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The history of Viet Nam has evolved through diverse fortunes, sometimes progressing, sometimes not, like that of other nations. In seeking a historical constant, one might say that Viet Nam, in its progressive expansions southward, has always been conscious of pressure from her powerful neighbor to the north, China.
The Quasi-Legendary Epoch
Like any other old nation in the world, Viet Nam has her own legends concerning the origins of the race in the dawn of time.
According to the National Annals, illustrious King Lac Long, of the Hong Bang Dynasty and grandson of The God of the Seas, married an immortal called Au Co, a descendant of the angels of the mountains. From this union, one hundred boys were hatched from one hundred eggs carried in a pouch by Au Co; and all the sons were handsome and stalwart. Then, the King and the fairy, conscious of the transitory nature of human existence, and the elusiveness of human happiness, decided to part. Au Co went up to the mountains along with fifty of her sons, and Lac Long went down to the sea with the others. From this separation, the kingdom of One Hundred Principalities(Bach Viet) came into being, including a vast zone adjacent to the Yang-tse-Kiang in the North, the Champa in the south, the China sea in the east, and the Tseu Chouan in the west.
Of these principalities, the most powerful and best organized was the Lac Viet, or Van Lang - literally, the country of the lettered - the area of which included present-day North Viet Nam, and the northern part of Central Viet Nam. This Kingdom supposedly endured from 2879 B.C. until 258 B.C., and had 18 kings. Thus, the 18 Hung Vuong kings of the Hong Bang Dynasty reigned for some 2622 years - which would mean an average of 150 years each. So we must assume that there must have been many lesser kings whose names were forgotten long before the period of recorded history.
Somewhere in the northern part of Viet Nam, meanwhile, there was a Kingdom known as Thuc ruled by the Thuc Dynasty. King Thuc Vuong had asked the southern King, Hung Vuong XVIII, for his daughter's hand in marriage. When the Thuc King's request was refused, he became enraged and a feud developed between the two family dynasties. One of King Thuc Vuong's nephews, Thuc Vuong Phan, profited from the degeneracy and debauchery of Hung Vuong XVIII to invade and conquer the Van Lang Kingdom in 257, B.C., thus ending the Hong Bang dynasty.
The combined kingdoms were then known as Au Lac, and were ruled by Phan, who assumed the name of An Duong Vuong.
King An Duong sought to protect his reign by constructing a spiral-shaped citadel, which was called Loa Thanh, or The City of Shell. In this endeavor, the King was said to have received the divine help of the Gold Turtle, who equipped the King with a supernatural cross bow which made him invincible. This weapon derived its magic from an attached claw offered by the Gold Turtle himself. The remaining ruins of The City of Shell still exist in the village of Co Loa, in Phuc-An province, North Viet Nam.
To the north, however, the powerful Chinese King, Shih Hwang-ti, of the Ch'in Dynasty, sent his General, Do Thu, on a mission to conquer the lands to the south; and the Tan dynasty then divided into three parts, the conquered lands, including the Kingdom of Au Lac which King An Duong Vuong had been forced to surrender.
One of these three regions came to be governed by the Chinese general, Trieu Da.
Capitalizing on the decay of the Tan dynasty, Trieu Da killed all the Chinese who were still loyal to the Emperor, and expanded the territories under his control. Trieu Da, who had by this time adopted the customs of the Viets, married his son Trong Thuy to the princess My Chau, daughter of King An Duong. In the year 208, the fiftieth year of An Duong Vuong's reign, the princess connived in a plot with her husband, so the story goes, and the pair managed to make off with the magic crossbow which had heretofore made her father, King An Duong Vuong, invincible. Thus it was that Trieu Da was able to benefit by his son's marriage to conquer and annex the Kingdom of Au Lac. Unfortunately, his daughter-in-law, the princess, was beheaded by her father, who drowned himself in the sea before the invaders could reach his citadel.
Trieu Da reigned as absolute monarch under the royal name of Trieu Vu Vuong, and his new, enlarged kingdom was renamed Nam Viet. This dynasty lasted for 70 years, from 208 B.C. until the beginning of the Chinese domination.
During the years of the Trieu Dynasty, Nam Viet had come gradually into the sphere of Chinese influence. In return for payment of tribute to the Court of the Han Emperor, the kingdom of Nam Viet received protection from and exchanged envoys with, the Chinese. Prince Anh Te, heir-apparent to the Nam Viet throne, was sent in his father's stead to pay the tribute demanded by the Chinese. When Anh Te returned in 125 B.C. to succeed his deceased father as king, he brought his Chinese concubine with him and named her as his Queen. Anh Te, who ruled under the name of Trieu Minh Vuong, died after a rule of twelve years, and was succeeded by his young son.
The Chinese, desiring more complete control, sent an envoy to win over the young king. The Chinese Queen Mother, who had been this envoy's lover before she was taken as Prince Anh Te's concubine, conspired with the envoy to bring her son, the child king, to the side of the Chinese. Just in time, the plot was uncovered, and the top mandarin of the Nam Viet Court exposed the plan and denounced the betrayal. The other Court officials rushed in to help, killing the plotters and the young king, and pro-claiming the eldest son of Trieu Minh Vuong(Anh Te) as king, since this son was born of a Vietnamese woman.
These developments, of course, did not please the Chinese. Less than a year later, in 111 B.C., the Chinese King, Vu De, sent two generals and five regiments to invade the territory of Nam Viet. The mandarins, powerless against such a force, were captured along with the new king, and all were killed.
Thus began the era of Chinese domination, which lasted for some ten centuries with only brief interruptions.
The Period of Chinese Domination
After the overthrow of the Trieu in 111B.C., Nam Viet was made a Chinese province and was known as Giao Chi.
Two of the Imperial Commissioners who were sent to govern Giao Chi were well-loved by the governed peoples. Tich Quang, who arrived in 2 or 3 A.D., devoted himself to bringing civilization and teaching morality, and thus won the respect of the people. Nhan Dien, who came to govern in about 29 A.D., became famous as a generous man, who taught the art of cultivation to the people, who had previously lived by hunting and fishing.
Nhan Dien 's successor, To Dinh arrived in 34 A.D., and was a harsh and cruel governor. In the year 40, he executed Thi Sach, one of his subjects, thus provoking the revolt led by Thi Sach's wife, Trung Trac, and her sister, Trung Nhi. The two sisters raised an army to fight against To Dinh, and they were soon joined by volunteers from other districts. The sisters declared themselves the Queens of the restored territory, but their reign was short-lived. The next year, China sent her finest generals and troops to reclaim the territory, and the sisters were defeated in the year 43. Cornered by the pursuing Chinese troops, the two famous heroines committed suicide by jumping into the Hat River, at the point where the Day and Red Rivers meet.
Following the defeat of the Trung sisters, the second period of Chinese domination lasted from the year 44 until 543, and the country was administered as a Chinese province.
The period of the second Chinese domination is sometimes known as the period of the Chinese civilizing governors. In the course of these five centuries plus one year, life in the province of Giao Chi, as it was then known (later, it was called Giao Chau),was completely patterned after the Chinese model.
It was also in this period that the nucleus of the future Champa kingdom, called Len Yi, was formed; and the period was characterized by Chinese campaigns against the Champa.
A cruel Imperial Commissioner again provided the cause for revolt against the Chinese A scholarly man of Chinese origin, Ly Bon, raised an army and defeated the Chinese in 541. After crushing a subsequent Chinese raid in 543, Ly Bon proclaimed himself king in 544, and renamed the territory Van Xuan. In 545, however, the Chinese reestablished their rule.
The following years were marked by a see-saw battle between the Chinese and the Viets: periods of Chinese domination alternated with insurrections which permitted the founding of several short-lived Vietnamese dynasties, including the early Ly, the later Trieu, and the later Ly. This confused and chaotic period ended in 602 with the consolidation of power in China under the Tuy Dynasty. The last Ly king, Ly Phat Tu, was forced to acquiesce to Chinese demands and yield up the country to a third period of Chinese domination.
The third period of Chinese domination, which lasted from 603 until 938, was characterized by even more intense efforts to implant the Chinese civilization. During this period, the country was divided and renamed An Nam Do Ho Phu (Protectorate of An Nam) and Tran Nam Do Ho Phu (Protectorate of Tran Nam)
Under the Chinese Tang Dynasties (618-690 and 923-936), the country was ruled through the Kao P'ing government (Cao Bien), which founded the Dai La citadel and initiated a strong administrative structure. However, the period was marked by several insurrections. In general, the Chinese domination was the long night of Viet Nam's history - a night ten centuries long, during which Chinese civilization became deeply rooted in the country
The Great National Dynasties
The long Chinese domination was brought to an end in the Tenth Century. In the battle of Bach Dang, which has become famous in Vietnamese history, Ngo Quyen led the troops which routed the Chinese invaders from the country and subsequently founded the first national dynasty in 939. For ten centuries in succession, eight dynasties took turns in reigning over the Vietnamese dominion, all continually devoted to the task of building and expanding the kingdom.
The Ngo Dynasty, 939-967, established the first capital of the country at Co Loa, on the ancient site of the City of Shell. Upon the death of Ngo Quyen in 967, the kingdom fell into chaos, and was partitioned into twelve fiefs, thus beginning the era of the Twelve Su Quan , or the Twelve Feudal lords.
From this anarchic era, the first independent Viet Nam emerged. Faced once more with the threat of a powerful China, the protege of one of the twelve lords, Dinh Bo Linh, was able to reunify the country.
Under the name of Dien Hoang De, he founded the Dinh Dynasty, 968-980, and called his kingdom Dai Co Viet. By means of an agreement with China, Dinh Bo Linh was able to obtain the acceptance of the country's independence in return for a triennial payment of tribute. This arrangement with China continued until the 19th Century and the advent of French colonization.
