History as Perspective

But It Will Kill Trees....

2011-11-28T19:58:00.001-08:00

Recently the noted journalist and, after ten critically-acclaimed books, we can also call him a historian, David G. McCullough gave a lecture at the 11th annual National Book Festival on the National Mall in Washington, DC, which was televised by CSpan 2's "BookTV". Mr. McCullough, who was speaking in support of his recently-published book The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, cracked a joke at one point that if anyone today wants to be famous in the future, all they need do is keep a daily diary in paper form in which they can write about anything -- their daily lives, anecdotes about friends, politics, fashion, latest TV shows, favorite music, holidays, etc. -- and at some point towards the end of your life when you know the end is nigh, simply mail your diary to the Library of Congress. You will be famous because historians will be citing your diary for decades, maybe centuries to come.

What was he talking about?

For much of human history, which is to say roughly the past 10,000 years, a fundamental problem at the root of many challenges facing human societies has been a lack of adequate, timely information. This might be information in the form of intelligence about what one's enemies were up to, or information about changes taking place in trade patterns, or information about how to deal with a person with bloody purple pustules forming all over their body. We humans have come up with some pretty impressive ways of capturing and exchanging information, of getting it to the people and places where it was needed, everything from alphabets to libraries to postal systems to schools. Each of these unto themselves are really amazing creations. Consider that during the 10th century A.D. Abbasid caliphate of the medieval Arab empire(s), they developed a banking system that included checking accounts which ingeniously kept track of information about balances so that when Abdul made a deposit in Baghdad he could still write a check against that deposit hundreds of miles away in Tunisia and the local bank could make sure he had enough in his account to cover his check. And this was without phones or computers. However, despite all our most brilliant inventions, we've almost always still fallen short somehow, usually in the timeliness category. Just imagine how Romeo and Juliet would have ended if they both had iPhones.

Indeed, those iPhones are a part of a very different problem we face today, which is what Mr. McCullough was referring to. Today we still lack some kinds of information -- anyone out there know how to cure cancer yet? -- but we've pretty much solved the timeliness problem by creating global networks of instant communications that allow just about anyone anywhere to say anything to anyone else anywhere else on the planet. As a dramatic example of some of the implications of this kind of thing, consider the Brazilian tourist in Germany who used a security service website he had subscribed to to check on his home back in Sao Paolo, only to discover someone was breaking into his house. he called the local police in his hometown in Brazil and watched live as they entered his home and arrested the burglars -- all this from his hotel in Germany. Or, even more impressive, as the Syrian regime continues to wage war against its own citizens as they demand an end to dictatorship, I receive daily through Facebook phone images and videos sent by average Syrians chronicling the atrocities being committed by their own government against them. In 1991, the world was stunned to see a camcorder video showed on TV news programs showing Los Angeles police beating a helpless black motorist they had stopped, but in 2011, the world can watch daily mountains of (very bloody) evidence of the Syrian regime torturing and killing its own citizens. This is powerful stuff -- but that mountains of evidence bit is the problem. We now have, through the internet and other mobile telecommunications devices, access to mountains of information about, well, just about anything humans anywhere know about anything. The problem is now too much information, so much that it overwhelms us easily, and we are forced to develop filters. Those filters can be a problem if we choose bad filters which don;t give us the most meaningful or accurate information, but that's another discussion. What David McClullough was talking about was that the process of sharing all this information requires that it be digitized first, that it be sent electronically.

For historians, this is a disaster. Massive amounts of information are being exchanged daily on a level never before seen in human history, and yet in a hundred years' time, how much of all the e-mails, Tweets, Facebook updates or credit card transfers will be available for historians to pour through? If you read a history of the American Civil War, an important part of that history will include individual accounts by people who experienced those events, and that information has largely been captured from diaries or personal letters those people later wrote -- but nobody in 2011 keeps a diary (in book form, anyway) or writes letters through the mail. We send e-mails, we blog, we take pictures with our phones and send them to friends or post them on Facebook -- and it's all electronic. Will any of these still exist for historians in a hundred or a thousand years who are trying to understand how we in the early 21st century lived? And of course it's not just individual people; businesses are sitting on mountains of information, so much so that consulting firms make big $$$ nowadays showing them how to use that information to better understand what their customers want and how they shop or spend money, but again, all of this is electronic. We have tax and purchase receipts from ancient Sumeria 6,000 years ago, but will we have any from the 21st century to understand how and what people, businesses or governments were buying?

So the moral of this story is clear: do as Mr. McCullough suggests and start a paper-bound journal or diary, or better yet, print out this blog and save it somewhere.

War is Hell

2011-04-23T22:40:00.000-07:00

For the first opening half hour or so of Steven Spielberg's 1998 film Saving Private Ryan, you, the viewer, are subjected to a horrifying scene of utter chaos and carnage as American soldiers attempt to storm the beaches at Normandy on the morning of June 6, 1944. This opening scene has been called one of the most realistic depictions of war in cinema.

That may be but the truth is, even that doesn't quite come close. Typically in Hollywood when a guy gets shot you see a firecracker-like pop-eruption on his chest, then a bloodstain. The actor twitches violently with each shot, falling dramatically. We have come to equate Hollywood 'realism' with blood; the more blood, the more realistic the depiction. The reality of the violence a gunshot visits upon a human body is far worse, however, and far more random. There are all sorts of variables involved -- the caliber, some technical aspects of the bullet and powder, the gun itself, the distance between the shooter and the victim, clothing, trajectory, etc. etc. etc. -- but in the end, a bullet is really just a merciless little axe hacking away at its victim, arriving by a fancy delivery mechanism.

All of this might just be interesting trivia except for the internet, which is very literally an information superhighway that allows communication in ways unheard before the late 20th century. With the recent events unfolding in the Middle East, the internet has allowed people on the streets to take pictures of state violence and transmit them around the globe, proving that the dictators in Syria, Iran and Libya are lying as they deny their forces have attacked unarmed crowds. In particular, I receive through a group in Syria daily pictures of the violence inflicted on protesters by their own government. These pictures often show horrific images of corpses, of human bodies mangled in ways that Hollywood will never show (and shouldn't). There is a political point behind showing these pictures, because these people are suffering under tyranny and these pictures make the naked evil of that tyranny apparent to all the world. Still, they are also a sober reminder that the violence shown in Hollywood films, even in their most sensational moments, falls far short of the reality and to some extent that de-sensitizes us to the depth of suffering experienced both in war -- be it World War II or the Civil War or the Punic Wars -- and in unstable countries ruled by tyrants. It is also a reminder of what we have asked many of our veterans to experience, so that we do not have to. War is a part of the human condition, and as long as there are tyrants there will be war, but we should be more circumspect about when and how we wage war for as General William Sheridan noted after the Civil War, war is indeed hell.

Even the Brooklyn Bridge has its History...

