Down the Rabbit Hole, Part 9

 

As I watch and read things, something may come up that piques my curiosity or stimulates a memory, so I pick up my phone and go down a short research rabbit hole.  Join me if you'd like.

William Adams

William Adams (1564-1620) was a ship's pilot and navigator considered to be the first Englishman to reach Japan.  Sound familiar?  Yes, he was the inspiration for John Blackthorne, the lead character in James Clavell's novel Shogun, recently adapted again as a limited television series.  Apprenticed at 12 to a shipyard master, Adams learned shipbuilding, astronomy, and navigation before joining the Royal Navy.  In 1600, he arrived in Japan on board a Dutch merchant ship, the only surviving ship of a five-ship expedition.  While the captain and other survivors were allowed to leave Japan, Adams and the ship's second mate were not permitted to leave the country.  They became advisors to the Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu  and became two of the first foreign-born samurai in Japan.  Adams was given the special title of hatamoto, a direct vassal of the shogun and awarded a fief, 80-90 serfs, and a handsome annual stipend. He was renamed Anjin Miura.  The Dutch second mate was rewarded similarly, but he drowned in a shipwreck a few years later.

Adams directed the construction of the first western-style ship in Japan. He also acted as an agent for English merchant interests interested in establishing trade.  Like Blackthorne in Shogun, Adams had an antagonistic relationship with the Jesuit Spanish and Portuguese priests in Japan who saw improving relations with the Protestant English and Dutch as threats to their spiritual and economic monopoly.  Adams died in Hirado, just north of Nagasaki, and left his estate to be divided equally between his English family and his Japanese family.

The Underground City of Derinkuyu

I've always been fascinated when I come across references to Turkey's underground city of Derinkuyu, just one of several underground settlements discovered in the central region of Cappadocia.  It consists of as many as 18 levels carved into the soft volcanic rock to a depth of 280 feet below the ground.  The city could hold as many as 20,000 residents and their livestock, and it was complete with wine and oil presses, cellars, apartments, school rooms, stables, and chapels.  It is believed that there are more than 600 entrances, and each one can be sealed by rolling stones from the inside.  That fact has led to speculation by archaeologists that the chief reason for building underground was defense.  Cappadocia has been crossed by invading armies repeatedly throughout its history, and the theory is that the first underground chambers were used for storage by the Phrygians in the 8th-7th centuries BC before people moved in to escape invading armies.  Over the centuries, the city was greatly expanded and reached its greatest population from from 780 -1180 during the Arab-Byzantine Wars.  The Christian natives of the region continued to seek refuge there from later Mongol invasions and Ottoman persecution in the early 20th century.  By 1923, the Ottoman Turks had expelled all Christians from the region, and the city was largely forgotten.  In 1963, a man discovered a hidden room while renovating his home, discovering an entrance into the underground city, and excavations began.  Today, about half of the city is open to tourists.  

Karen Horney

I took the required Intro to Psych courses in college and the educational psychology courses, but in those courses, I never once heard the name Karen Horney.  Turns out she's a fairly important figure in the development of psychology and psychiatric medicine.  Born Karen Danielsen in Hamburg Germany in 1885, she decided at an early age to become a physician, but college, let alone medical school, was closed to women in Germany.  That changed in 1900, however, and she entered medical school in 1906.  After marrying, starting a family, and losing her parents in rapid succession, she began the new field of psychoanalysis - as a patient -  as a means of coping, and she began studying the field herself.  In 1920, she became a founding member and instructor at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, and she started a private practice of her own as well.  Concerned over the rise of Nazism and divorced from her husband, she left Germany in the 1930s with her children and moved to Chicago.  As her career developed, she began to diverge more and more from Sigmund Freud's theories, particularly when it came to Freud's ideas that men and women were inherently different in their psychology.  She vehemently disagreed with his assertion that women suffered from "penis envy."  She believed that any differences were due to culture and society and not biology.  Her theories made her a founder of feminist psychology.  She also published important theories in the areas of neuroses, narcissism, and self-actualization.  After a few years in Chicago, she moved to Brooklyn where she set up a private practice and taught in medical schools until her death in 1952.

Novocherkassk Massacre

From June 1 through 3 1962, a large group of  peaceful and unarmed Soviet citizens rallied in the Soviet city of Novocherkassk in order to demand relief from crippling economic policies.  Wages at the city's largest employer, a locomotive factory, were slashed 35% while production quotas and work hours were increased.  Meanwhile, the state raised prices of milk, dairy, and other staples by as much as 35%.  Unrest started in May with strikes within the plant and spread quickly. On June 2, some 4,000 men, women, and children gathered and marched in the city square carrying Soviet flags and pictures of Lenin.  Thirty worker leaders were arrested, and tensions grew.  Infantry units were called in to restore order.  When the crowd ignored orders to disperse, the infantry fired into the air, but KGB (Soviet state police) sharpshooters and machine-gunners stationed on rooftops fired directly into the the crowd, operating under orders that were later traced back all the way to Premier Nikita Khrushchev.  At least 26 people died on the scene.  They were buried in unmarked graves, and they're families were never told what happened to them.  In the aftermath, a couple of hundred other people were arrested, several were executed, and dozens were imprisoned.  The incident was never reported in the press, and it was never publicly recognized until 1992, a year after the collapse of the USSR. In 1992, remains of the victims were disinterred and reburied, a monument was erected, an official apology was issued, and a token payment was made to surviving victims.  

