[lit-ideas] Cleopatra's Nose

"You don't  mean Cleopatra Williams"
 
                                   Confused, in Memphis-Emphasis.
 
 
In a message dated 2/26/2009 2:34:29 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,  
ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
This, only one day after once again  considering in class E. H. Carr's  
notion that some things don't count  as historical facts because they  
are too trivial.  I gave as an  example, flies laying eggs in Mongolia  
in April of 1562.  
----

Missed this earlier, but coincidentally was provoked to it, by  McEvoy's 
Popperian example
 
>Karl Popper [made up] "We are taught to think that the  violent 
>contests between corrupt factions is what constitutes history. 
>But this is only history from a certain POV. From another 
>POV the movement of a [shoe- sic] fly on a page may be 
>much more important history."

Trouble is Popper didn't know the _first_ thing about Banana  Republics!
 
From wiki's bio of Carr:
 
"As an example of his attack on the role of accidents in history, Carr  
mocked the hypothesis of “Cleopatra’s nose”, namely that, but for the magnetism 
 
exerted by the nose of Cleopatra on Mark Anthony that would be no affair 
between  the two, and hence the Second Triumvirate would not have broken up, 
and  
therefore the Roman Republic would have continued.[220] Carr sarcastically  
commented that the male attraction for female beauty can hardly be considered 
an  
accident at all, and is rather what one of the most common cases of cause and  
effect in the world.[221] Other examples of "Cleopatra's Nose" type of 
history  cited by Carr were the claim by Edward Gibbon if the Turkish sultan 
Bayezid 
I  did not suffer from gout, he would have conquered Central Europe, Winston  
Churchill's statement if King Alexander had not died of a monkey bite, the  
Greco-Turkish War would have been avoided, and Leon Trotsky's remark if he not  
contracted a cold while duck hunting, he would not have missed a crucial  
Politburo meeting in 1923.[222] Rather than accidents, Carr asserted history 
was  
a series of causal chains interacting with each other.[223]"
 
J. L. 
 
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