“You’re an ecologist, so tell me, should I replace all the incandescent bulbs in my house with fluorescent bulbs? And, what about these new light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs?” Well, I have a reasonably well-informed opinion on this issue, but it’s not really my expertise. “Perhaps then you can tell me more about the problem of invasive species?” Now you’re talking; this is something that ecologists can help with.

Ecology is the “branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings,” and was coined as “oekologie” by the German biologist Ernst Heackel in the 19th century from the Greek oikos meaning “house” and ology “the study of”. Ecology is, literally, the study of where living organisms live. By contrast, Environmental Science is a broader, interdisciplinary field in which ecologists work with other physical, chemical, and biological “ologists” to study and seek solutions to environmental problems. It’s a fine line between the two, but one role of ecology is to inform environmental science.

I’m a plant ecologist, and like to think that I’m seeking to understand Dürer’s famous painting “Das Groβe Rasenstück”. Described as a “habitat fragment,” Dürer’s painting (below) is one of the first botanically accurate illustrations of plants in a natural environment. It’s so accurate that we can identify in it over 20 different species (e.g., smooth meadow grass, greater plantain). Looking at this masterpiece, a host of ecological questions come to mind related to important concepts such as competition versus facilitation, community assembly, seedling establishment, limiting factors, population growth, etc. I discuss this painting with students in ecology classes and reproduced it on the cover of my 2002 book.

So, what can ecologists contribute to environmental science? Some of the current “hot topics” and challenges in ecology have an important bearing on issues in environmental science including the problems of non-native invasive species, preservation of biodiversity, use of biofuels and GM crops, and the effects of climate change. Sometimes the debate can get heated as when Mark Davis and colleagues suggested that we shouldn’t “judge species on their origins” as some non-native species may not be as bad as portrayed. Their paper, published in the high profile journal Nature ignited a firestorm of reaction across the internet. Right or wrong, their paper sparked a useful debate. Less controversial, but equally valuable was a study published in Journal of Ecology by Karen Robbirt and colleagues that used herbarium specimens dating back to Victorian times along with good old-fashioned quadrat counts of the spider orchid (Ophrys sphegodes) to document an advance in flowering time associated with climate warming in southern England. Although not controversial, this study was picked up by the media worldwide highlighting the importance of botanical collections and basic ecological field work to address a topical issue.

Not as bad as we think? The non-native Japanese stiltgrass (Microstegium vimineum) dominates the understory of an Illinois forest. Photo by David Gibson (©).

Disparaged by some philosophers as a “soft science” whose highest aspiration is to make the discipline “as hard as physics”, ecology is instead, a most fascinating branch of life science that transcends the hallowed halls of academia to address important and timely issues of environmental science set against the backdrop of evolution. It allows those of us with a love of nature to make a useful and important contribution.

David Gibson is Distinguished Professor of Plant Biology in the Center for Ecology at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is Editor in Chief of Oxford Bibliographies in Ecology, Editor of Journal of Ecology, and a Fellow of the Society of Biology. He has published two books with Oxford University Press, Methods in Comparative Plant Population Ecology in 2002 and Grasses and Grassland Ecology in 2009. Follow his tweets @davidjohngibson.

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Several people pointed out to me that I cannot distinguish a shrimp from a prawn, and I am afraid they are right. The picture copied for the shrimp post had the title “Shrimp cocktail,” but the shrimp there are too big and are really prawns. In any case, I decided to atone for my mistake and write a post on the etymology of prawn. This plan was hard to realize, because the origin of prawn is really, that is, hopelessly unknown: the word exists, but no one can say where it has come from. It is strange that more or less the same holds for shrimp and shark, though both are less opaque. There must have been some system behind calling those sea creatures. The fishermen who coined such names had a reason to call a shrimp a shrimp and a prawn a prawn.

Despite the obscurity that enshrouds prawn, it may be useful to sum up what people thought about its origin, even though the final solution is out of reach (and how many solutions in etymology can be called final?). Characteristically, the earliest English etymologists did not include prawn in their dictionaries. Even the great Franciscus Junius, who mentioned it, could not offer any cognate except (most hesitatingly) Greek perna “ham.” For many years no hypotheses appeared in the successive editions of Webster’s dictionary (Noah Webster was constantly on the lookout for Hebrew cognates, but evidently, no look-alikes turned up). Later “Of unknown origin” was added to the entry. And yet the word surfaced in the fifteenth century, in the full light of history. The attested forms are preyne, prane, pran, prawne, and, finally, prawn. If the word has an Old English antecedent (a suggestion along these lines has been made by an excellent scholar), it may have been prægn (with æ pronounced like a in Modern Engl. pram and g having the value of Modern Engl. y) or pragn. But no such form has been recorded, and even if it existed, we would have no clue to its origin.

Skeat had an idea of which he was never too fond. The Century Dictionary followed Skeat, and here is the relevant entry in full, with the abbreviations expanded: “…perhaps transposed from an unrecorded Old French parne, perne, a prawn (?), = Spanish perna, a flat shell-fish, = Old Italian perna, ”a nacre or narre-fish” (Florio), cf. diminutive parnochie, pl. “shrimps or prawne, fishes” (Florio), from Latin perno, a sea-mussel, so called from its shape, from perna (Old French perne), ham.” In the earlier editions of his dictionary Skeat compared the putative Romance etymon of prawn with the root of barnacle and traced Latin perna to Greek perna “a ham,” the word that caught Junius’s fancy. Later he expunged the comparison with barnacle. John Florio was the author of an early seventeenth-century dictionary of Italian and English.

The first edition of the OED had harsh words for Skeat’s tentative etymology (here and in the later quotation I have also expanded the abbreviations): “A suggested connexion with Latin perna, French perne ham, a ham-shaped shell-fish, a pinna, founded upon a blundered entry in Florio ‘parnocchie Shrimps or Prawne fishes’, (parnocchia (pl. -ie), being a variant of ‘pernocchia, a Nakre or Nacre (mispr. Narre-fish’) is opposed at once to the sense and the phonology.” Perhaps the Middle English word indeed has nothing to do with the words Florio listed, but parnochie is not so strongly opposed to prawn as regards “the sense and the phonology” that the comparison should be rejected out of hand.

Horse-mackerel and prawns by Ando Hiroshige.

In the last full edition of his dictionary, Skeat reproduced the early text of his entry but added British dialectal prankle “prawn” (Isle of Wight): “This suggests a connexion between prawn and prance; with a possible allusion to its bright appearance or quick movements. Cf. Jutland pranni ‘to strut,’ prannies ‘a showy person’.” The idea of a prancing, showy prawn arouses little enthusiasm. Yet in a different form it occurred to Eduard Mueller, Skeat’s predecessor, who found prankle in Peter Levens’s Manipulus vocabulorum, a 1570 English rhyming dictionary (it has been reprinted twice since that time). It seems that Skeat soon felt disillusioned with the prankle connection, because in the concise version of the last edition he said only: “Hardly (through a lost Anglo-French form) from Latin perna, a sea-mussel); cf. Middle Italian parnochhie, ‘a fish called shrimps or praunes;’ Florio.” Translated into plain English, this entry reads: “Origin unknown.” I suggest that two crumbs should be picked up from the debris: Middle Italian parnocchie “shrimp” (plural) and British dialectal prankle “prawn.” It won’t hurt to store up those forms for future reference.

Three more hypotheses should be mentioned for completeness’ sake. Hensleigh Wedgwood, at one time the main English etymologist, now almost forgotten, cited Old Engl. preon “bodkin”, whose cognates in other Germanic languages mean “awl; pin, peg” and which, in a roundabout way, may be related to the verb preen. “From the formidable spur with which the head is armed?” Ferdinand Holthausen, a distinguished German scholar, wrote countless articles about the origin of English words. Some of his conjectures found reflection in his etymological dictionary, seldom consulted outside Germany and almost devoid of value because of its extreme brevity. As early as 1904, he proposed to derive prawn from Old French preon (= Italian predone), from Latin (praedo “robber”; its accusative is praedonem, cf. Engl. predator). He thought that some prawns were parasites; hence robbers. I am not aware of any discussion of this idea.

Curiously, both Wedgwood and Holthausen traced prawn to preon, but one cited an Old English and the other an Old French form. Preon is not far removed from prægen, mentioned above. Finally, we should turn to Charles MacKay, the author of a dictionary in which he attempted (and failed) to trace numerous English words to Irish Gaelic. But his remark on prawn is interesting. He reasoned that since shrimp means “tiny thing,” perhaps prawn does too, and cited Gaelic pronn “small, trifling.” Pronn and prawn may be related, but, if they are, we are facing the dilemma familiar to us from the history of shrimp, namely, which sense is primary “small thing” or “small marine animal”? It would shed some light on the history of prawn if in our search for the etymology we stopped looking for words describing or naming shrimp, sea mussels, and so forth and concentrated on the sense “small.” But no useful word suggests itself, so that perhaps pronn is the figurative sense of prawn, a noun borrowed from English.

Although it is usually said that prawn has no cognates or even look-alikes, this is not quite true. Parnocchie and prankle are close enough. There are also some Frisian words cited by Gerhard E.H. Meier: purr, porr with their phonetic variants (they would have -n in the plural), and poorn “crab.” Since the Frisian words have no known etymology, we will not be closer to our goal if we decided that English borrowed prawn from Frisian. It looks as though for at least six hundred years seamen have used the word pran- ~ parn- denoting “prawn.” Its origin remains unknown, but it hardly goes back to Old English or Old French. We may be dealing with an obscure Mediterranean term, ultimately traceable to some substrate language of that area.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Over the next week, we are pairing excerpts from Jim Johnston’s From Slave Ship to Harvard with the historical comic strip “Flashbacks” by Patrick Reynolds. Together they tell the story of Yarrow Mamout. Read previous posts “A painter and his subject’s humble origins” and “A former slave in Georgetown.”