2011-04-13T21:41:00.000-07:00

Try to imagine the most startling news story you could think of, say, something like "Elvis discovered alive, and in bed with Jackie O, also still alive, while clutching stunning evidence of Loch Ness Monster and the Kennedy Assassination!" That's pretty good, actually. I wonder if the National Enquirer is hiring? I can do better than "Bat Boy". Anyway, it seems I have some competition in this department as news services the world over hummed with this amazing story this week: "Filmmaker claims to have found nails that hung Jesus". Notice they didn't even have to supply the "!"; you did that all by yourself as you read that.

So the story goes that a very controversial film maker and amateur archaeologist, Simcha Jacobovici, claims he's found, well, the nails used to crucify Jesus. Now, there's an entire story behind this and I'm not going to get into it. If you're going to pursue it, I would strongly suggest reading the opinions of some real archaeologists such as Bibleplaces.blog or A Hot Cup of Joe to see what the real experts have to say. However, there is a secondary, underlying story about this, one that transcends shysters and snake oil salesmen trying to gain riches and fame from the gullible, and that is the world of relics in Christianity, particularly Catholicism. The first thing that usually comes to mind are the many infamous medieval forgeries that produced enough pieces of the original crucifixion cross to fill a forest, and enough thorns from the crown of thorns to fill many gardens' worth of rose bushes, but these are really just the outer peripheral edges of an entire world of physical relics which Christians once -- and some still today -- use as totem-like bridges to important people and events from the history of Christianity. In this sense, Jacobovici's claim is less important to a historian as far as whether he's right -- whether they really are the nails that tormented Jesus Christ -- than that someone would take notice of his claims and try to verify them. In other words, these nails, whether they are what Jacobovici claims or not, represent a much larger Christian history and that makes these nails interesting to historians, that some today -- whether they believe Jacobovici or not -- take the topic seriously.

Halloween is Gone....or is it?

2010-11-02T09:54:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine who owned a restaurant in Germany in the 1990s told me that she once asked her staff to wear costumes for Halloween, but as guests showed up, they asked in bewilderment why the staff were wearing funny costumes. Halloween is -- or at least was -- a very American holiday, but in many ways that's not really true. It has been spreading to Europe for some years now, so that only a few years after my friend's failed Halloween experiment, German children were donning ghastly costumes and declaring "Trick oder Treat" to candy-laden homeowners. It is by now a firmly-established tradition across much of Europe. Of course, it already existed in Europe before the importation of the American version.

In Central Europe, until very recently it was a more solemn religious holiday observed by families on what to Americans is Halloween night, but to Christians elsewhere is All Saints Day Eve. November 1 is All Saints Day on the Christian calendar, and so on the even before -- i.e., October 31 -- Christians in Central Europe go to their local cemetery at dusk and place colorful candles on the graves of their loved ones, and sit as a family and tell stories about those passed on, or just pray quietly. Because it's usually fairly cold at this time of year after dark this ritual doesn't last too long, but it is a beautiful sight to see the sea of candle lights dancing in the evening darkness. (Note the picture above from St. Michael the Archangel Church in Silesia, southwestern Poland.)

But of course, this Christian holiday has deep roots in Europe, roots far older than Christianity, roots more akin to the more pagan themes common in the American Halloween holiday. Pagan agricultural societies in pre-Christian Europe held huge parties in the autumn, end-of-harvest celebrations (like the Bavarian Oktoberfest) both to celebrate the end of a lot of hard work all summer long, but as well as a final send-off to the good weather, and recognizing in the process that a long, hard and potentially deadly winter lay ahead. For us today, winter is just a nuisance but in pre-modern societies, winters were a long period when all the food came from the previous summer's harvest, and if it went bad or if it ran out, then people simply died of starvation. Also, having lots of people huddled together in close quarters with minimal fresh air for months did wonders for diseases. This is why peoples threw a party in early spring -- like Mardi Gras -- as a sort of "Holy crap, we made it!" party, but it also shows you why people associated death with winter and fall. Add in the visual cues of the scenery seemingly dying in the fall and winter (only to be reborn next spring), and you have clear signs of death everywhere in the autumn, and so it was on everyone's mind. People began to believe that the autumn was a time when death entered the world, and the dead could interact with the living -- prompting lots of rituals and superstitions about how one should deal with them. Thus were born both Halloween and the Christian All Saints Day. Many of the particular trappings of the American Halloween such as jack-o-lanterns have been traced to pre-Christian Celtic practices, but the truth is that the essence of Halloween permeated nearly all of Europe.

Happy Halloween, folks.

When does history matter?

2010-07-18T11:30:00.000-07:00

We are, in 2010, slowly coming up on the 100th anniversary of one of the worst conflicts in human history, World War I, which raged from 1914 to 1918. This war invokes images of guys with huge handlebar mustaches wearing colorful, peacock uniforms marching stiffly on jerky old film reels. The war is over-shadowed by World War II in popular memory for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that World War II ended only 65 years ago, compared to World War I's 92 years ago. But World War II has other advantages on the popularity front as well: its battles were decisive, and its end clearer and beyond doubt. Both are sliding precariously out of living memory, but with the gamut of scholarly works and popular culture based on the Second World War, the danger is much greater for World War I.

Is World War I worth remembering? Iwo Jima, Midway, Stalingrad, Normandy; these battles are a part of the West's popular vocabulary today but who has heard of the three battles of Ypres, or the Marne, the Brusilov Offensive, or Gallipoli? And yet, these battles changed the world just as much as their Second World War successors. Wars are not sporting events and do not need cheerleaders, but it's a question of what is lost if World War I ever completely recedes from the popular memory.

World War I is the marker between the 19th century world and the modern world, where Victorian optimism about progress gave way to 20th century jaded cynicism, where stodgy old aristocratic feudal political structures made way for aggressive, energetic dictatorships bent on state-worship -- and mass murder. It was the war where the plane, tank and submarine would first be put to terrible use. Pre-war causes like workers' rights, women's suffrage and anti-colonialism, seen before 1914 as the goals of small bands of vocal extremists, became integral parts of the post-1918 world. Millions of men (and women!) around the world were mobilized for war or work, torn from their ancestral homes -- many of whom hadn't traveled but a few miles beyond their place of birth their entire lives until this point -- and met new peoples, new technologies, and new ways of doing things, and brought them home. One consequence of this mass mixing of peoples from all over the world was the 1918-1919 mass influenza epidemic, which killed millions more people than the war itself had. (It was exactly this epidemic world leaders were thinking about when they reacted so strongly to the 2009 H1N1 flu epidemic.) Another consequence was the birth of popular (mass) culture -- the French and Germans alike were astounded by American films and the jazz played by black musicians in the U.S. army in their off-time, while American and Canadian soldiers brought home memories of exotic foods from the lands they served in to small-town communities less impacted by immigration, giving birth to traditions such as American pizza and spaghetti. The mauling the war inflicted on the global economy forced governments everywhere to consider for the first time the necessity of government management of at least some aspects of national economies, though to what extent exactly is still a very contentious political issue today.

So does World War I matter to us today, some nine decades after the trenches emptied? If we have any interest in truly understanding modern political debates about aid to Africa, government regulation of the economy, or popular culture in general, then yes indeed, it would be of great value for us to look back and try to understand the events of almost a century ago that gave birth to many of these issues.

