Results for Historically Speaking

Latest issue of Historically Speaking Now Online

March 21, 2014
Randall Stephens

The latest issue of HS is now up on the Project Muse site.  It is a longer issue than normal, featuring two forums, five essays, and four interviews.  Readers might be especially interested in our forum on Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (Yale University Press, 2013), one of the most important history books of the last year.  As Don Yerxa puts it in the intro to the forum: "It has been widely heralded as an extraordinary scholarly achievement. Parker makes the case for a link between climate change and the worldwide catastrophe that occurred 350 years ago. We asked Parker to begin our forum with an account on the book’s long gestation. Then three prominent scholars, Kenneth Pomeranz, J.R. McNeill, and Jack Goldstone, comment on Global Crisis, followed by Parker’s rejoinder."

This issue, as many of our readers know, also marks an important transition for HS.  We are suspending publication for the remainder of 2014 as we forge a more sustainable operational framework. We are hopeful that some very promising developments will enable us to resume publishing a new and improved Historically Speaking in 2015.

TOC, Historically Speaking (November 2013)

"Silver and Segregation"
Wyatt Wells

"Winston Churchill and the Literary History of Politics"
Jonathan Rose

"Winston Churchill and Almighty God"
David Reagles and Timothy Larsen

"Liberal Protestantism in 20th-Century America: An Interview with
David A. Hollinger"
Conducted by Randall J. Stephens

"Catastrophe 1914: An Interview with Max Hastings"
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Digital versus Printed Historical and Literary Editions: A Forum

"Television Is Not Radio with Pictures"
Holly Cowan Shulman

"Pouring Old Editorial Wine into New Digital Bottles"
Constance Schulz

"The Changing Production and Consumption of Historical and Literary Texts: The View from the Simms Initiatives"
David Moltke-Hansen

"The Invention of the American Meal: An Interview with Abigail Carroll"
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

"Global Crisis: A Forum The Genesis of Global Crisis"
Geoffrey Parker

"Weather, War, and Welfare: Persistence and Change in
Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis"
Kenneth Pomeranz

"Maunder Minimum and Parker Maximum"
J.R. McNeill

"Climate Lessons from History"
Jack A. Goldstone

"Response"
Geoffrey Parker

"A Combat History of the Great War: An Interview with Peter Hart"
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

"Jewish History and Education: A Review Essay"
Philip T. Hoffman

"Töchter of Feminism: Germany and the Modern Woman Artist"
Diane Radycki
Latest issue of Historically Speaking Now Online Latest issue of Historically Speaking Now Online Reviewed by Joseph Landis on March 21, 2014 Rating: 5

Joseph Amato on Local History and the Decline of Rural America

October 22, 2013
Joe Amato, emeritus professor of history at Southwest Minnesota State University, is a prolific and creative scholar. He has published eye-opening books on unique topics (his most recent is Surfaces: A History). He is also a veteran practitioner of the kinds of history most avidly pursued by non-academics: genealogy and local history. The January, April, and June issues of the 2013 volume of the Historical Society's bulletin Historically Speaking feature a three-part essay series by Amato, "Place and American History," where he ruminates on these seemingly mundane--though in his hands anything but--historiographical genres. Recently Amato spoke to South Dakota Public Radio's Nathan Puhl about these essays. You can listen to their conversation here.

Joseph Amato on Local History and the Decline of Rural America Joseph Amato on Local History and the Decline of Rural America Reviewed by Joseph Landis on October 22, 2013 Rating: 5

September Issue of Historically Speaking and the History of History Departments

September 17, 2013
Randall Stephens

In the coming weeks Historically Speaking subscribers will receive the latest issue.  In it we have essays on American political history and reform (John Frederick Martin and F. S.
Naiden), objectivity in the study of history (Judith Walzer Leavitt), Atlantic World history (Trevor Burnard), photography and the Great War (Von Hardesty), an obituary of Pauline Maier (Chris Beneke), and Evangelical Catholicism (Mark Edwards).  Alongside those are interviews with scholars concerning American religious history (Larry Eskridge), and the critical years of 1979 (Christian Caryl) and 1913 (Charles Emmerson).