Cartoonist Patrick Reynolds' "Flashbacks." Used with permission. http://redrosestudio.com/.

Margaret also told Peale that Yarrow became the property of her husband Brooke upon the “decase” of Brooke’s father. She and Brooke had planned to build a larger house in Georgetown and move there when it was done. Brooke asked Yarrow to make the bricks for the house and out houses, promising he would set Yarrow free when the job was done. Peale wrote in his diary:

Yarrow completed his task, but his master died before he began the House, and the Widow knowing the design of her Husband, told Yarrow that as he had performed his duty, that she had made the necessary papers to set him free & now he was made free. . . . Yarrow made a great many Bows thanking his Mistress and said that ever Mistress wanted work done, Yarrow would work for her — but she said that she never called on Yarrow to work for her.

Peale did not mention what kind of house Margaret was living in, whether it was the older wood frame house or the brick house that her daughter, Christiana, and son-in-law, Benjamin Mackall, built on Mackall Square. Nor did he ask a question that would be useful today: What happened to the bricks? Were they sold? Did her daughter and her husband, the Mackalls, use them in their new house? Or did Yarrow use them for the cellar of his house, because there are old bricks on the property to this day? But then Peale was merely recording things in a diary to jog his memory later, if need be. He was not writing for posterity and publication.

Peale went back to Yarrow’s to finish the portrait. The two men talked while Peale painted. Peale later wrote in his diary what Yarrow told him about his financial misfortunes:

After Yarrow obtained his freedom he worked hard and saved his Money untill he got 100$ which put into an Old Gentlemans hands to keep for him — that person died and Yarrow lost his Money — however it did not disperit him, for he still worked as before and raised another 100$ which he put into the care of a young Merchant in Georgetown, and Yallow [sic] said young man no die — but this merchant became a Bankrupt & thus Yarrow mett a 2d heavy loss — yet not disperited he worked & saved a 3d Sum amounting to 200$, some friend to Yarrow advised him to Buy bank stock in the Columbia Bank — this advice Yarrow thought good for he said Bank no die.

This version of the story is remarkably similar to what Yarrow told David Warden several years earlier. Yarrow had not changed it in the retelling. In fact, the words “young man no die” and “Bank no die” appear in both Warden’s book and Peale’s diary. The two men were directly quoting Yarrow’s words.

The quotes from Yarrow also serve as a reminder that English was a second, third, or even fourth language for him and as evidence that he understood investing, business, and law. He was not just blindly following instructions. In law, corporations are said to have a perpetual existence, which Yarrow correctly and poetically simplified to “Bank no die.”

Peale could have empathized with Yarrow’s fierce determination in the face of financial difficulties. Memories of all the money problems Peale had as a young man must have come back to him. How much worse, Peale probably thought, to be broke when you were old — and black.

While Peale was working on the painting that second day, he and Yarrow were getting more comfortable with each other. Peale had the opportunity to ask Yarrow about his lifestyle and the secret to his longevity:

Yarrow owns a House & lotts and is known by most of the Inhabitants of Georgetown & particularly by the Boys who are often teazing him which he takes in good humor. It appears to me that the good temper of the [m]an has contributed considerably to longevity. Yarrow has been noted for sobriety & a chearfull conduct, he professes to be a mahometan, and is often seen & heard in the Streets singing Praises to God — and conversing with him he said man is no good unless his religion comes from the heart. He said he never stole one penny in his life — yet he seems delighted to sport with those in company, pretending that he would steal some thing — The Butchers in the Market can always find a bit of meat to give to yarrow — sometimes he will pretend to steal a piece of meat and put it into the Basket of some Gentleman, and then say me no tell if you give me half.

The acquaintance of him often banter him about eating Bacon and drinking Whiskey — but Yarrow says it is no good to eat Hog — & drink whiskey is very bad.

I retouched his Portrait the morning after his first setting to mark what rinkles & lines to characterise better his Portrait.

Of course, the best evidence of what Yarrow was like is the portrait itself. At age eighty-three, he was still a vigorous, confident, and cheerful man. It is a remarkable image for someone who was imprisoned on a slave ship from Africa through the Middle Passage to America, subjugated as a slave for forty-four years, and then twice penniless in his old age. Perhaps Peale was amazed that after all he had been through the man could still smile.

James H. Johnston, an attorney and journalist, has published extensively on national affairs, law, telecommunications, history, and the arts. His contributions include papers on local Washington, D.C., history, Yarrow Mamout, and an edition of The Recollections of Margaret Cabell Brown Loughborough. He is the author of From Slave Ship to Harvard: Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family.

Instead of entertaining readers with make-believe characters, cartoonist Patrick Reynolds draws history. His “Flashbacks” about historical figures and events are carried in Sunday papers around the country. Recently, Reynolds has retold the story of Yarrow Mamout, relying in part on articles by Jim Johnston. The Washington Post in Yarrow’s Georgetown and the Staten Island Advance for New Yorkers carried the series. Reynolds makes quality history accessible to young readers as well as to adults.

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Christian Lacroix, autumn/winter 99/00, photograph by Niall McInerney, Bloomsbury Fashion Photography Archive.

Christian Lacroix, autumn/winter 99/00, photograph by Niall McInerney, Bloomsbury Fashion Photography Archive.

Lacroix as a child loved drawing and sketching. He studied Art History at university; his goal at that time was to be a fashion curator. It was his relationship with boutique owner Francoise Rosenthiel that altered the direction of his career. Without this encouragement, we may have been devoid of his truly spectacular couture.

Christian Lacroix, autumn/winter 99/00, photograph by Niall McInerney, Bloomsbury Fashion Photography Archive.

If you would like to learn more about Christian Lacroix, find out about his life and work by visiting Berg Fashion Library and reading a limited time, free article.

Hollie Graham is an intern at Berg Publishers, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, and you can find their articles online at Berg Fashion Library.

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Each age finds new questions to ask about the Roman Empire. Edward Gibbon, the English historian dedicated to the study of the Roman Empire, chose to entitle his seminal masterpiece The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire because for him, as for others at the end of the eighteenth century, it was decline and fall that was the real puzzle. The Romans had, so it seemed, achieved so much of the what European states of the day still strived to create. There was peace, the rule of law, and some measure of religious toleration. He documented economic progress too, noting advances in navigation and agriculture and the growth of commerce. Gibbon and his peers knew very well that the authors of the Greek and Roman classics on which they have been brought up were not Enlightenment scholars. But they felt some affinity for the spirit of the age. “The love of letters, almost inseparable from peace and refinement, was fashionable among the subjects of Hadrian and the Antonines, who were themselves men of learning and curiosity.” So for the subjects of the last generation of European monarchs who did not quake before the French and American Revolutions, the real question was: “Where did it all go wrong?” What brought ancient Rome to its knees and let in the barbarians?

Things look different today. It’s not just that we are less confident about those Enlightenment values, and more sceptical about Roman toleration and the quality of Rome’s emperors. We live amidst the ruins of European and Soviet Empires, empires that rose and fell in the blink of a Roman eye. Most historians consider the British Empire was in its infancy in Gibbon’s lifetime which gives it a lifespan of two and half centuries at best. Depending on how you count it the Roman Empire lasted between one and half and two millennia. Our question today is not ‘why did it fall?’ but ‘why did it last so long?’

Greek General and historian, Polybius

The Romans, of course, had no idea. Or rather their answers no longer convince us. Most saw their success as resting on the virtue of men and the favour of the gods (and so their decline on the growth of vices and the loss of that favour). The first analyst of Roman imperialism — the Greek general and historian Polybius — thought the answer might lie in the comparative advantage given by the Roman constitution. Rome was a Goldilocks city, not too democratic, not too monarchical, with a well-ordered military system and a religion in which the right people were firmly in control. That sort of analysis appeals more to modern political science with its interest in institutions. Yet every single institution changed in the course of Rome’s long history.

One new approach to the question is to follow Polybius’ comparative instinct but cast our net more widely. Rome was just one of a number of vast empires that appeared around the globe in antiquity. It seems astonishing at first that Persian, Chinese, Indian, Macedonian, Arab, Inka and Aztec conquerors, to name just the most famous cases, could create imperial states thousands of miles across and sustain them for centuries. The European empires of the nineteenth century had gunpowder and telegraphs, ships that could cross the oceans and were powered by dynamic economies back home. Yet they began to collapse almost before they reached their greatest extent. Early empires in Europe and Asia depended on iron technology and animal traction. All their documents were painstakingly written out by hand. In the New World they even lacked iron, ploughs, and writing! Seeing the Roman Empire against this backdrop does not make it less remarkable, but it helps us understand better what went right for it.

To take just one example: every early empire had to survive the end of expansion. Many early empires – that of the Mongols for instance – expanded fantastically rapidly but failed to stabilize their rule and collapse almost at once. China’s first imperial dynasty, the Qin, lasted just one generation. The Persian Empire of Cyrus nearly collapsed in the second, until Darius the Mede seized power. In all the success stories we see the same basic strategies played out. Conquerors form alliances with elements of the defeated peoples, share some power and some profits, and bind them into the new empire with a cosmological vision that made their own self-interest seem in some sense noble. And suddenly the emperor Augustus’ investment in creating a tax system and filling the empire with monuments makes sense. Successful conquerors invest in infrastructure: the Persian Royal Road, the Great Canal of China….and the Roman roads. Fast communications meant knowing the enemy’s moves earlier, making the most of a smaller army, and provisioning the great capitals that arose at the heart of every empire.

