Attack Ads, ca. 1800

Craig Nakashian posted a Facebook link to this amusing YouTube snark.   Thanks to all involved!

Christians leaving the Middle East

 Robert Fisk in the Independent:

Across the Middle East, it is the same story of despairing – sometimes frightened – Christian minorities, and of an exodus that reaches almost Biblical proportions. Almost half of Iraq's Christians have fled their country since the first Gulf War in 1991, most of them after the 2004 invasion – a weird tribute to the self-proclaimed Christian faith of the two Bush presidents who went to war with Iraq – and stand now at 550,000, scarcely 3 per cent of the population. More than half of Lebanon's Christians now live outside their country. Once a majority, the nation's one and a half million Christians, most of them Maronite Catholics, comprise perhaps 35 per cent of the Lebanese. Egypt's Coptic Christians – there are at most around eight million – now represent less than 10 per cent of the population.

This is, however, not so much a flight of fear, more a chronicle of a death foretold. Christians are being outbred by the majority Muslim populations in their countries and they are almost hopelessly divided. In Jerusalem, there are 13 different Christian churches and three patriarchs. A Muslim holds the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to prevent Armenian and Orthodox priests fighting each other at Easter.

When more than 200 members of 14 different churches – some of them divided – gathered in Rome last week for a papal synod on the loss of Christian populations in the lands where Christianity began, it was greeted with boredom or ignored altogether by most of the West's press.

 Yet nowhere is the Christian fate sadder than in the territories around Jerusalem. As Monsignor Fouad Twal, the ninth Latin patriarch of Jerusalem [counting from when? -- SM] and the second to be an Arab, put it bleakly, "the Israelis regard us as 100 per cent Palestinian Arabs and we are oppressed in the same way as the Muslims. But Muslim fundamentalists identify us with the Christian West – which is not always true – and want us to pay the price." With Christian Palestinians in Bethlehem cut off from Jerusalem by the same Israeli wall which imprisons their Muslim brothers, there is now, Twal says, "a young generation of Christians who do not know or visit the Holy Sepulchre".

 The Jordanian royal family have always protected their Christian population – at 350,000, it is around 6 per cent of the population – but this is perhaps the only flame of hope in the region. The divisions within Christianity proved even more dangerous to their community than the great Sunni-Shia divide did to the Muslims of the Middle East. Even the Crusaders were divided in their 100-year occupation of Palestine, or "Outremer", as they called it. The Lebanese journalist Fady Noun, a Christian, wrote a profound article from Rome last week in which he spoke of the Christian loss as "a great wound haemorrhaging blood", and bemoaned both Christian division and "egoism" for what he saw as a spiritual as well as a physical emigration. "There are those Christians who reach a kind of indifference... in Western countries who, swayed by the culture of these countries and the media, persuade eastern Christians to forget their identity," he wrote.

 Pope Benedict, whose mournful visit to the Holy Land last year prompted him to call the special synod which ended in the Vatican at the weekend, has adopted his usual perspective – that, despite their difficulties, Christians of the "Holy Land" must reinvigorate their feelings as "living stones" of the Middle Eastern Church. "To live in dignity in your own nation is before everything a fundamental human right," he said. "That is why you must support conditions of peace and justice, which are indispensable for the harmonious development of all the inhabitants of the region." But the Pope's words sometimes suggested that real peace and justice lay in salvation rather than historical renewal.

Making a difference

Some people I know had some spare money.  On top of whatever personal use they may have made of it, they funded some good projects.  Among the beneficiaries:

120 girls in Nepal who are freed from bonded labour and going to school.

Well.

More of this, please

A junk tank being turned into an artificial reef off the coast of Thailand.   From The Big Picture.

"History tells us nothing of the sort:" One historian's reaction to some discouraging political events

A lot of my friends are appalled and cast down by the just-past local elections in Ontario (including me), but my Brit friends are even more discouraged by the Tory resurrection (and for good reason).   In the case of Guy Halsall, events inspired this blog post, which I excerpt here not so much for its current political stance, but for its interesting remarks on the philosophy of history.  The bold emphasis is mine.

