I do continue to shake my head how people push Ada Lovelace, someone who wrote a paper almost 200 years ago, as the symbol of women-working-with-computers, when the _actual field_ has figures like Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton.
She didn't just write a paper. Her place in history is at least as well earned - I personally think moreso - as Babbage's.
"When Ada wrote about Babbage’s machine, she wanted to explain what it did in the clearest way—and to do this she looked at the machine more abstractly, with the result that she ended up exploring and articulating something quite recognizable as the modern notion of universal computation."
In fairness to JCC, I'm sure he'd look at the sort of things that go on at Yale these days, and insist that all mention of his name be removed from anything on campus.
The South, the South...God knows what shall become of her.
I mean that a school that started for the express purpose of training Puritan Congregationalist ministers, and had mandatory Protestant chapel until 1926, now has coed dormitories, an LGBT club, and Atheists at the Divinity College.
Even for someone not particularly religious for the time(Calhoun eventually became a Unitarian), all that would be a little difficult for him to get his head around.
I mean, it could be worse. I imagine sometimes how Increase Mather would react to Harvard today, and I kinda understand where fundamentalist terrorists get their outrage from.
That one of the most outspoken defenders of slavery would not approve of a 21st century American university that, among other things, admits black students and employs black faculty.
>Her message was a model of relevant, thoughtful, civil engagement.
Actually her message was a model of pretending that we haven't been having the black face conversation every single god damned year for over a hundred years while flogging her book.
In a hundred years, there will be campaigns to rename any buildings named after non-vegetarians.
There won't be a lot of names left if you take only the purest of the pure as names. Naming a building means celebrating the good things that a person did, not condoning the bad. People are complicated and it's a disservice to college students to suggest otherwise.
Context matters. It matters to be on the morally wrong side when society is at a decision point. By and large, we don't judge romans because they practiced slavery. We judge people who have chosen to defend slavery when it was not a moral consensus anymore and on the verge of abolition. Plenty of slave owners have their names on university buildings, but they never went to war to defend it.
There is a strong argument to be made that we are at a decision point on vegetarianism. Of course we'll only know for sure in retrospect, but
* Vegans and vegetarians are growing groups, especially among the young.
* Food technology is improving and making it easier and easier to not eat meat. There are a few startups in this area, such as Impossible Foods, that may revolutionize how we eat.
* The world is becoming increasingly aware of the risk of climate change, and that consuming animal products is a significant factor.
* We have plenty of solid scientific evidence showing people can live healthy lives without eating meat, removing the "we need it to survive" argument. (There is also some evidence that eating less meat is good for you, but there is a lot to debate there.)
* Legislation is moving more and more towards protecting animal rights, even if we have a lot left to do.
So yes, I think the top comment is right. People eating meat today will be judged poorly in a few generations' time.
Only about 3% of Americans are self-proclaimed vegetarians (less than 1% are vegans), and there's good evidence that the majority of those eat meat, fish, or poultry on a regular basis [1].
Of course, future generations may be 100% vegan and look back on us with horror at the way that we treated animals, our planet, our bodies, etc. But that's distinct from looking back on individuals who didn't choose a particular niche lifestyle and having it tarnish their memory.
Your points seem more about why you think that individual non-vegetarians should be judged harshly by history, but I see little reason to think that a lifestyle that less than 1% of the population strictly adheres to is going to become a source of individualized historical shame.
I believe your data is out of date, here is Wikipedia's summary:
> In 1971, 1 percent of U.S. citizens described themselves as vegetarians.[104] In 2008 Harris Interactive found that 3.2% are vegetarian and 0.5% vegan,[105] while a 2013 Public Policy Polling survey of 500 respondents found that 13% of Americans are either vegetarian or vegan—6% vegetarian and 7% vegan.[106] U.S. vegetarian food sales (meat replacements such as soy milk and textured vegetable protein) doubled between 1998 and 2003, reaching $1.6 billion in 2003.[107]
So in five years, veganism rose 14x while vegetarianism doubled? Color me skeptical. You also didn't address the issue that most of those people probably aren't even very strict in their diets.
