Three Students Just Deciphered the First Passages of a 2,000-Yea…
The trio used artificial intelligence to decode sections of the text, which appear to be a philosophical exploration of pleasure
Margherita Bassi @ smithsonianmag.com
col. -8, ll. 2-14: 2 ...]ι̣μ̣εν τοὺϲ̣ [πα]ρ̣[ὰ Ξ]ε̣- νοφάντωι το̣ιούτου[ϲ, ὃ καὶ ὑπ’ ἄ̣λλων δοκεῖ 5 γείνεϲθαι, παραπλη- ϲίωϲ δ̣’ ο̣ὐδὲ παρ̣’ ἑτέρωι ἴδι̣ον το̣ῦ δ̣οκοῦ̣ντοϲ̣ εἶναι καὶ παρὰ πλε̣ί- οϲ̣ι̣ν̣ ἥδιο̣ν, ἀλλ’ ὡ̣ϲ̣ καὶ 10 ἐ̣π̣ὶ τῶν βρω̣μ̣άτ̣ων ο̣ὐ̣κ ἤδ̣η τὰ ϲπάνια πάντωϲ̣ καὶ ἡδ̣ίω τῶν δ̣αψιλῶν̣ ε̣ἶναι̣ 14 νομίζ̣ο̣με̣ν· οὐ γ̣ὰρ̣
—Author Unknown, possibly Philodemus; decoded by the Vesuvius Challenge project
. . .
col. -7, ll. 4-10: λ̣ει παρὰ τὰ δαψιλῆ. 5 θεωρηθήϲεται δὲ τὰ τοιαῦθ’ οὕτω{ι} πολ̣λά- κιϲ πότερον ὅ̣ταν πα- ρῇ τὸ δαψιλέϲτερον ἡ φύϲιϲ ἥδιον ἀπαλλάτ- 10 τει το̣ύ̣τ̣ο̣υ̣ καὶ πάλ̣ι̣ν̣ ̣ ̣
—Author Unknown, possibly Philodemus; decoded by the Vesuvius Challenge project
. . .
col. -2, ll. 2-8: 2 ἑ̣κάϲτηϲ κριτηρίων θεωροῦνται. πρὸϲ δὲ οὔτε καθόλου περὶ 5 ἡδονῆϲ ἐχόντων τι λέγειν οὔτε περὶ τῆϲ κατὰ μ̣έ̣ρο̣ϲ̣, ὅ̣τε ὡ- 8 ριϲμένον τι, ἀλλ’ οὖν
—Author Unknown, possibly Philodemus; decoded by the Vesuvius Challenge project
. . .
col. -1, ll. 1-6: 1 ὰρ ἀπ̣εχόμ̣ε̣θ̣α̣ τὰ μὲν κρίνειν, τὰ δὲ κατέχειν καὶ ἐμφαί νoιθ’ ἡμῖν ἀληθῆ λέ- 5 γειν ὥϲπερ πολλά̣κιϲ ἂν ἐ̣μφανε̣ίη̣{ι}.
—Author Unknown, possibly Philodemus; decoded by the Vesuvius Challenge project
The text has to do with some notable Epicurean themes, in particular the relationship of pleasure to the scarcity or abundance of goods, perhaps especially aesthetic goods or goods of sensory experience (Per the translators: … As too in the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant.
)
The in-house scholars at the Vesuvius Challenge have confirmed that the text is new, unattested text from an ancient writer. Right now they seem inclined to think that the author might be the Epicurean philosopher and poet Philodemus (ca. 110 BCE – ca. 40 BCE).[1] He wrote extensively on ethics, music, and the philosophical controversies between the Epicureans and the Stoics.
