tingilinde

the lost month

A year ago February -- we didn't have to go through what we did.

snip

...

A handful of Asian countries made rapid moves in February of last year to curb COVID-19, including instituting comprehensive testing for SARS-CoV-2 and tracking people who tested positive. “But the rest of the world sat on their hands,” says Liu. She and her colleagues assessed how the WHO communicated risk during February 2020, and decided that the agency’s cautious weighing of incomplete evidence may help to account for why many countries failed to take action.

...

 

 

on napoleon

On the bicentenary of his death.

snip

...

Recent discussions about Napoleon show that his legacy is a far from settled. It’s interesting that many of the official channels promote the importance of debate and discussion when talking about Napoleon. The La Villette exhibition on Napoleon even has a manifesto to this effect. But a cursory glance at social media and newspaper columns show that the debate about Napoleon’s legacy is very much still ongoing.

...

I had no idea of his connection to Swiss history.

a tip of the hat to Bart

 

 

a fight for the foundry

The Whitechapel Bell Foundry - where Big Ben and the Liberty Bell were made ... 

snip

...

There’s no mistaking the Whitechapel Bell Foundry when you come across it. Hemmed in on one side by traffic that speeds into the City of London, its sooty Georgian frontage stands out from surrounding coffee shops and tower blocks. If you had passed by the foundry’s side gate before it shut in 2017, there’s a chance you might have heard the clatter of wheels on concrete floors as bronze bells were transported to the drying ovens, or the sound of metal being hammered apart to be melted down and recast. Inside, bell makers, or “founders”, wore aluminium suits that made them look like industrial astronauts and poured molten alloy into moulds made from London clay.

...

 

the roman roads of britain

 

 

republicans and history

They want kids to learn fairy tales rather than real American and World history - from historian Heather Cox Richardson.

 

 

 

on the invention of the police

Jill Lepore writing in The New Yorker.

snip

...

It is often said that Britain created the police, and the United States copied it. One could argue that the reverse is true. Colquhoun spent his teens and early twenties in Colonial Virginia, had served as an agent for British cotton manufacturers, and owned shares in sugar plantations in Jamaica. He knew all about slave codes and slave patrols. But nothing came of Colquhoun’s ideas about policing until 1829, when Home Secretary Robert Peel—in the wake of a great deal of labor unrest, and after years of suppressing Catholic rebellions in Ireland, in his capacity as Irish Secretary—persuaded Parliament to establish the Metropolitan Police, a force of some three thousand men, headed by two civilian justices (later called “commissioners”), and organized like an army, with each superintendent overseeing four inspectors, sixteen sergeants, and a hundred and sixty-five constables, who wore coats and pants of blue with black top hats, each assigned a numbered badge and a baton. Londoners came to call these men “bobbies,” for Bobby Peel.

...

 

 

hcr on the role of disinformation

Heather Cox Richardson comments on the role of disinformation in politics.

 

hcr on biden's direction

Historian Heather Cox Richardson comments on Biden's direction.

 

tracking the burger family

In the 60s A&W used mostly roof-mounted fiberglas figures of a burger family to as part of their branding.  A few still exist and Roadside America is on the case.

 

selbsltmord

Germany's 1945 Spring suicide epidemic.