There are differences of course between the early empires. Almost no other empire made the use (as Romans did) of slavery or citizenship; many had much less use for cities; some cultivated the scholars Gibbon identified with; some did without. Those contrasts too are revealing, helping explain some of Rome’s genuinely unique features. The trick, as always in comparative history, is picking the right comparisons. Rome in the Antonine Age was not quite like Enlightenment Europe, and it was not very like the British Empire either, for all that it was admired and taken as a model by both.

Greg Woolf is Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews. His research specialities include ancient literacy, the Roman economy, the sociology of ancient empires, ancient science, and Roman religion. His latest book, Rome: An Empire’s Story, publishes this month. See Greg Woolf discussing what’s new in Roman studies via our YouTube channel.

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Barack Obama proved this week that his understanding of public opinion and how timing can be used to massage the media’s storyline is head-and-shoulders above any campaigner we have known in modern history. Mitt Romney cannot begin to overestimate the gap between what Obama enacts by intuition and what he can barely perform by imitation.

On last Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” Joe Biden came out in support of same-sex marriage, an alleged gaffe that precipitated Obama’s announcement this week that his own thinking on the issue has evolved to the same effect. This then allowed Obama to tout his new position to the Hollywood crowd from whom he was raising $15 million on Thursday evening (that’s $13k per second of speech). Next morning, Obama wakes up to a story breaking about Mitt Romney bullying a presumptively gay classmate while in high school. Romney, for his part, is going to deliver the Commencement address at Liberty University this weekend to appeal to Christian conservatives. It is, believe it not, exactly in sync with the temporal frame and media storyline the Obama campaign has quite consciously created.

President Barack Obama addresses Indiana residents during a town halll style meeting at Concord High School February 9, 2009 in Elkhart, Indiana.

What a way to launch the Obama re-election campaign. The campaign opens with one message: this is the Obama Democrats voted for in 2008. Who would have thought that the politics of Hope would actually make a come-back after three years of compromises and disillusion? Hope is what excites young people, and with it, it will not be the record Obama will be running on, but an America liberals can be proud of. Because this is a state-by-state race to 270, Obama understands that the youth vote matters in North Carolina, Iowa, and Colorado — states that offer him an alternate route to victory other than the traditional way of Florida and Ohio.

The political dexterity of the Obama campaign in responding to changes on the ground can be seen in how they have turned the culture wars against Republicans. In 2004, the Bush administration used the culture war to rally the conservative base on the same-sex marriage issue, when a dozen or so states put constitutional amendments to define traditional marriage on the ballot. Today, Barack Obama is hoisting with that petard. Same-sex marriage is a losing issue for Republicans because while a majority of Republicans oppose same-sex marriage, a super-majority of Democrats support same-sex marriage. Culture wars are waged because their effect is asymmetric, and this time, it is benefiting the Democrats. Republicans cannot in good faith argue that the culture war is a distraction from real economic issues that Americans ought to be talking about because they were the first to wage it.

In just two electoral cycles since 2004, the Republican candidate who ought to be spending his time talking about the lackluster economy is being forced to address allegations about his actions as a high school kid. If there is a science to politics, Team Obama obviously understands its laws and equations.

Elvin Lim is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com and his column on politics appears here each week.

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Over the next week, we will be pairing excerpts from Jim Johnston’s From Slave Ship to Harvard with the historical comic strip “Flashbacks” by Patrick Reynolds. Together they tell the story of Yarrow Mamout. Read yesterday’s post “A painter and his subject’s humble origins.”

Cartoonist Patrick Reynolds' "Flashbacks." Used with permission. http://redrosestudio.com/.

Free African Americans were not uncommon in Georgetown. The 1800 census counted 277 free blacks, 1,449 slaves, and 3,394 white people. Tax assessments showed other blacks owned property in Georgetown. According to the 1815 assessment not only did “Negro Yarrow” own a house but so did “Negro Hercules, Semus husband.” His house was valued at $500 versus $200 for Yarrow’s. Brooke Beall’s ledger shows that he sold a “plough” and ozanburg cloth to “Negro Tom” and that “Negro Wilks” also had an account with him.

Chronicler David Warden mentions a Scotsman, Mr. Maine, who had a nursery for fruit trees and hedge thorns, such as pyrocantha, on the hill above Georgetown. Maine employed young blacks, whom he taught to read and write and instructed them “in moral duties.” Warden added: “Joseph Moor, a manumitted black, who lived with him [Maine] is now a respectable grocer in Georgetown.” As mentioned previously, Moor was a contemporary of Yarrow’s and, given his name, was probably also a Muslim.

Peale’s initial interest in Yarrow seemed to be scientific. Here, to Peale’s way of thinking, was someone who might prove men could live to the ripe old age of 140 and who might tell Peale how he did it. Just as he had painted the Negro slave James, who had turned from brown to white, Peale would paint Yarrow and then try to determine the secret of his longevity. There was more than science in Peale’s mind, though. Here was a black man of substance, one owning bank stock and a house. Peale might come away with a portrait to prove to the world that black people were the equal of whites if they had equal opportunities. Peale was quite proud of the portrait of the Reverend Absalom Jones, a black minister in Philadelphia, that his son Raphaelle had painted in 1810.

In his diary, Peale described how in late January he and Joseph Brewer went to Yarrow’s house to make the arrangements: “[T]hen went to Georgetown to pay a short visit to Mr. Joseph Brewer & Coll. [Colonel] Marburys families—and to know whether I could get an Old Negro named Yarrow to set to me, I went with Joseph Brewer to Yarrows House & engaged him to set the next morning.”

Peale worked at Yarrow’s house. It was not the best address in Georgetown. Few of the surrounding lots were developed. On one side of the property was the graveyard of the Presbyterian church. On another was a small creek. The portrait took Peale two days. At the end of the first day, he wrote: “I spend [spent] the whole day & not only painted a good likeness of him, but also the drapery and background.”

The next morning, before going back to Yarrow’s, Peale took time to investigate Yarrow’s background. This brief investigation turned up crucial information on Yarrow, which Peale saved in his diary for posterity: “However, to finish it more completely, I engaged him to set the next day — and early in the morning when [went] to see some of the family how [who] had knowledge of Him for many years & whose Ancesters had purchased him from the Ship that brought him from Afreca — a Mr. Bell in a Bank directed me to an ancient Widow who had set him free.”

This was in fact Thomas Brooke Beall, president of the Columbia Bank of Georgetown, and the “ancient Widow” was, of course, Margaret Beall, widow of Yarrow’s owner Brooke Beall. Naturally, the two Beall men were distant cousins. The name “Beall” was pronounced “Bell.” The bank president was a descendant of Ninian Beall, who supposedly was fond of explaining with gusto that his name should be pronounced like a “ringing bell.”

Peale’s main purpose in going to the bank was to confirm Yarrow’s claim. After all, in those days, stock ownership was something for wealthy men, like Brewer and Marbury. Yarrow was not in their league. His small wood frame house at the edge of a creek near the Presbyterian church’s graveyard was a far cry from Marbury’s elegant brick house overlooking the river.

James H. Johnston, an attorney and journalist, has published extensively on national affairs, law, telecommunications, history, and the arts. His contributions include papers on local Washington, D.C., history, Yarrow Mamout, and an edition of The Recollections of Margaret Cabell Brown Loughborough. He is the author of From Slave Ship to Harvard: Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family.

Instead of entertaining readers with make-believe characters, cartoonist Patrick Reynolds draws history. His “Flashbacks” about historical figures and events are carried in Sunday papers around the country. Recently, Reynolds has retold the story of Yarrow Mamout, relying in part on articles by Jim Johnston. The Washington Post in Yarrow’s Georgetown and the Staten Island Advance for New Yorkers carried the series. Reynolds makes quality history accessible to young readers as well as to adults.

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On this day in 1804, two Virginian explorers set out on a journey west in what would become the legendary Lewis and Clark Expedition. And in their footsteps, we can follow America’s expansion west.

Back in 1800 before the epic trip, the US population was 5.3 million. Ten years later, it increased to 7.2 million — a 36 percent increase. As shown in the following maps, this growth continued, and started moving west, adding territories and states along the way.

• 1800

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/lew-cl-1800.jpg

  Four years before Lewis and Clark begin their journey. US Census Data. Source: Social Explorer.

• 1810

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/lew-cl-1810.jpg

  Six years after Lewis and Clark complete their journey. US Census Data. Source: Social Explorer.

• 1820

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/lew-cl-1820.jpg

  US Census Data. Source: Social Explorer.

• 1830

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/lew-cl-1830.jpg

  US Census Data. Source: Social Explorer.

• 1840

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/lew-cl-1840.jpg

  US Census Data. Source: Social Explorer.

• 1850

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/lew-cl-1850.jpg

  US Census Data. Source: Social Explorer.

• 1860

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/lew-cl-1860.jpg

  US Census Data. Source: Social Explorer.

• 1870

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/lew-cl-1870.jpg

  US Census Data. Source: Social Explorer.

• 1880

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/lew-cl-1880.jpg

  US Census Data. Source: Social Explorer.

