Modern History

MODERN HISTORY

Shakespeare’s plays describe about 155 deaths, less than half onstage, involving 13 suicides, 33 stabbings, seven poisonings, five beheadings, three dismemberments, a host of gruesome ends, including two men baked into a pie and fed to their mother, all told in plots involving jealousy, greed, fighting for power, vanity, dishonesty, cruelty, arrogance, vengefulness, delusion, rage, hypocrisy, and paranoia—the entire range of human iniquity. The Bard is celebrated today as one of the foremost exponents of Renaissance humanism, and we are right to wonder why.

Coming across Martin Luther eating a hearty breakfast of two sausages, five barley loaves, three scrambled eggs, and a pitcher of milk, John Calvin quoted Philippians 3:19, “Their god is their stomach.” Luther responded with Proverbs 13:4, “The diligent soul is amply satisfied,” adding that it was the Doctrine of Justification.

The Spanish conquest of the Americas led to the fusion of cultures and in many ways to the mutual enrichment of disparate peoples. Mixed populations of the Spanish and Portuguese empires adopted the dominant religion of the Europeans—Christianity?—no, soccer.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who published his calculus in 1684, claimed that Isaac Newton’s calculus was derivative, based on their exchange of letters and notes. Newton retorted that he started working on his calculus in 1666, that is, it had long been integral to his physics.

James Watt made groundbreaking improvements to the steam engine in 1776, and for the first time, in contrast to the politics of the preceding centuries, the inventor put hot air to good use. He jumpstarted the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain so that the world was changed forever—harnessing cheap, plentiful power, factories output buttons, pins, textiles, and all sorts of products in huge volumes, with the side effect that human beings in assembly lines were transformed into robots in almost the same quantities.

The French Revolutionary calendar divided the year into four seasons of three months each and the months into three weeks of ten days each, which proved to be too revolutionary for the hardworking French. It reduced weekends from four to three per month, inciting Napoleon Bonaparte to execute the calendar by guillotine on January 1, 1806, to the cheers of millions.

Abraham Lincoln, the architect of the abolition of slavery in the U.S., had a difficult relationship with his wife, Mary Todd. Historians agree that he showed himself to be a steadfast man of principle—when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, he did not include his marriage.

The advent of photography coincided with the rise of Impressionism, not only in the visual arts, but in all aspects of Western culture. Claude Debussy, who led this trend in music, displayed the proverbial artistic temperament—he flitted between women, some married, in relationships that were temperamental, dissonant, experimental, unpredictable, emotional, moody, and free-spirited—interestingly, just like his music itself.

When Lenin attacked the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg on October 25, 1917, ousting the Provisional Government of Kerensky, he promised the Russian people, “Peace, Land, and Bread.” What they got was Stalin.

Medical records from 1923 confirm that Adolph Hitler had only one descended testicle. Widely attested, what has not been verified is that he had only half a brain.

In August 1946 the Americans dropped atomic bombs on a wartime enemy for the first and only time in history. Massively destructive blue-white flashes exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, giving unexpected new meaning to the Japanese term Shōwa or the era of “Radiant Japan.”

During the late forties, a struggling American artist refurbishing his New York City apartment spilled yellow paint on a large canvas he had laid out on the floor—liking what he saw, he decided to do it again, this time with red paint. Thus was born the legend of Jackson Pollock, master of Abstract Expressionism.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, hero of Indian independence, switched to wearing a poor man’s clothes and often walked barefoot. He came to be known as “Great Sole.”

Communist China hailed Mao Zhedong as “The Great Helmsman” of what at times appeared to be a sinking ship. History revised his revolutionary slogans—“Great Leap Forward” became “Great Leap Forward into the Pit of Famine,” and “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom” turned into “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom and Rot in Jail Afterwards.”

The Cold War saw the success of spy novels like Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana (1958), Ian Fleming’s The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), and Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October (1984). Ghost writers in the former Soviet Union sought to cash in with knockoffs—Our Hottie in Havana, The Spy Who Loved McDonald’s, The Hunt for Red Borscht—for some reason, they didn’t catch on.

Forging Ahead in Wind and Waves (1974)