Early in 1861 Arthur and Mary Denny, Charles and Mary Terry, and Edward Lander donated land on a forested 10-acre knoll overlooking Elliott Bay. The University was established there, on the site of what is now the Fairmont Olympic Hotel on University Street in downtown Seattle.

The Territorial University of Washington opened November 4, 1861. The fledgling University was little more than a backwoods school, which closed for lack of funds several times during its earliest years. The first faculty consisted of one professor who taught a curriculum that included Latin, Greek, English, history, algebra, and physiology.

-- Historic Overview - University of Washington

Today we're celebrating the 150th birthday of the University of Washington. 1861 was also the year the U.S. Civil War began, and on Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog they've been discussing how "two old ladies back-to-back" gets you back to an era when it was legal to own a human being in this country. In a similar vein, we were talking at a meeting yesterday about how somebody who has worked at the UW for thirty years (there were two at the table) has worked here for a fifth of the existence of the university. So I guess we're still young, and the history is still fresh. It only took 150 years to evolve from a backwoods school with a single professor to a world class research university.

Happy birthday, University of Washington!

Update: Good stuff from the Seattle Times, "UW began 150 years ago in audacious manner":

"Education throughout the Sound district is in an extremely backward condition," wrote William Barnard, the second president of the university, shortly after he resigned from his post in 1866.

"As an illustration: Not one of the misses attending the university, the first quarter after our arrival, could accurately repeat the multiplication table," Barnard wrote.

"Society is also greatly disorganized; drunkenness, licentiousness, profanity, and Sabbath desecration are the striking characteristics of our people," said Barnard, who counted "two distilleries, 11 drinking establishments, one bawdy house (brothel)" — and gambling going on just about everywhere.

It's worth remembering that the first settlers arrived in Seattle in 1851, and there were only 250 settlers and no high schools in the settlement when the UW was founded ten years later. Why build up to a university? Full speed ahead.

Do you believe that significant numbers of slaves fought on the side of the Confederacy? You're wrong. So, apparently, is Henry Louis Gates. The mythology of the Lost Cause runs deep in this country, and it pops up in surprising places.

I'm reminded of a recent conversation with a friend who told me that an absolutely brilliant writer we know believed in the Oxfordian theory about Shakespeare until my friend debunked it to him a couple of years ago. I said it reminded me of Birtherism. People believe the most bonkers stuff in the face of all the evidence. I probably do too.

Criterion has released a new version of Ang Lee's Civil War movie that's a bit over ten minutes longer than the theatrical version. I'd seen that earlier version on DVD before and found it a tale of two halves, with the first half being an utterly gripping war story and the second half a strangely mismatched kind of aimless marriage comedy. Watching the new version, I couldn't really see the differences, but the two halves seemed better integrated. I could now see how ambitious the movie was. It's an attempt to wrestle with the same history as previous Civil War epics such as Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939).

One of the things that disguises this ambition is Lee's typically understated approach. One of the things I've always liked about his movies is how taciturn they are, how nonverbal. There is always a sense that something is going on in the hearts of his characters that cannot be articulated. Another thing that disguises the epic quality of the story is that it happens on the fringes of the Civil War, in the Border War of Missouri and Kansas. All of the fighting is ultimately pointless skirmishing between guerrilla forces that has no effect whatsoever on the final outcome of the great battles back East and in the South. At the core of the movie is the Lawrence Massacre, when a band of men under William Quantrill descended on a Unionist town and murdered 180 unarmed men and boys in the streets and houses. In the movie, this is portrayed as an act of terrorism with no military purpose. The war has unleashed chaos on the land, and the movie raises the question of how order can be restored under these extreme conditions.

Lee explores the question through two major characters, Jake Roedel, who is the son of a Unionist German immigrant, and Daniel Holt, who is a freed slave. Both of them are fighting for the pro-Confederacy bushwhackers because of loyalty to another person -- Jake to a childhood friend whose father was murdered by Unionist Jayhawkers, and Holt to George Clyde, the charismatic Southern gentleman who manumitted him. Both Roedel and Holt slowly change their minds over the course of the movie, and Lee gets the pace of that change exactly right. In fact, Holt is the key to the story, initially treated as a voiceless cipher who gradually emerges from the shadows until we fully understand what motivates him. In his character, Lee captures the main thread of the Civil War: the freeing of the slaves to become independent actors in the history of the country.

