A few (very few!) articles...
Nov. 5th, 2005 11:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
On Guy Fawkes Day. Oh! Does that explain Dumbledore's phoenix' name? I can't believe I missed that if it does!
A Day to Think About a Case of Faith-Based Terrorism
By PETER STEINFELS
Today, just in case you had not noticed, is the 400th anniversary of Guy Fawkes Day - one of the most notable episodes of religion-based terrorism in Anglo-American history.
In the early hours of Nov. 5, 1605, officials of King James I of England, pursuing an intelligence lead, found Guy Fawkes and 36 barrels of gunpowder hidden in a storeroom on the ground floor of the Palace of Westminster, a warren of meeting rooms, apartments and even shops, where Parliament was to meet later that day.
Fawkes had fuses at the ready. He was the point man, though not the organizer, of what has been known ever since as the Gunpowder Plot. Inebriated by faith and outraged by the persecution of Catholicism under Queen Elizabeth and James, 13 Roman Catholic conspirators planned to blow up the king, his wife and sons and members of Parliament, detonating, they hoped, not only barrels of gunpowder but also an uprising that would install a Catholic government.
Two years ago, although allowing for the difficulty of comparing 17th-century gunpowder to modern explosives, the Center for Explosion Studies at the University of Aberystwyth concluded that the explosion could have obliterated the Palace of Westminster, Westminster Hall, Westminster Abbey and surrounding streets.
This estimate is found in "Remember, Remember: A Cultural History of Guy Fawkes Day" by James Sharpe, published today by Harvard University Press. His account is a reminder that such religiously inspired terrorism is part of the history of the modern West.
He tells the story of the plot, its unraveling and the trials and grisly execution of the conspirators rather economically, and he sets it in a much larger context of what, for English people of the day, was the equivalent of anything that is now described as a "clash of civilizations."
That context includes the persecution of Protestants under the reigns of Mary Tudor and of Catholics under her successor, Elizabeth. In 1570, Pope Pius V, by excommunicating Elizabeth and freeing her subjects to depose her, put all English Catholics under suspicion of being traitors. Then came the 1572 St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of thousands of French Protestants, the atrocities committed by Spanish troops in the Netherlands and the failed invasion of England by the Spanish Armada in 1588.
English Protestants naturally envisioned an international Catholic evil empire and consequently tried to stamp out any Catholic "fifth column" in their own land - to the point where Mr. Sharpe compares the experiences of underground English Catholics to that of resistance movements in Nazi-occupied Europe.
But his account does not stop with this background to the Gunpowder Plot. "Remember, Remember" (the book's title comes from an old rhyme beginning "Remember, remember, the Fifth of November") is a study in how over time the meaning of a historic event is changed and bent to a variety of religious, political and cultural purposes.
At the beginning of 1606, Parliament quickly passed an act mandating that Nov. 5 be a day of annual thanksgiving and commemoration of God's intervention to save the king, Parliament and nation. All loyal subjects were to attend services in every Anglican parish. The prescribed service remained in the Anglican prayer book until 1859.
Although there were some surprising voices of religious moderation early on, the sermons at those services were generally exercises in anti-Catholicism, intensified whenever a Catholic threat to England was conjured up, whether by fabricated accusations of Jesuit plots or the repercussions of Louis XIV's persecution of French Protestants after 1685.
Nov. 5 also became part of a remaking of the calendar of British holidays to suit a new Protestant national identity. It overshadowed All Saints' Day (Nov. 1) and All Souls' Day (Nov. 2), remnants of medieval Catholicism. It also became part of a history in which the throne and nation were understood as enjoying special protection from divine providence.
But curiously enough, Guy Fawkes himself was a latecomer to the day that came to be named after him. He was never mentioned in early sermons, and it was the pope, not Fawkes, who was burned in effigy.
In Boston, this date was celebrated as Pope Day with parades, bonfires and a dose of vandalism that made the upper classes nervous. "The Pope Day rituals," Mr. Sharpe argues, "gave plebeian Bostonians a schooling in demonstrating and crowd organization," which provided basic training for the rebellion against British taxation and eventually rule.
At some point, burning Guy Fawkes replaced burning the pope as the central ceremony, and Nov. 5 became less an occasion for religious and patriotic celebration than for the lower classes to blow off steam. In some popular 19th-century entertainment, Guy Fawkes actually became a wrongheaded but brave and defiant hero of sorts.
Enlightened Victorians wanted to bleach out the day's anti-Catholicism - and, more important, to discourage public disorder. Public authorities conducted a yearly battle against the marches, bonfires and assorted rowdiness that sometimes tipped into arson, assault and mob violence.
In the end, Guy Fawkes Day, like the British working classes, turned respectable, a kind of family-centered festival. Today's controversies over the remaining celebrations, says Mr. Sharpe, center mainly on worries about accidental fires, personal injuries and other damage from fireworks (two years ago a high-flying firework hit an Airbus landing at the Manchester airport) and even the trauma inflicted on household pets or hedgehogs entering the season of hibernation.
"Remember, Remember" ends with a few unavoidable reflections on parallels between contemporary fears of faith-based terrorism and those of England in the 17th and 18th centuries. The author also reflects on "the situation of English Catholics around 1605 and the generality of modern British Muslims," both groups overwhelmingly loyal but struggling to maintain their religious and cultural identities in difficult environments.
"Historians should avoid facile comparisons between the past and the present," Mr. Sharpe acknowledges, and he goes no further than prodding his readers to think.
On painted signs
Painted Signs, Relics of a Bygone New York, Become Even More Rare
By JOSEPH BERGER
They are hieroglyphics of a bygone New York, writings on walls redolent of a time when women wore corsets, nearly every parlor seemed to have a piano and buggies could be hired for a genteel ride up the avenue once a blacksmith shod the horses.
