Cyclopedia of Factoids - The Letters U-V-W

Uganda Scheme

Theodore Herzl, the visionary who founded Zionism, was an assimilated Jew, who did not consider Palestine the optimal choice for a resurgent Jewish nationalism.

When the British offered to him a homeland in East Africa (today's Uganda), he accepted and proposed it to the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basle in 1903. After bitter recriminations, the Congress decided (295 for, 178 against) to send an "investigatory commission" to the territory to inspect it and report back.

Herzl vowed that the Uganda scheme is not a substitute for the reclamation of Palestine as the historic homeland of the Jewish people. But his actions defied his speech. He pursued the British proposal to his death (in 1904) as did many other prominent Jewish leaders, organized in the Jewish Territorialist Organization (ITO).

The plan was decisively abandoned only after the Balfour Declaration which granted the Jewish people a homeland in Palestine under the British mandate.

Yet, in the meantime, other territorial plans emerged: in Canada, Australia, Iraq, Libya, and Angola. Close to 10,000 Jews settled in Texas. Stalin created a "Jewish Homeland" in Birobidjan. Even the Nazis tried to revive some of these "solutions to the Jewish question" - notably in Lublin, Poland and in the island of Madagascar.

http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Zionism/Uganda.html

http://www.jewishamerica.com/ja/timeline/zionism.cfm

Vegetarianism

Vegetarianism is associated with compassion. Yet, it pops up in the most unlikely historical contexts. Hitler is alleged to have been a non-smoker (which he was) and a vegetarian (which, strictly speaking, he was not). True, he he is known to have scathingly castigated meat eaters as cruel. He loved dogs and was surrounded by a few favourite canines even in his last days in the bunker in Berlin.

But he many sources document his passion for caviar, Bavarian sausages, liver dumplings, and ham, for instance. Moreover, the vegetarian movement in the Third Reich (Nazi Germany) was considered dangerously "cosmopolitan". It was (mildly) persecuted, was forced to abstain from participating in international activities and was forbidden to own offices or publish books. The state did allow individual vegetarians to convert their meat rations into dairy products, though.

Another curious affair involves the Japanese Shogun, Sunayoshi, who, on January 28, 1687, following the death of his only and beloved son, became a devout Buddhist. He criminalized the killing of all land animals, and the eating of fish, shellfish, and birds. When he died, in January 1709, his successor (and cousin) Ienobu, freed 9000 violators of the royal edict from jails across the country.

http://www.vrg.org

http://www.veg.org

http://samvak.tripod.com/hitler.html

Verdi, Giuseppe

Like Puccini, the career of Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) did not start auspiciously.

Coming from a tiny hamlet and the son of an innkeeper and farmer, he was snootily rejected by the Milan Conservatory due to his "advanced age" and "poor playing of the piano". He, thus, had to take private lessons from the Milanese composer, Vincenzo Lavigna. His second opera, King for a Day, was a flop. When his wife and two children died, he gave up composing altogether.

Luckily, the director of La Scala, the Milanese opera house, succeeded to convince him to rescind his vow. The result was Nabucco (1842). The opera was so adored that it was still playing in Buenos Aires and St. Petersburg a decade later.

As opposed to nostalgic re-writing of history, not least by Verdi himself, the fact is that the opera's subject matter - the Babylonian captivity of the Jews - was not meant to allude to the subjugation of the Italian people to Austrian rule. Only after Italy was unified in 1861, did Verdi propagate the apocryphal story of how he snapped out of his depression when the libretto fell and opened in the chorus "Va, pensiero", the song of the enslaved Hebrews. The new nation of Italy needed heroes and Verdi was "recruited", his earlier work deliberately recast as subversively anti-Austrian and nationalistic.

A series of successful operas - such as Rigoletto (1851), Il Trovatore (1853) and La Traviata (1853) - brought him international acclaim. When the Suez canal was completed, the Khedive of Egypt commissioned Aida (1871) to celebrate the opening of the waterway.

Verdi's dream was to retire early as a "gentleman-farmer" to land he purchased in 1844. He reluctantly served as a member of the Chamber of Deputies after the unification of Italy in 1861 but soon resigned. He did finally settle down in 1873 and became a very wealthy landowner.