An Example of Perspective

2010-06-22T20:35:00.000-07:00

I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass is dead. Toohulhulsote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led the young men is dead. It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are--perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.

- Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé, 1877

Today's mindless rant is born of technology, or more precisely, the failure of technology. In essence, I am using my little soapbox here to reply to someone else's blog because their "Leave a Comment" function isn't working. It's not their fault, but sound off I must, or otherwise possibly suffer a stroke. This is in reference to Dr. Mike Milton's 2008 blog -- hey, I'm just catching up now! -- about Norman Davies: "Norman Davies and the Appalling Problem of a Failure to Stand" (September 2, 2008; www.mikemilton.org). Now, I'll admit to being a Norman Davies fan but my point isn't to defend a man who doesn't need defending. No, I have other issues to grab my pitchfork over. First, take a moment and read Dr. Milton's entry. Go ahead; I'll wait.

I tripped across this entry by mistake while I was searching for something else. My reaction is not anger, just a sense that something fundamental is being missed. Whenever I read the quote above by Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé, my heart breaks. It is a quote saturated with sadness, weariness, exhaustion, but more importantly, defeat. This kind of experience is unknown to most Americans. Yes, the Confederacy lost the Civil War, and the Vietnam War ended in failure, but the Civil War was almost 150 years ago, and while the Vietnam experience was bitter for many Americans, it was ultimately something that happened over there -- somewhere else. Chief Joseph isn't just humiliated in having lost, he was speaking those words as a subjugated man whose destiny (and whose people's destiny) was forever more in someone else's hands -- his enemies' hands, to be specific. The Nez Percé's homes, their way of life, their beliefs; all were crushed and taken away by this defeat. It wasn't even just foreign occupation, it was exile, expulsion and virtual imprisonment in reservations, forever more at the mercy of their enemies' good will.

In his review of Davies' book The Isles, a History -- a history of Professor Davies' native British Isles -- Dr. Milton is upset at the book's seeming lack of British patriotism, and what he sees in both Dr. Davies and other similar Welsh experiences Dr. Milton had during a sojourn in Wales as a sort of Welsh tendency towards Balkanization, a centrifugal tendency among some peoples of Britain which fails to recognize just how good the British peoples have it in the United Kingdom, and how important unified national identities are. I'm not going to take issue with the last two statements, but I feel the need to explore the world a bit from the Welsh point of view for Dr. Milton's benefit.

I'll start by mentioning that I am neither English nor Welsh by ancestry. However, coming from a background in Eastern Europe, I have some insight into the kind of cultural forces that drive a people to behave as Dr. Milton witnessed in Wales, forces born of historic defeat and subjugation. The Scots were partners in creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, through a long process that began with the Scottish Stuarts holding both the Scottish and English crowns in the 17th century -- that part didn't end so well -- and ended ultimately in the Act of Union of 1707 by which Scotland and England united to form, well, the United Kingdom. This was a voluntary act by both countries which entailed debate in both their parliaments, and ultimately came down to a vote in both. For all the blustering of modern Scottish nationalism, the leaders of early 18th century Scotland chose to join with England.

Wales is a bit different. The Welsh are the descendants of the ancient Celtic Britons who fled first the Roman, and then later the Anglo-Saxon-Danish invasions of the British Isles. It is no mistake that Wales is a mountainous region; the ancestors of the Welsh literally fled to the hills. Turns out that wasn't enough, however; From before even Alfred the Great united Anglo-Saxon England in A.D. 845, the Anglo-Saxons and their English progeny constantly invaded Wales, and over several centuries' time, colonized its few towns. The Welsh survived as a culture by retreating further and further into the mountain wilderness, until there was nowhere left to retreat. Wales has spent its entire history ruled by Englishmen, often quite brutally. The last time a Welshman ruled Welsh territory, English was not yet a language, existing still as an Anglo-Saxon-Danish peasant language incomprehensible to even later Middle English-speakers like Shakespeare. Only in the 20th century has Welsh culture finally been able to openly be expressed, and Welshmen been able to take the first feeble steps in limited self-government since the 14th century, thanks to the Plaid Cymru revival movement. This is not so much a sob story as an opportunity to point out that Wales was decidedly not a voluntary party to the creation to the Act of Union in 1707. Wales existed only as a legal entity, whose title belonged exclusively to the British crown. The Welsh people were inconsequential to the British political unit called 'Wales'. The British 'Wales' effectively existed in London, not Swansea or Cardiff.

Now, the 20th century Wales that Norman Davies grew up in is a very different place and the massacres and humiliations of previous centuries are a thing of the past, but a culture that spends centuries under subjugation cannot so easily forget the past. Can Dr. Milton imagine what it's like to belong to a culture which has suffered foreign occupation and often brutal subjugation so long that most of your people forget their own language, adopting instead the language of the occupiers? Ask the Irish about that sometime. Norman Davies, in an earlier book on Polish history, quotes a Scotsman as advising the Poles who were recently (re-)subjugated by the Russians: "If you cannot stop the bear from swallowing you, at least do not let it digest you." These are words to live by for all subjugated peoples for preserving their cultures in the face of long-term hostile foreign occupation. And even today, because of arcane British laws, despite the relative sovereignty Wales has regained in the modern U.K., most Welshmen -- who are not Anglicans -- cannot hold many of the highest political offices in the U.K. True, the same is true of all non-Anglicans in the U.K., including in England itself, but a much higher proportion of Welsh are not Anglicans than English. It is a mere detail and a holdover from days when Britain truly was serious about religion, but still, it is an active remnant of one part of a system which denied the Welsh control over their own land.

Now, my purpose here was not to bash the British; I admire Britain -- including the English -- and consider the U.K. one of the sanest countries on the planet. My point was merely to point out however that the historical experiences of the English in relationship to Britain, similar to the experiences of European-derived Americans in their relationship to the United States, is one very qualitatively different from, say, African-Americans, Native Americans...or the Welsh. Though these peoples may now enjoy (finally) the full benefits of citizenship and relative self-government, and are no longer hindered in expressing their culture(s), it is only after a very long history of extreme mistreatment and the current benefits of citizenship notwithstanding, they will never be able to look upon the Union Jack or old Stars and Stripes in quite the same way as a Connecticut-born Yankee with ancestral ties stretching back to the Mayflower. Norman Davies describes this reality in his book by mentioning that for whatever ultimate loyalty the many peoples of Britain may muster for the United Kingdom -- and there is little indication that Wales will attempt to secede any time soon -- any sense of a 'British' patriotism (as opposed to 'English', 'Scottish' or 'Welsh') will not surprisingly often be quite weak outside England (and to a lesser extent, Scotland) itself. Remember that there is no 'British' soccer team; England, Scotland and Wales all have their own teams. How many American flags would you expect to see flying on Lakota Indian reservations in South Dakota this July 4th?

