Past & Present
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Emanuela Scarpellini, A tavola! Gli italiani in 7 pranzi (Rome, 2012). The first part of the title is a summons to come eat, and the second part translates as “The Italians in Seven Meals.” The book begins approximately with Italian unification in 1861 and runs to the present. The English translation will be published by Palgrave Macmillan later this year. ↩︎
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Scarpellini, chap. 5. ↩︎
- Got News? Make it Quick. — Jeffrey Shaffer argues that too much emphasis on the current news cycle without doing the hard work of studying the past is causing myopia in the media and public at large. (Christian Science Monitor)
- The Five Most Influential Civil War Books of the Last Twenty Years (as if that’s possible Brooks) Kevin Levin attempts the impossible and makes some interesting choices. (Civil War Memory)
- Where Are This War’s Winter Soldiers? — Ronald R. Krebs reflects on why veterans from the current war have so little political influence when compared to their Vietnam predecessors. (Slate)
- War Torn: Five Years — Yes, the Iraq War has been going on long enough to have a history. John Burns reflects on the past five years. (New York Times)
History under Trump
Interesting comment today by Cameron Blevins: History and Its Limits under Trump.
The Past in the Present
Am still shaking my head over the new administration’s discriminatory ban on Muslims entering the United States. It was no surprise after the hateful rhetoric of the election season, but announcing it on Holocaust Remembrance Day? And not mentioning Jews in a statement about the Holocaust? I wish I could call these actions tone-deaf, but they feel more intentional and sinister than that, even if the more apt historical parallels are the U.S. rejection of Jews fleeing Nazism and the internment of Japanese-Americans as an entire class of people during the Second World War.
Preparing to Fight the Last War? Maybe Not
Prussian War Academy ca, 1900 via Wikimedia Commons.
I've been taking some time to think more about a slow-moving article on Wilhelm Groener I've been working on. It has received a big boost recently from the GHI's new focus on the history of knowledge.
A truism holds that generals prepare to fight the last war, not the next one. Unable to peer into the future, they make do with the lessons of the past. Fair enough, perhaps, but this common-sense wisdom presupposes that military leaders will necessarily understand the salient features of the last war without preconceptions about war and officering affecting their discernment. In other words, the truism fails to account for the effects of prior training, experience, and acculturation in the production of knowledge about war. Instead, it implicitly assumes the existence of universal soldierdom, as if officering and soldiering—but for technology—were not culturally and historically contingent.
Wilhelm Groener (1867–1939) offers a case in point. A general staff officer in the German army who rose to prominence quickly in the First World War, Groener became an important spokesman in the interwar period for the so-called Schlieffen school, offering an interpretation of the war seemingly at odds with what actually happened. Instead of deriving new lessons from the stalemate, as his contemporary Erich Ludendorff did in a nightmarish vision of politics serving war instead of vice versa, Groener doubled down on the knowledge he had internalized in peacetime Wilhelmine Germany. Issuing from neither a military outsider nor an original thinker and steeped in antebellum military thoughtways and culture, Groener’s interpretation of the First World War can be analyzed in relation to his prewar training and wartime experiences to show the inner logic of the professional military knowledge and culture in which he was steeped.
Georgetown University’s Massive Slave Sale
This New York Times story sure hits close to home: “272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?" As a human being and as an alumnus, I find this startling. As a historian, I can’t think of a better way to make history relevant to students in the present.
