Dean Swift

Ancient gods at these Olympics

I suppose we are about half way through the London Olympics of 2012 – sad for some, radiant news for others. I suppose I will be accused of being a dry old stick (if not something much worse) but I used to enjoy the Olympic Games when in order to take part you had to be amateur. The moment the Committee plumped for professionals the Games gained a little glamour but lost all interest; for me anyway, and a few more like me.

And now the British Royal Mint makes gold coins to celebrate the Games. The coins’ designer explains that his inspiration was the first Games held ‘in ancient Greece, where athletes pledged their allegiance to the gods of Olympia’. Oh dear me no! There weren’t any ‘gods of Olympia’.

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Laurence of Arabia (article revised 2012)

The real Laurence, later he wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ / luisantoniodevillena.es

Thomas Edward Laurence was born in 1888, the son of Thomas Chapman, a member of a distinguished Anglo-Irish family. Thomas had eloped with his daughter’s governess, and settled in Oxford after adopting the name of Laurence. His son gained a First Class Degree in History at the University, and became an enthusiastic archaeologist wen he undertook to make excavations in Syria and Mesopotamia between 1910 and 1914. He learned desert lore from the many Arab friends he made on these scientific expeditions. (more…)

By Dean Swift| 2012-08-06T17:10:14+00:00 August 6th, 2012|English History, History of the Cinema, History of Turkey, The Arab races, World History|0 Comments

The Marquis who survived the French Revolution

The Marquis fights in America (against the English) / ushistory.org

Marie-Joseph, Marquis de LaFayette, was born in 1757, into a firmly established aristocratic family in a large European country whose people had been spoiling for a rebellion since the death of Louis XIV. Aged only twenty he was an officer in the French Army, showing enthusiasm for the American War of Independence. In fact his enthusiasm was unbounded and he emigrated to North America to join the colonists in their struggle against British control.
George Washington soon got to hear of this Gallic firebrand, who fought well at Brandywine, endured with the rest at Valley Forge, and then again at Monmouth in 1778. He was just twenty-one years old. (more…)

By Dean Swift| 2012-08-06T08:23:43+00:00 August 6th, 2012|French History, US History|0 Comments

Important American Moneybags: Astor, Mellon & Vanderbilt

Astor / en.wikipedia.org

JOHN JACOB ASTOR was born a century before our other subjects in this series ((1763). He emigrated from Germany in 1779 when he was sixteen, to work with his brother in London making musical instruments, but in 1783 (at twenty) he sailed for America to make his fortune.

Straightaway he got into the flourishing fur trade, and by 1800 he had established the beginnings of a commercial empire. He chartered the ships that carried precious furs across the Pacific and the Atlantic. He founded the American Fur Company in 1808, and dominated trade on the plains and in the mountains within ten years. (more…)

By Dean Swift| 2012-08-05T09:30:12+00:00 August 5th, 2012|US History|0 Comments

Important American Moneybags: Andrew Carnegie & Henry Ford

Carnegie / andrew.cmu.edu

Carnegie was born in 1835, the son of a Scots weaving hand-loom operator. The family left Scotland and emigrated to the United States of America in 1848. Young Andrew worked first at a cotton mill, then as a telephone operator, and then on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Quite soon he was Superintendent. As only seems to happen in America, he got himself into the iron manufacturing business, moved to steel, and became a millionaire. (more…)

By Dean Swift| 2012-08-04T09:21:32+00:00 August 4th, 2012|Scottish history, US History|0 Comments

Important American Moneybags: John P. Morgan & J.D. Rockefeller

Rockefeller / exito-motivacionysuperacionpersonal.com

The 19th and 20th centuries were the twenty decades during which men (and some women) astonished the world by making uncountable fortunes in the vast territories of the United States. Many of these fortunes remained and remain even in the over-taxed 21^st century. Here we deal with financiers; but some of those colossal, Croesus-like money boxes came from meat-packing, cotton, the invention of the canning industry, timber, building and builder’s materials, manufacturing of paint, motor cars and the railway,, glass and glassware; even buttons and ink.

John P. Morgan was a scion of an already rich banking family. John made his first million or so by investing heavily in railroads after the American Civil War (q.v.) and the crushing of dangerous Native American tribes. He was able to found his own investment banking house in 1895 when he was forty-eight. He named it J.P. Morgan and Co. (more…)

By Dean Swift| 2012-08-03T10:55:32+00:00 August 3rd, 2012|US History, World History|0 Comments

Figures in a Revolution: Jacques-René Hébert & the Sans-Culottes

Hebert / amis-robespierre.org

This French journalist and revolutionary was born in 1757, just thirty-two years before the French Revolution exploded on an astonished and cowed world. Hébert was not just a jobbing newspaperman, he owned the newspaper Le Père Duchesne, vulgar, scurrilous, earthy and therefore popular with the Paris mob known as the Sans Culottes In 1791 he intelligently joined a radical revolutionary club which was neither jacobin nor girondin. It was the Cordeliers. With his fellow members he joined in the assault of the Tuileries on 10 August, 1792 and was elected to the Paris Commune afterwards. (more…)

By Dean Swift| 2012-08-02T07:11:07+00:00 August 2nd, 2012|French History|0 Comments

What was the Committee of Public Safety?

The term is self-contradictory, but the committee’s founders could hardly call it the ‘Committee of Public Danger’. It lasted only from 1793 to 1795 but greatly damaged France’s reputation and standing in the eighteenth century world. (more…)

By Dean Swift| 2012-07-31T19:56:09+00:00 July 31st, 2012|French History, World History|0 Comments

The Fall of France: “for you, the war (of 42 days) is over!”

France´s surrender / learning.blogs.nytimes.com

For many, if not all, of our seasoned history-lovers, the fact that the Second World War might have been over by the middle of 1940 is unknown. But for the dogged determination of certain European nations, Hitler’s Germany could have been the military victor of the War, not just, as has indeed happened, the political and economic leader it has become. The United States need never have entered the War at the end of 1941. Russia could have stayed Russia instead of being under the Soviet yoke until the fall of the Berlin Wall. German could have been the obligatory second language in all European schools. Berlin might have been the capital of a different kind of European Union. To find the reasons why this did not happen we must look at France. (more…)

By Dean Swift| 2012-07-30T08:45:58+00:00 July 30th, 2012|English History, French History, German History, History of the Cinema, US History, World History|0 Comments

More about Finland

In our last post (No. 300) we took a brief look at the Finnish-Russian War of 1939/40. This war was incalculably important in the history of the twentieth century, but few historians have applied themselves to it. Here we take a broader look at Finland itself. (more…)

By Dean Swift| 2012-07-29T08:59:23+00:00 July 29th, 2012|EU History, German History, History of Finland, Russian history, World History|0 Comments

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