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100% original since 2010.

[reagancharlescook]

My 41 Generations of Grandparents

Before last week, I was able to trace my family history back 400 years.

In December of 2012 I’d done some ancestry research which linked my maternal grandfather’s family line back 11 generations to an Isaac Prevost, who was an Archbishop in Northern France. Since I couldn’t find any details on his parents, I concluded that was as far back as I was going to get.

I was wrong.

I recently found out about another branch in my family tree, a history that goes back another 1000 years. Since my great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandmother Catherine Marie Brossard is descended from French Nobility, I can now trace my family back to the Capetian and Robertian dynasties of the early middle ages.

My Family Over the Past 43 Generations

1. Reagan Cook, Me (1989 - present)

2. Julie Provost, Mother (1964 - present)

3. Aurelle Provost, Grandfather (1927 - present)

4. William Provost, Great Grandfather etc. (1898 - 1977)

5. Adolphe Provost (1867 - 1944)

6. Gabriel Provost (1825 - 1881)

7. Louis Provost (1774 - 1837)

8. Antoine Provost (1727 - 1779)

9. Eustache Prevost Jr. (1692 - 1788)      

10. Catherine Marie Brossard (1681 - 1721)              

11. Isaac Urbain Brossard (1633 - 1710)

12. Marthurin Brossard (1608  - 1660)

13. Guillaume de Brossard, I (1557 - unknown)

14. Nicolas de Brossard (1540 - 1570)

15. Michel de Brossard (1479 - 1554)

16. Francois Thomas de Brossard (1449 - 1506)

17. Perrot de Brossard (1425 - 1506)

18. Jean de Brossard (1391 - 1426)

19. Gauthier de Brossard (1368 - 1437)

20. Noel Nicholas de Brossard (1343 - 1400)

21. Charles de Brossard (1309 - 1392)

22. Antoine de Brossard, Valois (1289 - 1346)

23. Charles, Count of Valois (1270 - 1325)

24. Philippe III, King of France (1245 - 1285)

25. Louis IX, King of France (1214 - 1270)

26. Louis VIII, King of France (1187 - 1226)

27. Philippe II, King of France (1165 - 1223)

28. Louis VII, King of France (1120 - 1180)

29. Louis VI, King of France (1081 - 1137

30. Philip I, King of France (1052 - 1108)

31. Henry I, King of France (1009 - 1060)

32. Robert II, King of the Franks (972 - 1031)

33. Hugh Capet, King of the Franks (940 - 996)

34. Hugh, Duke of the Franks (898 - 956)

35. Robert I, King of France (866 - 923)

36. Robert IV, Margrave of Neustria (820 - 866)

37. Robert III von Wormsgau (789 - 834)

38. Robert II von Hesbaye (770 -  807)

39. Thuringbert von Worms und Rheingau (757 - 770)

40. Robert I, von Worms und Rheingau (700 - 764)

41. Lambert II Robertian (670 - 741)

42. Chrodrobert Robertian (655 - 677)

43. Lambert Robertian (640 - unknown)

While this long history might seem quite unique - a connection to historical nobility is guaranteed for just about anyone.

Yale statistician Joseph Chang explained this phenomenon in a 1999 research paper (read it here). The paper points out just how quickly family trees grow, from 2 parents, 4 grandparents and so on. Using this simple generational equation, after forty generations or so, you get to a family of 1 trillion ancestors. 

That’s about 2000 times more people than would have existed on Earth at the time (about 700 CE). 

The only way to explain this is to accept that our grandparents are not independent of one another. Instead of drawing a tree that reaches out forever, after a few generations our family network starts to looks like a big spider web.

As it turns out, you don’t have to look very far to find most recent common ancestors (MRCA).   According to Chang, the most recent common ancestor of every European alive today was a man or woman who lived in Europe about 600 years ago. 

So, while it’s fun to know that my French Canadian ancestors are descended from Medieval Kings; I’m also descended from the majority every other person who lived in Europe for the past two thousand years. 

Sources: 

Recent Common Ancestors of All Present Individuals, Joseph Chang, 1999

The Geography of Recent Genetic Ancestry across Europe, Peter Ralph, 2013

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Leaving Law, Ken Lum

- Ken Lum’s work is amazing. Definitely one of my all-time favorite Canadian artists.