And given previous results, I highly suspect many of those have eaten meat or fish in the last year.
And so my point stands: even if strict vegetarian / vegan lifestyles become the majority view in the future, it'll be many decades from now, and individuals in our era won't be widely shamed for not adopting such a lifestyle, given that only a tiny fraction of the population does.
Oh, I don't think strictness is the issue here. Sure, very possibly most vegans/vegetarians eat animal products now and then. It's hard to be 100% perfect, given how society is set up right now.
I agree this is a process that will take decades.
I disagree about the criticism. I think those future generations will be horrified at how we so casually accept the eating of animal products, factory farming, and so forth. (And they might feel some unease at the vegans/vegetarians that are just 99% perfect, too.)
The fact it's only a growing fraction right now doesn't mean the future won't be shocked at the majority today. There are plenty of examples where we are shocked by the majority in the past.
Yes, but that's not what we're discussing. We're discussing individualized shame in the future. And for that metric, strictness absolutely matters.
So in 200 years, will they remove the name of someone from our era from monuments or buildings because they weren't vegetarian? Especially considering almost no one was, and the people who claimed to be were mostly lying?
I am definitely in that overlap! I think food/water security is going to be vital in the next few years, particularly with some of the predicted challenges with global warming. I think that we NEED both advances in synthetic meat AND crop production. But then, I'm one of those crazies that think that Monsanto is only as bad as can be expected of a company of it's size.
Calhoun college was so named in 1931, and the only reason seems to be that he was a Yale alumnus who was Vice President. I'm not seeing the big offsetting factors. It's not like they're trying to rename something named after Thomas Jefferson, who also owned slaves.
That would be a good thing. Woodrow Wilson, though widely regarded as a progressive icon, was a racist who purged the federal government of blacks. Yale should be ashamed of this man, not celebrate him.
Does the progressivism of decades past need to be measured against the standards of today? I'm not being facetious, I'm asking genuinely because I've never really had the thought before but it seems like that's exactly you're suggesting here. It would seem to me that the progressive progress that we enjoy and push forward today stands on the shoulders of those progressives who came before us, even when their actions would be abhorrent to most people today.
well, to put things into context, three years after wilson, we had a president who called for anti-lynching laws, made several public and private addresses exhorting Americans to protect the civil rights of African-Americans, and gave a commencement address at Howard University. He also very famously and forcefully put down internal party efforts to prevent a black man from running in New York state.
I mentioned in a comment to the other reply, I really didn't know much about him outside of the acts associated with his legacy. Thanks for pointing this out.
I really don't know much about the man other than the big acts that were passed as part of his legacy. Thanks for getting me curious enough to read more about him.
Once enough time passes, trivial things don't matter anymore. Cheops, Gilgamesh or Hammurabi probably weren't paragons of virtue by current standards, but we still know about them and their legacy.
I don't see the problem here. Even public displays of principle have a cost/benefit ratio. Meanwhile, what do you think it would imply, if they didn't even do the cheap stuff?
It's called picking your battles in mine. Any proposal to rename the university itself is likely to run into more opposition than a proposal to rename a building.
Sorry, we will have only binary & atom-thick appraisals of historic figures in the US today. John Calhoun == Bad; Grace Hopper == Good. And that's all you need to know.
The ones doing the renaming have no independent convictions of their own. Or for that matter, much insight into or sympathy for, the differing views of others, let alone others from different times or places.
What they do have instead is a hyperactive self-righteousness gland, which is easily tickled to orgasm by the thought of them being on the right side, the side of the angels, in any conflict. It is what passes for their conscience. This explains the drive to cast all historic conflicts in the most reductive & simplistic way possible. So much the easier to spooge over how progressive they are for hating on the wrong side
John C. Calhoun is a person without mention of whom any history of early 19th century America would be incomplete. Yet, he can be dismissed with infantile invective ("human sewer"), as though he, like all antebellum Southerners was a monodimensional cartoon villain, like Decepticons who had an abiding interest in...cotton.