In 980, Dinh was assassinated by a mad visionary, and was succeeded by his six-year old son. A general of the Le family managed to gain control, however, by killing all of his opponents in the Court, and entering into illicit relations with the Queen Mother. In the meantime, the Chinese Emperor sought to profit from the weakness of the young King by sending an army to annex Dai Co Viet. In this crisis the general Le Hoan dispossessed the child of Dinh , and proclaimed himself King.
This so-called Early Le Dynasty lasted from 980 to 1009. Le Hanh repulsed the Chinese, but offered to continue the payment of tribute in order to maintain friendly relations with China. The first Le king died in 1005, and after seven months of fighting among the princes, the king's third son assumed the throne. This son had ruled for only three days when he was assassinated by his younger brother, whose reign of torture and terror lasted for four years. The last Le king died in 1009, thus ending the Early Le Dynasty which had been marked by a series of battles against China in the North, and against the Champa in the South.
The Early Le Dynasty was followed by the Great Ly Dynasty, 1010-1225, which numbered nine kings. The first Ly king was Ly Cong Uan, whose early history is obscure. According to legend, his mother conceived him by a genie while on her way to the pagoda. When he was three, she gave him to a Buddhist monk of the pagoda, who adopted him. After the death of the last Leking, several high officials of the Court joined in a plot with a number of Buddhist monks to bring Ly Cong Uan to the throne, thus establishing the Ly Dynasty.
While still a prince, the last Ly king had been forced into exile, during which time he married the pretty daughter of a rich fisherman named Tran, who provided lodging for the exiled prince. When the prince managed to return to power and became king, he made his wife the official Queen. The Queen, however, used her new influence to increase the power of her own family, which soon grew to be an independent military power, and, in effect, ruled the country. Weak, and becoming insane, the king became a bonze after ruling for fourteen years, and abdicated his throne in favor of his little seven year old daughter. The real power was held by the Queen mother, however, and by her cousin, Tran Thu Do, who was the highest ranking member of the powerful Tran family at that time. Thus, Tran Thu Do managed to marry the little Queen to his eight year old nephew. The young Queen then abdicated in favor of her eight year old husband, thus ending the Ly Dynasty.
After Tran Thu Do managed to make his nephew the king, he proceeded to secure the rule of the Tran by murdering the members of the Ly royal family, and compelling all Vietnamese who bore the family name of Ly to change their names to Nguyen. The Tran Dynasty, which was thus established in 1225)endured until 1400. The efforts to unify and organize the country continued during this period. Buddhism retained its former privileged position, although it was considerably altered in this period through contacts with other beliefs and customs. In particular, the influence of Confucianism expanded greatly during the rule of the Tran. The examination system for the recruitment of officials, which was introduced during the first period of Chinese domination, was revived. Also, the custom of joint rule by the king and the heir-apparent was begun during the Tran Dynasty in order to prevent a recurrence of the bloody feuds which had frequently arisen over earlier succession disputes.
Externally, this dynasty was marked by conflicts with the Mongol Dynasty in China, and with the Champa Kingdom in the South. The Mongols, under Kublai Khan, had defeated the Tong Dynasty in China and established the Nguyen Dynasty in its place. Seeking to attack the Champa, they demanded the right to cross the Vietnamese territory. When the Vietnamese refused, the Mongols attacked the vastly outnumbered Vietnamese. The great Mongol army, numbering some 500,000 men, was repulsed by the whole-hearted efforts of the Vietnamese, led by the king's brother, Tran Hung Dao, who is considered one of Viet Nam's great military heroes, Without pausing to recuperate from the ravages of the battles with the mongols, the Tran turned southward. The Tran king married his sister to the King of Champa in 1307 in order to extend the Tran territory. But the Champa king died the next year, and a series of wars with the Champa ensued.
The Tran Dynasty, which had begun with ambitious educational, agricultural and dike-building programs, was by now paying for its policy of over-extension and continual warfare. The rice paddies, long neglected in wartime, were no longer able to produce sufficient food, and the peasants were suffering acutely under the increasing burdens of war, famine and insecurity. The new Chinese dynasty of the Ming to the North was also a potential danger for the declining power of the Tran.
As the Tran Dynasty continued to decline, another leader emerged to assume increasing authority and influence. This man was Le Qui Ly, a minister to the Court. Le Qui Ly was a descendant of the Chinese family of Ho; but the name had been changed when one of Le Qui Ly's ancestors was adopted into a Vietnamese family by the name of Le.
Through the marriage of his aunt to the King, Le Qui Ly was able to further consolidate his position, until he had gained effective control over the ever-weakening Tran kingdom. While the Tran were still the nominal rulers of the country, Le Qui Ly began to implement his own policies of fiscal, educational and administrative re-forms. All the coins in the realm were called in, a paper currency issued, and restrictions were placed on the amount of land which one family could own. In the administrative field, Le Qui Ly altered the Confucian system of competitive exams, and appointed his loyal followers to office in order to increase his power.
When the Tran king abdicated in favor of his three year old son, Le Qui Ly had the former king hanged, and assumed the regency himself.
The practice of enthroning heirs before the king's death, which had been adopted by the Tran in order to assure a smooth succession, created a duality of influence which ultimately caused the downfall of the dynasty. The last Tran king, however, was the son of Le Qui Ly's own daughter; so, rather than killing his grandson, Ly simply dethroned him.
Having usurped the throne in 1400, Ly reverted to using his ancestral family name of Ho, and established the Ho Dynasty. After changing his own name, he changed the name of the country from An Nam to Dai Ngu. After a reign of only one year, Ly followed the custom of the Tran and abdicated in favor of his son, although Ly continued to exercise power himself and energetically advanced his programs of re-form. The army was reorganized and enlarged ; and Ly is credited with the invention of a kind of galley for the use of his fleet. Taxes were revised, and the ports were opened to trading vessels, which were also subject to taxation. The examination system was again modified to require more practical knowledge of peasant life, mathematics, and current events, in addition to the Confucian classics which had previously been required. Legal reforms were begun, and a medical service was established.
Externally, however, the Ho Dynasty was encountering difficulties in its relations with the Champa, and with the Chinese Ming Dynasty. Before Ly's far-sighted policy could take root, the Ming invaded. Ly's son had been granted recognition as King by the Chinese, who were deceived by the lie that there were no remaining descendants of the Tran. The Chinese quickly discovered the ruse, and immediately established liaison with those who were still loyal to the Tran. The Chinese promised to restore the Tran Dynasty, and the loyalists were soon joined by large numbers of aristocrats, whose interests were being threatened by Ly's reforms.
The Chinese invaded in 1406 with 5,000 men, along with a son of the last Tran king. The Chinese were defeated and the Tran king's son beheaded; however, the Chinese used this as an excuse to launch a larger invasion on the pretext of restoring the rightful Dynasty of the Tran. It is said that the Ho forces did not fight enthusiastically, because the people felt that the Ho Dynasty had usurped power from the Tran unfairly. Furthermore, the expense of continual war-fare against the Champa, and the taxation levied on holders of public lands had undermined the people's support for the Ho regime ; and the limitation of land holdings which Ly had instituted in order to further increase the power of the state made the regime as unpopular with the rich as it was with the poor,
Realizing this, the Chinese marked bits of wood with messages proclaiming their intention to restore the Tran, and threw these weapons of psychological warfare into the river. Carried by the current, the Chinese message was widely distributed, and served to increase the dissention of the people. The next year, the Ho were defeated, and the dynasty ended in 1407, having lasted for only seven years.
As the Chinese moved in, they sought to reestablish their former protectorate of Giao Chi. The Chinese victory, however, was premised on the assumption that the Tran Dynasty would be restored ; and it was for this reason alone that the Chinese had been supported by the Tran royal family, and by those members of the ruling class who expected their privileges to be restored with the return of the Tran. When the Chinese claimed their right to reestablish a protectorate on the grounds that no descendant of the Tran existed, they immediately found themselves confronted with a dangerous movement of popular dissidence. Having resorted to foreign assistance and gambled their nation's independence in order to regain their personal interests, the Tran learned a bitter lesson about treachery.
An attempt to wrest back power from the Chinese was made by a prince of the Tran family, who raised an army and rallied the people for a time, proclaiming himself Emperor Gian Dinh in 1407. In 1408, Gian Dinh won a spectacular victory over a far superior force of Chinese. But his success was short-lived. Gian Dinh beheaded two generals who had objected to his over-enthusiastic zeal in desiring to launch another attack without waiting for reinforcements. This act resulted in a considerable loss of support for Gian Dinh. Although the resistance was kept up for several more years, it was eventually washed away in blood, and the country was again placed under direct Chinese administration,
Under the Ming domination, the people were subjected to the worst exploitation and suffering of their entire history. The Chinese attempted, at the same time, to denationalize the local population. The great literary and historical works were removed to China, and Chinese classics were substituted for instruction in the schools. Vietnamese women forced to wear the Chinese fashion of vest and pantalons, and men had to wear their hair long, in the Chinese style. In fact, all the old customs - even the chewing of betel -were forbidden, and local religious rites were replaced by Chinese.
Forced labor was used to extract all manner of riches from the earth and sea for shipment to China. In addition, the Chinese, as well as those local officials who cooperated with them, profited by levying exorbitant taxes on everything from salt to silk-worm cocoons.
The oppressed people, determined to end the harsh Chinese rule, found a leader in a man named Le Loi. Le Loi came from a famous and wealthy family of aristocratic landowners, and was known for his courage, honesty and generosity. In 1418, Le Loi organized a resistance in his own village of Lam Son, in Thanh Hoa Province. Styling himself as the Prince of Pacification , Le Loi launched a guerrilla war against the Chinese which was to last for over ten years.
