History

I’ve written, revised and rejected a number of thoughts about the terrorist massacre in Madrid. I would have liked to have written something like this.

I’ve just bought a double-bill of Umberto Eco’s ‘The Name of the Rose’ and Barbara Tuchman’s ‘A Distant Mirror’ for Henry’s and my younger sister. Nelly’s a huge fan of historical mysteries who can tell you more about Richard III and the murdered princes, the Holy Grail and Pompei than is probably healthy for a 16 year old.

I thought Tuchman would be a good all-round introduction to medieval European history – I bet I’m not the only one who read it as a teenager and took a degree in medieval history as a result. I was amazed to see the book is now over 20 years old and I wondered – has it aged well? How is the book regarded by medievalists? Any other recommendations?

Here’s another question while I’m tapping CT’s collective brain power; Nelly’s thinking of applying to Oxford to study history, maybe with politics. (I think she should do PPE, but she says I’ll have to live vicariously through my own children if I have them, and not through my younger siblings.) Any ideas/prejudices/anecdotes about which colleges to apply to? The little I know about Oxford colleges I learnt from University Challenge.

Where’s a good place to be challenged but not hot-housed? What are the women’s colleges like? (bearing in mind that one blue-stocking in the family is probably enough) How to avoid the rugger-buggers? (fine people, but you don’t necessarily want to be sharing accommodation with them for 3 years.) And, how important is the choice of college for both academic and social life? Answers on the back of a postcard…

Simon Schama protests too much. He claims that academic history is “obsessed with scientific data and obsessive footnotes rather than good storytelling”:http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=493908 and calls for a return to a “golden age” of historical writing — Gibbon, Macaulay, Carlyle. This mostly seems like promotional fluff for his “new TV series”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2004/02_february/16/historians_genius.shtml. Yet “Timothy Burke”:http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/3715.html and “Invisible Adjunct”:http://www.invisibleadjunct.com/archives/000471.html broadly concur with Schama, though as cogs in the “juggernaut of academic history” that he condemns they add the caveat that “a broadly communicative, publically engaged rhetoric of history is dependent upon the existence of a body of much more meticulous scholarship.” That’s true — but it’s more than a caveat!

Schama’s Great Historians fused authoritative judgment, great range and vivid prose and brought the result to large audiences, helping to define the practice of history as they went. What fun it must have been. He wants those things, too. Yet although he speaks to an audience bigger than any of his heroes, Schama must know he can’t occupy that niche, because it no longer exists. The vast differentiation of the academic division of labor over the past century and a half destroyed it. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty of excellent, accessible narrative history written for a mass audience by respected historians. Schama’s complaints notwithstanding, you’ll find your local bookshop stocked full of the stuff — far more, alas, than you’ll find excellent and accessible sociology, political science or economics. But, unavoidably, these histories are written on the back of all those footnoted monographs, and they cannot command the field in the way that Carlyle or Macaulay might have.

Once asked what he specialized in, the sociologist “Daniel Bell”:http://www.pbs.org/arguing/nyintellectuals_bell.html replied, “Generalizations.” It’s a line worth stealing for job interviews, but it tells an important truth. Being a generalist these days is itself a kind of specialization. Like any other role in an advanced division of labor, it depends on thousands of others, most notably all those monographic specialists dug into the archives. Timothy Burke would like to see historians be trained “to write well, to seek audiences outside the academy, to stretch their powers of persuasion.” Those are worthwhile goals, but whereas the mills of academic specialization can grind exceeding small, we can’t all have our own BBC miniseries. Besides, I don’t think Schama simply wants historians to write better prose. Rather, he himself yearns to play the same role today that Macaulay or Gibbon did in their time. He covets the way they could grasp their subject whole and bring it to almost the entire reading public. Which of us scribblers wouldn’t want to do the same? But his “off-lead qualifications and dilutions”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2004/02_february/16/historians_genius.shtml suggest that, deep down, he knows that’s the sort of anachronistic wishfulness that historians teach us to avoid.

“Timothy Burke”:http://www.swarthmore.edu/socsci/tburke1/perma22004.html has a fascinating short post on Neal Stephenson’s _Quicksilver_ as a Foucauldian genealogy. As Burke says, Stephenson succeeds in looking at history from a skew angle, making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar. Read the piece – it’s an example of the very best kind of academic blogging. All that I can add is to point out one of the ways in which Stephenson (and Thomas Pynchon in _Mason and Dixon_) tries to defamiliarize the past; the use of anachronism. At various points in the narrative, Stephenson introduces modern ideas or inventions into the margins of his historical narrative (he can get away with this more easily, because _Quicksilver_ is an alternative history of the world, a history that never happened). He does this so as to make a tiger’s leap into the past.