I am cheered by the fact that more and more normal citizens are seeing this performative outrage pantomime for the chauvinism-of-viewpoint that it is.
> John C. Calhoun is a person without mention of whom any history of early 19th century America would be incomplete.
No one's stripping him out of the history books. Why does he deserve the honor of having a college named for him?
> Or for that matter, much insight into or sympathy for, the differing views of others, let alone others from different times or places.
I guess I can't pass up the irony of this statement. I grew up in the South. I'm old enough to remember a time when Confederates were seen as noble. Old enough to have people tell me quite sincerely that "those people had it good as slaves."
Attitudes have changed since then and in part because enough white people attempted to learn about and gained sympathy for a group of people very different than themselves: the enslaved black Americans of the 19th Century. Without the understanding and empathy which crossed cultural and racial boundaries, there would never have come a time when Calhoun's name was considered a negative by the majority.
You're complaining about binary, infantile invective whilst employing it yourself most blatantly. The stench of inadvertent irony is near overwhelming.
Sure, if people look under the surface. However it is still sugarcoating history, hiding the bad people, and making it seem like the good people were always appreciated.
Maybe it is a fair sacrifice for the sake of redeeming the past.
It certainly is an interesting new kind of cultural war.
You are reading something into this that is not there.
Choosing who from the past that we want to honor is pretty natural. (It's not "redeeming" the past to choose carefully who to honor this way.) Changing an honorary name on a building is different than changing a paragraph on a history book.
As a point of comparison, plenty of street names are changed to honor various historical figures, municipal functionaries, now-famous past residents, etc.
>You are reading something into this that is not there.
Whatever your thoughts on this particular decision, there absolutely is a "there" there.
No one actually cares what some sign on a building on a leafy campus says. They care a lot about which way the wind is blowing at an institution that turns out the elites of tomorrow.
The question is (in as equally-offensive terms as I can muster): will we, as a society (or our elites, from whom we'll take our cues),
- finally turn from a problematic figure of the past to one that better exemplifies our values of today,
or
- retain remembrance of what got us where we are, keeping in mind the importance of chronological charity?
If this is really not an important event, why is it posted on HN?
No one actually cares what some sign on a building on a leafy campus says
They do when the name is John frickin' Calhoun, increasingly.
Like Nickelback, we all thought he was cool at the time, but you look back and see that if he wasn't That Guy, somebody else would have, and at any rate the ideas he's known for are played out.
I couldn't find any examples where renaming of a road, with a person's name, hadn't been considered a big deal. Wikipedia had a big section on street renaming, but it seemed to happen exclusively after revolutions or similar situations.
The living owe nothing to the dead. Yale are honoring one dead person more, and another dead person less, without regard for the intentions of the dead but purely for the purposes of the living.
I honestly don't understand this argument. People brought up the same kind of snide remarks when BLM pushed to rename some college library after Woodrow Wilson, or to take down an Andrew Jackson statue somewhere.
Erasing history means erasing from history books, pretending it didn't happen. Taking down monuments is not the same thing. It is a big, overt statement that the contributions of those people are no longer respected. I don't see why this is so controversial.
I presume you are not outraged when statues of Hitler or Saddam are taken down?
> "It is a big, overt statement that the contributions of those people are no longer respected."
That's the crux of your argument. In this case, when talking about Calhoun College and the concept of "erasing history" it's not that the concern that Calhoun's name will be lost, but rather than part of the identity of the college and all the events tied to it will be.
It's easy enough to think that a name change will be "simple" but it's the question of how you refer to events in the past, how you get the community to reflect this change, and how you are able to respectfully honor the history of the college in the light of this change, without making everything that occurred in the past seem like an error or portrayed in a negative light.
Yale's choice to go forward is something that I'm proud of as this has been a point of contention in our community, but it has also spurred new questions of how we deal with the identity and history of the college.
