Yale will rename Calhoun College to honor Grace Hopper
nhregister.com
nhregister.com
I've rarely seen anyone champion Ada as a symbol of "Women working with computers".
She didn't just write a paper. Her place in history is at least as well earned - I personally think moreso - as Babbage's.
"When Ada wrote about Babbage’s machine, she wanted to explain what it did in the clearest way—and to do this she looked at the machine more abstractly, with the result that she ended up exploring and articulating something quite recognizable as the modern notion of universal computation."
She did so 100 years before Turing.
http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-o...
The South, the South...God knows what shall become of her.
What do you mean by this?
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new...
Actually her message was a model of pretending that we haven't been having the black face conversation every single god damned year for over a hundred years while flogging her book.
Although rather few of either.
Even for someone not particularly religious for the time(Calhoun eventually became a Unitarian), all that would be a little difficult for him to get his head around.
I mean, it could be worse. I imagine sometimes how Increase Mather would react to Harvard today, and I kinda understand where fundamentalist terrorists get their outrage from.
Hmm...
There won't be a lot of names left if you take only the purest of the pure as names. Naming a building means celebrating the good things that a person did, not condoning the bad. People are complicated and it's a disservice to college students to suggest otherwise.
* Vegans and vegetarians are growing groups, especially among the young.
* Food technology is improving and making it easier and easier to not eat meat. There are a few startups in this area, such as Impossible Foods, that may revolutionize how we eat.
* The world is becoming increasingly aware of the risk of climate change, and that consuming animal products is a significant factor.
* We have plenty of solid scientific evidence showing people can live healthy lives without eating meat, removing the "we need it to survive" argument. (There is also some evidence that eating less meat is good for you, but there is a lot to debate there.)
* Legislation is moving more and more towards protecting animal rights, even if we have a lot left to do.
So yes, I think the top comment is right. People eating meat today will be judged poorly in a few generations' time.
Only about 3% of Americans are self-proclaimed vegetarians (less than 1% are vegans), and there's good evidence that the majority of those eat meat, fish, or poultry on a regular basis [1].
Of course, future generations may be 100% vegan and look back on us with horror at the way that we treated animals, our planet, our bodies, etc. But that's distinct from looking back on individuals who didn't choose a particular niche lifestyle and having it tarnish their memory.
Your points seem more about why you think that individual non-vegetarians should be judged harshly by history, but I see little reason to think that a lifestyle that less than 1% of the population strictly adheres to is going to become a source of individualized historical shame.
1. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animals-and-us/201109/w...
> In 1971, 1 percent of U.S. citizens described themselves as vegetarians.[104] In 2008 Harris Interactive found that 3.2% are vegetarian and 0.5% vegan,[105] while a 2013 Public Policy Polling survey of 500 respondents found that 13% of Americans are either vegetarian or vegan—6% vegetarian and 7% vegan.[106] U.S. vegetarian food sales (meat replacements such as soy milk and textured vegetable protein) doubled between 1998 and 2003, reaching $1.6 billion in 2003.[107]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country#Unite...
There is a strong trend here, as shown both by that data, and by the other factors I mentioned (startups in the meat-free space, etc.).
Of course, a trend has no guarantee it will continue. But it is plausible that it will.
Harris poll in 2016 says about 3%: http://www.vrg.org/nutshell/Polls/2016_adults_veg.htm
And given previous results, I highly suspect many of those have eaten meat or fish in the last year.
And so my point stands: even if strict vegetarian / vegan lifestyles become the majority view in the future, it'll be many decades from now, and individuals in our era won't be widely shamed for not adopting such a lifestyle, given that only a tiny fraction of the population does.
I agree this is a process that will take decades.
I disagree about the criticism. I think those future generations will be horrified at how we so casually accept the eating of animal products, factory farming, and so forth. (And they might feel some unease at the vegans/vegetarians that are just 99% perfect, too.)
The fact it's only a growing fraction right now doesn't mean the future won't be shocked at the majority today. There are plenty of examples where we are shocked by the majority in the past.
So in 200 years, will they remove the name of someone from our era from monuments or buildings because they weren't vegetarian? Especially considering almost no one was, and the people who claimed to be were mostly lying?
Probably not.
I wonder what the Venn diagram is relating being pro lab-grown meat and pro GMO.