It is hard to express just how immensely exciting this is. This is the first major passage to come from a cache of books that, in a series of really horrific disasters and insane accidents, has been preserved down to our present distant future, where we can use frickin’ X-rays, 3-D modeling and artificial intelligence to peer through the body of burnt, sealed scrolls and read off the letters from their carbonized insides without unrolling them. This would be an awesome enough story as it is, but the technological feat also has a lot of promise to heal a real and massive loss. Most — the vast majority — of writing from the ancient world is lost to us.[2] For the next phase of the project, ]Vesuvius Challenge’s goals are](https://web.archive.org/web/20240209172423/https://scrollprize.org/grandprize):
In 2023 we got from 0% to 5% of a scroll. In 2024 our goal is to go from 5% of one scroll, to 90% of all four scrolls we have scanned, and to lay the foundation to read all 800 scrolls.
The primary goal for 2024 is to read 90% of the scrolls, and we will issue the 2024 Grand Prize to the first team that is able to do this. More details on the exact grand prize judging criteria will be available in March.
Every lost scroll that is recovered shines new light into the corners of a world covered in deep shadow, which we have only seen with the briefest, strobe-light glimpses. The Villa of the Papyri is a lost library from the high point of classical civilization; there are more than 800 carbonized scrolls which the project may be able to recover. It offers once of the most exciting chances in decades to recover lost works and add new primary sources for understanding and debating ancient history and ancient philosophy.
Technological civilization is awesome.
Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the scr…
The 2000-year-old scroll discusses music, food, and how to enjoy life’s pleasures.
web.archive.org
Since the wind knocked down power lines
and lightning set a birch aflame
from within, three turkey vultures roost
along the topmost branches,
matted black feathers with small red heads,
unfortunate harbingers of death,
though really, almost comically alive—
hunched as though deciding
some minor point before slipping off
on the umbrellas of their wings to rid
the roads of evidence of violence not theirs.
— Maya C. Popa (2022), Turkey Vultures
In The New York Review of Books (January 13, 2022)
The hierarchy in economics and its implications | Economics &…
The hierarchy in economics and its implications
cambridge.org
The paper is available as Open Access, so you should be able to read it for free either in HTML form or by downloading or printing a full-text PDF.
Is the way that economics is organized conducive to the production of economic knowledge?
James Heckman and Sidharth Moktan (Reference Heckman and Moktan2020) recently highlighted the dominance of economics’ ‘Top 5’ journals. Others have noted the outsize representation of economists from top-ranked departments among the authors and editors of those journals (Fourcade et al. Reference Fourcade, Ollion and Algan2015; Colussi Reference Colussi2018). I collect these issues together with others to highlight the many asymmetries of power, status and influence that exist between economists. In addition to (i) the dominance of the Top 5 and the concentration of (ii) authors and (iii) editors from a few universities in those journals, the top-ranked departments also train most of the discipline’s (iv) governors and (v) awardees, (vi) individual star economists dominate networks of coauthorship and (vii) the discipline exhibits a strong prestige factor in hiring. Together these asymmetries constitute the hierarchy in economics.
I give reasons to believe that the hierarchy in economics is both steeper – the asymmetries are greater – than it could be and steeper than hierarchies in other fields. I then highlight four reasons to worry about this increased degree of hierarchy in economics. Through (a) reinforcing conservative selection biases and (b) disincentivizing innovation, the steeper hierarchy in economics constrains the development of new beliefs from the discipline. By (c) restricting the exploration of alternatives, the steeper hierarchy reduces the justification we have for believing the outputs of economics. By (d) discouraging criticism, the steeper hierarchy makes it less likely that errors and faulty reasoning will be spotted. This reduces the likelihood that the outputs of economics will be true and so further reduces the justification we have for believing them. My descriptions of (a–d) will be qualitative. I will describe how the present organization of economics leads to (a–d) and describe the negative impact (a-d) have on the production of economic knowledge. I will not measure the effect size of (a–d) or weigh them off against trade-offs. My argument will, consequently, not constitute an all-things-considered judgement on the health of economics. The point is rather to describe the asymmetries that exist between economists (i–vii) and to spell out the mechanism by which these social features of economics impact the epistemic virtues of its outputs (a–d).