Like Puccini, Verdi lived, out of wedlock, with the common-law wife of a musical agent, the prima donna Giuseppina Strepponi. When she met Verdi, she already had three children, the oldest of whom was being reared by her former maid. Verdi refused to allow her to accompany him on official travels, due to the scandal that swirled around their relationship. Moreover, he had at least one documented affair with the fiancée of his best friend, Angelo Mariani. Her name was Teresa Stolz and she was a soprano opera singer. He loved her so much that she was even allowed to attend his deathbed.

Verdi was a very unpleasant and cantankerous person. He was known for his litigiousness, evasiveness, vindictiveness, reversals and constant bickering. He frequently clashed with censors due to the bold subject matter and librettos of his operas. But he gave rise to so much beauty that his personal foibles are all but forgotten by now.

http://opera.stanford.edu/Verdi/main.html

http://www.r-ds.com/verdiana.htm

Video Cassette Recorder

A Californian company, Ampex Corporation, invented the video cassette recorder in 1956. The Ampex VR1000 weighed 665 kilograms and stood 110 centimeters tall. It was not until 1972 that a home version was introduced by Philips of the Netherlands. Sony introduced the first affordable home video recorder and player in 1969 but it was JVC (Matshushita) from Japan which invented the VHS recording system in 1976 and competed with Sony's less successful Betamax standard.

http://www.tvhistory.tv/VCR%20History.htm

http://www.cedmagic.com/history/

Vinci, Leonardo da

Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, sculptor, architect, cartographer, engineer, scientist and inventor in the 15th century. Yet, despite his genius, he referred to himself as "senza lettere" (the illiterate, the man without letters). For good reason: until late in life, he was unable to read, or write, Latin, the language used by virtually all other Renaissance intellectuals, the lingua franca, akin to English today. Nor was he acquainted with mathematics until he was 30.

Leonardo was born out of wedlock but was raised by his real father, a wealthy Florentine notary. He served at least ten years (1466-1476) as Garzone (apprentice) to Andrea del Verrocchio and painted details in Verrocchio's canvasses. Only in 1478, when he was 26, did he become independent.

He was not off to an auspicious start. He never executed his first commission (an altarpiece in the chapel of the Palazzo Vecchio della Signoria, Florence's town hall). His first large paintings were left unfinished ("The Adoration of the Magi" and "Saint Jerome", both 1481).

Most of the sketches and studies for Leonardo's works of art and engineering are found on his shopping lists, personal notes, and personal expenditure ledgers.

No one was allowed to enter Leonardo's den, where he kept, as Giorgio Vasari in "Lives of the Artists", describes: "a number of green and other kinds of lizards, crickets, serpents, butterflies, locusts, hats, and various strange creatures of this nature".

Leonardo's clients were often dissatisfied with his glacial pace, lack of professional discipline, and inability to conclude his assignments. He was frequently involved in litigation. The Cofraternity of the Immaculate Conception sued him when he failed to produce the Virgin on the Rocks, an altarpiece they commissioned from him in 1483. The court proceedings lasted 10 years. The head of Jesus in "The Last Supper" was left blank because Leonardo did not dare to paint a human model, nor did he trust his imagination sufficiently. Leonardo worked four years on the Mona Lisa but never completed it, either. He carried it with him wherever he went.

Leonardo's terra cota model for a colossal bronze sculpture of the father of his benefactor and employer, Ludovico Sforza, was used for target practice by invading French soldiers in 1499. The metal which was supposed to go into this work of art was molded into cannon balls.

Leonardo was a member of the commission which deliberated where to place Michelangelo's magnificent statue of David. His cartographic work was so ahead of its time, that the express highway from Florence to the sea - built in the 20th century - follows precisely the route of a canal he envisioned. His scientific investigations - in anatomy, hydraulics, mechanics, ornithology, botany - are considered valuable to this very day. Bill Gates owns some his notebooks containing scientific data and observations (known as the Codex Hammer).

But Leonardo's loyalties were fickle. He switched sides to the conquering French and in 1506 returned to Milan to work for its French governor, Charles D'Amboise. Later, he became court painter for King Louis XII of France who, at the time, resided in Milan. In 1516, he relocated to France, to serve King Francis I and there he died.

