From Xico

Old Stuff All Over the Place -- It Must Have Been Crowded in Mexico in the Old Days

Right now there is (among many others) archaeological project at a place called Calixtahualca, north of Toluca, the capital city of the state of Mexico. It is under the direction of Michael E. Smith of Arizona State University.  Smith's interests are in both studies of ancient cities and of pre-Hispanic Mexico.  He's a very good and readable writer.  You should check out his book, The Aztecs, which is available on Kindle (yay!).  Smith is one of a number of contemporary scholars who have a passion for trying to figure out who people really were, how they might have thought, what their lives were like and how they planned their cities.

 Anyway, he has a blog on this project, and for those of you with an interest in the workings of an archaeological project in Mexico, here's the link.   You can also find out more on the project's web page here.  Many more links are available at these sites.

The Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) of Mexico presents a really nifty and impressive web page on a related site called Malinalco.  You should check it out: don't get dizzy, though, investigating it.  I found this linked to on Smith's blog.

Here's a picture from the INAH site of Malinalco:

Nuts about Guns

Yesterday we hiked up to a hillside finca belonging to some friends from Xico (more about this glorious day later, with pictures taken by my stepson and his new camera).  As we get to know them, our friends are more and more comfortable asking us about the US -- expressing their anger, in fact, and their amazement at US chutzpah in criticizing violence in Mexico.   Ordinary citizens are not allowed to own guns in Mexico.  Some noncriminals do illegally. I suspect, but don't know, that people who feel most threatened by drug mafias and kidnappers (the rich and the corrupt) do, for instance.  We don't live in a crime-free region, but for the most part, the most part of the most part, it is anything but violent, especially for ordinary citizens.  So our friends are amazed that the US press, operating in a country where supposedly there are now more guns than people, can condemn Mexico as an overall violent place.  As our friend Don A pointed out,  for the most part, (the most part of the most part) it is criminals murdering criminals here, and also, unfortunately, police and soldiers, but not people who are not directly involved in crime.  He was especially amazed that Norteamericános could condemn Mexico when in the US, ordinary people kill completely innocent ordinary people, not infrequently children, sometimes in large numbers, and out of the blue, in nursing homes and schools and homes, for instance.  How could a country think it is civilized and permit especially automatic weapons to be sold virtually anywhere, and why on earth would people think they should have them? 

Today in his NY Times column, Bob Herbert makes exactly the same points.  It is an important column to read.  It is important to note that since Sept 11, 2001, eight and a half years ago, 120,000 people have been murdered with guns in the US, a rate of about 14,120 a year.  Mexico has a third of the population, so the rate of gun deaths is  is higher, but as Don A pointed out,ordinary people here haven't been shooting their own families. And of course, the guns doing the shooting here are overwhelmingly guns coming from the US.  A significant point to make is that in the US, ordinary Americans buy such guns, and when they go berserk they do terribly damage.  It is criminal, not ordinary, Mexicans buying the guns to bring over the border.  There is no demand that the government here allow eveyone to arm himself; rather that the guns not be sold and that authorities bring order.  Mexico has like most of the world, a history which includes terrible slaughters.  Mexico's of course goes back to the 1500s and the arrival of the Spanish.  The awareness of history weighs on Mexico's soul as it does on the souls of European countries, of many countries.  The US, unlike these other countries, seems only minimally aware of its history, if at all.  Perhaps some searing lessons on, among other things, the Civil War; the violence of the anti-labor violence at the turn of the twentieth century; the slaughter of the Indians (Europeans pretty much wiped out Native Americans), prairie wars between ranchers and farmers, and the steady slaughter that our own criminal gangs from the gangs of New York to mafias to bloods and crips, has wrought would help us to understand why our gun laws are so insane and why we seem so crazy and violent and lawless to people in other parts of the world.

Denise Dresser, mujer extraordinaria, habla de su amor de México y de los problemas que lo afligen

Here in Mexico, journalists are sometimes, not infrequently, scholars. And not pedants, not all twisted up in social science jargon, but writers of limpid, honest, moving prose. And so is the case with Denise Dresser.  Below she speaks about AMLO, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, PRD candidate for president in 2006. She offers much insight into Mexico. Translation is mine.  The article first appeared in the journal Proceso on July 20, 2006, shortly after AMLO lostand was reprinted on the blog Contra López Obrador from where I retrieved it. It provides real insight into the thought of a moderate, modern, educated Mexican woman.  It's interesting to note that at this point, more women than men in Mexico are graduating from universities and going to graduate schools.