— Jack Wright (2023), The Hierarchy in Economics and Its Implications
In Economics & Philosophy. Published online 2023:1-22. doi:10.1017/S0266267123000032
The top-line argument of the paper as a whole is pretty interesting; there is also an interesting passage off to one side later on in the paper in response to a possible objection that there may be convincing countervailing reasons why economics should be strongly hierarchical or as hierarchical as it actually is or…. Maybe so! But even if so, these considerations still have to be considered as a real cost, even if they are the cost of something that is worth having for other reasons.
A second way of responding to the points I have raised could be to suggest that I have been too one-sided. Are there not circumstances in which steep hierarchies can be beneficial? To this I offer a clarification. The issues I describe should be considered pro tanto reasons to worry about the present degree of hierarchy in economics. I have argued that the steeper hierarchy in economics encourages four mechanisms that lower the uptake and supply of new beliefs in and the justification of the outputs of the discipline. I have not argued that the hierarchy in economics has no other effects. Thus, although (a–d) should give us reason to worry about the present organization of economics, they do not constitute an all-things-considered judgement on the health of the discipline. (a–d) are best thought of as tendencies worth paying attention to in discussions of how economics should be organized. An all-things-considered judgement on the organization of the discipline should consider (a–d) in conjugation with calculations of their effect sizes and also consider trade-offs from changing the present situation – including any beneficial effects of the hierarchy in economics.
— Jack Wright (2023), The Hierarchy in Economics and Its Implications
In Economics & Philosophy. Published online 2023:1-22. doi:10.1017/S0266267123000032
If it’s not worth having for other reasons, then the paper closes with some really interesting and thoughtful (if not especially decisive) considerations of things that might be done within the discipline.
Read the whole thing, as the kids of my generation used to say.
]]>Centers of Progress: 40 Cities That Changed The World
“In this superb book, Chelsea Follett takes the reader on a time-travel cruise through the great flash points of human activity to catch innovations…
Chelsea Follett @ centersofprogress.com
The chapters for each city[1] are mostly short vignettes more than in-depth portraits or deep-dive investigations. These are pretty light and enjoyable; for more details, you might want to work through the bibliographical entries for each city in the Suggested Reading
at the back of the book, which usually give about 2-4 secondary sources (some scholarly, others popular) on each city’s story. Follett is a lively writer and, to her credit, has a pretty decent sense for trying to depict both the development of things that are now familiar to us from our own world, while also keeping in mind just how strange and different places in the past might seem to us. The other day was the vignette on Abbasid-era Baghdad (for Astronomy,
and international / multilingual scholarship more broadly); today is the vignette on Heian-era Kyoto (for The Novel
and literary movements driven by court women like Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon.
Consul,
Tribuneor
Head of the Senate); but this one institution looks a lot like the temporary appointment of an Emergency King, for practical as well as ceremonial purposes.
But the office of dictatorship was also weird in its timing: it seems to have been used sometimes during the early centuries of the Roman Republic, then used little in the middle centuries and never at all after the second Punic War. Then, centuries later, it was brought back, in the midst of a couple horrendous political crises (first for the domination of Sulla, then for the capture of sole power by Julius Caesar) in which warlords used the revived title of Dictator (or, then, Perpetual Dictator) to consolidate unlimited one-man power and forcefully choke off ordinary republican politics while maintaining a pretense of respecting the republican constitution. You might think that this would be of interest to Emperors like Augustus, but there were no more Dictators named in Rome after the death of Caesar. The office was abolished by a law sponsored by Mark Antony. Later when Octavian / Augustus had taken sole power, he formally refused the title despite a couple of apparent attempts to revive it for him. In many ways, the actual political structure of Imperial Rome is something that we wouldn’t hesitate to recognize as a propagandistic cover over a 1,500 year reign of dirty, grubby military dictatorship; and there are a lot of propagandistic reasons why the old title of Dictator
ought to have been attractive to them for propaganda and traditionalist purposes; but nevertheless the Emperors didn’t actually use the title.
Here’s a couple things I’ve been reading in the last few days about the institution of dictatorship in Archaic and Classical Rome:
The Origin of the Roman Dictatorship: An Overlooked Opinion, Ronald T. Ridley. In Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, 1979, Neue Folge, 122. Bd., H. 3/4 (1979), 303-309.