If the movie stumbles (and I'm not sure it does), it is still in the final act, which depicts the development of a relationship between Roedel and a war widow, Sue Lee. I think the problem is that her character is not well-developed, because on a surface level this turn of events is exactly the right move. Again, it personalizes the political in the sense that the creation of an ad hoc family (complete with stepchild) is the new order growing out of the chaos of war. Yet unlike Holt, Sue Lee never really gets a story of her own, and thus her relationship with Roedel lacks depth. There is still something aimless about the final scenes in which she and Roedel come to terms despite themselves, and perhaps something stereotypical in the way that she represents the civilizing, socializing domesticity that will heal the wounds of war.

However, over all the movie does a tremendous job of putting American history into a narrative form. The crosscurrents tearing the country apart and pulling it back together are captured in the most intimate details of the characters' lives. The complexity of human experience is laid out both forcefully and delicately. As a drama, it reaches a crescendo halfway through that was physically exhausting both times I've watched it, nearly unbearably intense. It's a war film, and it does not shrink from the damage done, again presented in the most intimate, personal terms. Again and again, it strives to ground the epic, impersonal qualities of history and war in the simple details of daily life and the human comedy. Somehow it manages to make the human choices that form history both concrete and deeply mysterious, perhaps through that effective use of understatement (despite, or in contrast to, the florid, nearly Shakespearean language the characters speak).

This is one I'll no doubt be revisiting, although not lightly. Between this and Titus (also 1999), the movie watching was a bit on the brutal side last weekend.

Seriously, the Faulknerian ghosts in my head are dying under this barrage, and some version of Buffy-the-history-crap-slayer seems to be taking their place.

-- sporcupine in comments at Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog, where he has been "celebrating" Confederate History Month with an amazing series of posts about the Civil War and the Reconstruction from the slaves' and freedmen's point of view -- check out "One War. Three Sides." for but one example, or "Honoring CHM: One Drop" or "Heroic Memory" (about Robert E. Lee) -- and all of this stuff resonates with what we're seeing from the Tea Party right now

When you have a few minutes, it's worth taking a look at Ta-Nehisi Coates's long post, "The Big Machine," which is a meditation on systems, including the fast food system and American white supremacy. As he has done a lot recently, he gets into Civil War history, and I learned something new again. This time I learned about George Henry Thomas -- the son of a Virginia slaveholder who fought on the side of the North, destroyed the Army of Tennessee in 1864, and receded in national memory while the likes of Stonewall Jackson became legendary.

As Pesto says in the comments, "Systems resist change, and one way they do that is by adapting to certain kinds of resistance." Which isn't to say that resistance is futile, but that as TNC says about white supremacy, "We should be humbled by the clear evidence that we don't really understand what we defeated, how we did it, or how its legacy haunts us today."

Lovely dinner last night at Kaosamai in Fremont with juliebata, holyoutlaw, and Denys. Conversation was wide-ranging, as you'd expect, but the topic that fascinated me the most was when Julie talked about how after the Civil War, a number of ex-slaves (including ancestors of hers) moved to Wisconsin and became farmers and dairymen, settling in peacefully and marrying their white neighbors. This was completely new data to me. Denys spoke for me when he said, "This wasn't after World War II?" Julie confirmed it was after the Civil War. She told us that her great grandfather (if I'm remembering the correct generation) learned to speak Bohemian, because one of his neighbors was an immigrant from Czechoslovakia.

Well, I love having my world expanded like that. There was also much gossip and other chitchat about gardening and hip replacements and farmers markets and Alaska and werk. I ate garlic pork and drank Chang Thai beer, which I had never tried before. It was fine, very similar to Singha. The pork was absolutely slathered in finely minced garlic. It tasted lovely, but I don't think you want to stand near me today.