Three times, Le Loi was forced to return to the mountains, which were his safe rear base . Once, when cornered, Le Loi was saved only because one of his lieutenants sacrificed his own life by making the Ming believe he was Le Loi. After killing the lieutenant, the Ming withdrew, only to be attacked again by the true Le Loi. By following Tran Hung Dao's guerrilla tactic of attacking the weakest targets, and with-drawing before a stronger force, Le Loi's resistance forces gradually eroded the power of the Chinese. Le Loi pioneered another precept of guerrilla warfare as well: his forces maintained the strictest discipline, even when they were starving, and were absolutely forbidden to plunder the villages they occupied. Thus, Le Loi was able to win the support of the population, while the Chinese found themselves in hostile territory.
Le Loi was not lacking in the skills of psychological warfare, either. Nguyen Trai, a scholar and patriot, sought out the new leader. With his clever propaganda and stir-ring writings, he contributed greatly to making Le Loi something of a legendary hero in his own time.
The population was by this time in a state of general rebellion, and revolts broke out throughout the North in support of Le Loi. Le Loi thus had time to consolidate his forces while the Chinese were occupied with quelling these rebellions ; and the subsequent campaigns against the Chinese were successful. Finally, using the policy of employing ruse when confronted with superior strength; Le Loi organized a mock defeat to fool the Chinese reinforcements. Lured into the trap, the Chinese general was ambushed and beheaded, and the rest of his army was defeated in later battles of the same year, 1427.
According to the peace terms, the remaining Chinese troops were evacuated in 1428.But in order to save face, the Chinese exerted pressure to have some descendant of the Tran Dynasty put on the throne, since restoration of the Tran had been the pretext for the Chinese invasion. During the negotiations, Le Loi attended to the formality of reestablishing the Tran Dynasty; and Tran Cao was chosen to act as nominal ruler. King Tran Cao was well aware that he was to Be a puppet, however, and that he would be dishonored by not being permitted to exercise the authority due a king. Therefore, King Tran Cao attempted to flee. Pursued, captured and returned, King Tran Cao was made to drink poison, whereupon he died.
Le Loi then became king under the name of Le Thai To. The Le Dynasty was thereby founded in 1428, and the name of the country was changed from An Nam to Dai Viet, or the Great Viet.
It was during this period that Christianity was first introduced to the country. The romanized Quoc Ngu script was developed by the Jesuit missionary, Alexandre deRhodes; and this form of writing later supplanted the then-current Chinese-type Nom characters.
In the peace accord, it was agreed that the custom of paying a triennial tribute to China would be retained, but in practice the Le ruled independently. Immediately, Le Thai To (Le Loi) devoted himself to the task of reconstructing the war-devastated country. The army was cut from 250,000 to 100,000 men, and a rotational system was established to allow four-fifths of the men at a time to return to their fields, thus alleviating the serious problem of food shortages. The judicial system and penal code were reorganized to promote the national austerity campaign designed to overcome the conditions of social and economic chaos resulting from the war. To develop a corps of able administrators, the College of National Sons was founded, which admitted students on the basis of merit, thus permitting gifted children from poor families to receive advanced training.
Le Thai To died in 1433 at the age of 49, and was succeeded by his eleven year old son, Le Thai Tong. Quickly disposing of his Regent, Le Thai Tong governed ably despite the hardship of several natural disasters which led to poor harvests. On a visit to Nguyen Trai, the scholar and former propagandist for Le Loi, the young king was overwhelmed by the writer's beautiful concubine, and took her with him. Shortly there-after, the king died of poisoning, and was succeeded by his two year old son, Le Nhan Tong. The writer, Nguyen Trai, was suspected of having poisoned the king in revenge for the loss of his concubine. Nguyen Trai and three generations of his family were killed.
The Queen Mother acted as Regent for the child king, and under her rule new regulations for private ricelands were issued, a large canal was dug, and a successful campaign against the Champa was waged.
But the intrigues of the royal Court pre-vented the national development which had seemed assured with the removal of Chinese domination. The Queen Mother and the child King, Le Nhan Tong, were murdered by Le Nhan Tong's elder brother, Nghi Dan, who had formerly been the heir-apparent. But although he was the son of the Queen, Nghi Dan was not the son of the King, and when this became known, Nghi Dan was replaced as heir-apparent by Le Nhan Tong. Nghi Dan ruled for eight months after usurping the throne when he was killed by officials of the Court, who established the number four son as king.
The new king, Le Thanh Tong, reigned for thirty-six years, during which the country enjoyed an outstanding period of prosperity. While revising the tax system and promoting agriculture, Le Thanh Tong was primarily concerned with customs and morals. He ordered the people to cease spending large sums of money on building pagodas and carrying out the marriage and death rites, and to spend their money in more useful ways.
A great author and poet himself, Le Thanh Tong commissioned the writing of a national history, and was an enthusiastic promoter of education. The king also considered it his responsibility to concern himself with the morality of the people. To this end, He ordered that twenty-four articles governing personal conduct be read before each public gathering. For the most part, these rules dealt with duties of family members toward one another, prohibitions against letting young girls and boys associate with each other, the requirement for wives to be kind to their husband's concubines, and the necessity of being generous, honest, industrious, virtuous, and thrifty.
The reorganized military forces were also placed under strict discipline. A successful campaign against the Champa in 1471 pro-vided relief for the problems of insufficient availability of land and increased population pressure, paving the way for the southern migrations. Often, this expansion was accomplished by the soldier-farmers who set up militarized agricultural communities. The security of their rice fields thus assured, the Vietnamese established their culture as they moved south, and the Champa were gradually assimilated.
Le Thanh Tong died in 1497, and was followed by two competent but short-lived kings. The next king, Le Uy Muc, had apparently not studied the moral teachings of his grandfather, Le Thanh Tong. Muc began by murdering his grandmother and two of his ministers, and continued to reign with extravagant cruelty for five years.
Overthrown by his cousin, Muc died -either by suicide or murder, it is not clear which. Revolts were widespread, and the equally corrupt cousin fared no better than his predecessor. A court official raised an army, claiming he was going off to repress the revolts; but instead, he used the army to invade the palace and kill the king. The king's son was installed as the new ruler, but had reigned for only three days when he, too, was murdered - this time by the brother of the official who had led the revolt.
The next king, suspicious of the feuding officials, placed his trust in a fisherman by the name of Mac Dang Dung, who had fought his way up to the Court. As was the case with Ho Qui Ly 130 years before, Mac Dang Dung was able to exploit the weakness of the decaying dynasty to increase his own power. The worried king resorted to plotting the overthrow of his advisor , and fled the palace by night in order to seek the help of one of his generals. While the general was making up his mind, however, Mac Dang Dung attacked, killing the general and capturing the king, whom he later killed. Three years later, in 1527, Mac Dang Dung established the Mac Dynasty, forcing the Le officials to recognize it, and murdering the royal family and all of the officials who remained loyal to the Le. Many mandarins committed suicide, but many others joined in the organization of a resistance movement.
The Le loyalists appealed to the Chinese to restore the Le Dynasty. China prepared for an invasion, while at the same time demanding that Mac Dang Dung offer his submission. Mac Dang Dung rushed forth to meet the Chinese - with gifts. Dung and his entourage, moreover, had tied themselves with ropes as a gesture of subservience. The Chinese were favorably impressed, and agreed to the continuation of the Mac Dynasty - for a price.
The Le did not give up easily, however, and the resistance forces regrouped under the leadership of Nguyen Kim, son of a former Le general. Further support was en-listed for the cause when Nguyen Kim married his daughter to another general by the name of Trinh Kiem. Having proclaimed a Le descendant as Emperor, the two generals sallied forth to battle the Mac, and after a series of victories, the Western capital was retaken in 1543. But two years later, Nguyen Kim was murdered by a Mac officer, who surrendered himself to the enemy in order to poison their leader at the first opportunity. The Le's military power then passed into the hands of Kim's son-in-law, Trinh Kiem. Trinh Kiem withdrew to Thanh Hoa, at the edge of the Red River delta, and established the Southern Court in the name of the Le. With the Mac still in control of the Northern Court, the country was divided into rival and warring states by 1545.
By this time, the power of the Southern Court was completely in the hands of the Trinh, although the Le remained the nominal rulers for reasons of expediency. Nguyen Kim, the late founder of the revolution which had brought the Trinh to power, had two sons. Wary of the possible power of these two, Trinh Kiem killed one of them in a move designed to assure his own authority. The remaining son, Nguyen Hoang, fearing the same fate, pretended insanity for a while. Then, in 1588, he obtained permission from the Trinh to leave the North, and was later(1566) made Governor of the troublesome southern provinces of Thanh Hoa and Quang Nam.
When Trinh Kiem died in 1570, the military command of the Southern Court was assumed by his elder son, the inept and debauched Trinh Coi. Trinh Coi's younger brother, Trinh Tung, wasted no time in plotting to overthrow his brother; and the Mac took advantage of this squabble to launch another attack. Trinh Coi surrendered to the Mac, which allowed the military power of the Southern Court to fall into the hands of his brother, Trinh Tung. Trinh Tung then had the Le king killed, and en-throned another Le who was more to his liking; after which, Trinh Tung returned to the business of the war with the Mac.
The wars between the two continued indecisively until the Northern Emperor, Mac Mau Hop, was captured by the Trinh and beheaded after three days of public torture. The Mac Dynasty is usually reckoned as having ended with Mac Mau Hop's death in 1592, after lasting for 65 years, although the Mac retained control of a small area, the province of Cao Bang, in the Northern frontier region.
Benefitting from China's earlier recognition of the Mac Dynasty which was still in force, the Macs continued to enjoy a kind of privileged position under the Ming, and, after 1644, the Manchu Dynasty in China. When the Mac supported a disloyal governor in southeast China, however, the Manchu Emperor withdrew his protection, and in 1667, the country was finally reunited with the agreement of China's new Thanh Dynasty.