I have always loved living in Mexico.  Every day I give thanks that I live in a country with so much beauty, so much history, so much culture, so much life, so much dignity.  Whenever I can, I say it: I am crazy in love with Mexico.  I love its smells and flavors, its clearest regions and its darkest corners, is volcanoes and its valleys and everything in between.  Life in Mexico for an upper middle class woman like me is, in many ways, enviable.  I own my house and it is lovely; I send my children to a private school which is not very expensive; I own two used cars in good condition; I love my work and I can take care of my family with my income; I employ two people who help me in my house and I can afford to pay them; I take annual vacations and I'm saving to send my kids to university.  I have the life I have always wanted, full of ideas and books and art and students and friends and the opportunity to write in Processo and a socially useful career.  This my country has given me.

I am the product of the social mobility that still existed in the 1960s when I was born.  Going from one scholarship to another I obtained a good education and with it I have climbed up the social ladder.  In a country with 40 million poor people, I am among the privileged.  Although I am, I realize every day that something is wrong.  I would be able to use the sophisticated language of political science to explain it, but in this column I prefer to speak as a simple citizen.  Something is very wrong when the people who work for me--the nanny and the chauffeur and the gardener--have no hope of being more than they are today.  when they have no possibility of aspiring to something more because the country does not give them te chance.  When sexenio after sexenio* one president or another gives them only more of the same.When they know that their children's lives will, in the best of cases, be a carbon copy of theirs.  This precarious life, this stagnant, difficult life.  This is what so many with whom I share the country suffer.

An for this reason, the 2nd of July [2006] I voted for Andrés Manuel López Obrador.  I was one of those voters who was undecided until the moment I entered the voting booth, and once inside, I opted to vote for him for only one reason: I could not vote for a person who thought that the country was doing fine.  I could not vote for a party that offered only more of the same.  I could not be among those who thought that because the country worked for me, it was working well.  But I voted with ambivalence, because throughout the campaign I always thought AMLO made the correct diagnosis, but that he did not have adequate solutions.  That he fought for the good cause, but not with modern weapons.  That he knew that the country wasn't functioning, but he had no coherent public policy proposals for improving it. He never convinced me....I remember having said: "Andrés Manuel, you are offering poverty with dignity.  You are offering only a shovel for building a second floor."  The poor deserve and need more.

New Democracy in America -- by Jorge Javier Romero

Obama's election from the perspective of a Mexican writer looking at American history.

In La Crónica de Hoy.  (My translation)

5 de Noviembre de 2008 | Hora de publicación: 04:28

As I write, in the United States election results are pouring in. We're getting the numbers from the exit polls in the states where voting is over.  The institutionalized uncertainty of democracy is in evidence.  The commentators are doing nothing but repeating over and over that this is an historic election, as if it were not.  But beyond this now-hammered into the ground theme, preliminary results are showing  a very important step being made in the process of democratization which began with the Constitution [of the United States] in 1788.

The Constitution designed a means to guarantee the autonomous power of every state in the federal system.  Presidential power thus created was clearly limited by a bicameral legislature where the Senate, made up of two senators from each state, served as protective mechanism of this original arrangement.  The system of indirect election, which in the majority of states gives the victor all the delegates to the electoral college, was also designed to guarantee local power over central power.  

That first system, whose original concept was undoubtedly influenced by the thought of the Enlightenment, especially that of John Locke and Baron de Montesquieu, was thought to answer the particular challenges that faced the effort to create a central government on top of the traditional self-government that existed in the states which, until 1776, had been autonomous colonies.  After the War of Independence, the effort resulted only in a weakconfederation.

But what most worried the delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787-1788 was the issue of property rights.  It was about serving patrician property owners in the plantation states of the South and in the comercial states of the North.  And when they spoke of property rights, the delegates included the savage right to possess human beings as slaves.  Those national heroes of liberty designed a representative system which only included white males as members of the political community, those with a certain amount of property.  In the Puritan ideal of equality, neither women, nor Indians, nor poor whites, nor, of course, black slaves were included.