Signs painted on the sides of humdrum brick buildings advertised such wares and services, in bold block letters accompanied occasionally by an evocative sketch. Amateur archaeologists can still unearth them, faded and weathered as they are, by walking the streets of the five boroughs and simply looking up.
But the construction boom of recent years is tearing down these vestiges of an older New York, or obscuring them with glass, steel and concrete high-rises. Conversion of onetime factories to upscale lofts has also doomed many signs. Landlords, sniffing revivals in once-disparaged neighborhoods across the city, are sandblasting signs into dusty oblivion or painting them over as if they were unsightly graffiti.
As he works on a new house on East 154th Street and Elton Avenue in the South Bronx, Jimmy Reyes, a contractor, often cranes his neck to look across the street toward the dim paint that is all that remains of the 10-foot-tall letters for P.N. CORSETS and a nearby sign for CERTIFIED COLD STORAGE/FURS COATS SUITS/SAFE AS A BANK and wonders how much longer they might endure.
"It's a shame because that used to be nice art, hand-drawn, not like today where they use posters and papers," he said.
Like water tanks, vintage signs were part of the gritty landscape of old industrial cities. The decades before the Depression were their heyday, but even after printed billboards became the advertising method of choice, signs were commonly painted on buildings into the 1960's, and a few fresh ones can be spotted today on warehouses and brick walls.
"They evoke the exuberant period of American capitalism," said Kathleen Hulser, public historian of the New-York Historical Society. "Consumer cultures were really getting going and there weren't many rules yet, no landmarks preservation commission or organized community saying: 'Isn't this awful? There's a picture of a man chewing tobacco on the corner of my street.' "
While a century ago, preservation groups viewed the signs as vulgar interlopers, some now want to sustain them. They seem like remnants of "a more civilized time," Ms. Hulser said.
The city's Landmarks Preservation Commission, however, has decided that it will not protect what it calls "ghost signs," according to Diane Jackier, a spokeswoman. "The commission protects architectural features and the commission does not consider the painted signs a significant feature," she said. No one has applied for a landmark designation for a painted sign in years, Ms. Jackier said.
Signs that are threadbare but still visible recall workhorse department stores like Gimbels and Hearns and men's clothing shops like Rogers Peet. They evoke a time when apartment buildings like the Warwick Arms at 101 West 80th Street trumpeted ULTRA MODERN APARTMENTS with GLASS SHOWER ENCLOSURES and when bowling alleys like McLEAN BOWL-O-DROME, which opened in 1942 along the Yonkers border, lured customers by boasting of air-conditioning.
At a three-story brick building at 109 West 17th Street that is now a Japanese furniture shop, wording painted on the exterior alerts buyers to a former incarnation of the building: TO LET /CARRIAGES COUPES HANSOMS VICTORIAS LIGHT WAGONS/ HORSES BOARD BY THE MONTH.
According to Walter Grutchfield, 69, one of three buffs who maintain Web sites devoted to photographs of the signs, the building was a livery stable from 1900 to 1905, owned by Patrick Logan, whose Irish roots are detectable in stone clover leaves set into niches in the building's facade.
Not too far away on the side of 151 West 19th Street is white Italic lettering alongside a sketch of a scissors for Griffon SHEARS SCISSORS. Griffon Cutlery Works, which also sold nail files, tweezers and manicure sets, used the building as its headquarters from 1920 into the 1960's.
The scissors suggest that homemakers typically did their own sewing well into the 1960's, an observation corroborated a few blocks north along Seventh Avenue with a sign for Necchi sewing machines, complete with a drawing of a machine with gracefully curving legs.
A sales office for Necchi, an active Italian company, opened at 154 West 25th street in 1949, but has long closed.
Charles Scribner III, whose family founded the legendary publishing house that bears his name, said that every time he drove down Ninth Avenue toward the Lincoln Tunnel, he delighted in the SCRIBNERS sign on the side of a 14-story red-brick building at 311 West 43rd Street.
For him, it recalls the glory days when Scribner's, now known as the Scribner imprint of Simon & Schuster, published Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The building, which opened in 1907, was the publisher's printing plant and warehouse - Hemingway's shotgun shells were also stored there - and Scribner's sold it 1955 when, like other companies, it found printing in New York too expensive.
"There were probably boxes of the first edition of 'The Great Gatsby' stored there that would now be worth more than the building itself," Mr. Scribner said, noting that a jacketed first edition of the book sells for $150,000.
The tearing down of old buildings in Times Square has given some once-obscured old signs a fleeting exposure. One of the last signs in the area - for J.A. KEAL'S CARRIAGE MANUFACTORY REPAIRING on Broadway and 47th Street - was suddenly revealed around 1998 when the adjacent building was torn down. But it was concealed again the next year once a new building began rising on the same spot.
The Bronx is still a gold mine, but construction to fill in the gaps in streets once plagued by arson is hiding or destroying many signs. Murals for the laxative Fletcher's Castoria were once ubiquitous in working-class areas and one in yellow lettering can still be seen on 134th Street between Alexander and Lincoln Avenues.
But an 80-year-old Castoria mural on 180th Street and Belmont Avenue is no longer visible. One of the quainter Bronx signs, NEMUTH BLACKSMITH WELDING, can still be glimpsed on a ramshackle garage-like building on Halperin Avenue in the Eastchester section.
Along Bruckner Boulevard, a handful of lingering signs, like the one for JEWEL PIANO CO., attest to the South Bronx's fame as a hub of piano manufacturing before World War I. According to the Bronx Historical Society Web site, piano manufacturing began to die off with the advent first of phonographs, then radio, then television. The last plant closed in the 1970's.
Until recent years, an ESTEY PIANO CO. sign just below the clock on a late 19th-century building popularly known as the Clocktower hinted at the lyrical age when every home seemed to have a piano. But the building has been rented out for residential lofts, and the Estey sign has been scrubbed away.