I'd bet there's not a lot of overlap
Or we could stop freaking out that historical figures didn't have 21st century values, but that proposition is clearly too radical.
The ones doing the renaming have no independent convictions of their own. Or for that matter, much insight into or sympathy for, the differing views of others, let alone others from different times or places.
What they do have instead is a hyperactive self-righteousness gland, which is easily tickled to orgasm by the thought of them being on the right side, the side of the angels, in any conflict. It is what passes for their conscience. This explains the drive to cast all historic conflicts in the most reductive & simplistic way possible. So much the easier to spooge over how progressive they are for hating on the wrong side
John C. Calhoun is a person without mention of whom any history of early 19th century America would be incomplete. Yet, he can be dismissed with infantile invective ("human sewer"), as though he, like all antebellum Southerners was a monodimensional cartoon villain, like Decepticons who had an abiding interest in...cotton.
I am cheered by the fact that more and more normal citizens are seeing this performative outrage pantomime for the chauvinism-of-viewpoint that it is.
No one's stripping him out of the history books. Why does he deserve the honor of having a college named for him?
> Or for that matter, much insight into or sympathy for, the differing views of others, let alone others from different times or places.
I guess I can't pass up the irony of this statement. I grew up in the South. I'm old enough to remember a time when Confederates were seen as noble. Old enough to have people tell me quite sincerely that "those people had it good as slaves."
Attitudes have changed since then and in part because enough white people attempted to learn about and gained sympathy for a group of people very different than themselves: the enslaved black Americans of the 19th Century. Without the understanding and empathy which crossed cultural and racial boundaries, there would never have come a time when Calhoun's name was considered a negative by the majority.
Calhoun himself writes in 1837:
> But I take higher ground. I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good–a positive good.
...
> Compare his condition with the tenants of the poor houses in the more civilized portions of Europe–look at the sick, and the old and infirm slave, on one hand, in the midst of his family and friends, under the kind superintending care of his master and mistress, and compare it with the forlorn and wretched condition of the pauper in the poorhouse.
This revisionism avoids the text of the Constitution of the Confederate States, the writings of Calhoun, the 1860 census of South Carolina, the secession of the Southern States and the firing on Fort Sumter.
It avoids a lot more than that. The Confederacy themselves could have freed the slaves at any time.
6 months in when the south was winning
It's also not particularly surprising if you consider the history of the Cherokee specifically (compared to other Native American tribes). The Cherokee tried to have diplomatic relations with the Union (the United States), and the US stabbed them in the back. Of course they'd want to break up the Union - it was the only shot they had at reclaiming their sovereignty.
Civil War history is a hobby of mine that developed after the flag stuff a couple of years ago. There were so many factors that went into the conflict it's hard to even know where to begin.
Snag a book on the economics of it sometime if you're interested though.
Two small points to get you started.
1. The causes of secession and the cause of the war were not the same thing. The former had many, the latter was entirely economic.
2. Only 4 states even issued declarations. 3 of them were heavily about slavery. The rest require historical context to understand. Slavery wasn't even under threat if states had just hung around. You need look no further than Lincolns inaugural speech to verify that.
> Slavery wasn't even under threat if states had just hung around.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act threatened to tip the balance of slave states vs. free states, and Lincoln's and the Republican Party's platform of not allowing the creation of any new slave states effectively put an expiration date on slavery in the US. That is why the ordinances of secession mentioned the threat against slavery. Lincoln only stated that he wouldn't directly abolish slavery because the slave states had already threatened to secede if he were elected, citing the belief that he would.
There is no debate among professional historians about the cause of the slave states' secession. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military-jan-june11-civilwar_...
I've been down this discussion road many time before and it goes on for a while with a lot of back and forth. The simplest thing for you to do is to go and grab a couple of books on the civil war, read them and when you get to something that seems impossible based on what you currently know go and look up the citations. The digitized Library of Congress and Google's efforts to scan historical documents make it really easy to read while verifying.
Since you're harping on the causes for secession, I'm going to go ahead and provide you a couple of quick links to refute your stance to get you started though:
http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/primarysources/dec...
This includes the declarations of Georgia, Texas, South Carolina and Mississippi. Georgia, Texas and Mississippi were almost entirely about slavery. South Carolina's was partially about slavery. You can see a graph here with a breakdown of each document (http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/secession/).
