Author: Betz

The Gordon Rioters

Post author By Betz
Post date April 22, 2015

Have a drink with: The Gordon Rioters
Angry Protestant mob, muse to Charles Dickens

Ask them about: Looting, pillaging, using the word “popery” without laughing. (Try it: popery popery popery.)

“If they touch my work that’s a part of so many laws, what becomes of the laws in general, what becomes of the religion, what becomes of the country!”

You wouldn’t be wrong to wonder if this quote came out of Indiana in recent weeks, or perhaps Arkansas, in the face of debate over whether founding concepts of religious liberty could in fact literally be discussed over pizza. But in fact the quote is from Charles Dickens’ neglected novel Barnaby Rudge, in which a panicky hangman frets over religious freedom laws in 18th century England.

Dickens took his story from the events of June 1780, in which Protestants gathered with Lord George Gordon to march on Parliament and there present a petition for the repeal of Catholic relief legislation. The crowds grew and surged as they moved, and a week of “No Popery” violence broke out in London, requiring some 12,000 troops to restore peace.

Tags Angry Mob, Catholicism, Dickens, England, Religion & Reform

20th Century

Maria Altmann (& Liz Taylor, too)

Post author By Betz
Post date March 30, 2015

Have a drink with: Maria Altmann and Elizabeth Taylor
Art lovers, ladies of style, legal pit-fighters.

Ask them about: goddamn Nazis.

Behavioral advertising is like unexpectedly running into an ex: it seems to know an awful lot about you in ways you forgot you made possible, but for the most part just makes you feel awkward and vaguely regretful.

Thank Facebook for this epiphany, after it pushed the trailer for Helen Mirren’s latest movie on me at least seventeen times in a twenty-four hour period. I’d be pissed at Zuckerberg and crew, too, except that for once technology read me like a cheap novel. (You can lay off with the juice cleanses, though, Mark.)

“Woman in Gold” is the made-for-cinema story of Maria Altmann, her aunt Adele, and one of the most famous paintings of the 20th century. If you’re into history, law, art and Nazis (and who isn’t?), it’s a kicker.

Tags Art, Cultural Property, Hollywood, Law Geekery, World War II

15th Century 16th Century

Leonardo da Vinci

Post author By Betz
Post date February 26, 2015

Have a drink with: Leonardo da Vinci
Polymath, painter, engineer, left-handed gay underdog genius

Ask him about: flying psychic unicorn voyages of the mind

The surgeon and writer Leonard Shlain was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2008 and died less than a year later, just a week after finishing the manuscript for his book “Leonardo’s Brain.” Released late last year with the help of Shlain’s surviving family, the book purports to use what we know of Leonardo da Vinci’s life and work to tell us about the capability, potential and future evolution of the human brain.

Shlain starts with the premise, hardly arguable, that da Vinci stands alone in artistic accomplishment and diversity of skill. It is no exaggeration to claim that few if any humans throughout history have even begun to approach Leonardo’s explosively creative, integrative mode of thinking, and to execute on it so well and so beautifully. To suggest candidates – he tosses out Omar Khayyam, Galileo, Goethe, Freud – is only to drive home the achievement gap.

It’s one thing to say that every artist, ever, was influenced by da Vinci, to suggest that he presaged the discoveries of Newton and Bernoulli, or even to claim he discovered arteriosclerosis (all of which Shlain does).

But that’s small potatoes once you bring up the psychic flying.

Maybe we should back up a little.

Tags Art, Italy, Neuroscience, Renaissance, Woo-woo

15th Century 16th Century

Queen Isabella of Spain

Post author By Betz
Post date January 31, 2015

Have a drink with: Queen Isabella of Spain
Queen, ass-kicker, Rules girl, working mom

Ask her about: kicking everyone out of Spain

A few year-end lists recommended Kristin Downey’s biography of Queen Isabella, so lately I’ve been knee-deep in early modern Spain and a lot of questions about the famous lady.

What is image-making and what is truth? Was Isabella the complete idealized ruler? Was she calculating, maniacal? Was she or Ferdinand more responsible for ills like the Inquisition or the expulsion of the Jews from Spain? What aspects did her piety carry?

All of this brings me back to one of history’s most prevalent and maddening problems: unless you were there (and in most cases you weren’t), you can’t know exactly how things went. And even if you were, your reaction is yours alone – and trying to get into the head of any person other than yourself is foggy work. It’s the police lineup problem, or like being in a family where everyone has a slightly different story of how that fight at Christmas dinner went down, and everyone except that one cousin thinks Uncle Steve’s a jerk.

Said more nobly by John Gaddis: “but the past, in another sense, is something we can never have. For by the time we’ve become aware of what had happened it’s already inaccessible to us: we cannot relive, retrieve, or rerun it as we might some laboratory experiment or computer simulation. We can only represent it…We can perceive shapes through the fog and mist, we can speculate as to their significance, and sometimes we can even agree among ourselves as to what these are.”

Put another way, how do we solve a problem like Isabella?

Tags Catholicism, Kick-Ass Ladies, Religion & Reform, Royals, Spain

19th Century 20th Century

The Yale Bowl

Post author By Betz
Post date December 9, 2014

Have a drink with: the Yale Bowl
Stadium, immovable earth beast, cradle of American football

Ask it about: what it wants for its 100th birthday.

In 1914, Yale University celebrated the completion of one of its largest and most famous construction projects, the Yale Bowl. More than a stadium, much more than an Ivy League niche item, the Bowl is a physical point on the continuum of football’s growth as a sport.

Yale was instrumental in starting, growing and formalizing the game we know and watch in America today. (No, really! Ivy League football!)

