history of the site. We know that Chichen was founded in the Classic, abandoned, and then reoccupied in the Late Classic when it flourished and grew. Known for its use of both Puuc style architecture from northern Yucatan as well as what we now call International style (sometimes still referred to as Toltec) architecture, Chichen has provided a debate over who influenced the city and how much the city had influence over others. This earlier construction can hopefully shed some light on whether the Castillo was envisioned to embrace the International style or whether a more local Maya style was first used in its construction.

That article I was talking about the other week was published, Some Notes on William Lumley - Lumley being a correspondent with H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, and with whom Lovecraft collaborated on the story "The Diary of Alonzo Typer"; he's also slightly famous in Lovecraft scholarly circles as one of the few occultists of Lovecraft's acquaintance, and the first to assert that Lovecraft and his fellow pulpsters were channeling real occult lore in their fiction - which later became a major point of Lovecraftian occultism. Despite this, we know almost nothing about Lumley himself - just one of those minor figures of history, little more than a name.

I also got interviewed the other day, which isn't very historical, but is rare enough and gives me a chance to talk about what separates the scholars from the fanboys - although there's still a fair overlap.

Also been making my way through another batch of dead men's mail: From Baltimore to Bohemia: The Letters of H. L. Mencken and George Sterling - very tangential to pulp studies: Sterling was a friend and mentor to Clark Ashton Smith, as well as a correspondent with Samuel Loveman, both of whom were friends and correspondents of H. P. Lovecraft and others. One of those volumes where if your interest doesn't lie along a fairly narrow line, there's a lot of gristle for little "meat," but sometimes its books like this that give nuance to a biography or an event, and sometimes you run across surprises... one that made me do a little cross-referencing:

Clark Smith, our young poet of the Sierran foot-hills, sends me a prose-poem of extraordinary beauty. I'm begging him to send it to "Smart Set." If he doesn't, I shall. He is a precocious, morbid youth, with a strong savor of Baudelaire.

• George Sterling to H. L. Mencken, 22 Apr 1918, From Baltimore to Bohemia 31

I sent your "Ennui" on to Mencken, and had the nerve to make one small change, as the editors may even make others! For the name "Chan" seeming too amiable, as it were, to me, I went over a list of the Chinese emperors and selected a name that sounded like that of a dangerous man to offend: Seaou-Sin. I trust you'll not greatly disapprove, even if it has unbalanced your sentences a bit. "Chan" is quite too plump and mild, I think. The other name is serpentish.

• George Sterling to Clark Ashton Smith, 12 May 1918, Shadow of the Unattained 160

http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/prose-poetry-plays/13/ennui-(in)

Dr. Denton Cooley, heart transplant pioneer, died today. He was one half of what I consider one of the great under-appreciated feuds in American history: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/27/health/27docs.html

Dear peoples across the sea,

We do not marry snakes. Unless if she's Miia.

This is perhaps a question that should have its own thread so do let me know if i should repost.

I am a PhD student (first year) but I did a dissertation for my masters degree. I think my dissertation has a lot of stuff that is publishable but am I being too ambitious? I am a bit hesitant to ask my professors for fear of seeming silly (even though I am sure they would not care). Any advice? Should I wait until I am a bit further into my program or does it not matter if I am confident in it?

Back in business, my friends! Here's an update on how I've been doing:

https://gunlord500.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/gunlords-dissertation-saga-episode-22-season-2-review-and-ideas/

Aside from playing Darkest Dungeon and watching Cromartie High School, I went over my whole dissertation draft (192 pages, about) and corrected all the lil spelling and formatting errors my profs noted, AND I gave some thought to fixing some of the larger organizational issues they mentioned! I sent them an email asking for a little advice on doing so. I should get a reply from em soon hopefully, if not I get can started on the simpler matters...next week. I'mma relax a bit for this week :p

another "academic" history podcast sighting: CSPAN Lectures in history. It, as the name suggests, is a collection of one off lectures by professors. Haven't dug into it very much but it looks interesting so far

http://podcasts.c-spanvideo.org/lecturesInHistory.xml

it is updated weekly and the description is

Join students in college classrooms to hear lectures on topics ranging from the American Revolution to 9-11.

anyone have other "interview an author" style podcasts/audio versions of speech/lectures? history or history adjacent stuff

Incident a few weeks ago in 20th century Europe class ground my gears a bit. It's a general survey course, so depth in military operations is not exactly to be expected, but I really did not like that the professor, after very briefly describing the Battle of Britain, posed the question to the class about if strategic bombing even works, but didn't actually open it up for anyone to comment, and moved right on. I know she had a lot of material to get through, but it just rubs me up the wrong way that a professor would pose a question on a topic she doesn't know that much about (she's emphatically not a military historian) after giving a surface level explanation, and not give students a good opening to contribute.

What's the difference between half plate and 3/4ths plate armor?