To estimate how much medieval literature once existed, book historians compare ancient book catalogs, which are incomplete, with the number and scope of surviving texts. Another estimate borrowed a technique from ecology called the “unseen species” model. The researchers turned to lists of surviving medieval texts—and those suspected to have been lost—written between 600 and 1450 C.E. in Dutch, French, Icelandic, Irish, English, and German. There were 3648 texts in total. When they ran those numbers through the unseen species model, the algorithm suggested just 9% of medieval texts from that period survived to the present day. That’s rather close to traditional estimates of 7%. The new study also broke things down by region: The model suggests only about 5% of English vernacular works have survived, compared with 17% and 19% for Icelandic and Irish vernacular works, respectively.
Tag: history
Birth certificates
75% of the births in the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries went unregistered. Though the US pioneered the institutionalization of a decennial census, it lagged behind European countries in recording births, deaths, and marriages. Such records were not considered a federal matter, and the various states were all over the map with what they collected, if anything.
Progressive Era reformers got state and federal governments to adopt official records of birth during the first 40 years of the 20th century. These replaced affidavits, which were sworn and notarized statements by a child’s parent(s). Affidavits proved untrustworthy when it came to child labor laws: parents cheated, and notaries lied.
“The solution to the problem of enforcing child labor laws was, ironically, to shift the authority to authenticate a child’s birth away from the people who had actually witnessed it—parents. Professionally produced, birth certificates objectified a child’s age and identity, making a truth that existed apart from the personal relations that created the child.”
This was all part of the “bureaucratization, standardization, and quantification of information that accompanied modernization” and the birth of the “information state.” Documentary written evidence was privileged over the “oral and transient.”
See also the history of the passport.
Payday
It is difficult to track or even imagine all the ways in which a cycle of steady, progressive depletion of funds shaped Americans’ experiences of labor and leisure in towns and cities at the moment when this cycle first took root. The reverberations were undoubtedly broad. For starters, the combination of weekly reckonings and diminishing resources could be felt in the workplace. It may well have induced workers to accept more overtime work (when the choice was theirs) later in the week, which might have contributed to the weekly rise in textile output after Thursday. Labor records from a Massachusetts mill in the early 1850s show a decided spike in overtime pay at the end of a week, and especially on Saturdays. But the weekly pay system had an even greater impact beyond the walls of the workshop and the factory, in the proliferating commercial venues where wage earners spent their money. Pay weeks, rent weeks, and the different Sabbath observances of Christians and Jews all shaped the urban lending industry and in turn structured the microfinances of ordinary life. Although interest rates were calculated by the month, borrowers had to repay the full interest on a loan even when they redeemed pledges after a week, as they often did. More generally, the rhythms of the pawning week, in tandem with the pay period on which it depended, became a feature of the urban timescape, determining when working people had money to spend and when they could gain access to their valued possessions. Like taverns and boardinghouses, pawnshops registered this calendar with special sensitivity, but the pay week shaped more than just business cycles; it shaped urban experience.
1021
New research pinpoints an exact date Vikings from Europe were in North America: 1021 (1000 years ago this year), 430 years before Christopher Columbus was even born. How was this determination possible? Because the Sun erupted in an immense series of storms that altered Earth’s atmosphere, leaving measurable changes in tree rings at the time. A team of scientists looked at wood found at the L’Anse aux Meadows Viking site. In 3 cases the trees had been physically cut down, and moreover, they were clearly cut with metal tools — Vikings had metal implements at the time, but indigenous people did not. The wood was all from different trees (one was fir, and another juniper, for example). The key parts here are that the wood was all from trees that had been alive for many decades, and all had their waney edge intact as well.
