Tragedy in Poland

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?

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.....

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

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

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

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!

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.