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).

Vanishing Military Historians

John J. Miller (via PDTR) investigates why military historians are become scarce on college campi. He quotes Mary Habeck, a military historian at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C., who blames the "tenured radicals" of the 1960's, who prefer studying "the kind of social history [they] want to support." Thus, according to Miller, these academics concentrated on social history instead of "diplomatic, intellectual, and maritime history — but perhaps none have suffered so many casualties as the 'drums and trumpets' crowd."

Miller has surveyed American colleges and universities and explains:

At first glance, military history appears to have maintained beachheads on a lot of campuses. Out of 153 universities that award doctorates in history, 99 of them — almost 65 percent — have at least one professor who claims a research interest in war, according to S. Mike Pavelec, a military historian at Hawaii Pacific University. But this figure masks another problem: Social history has started to infiltrate military history, Trojan Horse–style. Rather than examining battles, leaders, and weapons, it looks at the impact of war upon culture. And so classes that are supposedly about the Second World War blow by the Blitzkrieg, the Bismarck, and the Bulge in order to celebrate the proto-feminism of Rosie the Riveter, condemn the national disgrace of Japanese-American internment, and ask that favorite faculty-lounge head-scratcher: Should the United States have dropped the bomb? “It’s becoming harder and harder to find experts in operational military history,” says Dennis Showalter of Colorado College. “All this social history is like Hamlet without the prince of Denmark.”

Miller also gives examples of endowed military history chairs that are going unfilled (University of Wisconsin); accomplished military historians who are retiring and not being replaced (Gerald Linderman and John Shy at Michigan); or replaced by non-military historians (James MacPherson's prospective replacement at Princeton is an expert in gender studies); and institutions that are refusing endowments for a military history chair at all (Dartmouth).

It's not just the universities that have turned away from military history. At least one of the mainstream historical scholarly publications has been ignoring straight military history, too.

Another reason for the shortage of scholars is that military historians have been shut out of The American Historical Review, the most prestigious academic journal for history professors. Last year, John A. Lynn [who states he is a Liberal Democrat--ed.] of the University of Illinois surveyed the last 150 issues of the AHR, which comes out five times annually. During this 30-year period, he couldn’t find a single article that discussed the conduct of World War II. Other ignored wars included the American Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. There was a single article on the English Civil War, dealing with atrocities committed therein. Lynn located precisely two articles on the U.S. Civil War. One of these also dealt with atrocities. “I guess military atrocities are attractive to the editors,” he says. The only article on World War I focused on female soldiers in the Russian army. “I suspect the editors liked it because it was about women, not because it was about war.” The lead article in the most recent issue of the AHR is about wigs in 18th-century France.

Miller does qualify that the military academies are still strong in military history and also menitions that some public universities, including Kansas State, Ohio State, and Texas A&M, have strong, well-respected military history programs. However, he also explains that military historians are forced to find refuge at second-tier schools and in the military itself.

Miller may seem a bit snarky towards the social historians, but the point of his article isn't so much to attack what is being studied as it is to call attention to what isn't. Military history--traditional military history--is important because of the lessons it teaches:

“Knowledge of military history is an essential prerequisite for an informed national debate about security and statecraft,” says Michael Desch, a political scientist at the Bush School of Government and Public Service in Texas. Many voters, for instance, don’t know how to contextualize the nearly 23,000 U.S. military casualties in Iraq since 2003. That’s a pretty big number. But it’s also roughly the level of casualties suffered at Antietam in just one day, and a small fraction of the more than 200,000 casualties endured in Vietnam.

Critics of the war also have plenty to gain from a public that has a better understanding of older conflicts. “People might have realized that we have a poor track record of using the military to do nation-building in Third World countries,” says Desch. “The model isn’t Germany or Japan, but Nicaragua and the Philippines.” Finally, the population of Americans who have served in the military is shrinking, and with it their knowledge of what armies and navies do.

Anybody who has studied the history of war knows that it’s possible to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat — it happened at Shiloh, when a Confederate attack nearly routed the Union army, only to have General Grant drive them off the field of battle the next day. Perhaps military historians can stage a similar comeback. In their efforts to do so, they will be wise to remember something that Grant didn’t know back in 1862: An awful lot of brutal fighting lies ahead.

I think Miller's concerns about the dearth of military history courses offered to, say, your average undergraduate, is--while not unfounded--a bit overwrought. I can only point to my own personal experience.