The September issue also includes James M. Banner's fascinating essay "The Almost Nonexistent History of Academic Departments."  Writes Banner: "Department histories are almost nowhere to be found."  Why is that so?  Says Banner:

The history of education has never found a strong place in history departments. Those aspiring historians seeking entry to graduate programs, even those with a nascent interest in the history of education, have not been without good sense in defining their interests to graduate program admissions committees as being, say, in the social history of ideas if they are interested in academic culture or, say, in the history of the social composition of academic faculties or student cohorts if they have a general interest in academic institutions. Those of their mentors who might wish it were otherwise, who would like to see students pursue the history of academic departments—and there are a few, even if very few, of these—have found it a losing game to try to attract their students to such subjects. It is thus a distinctive and hardy student who proposes to undertake a dissertation on the history of a university department in any discipline.

Two other forces are at work against the pursuit of departmental histories. One is the simple fact that institutions do not have memories; only their members and employees do. If faculty members fail to take an interest in their histories, academic departments are not likely to be the subject of institutional histories. The histories of departments are carried within their members’ memories, not within the institutions themselves; once their members resign or retire, the history they embody leaves the department with them. Only concerted efforts to capture and preserve those memories can avail.

But a second reality working against department histories is the disposition of most faculty members toward their own departments and colleagues. Academics are practiced in, sometimes champions of, gossip. They nourish themselves on intramural disputes, on information about their colleagues, on battles over appointments. That is generally all to the good, for if kept within collegial bounds, gossip and inside information are constituent parts of the equilibrating mechanisms of all institutions. But in this case, private knowledge gained and imparted through gossip stands in for formal historical knowledge and is not recorded or caught on paper or tape as a resource for formal future histories unless it happens to be set down in personal correspondence or diaries that find themselves into library collections. If not, that knowledge is allowed to vanish into air and thus be of no use to future historians. . . .

Read more by subscribing to the print issue or by logging on to Project Muse.
September Issue of Historically Speaking and the History of History Departments September Issue of Historically Speaking and the History of History Departments Reviewed by Joseph Landis on September 17, 2013 Rating: 5

Remembering World War I in the Northeast of England

September 15, 2013
Randall Stephens

The Response by Sir William
Goscombe John. Unveiled by
the Prince of Wales in 1923.
Ernest Hemingway didn't mince words.  The author of A Farewell to Arms claimed that World War I "was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied. So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought."  Seeing the ravages of war up close, he served with distinction as an ambulance driver in Italy.  Gertrude Stein coined the phrase "lost generation," which applied to Hemingway and other wayward souls like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

What accounts for the gap between Hemingway's tone and the gallant, heroic one of war memorials?  Did region have a role to play in war remembrance?  How do we make sense of the conflict now that the last veterans have passed away?

As we near the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I Don Yerxa has been conducting a series of interviews on the subject in the pages of Historically Speaking.  Watch for other essays, forums, and interviews in the coming months.

Here at Northumbria University my colleague in the History Programme, James McConnel has put together a stellar series of lectures to commemorate the war in the northeast of England.  This region responded in greater numbers, per capita, than any other.  So, the memories of the war take on a special meaning here.  Below is the full list of the lectures and the dates.

Tynemouth World War I Commemoration Project. (Lectures to be held at 6pm at Northumbria University, Sutherland Building, Northumberland Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 8JF).

9 October 2013
Professor Sir Hew Strachan, All Souls College Oxford
"The Ideas of War, 1914"

12 November 2013
Emeritus Professor Martin Pugh, Newcastle University
"Women and the First World War: Emancipation or Domesticity?"

3 December 2013
John Lewis-Stempel
"Six Weeks: The Life and Death of Junior Officers on the Western Front"

British Empire Union poster, 1918.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
21 January 2014
Emeritus Professor John Derry, Newcastle University
"Hindenberg and Luddendorf: A Brilliant Parnership?"

