History Lessons

I thought about entitling this "When we die, this is who will replace us."

This is from a friend's facebook page talking about just one day, and one question of one day, in his history class:

Most disturbing question of the day: While discussing ancient migrations from Siberia to Alaska, a student in my U.S. History class asked if this means we now think that the Puritans were NOT the first people to settle in America.

Yes. We now think that.

One of the comments was from another teacher: "I have you ALL beat. A student of mine asked me if I had served in WW2, and she was serious."

Years ago another friend of mine had students in her North Carlina history class who didn't know which came first, World War I or World War II. Another one thought the Civil War (ours, presumably) came after World War I.

ed. majors, learning to mold the minds of our future.
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The news as Sci-Fi

I have always enjoyed Science Fiction stories because it is like reading historical fiction where all the facts are made up.

Sometimes it is worthwhile to attempt that since all prediction is essentially an exercise in science fiction, or counter-history fiction. I have dipped into The Next Decade by George Friedman where he attempts to do that for the next 10 years. I may not go any further into it, but the attempt at least looks interesting.

And then there is this wonderful bit of prediction as 'history' in today's Washington Post by Jeff Greenfield entitled "What Happens to American Politics if We Default? Hello, Third Party." I think he may be right, if not immediately than in the long run.

If Sentenciae has a theme, it is that all American elites have disgraced themselves in the first decade of the 21rst century. The nutters in the Tea Party have gotten that part right and they are the first clear reaction to it. I think that essentially we are experiencing the birth pangs of a new civilization which is never easy. Western civilization is trying to give birth to a new syncretic civilization the same way Hellenic civilization gave birth to Hellenistic civilization.

We live in interesting times.

Westernistic? Occidentalistic?

Without Comment

Transmission problems

Well, Murty has transmission problems on his WRX which is going to cost a bunch but I am talking about a different type of transmission problem.

This kind.

The perfect illustration for why historians have troubles with eyewitness accounts, oral history, legends, and recopied texts.


if it were easy it wouldn't be fun

Slavery, the Civil War, and our need for myths

I tell my classes, when I am in the mood to, that almost all they know about the Civil War is wrong, including their idea of a Rebel Yell. Yet we all need our comfortable little myths. The Old South has more than its fair share (Gone with the Wind and "Birth of a Nation" just for starters).

Here is an attempt, probably unsuccessful, on the part of the Washington Post to demythify some of it.

"Heritage not hatred" is the latest motto of the unreconstructed. I know better.

History is Bunk

At least in the state of Virginia which has adopted history texts written by a non-historian for the ignorant chosen by the inept. Here's an snippet of an editorial in today's Washington Post:

Among the mistakes: wrong date for America's entry into World War I, incorrect tally of states that joined the Confederacy, gross understatement of casualties at the battles of Bull Run. "I absolutely could not believe the number of mistakes - wrong dates and wrong facts everywhere," said Ronald Heinemann, one of the historians who reviewed Five Ponds Press's "Our Virginia: Past and Present." Reviewing another of the publisher's books, historian Mary Miley Theobald concluded the mistakes were "just too shocking for words." The unusual review of the books followed the disclosure by The Post's Kevin Sieff in October that "Our Virginia" included the statement (quite incorrect) that thousands of black soldiers fought for the South during the Civil War.

This is embarrassing on so many levels. Just for the record, when in the final desperate days of the Confederacy Gen. Lee pleaded with the politicians to let him recruit slaves with the promise of freedom the politicians told him no way. Then the Confederacy was put out of its misery.

It seems to be a collision between political and financial constraints. I.e. the books were cheap and they didn't ruffle any ideological feathers.

you get what you pay for.

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Computer progress

The first Apple computer. For sale: $166,000

A little Mongol history from Jon Stewart

Carmen brought home from the library Jon Stewart's (or his team of writers') new book Earth (the Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race. On one page is a supposed birth announcement that I will quote in full, because it appeals to my sense of humor and they get the history right, mostly.

Genghis and Chaka Khan
are pleased to announce
the birth of their son
JOCHI
November 5, 1185

At the Khentti Maternity Yurt

May he be a blight on the World!

This is hilarious if you are into Mongol humor.