Communism, Consumerism, and Currency
Seen at an upscale mall in Guiyang, China this summer. (Photo by author)
History and the Packaged Gnocchi
One evening after work recently, I was half-starved and wanted something I could cook quickly. I saw some packaged gnocchi in the cupboard, made by De Cecco, which I thought would fit the bill, until I started reading the directions. Unfortunately, these were quite long, and they mentioned all kinds of ingredients not in the package, so I gave up. I didn’t want a detailed recipe. I just wanted to know how to cook the gnocchi. A few days later, while editing an English translation of a book about Italians and food in the modern era, I learned something that made me go back to the gnocchi.1
In the early post–World War II decades, when the Italian food industry was trying to get consumers—in this context mainly women—to buy its new, ready-made food products, it decided that offering detailed preparation suggestions for the integration of other foods into its packaged products would improve the image of the new products, that is, make them more legitimate and appealing. But consumers bought ready-made foods for their convenience, not for the opportunity to prepare something elaborate. If one wanted to make something more involved, one could do it the old-fashioned way, from scratch, even if one might use certain intermediate manufactured goods like bouillon cubes or dry pasta.2
With this nugget about Italy’s food history in hand, I went back to the gnocchi package whose directions had thwarted me earlier. I still found only one very detailed paragraph, nothing short about the gnocchi themselves, as pasta packages in this country have led me to expect. But this time I decided I had better skip ahead in the directions, and, sure enough, what I needed was there, buried near the end: “In the meantime, cook the gnocchi in plenty of boiling salted water, remove them as they rise to the surface …” So that was what the “ready in 2 min.” label on the front of the package was referring to. Apparently this step is such common knowledge in Italy that there is no reason to highlight it in readily accessible instructions, even if the manufacturer still feels the need to make its product more attractive to potential customers with a detailed recipe.
But the package in my hand was for the American market, so why attach the same, apparently decades-old assumptions about food and gender in Italy to it? It hardly makes sense, except if explained in terms of the product’s postwar Italian history. Language from that context seems to have been translated into English without giving much thought to this context. Or is this a way to market something very ordinary, little potato dumplings, as something special? In any case, I’m pretty sure that the packaged gnocchi my European spouse bought for the pantry still carry part of their history in the accompanying directions, which at least I can read now.
Reflections after Class
One of those questions came up in class tonight with a group of MA students discussing Peter Fritzsche’s Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA, 2008), a question where I grow perhaps too animated, maybe conveying impatience, even arrogance, or, if I’m lucky, simply passion. What was the difference between communism under Stalin and nazism under Hitler?
The differences are stark, but there’s that pesky word “socialism” and the collectivist rhetoric that is so easily conflated or confused with “collectivization,” never mind the existence of economic plans, mass murder, and a host of apparently shared phenomena commonly subsumed under the heading of “totalitarianism.” So why does this question sometimes cause me to push back instead of letting students gradually begin to understand, taking as many intermediary steps as they need to get there?
I would like to blame the heat and my tiredness after a forty-eight-hour power loss at home, and there’s something to that. But this is also one of those topics that can get my goat under better conditions, unless I am prepared for it. I am ready these days when teaching History 100 (“Western Civilization”), but the question took me by surprise in the context of a graduate survey of modern Europe. I am beginning to think it should not have.
Perhaps it’s time to choose some primary sources for the students to analyze in at least a portion of our next class.
Something about this question can elude or confound even well-informed graduate students like those in my current class. Something is getting lost in translation from a past that grows more distant, more remote. The words “nazi” and “socialist” and “communist” are on many lips in these United States, but they’re employed in our own contemporary struggles over ideology, identity, and politics. They help us to create meaning in our own world, but this circumstance complicates the already difficult task of understanding the Germany and Soviet Union that existed in the 1930s and 1940s.
U.S. History as a Political Football?
History is one of those subjects that politicians and the general public are never going to leave to historians alone. I’ve got no problem with that, if those doing it follow basic rules of evidence and have a decent sense of what historical thinking is. I wish those proclaiming what they take to be the truth of history were more interested in discovering that truth than reshaping history to illustrate their own political beliefs. Such a phenomenon is not new, but the current trend among some conservatives to rewrite American history to fit their image of America today is irksome at best, downright troubling at worst, especially if such “history” enters the classroom.
For a taste of this phenomenon, read Steven Thomma, “Not satisfied with U.S. history, some conservatives are rewriting it” (McClatchy Newspapers). You might want to view the video on that page too. It would be interesting to find a longer piece in a venue that permitted footnotes to lead to further reading, but I suspect most academic historians do not take these rewritings of history seriously enough to address them. Such battles over history will be fought in the media instead, the standard of truth frequently being ideological purity. Let the buyer beware.
The Politics of Identity and How We Learn History
There is an interesting article in yesterday's New York Times about how Texas is changing the content of its American high school history textbooks. Instead of taking potshots at its clear abuses of history, however, the author locates it in a broader context of history curricula and identity politics over the past few decades. See Sam Tanehaus, "In Texas Curriculum Fight, Identity Politics Leans Right."