I wondered, "Why does GFK_of_xmaspast feel so strongly about this person?" I hadn't known (or recalled) anything about John C. Calhoun.
Calhoun himself writes in 1837:
> But I take higher ground. I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good–a positive good.
...
> Compare his condition with the tenants of the poor houses in the more civilized portions of Europe–look at the sick, and the old and infirm slave, on one hand, in the midst of his family and friends, under the kind superintending care of his master and mistress, and compare it with the forlorn and wretched condition of the pauper in the poorhouse.
The Lost Cause tries to paint the Civil War as about States' Rights rather than slavery. This reinterpretation began immediately after the war, arguably by Robert E Lee himself. The War of Northern Aggression et cetera tries to paint the South as the victims.
This revisionism avoids the text of the Constitution of the Confederate States, the writings of Calhoun, the 1860 census of South Carolina, the secession of the Southern States and the firing on Fort Sumter.
I'm not sure why that's relevant to the parent comment.
It's also not particularly surprising if you consider the history of the Cherokee specifically (compared to other Native American tribes). The Cherokee tried to have diplomatic relations with the Union (the United States), and the US stabbed them in the back. Of course they'd want to break up the Union - it was the only shot they had at reclaiming their sovereignty.
He mentioned the lost cause narrative being something that was created after the war. That document goes into detail about a whole lot that was going on at the time that fit the "narrative".
Civil War history is a hobby of mine that developed after the flag stuff a couple of years ago. There were so many factors that went into the conflict it's hard to even know where to begin.
Snag a book on the economics of it sometime if you're interested though.
It's pretty easy to know where to begin: slavery. Just look at the constitution of the CSA, which requires all member states to have slavery. How is that promoting states' rights? Or look at the ordinances of secession: https://www.google.com/amp/s/aliberalthinker.wordpress.com/2.... To say the CSA was mainly formed on any issue other than slavery requires conspiracy theorist contortions.
It doesn't. It requires nuance and a whole lot of historical context. Slavery was certainly a factor, but it was one of many.
Two small points to get you started.
1. The causes of secession and the cause of the war were not the same thing. The former had many, the latter was entirely economic.
2. Only 4 states even issued declarations. 3 of them were heavily about slavery. The rest require historical context to understand. Slavery wasn't even under threat if states had just hung around. You need look no further than Lincolns inaugural speech to verify that.
If slavery was one of many factors for secession, why weren't any of those other factors mentioned in the ordinances of secession? Why were all of the seceding states slave states? Of the states who didn't mention a reason for secession in their ordinances of secession, all their governors made statements explicitly naming slavery as the reason (see previous link).
> Slavery wasn't even under threat if states had just hung around.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act threatened to tip the balance of slave states vs. free states, and Lincoln's and the Republican Party's platform of not allowing the creation of any new slave states effectively put an expiration date on slavery in the US. That is why the ordinances of secession mentioned the threat against slavery. Lincoln only stated that he wouldn't directly abolish slavery because the slave states had already threatened to secede if he were elected, citing the belief that he would.
You keep harping on the cause of secession, not war. Again, there were different causes for each state.
I've been down this discussion road many time before and it goes on for a while with a lot of back and forth. The simplest thing for you to do is to go and grab a couple of books on the civil war, read them and when you get to something that seems impossible based on what you currently know go and look up the citations. The digitized Library of Congress and Google's efforts to scan historical documents make it really easy to read while verifying.
Since you're harping on the causes for secession, I'm going to go ahead and provide you a couple of quick links to refute your stance to get you started though:
This includes the declarations of Georgia, Texas, South Carolina and Mississippi. Georgia, Texas and Mississippi were almost entirely about slavery. South Carolina's was partially about slavery. You can see a graph here with a breakdown of each document (http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/secession/).
That first link also includes Virginia's secession ordinance at the bottom, which isn't a declaration of causes but merely the bill passed to secede. You'll notice no mention of slavery, but instead the perversion of federal power. The only mention of the word slave is the oppression of not only Virginia "but the southern slave holding states".