This begins from a passage of Livy about the creation of the first dictatorship in the early Republic, during a social and military crisis around 501 or 498 BCE.
Supra belli Latini metus quoque accesserat, quod triginta iam coniurasse populos concitante Octavio Mamilio satis constabat. In hac tantarum expectatione rerum sollicita civitate, dictatoris primum creandi mentio orta(L. 2.18.3-4).[Dread also was increasing about the Latin wars, because now the thirty nations[1] stood well enough together as they were being whipped up by Octavius Mamilius to swear to an alliance. The expectation of so many matters having shaken the City [of Rome], for the first time there was mention of appointing a Dictator. —R.G.]
. . . The reason for the new office is hardly varying. It was a military crisis. Dionysios has been misunderstood to imply political reasons (5.70f.). He says the plebeians were bringing up economic grievances (5.63f.), but these were important only because they might imperil the conduct of the Latin war (5.61). He simply wants to explain the dictator’s freedom from provocatio [provocatio ad populum[2]]. . . . Yet no-one who is conversant with the history of the monarchy and early Republic would put too much faith in the annalist-cum-jusrists’ versions. We are dealing with what has been shown to be a most ancient office which went out of use just at the time of the earliest Roman historians, at the end of the third century. Thus almost the entire historical tradition was referring to an office it had not seen in operation.
That is, the paper stresses, there’s are questions to pursue about what the dictatorship was like in the archaic period, when it was used from time to time during emergencies in the City of Rome’s early foreign wars against its neighbors — not what it became much later at the end of the Republic, when it was had become old-fashioned title, not used in hundreds of years, that was suddenly revived and substantially reinvented in the midst of the Crises of the First Century. The archaic dictatorship was an office with extraordinary powers to suspend normal constitutional protections, mostly connected to its military role, but old-time dictators in the Republic were appointed for a particular purpose, with a time-limited half year term, expected to resign if the emergency passed or the purpose was accomplished, and ringed around with limitations and taboos intended to prevent them from exercising law-making power or taking on the trappings of kingship.[3] Sulla and Caesar both had themselves appointed Perpetual
Dictators without limited terms, and they immediately used the dictatorship to ruthlessly punish domestic opposition and to exercise sweeping and unchallenged power to rewrite Roman constitutional law without traditional restraints on their ambition.
The center of the paper is a really interesting and thorough lit review of scholarly writing up to 1979 on the nature and origins of the archaic Republican dictatorship — (1) where it came from, (2) what it was supposed to do, (3) what relationship it had to the ordinary powers of constitutional magistrates during the republic, and (4) drawing on all this, why Romans would go ahead and create an institution with sole role and extraordinary powers, so like the power of the old kings, just a few short years after they had fought a revolution to get rid of those guys. Ridley’s most interested in looking at debates over:
dictatorhad origins peculiar to Rome and its local history, or whether you might find a more common Latin institution in other Latin towns outside Rome; or
dictator) that was used by Rome and other Latin towns to command allied forces in leagues between the many Latin towns; and
The overlooked opinion
in the title is short and towards the end, and really kind of less interesting than the long literature review and discussion of major debates about the nature of the dictatorship under the Republic. But, for the record, Ridley opines that the origin of the office may have been Latin, or at least that Livy is suggesting that it was, and that the Romans may have adopted and adapted the idea from the office of a Dictator
to command allied Latin towns. Moreover that the reason for Livy’s interest in the institution may have had something to do with the political debates over the titles and honors for the newly triumphant Augustus, who says that he was offered a dictatorship twice and refused it (but somehow managed to go on finding ways to exercise autocratic power for the rest of his life anyway, even without the title[4]):
. . . Thus the modern discussions. But an
overlooked opinion? In none of the above discussions can I find understanding of what seems to me the main thread of Livy’s account. The Latin league led by Octavius Mamilius was coming against Rome. Then for the first time the Romans thought of a dictator. Is not Livy’s implication clear that the Roman dictator was inspired by, even modelled on, the Latin federal dictator? Not even de Sanctis and all the others who have seen the connection with the league have adduced this text in their support.Admittedly, it is only Livy’s implication. . . . We mentioned at the beginning of this note, that for the later annalists the dictatorship was an office long in disuse, the classical dictatorship, that is. In fact, as many scholars have seen, that existed only in the fifth and fourth centuries, and was being phased out even in the third. The Sullan and Caesarian revivals were completely different, but excited historical and antiquarian interest. Macer’s comments were undoubtedly part of his popularis reaction to Sulla. After Caesar’s autocracy, the office was abolished by M. Antonius in 44 (Cic. Phil 1.3[5] etc). But then in 22, there was clamour in Rome that Augustus should assume it, from both the senate at the people (RG 3). More pertinently, we may assume that there was much talk of dictatorship in 28/27 (note Tac. Ann. 1.9[6]). And Livy was writing books 1-5 between 27 and 25 B.C.
