I've been reading up Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who, among other things, is perhaps the most quotable American general in the last half century. He told this anecdote which has amused me to no end over the past week about the invasion of Afghanistan where he was sent to Pakistan to negotiate the passage of US troops and to gain Pakistani support and had the following interaction with the Ambassador:

US Ambassador to Pakistan: Who the hell are you and what are you doing in my country?

Mattis: Madame Ambassador, my name is Jim Mattis and I’m gonna take about 1000 of my best friends up into Afghanistan to kill some people.

Amb: Really general?

Mattis: Yes, Maam.

Amb: Well sit down, I think I can help you.

So, a Nature article on disease spread after contact is making the rounds. Briefly, the researchers conducted aDNA analysis of dental samples taken from 29 burials in Oaxaca associated with the terrible cocoliztli epidemic in the late 1540s. All but 5 samples contained Salmonella enterica, specifically a strain called Paratyphi C that in our modern context causes a typhoid-like infection called enteric fever that has a case fatality rate of 10-15% if untreated. The pathogen is transmitted through a fecal-oral route, meaning easy spread through contaminated water sources, and can be spread by a carrier who isn't actively sick (think the famous Typhoid Mary as opposed to other pathogens like influenza that require active infection for transmission).

Prior to this study there was continual debate surrounding the organism responsible for the cocoliztli epidemics that killed millions throughout Mexico in the late 1540s, as well as another epidemic in the 1570s. Originally researchers assumed cocoliztli was smallpox, or another introduced Eurasian pathogen like measles. Recently, though, the link between extreme drought and the timing of the epidemics caused some researchers to hypothesize a virus similar to our modern Hantavirus was responsible for the epidemic. As drought intensified the reservoir for the virus, mice, moved closer to human populations. This close proximity, combined with all the upheaval and psychosocial stress of contact to weaken host defense, allowed for easier transmission of the virus to humans and the spread of periodic catastrophic epidemics. The big mindshift with the Hantavirus-like theory was that under the right circumstances a pathogen native to the New World could cause massive epidemic mortality after contact. The approach assumed Native American populations, like organisms throughout the world, were host to their own pathogens and given environmental and host disruption a previously contained pathogen could emerge into an epidemic.

Now, back to the article, there are several issues to be resolved. First, just because the bacterium was found in one region with internments associated with cocoliztli mortality we are a little ways off from proving the bacterium caused this epidemic. Co-infection is possible, and a relatively delicate virus would be more difficult tho isolate after 500 years than a larger, hardier bacteria. Second, I would really like to see if the strain of Paratyphi C extracted from the burials is similar to contemporaneous European strains (indicating introduction of the pathogen), and not a older/New World strain (that could have possibly come to the Americas a long time ago via a carrier). Like tuberculosis, this Paratyphi C's journey to the New World might be much more complex than we assume, and further investigation is required. Finally, (and I'm going to phone a friend here), we need to check back with contemporaneous sources to see if the symptoms of enteric fever match written descriptions of cocoliztli. In the modern context the rash and hemorrhage associated with Paratyphi C seems rare, while I need /u/400-Rabbits to remind me how the Nahuatl sources described the 1540s and 1570s infections.

Also tagging in /u/Mictlantecuhtli for further discussion, because he wanted to talk about this.

I've been re-reading a book assigned to me as an undergraduate a few years back. Frankly, it seems that many of the claims made within the book are questionable at best, and I was hoping to get some opinions from the subreddit.

The book is "Alcohol: A History." Assigned by a University professor to be read for the class. The Professor himself was the author of the book, and taught the information in the book to this class of hundreds of university students (not freshmen, I might add). I hope someone with knowledge of the subject can shed some light on it. The following are excerpts from the book written by a working, tenured Professor at a North American school.

“At the material level, until the nineteenth century, alcohol (mainly beer and wine) was widely consumed by Europeans and North Americans for hydration because so many sources of water were unsafe to drink.” (page 4) “It is no coincidence that the temperance and prohibition movements arose at the same time that municipal governments in Europe and North America began massive projects to provide urban populations with supplies of safe drinking water, and as coffee, tea and other nonalcholic beverages became widely consumed.” (page 4)

“...we must be careful not to assume that, before safe water was available, everybody drank alcohol for hydration purposes. Water, potable or not, was free, but alcohol was not. The poor must have consumed any water that was available, a practise that undoubtedly contributed to their low life expectancy.” (page 4)

“Although we cannot know for certain the alcohol level in ancient beer, it was probably high enough to make an impact but not so high that drinking a liter or two a day –making it excellent for hydration – would prevent anyone from getting on efficiently and safely with daily life.” (page 18)

“...alcohol consumption as having gone through three stages in the ancient world: first as a beverage consumed only rarely, and then mainly on ceremonial or festive occasions; second, as a beverage more generally consumed, partly because it was believed to have general health benefit; and third, as the only beverage consumed, because it was believed to be safer than water.” (page 43) “By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European doctors were almost unanimous in their belief that drinking water was dangerous, but it is difficult to know how far back that view went.” (page 43)

In regards to women and children avoiding drinking alcohol: “We should conclude that consuming bad water contributed (along with poor nutrition and housing) to lower life expectancy among the poor and among women of all classes. It is reasonable to see water consumption implicated in the high historic levels of childhood mortality.” (page 44)

I'm interested in knowing how much of these excerpts are correct. Or if anyone has encountered his scholarship in the past.

I will preface this by saying book summaries/reviews are not my strong point so apologies if I seem to provide too much extraneous detail or whatever.

