I live in Raleigh, North Carolina. In the fair satellite town of Durham, the was recently a protest that ended up removing a statue to... something. Or someone? Unfortunately, removing the statue has entirely erased all historical record related to the event, person or place the statue referred to. Really screwed the pooch on that one.

I have a couple of recent posts for medievalists.net that I think people here might enjoy:

• An Ethiopian Monk and a Dominican Friar Walk into a Bar (and the patriarch of Antioch looks up from his drink and says...)
• Fake Proverbs from the Real Middle Ages

Tomorrow marks the start of the 148th season of college football in the US. And the sport has come a long way from the first meeting in 1869 with Rutgers and Princeton's friendly dust-up.

In that trend its worth looking back on the sport and the impact its had in virtually every facet of American life in that time. The game may have another clouded future, but it is not the first time that the violence inherent in the game has made its future look uncertain. A number of deaths in the early 1900s brought about calls to end the game too, and no less than Teddy Roosevelt called major coaches and authorities on the sport to DC to save the game.

In 1905 then the NCAA was formed to standardize the game across regions and conferences, and the forward pass was made legal. But the passing game was slow to take off. One of those schools that sought to use a wide open option heavy playbook was the Carlisle Indian School in eastern Pennsylvania. Under the coaching of former Cornell player and coach Pop Warner the Indians sought to use motion and misdirection to make up for what they lacked in size against the traditional Eastern powers of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. While other schools like West Point were part of the strong second tier of the sport too.

One player though would catapult Carlisle into the center of the football universe though. That was Halfback Jim Thorpe, perhaps the single most naturally gifted athlete America has ever produced. On top of twice being named a collegiate All-American, once an NFL All pro, he was at different times a professional Track Star, Basketball, Baseball, and Football player, and won 2 Gold Medals in the 1912 Olympic games in Decathlon and Pentathlon all before the age of 30!

But back to our tale. The 1912 Indians football team was a power house in every sense, they led the nation in scoring, and finished with a 12-1-1 record. One of those games though stands out above the rest. The November 9th game at Army. While not the first time the schools had met, or the first chance Pop Warner's teams had to beat a national power(they had beaten Harvard the year before) it still had deeper meaning to the boys from the Indian School.

In his pregame speech Coach made sure this was brought home.

But against Army, simply winning wasn't good enough. The Indians intended to win in a certain way. Warner had developed an extraordinary new offense: an exercise in exact timing, artfully disguised ball handling and, above all, speed. The Indians had held it under wraps game after game. When Warner asked them against which opponent they wanted to debut the scheme, they had been unanimous: "The soldiers."

As the Indians finished dressing, Warner surveyed the locker room. There was quarterback Gus Welch, the orphaned Chippewa from Wisconsin, slightly built but with a conjurer's quickness of foot and hand. There was tackle Pete Calac, a Mission Indian from Fall Brook, Calif., who lost two siblings to typhoid and came to Carlisle on the Union Pacific with only a third-grade education. Then there was Thorpe, sleepy-eyed yet with a buried intensity. Warner took a few minutes to review the new game plan. Then, when he was sure each player understood his assignment, he addressed them all. "Your fathers and your grandfathers," Warner began, "fought their fathers. These men playing against you today are soldiers. They are the Long Knives. You are Indians. Tonight, we will know if you are warriors."

The game wasn't even close with an Indians victory 27-6. One of the starting Linebackers for the Army team was Sophomore Dwight D. Eisenhower, who would later remark that Thorpe was the best player he had ever faced on the field.

The victories by Carlisle helped legitimize the sport as something for more populations than the Ivy covered campuses of the Northeast and Midwest, and while not doing away with stereotypes(and at times playing them up) of Native Americans earned them a strong measure of respect from the national press.

The school however would cease operations a few years later though in the wake of several abuse scandals and Congressional investigations and the facilities turned back over to the US Army. Thorpe would mostly drift through the rest of his life, including having his Olympic medals stripped for having violated the very strict amateurism rules at the time. While Pop Warner would move on and win national championships at Pittsburgh and Stanford. But the legacy of Carlisle would remain, both in changing racial perceptions on the field, and sparking more diversification in the sport, and stands right with the University of Chicago as one of the two most impactful defunct teams.

