The Four Chaplains – “Interfaith in Action”

The Four Chaplains – “Interfaith in Action”

Seriously, Stop Refrigerating These Foods - Reviewed.com Refrigerators

Seriously, Stop Refrigerating These Foods - Reviewed.com Refrigerators



Okay, well off our typical subjects. . .



Or maybe not.  There are a fair number of things that need not be refrigerated, but people do anyway, reflecting a change in habits over time.  Interesting how refrigeration has affected our diets, and habits.

Tuesday, July 14, 1914. Bastille Day.

The Government of Ireland Bill passed the House of Lord, allowing Ulster counties to vote on whether they wished to participate in Home Rule from Dublin.

Hungarian Prime Minister István Tisza, who had opposed going to war with Serbia, changed his view out of fear that if Austro Hungaria did not do so it would result in a breach of the alliance with Germany. 

It was Bastille Day.

Last edition:

Monday, July 13, 1914. Austrians conclude no Serbian involvement.

Labels: 1910s, 1914, Austro Hungaria, Canadian Arctic Expedition, Education, July Crisis, Ohio, Serbia, Weather, World War One

The Big Picture: Labor Party Convention, November 22, 1919

First national Labor Party convention, November 22, 1919. This photos is illustrative of the rise of socialist parties in the United States in the early 20th Century.

Monday, July 13, 1914. Austrians conclude no Serbian involvement.

An Austrian investigation into the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand concluded that there was little evidence to support Serbian government involvement in his murder.

Captain Robert Bartlett departed from Alaska on the Bear for Wrangle Island to rescue the Canadian Arctic Expedition.  Only fourteen survivors then existed.

Kent State Normal School, summer session, 1914.

Last edition:

Sunday, July 12, 1914. Mehmedbašić arrested.

Labels: 1910s, 1914, Albania, Arkansas, Crime, July Crisis, Labor unrest, Personalities, Serbia, World War One

Sunday, July 12, 1914. Mehmedbašić arrested.

Muhamed Mehmedbašić, whom is generally forgotten, was apprehended for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.  He was one of the principal planner of the killing plot.  A Muslim, he lived a complicated life supporting Serbian independence. 

Mehmedbašić in 1943.

He escaped from prison two days later in circumstances that remain suspicious, remained involved, perhaps, in various movements, and was killed by the Ustaše in 1943, showing perhaps that he remained a significant figure in some ways.

Albanian rebels captured Berat.

Shots were fired at the homes of striking miners in Hartford, Arkansas, causing them to riot thereafter.

Last edition:

Saturday, July 11, 1914. Babe Ruth premiers, as does the USS Nevada.

Labels: 1910s, 1914, 1940s, 1941, 1944, 1945, 1948, Anarchy, baseball, boats and ships, Diplomacy, Germany, Iwo Jima, July Crisis, Okinawa, Operation Dragoon, Serbia, U.S. Navy, World War One, World War Two

Friday, July 11, 1914. Babe Ruth premiers, as does the USS Nevada.

Babe Ruth made his major league debut with the Boston Red Sox.

July 11, 1914: Babe Ruth makes his major-league debut with Red Sox

The German foreign office sent a letter to King Peter of Serbia congratulating him on his birthday.

The USS Nevada was launched.

It was classified as a "super dreadnaught", which would really place it in the brief category of "battleship", in a period of rapid naval evolution. The launch was attended by Governor Oddie, Governor David I. Walsh of Massachusetts, Senator Key Pittman of Nevada, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt.

She'd serve in World War One.

She was at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, sunk and refloated in 1942.  She served thereafter in Operation Dragoon, the invasion of southern France, as well  as the landings at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. She was sunk as a target in 1948.

On the same day, 5,000 people attended an Anti Militarist League rally to commemorate the anarchist killed in the July 4, Lexington Avenue Explosion.

Last edition:

Friday, July 10, 1914. Loyalties.

Labels: 1910s, 1914, Austro Hungaria, July Crisis, panoramic, Russia, Serbia, Ulster, United Kingdom, Virginia

Friday Farming: Potato Digger

Friday, July 10, 1914. Loyalties.

The Provisional Government of Ulster met for the first time in the Ulster Hall.  It pledged to keep Ulster in trust for the King and British constitution.

Georgian born Nicholas Hartwig, the unlikely named Russian Minister to Serbia, died of a massive heart attack while visiting Austro Hungarian minister Baron Wladimir Giesl von Gieslingen in Belgrade.  He was an ardent pan Slav, who was said to be more Serbian than the Serbs.

Mountain Lake, Virginia.  July 10, 1914.

Last edition:

Thursday, July 9, 1914. Huerta defeated.