During the 19th Cenury, gradually more people became eligible to vote.  At the beginning of the last century, women finally received the right to vote, but in many southern states, racial segregation stood strong a century after the abolition of slavery which had come at the cost of a terrible civil war, and blacks continued to face obstacles in exercising their right to vote.

It has been barely fifty years since the black community of the South was victimized by violent discrimination.

It was the mobilization and resistance of civil rights activists who succeeded in gaining legislation to guarantee the full equality of a substantial part of the population of the United States which, until then, was treated as inferior.

Even with these advances, the electoral representation of the black community of the United States has traditionally been small, to the extent that in the Senate there have been very few blacks: in the present Senate, Barack Obama is the only one.

If only for this fact, the election yesterday signified a very important thrust forward in the evolution of the democratic process of the United States.  That which was born as an elective oligarchy of white patricians step by step has broadened political representation. 

However, the Constitution of 1788, still in force, makes it difficult for a single change in the presidency to bring about great changes in US politics since the mechanisms of checks and balances among the powers were designed to be be conservative [to prevent hasty change] However, in spite of the limitations to presidential power, Obama's election has cultural implications of transcendent importance.

It shouldn't be forgotten that Clinton could not advance his health care reforms precisely because of Congressional obstacles.The incoming president triumphed with an enormous ability to communicate his offer of change.  He has succeeded in generating utopian energies in a good portion of the electorate and has mobilized in his favor young people who exercised their right to vote for the first time.  The expectations he has generated, today to his advantage, can turn against him when he begins to govern in the midst of the tremendous economic crisis which the world faces.

The huge problems that President Obama will have to face during the coming months will test the energy and creativity which he and his team have demonstrated during the campaign.  His clear and powerful oratory will now have to be turned to mobilizing the government, and as we well know in Mexico, it is not the same to be a good candidate as to be a good president.

Obama has shown great ability and consistency during these last months.  However, the great unknown which faces us today is whether he will succeed in constructing a new social pact, with international implications. To succeed requires that he construct a new economic and social order in a world which Bush has left in crisis and at war.  The expectations are very high.  We will have to wait to see how the new democracy in America meets them.

Santoral de Ayer -- Saints whose days were yesterday in Mexico

Here is another bit about a saint who appeared on yesterday's Santoral in El Universal.

You'll notice that most of the old saints died as martyrs.  These aren't cheery stories.  But they provide interesting and often pleasant little surprises, like the charming statue of St. Leticia.

The saints for yesterday include some very famous ones: Nicholas, Thomas and Christopher, or Cristobal, Nicolas y Tomas and some with interesting names: Nemesio, Narciso, Quintin, and Ampliado.  And to be inclusive, we add Leonardo and Leon.

Someone named Angel Rodríguez Vilagrán has created a very nice site in Spanish devoted to San Narciso.   I summarize some of what I found below.

Narciso is the patron saint of Girona, a small city in Cataluña, in Spain.  It lies in the northeast-most province of Spain, also called Girona.  The people of Girona acknowledge that Narciso is not as "important" as other saints, but he is very special to them. 

His story:
He was probably born in the 3rd century in or near what is today the city of Augsburg -- Augusta in those days-- although some people think he was born in the Middle East.  He was a wandering bishop without a fixed residence when he and his deacon Félix (not Félix africano) found themselves in Augusta without a place to stay.  The legend has it that Divine Providence led them to call at the house of a prostitute called Afra, a pagan.  The author of the account I am using suggests that this probably would have been the cult of Venus and that her worshippers had already purified themselves in her honor.  Anyway, Afra realized that Narciso and Felix were Christians and engaged them in a discussion, I imagine, of their religion, since it led her and her servants Digna, Eunmia and Eutropia to convert to Christianity.

The prefect of Augusta, a pagan named Gaius, learned of the visit of Narciso and Félix and the conversion of Afra and her servants.  He ordered that Afra be burned at the stake, and indeed this came to past, apparently on August 7, 304. 

San Narciso and his deacon, Félix, made their way to Girona and settled there.  And it came to pass that one day while they were celebrating Mass in the Church of Saint Felix (this the San Felix of Africa) a group of people in the church rushed the altar and murdered them  The year was probably 307.

It was not until the eleventh century that Narciso became the patron saint of Girona.  A cult had grown around him, apparently because his body had remained "uncorrupted" lo the previous seven centuries.

