And You Thought Halloween Was Scary? How About Teaching Bad History About Witchcraft??

Often as not it's bad history rather than scary costumes that forces historians to turn away and scream in terror every Halloween.

I was dismayed to see that Hampshire College--admittedly, the Spiritual Life Center and Community Partnerships for Social Change, rather than an academic class--was sponsoring a screening of one of the worst pseudohistorical documentaries for the occasion.

"The Burning Times" is a 1990 piece in the National Film Board of Canada's "Women and Spirituality" series. It has developed a popular following for all wrong reasons, which will become immediately obvious:

This documentary takes an in-depth look at the witch hunts that swept through Europe. False accusations and trials led to massive torture and burnings at the stake, and ultimately to the destruction of an organic way of life. The film questions whether the widespread violence against women and the destruction of the environment today can be traced back to those times. 

The intention of my Hampshire colleagues was good, I am sure: to add some intellectual content to a holiday long known here for its substance- and sex-related excesses, to highlight the historical oppression of women, and to acknowledge neo-paganism within the scope of spiritualities in the college community.

Unfortunately, the film is a slick and sloppy New Age compilation of errors, half-truths, omissions, and exaggerations.

Given that "The Burning Times" describes the city of Trier as "French" even though all the signs on the buildings shown are in German and it belonged to France only briefly--from 1794 to 1815, never during the Middle Ages--an attentive viewer might think to question the film's larger claims such as the characterization of the witch hunts as "the women's Holocaust" (at 14:19).

I remember one colleague here in the Five College Consortium lamenting to me that whenever students saw "The Burning Times," it took him at least half a semester to unteach the idiocy they had absorbed. Some years ago, when I saw that WGBY, the local Public Television station, was showing this sorry film during a pledge drive (adding insult to injury), I went so far as to call them up and explain that I was therefore not going to donate any money that year.

Yes, it's that bad.

The work of any professional historian will suggest how much more complex the reality was.

Even a glance at David Hall's appropriately titled essay on "Witchcraft and the Limits of Interpretation" (New England Quarterly, 1985) should make anyone pause before making sweeping generalizations covering many centuries and countries.  But his piece is rather heavy going.


For those seeking the bird's eye view, Brian Pavlac, author of Witch Hunts in the Western World, helpfully lists:

Ten Common Errors and Myths about the Witch Hunts, Corrected and Commented

1. The Witch Hunts were an example of medieval cruelty and barbarism.
2. The Church was to blame for the Witch Hunts.
3. The Witch Hunts specifically targeted women.
4. The Witch Hunts were an attempt at "femicide" or "gendercide," meaning the persecution of the female sex, equivalent to genocide.
5. The Witch Hunts were all alike.
6. Millions of people died because of the Witch Hunts.
7. People condemned during the Witch Hunts were burned at the stake.
8. During the time of the Witch Hunts, witches actually existed and worked magic.
9. In modern usage, the term "Witch Hunt" can be applied to any persecution of a group of people.
10. Modern witchcraft/magick/wicca is a direct descendent of those practices done by people during the Witch Hunts of 1400-1800.

(detailed explanation of each here on his Women's History Resource Site).

Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance deal specifically with the film:

Overview:

We are not going to win many friends in the Neopagan communities with the following essay. However, we believe it to be accurate. It is a story that needs to be told.

The facts are that almost all of the information that is generally accepted as truth by the Neopagan community about the "burning times" is wrong:

• The total number of victims was probably between 50,000 and 100,000 -- not 9 million as many believe. 

• Although alleged witches were burned alive or hung over a five century interval -- from the 14th to the 18th century -- the vast majority were tried from 1550 to 1650. 

• Some of the victims worshiped Pagan deities, and thus could be considered to be indirectly linked to today's Neopagans. However most apparently did not. 

• Some of the victims were midwives and native healers; however most were not. 

• Most of the victims were tried executed by local, community courts, not by the Church. 

• A substantial minority of victims -- about 25% -- were male. 

• Many countries in Europe largely escaped the burning times: Ireland executed only four "Witches;" Russia only ten. The craze affected mostly Switzerland, Germany and France. 

• Eastern Orthodox countries had few Witch trials.[....]

• Most of the deaths seem to have taken place in Western Europe in the times and areas where Protestant - Roman Catholic conflict -- and thus social turmoil -- was at its maximum.

Any questions?

If there's a lesson to be learned, it's that changing historical facts is no way to redress historical injustice or bring about historic change. Even would-be radicals need to do their homework.

Removing Columbus from the Calendar

Ironically, as I noted in an old post, the cancellation on this stamp honoring Christopher Columbus and

the "discovery" of America obscures the figure of the putative hero. It could serve as a metaphor for his fate in recent years.

The reaction against the glorification of Columbus advances a bit further this fall as the government of the city of Seattle today--on the federal holiday of "Columbus Day"--signs a measure mandating the celebration of the second Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples' Day.

Nothing of the sort planned in Amherst yet. (Select Board signed the fall Town Meeting warrant a week ago.)

My 2012 roundup of stories on changing attitudes toward the explorer and his holiday. covered a lot of ground, so I won't try to do the equivalent here again. (I think there was some pretty good stuff there: check it out.)

Instead, I'll just note that the Harvard Crimson got into the game this year with the brief and light-hearted Even People in the 1400s Agreed Columbus Was An Asshole.


Update, Oct. 27: belatedly came across this from John Patrick Leary's Tumblr, which chronicles and dissects the language of inequality. In this one, he describes the anachronistic appropriation of Columbus:

Happy Imperialist #Leadership Day from the Keywords #Team!

This Columbus Day offers some of the less historically (to say nothing of morally) inclined out there to draw fatuous links between the contemporary cult of entrepeneurship and the legacy of Christopher Columbus’ conquest—err, acquisition—of America some 500 years ago. (read the rest)

"the British as a nation had no great opinion of the French": evolving sensibilities in World War II histories

Trying to write history with a touch of humor or irony as well as analytical rigor can be a tall order: all the more so, in the case of deadly serious topics such as war and mass death. Here is one such attempt by Peter Calvocoressi.

As he notes in the second edition of his history of the Second World War, attitudes change, and scholarly needs and perspectives along with them. He is eminently qualified to do so, for not only was he a historian: he was also involved in British intelligence work at Bletchley Park during the war. (Indeed, the analysis in the first edition of his book was hampered by the fact that he still could not legally reveal that the Allies had broken the German "Ultra" codes.)

The first readers of this book were prompted, I surmise, mainly by wonder. They wanted to know how and why this terrible war, which they had experienced and survived, had come about; and how it ran its course, with what shifts and turns, what inventions, skills and pieces of luck. This curiosity was allied with the simple convictions of right and wrong which had ruled during the war; wartime loyalties persisted for a time in post-war exhilaration and relief, equally unquestioning, providing their own scale of values. A later generation has other needs. The curiosity is still there, but an audience further removed from the intensities of war is more critical. It takes less for granted and sees no reason not to query particular reputations or general strategies, ours as much as theirs. War leaders, military and civilian, are subjected to the beady eye of posthumous inquest, which is sometimes justified by the resulting verdicts although it may in some cases smell of a distasteful iconoclasm. Strategies which, during the war, were judged purely in terms of their war-winning efficacy are reviewed and censured in moral terms which the warriors themselves would have dismissed as a luxury rightly banished from the calculation of their wartime exigencies.

