A Consensus on Un-serious Europe

Left, Right and Center agree, European leaders are a bunch of unserious wannabes:

MARA LIASSON: [T]he U.S. wants the European and other NATO countries to pony up more. That's, I think, been a perennial problem. You and I have covered a lot of summits where the Europeans talk big, they want to be a counterweight to the United States, but as you heard Nick Burns just say, they're not willing to spend the proportion of their GDP on defense the way we do.

MORT KONDRACKE: The United States spends about 3.8 percent of GDP on defense, the whole rest of NATO spends 1.9 percent. . . . And our friends, the French, you know, have specifically refused to get involved in Afghanistan. They've got 20,000 men that they have on standby duty for use someplace, and when they were asked specifically to join up and go help out in Afghanistan, they said, "No, we're going to hold these back in case they're needed in Kosovo." You know, typically French.

BARNES: [T]he Germans, the Italians and the Spanish, even when they come, they have a rule. No combat. They don't want to fight. So it's left to the Americans, the Canadians, and the Dutch, actually, are pretty good. And then the Australians, who aren't even members of NATO are the ones who are actually doing the fighting. And the Canadians have lost 34 soldiers in recent months, so they've really done a good job.

Look, the Europeans have been free-riders now for 60 years. It's going to are hard to get them off the dole, it really is. And it'll almost be small amounts of money, percentage-wise. [bold from NRO]

OK, I know I'm immediately endangering any credibility I may have with many because this comes from FOX (evil evil evil) via NRO (evil evil evil), but frankly, I don't care. So what if these observations were made on FOX, the comments all ring true to me and it's not like it's the first time similar points have been made (here, here, here). However, the wonderful succinctness of the above is that we have someone from Left (Liasson), Middle (Kondracke) and Right (Barnes) all agreeing that "Europe"--that generalized group of nations that is comprised mostly of the Cold War "west"--talks big and carries a twig.
Not all of them, to be sure, but too many of them.

Dershowitz Takes President Carter to Task

In "The World According to Carter," Alan Dershowitz (via ALD) finds much wrong with President Jimmy Carter's "ahistorical" retelling of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict that runs through the former President's new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

Sometimes you really can tell a book by its cover. President Jimmy Carter's decision to title his new anti-Israel screed "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" (Simon & Schuster, 288 pages, $27) tells it all. His use of the loaded word "apartheid," suggesting an analogy to the hated policies of South Africa, is especially outrageous, considering his acknowledgment buried near the end of his shallow and superficial book that what is going on in Israel today "is unlike that in South Africa—not racism, but the acquisition of land." Nor does he explain that Israel's motivation for holding on to land it captured in a defensive war is the prevention of terrorism. Israel has tried, on several occasions, to exchange land for peace, and what it got instead was terrorism, rockets, and kidnappings launched from the returned land.

In fact, Palestinian-Arab terrorism is virtually missing from Mr. Carter's entire historical account, which blames nearly everything on Israel and almost nothing on the Palestinians...There is no mention of the long history of Palestinian terrorism before the occupation, or of the Munich massacre and others inspired byYasser Arafat. There is not even a reference to the Karine A, the boatful of terrorist weapons ordered by Arafat in January 2002.

Mr. Carter's book is so filled with simple mistakes of fact and deliberate omissions that were it a brief filed in a court of law, it would be struck and its author sanctioned for misleading the court. Mr. Carter too is guilty of misleading the court of public opinion. A mere listing of all of Mr. Carter's mistakes and omissions would fill a volume the size of his book.

After listing a few of the "mistakes and omissions," Dershowitz continues:

And it's not just the facts; it's the tone as well. It's obvious that Mr. Carter just doesn't like Israel or Israelis. He lectured Golda Meir on Israeli's "secular" nature, warning her that "Israel was punished whenever its leaders turned away from devout worship of God." He admits that he did not like Menachem Begin. He has little good to say about any Israelis — except those few who agree with him. But he apparently got along swimmingly with the very secular Syrian mass-murderer Hafez al-Assad. Mr. Carter and his wife Rosalynn also had a fine time with the equally secular Arafat — a man who has the blood of hundreds of Americans and Israelis on his hands:

Rosalynn and I met with Yasir Arafat in Gaza City, where he was staying with his wife, Suha, and their little daughter. The baby, dressed in a beautiful pink suit, came readily to sit on my lap, where I practiced the same wiles that had been successful with our children and grandchildren. A lot of photographs were taken, and then the photographers asked that Arafat hold his daughter for a while. When he took her, the child screamed loudly and reached out her hands to me, bringing jovial admonitions to the presidential candidate to stay at home enough to become acquainted with is own child.

