History Carnival 28

Erm, this isn't easy to admit so I suppose I'll just come out and say it. I regret to announce that I accidentally deleted the folder with all the History Carnival submissions.

April Fool! Hoo-boy, you should've seen your face. Welcome to the 28th edition of the History Carnival! Surprisingly this is a nearly fool-free carnival, so I've taken it upon myself to append some foolishness at the end. Between here and there we have some excellent, thought-provoking posts ranging over the last few thousand years of history.

I had so much fun reading through all these submissions I didn't have the heart to reject any. Let me suggest several visits to take it all in. Everything here is worth checking out. And so, without further ado, here is this fortnight's Carnival of History in strict patalogical order.


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Our most recommended post this carnival is Rob Macdougall's Superman I: Secret Origins. Macdougall uses Gerard Jones' history Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book along with Tom De Haven's novel It's Superman! as a springboard to consider the development of twentieth century popular culture, American Jewish identity, and the idiosyncratic Bernarr MacFadden. Macdougall also references the Eastern News Company, a topic with which I'm somewhat familiar. I suppose now I'll have to interrupt my research to check Men of Tomorrow out of the library. Thanks Rob!

Men of Tomorrow pinpoints Donenfeld's early distributor Eastern News as "a major nexus for an important, undocumented alternative culture in early twentieth century America," one that linked feminists, fitness fanatics, social visionaries, gangsters, and girlie mags. The trucks that carried Donnenfeld's "spicies" also distributed Margaret Sanger's (then illegal) birth control, Al Smith's campaign literature, and Frank Costello's mob liquor. Eastern News handled Hugo Gernsback's "scientifiction" stories and Bernarr MacFadden's body-building magazines, each a parent to Superman and the superhero in their own way. I like that notion a lot—the alt-dot-culture of the 1920s and 1930s, a crucible of cheap magazines and disreputable ideas—and I wish I knew of more good writing on the area. If you haven't noticed, I'm very fond of unexpected historical connections, especially when they reach into the weirder corners of Americana.

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Sparked by Rob's post, Jason Kuznicki at Positive Liberty suggests an earlier era of book history research by suggesting some works of Robert Darnton in his post History: Poisonous, Repetitive, Written by Losers. Darnton's analysis of printed materials available surrounding the French revolution is some of the best and most creative history done in the last half-century. But Jason really gets going on debunking the idea that history is written by the winners, a conceit used by Jones at the beginning of Men of Tomorrow.

Aside from the old saw about history repeating itself (whether or not we learn from it — take your pick), the one thing that everyone thinks they know about history is that it’s written by the winners. Sadly, this claim seems not to correlate with actual historiography at all. Counterexamples abound.

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Gillpolack has several worthwhile posts relating to the recently passed women's history month. The first notes that there are plenty of sources for women's history if you make a serious attempt to look for them.

Another post points to a history of women telegraph operators and contemplates the role of women in science fiction. Which segues nicely into this post about Feminism and science fiction. The final entry is a personal tribute to composer and music critic Linda Phillips.

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Other Men's Flowers answers the question "Who were the first famous women connected with Britain (i.e. those who died before the end of the fifth century and whose biographies are included in the ODNB?)" in Early Celebrities.

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Liz Henry, over at Composite, argues that Cuban poet Luisa Pérez de Zambrana should be considered a modernista as well as a romantic poet.

"I would also note that another force is in play. Pérez de Zambrana gained some fame as a Romanticist, and then moved on to write in other styles. When male poets do this, it makes them versatile. When women do it, it's because they haven't mastered any one thing, they haven't focused, and they have no depth. Ah, fickle Woman!"

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I love manifestos, and was delighted to find a History of Science manifesto over at Ragesoss 2.02.

Sage Ross was prompted to write his history of science manifesto after being confronted with the three questions:

1. What are the most important problems in your field?

2. Are you working on one of them?

3. Why not?

His blog entry attempts to answer the above questions and the manifesto itself can be found posted at Wikipedia.

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Speaking of manifestos, Rob P at History: Other notes that the Sorbonne Occupation Committee in Exile seems to be channeling the situationists, who were masters of the manifesto. This allows him to launch into some thinking about the meaning of democracy and the riots in France in An old one but a good one....

The reason why say, university occupations, however contested their character might be, continue to excite me and others is that they offer alternate models of popular sovereignty. As I argued (in class — make of that what you will) on Monday, the number of strikes and demonstrations that continue to be witnessed in France are no reason for introspective whining about democratic "immaturity" in French broadsheets, or smugness about the relative "contentment" of Anglophonic political culture. Rather, they demonstrate only the wide-scale death, or stultification, of the British popular political imagination.