— Total War: The Causes and Courses of the Second World War. Volume I: The Western Hemisphere, second revised edition (NY: Pantheon, 1989), xvii-xviii

Here, then, is part of his characterization of the mood and stance of Great Britain in the early months of World War II:

While prognostications of an unimaginable rain of death proved ill founded, the British found themselves spectators in a phoney, unnatural and yet humiliating war: no help was given to the Poles, no help reached the Finns, whose gallantry was at least equal to that of the Poles and more effective; Norway, a much respected country, was occupied by the Germans under the British nose. When the campaign in the west opened, the bombing of Rotterdam revived the German reputation for Hunnish atrocities in the First World War. France collapsed--a shock but in a sense also a release, since the British as a nation had no great opinion of the French and were as happy to fight, if need be, without a French ally as with one. Whereas Munich and the occupation of Prague and the growing evidence of Nazi barbarity had braced the younger generation for a fight, the bombing of Rotterdam stirred an older stratum of anti-German patriotism which, inclined also to be contemptuous of France, was undismayed at the prospect of single combat. And old and young were equally fortified by the retreat from Dunkirk which with a glorious perversity they regarded as a victory. (426-27)

Long before "The Simpsons" popularized the characterization of the French as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," the British held their erstwhile allies in disdain, and this obvious fact is nowadays discussed frankly in the history books. At the same time, as Calvocoressi gently but firmly points out, the behavior of the British prior to the German invasion was less than glorious, and he cannot help noting the desperation behind the need to make a silk purse from the sow's ear of the Dunkirk débâcle. (He could have added that even that perverse victory was made possible in part by the French soldiers who were ordered to remain behind to secure the evacuation, and paid for their devotion with death or imprisonment.) Almost no one comes off without a blemish here, and that's precisely the point—or part of it. The larger point is that, despite everything, in the end, the nation came together and the job got done.

He goes on to note why this was the case. In essence: there was a broad consensus of purpose behind both the war effort and government, as such. Most intriguingly, among the factors that he identifies: British society was not necessarily fair—in fact, not at all by our standards, or even the rather lower standards of the day—but it was stable because it benefited from a pragmatic consensus:

Although socially stratified to an extraordinary degree, this society was ideologically more coherent than most in Europe, less distraught by fascist or communist fissures, readier to respond unitedly to the generous humanity, the aristocratic chauvinism and the courage of a Winston Churchill. Furthermore, Britain was a singularly law-abiding, government-conscious and well-governed country. It was well governed not in the sense that the government was good for the people as a whole, but in the sense that the government worked well within the limits set for it by the people who did the governing. Great Britain between the wars was not an agreeable place to live in. It was crowded with misery and injustice: estimates of the underfed in the worst years in the thirties go as high as twenty million. Little was done by government to help this large section of the nation and much of what was done was silly, for the governors were for the most part men of limited awareness and only moderate intelligence. Yet the temper of Great Britain did not become revolutionary. Rather did it become resigned in the face of chronic unemployment, killing poverty and the obscene slums which were among the most frightful places in which Europeans had ever been expected to live; and one of the main reasons for this resignation may be found in the fact that Great Britain had strong government. Strong government does not in this case mean repressive government but a government which never looked like breaking down or running down and which remained fully competent to perform its allotted tasks and preserve the formal framework of a nation's life. Although government was bad in the sense that it was inadequate in conception and performance, it worked. It accepted a deplorably narrow view of its functions, but this view was traditional and excited little rebellion (except for the intellectual kind) with the result that the machinery of government did not become discredited. (427)

Another fine, dense paragraph: analytical yet opinionated, informative, yet marked by wit. I wish my students could write like this.

It sounds dreadfully familiar in some ways (at least the part about limited awareness and intelligence). Today we are (so one hopes) no longer willing to "become resigned" and accept that stability at that price. Still, as we tear ourselves apart in the current presidential campaign (which will presumably get only nastier after the Republicans select a candidate), it's worth noting the importance of a consensus on the legitimacy of government, even as we strive for a society characterized by greater equality and fairness.

Winston Churchill: Smoker, Drunk, One Tough Dude--With Good Judgment

In the course of writing an introduction to a World War II memoir (one of the projects that got in the way of blogging in recent weeks), I had occasion to read a generous body of historical literature on the war, which inevitably yielded a few choice and sometimes humorous passages. (And in the meantime, as issues of war and peace suddenly again become the subject of national conversation, these quotations about policy and leadership perhaps acquire additional significance.)

Here, a description of the military and political situation upon the outbreak of World War II on the western front:

Hitler was riding high; his goals within reach. Life was good. The sight of German troops marching down the Champs-Elysées assuaged the humiliation of Versailles. Only two vexing matters remained: an ally he loathed to the east—the Soviet Union—and a foe he admired to the west—Great Britain. Contrary to expectations and against all odds, Britain had not folded. Neville Chamberlain, with whom he had done satisfactory business in Munich in 1938, had stepped down as prime minister on 10 May 1940. Winston Churchill, cut of another cloth entirely, was now in charge. It was perturbing to have so equal an adversary. Fortunately, Churchill was a heavy smoker and a drunk, the teetotaler Führer consoled himself. Surely he would either drop dead or, in an inebriated stupor, err egregiously.

Churchill did smoke heavily and drank a bottle of whiskey a day. But he did not err egregiously. His vivid historical imagination gave him a moral and intellectual compass to guide him through the turbulence of the moment. A great nationalist, Churchill was proud of Britain's past and hopeful for its future. It seemed to him that a historic moment was upon them. Thus, as Belgium fell and France teetered and Britain's foreign secretary Lord Halifax suggested a negotiated peace with Hitler using Mussolini as a negotiator, Churchill stood firm.

—Debórah Dwork & Robert Jan van Pelt, Holocaust: A History (NY: W. W. Norton, 2002), 166

Nazi caricature

[update: image]

Just the facts, ma'am: historians and their history (controversy! fetishes! nudism! even the Ark of the Covenant!)

Over the years, among the courses I've come most to enjoy teaching are (believe it or not) those involving historical method and historiography, the history of history, as it were. Sounds boring, I know—for teacher and student alike—and it could be. But it's actually essential if students are to understand what the study of history is supposed to accomplish—especially given that many have such a bad experience in high school history class.

There is a classic type of methods or historiography class that entails either a whirlwind survey of historical writing from Herodotus to the present (or within a given field as the case may be) or heavy-duty theory, focusing on the abstract. They have their place (mainly in grad school, if there), but that's not what average undergrads need. Rather, they need to learn that history is not just about "the past" (things that have already happened is not really a meaningful field of study), much less a random collection of facts about that past. What history really involves, as the great historian Marc Bloch pointed out, is "the science of men in time": how the human being behaves in different settings. That means, among other things, understanding just how people in earlier periods were both like and unlike us: in other words, gaining a sense of historical perspective.

To be sure, the notion that high school history consists of nothing but memorizing meaningless strings of names and dates is an outdated caricature. Still, the problem is that high school courses, even when employing up-to-date insights and works (some of the same ones that I use) still fall short of the mark. For that matter, so do many in colleges and universities, but perhaps not for the expected reasons.

What did you say we were supposed to do?

Cognitive Psychologist and Professor of Education Sam Wineburg has made this problem a central task of his career: Historians are experts at what they do and therefore know it so well that it never occurs to them to stop and explain it. (An analogy might be starting up a car or using word-processing software. These are second nature to us: we don't reach for the owner's manual each time; indeed, we could not accomplish the task if we had to. But imagine trying to explain these activities to someone totally unfamiliar with them.) Students, by contrast, have no such expertise and experience, and are therefore often mystified or frustrated in the classroom: in effect, we ask them to produce something without quite telling them what it is, what we are looking for, and how to do it. (Hell, I'd be frustrated, too.)  The essence of the historian's expertise, as Wineburg sees it, is the interpretation of evidence, entailing "sourcing" (who created the document under what circumstances for what purpose or audience?) and "corroboration" and "contextualization," which allow us further to assess its accuracy and contemporary significance.

In his view, students tend to view faculty as generating neat "finished products" in their teaching and their writing. The solution, he says, is for professors to demonstrate how they work, primarily by making explicit the messy process of interpreting texts, including not just the aforementioned skills, but also very tentative nature of conclusions. Students would then come to see that both they and their professors are engaged in the same tasks and struggling with the same dilemmas, simply at different levels.