After the death of Mac Mau Hop in 1592, the remaining son of Nguyen Kim, Nguyen Hoang, had left his southern refuge to aid the Trinh in the struggle against the Mac remnants, despite the mistrust which had arisen between the Nguyen and the Trinh. But, when revolts broke out against the Trinh in 1600, Nguyen Hoang returned to his southern residence. The North continued to be torn by wars and intrigues under the tyrannical rule of the Trinh; and an abortive plot by the Le king and one of Trinh Tung's sons against the Trinh ended in Trinh Tung's killing his disloyal son as well as the Le king. Power then passed to Trinh Tung's eldest son, who ruled on behalf of the figurehead Le king who was subsequently installed.
Meanwhile, the South prospered under the increasingly independent rule of Nguyen Hoang, who enjoyed the support of the militarized agricultural colonies which had been settled in the southern region.
When Nguyen Hoang died in 1613, his son, Nguyen Phuc Nguyen, assumed control and ruled with absolute authority under the name of Lord Sai. Thus, the country was again divided, and the Nguyen family became masters of the country to the South of the Song Giang River, which is located slightly above the 17th Parallel that defines the present division of Viet Nam. Both the Nguyen and the Trinh, however, claimed allegiance to the Le Dynasty. the Vietnamese expansion, and the new lands provided a solution to the Nguyen's problems of population pressure.
The Trinh tried unsuccessfully to dislodge the Nguyen in 1620, after which the Nguyen ceased paying taxes to Hanoi's Trinh rulers. When the Nguyen twice disobeyed the Trinh's summons to come and explain this action, war broke out. Between 1627 and 1672, the Trinh sent seven expeditions against the Nguyen. But the Nguyen had built two great walls across the narrow central corridor, thus defending themselves against invasions from the North's superior forces, which were being aided by the Dutch. Portuguese aid, however, made the Nguyen stronger in armaments; and the failure of all seven campaigns left the North considerably weakened. In 1672, the Trinh finally agreed to a division of the two territories at the boundary of the Linh River. After fifty years of civil war, the Trinh and the Nguyen settled down to a period of peaceful coexistence, which lasted for slightly more than 100 years.
During this time, the Trinh reorganized their administration to promote honesty and efficiency, requiring all officials to take periodic examinations and weeding out incompetents. Unhappily, this well-intentioned program ended when money was needed to quell revolts, and the practice of selling administrative posts was instituted.
The penal code, too, was altered by the Trinh, and the punishments of bodily mutilation were abolished. In the past, a thief was sometimes punished by cutting off a finger or two, or - in the case of more serious offenses - by chopping off one or both hands.
A more uniform taxation system was de-vised, and minted coins were used as the standard currency in the northern kingdom.
The cruel reign of Trinh Giang (1729-1740),however, resulted in the outbreak of more riots and revolts, thus preventing the continuation of earlier progressive policies.
In the South, meanwhile, the administration was also reorganized, and officials we regrouped according to functional categories. Taxes were determined according to the quality of the land as well as quantity
The greatest significance of this period, however, is that it marked the opening up and settlement of the vast rich lands of the Mekong River delta. The Cambodian population in the area provided little resistance to
The South readily absorbed, too, the influx of refugees who left the insecurity and tyranny of the Trinh in the North, as well as numerous Chinese immigrants. The Chinese were especially active in trading, and by 1700, commercial trading was well-established' and flourishing.
With the system of a highly centralized government, however, local autonomy was extremely strong; and this pattern was rein-forced by the relative isolation of independent local economies. Thus, the enormous expansion of territory was not matched by the economy, which remained static, and village-oriented. Despite these conditions, though, the Vietnamese managed to survive as a single people. Their unity of customs and traditions was preserved intact by the stability of the village system, and the peasants' way of life, which was the same in all regions.
Laws for the protection of the peasants were ineffective both in the North and in the South, and the lot of the peasant grew progressively worse. Rebellions erupted with increasing frequency ; but more importantly, the insurrections were coming to be dominated by peasant elements, rather than by aristocratic political dissidents. As contacts with the West increased, moreover, the just-emerging forces of popular revolution in the West added impetus to the Vietnamese movement which was already underway.
The Tay Son brothers came up from the masses, and profited by the occasion of internal disorders to raise the colors of liberation. They routed both the lords of the Nguyen and Trinh by 1777, and put the last sovereign of the Le line to flight. One of the brothers, Nguyen Hue, became Emperor under the title of Quang Trung, and thanks to him, the national unity as finally restored for a brief time. Unfortunately, he died in 1792 without being able to assure the continuation of his dynasty.
Meanwhile, in the South, Nguyen Anh - the successor of the Nguyen lords - resumed the attack against the Tay Son, who became weaker and weaker. Nguyen Anh succeeded in reunifying the country in 1801, after a 27 year struggle. In this endeavor, Nguyen Anh enlisted the support of the French missionary, Monseigneur Pigneau de Behaine, the Bishop of Adran. The Bishop negotiated a treaty with France, which would have brought French military aid to Nguyen Anh in exchange for certain territorial and trading rights. The promise of aid was withdrawn later, but the Bishop of Adran proceeded on his own to raise troops and money. With the help of these recruits, Nguyen Anh's army was trained in the use of Western military techniques. The Bishop died in 1799 and Nguyen Anh continued his campaign without the advice of his trusted and loyal friend.
In 1802, Nguyen Anh completed his military victory over the Tay Son with the seizure of
Hanoi, and proclaimed himself Emperor, assuming the royal name of Gia Dinh. The country was
then known as Viet Nam.
The Nguyen Dynasty, founded by Gia Dinh, embarked on a massive reconstruction
program. For a time, things went very well, since Europe was then preoccupied with the
Napoleonic wars, and Gia Long concluded that a policy of non-involvement with the West was
not only desirable, but practicable.
King Tu Duc
Gia Long was succeeded by his son, Minh Mang, who was known to be hostile to Western influence, on the grounds that it undermined the traditional Confucian social order. External conditions, however, had changed, and the ultimate confrontation with the West was unavoidable.
The French Colonization.
King Dong Khanh
Hostility against the West increased. The Nguyen emperors issued stronger and stronger edicts against the incursion of foreigners, and especially against Christian missionaries ; but all of these injunctions went unheeded. Any actions taken to enforce the edicts served only to incite the West. French admirals attempted to interfere in the policy of the Nguyen governments and subsequent invasions and military operations finally led to the signing of two treaties, in 1862 and 1874, which made Viet Nam part of the French Empire. The kingdom of the late Emperor Gia Long thus became part of a geographical entity called French Indo-china, which included two other nations Cambodia and Laos.
Due to the methods of French administration, Viet Nam was partitioned into three regions: Tonkin in the North, Anna in the Center, and Cochinchina in the South. While the latter was administered directly, the others, Tonkin and Anna became French protectorates with a kind of autonomy under an emperor of Nguyen descent, whose power was mainly symbolic.
The introduction of Western civilization and the demands of the French colonial economy did indeed undermine the traditional order, as Minh Mang had predicted it would. The class structure and the educational systems were drastically altered. The upheaval and instability created by the attempts to transform a traditional society, coupled with the resentment and hostility which resulted from the loss of sovereignty provoked a continuing resistance to the French rule.
Opposition took every possible form, ranging from poetic satires and formal petitions to armed revolt. But as in centuries past, ordinary Vietnamese citizens were excluded from participation in government above the village level. At times, hopes of reform were encouraged by changes in the French government itself, or by the appointment of a more liberal Governor-General. Before any of the reforms were implemented, however, World War II intervened to change the course of events.
King Khai Dinh
The Recovery of National Independence.
After the fall of France in 1940, the Vichy government retained authority in Indochina until the occupying Japanese assumed power in March, 1945. One month later, the Emperor Bao Dai proclaimed the independence of Viet Nam under Japanese protection, and formed a national government with the patriot and scholar, Tran Trong Kim as Premier. There-after, a series of governments succeeded - and sometimes competed with - each other.
At the end of the war, French troops were landed to reoccupy their former colony, and immediately encountered the fierce resistance of Vietnamese nationalists, determined to protect their newly-won independence. Periodic attempts to negotiate a settlement were made during the nearly ten years of fighting which ensued. In France, the war became increasingly unpopular, while the Vietnamese were united in the common cause of national independence. Finally, the Geneva Agreement of July 21, 1954 was signed, with which peace came back to Viet Nam. The joy of Viet Nam was marred, however. Since the Communists had gained control of the nationalist forces in the North, the country was divided into two parts. The Communists were allowed to rule in the North (Democratic Republic of Viet Nam) separated by the demarcation line of the Seventeenth Parallel from the free regime in the South (Republic of Viet Nam).
From 1954 until 1963, South Viet Nam was ruled by President Ngo Dinh Diem. His dictatorial regime was effective in achieving the national stability essential for coping with the initial period of crisis ; but with the development of greater internal stability, the regime became less, rather than more flexible in its policy. Thus, the people, who had fought so hard and so long, were frustrated in their desire for true freedom. Externally as well, the Vietnamese were being threatened with a possible loss of freedom, as the Communist North began its campaign of terrorism and guerrilla warfare designed to conquer the South.
At last, on November 1, 1963, a great revolution, jointly managed by the South Vietnam army and the people, upset the dictatorial regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, and installed the Second Republic. Since then, several civilian and military governments have taken turns in office in Saigon, with varying success, prior to the formation of a National Directory on June 19, 1964. This latter groups the main military leaders of the Armed Forces of the Republic, and has installed a War Cabinet to effectively direct the struggle against the Communist aggression and to advance the work of the Revolution, kindled in the triumph of November 1,1963.


text:
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 24.0378 Thursday, 1 August 2013
Date: August 1, 2013 12:58:31 AM EDT
Subject: Two Sets of Controversies
Ward Elliott posting on SHAKSPER bet controversies 7 7 13
Two sets of controversies.