An abbot in Augusta (Augsberg) requested that the Bishop of Girona send him some of the relics of Felix, thinking that since the church was San Felix, there'd be relics of the saint.  The Bishop explained that their Felix was not San Felix and they had no relics of the latter.  Instead he sent some remnants of the clothes of San Narciso, saying this was the saint they had relics of.  He did not send bones, however, because as he pointed out, the saint's body remained untouched by decay.

San Narciso is also credited with saving Girona from several French invasions, always with flies. According to legend, in 1285 French troops headed by Phillip the Brave invaded Girona and occupied the Church of St. Felix, looting and desecrating it.  In defense, flies flew out from Narciso's crypt, biting the soldiers and their horses ferociously, killing twenty thousand of the former and four thousand of the latter (who surely didn't deserve this fate).  This apparently happened again in 1653 and reportedly during one of Napoleon's attacks. There is more detail, historical background and explanation on Angel Rodrígues Vilagrán's website. 

Here is an anonymous 17th century painting I found on the website which portrays the Attack of the Flies.

On Holding the World Together and Spreading the Wealth

As we (members of the world) travel through history, groups of us come up with systems of belief and activity which keep things more or less going, sometimes in a progressive way, sometimes regressively, sometimes just kind of treading water.  Sometimes all at the same time.  Historians and others can discern patterns in this ebb and flow of human activity and belief.

I believe the sun will rise tomorrow and the next day and the next.  Virtually all of us believe this.  Or should I say, know it.  Or, rather, are accustomed to saying one thing while meaning another.

As most of us know, the earth in fact goes around the sun, the sun doesn't rise, the earth turns on its axis, rotating so that the part facing the sun shifts away.

We probably also remember that it was Copernicus who first outlined the theory that the earth went around the sun, not the other way around, and further said that it was the sun that was at the center of the universe. This discovery, and his and Galileo's and other famous contemporaries' discoveries and their developing inquisitiveness was upending the European view of the order of things, the common wisdom of the time. As you may remember, the Church took action against Galileo. Among other things, the notion that the earth moves around the sun contradicts what is written in the bible in such places as Psalms 93, 96, and 104, in 1 Chronicles, and Ecclesiastes.  (I wonder if Biblical literalists today believe the sun goes around the earth.  Dare we ask Sarah Palin?)

Other cultures also took for granted that the sun rose and set every day. But we are wrong to assume that these Renaissance Europeans were the originators of the idea. In fact there were some cultures and people who guessed the solar system was heliocentric long before Copernicus and Galileo. 

Challenging the belief that the sun rotated around the earth was a challenge to the fiber of authority in Catholic Europe. It loosened the glue that bound people at that time because it challenged assumptions on which its identity was based.  Scientific inquiry such as that of Copernicus and Galileo led to dramatic changes of all sorts, including discovery of the rest of the planet. Over time, the official church itself learned to incorporate much scientific learning into its world view, more at some moments than at others. Some people still haven't managed to: it is too much of a threat to the ties that bind them together and give them purpose and meaning and identity. Because of their insistence on their correctness and their rigidity, they attempt to deny and sometimes succeed in denying others access to knowledge, tolerance and compassion.  Other people, while fully cognizant of the validity of evolution, for instance, recognize that at least some scientific discoveries have presented us with a very mixed bag of good, bad and indifferent.

We're always coming up against new paradigms that break the old. Often they sneak up on us and modify our views without our even noticing.  We come to believe things without knowing why. Big changes from one paradigm to another are generally called paradigm shifts a term most commonly used in science.  The shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric view of the solar system is a paradigm shift.  However, I would argue we can use the term for any substantial shift in our world view.

Americans view history as progressive: that is, we are always moving towards a better place.  This is in part our heritage from the Enlightenment and in part our Christian heritage: we are waiting for the coming of Christ.  We don't think about this very often, but it informs our beliefs in our specialness.

