William Pitt the Younger riding on the back of George III while surveying the French squadron, 1803. © Musee de la Ville de Paris, Musee Carnavalet, Paris / Bridgeman Images.

Spies

Volume IX, Number 1 | winter 2016

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Miscellany

Concerned about pigeons carrying military communications, German troops in occupied Belgium during World War I would shoot at overhead flocks. Such fears had not abated by World War II, when the British government ordered a systematic slaughter of pigeons throughout the UK, and inmates at British and Australian interment camps were banned from approaching birds on compound grounds. 

A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.

- P.D. James, 1992

Lapham’sDaily

U.S. secretary of agriculture Sonny Perdue meets with German minister of food and agriculture Christian Schmidt, 2017.

DÉjÀ Vu

Equal Climates

2017:

U.S. Department of Agriculture bans words related to climate change.

-350:

Aristotle denies that the climate is changing.

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The 7th New York Militia Regiment marches down Broadway, an illustration from Harper’s Weekly, 1861.

LQ Podcast

#11 John Strausbaugh

Lewis H. Lapham talks with John Strausbaugh, author of City of Sedition: The History of New York City During the Civil War. More