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What is the most numerous vertebrate on earth?

Noah Strycker, the author of “The Thing With Feathers,” a book about birds, recently told an interviewer that the domestic chicken “has more numbers” than any other vertebrate.

He put the planetary figure at 24 billion - or 3.5 chickens for every person.

While that’s a big number it’s nowhere close to the record. 

In terms of total population the winner is a bristlemouth  — a fish that lives in the middle depths of the world’s oceans. 

Biologists put the global figure for bristlemouths at hundreds of trillions — perhaps quadrillions, or thousands of trillions.

“They’re everywhere,” Bruce H. Robison, a senior marine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, said of the bony little fish. “Everybody agrees. It’s the most abundant on the planet.”

It makes sense that the winner is a fish. Habitats on land — rain forests, steppes, woodlands, deserts, alpine meadows, all well explored over the centuries — make up less than 1 percent of the planet’s biosphere. The band of life is narrow. Fertile soil goes down only a few feet, and even the tallest trees stretch up only a few hundred feet. 

Water, however, is a different story. It covers more than 70 percent of the earth’s surface and goes down miles. Scientists put the ocean’s share of the biosphere at more than 99 percent. 

From William H. Broad’s ‘An Ocean Mystery in the Trillions’

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Tom Cruise/Coors Light, Reagan Charles Cook

Ink on Canvas (12″ x 16″)

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Just for Men: A Chemical Burn

Though it has been on the market since 1987, the popular hair dye product Just for Men® has recently come under legal scrutiny due to reports of severe side effects.  

The product’s manufacturer, Combe Brands is currently facing class-action suits from various personal injury firms including Wright & Schulte LLC, The Schmidt Firm PLLC, and Wilson, Kehoe, Wilingham LLC.

The initial legal action against Just for Men® was based on roughly 400 reports of serious chemical burns on the product review website ConsumerAffairs.com. 

Just for Men® Customer Reviews:

“After using this product, that evening, I noticed that my face was blotchy, so I shaved the beard off. To my surprise, my whole chin was a lighter shade than the rest of my face!”

Timothy of Dayton, Ohio

“I use Just For Men as instructed no longer than 5 minutes and believe me the results even now 17 days later no one can tell me. No chemicals should be this powerful to rip a facial apart, hairline Scout headaches, hard to breathe. This is pain, suffer, a complete embarrassment. This product has done me so much harm. I am too embarrassed to be seen in the public at all even around my whole family. In a motel because this is too much to bear. I cry from embarrassment or so much pain. I cannot sleep on my face. Can I sleep on my head. It is even hard to shower. To let anyone touch my face. Even the wind hurts. I tried to get in touch with Just For Men and I got no response.”

Paul of Houston, Texas

“I ended up getting Vitiligo after using this product for 6+ months. I was trying to figure out what was causing these (at the time) subtle white spots, which then grew and got more and more white. I am so unhappy and depressed with having the condition now after seeing my dermatologist. I had to spend $245 for the visit and $487 for photo optic ointment after insurance. No cure, but there could be improvement. The chemicals in this product are toxic.”

Chris of San Francisco, California

“I have been using the Just For Men beard coloring since last Oct and in May 2015 it burned my face and I can't get it to go away. Please help me get some relief. Apparently someone mixed the product wrong and people like me are suffering with a chemical burn.”

Dave of Chesnee, South Carolina

“I did the skin test and waited 48 hrs. before I tried this product. I applied JFM beard and mustache dye to my skin on the night of Apr 23 @ about 8 pm, by 2 am of the 24th I was at the hospital because I had itching, swelling, oozing and a lot of heat generating from the area that I had applied the product. Today is my wife's birthday, I wanted to look my best when I took her out, now I can't even leave my house. Thanks JFM!!!”

Billy of Greensboro, North Carolina

Interesting Note: Just for Men® parent company Combe Brands also manufactures the female hygiene product Vagisil®.  