This semester, as it happens, I am teaching two such historiography courses, one aimed at beginning students, the other, at concentrators in the field.

The first course is built around the notion of debate. After some general and introductory material about the task of history and the nature of historical writing and thinking today, we launch into exploration of a series of concrete topics that allow students to see just how interpretations are formulated, criticized, and defended:

Many people have learned and are accustomed to thinking of history as an authoritative account of the past, based on indisputable facts. Scholars of history, by contrast, understand history as a matter of contested and evolving interpretation: debate. And they argue not just over the interpretation of facts, but even over what constitutes a relevant fact. This course will use some representative debates to show how dynamic the historical field is. Topics may include: Did women have a Renaissance? How did people in early modern France understand identity? Why did eighteenth-century French artisans find the torture and slaughter of cats to be hilarious rather than cruel? Were Nazi killers who committed genocide motivated by hatred or peer pressure? Are European Jews descended from medieval Turks rather than biblical Hebrews? Students will come to understand how historians reason and work. In so doing, they themselves will learn to think historically.

I have found that it is particularly fruitful to focus on these cases in which the basic "facts"—objectively established information, directly pertinent documentation, etc.--are limited and known, and yet historians disagree as to their interpretation. Just what, then, do the sources "mean"? To what extent do we need to understand other, contextual evidence? Where is the boundary between legitimate "interpretation" of the sources and rampant speculation or bias? Is everything just a matter of "opinion" Or, can we establish objective criteria for measuring validity?

And since we find ourselves in an election year, it's worth pointing out that these are skills that apply equally well to the political realm. In a sense, what we all do as citizens and voters is very much the same: Although no ordinary person can be an expert on everything from climate change and budget deficits to questions of war and peace, we are nonetheless required to judge the arguments of those who propose policies in these areas based on our best understanding of the relevant "facts" and general logic.

Facts, Fishmongers, Fetishes

Part of the challenge is not only that students think history is about "facts," but also that it does not occur to them (or sometimes: their teachers) to ask what a fact is. We therefore start with a selection from E. H. Carr's classic What Is History? originally delivered as the George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures at the University of Cambridge in 1961 (NY: Vintage Books, 1961). The first chapter, "The Historian and His Facts," not only lays out the underlying assumptions of the project but also contains a host of choice quotable passages revealing his inimitable style as well as incisive reasoning.

There, he attempts to explain how a justified reaction against moralizing and philosophizing history in the nineteenth century inadvertently led to an equally distorted "cult of the facts," which unfairly limited the historian's domain.

Citing the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of a fact as "a datum of experience as distinct from conclusions," Carr dismisses this as "the common-sense view of history" and introduces his ichthyological/culinary metaphor as a criticism:

The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions, and so on, like fish on the fishmonger's slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him. (6)

He goes on to explain why this notion of the fact is inadequate for our purposes. For example, that Caesar crossed the Rubicon and that there is a table in the middle of the room are both "facts" but not of comparable importance. '[A] mere fact about the past is transformed into a fact of history" when a historian cites it and it is then "accepted by other historians as valid and significant" and becomes a part of their ongoing dialogue and debate. (11)

Carr defines the genuine "dual task of discovering the few significant facts and turning them into facts of history and of discarding the many insignificant facts as unhistorical" by contrasting it with the nineteenth-century "heresy that history consists of the compilation of the maximum number of irrefutable and objective facts":

Anyone who succumbs to this heresy will either have to give up history as a bad job, and take to stamp-collecting or some other form of antiquarianism, or end up in a madhouse. It is this heresy, which during the past hundred years has had such devastating effects on the modern historian, producing in Germany, in Great Britain, and in the United States a vast and growing mass of dry-as-dust factual histories, of minutely specialized monographs, of would-be historians knowing more and more about less and less, sunk without trace in an ocean of facts. (14)

He continues this argument, reinforcing it by continuing to employ the religious imagery:

The nineteenth-century fetishism of facts was completed and justified by a fetishism of documents. The documents were the Ark of the Covenant in the temple of facts. The reverent historian approached them with bowed head and spoke of them in awed tones. If you find it in the documents, it is so. But what, when we get down to it, do these documents—the decrees, the treaties, the rent-rolls, the blue books, the official correspondence, the private letters and diaries—tell us? No document can tell us more than what the author of the document thought--what he thought had happened, what he thought ought to happen or would happen, or perhaps only what he wanted others to think he thought, or even only what he himself thought he thought. None of this means anything until the historian has got to work on it and deciphered it. (16)

It is in fact (no pun intended) precisely this point the that the oft-misunderstood quotation that serves as the motto of this blog—from the writings of Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59), a "liberal" and "whiggish" historian if ever there was one, and great-uncle of the historian after whom Carr's lecture series was named—sought to make.

Carr goes on to show how the selection process of survival and publication of documents further constrains the value of the "facts" themselves. Finally, he argues that the satisfaction of the traditional elites with the social order reinforced the tendency to focus on the facts at the expense of a philosophy or concept of history:

The liberal nineteenth-century view of history had a close affinity with the economic doctrine of laissez-faire--also the product of a serene and self-confident outlook on the world. Let everyone get on with his particular job, and the hidden hand would take care of the universal harmony. The facts of history were themselves a supreme demonstration of the supreme fact of a beneficent and apparently infinite progress towards higher things. This was the age of innocence, and historians walked in the Garden of Eden, without a scrap of philosophy to cover them, naked and unashamed before the god of history. Since then, we have known sin and experienced a Fall; and those historians who today pretend to dispense with a philosophy of history are merely trying, vainly and self-consciously, like members of a nudist colony, to recreate the Garden of Eden in their garden suburb. Today the awkward question can no longer be evaded. (21)

And there we are (or were): naked in our own inadequacy. One hopes that the image will leave a memorable impression on the student mind.

Would have, could have, must have: Professional historian at work! Do not attempt on your own.

Perhaps because 'tis the season to mark papers, I am especially on the lookout for leaps of logic, sweeping generalizations, and other unfounded arguments.

Also, because I am teaching my course on debates in history in the spring. There, I try to get students to understand several fundamental truths:  persuasive argument depends on the marshaling of evidence, and evidence demands interpretation. I try to get them to see that the facts are essential, but do not "speak for themselves." The science of history is in a very real sense therefore the history of evolving interpretations, a dialogue with our colleagues and predecessors. For that reason, too, we generally say, we still find it useful to read and engage with even the historians of the distant past, whose views we no longer share. This is commonly cited as one difference between the human and natural sciences. The laboratory scientist generally derives no practical benefit from reading antiquated and refuted theories.

We examine several cases in which two historians look at the same facts and arrive at very different conclusions. A classic modern example is Natalie Davis's celebrated Return of Martin Guerre (subject of the popular film of the same name) involving marriage and mystery in sixteenth-century France. A young woman's socially awkward and sexually inept husband abandons her. How could she not know that the strapping, virile fellow who returns years later, claiming his role and rights, is in fact someone else? Oh: and this was serious stuff back then. The new husband was eventually found guilty of imposture and executed. The wife was found innocent, on the grounds that she was deceived. For Davis, she must have known, and the two must have colluded in order to fashion new identities and a romantic marriage influenced by new Protestant ideals. The judge was sympathetic and covered up the truth. For Robert Finlay, by contrast, the sources say that the wife was duped, and that is that: Davis imposes modern feminist values and a postmodernist reading on the sovereign sources. Davis's book is full of phrases to the effect that one of the characters must have or could have or might have thought or done this or that. For Finlay, this is wild speculation. For Davis, Finlay has a mindnumbingly simplistic approach to sources, assuming that they can be taken at face value, that we do not need to look beneath the surface or take into account the implicit subjectivity or even duplicity of the author. The reader will judge.