It's summer, and both of SHAKSPER's old-time bet controversies are back with us. The first controversy has to do with our £1,000 bet, which quietly passed its tenth birthday on June 9. It is still on offer and still seems controversial enough for people to gripe about, though never enough for anyone to take us up on it. If our bet were a kid, it would be alive and headed for the fifth grade. Joe Egert now has reservations about it. He thinks our evidence is circular, and he urges us to raise the ante.
The second controversy is the latest of three rounds of Michael Egan's counterbets. These might seem more like feints than real bets, because every time he has almost gotten his demanded hearing underway, he has yanked away the football like Lucy and stormed out before a verdict could be reached. I don't suppose that he, or Lucy herself for that matter, actually sets out consciously planning to play the Lucy role, so words like feint and strategy may not be quite the right ones. But it always seems to work out that way. My guess is that he starts out with an all-consuming desire to stir up some attention for his Woodstock ascription, demands a hearing for it in peremptory tones, then gets cold feet when others balk at his insistence on doing it his My Way, feels that he is about to be caught in someone else's trap, and bails out in alarm. But it's his own trap, not someone else's; it has the same bad effect as an intentional Lucy bait-and-switch strategy; and it does drag out the controversy, in this case, longer than it deserves.
It also backfired badly in his last round. He stormed out, as always, but too late to forestall the verdict he had demanded. He got his verdict, lost, owes us £1,000, and won't pay it. Last week he came back yet again, incredibly, denouncing Larry Weiss, the convenor of his demanded hearing panel, for taking an "unhealthy interest" in his case – and demanding that Mr. Weiss go another round with him, this one on his own home court. If the Egan counterbets were kids, and were still alive, his oldest would be eight this week. But all of them are dead, at Egan's own hand. On the other hand, it looks like he has a new, fourth one on the way, but for Weiss, not us. Will it live any longer than the others?
Our original bet.
Our original bet comes up whenever the talk turns to the acceptability of stylometry, like ham and eggs, more often than not because I bring it up myself to reaffirm its original point: some debates, deadlocked on opinion, can be settled on the facts with a bet. Ten years ago, as now, many SHAKSPERians were uncomfortable with stylometry. They didn't want to discuss it themselves, and they didn't want us to bring it up either. Some strongly urged that stylometry be outlawed on SHAKSPER discussions as unacceptably deceptive, untrustworthy, and circular. My co-author, Rob Valenza, and I have many times defended our stylometry and resisted having it outlawed, wherever possible using simple, non-technical devices to help clarify technical points to a non-technical audience. Our bet was such a device. It was intended to clarify and unjam a deadlock of conflicting opinion with an appeal to facts. The gist of this long posting is that it worked, much better than weeks of fruitless head-butting over matters of opinion, belief, and acceptability, and that it still serves a useful function. For somewhat longer answers, read on, or skip to the summary of "lessons learned" at the bottom. For yet longer, more nuanced and documented answers, see our many previous postings in SHAKSPER's archives, or our section on the original bet in our "Oxford by the Numbers," 2004, 363-65, http://www.cmc.edu/pages/faculty/welliott/UTConference/Oxford_by_Numbers.pdf.
Let's start by mentioning Joe Egert's posting and come back to it at the end. The other week he deplored "the circularity that lies at the heart of early modern stylometric methodology," and which certainly lay at the heart of our original bet. He thought our still-open thousand-pound bet offer was too niggardly, shouldn't really count as a "victory" for us. He urged us to raise it to eighteen thousand and make it more enforceable, so, if he takes the bet, he won't get stiffed. That may be worth some thought. In the old days it took us just a few seconds of reflection to raise it from $25 to $1,000, and two years to raise it again from $1,000 to £1,000. Does it need more?
Gatekeeping, proxy evidence, and transaction.
Nobody spoke or thought of our bet in quite those terms when we first offered it, but, in retrospect, the key problems we addressed were gatekeeping, proxy evidence, and transaction costs. Economists use the technical term transaction costs, and so do we, but jargon-spurners can think of them as time costs or hassle costs without losing too much fidelity. A surprising number of academic controversies, especially knotty, technical ones over authorship, are not settled on the merits, which most people don't understand, but by proxies, which most people think are easier to understand – clever rhetoric, flaunting or weighing credentials, appeals to higher authority, haloes, anchors, votes, trials, bets, flipping coins, and so on. All of these can be proxies for breaking deadlocks and getting enough closure to keep a conversation alive. Few of Donald Foster's American admirers had the foggiest idea whether his SHAXICON evidence in Elegy by W.S. actually proved what he claimed it did, but he was a good story-teller and, for a while, a thriving self-promoter in celebrity authorship cases. Everyone understood and admired when he correctly identified the author of Primary Colors. Many concluded that, if he got Primary Colors right, he must have gotten the Elegy right, too. They were right about Primary Colors, wrong about the Elegy. Later, when Foster conceded that he got the Elegy wrong, most people accepted that, too, again without ever trying to puzzle their way through his actual evidence or to study countercases from us (2001), Gilles Monsarrat (2002), or, especially, Brian Vickers 'Counterfeiting' Shakespeare (2002). Proxies can help you to infer the unseen from the seen, the complex from the simple, and the difficult from the easy.
Does anyone doubt that authorship itself is a kind of proxy writ large? Just the other week, according to Nielsen Bookscan, The Cuckoo's Calling, by no-name "Robert Galbraith," had sold only 500 copies in the U.S. Now, with the help of a bit of stylometry, it turns out that it's actually by superstar J.K. Rowling. Would anyone want to bet that Rowling's publisher guessed wrong in printing up another 300,000 copies? Or that Woodstock's sales wouldn't pick up considerably if it were shown to have been actually written by dead, white, male superstar William Shakespeare?
Proxies are usually quicker and easier than direct evidence, and often almost as useful for practical purposes. Most people don't know stylometry, don't want to learn it, and find it more convenient to defer to the say-so of stylometrists, or to other knowledgeable gatekeepers, or to the collective orthodoxies of their own group, than to pause to sort out knotty technical questions on the merits on their own. For most of us, most of the time, life goes farther and better with proxies than without them (Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011, Ch. 7-9).
In our case, both proxies and collective orthodoxies were in play. In 2003 we were newcomers to SHAKSPER, outsiders who thought that our Shakespeare Clinic students, using unorthodox new-optics methods, had made some major advances, discoveries, and validations. We thought that we could contribute something worthwhile to SHAKSPER's discussion of possible co-authorship in Titus Andronicus. But no. SHAKSPER had adamant, vocal, self-appointed gatekeepers who would have none of it, not because they had read and rejected our evidence, but because they didn't trust statistics of any kind. To them it seemed a given that statistics are circular, tell you nothing you don't already know, and have no place in a legitimate authorship discussion. They told us, firmly, pointedly, and repeatedly to leave our statistics at the door. I would guess that many, maybe most SHAKSPERians shared their distrust of quantitative evidence like ours, though perhaps not their adamant insistence that it must therefore be outlawed from SHAKSPER discussions.
We spent several fruitless sessions patiently responding to each of our gatekeepers' points, but we soon realized that we were getting stonewalled. We had three choices: struggle on with the endless, uphill deadlock over admitting our evidence, fold our tents, or find a better proxy. We went with the proxy. When it occurred to us that the gatekeepers' circularity theory was testable, it also occurred to us that a bet was a good way to test it. Whichever side was right, the bet could test it and settle it with objective, empirical evidence and with a minimum of fuss. Better that than spending hours and weeks venting people's opposing philosophies about banning statistics but never settling the controversy. Everyone, said Daniel Patrick Moynihan, is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts. Betting is better suited to events where there is an objective winner, like a horse race, than to events where winning is a matter of taste, like a beauty contest. With most horse races you can tell who won, without endless, inconclusive argument whether the judges were using acceptable procedures. With horse races, the transaction costs of telling the winner are much lower. Ours was a bet of the horse-race type.
If our gatekeepers really thought they were right, they would expect to win on the facts and take the bet. But they didn't take the bet, and that tells us something.
The gist of our bet was this: that no one could come up with a single untested play, among hundreds available, that our Shakespeare-or-no tests would misclassify. If we were right that our new-optics results were non-circular and extrapolable, the patterns we found in tested plays would also be found in untested plays. We would win. If the gatekeepers were right, that our methods are circular and couldn't be extrapolated, they would win. We originally conceived it as a $25 bet, but immediately realized that it had to be much higher to justify the testing costs. The transaction costs of editing and testing a new play are not zero, and not trivial. It makes little sense to incur a thousand pounds worth of preparation and testing cost to settle a $25 bet. We raised it at once to a thousand dollars, and eventually raised it again to a thousand pounds, both increases intended to discourage frivolous takers.
But we also made it clear that takers were welcome to pretest the plays themselves, with free software supplied by us, so that, if they wished, they could screen scores or hundreds of plays to find just one that our tests would misclassify, at zero financial risk to themselves. If our theory was right, and they didn't hit the jackpot on the first couple of tries, and actually had to test scores of new plays to find one that would pass our Shakespeare tests, the takers, not us, would be the ones who would get stuck with the hefty editing and pretesting costs. If their theory was right, then the untested bulk of the haystack could just as well have been loaded with needles, which doubtless could easily be found with just a test or two, particularly if guided by the gatekeepers' educated intuition, which they assumed to be far more reliable than our pages and pages of dull, dry, mechanical, circular statistics. That's testable, too, if you are willing to find out the stats. Our gatekeepers loved sports imagery, as did we, and they used it both boldly and misleadingly, as a proxy to support their stats-are-circular theory. If they had read, Moneyball, which was first published only two weeks before our original bet, they might have been less wedded to their circularity theory.