• 1890

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/lew-cl-1890.jpg

  US Census Data. Source: Social Explorer.

• 1900

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/lew-cl-1900.jpg

  US Census Data. Source: Social Explorer.

• 1910

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/lew-cl-1910.jpg

  US Census Data. Source: Social Explorer.

The population of the Northeast region — once the focal point of the US — shrank by 1.1 percent from 2000 to 2010. The Midwest also saw a decline in population (1.2 percent). Meanwhile, the South and the West grew, 1.5 percent and 0.8 percent respectively.

Sydney Beveridge is the Media and Content Editor for Social Explorer, where she works on the blog, curriculum materials, how-to-videos, social media outreach, presentations and strategic planning. She is a graduate of Swarthmore College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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In the fifty years since the publication of A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess’s dystopian fable remains by far the best-known of his more than 60 books. It also remains controversial and widely misunderstood: assailed for inciting adolescent violence (especially following Stanley Kubrick’s explicit 1971 film adaptation) or viewed as an anti-psychiatry treatise for presenting behavioural conditioning as an instrument of social control. But this aspect of the book needs to be seen within a broader context.

Let’s take a look at the anti-psychiatry case. The protagonist Alex — convicted of murder following a brutal home-invasion — is offered early release for submitting to a conditioning process called the Ludovico Technique.

Transferred to a “new white building” resembling a private clinic, Alex believes he has fooled the authorities into releasing him after he watches some “films” and receives vitamin shots. Then the tables are turned. The “vitamins” leave Alex groggy and increasingly sickened as he is subjected to an endless series of violent images while strapped into a chair, his eyelids pinned wide open. Wired up with electrodes, he decides the doctors “and the others in white coats” — including a technician callously “twiddling with the knobs and watching the meters” — are worse than the criminals they seek to reform. The clinicians, however, rationalize their actions as therapeutic and Alex’s reactions a sign of improvement: “You are being made sane, you are being made healthy.”

Alex discovers the injections are a form of aversion therapy, administered along with scenes of Nazi atrocities and (as an unintended side-effect) the final movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The doctors, unmoved by music except as “a useful emotional heightener,” dismiss his outrage. “Now we can be perfectly clear about it. We can get this stuff of Ludovico’s into your system in many different ways…. But the subcutaneous method is the best. Don’t fight against it.” Resistance is met by force, with burly attendants pinning him down while the nurse jabs him “real brutal and nasty. And then I was wheeled off exhausted to this like hell sinny [cinema] as before.”

Malcolm McDowell as Alex in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. Copyright Warner Bros and Hawk Films.

After the drugs are discontinued the forced viewings, and Alex’s nausea, persist. Once rendered physiologically incapable of all aggression, he is paraded before an audience of prison officials and politicians. His complaint, “Am I like just some animal or dog?” (echoing I.P. Pavlov’s conditioning studies) is dismissed with the reminder that he volunteered for the treatment and the results are “a consequence of your choice.” This so-called choice was merely a form that Alex signed without understanding the details; Burgess raises the question of informed consent. This concept, just emerging in the late 1950s, has been a hot-button issue in psychiatry ever since.

Political interest in behavioural programming is represented by the Minister of the Interior (whom Alex nicknames Minister of the Inferior, or — in a nod to the truncations of George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984 — Int Inf Min). The “Min” visits the prison to implement the treatment in order to fight crime “on a purely curative basis. Kill the criminal reflex.” He reappears as Alex’s “cure” is demonstrated and boasts to the media about government efforts to suppress “young hooligans and perverts and burglars.” In fact the police are now recruiting former hooligans to rough up whomever they choose and round up enemies of the Government, an agenda suggested by the Minister’s earlier comment about clearing the prisons for “political offenders.” This combination of political tyranny and abusive (Pavlovian!) conditioning in a future Britain where adolescent thugs speak a mixture of Cockney rhyming slang, archaisms, and anglicized Russian (“Propaganda. Subliminal penetration,” a doctor suggests) creates an additional sinister note that would have been especially potent in the Cold War era when A Clockwork Orange was published.

Yet the political angle shouldn’t be overplayed. Despite superficial parallels with French philosopher Michel Foucault’s assault on psychiatry as an agency of social control in Folie et déraison (Madness and Unreason), published in 1961, Burgess was no anti-psychiatry theorist. His interests lay elsewhere. John Burgess Wilson (1917–93) was a self-taught linguist and composer with a literary background. A lapsed Catholic, he remained drawn to such moral issues as good and evil, free will, and social control. A full-time writer and critic since the late 1950s, Burgess was eulogized in The Times as “a great moralist.”

Of equal interest here is the actual psychiatric backdrop to Clockwork in 1960s Britain. Psychiatry was in the middle of dramatic change. Mental hospitals were reforming, bringing in open-door policies and putting the nurses in jeans rather than whites. A series of highly-effective physical treatments had been introduced in the 1930s — insulin coma, chemical convulsion, and electroconvulsive therapy — and by the 1950s ECT was in common use. The optics of these interventions were horrible, as Burgess clearly recognized, but they made patients better and didn’t “torture” or “brainwash” them as anti-psychiatrists (or the entirely fictional Ludovico regime) alleged.

Beginning in the 1950s, a series of revolutionary drug treatments arose: antipsychotics, antidepressants and anxiolytics. So widespread was their use that, by the time Burgess penned Clockwork, they had become the subjects of cocktail party chitchat. Medical psychotherapy, which had ruled the roost in previous decades, was wobbling (the Brits never had much interest in Freud’s psychoanalysis) and was about to be pushed out the door. All these innovations lent themselves marvelously to being parodied, sent up, and pulled down by scornful novelists.

That’s the social backstory. In the light of Burgess’s own backstory, the central message in A Clockwork Orange is voiced by the Prison Chaplain, who questions whether it is better for a man to choose evil rather than having “the good imposed upon him,” and ultimately leaves the prison service to speak out against the Ludovico Treatment. The key image is thus that of the title (and dissident F. Alexander’s treatise), which defines “a clockwork orange” as “The attempt to impose upon man… laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation.”

Edward Shorter is Jason A. Hannah Professor in the History of Medicine and Professor of Psychiatry in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto. He is the author of numerous books on psychiatric history including A Historical Dictionary of Psychiatry and Before Prozac. Susan Bélanger is Research Coordinator with the History of Medicine Program, University of Toronto, and a long-standing fan of speculative fiction.

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Over the next week, we will be pairing excerpts from Jim Johnston’s From Slave Ship to Harvard with the historical comic strip “Flashbacks” by Patrick Reynolds. Together they tell the story of Yarrow Mamout.

Cartoonist Patrick Reynolds' "Flashbacks." Used with permission. http://redrosestudio.com/.

By the time he met Yarrow Mamout in January 1819, Charles Willson Peale was wealthy, famous, respected, and aging. In addition to being an artist and portrait painter, he had served as an army officer during the Revolutionary War and a state legislator in Pennsylvania. On top of this, he was a scientist, inventor, diarist, museum director, polymath, and entrepreneur. Peale brought all of this not only to his decision to paint Yarrow but also to the artistic choices he made in capturing Yarrow on canvas, an image that mixes Peale’s life experiences and views and Yarrow’s visage and personality.

Peale’s origins were humble. His father, also named Charles, had been born in England. As a young man, the elder Peale had taken financial liberties that resulted in conviction for embezzlement and a sentence of death. He secured the option of emigrating to America instead. Like so many others, such as Ninian Beall and Yarrow Mamout, the father of the great artist came to Maryland more or less involuntarily as a convict.

After completing his sentence of servitude, the senior Peale became a schoolteacher and married Margaret Triggs in 1740. Charles Willson was their first child, the middle name coming from relatives in England. The boy was born in 1741 in Queen Anne’s County, Maryland, near the town of Centreville on the Eastern Shore, a peninsula, connected to the mainland at the north, but separated from the rest of the colony by the Chesapeake Bay. After young Charles was born, his family moved to nearby Chestertown.

Peale’s father died when Charles was only eight years old, leaving the family without a breadwinner. His mother therefore decided to move to the larger, colonial capital of Annapolis on the west side of the Chesapeake and take up work as a seamstress. There were only 150 or so houses in the town, but it was livelier than Centreville or Chestertown.

The family was timely assisted by a young Annapolis lawyer named John Beale Bordley. He had once been a student of Peale’s father. The elder Peale had been like a father to Bordley, and so, for the rest of his life, Bordley returned the favor by helping Charles Willson.

As chance would have it, then, Peale was living in Annapolis in June 1752 when Yarrow was brought there as a slave aboard the Elijah. There is no record on the matter, but one can imagine the boys of the town going to the harbor as soon as the slave ship dropped anchor. Other memories of life in Annapolis and the wonders that came in from the sea did stick in Peale’s head. For example, years later he fondly recalled a boyhood experience of hearing a newly arrived ship’s captain read from a foreign newspaper: “The manly expressive sweetness of his voice seems still to vibrate in my ears even at this distant period — and I have enjoyed the remembrance of it a thousand times.”

James H. Johnston, an attorney and journalist, has published extensively on national affairs, law, telecommunications, history, and the arts. His contributions include papers on local Washington, D.C., history, Yarrow Mamout, and an edition of The Recollections of Margaret Cabell Brown Loughborough. He is the author of From Slave Ship to Harvard: Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family.