Still, even as we attempt to teach this complexity in interpretation, we teach students to err on the side of caution in their own writing. Davis and Finlay are professionals, intimately familiar with the nature of the documents and the society. They can assemble extensive evidence in support of every point. Davis's footnotes on even minor contextual matters sometimes threaten to become miniature essays in their own right. Davis brought to her adventurous interpretations decades of experience that students by definition lack. They tend to see sources in a much more limited way, and to use them accordingly. They think in terms of quoting or discussing individual sources in detail rather than synthesizing and assembling them in service of a larger point. Above all, because they necessarily lack the contextual knowledge, they are much more prone to outrun their evidence. It's a little bit like driver ed: the student may understand the theory and moreover know all the correct individual things to do, but putting them together in a real-life situation without adequate experience can be dangerous: you don't take her onto the streets of Boston or New York on the first day.

I therefore always recall my father's teaching me a Latin phrase from Terence that he learned in Gymnasium: "Quod licet Iovi non licet Bovi": what is permitted to Jove [Jupiter] is not permitted to an ox. In other words, not everyone has equal rights.

Here's an example of a reviewer grappling with this issue in a modern scholarly journal:

By the beginning of 1833, 'his views must have assumed their full shape' (p. 166). (One winces at the 'must have', a phrase to which Vereté was prone but one which if used by an aspiring postgraduate would bring deserved coals of fire on his or her head). Vereté was very good at discovering documents but he was inclined to take them at face value and sometimes failed to ask why these arguments were used, how far those who used them believed in them and how far statesmen acted on them rather than on other arguments.

from M. E. Yapp, review of From Palmerston to Balfour: Collected Essays of Mayir Vereté, Middle Eastern Studies 29 no. 2 (April 1993): 358-59

None of this, or course, is to say that facts don't matter.  As we are accustomed to saying, everyone has a right to his or her own opinions, but not his or her own facts. John Adams famously said in his defense of the British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre:

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

And, writing during the time of the Vietnam War and the controversy over the Pentagon Papers, Hannah Arendt (not someone I generally quote if I can help it) cites a conversation between the French Premier and a German politician over war guilt in the First World War:

'What, in your opinion,' Clemenceau was asked, 'will future historians think of this troublesome and controversial isue?' He replied, 'This I don't know. But I know for certain that they will not say Belgium invaded Germany.'

Nuff said.

Books Into Battle: John Hench Wins Distinguished Award for Study of Propaganda and Publishing During World War II

With all the attention paid to the Civil War these days, it's easy for the topic of World War II to get pushed into the background. Military history of the conflict will always find an audience (and a publisher), but it's a delight to come across a book that actually breaks new ground by attempting to tell us what the war meant to governments, soldiers, and civilians--moreover, by studying the role of culture rather than killing.

World War II is still seen by most of us as "the good war" (to cite the title of Studs Terkels's oral history), especially in comparison with the wars in which the United States has since become involved. It was seen as a contest between good and evil, a war of ideas or worldviews. The old "Why We Fight" indoctrination films, for example, made this clear in the opening shots, depicting opposing "slave" and "free" worlds. The Allies of course eventually went to war reluctantly, and not out of abstract opposition to fascism, as such, but once the war was underway, it became a fight for ideas as well as survival.

John B. Hench, former Vice President for Collections and Programs at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, tells a little-known part of that campaign in Books As Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II, (Cornell University Press, 2010). He shows how the United States sought to use the printed word to win both the war and the peace—and a piece of the big postwar global economic pie.

Last month, at the annual conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) in Washington, DC, we honored him with the George A. and Jean S. DeLong Book History Book Prize for the best publication of the past year. It was a real delight to see such richly deserved recognition for a great scholar and generous colleague.

This is a fascinating book that draws upon new sources to tell an important story. He had me hooked at the outset:

Only weeks after the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944, a surprising cargo—crates of books—joined the flood of troop reinforcements, weapons and ammunition, food, and medicine onto Normandy beaches. The books were destined for French bookshops, to be followed by millions more American books (in translation but also in English) ultimately distributed throughout Europe and the rest of the world. The British were doing similar work, which was uneasily coordinated with that of the Americans within the Psychological Warfare Division of General Eisenhower's Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, under General Eisenhower's command.

Here, the table of contents:

Introduction : Books on the Normandy Beaches

Cultivating New Markets
1. Modernizing U.S. Book Publishing
2. War Changes Everything--Even Books

Books as "Weapons in the War of Ideas
3. Publishers Organize for War and Plan for Peace
4. "Books Are The Most Enduring Propaganda of All

5. Seeking "an Inside Track to the World’s Bookshelves"
6. "Everyone but the Janitor" Selected the Books
7. Books to Pacify and Reeducate the Enemy
8. Making the "Nice Little Books"

U.S. Cultural Power Abroad
9. Liberating Europe with Books
10. The Rise and Fall of the United States International Book Association
11. The Empire Strikes Back
12. Books for Occupied Germany and Japan

Epilogue : American Books Abroad After 1948

Read the rest of the story on the book blog.

Karl Marx: No Pain, No Gain! (I paraphrase)

"no royal road to science"

Occasionally, when students insist that a reading assignment is difficult or complain about the amount of work (in fact a reasonable amount, if one stops to consider that college is or should be the equivalent of a full-time job), or when I come across a badly written and badly reasoned news article or policy document, I ask myself what the best advice or response is. One could do worse than to cite Karl Marx.

From the Preface to to the 1872 French edition of Capital  l:

To the citizen Maurice Lachâtre

Dear Citizen,

I applaud your idea of publishing the translation of “Das Kapital” as a serial. In this form the book will be more accessible to the working class, a consideration which to me outweighs everything else.

That is the good side of your suggestion, but here is the reverse of the medal: the method of analysis which I have employed, and which had not previously been applied to economic subjects, makes the reading of the first chapters rather arduous, and it is to be feared that the French public, always impatient to come to a conclusion, eager to know the connexion between general principles and the immediate questions that have aroused their passions, may be disheartened because they will be unable to move on at once.

That is a disadvantage I am powerless to overcome, unless it be by forewarning and forearming those readers who zealously seek the truth. There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.

Believe me,
dear citizen,
Your devoted,

Karl Marx
London
March 18, 1872

What's Left of BDS?

I am always amused (in a sardonic way, of course), when I see the self-proclaimed radicals of the anti-Israel “BDS” (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement dismiss their critics as “right-wing.” Some are. Many are not.

And that’s just the problem: the BDS zealots make it easy on themselves by hurling smear words. One size hits all. Why bother to target your opponents’ ideas when you can fire back with slogans rather than arguments?

It is ironic in more ways than one. We’ve been there before. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the issue was the SDS rather than BDS, and when one of the soi-disant ultra-radicals arrogantly questioned the progressive credentials of Irving Howe, the great socialist famously put him in his place. And long before that, Lenin dealt with the problem when he diagnosed the “infantile disorder” of “left-wing communism."

Unlike their predecessors of the 1920s and 1960s, however, many of the younger activists who most pride themselves on their “leftist” credentials have no clue as to the leftist tradition. (After all, these are people who think “reactionary” means “reactive,” and who believe that informed political action derives from wearing a keffiyeh rather than reading Kapital.) If they did, they would be for the solidarity of all peoples rather than elevating one nationalism above others (in fact, only one other). They would be more aware of the dangers of antisemitism: of the noble tradition of the left in opposing it, and of the ignoble lapses of the left in at times downplaying or even cultivating it. They would have no truck with the notion that they should ally themselves with objectively reactionary and clerico-fascist forces such as Hamas and Hizbullah, which espouse policies that, if issuing from the mouth of a Christian evangelical “fundamentalist,” would earn instant and pitiless condemnation.