I can't remember if I've previously noted here that within the past year I spotted a street sign in the alley next to the Blue Moon Tavern that read Roethke Mews. I had to look up the meaning of "mews", but I loved the pun on "muse" at first sight. I also loved this recognition of Roethke. Theodore Roethke was an American poet who taught at the University of Washington beginning in 1950 and thereby became, famously, a regular at the Blue Moon.

The reason I bring it up now is that I've been reading obituaries of Walt Crowley, the Seattle historian and public figure who died last Friday at age 60. The obituary at BlatherWatch includes a comment from someone who explains that Crowley was behind the naming of the alley. I'm sure that Crowley will be remembered more for other things, such as HistoryLink.org: The Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History, but the naming of that alley was a brilliant stroke. I hadn't realized until today that the City Council had even made the name official, thanks to Crowley's effort. Good one, Walt! The bow ties are forgiven.

Thanks to a discussion with Craig Smith that started on the topic of the West Coast literary science fiction convention called Potlatch, I've become aware of an interesting morass of Seattle history. It seems that in the aftermath of the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, the city began holding an annual Potlatch Festival to try to keep up its national profile. In 1913, the Potlatch Festival was disrupted by a riot that foreshadowed some of the region's history in the next few years.

( Of Wobblies, pacifists, prostitutes, and sailors )

Yesterday I went to the Elysian Brewpub to have a Bifröst Winter Ale before heading to the Paramount for the screening of Diary of a Lost Girl (Tagebuch einer Verlorenen, 1929). I had been hoping to finish reading Angela Carter's retelling of the Bluebeard story, "The Bloody Chamber," but I ended up talking to the Elysian's manager, Greg, about the light rail and other Seattle developments instead. When I got the chance to have a word with the Elysian's brewer, Dick, I leapt at the chance to ask him about the original Redhook yeast.

Dick said that they didn't know what they were doing and allowed the standard yeast they began with to become infected. Infected by what, I wanted to know. Was it wild yeast? Could have been any number of things, he said. Yeast is susceptible to bacterial infection too.

It's still not clear to me how it happened exactly. Dick confirmed what others said in the comments to my previous post on this subject, that yeast is highly susceptible to change, and he said that he'll use a given batch of yeast only twenty or thirty times before going back to the yeast bank (I think he called it) and ordering a fresh batch. I'm not sure if Redhook just kept using the same yeast for too long, or if it got infected right away. I also asked him if he used local yeasts for his Belgian-style beers, and he said no, he gets Belgian yeasts from the yeast bank. I didn't ask him how the yeast bank keeps the strains stable. Now I wonder what Redhook used when they tried to recreate the original Redhook a few years later. Did they still have some of the infected yeast around? Somehow I don't think I'm ever going to get to the bottom of this story.

Later, as I sat in the Paramount wondering why akirlu and libertango hadn't shown up (turns out they were stuck in Redmond because of terrible traffic due to traffic lights being out), who should wander down the aisle but Dick. "I should have known this was where you were going," he said. Indeed, he and I used to talk movies all the time when I was a regular at the Elysian. It was a gorgeous print of the movie, too, although I prefer the other movie Louise Brooks made in Germany with G.W. Pabst, Pandora's Box. But it was fun to see it on the big screen with a crowd of several hundred yeasty, hoppy souls.

The Carpenter Machineworks at the corner of 36th and Albion (the bottom of my block) has been torn down, and with it has gone some of the diversity -- and mystery -- of the neighborhood. I had noticed a couple of weeks ago that the windows and doors were open and that the building seemed empty. It was the first time in my 23 years living here I'd ever seen inside it, as far as I can recall. It was a nondescript light-industrial structure made of corrugated tin. Nothing much seemed to happen there, although occasionally I'd hear someone banging around inside. A rusty old heap of a flatbed truck with a little crane on the back was parked out front, off the street, for years. It was all a little mysterious, just like the blank-looking green building right next to it, which has a name and phone number painted on the door but little other sign of purpose or use. An old man drives up occasionally in a plain white van and goes inside, but what exactly does he do in there? It's gotta be a front for clandestine activity!

( Histories and mysteries of Fremingford ... )