Today, the dominant beliefs are that our democracy and the capitalist economy which it rests on are examples of this progress.  The capitalism we have come to believe in has as some of its basic beliefs the notion that profit should drive businesses pretty much exclusively, that efficiency in the name of profit seeking is good, that individuals should be and can be completely responsible for themselves, that we act as rational beings in the marketplace, that a government that regulates business is a bad government, that taxes are evil, that private enterprise can do most if not all things better and that we have every right to keep what we earn. In other words, what's good for the economy is good for the country even to the extent that in the face of global warming, we see the most viable approaches as economic. In opposition to capitalism most of us see nothing but socialism or, worse, communism: two poles: one good, one bad.  Most of us would acknowledge this is awfully simplistic, but still, these are organizing principles of our society.

I think we are due for a paradigm shift.  The current meltdown in our economy is the catalyst.  What I hope we start to notice is that in fact the world is much more than the economy, and that in fact the global economy as it is currently constituted is riding roughshod over not just poor rural people, but social structures and the environment.  I hope we incorporate as a guiding principle that sharing the wealth is a very good idea.

Olmecs were people, too: update

This link provided by Joe in the first Olmecs were people posting provides some pretty interesting information.  Interestingly, both Joe and LTG referred to were-jaguars, which the "baby-faces" are not.  I'll look at them in another post.  However, here is a bit more about the"baby-faces" from Wikipedia.  I still would suggest that even if some of the figures appear baby-like, they might also just be very fat...others not babies at all.  This is really a stretch, perhaps, but maybe very fat people had some significance.  Years ago, in a totally unrelated culture, the Kabakas of Buganda, a kingdom in Uganda before the British took over, fed their wives to make them so fat they couldn't walk.  It was a sign, if I remember correctly, of the wealth and generosity of the Kabakas, or kings. 

Olmecs were people, too

When I used to think of old Mexican civilizations,  images of giant monstrous god statues, of large, impersonal temples, of STRANGE things would fill my mind.  But in fact the inhabitants and creators of these marvellous civilizations were, to use a worn phrase, people, too.  The Olmecs with whom I am going to spend a bit of time are still considered the creators of the mother civilization of Mexico, though they certainly weren't the only people around.  They lived in Veracruz and Tabasco (the state, which lies to the south and east of us) for the most part.  They thrived an unimaginably long time ago: from maybe 1350 BC to 300 BC, in other words, they emerged as an organized, complicated, sophisticated society during the time of the Egyptian pharoahs, at the same time Moses led the Jews out of Egypt, at the time of the emergence of the Upanishad tradition in India, at the beginnings of the Greek alphabet, at the time of the first Chinese dictonary.  They had lived in the area for some thousands of years before, or at least people whose heirs became Olmecs did.

So they were around as a major culture for around 1000 years, fifty generations.

The Olmecs didn't live right near us, more to the south and east, not in the mountains, rather closer to the coast, at lower elevations.  But all around us, people are still digging up stuff from them and from those who copied them and were their neighbors.

Back to the Olmecs being people.

Here in Xalapa, the Museo de Antropología de Xalapa (MAX for short) shelters archeological remnants of the Olmecs and the other groups in Veracruz.  Over the entrance to the gallery, it says something like, "Welcome.  This is your patrimony."

Jim and I took our cameras the other day to the Museum to try to capture some images for you.  The first ones I am going to show you are of people. I won't try to distinguish between places or between periods of time or their status. They are not photos of people but photos of sculptures, and very worn ones, so this is a little difficult, but see what you think these faces tell us.

These portraits are part of a collection called "baby faces."  It's thought that they are sculptures of children, but I tend not to think so. For one thing, at least some of them have teeth.  For another, the noses aren't, for the most part, baby noses.  More likely it seems to me is that they are smooth skinned because a lot of Mesoamericans were, and many of their heirs still are.  To me some look like they might be kids, but mostly they look like either young adults or adults of an uncertain age.

I'd be interested in your reactions.

The Magnificent Tenochtitlan

I am going to move back in time and move towards Veracruz after this post.  I debated whether to save this for when I return to the Aztecs, but I wanted to leave you with this image, an anchor, if you will, to hold you to remembering just how remarkable the world of Mesoamerica was.

What you see is a three-dimensional rendering of Tenochtitlan I THINK originally created by Miguel Covarrubias.  This is Tenochtitlan at its height, with a population of about 250,000 souls.  You can see the three causeways that connected it to the mainland, the dike called the Albarrada de Netzahualcootl and the ceremonial center.  All of this was built upon chinampas, those built-up beds for agriculture.  Like Venice, you could get virtually anywhere within the city by boat, for canals were as common as streets.  The big causeway, bottom center, is the one on which Cortés and his conquistadores entered.  The Spaniards razed it to the ground.