There is something quite disturbing about these pictures.

"Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" is so biased that it inevitably raises the question of what would motivate a decent man like Jimmy Carter to write such an indecent book. Whatever Mr. Carter's motives may be, his authorship of this ahistorical, one-sided, and simplistic brief against Israel forever disqualifies him from playing any positive role in fairly resolving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. That is a tragedy because the Carter Center, which has done much good in the world, could have been a force for peace if Jimmy Carter were as generous in spirit to the Israelis as he is to the Palestinians.

Conservatives Back Ideology with Cash

Ralph Luker points to a new book by Syracuse University professor Arthur C. Brooks called Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism. According to this story:

When it comes to helping the needy, Brooks writes: "For too long, liberals have been claiming they are the most virtuous members of American society. Although they usually give less to charity, they have nevertheless lambasted conservatives for their callousness in the face of social injustice."

...The book's basic findings are that conservatives who practice religion, live in traditional nuclear families and reject the notion that the government should engage in income redistribution are the most generous Americans, by any measure.

Conversely, secular liberals who believe fervently in government entitlement programs give far less to charity. They want everyone's tax dollars to support charitable causes and are reluctant to write checks to those causes, even when governments don't provide them with enough money...

"These are not the sort of conclusions I ever thought I would reach when I started looking at charitable giving in graduate school, 10 years ago," he writes in the introduction. "I have to admit I probably would have hated what I have to say in this book."

Still, he says it forcefully, pointing out that liberals give less than conservatives in every way imaginable, including volunteer hours and donated blood.

...Harvey Mansfield, professor of government at Harvard University and 2004 recipient of the National Humanities Medal, does not know Brooks personally but has read the book.

"His main finding is quite startling, that the people who talk the most about caring actually fork over the least," he said. "But beyond this finding I thought his analysis was extremely good, especially for an economist. He thinks very well about the reason for this and reflects about politics and morals in a way most economists do their best to avoid."

Brooks seems very reluctant to embrace his findings. I would bet it's because he isn't too keen on the idea of the political hammer it could become for social (religious) conservatives. I also think he'll get his wish of having other academics putting his findings through rigorous analysis! Finally, Ralph poses a good question: "do people on the left actually say: 'I gave at the IRS.'?"

Religion and the Founders: Going Beyond the "Top Six"

In 2001, Michael Novak wrote in Faith and the American Founding: Illustrating Religion's Influence:

For a hundred years scholars have stressed the principles that come from the Enlightenment and from John Locke in particular. But there are also first principles that come to us from Judaism and Christianity, especially from Judaism. Indeed, it is important to recognize that most of what our Founders talked about (when they talked politically) came from the Jewish Testament, not the Christian. The Protestant Christians who led the way in establishing the principles of this country were uncommonly attached to the Jewish Testament.

Scholars often mistakenly refer to the god of the Founders as a deist god. But the Founders talked about God in terms that are radically Jewish: Creator, Lawgiver, Governor, Judge, and Providence. These were the names they most commonly used for Him, notably in the Declaration of Independence. For the most part, these are not names that could have come from the Greeks or Romans, but only from the Jewish Testament. Perhaps the Founders avoided Christian language because they didn’t want to divide one another, since different colonies were founded under different Christian inspirations. In any case, all found common language in the language of the Jewish Testament. It is important for citizens today whose main inspiration is the Enlightenment and Reason to grasp the religious elements in the founding, which have been understated for a hundred years.

More recently, Novak has written about how the focus has been on the supposed irreligiosity of the "big six" founders (Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Washington). He's willing to admit that Jefferson, Franklin and Monroe were the least religious of the top 100 Founders, but also makes an argument against the assumptions for the other three. He also mentions that Gordon Wood has been making much the same case. According to Novak:

[Wood] has not found a single atheist during the Founding period (not even Tom Paine), and certainly not among the Founders. Second, he finds even the least religious of the Founders considerably more religious than the average professor at American universities today. Ours is a far, far more secular age, our leaders and our people are far more ignorant of religious ideas. Third, he finds that Jefferson—the Founder most attended to today—was an outlier among the Founders.

Wood has also argued that George Washington, while not being by any means an enthusiast or an evangelical in the modern sense, was probably one of the more religious of the Founders...