A couple weeks ago I answered a question related to bilingualism/mutual intelligibility between speakers of Old Norse and Old English here. In that answer I focused pretty much entirely on circumstantial evidence found within the literatures of both cultures. At the end of my answer I mentioned a couple works by Matthew Townend that sounded relevant but I had not actually read. Well, I recently tracked down (thank god for amazon) and read Language and History in Viking Age England: Linguistic Relations Between Speakers of Old Norse and Old English.

It wound up being a pretty fascinating read for me, though it likely would not be an easy read for those unversed in linguistic nomenclature. Talk of velar stops, palatalization, assibilation, rising diphthongs, nasalization, etc. abound throughout the first half of the book and crop up occasionally through the rest of the work. This was expected though. Hard to talk of linguistic relations without getting into the nitty gritty of linguistic analysis.

The book is split into six chapters. The first serves as an introduction where he relates a few examples of Anglo-Norse contact and discusses the four main methods of determining intelligibility between two languages and, to an extent, how he intends to apply the methods throughout the rest of the work. I will allow him to explain the rest of the chapters: "Chapter 2 therefore assesses the degree of linguistic distance between Viking Age Norse and English by considering the closeness of their historical evolution and comparing the phonological systems of the two languages. Chapter 3 analyses the Scandinaviasation of Old English place-names and relates this to the processes involved in dialect intelligibility. Chapter 4 considers aspects of Anglo-Norse contact as reflected in three Anglo-Saxon sources, and chapter 5 assesses the more anecdotal witness of literary texts." (p.17) Chapter 6 serves as his conclusion and a short analysis of some of the implications of his findings.

Probably the most interesting argument put forth is that found in chapter 3. Townend looks at English place-names and people names and how they are changed after Scandinavian settlement in England. The main thrust of the argument relies on a concept arrived at by other linguists called a "switching-code". The idea is that with enough exposure the speakers of a dialect build up an association between the phonemic content of their own dialect and that of another dialect sufficient to allow understanding (A phoneme is a unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another). What Townend finds is that there was almost undoubtedly a functional switching-code between OE and ON which would only arise from some amount of mutual intelligibility combined with a lack of widespread bilingualism.

The largest weakness of the book is the breadth, or lack thereof, of material studied in chapter 4. Only three main sources are looked at and Townend's focus on one those three particularly lacks any force. This source is Æthelweard's chronicle and the Norse names that appear in it. Townend claims that Æthelweard pays particular attention to how the names actually sound in Norse as opposed to Anglicizing them (implying exposure to and limited understanding of the Norse language). In the list of names and explanations provided though it seemed like Townend ended his examination of over half of them by stating that the ON and OE forms were exceptionally close to begin with and so no information could be gained or that Æthelweard had made some change that didn't make sense. This is hardly convincing when trying to demonstrate a person's interest in maintaining aspects of another language. I will concede that it is entirely possible that I misread or misinterpreted some of those passages but to my mind the section on Æthelweard's chronicle was noticeably weaker and less convincing than much of the rest of the book.

My favorite section, and definitely the most convincing to me in regards to mutual intelligibility, is chapter 5. This is definitely my personal bias. As interesting as the linguistic analysis is, I'm a sucker for the literature. The most potent argument put forth in this chapter looks at the literature of both Iceland and England for any mention of interpreters in Anglo-Norse contact. Townend's summary of this analysis is that "there are a good many references in Anglo-Saxon [and Icelandic] texts to the use of interpreters as the means of overcoming the barrier of unintelligibility existing between speakers of two languages, and a good range of languages are specified in such a context. But on no occasion…recording Anglo-Norse contact, is there a single reference to the use of interpreters…This was true of the references to interpreters in Icelandic saga-literature, and it is equally true of the references in Anglo-Saxon texts" (p.171).

Townend ultimately decides on saying that there was "adequate intelligibility" between speakers of Old Norse and Old English. The languages were close enough that the English and Norse could at least do business with each other without the need for one to be bilingual or for there to be an interpreter. Personally, I really like this terminology. Little bit more nuance to it than "mutual intelligibility."

Overall I really liked it. It is definitely not for the layman though. Having said that, if you have an interest in the subject I recommend checking it out (especially chapters 3 and 5). The arguments are interesting and for the most part well put together. I know I kind of hit the main points but there's a lot of material covered that I didn't even come close to touching on. Also, there's ample opportunity to find more related readings if you're so inclined (seriously, this thing's bibliography is like 20 something pages. I know that's not uncommon in academia but still).

/u/DoodleDwarf , /u/AlTarikh

Polished off Southern Slavery and the Law, which was a relief. Maybe a lawyer would love it, but he shot right past interesting technical detail and into stuff that doesn't matter a whole lot for interpretation. This is the third or fourth I've read in a row that was very technical, so William Lee Miller's Arguing About Slavery has been a tremendous relief. So far as I know, it's the only book length treatment of the Gag Rule controversy which I've become interested in for reasons within the previous twenty years.

Taking a series of debates in Congress, with many quotations from the Congressional Globe, and making it into a breeze, useful, and easy to follow narrative is quite a feat. I wish he had footnotes. When he uses the Globe, which is I think every direct quote so far, he gives the date and that's fine. But Miller also leaves Congress to tell us about abolitionist organizing and the absence becomes more obtrusive. There are endnotes, but they come unnumbered. There are page refs adequate to know what they're talking about if you read them through but nothing to get you from the page to them. Usable, but annoying.

Is there anyone here who has knowledge of traditional african religions beliefs?

Which book would you recommend to someone that wants to learn about the French Revolution (specially the jacobins) in full detail, but also being enjoyable, as a reading you could take to the beach. Thank you!