More to the point, as concerns me today, the teleology of the longue durée takes short-term sets of events and experiences, like the common man’s involvement in the baronial reform movement (by the way, I’m not trying to claim the Barons’ Revolt really was some sort of democratic revolution; it is just a suitable example to use for this thought-exercise) and turns them either into blips or dead-ends or ‘steps’ on the road to a major change, depending upon how the course of history is interpreted from a particular vantage point. Both are mistaken ways of seeing. That the common freeman of Leicestershire, hit by the royalist backlash after Evesham, drew no comfort from the fact that ‘only’ 400 years later Parliament would overthrow and behead a king, and introduce a constitutional monarchy, goes without saying. To turn his and his allies’ efforts into a dead-end or a blip because they failed is similarly teleological. The triumphalist grand narrative denies the pain and anguish of lived experience; the ‘dead end’ approach denies us hope. Indeed, maybe it is intended to deny us hope: don’t try and challenge the natural, the ‘right’ order of things. “History tells us …” How often do we hear that phrase? But history tells us nothing of the sort. Ever. So they failed. Try again (as Žižek is fond of quoting); fail again; fail better.

The approach rules out (as I have also argued before) the irony of history. It leads us to the absurdities of, to take just one egregious example, Peter Heather’s arguments that ‘The Goths’ were a people with a coherent set of aims (on the basis that at some later point, some people called Goths ended up with a kingdom within what had been the Roman Empire). In the hundred years preceding the deposition of the emperor Romulus in 476 it is well-nigh impossible to identify anyone who was actually trying to bring down the Roman Empire, rather than trying to re-establish the imperial political system of the fourth century, with them in a controlling position. A great deal of the history of the creation of what we see as the new political and social world of the ‘Middle Ages’ is in fact the history of people trying to recreate the Roman Empire. Napoleon may have realised that the game was up late in the evening of June 18th 1815 but when he signed the Treaty of Tilsit a few years earlier, or when he married Maria Louisa of Austria, or when his son was born, he and his followers can be forgiven for thinking that he (and they) had won. What interests me about the generations around 600 is that the motor for change, as it appears to me at the moment at any rate, is an awareness that they were living through a new phase: that the old world of Rome had gone (note that it had taken the best part of a century after Romulus’ deposition, and some fairly horrible wars, to establish this point). They were trying to figure out how to respond to this, new situation, with (naturally, but perhaps more obviously than usual) little idea of where they were going.

You might well have guessed where I am going with these meandering thoughts. It looks to me that we are at a point where those of us on the Left might well think that the game is up, that that’s it, we lost. If we can draw lessons from the way we think about history, though, I think we might make several important points. One is that many people do not seem (surely?) to realise the implications of what is happening, so there is still a battle to be fought and won. Another is that the game isn’t up yet; or rather that it only is if we give up on it. Cameron and his order-paper-waving right-wingers may think they have won, and that they can go ahead and dismantle the welfare state, and sell its opportunities off to themselves and their chums in the private sector (in effect returning us to a 21st-century form of feudalism) but they can be stopped. And they must be stopped. But that is down to all of us. The alternative is that everything – every little change, every little baby-step, to improve the lot of the ordinary person – that people have fought and died for over the past seven and a half centuries becomes a dead-end, a curious blip that right-wing historians will be able to point to as showing the futility of challenging the ‘natural’ order. Every backlash against fairness, every move against the Welfare State, the National Health Service, free education and so on, will be made into a step on the road of Progress. Is that the history we want to bequeath to future generations?

If we work hard, this may not be the Waterloo of the Welfare State but the Ligny** of the Right. The alternative is not worth thinking about. It’s not over yet, and (to return to my earlier metaphor) David Cameron is no Lord Edward.

...

** For those less interested in Napoleonic military history than me, the battle of Ligny was Napoleon’s last victory, fought two days before Waterloo. Napoleon, it has to be said, played a blinder in the Waterloo campaign up until the battle itself. Such is the irony of history.