That first link also includes Virginia's secession ordinance at the bottom, which isn't a declaration of causes but merely the bill passed to secede. You'll notice no mention of slavery, but instead the perversion of federal power. The only mention of the word slave is the oppression of not only Virginia "but the southern slave holding states".
Now, hop on over to timeline of events on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_events_leading_to_...
Jump down to 1861, then look at Feb 4, April 4, April 15 and then April 15-16, April 17-19 (really most of the "Aftermath 1861" section).
To summarize, you'll see Virginia unwilling to secede (... only 32 of 152 are immediate secessionists...), Virginia again reject secession, Lincoln bypass congress to request troops from each state. Following this request for troops is when the remaining states secede (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee).
For these states, they were not seceding "because slavery" they were seceding because the Federal government was bypassing Congress to start a war and had no intention of taking up arms against the south. The way in which the war was fought did not help the case.
Now, that should put most of the idea of a single cause of secession to rest. What I would suggest next is for you to grab a book on the economics of the civil war (because there are many).
Just to give you a hint of exactly how big of an issue this was...
March 18, 1861 the Philadelphia Press wrote: "Blockade Southern Ports. If not a series of customs houses will be required on the vast inland border from the Atlantic to West Texas. Worse still, with no protective tariff, European goods will under-price Northern goods in Southern markets. Cotton for Northern mills will be charged an export tax. This will cripple the clothing industries and make British mills prosper. Finally, the great inland waterways, the Mississippi, the Missouri and the Ohio Rivers, will be subject to Southern tolls."
March 22, 1861 the economic editor of the New York Times wrote, "At once shut down every Southern port, destroy its commerce and bring utter ruin on the Confederate states."
That's before we even get into why John Brown is famous, because he never actually accomplished anything. The only reason we know his name is that he lit a match on a lot of southern fears and northern sentiments. You can even see this played out in the Emancipation Proclamation because it was issued twice - the first time as a warning.
I'm not even pretending that slavery wasn't a major factor, just refuting the idea that it was the only factor. The war was about money and fear, from both sides for different reasons.
> You'll notice no mention of slavery, but instead the perversion of federal power. The only mention of the word slave is the oppression of not only Virginia "but the southern slave holding states".
The perversion of federal power mentioned is the new government's coming actions to eventually kill slavery. Again, the governor of Virginia said as much (“The Northern States must strike from their statute books their personal liberty bills, and fulfill their consitutional obligations in regard to fugitive slaves and fugitives from justice. If our slaves escape into non-slaveholding states, they must be delivered up.”) Again, no other cause is mentioned by any of the states.
> For these states, they were not seceding "because slavery" they were seceding because the Federal government was bypassing Congress to start a war and had no intention of taking up arms against the south.
They didn't like Lincoln's call for volunteers to bring the seceding states in line, yet they had no qualms about immediately raising troops via draft (via the first conscription law in the United States) to fight against the Union. Why is that? You noticed that your Wikipedia link about the timeline of events leading to secession is all about the history of slavery regulation in the United States, right?
Your quotes are proposals of what to do with Southern states that seceded, not the cause of secession.
You're going into mental contortions to disagree with historians. Why?
The quotes were to provide you with context on the economic impact secession was going to have on the northern economy (which would have been devastating). I'm well aware of everything left out of the Wikipedia timeline, but it's a locked topic with 15,000 plus edits.
If you want a better understanding of the subject, there are a lot of books to satisfy your curiousity.
Actually, the Confederate constitution was even more hostile on the subject of states' rights than was the US Constitution.
(4) No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing
the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.
So if say Mississippi were to suddenly see the light, they couldn't as a state pass a bill impairing the right of property in negro slaves.
What do you mean to imply by this quote? It's horribly discriminatory and it's actually pro-slavery.
There's no question that today, and for the best part of the past 150 years, we find Calhoun's views absolutely abhorrent and reprehensible. For us, there is no question about it.
Calhoun, and most everyone else in human history, lived in a different time. We now "know" that slavery is inherently wrong, but Calhoun, for example, didn't see it that way. He literally believed he was doing a good thing. We now find that paternalistic, condescending, and abhorrent. Even in his own time, Calhoun's views were becoming outdated.