Now, hop on over to timeline of events on Wikipedia:
Jump down to 1861, then look at Feb 4, April 4, April 15 and then April 15-16, April 17-19 (really most of the "Aftermath 1861" section).
To summarize, you'll see Virginia unwilling to secede (... only 32 of 152 are immediate secessionists...), Virginia again reject secession, Lincoln bypass congress to request troops from each state. Following this request for troops is when the remaining states secede (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee).
For these states, they were not seceding "because slavery" they were seceding because the Federal government was bypassing Congress to start a war and had no intention of taking up arms against the south. The way in which the war was fought did not help the case.
Now, that should put most of the idea of a single cause of secession to rest. What I would suggest next is for you to grab a book on the economics of the civil war (because there are many).
Just to give you a hint of exactly how big of an issue this was...
March 18, 1861 the Philadelphia Press wrote: "Blockade Southern Ports. If not a series of customs houses will be required on the vast inland border from the Atlantic to West Texas. Worse still, with no protective tariff, European goods will under-price Northern goods in Southern markets. Cotton for Northern mills will be charged an export tax. This will cripple the clothing industries and make British mills prosper. Finally, the great inland waterways, the Mississippi, the Missouri and the Ohio Rivers, will be subject to Southern tolls."
March 22, 1861 the economic editor of the New York Times wrote, "At once shut down every Southern port, destroy its commerce and bring utter ruin on the Confederate states."
That's before we even get into why John Brown is famous, because he never actually accomplished anything. The only reason we know his name is that he lit a match on a lot of southern fears and northern sentiments. You can even see this played out in the Emancipation Proclamation because it was issued twice - the first time as a warning.
I'm not even pretending that slavery wasn't a major factor, just refuting the idea that it was the only factor. The war was about money and fear, from both sides for different reasons.
Again, there is no debate among historians about why the states seceded. See the final link in my previous post.
> You'll notice no mention of slavery, but instead the perversion of federal power. The only mention of the word slave is the oppression of not only Virginia "but the southern slave holding states".
The perversion of federal power mentioned is the new government's coming actions to eventually kill slavery. Again, the governor of Virginia said as much (“The Northern States must strike from their statute books their personal liberty bills, and fulfill their consitutional obligations in regard to fugitive slaves and fugitives from justice. If our slaves escape into non-slaveholding states, they must be delivered up.”) Again, no other cause is mentioned by any of the states.
> For these states, they were not seceding "because slavery" they were seceding because the Federal government was bypassing Congress to start a war and had no intention of taking up arms against the south.
They didn't like Lincoln's call for volunteers to bring the seceding states in line, yet they had no qualms about immediately raising troops via draft (via the first conscription law in the United States) to fight against the Union. Why is that? You noticed that your Wikipedia link about the timeline of events leading to secession is all about the history of slavery regulation in the United States, right?
Your quotes are proposals of what to do with Southern states that seceded, not the cause of secession.
You're going into mental contortions to disagree with historians. Why?
I'm not going to overinvest my time here because this is a long road. All my above points stand, but you need to reread them.
The quotes were to provide you with context on the economic impact secession was going to have on the northern economy (which would have been devastating). I'm well aware of everything left out of the Wikipedia timeline, but it's a locked topic with 15,000 plus edits.
If you want a better understanding of the subject, there are a lot of books to satisfy your curiousity.
I hope I have not been misunderstood through my lack of clarity here: I am completely in agreement with CalChris (if you don't like what I wrote for other reasons, fair enough.)
That's the point, GP was wondering why some one would suggest nameing a sewer after Calhoun and found a quote from Calhoun himself (as opposed to some third party that could be accused of drinking haterade) showing him to be a human sewer.
I hope that history judges us more kindly than we judge history.
There's no question that today, and for the best part of the past 150 years, we find Calhoun's views absolutely abhorrent and reprehensible. For us, there is no question about it.