More on St. Crispin's Day

Will McLean reminds us of some good posts he has written on Agincourt and Henry V.  Definitely worth reading.

Africa circumnavigated!

If a Phoenician ship didn't do it in 600 BC, one has now!  Video from the BBC.

Historians at war over Agincourt

From the New York Times:

No one can ever take away the shocking victory by Henry and his “band of brothers,” as Shakespeare would famously call them, on St. Crispin’s Day, Oct. 25, 1415. They devastated a force of heavily armored French nobles who had gotten bogged down in the region’s sucking mud, riddled by thousands of arrows from English longbowmen and outmaneuvered by common soldiers with much lighter gear. It would become known as the Battle of Agincourt.

But Agincourt’s status as perhaps the greatest victory against overwhelming odds in military history — and a keystone of the English self-image — has been called into doubt by a group of historians in Britain and France who have painstakingly combed an array of military and tax records from that time and now take a skeptical view of the figures handed down by medieval chroniclers.

The historians have concluded that the English could not have been outnumbered by more than about two to one. And depending on how the math is carried out, Henry may well have faced something closer to an even fight, said Anne Curry, a professor at the University of Southampton who is leading the study.
Those cold figures threaten an image of the battle that even professional researchers and academics have been reluctant to challenge in the face of Shakespearean verse and centuries of English pride, Ms. Curry said.

“It’s just a myth, but it’s a myth that’s part of the British psyche,” Ms. Curry said.
The work, which has received both glowing praise and sharp criticism from other historians in the United States and Europe, is the most striking of the revisionist accounts to emerge from a new science of military history. The new accounts tend to be not only more quantitative but also more attuned to political, cultural and technological factors, and focus more on the experience of the common soldier than on grand strategies and heroic deeds.

There's more...

Re-enactment, wargaming, and the Russian front ...

...among other atrocities.

Are you, or have you ever been, a reenactor, a historical recreationist, or wargamer? do you know anyone who has ever dressed up in the Wehrmacht uniform for fun? Are you sure?

Then you may be interested in this article by Robert Citino from history.net, which I was referred to by Brad DeLong, to whom thanks:

Last week I was contacted by Joshua Green, Senior Editor at Atlantic Monthly.  Seems there is a candidate running for Congress in northwestern Ohio who has been part of a Waffen-SS re-enactor group. Their aim, like that of re-enactors everywhere, was to "live history," in this case the history of the 5th SS Panzer Division, a multinational mechanized formation nicknamed "Wiking."  Green wanted to know my thoughts about the Division and those who would re-enact it.  I said some negative things, and I stick by them:

What you often hear is that the [Wiking] division was never formally accused of anything, but that's kind of a dodge. The entire German war effort in the East was a racial crusade to rid the world of 'subhumans,' Slavs were going to be enslaved in numbers of tens of millions. And of course the multimillion Jewish population of Eastern Europe was going to be exterminated altogether. That's what all these folks were doing in the East. It sends a shiver up my spine to think that people want to dress up and play SS on the weekend.

... 

But there is one further thing I've noticed:  the number of notes I've gotten from re-enactors protesting their innocence and accusing me of accusing them of–I don't know–all being Nazis, I guess.  Such notes I consider to be completely unnecessary.  In my line of work, I know somewhere between 100 and a bazillion re-enactors of all stripes.  It seems like a neat hobby, and for those who really do the prep work involved in a good re-enactment, it can be a learning experience of the first order.  They take their fair share of grief from outsiders, I suppose, but I say:  Here's to the re-enactors!

While I had a ball, especially back in graduate school when I actually had time to set up and play a monster game like Drang nach Osten, I can tell you one thing about those days.  There was a fringe element in the hobby that worshiped the Wehrmacht, the Waffen-SS, and, I sometimes suspected, Hitler himself.  Ask anyone who was wargaming back in the 70's and 80's, and I'm sure they'll confirm what I'm saying. 

...

 We loved the games, in other words, but a lot of us were embarrassed about what seemed to be a kind of adolescent crush on the Wehrmacht.