Stephenson uses anachronisms to jar our sense of the seventeenth century as a fixed stage along the progression that has led ineluctably to the modern world. He wants to bring home to us how the past was, like the modern age, a ferment of possibilities. It could have developed in many different directions. In _Quicksilver_, the past and the present are related not because the one has led to the other, but because they are both the same thing at different stages; vortices of possibility. Even if _Quicksilver_ isn’t really a historical novel, it’s a novel of history, which to my mind is a much rarer and more interesting thing.

I was at a meeting the other day where the question of “normal” boy and girl behaviour came up. I mean by this what girls and boys, especially teenagers, take to be normal behaviour for those of their own and the opposite gender. I _don’t_ mean what they ought to do. The opinion was voiced by others present that these norms had shifted appreciably in the last twenty or thirty years. Wearing makeup, for instance, they thought, was far more acceptable for boys today that for boys “twenty or thirty years ago”.

Since I was myself a teenager thirty years ago, I think I can say with some authority that this is mistaken, at least for the UK. Sexual intercourse was, as we know, “invented in 1963”:http://alt.venus.co.uk/weed/writings/poems/plam.htm , and by the early-to-mid-1970s glam-rock in the shape of David Bowie and Marc Bolan had made all kinds of flirting with cross-dressing and ambiguous gender identity acceptable for teenage boys. Punk followed almost immediately afterwards. (I’m told that things were different and more backward in the US, which, for James Miller, in his magisterial “Flowers in the Dustbin”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684865602/junius-20 , explains Bowie’s initial lack of success over there — until he toned things down.) But my guess is that, in the UK at least, teenagers were more ready to play with mixed sexual signals in the 1970s than they are today (and have been since the advent of “new laddism” in the 1990s).

My reading of the evolution of teenage mores may, of course, be wide of the mark. But my point in making it is just to observe how common is the notion of a “dreamtime” about “twenty or thirty years ago” when 1950s moral and cultural norms are supposed to have applied. Probably such standards didn’t obtain in the 1950s either, but people look on the past with a permanently moving horizon before which things were different, everybody was straight, lived in conventional families and playing with sexuality (and indeed being serious about it) was the preserve of intellectuals, poets and German cabaret artistes. It wasn’t like that.

Two hundred years after the foundation of the world’s first black republic, “Ian Thomson, writing in the Guardian, hails Toussaint L’Ouverture”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1134518,00.html . For those who don’t know his story, C.L.R. James’s “The Black Jacobins”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679724672/junius-20 is the place to look. And here is Wordsworth’s poem in full:

bq. Toussaint, the most unhappy man of men!
Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough
Within thy hearing, or thy head be now
Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den; —
O miserable Chieftain! where and when
Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:
Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,
Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;
There’s not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.

“Unlearned Hand”:http://www.enbanc.org/archives/000634.html wonders what we’ll think about America in a hundred years:

bq. Here’s the game I’d like to play, if you’d all be so obliged: name the one thing about America as it is now that the America (if it exists as such) of 2104 will look back on with the most admiration/envy/nostalgia, and the one thing the America of 2104 will look back on with the most disgust/pity.

I’d like to say that we’ll be disgusted by the amount of poverty in the 21st century–and how little Americans did to alleviate it. But that’s probably too optimistic. We’ll pity our inability to cure diseases that will have been eradicated over the next century. Much harder, I think, to decide what we’ll admire. Maybe we’ll be nostalgic for the days before our permanent attachment to computers.

One of the most striking historical facts I’ve learned this year is that George Washington freed all his slaves in his will despite opposition from his family, including his wife Martha. It’s surprising and revealing that this fact has never been part of the standard account of Washington’s life.

It is also one of the facts leading me to an increasingly negative view of Thomas Jefferson. The parallel between Jefferson’s unacknowledged slave children by Sally Hemings and the more recent case of Strom Thurmond, on which Kieran has recently posted, is striking. (Jefferson was, quite literally, the first Southern Democrat). Until now, I’ve tended to vaguely excuse Jefferson’s actions here as a case of personal inability to resist the thinking of the times, but Washington’s example undermines this.

I think you can go from the personal to the political here as well. The course leading to the Civil War was set when the Northern States adopted emancipation around the time of the Revolution and the Southern states did not. Jefferson advocated gradual emancipation in Virginia at this time (1783), but he didn’t fight hard on the issue after this. Given Washington’s personal evolution on the issue, it seems plausible that a determined effort by Jefferson in the years after Washington’s death, during which he was president for eight years, could have achieved a peaceful end to slavery.