Many opponents of BDS on the left may in fact share some of the critiques of Israeli policy advanced by BDS advocates, but they differ in their motives, their assessment of the overall situation or the tactics, or all of the above. Above all, they are committed to a realistic vision of peace, defined as two peoples living in two states created by mutual agreement and based on national reconciliation.

That is the position of the Socialist International,  Trade Unions Linking Israel and Palestine, and other progressive groups dedicated to practical action rather than acting out.

Some of the most provocative thinking comes from the British far left.  Although these marginal groups aren’t going to bring about a revolution anytime soon, their analysis of some aspects of the Middle East conflict—particularly, the objective and subjective failings of the BDS movement—is spot on. Interestingly, they have no problem in condemning in the strongest terms the “occupation,” Operation Cast Lead, and the IDF confrontation with the Jihadis on the Mavi Marmara, without, however, concluding that Israel is a genocidal apartheid state that must be destroyed.

Because this discourse is not well known in the States, or indeed, in most mainstream circles, I’ll offer a few extended quotes, with links to the full texts:

• "Why left-wing students should not support boycotts of Israel":

We believe solidarity with the Palestinians should be the left’s starting point on the question of Israel/Palestine. But we believe that the proposal to boycott Israel is reactionary, counter-productive and will hinder efforts to build an effective movement of solidarity with the Palestinians. . . . .

Why boycotts will not help the Palestinians

We oppose the oppression of the Palestinians by Israel both because we are against oppression in general, and because it undermines the development of the kind of politics we want to see in the Middle East – revolutionary politics, with workers of different national and religious groups uniting in the struggle against capitalism. Unless they fight for the right of every people to freely determine their own future – a right the Palestinians are currently denied – workers in the region will never build a movement capable of overthrowing capitalism.

So the urge to “do something” for the Palestinians is a good one. But boycotts of Israel are not a good thing to do. They are likely to be ineffective; in so far as they are effective they will harm the Palestinian cause, and have other negative consequences too. . . .

Many, perhaps most, Israelis support their own government's policy. The Palestinians have every right to struggle for their freedom now, regardless of what support they have in Israel. But what they need most of all is Israeli allies. . . .

It will most likely take big political (and social) upheavals within Israel to force it to change policy. In fact, it will probably require the replacement of this Israeli government by a very different one. So the attitude of most Israelis matters. . . .

This left, broadly defined, is small and weak, like in Britain, but it exists. It needs support and solidarity.

There is also, of course, the Israeli working class, the great majority of which is ethnically 'Jewish'. Parts of it are organised, and have fought big struggles. Most workers, and at least the leaders of their trade union organisations too, currently support the government. But as socialists, we think it is self-evident that what Israeli workers think should be of concern.

Boycotts will certainly weaken the left, internationalist, pro-Palestinian wing inside Israel, and strengthen the right, by making Israelis feel as if a hostile world is pressing down on them (of the course the history of the Holocaust and anti-semitism play a role here too). The more effective they are - for instance, the more Israelis lose their jobs or livelihoods as a result - the stronger this negative impact will be. Boycotts will harm, not help, the Palestinians. . . .


Is Israel “the” problem? Should we support any measure that hits Israel?

Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians is a big part of the problem; the major problem, in fact, and the one we should focus on. But it is not the only problem. A big part of what is wrong with the way some left-wingers talk about Israel-Palestine is their totally one-sided and un-nuanced condemnation of Israel.

What, for instance, about the fact that most of Israel’s neighbours do not and have never recognised its right to exist – and have tried to crush it in three wars (1947, 1967, 1973)? What about the fact that many Arab states have also mistreated the Palestinians (particularly Jordan, which has carried out terrible massacres)? Israel’s imperialism, its chauvinism, its nationalism (Zionism) have to be understood within a network of interlocking, antagonistic and mutually reinforcing imperialisms, chauvinisms and nationalisms. Again, this is not to excuse Israel’s crimes, but to understand their context – and therefore understand how to fight them. To refuse to do this means distorting reality, and therefore, in effect, giving up on changing it.

We repeat: the urge to do something to stop oppression is good. That does not mean that doing anything, no matter how harmful and counterproductive, is a good idea. (read the rest)

The article goes on to insist that the answer is solidarity: with both Palestinians and Israeli workers. It also, and more provocatively, characterizes the BDS movement as implicitly antisemitic, a topic taken up more directly in the following piece:

• "What is left anti-semitism?"

What is “left-wing anti-semitism”? Where is it manifested? What is to be done about it?

. . . left-wing anti-semitism knows itself by another and more self-righteous name, “anti-Zionism”. Often, your left-wing anti-semite sincerely believes that he or she is only an anti-Zionist, only a just if severe critic of Israel. . . .

The objector continues: Israel deserves criticism. . . . To equate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism is just crude and hysterical Zionist apologetics.

No, by “left-wing anti-semitism” we emphatically do not mean political, military, or social criticism of Israel and of the policy of Israeli governments. Certainly, not all left-wing critics of Israel or Zionism are anti-semites, even though these days all anti-semites, including the right-wing, old-fashioned, and racist anti-semites, are paid-up “anti-Zionists”.

Israel frequently deserves criticism. Israel’s policy in the Occupied Territories and its general treatment of the Palestinians deserve outright condemnation. The oppressed Palestinians need to be politically defended against Israeli governments and the Israeli military. The only halfway equitable solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, a viable, independent Palestinian state in contiguous territory, side by side with Israel, needs to be argued for and upheld against Israeli power. . . .

The difference here between left-wing anti-semites and honest critics of Israel — a category which includes a very large number of Israeli Jews as well as Israeli Arabs — is a straightforward one of politics, of policy.

The left-wing anti-semites do not only criticise Israel. They condemn it outright and deny its right to exist. They use legitimate criticisms, and utilise our natural sympathy with the Palestinians, not to seek redress, not as arguments against an Israeli government, an Israeli policy, or anything specifically wrong in Israel, but as arguments against the right of Israel to exist at all. Any Israel. Any Jewish state in the area. Any Israel, with any policy, even one in which all the specific causes for justly criticising present-day Israel and for supporting the Palestinians against it have been entirely eliminated.

The root problem, say the left-wing anti-semites, is that Israel exists. The root “crime of Zionism” is that it advocated and brought into existence “the Zionist state of Israel”.

Bitterly, and often justly, criticising specific Israeli policies, actions, and governments, seemingly championing the Palestinians, your left-wing anti-semites seek no specific redress in Israel or from Israel, demanding only that Israel should cease to exist or be put out of existence.

They often oppose measures to alleviate the condition of the Palestinians short of the destruction of Israel. (read the rest)

It is striking is that this sort of frank talk is so rare: not only on the activist left, but also in the mainstream media. How is it that these Trotskyites "get it" but the bourgeois and upper-class sophisticates of the Guardian do not?

To remain on this side of the Atlantic:  Among the most moving leftist statements on the nullity of the anti-Israel infantile left was a post that appeared only recently. The blogger known as “Jew Guevara” briefly recounted the history of his own leftist evolution, from a radical proponent of peace and equality in Israel, to a yored, an ex-Israeli living abroad in voluntary exile, alienated both from his country and from its enemies. Few commentators can thus as compellingly pillory the disingenuousness and destructiveness of the BDS movement:

How odd then, to find myself dismissed as a ‘Zionist’ here and there in the Palestinian solidarity movement. Not like so many people actually know me or anything. But… there was that JATO woman at the UFPJ gathering, the trainer at the Student PSC conference, the outright verbal assualts on the activist listserve, and a picture comes to mind.

The Palestinian solidarity movement, especially as it has coalesced around the strategy of BDS, has two faces. One face is warm, friendly and intelligent. It says that BDS is a tactic not a preferred political solution. It doesn’t require B, D and S, and it can be directed at the occupation or at Israel in general - no coercion. It makes Gush Shalom feel right at home.