 So, to all my re-enactor friends, I say this:  I really don't think it's good for the anyone in the "Living History" community to be dressing up in the uniform of a criminal organization.  The war in the east was more than a mere military campaign, and the Waffen-SS wasn't just "soldiering."  They were fighting a "war of extermination" (Vernichtungskrieg).  The historical record of the Waffen-SS is as clear as you can get, it isn't a pretty one, and I think there are better ways to spend your free time.

*****
PS:  For a discussion of the "Wehrmacht problem" in the wargaming and scholarly community alike, take a look at the interesting recent book by Ronald M. Smelser and Edward J. Davies II, The Myth of the Eastern Front:  the Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture.  I don't agree with everything the authors have to say, but it was a fascinating book to read.

 Me, I sometimes have problems sharing the enthusiasm of my friends for Henry V's victory at Agincourt. I have a hard time seeing the difference between the slaughter of prisoners at Agincourt and the slaughter at Nicopolis. But then, you may ask, why have you spent so much time in armor yourself?

From the Economist: Anglo-Indians

Anglo-Indians were originally the offspring of British men posted in India with local women. Once upon a time, being half-British was a significant advantage.  Now, not so much.  This article inspired sober thoughts in me, about how a cultural turn can, like personal emigration or war, leave you absurdly isolated, your birth-culture seemingly irrelevant:

DRESSED in a floral tea-dress, at a retirement home for Anglo-Indians in Kolkata, Rita McDonald, who is 85, is a poignant reminder of Britain’s two-century rule over the Indian subcontinent. Like many Anglo-Indians, members of a Eurasian community spawned during the Raj, she eats bacon and eggs for breakfast, speaks precise English and, though she has lived all her life in India, knows little Hindi or Bengali. Yet her home, hung with yellowing photographs of Queen Elizabeth and the late Diana, Princess of Wales, is thick with tales of poverty and loss.

Recent decades have been tough on Anglo-Indians, who are defined by the constitution as Indian citizens of European paternal ancestry. Many can date that ancestry to the 18th- and early 19th-centuries, when British employees of the East India Company tended to come to India without wives, and found local women to fill the gap. Such intermingling became less common after the great mutiny of 1857. Yet its legacy, a class of educated, English-speaking and loyal Eurasians, was crucial to British rule. Anglo-Indians manned the customs, telephone exchanges and railways. Mimicking the grander seclusion of their British masters, they lived apart in purpose-built railway towns, disdaining their Indian colleagues. “All the Indians wanted to be Anglo-Indian,” said Malcolm Booth, an 83-year-old officer of the All India Anglo-Indian Association.

But after the British quit India in 1947 the Anglos lost their privileges. They are still guaranteed two seats in India’s parliament, yet public funding for their schools was stopped in 1961. Few could compete in India’s new, non-discriminatory job market. Many left for Britain, Australia and Canada. The Anglo-Indian population fell from perhaps 500,000 in 1947 to fewer than 150,000 today.

Those who remain fear for their culture. Their youngsters, like many in India’s urban middle-class, are marrying outside the community. They speak Hindi and prefer kulfi to spotted dick. Yet many are also thriving, thanks to rising demand for Anglophones from India’s booming services firms. Brightening, Mrs McDonald remarks that all of her grandchildren remaining in India have found good jobs in call centres. “They’re good, call centres,” she says. “Many people have found jobs there.”

The comments are of interest, too.

More beautiful iron work from a re-enactor

Historical re-enactors and re-creationists don't have the highest reputation either with the general public or among scholars.  since I have spent more than my fair share of time running around in armor, I  have a  different opinion. Part of it goes back to the attitude that "historians don't own history" ( or at least not all of it :-)) but also because I know a number of people who have come out of the reenactment and become masters of some historical-based skill.   Their accomplishments deserve the highest praise.

