Tuesday 26 December 2017

Some Boxing Day Relief.



Today for Boxing Day, some interesting stories from yesteryear. We open with “Slater the Traitor,” to the British anyway.  Meander through some Boxing Day trivia, some of it possibly even true. Wander through an 18th century British “Starbucks,” and close with how J. Edgar Hoover nearly ended “It’s A Wonderful Life.” Normal service resumes tomorrow.

How Industrial Espionage Started America’s Cotton Revolution

To the British, Samuel Slater was ‘Slater the traitor,’ but to the Americans, he was the father of the American industrial revolution

By Kat Eschner smithsonian.com December 20, 2017
With technical know-how and entrepreneurial spirit, Samuel Slater helped build early American industry–becoming rich and famous along the way.

Slater bailed on the English and came to America in 1789, sailing on a ship to New York in response to the bounties offered by the American government for workers who knew how to manufacture cotton. The technologies involved in manufacturing cotton fabrics were held by the British, who kept them from the Americans by the fairly simple expedient of forbidding skilled textile workers from emigrating and not allowing technical drawings of the machinery to leave Britain.

Because of these practices, even though cotton had been cultivated in the United States with the use of enslaved laborers for more than a century, the country had no domestic textile manufacturing industry. After Slater brought his technological know-how from Britain, with the backing of American merchants, textile manufacture became America’s most important pre-Civil War industry and cotton production became a central part of the early American economy.

Slater was born in Derbyshire, England in 1769, writes PBS, and started working at a young age. He was apprenticed to a cotton mill owner and eventually became a supervisor at the mill. In that position, the public broadcaster writes, “he became intimately familiar with the mill machines designed by Richard Arkwright, a genius whose other advances included using water power to drive his machines and dividing labor among groups of workers.” In other words, he was just the kind of person that the British wanted to hold onto.

However, Slater was able to sneak out of Britain. He wasn’t carrying any documents with him, but he had memorized everything he could about Arkwright’s machines and process. In America, he found the support of a Rhode Island merchant, Moses Brown, and constructed the first water-powered cotton spinning mill in that state. It opened on this day in 1790.

This marked the beginning of a manufacturing boom for Rhode Island and New England in general that drew families of workers to Slater’s mills. “He eventually built several successful cotton mills in New England and established the town of Slatersville, Rhode Island,” writes the Library of Congress. Figures like Samuel Slater and, later, Francis Cabot Lowell, helped to create a domestic textile manufacturing industry that became the most important industry in America before the Civil War, the library writes.

In the South, where the raw material for these mills was produced, the national demand for cotton helped shape the economy. Eli Whitney’s infamous invention of the cotton gin in the early 1790s coincided with this new domestic demand for cotton and thus the demand for slaves to farm it, writes historian Junius P. Rodriguez. “In the South, cotton became the chief crop and the basis of the region’s economy,” he writes. “Cotton production in the South increased from about 3,000 bales in 1793 to approximately 178,000 bales by 1800.” With this growing demand came a resurgence of the slave trade. By the time the Civil War began, “cotton production had exploded to four million bales per year,” he writes.

Although a lot of this cotton left the country–it was the biggest export, he writes–it also fueled domestic textile production in New England. “The manufacturing of cotton cloth enabled the North to evolve into an industrialized region,” he writes. To the British, Samuel Slater was known as “Slater the Traitor” for taking their trade secrets to America–to the history of America, he was a more complicated figure.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-industrial-espionage-started-americas-cotton-revolution-180967608/?utm_source=smithsoniandaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20171220-daily-responsive&spMailingID=32337708&spUserID=NjUwNDIzNTUzNDE0S0&spJobID=1182580638&spReportId=MTE4MjU4MDYzOAS2

What Is Boxing Day and How Did It Get Its Name?

---- Boxing Day is a national Bank Holiday, a day to spend with family and friends and to eat up all the leftovers of Christmas Day. The origins of the day, however, are steeped in history and tradition.