History is just like stew

Some weeks ago someone in the US asked a bunch of questions about Mexico – things he just couldn’t wrap his head around, the kind of things that well-meaning Americans ask about Mexico.  So I thought I’d try my hand at answering some of them.  The first I picked had to do with why Mexicans wanted to keep Pemex out of private hands.   So I thought, I’ll go back a little bit in Mexican history, meaning the 19^th and early 20^th centuries – Pemex was nationalized in 1938 --to explain this.  I still haven’t done so, even though I’ve been wandering around Mexican history ostensibly coming up with a response.  Well, one thing has just led to another, and since this is a blog and I can wander, it’ll be awhile till I get back to Pemex, though I w ill.  I find myself rummaging in Mesoamerica – the place that existed before the Spanish Conquest.  I never expected this.  When I took my Diplomado en Estudios Mexicanos, I was anxious to get out of the early stuff:  it was the 19^th and 20^th centuries that really captivated me and seemed really relevant and interesting and somewhat distressing.

But somehow I ended up going further and further back in time. 

One of the reasons I think I didn’t like the long Mesoamerican era originally was because it seemed so unknowable, so terribly foreign, so long ago and far away.  Dusty museum relics: rows of little clay figures. What got me drifting further back in time in spite of myself was finding I wanted to know more about the area in which we live where present and past and more distant past are piled up on top of each other:  the very act of seeing people here who are descendants of those people from so long ago.

My journey has gone from starting to look at the reason for the devotion to state-owned oil,  to wanting to remind myself of the Porfiriato which had much in common with the present in terms of selling Mexico to foreigners in exchange for a profitable bottom line to wanting to know more about the (in)famous Santa Anna of, for Americans, Alamo fame.  Santa Anna, born in a house in Xalapa, in some ways emboded  Veracruz in the nineteenth century. He owned land from the Gulf all the way up to just outside of Xalapa, for one thing; he took part in the Mexican Revolution in Veracruz, and he always came back.  In looking into Santa Anna, I started to wonder about cattle ranching and found an article about the earliest cattle ranching here in Veracruz in the 1500s by the Spaniards who brought cattle over (and incidentally introduced cattle to Texas). 

THEN I read something about Googling … and how people don’t think so linearly as once was thought, and that Google makes it possible to follow our trains of thought without being so trapped by the need to stay on  a straight line.  History writing and theorizing has, until recently, been pretty straight-line, the consequence at least partly  of the Enlightenment’s influence on our culture:  we were trained to think  that history was linear: that is, that people started out in caves (or as apes or whatever) and have been getting progressively more and more advanced.  But in fact, that doesn’t seem to be exactly the case, and among the cultures that didn’t think so are the Mesoamerican cultures. 

My first experience of getting lost in non-linear history learning was at The University of Minnesota where I got an MA in African History following my stay in the Peace Corps.  There, especially addressing West Africa, I started out feeling like I was digging my way through a giant bowl of very interesting stew.  I could make out the ingredients around me, but I couldn’t see all the ingredients, and I couldn’t see how they all went together. We had stuff about gold-for-salt trading, slavery, kingdoms, languages, migrations,  Islam and animism and Christianity and so on and so on.  By the end, it was making sense.  Flavors mingled well, so to speak.  Ingredients added at the beginning were ready at the same time as those added later; boiling and then simmering was necessary. 

It’s not only that history happens in a kind of like a stew is made.  We find out about it the way we eat stew:  Ah, this is a piece of meat, and here’s a potato, and this rosemary must be the flavor I taste. 

if we are convinced that first we have prehistory, then we all o through the same stages as groups of people, from little egalitarian hunter-gatherer groups to farmers to chieftainships, to states, etc., we’re going to miss stuff.  This is particularly true in Mesoamerica and Latin America as a whole where discoveries are being made right and left right now which add all kinds of new ingredients to the mix.

So I guess this is all an explanation: my blog posts about Mexican history will be ingredients added to the stew and cooked and stirred and tasted.    I hope each can be read as a stand-alone, and that as they appear you will be able to add them to the mix.

 

And I hope you will see that history is an ever-expanding stew, but that it doesn’t always get better.