One such person is Darrell Markewitz, whom I've known for almost 40 years now. In that time has grown from a young eccentric  to a mature eccentric who knows things other people don't know and can do things that other people can't do.  He loves researching historical techniques and has done valuable work in connection with Viking culture in North America, but he is also a contemporary person who makes iron – based art for modern clients. Here, too, he might be seen as a reenactor – reenacting some of the graphic innovations of the 1970s. Whatever you call it, I say it is good, and better than good. The picture above is an example of a commission piece for a patron/client.  Go here to have a closer look and, if you've got the cash and share Darrell's belief in the beauty of iron, give him a call.

Nipissing University, pictures from September 2010

Every time I go on sabbatical, it seems, a new wing is thrown up at Nipissing University. I come back when everyone else has already gotten used to the alterations, and I feel like the new kid even though I've been here for 20 years. Not that I'm complaining!  Although I missed the good company I had out in the portable when I first came here (not to mention the peace and quiet), it took little effort to adjust to the good facilities of the H Wing. And now the R Wing is up and running; and although it's not really new anymore, this is the first year I've  had the opportunity to use it (one class in R the 313) and I am enjoying it a great deal.

How so? Well, it is a matter of the view.  We always tell people how beautiful the setting of our university is, and it  is quite true that it is beautiful. However, if you are inside the complex we share with Canadore College, you seldom get a good look at it.  Sure, most offices and some classrooms have windows, but they don't  exactly give access to a panoramic impression.  

Until now.

When I walk from my office in the H Wing over to my seminar classroom in the R Wing, both on the third floor, I get this gorgeous view of the pond, of Canadore College, and the trees of the conservation area  from the corridor windows.  Here are some pictures I took during one of our many rainy days in September; but sometimes a gray day really brings out of fall colors. I will let you judge; but if it doesn't come across to you it is probably due to my limited skills as a photographer.

Architects! Well done!

Timeline of negotiations in Afghanistan.

From the Globe and Mail.  See the preceding article on the possibility of serious negotiations now.

Historians don't own history

The e-mail list MEDIEV-L, like many an established community, falls into repeated discussions of the same subjects. One of the more common repeated conversations is the one about the accuracy of historical movies; many contributors to the list are very critical of just about anything that comes down the pike. I can understand that; I used to have the same attitude. But once upon a time I tried writing a screen treatment of Gregory of Tours' History of the Franks, and I realized that I would have to take considerable liberties with Gregory's material if I was going to tell a story that anyone in the present would care about. Since then, although I can be very aggravated by stupid choices made by filmmakers, I think I've had a more realistic view what contemporary film demands of its practitioners.

In the latest round of films discussion, that famed benefactor of the human race, Paul Halsall, offered the following essay. I find myself in substantial agreement with it so even though it is somewhere on the web and has been since 2001 (sez Paul), I republish it here with permission of the author.

Film is perhaps the most common way the modern American public is exposed to history, but many people still think that it is a waste of time to think seriously about "movies," since, after all, movies are just entertainment. One Internet poster put it this way:

..the idea of the movie is to let the people who go to the cinema have a good time and (if possible) learn something without being too serious.

This position -- that film is primarily entertainment -- is often made by students. The position is wrong.

Some films, it is true, are simply a matter of entertainment (American Pie II for instance), but many others use a particular artistic form to take part in a cultural discussion while also being entertaining. A large number of successful entertaining films have involved a good deal of political commentary, and entire genres are concerned with how we, as human beings, deal with pain and suffering.

There is no reason that a film cannot be both entertaining and participate in the "cultural conversation about the past that we call history."

More than this, the dichotomy between "entertainment" and "a good time movie" really involves a denial that film is a legitimate art form. By now, after a century of cinema, it is clear to most thinking people that film can be an art form, and is quite often a "high art."

It is true that unlike a number of arts -- poetry, drawing -- film is heavily dependent of both technology and truly enormous amounts of funding, and also true that film is a collaborative to an extraordinary degree. But so is a play, and no one would assert that plays are "just for fun."

It is perhaps worth noting that academic history itself is a form of intellectual entertainment.  It is true that many historians write badly, or at least do not prioritize writing, but in its presentation of ideas to the mind for consideration, its effort to engage its consumers in thought about things apart from the mundane details of life, I think there is more in common between history and other arts than many people realize.