To sum it up, I'll paraphrase an example from an article in Time Magazine from 1992, commemorating the 500th anniversary of Columbus' voyages to the Americas; the article quoted two friends in Brazil, one a descendant of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, the other the descendant of local Native Indians. Looking out over the ocean, the Jewish Brazilian said, "Columbus' discovery meant salvation for my people," while the (Native) Indian Brazilian responded, "...and it meant disaster for mine."

That's history for ya.

Tragedy in Poland

2010-04-18T10:15:00.000-07:00

The world has witnessed this past week pictures of thousands of Poles congregating in the streets of their cities, heaping flowers and candles on impromptu monuments and weeping uncharacteristically openly in public. The news indeed has been grim, but was President Lech Kaczynski some sort of Jack Kennedy to warrant this nationwide outpouring of grief? Would a similar tragedy involving the Joint Chiefs of Staff bring teary-eyed Americans into the streets?

President Kaczynski was actually a controversial figure in Poland and abroad. Indeed, plans for his entombment in Wawel fortress chapel in Cracow, the historic seat of medieval Poland's royalty, has provoked an outcry from some of his political opponents. So what is behind the huge national reaction to this plane crash?

Most news sources have mentioned the reason for the trip: ceremonies being held at the site of a World War II-era massacre of some 22,000 Polish POWs by their Soviet captors near the modern western Russian city of Smolensk. That earlier tragedy, which took place in 1939-1941 when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were allies and accomplices in the 1939 destruction of Poland, is still today an unresolved source of friction between Poland and Russia. Indeed, it played a role in this week's tragedy; Polish prime minister Donald Tusk had agreed to attend a ceremony with Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin last Wednesday, but Polish president Kaczynski had refused to attend that ceremony as the Kremlin still refuses to fully open its archives on the 1940 Katyn massacre to historians. President Kaczynski was on his way to separate commemorative ceremonies at Katyn this past weekend (not attended by Russian officials) when the plane crashed.

But there is much more to this tragedy still. The very ground on which the president's plane crashed is soaked with the blood of Poles and Russians who, in the 16th and 17th centuries, fought one another in countless savage battles for control of Smolensk. But the memories of medieval struggles did not bring Poles into the streets this week; it is the national sense of loss, of having lost again. Medieval Poland enjoyed its successes but modern Poland's history has been somewhat less prosaic, and in 19th century Poland, Russian and German occupiers repeatedly imprisoned, exiled or executed the country's political and cultural elites in a bid to decapitate any resistance and indeed when the country was reborn in 1918, it desperately lacked trained and educated leaders to organize the country. Poland's ruler at the beginning of World War II, Jozef Beck, died in a Romanian internment camp in 1944 after escaping the joint Nazi-Soviet onslaught. The Polish prime minister for the government-in-exile in London during World War II, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, died -- along with his daughter, his chief of staff and several government members -- in a mysterious plane crash off Gibraltar in 1943 at a time when he was strongly opposing Soviet territorial demands, to the open chagrin of both London and Washington. Conspiracy theories about Sikorski's death abound among Poles, and by coincidence, a popular Polish TV network had showed a conspiracy-laden film about Sikorski over the Easter weekend. Sikorski's successor, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, tried to return to Soviet-occupied Poland after the war to participate in elections but after widespread fraud by the communists and threats from the Soviet NKVD (the 1940s-era KGB), Mikolajczyk had to flee for his life. During the years of Soviet-imposed communist rule in Poland, the government-in-exile continued in London. The last president of the Polish government-in-exile, Ryszard Kaczorowski, resigned his office in December, 1990 after turning over the pre-war seals of office to Lech Walesa, the first freely-elected president of the country since the 1920s. Kaczorowski was among the 96 victims on the plane with President Kaczynski this past weekend.

So while Poles may differ on how they evaluate Kaczynski as a politician, and though all indications at this point are that this was just a tragic accident, his death this weekend has opened old wounds, old wounds in a country all too familiar with tragedy.

History of Who, Exactly?

2010-01-27T11:51:00.000-08:00

Professor James C. Scott has published a book recently that is making some waves. As I've said before, I'm all for revisionist views of history, so long as they are well-grounded in the evidence. Sometimes, it's good to have someone force us to see things a little differently.

Such is the case with Professor Scott's book, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. The title makes his thesis sound pretty radical but the idea is actually interesting. Professor Scott rejects the usual approach of state- or country-based histories, and tells the story of the peoples living in the deep jungles and mountains of inland Southeast Asia, far away from the cities and administrations of the governments clinging effectively to the coasts. These peoples, long persecuted as annoying and slippery minorities by the various governments which have passed in the region, have tried their best to stay as remote from the countries, their taxes and their prying police forces for centuries, living a sort of outlaw existence in the interior regions -- which Scott calls Zomia -- while rejecting any of the benefits of civilization and refusing to identify themselves with any of the established countries in Southeast Asia.

Some historians and regional specialists have taken issue with Professor Scott's approach and it may be indeed that he is guilty of some ideological over-reach -- theorists sometimes see things a little too black-and-white, ignoring many of the gray areas inbetween -- but still, I like Professor Scott's approach because it highlights our own propensity today to (lazily) simply assume that our lifestyle is the end-all and be-all of human existence. For instance, historians and archaeologists were puzzled in the 1980s and 90s when evidence surfaced in Eastern Europe and Central Asia that several groups seemed to have lapsed back into more primitive "hunter-gatherer" lifestyles after having "achieved" agricultural societies. Why would anyone reject the obvious fruits of civilization? -- or so ask we. Our popular assumption that human societies followed some form of linear development, that we were all on some sort of path towards ultimate civilizational utopia, has been challenged a lot in recent decades, but we still cling to it. The simple fact is, civlization doesn't quite work for everyone, and there have always been those who have carved their living on the outskirts of civilizations.

Don't get me wrong; I'm all for civilization. If you want this keyboard, you'll have to pry it from my cold, dead fingers! Still, it is impossible to completely dismiss Professor Scott's approach, and indeed there is even an echo of Zomia in Eastern Europe. The Carpathian Mountains arch to form a massive stone cradle in the heart of Eastern Europe, and despite all the fits of nationalism that have convulsed the region, there is a historic tradition of mountain peoples all throughout the Carpathians who share many traditions of music, folklore, fashion styles, lifestyles, and a romantic sense of anti-authority, anti-state banditry which has perennially frustrated the governments on the plains below.

You say tomato.....

2010-01-11T09:25:00.000-08:00

Napoleon once (in)famously said "History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon." In some sense, this is true, because how we look at the past is often defined as much by how we view ourselves and our world as by the (historical) facts we see before us -- hence the name of this blog. For instance, we today in 2010 see World War II as a defining event of our times, and we see ourselves as living in its shadow still some 60+ years after it ended. Consider then what it might be like for a time traveler to suddenly show up in our midst from the distant future who dismisses World War II as mere trivia but instead wants to talk about some obscure event that happened in 1978 in the Ugandan jungles which, according to our time traveler, is seen in his/her times as the earliest beginning of the Great Zoog Empire. We, the peoples of the early 21st century, are defined in the time travelers' era as "pre-Zoogites", and the defining historical events of our times for them are obscure and largely unknown minor news factoids for us, if we're aware of them at all. This is a fun exercise but it gives you a sense of historical perspective. Keep in mind that we today often impose this same type of reasoning backwards onto those who came before us.

