Books
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I can’t remember where I got this phrase, but the link is now dead or hidden behind the AHA paywall (November 26, 2014). ↩︎
Fostering Historical Thinking with Brecht’s Galileo
Spring is almost here, which means its time to order books for the summer term. Summer in DC gets hot, and the summer terms are short, so I usually try to assign things that are both reasonably entertaining and not too long for the general audience I get in my introductory survey courses that are mandatory requirements for all majors. Besides covering a variety of themes and genres, I often try to pick one book that will jump-start historical thinking. I want a book that will make students more aware of how much "the past is like a foreign country" that we will not understand, if we do not try to fathom the conditions and assumptions of the time without letting our contemporary worldview get in our way.
Last year I tried Bertolt Brecht's Galileo, which I had first experienced as a TA for Sandra Horvath-Peterson at Georgetown University back in the 1990s. Of course, Brecht adapts Galileo's story to his own purposes, but it provides a useful point of departure for a discussion about the Scientific Revolution. It also forces students to come to terms with the limits of historical fiction.
It usually goes pretty well, though the first section I did it in was a little rocky, partly because not enough students had done the reading, but also because I was surprised that so few people had any general knowledge of fascism. The paperback edition we used, translated by Eric Bently, contains some excellent material on Brecht's prejudices, but it spends too much time on material more of interest to specialists in drama. Some students read the first part of it, but most gave up and went straight to the play. So I integrated a mini talk of Brecht's time into the discussions and got them to reason out how the problems of the nineteen thirties and forties had manifested themselves in a play Brecht had set in the seventeenth century. I also assigned sources from 1615 and 1633, so that they could get a sense of the issues from Galileo's own time.
One point I tried to make clear was that science was only then beginning to manifest itself as an independent discourse, that it was perfectly natural for the Church to be interested in science at the time and even claim authority on the matter. Of course, I'm no specialist on the matter, but it seems to me that this basic point is worth making. Most students seemed to get it too. Indeed, I felt like cheering when one woman near the end of a class wondered aloud what people would think about our own world in another few hundred years. Sound trivial? Maybe to historians and those for whom historical thinking comes naturally. In our presentist society and with this presentist generation, I think the question was excellent. This student and her classmates were thinking historically.
The success of this discussion was also due in part to another issue. I have begun to “legitimate confusion” for my students,1 that is, I have begun to cultivate an awareness in them of just how hard historical interpretation can be and how important learning how to ask questions can be. With this attitude, students can explore sources and ideas honestly and thoughtfully without fear of getting it wrong and looking bad. With such an awareness, students were willing to attempt the leaps of imagination necessary to navigate among three different time periods, the early twenty-first century, the nineteen thirties and forties, and the first few decades of the seventeenth century.
I might try this book again, though I could also do with a change. Perhaps some of you have some ideas?
Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day
I’ve started reading Thomas Pynchon’s, Against the Day. I enjoy Pynchon, though there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to say anything meaningful about his novel because his narratives are often difficult to follow. Take, for instance, the cryptic but thought-provoking quote from Thelonius Monk at the beginning of the book: “It’s always night, or we wouldn’t need light.”
This novel is set at the turn of the previous century, beginning with the Columbian World’s Fair in 1893 and running past the First World War. As usual, Pynchon sometimes seems to play fast and loose with historical facts, so it doesn’t feel like historical fiction in any traditional sense. That’s not a criticism, mind you, just something to keep in mind when reading it.
Maybe I will have to make use of the Thomas Pynchon Wiki, which I just discovered. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll check out some of the many reviews on the novel, though I don’t want to spoil it for myself, especially since I find my tastes are often out of sync with those of the reviewers.
One practical thing I like: with 1085 pages, this $18.00 paperback is a relative bargain; it’s going to keep me busy for a long time.
Perhaps after that I’ll go back and look at some of his earlier stuff. I read Vineland when it came out in paperback, but I hadn’t touched Pynchon before that since I was maybe only twenty-one. I read Gravity’s Rainbow, for instance, while in the field artillery on maneuver in Grafenwöhr, Germany. I still remember clinging to the book while bouncing up and down and eating dust on dirt roads on the back of a self-propelled eight-inch howitzer.