Kevin Levin of the blog Civil War Memory thinks that the focus on textbooks in this newest episode of America's culture wars misses the point, however. He points out that much history teaching is no longer focused on textbooks. He has a point. Even those of us who still sometimes use textbooks and do not rely as heavily on the internet see history education in terms very different than those of the Texas Board. See "Texas, Textbooks, and the Battle For Our Children’s Souls" and "If I Should Teach American Exceptionalism . . ."
When History Collides with Commercial Interests
Jon Wiener has published an interesting piece in The Nation about the way that the tobacco industry is using and abusing not only history, but also historians in its quest to fend off liability claims. See “Big Tobacco and the Historians” (February 25, 2010).
Contemporary Political Rhetoric and Teaching History
Earlier this month I did a post on my Hist 100 blog that might be of some interest to readers here [on Clio and Me], "Contemporary Politics and History." My audience was primarily freshmen in their first semester at university, most of them too young to have voted in the last election.
I have said this in class, but it needs repeating here: Our contemporary American political discourse about socialism and nazism has absolutely nothing to do with those terms and phenomena in actual history. While we are not in class to talk about American politics, I want to point out how language and history are being abused for political purposes. I am not doing this to undermine the stances of politicians who use hyperbole to make their points. There are perfectly good ideological and policy reasons that one can bring to either side of the health care debate, the energy policy debate, environmental policy debates, and so on. But none of these reasons has anything to do with Hitler, nazism, communism, or socialism—not if we are being honest, and as long as we are willing to see the slippery slope argument for what it is, a logical fallacy.
This abuse of history used to just offend me as a citizen who knew something about history, but addressing the abuse became part of my teaching job this summer when I had a student try to explain Hitler in terms of "socialism" and "big government." That is when I realized that not only was history being abused for political purposes, but our contemporary political discourse was getting in the way of students understanding the past. That's why I wrote a blog post on my own history blog sarcastically entitled, "What Having a Socialist Nazi in the White House Means for the Classroom."
I could follow the logic of the student who described Hitler in terms of "socialism" and "big government," if I were willing to understand the past in terms of this country's contemporary self-image, but I am not. We need to take the past on its own terms and try to understand it in some detail before we attempt easy analogies. In other words, my concern relates to historical thinking, that is, that thing I began teaching you with the reading assignments from August 31st, including Gerald Schlabach's "A Sense of History."
What Having a Socialist Nazi in the White House Means for the Classroom
I am probably not alone when I say that I have a hard time taking GOP “socialism” rhetoric seriously. The same goes for right-wing attempts to equate Obama with Hitler. Apparently, however, I need to keep this rhetoric in mind when planning my classes for it has entered my classroom in an unexpected way. In a blue book essay about totalitarianism this summer, one student explained nazism in terms of “socialism” and “big government.” There was no political intent behind these statements. The student simply drew on the language of everyday life, as students are wont to do.
This is a sad commentary on what rhetorical excess on the right is doing to our everyday vocabulary, but it also presents an opportunity. Without engaging in politicking, I can use this apparent linguistic and cultural deficit not only as motivation to be more thorough about how I teach socialism, nazism, and other modern political ideologies and systems, but also as an example for historical thinking. My instinct here is to talk about the use and abuse of history, which is probably what I will do. On the other hand, however, some of those who throw around the “s” word really believe that socialism is on the march in the United States. If I were to take such fears seriously, I would also use them to teach my students about how the meaning of language shifts and even mutates over time, sometimes meaning different things to different groups of people. This too would be a worthwhile lesson, although it would bring me closer to something that some students might perceive as politicking. I should probably take that chance.
My 9/11
A lot of people get angry or sad or both on 9/11. Of course, the loss of life in this country was horrible, but for me that date always brings up the manner in which Bush used Americans' sentiments to go to war against a country that had nothing to do with the attack, Iraq. And in this political season, it brings to mind how McCain was ahead of the curve in calling for that war.