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Recent genetic research has been used to strongly suggest which set of bones really belong to Christopher Columbus. They hope to use similar research to solve the mystery of his birthplace. Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs takes a more traditional approach in attempting to determine Where was Myles Standish born?

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The Virtual Stoa offers up some excellent questions and answers about the Enlightenment, which in turn has prompted an interesting discussion. Sharon, who recommended this link, notes "...intelligent and historically informed (rare commodity) response to ongoing hot debate started off by journalist in the Guardian's 'Comment is Free' blog (Includes links)"

Question #3: Putting the two previous questions together: was there one Enlightenment, or several?

As we make "Enlightenment" include more than just Paris, we can still ask whether Paris remains a privileged centre or not? Are you "Enlightened" insofar as you are reading the same books as the people in Paris and arguing about them in a language they would understand, or are there alternative ways of being "Enlightened" in the eighteenth century that bypass Paris altogether?

If you talk about the "Scottish Enlightenment", for example, as people in the last fifty years have quite often done, is this in order to distinguish it from the "French Enlightenment" or the "German Enlightenment" or the "Neapolitan Enlightenment", or is it to indicate that Scotland was participating in a much broader set of international developments?

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If you're home schooling your child and you want to help them understand the meaning and importance of chronology, a fundamental component of historical research, and you're the sort of person who believes that Bishop Ussher's Annals of the World is "one of the most important history books ever to be written" then check out History, Chronology and the Bible. This extensive post covers a lot of material for Christian homeschoolers studying ancient history using the Bible. Trivium Pursuit provides "resources which apply Christian Classical Education to Homeschooling."

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Marc at Spinning Clio responds to a Peggy Noonan column about educating immigrants and concludes that teaching a positive history, rather than an overly critical history, to elementary school students might not be such a bad idea in A Positive Historical Baseline.

There is nothing wrong with first introducing a positive history to little kids who in today's day and age seem to not hear enough positive stories. In the grand sweep of our nation's history--although many things have "gone wrong"--I think most would admit that the U.S. has historically been heading in the right direction (I'm generalizing, not being deterministic). Recognizing this, we should establish a positive historical baseline from which older students can venture. When they get older, when they reach those teenage years when so many believe history is boring and their minds are looking for something new and exciting, that's when we should introduce them with "well, did you know this part of the story about such and such."

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Fellow Okie Ms. Cornelius is a public high school teacher and takes a few moments to educate us on the problems when No Child Left Behind leaves history behind in What does it mean if NCLB wants to leave history behind? at A Shrewdness of Apes.

Because social studies is not tested under either federal or state guidelines, the administration (this word has multiple meanings in this context, and I use all of these meanings deliberately) has devalued history education as just a wonderful way to teach some basic writing and reading skills.

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American President's Blog is a wonderful theme blog and well worth checking out regularly. A few weeks ago APB asked
Can An Obscure President Become a Lesson in Character? In this post elementaryhistoryteacher recounts the lessons that can be learned by a group of fifth graders when a teacher takes the time to teach her subject rather than skip over the material because the textbook information is scant.

"When I taught fifth grade I generally began talking about President Arthur by asking students to refer to the page in the text. We read it together. I then ask students for their observations. I take all answers, right or wrong. If they are wrong I usually qualify their participation by stating something like, 'Good observation but you’re heading in the wrong direction.' Some little sweetie will finally observe the small amount of information in the text. 'Why is there so little?' I ask."

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David Mattison at the The Ten Thousand Year Blog directs our attention to folkstreams.net, a worthwhile project devoted to creating a "national preserve of documentary films about American folk or roots culture." This is just one of several great online collections. Three others that immediately come to mind are Tinfoil, a collection of early sound recordings, including some Edison cylinders, the Internet Archive Moving Images collection which focuses on collecting film that has fallen into the public domain (other parts of Internet Archive focus on the web, texts, audio and software), and UBUWEB which has a remarkable collection of material by avant-garde and experimental artists and composers. Mattison also recommends some sites similar to folkstreams.

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We have two entries from Nouri Lumendifi at The Moor Next Door, both about Algeria. The first looks at Jews and Christians in Algeria. The second is a
Reflection on Camus.

"Camus wrote what he knew, which was French Algeria, from the eyes of a pied noir. [Edward] Said faulted Camus for this, as did many of Camus's contemporaries who viewed him as being apologetic or weak on the Algerian question. However, I do not."

