Saturday, December 13, 2014

On the word "decimate"


This post has nothing to do with Santa Cruz but, lacking a more general history blog, I'm choosing to digress today and write about a word - "decimate" - which has long been a pet peeve because of what I had always perceived to be the loss of its historical meaning, and its egregious misuse in modern English. A bit of study has, however, altered my perspective somewhat.

Altered perspectives seem to be a hazard inherent in blogging, and to any other form of writing. proclamations and manifestos may come later, but the process of converting half-formed ideas and opinions into written words without the need to produce a finished product allows the writer to take a closer look at "what lies beneath" (to borrow a convenient movie title). After writing a sentence, I often have to stop and ask myself "Where did that come from? Is it true?" The ensuing journey of discovery is usually both enlightening and entertaining (yes, I'm easily amused).

Decimate - the word conjures up visions of horrendous slaughter - one dictionary's #1 definition is: "kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage or part of". But why the prefix "deci", which denotes "one tenth"? As is often the case with the English language, answers are not simple. Two different historical streams provide some perspective.

Decimation, by William Hogarth (1725)
A student of ancient Roman history will be familiar with one meaning of the word. Decimation (from Latin decimatio) was a draconian measure devised in the Roman army as the ultimate punishment for a large military unit convicted of a capital offense: e.g. cowardice, desertion or mutiny. The Wikipedia entry for Decimation (Roman army) explains it pretty graphically:
"A cohort (roughly 480 soldiers) selected for punishment by decimation was divided into groups of ten; each group drew lots (sortition), and the soldier on whom the lot fell was executed by his nine comrades, often by stoning or clubbing."
But hold on - this article claims that: "Unfortunately for the etymological purists, decimate comes from the Medieval Latin word decimatus, which means ‘to tithe’. The word was then assigned retrospectively to the Roman practice of punishing every tenth soldier."

Does this prove the "etymological purists" wrong? Not exactly - the OED blogger is speaking only about the etymology of the English word. A historical perspective going back to pre-English times yields a more expansive view.

In Latin, the Roman military practice was called "decimatio", and use of the term goes back several hundred years before Christ. The literal meaning of the word is "reduce by one tenth". There were other words referring to variant forms of the practice, involving different levels of "reduction". For instance, "centimatio" meant "reduce by one hundredth".

As the OED blogger notes, it was not until "medieval Latin" that the word was applied to the religious practice of "tithing" - that is, giving a tenth of one's income to one's religious institution of choice. So the English word "decimate" may have been "assigned retrospectively" to the Roman practice, but the Latin word meant a particular military punishment long before the Middle Ages.

An even longer historical view can be applied to the other "original" meaning. The concept of "tithing" was adopted by early Christianity, but the practice originated in the Hebrew religion (with a Hebrew noun to name it), predating both Christianity and ancient Rome by hundreds of years (at least).

As a side note, and as one who grew up in a church that preached (but whose members rarely practiced) tithing, it's interesting to note that the literal meaning of "decimate" is the negative "reduce by one tenth". Preachers, on the other hand, usually tried to sell the concept in a positive way - as "giving" (never as decimation).

More progressive theologians (supported by the teachings of Jesus himself) advocate "Christian charity". For some, part of the rationale is that a loving God will see your generosity and reward it, so that in the end your prosperity will be greater than if you had kept that last tenth. While I no longer believe that's literally true, I do believe that financial generosity is a product of spiritual generosity, which is its own reward.

Enough digression - back to pedantry - during the long evolution of English, the modern word "decimate" has lost both original meanings. Adding insult to etymological injury, the "deci" prefix has lost any meaning at all. Historical novelists, who should know better, are among the worst modern offenders. I read a lot of historical fiction, and am constantly confronted with this abuse of a good word by the very writers who should be protecting it.

Finally, I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that the word's meaning has evolved into something completely different from either of its original meanings - that's not exactly unprecedented, is it? The same thing has happened to many words, even over relatively short spans of years. Can anyone today listen to the theme song from the '60s animated TV show, The Flintstones, and not react when it gets to the last line: "...we'll have a gay old time!"

