History

Verde Canyon Railway

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A while back I was in Sedona and took the Verde Canyon Railroad. This railroad was for mining but now is a popular tourist attraction. Here is a link to their web site. From the site:

The railroads of north central Arizona were all built to support Arizona’s richest copper mine located in Jerome, in the Mingus Mountains above Clarkdale. The Verde Canyon Railroad (formerly the Verde Valley Railroad, operated by the Santa Fe, Prescott & Phoenix Railroad,) was financed by Senator William A. Clark for $1.3 million dollars in 1911. Built miraculously in only one year, the 38-mile, standard gauge line from Clarkdale to Drake, AZ was constructed by 250 men using 200 mules, picks and shovels and lots of DuPont black powder explosives. Today, the same railroad would cost in excess of $40 million to build.

As always, I marvel at how fast these types of operations used to be built, in the days before government and lawyers strangled the life out of everything. I also doubt their “$40 million” figure, because you probably can’t build much of anything and get the permits to do so within our lifetime (the train line runs near a bald Eagle nest, which probably makes it impossible to construct anything).

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Movie Review: “Dark Blue World”

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I learned about this Czech film a couple of years ago via screenwriter/blogger Robert Avrech. It’s not very well known in the U.S. and wasn’t then available on Netflix (though it is now), so I bought it, and just re-watched it…definitely a film worth seeing more than once. Friendship, love, and war, and some aspects of history that are probably unfamiliar to most Americans.

When Czechoslovakia was occupied by German troops in 1938, many Czech pilots made their way to the West and served with the Royal Air Force. After the war, surviving/returning pilots were imprisoned by Czechoslovakia’s new Communist government, which feared that they had been contaminated by Western ideas.

Franta Slama is a Czech air force captain. His younger protege and friend, Karel Vojtisek, is an aspiring fighter pilot. After the humiliating surrender of the airfield to an ungracious German officer, Franta and Karel escape the country via motorcycle. Franta leaves behind his girlfriend, Hanicka, and his beloved dog Barcha. Karel is not in a relationship, but is girl-crazy to a degree even greater that typical for his age.

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Get Out Your Godwin’s Law-O-Meter

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I originally posted this at zenpundit.com but then I remembered that at Chicago Boyz there are likely many readers and bloggers who are fans of Jonah Goldberg and might enjoy reading him squaring off against leftist academic critics:

HNN is running a symposium on Jonah Goldberg’s recent book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning:

While I know a great deal about the historical period in question, I have not read Goldberg’s book, so I am not going to comment on his core proposition except to say that IMHO, I tend to find arguments that the intellectual roots of Fascism and Nazism are located exclusively on one side of the political spectrum are flatly and demonstrably wrong. Goldberg’s polemical thesis though, yields a hysterical reaction because he is jubilantly shredding the hoary (and false) assertion of the academic Left, going back to the pre-Popular Front Communist Party line of the 1930s, that Fascism is a form of radicalized conservatism and a secret pawn of big-business capitalism.

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McDougall On Tocqueville

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Walter McDougall introduces us to young Alexis de Tocqueville in his book Throes of Democracy:

Alexis de TocquevilleAs late as 1997 a historian with some pretensions to veracity wrote (albeit tongue in cheek) that “complete objectivity about America is a characteristic only of God and Alexis de Tocqueville”. In truth, the young Frenchman’s methods were highly subjective. He was an aristocrat whose parents narrowly escaped the guillotine during the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. So he came to America inclined to believe that government in the hands of the envious masses was far more dangerous than rule by disinterested aristocrats. Tocqueville was raised a Catholic, but exposure to Enlightenment philosophy hobbled his faith: “I believe, but I cannot practice”. So he came to America with little appreciation of what made religious people tick, especially Protestants of British stock. His classical education and training for a French legal career biased his mind toward deduction rather than empirical, historical thought. So he came to America with little sense of the profound experience that inspired the thirteen colonies to found the United States.

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The Defeat of the English Armada, the Fall of England, and the Rise of Spain

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The Well-Chinned

No one ever expects the Spanish Armada. Yet, somehow, in the year of our Lord 1588, England had survived. Perhaps the arrival of the Invincible Armada was predictable. After all, Phillip II, the Well-Chinned, His Most Catholic Majesty, king of Spain, etc. had a well demonstrated habit of oppressing Protestants, at least when he wasn’t indulging his primary passion of breeding the next generation of super-chinned Hapsburg superman with one of his cousins or maybe a niece. Of course it didn’t help that Elizabeth I, the Miser, Queen of England, had pursued a muddled strategy of extreme caution and provocation, which only infuriated a man laboring under the oppressive weight of a giant chin and living heretics.

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