To understand why this is true, let’s take a crash course in American football:

Tags Connecticut, Football, Mass transit, New Haven, Sports, Teddy Roosevelt, Yale

B.C.E.

Akhenaten

Post author By Betz
Post date October 25, 2014

Have a drink with: Akhenaten
Pharaoh, gender-bender, sun-worshiper, innovator

Ask him about: Starting your own religion in five easy steps

It’s amazing that so much interest persists in the ancient Egyptian ruler Akhenaten, a king about whom precious little is clear: no one knows when he was born or when he died, why he made the sweeping theological and societal changes that caused many scholars to call him the world’s first monotheist, or even who his successors were.

Still, it isn’t hard to see why the story’s a sticky one, and not least because company loves mystery. John Ray, writing in History Today, tossed off just a few of the speculations over which history has loved to ponder Akhenaten: “the ingredients are rich: a tormented visionary, a misunderstood poet, a visual artist of genius whose mission went unheeded, the apostle of domestic virtue, an incestuous child-abuser, a political disaster, an insane bisexual pope or ayatollah suffering from pathological endocrine disorder, a man out of his time.”

If Egyptian rulers were musicians, this guy is Gaga in a meat dress.

Tags Ancient Egypt, Cultural Property, Egypt, Megalomania, Religion & Reform, Royals

20th Century

Bruno Schulz

Post author By Betz
Post date September 30, 2014

Have a drink with: Bruno Schulz
Writer, artist, cultural property puzzle, cult superstar

Ask him about: making hipsters’ heads explode.

My husband recently bought a bag from a company whose gleeful tagline was, “They’ll fight over it when you’re dead.” If post-mortem squabbles are really how you know you’ve hit the big time, Bruno Schulz is fist-pumping his way through the hereafter.

A prolific author and artist, Schulz is perhaps best known for his two volumes of short stories, The Street of Crocodiles (also sometimes known as Cinnamon Shops) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Schulz lived in the city of Drohobycz – then part of Poland, now Ukranian – for most of his life, working as a drawing teacher and publishing works which tended towards the erotic and the grotesque. His art and writing were bold, unsentimental and yet wildly fantastical; Schulz was too grounded to be a surrealist, too oddball for mainstream, talented enough to be thoroughly disarming.

Tags Art, Author!, Central Europe, Cultural Property, World War II

17th Century 18th Century

Captain Kidd

Post author By Betz
Post date August 26, 2014

Have a drink with: Captain William Kidd
Privateer, man of song and legend, unwitting pirate?

Ask him about: the tabloid trial of the (18th) century!

William Kidd, a merchant captain and commissioned privateer, was tried and executed in 1701 for throwing away the king’s commission to turn pirate in the Indian Ocean. Not 25 years later, Captain Kidd was renowned in England as the man “whose publick Tryal and Execution here, rendered him the Subject of all Conversation, so that his Actions have been chanted about in Ballads.”*

To the end Kidd denied he’d been a pirate, and lamented a perfect storm of mutiny, betrayal and scapegoating.

So: birth of a pirate king, or a complete bus-chuck?

Tags Colonial America, Entrepreneurship, Law, Law Geekery, Pirates, Ships & sailing, Trials

16th Century

Saint Teresa of Avila

Post author By Betz
Post date July 21, 2014

Have a drink with: St. Teresa of Avila
Reformer, mystic, dreamer, smart lady.

Ask her about: that time she told the devil to piss off.

I grew up thinking saints were terribly stodgy, righteous people who had somehow gotten themselves onto life’s “Do Not Call” list for doubt and temptation. It wasn’t until later in life, when I learned that hagiography is basically a template for fictionalizing the lives of remarkable yet messy people, that I realized many of them would probably have made excellent drinking buddies.

My personal favorite is Saint Teresa of Avila, the first woman doctor of the Catholic Church and a stone-cold sixteenth-century bad-ass. I own a St. Teresa coloring book. You can’t but be awesome if someone made a coloring book about you.

Teresa grew up in sixteenth-century Spain, smack in the middle of what we’d now call the early modern period in Europe and the Spanish (Counter-) Reformation. This is to say: Lots Going On. Europe had suddenly gone pro in hair-splitting points of church doctrine; academic humanism was on the way up; there was explosive growth in art, writing and theater; hybridization and tension thanks to Jewish and north African cultural influences in Spain; and also there’s the disturbing effect of inbreeding on the Hapsburg family jaw. Plus, iconoclasm and poop jokes.

Tags Catholicism, Kick-Ass Ladies, Mysticism, Religion & Reform, Spain, Woo-woo

19th Century

The Charles W. Morgan

Post author By Betz
Post date July 4, 2014

Have a drink with: The Charles W. Morgan
Whaleship, world traveler, cultural ambassador, marine rendering plant

Ask her about: What it smells like to cart around a few dozen sailors in a wooden oil tub with limited cleaning facilities. For three years at a time.

The Charles W. Morgan is the last of the American wooden whaling ships, originally built in 1841 in New Bedford, Massachusetts and retired in the early 20th century after an active whaling career. Normally a floating exhibit at Mystic Seaport, the Morgan has undergone a multi-year, multi-million dollar restoration and is right now under sail around New England for the first time since the 1920’s. She’ll travel from Connecticut to Newport, New Bedford, Cape Cod and Boston before returning home in August, and you can follow the voyage on the Seaport’s various great online and social media streams (hashtag: #38thvoyage).

Now, I love history, but I REALLY love whaling history. To the point that I did a summer internship at a whaling museum while in law school. (Tax law memos or scrimshaw? Duh.) But if you are not me, and chances are you aren’t, what is this Morgan thing all about?

I thought you’d never ask.

Tags Connecticut, Ships & sailing, Whaling