Calhoun, and most everyone else in human history, lived in a different time. We now "know" that slavery is inherently wrong, but Calhoun, for example, didn't see it that way. He literally believed he was doing a good thing. We now find that paternalistic, condescending, and abhorrent. Even in his own time, Calhoun's views were becoming outdated.
But there is not, and never has been, an oracle anyone could consult to find the Truth about what is Good and Right. Even seemingly objective religious oracles of the Truth About Morality are subject to interpretation. We all had to muddle our own way through it. Our consciences were all formed by the society we lived in and, no doubt, by our self interest.
I have no doubt that hundreds of years from now, when social norms have evolved in ways we can't imagine, people will find our views abhorrent and reprehensible too. I hope they do not dismiss us human sewers on that basis alone.
At any rate, I think that when you dismiss figures of the past as human sewers, you overlook just how past atrocities happened, which makes it easier for them to happen in the here and now.
All one needed to do was ask the slaves whether they liked being slaves. Looks like some people did listen to the slaves and they found themselves on the right side of history. So you don't need to consult an Oracle. Listening helps.
Even today, we don't care that much for people's stated preferences. They only matter if they don't conflict with something we regard as wrong, if the person is capable of informed consent, if it doesn't create excessive positive obligations on other people, et cetera.
But Calhoun would have claimed, as implied in the quote upthread, that slaves were essentially incapable of 'informed consent'; they were like children, slavery was better for them regardless of their stated preferences. Calhoun would have considered that as ridiculous as asking a child whether or not they liked their vegetables. Obviously, given our values today and our knowledge of biology, that's not only wrong in every sense but absurd. But when you grow up in a culture of normalized racial inequality, that's what you get.
Not only that, he would have pointed out that many slaves liked their position in life.
I only wish right and wrong were so simple.
Incidentally, one of the proximate causes of the Civil War, and one of the most persuasive voices for abolition was John Brown, who died a martyr after being hanged for taking up arms to free slaves. It was his dedication to the cause even up to the gallows that convinced many people of its rightness. His speech at his trial should be read by everyone.
> we don't care that much for people's stated preferences
I strongly disagree. The foundation of democracy and liberty is self-determination. Civil rights protect their stated preferences and other limits to the law and government. The philosophical foundation of the U.S. is individual liberty.
Calhoun would make lots of claims; people always have justifications. The people doing evil don't stand up and say so; they give rationalizations to sway the gullible and lull others into confusion or not caring. Hitler, Stalin, Putin, and the rest did the same.
"At any rate, I think that when you dismiss figures of the past as human sewers, you overlook just how past atrocities happened, which makes it easier for them to happen in the here and now."
i disagree. how past atrocities happened is less (probably not at all) from name-calling the victimizers of the past and more from wiffle-waffling intellectual obfuscation of pure self-interest as something more than what it is. what could justify kidnapping people, putting them in mortal danger by shipping them across the ocean against their will, selling them to masters who had liberty to anything they liked with them?
flip it around: there're plenty of horrible things happening right now, and lots of people proffering up weak-ass justifications for them. i have a low opinion of them. why should i have a higher opinion of their counterparts for 150 years ago?
> Calhoun, and most everyone else in human history, lived in a different time.
Your attempt to seem wise and clever might come across a bit better if you had even the slightest aquaintence with the topic of history, about which you seem to be almost entirely ignorant. By 1837 slavery had been abolished in the countries the US would consider itself a peer of. Slavery was not some mainstream idea; it had, for decades in the civilised world, been on the run.
Appealing to the notion we are unreasonably judging the slavery advocates of the mid-19th century by their own standards shows either complete ignorance or a frankly creepy desire to propogate their philosophy.
Not only was I fully aware of it, but I had just read Emerson's speech on the subject of the end of the British slave trade yesterday.
That is why I was careful to point out that Calhoun's views were already becoming outdated; and at any rate, Calhoun lived in the US, not in, say, England. I'm not arguing that Calhoun was some kind of progressive for his time. I'm sure you don't mean what you seem to be insinuating with your other claim - obviously nobody who isn't mentally ill supports any philosophy of slavery in 2017. That said, I don't think it's 'creepy' to understand how people who did things we regard as abhorrent justified their deeds to themselves and to others.