Instead of entertaining readers with make-believe characters, cartoonist Patrick Reynolds draws history. His “Flashbacks” about historical figures and events are carried in Sunday papers around the country. Recently, Reynolds has retold the story of Yarrow Mamout, relying in part on articles by Jim Johnston. The Washington Post in Yarrow’s Georgetown and the Staten Island Advance for New Yorkers carried the series. Reynolds makes quality history accessible to young readers as well as to adults.

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May 14, 1948

Israel declares statehood

Late in the afternoon of May 14, 1948, a group of Jewish settlers fulfilled a long-cherished dream and declared, as of midnight that night, the existence of the state of Israel. The announcement created the first Jewish state in nearly two millennia — and outraged the Palestinian people and their Arab allies.

Theodor Herzl

The Zionists’ dream received a boost in 1917, when Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour of Great Britain endorsed the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine. The Balfour Declaration also held that any Jewish state would not “prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Five years later, the idea of a Jewish state was incorporated into the League of Nations agreement creating a British mandate in Palestine.

The Holocaust intensified the move for a Jewish state; six million European Jews were lost during World War II. Meanwhile, a weakened Britain was ready to end its role in Palestine. In 1947, it announced that the mandate would terminate on May 15 of the following year. That November, the United Nations General Assembly voted to create separate Jewish and Palestinian states in the area.

Early in 1948, fighting between Jews and Palestinians broke out. In the midst of this conflict, on the eve of the British departure, a group called the Jewish People’s Council declared Israeli statehood.

Hours later, President Harry Truman issued a statement recognizing the Jewish state. On May 15, as Israel came into existence, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria issued a formal declaration in opposition and launched an attack, beginning the first of several Arab-Israeli wars in the region.

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On this day in 1796, British doctor Edward Jenner administered the first smallpox vaccination to James Phipps, an eight-year-old boy. To mark the anniversary, we speak with Martin S. Hirsch, MD, FIDSA. Dr. Hirsch is editor-in-chief of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, professor of infectious diseases and immunology at the Harvard School of Public Health, and a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital.

What impact did Edward Jenner’s accomplishments with smallpox vaccination have on the world’s response to the disease and to infectious diseases in general?

Jenner discovered the basic principle that one could become immunized against certain transmissible infectious agents by previous exposure to related agents. In this case, he used cowpox to protect individuals against the highly lethal smallpox. It is remarkable that this advance came without any knowledge of virology or immunology, although it did build on earlier experiences with variolation, a procedure whereby material from actual smallpox lesions was used to protect others against serious disease; variolation had been employed both in England and America during the early 18^th century, prior to Jenner’s monumental work. Jenner’s careful studies established the framework for the entire field of vaccinology, which has dramatically changed the world for the better. Over the past 100 years, not only has smallpox been eliminated from the globe, enormous progress has been made towards reducing the world burden of other infections, including poliomyelitis, measles, mumps, and rubella, among others.

I understand you saw a case of smallpox while in India in the 1960s, making you one of the few living US physicians today to have seen patients with the disease. How did that experience affect your understanding of smallpox and its impact?

While in medical school in 1963, I was fortunate enough to spend seven months in Calcutta, India. While there, not only did I see a patient with smallpox, I was able to spend a fascinating evening traveling from door to door with a group of public health workers who were vaccinating susceptible individuals in order to help eradicate smallpox virus from India. Fortunately, these efforts succeeded, as well described in the book by Dr. William Foege, House on Fire: The Fight to Eradicate Smallpox. The major lesson I learned from these activities is that with organized and cooperative international efforts, even highly infectious agents with great public health impact can successfully be controlled. Let us hope that similar approaches can be successfully mobilized against current scourges, such as malaria and HIV.

How much of a concern should smallpox be to the world today, and does it still pose a threat to public health?

Although no cases of human smallpox have been reported in decades, there remains a risk that residual stocks of variola (smallpox) virus in the wrong hands could pose a threat to humankind. We know of existing stocks at the CDC in the USA and in Russia; we don’t know if there are virus stocks stored secretly elsewhere. There have been ongoing discussions for many years regarding disposal of known smallpox virus stocks in the world, with arguments made either to eliminate them in order to reduce the risk of transmission, or to keep them in order to make better antiviral drugs or vaccines in case of virus reemergence. This issue has been debated by the WHO and the US Institute of Medicine, among other groups, but no resolution has yet emerged.

What important research advances have been made regarding this disease recently? Is there still more to learn?

Smallpox vaccines are still administered to some recipients, e.g., military populations in certain parts of the world. These vaccines have risks of their own, particularly in immunocompromised populations. Considerable research is ongoing to understand the mechanisms of immunity to variola virus and to prepare safer vaccines against it. In addition, work is underway to develop safer and more effective antivirals against the virus, as well as against related viruses (e.g., monkeypox) that still pose a problem to populations in certain parts of the world. The importation of monkeypox viruses to the US was demonstrated several years ago, and led to numerous cases in our country, reminding us that continued vigilance is necessary to prevent new infections in the years ahead.

Dr. Hirsch is editor-in-chief of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, professor of infectious diseases and immunology at the Harvard School of Public Health, and a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital.

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The progress of gay rights is again subject to political warfare in the United States. Despite his recent proclamation in support of gay marriage, many have been disappointed by the pace in which President Obama has addressed issues of sexuality equality: particularly regarding the length of time it took to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the lack of progress on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. This sentiment is flamed by the passage of homophobic legislation, with 38 states prohibiting marriage equality — the most recent being North Carolina just this week.

Regardless of his motivation, Obama’s recent support of marriage is made possible because attitudes toward homosexuality are improving rapidly in the United States. In 2010, a Gallup Poll found that, for the first time, a majority of American’s (53%) support gay marriage. Significantly, there is evidence that change is occurring among social conservatives too. For example, a 2011 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that a majority of Catholics and 44% of young evangelicals aged between 18 and 29 support gay marriage.

A key component of changing attitudes appears to be age (the report shows a 20 percentage point difference between 18-29 year olds and those aged 65 and older). A recent survey of over 200,000 first-time college undergraduates across 270 colleges in the United States found that 71.3% of first-year students support same-sex marriage; a figure that would be even higher if it accounted for those supporting civil partnerships.

In order to understand why homophobia has been such a potent political issue, it is first vital to recognise the cultural components of homophobia. Rather than conceiving it as individual disgust of homosexuality or personal dislike of same-sex relations, social conditions heavily influence levels of homophobia. Indeed, sociologist Eric Anderson highlights that the 1980s were the apex of homophobia precisely because social and political events combined to produce an exceptionally hostile anti-gay climate.

The 1980s were particularly homophobic for three reasons. First, the AIDS crisis meant that an already marginalised group became incredibly stigmatised. AIDS was labelled the ‘gay disease’ and gay and bisexual men were blamed for its spread to the heterosexual community. This, combined with right-wing politicians eager to use homophobia to their electoral advantage, completed the politicisation of homosexuality. Evangelical Christians embraced this social prejudice to argue that a moral decline had occurred in America, ensuring that the bigotry they fostered was channelled into fundraising for their churches.

Yet the social nature of homophobia means that such attitudes can change. Evidence started to emerge in the mid-1990s as more liberal politicians took power and it became possible to voice pro-gay attitudes without being ostracised. Furthermore, the growth of the Internet corresponded with an upswing in gay visibility on television and in the press. As such, media representations have become increasing positive: from Will & Grace in the late 1990s to Modern Family today.

This is not to argue that equality has been achieved in the United States. For instance, recent reports from the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) show that many LGBT youth continue to have negative experiences in schools. However, there is cause for optimism with respect to progress in the United States, particularly if we look at what is occurring across the Atlantic.

There has been a sea-change in attitudes toward homosexuality in Britain. Research by gay rights charity Stonewall finds that 87% of British citizens would be comfortable with their MP being gay, and 86% would be comfortable if a close friend was gay. This is supported by the most recent data from the British Social Attitudes Survey, documenting that only 29% of adults think same-sex relationships are wrong, down from 46% in 2000.

Crucially, just like the United States, the most positive attitudes toward homosexuality are found in youth. For example, in The Declining Significance of Homophobia: How Teenage Boys are Redefining Masculinity and Heterosexuality, I document a radical shift in the attitudes of 16-18 year old boys in three educational settings. Here, not only is homophobic language absent, it is stigmatised by the male students. Accordingly, we need to pay close attention to the attitudes of younger generations in the United States to fully understand trends regarding homosexuality.

Yes, there are still battles to be fought, and it is not necessarily the case that the United States will mirror the developments in Britain. But there is room for optimism. The debates occurring in America have shifted from being a mere part of a homophobic culture to one where the lived experiences of LGBT people are rapidly improving. And yes, one where even the President supports their right to marry.

Mark McCormack is a qualitative sociologist at Brunel University in England. His research focuses on the changing nature of masculinities among British youth. In The Declining Significance of Homophobia: How Teenage Boys are Redefining Masculinity and Heterosexuality, he examines how decreased homophobia has positively influenced the way in which young men bond emotionally and interact in school settings. You can follow him on Twitter @_markmccormack.

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Portrait with oils of Gabriel Fauré by John Singer Sargent (~1889). Source: The Paris Museum of Music.

Verlaine’s poem was inspired by the paintings of Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), innovator of the fêtes galantes genre. The scenes in these paintings are not specific to any one time or place — contemporary figures are placed in theatrical commedia dell’arte costume (as in Sous un habit Mezzetin) or in settings modeled after 16th-century paintings. Verlaine, in using Watteau’s paintings as inspiration, removes them even further from any particular setting.