I don't offer all of this up to support some "Christian Nation" argument. But I do think things have a gone a bit too far in proclaiming that the Founders weren't really, you know, that religious and, by extension, they'd be somehow against referring to God in public. Historians have learned to contemporize their subjects in so many other areas of historical research. Yet, it seems to me that there is a deficit of contemporization with regards to how important religion was in both the daily life and the philosophy of the Founders.

Whether for political or ideological reasons, some scholars have improperly equated "religious" with "evangelical" (or "Christianist") . One can be religious, recognize its importance in setting up moral guideposts (especially in a Republic), but not seek to Establish an official religion. Some seem to think that any mention of God or reference to religion within the close proximity of the Public Square is just the first misstep down the slippery slope to a theocracy.

To wrap this up, I think Novak's call for more study of the religious aspects of the Founders philosophy (all of 'em, not just the big names) is a kick in the pants for young historians looking to make a mark.

We urgently need good studies of all of them, if we wish to have a fairer idea of “the faith of the Founders.” Let us suggest, for starters, studies about the depth of the Christian faith of Roger Sherman; Samuel Huntington; William Williams; the Carroll cousins Charles, Daniel, and John; Hugh Williamson; Robert Treat Paine; William Paca; John Dickinson; Rufus King; William Livingston; John Hancock; Benjamin Rush; Patrick Henry; James Wilson; and George Mason.

There's gotta be a thesis, dissertation (or three) in there somewhere....

Remember

"The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down...

...of the big lake they called 'Gitche Gumee.'" Today is the 31st anniversary of the sinking of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald, which was immortalized by Gordon Lightfoot.

It is also the birthday of the U.S. Marine Corps!

Clifford Geertz

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz has passed away.

Dr. Geertz's landmark contributions to social and cultural theory have been influential not only among anthropologists, but also among geographers, ecologists, political scientists, humanists, and historians. He worked on religion, especially Islam; on bazaar trade; on economic development; on traditional political structures; and on village and family life. A prolific author since the 1950s, Dr. Geertz's many books include The Religion of Java (1960); Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (1968); The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (1973, 2000); Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali (1980); and The Politics of Culture, Asian Identities in a Splintered World (2002). At the time of his death, Dr. Geertz was working on the general question of ethnic diversity and its implications in the modern world...

Dr. Geertz's deeply reflective and eloquent writings often provided profound and cogent insights on the scope of culture, the nature of anthropology and on the understanding of the social sciences in general. Noting that human beings are "symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking animals," Geertz acknowledged and explored the innate desire of humanity to "make sense out of experience, to give it form and order." In Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988), Geertz stated, "The next necessary thing...is neither the construction of a universal Esperanto-like culture...nor the invention of some vast technology of human management. It is to enlarge the possibility of intelligible discourse between people quite different from one another in interest, outlook, wealth, and power, and yet contained in a world where tumbled as they are into endless connection, it is increasingly difficult to get out of each other's way."

I was first exposed to Geertz's work through my studies of Bernard Bailyn's work on the ideological underpinnings of the American Revolution. Geertz's attempt to understand how humans "make sense out of experience, to give it form and order" went a long way towards explaining how ideology can be an important historical force.

Spinning Clio : Best of 2006

With nominations for the 2nd Annual Cliopatria Awards opening soon, I thought I'd offer up some of my best/favorite posts over the past year. Sure, I'd like some of 'em nominated (if they deserve it), but I also think it's a worthy exercise in and of itself. Blogging can get a little ephemeral and rediscovering one's own work may inspire further investigation down a forgotten path. Anyway, they are with a brief blurb about each:

Meet the new boss, will he turn out like the old boss?: Prompted by a Peggy Noonan column about the insular elite, I tied in a discussion of a "new elite," Glenn Reynold's Army of Davids, Alan Taylor's William Cooper's Town and Turner's frontier thesis.

I Like Medieval Women (Especially Queens) : An introduction to the study of medieval queens, with a few suggested readings.

A Positive Historical Baseline : I argue that we should be truthful about the missteps in America's past, but "[w]e should teach our kids to give their own nation and those who built it the benefit of the doubt" when first exposing them to American history.

The Historiography of the Early Middle Ages and National Homogeneity : After reading a piece by Götz Aly on re-contextualizing the Holocaust in which he mentions the medievalist Jacob Burchhardt, I delved into how current medievalists have shown that the concept of ethnically pure nation-states was a myth.