We thought the circularity theory was wrong, confidently enough to bet a thousand pounds against it and on our own tests. It seemed like high stakes both then and now, and could have been taken as a sign that we were either very confident or very bold as bluffers, take your pick. In fact, our high confidence levels shouldn't have mattered in the least, and probably didn't (low confidence levels might have been more telling). They were, and they remain, a matter of our feelings and opinions, not of fact, and everyone knows that many views held with the deepest, most sincere and passionate of convictions have turned out to be false. What did matter, a hundred times more than ours, was the low confidence levels of our would-be gatekeepers themselves, which could easily be inferred from their behavior. If they really believed they were right, our bet offered them be a big, easy, risk-free reward, plus a gratifying, high-profile, clear-cut victory over the barbarians, which could give them enough credibility and clout, or us enough embarrassment, to keep us fenced out for many years. If they really believed our evidence was circular, they would have grabbed it.
But they didn't, and haven't, nor has anyone else in the ten years since—probably, we would guess, because they, too, silently sensed that the circularity argument was far too weak for any rational, loss-averse person to bet on. The original gatekeepers wisely folded their tents and have not tried to obstruct us from that day to this. For this they have our thanks. Our thoughts on Titus Andronicus were duly entered, and we have had years of free, fruitful, unobstructed access to SHAKSPER ever since. We are grateful to have gotten through the gates, with much help from our bet, and we remain grateful enough to revisit the bet episodically to see what can be learned from it.
Some Pros and cons of proxy proofs.
Have the gatekeepers' years of reticence actually proved that we were right and they were wrong? No, it's just a proxy, not a real proof. For a real hard-nosed standard-bearer, only testing all available plays could do that, and, even if that were done, well-entrenched skeptics could still protest that testing the known, available plays was not enough. Maybe some of the known lost plays, if they could be found, or the unknown ones, would prove their point. "Perfection or nothing," is their unstated motto—as long as the other guy is the one expected to provide it. But the underwhelming response did show that the gatekeepers themselves didn't and don't believe enough in their own theory to bet on it, not even if they could pretest hundreds of plays ad libitum and risk no money. It was a proof by proxy, but a good enough one to free us from the unreasonable expectation that, to prove anything, we had to prove everything first. Our bet was, and it remains, a much better proxy than the gatekeepers' own "everybody knows statistics are circular and can't be extrapolated" argument, for two reasons: (1) In Twain's words, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so;" and (2) the gatekeepers' actions, if not their words, said clearly they didn't believe in it enough themselves to risk money or time on it.
Did our proxy spare us endless wrangling and transaction costs as much as we had hoped? At the time, absolutely. The gatekeepers stopped obstructing, and we became full, free, happy participants in SHAKSPER authorship conversations, most of which would never have taken place in SHAKSPER's absence.
The Egan Counterbets.
In short, our own bet still seems to me a success story. It paid respectful attention to the opinions of the gatekeepers, but did oblige them to decide, tacitly, whether they believed enough in them to bet on them. They wisely decided no, the deadlock was unjammed, and the gates were opened with much lower transaction costs than we would have gotten from more months of deadlock. It's much harder to think of the Egan Counterbets as a success story. I think of them as tragicomedies of transaction costs, a series of battles over how much time and effort Egan could reasonably exact from the other side and the judges before he scampered off with the football in the final act. He seemed desperate to have a hearing for his "irrefutable" Woodstock case, with willing debate partners, judges, and a verdict, and he wanted us to provide all of these but the verdict in his favor.
We were willing to do so, with the help of volunteer mediator Larry Weiss, but only at a reasonable scale, not too grossly disproportionate to the amount at stake. We didn't want to pay for Egan's blue-ribbon panel, nor to oblige any panel, far less ourselves, to read everything he thought necessary to make his case, nor to let the debate drag on indefinitely. He wanted all of these at the outset, yielded on a few of them over the eight years of controversy, but was adamant to the end, even after agreeing to the contrary, that everyone had to read all, or, at the very end, two volumes, of his sprawling, $400, 4-volume Woodstock treatise before justice could be done. Whenever we balked at saddling the judges, and ourselves with £10,000 worth of transaction costs to settle his £1,000 bet, he would snatch away his football like Lucy, stomp out in a rage, denounce the process as a "charade and a show trial," declare the case closed – and then, like Lucy, get ready to repeat the process a few years later. Our mistake was to suppose that his obsession with getting a public hearing for his case actually extended to getting it settled with a verdict. Obviously, it didn't. Stir now, serve later, was his motto, and it produced much stirring, but little serving.
Though he published, posted, or sent out hundreds of pages of his data and analysis – or was it thousands, counting his webpage before it was discovered and he disavowed it and took it down? – he was quick to disavow all of it as "his case." But for someone outwardly desperate to get a hearing and a favorable verdict, and whose only favorable reviewer described his sprawling, wandering, unindexed, Woodstock treatise as a "reader's nightmare," and despite repeated requests, he never came up with a compact case statement of his own till a year and a half after the third-round verdict had already been handed down. It's as if he feared that his needles of evidence would lose their irrefutability if anyone separated them from his vast, protective haystack. If so, he was probably right, since his case was weak, and it was harder to hide that in 40 pages than it was in all four costly, sprawling volumes. Eventually, a year and a half after Round 3 was over, he did produce a 40-page brief, whose shortcomings were less like a needle in a haystack, and more like a banana on a pool table. By then, it was much too late to have had any effect on the Weiss panel's verdict on Round 3. But perhaps, if he doesn't disavow it and duck out yet again, and there is a Round 4, he can hope it will help him with that.
It's important to note that all of Egan's bets were his, not ours, and that we had no legal or ethical obligation to play Charlie Brown to his Lucy, far less to accept the heavy burden of unreasonable transaction costs he wanted us to shoulder. Our bet had to do with trying our tests on untested plays to see if they would work, as we expected, or not work, as the circular-theory folks expected. Egan's bet had to do with applying his own evidence to a play already tested by us and roundly rejected as Shakespeare, as it was, and still is, rejected by orthodox Shakespeare scholars. Ours was on an objective question of fact, his on a matter of opinion. Ours was still a horserace, his a beauty contest. On the other hand, if he was right, it would be a glaring indicator that our tests weren't 100% accurate, only 99%, and that there might be a grain of truth in the stats-are-circular theory. If so, addressing it directly and getting it decided, with Egan's co-operation and Larry Weiss's mediation, seemed less likely to make trouble than letting it sit and stew with the circularists.
So we negotiated with Egan in 2005, with help from Larry Weiss, to find a suitable panel, a debate prompt, and written safeguards against out-of-control transaction costs. Both parties were to submit short case statements and closing statements, with no limit on supporting documents, but no requirement that everything be read, and no more than a month of debate. Egan agreed at once to the panel, all of SHAKSPER's membership, to the debate prompt, and to the unlimited right to submit documents. But not, most emphatically not, to the one-month limit, nor to letting the panel decide for themselves how much or little of his reader's nightmare they needed to read before ruling. For him, it had to be the whole nightmare or nothing, with discussion for "as long as it takes." We balked, and he stomped out, twice, denouncing us as "fakes and phoneys." "The bet has been called off and the matter is now closed."
That was the first two rounds, and of course the matter was not closed. He tried unsuccessfully to arrange a third round through Roger Stritmatter, of the Shakespeare Oxford Society. We declined. Then he tried again, but, having walked out twice, and called us less temperate names than most would use who are seeking to win someone's co-operation, he was forced to sweeten the pot considerably to show some semblance of good faith. This time he insisted that he really, really wanted his case heard and decided, and would make us an offer we couldn't refuse: Pick any panel we like, £1,000 for us if we win, nothing for him if we lose, time limits OK, case-statement word-limits OK, unlimited supporting submissions OK, but panelists were required to read only as much of both sides' submissions as they deemed necessary to render a fair judgment. No obstruction or breach of agreement allowed, or Weiss could declare a forfeit. Both sides agreed to all of these. Weiss recruited a panel of himself and two other SHAKSPERians from the Golden Ears pool, Will Sharpe, and Dale Johnson. Then, in breach of his agreement, Egan changed his mind yet again and demanded that everyone on the panel read hundreds of pages of his reader's nightmare, as his oversized case brief. Two of the panelists were willing to read all of this, one not. That was not enough for Egan, who once again snatched away the football, denounced the process as a "charade and a show trial," and stomped out.
Another Aughh! situation for the Charlie Browns? Not quite. This time the submissions to the panel were complete in accordance with the rules to which both sides had agreed. The panel went ahead and decided the case on its merits, unanimously, in our favor. Larry Weiss's opinion is available at http://shaksper.net/documents/doc_download/274-egan-v-elliott. Our SHAKSPER posting gives the gist of our case http://shaksper.net/archive/2011/303-september/28127-thomas-woodstock- and contains further leads to our brief and timeline, both available online.
A year and a half later, Egan finally did submit a 40-page brief as a rebuttal to the panel's verdict. See below for the link: http://shaksper.net/archive/2013/337-february/29094-in-the-case-of-egan-vs-elliott-a-reply-to-larry-weiss-et-al
If your case is strong, a 40-page brief normally shows it much more clearly than a 2,100-page brief. If your case is weak, a 40-page brief shows that more clearly, too. Just like ripe ones, rotten bananas are more obvious on the pool table than they are buried in the haystack. Egan's long-overdue brief makes it all too clear that his case is weak. The nub of his argument is that his own evidence, though weak by the ounce, becomes irrefutable by the ton. "No single datum clinches the matter but hundreds en masse seem unanswerable (his brief, 2013, 6)." That's implausible enough on its face, but especially hard to swallow if there is also a bushel of strong, unanswered contrary evidence, as there is in Woodstock's case. We took Shakespeare's measure in 152 tests, old and new. In 62 of these, Woodstock fell outside Shakespeare's range. That means we found 24 more Shakespeare rejections in Woodstock alone than we found in our entire corpus of 29 single-authored, core-Shakespeare plays combined. The odds that Shakespeare would produce that much discrepancy from his own norms by chance in just one play are lower than the odds of getting hit by lightning. He responded by declaring that our "assumption . . . that a writer as varied and complex as Shakespeare can be pinned down by numbers" is "unacceptable (his brief, 2013, 5)."