The other face is quite clear that the one state solution is preferred and the two state solution is dead - and good riddance. Anyone in support of an Israeli identity is a Zionist. Anyone seeking compromise with Zionists is a Zionist. Anti- or non-Zionists who refrain from calling for an end to Israel are ’soft-Zionists.’ Israelis are ‘butchers’ who commit ‘massacres’, their peace camp isn’t really for peace except for a handful, the Palestinian Authority is not only corrupt, it is ‘only corrupt’, lacking in any other attributes or identity. It’s everything awful about the 90s campus culture wars/identity politics madness, with the eager pleasure in despising whatever isn’t politically correct.

Everything I used to hate and fear about the Israeli right wing: the extremist language, the eagerness to demonize the other, the closing of ranks around a narrow set of ideas, the very harshness of the voice and tone. It’s the flattening of every nuance into a slogan or holy truth. It’s the utter impossibility of dialogue with people who feel differently.

I used to be part of that first group. Some days, I still am. But… I keep running into that second group and it turns my stomach. Sometimes it’s the same person displaying one face or the other, depending the audience. It’s as if all the experiences I have growing up in Israel and ‘putting myself out there’ as a refusenik, participant in militant demonstrations, getting arrested, working inside of majority Palestinian political organizations - count for nothing. Because I’m insisting on the slogans of my youth (Arab/Jewish unity, two states for two peoples, down with the occupation, negotiations yes/war no) somehow I’m excluded from the cool kids lunch table at the Palestinian solidarity middle school. Back in Israel, that’s who I sat with. Now they sneer at me.

But I can’t sit with the Zionist kids anymore! Not after all that stuff I said about not being a Zionist…. sniff.

I guess I’ll go sit by myself. And I am NOT a Zionist! I’m just another Israeli yored in New York waiting for the occupation to be over. So I can go home. 

[h.t./via Solomonia; and BTW, see the comment thread]

It could be our college campus (1, 2) he is describing.  I can think of few more depressing summations of the situation.

How Much Control Should Students Have Over University Life? And Where Did All That "Town-Gown" Stuff Come From?

Here at Hampshire College, a presidential Governance Task Force (which I have somehow ended up co-chairing) has just completed work on its draft report. The task was to identify and evaluate all mechanisms for decision-making, and then to formulate recommendations. We are big believers in maximum democracy and deliberative process, but it can be hard to strike the right balance:  too quick a process, and one doesn't get enough buy-in; too slow and drawn-out a process, and people feel exhausted and demoralized.  (the similarity between the culture of the College and the Town of Amherst is often striking).  The challenge, then, was to come up with ideas that would retain our strongly participatory system of shared governance while clarifying procedures and increasing efficiency. This afternoon, we met with the President to discuss next steps and implementation.

A key issue is the role of students.  Our system is distinctive and nearly unique in that it not only requires students to take a strong hand in designing their own programs of study (in close consultation with faculty advisors), but also gives them a strong role in the governance of the College. I'm not talking about just the proverbial "student government." Instead, students (among other things) take part in the deliberations of the five divisions of the College (akin to department meetings) and even play a role in policy-making and the hiring and promotion of faculty.  We have a student representative on the Board of Trustees.

Outsiders often ask me how this works, and even some faculty occasionally raise questions about the nature or scope of student participation. I happen to regard this participation as one of the strengths and pleasures of our system, so I respond by saying more or less what I've just said. Sometimes, though, I go further and put on my historian's hat.

The notion that a university is a business (really, a big corporation), housed in a miniature city, with students as its customers, is in most senses a fairly recent one.  In another sense, though—at least as concerns the business and the customers—it's actually quite ancient: it's just that the roles may be different from what the average person expects.

I always recall these passages from a favorite old textbook.

In the Middle Ages the word "university" (universitas) meant any corporate society or corporation.  A gild of merchants or craftsmen, a cathedral chapter, or a community of monks might be called a universitas, an organized group.  During the twelfth century the students at Bologna organized themselves into two groups or "universities" consisting of the Italian students (the Cismontane university, students "this side" of the Alps) and the students from north of the Alps (the Transmontane university).  These two "universities" of students were actually what is called the University of Bologna.

     The purpose of the organization at Bologna was twofold: for protection against exploitation by the townspeople who charged what the market would bear for food and lodging, and for assurance that the course of legal instruction should be worth the tuition fees paid by students to their professors.  Against the townspeople the students relied upon the threat of simply moving away en masse, a threat that was easy to put into effect because the university itself was simply a group of people, not a campus with buildings and grounds permanently located.  The university of students thus slowly gained the right to fix prices and rents and to regulate not only student life but the relations between "town" and "gown" (i.e. the students collectively, so called because of the clerical garb worn by the great majority of students who were in minor orders).  Against the professors the students relied on the threat of boycott.  Since the professors' income derived from students' fees, the organized students could dictate the nature of the curriculum and could enforce minimum standards of instruction by the simple device of not attending the courses of unsatisfactory professors.  In the earliest surviving statues of the university the professors were subject to minute and stringent regulations.  They were required to begin lecturing with the bell and finish within a minute after the next bell; they could not be absent without permission, and had to post bond for their return if they left Bologna; they were required to proceed systematically through the subject matter of the Corpus Juris, and not to omit or postpone difficult sections.  If a professor were unable to attract at least five students to a scheduled morning lecture, he was subject to the same fine as if he were absent without leave.

  —Robert S. Hoyt, Europe in the Middle Ages, second ed. (NY:  Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1966), 324

They made a strong impression on me when I first read them, and it's worthwhile to return to them periodically, just in order to maintain a sense of perspective. 

Come to think of it, the residents of Amherst (1, 2, 3, 4) might find those words pretty interesting, too.

History: Twice as Useful as Philosophy

As the great Michel de Montaigne famously said, "philosopher, c'est apprendre à mourir."  According to Felipe Fernández-Armesto:

There are, in my submission, only two reasons for studying anything: to enhance life and to prepare for death. The study of history embraces life because it conjures in the mind a vivid context for the appreciation and understanding of encounters with people and with artefacts, with streets and texts, with landscapes and ruins.  And it prepares you for death by cultivating what [E. H.] Carr called 'imaginative understanding', which some contributors to this volume would have called 'empathy' or other names of which Carr would disapprove.  By broadening the mind, by exercising the ability to understand the other, history has a moral effect on the person that studies it.  It can make you a better person.  Our best peculiar justification for history is to say that it needs no justification.  Because it is everything, it is inescapable.  You can say of it what Mallory said of Everest.

— Felipe Fernández-Armesto, "Epilogue:  What is History Now?" in David Cannadine, ed., What is History Now? (Houndsmills and NY:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 154

Museums and Archaeology: From Pillage to Partnership

• Bernard Frischer, Museums Should Dig In - NYTimes.com
  An intriguing idea: given that many museums--notably and recently, the Getty, for example--have been caught dealing in stolen goods or artifacts of dubious provenance, the author suggests that museums once again undertake their own archaeological expeditions in search of items for collections. In the bad old days, of course, it was done through sheer hubris, colonialism, and pillage. Nowadays, with laws protecting cultural patrimony and regulating exports in place, such undertakings would occur in partnership with local authorities. In a truly collaborative relationship, both parties would benefit.

Related articles

• ArtsBeat: Case Against Former Curator Ends (artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Stolen Aphrodite Returns (thedailybeast.com)
• Time Limit Ends Antiquities Case Of Ex-Curator (nytimes.com)
• Italy Drops Charges Against Ex-Curator Marion True (businessweek.com)
• Getty Museum statue transfer ends Italy dispute (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Historian Marla Miller Honored for Work on Betsy Ross

Praise for our UMass colleague Marla Miller's pioneering study, Betsy Ross and the Making of America, continues to mount.