Older signs are being preserved, virtually, through the Internet. Frank H. Jump, a 45-year-old Brooklyn schoolteacher, sells photographs of the signs for $750 each through his Web site, www.frankjump.com. A favorite is the gold-on-blue sign at 147th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard for Omega Oil, a snake-oil concoction once used for sunburn, weak backs and stiff joints.
As someone who received a diagnosis of AIDS 22 years ago, he sees the painted signs as "metaphors for survival." So he was heartbroken to see another favorite, a spectral azure sign advertising a 19th-century laundry whitener, RECKITT'S BLUE/ THE PUREST AND BEST, on a three-story building at 622 Washington Avenue in Brooklyn, obscured by a new building. It had once been featured in articles about his curious obsession.
"That one hurt the most," he said.
On cloning animals
What's the matter with cloning Rex?
Humane groups oppose cloning dogs for pets. But we've been designing dogs to suit our whims for generations. Why stop now?
By Kirsten Weir
Nov. 05, 2005 | Shadow Anne is a dog adored. "She is smart, very independent, graceful, beautiful and elegant," says her owner, Marianne Schlegelmilch. "She likes to stand on the second-story beam of our house, gazing over her kingdom, with her long ears blowing in the wind -- sort of like Kate Winslet in 'Titanic.' She is a diva."
Shadow Anne is an Afghan hound, an aristocratic breed designed to be thin, hairy and refined. Afghans may lag behind labs and retrievers in popularity, but they recently secured a spot in history as the first canine to be cloned. In August, South Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang and his colleagues announced they'd successfully produced an Afghan hound clone, dubbed "Snuppy" for "Seoul National University puppy." The cloning milestone grabbed the public's attention. This wasn't just another Dolly the sheep. This was man's best friend.
"It would be really hard to replicate the life experiences that made Shadow who she is today," says Schlegelmilch, of Homer, Alaska. "Still, if I could clone her when she reaches old age, I might be tempted."
Schlegelmilch is not alone in her desire to keep her canine companion around indefinitely. In recent years, a trio of pet-cloning companies, Genetic Savings & Clone, ForeverPet and Perpetuate, have sprung up to meet the growing demand for carbon copies of Rex and Fluffy. Already the companies have a backlog of customers who have paid to store their pets' genes in the companies' freezers. So far, Genetic Savings & Clone is the only company that has cloned kittens for clients. (Recently it dropped the price from $50,000; a cat clone can now be had for just $32,000.)
Beneath the utopian science are some unsettling ethical questions about animal welfare and health. With city pounds across the country filled with homeless dogs and cats, should a person pay tens of thousands of dollars to essentially manufacture a new pet? Given that cloning is not a perfected science, is it premature to clone dogs and cats that could later suffer a bevy of medical problems?
The spotlight on cloning also illuminates the seldom acknowledged fact that, in many ways, cloning dogs and cats is redundant. We've more or less accomplished with breeding what cloning aims to create -- animals nearly identical in appearance and temperament. Since domesticating dogs from wolves more than 10,000 years ago, we've engineered the species to suit our needs and our whimsies -- border collies for herding sheep, malamutes for hauling sleds, teacup Chihuahuas for accessorizing starlets.
When it comes to dogs, "we've been doing seat-of-the-pants genetics for at least 12,000 years," says Stanley Coren, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia and author of numerous books on dogs. We did so, for the most part, with little knowledge of the underlying genetics. Today, sophisticated geneticists are tinkering with dog DNA in all sorts of ways. Some experiments are resulting in key cures for canine afflictions. And cloning, which at first glance may seem a quintessential act of human vanity, could become a reliable method for duplicating ideal pets.
Snuppy was created by somatic cell nuclear transfer, the same technique that produced Dolly the sheep. The genetic material is sucked out of donor eggs and replaced with DNA taken from skin cells of the clone "parent." The resulting embryo is stimulated to divide with chemicals or electricity, then implanted into a surrogate mother.
From nearly the moment Snuppy was born, groups such as the American Anti-Vivisection Society, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the Humane Society of the United States expressed their opposition. "There are millions of animals who are euthanized every year simply because they don't have a home," says Stephanie Shain, director of outreach for the Humane Society. "To clone a pet when there are so many animals that need homes, we think it's a technology that's completely unnecessary."
Not only is the technology unnecessary, Shain says, but it's imperfect and potentially dangerous. Cloning is extremely inefficient. To produce the first dog clone, the Korean team implanted multiple embryos into more than 100 surrogate dogs; only Snuppy survived. The lifespan and health of cloned mammals has also been called into question. Dolly, the famous first mammal to be cloned from an adult, suffered from lung disease and arthritis and was put down at a relatively young age. Whether her health problems were related to cloning is unknown.
Critics also contend that commercial cloning is consumer fraud, given that a clone won't be identical to the original pet. Although they will look alike and share the same genes, clones will grow up in different environmental conditions than the original animals, and have their own personalities and behaviors. Clones are essentially identical twins displaced in time. "There's no way to replicate an animal's personality," Shain says. "They're toying with these people's emotions."
Autumn Fiester is a senior fellow at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School and the owner of a purebred bichon frisé. She believes the jury is still out on pet cloning and will be until we know more about the health of the clones. But, she says, "it seems like Genetic Savings & Clone, for its part, has produced healthy animals." In the meantime, she says, "the preliminary arguments made by the opposing camp are not strong arguments."
Fiester points out that spending $30,000 on an animal that may live 15 years works out to just a couple hundred dollars a month. We often spend that on other so-called luxury items, like going to the movies or dining out. And at the end of a month of fine dining, you aren't even left with an object -- let alone one that loves you unconditionally. "In principle it is not irrational to want a later-born twin of a beloved pet," Fiester says. "Clients can say, 'At least I have something left, a little bit of my animal for me to cherish.'"