Does this sound familiar? It should. It's another invocation of the circularity argument, just as rickety as the original ten years ago, and just as testable on the facts. That's what our original bet was about, and why we have rise to its defense every few years whenever a reminder looks called for. If Egan is right, he could easily refute us by coming up with just one untested play that our tests misclassify. He hasn't even tried. Once again, the proper question is not whether it's acceptable, but whether it is so.
When he seemingly sought to settle his ascription via someone else's opinion, as with his own dead counterbets, we were willing to go along with that, too, three times. In the end, after imposing a lot of transaction costs on the Charlie Browns, he got his judgment, which he lost and wouldn't pay up. That should be enough baggage to end our years (if not Larry's) of on-call servitude as Charlie Browns. Egan, having defaulted on the third round, has not tried to tempt us into a fourth round. Who would bet on the next sweetened pot if the last one was a fake? Our guess is that we're off the hook at last. If so, I think we do have Egan's own bets, plus years of patient negotiation and argument on our part, and patient mediation on Larry Weiss's part, to thank for making each successive round a bit more demanding, and, in the end, for putting Egan's Woodstock case out of its misery. It's not very gracious of Egan, having badgered the good Samaritan, Weiss, into setting up the panel he sought so desperately, putting up with Egan's moods, and struggling through his whole sprawling haystack of a case, to denounce him for his "unhealthy interest" in Egan's own case. But there is a sense in which Egan could be right: that his overclaimed, underproved case has finally gotten aired, judged, and found wanting, and that interest in it is no as longer healthy or urgent as it might once have seemed. Reading Egan's ungracious posting, my sympathies went out to Larry Weiss, the kindly judge who spent so many thankless hours and years trying to get Egan his desperately-sought hearing, patiently read through his reader's nightmare, put up with his moods, and deserves his thanks, not his wrath, for taking any interest at all in his case, healthy or otherwise. No good deed goes unpunished.
Bottom line: Over eight years Mr. Egan has stormed into, and then tried to storm out of, three rounds of negotiation to get him his hearing, the last time after agreeing to terms which he breached. In the last round, he stormed out too late to halt the hearing. He got it, lost, hasn't paid us the thousand pounds he agreed to, and now seems bent on starting the process yet again, as if nothing had happened, having too long refused to get down to cases, and never having tried to take account of the elephant in the room—the colossal stylometric discrepancy we found between Shakespeare and Woodstock. That's a lot of transaction costs, many times more than the thousand pounds he hasn't paid, on top of a mountain of his own and Woodstock's credibility problems. It's a lot of baggage to answer for next time he needs a Charlie Brown to help him stir his pot. I think that we're very near to the last chapter on Mr. Egan's bets, and that, in some sense, we have the bets themselves to thank for finally getting us there.
Upping the ante on our bet.
Now let's go back to our own bet and Mr. Egert. Should we raise the ante as he urges? He carries very little baggage and, to his credit, is actually inquiring about our live, fact-seeking bet, not the dead Egan counterbets. To his further credit, he has shown more interest than anyone we know of in actually pre-testing some plays with our software. Our best guess is that it's a wild goose chase, and we are glad that he, not us, is the one pursuing it, but it's only a guess. If he, or anyone else, finds an untested play out there that passes our Shakespeare tests, we would very much like to know it. So would everyone else. At a minimum, it would be a little coup, a clear exception to our 100%-accurate track record of classifications to date. It could cut it to 99% or perhaps even less, if he comes up with more than one other-authored Shakespeare match.
Or it might just be a giant surprise of a coup, raising the question whether the exceptional play was not other-authored at all, but possibly the Lost Shakespeare of Egan's and every other red-blooded, hyper-Stratfordian Ahab's dreams (A hyper-Stratfordian is someone who thinks that there is a lot of Lost Shakespeare out there, awaiting "discovery" by seekers more keen or bold than their precursors). If confirmed, it could win for its discoverer the same kind of fame and glory that Egan craves, and that Donald Foster actually enjoyed in the 1990s before his Elegy bubble burst. Passing our tests could be a vital piece of the confirmation process. If that were so, £1,000 would be a trivial price to pay for turning up such a Holy-Grail moon rock from a pile of plays that generations of orthodox Ahabs, themselves desperately in search of Lost Shakespeare, had passed over as presumptive slag. But we haven't heard much sign of success in his quest, so far; Mr. Egert hasn't accepted our bet offer, only asked to have it raised; and that still seems to us a sign that he doesn't give circularity any greater weight than the gatekeepers of old. It's not much.
On the other hand, perhaps we are misinterpreting an important signal on his part. Why is he asking us to raise the ante to £18,000? Surely not to shame Mr. Egan into paying us on his bet; if Egan won't pay us the £1,000 he owes us, why on earth would he, or should he, pay us another £17,000 which he doesn't owe us? Mr. Egert's apparent intent is to get us to commit to paying more ducats if we lose, and to make the commitment more enforceable. Perhaps he has already found his moon rock, wants a better price for it, and would like us to supply it. Or perhaps he has realized that finding the moon rock, if it exists, will cost more time and energy than £1,000, and that he really needs more incentive to justify the effort, and would like us to supply that.
What he hasn't explained is why we should consider a higher-stakes bet preferable to the one that has served our purposes for a decade. Would it help us get past SHAKSPER's gatekeepers? No, that already happened a decade ago. Would it discourage frivolous takers? No. If anything, the much higher stakes would encourage a different kind of frivolous taker, the clever rent-seeker, looking not just for the satisfaction of discrediting our methods or for the possible thrill of finding a moon rock, but for ways to profit from a higher payoff, sufficient to repay the cost of litigation, depositions, affidavits, stipulations, arbitrations, contracts, escrows, forum shopping, contingency fees, settlements, or other Due Process whatnots of modern high-stakes deals, any or all to be secured at $600 per billable hour. Would that cut transaction costs? When pigs fly. It's much more likely to raise them.
Improving enforceability is a legitimate concern. What if Mr. Egert won and we stiffed him for the £1,000, or we won and he stiffed us, as Egan has? I could think of arrangements, such as escrows, which could make stiffing more difficult, and collection easier. I bet Larry Weiss would have something worthwhile to say on this subject, and I would be willing to discuss such arrangements with Mr. Egert, if they are important to him. But let's face it: the point of our bet was not to make money on it, but to get the gatekeepers off our backs. It worked. The point of trying to accommodate Egan on his bet was not to make money from him, but to get him off our back. That didn't work so well for a long time because he kept making Charlie Browns of us, and we let him. But he did eventually miss a step and picked up enough baggage that we don't have to do it anymore. I think, our Charlie Brown era is over, with Egan at least, and I hope I'm right.
What about Mr. Egert's own stated reasons for urging us to raise the stakes: our supposed need to impress him and others with the fervor of our belief in our own methods? Not enough. How passionately we endorse our own methods says very little about whether or not they are right. We didn't offer our bet to impress people with the fervor of our faith in our own assumptions, but to test our critics' faith in theirs. If their faith was too faint to risk £1,000, who would expect them to be bolder about risking £18,000? £1,000 has been enough to make our point for many years, even for Mr. Egert, who still hasn't taken us up. He hasn't yet given us a good reason to change it.
Can any lessons be drawn from the first ten years of our bet experiment? Let's look at some, one by one:
Is it OK to use proxy evidence in place of direct proofs? In general, yes. I have spent the last 45 years teaching college kids, smart ones, and I try to reach them at whatever level will best do the job in the time available. If you care about getting through to someone, it's better to use simple language and imagery that he understands, even if it's proxy, than complicated language and imagery that he doesn't understand. See Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011, Ch. 7-9. Most of us use proxies and shortcuts most of the time, when we can't take all night or all year to make the point properly, and there is good reason for it.
Is it OK to use proxies which presuppose that the earth is flat? Not if you can help it, not even if people understand it better. But there is a permissible arguendo exception, along these lines: "If people really believed that the world were flat, then they would accept our bet that they can't find a single instance of someone falling off the edge." The presupposition is false, but the proxy still works to show it so.
Is some statistical evidence circular or misleading? Yes, same as with other forms of evidence.
Is all of it circular? No.
Is banning all statistics the best protection against bad statistics? Not at all, especially where the alternative looks like a flat-earth proxy. With statistics, as with other things, it is best, where you can, to use the good, skip the bad.
Did our bet cut the transactions costs of getting through SHAKSPER's gate? Unquestionably.
Has it ended the notion that all statistics are circular? No. Mr. Egert still seems to think they are. But he does fully understand that we've got a bet on it, and he hasn't yet taken it.That can't but dim his circularity argument a bit.
Did any of Egan's bets cut anyone's transaction costs? For a long time, no. In the end, yes. Trying to get them settled did waste a lot of time, more, in retrospect, than Egan or his evidence really merited. But my guess is that it did help get them settled in the end.
Have we heard the last chapter of the Egan bet? I hope so, but can't guarantee it.
Could any of these questions be decided on the merits today without the proxy? I suspect so, but realize that that, too, is a question of transaction costs. How deep is SHAKSPER's members' distrust for statistics? Enough, ten years ago, to rule out the possibility that better use of statistics might explain how the Oakland Athletics, with a $40 million payroll, could compete on even terms with the Yankees, with their $125 million (Moneyball, 2003)? Enough, today, to dismiss Nate Silver's calling all 50 states correctly in the 2012 elections by clever extrapolation of tiny samples (The Signal and the Noise, 2012)? Or to rule out the latest stylometric evidence that J.K. Rowling wrote The Cuckoo's Calling? What about the Shakespeare Clinic's own experience with the last four expansions of its archive of tested plays? Every time we added new texts, including the three dozen or so plays we have tested since we first offered the bet, we could see that the same Shakespeare patterns we found in the old rounds continued to be found in the new rounds. See our "Oxford by the Numbers," 2004, 367.