St. Martin's Le Grand

In Karen Brooks' novel, The Good Wife of Bath, the title character lives for a time in the St. Martin's Le Grand section of London, just north of St. Paul's Cathedral.  During the 19th and 20th centuries, the area was dominated by the General Post Office headquarters, and "St. Martin's Le Grand" became a synonym for the national postal authority much like "Scotland Yard" has for the police.  It was in the General Post Office headquarters that Guglielmo Marconi demonstrated his wireless telegraphy invention, earning support for the development of what became radio, but the history of the area goes back several hundred years before.  Some traditions maintain that the site was home to a church and monastery as far back as the 7th or 8th century, but confirmed history has a church and college built ( or rebuilt) there around 1056.  Shortly after,  St. Martin's Le Grand, and other churches, began asserting sanctuary rights in England, and this concept became part of English common law by the late 12th and early 13th centuries.  There was a tradition, sometimes called abjuration, that a felon could seek temporary asylum by living in a church or churchyard for up to forty days while he made plans to leave the kingdom.  Eventually, in St. Martin's the time limit was lifted, and the area became known as a "liberty," and felons, debtors, and other wrongdoers were free from arrest and harassment from sheriffs, constables, and creditors.  The City of London did not accept this idea without a fight, and the idea of sanctuary was contested in courts into the 15th century, with St. Martin's Le Grand seemingly winning a in the early 1400s.  However, King Henry VIII's seizure and dissolution of churches and monasteries during the English Reformation caused a sharp decline in sanctuary's legal standing.  The St. Martin's church, monastery, and college were demolished about 1450, but the area retained some "liberty" status until it was annexed into the Aldersgate Ward of the City of London in 1815.

Battle of Hayes Pond

On the night of January 18, 1958, about fifty members of the Ku Klux Klan attempted to stage a rally near Maxton, North Carolina. Several hundred armed Lumbee Indians, many veterans of WWII and the Korean War,  showed up, a fight ensued, and the Klansman dispersed and fled.  The event was covered widely by the national news media, and the media coverage overwhelmingly condemned the Klan and praised the Lumbees.  The event became known as the Battle of Hayes Pond or the Maxton Riot.

Who are the Lumbees and why Maxton?  Maxton is located in Robeson County which has a significant Lumbee population.  The Lumbee people are like the Seminole tribe in Florida, a relatively new tribe comprising survivors of several other tribes decimated by European violence and disease.  These survivors coalesced to form a new community, officially recognized as a tribe by Congress in 1956.  The Lumbee assimilated quite quickly into the majority culture and intermarried with white and black North Carolinians, making them fairly indistinguishable from the rest of the community.; they were agrarian, English-speaking, and Protestant, bound together by kinship and their shared history.  While they were not subjected to removal like like other southeastern tribes, North Carolina law designated them "colored" in spite of the fact of the fact that many were physically indistinguishable from white North Carolinians, and subjected them to segregation, discrimination, and Jim Crow laws from the antebellum period into the 1950s.  After official tribal designation occurred, and many Lumbees started protesting segregation, James "Catfish" Cole began organizing Klan activities in Robeson County including cross burnings and the Hayes Pond rally.  He ignored local law enforcement requests to cancel the rally, and he and another Klansman were arrested and convicted for inciting a riot as a result of the event.  Following the incident, the North Carolina Klan shrank and splintered even further, and Americans learned about the existence of the Lumbees from the media attention.  

Josh Gibson

A few days ago, Major League Baseball announced the integration of Negro League and Major League statistics.  This integration really shook things up, with many new names popping up on leaderboards and as record holders.  I must admit that I'm a little surprised by how little talk this generated, but I must admit that I may be the least interested person in the world when it comes to baseball - in fact, I loathe it.  I'm a bit confused because one of the things that baseball fans constantly rave about it is statistics, and Negro League statistics are questionable.  They weren't kept as closely as Major League statistics, and teams played only a few dozen games a year (60 or fewer) against other professional teams, compared to the seemingly hundreds and hundreds of games played today.  For most of the year, Negro League teams, played semi-professional, school, and local amateur teams in "barnstorming" tours across the country.

Nevertheless, some really fantastic athletes played in the Negro League and were denied their due for too long.  One of the most famous was Josh Gibson, who now holds several Major League Baseball records.  When Gibson played, he was called the "black Babe Ruth,"  but many called Ruth the "white Josh Gibson."

Gibson was born in the small southwest Georgia town of Buena Vista in 1911.  The family moved to Pittsburgh in 1923, and his father went to work in a steel mill. Gibson entered training to become an electrician.  At age 16, he first played organized baseball on a Gimbel's Department Store team; he worked there as an elevator operator.  He was recruited by the Pittsburgh semi-pro black team, the top semi-pro black team in the country.  By 1931, he had made the major Negro League, playing for most of his professional career with the Homestead Grays.  His career was tragically cut short, however.  In 1943, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor.  He refused surgical treatment and died of a stroke four years later at age 35.  In 1972, he became the second Negro League player inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, after Satchel Paige.