18 February 2014
Dr Edward Madigan, CWGC
"The Better Part of Valour: British Understandings of Courage during the First World War"

4 March 2014
Professor Gary Sheffield, University of Birmingham
"Douglas Haig, the First World War, and the British People"

8 April 2014
Professor Andrew Lambert, King’s College London
"The War at Sea from the July Crisis to the eve of Jutland"

8 May 2014
Professor Joanna Bourke, Birkbeck College London
"'Sharp Shooting Pains that Make Me Shout Out': A History of Disability and the First World War"

For more, click here.
Remembering World War I in the Northeast of England Remembering World War I in the Northeast of England Reviewed by Joseph Landis on September 15, 2013 Rating: 5

Karel C. Berkhoff on Stalin, the Media, and World War II

August 04, 2013
Randall Stephens

How did Stalin control the media during World War II?  And how did that level of control shape the direction of the war and compare to similar efforts in Germany?   Karel C. Berkhoff explores these and other questions in his June 2013 Historically Speaking essay, "Motherland In Danger: How Stalin Micromanaged The Media During The War With Nazi Germany and Hurt Mobilization Efforts." (See the full piece at Project Muse.)

Asks Berkhoff: "If you lived, say, in Novosibirsk or Tashkent during World War II, what were you told? What did Soviet newspapers and radio tell Soviet civilians, and what did it all mean for the outcome of the war?" 

Throughout he notes that Stalin's extensive wartime propaganda stood out when compared to contemporaries.  Here's a brief excerpt:

A close look reveals that during the war with Nazi Germany, known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, Soviet propaganda was much more centralized than in Nazi Germany. Joseph Goebbels led the German Ministry of Propaganda, but he lacked dictatorial power; competing forces remained in place. In the Soviet Union, however, one man basically decided everything. Stalin created a central information bureau, instructed editors, studied drafts of newspaper articles, glanced at page proofs, and immensely tightened censorship. He squeezed out the voices of real people, quite contrary to the view that the war made him loosen his grip.

Stalin found keeping control more important than stimulating and mobilizing people, so in this sense, Soviet propaganda was more totalitarian than its notorious Nazi counterpart. The extreme centralization, as both an ideal and a practice, had no equal in wartime Europe. Nothing shows this better than the Soviet state’s almost immediate confiscation of radio receivers from its own citizens; only wire radios remained. It was all because of fear. Stalin led a regime that had known for a long time, even under Vladimir Lenin, that its popular support was slim, and now, at war with Germany, he feared that his citizens might become less loyal to him. Stalin also feared that accurate information might benefit Nazi propaganda or cause the Americans and other allies to reconsider their Soviet aid.

One could argue that propaganda that barely informed did not really hurt the war effort because the home country was under attack and the invaders’ regime was more brutal and murderous than any earlier occupation in world history. It is true that eventually the “war of annihilation” declared by Adolf Hitler just had to be opposed. The danger underlined in Soviet propaganda was real, and Soviet citizens realized that, indeed, Nazi Germany offered them nothing but slavery and death. Stalin’s propaganda told them that the “Hitlerites” were murdering innocent civilians, including women, children, and the elderly; soon rumors and first-hand accounts by refugees confirmed these tales. The entire country was under threat. Moreover, Stalin, in a rare brilliant stroke, made propaganda speak more of the “fatherland” and the “motherland” than of Russia, a word that alienated many non-Russian citizens. While Russian patriotism did flourish, the Georgian-born dictator restrained its chauvinistic version.

In various ways, the war propaganda of the Soviet Union resembled that of other belligerents. There were stories about selfless war heroes, which people suspected were partly or wholly untrue, and if Moscow received information contradicting the tales—corpses not found, dead heroes turning out to be alive––it was suppressed. Soviet citizens were also provided with many stories about traitors. In Germany, the UK, and the U.S., too, the media searched for and found war heroes and traitors. If British and American propaganda denigrated entire nations as enemies, for most of the war, Soviet propaganda also emitted hate speech—it encouraged and incited ethnic hatred and violence. In an ideological heresy tolerated by Stalin, the German people, not just their leaders or the “fascists,” became evil incarnate.