Qualifying Bennett's Jefferson: How Jefferson Was Able to Wage War on the Pirates : An excerpt from William Bennett's America: The Last Best Hope seemed to me to give too much credit to Thomas Jefferson--and to be too dismissive of the efforts of George Washington and John Adams--for how the U.S. finally dealt with the Barbary Pirates. In short, Jefferson used a Navy that he had previously and repeatedly tried to scuttle.

Historical Consumerism : Historian Stephen Fry spoke about why history matters and I explained why, and how, I discovered it matters to me.


And there you have 'em. The six bests post of the past year, IMHO.

Cliopatria Awards: 2006 -- Nominations Opening Soon

Ralph Luker has announced that nominations for The Cliopatria Awards, 2006 edition will be opened on November 1.

Nominations for the Best Individual Blog, Best Group Blog, Best New Blog, Best Post, Best Series of Posts, and Best Writer will be open through November. The eligibility time-frame for the Awards is 1 December 2005 through 30 November 2006. Nominations will be judged during December. Winners will be announced at the 4th Annual Banquet of the Cliopatricians at the AHA convention in Atlanta and, subsequently, here at Cliopatria in early January. Here are last year's winners.

I was honored to be nominated last year for my series on historiography. To make it easier for anyone who may be looking my way this year (wink wink), I'm going to compile a list of what I believe to be my "Greatest Hits" of history blog posts from the last year. Stay tuned.

The "Muslim Ages"?

Apparently, there is a move amongst the ubiquitous "group of academics" to get rid of the terms "Dark Ages" and "Middle Ages".

The ambitious project, backed by the British foreign office, aims to contest the very notion of a period that is known in the West as the Dark Ages, and highlight what has been called by Prince Charles of Wales as the "indebtedness" of Western civilisation to the Muslim world.

"We are told that nothing happened between the Roman Empire and [the Renaissance]. How can we accept that humanity went to sleep for that long?" asked Salim Al Hassani, the Iraqi-born British professor of mechanical engineering behind Muslim Heritage, which held a lecture about 1001 Muslim inventions at the Madinat Theatre on Tuesday, also featuring an address by the British consul general in Dubai, John Hawkins.

The term 'Dark Ages', Al Hassani told Gulf News, is losing ground and the period is more commonly referred to as the 'Middle Ages', which according to him is also misleading.

"'Middle Ages' refers to a period between two ages. Why don't we just give that period a name?" he asked, adding that the only appropriate name for the period would be the 'Islamic' or 'Muslim' age. Al Hassani said it is time for historians in the West to give due credit to Muslim academics.

Richard Brown, spokesperson for Muslim Heritage, said the response the programme has received has been overwhelming. A recent exhibition held by Muslim Heritage in Manchester, UK, attracted 80,000 visitors and was extended from three months to six, due to popular demand.

According to Brown, there is growing interest in the project's work in the West. Interestingly, he said, the largest number of requests for the exhibition came from the United States.

"'Middle Ages' refers to a period between two ages. Why don't we just give that period a name?" asks Al Hassani.

Sure....but wouldn't it strike today's medievalist as a bit disconnected to be called a "Muslim Age" scholar while they are studying, say, Eleanor of Aquitaine or St. Patrick? Others have attempted to rid us of this particular set of historiographical baggage and have failed. Heck, couldn't China lay claim to just as much "progress" during this time as the Muslim world? Maybe we should call it the "Eastern Age" or something. Anyway, I seriously doubt that such a generic appellation would catch on, but I'm nearly certain that naming an entire age after a specific culture isn't going to be widely accepted.

Military Path to Citizenship

Writing in the Washington Post, Max Boot and Michael O'Hanlon propose a military path to citizenship and National Review's Stanley Kurtz thinks it's a good idea while John Derbyshire and Mark Krikorian do not. Kurtz offers some historical examples of non-citizens contributing to the national defense (and asks for more) and is supported by emailers (one, two, three) who explain that, indeed, this is already going on in the U.S. military (which Boot and O'Hanlon mention in their piece).

Derbyshire's specific complaint against the idea is this:

The difficulty Boot notes in increasing troop levels ought to be a clue that, while we're happy to sign on to kill Saddam or nuke Japan or burn Atlanta (sorry to you Georgians out there), not enough of our people are interested in playing nursemaid to a bunch of crazies to make that a sustainable policy. To ignore that, and call instead for the recruitment of foreign soldiers, stems from the same impulse as Brecht's crack about "dissolving the people and electing a new one" — if the American people aren't interested in signing up for police duty in Araby, lets find people who are.