Saturday, December 6, 2014

Timeline of the Portola Expedition

The article Timeline of the Portola Expedition is now complete on Wikipedia. The article needs an infobox or image to add visual interest at the top, and more linking to/from other articles remains to be done. Also, better maps of the expedition route could be created, but that will take some time. Right now, I'm more focused on completing transfer of all the Santa Cruz Patch blog posts and the Panoramic views of Santa Cruz, 1870-1904 project.

Thursday, November 27, 2014

More Patch transfers

Installment number 20 - The River, transferred to pages here from the defunct Santa Cruz Patch blog platform, updates the TOC at left through the end of the 2011 Patch posts. Date-wise, that gets into 1862, with a story of the big flood of that year.

Thursday, November 20, 2014

Notes for expanded Prezi post

A new page (in list at left) contains notes to accompany the expanded Prezi slide show on the "Bird’s Eye View of Santa Cruz, 1870". As explained in "Panoramic views of Santa Cruz, 1870-1904", this slide show is the first in a planned series tracing the early development of Santa Cruz through examination of graphic images.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Panoramic views of Santa Cruz, 1870-1906




Six panoramic views of Santa Cruz
(http://santacruzhistory.blogspot.com/2014/10/panoramic-views-of-santa-cruz-1870-1906.html)

Introduction

An important period in the early growth and development of Santa Cruz can be seen through a series of “bird’s eye” and land-based panoramic views of the city, produced using a variety of media and methods. The earliest non-photographic pictorial panorama dates from 1870 - the last from 1904.

A few early ground-based photographs are also panoramic, notably those taken from School Street and from High Street. The era of aerial panoramic photography began in 1906 (using kites).

The Santa Cruz panoramic pictorial views, with links to more detailed articles on each one (to be added as each article is posted):
·        1870 Bird’s Eye View of Santa Cruz, Cal. by Charles B. Gifford, hand-colored lithograph (Bancroft Library, online here - detail shown above)
·        1876 panorama painting by Trousset, looking west from bluff on east side of San Lorenzo River mouth (on display at MAH History Gallery)
·        1877 “bird’s eye” view, from woodcut by artist unknown, (Bancroft Library, online here). A section of this work has been reproduced as an exterior wall mural at Tannery Arts Center.
·        1888-89 panorama lithograph, looking NNE from West Cliff Drive: "Santa Cruz, Cal.” Hand-colored and published in 1889 by lithographer Henry Steinegger (1831-1917) (Bancroft Library, online here). Stan Stevens researched the history of this work and deduced that the artist was probably E. F. Cook.
·        1893  panorama oil painting by Frank Heath, looking south from south end of Pasatiempo heights (SCPL downtown)
·        1904-06 “bird’s eye” lithograph, published by Fred Swanton - probably as a promotion for his development ventures. Some of the structures and streets shown were never built. (Bancroft Library, online here)

The 1870 and 1877 “bird’s eye” views use an imaginary aerial viewpoint offshore from the main beach, and a considerably distorted perspective (especially through foreshortening) to achieve a more inclusive view. There are also some visual factual errors, but these two views are very useful for identifying structures and other features.

The 1888-89 Steinegger “bird’s eye” view uses a slightly lower imaginary aerial viewpoint above West Cliff Drive. It shows more detail than either of the other two lithographs, especially for nearer features, so at first it looks more realistic. There are, however, some major perspective and factual errors.

The 1904-06 Swanton imaginary “bird’s eye” viewpoint is very high off Lighthouse Point, and shows Santa Cruz from Natural Bridges to the mouth of the San Lorenzo River. Online resolution is not very good, and the zoom viewer is lacking. Further study and, especially, finding a higher-resolution image is necessary.

The Trousset and Heath compositions are standard landscape views, and seem to be very accurate. But, because they were made from locations on the ground and show distance perspective realistically, much less detail is visible for all but the closest subjects.