The important thing is not to mistake "amusement" for "entertainment."  Amusement means nothing but passing satiation, but some of the greatest achievements of human beings have been "entertainments." Good films can be great "entertainments" also: the sadness is when they are only amusements.  For all its faults, Braveheart was an entertainment, while A Knight's Tale was merely amusing.

[Let's not be too hard on "entertainment'! There are many ways of being "entertained" by a historical movie. One of my students who had never really heard of Scotland was inspired the film to start reading biographies of Wallace, and then to enroll in multiple classes in order to expand an interest that began in his imagination and made him want to care about the people he imagined.  Another viewer, say someone with a wide knowledge of Scottish history and the genealogy of its myths, could be "entertained" by the movie simply by contemplating the his or her knowledge of the multiple deflections to bring a myth to its current state. And yet another person could just enjoy men in woad slicing heads off.]

Could A Historical Film be Better than A Book?

It might be possible to mount not just a defense of film, but a real challenge to those who claim that film cannot, by its nature, do history. Perhaps historical film can be better than historical books? Let's try a small thought-experiment.

Both a film and a book are imperfect ways of presenting an understanding of the past.  The problems that film faces in doing so is that, at least in the case of feature films, a single narrative is usually imposed on complex events, dramatic needs force compression of events and personalities, and cinematographic needs require that all the blanks in the record (what people were wearing, who was standing in the background, how someone's voice sounded) be filled in. The problems that books face in doing history include a complete lack of a three dimensional vision, the requirement that readers be able to read in a particular way, very often the imposition of a single point of view, the imposition of analytic simplifying on an actually infinitely complex reality, and finally the presentation of inaccurate information to readers whose first contact with that period is through a particular book.

Just then as it is impossible for film to do accurate history, so also is it impossible for a book to do accurate history.  Both forms, however, have advantages and disadvantages. Just as it is absurd to criticize a scholarly book for its failures in cinematography, so it is absurd to criticize a film for its failures in detail, etc.

A parallel might lie in the rival claims of stage drama and opera.  I think a claim could be made that great opera is a more "realistic" form than spoken drama. It is true that in spoken drama, there can be more scenes and more detail, and it is also true that most people do not go through life singing out their emotions. However, the norm in drama is for person A to speak, then person B.  While person A is speaking, we have no real idea what person B is thinking. Occasionally a dramatist might have two speaking at once, but any more than that and it becomes a hubbub. Famously in The Marriage of Figaro, Mozart is able to construct a scene in which the emotional states of six characters are presented to the audience simultaneously.  In that scene, since in real life multiple people are present at a given event, Mozart is more realistic than Beaumarchais could ever be.

The point is of course that spoken drama and opera are two different ways to present a dramatic event (a novel is yet another), and each has its advantages.   Academic history is an important way to present the past, but all too often the past that is presented in drained of human vividness. Good film, and even Hollywood feature films, can present a humanly vivid past that is true in its own way.

Let me give an example. Gladiatorial games and staged chariot races have been of interest to both academic historians and filmmakers. Academic historians are excellent at getting the details right, documenting the social and class structure of mounting the games, and so forth. Equally, if you want to understand the political implications of the hippodrome, you need to read academic historians on Circus factions.

But in the case of the gladiatorial games, academic historians are simply unable to present the horror of human beings deliberately going to watch other human beings die as well as Cecil B. DeMille did in Sign of the Cross. One might claim that DeMille was being ahistorical, and that the games were normal to the Roman viewers, but we have ample sources documenting contemporary horror -- think of the Passion of Perpetua or Tertullian's On the Spectacles.  In this case, DeMille is in some respects a better historian than an academic writer can be.

In the case of chariot races, little can be understood until one understands the thrill -- and in that respect Fred Niblo's 1927 Ben Hur, and even the 1959 version, are better or at least equally as good as any academic history.