But there is not, and never has been, an oracle anyone could consult to find the Truth about what is Good and Right. Even seemingly objective religious oracles of the Truth About Morality are subject to interpretation. We all had to muddle our own way through it. Our consciences were all formed by the society we lived in and, no doubt, by our self interest.
I have no doubt that hundreds of years from now, when social norms have evolved in ways we can't imagine, people will find our views abhorrent and reprehensible too. I hope they do not dismiss us human sewers on that basis alone.
At any rate, I think that when you dismiss figures of the past as human sewers, you overlook just how past atrocities happened, which makes it easier for them to happen in the here and now.
But Calhoun would have claimed, as implied in the quote upthread, that slaves were essentially incapable of 'informed consent'; they were like children, slavery was better for them regardless of their stated preferences. Calhoun would have considered that as ridiculous as asking a child whether or not they liked their vegetables. Obviously, given our values today and our knowledge of biology, that's not only wrong in every sense but absurd. But when you grow up in a culture of normalized racial inequality, that's what you get.
Not only that, he would have pointed out that many slaves liked their position in life.
I only wish right and wrong were so simple.
Incidentally, one of the proximate causes of the Civil War, and one of the most persuasive voices for abolition was John Brown, who died a martyr after being hanged for taking up arms to free slaves. It was his dedication to the cause even up to the gallows that convinced many people of its rightness. His speech at his trial should be read by everyone.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/John_Brown%27s_Speech_to_the_...
I strongly disagree. The foundation of democracy and liberty is self-determination. Civil rights protect their stated preferences and other limits to the law and government. The philosophical foundation of the U.S. is individual liberty.
Calhoun would make lots of claims; people always have justifications. The people doing evil don't stand up and say so; they give rationalizations to sway the gullible and lull others into confusion or not caring. Hitler, Stalin, Putin, and the rest did the same.
i disagree. how past atrocities happened is less (probably not at all) from name-calling the victimizers of the past and more from wiffle-waffling intellectual obfuscation of pure self-interest as something more than what it is. what could justify kidnapping people, putting them in mortal danger by shipping them across the ocean against their will, selling them to masters who had liberty to anything they liked with them?
flip it around: there're plenty of horrible things happening right now, and lots of people proffering up weak-ass justifications for them. i have a low opinion of them. why should i have a higher opinion of their counterparts for 150 years ago?
Your attempt to seem wise and clever might come across a bit better if you had even the slightest aquaintence with the topic of history, about which you seem to be almost entirely ignorant. By 1837 slavery had been abolished in the countries the US would consider itself a peer of. Slavery was not some mainstream idea; it had, for decades in the civilised world, been on the run.
Appealing to the notion we are unreasonably judging the slavery advocates of the mid-19th century by their own standards shows either complete ignorance or a frankly creepy desire to propogate their philosophy.
That is why I was careful to point out that Calhoun's views were already becoming outdated; and at any rate, Calhoun lived in the US, not in, say, England. I'm not arguing that Calhoun was some kind of progressive for his time. I'm sure you don't mean what you seem to be insinuating with your other claim - obviously nobody who isn't mentally ill supports any philosophy of slavery in 2017. That said, I don't think it's 'creepy' to understand how people who did things we regard as abhorrent justified their deeds to themselves and to others.
I look forward to the day when mental illness isn't universally equated with negative things. I try to be forgiving of people who do this, but a lot of them are like people who supported slavery and segregation (mean, hateful, etc).
Mental illnesses are ethically neutral. People with them span the range of human experience.
Yes, we need to have some mercy too; I certainly make mistakes, but then I am responsible for them.
Calhoun's peers fought a war to end slavery; it wasn't as if he had to imagine quantum physics in the 19th century to figure it out.
I'll have been dead for a hundred years; I won't give a fuck.
Maybe it is a fair sacrifice for the sake of redeeming the past.
It certainly is an interesting new kind of cultural war.
Choosing who from the past that we want to honor is pretty natural. (It's not "redeeming" the past to choose carefully who to honor this way.) Changing an honorary name on a building is different than changing a paragraph on a history book.
As a point of comparison, plenty of street names are changed to honor various historical figures, municipal functionaries, now-famous past residents, etc.
That sounds interesting. Which persons have had "their" streets changed in this way?
Proceed from that to [university] [hall] [renaming].
Whatever your thoughts on this particular decision, there absolutely is a "there" there.