Most surprising is the similar treatment of what we now call the Holocaust: how the Nazis—assisted by many other Europeans—succeeded almost completely in murdering all the Jewish men, women, and children within their reach. Early on, Stalin and his associates were told by various sources that the Nazis were exterminating all Jews. But the media hardly ever highlighted this killing campaign. Stalin was aware that many of his associates and subjects were anti-Semitic. Telling the country about Jews would hurt the war effort against those who were exterminating them, he seems to have assumed. Here, too, Soviet coverage resembled British and American reporting.

Read on through your library subscription to Project Muse, or subscribe to Historically Speaking here.
Karel C. Berkhoff on Stalin, the Media, and World War II Karel C. Berkhoff on Stalin, the Media, and World War II Reviewed by Joseph Landis on August 04, 2013 Rating: 5

Michal Jan Rozbicki on "The Rise of Learned Hagiography"

July 09, 2013
Randall Stephens

The following excerpt is from Michal Jan Rozbicki's review essay in the June 2013 issue of Historically Speaking.  Rozbicki uses Jon Meacham's Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
(Random House, 2012) to delve into "the cult of great individuals," which even in the present, does not lack enthusiasts.  Rozbicki is professor of history and director of the Center for Intercultural Studies at Saint Louis University. He is the author of Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution (University of Virginia Press, 2011).

One would be hard pressed to find a dull period in Thomas Jefferson’s life. Mindful of that, I began devouring Jon Meacham’s 800-page Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power anticipating a gourmet biographical feast. It started off as an enjoyable and well-paced story but it was not long before the taste of syrup began to take over. By the time I reached page eight I had already been informed that “Jefferson was the
most successful political figure of the first half century of the American Republic,” “had a remarkable capacity to marshal ideas and to move on, to balance the inspirational and the pragmatic,” and was “a transformative leader.” He was a “formidable man” and his “genius” was that he “dreamed big but understood that dreams become reality only when their champions are strong enough and wily enough to bend history to their purposes.” A case of “the rare leader who stood out from the crowd without intimidating it,” his “bearing gave him unusual opportunities to make the thoughts in his head the work of his hands, transforming the world around him.” Not only “a man of Enlightenment, always looking forward, consumed by the quest for knowledge” but also “an inveterate walker,” “fit and virile,” “never tired of invention and inquiry,” “delighted in archeology paleontology, astronomy, botany, and meteorology,” “drew sustenance from music and found joy in gardening,” “bought and built beautiful things,”“was an enthusiastic patron of pasta,” and “enjoyed the search for a perfect dressing for his salads.” Moreover, he “knew Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and Spanish,” was “a student of human nature, a keen observer of what drove other men,” “perfectly acquainted” with “subject after subject,” an “extraordinary man.” Politically, he was “the father of the ideal of individual liberty, of the Louisiana Purchase, of the Lewis and Clark expedition, of the American West,” “the author and designer of America, a figure who articulated a vision of what the country could be.” A “builder and a fighter,” he “gave the nation the idea of American progress.” He was able to operate “on two levels, cultivating the hope of a brighter future while preserving the political flexibility and skill to bring the ideal as close as possible to reality.” The world “found him charming, brilliant, and gracious,” friends thought “he was among the greatest men who had ever lived, a Renaissance figure who was formidable without seeming overbearing, sparkling without being showy, winning without appearing cloying,” and “women in particular loved him.” Oh, and “he had great teeth” (xvii-xxiv).

The first pages are a herald of what is to come. The book is a glitzy glorification of Jefferson. But it is much more than that. It represents a new and intriguing genre that is perhaps best described as learned hagiography, an eclectic mix of seemingly incompatible components like old-fashioned hero worship, elite-centered topic, seductive narrative aimed at popular readership, solid scholarly research with a heavy apparatus of citations, and a didactic political objective.