Why is it Called Boxing Day?
Arguments abound on the origins of the name Boxing Day.  All the answers below are valid,  so maybe it is one, or even all of them.

A ‘Christmas Box’ in Britain is a name for a Christmas present.
Boxing Day was traditionally a day off for servants and the day when they received a  ‘Christmas Box’ from the master. The servants would also go home on Boxing Day to give ‘Christmas Boxes’ to their families.

A box to collect money for the poor traditionally and placed in Churches on Christmas day and opened the next day - Boxing Day.

Great sailing ships when setting sail would have a sealed box containing money on board for good luck. Were the voyage a success, the box was given to a priest, opened at Christmas and the contents then given to the poor.

When is Boxing Day?
Boxing Day is the 26th December and is a national holiday in the UK and Ireland.

Activities on Boxing Day
Boxing Day is a time to spend with family or friends, usually those not seen on Christmas Day itself. In recent times, the day has become synonymous with many sports. Horse racing is particularly popular with meets all over the country.

Many top football teams also play on Boxing Day.

Boxing Day is also a time when the British show their eccentricity by taking part in all kinds of silly activities. These include bizarre traditions including swimming the icy cold English Channel, fun runs, and charity events.

Fox Hunting on Boxing Day
Until 2004, Boxing Day hunts were a traditional part of the day, but the ban on fox hunting has put an end to this in its usual sense. Hunters will still gather dressed resplendently in red hunting coats to the sound of the hunting horn. But, since it is now forbidden to chase the fox with dogs, they now follow artificially laid trails.

The New Boxing Day Sport - Shopping
Another ‘sport’ to emerge in recent years is shopping. Sadly, what was once a day of relaxation and family time sees the start of the sales. Sales used to start in January, post-New Year, but the desire to grab a bargain and for shops to off-load stock means many now begin on Boxing Day.
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Archaeologists Discover 500 Artifacts from 18th-Century British Coffeehouse

Among the finds were cups, saucers, sugar bowls, coffee tins and an impressive collection of teapots

By Brigit Katz smithsonian.com December 22, 2017 12:32PM
Archaeologists at the University of Cambridge have published details of a fascinating excavation that turned up some 500 artifacts from an 18th-century British coffee joint. As David Behrens of the Yorkshire Post reports, Clapham’s coffeehouse was located on a site now owned by St. John’s College in Cambridge, and its cellar was packed with the remains of cups, saucers, teapots and other vessels that helped serve up tasty treats to patrons. Researchers have compared the establishment to Starbucks—you know, if Starbucks also served eel and calf’s foot jelly.

Between the 1740s and 1770s, Clapham’s was run by William and Jane Clapham. The couple’s coffeehouse was a popular spot among residents of Cambridge and students of the university. According to a Cambridge press release, the joint was even mentioned in a poem that ran in a student publication of 1751: “Dinner over, to Tom’s or Clapham’s I go; the news of the town so impatient to know.”

Researchers believe that Clapham’s cellar was filled with items in the late 1770s, when Jane decided to retire (William had since died). The site was rediscovered after St. John’s College commissioned an archaeological survey of the area around its Old Divinity School. The excavation revealed the most extensive collection of early coffeehouse artifacts that has ever been discovered in England, which has in turn shed new light on centuries-old coffee culture.

Like modern-day coffee spots, Clapham’s appears to have offered a range of comforting hot beverages. Archaeologists found coffee cups, saucers, sugar bowls, milk and cream jugs, an impressive collection of 38 teapots, and cups for holding chocolate drinks. “[C]hocolate was served with a frothy, foamy head,” the Cambridge press release explains, which required tall cups that researchers could distinguish from other types of vessels. The team also discovered utensils and crockery that would have been used to make pastries, tarts and other desserts.