For some pet owners, replacing a lost pet with an animal from a shelter isn't an acceptable alternative. "Pet owners do not want any old pet," Fiester says. "They are after a certain genetic constellation, a certain cat or certain dog."
One such owner is Kathleen McNulty, from Long Valley, N.J. She has banked her dog Riley's genes with Genetic Savings & Clone and has posted a testimonial on the company's Web site. "I am very sympathetic to homeless cats and dogs," she wrote. "I have a barn full of cats that have been adopted from shelters. But I had this one very special relationship with this one dog, and I know that I'm not going to find that relationship with a dog that I get out of a shelter."
According to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association, more than 43 million U.S. households keep nearly 74 million dogs as pets and de facto family members. We love our dogs and are often willing to spend exorbitant sums for the perfect pup. The American Kennel Club estimates that one in four dogs are purebreds.
Individual dog breeds are so familiar to us, it's easy to forget that they are just races of a single species -- races that we've invented. In the wild, nature selects for particular traits and behaviors. In dogs, we've stepped in for Mother Nature and made our own selections.
Those selections have produced a species that comes in shapes and sizes that are all over the map. English mastiffs tip the scales at up to 200 pounds, while Chihuahuas weigh in at less than six. The faces of a bulldog and a basenji give no hints that they belong to the same species. "Some people design dogs like it's an art form," says Coren.
Unfortunately, those art forms often beget health problems, linked not to genetic diseases but to the dog's body shape. We've selected for physical traits in dogs that would never have originated in nature because they're not adaptive. The English bulldog is a classic example, says Raymond Coppinger, an evolutionary biologist at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., and co-author (with his wife, Lorna) of "Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior, and Evolution."
Bulldogs' heads are so big that they cannot fit through the birth canal, and their puppies must be delivered by cesarean section. And their radically flattened faces lead to deformed respiratory machinery, Coppinger says. As anyone who's come into contact with a snorting, snoring bulldog knows, they have a hard time breathing. Such a hard time, in fact, that they often have abnormally low levels of oxygen in their bloodstreams. "The dog isn't adapted to be that shape," he says. "The biology can't go there."
Some of our aesthetic choices have no apparent bearing on a dog's well-being; chances are, fur color doesn't much matter to a dog that doesn't have to camouflage itself in the wild. But in other cases, our choices could very well affect a dog's quality of life. Is it animal cruelty to create teacup breeds that are so small their mouths can't support a healthy set of teeth? Or to engineer Chinese Shar-Peis whose absurdly wrinkled skin harbors ulcers and mange?
Breeders themselves sometimes debate where to draw the line in shaping a dog's anatomy, says Patrick Venta, a professor of veterinary medicine at Michigan State University and a collaborator on DogMap, one of several canine genome projects. "If you breed to the extreme, you enhance the features of the breed, but if you push too far, it can create some type of health problem for the dog," he says. "There will be gray areas."
While much of current genetic research aims to benefit human medicine, a large number of scientists are working to improve the health of our favorite pet. Dogs suffer from an impressive collection of genetic diseases and disorders, thanks to a high incidence of inbreeding. Breeds such as Labrador retrievers and Afghan hounds are crippled by hip dysplasia, golden retrievers are prone to a specific type of cancer, and narcoleptic Dobermans fail as watchdogs when they topple over into a deep and sudden sleep.
Those and other health issues may very well be resolved with genetics research, but cloning isn't likely to play much of a role in identifying and eliminating genetic disorders. "Cloning is incredibly expensive ... and extremely inefficient," says Venta. "There are so many things people involved in canine genetics can do without whole-organism cloning."
In 2001, scientists at Cornell announced a gene therapy technique to cure congenital blindness in Briards, a type of French herding dog. Traditional genetics work has so far produced tests for as many as 30 canine diseases, Venta says, allowing breeders to avoid carriers of conditions like narcolepsy and hip dysplasia.
Animal rights activists often condemn genetic tinkering as well as cloning. But whether a dog was conceived by breeding or by cloning, maybe they have it made. Sure, they suffer a little manipulation, but they get food and healthcare and a warm place to sleep. While we've exterminated the wolf from much of its original habitat, we've made sure to ferry our pampered dogs into this millennium and probably the next.
"We wouldn't have any dogs if humans over the course of thousands of years hadn't selected certain characteristics," Venta says. "We'd be living with wolves."
Coren agrees and even calls dog breeds vital. "My wife and I recently got a beagle and we knew he'd be sweet and kissy-faced and dumb as a stone," he says. "Predictability is what you're paying for when you pay for a purebred dog, and it's a good thing. You don't want to have to roll the dice." Cloning would take that purebred predictability and bump it up a notch.
Schlegelmilch first fell in love with the Afghan hound when one ran by her house more than 30 years ago. "I had never seen any animal quite so elegant and graceful," she says. Within six months she owned one, and she and her husband have kept them ever since. With each new dog, they know just what to expect: a graceful, athletic, independent dog that doesn't necessarily obey commands.
Schlegelmilch now deals with a trusted breeder who tests for genetic disease and produces healthy puppies. Not all breeders are so responsible. Schlegelmilch's first Afghan hound Desiree died at age 3 from the canine version of Huntington's disease, a genetic disorder. "In retrospect, I think she came from a puppy-mill type of breeder," she says.
The irony of cloning, says bioethicist Fiester, is that it may prove more ethical than breeding, as there's no dearth of evidence that breeders can be irresponsible. Commercial cloning companies can also be fairly certain that a person spending thousands of dollars on a clone will pamper her pet. The average dog breeder has much less reassurance that clients will be loving owners. "Our initial reaction [to cloning] may be a yuck factor against Frankenpets," Fiester admits. "But ethically, cloning may have a leg up."