Carmen and I once named a dog Jochi (though later he had to change his name to Riley-ugh)

History as it never happened

History that never happened

Down in the cellar the Gestapo was licensed to practice what the Ministry of Justice called "heightened interogation." The rules had been drawn up by civilized men in warm offices, and they stipulated the presence of a doctor.

...

Inside, beyond the SS sentries and the creaky revolving door, the board announced the current state of terrorist alert. There were four codes, in ascending order of seriousness: green, blue, black, and red. Today, as always, the alert was red.

Random quotes from The Fatherland by Robert Harris. It was published in 1992, a work of imagination about 1964 that never could have happened. It never did happen.

The Value of History

From The Fatherland, a dystopia about a victorious Third Reich.

Clio, the Muse of History, guarded the Reichsarchiv: an Amazonian nude designed by Adolf Ziegler, the "Reich Master of the Pubic Hair." ... Behind her, a sign had been carved above the entrance to the archive, gold leaf inlaid on polished granite. A quotation from the Fuhrer: FOR ANY NATION, THE RIGHT HISTORY IS WORTH 100 DIVISIONS.

Later, the hero March enters the archives with an archivist, Halder.

"'The right history is worth a hundred divisions,' remember? That's the place where the wrong history goes. Shit. Look out."

Halder pulled March into a doorway. A security guard was coming towards them, bent like a miner in an underground shaft, pushing a metal cart. March thought he was certain to see them, but he went straight past, grunting with the effort. He stopped at the metal barrier and unlocked it. There was a glimpse of a furnace, a roar of flames, before the door clanged shut behind him.

And such is the value of honest history.

About that mosque...

I was amused this morning, amid all the overheated hubbub about the proposed mosque and or Islamic center three or four blocks from ground zero in Manhattan, to read about efforts for the Boy Scouts of America to make their current jamboree Muslim friendly. Along with a lot of high tech gadgets an "inflatable mosque provides a place for Muslim scouts to worship."

Amazing. As a former Scout who actually earned three or four merit badges (and wished there had been one for reading large books about history) I have a certain amount of respect for the institution but am a bit bemused, particularly when the article describes the latest scouting styles.

Some boys sport lime-green hair to match the T-shirts of their non-dress uniforms, and most wear loose-fitting knee-length shorts, some surfer-dude cool with bright swirls.

What would Baden-Powell make of this?

And having almost finished the Baburnama, I wonder: wouldn't the first Moghul have loved to have had an inflatable mosque to take along on his raids? Not to mention his wine parties.

Word origins

If you have been reading this blog at all you know I like to play with words and to learn where they came from (I also like weird little cars). Today in my morning reading of Marco Polo I found the following among the translator's notes:

The same romance brings in the story of the Stone of Samarkand [used for the throne of Timur-i-lang), and accounts for its sanctity in Saracen eyes because it had long formed a pedestal for Mahound!

And this notion gave rise to the use of Mawmet for an idol in general; whilst from the Mahommerie or place of Islamite worship the name of mummery came to be applied to idolatrous or unmeaning rituals; both very unjust etymologies. Thus of mosques in Richard Coeur de Lion:

"Kyrkes they made of Crystene Lawe,
And her Mawmettes lete downe drawe." (Weber, II. 228.)

So Correa calls a golden idol, which was taken by Da Gama in a ship of Calicut, "an image of Mahomed" (372). Don Quixote too, who ought to have known better, cites with admiration the feat of Rinaldo in carrying off, in spite of forty Moors, a golden image of Mahomed.

I read Don Quixote once, and think the writer misses the point. Cervantes was nothing if not ironic, and sometimes downright sarcastic.

Mummery! A much neglected word. Now I know where it came from.

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Poetry Nook

A poem by Longfellow retelling Marco Polo's story of the destruction of the Caliph in Baghdad by Alau, better known as Hulagu Khan, grandson of Chinggis Khan. His brother was Kubla Khan who did "a stately pleasure-dome decree" in another pretty good poem.