Together, these panoramic views provide some of our best - and most easily appreciated by the general public - information on the growth and development of central Santa Cruz during that period.

The pictorial views are important historical resources for a number of reasons:
  1. In some cases, they may be the only surviving pictorial views of long-vanished buildings and other structures – even of entire streets and neighborhoods.
  2. In other cases, especially for the later pictorial views, there are corroborating photographs, but they generally do not show neighborhood context as well as the panoramic views.
  3. Many natural and built features of Santa Cruz were constructed, altered, removed and/or replaced during the time span covered by the pictorial views. That evolution can be traced by comparing views composed in different years.
  4. In a few cases, early structures, streets and physical features have survived, but in greatly altered form.
  5. In nearly all cases, historic features’ surroundings have changed to such an extent that the original context cannot be easily imagined.
The predecessor to the three-dimensional pictorial views is the 1853 U.S. Coast Survey Map (view and/or download here). Although only two dimensional, the map does show locations of streets and structures (but with very little identifying text). Santa Cruz changed greatly between 1853 and 1870, but the basic shape and main streets of Santa Cruz were already established at that time. The map was periodically updated with a colored ink, but the newest structure shown appears to be the Powder Company wharf, built in 1865. The 1867 lighthouse was not added.

After 1877, the Sanborn Insurance Company maps make it easier to identify and corroborate street and building locations and, in some cases, names. UCSC Library Digital Collections now has most of the Sanborn maps digitized and viewable online here

One other important graphical resource from this time period should also be mentioned. W. W. Elliott's Santa Cruz County Calif. Illustrations (1879) contains a wealth of detailed sketches of houses, commercial buildings and other features. The 1879 timing of the publication is very helpful in corroborating and identifying features seen (or replaced, or not yet existing) in the 1870, 1876 and 1877 panoramic views. The 1997 indexed edition, published by the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and history, is especially useful because of all the additional research material it contains.  




Timeline of panoramic views and other graphical resources

    1853 - U.S. Coast Survey Map: extends inland about a mile; shows water bodies and landforms via topographic contours, roads & building outlines (most unlabeled)
    1860 – or shortly thereafter. Oldest photographic downtown panoramic view, looking south from bluff at end of School Street and showing the newly constructed Flatiron Building. Later photos from this spot, High Street and others (SCPL photos - 'Panoramas and Aerial Views--Santa Cruz City'). 
    1866 – First Santa Cruz street map, commissioned soon after first town charter: many streets have names changed, or are officially named for the first time; no buildings shown
    1870 – (August-November) First pictorial panoramic “bird’s eye” view (Gifford-Bancroft), with numbered key
    1876 – Trousset panorama painting, from east side of river mouth
    1877 – Second pictorial panoramic “bird’s eye” view (artist unknown)
    1877 – First Sanborn Fire Insurance maps of Santa Cruz, showing streets and buildings (some named)
    1879 - W. W. Elliott's Santa Cruz County Calif. Illustrations 
    1888-89 – Third panoramic “bird’s eye” view (Steinegger, pub. 1889)
    1893Heath panorama painting, from Pasatiempo hill
    1904-06 - Swanton pictorial panoramic “bird’s eye” view (Britton & Rey lithographers, artist unknown) 
    1906 – First aerial panoramic photograph (Lawrence)

Monday, August 11, 2014

More Santa Cruz Patch blog transfers

Two more pages added and updated (TOC also updated), with content formerly in the blog on Santa Cruz Patch:
  • 2 - The Explorers
  • 3 - The Missionaries

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Patch blog is kaput

Santa Cruz Patch has, without notice, dropped all the blogs, so none of the links from here to there will work. I'm starting to transfer those blog posts from my own files to pages on this blog, beginning with 1 - The Ohlone. The re-postings will be a work in progress for awhile. Rather than list each of the new pages on the list at left, I'll re-purpose the TOC page and update links from there.