But obvious perspectives aside, this brings us to the fundamental question, "What is History"? If it is nothing more than a pile of perspectives, then is it worth anything more than, say, travelogues or the average opinion you'll hear on politics any given evening in your friendly local pub? History is a discipline, a study of human relationships (best displayed in civilizations) over time and how they met both challenges and change. A trained historian tries to be objective and incorporate both an emic (internal, from the point of view of the subject) and etic (external) view into their studies, and while as we've mentioned no person can ever completely escape their own perspective, a historian will still always need to anchor their findings on facts. In the best tradition of EH Carr, historical facts are essentially data, the raw ingredients of history. Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon. So what? As a stand-alone historical fact, it means little. Millions of Italian citizens today cross the Rubicon as well, and nobody writes a book about them. Only when that fact is interpreted and put in context -- in other words, is processed -- does a mere fact become History. Knowing that the Roman Senate had forbade any general from entering a perimeter around the city of Rome with his army, delineated north of the city by the Rubicon, suddenly explains why Julius Caesar crossing it is historically significant; by doing so, he was raising the flag of revolt and signaling his intention to take over the Roman Empire.

Man, that was a lot of wind just to get me to this point. Sorry. Anyway, the point is that interpretations sometimes change, and occasionally revisionist histories emerge -- which is all well and good, as they force us to continuously re-evaluate "established" history -- so long as they are anchored in facts. Historians spend a lot of time evaluating their sources, and checking the "facts". Unfortunately, there are those who are more concerned with interpreting history to fit their own perspective, or more accurately, their own ideology, which all too often does not require a very thorough analysis of the known facts, or a very selective recollection of them.

One such case appears to be Oliver Stones' soon to be aired 10 hour TV mini-series pseudo-history "Secret History of the Twentieth Century". I have not seen any of this series yet in any form so this is not a review, but rather a reaction to Stone's descriptions of it at a recent press conference in San Francisco. Stone has seemingly chosen to relativise Hitler, describing Hitler as merely a man of his times. Well of course he was; we all are. However, as an example, Mussolini was a man of his times, a nationalist and an imperialist in an age which still embraced both, but Hitler was different, he was extraordinary. Mussolini merely wanted what many -- most? -- Europeans of the first half of the 20th century wanted: Empire. He romanticized militarism and military pageantry, and believed in a Social-Darwinistic order whereby the strong rule over the weak, a sort of eat-or-be-eaten world. Nationalistic authoritarian dictatorships sprang up all across 1920s and 30s Europe, from Spain and Portugal to Greece, Latvia, Poland and Romania, most emulating Mussolini. Even in the established democracies, fascism had its supporters like the British 'Black Shirts'. World War I and the Great Depression had convinced many across Europe (and the world) that democracy and free-market economics had failed. People like Mussolini merely embodied what many Europeans wanted to do, to ditch messy, slow parliamentary politics in favor of some strong leader who would lead the nation to its rightful place among the great countries.

Hitler, however, was different. He also believed in empires, militarism and the superiority of some peoples over others -- but he took these concepts much further. Mussolini operated in the open and essentially usurped existing social and political structures to do his bidding. Hitler did not embrace the old order -- however it could be changed -- but rather tried to completely destroy it and replace it with his own. The very theatrical Mussolini was a man of his times; Hitler rejected his times. The very story of Nazi Germany is indeed the story of an extremist group coming to power and somehow convincing the citizenry of an advanced, modern country to do things that their own moral structures forbade: mass murder, brutality, extermination, genocide. Hitler railed against Judeo-Christian values and went to elaborate lengths to convince his people, bureaucrats, police and soldiers to do things considered before the war -- even after the experience of the First World War -- as unthinkable. The extermination camps of the Holocaust were hidden in rural Nazi-occupied Poland, and Nazi news outlets spoke only of deporting Jews "to the East". Hitler was challenging the fundamental moral and ethical codes of his day, but Mussolini was marching in step with them. Stones' attempt to describe Hitler as merely a product of his times is very much to miss the historical point of Hitler, that he rejected his times and the limits they put on his evil designs. The kinds of atrocities Hitler managed to convince his compatriots to commit in 1933-45 are important to us not as mere signs of the times but exactly because they are so extraordinary, so out of sync with the accepted norms and behaviors of Hitler's times. If they were indeed just the products of peoples of the 1940s acting normally, then we of the 21st century need never fear those kinds of behavior because they are only relics of the past. In reality, as the Yugoslav implosion wars and the Rwandan massacres of the 1990s show, Hitler's lesson has not been lost on others of our own times, and still pose a threat. Genocide and mass murder are anathema to us today, just as they were to our forefathers in the 1940s, but then, as now, some are willing to commit these crimes.

Again, I haven't seen Stones' series yet and I am only reacting to his own descriptions in the press, but there is a great danger in trying to relativise extraordinary people and events of the past. Stone is right in saying that there is little historical value in calling Hitler 'evil', but he is wrong to dismiss Hitler's crimes as merely contemporary or typical of the day. They were not, they were as blood-curdling and horrific to those of the 1940s as they still seem to us today; and therein lies the historical value of studying and understanding people like Hitler.

Washington Slept Here...or There

2009-11-23T04:45:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the hiatus; turns out work sometimes is work. In any event, there was once a historic home located in Kingston, NJ which laid claim to one of the oldest tourist traps in America, that "Washington Slept Here." Then, the fates took a turn and the house was bought but needed for some reason or other to be moved. Moving houses, especially 200+ year old houses, is an impressive job but it can be done and some contractor successfully did it. The wife and I noticed, however, that when the house was moved, it brought with it the sign claiming "Washington Slept Here". Now, if we are generous and believe that Washington had indeed slumbered away in the place, it brings to question the accuracy of the claim. After all, Washington may indeed have slept in the house, but not there. It's a technicality, but one which can be important to some.

Similarly, Provincetown, MA is waging a campaign to be recognized as the real first landing place of the Pilgrims in New England. While just about all Americans know about Plymouth ("Plimouth Plantation") and its Rock, the question -- crucial for the tourist boards in both Provincetown and Plymouth -- is whether that Rock was really the first place a bunch of sea-sick refugee religious fanatics first set foot in the New World. The truth is....that Provincetown is right. The Pilgrims hit Cape Cod first and tried to create a settlement at Provincetown first, giving up and moving on to Plymouth shortly thereafter. So score one for Cape Cod. However, before they start popping champagne in Provincetown, they might want to read the Pilgrims' accounts of Cape Cod: "A hideous and desolate wilderness full of wild beasts and men." (A Voyage Long and Strange, by Tony Horwitz, 2008; Pg. 1) In other words, the Pilgrims abandoned their Provincetown settlement in 1620 because they hated the place. They may not want to emphasize that fact on the Provincetown tourist posters. Having visited Cape Cod I can assure you it is a pleasant enough place but my point is that accuracy is important in some respects, but may not be suitable for our current *uses* of history. But hey, if it's any consolation to the folks in Provincetown, none of the original Mayflower passengers' journals mention anything about Plymouth Rock either....