"I said to the Kalif: 'Thou art old,
Thou hast no need of so much gold.
Thou shouldst not have heaped and hidden it here,
Till the breath of Battle was hot and near,
But have sown through the land these useless hoards
To spring into shining blades of swords,
And keep thine honour sweet and clear.
* * * * *
Then into his dungeon I locked the drone,
And left him to feed there all alone
In the honey-cells of his golden hive:
Never a prayer, nor a cry, nor a groan
Was heard from those massive walls of stone,
Nor again was the Kalif seen alive.'
This is the story, strange and true,
That the great Captain Alau
Told to his brother, the Tartar Khan,
When he rode that day into Cambalu.
By the road that leadeth to Ispahan."

History as Cinema

Doesn't really work. Plots are too unbelievable. Matt Yglesias cites Robert Farley who cites ... this guy named Scott [this is similar to the manuscript tradition beloved among medieval historians].

So Doctor Who is not a complete loss. But then there are some shows that go completely beyond the pale of enjoyability, until they become nothing more than overwritten collections of tropes impossible to watch without groaning.

I think the worst offender here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called "World War II".

Let's start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Show allSecret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn't look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apoplectic rage when he doesn't get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.

I wouldn't even mind the lack of originality if they weren't so heavy-handed about it. Apparently we're supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and untrustworthy they could be? And that they diverted all their resources to use in making ever bigger and scarier death camps, even in the middle of a huge war? Real people just aren't that evil. And that's not even counting the part where as soon as the plot requires it, they instantly forget about all the racism nonsense and become best buddies with the definitely non-Aryan Japanese.

Not that the good guys are much better. Their leader, Churchill, appeared in a grand total of one episode before, where he was a bumbling general who suffered an embarrassing defeat to the Ottomans of all people in the Battle of Gallipoli. Now, all of a sudden, he's not only Prime Minister, he's not only a brilliant military commander, he's not only the greatest orator of the twentieth century who can convince the British to keep going against all odds, he's also a natural wit who is able to pull out hilarious one-liners practically on demand. I know he's supposed to be the hero, but it's not realistic unless you keep the guy at least vaguely human.

And this goes on and on, managing to be both hilarious and instructive. Never dismiss an historical story on the grounds of plausibility. There are usually other reasons.

BUT, this brings up a SERIOUS QUESTION for all you Sci-Fi fans out there! In the late 60s or early 70s I remember reading a story in either IF or ANALOG magazines (I think) written as if it were a scholarly paper by an historian completely debunking the 'myth' of Hitler and World War II as entirely too implausible and clearly contrived.

Does anyone remember such a story? Do you remember who wrote it or where I can find it?

please.

ps: who is Amy Pond?

David Frum goes historical

On the Chinese Song Dynasty no less. He is reading several books about the period and is highly impressed. The Song were the Dynasty before the Mongols and is generally agreed to be the period when Chinese civilization reached its heights (except for personal hygiene according to Frum).

It's worth reading. Though I have to laugh at his last paragraph:

Premodern history is a story of cruelty. If half the world’s people lived in China in the year 1000, at least half the world’s cruelty took place there too – and probably much more than half, since the Chinese were so much better organized than anyone else.

Aside from not daring to try to calculate the proportion of cruelty that was actually Chinese, I would have thought that the 20th Century had pretty much retired the competition in cruelty.

and Early Modern? Wars of Religion anyone?

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A common problem

Well, at least for me.

Carmen brought this cartoon back from her three week trip in that pestilential swamp-hole to our south. It reminded her of me.

OK - I see her point.

R. A. Lafferty and the Semitic Germans of 300 BC

The Science Fiction School of History

One of my favorite history books is The Fall of Rome by R. A. Lafferty, who was better known for his science fiction writing. I am not sure about his science fiction, but when such a creative imagination was turned loose on the declining years of the Roman Empire and the career of Alaric the Goth, the results were spectacular. The odd thing is, Lafftery really knew the ancient sources and created an image of a living, breathing world with complex characters whose lives made no concessions to our 19th century notions of how it really was. Any historian of the period worth their salt could probably pick holes in his story, but I learned a lot about history, and a lot more about the disciplined, informed historical imagination from this book. [for some big chunks of it, check here]

One of the odder notions that he put into the book was the idea that the Balti, the leading clan of the Visigoths, were not originally from Germania but were aliens to northern Europe. He makes the cryptic statement that the noble house had come from a strange land hundreds of years earlier and they remembered Rome. If I recall rightly after 40 years the italics were in the original. Nowhere in the text does he explain this but on the map on the inside of the book cover there is a note showing Carthaginians coming to the coast of Germania, right about at the foot of the Danish peninsula.