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Carla Nayland is inspired to share her research into the aqueducts of Rome after watching Pompeii.

Reviewing Pompeii and the astonishing engineering in the Roman water supply system serving the Bay of Naples prompted me to ferret out my notes from when I was researching Roman water supply in Britain. This was turning into a long post even by my standards, so I've split it into two. Conveniently, it more or less divides along the lines of 'evidence' (part 1) and 'interpretation' (part 2).

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Jon Swift's review of Thomas E. Woods Jr.'s Politically Incorrect Guide to American History was removed from Amazon.com at the request of the author. Swift reprints the review on his blog along with Woods's response.

Excerpt from Woods's response: "Do you not understand the term "politically incorrect"?? It doesn't mean FACTUALLY incorrect. Have you never heard of political correctness?"

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Respectful Insolence joins the carnival with Real Holocaust Revisionism. Orac draws the distinction between holocaust revisionism and holocaust denial and points us to the Committee for Open Debate of the Holocaust (CODOH).

"One of the most annoying thing about Holocaust "revisionists" is that they really aren't revisionists at all. Revisionism is a legitimate academic pursuit in history. Indeed, nearly all history is to some extent revisionist, because new historians find new sources that previously may have been lost or otherwise not available and reinterpret history in light of new information, or they bring a different perspective to the existing evidence and try to get closer to the "truth" of history. What Holocaust deniers have done is to appropriate the term "revisionist" in a deceptive manner meant to add a patina of academic historical legitimacy to their lies and equate their "work" to that of legitimate historians."

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Nathanael D. Robinson takes Lou Dobbs to task for taking a Teddy Roosevelt quote out of context in Spanish Spoken Here at History News Network. Spanish was spoken in the Southwest US long before that part of the country was ever the US.

This is the worst of 'bad history': choosing a quote that itself warped the reality of its time. Addressing immigrants, Roosevelt lumped together all those who came from a non-European, non-English speaking culture into the same category. Yet many Californios, Nuevo Mexicanos, and Tejanos were not immigrants. They had been in their territories for a long time, becoming Americans by annexation and purchase. Until late in the nineteenth century, these territories were better reached from northern Mexican states than eastern and mid-western American states.

An update to the original post can be found here.

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Ahistoricality explains why a historical analogy by Donald Rumsfeld mischaracterizes history in Rumsfelds's Progress.

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World History Blog looks at the current conspiracy theories surrounding the World Trade Center towers destruction on 9/11 and Holocaust denial. Conspiracy Theories, 9/11, and Historical Revisionism.

"I find a striking similarity between 9/11 revisionist and Holocaust deniers. Many of the claims of Holocaust revisionism is that the Holocaust was a fabricated event created by the West to justify the creation of Israel. The 9/11 revisionists are claiming that the event was contrived by Israel or other western power to create a backlash against Arabs which also benefits Israel. I find it ironic that educated individuals who may even realize the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is fake and is not proof of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy also at the same time believe that many of the major historical events of the last 70 years are proof of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy."

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Mr. H at Gironale Nuovo introduces us to a delightful collection titled Curiosities of Street Literature, compiled by a London bookseller in 1871 in Gallows Literature.

In 1871, a London bookseller named Charles Hindley published a 'large and curious assortment' of '"Cocks," or "Catchpennies,"' in other words, miscellaneous 'Street-Drolleries, Squibs, Histories, Comic Tales in Prose and Verse, Broadsides on the Royal Family, Political Litanies, Dialogues, Cathechisms, Acts of Parliament, Street Political Papers, a Variety of "Ballads on a Subject," Dying Speeches and Confessions,' etc., etc.

The always excellent BiblioOdyssey pursues a similar theme in Murder Most Foul

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Martin Rundkvist at Salto Sobrius is commissioned to write about a 5th and early 6th century Swedish cemetery and gives us an advance look at some his findings in Migration Period Chamber Graves.

"This beautiful little silver Bügelknopf brooch was found in grave 141, an unassuming tiny concentration of burnt bone and charcoal. Other finds were just a copper alloy wire fragment and a few ugly potsherds. This is the oldest datable grave at the cemetery, a 4th century burial, and its general tinyness makes me wonder if it may have been a child's burial. The bones don't tell."

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Nathanael at Rhine River picks up on a thread of conversation about tradition started at Crooked Timber and responded to by Sharon Howard and writes about the creation of the category of tradition in Tradition Patents.

"But the problem of the nineteenth century was not that it invented traditions, either ex nihilo or on remnants of the past, but that it invented the category of tradition: the culture that was the spontaneous expression of the people/nation (often rooted in or preserved by its peasantry) and that was endangered by the transformations set forth by modernity."