Monday, July 14, 2014

Portola again

The plan for Wikipedia editing was to move on from Portola (for a while), but an unexpected development brought me back. As an easy way to connect all of the California places mentioned in the Crespi (and other) diaries of the Portola expedition, I created a new category (category links are found in a bar at the bottom of WP articles) called "Places of the Portola expedition". For reasons never convincingly explained (to my mind) in subsequent discussions, a couple of other editors found that to be an unacceptable use of categories and the cat has now been deleted. It was suggested that a better option would be to create a new article giving a "timeline" of the expedition. Well yes, I agree, but it's a lot of work - which is why I went the "category" route as a short-term solution.

Anyway, I'm now working on that article, to be titled "Timeline of the Portola expedition (1769-70)". Learning some new WP techniques along the way - like how to use the template that creates collapsible sections in an article. It's also a chance to upload a few images from the Bolton book, like the map above.

Sunday, June 29, 2014

Project updates

The Wikipedia editing relating to the Portola expedition led (as WP editing always does) to many other California history articles needing improvement and/or correction. Most WP articles eventually get pretty good if enough editors take an interest. Articles about small-to-medium sized CA communities, however (including many of those later established at Portola campsites), tend to have only a few editors and few reliable sources. Where scholarly online sources are lacking, the oft-inflated claims of local boosterist websites go uncorrected.

The current program is twofold: 1) continue to discover and read early CA history sources, and 2) after finishing a CA history book, to go back through it again looking for passages to be used as WP citations. That was a lot of fun with the Crespi diary. Next up for that treatment are several books from SCPL:

  • Fages, P., Priestley, H. I., & Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Historia y Etnografía (Mexico). (1937). A historical, political, and natural description of California. Berkeley: University of California Press. 
  • Hutchinson, C. A. (1969). Frontier settlement in Mexican California: The Híjar-Padrés colony and its origins, 1769-1835. New Haven: Yale University Press.
  • McKittrick, M. M. (1944). Vallejo, son of California. Portland, Or: Binfords & Mort.  

Saturday, May 10, 2014

Santa Cruz County History Update: the Explorers

The following is the most recent post from "W C Casey's blog" on Santa Cruz Patch. Since the departure of editor Brad Kava, SC Patch has been spiraling down. When this post failed to post, it seemed like the time had come to move on. This blog will be a temporary home for this post (sans images) until a dedicated blog and/or page is set up.