I said there weren't many. Anyway, I'm off. Djusk' a!
A Day to Think About a Case of Faith-Based Terrorism
By PETER STEINFELS
Today, just in case you had not noticed, is the 400th anniversary of Guy Fawkes Day - one of the most notable episodes of religion-based terrorism in Anglo-American history.
In the early hours of Nov. 5, 1605, officials of King James I of England, pursuing an intelligence lead, found Guy Fawkes and 36 barrels of gunpowder hidden in a storeroom on the ground floor of the Palace of Westminster, a warren of meeting rooms, apartments and even shops, where Parliament was to meet later that day.
Fawkes had fuses at the ready. He was the point man, though not the organizer, of what has been known ever since as the Gunpowder Plot. Inebriated by faith and outraged by the persecution of Catholicism under Queen Elizabeth and James, 13 Roman Catholic conspirators planned to blow up the king, his wife and sons and members of Parliament, detonating, they hoped, not only barrels of gunpowder but also an uprising that would install a Catholic government.
Two years ago, although allowing for the difficulty of comparing 17th-century gunpowder to modern explosives, the Center for Explosion Studies at the University of Aberystwyth concluded that the explosion could have obliterated the Palace of Westminster, Westminster Hall, Westminster Abbey and surrounding streets.
This estimate is found in "Remember, Remember: A Cultural History of Guy Fawkes Day" by James Sharpe, published today by Harvard University Press. His account is a reminder that such religiously inspired terrorism is part of the history of the modern West.
He tells the story of the plot, its unraveling and the trials and grisly execution of the conspirators rather economically, and he sets it in a much larger context of what, for English people of the day, was the equivalent of anything that is now described as a "clash of civilizations."
That context includes the persecution of Protestants under the reigns of Mary Tudor and of Catholics under her successor, Elizabeth. In 1570, Pope Pius V, by excommunicating Elizabeth and freeing her subjects to depose her, put all English Catholics under suspicion of being traitors. Then came the 1572 St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of thousands of French Protestants, the atrocities committed by Spanish troops in the Netherlands and the failed invasion of England by the Spanish Armada in 1588.
English Protestants naturally envisioned an international Catholic evil empire and consequently tried to stamp out any Catholic "fifth column" in their own land - to the point where Mr. Sharpe compares the experiences of underground English Catholics to that of resistance movements in Nazi-occupied Europe.
But his account does not stop with this background to the Gunpowder Plot. "Remember, Remember" (the book's title comes from an old rhyme beginning "Remember, remember, the Fifth of November") is a study in how over time the meaning of a historic event is changed and bent to a variety of religious, political and cultural purposes.
At the beginning of 1606, Parliament quickly passed an act mandating that Nov. 5 be a day of annual thanksgiving and commemoration of God's intervention to save the king, Parliament and nation. All loyal subjects were to attend services in every Anglican parish. The prescribed service remained in the Anglican prayer book until 1859.
Although there were some surprising voices of religious moderation early on, the sermons at those services were generally exercises in anti-Catholicism, intensified whenever a Catholic threat to England was conjured up, whether by fabricated accusations of Jesuit plots or the repercussions of Louis XIV's persecution of French Protestants after 1685.
Nov. 5 also became part of a remaking of the calendar of British holidays to suit a new Protestant national identity. It overshadowed All Saints' Day (Nov. 1) and All Souls' Day (Nov. 2), remnants of medieval Catholicism. It also became part of a history in which the throne and nation were understood as enjoying special protection from divine providence.
But curiously enough, Guy Fawkes himself was a latecomer to the day that came to be named after him. He was never mentioned in early sermons, and it was the pope, not Fawkes, who was burned in effigy.
In Boston, this date was celebrated as Pope Day with parades, bonfires and a dose of vandalism that made the upper classes nervous. "The Pope Day rituals," Mr. Sharpe argues, "gave plebeian Bostonians a schooling in demonstrating and crowd organization," which provided basic training for the rebellion against British taxation and eventually rule.
At some point, burning Guy Fawkes replaced burning the pope as the central ceremony, and Nov. 5 became less an occasion for religious and patriotic celebration than for the lower classes to blow off steam. In some popular 19th-century entertainment, Guy Fawkes actually became a wrongheaded but brave and defiant hero of sorts.
Enlightened Victorians wanted to bleach out the day's anti-Catholicism - and, more important, to discourage public disorder. Public authorities conducted a yearly battle against the marches, bonfires and assorted rowdiness that sometimes tipped into arson, assault and mob violence.
In the end, Guy Fawkes Day, like the British working classes, turned respectable, a kind of family-centered festival. Today's controversies over the remaining celebrations, says Mr. Sharpe, center mainly on worries about accidental fires, personal injuries and other damage from fireworks (two years ago a high-flying firework hit an Airbus landing at the Manchester airport) and even the trauma inflicted on household pets or hedgehogs entering the season of hibernation.
"Remember, Remember" ends with a few unavoidable reflections on parallels between contemporary fears of faith-based terrorism and those of England in the 17th and 18th centuries. The author also reflects on "the situation of English Catholics around 1605 and the generality of modern British Muslims," both groups overwhelmingly loyal but struggling to maintain their religious and cultural identities in difficult environments.
"Historians should avoid facile comparisons between the past and the present," Mr. Sharpe acknowledges, and he goes no further than prodding his readers to think.
On painted signs
Painted Signs, Relics of a Bygone New York, Become Even More Rare
By JOSEPH BERGER
They are hieroglyphics of a bygone New York, writings on walls redolent of a time when women wore corsets, nearly every parlor seemed to have a piano and buggies could be hired for a genteel ride up the avenue once a blacksmith shod the horses.