Labels: 1910s, 1914, Álvaro Obregón, Austro Hungaria, Central Powers, July Crisis, Mexican Revolution, Mexico, Serbia, Swimming, World War One

Mid Week At Work: Striking women, 1910

Thursday, July 9, 1914. Huerta defeated.

Obregón took Guadalajara.

It was the effective end of Victoriano Huerta's regime.

Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph was advised his council was working on an ultimatum containing demands that were designed to be rejected by Serbia.

As the recent posts have demonstrated, the "war guilt" clauses imposed on the Central Powers after World War One were not without merit.

Miss Norma Phillips.

Last edition:

Wednesday, July 8, 1914. Rebels and Emperors.

Labels: 1910s, 1914, Álvaro Obregón, Austro Hungaria, China, Chinese Warlord Era, July Crisis, Mexican Revolution, Mexico, Serbia, Sun Yat-sen, World War One

Painted Bricks: The end of the NCHS swimming pool

Painted Bricks: The end of the NCHS swimming pool

Wednesday, July 8, 1914. Rebels and Emperors.

Mexican rebels under Álvaro Obregón defeated a Federal force numbering 6,000 sent out from Guadalajara to arrest his advance.

Exiled Chinese revolutionary figure Sun Yat-sen reorganized the Kuomintang party under the new name Chinese Revolutionary Party after Yuan Shikai, self-proclaimed emperor of China, outlawed the political party.

The Austro Hungarian Council of Ministers gave its recommendations to the Emperor, with the first bieng a surprise attack on Serbia being the preferred option, and the second place one being to  place demands on Serbia before mobilization to provide a proper "juridical basis for a declaration of war".

Last edition:

Tuesday, July 7, 1914. Pondering war.

Labels: 1910s, 1914, Austro Hungaria, Germany, Hungary, July Crisis, Personalities, Serbia, World War One

Everything Old is New Again. Yeoman's laws of History and Behavior and the U.S. Military Sidearm.

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Yeoman's Second Law of History.  Everything last occurred more recently than you suppose.

Here too, it doesn't matter what the topic is, it happened much more recently than you think it did.  Almost everything and every behavior is really durable, if it had any purpose in the first place.

For example, last bayonet charge?  Are you thinking World War One?  Nope, the British did one in Iraq.  Small unit, but none the less they did it.  And in the Second Gulf War.  Last cavalry charge?  Civil War?  No again, they've happened as recently as the current war in Afghanistan.  Last use of horse mounted troops?  Well. . . we aren't there.  It's still going on.  We're never as far from what we think is the distant past as we imagine.

From Yeoman's Laws of History.

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 Soldiers training with M1911 .45 ACP pistols during World War Two.

This past week, the U.S. Army announced that it is giving up on an effort to replace the M9 pistol it adopted in 1985 (basically because Congress forced it to) with another 9mm pistol.  It wants a pistol that shoots a larger cartridge.  Something in the .40 to .45 range.

The pistol that never really left.  A Greek soldier coaches a Polish soldier in the shooting of the M1911 handgun.  How exactly a scene like this comes about, I don't know, but the M1911 kept on keeping on in the hands of soldiers who really needed an effective handgun.

Instruction on the M9, the Army's current (well, one of the current) handguns, taking place in Afghanistan.

People who follow such things will recall that the U.S. Army had been using the .45 ACP cartridge and the M1911 pistol since 1911.  The Army never saw any reason to replace either, but Congress did and ultimately the Army was forced into adopting the 9mm cartridge, which was the NATO pistol standard.  The Army ended up adopting a Beretta pattern of pistol as the M9, and has been using it ever since, sort of.

Truth be known, just as with the 5.56 cartridge and the M16, there were those in the Army who were never very happy with the change, and ongoing criticism went on for a long time.  There were always efforts to paint a happy picture on the pistol situation, in spite of persistent rumors of the cartridge being inadequate and the M9 having problems, but they were basically officially denied.  Then wars happened.

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Yeoman's Thirteenth Law of Human Behavior:  The measure of the utility of something is how well it accomplishes a task, not how new it is.  Nonetheless, people tend to go with the new, even if less useful.

People tend to believe that they adopt new technology or implements because they are better or more efficient than what came before them.  Very often they are. But they aren't always.  Nonetheless, the new tends to supplant the old, simply because its new.

There are plenty of examples of this.  Some old tools and old methods accomplish any one job better than things that came after them, and some things remain particularly useful within certain condition or niches.  Nonetheless, it takes educating a person to that to keep those older things in use, because they are, well. . . older.