I took courses titled "World War II" and "The Civil War" in which I think it could be reasonably expected that "military history" would be covered. In my World War II class, the professor (whom I'd describe as a diplomatic/social historian) came right out and said he wasn't going to focus on tactics (which was fine by me). Nonetheless, he did cover basic strategy and also touched on the "war is politics by other means..." methodological track. That being said, as he promised, he focused much less on battles than the social impact on the homefront, for instance. Miller is also on target in that we did investigate one of the very topics that he mentions as being a favorite: Hiroshima. The course was very well done and enjoyable and I learned a lot. But it was definitely presented from the perspective of social and diplomatic history, not military.

The Civil War course, on the other hand, was taught by a professor who was much more of a diplomatic/military historian. As such, he delved much deeper into tactics and battles, though he didn't neglect politics or diplomacy. He did, however, give relatively short shrift to social history. This course was also worthwhile, but, again, the dominant perspective was that of the discipline in which the professor specialized.

Thus, I believe that, when done properly, a general survey-type course--the kind most undergrads take--can effectively delve into tactics and battles as well as other areas (social, diplomatic, political). That's where I think Miller is a little off the mark. The traditional topics covered by military history are being taught as part of a larger, more comprehensive course that also covers history as studied via a wide variety of historical methodologies. That being said, he does make an important point.

Colleges and universities need to have military historians on campus who teach conventional military history courses as well as general surveys. First, and most in-line with Miller's critique, the continued popularity of books devoted to the military history of the Civil War and WWII show that there is a body of students out there who would be interested in straight forward military history courses. Thus, specific, upper level courses in military history would probably be well received and be attractive to many students.

Yet, to my mind, it is the role that military historians can play in the historical education of the broader student population that is more important. I saw many people interested in military history in my Civil War class. They were there for the guns and ended up learning about a whole lot more (yes, like about the "butter"). Similarly, there were people in my WWII class who were interested in the home front and Hiroshima, but also took away some knowledge about battles and a few tactics and how specific military capabilities and outcomes play a part in history.

What I'm getting at is that a military historian--just like a social or economic or diplomatic historian--brings a certain point of view to courses that deal with broader topics. It would be a shame if these perspectives are lost because they aren't popular enough amongst the academics or "sexy" enough for academic journals. The current impression is that any young historian simply can't make much headway with a specialization in military history. If there is no demand for this methodolgy, the supply will soon dry up and our understanding of war will be the worse for it.

Medieval Immersion for Kids

I wish they had this when I was a kid:

Hundreds of elementary and middle school students will "go medieval" for a day as the Historic Camelot Project, a Wisconsin educational nonprofit organization, holds two days of hands-on education at Fireman's Park in Fox Lake.

Beginning at 9 a.m. Wednesday and Thursday, Sept. 27 and 28, Camelot will host two two-hour blocks of educational presentations that present daily life in medieval Britain. Presentations will be followed by a short demonstration of knightly weapons and horsemanship.

Students will also become involved in medieval cooking, building wattle fences and walls, and dipping candles, as well as lectures on early medieval life and history.

This will be the first of its kind of "immersion" education in medieval history in the Midwest, giving students and teachers a small taste of what will be a daily offering at the medieval village museum Camelot is hoping to open in Southcentral Wisconsin.

"While there are abundant opportunities for students to visit historical, open-air museums depicting early life in Wisconsin and in Colonial America if you go back East, there are none of the pre-medieval and medieval village museums available as they are in Europe," said Lloyd Clark, Camelot executive director. "This is their history also, but one that is not given sufficient weight.

"What we hope to create with the Historic Camelot Village Museum is a recreation of typical pre-medieval life in Britain, much the same as Old World Wisconsin shows life in 1800s Wisconsin — with a small, traditional indoor museum to showcase the changes in British clothing, arms and armor, and typical items of daily life over the period from just after Rome left Britain to the Late Middle Ages."

. . . Clark hopes to kindle a new appreciation in children for their ancestors and to showcase not just the kings, knights, arms and armor but the lives of the "regular" people of the age.

Relevancy of the Middle Ages; or how a Medieval Source Got the Pope in Trouble

Pope Benedict has elicited Muslim outrage because he cited and quoted a medieval emperor's musings on Islam, faith and reason. (See!!! The Middle Ages can be relevant to today!!!) Here is the quote, stripped of all context:

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

Juan Cole asserts that the Pope was in error both theologically and historically in his citation:

The pope was trying to make the point that coercion of conscience is incompatible with genuine, reasoned faith. He used Islam as a symbol of the coercive demand for unreasoned faith.

But he has been misled by the medieval polemic on which he depended.

In fact, the Quran also urges reasoned faith and also forbids coercion in religion. The only violence urged in the Quran is in self-defense of the Muslim community against the attempts of the pagan Meccans to wipe it out.