If the circularity theory is correct, none of these should have happened. Neither Silver's limited voter samples nor our limited play samples could be expected to tell us anything about 99.9% of voters who didn't get interviewed or the 75% of plays which hadn't gotten tested. Yet they did for Silver and they have for us. If facts matter, all of these extrapolations should put the "statistics-are-circular" theory into the same drawer as the flat-earth theory, and you shouldn't have to bet on it to convince people that it is not so. If facts don't matter, then the circular theory lives on in the mouths and souls of today's gatekeepers, and it still takes a bet to demonstrate that it is dead in their own hearts and pockets. I suppose that's better than nothing. But proxies do have their own problems, and I can't help wondering whether stylometric facts are really as impenetrable as most people think. If you care about authorship, you should not rule out stylometry. Try a little the next time you find yourself feeding on proxy evidence, and see if its transaction costs are not lower than people think, and its benefits higher. You might find that you like it.
Does authorship matter? For sure.
What would have happened without the bets? Most people deal with challenges on one of two ways: sensitive and responsive or not-so-sensitive and not so responsive. There are good arguments for both. Under the sensitive scenario, we would have felt duty-bound to respond challenges seriously, even flat-earth ones, accept whatever transaction costs they entailed, and respond to every point seriously and politely. No one could do this with every flat-earth bright idea on offer; there are far too many of them, some dismissible out of hand, many not. But now and then one pops up in your back yard or blocking your path, and you have to decide between responding and ignoring. We responded for a while with our circularists, found ourselves getting nowhere, and used the bet to get unstalled. Absent our bet, we might well have tired of the hassle, given up on SHAKSPER, never had to bother with postings like this one, and never done our bet experiment, Egan's bet experiment, or our Golden Ear experiment. SHAKSPER was indispensible for all of these conversations, and deserves a lot of people's thanks, ours especially.
What would we have done without the Egan bet? Saved ourselves years of getting Lucied. Our experience with Egan commends the less-sensitive scenario. It is better suited for assertive, flat-earth challenges like Egan's, which are not so serious, polite, or heedful of evidentiary niceties. Would we or anyone have paid any attention at all to Egan's book, absent his direct challenge? I doubt it. Even with the direct challenge, we might have responded less seriously or less politely, or not at all, and done so earlier. It would have made sense in terms of transaction costs, but the not-so-sensitive approach hasn't been our normal first resort. Normally, we have tried to wait till after someone's third, fourth, or fifth rude, frivolous challenge before telling him off or shrugging him off (Is anyone surprised, by the way, that it has always been a him, not a her?).
I sometimes think that we spent more time than we should have in the responsive phase, with Egan and with other obstreperous gatekeepers. My wife has felt that way for a long time, Valenza too. He has joined in most of my defenses, but his own preferred response to rude challenges is to ignore them. Maybe there's a lesson there. Or maybe there are some challenges which have to be addressed if you want to stay in the game. Either way, a well-conceived bet can be a better response than a shrugoff for unjamming deadlocks, cutting transaction costs, and leading the conversation in more fruitful directions, especially if you happen to be an outsider carrying the burden of proof. I think we did better with our own bet than we would have done without it, and it's possible that, in the end, the same could be said of our taking Egan's bet seriously enough to respond to it seriously and politely, again and again.
What would Egan have done without his bet? That is more his to say than ours. I suspect that he would have found some other ways to stir the pot for his Woodstock ascription, perhaps in his journal, which I gather is devoting a special issue to the topic. I also suspect that the outcome would have been essentially the same as with the bet, but years sooner: his book unread and no one of consequence persuaded. With the bet, we know for certain that at least four very patient people have read Egan's evidence who would not have done so otherwise, and none were persuaded. Most people on SHAKSPER now know it, too. "Unhealthy interest," as Egan charges? It seems odd, coming from him. But perhaps it was better than ignoring him.
Has Joe Egert found the Lost Shakespeare? I don't know. He certainly hasn't claimed so, but he is showing some of those tell-tale signs of finding a way to turn it to his greater advantage. If he has found it, I and many others would like to know. But not enough to offer him £18,000 just to make him try harder, far less as a kind of Mom tattoo to show our fervid devotion to our own methods—and least of all as a kind of prize to invite the other contentious hyperstratfordians of the world to our doorstep, demanding that we drop everything and attend to their moon-rock claims. Who, after eight years of Egan, would want that? Let's face it. If our methods are wrong, raising our ante is not going to make them right. If things are slow in this summer, I don't see a bigger offer from us livening them up much, least of all in a way that would minimize frivolous, contentious distractions for us. That said, I wish Joe well in finding the Lost Shakespeare, and I'm still glad that he is the Ahab on this one, not us.
Is this posting too short? Maybe so, for some. We've said a lot of it before. There's plenty more out there, if you don't mind reading it. Start with http://shaksper.net/archive/2011/303-september/28127-thomas-woodstock-
Is this posting too long? Maybe so, for others. It's one of our longer ones. My apologies to SHAKSPERians for imposing on their patience with a fourteen-minute exploration of the place of bets in SHAKSPER arguments. There is one. Nothing is either good or bad, save alternatives make it so. The exploration is optional, and could be cut to four minutes by going straight to the "Lessons" section. It's shorter and easier to understand in one big concentrated lump than it would be in ten little spread-out lumps. It is much, much shorter than what we and SHAKSPER were up against in our wrangle with the gatekeepers, pre-bet. And it is infinitesimal compared to what the Weiss panel, and we, had to take on to get the case of Lucy v. Charlie Brown finally heard, decided, and over with. I hope SHAKSPERians will learn something from it. We have.
Do transaction costs matter? Much more than most people realize.
Can bets lower them? Our fact-bet, yes. Egan's opinion-bets, in the end, eventually, though it took six years, and many more transaction costs than it deserved. Egan's repeated demands, first to get a verdict on Woodstock, and later to repudiate it, are reminders that bets can carry their own seeds of contention. His bets have led to new frontiers of confrontation and contention. On the other hand, I suspect that they have also helped ring down the final curtain on Egan's Woodstock drama. I am grateful to Larry Weiss, and to his panel, of himself, Will Sharpe, and Dale Johnson, for taking on thousands of murky pages of transaction costs and for ruling, correctly, that Mr. Egan failed to make his case or live up to his agreements. I am sorry, though I can't really say I am surprised, to see Mr. Egan berating them for taking an "unhealthy interest" in his cause, after all his years of pleading and prodding to get someone to read his book, all of it, and pass judgment on it. They did both, and they did it well. All SHAKSPERians, including Hardy, who has made debates like ours possible, are in their debt for making such debates other than interminable.
Ward E.Y. Elliott
Burnet C. Wohlford Professor of American Political Institutions
[Editor's Note: There is an excellent essay by Mac Jackson discussing among other things the Ward/Valenza methods and findings in Shakespeare Beyond Doubt. –Hardy]

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Sermon Illustrations
Sermon Illustrations > Theology > People Have Remodeled Their Ideas
Against the Night, Charles Colson, p. 151
Against the Night, Charles Colson, p. 151
I'm reminded of E. B. White's comment: "People have recut their clothes to follow the fashion...People have remodeled their ideas too&md;taken in their convictions a little at the waist, shortened the sleeves of their resolve, and fitted themselves out in a new intellectual ensemble copied from a smart design out of the very latest page of history." When slavery to fashion invades the church, our latest ideas are yesterday's fads. We adopt the world's agenda&md;just a few years too late. Many churchmen sport theological bell-bottoms.


text:
|Document Type:
|Special Report
|David DeForest Woods
|Email address:
|Mark II Dual-Mode Vehicle Design and Analysis
|Master of Engineering
|Engineering Mechanics
|Committee Chair:
|Dr. Robert Hendricks
|Chair's email:
|Committee Members:
|Dr. Norman Eiss
|Dr. Ronald Landgraf
|Dr. Douglas Nelson
|Dr. John Lesko
|High Speed Ground Transit (HSGT), Dual-mode, Radio control
|Date of defense:
|July 28, 1998
|Release the entire work immediately worldwide.
In the Spring of 1998, the Virtual Corporation at Virginia Tech demonstrated the ability of Linear Switched Reluctance Propulsion (LSRP) to propel a vehicle on a track using only the interaction of a passive magnetic component carried on the vehicle with electromagnets built into the track. The Mark II project was a follow-on effort to complete a thorough design analysis of a second iteration vehicle which features the complete functionality of the original vehicle, with the addition of the ability to enter and exit the LSRP track system using remote control and an electric motor. The new vehicle also features certain design improvements in communications and structural rigidity. This paper elaborates on the process of design and analysis of the vehicle and ramp systems, including detail design drawings, finite element analysis of the vehicle chassis, powertrain subsystem analysis, and detailed analysis of the ramp surface contour design.
List of Attached Files


text:
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Arts, Humanities, and Languages Department: Faculty and Staff
Andrews, Wayne Ph.D.
Office Location: 1188 Fort St. Mall, #406
Prior to teaching Philosophy and Humanities at Hawaii Pacific University for over a decade, Dr. Andrews taught at the University of Hawaii and the University of California. Holding a B.A. and M.A. in Philosophy, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness (Philosophy) from the University of California at Santa Cruz, he has been able to pursue life long interests in social and political philosophy, ethics, and literature.
You might best understand Dr. Andrews by considering what he values. (1) He often drives through vast spaces of the American West not to see but to behold Nature. (2) He loves to read philosophy and poetry while sitting in a room with his wife. (3) The mission of his whole adult life has been and continues to be conducting the work of Socrates. (4) He went around the world twice, once as a backpacker, and intends to go one more time.