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For reasons that are a bit of a historical oddity, the U.S. Army has always been pistol heavy compared to other armies, and so unlike many other armies, the Army's pistol actually ends up being used in combat.  Given that, the .45 ACP began to creep back into use for special troops in the service, followed by the M1911.  Recently, the Marine Corps simply gave up on the 9mm M9 and readopted a new version of the M1911 for combat troops. The Army now appears set to do so, and in fact has been issuing variants of the M1911 to special troops for some time.  The Navy too has been issuing a .45 ACP pistol, although it's not a M1911, when conditions require it.  This follows the interesting story of the service's 7.62 NATO M14 rifle creeping back into use after decades of denying it was more effective than the 5.56 M16, although there's no indication that the M14 will replace the M4/M16, and I am sure it will not. The M1911 .45 ACP pistol may very well end up replacing the M9 and the 9mm completely. At least some big cartridge pistol will.  This basically proves the critics of the M9 and the 9mm to have been right all along.

 

U.S. soldiers in Vietnam.  All of the firearms that can be seen in this photograph are M16A1 rifles, a rifle that came into service due to being first adopted by the USAF for service (as the M16) in Vietnam.  The rifle supplanted the M14 over the objection of Springfield Armory, which ended up ceasing to exist in the process.  In spite of repeated efforts to fix various problems associated with it, which has resulted in the rifle remaining in service to this day, there have always been grumblings about it.



U.S. soldier of the 1st Infantry Division in Afghanistan, with an updated version of the M14 rifle.  Like the M1911, the M14 never really left the services, as it carried on in the hands of special troops before coming roaring back into service due to the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It's sort of an interesting story in context of the lessons of history.  The Army has played out this story before.

The U.S. Army went big into sidearms during the frontier era, when effective revolvers first became available.  Revolvers ended up being issued to every single cavalryman by the mid 19th Century, which was not the case for most armies, which relied much more on sabers and perhaps a long arm of some sort.  American cavalrymen, by the post Civil War frontier era, were all provided with a carbine, a saber and a sidearm.  In the field, sabers were often omitted.  Because of this, sidearms were regarded as a serious combat arm by the American military, and in spite of efforts to change that over the years, this remains the case.  American troops carry sidearms to an unusual degree.

In the mid 19th Century, cap and ball service revolvers were generally .36 or .44, with .44s being the more common issue arm in the U.S. Army (and also in the Confederate army).  .36s were used, but they were not used as much as .44s.  The .44 "Dragoon" revolver had come in the prior two decades, and it remained the standard up until 1873, at which point the Army adopted the M1873 Colt revolver in a .45 cartridge.  Why the change from .44 to .45 I don't know, as there was already a big .44 cartridge available, but that brought in the .45.  

Civil War Union Cavalryman with Colt 1860 model revolver.  This cap and ball revolver was the last of the series of successful cap and ball Colts.

The .45 as the service caliber remained in use for decades but in the late 19th Century an effort was made to replace it with a .38 cartridge and a new, double action, revolver was adopted.  It was used, along with old stocks of .45 revolvers, in the Spanish American War, but it was a failure in the Philippine Insurrection and .45 revolvers were reissued and a new one adopted.

 The 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry on the San Juan Heights. Theodore Roosevelt carried, and used, a .38 Colt revolver that had been recovered from the USS Maine in the action.

Sound sort of familiar?

Finally, a brand new .45 cartridge and a new automatic pistol were adopted in 1911. That pistol and cartridge carried right on until 1985, and it appears set to come back on it.  History repeating itself.

  

American soldiers in France with captured German 9mm P08s. The 9mm cartridge is actually a little older than the .45 ACP.

This is an interesting story, to followers of things of this type, as it shows the "history repeating itself maxim, and it's a story the US has actually lived through more than one.  The US military had a .45 sidearm and started to replace it with a lighter .38, but that failed, and the US went back to the .45.  Later in the 1980s, the US again replaced the .45 with a lighter cartridge, this time the 9mm. Granted, politics and pressure were involved with it, and an aspect of it was the adjustment of the service to increased numbers of women combined with the erroneous belief that women couldn't handle the bigger handgun.  It's not really a simple story. Yet here again, the 9mm is set to be replaced, apparently, with a .45 again.

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Yeoman's First Law of History.  Everything first happened longer ago than you suspect.

It doesn't matter what the topic is, but the first occurrence of anything is always further back in time than originally thought.  This is why certain distant dates are continually pushed back, and will continue to be. So, take whatever you like, say the first use of the horse, or the first appearance of humans in North America, and you'll find the "first" date gets more and more distant in time.  Things that were thought to happen, say, 5,000 years ago, turn out to have happened 50,000 years ago, or 500,000 years ago, as we gain better data.

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We've done that with rifles too, actually.  At the turn of the century, when smokeless powder weapons were coming in, the .45-70 single shot "Trapdoor" Springfield was replaced by the .30-40 Krag in the Army.  In the Navy and Marine Corps, however, the .45-70 was replaced by the 6mm Navy Lee, which proved too light and was soon thereafter replaced itself.  

U.S. Marines on board the USS Wyoming, equipped with Navy Lees.