Call these sentiments mean-spirited, if you will. How dare I politick on this day of remembrance? Fair enough, but these sentiments have been with me for many years now. They are part of my 9/11, just as are the worries about friends in New York, the story of a colleague’s husband who missed work that day and whose general was killed in the Pentagon office my colleague’s husband usually also occupied, the tales told by people in my building streaming in from downtown reporting alleged bombs in cars around the city, the military helicopters and jets over the skies of DC and the absence of the usual noisy commercial airliners, a child sick at home and a wife working downtown, the activation of a friend in the DC National Guard for years of active duty in this city and Afghanistan, the quiet evening streets for weeks after the attack, the sudden departure of Arab students from my building because their parents back home feared for their safety, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the color-coded warnings, and the never-ending rhetoric and politics of fear.
Or talk about hindsight being twenty-twenty. Thing is, Bush didn’t need hindsight. All he and his advisors needed was a sense of how countries have reacted to attacks in the past. As a historian, I claim no special insights into the future, but I frequently have a fair idea of what we should be paying attention to in the present. I’m good at asking questions, even if my answers aren’t always right. Here’s what I told my shaken students in Washington, DC seven years ago. And still we don’t teach war and society as a fundamental aspect of the human experience in required undergraduate history courses. What a shame.
The Most Famous Closed Trial with Secret Evidence
Sometimes history just leaps off the pages and proclaims its relevance for our own times. On December 24, 1894, The Times of London published a long editorial about the first trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus for alleged treason.
"We must point out that, the more odious and unpopular a crime is, the more necessary is it that its proof and its punishment should be surrounded by all the safeguards of public justice. Of these, the most indispensable is publicity. . . . It may be important for the French people to preserve the secrets of their War Department, but it is of infinitely greater importance for them to guard their public justice against even the suspicion of unfairness or of subjection to the gusts of popular opinion."
The Times correspondent wrote these words when there was still little doubt of Dreyfus' guilt in the public at large. There were no Drefusards yet, that is, members of a movement to see the wrongfully convicted man exonerated. It was three years before Emile Zola wrote "J'accuse." The point wasn't about guilt or innocence. It was about the rule of law, which meant due process out in the open even for grave matters of national security. The later establishment of Dreyfus' innocence reminded observers why.
Tomorrow my class is discussing Michael Burns, France and the Dreyfus Affair: A Documentary History (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999). Burns tells this dramatic tale with his own gripping prose interspersed with documents from the period. And he extends the tale as far as 1998, in order to help readers understand the affair's legacy. For those with more time on their hands I also recommend Jean Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: George Braziller, 1986), a big history book that reads like a good political thriller.
Blogging and Myth-Busting
Kevin Levin of Civil War Memory has posted good material to his academic blog under the category, myth of black Confederates. Several recent posts include criticism of efforts by modern-day Confederate patriots and would-be historians who want to appropriate Weary Clyburn, a slave, as a defender of Southern liberty. In one he points out that writing good books to debunk myths is all well and good, but on the subject of black Confederates "the real fight must take place on the web."
In the same post he points to an earlier one he made in late March: "Should Civil War Historians Blog (academic that is)?" In it he observes how vast the public discourse about the American Civil War is, while the discourse in which professional historians participate is relatively narrow. Historians need to continue their current research and publishing mission, but they also have "a responsibility to engage a wider audience and contribute to the public discourse." Since much of the public turns to the internet for ready answers, historians need to offer these answers in an accessible format, especially for highly sensitive questions that shape American identity.
I agree with Kevin about the need for Civil War historians to blog. I have also observed a similar need with respect to Holocaust denial, since I have found that Google can get it wrong. Until now I have used this blog mainly to reflect on what I do and to communicate with other historians, but as Kevin points out, Google brings him search engine traffic for important topics such as black Confederates, so his blog posts reach a wider audience. I have written a few of my posts with that awareness, but his arguments make me think I could do much more. So could other historians.
Authors of Interrogation Handbook Abuse Their Sources
In a piece called "Mind Games: Remembering Brainwashing" from today's New York Times, Tim Wiener points to one of the more irresponsible uses of historical documents that I have seen this summer. Apparently "American military and intelligence officers" (he is not more specific) decided in 2002 to examine Cold War CIA studies of Chinese interrogation methods during the Korean War. After all, these Communists were the supposed masters who fed the kinds of fears that later gave rise to a movie like "The Manchurian Candidate." In one major study the officers found examples of what are now often called "harsh interrogation techniques" when the more negatively valued term "torture" is being deliberately avoided. "They reprinted a 1957 chart describing death threats, degradation, sleep deprivation—and worse—inflicted by Chinese captors. And they made it part of a new handbook for interrogators at Guantánamo."