He called the resulting collection of poems Fêtes galantes and included “Clair de lune” among them. The poem begins, “Your soul is a chosen landscape,” and Verlaine populates that landscape with Watteau’s familiar lovers, masqueraders, and musicians under the “calm moonlight, sad and beautiful.”

Fauré’s setting of Clair de lune takes its aesthetic from cues in the works of both Verlaine and Watteau. The song can sound surprisingly classical in its restraint. The left hand accompaniment consists almost entirely of unsustained, arpeggiated chords separated by eighth rests, while the right hand plays the fluid melody in a texture with ties to Classical song traditions. The singer’s line acts almost as an obbligato line in what could easily have been a piece for solo piano. The voice enters unexpectedly in the middle of a melody begun in the piano and fades out before the end of the song on the dominant, allowing the piano to play the final cadence alone. These unexpected elements, combined with frequent tonal shifts, a mixture of major and minor modes, and nuanced harmonies illustrate Fauré’s innovation as a composer and give the song a dream-like quality that evokes Verlaine’s poem, the paintings that inspired it, and the light of the moon that inspired all three.

Clair de lune is a perfect example of Fauré’s commitment both to musical progress and to the text of his songs. It is simultaneously modern and reminiscent of the music written a hundred years before his time, and its subject, the moon, continues to fascinate us as it did Fauré.

Listen to Fauré’s Clair de lune sung by Véronique Gens.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jessica Barbour is the editorial assistant for Grove Music Online. You can read more about Fauré, Verlaine, and Gens with a subscription to Grove Music Online, and you can learn about Watteau in Grove Art Online.

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May 11, 330

Constantine dedicates Constantinople

Six years before, the emperor had ordered the building of a vast new city. On May 11, 330, construction was sufficiently complete for that city to be dedicated. The Emperor Constantine took part in a solemn mass at St. Eirene, his newly built church, that dedicated the new city to the Virgin Mary. He issued an edict that declared the city New Rome, or the Second Rome, capital of the empire. Within a hundred years, though, the city came to be known by another name — Constantinople.

Colossal statue of Constantine: head, 313-324 AD in the Musei Capitolini, Rome. Photo by Jean-Christophe Benoist. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Echoing the old Rome, the new capital was built on seven hills. A key new structure was the Milion, a monument that would serve as the point from which all imperial distances were measured. Crowning this structure was a holy relic — a piece of wood thought to be from the cross on which Jesus was crucified.

Constantine had an oval forum built entirely of marble. In its central plaza, he erected a 100-foot-tall porphyry column on a glittering marble base. Atop the column was placed a statue of the Greek god Apollo — his head replaced by a likeness of the emperor.

Constantine expanded the old hippodrome where chariot races were held and built an extensive palace as well. He also built stout walls, but these were eventually replaced, as his city swelled in population and needed to grow.

Thousands of workers had labored years to complete these buildings and to decorate them with treasures taken from sites around the Mediterranean. They enjoyed the forty days of festivities that followed the city’s dedication. Then they went back to work, finishing Constantine’s new capital.

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The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. In this week’s VSI column, we give you Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series!

Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction

By Patricia Aufderheide

What happens to documentary when media goes interactive? It’s not always a welcome question. Documentarians aren’t necessarily thrilled at the idea of someone poking at their precious work on a smartphone, rather than settling into a seat at a theater or on a couch.

But they’re going to have to get used to it. Media users want to do more than just watch these days. Unless it’s in 3-D or otherwise dazzling, we increasingly think we want to play with our media. Go ahead, revisit your childhood haunts at The Wilderness Downtown.

As discussions at the leading industry conference South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, TX showed this March, early documentary adopters are leaping to the challenge. With HTML5 and other tools coming to make video more seamless on the web, interactive documentary is almost here.

Here are some of the lessons those early adopters learned while hanging out on the bleeding edge of change:

1)      Story is key.

Documentary is about its characters undergoing a transformation of some kind. Documentary takes users on an emotional journey. If you lose the story, you lose the user. So don’t let the bells, whistles, coding challenges, and new apps lead you away from the core obligation to tell a story. Here’s Mozilla’s Ben Moskowitz on Tribeca’s blog: “The Pixar artists on Up were inspired by the challenges of rendering thousands of balloons with rainbows and refraction techniques using computer graphics. But the movie succeeded because those technologies helped captivate viewer imaginations and better tell the story. And, frankly, all the beautiful rainbows in the world won’t make up for the lack of a strong story.”

What’s the best storytelling platform of all time? As Lance Weiler, a pioneer in interactive work and creator of Pandemic 1.0 (which debuted at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival), put it in a word, “Christmas.” It’s got a built in narrative, and people endlessly rework that narrative and interact with it to tell their own stories with it.

2)      Don’t think technology, think experience.

James Burns of Zeega doesn’t want the documentarian to get bogged down in coding challenges. There are people for that, and Zeega’s among the tools (Popcorn is another) they can use. Where do you want people to go, and what would you like them to do? That’s the biggest challenge, to him.

It’s not so easy to think of what kind of experience you’d like people to have. Documentarians are used to making longform stories in an inert format; gamers are used to building systems. The overlapping edges of that Venn diagram are still in the first stages of exploration. One cool example: The National Film Board of Canada’s Interactive division nurtured into existence Bear 71, which lets users experience an ever-more-constrained-and-surveilled environment from animals’ perspective.

3)      Expect to pioneer.

The new opportunities to engage viewers and tell stories with new possibilities and resources also mean solving problems people didn’t use to have. Take the challenges facing the makers of 18 Days in Egypt.  Jigar Mehta and Yasmine Elayat are developing a crowd-sourced documentary that retells, using smartphone video and photos, Twitter, and other media taken at the moment by participants, the story of the Egyptian Spring. Mehta faced the problem of combining five minutes of personal testimony about a moment in the Egyptian Spring with 15 seconds of video from that very moment. How to use both in the same scene? They foregrounded the testimony and used a looped version of the video as background. Developer Brian Chirls, who worked with them, said that open video today is in a similar position to film before D.W. Griffith worked out the basics of narrative editing; creators are still working out the basic formal strategies that soon will be completely obvious.

Pioneering can be painful, too, as Luisa Dantas noted. Her film Land of Opportunity, about rebuilding New Orleans post-Katrina, was completed before she began work on an open video platform that allows educators, organizers and urban development experts recombine the narratives for their own purposes. As her demo shows, there’s plenty of promise when you have a rich database and lots of potential users, but she struggles with the problems of working with home-made technology that is still being iterated. “Some of this is still a dark art,” she said.

The hardest part for her, as for many documentarians, is realizing that in the interactive world, iteration is key. You need to learn from feedback what users want, and how they want to get it. The software designers’ cliché, “Always be shippin’” (keep putting product out), violates what every documentarian knows: Keep your work under wraps until you’re ready for release. Of course, both rules are appropriate for their environments.

How to negotiate the new world? One way is to simultaneously develop several platforms. That’s what Six to Start, the makers of the BBC documentary series The Code, about mathematics, did. They developed a series of three traditional documentaries with a classic narrator (Marcus du Sautoy), four Flash games, and a real-life treasure hunt. User engagement generated thousands of photos, videos and even 3-D sculptures made by users, as well as a Wiki page with more than a hundred thousand viewers. The different parts of the project appear to have fed interest in the others.

Interactive documentary is still on the bleeding edge of change, and the longform, passive viewing experience isn’t going away either. But for documentarians who want their work to touch and change the people they reach, interactivity is moving close to being an off-the-shelf option.

Patricia Aufderheide is University Professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C. and director of the Center for Social Media there. She is the author of, among others, Documentary: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2007)She has received numerous journalism and scholarly awards, including the Preservation and Scholarship award in 2006 from the International Documentary Association, a career achievement award in 2008 from the International Digital Media and Arts Association, and the Woman of Vision Award from Women in Film and Video (DC) in 2010. She received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Minnesota.

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Are we lonely because of Facebook? For the last few weeks, sociologists, technologists, and other pundits have debated this question. Facebook’s critics claim the technology isolates its users, while its defenders seem unwilling to concede that their social networking results in loneliness. Largely absent from the conversation has been the historical perspective, which sheds important light on the topic. When one takes the long view, it becomes clear that Facebook has not made us lonely, for Americans have been lonely for at least two centuries, and have often struggled to find ways to assuage these feelings.

Facebook is a symptom, not a cause, of this enduring American social problem, which springs, most fundamentally, from our individualistic ideology. Our status updates, our Instagram photos, our tweets, are but the latest balms for our loneliness, just as letters, postcards, and daguerreotypes sent through the mail were the remedies of choice in the nineteenth century. While the technology we use to cope with isolation has changed dramatically, the more significant transformation lies in the fact that we are much more reticent about discussing our loneliness than our forebears ever were. The vehement denials of loneliness by Facebook users underscore this point.

In the past, many Americans showed a greater willingness to admit to emotions like loneliness, homesickness, and sadness than they do now. Today, we are expected to be cheerful, self-reliant, and resourceful, but these expectations — while developing in the nineteenth century — did not take full root until the twentieth. It once was acceptable for Americans to display their melancholy publicly. Despite our national mythology about the rugged adventurousness of nineteenth-century pioneers, prospectors, soldiers, and cowboys, these men and women often expressed pain at their isolation and discomfort with individualism. In 1843, Elias Lothrop left Durham, Maine in hopes of finding prosperity in Chicago. He wrote his wife, “I have many lonesome hours but that is to be expected.” As the letter continued however, Lothrop made clear that sometimes he found his loneliness too much, and longed for home “Sometimes I think that I will give up all my ambitious ideas of trying to make money and content myself at home and enjoy what little I have among my friends.” Such public admissions of sadness and isolation were common — it was not unusual for men to cry in public when they heard mournful songs, like “Home, Sweet Home,” which focused on the pain of separation. Learning to be an individualist was no easy lesson to master.

