But It Will Kill Trees....

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.

Even the Brooklyn Bridge has its History...

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?

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?

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.

Show me the money!

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!

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.