An interesting but wild idea, backed up by nothing I have always thought.

Then I read a book by the linguist John McWhorter called Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue. In the last chapter he points out that proto-Germanic, the ancestor of Norse, English, German, Dutch and Gothic, is like no other version of Proto-Indo-European found in Europe. It has some very odd features (e.g. all proto-Indo-European p's become f's as pater ---> father). McWhorter, whose specialty is the formation of creoles, believes that these oddities are typical of a language, such as Proto-Indo European, that had been picked up by a number of people speaking an entirely different type of language. He then suggests that the specific oddities of proto-Germanic would be explained by contact with a Semitic language. At first you scoff, then you read his examples and you begin to wonder.

But what Semitic languages would be out on the North Sea coast near the Danish-German border in around 300 BC? Well, Phoenician. Which as Punic was the language of Carthage.

So now I am curious: just where did Lafferty come up with this particular idea, a half century ago.

his day job was working as an electrical engineer, Mr Sobrino.

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Consolidation

Consolidation:

"At the opening of the fourteenth century of the Christian Era, the North and Central Italian regions of Lombardy, Romagna, Tuscany, Umbria, and the Marches were partitioned between seventy or eighty city-states; or, in other worlds, there was a larger number of fully-self-governing states in one half of Italy in A.D. 1300 than can be counted in 1935 in the whole world."

Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History

On the whole, Toynbee thinks that the replacement of the Italian city-state model by larger nation-states was a Bad Thing.

but then, he is largely forgotten these days, so what did he know?

Reading projects for the summer

I have set aside an enormous pile of books to read this summer. Probably overly ambitious, but I might as well dream.

One that I am reading on Gutenberg.org is Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence, a memoir of his service during World War I among the Arabs of what would become Saudi Arabia. It is fascinating on many levels, not least as a peek into an arresting and complex personality. Lawrence is a superb observer of the natural world and an even better one of human natures. The pen-portraits he draws of so many are fully fleshed, subtle, and convincing.

But Lawrence is a peculiar person, one who constantly goes off on tangents you would not expect. Here he is after a battle in which the Arabs destroyed most of a battalion of Turkish troops.

The dead men looked wonderfully beautiful. The night was shining gently down, softening them into new ivory. Turks were white-skinned on their clothed parts, much whiter than the Arabs; and these soldiers had been very young. Close round them lapped the dark wormwood, now heavy with dew, in which the ends of the moonbeams sparkled like sea-spray. The corpses seemed flung so pitifully on the ground, huddled anyhow in low heaps. Surely if straightened they would be comfortable at last. So I put them all in order, one by one, very wearied myself, and longing to be of these quiet ones, not of the restless, noisy, aching mob up the valley, quarrelling over the plunder, boasting of their speed and strength to endure God knew how many toils and pains of this sort; with death, whether we won or lost, waiting to end the history.

After a battle that had lasted most of the day in a heat Lawrence describes as the worst he had ever experienced in Arabia and in which he had exerted himself far beyond his last nerve, he finds time to wander among the dead, admiring their beauty and arranging them in neat little rows.

A most peculiar fellow. And absolutely ruthless.

actually it was Anactoria who showed me how to find Lawrence on the internet. I don't think she visits anymore, but thanks anyway.

Irish History

Over on David Frum's blog, there is a post by Sean Linnaine on Irish history. Well worth reading, but I have to wonder about this one:

Irishmen have served honorably in every army on the face of the Earth. Irish soldiers have distinguished themselves in battle in every war from the time the Romans first tried to land on their shores, to this very day.

Well, Roman governor Agricola did boast to his son-in-law one day on the beach that he could take that island with one legion, and a few scattered merchants probably made there way to Erin, but otherwise I don't remember the Romans trying to land on their shores.

Unless he's confusing the Britons with the Irish.