Even the prominent were willing to admit to loneliness; there was no shame in it yet. When Clarence Darrow moved to Chicago in the late nineteenth century, he was overcome by a sense of his own isolation. He recalled:

I rented a very modest apartment and took desk room in an office…. From the very first a cloud of homesickness always hung over me. There is no place so lonely to a young man as a great city where he has not intimates or companions. When I walked along the street I scanned every face I met to see if I could not perchance discover some one from Ohio. Sometimes I would stand on the corner of Madison and State Streets — ‘Chicago’s busiest corner’ — watching the passersby for some familiar face; as well might I have hunted in the depths of the Brazilian forest.

Well into the twentieth century, migrants like Darrow who had left home and family in search of profits had similar experiences. In Los Angeles, the cultural critic Carey McWilliams, describing life in Los Angeles, sketched a portrait of a town beset by a mood of ‘aching loneliness—the really terrible loneliness –that for years has been so clearly apparent in the streets and parks, the boarding houses and hotels, the cafeterias and ‘lonely clubs’ of Los Angeles.” Much of that loneliness came from the fact that so many residents in L.A. were recent arrivals from somewhere else.

However, in our contemporary society, which prizes individualism and shows little patience for the emotionally needy in our midst, it has become taboo to be lonely. Instead, we must be cheerfully independent. As Philip E. Slater explained in The Pursuit of Loneliness, “Independence training in American society begins almost at birth—babies are held and carried less than in most societies and spend more time in complete isolation — and continues… throughout childhood and adolescence. When a child is admonished to be a ‘big boy’ or ‘big girl’ this usually means doing something alone or without help…. Signs of independence are usually rewarded.” Given such training, psychiatrists have noted how difficult it is for Americans to admit their need for emotional connections because they believe such a need is a sign of dependency and inadequacy. The psychiatrists Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz described the resistance they encountered when trying to talk with their patients about loneliness. They treated a large number of people who believed they were depressed but who were in fact lonely. Yet few were willing to give their melancholy that name. The psychiatrists concluded, “Talking about loneliness in America is deeply stigmatized; we see ourselves as a self-reliant people who do not whine about neediness.”

The result of such ideology is that we often keep quiet about our loneliness, our need for connection—more so today than a century ago. It seems unlikely that anyone would today join a “lonely club.” To do so would broadcast a discomfort with solitary individualism, and make all too apparent a vulnerability that seems needy and, to some, pathetic. We have internalized the emotional style of individualism, and learned to suppress the feelings that so often dog us. That doesn’t mean they aren’t there; it just means we can’t talk about them — which may make us even lonelier.

Susan J. Matt is Presidential Distinguished Professor of History at Weber State University, in Ogden, Utah. She is the author of Homesickness: An American History. Read her previous post “Home for the holidays” on the OUPblog.

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For Americans in 1869, the driving of the golden spike, which joined the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads at Promontory Point, Utah, on May 10, carried a significance similar to that of the first moon landing for a later generation. It marked the conquest not only of distance, but of a landscape that was as alien to most Americans as the moon. It bound together the far-flung ends of a nation still licking its wounds from a bloody and divisive civil war. Travelers could now go from New York to California via a series of trains in seven days, a journey that earlier took 35 days across the fever-infested Isthmus of Panama or five months for the perilous sail around Cape Horn. In the process they could also glimpse the West that few of them had ever seen and was already an American mythology in the making.

This longest ribbon of iron ever built by man across the harshest but most spectacular terrain in the nation reflected the dawn of a new age of industrial progress, in which the reunited states were sure to excel. Visions of settlements, towns, cities, farms, mines, and trade with the Far East beckoned to a people eager to fulfill them at almost any cost. Fabulous riches awaited from industry, trade, and commerce. More railroads soon followed, and eventually five more transcontinental lines were built along with thousands of miles of track laid by other roads. For more than another half a century the railroads remained the biggest and most dominant industry in the nation.

Source: National Archives and Records Administration

Americans reached out toward a world larger than they had ever imagined, confident of making it smaller through familiarity. “We are the youngest of the peoples,” bragged the New York Herald, “but we are teaching the world how to march forward.” March forward they did, and not alone. That same year another mammoth project, the Suez Canal, opened for traffic. Distant shores whose wealth and promise had tantalized imaginations since the days of Marco Polo now seemed within reach. Work was also underway to connect New York, London, Calcutta, and Canton by telegraph. “Commercially it places the United States in contact with Asia,” added the Herald, but even more, “internally it will make North America sparkle with cities; politically, as a national binding force it is invaluable.”

What of the railroads that met on that memorable day? Although the railroads endured some hard, often desperate times after 1920, they reconfigured themselves to become a strong and prosperous industry driven by fresh ideas and technologies. Today the rail industry is dominated by four giant systems, two east of the Mississippi River and two west of it. Of the four, the largest and the only one that still possesses its historic name is the Union Pacific. Its partner at Promontory, the Central Pacific, was later absorbed by the Southern Pacific Railroad, which in 1996 was taken over by the Union Pacific. Today the UP still owns and operates what became famous as the Overland Route. In that sense the driving of the golden spike still resonates today in an age when the railroads bear scant resemblance to their earlier selves.

Maury Klein is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Rhode Island and the author of many books, including Union Pacific, The Reconfiguration: America’s Greatest Railroad from 1969 to the Present ; Rainbow’s End: The Crash of 1929 ; and The Power Makers.

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In 1955 Margaret Knight became the most hated woman in Britain. She was vilified and demonised in virtually every British newspaper, and thousands of letters attacking her were sent by ordinary Britons to the BBC, to the papers and to her personally. Parents wrote fearing for the safety of their children, bishops and priests criticised her impudence, whilst well-known authors like Dorothy L Sayers castigated her ignorance. Hounded by journalists and pursued by photographers, the smiling image of Mrs Knight in her ‘Sunday-best hat’ and coat appeared in most newspapers. She was the nation’s number one ‘folk devil’ of 1955.

What had she done to deserve this? Had she molested children? Was she exposed as a spy and a traitor? Had she sold secrets to the Russians? None of these. What she had done was broadcast two thirty-minute talks on the BBC Home Service in January 1955 in which she called for children to be educated about morality without religion. She was a psychology lecturer at Aberdeen University, and spoke in simple terms of how as a humanist and atheist she believed that there were better ways of leading children to an ethical life than by drilling religious irrationality into their young minds. Such views are commonplace now in the twenty-first century and, whilst not without controversy, they are routinely debated by protagonists and opponents in the media. But in 1955, things were very different.

Margaret Knight was the first female atheist to be allowed to broadcast her views in Britain. A few male philosophers had appeared on radio to argue for atheism, notably Bertrand Russell in the late 1940s. Indeed, Britain in mid century was renowned for the depth of her atheist or agnostic stars, including philosophers A.J. Ayer and Stephen Toulmin, the novelist E.M. Forster, the historian A.J.P. Taylor, and scientists like Jacob Bronowski (who would go on in the late 1960s to make the acclaimed TV series The Ascent of Man).

So why then was Margaret Knight so controversial? Why did she achieve a banner front page story in the popular Sunday Graphic, headed ‘THE UNHOLY MRS KNIGHT’, in which it was said that the BBC had ‘allowed a fanatic to rampage along the air lanes, beating up Christianity with a razor and a bicycle-chain’?

First, it was culturally shocking in the 1950s for a woman to express atheist views. This was a decade in which a woman was expected to be chaste in singlehood and devoted in marriage to nurturing children and homemaking. To advocate scientific humanism went contrary to all expectations of what a woman should stand for. This was nowhere so well put as in the Sunday Graphic where, beside a photograph of Knight, it wrote: “Don’t let this woman fool you. She looks ― doesn’t she? ― just like a typical housewife: cool, comfortable, harmless. But Mrs Knight is a menace. A dangerous woman. Make no mistake about that.” The Anglican Bishop of Coventry, Dr Neville Gorton, was quoted in the Daily Express under a banner headline, ‘BISHOP CHECKS Mrs KNIGHT’: “This bossy female,” he called her “this brusque, so-competent, bossy female,” adding: “She seemed a very simple-minded female to me.” (He was later forced to make an apology, admitting this was an “unchristian remark.”) Many newspapers, including the News Chronicle and the Express, made much of the fact Knight was unqualified to talk about children’s education because she was childless, or ‘barren’ as one of them put it.

Second, there was intellectual snobbery at work in mid-century. Just as the prosecution in the Lady Chatterley trial some five years’ later would suggest it improper for a gentleman’s servants and wives to read salacious novels, so it was argued that working-class people were ill-equipped intellectually to handle atheist views. The columnist Cyril Aynsley in the Daily Express wrote that “if Mrs Knight has torn a hole of doubt in 10,000 and more beliefs by her one broadcast, then it might be impossible to patch that hole.” In any event, as the Revd Dr Donald Soper said, Knight’s talk “consisted mainly of undigested bits of moral philosophy, bristling with mistakes.”

Third, the mid-1950s was the height of the Cold War. A Daily Telegraph leader noted that the “BBC does not allocate official time to Communists to explain their views, and yet what Communism is in matters political atheism is perhaps in matters metaphysical.” The paper accused the BBC of “A Sponsoring of Atheism,” fearing that “agnostic propaganda” was akin to “a serious apologia for polygamy, or homosexuality, or any other manifestation of the frailties of human nature.”