> obviously nobody who isn't mentally ill supports any philosophy of slavery in 2017
I look forward to the day when mental illness isn't universally equated with negative things. I try to be forgiving of people who do this, but a lot of them are like people who supported slavery and segregation (mean, hateful, etc).
Mental illnesses are ethically neutral. People with them span the range of human experience.
That argument suggests there can be no judgment about anyone, and everyone is helpless to judge good from bad. I'm not willing to abandon the idea of good and I hold people responsible, including myself, for their judgment.
Yes, we need to have some mercy too; I certainly make mistakes, but then I am responsible for them.
Calhoun's peers fought a war to end slavery; it wasn't as if he had to imagine quantum physics in the 19th century to figure it out.
That's an understatement! He was a president of the East India Company and an absolutely brutal slavemaster:
> The records of this period mention a flourishing slave trade in [Chennai], a trade in which Yale participated. He enforced a law that at least ten slaves should be carried on every ship bound for Europe. In his capacity as judge he also on several occasions sentenced so-called "black criminals" to whipping and enslavement. When the demand began to increase rapidly, the English merchants even began to kidnap young children and deport them to distant parts of the world, very much against their will. At a time when profits from the slavetrade were dwindling and pressure from the Mughal government to stop the enslavement was mounting, the administration of Fort St George eventually stepped in and introduced laws to curb enslavement
...who got his money from his parents and uncles. Moe Brown was also a quaker && robustly antislavery, but that did not stop him from bailing out his brothers during the war. Trying to extricate the triangle-trade money from the Brown family is like trying to wring the pink from a sunrise.
As for the renaming, when people are honoured by having things named after them, from time to time it's appropriate to see whether the things they did would still be considered honourable. Otherwise we'd still be referring to Stalingrad and Leningrad.
Stalingrad and Leningrad are not good examples. They both had other names before the Soviets did exactly what you're advocating and swept away history to make way for their new era of equality.
If you look at that paper, she gives an example of the language on figure 9 of page 248:
0 b0i I(1,2,3,4,5) 1,2,3,10,6
1 apn 1,10 4
2 x-e 4 5
3 amc 6,1 7
4 ts0 7 8
5 am0 5,8 9
6 yrs 1,9 0(1,2)
7 aaL 1,2,3 1 8,1
8 ust
(I hope I copied the above correctly, the table is a bit hard to interpret.)
It looks rather like assembly language. Except that the mnemonics in column 2 aren't actually assembly opcodes, they identify subroutines written in machine code. Variables are represented by numbers. The third column is used for input arguments, the fourth for output arguments, the fifth for control flow.
It was a "compiler" in the sense that it read the program and wrote out machine code for each instruction to (a) move input arguments from the variables according to the calling convention (b) make the subroutine call (c) move the output arguments back to the memory locations for the variables.
Very primitive, but I don't think anyone else in 1952 was doing any better. (Other 1950s languages look far more modern – such as LISP and FORTRAN – but they were developed 4-5 years later.)
Thirty years later they added some curly braces and called it C!
Mostly kidding, but this is an important step. Assembly, as it came to be known, was one of the first "high level" languages because you could multiply two numbers without having to know the exact opcode for multiplying.
The objection is that she was not "on the team". The ran the team and wrote the papers. It was her project, and she deserves credit for more than merely being present.
I think tyteen4a03 is making light of specifically how the sentence was parsed. It was likely an editing or drafting error, because it should have originally been "... first computer language compiler in 1952." The article as presented currently makes it seem as if there's a programming language referred to by the name "compiler" that she helped develop.
"Grace Hopper invented the concept that computers should be provided instructions that look more like human language instead of forcing programmers to translate their instructions into numbers manually."
I'm glad. It would be a shame to challenge students with the realities of our past. College isn't about challenging students, it's about creating a safe space to ensure that upper middle class pathological narcissism is fostered and that students never mature into adulthood.