— Ronald T. Ridley (1979), The Origin of the Roman Dictatorship: An Overlooked Opinion.
In Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, 1979, Neue Folge, 122. Bd., H. 3/4 (1979), 303-309.
Anyway, remember that bit about folks who suggest that Dionysios of Halicarnassus offered an alternative theory, focused on domestic political conflicts (specifically, class conflicts) within Rome as the reason for instituting the archaic dictatorship? Ridley doesn’t think much of that reading. But this guy does:
In particular, Kalyvas wants to argue that Dionysius[7], and also, in a later century, Appian[8], were engaged in a more or less deliberate effort to challenge traditional Roman views of the Dictator, by viewing it in light of classical Greek political writing on the rule of Tyrants. Modern writing about authoritarianism typically treats dictatorship and tyranny as two roughly equivalent words for the same sort of violent, extralegal, unaccountable and one-man or closed-circle political regimes. But ancient Roman (Latin) writers mostly saw these as two very different things. Kalyvas wants to argue that Dionysius and Appian may actually be ancient forerunners to the modern view — that they wrote about the older and newer Roman dictatorships as a form of elective
tyranny[9] and that this may reflect a critical assessment that the Roman institution of dictatorship was repressive and dangerous from the start, more like tyranny than patriotic Roman authors seemed to realize, and that it always carried within itself the poisons that would ultimately seep out into republican political institutions and send them down into warlord violence, civil war and authoritarian rule.
For most of the twentieth century the concepts of dictatorship and tyranny were treated as synonyms, two names for one form of autocratic political rule. . . . The dictator and tyrant were fused together in a single figure, that of illegality, violence, and arbitrariness, and perceived as a common threat to political freedom, constitutionalism, and the rule of law, a threat the ancients had formulated as political enslavement. Accordingly, throughout the century, the conceptual identification provided normative resources to those who opposed the modern revival of dictatorship. Denunciations of the many forms of dictatorship, both of the Right and the Left, which emerged over the course of the last century as modern manifestations of tyranny mobilized repeatedly these resources.