No one actually cares what some sign on a building on a leafy campus says. They care a lot about which way the wind is blowing at an institution that turns out the elites of tomorrow.
The question is (in as equally-offensive terms as I can muster): will we, as a society (or our elites, from whom we'll take our cues),
- finally turn from a problematic figure of the past to one that better exemplifies our values of today,
or
- retain remembrance of what got us where we are, keeping in mind the importance of chronological charity?
If this is really not an important event, why is it posted on HN?
They do when the name is John frickin' Calhoun, increasingly.
Like Nickelback, we all thought he was cool at the time, but you look back and see that if he wasn't That Guy, somebody else would have, and at any rate the ideas he's known for are played out.
Having a college named after you is much more likely to cause people to assume you were a great person unless they perform more detailed research.
This is the reason Charles Koch spent $10M to name George Mason's law school after a recently deceased conservative Supreme Court justice.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/03/3...
Erasing history means erasing from history books, pretending it didn't happen. Taking down monuments is not the same thing. It is a big, overt statement that the contributions of those people are no longer respected. I don't see why this is so controversial.
I presume you are not outraged when statues of Hitler or Saddam are taken down?
That's the crux of your argument. In this case, when talking about Calhoun College and the concept of "erasing history" it's not that the concern that Calhoun's name will be lost, but rather than part of the identity of the college and all the events tied to it will be.
It's easy enough to think that a name change will be "simple" but it's the question of how you refer to events in the past, how you get the community to reflect this change, and how you are able to respectfully honor the history of the college in the light of this change, without making everything that occurred in the past seem like an error or portrayed in a negative light.
Yale's choice to go forward is something that I'm proud of as this has been a point of contention in our community, but it has also spurred new questions of how we deal with the identity and history of the college.
Of course, the brand names of these colleges are too valuable to dump.
That's an understatement! He was a president of the East India Company and an absolutely brutal slavemaster:
> The records of this period mention a flourishing slave trade in [Chennai], a trade in which Yale participated. He enforced a law that at least ten slaves should be carried on every ship bound for Europe. In his capacity as judge he also on several occasions sentenced so-called "black criminals" to whipping and enslavement. When the demand began to increase rapidly, the English merchants even began to kidnap young children and deport them to distant parts of the world, very much against their will. At a time when profits from the slavetrade were dwindling and pressure from the Mughal government to stop the enslavement was mounting, the administration of Fort St George eventually stepped in and introduced laws to curb enslavement
As for the renaming, when people are honoured by having things named after them, from time to time it's appropriate to see whether the things they did would still be considered honourable. Otherwise we'd still be referring to Stalingrad and Leningrad.
So ironically, the Jewish graveyard in Kaliningrad is one of the last monuments of the old city Königsberg, since the names are all German.
I think they still failed. You cannot erase Kant.
Yup, journalists at it again.
http://xover.mud.at/~marty/iug2/p243-hopper.pdf
I'm not sure what your objection is but she wrote this in 1952 and specifically used the words compiling routine.
If you look at that paper, she gives an example of the language on figure 9 of page 248:
0 b0i I(1,2,3,4,5) 1,2,3,10,6
1 apn 1,10 4
2 x-e 4 5
3 amc 6,1 7
4 ts0 7 8
5 am0 5,8 9
6 yrs 1,9 0(1,2)
7 aaL 1,2,3 1 8,1
8 ust
(I hope I copied the above correctly, the table is a bit hard to interpret.)
It looks rather like assembly language. Except that the mnemonics in column 2 aren't actually assembly opcodes, they identify subroutines written in machine code. Variables are represented by numbers. The third column is used for input arguments, the fourth for output arguments, the fifth for control flow.
It was a "compiler" in the sense that it read the program and wrote out machine code for each instruction to (a) move input arguments from the variables according to the calling convention (b) make the subroutine call (c) move the output arguments back to the memory locations for the variables.
Very primitive, but I don't think anyone else in 1952 was doing any better. (Other 1950s languages look far more modern – such as LISP and FORTRAN – but they were developed 4-5 years later.)
Mostly kidding, but this is an important step. Assembly, as it came to be known, was one of the first "high level" languages because you could multiply two numbers without having to know the exact opcode for multiplying.
When will the book burning start?
Also, please don't create many obscure throwaway accounts; that's not a legit use of throwaways, and we ban them.