The furore lasted barely a month. But the fallout was great. It unleashed liberal criticism of religious broadcasting on the BBC and led to major reforms. Within five years, mockery of religion on TV and radio became common in the ‘satire boom’ of the 1960s. So great was her impact that broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy wrote: “Before Mrs Knight, Britain had been a more or less Christian country; after her it became a more or less secular one.”

Callum Brown is professor of religious and cultural history at the University of Dundee. His latest book, Religion and the Demographic Revolution: Women and Secularisation in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since the 1960s, is due out from Boydell & Brewer in November. Read his article “‘The Unholy Mrs Knight’ and the BBC: Secular Humanism and the Threat to the ‘Christian Nation’, c.1945–60″ in The English Historical Review free for a limited time.

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Why don’t good and hood rhyme with food and mood? Why are friend and fiend spelled alike but pronounced differently? There is a better way of asking this question, because the reason for such oddities is always the same: English retains the spelling that made sense centuries ago. At one time, the graphic forms we learn one by one made sense. Later the pronunciation changed, while the spelling remained the same. Therefore, the right question is: What has happened to the pronunciation of the words that give us trouble?

Everybody has heard that vowels can be short or long, but those who have not studied Greek or Latin should beware of such terms. According to the formulation English speakers learn pat, pet, pit, and pot have short vowels, as opposed to pate, Pete, spite, and spoke. However, those are conventional terms inapplicable to today’s pronunciation. Some idea of what length or at least duration means can be gained from words like father and spa. They indeed have “long a.” Flaw and saw have “long o” in the pronunciation of the speakers who distinguish between Shah and Shaw; too has “long u.”

In ancient Indo-European (which includes Germanic), a long vowel functioned as a combination of two short ones. Then, not earlier than the thirteenth century but hardly later than the fifteenth, the situation in English changed, and vowels became indivisible, with their duration depending on how the postvocalic consonant adhered to them. If the contact was close, the vowel was pronounced short, but if it was loose or if there was no consonant following a vowel, length prevailed. Although untrained speakers of British English rarely associate the difference between bid and bead, cod and cord, let alone bud and bard, with vowel duration, the difference is significant. Speakers of American English have still more trouble here. Even Germans, in whose language the situation is roughly the same as in English, complain that the recent spelling reform disturbs them when they have to decide whether the previous vowel is short or long.

Linguistic revolutions occupy a few pages in elementary textbooks. In real life, they entail vacillation, acceptance of a new norm, returning to the conservative variant, and multiple inconsistencies. This is what happened in English. The choice of the vowel-consonant contact was not regulated by strict rules, though some tendencies can be detected even after so many centuries have passed. In Old English, good, hood, and mood had the same vowel (approximately as in Modern Engl. saw) and formed a perfect rhyme. That state of undisturbed harmony was ruined by the introduction of the new regime: every word had to choose its type of contact.

Robin Hood and His Friends.

Apparently, the choice was often arbitrary. Good and hood acquired close contact, and the vowel shortened, while mood ended up with a loose contact and, consequently, a long vowel. Some words develop fast, others are slowcoaches. When the so-called Great Vowel Shift struck (this happened in early Modern English), the original vowel of good, hood, and mood (to repeat: it resembled aw in Modern saw) acquired the value of Modern English too. As is well known, in the north of England both words in the phrase shut up are pronounced with the vowel of put, that is, shoot oop, unlike what happens in the south. But Standard English also lacks consistency: put and cut do not rhyme; bull and bulb have different vowels. It seems that the vowel of blood changed from what we today hear as aw in saw to “long u” as in Modern woo so early that it became short in time for changing to the vowel of Modern cut. Therefore blood (similarly, flood) now rhymes with bud. The spelling of good, mood, and blood takes no cognizance of the changes that have happened in those words. On paper they still occupy the same chamber as they did at the court of King Alfred.

Scholars have been describing English pronunciation since the seventeenth century, and we have detailed evidence of the great vacillations in the way all such words were pronounced in the not too distant past. It always comes as a surprise that some variants, vastly different from those we now hear, existed not a thousand years ago, but in the days of Fielding, Dickens, and even later. In Middle English, friend rhymed with fiend. Yet, unexpectedly, close contact set in in it before nd, a consonantal group that at an earlier epoch caused lengthening (that is why bind and bound rhyme with lined and crowned: without lengthening they would have rhymed with dinned and the first syllable of Tundra). Close contact meant shortening. The two words are still spelled alike, though only fiend has retained loose contact.

With time, the visual image of the most familiar words becomes so familiar that we stop noticing the incongruities. Said, plaid, says, done, gone, one, and dozens of their linguistic cousins are hieroglyphs to be learned individually. Our reverence for the past will probably never allow us to switch to sed, sez, plad, or, God forbid, nun (the latter for none). What a devilish plan to separate friend and fiend, even though living speech has separated them quite successfully! Frendship will certainly be less precious without a superfluous letter.

By way of conclusion, here is a curious example of interplay between shortening in a dissyllabic word and folk etymology. Once the word Christscrosse existed. It meant “figure of a cross.” In compounds and long words the first vowel was regularly shortened, which explains the difference in the modern pronunciation of holy and holiday, south and southern, white and Whitsunday, Christ and Christmas. The first vowel in Christcrosse developed as in Christmas. That word also denoted “alphabet,” because the figure of the cross was used in front of the alphabet in hornbooks and primers (early primers consisted of a single page protected by a sheet of transparent horn). The word lost its religious significance to such an extent that the pronunciation and spelling crisscross obtained and the compound was understood as a reduplication like trictrac, flip-flop, and so forth; hence the change of sense.

Those who were impressed by the story told here may ask themselves how they pronounce the word primer. Does it rhyme with dimer or dimmer in their speech? Cogitation and an attempt to square accounts with their phonetic conscience will allow them to spend a pleasant week in anticipation of the next post (which will have nothing to do with spelling).

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Some babies are born four weeks too early and others are born three weeks past the due date. Their timing seems random, but that is certainly not the case. Of all births, around 90% take place between 37 and 40 weeks. There are several theories about how the timing of birth is regulated, but the process is not completely understood. According to one theory, the placenta runs on a nine-month clock, telling time by the flux of pregnancy hormones. Your clock may run fast, causing an early birth, or slow, bringing a late baby. According to another theory, the fetal brain acts like a computer, recording its own growth and environmental changes in the uterus until the moment for birth is just right.

Up to a few years ago, there was little expectant management in the Netherlands. Many midwives had the belief that childbirth should come naturally, relying on the mantra that “baby knows best”. Babies who spend extra time in the womb continue to grow and develop undisturbed by the outside world, so it was thought. This belief, long challenged by obstetricians, is commonplace on the Internet. The US group Ten Month Mamas advocates on their Facebook site that labor should not be induced even if pregnancy is post-term.

However, being born post-term can give rise to complications. Children born late are generally larger, and more often need a Caesarian section or an assisted delivery. Studies have shown that post-term births are associated with neonatal morbidity and mortality. Much less is known about the long-term consequences of post-term birth.
In the study that we recently undertook we were, therefore, interested in studying the relation between post-term birth and the child’s development. We followed more than 5,000 children born between 2002 and 2006 from early pregnancy onwards until age 3 years. In the early 2000s ultrasound examinations during pregnancy were not part of the diagnostic routine assessments in the Netherlands. However, as part of the study, mothers were offered three ultrasound examinations.

These ultrasound examinations were later used to calculate gestational age (time between conception and birth) of the newborn. When the children grew up, mothers and fathers each reported about their child at the age of 1,5 and 3 years. We were particularly interested whether being born post-term increased the risk of attention-deficit hyperactivity (ADHD), affective and pervasive developmental (autistic like) problems.

We observed a U-shaped association between gestational age at birth and emotional and behavioral problems. This means that not only a preterm birth but that a post-term birth increases the risk of problems in preschool children. Post-term birth predicted in particular the onset of ADHD-type problems, which were twice as likely to occur in children born after 42 weeks than in those born between 38 and 41 weeks.
Interestingly, the emotional and behavioral problems were not due to birth complications, such as assisted deliveries or high birth weight (>4000 grams).

So, how can this be explained? Possibly, a prolonged pregnancy is harmful for the child’s brain. Perhaps, the placenta ages and functions less well. In this case, inducing labor is indeed an effective way to prevent problems. On the other hand, post-term birth could indicate that the fetal brain or the placental clock was already disturbed. Then, the prolonged pregnancy is not the cause but one of the symptoms of a developmental problem already present early in life.

Since the beginning of the study, the expectant management policy in the Netherlands has been adapted to reduce the occurrence of birth complications. Like in all other developed countries, today a pregnant woman is referred to the gynecologist for close monitoring at 41 weeks and Caesarean section at 42 weeks of gestation. Whether the current policy reduces emotional and behavioral problems will be hard to prove, but this policy will certainly prevent many birth complications.

The International Journal of Epidemiology has granted free access to the full paper on this topic, “Post-term birth and the risk of behavioural and emotional problems in early childhood“, which is co-authored by Hanan El Marroun.

Hanan El Marroun is a postdoctoral researcher at the Erasmus MC – Sophia Children’s Hospital in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She is very much interested in answering the question of how the intrauterine environment influences child development. Her current research is focused on the early and late effects of prenatal cannabis and tobacco use, and prenatal exposure to depression and antidepressants.

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