The equation of dictatorship and tyranny is not, however, unique to the twentieth century. It appeared as well in a preceding historical period in the shifting political context of the revolutionary upheavals of Europe and its oversees colonies and the decline of the monarchical order. Claude Nicolet rightly observes that
since the eighteenth century,the term dictatorshiphas served to refer to despotisms or tyrannies—in other words, essentially powers which are far from having been regularly conferred, and instead had been usurped through force or deceipt. . . . Nicolet’s narrative accurately captures the modern blending of the two terms and correctly relocates it within the broader historical movement and diffusion of republicanism. But his story is incomplete. It disregards a still earlier moment in Western political history when the dictator began to look dangerously like a tyrant. In the turbulent transitional period between the Roman republic and the Principate, Sulla and Caesar, and their struggle for supreme power gravely tested the institution of dictatorship. Theabuseof this emergency institution, its exercise outside the limits delineated by the established legal framework, its appropriation for the advancement of personal ambitions, and even its use against the republic itself, prompted a profound reconsideration of its nature, function, and value.Two Greek historians of the early and high Imperial periods, Dionysius of Halicarnassus (60 BC-after 7 BC) and Appian of Alexandria (95-165 AC) undertook such a radical reassessment. While most of the annalists and
republican historianscherished the memory of the republic and its institutions, among which dictatorship was held in the highest esteem, the writings of the two Greek narrators followed a different path. . . . In their Greco-Roman synthesis dictatorship is re-described astemporary tyranny by consentand the tyrant as apermanent dictator.This historical and conceptual revisionism inaugurated a comparative study of the Roman institution of dictatorship and Greek theories of tyranny with some crucial implications [… for …] its very capacity to preserve the constitutional order. Was the abuse of Roman dictatorship accidental, the effect of moral decline ,or the result of its own unruly nature? . . . Unlike Livy and Sallust who ascribed the fall of the republic to various external causes and their corrupt effects, Dionysius and Appian’s diagnoses suggested the preponderance of internal reasons for the inherent instability, decline, and ultimately fall of the Roman republic. . . .Certainly, I am not suggesting to oppose Dionysius and Appian against more renowned and influential historians of their times in the name of some objective,
true[10] factual attributes of the Roman institution of dictatorship. Rather . . . I examine how the two concepts gradually came to be associated with new meanings as they were increasingly fused. I consider Dionysius and Appian’s unprecedented equation by focusing on the historical narratives, conceptual translations, and theoretical arguments that permitted the identification of the two terms. . . .. . . Dionysius and Appian’s Greco-Roman synthesis altered the normative connotations associated with [the] classical ideal of dictatorship. It demystifies the republican portrayal of dictatorship and exposes the monster lurking beneath the hero, the wolf inside the soldier, the anomie [inhabiting] the law. The towering reputation dictatorship enjoyed with its martial aura of nobility, an ethical emobodiment of civic virtue and patriotism, are now all cast aside as institutional and oratory ornaments to reveal that dictatorship is another name for tyranny. As a consequence their histories disclosed a tyrannical kernel hidden inside the institutional fabric of republican government.
Furthermore, an additional ramification is that both Dionysius and Appian’s views question much later attempts, such as those of Mommsen and Carl Schmitt, to distinguish between two different dictatorships: an older, ancient dictatorship and its irregular, radical reinvention by Sulla and Caesar. Against this influential interpretation of two types of dictatorship, the one commissarial and the other constituent, the two Greek historians point to the historical continuity and institutional consistency of Roman dictatorship. jFor instance, in their historical revisions of Roman history, Sulla’s dictatorial tyranny loses all of its exceptional or innovative charactger. It is neither an unfortunate anomaly nor an erratic occurrence. His dictatorship does not signify a break in the history of the institution Instead, it is regarded as the repressed but permanent, endemic tyrannical possibility of dictatorial powers. Tyranny, therefore, is seen as an integral part of dictatorship. . . . Here, one cannot help but notice the tragic irony, even poetic justice, of Dionysius and Appian’s histories. Although the Romans took pride in overthrowing the monarchy, . . . they were ultimately unable to rid themselves of the (bad) king. And along with praising themselves for their devotion to the law and their patriotic respect for tradition and custom, the Romans opened up a permanent gap, an internal fissure in the legal edifice of their republic. To save the city, the constitution created this void, this empty space of the law, the space of a-nomia, where the dictator comes to encounter the tyrant in their common ambition to fill it up with the power once owned by the kings. . . .
— Andreas Kalyvas (2007), The Tyranny of Dictatorship: When the Greek Tyrant Met the Roman Dictator.
Political Theory 35.4 (Aug. 2007), 412-442.
… I am hastening to come to a very extraordinary act of virtue of Marcus Antonius. He utterly abolished from the constitution of the Republic the Dictatorship, which had by this time attained to the authority of regal power. And that measure was not even offered to us for discussion. He brought with him a decree of the senate, ready drawn up, ordering what he chose to have done: and when it had been read, we all submitted to his authority in the matter with the greatest eagerness….Cicero; translation by C.D. Yonge, 1903. —R.G.]↩
Then followed much talk about Augustus himself . . . . He had often yielded to Antonius, while he was taking vengeance on his father’s murderers, often also to Lepidus. When the latter sank into feeble dotage and the former had been ruined by his profligacy, the only remedy for his distracted country was the rule of a single man. Yet the State had been organized under the name neither of a kingdom nor a dictatorship, but under that of a prince.Tacitus; translation by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb. —R.G.]↩
Think for one moment.