In many ways, Clapham’s was less like a café and more like an inn, Craig Cessford of the Cambridge Archaeological Unit tells the BBC. Animal bones found at the site suggest that patrons were enjoying hearty meals of mutton, beef, pork, hare, chicken goose, fish and eel. The excavation also turned up a large number of feet bones from immature cattle, leading experts to believe that calf’s foot jelly, once a popular dessert in England, was a house specialty.

It also seems that people at Clapham’s came for a boozy time; amidst the various drinking vessels, archaeologists found a robust selection of wine bottles, wine glasses, and tankards. The discovery “suggests that the standard view of early English coffeehouses, as civilized establishments where people engaged in sober, reasoned debate, may need some reworking,” according to the press release, which also makes note that no evidence of reading materials were found at the site.
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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-discover-500-artifacts-18th-century-british-coffeehouse-180967609/?utm_source=smithsoniandaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20171222-daily-responsive&spMailingID=32365778&spUserID=NjUwNDIzNTUzNDE0S0&spJobID=1182815429&spReportId=MTE4MjgxNTQyOQS2

The Weird Story of the FBI and ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’

The film supposedly had Communistic tendencies

By Kat Eschner smithsonian.com December 20, 2017
It’s A Wonderful Life bombed at the box office before becoming a Christmas classic. Along the way, it also caught the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The movie’s preview showing at New York’s Globe Theater took place on this day in 1946, a day before the movie opened to the public. “Though it has become a quintessential American classic, It’s a Wonderful Life was not an immediate hit with audiences,” writes Jennifer M. Wood for Mental Floss. The film’s producer and director, Frank Capra, ended up $25,000 in debt. In spite of this, Capra said he thought the tale of a suicidal man and his guardian angel was “the greatest film I ever made.”

An unnamed FBI agent who watched the film as part of a larger FBI program aimed at detecting and neutralizing Commie influences in Hollywood (fathered by, yes, J. Edgar Hoover) said it was “very entertaining.” However, writes scholar John A. Noakes, the agent “also identified what they considered a malignant undercurrent in the film.” As a result of this report, the film underwent further industry probes that uncovered that “those responsible for making It’s a Wonderful Life had employed two common tricks used by Communists to inject propaganda into the film.”

These two common “devices” or tricks, as applied by the Los Angeles branch of the Bureau, were smearing “values or institutions judged to be particularly American”–in this case, the capitalist banker, Mr. Potter, is portrayed as a Scroogey misanthrope–and glorifying “values or institutions judged to be particularly anti-American or pro-Communist”–in this case, depression and existential crisis, an issue that the FBI report characterized as a “subtle attempt to magnify the problems of the so-called ‘common man’ in society.”

George Bailey, the film’s protagonist, is also a small-scale community bank manager, and seen from one perspective his competition with aggressive tycoon (and Scrooge stand-in) Henry F. Potter, who runs the competing bank, tells a larger story about American business and industry. In the moment of post-war paranoia, even the idea of a community bank could be read as Communist. And George Bailey’s deep unhappiness in a quintessentially American small town life could be perceived as failure, which was broadly portrayed as Communist as well. But the story of the movie is much subtler than that, writes Noakes: “It’s a Wonderful Life depicts a struggle between two bankers, each representing a different vision of capitalism and democracy.”

However, the FBI’s apparatus was set up to provide Hoover with the answers he wanted to hear. Either a movie was subversive or it wasn’t, and in the Bureau’s broad framing, this one certainly was. The organization handed over the results of its investigation to HUAC, presaging the organizational cooperation that was a hallmark of McCarthyist Hollywood witch hunts. However, in this case, HUAC chose not to call in the film’s writers and director. The film continued to be shown unimpeded.

Ironically, it is the very aspects of the film that put it under suspicion that have helped to make it a Christmas favorite (a copyright lapse that caused royalty-free repeats of the movie to be played on television ad nauseam between 1974 and 1994 didn’t hurt either, writes Wood.) George Bailey’s central question of whether his life, good or bad, has been worthwhile, is the kind of thing a person might wonder in the dark of the year. It’s a question that transcended the FBI’s concerns.

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