The cult of great individuals has never lacked enthusiasts. Some are drawn to the Nietzschean belief that strong personages, superior to ordinary people, are the driving force of history. Others long for a savior who will liberate us from all evil. Some are passive followers finding comfort in believing that this or that leader is wise, knows best, and will guide everyone through the turmoil of existence. Others are mesmerized by the pomp and majesty of office. All reflect the uncanny ability of people to create idealized fictions and then believe their own wishful thinking. Their heroes have one thing in common: they are not so much who they are as who they ought to be.

Greatness sells, which is why hero-worshiping literature has a long and venerable
tradition, rooted in both popular and elite culture. It stretches from Greek mythology, Gesta Romanorum, lives of saints, Arthurian legends, chivalric romances, troubadour songs, and chronicles of monarchs, through the political drama of Renaissance and the epic poetry of European romanticism, to didactic biographies of leaders (such as Parson Weems’s life of Washington) and historical novels. These writings—as opposed to modern, critical history aiming to explain why things happened—mostly describe prominent people and events in time, often embellishing them with invented episodes, folk legends, and even the personal views and experiences of the authors. The goals are usually fairly simple: exalt the qualities of the great and the saintly, lionize the powerful, and point to their role in changing the course of history. One of the distinctive features of this literature is that it was an instructional tool. Its aim was pragmatic and rooted in the present. Authors hoped that their works would supply the collective memory with worthy themes and symbols that bind societies and invite followers. The enduring attractiveness of such stories lies less in their adeptness in reconstructing facts than in their ability to conjure up ideal types, to celebrate the potential of the individual person, and to offer positive models of virtue—all qualities that defy the incoherence of the world.

By selecting Jefferson, Meacham taps directly into the pantheon of national icons. Reverence for the Founders is perhaps the most conspicuous form of hero worship in America. Politicians, journalists, and ordinary people look to them for usable history, and revel in “discovering” their own views in the Founders’ minds. A suitable quote can buy a badge of legitimacy for a broad variety of endeavors. For writers of historical biographies, this appeal has been a gold mine. Hardly a few months go by without a new volume, and the demand seems insatiable. All things considered, this is terrific for history, and helps thwart a broader weakening of public interest in the country’s past (exemplified, for instance, by the decline of U.S. survey courses as core requirements in colleges). . . . 
 
Read more from Historically Speaking at Project Muse. 
Michal Jan Rozbicki on "The Rise of Learned Hagiography" Michal Jan Rozbicki on "The Rise of Learned Hagiography" Reviewed by Joseph Landis on July 09, 2013 Rating: 5

Science, Religion, and the Modern West: The April Issue of Historically Speaking

April 28, 2013
Randall Stephens

In the coming week the April 2013 issue of Historically Speaking will be posted to the Project Muse site.  Subscribers can expect it soon in mailboxes.  The issue includes essays on environmental history, ancient religion, teaching, and Harry Truman.It also features interviews with Matthew Bowman on Mormonism in American history, John R. Gillis on seacoasts in history, and turning points of World War I with Ian F.W. Beckett. 

In addition the April issue includes a lively forum on "Scientific Culture in the Modern Era" with intellectual historian Stephen Gaukroger (University of Sydney).  "One of the most distinctive features of Western culture since the 17th century is the gradual assimilation of all cognitive values to scientific ones," writes Gaukroger in his lead essay. "A particular image of the role and aims of scientific understanding is tied up in a very fundamental way with the self-image of Western modernity. One striking illustration of this is the way that the West’s sense of what its superiority consisted of shifted seamlessly in the early decades of the 19th century from religion to science. From that time on, but particularly in the second half of the 20th century, this self-understanding has been exported as an essential ingredient in the process of modernization."