The "medieval polemic" to which Cole refers is the work done by Theodore Khoury, whose translation of Manuel II's writings the Pope depended on.

Thomas F. Madden, historian of the Crusades (and he wrote a good review article on recent Crusade books here), has written about some of the important missing context that has been stripped away.

This is a tough lecture to boil down to one sentence, but if forced I would characterize it as: Theology belongs in the university because only by studying faith with reason will we find solutions to the problems of our time. However, if instead of reading the lecture we simply cut out everything except the words of Manuel II Palaeologus written six centuries ago, then we have a good justification for Pakistan’s parliament to unanimously condemn the pope. If we further pretend that it was Benedict, rather than a long-dead emperor, who expressed these sentiments we have a sound basis for the [subsequent Muslim outrage].

Andrew Morse is helpful in explaining why there is outrage in the Muslim world against what the Pope was talking about:

Although the furor over Pope Benedict’s [address] has centered on a perceived insult to the prophet Mohammed, I believe that the remarks were directed at a more recent figure, Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian writer active in the Muslim Brotherhood in the mid-20th century whose writings are widely read in the Islamic world today....many of Sayyid Qutb’s writings concern the split between faith and reason embodied in Western philosophy. According to Luke Loboda’s invaluable essay on Qutb’s work, Qutb believed that Christianity, under the influence of Greek philosophy and Roman tradition, had created a separation between faith and reason that was unnatural, unspiritual, and ungodly. In the Christianized West, maintaining social order became a purely rational process separated from religious faith, forcing people to continually deny the truth that faith and reason were inextricably linked, leaving them in disharmony with God’s creation.

In Qutb’s view, God had provided man with a system for uniting faith and reason in his day-to-day life – the system of Islamic law. Reason was acceptable when used for interpreting or implementing Islamic law, but not useful for discovering truths outside of its structure. Social orders claiming a rational basis and without relation to Islamic law and were especially unacceptable; Qutb viewed them as restrictions on and distractions from the precise instructions provided by God on how to exist harmoniously within the universe.

This is a complicated topic and I've only begun to really get into it myself. (In fact, after doing this post, I discovered that Wikipedia has an excellent summary of the debate!) But regardless of my own relative naivete on the subject, I can see that there are genuine debates concerning faith and reason and how the relate internally and externally to Christianity and Islam. Unfortunately, these worthy intellectual pursuits are subsumed by the reactions of the "Arab Street" who are nothing more than tools of radical imams or totalitarian governments who seek to use them for their own gain.

Late Antiquity Migrated to the Early Middle Ages

Late Antiquity, the Migration Period, or the Early Middle Ages? Just askin'.....still waiting for Peter Heather's latest, btw. (Though the seller got back to me to let me know that it was being sent priority now...apparently it was hidden underneath some papers). According to the Late Antiquity article from Wikipedia:

While the usage "Late Antiquity" suggests that the social and cultural priorities of Classical Antiquity endured throughout Europe into the Middle Ages, the usage "Early Middle Ages" emphasizes a break with the classical past, and the term "Migrations Period" emphasizes the disruptions in the same period of time.

More later.

Gathered Thoughts: Populism, Democracy and Liberalism, the Trope of the Brave Idealist , American Exceptionalism

Sometimes, we find things that interest us, we keep 'em, but can't really find a way to work them in to a post. Well, here are the remnants after picking through a summers' worth of left-overs.

Back in July I was led to this Dallas Morning News piece that called for a new type of populist movement.

There is a tremendous cost to the health of the republic, to the common good, that comes with the creative yet destructive power of unlimited economic and political progressivism. The vital role property-owning and self-sufficient families, small towns and regional governments play in a free republic has been recognized for centuries. The civic virtues associated with widespread ownership of land, decentralized systems of trade, commitment to the common good of one's tribe and the moral sturdiness of belonging to a tradition are necessary to the continued independence of a free people.

And the loss of these goods will always strike the middle classes first and hardest. When they are lost, they are felt as loss – loss of an entire way of life. And just as the masses of dispossessed and alienated fought back during the Gilded Age, they are likely to again....

What is called for is an anti-progressive populism; an anti-movement movement; a return to what is near, known and particular. What is called for is what I think of as regional populism. Its first political task will be to rediscover the ways citizens of the old American republic used to think and talk....

Folk populism requires people willing to make sacrifices to defend what they love from encroaching destruction via spaghetti-like superhighways, foreign entanglements, megacorporations and megachurches, technological developments, mass media and hypermobility....