And anyway, whether Provincetown or Plymouth, we all know that Jamestown beat both, having been settled in 1607.....

How Historical Change Flows Through Us

2009-06-20T07:22:00.000-07:00

When I was about 18 or so, I had a job in a small town, and lived in the next small town about 5 miles down the road. I couldn't afford a car at the time, so each day I walked the 10 miles back and forth. No, this isn't one of those "I walked in 6 foot snow, uphill both ways, with wolves nipping at my heels" stories; I'm not an embittered old man yet. Yet. However, I did walk those 10 miles, and honestly, I didn't mind it; it kept me in shape, gave me time to ponder things -- I always liked to think -- and in any event, on occasion, some kind soul with a car would take pity on the poor slob that was me and pick me up along the way. On one such occasion, on a sunny spring day, just such a blessed soul, some young guy about my age, picked me up with his 1969 dusty-beige Dodge Charger. Since both towns were centered on the same highway, it was obvious where I was going, so we did not exchange any words at all. He simply pulled over, I got in, and off we went. Now, this was a time when someone driving a car from the 1960s was not unusual, and indeed this Charger had not been "restored", though it was kind of different for such a young guy to have such a sporty car like that at his age. In any event, one of the reasons we didn't talk was that we couldn't hear each other; he had installed an awesome sound system in this beast which already had a powerful 318 cubic inch V-8 engine, so as he stepped on the gas the G-forces pushed us back in our seats and the engine roared us down the road. Pardon me for a moment while I wipe the drool off my chin, and the tear from my eye as I look outside at the Corolla sitting in my driveway today. Anyway, it was a nice, warm spring day, the windows were open, the sky was blue, the wind was whipping through our hair; we both had long hair. Man, I had hair then! Sorry, I keep digressing; anyway, so there we went down the road with the wind whipping through our -- whimper -- hair. It was awesome. The song bellowing -- no, booming out of his sub-woofers was Heart's Barracuda, and I'd swear the road itself was vibrating and thudding with the bass line. As the song nears its triumphant crescendo with the words...

You're gonna burn, burn, burn, burn, burn it to the wick Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh, Barra, Barracuda!

...the bass line picks up in a thunderous, testosterone-infused blow-out of a hard rock ending. Suh-weet. When we got to town, I thanked the guy for a great ride -- I still remember that ride today, decades later -- and I don't think my feet touched the ground at all that day at work.

So today's topic is music. The experience of music has changed quite a bit over the past century or so, and that has changed the music itself. I got to thinking about this because I heard Don McLean, the guy who wrote "American Pie" ("...and them good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye, singing this'll be the day that I die."), on the local radio as he was complaining about how the new technology of music -- downloading songs, in particular -- was in his opinion destroying music by taking artistic control of the album away from the artist; fans can just cherry-pick whatever songs they like, usually the ones to make the charts or achieve radio play, without listening to the rest. This got me thinking a bit...

In the 18th century, there were a couple levels of music. There was a formal level performed by professional musicians who travelled around to venues -- you know, the Mozarts of the world. Given that the 18th century was, for most people, all work and very little play, these concerts were very popular for all classes of society. You might think Mozart, Bach or Beethoven are stuffy music for old folks, but they were the high entertainment of their day, the cable TV of 18th century Saturday nights. Everyone swarmed to these concerts, and the music was social music; it was written and performed for a live audience sitting just a few feet away. The musical themes were taken from popular cultural themes and images, something that everyone in the audience would relate to and understand. There was another kind of music as well, the, well, let's call it "low brow" music, which was working people sitting outside in the evenings looking to blow off some steam and have some cheap fun. In Europe and America this usually involved a guitar or fiddle, maybe a few percussion instruments, a singer, and people would laugh, sing and dance with the music. Here again, the themes of these songs were generic and aimed at their audience, in this case, lower-level classes in society, with themes taken from the hard working lives they knew.

Although styles changed over time or across regions, this basic culture of music remained the same for centuries. Until, that is, a bunch of guys in the 19th century invented a way to record sound. For a while there was some fumbling over formats, with for instance Thomas Edison perfecting a clay cylinder, but eventually in the early 20th century flat plastic (and shellacked) disks won the day, and the record album was born. This was a revolution; now, an average person could bring a concert played by the professional musicians into their home and listen to it anytime they wanted. At first, recording companies rushed to record all the great professional music that had been, until then, a special event thing, but soon recorders were recording any type of music they could get their hands on. At about this same time (or maybe I should say, right on time) some popular forms of music were raging across the U.S. -- the blues, jazz, marching music -- and very quickly recording studios began recoding and selling the stuff. It redefined "popular" because now anyone could listen to any music no matter where they lived. The thing about a record was that it had limited playing time, but soon artists adapted to that playing time and began producing music suited to records. Artists understood their audience had changed, had widened now and was no longer just the local yokels out on a Saturday night; it was everybody. Jazz, blues, and their strange sibling rock and roll all grew up around this record technology, and as technology improved allowing records to play both longer and better quality sound, artists adjusted their music along the way.

Another thing about records though was that they had to be flipped over mid-way through the performance, and with more sensitive players could skip easily if someone jumped or bumped into some furniture in the room. You also couldn't leave them in direct sunlight or let them get damp; they would warp like a tortilla chip. In the 1970s, someone came up with the idea of the cassette (after an embarrassing experiment with 8-tracks), which negated some of the more sensitive issues that record LPs ("long-playing") had. This was another revolution, because cassettes were smaller and easier to carry or store, and cassette players could be put in cars, which meant you didn't have to listen to the radio anymore -- you could bring your own music along. (My adventurous car ride described at the beginning involved a cassette player in the guy's awesome car.) Now music wasn't just for home, you could take your music almost anywhere. Sony got rid of the "almost" part in the early 1980s when they invented the Walkman, which now allowed you to take your music anywhere a person could go. Soon, to the consternation of the music companies, recordable cassettes were born and for the first time, listeners and fans could cherry-pick their favorite songs from multiple artists and put together their own mix cassettes, which I assure you we all quickly did.

With each step in this technological trail, music became a little more personal, a little more focused on the individual rather than the audience-crowd. Artists understood that they were writing (and performing) not for a hall full of bored locals, not for a bedroom full of teenagers, but now for a single person walking along a beach or on a street, listening to their music. If you listen to the popular music of the 1980s, 90s and our own decade, you see that music becomes more personal, almost like a private dialogue between the artist and listener.

The birth of the 'concept album' is usually credited to the Who's 1969 album Tommy, but if you listen to any Johnny Cash, Merl Haggard, Woody Guthrie, Ray Charles, Miles Davis or etc. album, it'll become obvious that the concept album was pretty much born with the record. The concept album is seen by many as the epitome of the album, of the fullest artistic realization of what modern popular music can bring you: Pink Floyd's The Wall, Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Janis Joplin's Pearl; great music that tells a story, a story for us all. I'm not complaining or bemoaning the changes technology has made, just observing. OK, I am complaining a little bit. The old Roman saying, Omnia mutantur, nihil interit -- "Everything changes, but nothing is lost" -- applies here, I suppose.