Ultimately, the .30 became universal in the US military until the 5.56 came in, but then the .30 started coming back in again, with the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The point?  I suppose there really isn't one, other than that this provides an interesting way to explore the operation of some of the prime Yeoman's Laws of History and Yeoman's Law of Human Behavior.

Tuesday, July 7, 1914. Pondering war.

 Austro Hungaria convened a Council of Ministers that ran six hours in length.  Most of the council supported going to war with Serbia despite possible Russian intervention. Count István Imre Lajos Pál Tisza de Borosjenő et Szeged, the Prime Minister of Hungary, however opposed discussions that could lead to war.

Count Tisza.

Tisza felt that the Austro Hungarian Empire had too many Slavs already.

He was assassinated by soldiers in October, 1918.

German Chancellor Theobald Theodor Friedrich Alfred von Bethmann Hollweg commented in Germany that “An action against Serbia can lead to world war.”

Serbian Prime Minister Nikola Pašić contradicted previous statements by his diplomats and denied that Serbia had warned Austro-Hungaria about plots to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Last edition:

Monday, July 6, 1914. War warning.

Labels: 1910s, 1914, British Columbia, Canada, Crime, Diplomacy, Germany, Immigration, July Crisis, law, The written word, United Kingdom, Uruguay

The Big Picture: Seven Pines Battlefield. 1912

Monday, July 6, 1914. War warning.

German Ambassador to the United Kingdom Karl Max provided warning to British Foreign Minister Sir Edward Gray that war with Serbia was likely.  Gray remained optimistic that it could be avoided.

Kaiser Wilhelm II, against his judgment, went on his annual cruise of the North Sea.

The British Columbian Court of Appeals unanimously ruled that it had no authority to intervene in immigration officials' decision to tow a Japanese vessel with Indian immigrants on board out to sea.

Christian Lautenschlager of Germany won the French Grand Prix.

Uruguayan poet Delmira Agustini whose brief marriage to Enrique Job Reyes had ended in divorce was murdered by Reyes, who then took his own life.

Last edition:

Sunday, July 5, 1914. The Blank Check

Labels: 1910s, 1914, Austro Hungaria, German, July Crisis, Monarchy, Serbia, World War One

The damage one historian with erroneous conclusions can do.

Army historian of World War Two and the Korean War, S. L. A. Marshall

Historians can be enormously influential.

Many people tend to think of historians as tweedy characters, looked up in their rooms wearing thick glasses and going through piles of books. That isn't the case of course, although they do read a lot, but they do research and that research tends to get reflected in their published works. That is inevitable.

Historians aren't always correct.  More often than not, when they're not, its simply inadvertent.  Not everyone understands everything they study or see, and errors can be made.  Those errors can become very hard to correct later.  For example, the widely erroneously believed myth that cavalry played hardly any role in World War One has proven to be darned near impossible to correct, in spite of it simply being demonstrably wrong.  It might never be corrected.

But an error that's intentionally created to advance a point is another matter, and that appears to be the case with the legendary findings of S. L. A. Marshall in his still in print book Men Against Fire.

Men Under Fire reported Marshall's conclusions that only 25% of troops fired their weapons in combat during World War Two.  The finding was so influential that the Army adjusted its training and doctrine as a result, applying its newly learned lessons during the Vietnam War. The problem is that Marshall's own data didn't support his conclusions and they were wholly incorrect.

This did great damage to the U.S. Army at the infantry level.  Marshall's work was later drawn into question and discredited.  Marshall himself has received some criticism for his behavior in how he came to bully his research assistants.  But the book is still in print all these years later and it still shows up on Army recommended reading list, showing I suppose how prevalent an influential work can be once its received initial approval.  At the training level, the Army moved on after Marshall and went back training marksmanship, but not before many years of his influence had had an impact.  The Army's historical branch should withdraw the book lest it have any renewed influence, although that risk is no doubt slight. For historians, and the readers of history, the story has a lesson all of its own.

Sunday, July 5, 1914. The Blank Check

Referred to as the "blank check", Kaiser Wilhelm II pledged Germany's unconditional support of whatever action Austro Hungaria may take in regard to the crisis with Serbia.

A war council between the countries was held at Potsdam to discuss possibilities of war with Serbia, Russia, and France.  It concluded that eliminating Serbia was a necessity, with Emperor Franz Joseph claiming war was necessary to preserve the dual monarchy.

So, a war was deemed necessary over the murder of a man he didn't like, and the Austro Hungarians didn't either.

Last edition:

Saturday, July 4, 1914. Independence Day.

Labels: 1910s, 1914, Butte Montana, Germany, Holidays, Horse Racing, Independence Day, July Crisis, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Montana (Butte), panoramic, Serbia, Terrorism, the spoken word, Woodrow Wilson, World War One, Zaian War