Signs painted on the sides of humdrum brick buildings advertised such wares and services, in bold block letters accompanied occasionally by an evocative sketch. Amateur archaeologists can still unearth them, faded and weathered as they are, by walking the streets of the five boroughs and simply looking up.
But the construction boom of recent years is tearing down these vestiges of an older New York, or obscuring them with glass, steel and concrete high-rises. Conversion of onetime factories to upscale lofts has also doomed many signs. Landlords, sniffing revivals in once-disparaged neighborhoods across the city, are sandblasting signs into dusty oblivion or painting them over as if they were unsightly graffiti.
As he works on a new house on East 154th Street and Elton Avenue in the South Bronx, Jimmy Reyes, a contractor, often cranes his neck to look across the street toward the dim paint that is all that remains of the 10-foot-tall letters for P.N. CORSETS and a nearby sign for CERTIFIED COLD STORAGE/FURS COATS SUITS/SAFE AS A BANK and wonders how much longer they might endure.
"It's a shame because that used to be nice art, hand-drawn, not like today where they use posters and papers," he said.
Like water tanks, vintage signs were part of the gritty landscape of old industrial cities. The decades before the Depression were their heyday, but even after printed billboards became the advertising method of choice, signs were commonly painted on buildings into the 1960's, and a few fresh ones can be spotted today on warehouses and brick walls.
"They evoke the exuberant period of American capitalism," said Kathleen Hulser, public historian of the New-York Historical Society. "Consumer cultures were really getting going and there weren't many rules yet, no landmarks preservation commission or organized community saying: 'Isn't this awful? There's a picture of a man chewing tobacco on the corner of my street.' "
While a century ago, preservation groups viewed the signs as vulgar interlopers, some now want to sustain them. They seem like remnants of "a more civilized time," Ms. Hulser said.
The city's Landmarks Preservation Commission, however, has decided that it will not protect what it calls "ghost signs," according to Diane Jackier, a spokeswoman. "The commission protects architectural features and the commission does not consider the painted signs a significant feature," she said. No one has applied for a landmark designation for a painted sign in years, Ms. Jackier said.
Signs that are threadbare but still visible recall workhorse department stores like Gimbels and Hearns and men's clothing shops like Rogers Peet. They evoke a time when apartment buildings like the Warwick Arms at 101 West 80th Street trumpeted ULTRA MODERN APARTMENTS with GLASS SHOWER ENCLOSURES and when bowling alleys like McLEAN BOWL-O-DROME, which opened in 1942 along the Yonkers border, lured customers by boasting of air-conditioning.
At a three-story brick building at 109 West 17th Street that is now a Japanese furniture shop, wording painted on the exterior alerts buyers to a former incarnation of the building: TO LET /CARRIAGES COUPES HANSOMS VICTORIAS LIGHT WAGONS/ HORSES BOARD BY THE MONTH.
According to Walter Grutchfield, 69, one of three buffs who maintain Web sites devoted to photographs of the signs, the building was a livery stable from 1900 to 1905, owned by Patrick Logan, whose Irish roots are detectable in stone clover leaves set into niches in the building's facade.
Not too far away on the side of 151 West 19th Street is white Italic lettering alongside a sketch of a scissors for Griffon SHEARS SCISSORS. Griffon Cutlery Works, which also sold nail files, tweezers and manicure sets, used the building as its headquarters from 1920 into the 1960's.
The scissors suggest that homemakers typically did their own sewing well into the 1960's, an observation corroborated a few blocks north along Seventh Avenue with a sign for Necchi sewing machines, complete with a drawing of a machine with gracefully curving legs.
A sales office for Necchi, an active Italian company, opened at 154 West 25th street in 1949, but has long closed.
Charles Scribner III, whose family founded the legendary publishing house that bears his name, said that every time he drove down Ninth Avenue toward the Lincoln Tunnel, he delighted in the SCRIBNERS sign on the side of a 14-story red-brick building at 311 West 43rd Street.
For him, it recalls the glory days when Scribner's, now known as the Scribner imprint of Simon & Schuster, published Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The building, which opened in 1907, was the publisher's printing plant and warehouse - Hemingway's shotgun shells were also stored there - and Scribner's sold it 1955 when, like other companies, it found printing in New York too expensive.
"There were probably boxes of the first edition of 'The Great Gatsby' stored there that would now be worth more than the building itself," Mr. Scribner said, noting that a jacketed first edition of the book sells for $150,000.
The tearing down of old buildings in Times Square has given some once-obscured old signs a fleeting exposure. One of the last signs in the area - for J.A. KEAL'S CARRIAGE MANUFACTORY REPAIRING on Broadway and 47th Street - was suddenly revealed around 1998 when the adjacent building was torn down. But it was concealed again the next year once a new building began rising on the same spot.
The Bronx is still a gold mine, but construction to fill in the gaps in streets once plagued by arson is hiding or destroying many signs. Murals for the laxative Fletcher's Castoria were once ubiquitous in working-class areas and one in yellow lettering can still be seen on 134th Street between Alexander and Lincoln Avenues.
But an 80-year-old Castoria mural on 180th Street and Belmont Avenue is no longer visible. One of the quainter Bronx signs, NEMUTH BLACKSMITH WELDING, can still be glimpsed on a ramshackle garage-like building on Halperin Avenue in the Eastchester section.
Along Bruckner Boulevard, a handful of lingering signs, like the one for JEWEL PIANO CO., attest to the South Bronx's fame as a hub of piano manufacturing before World War I. According to the Bronx Historical Society Web site, piano manufacturing began to die off with the advent first of phonographs, then radio, then television. The last plant closed in the 1970's.
Until recent years, an ESTEY PIANO CO. sign just below the clock on a late 19th-century building popularly known as the Clocktower hinted at the lyrical age when every home seemed to have a piano. But the building has been rented out for residential lofts, and the Estey sign has been scrubbed away.