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Not content with restricting ourselves to history written in English we turn to Rua da Judiaria to remember that April 19, 20 and 21 of 2006 is the 500th anniversary of a the horrific slaughter of four thousand or more Jews in Lisbon. 500 anos: O massacre de Lisboa

Vai fazer exactamente 500 anos, nos dias 19, 20 e 21 de Abril, que um cataclismo se abateu sobre Lisboa. A alma da Capital do Império sofreu um abalo tão grande – senão mesmo maior – quanto aquele que a haveria de destruir em 1755. Durante três dias, em nome de um fanatismo sanguinário, mais de 4 mil pessoas perderam a vida numa matança sem precedentes em Portugal.

There are five posts of analysis and testimonials. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

Don't forget to use Babel Fish if you need help with your translations.

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Phil Harland at Religions of the Ancient Mediterrenean takes a look at Satan Satanic Conspiracies of the 70s and 80s.

"In essence, this conspiracy theory entailed a worldwide, secretive network of Satan worshippers who were systematically exploiting both children and adults to engage in wild and demonic rituals."

He also spends some time dealing with backmasking.

The idea was that if you play a record backwards (remember records?) you could potentially hear an alternate message that, it was believed, was placed there intentionally by the artists in order to serve their lord and master, Satan.

An interesting documentary about this very subject is Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills. Highly recommended, but difficult to find.

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Miriam Burstein at The Little Professor gives us eleven Rules for Writing Neo-Victorian Novels.

5. Any outwardly respectable man will a) have frequent recourse to Prostitutes, b) have a Dark Secret, and/or c) be Jack the Ripper.

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Caleb McDaniel tries to help us make a little extra money by pointing us to this historical brain teaser that comes with an award.The Thousand Dollar Question is Can you find an example of "repressed memory" prior to 1800?

"A larger question that Cliopatria's readers might be able to address is a question that is begged by this contest: can we really mine history for evidence of clinical conditions that have only been identified in modern times? It's a question that's also been raised by recent debates on Joshua Wolf Shenk's contention that Lincoln was clinically depressed."

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Timothy Burke takes a moment of shocking racist behavior to explore historical consciousness and collective memory. "Thank Your Grandpa For My Cotton Shirt"

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Natalie at Philobiblon has some questions about the problems created by rhyme in A Question of Rhyme.

She manages to take a break from work to see a play about the queens of Henry, Divorced, Beheaded, Died.

"The history and research behind the show are solid. I happen to be working on a book covering the same period and the details of the history can’t be faulted and are in line with all of the latest research.

"The starting premise is too an interesting one, but from there it is all downhill."

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The Diamond Geezer is also out and about and gives us a review of the Imperial War Museum.

"Once you get past the queue at the cash desk you enter into a tall airy entrance hall packed with the machinery of war. Mighty rockets rise up from the floor (that's a V2, that's a Polaris). Field guns and tanks are scattered around for intimate perusal (that's a Howitzer, that's a Sherman). A selection of classic warplanes hang across the ceiling (that's a Sopwith Camel, that's a Focke and yes, that's a Spitfire)."

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In the first of several retroblogs (blogs posting works of someone long dead) Misteraitch continues his Curiosities of Literature series by Isaac D’Israeli with the post On Puck the Commentator.

"This is an incrementally-published online presentation of Isaac D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature, a compendium of book-lore whose first edition was published in 1791. Many new articles were added in editions issued in 1807, 1817 and 1823, and the book was further revised up until D'Israeli's last years. The primary source for the present text is an undated single-volume edition published ca. 1885 by George Routledge & Sons, the text in which was drawn from much earlier (1820s) editions of the work."

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Natalie of Philobiblon is also posting a historical work online with her Diaries of a Lady of Quality, "written between 1797 and 1844 by Miss Frances Williams Wynn, the daughter of Sir Watkin Williams Wynn (the fourth baronet) and Charlotte, daughter of George Grenville (First Lord of the Treasury, 1763-1765)."

This entry, Countess Macnamara. The Bourbons, brings us some 19th century gossip on French history.

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More retroblogging by The Rev. Vicesimus Knox on On the Fallaciousness of History.

"So little credit is to be given to historians, even in the recital of facts of public notoriety! how much less to their delineation of characters, and descriptions of motives for actions, secret counsels and designs, to which none was a witness but the bosom which entertained them! Yet many historians kindly communicate all. You would think them of the privy-council of all nations; that they possessed the attribute of omniscience, though their intelligence never came from a higher source than an old woman’s tale."