With this major shift in Western thought, soon enough religion came under new scrutiny. Using the perspectives of historical-critical thinking and later developments in science, researchers from the late-19th century forward began to reinterpret the sacred texts of the West. In an essay on "The Dead Sea Scrolls," also in the April issue, John J. Collins  (Yale Divinity School) examines changing perspectives and decades of wrangling about the meaning and context of the scrolls.  ""No archaeological discovery of the 20th century has aroused more interest than the Dead Sea Scrolls," Collins observes.

Below are two sections from Collins' fascinating piece on the arguments and counterarguments about the scrolls:

[American biblical scholar and historian] Robert Eisenman argued that the Scrolls, rather than the Gospels, were the primary documents of early Christianity, which was a hate-filled, xenophobic movement. Australian scholar Barbara Thiering claimed that Jesus was the figure called “the Wicked Priest” in the Scrolls. Two British writers, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, published a book called The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception in 1991, in which they argued that Allegro and Eisenman were right, but that the truth was suppressed by the priests on the editorial team at the behest of the Vatican. Most scholars dismiss all of this as nonsense, but it always finds a ready market in the press. Even now, after most of the debates have subsided, laypeople ask earnestly whether Jesus or John the Baptist were Essenes. There is no reason to think that they were.
Text from The Great Isaiah Scroll,
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

 
In fact, the relevance of the Scrolls to early Christianity is complex. They fill out many details about the world in which Christianity was born. The followers of Jesus, like the Essenes, believed that history would soon come to an end, that a savior figure would come from heaven, and that messiahs would restore the right order on Earth. Their idea of what constituted the right order, however, was very different from that of the Essenes. Jesus and his followers did not place great emphasis on purity, and were more concerned about what came out of a person’s mouth than with what went in. The sect known from the Scrolls, in contrast, was obsessed with purity, and separated themselves from their fellow Jews to avoid defilement.

The Arab-Israeli war of 1967 was a turning point in the history of scholarship on the Scrolls. Both the site of Qumran and the Rockefeller Museum where most of the Scrolls were kept came under Israeli
An aerial view of the ruins of Qumran. From the
BBC documentary Traders of the Dead Sea Scrolls (1998).
control. The Israelis did not immediately interfere in the publication process. The old editorial team remained in place for more than twenty years. But Yigael Yadin, who was both a general in the army and a distinguished scholar, took some soldiers and paid a visit to Kando, the cobbler in Bethlehem who was the middleman to whom the Bedouin brought the Scrolls. After some “unpleasant” negotiations, Yadin took possession of a long document called the Temple Scroll, which Kando had hidden in a shoe box under the floor boards. Kando later received a payment from the Israelis by way of settlement. . . .

The debates about the Scrolls have often been acrimonious. Norman Golb, long-time professor at the University of Chicago, has persistently disputed the Essene attribution, and has complained vociferously whenever his position is not acknowledged. His son Rafael, a real-estate lawyer in New York, was convicted in the State Supreme Court in November 2009 of impersonating a prominent Scrolls scholar, Lawrence Schiffman, who disagrees with his father, and pretending to confess to plagiarism in Schiffman’s name, apparently in the hope of incriminating him. Elisha Qimron, the scholar who helped publish 4QMMT, sued a magazine publisher, Herschel Shanks, for unauthorized publication of the reconstructed text and translation. Shanks was convicted by an Israeli court and had to pay damages. Exchanges about the Scrolls have often been more heated than is usual in the normally peaceful world of biblical scholarship.

It is somewhat difficult to say why this is so. For scholars like Golb, the Jewish character of the Scrolls seems to be at stake. The implication is that if they are attributed to a marginal sect, the Essenes, they are not “really Jewish” and are more akin to Christianity. For a long time Christian scholars had seemed to appropriate the Scrolls and set them against rabbinic Judaism. Certainly, some of the claims about the relevance of the Scrolls for early Christianity have been wildly exaggerated. . . .

The full essay will soon be posted at Project Muse. Subscribe to Historically Speaking here.
Science, Religion, and the Modern West: The April Issue of Historically Speaking Science, Religion, and the Modern West: The April Issue of Historically Speaking Reviewed by Joseph Landis on April 28, 2013 Rating: 5
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