The provenance of these techniques might give pause, but here's the real bombshell:
The irony is that the original author of that chart, Albert D. Biderman, a social scientist who had distilled interviews with 235 Air Force P.O.W.’s, wrote that the Communists’ techniques mainly served to “extort false confessions.” And they were the same methods that “inquisitors had employed for centuries.” They had done nothing that “was not common practice to police and intelligence interrogators of other times and nations.”
This story reminds me of the student who hurriedly pulls a bunch of quotes from a book without actually reading or studying the book as a whole, let alone thinking about its historical context. The student then slaps the material together in a paper that might confirm his own beliefs, but whose conclusions bear no tangible relationship to the source that he supposedly read and analyzed. Is that what happened here? Or was the document perhaps too complex for them? Perhaps they needed to invest in some historians who were not afraid to dig through this kind of thing in an honest manner, no matter what conclusions the documents might suggest.
Ignorance or Deliberate Abuse?
I can't decide whether the White House is deliberately insulting our intelligence with Bush's recent appeasement accusations or if they really don't know anything about Neville Chamberlain's appeasement. Chamberlain isn't criticized in history for talking to Hitler, but rather for giving away the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia and with it that country's means to defend itself against Germany. The difference is not trivial. And what does McCain's echoing of Bush's remarks tell us about him? Did he also not learn this bit of history? Or is this just politics? Be that as it may, Kevin Levin is right about this being a teachable moment. The "Hardball" video he posted on his blog is hilarious and sad at the same time.
Links: History, Politics, and Memory
American Idealism
In his 1998 survey of human history, The Way of the World, David Fromkin writes of Prohibition in the United States thus:
The experiment proved to be a disaster. Human nature resisted it. The inability of the government to enforce the laws against alcohol brought about a general collapse of law and order in such cities as Chicago in the 1920s. In the 1930s the law and the constitutional amendment were repealed, and order was restored. (215)
This observation reminds me of both drug policy and immigration policy in the United States. We legislate social change and then are surprised when it doesn’t occur or law and order come under threat. Fromkin is on to something when he writes, “Prohibition was an extreme symptom of a general American view that anything can be changed by passing a law, a view that ignores rooted realities of human nature” (215). This idealism is also evident in our foreign policy.
Paradoxically, we used to criticize the Soviet Union for its utopian attempt to remake human nature as it strove to realize the Communist dreams of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. While it took some American idealism to overcome the Soviet threat, it also took hard-nosed realism. Where would we be now if we had decided to turn the Cold War into a shooting war in the name of an idea called democracy?
Good Old Stalin
History can be used to justify all manner of circumstances in the present. Want to justify an authoritarian regime in Russia? Referring to Russia’s present conditions can help, but even more effective can be skillful tradition-building that shows Russia’s long line of great authoritarian rulers. And what better place to start than with history teachers in the schools?
The New York Times published a remarkable article yesterday about a new history guide for high school teachers in Russia. After a brief introduction, it offers verbatim excerpts on Stalin, who comes away smelling like roses, despite his massive purges.
Stalin followed Peter the Great’s logic: demand the impossible from the people in order to get the maximum possible. . . . The result of Stalin’s purges was a new class of managers capable of solving the task of modernization in conditions of shortages of resources, loyal to the supreme power and immaculate from the point of view of executive discipline. . . .
Thus, just like Chancellor Bismarck who united German lands into a single state by “iron and blood,” Stalin was reinforcing his state by cruelty and mercilessness.
It is quite an intellectual feat to bring Stalin into line with both Peter the Great and Otto von Bismarck. Indeed, such relativism reveals something about the Kremlin’s self-image these days. It would be helpful to see the rest of the guide before drawing broader conclusions. Still, does not the following statement recall some of Putin’s own criticisms of democracy in the United States in recent years?
Political and historical studies show that when they come under similarly serious threats, even “soft” and “flexible” political systems, as a rule, turn more rigid and limit individual rights, as happened in the United States after September 11, 2001.
Yes, history textbooks matter.