Excellent article on the team and Thorpe: http://nativevillage.org/Messages%20from%20the%20People/team_that_invented_football.htm

Public Radio interview with the author of one of the books written about Thorpe and the team: http://wamc.org/post/jim-thorpe-and-carlisle-indian-school-football-team

Completed my trip around the world and finally landed back in the US this week. Here's a small album if anyone is actually interested. Absent highlights include the tourists that had never met a white person and what are potentially the oldest house remains ever found in Mongolia. Cheers

I suppose I am engaged in what seems to be a childish task, that of seeking to compromise Haeckel’s principle with the theories of Spencer — no, not compromise — I detest that word, it suggests surrender and evasion, what I am seeking to do, is to find a common view point. I think that the teachings of Yogi Ramacharaka come nearer to doing this than any other. Haeckel argues in one direction, Spencer in another; the Yogis argue in both directions and seem, in the Gnani Yoga at least, to cover both fields of speculation, physical and spiritual. Haeckel’s theory is simply of matter, Spencer’s of relative appearance; the Yogis take up both questions, agree with Haeckel that matter or the appearance of matter is solidity insofar as human life is concerned, and agree with Spencer that there is an Unknowable, an underlying principle beneath all outward appearances. They agree with Spencer that the All is Unknowable, because It so far transcends human experience that the human finds no thought by which to formulate an idea. For all human ideas are finite and relative, while the All or One or Unknowable is infinite and absolute. Upton appears to agree perfectly and gives the Yogis great respect. In fact, Upton is more of an occultist than I thought — he leans more strongly toward the existence of the occult than I. This is no doubt, because, in spite of the fact of supposed inhibitions regarding were-wolves and the like, I have always maintained a more or less sardonic attitude toward the occult, seeing therein a purely material opportunity to make money. Upton says, in effect, that a man is foolish to deny that which he cannot conceive simply because he cannot conceive it. To me, the occult is simply as yet unexplained forces of nature, natural phenomena, just as radium and tides are and were. To most people mention the occult or anything outside the range of human experience or knowledge and instantly there leap to their minds, visions of ghosts and witches, human sacrifices and swamis with crystal balls. No wonder there are so many fakes of the sort. I only wish I had the opportunity and intelligence to become a swami or founder of a cult or something whereby I could make money by the credibility and ignorance of the people at large, who if you mention occultism, see in their mind a filthy witch mumbling meaningless incantations, or a fake Hindu reading the crystal to see if some flapper’s love affair will come out right!

• Robert E. Howard to Tevis Clyde Smith, March 1928, Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard 1.180-181

"Yogi Ramacharaka" was the pseudonym of William Walker Atkinson, a leader of the "New Thought" movement which Howard's father was interested in, and who published a number of works under various names (even his own!) on subjects of mysticism, Eastern philosophy, and yoga - the yoga books, including Gnani Yoga (1906) are still in print. An uncharitable mind might see in Howard's final comments a precursor to the same thought pattern which would lead fellow pulpster L. Ron Hubbard to create Dianetics and Scientology - by chance, both Howard and Hubbard were members of the American Fiction Guild.

I'm fascinated by the Punic Wars between Carthage and Rome. They started out as a fight for Sicily, and turned into the biggest, nastiest wars the world had yet seen. By the Third Punic War, Rome seemed bent on the complete annihilation of Carthage, which they brutally carried out. So my question is, what other wars saw its participants seeking to completely destroy their enemy, rather than just conquer them or gain some political advantage? I don't really need a long answer, just name some wars/conflicts and i'll read about them myself.

I finished reading Jean Gimpel's The Medieval Machine, which is a great example of the problems of applying history to the present and the future.

Most of the book (first published in '76, updated in '88) has the aim of challenging traditional views of the Middle Ages and showing the 11th-13th centuries in Western Europe as a time of economic, technological, social and intellectual dynamism. It's all decent stuff, or at least it seems that way to a non-expert.

Then there's a chapter on the end of that era, and finally an extensive epilogue drawing parallels between the decline of Western Europe in the late Middle Ages and the current state of the West/US. Gimpel's predictions include the strength of Japan (on the eve of its "lost decade") and that computerisation may be in decline. Not only are these last two chapters much weaker - I thought parts of the epilogue were barely coherent - but they actually raise questions about the rest of the book (for example, who exactly benefited from "progress").

I don't recall having that experience before, where the close of a book actually starts to undermine the rest of it.

Because you poor guys haven't had enough questions on statue removal, anythoughts on New York's potential inclusion of the Ulysses S Grant tomb and statue for potential removal. Grant was a slave owner( last president to do so I think?) And his infamous general order 11 is pretty terrible.

Any good period written books on colonial life in Africa? English colonies preffered, no subject in particular.

I've had a look through the book list but there wasn't much there and and none of the books there were written at the time and thats what I would like to read.

Is anyone else's IFTTT goofing up? I got it successfully sending me emails for a day and then it just stopped.