Radioactivity & deep time
Radium forever transformed attitudes to time and where we may be within history – creating the first efflorescence of truly long-term thinking. Until that point, we knew the Earth was old, but hadn’t fully embraced how many more millions – or even billions – of years could lie ahead for humanity and the planet. In Europe, Christians assumed they were much closer to time’s end than its beginning. Judgement Day was anticipated soon. Then, the 1900s dawned, and radioactivity was discovered. This changed everything. From thinking they lived near history’s end, people now recognized they could be living during its very beginning. Humanity’s universe, no longer decrepit, now seemed positively youthful.
Glasses history
In his book Kitāb al-Manāẓir (Book of Optics), written in 1021, the Arab mathematician Ibn al-Haytham, also known as Alhazen, was the first to recognize and describe the magnifying property of curved glass surfaces and to put it to practical use by making reading globes. Despite the groundbreaking significance of this discovery, it remained unknown in the West for a long time because it was published in a treatise written in Arabic. It was not until the end of the 12th century that Alhazen’s treatise was translated into Latin by Franciscan monks in Italy, revealing to the Western world that an object was magnified when viewed through a transparent spherical element. The translation of the Book of Optics provided not only a physical explanation but a practical insight: convex polished hemispheres made of certain semiprecious stones magnified letters when placed on them. These reading stones were the first vision aids to be used systematically.
Roman Food Dimorphism
By measuring the isotopes of carbon and nitrogen in the bone amino acids, researchers were able to reconstruct the diets of people who lived contemporaneously in much more detail than was previously thought possible. “We found significant differences in the proportions of marine and terrestrial foods consumed between males and females, implying that access to food was differentiated according to gender.” Males were more likely to be directly engaged in fishing and maritime activities, they generally occupied more privileged positions in society, and were freed from slavery at an earlier age providing greater access to expensive commodities, such as fresh fish.
First Applied Geometry
Researchers have made a discovery that may shake up the history of mathematics, revealing evidence of applied geometry being used for the purposes of land surveying 3.7 ka BP. Found on a Babylonian clay table, the etchings are believed to represent the oldest known example of applied geometry, and feature mathematical techniques linked to the Greek philosopher Pythagoras that were well ahead of their time.
Link Rot
I was able to analyze ~2m externally facing links found in NYT articles since its inception in 1996. We found that 25% of deep links have rotted. If you go back to 1998, 72% of the links are dead. More than 50% of all NYT articles that contain deep links have at least 1 rotted link. The benefits of the internet and web’s flexibility—including permitting the building of walled app gardens on top of them that reject the idea of a URL entirely—now come at great risk and cost to the larger tectonic enterprise to, in Google’s early words, “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” What are we going to do about the crisis we’re in? A complementary approach to “save everything” through independent scraping is for whoever is creating a link to make sure that a copy is saved at the time the link is made. Authors of enduring documents—including scholarly papers, newspaper articles, and judicial opinions—can ask Perma to convert the links included within them into permanent ones archived at perma.cc; participating libraries treat snapshots of what’s found at those links as accessions to their collections, and undertake to preserve them indefinitely. A technical infrastructure through which authors and publishers can preserve the links they draw on is a necessary start. But the problem of digital malleability extends beyond the technical. The law should hesitate before allowing the scope of remedies for claimed infringements of rights—whether economic ones like copyright or more personal, dignitary ones like defamation—to expand naturally as the ease of changing what’s already been published increases.
Bass Reeves
So goes one of the many tales of Bass Reeves, whose exploits were so legendary they often sound like myth. But the historical record corroborates many of the most stunning details. Some criminals were so afraid of Reeves they turned themselves in as soon as they heard he was after them. He stalked others in their nightmares. Once, Reeves even arrested his own son for murder. “We quite commonly refer to Bass as the most prolific law enforcement officer the nation has ever seen. He was an enslaved person and ends up becoming one of the most well-known lawmen of the age as a Black man in the South. Bass Reeves is the greatest frontier hero in American history—bar none. I don’t know who you could compare him to. This guy walked in the Valley of Death every day for 32 years and came out alive.”
Gregor J. Rothfuss 