Post title: Santa Cruz County History Update: the Explorers 

Recently, I've been revisiting the Portolà expedition of 1769-70, so it seems like a good time to update this post from August 12, 2011. The original plan for this blog was to proceed chronologically through Santa Cruz County history, and this post was third in that progression, after an introduction and the Ohlone.
The impetus for a new look at Portolà came from the discovery that translations of the three diaries kept by expedition members are now available online (see the Wikipedia article for links). For a history geek, it's fascinating to read those diaries and realize that they are the first written descriptions of those places ever recorded, and that the authors were actually camped at those unknown (to Europeans) places as they wrote.
The briefest diary was by Portolà himself; a longer one was written by military engineer Miguel Costanso, and the most detailed was by Franciscan missionary Juan Crespi. The Pacifica Historical Society has a great tool on its website - a day-by-day account with entries from all three diaries (watch out for a few transcription errors). At times, it would be helpful to also have the original Spanish alongside the English translations, but that project awaits some future web-savvy California historian.
The translator of the online version of the Crespi diary, Herbert Bolton, worked out the present-day locations of the places visited by the expedition during its travels, and shares that information in footnotes. That's very useful because:
  1. The native Californians had no written languages to record their names for places,
  2. Portolà and his companions were the first Europeans to see most of those places,
  3. the Spaniards of the Portolà expedition did not attempt to transliterate very many of the native names they heard, and
  4. very few of the Portolà names have survived. 
As noted in the original post, Santa Cruz was one of those few surviving Portolà names. Furthermore, our county is the only one in the state that preserves a Portolà expedition name (and it was almost Branciforte County).
Wikipedia provided a handy place to post information about the expedition's stopping places, so there are now added bits of Crespi's diary in a bunch of articles, and a new "category" (found at the bottom of WP articles) called "Places of the Portolà expedition", where links to Portolà expedition-related articles can be found.
Those who also love geography already know about Google Earth. I had a great time using GE, in conjunction with the diaries, to follow the day-by-day progress of the explorers from San Diego to a wind-swept ridge overlooking San Francisco Bay.  In many places, the exact route remains in dispute, so the "geogrophiles" out there can have fun using zooming into the satellite views to compare the different possibilities. Another useful site was the USGS National Map, which combines current versions of all of the "quadrangle" topographic maps into one zoomable online map. Many old place names can be found on USGS maps.
Following is the original 2011 post, with inserted editorial comments enclosed in square brackets:
Original title: Names on the Signs in Santa Cruz: the Explorers
In comparison to other parts of California, Santa Cruz was missed by the early European explorers. The first voyage to come close was the Spanish expedition led by Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, who sailed north from Mexico in 1542 on a mission to explore the unknown coast.
Cabrillo gave names to many places in California, but, for some reason, none of those names were retained by future Spanish explorers. Cabrillo landed at places now known as San Diego, San Pedro and the Channel Islands. He sailed past Point Conception, missed the entrances to Monterey and San Francisco bays, and made it [one of his ships did, anyway] as far north as the mouth of the Russian River before turning back.
On the way south, he found and sailed into Monterey Bay but didn’t land. Still, Cabrillo was the first European to come anywhere close to Santa Cruz, so his is the oldest European name to appear on local signs: at Cabrillo College. The section of Highway 1 running through Santa Cruz County is known by some as Cabrillo Highway [it should really be called Portolà Highway]. The photo is of a sign from San Mateo County, but I haven’t found one locally. Maybe some observant blog reader knows where there is one? [Portolà Highway is an even more appropriate name because later explorers bypassed the coastal route in favor of the path followed by today's Highway 101]

On the basis of Cabrillo’s voyage, Spain claimed California as part of New Spain, a huge area that included today’s Mexico and Central America in addition to much of the southwestern and south-central United States. England also had colonial ambitions, and Queen Elizabeth dispatched Francis Drake in 1577 to plant the British flag. During his round-the-world journey, Drake also sailed north along the California coast. The exact location of his landings is unknown, but no one has ever claimed he stopped in Santa Cruz.

Spain moved to follow up on that brief flurry of exploratory activity. A second sailing expedition, led by Sebastián Vizcaíno, arrived at the southern end of our bay in 1602. Vizcaíno named it Bahia de Monterrey, after the Viceroy of New Spain. The name stuck, superceding Cabrillo’s Bahia de los Piños (Bay of Pines). Vizcaíno named lots of other places around Monterey and further south, but never came to our end of the bay. His expedition left without establishing a settlement, and our quiet bay was left to the Ohlone once again.

Over 160 years later, Spain was finally roused to action by the expansion of British and Russian trading posts southward along the Pacific Coast from Alaska and Canada. In 1769, an expedition commanded by Gaspar de Portolà set out [by land and sea] from Mexico to rediscover the bay described by Vizcaíno. They reached the coast [from the Salinas Valley] on a typical summer day and found the view obscured by fog. They didn’t even realize they were on a bay.
Thinking they had missed Monterey Bay, Portolà’s party turned north and [after crossing and naming the Pajaro River] marched until they got to a large river which they [Crespi] named Rio de San Lorenzo. Crossing the river, they explored the area and found a spring-fed creek, which they [Crespi] named Arroyo Santa Cruz. The creek, which flows into Neary Lagoon, is known today as Majors Creek or Laurel Street Brook. Soon, Portolà moved on up the coast to discover San Francisco Bay before turning around and marching back to San Diego. He never returned to Santa Cruz, but those three names stayed on. Portolà's name is memorialized on signs up and down the California Coast, but not a lot in the Santa Cruz area. We have Portola Drive out in Pleasure Point, but that's about it.
After Portolà, more than 20 more years were to pass before the arrival of more European visitors. The next Spaniards, however, came to stay. They were the missionaries.