What would this kind of regional populism look like in an actual political platform? Broadly speaking, it would seek at every turn to end the dependence of its constituents on elites. It would oppose, for example, the nationalization of any sector of our economy, from health care to agriculture. Instead, it would seek creative ways to open regional markets for regional goods.

It would seek to permit regional cultural and religious particularities to emerge from the fog of federalized regulation and be made manifest in our schools, courthouses, businesses and civic organizations. And it would provide incentives to keep cultural capital local. It would encourage people to work, study and raise families close to where they grew up. It would seek ways to promote local culture and would cultivate loyalty to our neighbors and a fierce love for our own places.

But in the end, what this kind of vibrant regionalism requires is something much more difficult to obtain than a slogan. It is a renewed appreciation for society over and against both the individual and the state. Society defined by what the agrarian essayist Wendell Berry calls "membership" – a network of social interconnectedness and shared obligation. To be a member of this kind of social order is the best hedge against manipulation by the central planning committee for "growth" and "prosperity." It is, to put it plainly, to be free.

On the topic of populism, Prof. John P. McCormick (hosted by Alfredo Perez at Political Theory Daily Review) has a long paper of interest. (Here's the abstract):

The chapters of Rousseau’s Social Contract devoted to republican Rome prescribe institutions that obstruct popular efforts at diminishing the excessive power and influence of wealthy citizens and political magistrates. I argue that Rousseau reconstructs ancient Rome’s constitution in direct opposition to the more populist and anti-elitist model of the Roman Republic championed by Machiavelli in the Discourses: Rousseau eschews the establishment of magistracies, like the tribunes, reserved for common citizens exclusively, and endorses assemblies where the wealthy are empowered to outvote the poor in lawmaking and elections. On the basis of sociologically anonymous principles like generality and popular sovereignty, and by confining elite accountability to general elections, Rousseau’s neo-Roman institutional proposals aim to pacify the contestation of class hierarchies and inflate elite prerogative within republics—under the cover of more formal, seemingly more genuine, equality.

James Lileks examined the '50's and the adolescent mind-set by skewering a play that championed the prototypical brave counterculturist who took on McCarthy.

I’m not going to defend McCarthy, because he was a brute and boor and a butter-eating drunk who set back the anti-Communist cause four decades. To say that he was sorta right, in the sense that there were Commies about, is like saying that J. Robert Oppenheimer had a salutory effect on Japanese urban renewal. I’m not interested in those debates right now. I’d just like to point out that it’s a little late in the game to trot out a play about the mean old witch-hunts. The bravery of the scrappy idealists! The piggish philistinism of the anti-commie brutes! The smothering wet quilt of Conformity that held America motionless until it was thrown off by the undulating hips of Elvis! (Did you know they didn’t show him below the waist on TV, at first! True! It was horrible, the Fifties; no one had sex without weeping in shame afterwards. Sometimes during.) It's just interesting how Westerners think that that Red Scare was a historical event of such towering proportions it trumps the tales of the Soviet Union in the same period. US version: communist sympathizers frozen out of screenwriting jobs, justly or unjustly. USSR version: actual communists killed in ghastly numbers by a parody of a legal system underwritten by brute force and an industrialized penal system built on slave labor. Why is the latter ignored, and the former celebrated?

Jonah Goldberg offered thoughts on whether its democracy or (classical) liberalism that we should focus on spreading in the Middle East:

No serious person, it seems to me, can deny that it would be better to live in a liberal but undemocratic society than a democratic but illiberal society. In other words, democracy — while an important mechanism — is fundamentally amoral. A society of evil men can democratically choose to do evil.

I think many democracy-boosters understand this, and agree, but they use democracy as an umbrella term for liberalism. The problem is that this leads to a corruption of rhetoric and, eventually, thinking. I think it's pretty clear that liberalism and democracy go together in the long run. But I think it is obviously false that democracy automatically yields liberalism. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't. More often — as in the United States, Great Britain etc — one could just as easily argue that liberalism leads to democracy. I understand we need to take a principled pro-democracy stand. But we shouldn't blind ourselves to the fact that undemocratic institutions are often on the side of the angels. The Turkish military, for example, is a defender of Turkish liberalism - flawed though it may be — against the threats it faces from, among other things, democratic Islamic populism.

Pursuing elections before you've cultivated liberal values is a recipe for Hitlerism or Hamas-ism. Indeed, it's a fascinating contrafactual to ponder how different things might have been if the Bush Administration had not emphasized — rhetorically — literal elections over everything they think elections represent (see here for a recent lament along these lines in the Corner).