Leonardo summed up the lessons of his art in a series of missives to his students, probably in Milan. These were later (1542) collected by his close associate, Francesco Melzi, as "A Treatise on Painting" and published in print (1651, 1817).

http://www.mos.org/sln/Leonardo/LeoHomePage.html

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/leonardo_da_vinci.html

War

In 1896 Zanzibar surrendered to British forces after 38-45 minutes. It was the shortest war in history.

On 25 August 1896, following Sultan Hamid bin Thuwain death, an usurper declared himself the new Sultan in the palace.

England ran a protectorate on the island of Zanzibar since 1890. On August 27, three warships of the Royal Navy opened fire and, in less than an hour, leveled the palace and deposed the wannabe.

The 100-years war between Britain and France lasted 117 years (1337-1453). The Britons were expelled from Calais only in 1558. This is by far the longest war in history.

http://www.geocities.com/factszone/history.html

http://www.readnrun.com/shortest_war.htm

http://www.ku.edu/kansas/medieval/108/lectures/hundred_years_war.html

Warfare, Biological and Chemical

Chemical and biological warfare are not an invention of the 20th century.

Solon (638-559 BC) used a strong purgative, the herb hellebore, in the siege of Krissa. During the 6th century BC, the Assyrians poisoned enemy wells with rye ergot. In the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), the Spartans flung sulfur and pitch at the Athenians and their allies. In the Middle Ages, besiegers used the bloated and dripping bodies of plague victims as readymade "dirty bombs".

In 1346, during its siege of Kaffa (present day Feodosia in Crimea), the Tartar army suffered an outbreak of the Plague. They hurled the corpses of their infected dead over the city walls and into the city's water wells. The resulting epidemic led to the city's surrender. It is widely believed that people afflicted with the horrendous disease fled the place and started the Black Death pandemic which consumed at least one third of Europe's population within a few years. Russian troops adopted the same tactic against Sweden in 1710.

Smallpox was another favorite. Francisco Pizarro (1476-1541) gave South American natives clothing items deliberately contaminated with the variola virus. During the French and Indian wars in North America (1689-1763), blankets used by smallpox victims were given to American Indians. General Jeffery Amherst (1717-1797) gifted Indians loyal to the French with smallpox-contaminated bedspreads during the French and Indian War of 1754 to 1767. An epidemic broke among the Native American defenders of Fort Carillon and they lost it to the English.

http://www.nbc-med.org/SiteContent/HomePage/WhatsNew/MedAspects/contents.html

http://www.vectorsite.net/twgas.html

Washington DC

People who have resided in Washington DC for longer than 12 months were enfranchised - given the right to vote - only in 1961 with the passing of the 23rd amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The Amendment was proposed in Congress on June 16, 1960 and ratified on March 29, 1961. It reads:

Amendment XXIII
Section 1. The District constituting the seat of government of the United States shall appoint in such manner as the Congress may direct:

A number of electors of President and Vice President equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives in Congress to which the District would be entitled if it were a state, but in no event more than the least populous state; they shall be in addition to those appointed by the states, but they shall be considered, for the purposes of the election of President and Vice President, to be electors appointed by a state; and they shall meet in the District and perform such duties as provided by the twelfth article of amendment.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The District of Columbia was formed in 1802 from bits of Maryland and Virginia.

http://www.vaix.net/~captainnemo/plan/23rd.htm

Women’s Rights

The equality of the genders is a recent development. Switzerland granted women the right to vote in national polls only in 1971 - long after Muslim women in Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Indonesia, for instance, were enfranchised. Britain allowed them to cast ballots only in 1928-9. Women in France were not allowed be sole signatories of cheques until 1962.

In the USA women were barred from jury duty and public office until the early 1930s. Women in both the Republican and Democratic parties were relegated to special "Divisions" until 1952. The Equal Rights Amendment was proposed in 1923 and passed both houses of Congress only in 1972. It expired in 1982, three states short of adoption.

The first woman governor – Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming - was elected in 1924, upon the death of the previous governor, her husband.

The second woman governor - Ella Grasso of Connecticut - was elected in 1974 and the first judge of the Supreme Court - Sandra Day O'Connor - was appointed in 1981.

http://dmoz.org/Society/People/Women/Women%27s_Rights/

http://www.rochester.edu/SBA/history.html

http://www.rochester.edu/SBA/timeline1.html

http://dmoz.org/Society/People/Women/Issues/

Philosophical Musings and Essays
Essays about current topics in philosophy.