Laudator Temporis Acti

Charles Oman, A History of the Art of War: The Middle Ages from the Fourth to the Fourteenth Century (London: Methuen & Co., 1898), p. 58:

Still more interesting is the account of the array of the Franks a hundred years later, at the all-important battle of Poictiers, where Charles Martel turned back the advancing flood of Saracen horsemen who had swept so easily over the debris of the Visigothic monarchy. "The men of the North," says the chronicler, "stood as motionless as a wall;¹ they were like a belt of ice frozen together, and not to be dissolved, as they slew the Arabs with the sword. The Austrasians, vast of limb, and iron of hand, hewed on bravely in the thick of the fight; it was they who found and cut down the Saracen king." Obviously, therefore, at Poictiers the Franks fought, as they had done two hundred years before, at Casilinum, in one solid mass,² without breaking rank or attempting to manoeuvre. Their victory was won by the purely defensive tactics of the infantry square; the fanatical Arabs, dashing against them time after time, were shattered to pieces, and at last fled under shelter of the night.

¹ "Gentes septentrionales ut paries immobiles permanentes, et sicut zona rigoris glacialiter adstricti gladio Arabes enecant. Gens Austriae mole membrorum praevalida et ferrea manu per ardua pectorabiliter ferientes regem inventum exanimant" (Isidorus Pacensis).

² See p. 63.

"Dispatches: Skin Deep 101," Time 143.7 (February 14, 1994) 16 (on an African Heritage 101 class taught by Professor Leonard Jeffries at City College):

According to Jeffries, the class will focus on African contributions to world civilization that have been ignored by Eurocentric scholars. He begins by scribbling a chalkboard chart featuring "the sun people" (i.e., people of color) at one corner of a triangle and "the ice people" (i.e., not people of color) at another. Next to the latter he jots down a few salient attributes: "individualist," "competitive," "exploitative." Jeffries explains that his chart "gives us a paradigm for looking at the world. We're not talking about superiority and inferiority, but we're talking about the important factor of melanin." Blacks have more melanin — a skin pigment — than whites; Jeffries asserts, "It allows us to negotiate the vibrations of the universe and to deal with the ultraviolet rays of the sun."