I’ve just reached Amartya Sen’s chapter “Famines and Other Crises” in “Development as Freedom”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385720270/junius-20 . He has some discussion of the great famines that depopulated Ireland from 1845 onwards. The potato blight had destroyed the crop but the Irish peasantry lacked the resources to buy alternative foodstuffs which continued to be exported:

bq. ship after ship — laden with wheat, oats, cattle, pigs, eggs and butter — sailed down the Shannon bound for well-fed England from famine-stricken Ireland. (p.172)

[click to continue…]

By sheer coincidence, I read Kieran’s “post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000897.html a couple of hours after I picked _Quicksilver_ up again (I’ve been too busy this semester to read big fat books, however tempting), and came across this passage (p.200-201, US edition).

bq. There, mounted up high on a weatherbeaten stick, was a sort of irregular knot of stuff, barely visible as a gray speck in the moonlight: the head of Oliver Cromwell. When the King had come back, ten years ago, he’d ordered the corpse to be dug up from where Drake and the others had buried it, and the head cut off and mounted on a pike and never taken down. Ever since then Cromwell had been looking down helplessly on a (sic) scene of unbridled lewdness that was Whitehall palace.

Pepys figures prominently in the narrative a couple of pages before; I suspect that his diaries are Stephenson’s source. So far, I’m enjoying _Quicksilver_ a lot more than I expected, given some of the rude reviews (Kevin Drum describes it as a “core dump”:http://www.calpundit.com/archives/002526.html). But then, my tolerance for long, semi-relevant digressions on this or that subject is probably a lot higher than that of the average reader. Will blog more on this when I’ve finished the damn book …

When I lived in South London a few years ago, there were a handful of small cemetaries within walking distance of my house. It was an interesting contrast. American gravestones tend to be fairly minimalist; it’s unusual to see much more than “Beloved Father” or a Bible verse. In British cemetaries, we saw a number of memorials with very personal, heart-rending epitaphs. Widows and widowers inscribed “I’m lost without you” on the graves of their spouses; parents wondered why God couldn’t wait a little longer to take their beautiful children.

The gravestone that sticks with me is a memorial for a soldier from New Zealand who didn’t come home. His parents bought a plot for him in a graveyard in South London that they probably never saw. I wish now that I had thought to write down the epitaph. It was not an appeal to patriotism, or to the good cause. It was a controlled cry of anguish from parents who had lost their beloved son to a small piece of land on the other side of the world.

People like me, who have never really been cold or hungry or frightened in their whole lives, have the duty to be grateful for his sacrifice. But to his parents, it was surely more than they could stand.

I owe more than I can say to our soldiers and our veterans, to people like Kos and Tacitus and Wesley Clark and George H. W. Bush and my brother Scott. Thank you.

On the 85th Armistice day, I remember with honour the memory of:

• Military casualties of the First World War
• Military casualties of the Second World War
• Casualties of conscripted labour in the Second World War (such as the “Bevin Boys” conscripted to work in coal mines in the UK, who had a casualty rate higher than most active service units)
• Casualties of the Second World War among the fire service, ARP, ambulance service and similar, many of whom were conscientious objectors to the war itself
• Military casualties of the Falklands War

In their own ways, all of these people gave their lives in protecting the lives and liberty of Britons, for which we owe them the most profound thanks.

I also remember with the deepest sympathy and pity the men and women of our armed forces who gave their lives in the other military operations which the United Kingdom has carried out in the last century. They died for the most part in the service of dishonourable missions which were forced on them by governments which we elected, so we bear them an equally heavy debt, though much less glorious and more shameful.

This is the nearest I can come to a pacifist’s response to this day; I long since gave up wearing a white poppy in remembrance of the conscientious objectors in my own family, simply becaused it caused so much offence. I wholeheartedly apologise for any offence caused by this statement, without withdrawing any of it.

From James Buchan’s _Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money_ (as nice an example of limpid prose as you could ask for, by the way) comes the following.

bq. Sir William Petty, when challenged to a duel in Ireland by Sir Aleyn Brodrick, readily accepted, though he was so short-sighted as to be purblind. He merely asked for choice of weapons and selected, according to Evelyn and Aubrey, ‘an hatchet or Axe in a darke cellar.’

Today brings the “last commercial flight of Concorde”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3209837.stm . “Concorde”:http://www.concordesst.com/ was built jointly by engineers in Toulouse and in Bristol (the city where I live and work). It is a tremendous source of local pride for the people of the city. Just last weekend I happened to be in the British Aerospace Welfare Association in Filton and overheard a number of elderly people who had worked on the project chatting about their experience of the aircraft. Anyone who grew up in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s will also know what the plane represented then in terms of confidence in a new technology-driven future, how the test flights were reported, the celebrity status of test-pilot “Brian Trubshaw”:http://www.concordesst.com/history/trubshaw.html , the worries about Concordski (later crashed at the Paris air show) and Boeing’s rival SST (abandoned). Now it will take longer to get from London to New York than it did twenty-seven years ago.