Older signs are being preserved, virtually, through the Internet. Frank H. Jump, a 45-year-old Brooklyn schoolteacher, sells photographs of the signs for $750 each through his Web site, www.frankjump.com. A favorite is the gold-on-blue sign at 147th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard for Omega Oil, a snake-oil concoction once used for sunburn, weak backs and stiff joints.
As someone who received a diagnosis of AIDS 22 years ago, he sees the painted signs as "metaphors for survival." So he was heartbroken to see another favorite, a spectral azure sign advertising a 19th-century laundry whitener, RECKITT'S BLUE/ THE PUREST AND BEST, on a three-story building at 622 Washington Avenue in Brooklyn, obscured by a new building. It had once been featured in articles about his curious obsession.
"That one hurt the most," he said.
On cloning animals
What's the matter with cloning Rex?
Humane groups oppose cloning dogs for pets. But we've been designing dogs to suit our whims for generations. Why stop now?
By Kirsten Weir
Nov. 05, 2005 | Shadow Anne is a dog adored. "She is smart, very independent, graceful, beautiful and elegant," says her owner, Marianne Schlegelmilch. "She likes to stand on the second-story beam of our house, gazing over her kingdom, with her long ears blowing in the wind -- sort of like Kate Winslet in 'Titanic.' She is a diva."
Shadow Anne is an Afghan hound, an aristocratic breed designed to be thin, hairy and refined. Afghans may lag behind labs and retrievers in popularity, but they recently secured a spot in history as the first canine to be cloned. In August, South Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang and his colleagues announced they'd successfully produced an Afghan hound clone, dubbed "Snuppy" for "Seoul National University puppy." The cloning milestone grabbed the public's attention. This wasn't just another Dolly the sheep. This was man's best friend.
"It would be really hard to replicate the life experiences that made Shadow who she is today," says Schlegelmilch, of Homer, Alaska. "Still, if I could clone her when she reaches old age, I might be tempted."
Schlegelmilch is not alone in her desire to keep her canine companion around indefinitely. In recent years, a trio of pet-cloning companies, Genetic Savings & Clone, ForeverPet and Perpetuate, have sprung up to meet the growing demand for carbon copies of Rex and Fluffy. Already the companies have a backlog of customers who have paid to store their pets' genes in the companies' freezers. So far, Genetic Savings & Clone is the only company that has cloned kittens for clients. (Recently it dropped the price from $50,000; a cat clone can now be had for just $32,000.)
Beneath the utopian science are some unsettling ethical questions about animal welfare and health. With city pounds across the country filled with homeless dogs and cats, should a person pay tens of thousands of dollars to essentially manufacture a new pet? Given that cloning is not a perfected science, is it premature to clone dogs and cats that could later suffer a bevy of medical problems?
The spotlight on cloning also illuminates the seldom acknowledged fact that, in many ways, cloning dogs and cats is redundant. We've more or less accomplished with breeding what cloning aims to create -- animals nearly identical in appearance and temperament. Since domesticating dogs from wolves more than 10,000 years ago, we've engineered the species to suit our needs and our whimsies -- border collies for herding sheep, malamutes for hauling sleds, teacup Chihuahuas for accessorizing starlets.
When it comes to dogs, "we've been doing seat-of-the-pants genetics for at least 12,000 years," says Stanley Coren, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia and author of numerous books on dogs. We did so, for the most part, with little knowledge of the underlying genetics. Today, sophisticated geneticists are tinkering with dog DNA in all sorts of ways. Some experiments are resulting in key cures for canine afflictions. And cloning, which at first glance may seem a quintessential act of human vanity, could become a reliable method for duplicating ideal pets.
Snuppy was created by somatic cell nuclear transfer, the same technique that produced Dolly the sheep. The genetic material is sucked out of donor eggs and replaced with DNA taken from skin cells of the clone "parent." The resulting embryo is stimulated to divide with chemicals or electricity, then implanted into a surrogate mother.
From nearly the moment Snuppy was born, groups such as the American Anti-Vivisection Society, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the Humane Society of the United States expressed their opposition. "There are millions of animals who are euthanized every year simply because they don't have a home," says Stephanie Shain, director of outreach for the Humane Society. "To clone a pet when there are so many animals that need homes, we think it's a technology that's completely unnecessary."
Not only is the technology unnecessary, Shain says, but it's imperfect and potentially dangerous. Cloning is extremely inefficient. To produce the first dog clone, the Korean team implanted multiple embryos into more than 100 surrogate dogs; only Snuppy survived. The lifespan and health of cloned mammals has also been called into question. Dolly, the famous first mammal to be cloned from an adult, suffered from lung disease and arthritis and was put down at a relatively young age. Whether her health problems were related to cloning is unknown.
Critics also contend that commercial cloning is consumer fraud, given that a clone won't be identical to the original pet. Although they will look alike and share the same genes, clones will grow up in different environmental conditions than the original animals, and have their own personalities and behaviors. Clones are essentially identical twins displaced in time. "There's no way to replicate an animal's personality," Shain says. "They're toying with these people's emotions."
Autumn Fiester is a senior fellow at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School and the owner of a purebred bichon frisé. She believes the jury is still out on pet cloning and will be until we know more about the health of the clones. But, she says, "it seems like Genetic Savings & Clone, for its part, has produced healthy animals." In the meantime, she says, "the preliminary arguments made by the opposing camp are not strong arguments."
Fiester points out that spending $30,000 on an animal that may live 15 years works out to just a couple hundred dollars a month. We often spend that on other so-called luxury items, like going to the movies or dining out. And at the end of a month of fine dining, you aren't even left with an object -- let alone one that loves you unconditionally. "In principle it is not irrational to want a later-born twin of a beloved pet," Fiester says. "Clients can say, 'At least I have something left, a little bit of my animal for me to cherish.'"
