If you can’t go to Waterloo….

 

Let Waterloo come to you.

Battle of Waterloo

You may have heard--June 18th is the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo.  Hundreds of thousands of history buffs, nerds, geeks and buggs* will gather in Belgium to watch 5000 enthusiasts and 300 bewildered horses reenact the battle.  My guess is that plenty of them are already there, drinking beer and eating frites. (With mayo, not catsup.  Because that's the way the Belgians do it.  And a mighty fine way it is, too.)

Those of us who don't have tickets are not out of luck. **  One of my favorite websites, Military History Now,*** is hosting a real-time virtual reenactment created by game developers Matrix Games and The Slitherine Group.  Eight hours of simulated nineteenth century battle on your computer stream--or at least as much of it as you can bear arrange to watch. That is some serious geek-ery.

Personally, I plan on having it on in the background while I work--the way my Grandpa Mahaney used to listen to the Cardinals while he worked in his shop.

Are you in?****

 

*My favorite typo ever. Why yes,  I am a history bugg. Aren't you?

**  In fact, maybe we're the lucky ones.  That's going to be one big crowd.

***If you're interested in "the strange, off-beat and lesser-known aspects of military history", you'll love it too.

****Here are the practical bits:

  • Streaming is scheduled to start at 11:30 AM Central European Time (4:30 AM in my time zone), when the initial attack occurred.  Because that's what a real-time reenactment means.
  • It will be streamed via a TwitchStream channel.  (Don't ask.  I don't know.)
  • Check  http://militaryhistorynow.com/ or MHN's Twitter feed @MilHistNow for updates

A hat tip to friend and fellow history buff Scottie Kersta-Wilson for calling this to my attention.  I love Military History Now, but I don't always read their posts the day they arrive. I'd have kicked somethng if I'd missed this.

Lovelace, Babbage, and Steampunk Comics

Normally when I use the phrase "comic-book history" here on the Margins I'm referring to the shorthand popular version of history that we learned as children and carry in our hearts as adults:  Abraham Lincoln dashing off the Gettysburg address on the back of an envelope,  the first American Thanksgiving, Marie Antoinette's infamous line "let them eat cake--like that.  These historical anecdotes are at best incomplete versions of history and at worst absolutely wrong, but they are emotionally satisfying so they live on no matter how often they are debunked.*

Today, though, I'm going to talk about a real comic book, described by its author as "an imaginary comic about an imaginary computer.":  The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer.

Sydney Padua starts out with two real people:

Ada_Lovelace_portrait  Augusta Ada King (1815-1852) , the Countess of Lovelace, better known as Ada Lovelace. Daughter of the famous (and infamous) Lord Byron, Lovelace was a talented mathematician.  Most women with that skill in her time would have had no opportunity to use it.  Lucky for her, her mother insisted that she be educated in a rigorous  program of math and science well outside the norm for young women of the time,  hoping  such study would counteract any poetical tendencies she might have inherited from her father. ** (In case you're not up on nineteenth century gossip, it was a spectacularly unhappy marriage.)

Charles BabbageCharles Babbage (1791-1857) was an irascible and inventive mathematician and tinkerer who is often called the "father of the computer".  He designed two machines intended to automate complex  calculations:  the difference machine and the later, more complicated analytical engine.

Lovelace was fascinated by his work.  When asked to translate an Italian engineer's article on the analytical machine  into English, she added her own notes to the piece*** in which she described how code could be written that would expand the use of the machine.  Making her the first computer programmer.  At least in theory.

Padua tells the history of Lovelace and Babbage in twenty-five smart, snarky, footnoted pages--then revolts against the fact that history gives her characters unhappy endings.****  The rest of the smart, snarky, footnoted comic takes place in an alternative steampunk universe where Lovelace and Babbage "live to complete the analytical engine and use it to have thrilling adventures and fight crime."   Padua takes elements of nineteenth century history (Luddites, for example) and historical personages (Queen Victoria among them) and twists them into unhistorical forms that are nonetheless historically illuminating.  It's quite a trick and makes me think of Marianne Moore's definition of poetry as the ability to create "real toads in imaginary gardens".

 

 

*My apologies to those of you who have heard this rant before, either here or In Real Life.

**This seems to have been based on a fundamental lack of understanding of the poetical properties inherent in higher mathematics and the amount of imagination required to make scientific leaps.

***Three times the length of the original article.

****Lovelace had a drug habit, tried (unsuccessfully) to use her mathematical skills to build a gambling system, and died young of uterine cancer.  Babbage, being irascible, was in constant fights with just about everyone and never built his analytical engine.  In part because he was in constant fights with just about everyone.

History on Display–From Senegal to Seeger: Stories of the American Banjo

banjo

Wade Ward of Bog Trotters Band, Galax, Virginia. 1937

Recently My Own True Love and I had the chance to see Michael Miles’ most recent one-man musical documentary, From Senegal to Seeger: Stories of the American Banjo. It was a last-minute addition to a long-planned small-scale road trip.  It turned out to be one of the highlights.

We both love the banjo. We’d seen Miles work his music-cum-history magic before. It was a no-brainer.

Over the course of 90 minutes, Miles played music from across a 300-year period on seven different banjos, interspersing the music with poetry, historical vignettes, personal anecdotes, and opportunities to sing along.* The result is an impressionistic portrait of American history seen through the lens of the banjo.

My takeaways?

  • A renewed sense of the banjo as America’s instrument of social change (or perhaps just subversion), from slaves dancing in New Orleans’ Congo Square on Sundays to the folk music movement of the 1960s.
  • The courage and clarity of Pete Seegher’s testimony before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, in which he invoked his First Amendment rights to perform for audiences that had ranged from hobo jungles to the Rockefellers.
  • The poetry of Walt Whitman and Wallace Steven is much easier to understand when recited by someone who does it well.

Miles is an extraordinary musician and performer. (Not always the same thing.) If you get a chance to hear him, go for it! In the meantime, check out the clips on his website.

And if you can’t wait to learn more about the history of the banjo, or perhaps the banjo’s role in history, I strongly recommend Karen Linn’s That Half Barbaric Twang: The Banjo in American Popular Culture.

 

*The audience in South Bend, Indiana, did not sing along with the gusto that we’re used to hearing at the Old Town School of Folk Music but they made up for it with wild applause and multiple standing ovations.