London: Marx’s beloved Kapital
QUESTION Why was Germanborn Karl Marx buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery?
KARL MARX was born in Trier, which was then part of the Kingdom of Prussia in the German Confederation.
He spent his early years in Germany, studying law, philosophy, and economics.
Marx was expelled from Prussia in 1845 in objection to his antiroyalist articles, and he settled in Brussels. After leaving Belgium in 1848 owing to political upheaval, Marx briefly lived in France before being expelled by the country’s government.
This led him to England where he was allowed to exercise freedom of speech. He arrived in London in 1849 and remained until he died in 1883.
He lived in various places within the city, including Soho, Hampstead, Maitland Park and Primrose Hill. It was in London that Marx produced most of his significant works, including Das Kapital, and became the leading figure in the international socialist movement.
Marx died as a stateless Londoner. He was buried in the East side of Highgate Cemetery in a modest grave next to his wife Jenny von Westphalen, who had died in 1881. It was geographically appropriate.
The bodies were disinterred and reburied at a nearby location in 1954. A monumental tomb featuring Marx’s head was designed by Laurence Bradshaw and unveiled in 1956. The ceremony was led by Harry Pollitt, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which funded the memorial. Lou Jones, London.
QUESTION Did Canada have Indian Wars in the way America did?
IN CANADA, there were conflicts between Indigenous peoples and European settlers, but they weren’t systematic.
In the United States, the Indian Wars were characterised by largescale violence, and displacement of Indigenous peoples. They were underlined by a deliberate policy of westward expansion.
One notable series of conflicts in Canada was the Beaver Wars in the 17th century. These were complex affairs; the Iroquois Confederation led by the Mohawks mobilised against Huron, Algonquin and related tribes of the Great Lakes region.
The Iroquois were supplied with arms by their Dutch and English trading partners; the Algonquians and Hurons were backed by the French, their chief trading partners.
Another later period of conflict was the resistance of Indigenous peoples to the encroachment of European settlers and the imposition of Canadian government policies, such as the Red River Rebellion led by Métis leader Louis Riel in the late 19th century, and the Northwest Resistance led by Cree chief Big Bear.
These conflicts were often localised and driven by specific grievances rather than part of a larger, organised campaign of conquest. Jo Grainger, Worcester.
QUESTION What were the origins of the vocoder that Steve Harley liked to use on his records?
THE VOCODER, short for voice encoder, was developed in the 1920s for telecommunications encoding purposes by Bell Labs engineer Homer Dudley.
Dudley’s work was focused on improving the quality of long-distance telephone calls by reducing bandwidth requirements.
His vocoder worked by splitting the input sound into multiple frequency bands. It then used these bands to modulate a carrier signal, creating a blend of the two sources. Selective filtering reduced the input signal’s full audio spectrum to a fraction of its original bandwidth. Dudley’s research led to the development of the first vocoder prototype, which he called the Voder. The Voder was demonstrated at the 1939 New York World’s Fair and garnered significant attention.
During the Second World War, military members used the vocoder for secure voice communication. The major transition from military device to musical effect was when composer Wendy Carlos used it on the soundtrack for 1971’s A Clockwork Orange.
She performed a vocoder arrangement of the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, using a Moog synthesiser as the carrier signal. Steve Harley, who sadly died last month, used the vocoder extensively on his 1976 album Love’s A Prima Donna, on the songs G.I. Valentine, Finally A Card Came and Is It True What They Say?
Vocoders have since become especially popular in electronic music genres where artists use them to manipulate and distort vocal sounds creatively. Some famous tracks that use the technology include In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins and Blue Monday by New Order. Philip Murray, Stirling.
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