Kevin O. McCarthy was born in Bakersfield. He currently represents the 20th Congressional district in the state of California.
The State of California became part of the internationally-recognized territory of the United States of America in 1848, and then became a U.S. state in 1850, as a result of Article V of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
Article V
The boundary line between the two Republics shall commence in the Gulf of Mexico, three leagues from land, opposite the mouth of the Rio Grande, otherwise called Rio Bravo del Norte, or Opposite the mouth of its deepest branch, if it should have more than one branch emptying directly into the sea; from thence up the middle of that river, following the deepest channel, where it has more than one, to the point where it strikes the southern boundary of New Mexico; thence, westwardly, along the whole southern boundary of New Mexico (which runs north of the town called Paso) to its western termination; thence, northward, along the western line of New Mexico, until it intersects the first branch of the river Gila; (or if it should not intersect any branch of that river, then to the point on the said line nearest to such branch, and thence in a direct line to the same); thence down the middle of the said branch and of the said river, until it empties into the Rio Colorado; thence across the Rio Colorado, following the division line between Upper and Lower California, to the Pacific Ocean.
The southern and western limits of New Mexico, mentioned in the article, are those laid down in the map entitled “Map of the United Mexican States, as organized and defined by various acts of the Congress of said republic, and constructed according to the best authorities. Revised edition. Published at New York, in 1847, by J. Disturnell,” of which map a copy is added to this treaty, bearing the signatures and seals of the undersigned Plenipotentiaries. And, in order to preclude all difficulty in tracing upon the ground the limit separating Upper from Lower California, it is agreed that the said limit shall consist of a straight line drawn from the middle of the Rio Gila, where it unites with the Colorado, to a point on the coast of the Pacific Ocean, distant one marine league due south of the southernmost point of the port of San Diego, according to the plan of said port made in the year 1782 by Don Juan Pantoja, second sailing-master of the Spanish fleet, and published at Madrid in the year 1802, in the atlas to the voyage of the schooners Sutil and Mexicana; of which plan a copy is hereunto added, signed and sealed by the respective Plenipotentiaries.
In order to designate the boundary line with due precision, upon authoritative maps, and to establish upon the ground land-marks which shall show the limits of both republics, as described in the present article, the two Governments shall each appoint a commissioner and a surveyor, who, before the expiration of one year from the date of the exchange of ratifications of this treaty, shall meet at the port of San Diego, and proceed to run and mark the said boundary in its whole course to the mouth of the Rio Bravo del Norte. They shall keep journals and make out plans of their operations; and the result agreed upon by them shall be deemed a part of this treaty, and shall have the same force as if it were inserted therein. The two Governments will amicably agree regarding what may be necessary to these persons, and also as to their respective escorts, should such be necessary.
The boundary line established by this article shall be religiously respected by each of the two republics, and no change shall ever be made therein, except by the express and free consent of both nations, lawfully given by the General Government of each, in conformity with its own constitution.
— Treaty of peace, friendship, limits, and settlement between the United States of America and the United Mexican States concluded at Guadalupe Hidalgo (English version).
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed and ratified in 1848. In the treaty the United States government demanded the accession of 525,000 square miles of land formerly claimed by the Mexican Republic after invading Mexico, killing about 25,000 Mexicans, and finally conquering and occupying the capital city, in a declared war from 1846-1848.[3]
Mexican-American War
Main article: Mexican-American War
Alta California and Santa Fe de Nuevo México were captured soon after the start of the war and the last resistance there was subdued in January 1847, but Mexico would not accept the loss of territory. Therefore, during 1847, troops from the United States invaded central Mexico and occupied the Mexican capital of Mexico City, but still no Mexican government was willing to ratify the transfer of the northern territories to the U.S. It was uncertain whether any treaty could be reached. There was even an All of Mexico Movement proposing complete annexation of Mexico among Eastern Democrats but opposed by Southerners like John C. Calhoun who wanted the additional territory for their crops but not the large population of central Mexico.