Technology has marched on, with the inception of digital music, which again revolutionized music. Digital music can be carried in even smaller portable devices that make the old Walkmans look like bricks we wore on our hips, and it can be distributed on the internet. This has opened up the music catalog because it costs almost nothing to store and make digital music available online, which means that even the oldest and most obscure recordings can be made available. It used to be that for albums by bands not yet in the popular musical mainstream, you had to either go to record shops in places like New York or Chicago which carried obscure stuff, or you could order through your local record store and, if they had your album in their catalog, they'd ship it to the store in 2 to 6 weeks. I am still waiting for an album I ordered at a store in New York state back in 1988. (Hint, hint: this refers to the unreliability of the process.) Digital music has also taken a lot of the hot air out of the music industry's sails as anyone can sell their music online and market it fairly cheaply, a fact that the industry tried to ignore for a while in the late 1990s and early 2000s by suing anybody who suggested that it still wasn't 1982. Eventually they caved in and adapted, but the album as a format for music -- through the LP record, cassette and CD -- is dying, as sagging sales show. This is what Don McLean was complaining about, and I understand his pain. Folks like me who remember albums still think in that format, and we're the dying breed of fogies who still buy albums. Nowadays, digital music has undermined not only the album but the song format as well; digital music allows 13 year old kids to cut up and combine different parts of recorded songs through "mashup" software, and distribute it online, so that one file may combine Beethoven, Dr. Dre, a clip from a speech by Bush, Metallica and some Bonnie Raitt. I have to admit that some of that stuff isn't too bad, a throwback to some of the better techno stuff of the 1990s that also combined known songs and wove them around original music.

I don't have a moral here, other than to say that my story at the beginning was a point in time, a specific way in which people at that time listened to and enjoyed music. It was unique to its time, and while people still go to concerts and listen to music in their cars -- with quite frankly far better quality sound systems -- the experience of music has changed. I agree with Don McLean that I will miss the album as a sort canvass on which artists painted their music -- I think Fiona Apples's Tidal, or Cyrus Chestnut's Soul Food, or Neil Young's Prairie Wind are great albums from which I'd never want to cherry-pick individual songs -- but I am also grateful for having access to odd and obscure musical recordings I probably would never have learned about were it not for the net and digital technology. In the 1980s as a rabid Led Zeppelin fan, I read eagerly about legendary concerts of their golden age in the early-to-mid-1970s, but now I can actually listen to bootlegs of those concerts. Amazing. Perhaps ironically, the digital age has also made all of Don McLean's recordings available to me, something which would not have been possible in the age when the record store was king. So, given all this, it will be interesting to see how the newer generations listen to and incorporate music into their lives. I, for one, am going to pop in Heart's Little Queen CD right now. Thumpa, thumpa, thumpa, oh yeah.....

The Past as the Present

2009-06-03T09:05:00.000-07:00

This is going to hurt but it's for your own good:

Memories
light the corners of my mind
Misty water-colored memories
of the way we were
Scattered pictures
of the smiles we left behind
Smiles we gave to one another
For the way we were
Can it be that it was all so simple then?
Or has time re-written every line?
If we had the chance to do it all over again,
Tell me, would we? Could we?

That's right, I've resorted to quoting Barbra Streisand. Actually, back in the 1960s she was pretty hot, but my hormones aside, today's historical meditation is on historical memory, or how -- and why -- we remember history. Today's thoughts were inspired by this being the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacres in Beijing, and the fact that the average school student in China today has absolutely no idea that those events ever took place. The early Soviet historian Mikhail Pokrovsky once said that History is just politics viewed backwards, and to a certain extent he's right -- we view the past through the lens of how we live today. Of course, Pokrovsky was a hack as a historian and the more menacing meaning behind his statement was that governments or political extremists should generate and propagate very selectively-screened "histories" to justify their goals and means of achieving them. He apparently hit on a good idea because the 20th and 21st centuries have been filled with all sorts of ideologically-charged propaganda masquerading as History, but still, does what really happened matter? Does it somehow cut through all the political noise and still impact our lives? It does for Chinese citizens today, who, whether they understand the reasons behind it or not, have been deprived of access to several popular social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and yes even Blogger as a nervous Chinese dictatorship tries to quash any memorials to the events of twenty years ago. But still, we all, the 6.8 billion of us, do live in a world where the Tiananmen Square massacre did happen, and it has impacted our lives even if only in subtle ways we are less aware of. We each carry around a unique perspective on those events, even if we don't actively think about them. History, like language, is a living thing that changes with us, and shapes us as much as we constantly re-shape it with our changing worldview. I'll be returning to this theme in future posts but for now, I want to focus on some very brave people who deserve to be remembered:

Show me the money!

2009-05-16T07:30:00.000-07:00

For my first installment in this blog, I'll take a look briefly at how we consume History, or History as a product. I'm sure a bunch of you just flinched now and maybe spilled your coffee, and that is a perfectly healthy reaction, but nonetheless the reality is that somebody somewhere has to pay for historical research to get done, and the answer to "Who pays for this stuff?" impacts the end product.

I like to compare History in this sense to art. Think for a minute about art history; if you've ever taken an art history class, you've no doubt spent time looking at the cave art from Lascaux, some Byzantine icons and murals, maybe, for some of the more culturally inclusive classes you spent time looking at Buddhist and Islamic art styles, then of course you hit the Renaissance -- Michelangelo, Bellini, van Eyck, Duerer, etc. -- and then you rapidly moved into modern art. All amazing stuff, with architecture, sculpture, mosaics, etc. all thrown in for good measure. The big hanging question for all these starving artists was, "Who is going to pay me to do this stuff?" A big (and oft-ignored) part of the story behind the changes in art styles and focus has been who commissioned and bought the stuff. I'm not quite sure who "paid" the artists at Lascaux, but medieval European art was primarily financed by churches and wealthy families, while Renaissance art saw growth in the latter category at the expense of the former. As centralized governments -- cities, provinces, national -- became stronger and wealthier, they too began to commission art and hire artists. In our modern age, art is primarily fed by an open market with individuals, governments and a new phenomenon, the art museum, all competing to generate and display art. Is it any wonder then that (Western) art has moved from its medieval, communal and religious-themed origins (when churches were the primary consumers) to a more secular and often narcissistically individualistic theme in our own times, given who is funding the stuff nowadays?