My college roommate's family was a beneficiary of the military path to citizenship. A Filipino, his father enlisted in the Navy, did his time and wound up in San Diego as a U.S. citizen. I have no doubts that there are non-U.S. citizens who would jump at the chance to obtain expedited U.S. citizenship.

Searching for Local History

Sarah Sutton of the Warwick Beacon (a local paper) writes:

When Steve Insana, Buckeye Brook activist and champion of environmental preservation in the Conimicut area, stepped out of his truck with a chainsaw in hand, I wondered what I had gotten myself into.

I’d agreed to meet him Saturday morning at the fire station on West Shore Road and Sandy Lane, which was to be the starting point for his attempt to uncover a 200-year-old burial plot located somewhere in the brambles near Buckeye Brook. I hadn’t realized we’d be blazing a trail through tangles of vines, climbing over logs and ducking under branches to make our way to the site.

They found it!

Brown University Slavery Report

Around 3 years ago, Brown University president Ruth Simmons organized a commission to investigate the school's ties to slavery. As anyone who has read Charles Rappleye's Sons of Providence knows, the Brown brothers benefitted from the slave trade and some of that money undoubtedly went towards the founding and expansion of the University. Yesterday, the commission released its report. According to the Providence Journal:

About a third of the report focuses on Brown’s deep ties to slavery and the slave trade; a third explores modern day slavery and reparations; and the remainder is recommendations and footnotes.

The recommendations include:

•Publicly acknowledging the participation of Brown’s founders and benefactors in the slave trade by revising Brown’s history to incorporate its connection to slavery and by the creation of an on-campus memorial.

•Establishing a university center for research on slavery.

•Adopting a more transparent and socially responsible investment strategy and policy for accepting gifts.

•Recruiting more economically disadvantaged students and diverse faculty, and offering more financial aid to diverse and international students. This includes actively recruiting students from Africa and the West Indies, “the historic points of origin and destination for most of the people carried on Rhode Island slave ships.”

The ProJo also termed "surprising" the recommendation that "Brown intensify and consolidate its efforts to improve education in Rhode Island, particularly the public schools in Providence." I don't know if it's surprising, but it's certainly a case of putting your money where your angst is. Instead of simply saying your sorry, it sounds like Brown is going to take some of the millions they make/have in their endowment and help out under-priveleged kids in Providence.

“To appreciate the dimensions of the crisis, one need look no further than Providence, where 48 of the city’s 49 public schools currently fail to meet federally prescribed minimum standards for academic achievement,” the report states. “This situation represents a direct challenge to Brown University. One of the most obvious and meaningful ways for Brown to take responsibility for its past is by dedicating its resources to improving the quality of education available to the children of our city and state.”

Brown’s previous and current efforts — tutoring and mentoring programs, arts and literacy initiatives and teacher training programs — are well intentioned, but “highly decentralized,” “ill-coordinated,” and “chronically underfunded,” the report states.

“If Brown is to make a meaningful impact in local schools, it will require a sustained, substantial commitment of energy and resources for many years,” the report states.

The committee suggests that Brown create more classes for teachers and allow public school teachers to take one Brown course a semester free of charge. The group also wants the university to expand its Brown Summer High School program, which prepares Rhode Island students for college-level work. The committee recommends an increase in financing for the university’s master’s degree in teaching program, including full tuition waivers for students who commit to teaching in local public schools for three years. The group also recommends that Brown faculty offer enrichment courses in local schools and help schools develop new programs.

The committee urges the university to expand its new urban education policy program. The committee also advocates expanding internships for Brown undergraduates interested in teaching; coordinating with other colleges in Providence that are active in the schools; and providing administrative and staff support for the education initiatives.

Good for them. I hope the University follows through.

Medieval Expert Witness

In "How French TV fudged the death of Mohammed Al Durah", Boston University professor Richard Landes describes what he has discovered about the Al Durah film and how his expertise in the area of medieval blood libel has landed him in the middle of a court case involving the French TV station that has refused to allow critics view the original film.