Eventually Nicholas Trist forged the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, explicitly redefining the border between Mexico and the United States in early 1848 after President Polk had already attempted to recall him from Mexico as a failure. . . .
The Mexican Cession as ordinarily understood (i.e. excluding lands claimed by Texas) amounted to 525,000 square miles (1,400,000 km2), or 14.9% of the total area of the current United States. If the disputed western Texas claims are also included, that amounts to a total of 750,000 square miles (1,900,000 km2). If all of Texas had been seized, since Mexico had not previously acknowledged the loss of any part of Texas, the total area ceded under this treaty comes to 915,000 square miles (2,400,000 km2).
Considering the seizures, including all of Texas, Mexico lost 55% of its pre-1836 territory in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.[4] . . .
About 27% of the current American population — including Kevin O. McCarthy, when he is not in Washington, D.C. — lives in states that were partly or entirely transferred to the United States as part of the Mexican Cession. If you think for one moment, you might notice that the reason Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, Alta California is a U.S. Congressman and not a Mexican national, is precisely because he was born and grew up and worked and lives on land that the U.S. government, which I have to presume is what he means by America
asked for
in a list of treaty demands at the end of a crushing victory in a years-long war of conquest and occupation. After a moment, you might wonder what the point of these kind of statements, patriotic guff that is just obviously and wildly non-factual, counter-factual, perhaps basically anti-factual in its presentation, could possibly be.
Considering that a great part of the territories, which, by the present treaty, are to be comprehended for the future within the limits of the United States, is now occupied by savage tribes [sic], who will hereafter be under the exclusive control of the Government of the United States….As a result both of the guarantees made in this article, and also the U.S.’s own efforts to control and settle colonies of Americans in the interior of the territory, they spent the next three decades or so repeatedly fighting wars with Indians in the southwest territories they patrolled, taking over control of the land from the defeated nations, and forcing them to migrate to new territories or to settle on reservations.↩
(By Dorothy @ CatAndGirl.com. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License..)
The World Might Be Far ...Er Than We're Allowed To See
Dorothy @ CatAndGirl.com @ catandgirl.com
Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Te…
The Texas Revolution has long been cast as an epic episode in the origins of the American West. As the story goes, larger-than-life figures like Sam H…
Sam W. Haynes @ goodreads.com
Unsettled Land
Sam W. Haynes (2022)
Introduction
. . . On the eve of the rebellion[1] Texas was a region of extraordinary ethnic diversity, having been a place of convergence for the peoples of North America for more than a century. In the 1700s, its indigenous population saw the influx of the Comanches and the Apaches, nomadic tribes following the buffalo herds that came down off the High Plains. At the same time, the Spanish Crown began to make a tentative effort to colonize the region, establishing a string of missions, military outposts, and civil settlements from the Rio Grande to the Sabine River. The flow of migrants increased sharply in the early nineteenth century, with the arrival of Cherokees, Shawnees, and other refugee Indian tribes from the United States. They were followed in turn by white Americans, some of whom brought enslaved men and women of African descent. European immigrants, like those of the Beales colony,[2] were also beginning to make their way to Texas. Together they created a patchwork of overlapping borderlands and ethnic enclaves on Mexico’s northern frontier, each group trying to navigate and make sense of the turbulent world in which they found themselves. . . .
. . . When a wider lens is used to see the Texas Revolution, the alpha male heroics and moral clarity of the familiar narrative dissolve and a new, more chaotic picture emerges. More than a contest between the Mexican army and Anglo rebels, the struggle for independence is also the story of ordinary people in an extraordinary time, of lives upended by the seismic shift from a multiracial society to white rule. If the birth of early modern Texas is a story of triumph, it is also in equal measure one of tragedy, which saw the coming together, then pulling apart, of people in an unsettled land.
— Sam W. Haynes (2022), Unsettled Land: From Revolution To Republic, the Struggle For Texas
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