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Illustration by Nicolas Henri Jacob, 1840

From ATLAS OF HUMAN ANATOMY AND SURGERY 

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Butt Simpson,  Reagan Cook

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The Weaker Sex

Poorly educated men in rich countries have had difficulty coping with the enormous changes in the labour market and the home over the past half-century. 

As technology and trade have devalued brawn, less-educated men have struggled to find a role in the workplace. Women, on the other hand, are surging into expanding sectors such as health care and education, helped by their superior skills. 

As education has become more important, boys have also fallen behind girls in school (except at the very top). Men who lose jobs in manufacturing often never work again. And men without work find it hard to attract a permanent mate. 

The result, for low-skilled men, is a poisonous combination of no job, no family and no prospects.

Excerpt from The Economist

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5 Months, Reagan Charles Cook

Ink on Canvas (24″ x 36″)

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The Rise of the Anti-Pope

An antipope is a person who, in opposition to the one who is generally seen as the legitimately elected Pope, makes a significantly accepted competing claim to be the Pope, the Bishop of Rome and leader of the Roman Catholic Church. At times between the 3rd and mid-15th century, antipopes were supported by a fairly significant faction of religious cardinals and secular kings and kingdoms.

The period in which antipopes were most numerous was during the struggles between the popes and the Holy Roman Emperors of the 11th and 12th centuries. The emperors frequently imposed their own nominees to further their own causes. The popes, likewise, sometimes sponsored rival imperial claimants (anti-kings) in Germany to overcome a particular emperor.

The Western Schism—which began in 1378, when the French cardinals, claiming that the election of Pope Urban VI was invalid, elected Clement VII as Pope—led to two rival lines of claimants to the papacy: the Roman line and the Avignon line (Clement VII took up residence in Avignon, France). To end the schism, with the support of King Sigismund of Germany, a special Catholic council was created to force the competing popes to abdicate, so that another could be chosen.

In May 1415, the Council of Constance forced Pope Gregory XII of the Roman line to resign in July 1415. In 1417, the Council also formally deposed Benedict XIII of Avignon, but he refused to resign. Afterwards, Pope Martin V was elected and was accepted everywhere except in the small and rapidly diminishing area that remained faithful to Benedict XIII. 

The scandal of the Western Schism created anti-papal sentiment and fed into the Protestant Reformation at the turn of the 16th century.

[reagancharlescook]

Taking Andrew Jackson off the $20 Bill

IN 1928 the Treasury Department issued the first $20 bill featuring Andrew Jackson, replacing Grover Cleveland. After almost a century, Jackson needs to step aside — and this time, the bill should feature John Ross, a Cherokee leader and Old Hickory’s opponent in a fight to control Indian land.

Jackson infamously won that fight, but used methods that stained his country’s honor. Ross lost, but only after resisting for over 20 years. Placing Ross on the $20 bill would bring a measure of symbolic justice to a seminal episode of American history.

This is hardly the first proposal to change the $20 bill. Calls to replace Jackson, a slave owner, with an American Indian or an African-American are common; this year a brilliant campaign to put a woman on the $20 bill has gained traction. We should be adding diverse figures to our money. But we should do this without losing sight of the incredible era the $20 bill now represents: America’s formative years between the Revolution and the Civil War.

It was an era of nation building, and Jackson was a nation builder. Before running for president, he was a soldier, whose exploits changed the map of the United States. Alabama could not become a state until after he crushed the Creek Nation, which owned most of it. Florida belonged to Spain until after he invaded it.

The trouble lies in how Jackson made the country we inherited. His troops massacred Indians. He coerced Native Americans into surrendering land through unjust treaties. In 1830, President Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, supporting a policy to push all natives west of the Mississippi. One result was the Trail of Tears in 1838, when 13,000 Cherokees left their homeland in the Appalachians. Another was a war against Florida’s Seminoles, lasting nearly as long as the war in Iraq.

The story is even worse than is generally known. Jackson and his friends obtained slices of Cherokee real estate for personal profit, and colonized the land with lucrative cotton plantations worked by slaves.

What redeems this as an American story is the resistance of John Ross. A Cherokee of mixed race, Ross navigated between cultures in a way that feels familiar today. As a young man he fought in Jackson’s army. Later he became Jackson’s antagonist, rejecting his efforts to capture the Cherokee homeland in north Georgia and surrounding states.