For some pet owners, replacing a lost pet with an animal from a shelter isn't an acceptable alternative. "Pet owners do not want any old pet," Fiester says. "They are after a certain genetic constellation, a certain cat or certain dog."
One such owner is Kathleen McNulty, from Long Valley, N.J. She has banked her dog Riley's genes with Genetic Savings & Clone and has posted a testimonial on the company's Web site. "I am very sympathetic to homeless cats and dogs," she wrote. "I have a barn full of cats that have been adopted from shelters. But I had this one very special relationship with this one dog, and I know that I'm not going to find that relationship with a dog that I get out of a shelter."
According to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association, more than 43 million U.S. households keep nearly 74 million dogs as pets and de facto family members. We love our dogs and are often willing to spend exorbitant sums for the perfect pup. The American Kennel Club estimates that one in four dogs are purebreds.
Individual dog breeds are so familiar to us, it's easy to forget that they are just races of a single species -- races that we've invented. In the wild, nature selects for particular traits and behaviors. In dogs, we've stepped in for Mother Nature and made our own selections.
Those selections have produced a species that comes in shapes and sizes that are all over the map. English mastiffs tip the scales at up to 200 pounds, while Chihuahuas weigh in at less than six. The faces of a bulldog and a basenji give no hints that they belong to the same species. "Some people design dogs like it's an art form," says Coren.
Unfortunately, those art forms often beget health problems, linked not to genetic diseases but to the dog's body shape. We've selected for physical traits in dogs that would never have originated in nature because they're not adaptive. The English bulldog is a classic example, says Raymond Coppinger, an evolutionary biologist at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., and co-author (with his wife, Lorna) of "Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior, and Evolution."
Bulldogs' heads are so big that they cannot fit through the birth canal, and their puppies must be delivered by cesarean section. And their radically flattened faces lead to deformed respiratory machinery, Coppinger says. As anyone who's come into contact with a snorting, snoring bulldog knows, they have a hard time breathing. Such a hard time, in fact, that they often have abnormally low levels of oxygen in their bloodstreams. "The dog isn't adapted to be that shape," he says. "The biology can't go there."
Some of our aesthetic choices have no apparent bearing on a dog's well-being; chances are, fur color doesn't much matter to a dog that doesn't have to camouflage itself in the wild. But in other cases, our choices could very well affect a dog's quality of life. Is it animal cruelty to create teacup breeds that are so small their mouths can't support a healthy set of teeth? Or to engineer Chinese Shar-Peis whose absurdly wrinkled skin harbors ulcers and mange?
Breeders themselves sometimes debate where to draw the line in shaping a dog's anatomy, says Patrick Venta, a professor of veterinary medicine at Michigan State University and a collaborator on DogMap, one of several canine genome projects. "If you breed to the extreme, you enhance the features of the breed, but if you push too far, it can create some type of health problem for the dog," he says. "There will be gray areas."
While much of current genetic research aims to benefit human medicine, a large number of scientists are working to improve the health of our favorite pet. Dogs suffer from an impressive collection of genetic diseases and disorders, thanks to a high incidence of inbreeding. Breeds such as Labrador retrievers and Afghan hounds are crippled by hip dysplasia, golden retrievers are prone to a specific type of cancer, and narcoleptic Dobermans fail as watchdogs when they topple over into a deep and sudden sleep.
Those and other health issues may very well be resolved with genetics research, but cloning isn't likely to play much of a role in identifying and eliminating genetic disorders. "Cloning is incredibly expensive ... and extremely inefficient," says Venta. "There are so many things people involved in canine genetics can do without whole-organism cloning."
In 2001, scientists at Cornell announced a gene therapy technique to cure congenital blindness in Briards, a type of French herding dog. Traditional genetics work has so far produced tests for as many as 30 canine diseases, Venta says, allowing breeders to avoid carriers of conditions like narcolepsy and hip dysplasia.
Animal rights activists often condemn genetic tinkering as well as cloning. But whether a dog was conceived by breeding or by cloning, maybe they have it made. Sure, they suffer a little manipulation, but they get food and healthcare and a warm place to sleep. While we've exterminated the wolf from much of its original habitat, we've made sure to ferry our pampered dogs into this millennium and probably the next.
"We wouldn't have any dogs if humans over the course of thousands of years hadn't selected certain characteristics," Venta says. "We'd be living with wolves."
Coren agrees and even calls dog breeds vital. "My wife and I recently got a beagle and we knew he'd be sweet and kissy-faced and dumb as a stone," he says. "Predictability is what you're paying for when you pay for a purebred dog, and it's a good thing. You don't want to have to roll the dice." Cloning would take that purebred predictability and bump it up a notch.
Schlegelmilch first fell in love with the Afghan hound when one ran by her house more than 30 years ago. "I had never seen any animal quite so elegant and graceful," she says. Within six months she owned one, and she and her husband have kept them ever since. With each new dog, they know just what to expect: a graceful, athletic, independent dog that doesn't necessarily obey commands.
Schlegelmilch now deals with a trusted breeder who tests for genetic disease and produces healthy puppies. Not all breeders are so responsible. Schlegelmilch's first Afghan hound Desiree died at age 3 from the canine version of Huntington's disease, a genetic disorder. "In retrospect, I think she came from a puppy-mill type of breeder," she says.
The irony of cloning, says bioethicist Fiester, is that it may prove more ethical than breeding, as there's no dearth of evidence that breeders can be irresponsible. Commercial cloning companies can also be fairly certain that a person spending thousands of dollars on a clone will pamper her pet. The average dog breeder has much less reassurance that clients will be loving owners. "Our initial reaction [to cloning] may be a yuck factor against Frankenpets," Fiester admits. "But ethically, cloning may have a leg up."
I said there weren't many. Anyway, I'm off. Djusk' a!