I have become involved for two reasons. First of all, I noted almost immediately that Palestinians and anti-Zionists, insisting that Israel killed the boy on purpose, used Al Durah in a way familiar to medievalists--as a blood libel. This was the first blood libel of the twenty-first century, rendered global by cable and the Internet. Indeed, within a week, crowds the world over shouted "We want Jewish blood!" and "Death to the Jews!". For Europeans in particular, the libelous image came as balm to a troubled soul: "This death erases, annuls that of the little boy in the Warsaw Gherro," intoned Europe1 editorialist Catherine Nay. The Israelis were the new Nazis.

And second, when I saw the raw footage in the summer of 2003--especially when I saw the scene Enderlin had cut, wherein the boy(allegedly shot in the stomach, but holding his hand over his eyes) picks up his elbow and looks around--I realized that this was not a film of a boy dying, but a clumsily staged scene.

Tapera-DHH Survey of History Blogs

A couple weeks ago, I filled out a questionaire for the Tapera-DHH Survey of History Blogs, sponsored by Tapera and Digital History Hacks. They have now put their results online and are looking for more respondents. First, here is the questionaire:

Questionnaire

Blog:

URL:

Authors:

First post (mm/dd/Y):

Questions:

1. Which history-related blogs do you visit most frequently? (1-5)
2. What factors do you think are involved in your choice of blogs to read? (For example: quality of information, writing, institution, author profile, rankings, entertainment value…)
3. What factors characterize your own blog? Which are most important?
4. Have you changed the objectives of your blog since you created it?

The most interesting data is contained within this graphic of the links between history blogs (I love these web-like/linkage things!). From what they've compiled, I find it interesting that 3 of the history blogs that I indicated that I visited most frequently (Question 1) didn't respond to the survey themselves nor did they have any other links from other history bloggers. These were Blogenspiel (15), Albion's Seedlings (50) and In The Middle (51). (Supplemental data--including reference numbers--is in this spreadsheet). One of my "top 5" is The Rhine River (27), who also didn't respond to the survey, but is mentioned in the top 5 of The History Librarian (76) and Far Outliers (101). The final one of my top 5 is the King of All History Blogs, Cliopatria (17). Looking at the graph, it looks like I'm clustered with Far Outliers and Rhine River. Interesting.

Here are the Top 5 (according to the survey)

Cliopatria
Digital History Hacks
Old is the New New
Early Modern Notes
Edwired

No real surprise, though I think that DHH's involvement in the survey has biased the results a bit (no slight intended guys!). The rest of the top 5 seem right on, even Edwired, which I would deem more academic than history-related. After all, most history bloggers are in academia. Not me.

King Richard's Faire

To many here in southern New England, Autumn means it's time for King Richard's Faire:

...a vivid recreation of a 16th century English marketplace at festival time. Actors, dancers, puppeteers, jugglers, minstrels, mimes, magicians and musicians perform each weekend for the favor of his Royal Highness King Richard.

Royalty and beggars, highwaymen and guards, knights and wenches, swordsmen and soothsayers roam throughout the 80 acre wooded village while artisans hawk and display a wide array of unique hand-made wares.

The Royal Chefs prepare delectable edibles authentic to Renaissance times. Exotic animals, jousting knights on horseback, challenging games and Renaissance merriment round out a day at the Faire.

Now, don't blame the denizen's of poor Richard's Faire, they aren't the only ones participating in such "creative" anachronisms (thinly veiled reference to the SCA intended). In Murphysboro, Illinois, there was a similar "medieval" fair that included a pirate parrot!!! To be fair, none of the performers or organizers claim that historical accuracy is the primary goal nor do they claim to be exclusively medieval in content. For instance, the Illinois fair said it was medieval-Renaissance-early modern. In essence, these little festivals aren't medieval so much as they are "before America"--centric. So, for unbelievably high prices, one can be treated to anachronistic fashion--buxom beauties!--dashing knights--wooden swords!--and, well, a lot of fun. Just don't expect to encounter the bubonic plague, the Inquisition or a Crusader!!!

Congressional Medievalism

John Tierney:

Suppose Nike’s founder, Phil Knight, asked taxpayers to subsidize a program for 16-year-olds to leave their homes to become “squires” running errands at Nike headquarters. Or suppose, before his death, Sam Walton had asked Congress to build a dormitory in Arkansas to house teenage “serfs” spending a semester away from their schools to work on a Wal-Mart loading dock.

These executives would become national jokes. They’d be denounced for trying to revive 19th-century child-labor practices and 12th-century feudalism. There would be no public money appropriated for Knight’s Squires or Sam’s Serfs.