Last month, the Philadelphia Enquirer featured Marla in a story on the Betsy Ross House in that city as well as a special exhibition based on her book,  "Betsy Ross: The Life Behind the Legend," at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware.

That same week, the University of Massachusetts proudly announced:

The History Department's Marla Miller, author of "Betsy Ross and the Making of America," has received a $10,000 "Recognition of Excellence" prize as part of the 2010 Cundill Prize in History competition at McGill University, the world's richest historical literature prize.

Congratulations to one of our leading public historians.  Don't live in Amherst? You can watch her on Book TV here.

Could You Please Write Me a Letter of Recommendation for Graduate School? (I know I'm not giving you much notice, but...)

I just recently put up the December calendar icon. I know what that means. The days grow short and the hopes grow long. Yes, it's that time again: the two or three frigid months of deepest darkness when the majority of letters of recommendation for graduate school are due. (Why do you think I am up at this hour?)

As if by divine grace, along comes this video gem (it has several counterparts in other fields) to remind me as well as the students just what they propose to get themselves into. It has gone viral in university literature and history departments. It also has provoked quite a controversy. Opinions divide sharply into two camps: (1) it’s hilarious (LOL, LMAO); and (2) that’s not funny.

Some highlights:

Student:  Being a college professor will give me the flexible schedule that best suits my personality.

Professor:  No, being a college professor means that you will work on average 65 hours a week trying a publish an obscure article that no one cares about in an obscure scholarly journal that nobody will read, just so that you can put it on your c.v.

You will serve on five to six committees at your school, where you will discuss just how much of your salary the administrators believe you can do without and how many more classes they believe you can teach so they increase the millionaire salary of the football coach.

Student:  I like Robin Williams in “Dead Poets Society.” I want to live a life of the mind.

Professor:  Oh, my God. Life is not a movie script. Humanities and higher education is under attack SUNY Albany just cut their French and Italian programs. The Tea Party may take control of Congress. They believe all college professors are radical Marxists and they are scheming of ways to have us all fired.. You will have a career where people will demand that you constantly justify to them why you exist, and you will begin to question the nature of your own existence. You will discover that your own life has been a complete waste and that will be confirmed to you when a student like you walks into your office asking for a recommendation.

Clearly, it struck a nerve, for someone felt motivated to produce “Yes, I Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities” (with the rather unoriginal subtitle, “Response to the video…”)



It in turn produced a stream of critical viewer YouTube comments whose bitterness and cynicism went far beyond anything contained in the first animation.

So, who’s right?

Personally, I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. A similar entry in the series, in which a totally arrogant and talentless would-be writer attempts to pitch his magnum opus to a jaded agent, has likewise gone viral. And, interestingly, some of the same humanities faculty who hated the piece on the letter of recommendation loved this one. (One expressed the wish for a flat-screen tv on her door, so that she could have it on constant replay, 24/7.)

The subtitle of the original piece really should explain its intent pretty clearly (we're talking about textual interpretation here, folks, and this is not Ulysses): “A bright motivated undergrad decides to ask her professor for a letter of recommendation to graduate school.” Then, again, the student is described as having gotten a "C," which seems contradictory as well as bizarre (you almost have to try to achieve that, given grade inflation nowadays).  Perhaps, too, poor choice of the stock computerized voice assigned to the student made her sound stupid rather than merely full of the youthful idealism that we, too, once possessed.

In any case, I think the reactions were so strong because devoted scholars and teachers, lovers of culture, somehow felt their character and raison d’être threatened. At a time of economic insecurity, when the humanities face the twin threats of budget cuts and declining appreciation for seemingly non-utilitarian intellectual endeavors in society as a whole, they no doubt felt they were being told that their lives had been futile, based on a lie or a misconception.

When I was growing up, it was an annual spectacle to watch the rural Republican legislators denounce all those "lazy" professors at the large state university who never did any work. These critics apparently identified work with "contact hours," i.e. the time faculty were contractually obligated to spend with students. Fine. By that standard, I suppose we are lazy but far from the laziest or best-paid: the average professor may have 6 to 8 hours in the classroom per week and a couple more in office appointments, whereas the pro football player does, by the same measure, about 3 hours of work—and the clergy, at the bottom of this totem pole (in both quantity of labor and social utility), maybe one to one and a-half hours of work (depends on the religion and the golf schedule).

In all seriousness, I'm the first to admit that we are lucky and privileged: we do what we love and get paid for it, we enjoy unusual job security, we are to a rare extent (if not completely) in control of our own work time, conditions, and obligations, and we get long vacations, even if that vacation consists not in freedom from work, and rather, in the freedom to configure that work time in more flexible (though also more intensive than average) ways.

Still, graduate study and the academic career (the fantasies of state legislators and other critics notwithstanding) are no picnic, and prospective applicants need to be made aware of that. We work long hours, but unlike unionized wage laborers, we don't get paid extra for overtime. I would estimate (based on observation and previous studies) that my colleagues work, on average, 60-85 hours per week at their jobs. Some of that time is spent on research, which is necessary for professional advancement, but whose costs—travel to libraries and archives, attendance at national or international conventions—are (contrary to what the second video suggests) paid largely out of pocket unless one works at one of the wealthiest and most elite institutions.

And that's if you get that far. Working backward: The employment market sucks. I remember, they kept telling us, in more or less so many words: when this generation passes, there will be lots of jobs. Well, they said that for at least a couple of decades before people stopped believing it, and in the meantime, given the financial constraints under which we all work, many old positions are eliminated, go unfilled for years, or are redefined in peculiar ways. That reverse itinerary brings us back to graduate school. I've served on the graduate admissions committee of the UMass/Five College PhD program in history. Applications that speak merely of the candidate's "love of history" (did you acquire it because your grandfather told stories of his life, or your parents took you to Gettysburg in third grade?) end up in the wastebasket. (Sorry, kid.) What the graduate programs are looking for is a combination of raw talent, understanding of the field, and understanding of the nature of professional training and the career. Graduate school is in a sense your big moment of freedom and yet also no fun: you are freed from college requirements and able to focus on your true intellectual love. At the same time, you are socialized by being professionalized. With new freedom come new constraints. You can’t be a generalist. You won’t be indulged.

It is, of course, one big string of deferred gratifications held out before the bright student, like a lure before a greyhound at the track: once you are beyond—fill in the blanks:  undergraduate distribution requirements; graduate applications; graduate distribution requirements; your PhD prelim exams; your thesis proposal; graduate school; employment; tenure—any one of half a dozen other things, you will be truly free to do what you love. It’s hard to be both brilliantly creative and ruthlessly pragmatic, especially before the age of 40. As I tell my students: the smartest and most original students often leave graduate school or academe—not because they can’t perform, but because they find the demands of the theater owner are not to their liking. You need to have a very high tolerance for boredom, tedium, and nonsense. Or, as a senior professor told me when I was a student and we met while doing research in Europe: "My grad students tell me, 'They treat us like mushrooms: keep us in the dark and feed us a lot of shit.'"

The main point that the first video is making, then, is that "love" of a field or discipline is not enough: necessary, but not sufficient. In that sense, it’s like love itself: burning passion is not enough to sustain a marriage, which is a social contract and a pragmatic arrangement of daily life over the long haul. Even the most ardent lovers have to come to a modus vivendi about managing the budget, doing the dishes, and taking out the garbage. Those who truly love scholarship and culture and want to make a career of that will also learn, figuratively, to take out the garbage.

Understood? Fine, I’d be delighted to write you a letter of recommendation. Now give me those forms (but please, if you can, give me more than a week’s warning about the due date, too.)