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
My wife has had a handful of volumes from Alexander McCall Smith’s wonderful private detective series set in Botswana. I had long wanted to get going on them, but she had loaned out the first volume and we don’t know who has it. Last week I was pleased to find a copy of the first volume in our laundry room, where people in my building sometimes deposit unwanted books. I am so glad I began reading it. I was hoping for detective stories with a harder edge, but that didn’t happen. Instead I got something better. The main character, Mma Precious Ramotswe, “a traditionally built woman,” is the most likeable character I’ve encountered in years. She’s a real woman with real problems, but with rare strength and courage, as well as a fine zest for life. This sounds like a cliche, but I am loathe to go into details for fear of spoiling plots. You can find out more on the author’s website, if you want.
I am almost done with the fourth. Now I have to take a break again, because we’re missing the fifth and sixth, and I don’t want to go straight to the seventh, which we have. Apparently there’s an eighth out now too.
By the way, I enjoy reading mysteries not just for the mystery, but for the milieu they usually reveal to me. Indeed, these books would have been a disappointment if mystery was all I had wanted. The stories are all about the characters and their world in Botswana. Along the way Mma Ramotswe and her assistant, Mma Makutsi, deal with a variety of cases and moral questions.
Paradoxes
I was looking through Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists, a play I have used a few times in a survey course on modern Europe. In the back of the English translation by James Kirkup are “21 Points to The Physicists,” one of which reads, “The more human beings proceed by plan the more effectively they may be hit by accident.” This quote sums up my recently completed dissertation on three levels that I would like to consider: the content of my research from the point of view of its historical subjects, the path my research takes from my point of view, and the shape of the narrative that eventually emerges. I plan to look at these paradoxes in future posts at irregular intervals. For now I will mention a different one that is not as difficult to resolve.
I spent four years in the U.S. Army during peacetime, and I disliked being a soldier. I also rarely found military history interesting. Nonetheless, my research has focused on war. My M.A. thesis is about Bavarian soldiers and French civilians in the Franco-Prussian War, and my Ph.D. thesis is about the Imperial German officer corps and war planning. How did a former soldier who hated his experience in the military come to enjoy studying military history?
At least part of the answer lies in my military experience. A kid from the woods of New Hampshire had a lot of learning to do in a unit in which most everyone else came from the inner city or rural south. Add class, race, and educational levels to this mix, and I got a first-rate education. You see, I was not just in the army, but combat arms, specifically, the field artillery. When I enlisted I made the naive assumption that the army was the army no matter what one did, and it was offering a substantial bonus for four years in the artillery. So why not? Without going into a longer story, let me say that I left the army in 1987 with an insight of which at the time I was unaware: studying the army can teach a person a lot about that army’s country.
Not until I was doing my M.A. in Augsburg, Germany did I realize that I knew this. I think it was late 1992 or early 1993 when I met Professor Stig Förster, who had just returned to Europe from a stint at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. Stig was editing On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861-1871, and I, as an American there, was recruited as one of his student helpers. I found the topics interesting, because in a seminar I had recently taken with another historian, we had learned about the lead-up to the war and the postwar settlement, but the war just kind of happened. I remarked on this circumstance to Stig. One thing led to another and he suggested I could explore the Bavarians' treatment of civilians in 1870–71 for my master’s thesis. The topic sounded interesting, but also vaguely pornographic. Was it even decent to probe into such suffering? At the same time, scenes from Bosnia on TV suggested to me that such topics mattered. Before making up my mind, I asked if there was an historical treatment of these kinds of issues that might show me the historical value of examining atrocities. That led to Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict In Missouri During The American Civil War, as well as James M. McPherson, Battle Cry Of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Of course, I also dug into Michael Howard’s perennial The Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion of France, 1870-71. These books showed me that the study of war was integral to mainstream history and vice versa. With war being fought once again on European soil (the Balkans), I not only was hooked, but I thought such studies were a moral imperative.
Having completed a PhD program and many years of teaching, I no longer see my research in such grandiose terms. Still, I try to integrate at least one lecture on broad trends in war and society into each survey course I teach. I think students need to know that human behavior in war is historically contingent. They need to know, for instance, that humanity and atrocities in warfare have a history. The list is much longer, of course, but I can revisit the topic another time.
Photo of an 8-inch howitzer under a camouflage net taken in Germany, probably in Grafenwöhr in the fall of 1983