Yet Congress sees nothing strange about dragging teenagers from their families and schools to become pages, one step below a squire in the feudal food chain. They’re not being forced to wear Prince Valiant haircuts, but they have to do scut work that’s probably even less useful than what they could learn at Nike or Wal-Mart.

How true.

The Military History Foundation

Mark Grimsley has tired of the "hand wringing" and proactively started The Military History Foundation:

I have created The Military History Foundation in response to my perception that at present, a dearth of ideas and strategies exists concerning the advancement of military history as an academic field. The tone among many senior scholars in the field -- including those who hold, or have held, leadership positions -- is strikingly defeatist. Along with their rank-and-file counterparts, they complain about the marginalization of the field, blaming it on a blind prejudice against miltary history among academics in other fields.

This may be true. It is also irrelevant.

I happen to think the thesis of an unreasoning hostility toward the field is overblown. But even if it is not, this does not relieve us of the responsibility for developing and executing plans to strengthen the academic military history. Since others do not seem to be shouldering the burden, I've decided to embark on the work myself....

...I am going to do what I can to generate constructive plans and insist that the leadership of the Society for Military History either adopt them or develop constructive plans of its own.

That is the immediate task of The Military History Foundation. At the moment, it consists of a domain name purchased for $23.90 and a few web pages.

But it won't stay that way.

Instead of perpetuating a debate whereby many continue to talk past each other, Grimsley has provided a potential avenue for change. Kudos for the proactive approach!

A Royal A**hole

JJC at In the Middle explains the significance of King Alfred's hemorrhoids by examining his biography. Of course, his biographer's name was....Asser.

Vanishing Military Historians? Not Really

Mark Grimsley takes issue with John Miller's piece about vanishing military historians, which I commented upon earlier this week. [Full disclosure: I asked Grimsley for is take on the piece--and apparently I wasn't the only one]. In short, Grimsley thinks Miller's partisanship has skewed his analysis and that miller purposedly ignored the successful military history programs at such "liberal bastions" as Duke and UNC. Grimsley also did his own research into the University of Wisconsin situation that Miller used as an open to his piece. As they say, "read it all", and this follow up (and there will be more from Grimsley, I'd imagine).

UPDATE: John Miller has responded:

How clever of him to have uncovered my sinister conspiracy not to mention Duke or UNC! As it happens, I did quote UNC's ROTC commander, who is also a professor of military science at the school. I suppose I could have written that Duke and UNC have great programs—a couple of my sources said as much. More often, however, I heard OSU, Texas A&M, and Kansas State mentioned, so those are the ones I cited in the piece (along with West Point, which is a special case). But these are highly subjective judgments and professors get jealous about such things, so I'll say right now, on the record, that Duke and UNC have quality programs in military history.

Grimsley continues to post about it, including putting up a comment from a reader, which echoes my own feelings on this matter:

Having read Miller’s piece, the responses herein, and being a recently retired faculty member, I must say that the whole thing here seems to be a matter of umbrage taken unnecessarily. I cannot discern in Miller’s piece any disrespect for the field of military history, and to presume that he’s trying to implement some secret plan to kill it off simply to be able to make a point about the liberal biases of academia leads straight to paranoia.

It seems that Miller’s piece was incomplete, and no doubt he regrets any significant omissions — but looking upon you as persons who understand that any conveyance of facts about an event or circumstances by necessity must be limited, I would expect more understanding of this to be displayed.

The commenter also sketched a rough guideline how to approach the subject more analytically, which Grimsley has fleshed out.

Unfortunately, I think Grimsley seemed predisposed to assume the worst about Miller's motivation for writing the article and approached the matter too tendentiously in his initial response. In an email to Miller, Grimsley stated that:

My recent posts on both Cliopatria, the big history blog, and my own individual blog devoted to academic military history, respond to your September 26 article, “Sounding Taps.” The tone I have taken is contentious but I hope not abusive. Basically your article struck me as deliberately constructed so as to catastrophize the position military history has within the academy.

Grimsley's piece is not "abusive", but it's contentiousness is surrounded by a large amount of flippancy. It seems to me that the best way to engage in a debate over an issue is to--at least initially--take the argument at face value, offer correctives or refutations and proceed. By assuming the worst of Miller's motivation, I think Grimsley has needlessly applied a bellows to a fire that--according to him--need not have been kindled in the first place. Both have good points, and a healthy, respectful dialogue would probably be more useful and productive. (I'm off the stump now).