Determined to adapt to white civilization, Cherokees embraced white styles of clothing and agriculture. Some, including Ross, also took up slavery. (There are few saints in this tale.) The ultimate adaptation came in 1828, when Ross was chosen as principal chief under a new constitution modeled on that of the United States. Ross’s government started a newspaper, publishing exposés of the Cherokees’ white antagonists. He worked with white allies, including women. Cherokees even sued, asking the Supreme Court to recognize their right to govern their land.

A ruling in their favor was ignored. But Cherokees were more than mere victims. They enriched our democratic tradition. Ross wanted the Cherokee Nation to become a territory or state within the Union — which it did, in a way, generations later as part of Oklahoma.

Ross deserves a prominent place on our currency. But that doesn’t mean Jackson should go completely. He should remain on the $20 bill, but on the flip side — because there’s a flip side of the story.

Jackson, too, enriched our democratic tradition. Orphaned in youth, this son of poor Scots-Irish immigrants started life with almost nothing. His election as president was a landmark: No one from such a modest background had ever risen so high in America.

He won the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, blocking British invaders with an army of white frontiersmen, black militia troops, Gulf Coast pirates and Indians. Given Jackson’s greed for Indian real estate, it is startling to read an 1817 letter in which he insisted his Cherokee troops receive pay and benefits equal to those of white soldiers.

Given that he bought and sold human beings, it is equally strange that he played a role in slavery’s eventual demise. He prevented the Union from fracturing during his stormy presidency, and his fortitude set an example. Decades later, as Abraham Lincoln strained to save the Union during the Civil War, a portrait of Jackson hung on his wall.

A $20 bill with Ross and Jackson would set a pattern for other bills. Each denomination should feature two different people who together tell a story, illustrating our democratic experience.

Lincoln could share the $5 bill with Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who prodded him to move faster to end slavery. Ulysses S. Grant could share the $50 bill with Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose antislavery novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” did as much to start the Civil War as Grant’s armies did to end it.

Pairings can even clear space for new stories. Four of today’s seven bills feature founding fathers. Pair the founders on two bills — Washington and Franklin, Hamilton and Jefferson. (The latter pair clashed viciously over federal versus state power, a conflict that still animates our politics.) Two bills will then be available for more recent figures. Imagine a civil rights-era bill with Rosa Parks and Cesar Chavez.

The faces of people with differing perspectives would also show a larger truth: Democracy is a conflict of interests and ideas. Many players in that conflict have been grievously wrong. But as they struggled, we now know, our forebears were often thrashing toward the light.

[reagancharlescook]

The hyena and other men, Pieter Hugo

The men’s acknowledgement of the camera suggests a degree of agency in the production of the images, but it also underscores the fact that the hyenas are not performing and are not capable of doing so in the same sense. Although they share the space of the photograph and receive equal billing in the titles, a deep rift divides the two species of subject.  The men take a theatrical stance, acknowledging the artifice of the portrait and the presence of the viewer. The hyenas, on the other hand, are completely absorbed, unaware of the camera and its functions. The photographs are racked with a tension emerging from the split between absorption and theatricality and that between the animal and the man.

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A scold's bridle, sometimes called a brank's bridle or simply branks, was an instrument of punishment used primarily on women, as a form of torture and public humiliation. First introduced by the Church of Scotland in 1567, the device saw use across Europe and the New World until the mid 18th century.  The device was an iron muzzle in an iron framework that enclosed the head. A bridle-bit (or curb-plate), about 2 inches long and 1 inch broad, projected into the mouth and pressed down on top of the tongue. The curb-plate was frequently studded with spikes, so that if the offender moved her tongue, it inflicted pain and made speaking impossible. Wives who were seen as witches, shrews and scolds, were forced to wear the branks, locked onto their head.

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Untitled, Gregory Crewdson

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Oxford Tire Pile #4, Westley, California,  Edward Burtynsky

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Bill Murray as Steve Zissou, Reagan Charles Cook

(From the old days, when I used to paint portraits)

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Polar Bears in Glasgow Zoo, Mid-20th Century