Rich's points are well-taken. There's a reason we're stuck dealing with the Middle East — because much of the rest of the world has come to its senses. The Arab or Muslim "street" doesn't much care about democracy. Until it does, harping on elections is a fools errand. That doesn't mean we shouldn't support pro-democracy groups and activists — where our support would help — but our choices right now are basically, to use a social scientific phrase, really sucky. That's why I think we can't be tied down to one approach. If there's a strong-man who wants to be Attaturk, we should give him some leeway. If elections will advance the ball toward liberalization, we should be for elections. Our principles are larger than mere elections and a more realistic foreign policy would advance our ideals more if it took this into account. Ronald Reagan, for example, understood that pushing democracy in the Soviet Union was a far less effective rhetorical weapon than the subject of human rights.

Finally, Scott McLemee examined how globalization has contributed to American Exceptionalism, Maurice Obstfeld and Alan Taylor wrote a related paper (PDF), Joshua Zeitz reviewed Eric Rauchway's contribution (Blessed Among Nations) to the debate, and AEI has James Q. Wilson's explanation of the qualities that make American political institutions unique.

What's the Historical Value of Path to 9/11

After examining the "mainstream" debate during the run-up to the actual showing of Path to 9/11 (here and here), I have to wonder what historians think of it now that it has actually aired. Truth be told, I haven't seriously looked for--nor have I really run across in my daily blog travels--any post mortems on Path in the history blogosphere. Now that historians have had the opportunity to see it, they don't seem to have written about it anywhere near as much as they did when they hadn't seen it. Hm. Well, here's my take.

First, I believe that--in a very idealistic sense--Path to 9/11 was a missed opportunity. As I mentioned in a previous post, Dale Franks' observation that "Fake but Accurate" isn't good enough and that if the filmakers had simply "hew[ed] tightly to the 9/11 Commission's report, they could have stood their ground firmly on the basis of the film's historical accuracy." That being said, while it was indeed a docudrama and some characters were amalgamations and there was "time compression", the overall theme was accurate: government and the bureaucracies that compose it are ill-suited to "think outside of the box" and take action.

Path showed that our government was still fighting the last war (or not--post-Cold War, etc.). Terrorism was regarded as a legal problem and the solutions formulated to deal with it based on that philosophy proved to be unsatisfactory and ineffective. Within that framework, those in power--the members of the Clinton and Bush administrations--were simply not able to imagine the level to which Al Queda was willing and able to take their (at the time) one-sided war. The quick take away: bureaucracies don't change very fast or very well.

Whether or not Path can be used by historians in relation to its acute subject matter--does it have any historical value in explaining the path to 9/11--seems less important than how it can be used as an example in explaining a broader historical problem. Namely, no matter how accurate a document is in depicting actual events, historians (and everyone else) must be careful in how they criticize historical actors for decisions they made without the benefit of the hindsight that we posess in the here-and-now.

"Assessing the Islamist Threat"

The Moslem world sprawls around half the east, from the Pacific across Asia and Africa to the Atlantic, along one of the greatest of trade routes; in its center is an area extremely rich in oil; over it will run some of the most strategically important air routes.

With few exceptions, the states which it includes are marked by poverty, ignorance, and stagnation. It is full of discontent and frustration, yet alive with consciousness of its inferiority and with determination to achieve some kind of general betterment.

Two basic urges meet head-on in this area, and conflict is inherent in this collision of interests. These urges reveal themselves in daily news accounts of killings and terrorism, of pressure groups in opposition, and of raw nationalism and naked expansionism masquerading as diplomatic maneuvers. The urges tie together the tangled threads of power politics which—snarled in the lap of the United Nations Assembly—lead back to the centers of Islamic pressure and to the capitals of the world's biggest nations.

The first of these urges originates within the Moslems' own sphere. The Moslems remember the power with which once they not only ruled their own domains but also overpowered half of Europe, yet they are painfully aware of their present economic, cultural, and military impoverishment. Thus a terrific internal pressure is building up in their collective thinking. The Moslems intend, by any means possible, to regain political independence and to reap the profits of their own resources, which in recent times and up to the present have been surrendered to the exploitation of foreigners who could provide capital investments. The area, in short, has an inferiority complex, and its activities are thus as unpredictable as those of any individual so motivated.

The other fundamental urge originates externally. The world's great and near-great powers cover the economic riches of the Moslem area and are also mindful of the strategic locations of some of the domains. Their actions are also difficult to predict, because each of these powers sees itself in the position of the customer who wants to do his shopping in a hurry because he happens to know the store is going to be robbed.

Thus says a report just published in the Middle East Quarterly.

It was written in 1946.