So too goes History. History as a discipline was really born somewhere in the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe -- yeah, I know about Herodotus and Procopius, and you can argue about the value of oral histories like Beowulf, but History as an objective, disciplined study of human civilizations is a relatively modern thing -- and it was primarily driven by the Renaissance-era universities. Ah, the universities, where if one could achieve a tenured position, life was relatively safe and comfortable, and one could focus on research, publish the findings when complete, give the occasional public lecture. Life was sweet. Well, no more of that nonsense. Europe's early universities were funded by wealthy aristocratic sponsors, while in the 19th and 20th centuries, governments increasingly took over. In the 21st century, however, certainly in America but increasingly so in Europe and elsewhere as well, universities are becoming businesses who are funded in part by government grants still, true, but as well by wealthy donors (individuals and businesses) and their ability to attract funding is tied directly to their ability to attract top-rate students who in turn prove to be top-rate performers in their chosen academic fields. In this environment, universities have put immense pressure on all their academic arms, History departments included, to turn as much ground-breaking, Earth-shattering (and headline-grabbing) research as possible. Publish! Publish! Publish! professors are told, and they are also pressed into speaking circuits so that every opportunity for them to show their face and show off their expertise is seen as a marketing opportunity for the university.

Now, it may seem like I'm complaining about the current state of affairs but I'm not; I'm merely describing them. They are what they are, but their importance for us here today is that they influence and impact what historical research gets done. In today's market-savvy environment, aside from strictly academic journals and conferences, History is focused towards the lowest common denominator, namely, its ability to compete and sell (almost as a form of entertainment) in an open marketplace. If you visit bookstores in different countries, you'll be struck by what subjects crowd the shelves of popular bookstores. Each country tends to have their own favorites, their own biases. Now, there is historical research done on just about every possible subject, and one could argue that the market has made room for the less popular subjects by provided them an outlet in the form of the internet, where you can find and buy just about anything, but when it comes to your local bookstore, the stuff on the shelf is treated as any selling inventory: what moves the fastest? This is why there will always be more books on military history -- because more men read history than women, and nothing's as testosterone-infused and exciting as warfare -- than books on, say, the 18th and 19th century Shaker communities, or how different grains have shaped civilizations. In a certain sense this is fine because, well, at least some historical research is getting done somewhere and someone's reading it, but it does have the dangerous effect of skewing the popular understanding of History, that our ancestors did nothing but heroically storm enemy beaches and triumphantly plant the flag on mountain tops. We're in danger of developing a historical myopia which, for some, may be a minor issue, but in a world where some nutcases drugged up on a very self-serving vision of History decided to fly passenger airliners into skyscrapers, I would suggest that History really does play a part in how our present world unfolds, our understanding of our past -- however flawed -- often does impact our world.

So what can we do? There are all sorts of arguments to be had about the state of academia today and what should be done about it, but I think the real answer is a more democratic one; namely, that the responsibility for making an effort to truly understand our past lies with each one of us. It means viewing History less as mere entertainment -- all those exciting World War II programs on the History Channel -- and more as a part of who we are today. It means maybe reaching for that book on the Shakers or visiting a local museum or reenactors community instead of watching troops storm Omaha Beach again. There's nothing wrong with military history, of course, and there certainly is a proper time for remembering the heroes who took Normandy in 1944, but when you look at some 10,000 years of human history, World War II is important but only a small part of our larger picture. Making the effort to learn about other aspects of our past, such as how great-grandma in the 19th century dealt with feminine hygiene issues, or how the spread of Scottish textile manufacturing to New England in the 19th century transformed life there and also led to, among other things, child labor laws and the invention of the computer -- these are as much a part of who we are today as what happened at Gettysburg in July, 1863.

Welcome to History as Perspective!

2009-05-13T19:12:00.000-07:00

When I was a very young lad, my mother used to occasionally take me to these parks with lots of stones and flowers, with very manicured lawns and high iron fences. The dress code was formal, which precluded me from doing what a three or four year old boy wanted to do, which was run around, kick things and roll in the mud. These were extremely boring visits, usually shoehorned into a day of errands, and as I was too young to ask for the car keys, I had no choice but to go and try to be on my best behavior. Luckily, these visits only happened a few times a year, but when your entire life so far amounts to about 36 months, a few times a year seems like overkill. Anyway, I don't remember how old I was, but somehow my mother was able to impress upon me one day while on one of these visits just what it was we were visiting, and I can remember the revelation as it struck me like a one ton delivery truck: there were people buried beneath those stones, real people! I remember walking along a row of stones, noticing somehow for the first time the names and dates on each stone, realizing that each one represented a lifetime, a whole collection of memories. I thought of all the stories I'd heard about our family, about my grandparents and their parents, a huge treasure-trove of anecdotes about jobs they'd had, pranks they'd pulled -- you definitely don't ever want to turn your back on anyone from my family -- fish they'd caught, horses and cars they'd owned, all these stories that made these ancestors of mine legendary, and I knew that all these people buried beneath these stones must have had similar stories to tell.

Thus began my life-long love affair with History. It's that human element behind the cultural masks we like to hide behind, the huge array of ingenious ways we've invented over the past 10,000 years to fulfill the core basic human needs that intrigues me. I'm not nostalgic; while I'd give anything to get into a time machine and visit the 19th -- or the 9th -- century, I will also want to come back. I'm pretty happy with the 21st century, thank you. It's just that I enjoy trying to understand how those who came before us lived and saw their world -- our world -- and how their lives unfolded. It's also not about glorification or ancestor-worship; the past has had its share of jerks, idiots and bullies as well. Well, de mortuis nil nisi bonum, as they say.

Most folks nowadays experience history primarily through school, which they remember as being boring for having to memorize endless lists of battles, kings, treaties and inventions, or through the wonder of modern cable television, which is more exciting but would give an outsider the impression that the vast majority of human history has been people stabbing or shooting one another. History is more than just lists and pictures of people in funny clothes, however; history is our understanding of the past, of how what they were eventually came to be what we are today. This means that History -- uppercase "H" there -- while not a "hard" science like botany or geology, is still a pretty serious scholarly discipline that, aside from its own research methods, also relies on everything from archaeology to linguistics to modern cultural anthropology to, well, everything. Really. History involves everything from lawn mowers to your pets to bagels to hairstyles to underwear to the Hubble Telescope; everything. The problem is that since we are looking at the past, well, we drag ourselves into the mix a bit. When we look at History, we can't help but look at it from our modern perspective, from our own conceptions of what life is about. We can try to be objective, but quite frankly we're a bit limited in that department. What this all adds up to is that History isn't just a description of the past, it's an exploration of our relationship to the past as well, and that means our relationship to the present to boot. Exploring something about Grandma's life is a de facto exploration of our own lives. Man, aren't we a bunch of narcissistic egotists?

That's what this blog is going to be about, my meditations on History, the past, and how we look at both. I am an amateur historian who is (hopefully) about to be published for the first time, but while I've always loved reading and experiencing History through multiple sources -- and I'll occasionally share some of those insights here as well -- I've also spent a lot of time reading and thinking about the theory behind History, behind how we look at the past and how we apply it today; it is some of those findings and ideas I'll be kicking around here. So please join in to the discussion and share some of your own observations, and feel free to pick a part mine -- although, with my paper-thin skin and fragile egg-shell ego (backed up by a ferocious, man-eating wife), I'll have to insist that all discussion be respectful.