Postscript

I am delighted to report that all the students asking me for letters of recommendation are serious and eminently qualified, as they almost invariably are. Indeed, although it is a little-known fact, Hampshire College is ranked first in the country in the percentage of graduates who go on to get a PhD in history, and eighth in the other humanities.  Follow us on Twitter in order to learn more.

* * *

Some resources if you are thinking about applying to grad school (especially in history):
• Paul Boyer, "Graduate Applications: The Important Elements," American Historical Association (AHA) Perspectives, Oct. 1989

• John King and Andrew McMichael, "Inscribing Your Future: The Trials and Tribulations of Applying to Graduate School," American Historical Association (AHA) Perspectives, Sept. 1998

• David R. Stone (Kansas State University), "Should I Go to Grad School in History? What Happens Once I Get There? A Guide to Applying to History Graduate Programs"

• Statement of Purpose and Letter of Recommendation Guidelines (University of California Santa Barbara)

Related articles

• what is the secret code for letters of recommendation? (orgtheory.wordpress.com)
• On the Role of the Humanities (medhumanities.org)

Jan Wiener, 1920-2010

Just a brief note on the sad news of the passing of historian Jan Wiener.

Here's the AP story, via Haaretz:

Jewish Czech who fought Nazis with British army dies

Jan Wiener, who fought in the British air force during World War II after fleeing Nazis in Germany and Czechoslovakia, died at age 90. (read the rest)

A more detailed appreciation will follow here soon.

Marla Miller on Betsy Ross on C-SPAN 2

Speaking of the flag, and related issues:  One of the occasional advantages of being a night owl is the satisfaction of finding that rare late-night television program worth watching (they are rare indeed, so the pleasure is all the greater). In this case, it's  our University of Massachusetts colleague Marla Miller speaking on her new book about Betsy Ross at (where else?) the Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia on C-SPAN 2 (broadcast of an event from April 28).

Maurice Olender on the craft of reading and historical reasoning

A little gem from what Umberto Eco calls "one of the most beautiful books that I know on this subject":

A scholar's writings can be a place where conflicts crystallize: an author's whole work can be based on positions that to us seem mutually contradictory . . . .
  To confine an author to a simple image of his work, often concocted by later researchers for purposes of their own, is to recreate the past by inventing precursors for the present. . . .
  To take an author seriously, to view his work in the context of its times, to attempt to describe the twists and turns of his thinking does not, however, mean that one agrees with his conclusions or subscribes to his views. Obvious as this point is, it is worth making explicitly here.

Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Aryans and Semites, a Match Made in Heaven, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, revised and augmented ed. (NY: Other Press, 2002), 18

Questions About Historical Analogies? Read Richard Evans

I wanted to add a footnote to my recent discussions of historical analogies by recommending the work of Richard J. Evans. Evans, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, is one of my favorite historians who, with only a handful of others in recent generations, has reshaped the field of German history and our attitudes toward it.

Evans is energetic, of dauntingly wide-ranging interests and knowledge, as his major publications show. He was a pioneer of real social history in the field of German studies. He has written about feminists, peasants, and workers. His conceptually as well as empirically studies of Hamburg are anything but mere "local studies."  Among the main themes of his work are the questions of continuity and change in German history, as represented by the twin emphases on the Wilhelmian Kaiserreich and the Third Reich. In the course of writing on the latter, he has also produced major works on historiography dealing with both the challenge of the Nazi past and general issues of method. His In Defence of History has been translated into German, Swedish, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Italian and Turkish.

Evans has just brought out the third and final volume of what is bound to be regarded as his magnum opus, a history of Nazi Germany (irony of success: one can only hope that it brings additional and deserved attention to his earlier works rather than eclipses them).

I thought of a review of his Third Reich at War this May and June, as Nazi analogies burst out like summer flowers on both the domestic and international fronts. The New York Times Book Review appraisal (May 17), by Walter Reich, former director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, made the point very simply:

The public’s memory of what Nazi Germany was and did has been, in recent years, mangled and trivialized. Widely seen but misleading films and politicized accusations of countries perpetrating “holocausts” against various groups have debased people’s sense of the real nature of the Germans’ deeds during World War II.

Which is why Richard J. Evans’s “Third Reich at War” couldn’t have come at a better time. The book may well be not only the finest but also the most riveting account of that period. If any work of accurate history has a chance to correct the distortions of public memory, this is it.

Agreed.  Read the book and learn.

Amherst Museums Win Awards

It's appropriate that the emblem at the top of the web page is Janus, looking both backward and forward, for that's what I have to do here.  When two local museum publications won prestigious awards from the New England Museum Association (NEMA) back in May, I filed away the press release, expecting to use it along with some of the news coverage, but the latter failed to materialize.  Apparently that coverage will come in November, when the awards are actually presented at the conference—something to look forward to.  In the meantime, here is the story.

In a press release dated May 10, NEMA announced

Amherst Museums Win Coveted Publication Awards

     (Arlington, MA) — The New England Museum Association (NEMA) today announced that two Amherst museums have won First Place in its 2010 Publication Award Competition. The Amherst Historical Society and Museum won the "Books, under $ 10" category for its entry entitled, Amherst A to Z, 1759-2009.  The University Gallery at the UMass Fine Arts Center won the "Posters" category for its entry entitled, Warhol poster.
     "This award puts the Amherst History Museum, and the University Gallery in very good company at the top ranks of our region's institutions," said NEMA Executive Director Dan Yaeger in announcing the honor.  "Graphic communication is vital to connecting a museum with its community, so their success with publications reflects their success in overall operations as well."
     The competition this year was especially intense, Yaeger said, with 241 publications from 78 museums entered in 19 different categories.  Competition winners will be recognized and exhibited at the 92nd Annual Amherst A to Z NEMA Conference in Springfield, Massachusetts, November 3-5, 2010. . . .

Amherst A to Z:  Amherst, Massachusetts 1759-2009 was the brainchild of then-Historical Society President Betty Sharpe, who conceived of it as both a contribution to the town's 250th anniversary celebrations and a fundraiser for the museum.  Having come up with the idea, she also volunteered to write the book.  She conducted extensive research, involving  artifacts as well as documents, and in addition consulted with numerous residents about both choice of topics and details. The topics are eclectic in the best sense—surprisingly and instructively diverse rather than merely subjective. To be sure, we learn about famous residents, from Emily Dickinson to Noah Webster, and the expected sites such as Town Hall or events such as the Hurricane of '38, but also about much else: the "Baby Book" kept as a record of deliveries by an early 19th-century physician; the "Cambodian Community" of new Americans here, the "Love Notes" charitable fundraiser of the Amherst Club, the "Renaissance Center" at the University of Massachusetts, the "Tiffany and LaFarge" windows in the Unitarian Universalist Meetinghouse, "Community-Supported Agriculture," the "Zion Chapel" (now Goodwin Memorial AME Zion  Church) and the "Zip Code"—01002—one of the lowest in the nation.

 Few people were better qualified to undertake such a task.  In addition to heading the Historical Society and serving on the Historical Commission, Betty, a specialist in American history and American studies and former Director of Education of the Smithsonian's American History Museum, is the author of the acclaimed In the Shadow of the Dam (Free Press, 2004), on the 1874 Mill River Flood in Haydenville, Massachusetts, the most deadly such American disaster up to that time.

Debbie Sachs Gabor served as the editor, and Mary Zyskowski (www.designmz.com) did the design work.

Amherst A to Z has been selling briskly in local bookstores, especially in the fall and spring, when college students and their parents come and go, often seeking information or souvenirs involving the town. It is available directly from the Museum.


Both the University Gallery and Amherst History Museum are members of Museums10, the consortium of sister organizations in the Upper Pioneer Valley.  Periodically, the group coordinates exhibits around a common theme.  In fall of 2007, it was Books (partial coverage here).  In 2010, it will be food: "Table for 10 The Art, History and Science of Food."


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