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Not quite a retroblog, nonetheless Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog and is shelling out wisdom.

"Lordynges, by Goddes grace ich yow biseche that ye forgyven me myn tardinesse yn updatinge myn blogge. In this droughty march, the customes house is unusualie bisy.

"Ther ys one of the demaundes for myn advyce column that I am looth to lette passen unanswerede, yet also looth to answeren, so hevy are the paynes it driveth thurgh myn herte."

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Laura James at CLEWS: The Historic True Crime Blog alerts us to some new Free content from Newspaperarchive.

"Yippee! So you, gentle Reader, visitor of Clews, are being asked what subjects you’d be interested in reading about, gratis. If you have any ideas email me or leave a comment. Should I ask for Black Dahlia? Lizzie Borden? What kind of newspaper articles would you be interested in?"

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John Hawks considers Arabian baboons and Red Sea land bridges with some interesting pointers for anyone thinking about the role of land bridges in historical diasporas.

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Owen raises some compelling questions about recent South Korean historiography in Duelling Histories Part 3.

Basically, the main protagonist, Im Chi-hyŏn, argues that Park's rule was an example of a 'mass dictatorship' (대중독재), in other words, the idea that Park was able to rule by creating some degree of consent for his dictatorship. Cho counters that "the mass dictatorship theory is problematic because it expands the accommodating silence of the masses into a general and active agreement with the dictatorship, thus justifying it."

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Rex at Savage Minds spends some time give us some background about Gavin Menzies popular 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, and the backlash it's received from scholars, especially the review by Robert Finlay.

"A fine example of academic blood sport at its finest, Finlay’s savaging of Menzies manages to combine over-the-top rhetoric with real and detailed empirical refutation."

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Inspired by Victor Davis Hanson's recent list of definitive books on 20th century battles, Grant Jones of The Dougout considers his five favorite warrior memoirs. My Favorite Five Military memoirs

"Richthofen wrote this short book while recuperating from wounds inflicted by the rear gunner of a British two seater. It was originally published while World War I was still in progress so, of course, suffered from the censor's red pen. However, it's a wonderful look at the German air service during the war."

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Miriam provides an obituary for Robert Scott, Flying Ace at Miriam's Ideas.

"Brigadier General Robert Scott, who has died aged 97, became an 'ace' fighter pilot flying alongside RAF squadrons in Burma against the Japanese in 1942, an experience that he recorded in his classic wartime memoir God is my Co-Pilot; a film of the same name, starring Dennis Morgan as Scott, was released in 1945."

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Not the Olympics and not so well known in the US, Airminded gives us some background on the Commonwealth Games in Hurrah for the British Empire Games.

Getting back to the British Empire Games, it seems to me that there was a vogue in the interwar period, and perhaps especially in the 1930s, for prefixing the word "Empire" or "Imperial" to various events and schemes. Aside from the Games, there was Empire Day and Imperial Preference. In my own area, there was Empire Air Day and the Empire class flying boats; Imperial Airways and the Imperial Airship Programme. Perhaps with the Dominions "growing up" and increasingly going their own way (the Statute of Westminster was passed in 1931), there was a desire to reinforce the ties of culture and sentiment with something more practical. And of course aviation was an ideal technology for such a purpose.

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Another Savage Minds post, this one from oneman, contemplates the creation of the Muslim identity in the West and looks at an exhibition currently touring Britain of influential Muslim inventions. The Invention of the World: Islam in the West.

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Andrew Ross at Air Pollution takes on Walter Benjamin and offers some suggestions for reframing our concepts of modernity in Back with a Bang.

"The newspaper is often considered just another example of the disorder of modern life. The fait divers, for example, placed random events next to one another, without coherent order. In addition, the newspaper blurred the line between commerce and news: almost all of it could be bought and sold. However, the very disorder of the newspaper, repeated day after day after day, effectively created a way of disordered order. People were able to make sense of the disorder, enabling them to find a new way of structure."

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Over at the skwib, Mark A. Rayner's irregular and explosive weblog, we see that the Lost Power Point Slides (Ides of March Edition) have been unearthed. Previous unearthed slides can be found here. While you're visiting skwib be sure and check out the recently hosted Carnival of Satire.

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The next History Carnival host is (a)musings of a grad student.

Suggestions can be made via this form or email Rebecca at rgoetz[at]fas[dot]harvard[dot]edu. If you're interested in hosting a History Carnival, email Sharon at Early Modern Notes.



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Finally, A Brief Patahistorical Essay on Pranks.