The Problem with the History vs. Hollywood Approach

In 2001, the History Channel initiated a series called History vs. Hollywood. Although the show turned out to be remarkably uncritical about historical inaccuracies in Hollywood movies, its title encapsulated the dominant model in professional historian's thinking about historical film -- that they are to be judged by how "accurate" they are.

Since I first taught a class on medieval history and film in the summer of 2001, I have become increasingly unhappy with judgments on historical or period films that are based entirely on "accuracy."

I am not the first to reject the model. Robert Rosenstone's work is always cited as crucial, and he has long argued that film is a potentially better way to relate history than text. For me, however, his work is singularly unconvincing, or at least irrelevant, since he ends up endorsing not history films as they are actually produced, but specialist documentaries hewing to a programmatic formula.

I want to argue, instead, that there a ways to think about historical movies as they actually are that might make sense to a professional historian, and perhaps more importantly to anyone who enjoys a movie but wants also to be able to think about film critically.

Here are my suggestions about how to view historical movies.

1. Realize that the past is not owned by historians.

All sorts of other valuable cultural producers also make claims on the past -- poets, visual artists, theologians, novelists, and politicians. The assumption that "we" as historians own the past is simply not admitted by all others who use the past, and there is no intrinsic reason why film makers should credit historians claims more than others.

The usual assumption is that Academic Historians own the past because they have more accurate information and better skills of interpretation.   In the field of academic publishing, this is certainly true, but standing besides the past as determined by academic historians are "other pasts" that actually matter to people. These other pasts are constructed through a series of filters and distortions, amplifications and deletions, censorships and romanticizations.

Given that academic history is, more or less, only 200-300 years old, it was these "other pasts" that were almost exclusively the way that people in the period we study (i.e. the "middle ages") actually conceived of there own past.   Charlemagne, for example, was in pretty much the same legendary position in thirteenth century France that Wallace was in eighteenth century Scotland.

I would insist that academic historians who insist on sweeping away all the "later myths" are missing the richness of the past, rather like "archeologists" who to get to Periclean ruins used to sweep away the later Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Serb, and Ottoman accretions.

There are many ways of looking at the past. I am in no way suggesting that academic history is deficient, but the way some academic historians talk about historical films reminds me of the Catholics who, upon arriving in heaven, have to be sneaked past the areas holding those of other faiths because they just won't believe its heaven if anyone else is there.

2. Use a multiplicity of ways in which to view the connection of a film and history:

A: A historical film is usually made using topoi (literary or cinematic conventions) established within the history of cinema.

Gladiator for example owes a lot to previous films such as Ben Hur (1927), The Sign of the Cross, Ben Hur (1959), El Cid, and so forth. It is also an expression of a particular director's outlook. Compare the sweep over Los Angeles in Blade Runner, for example, with the sweep over Rome in Gladiator, and the role of director Ridley Scott's own art becomes clear.

Medieval historians who comment on movies are often painfully unaware for both the importance of conventions in the history of cinema, not to mention the significance of understanding that particular directors may manifest a distinct auteur style.  One of the many films made about St. Francis -- Francesco -- features Mickey Rourke as the saint, a casting choice that caused much hilarity. That hilarity illustrates what I have come to see as a major flaw in the way medievalists typically view movies.  Counter type casting is in fact a very common technique, and we should not make too much of the fact that Mickey Rourke plays Francis. We might indeed celebrate how such casting forces a break with overly pious representations of the saint.   (Keanu Reeves, for instance, has performed well in two of the most successful Buddhist movies ever made: as the Buddha in Little Buddha and as the Buddha-to-be in The Matrix).  For any serious historical critic of Francesco, however, the really important thing  is that it is the product of one of the most important female "auteur" directors, Liliana Cavani.  If historians are going to use the film for more than classroom clips, they need to consider the film in relation to Cavani's other interests.  Her film on the Tibetan religious figure Milarepa, for instance, must be taken into account when considering her view of Francis.

B: A historical film, like other films, often reflects the period in which it was made.

Sticking with previous examples, it is interesting just how normative an "early Christian" connection was in almost all Hollywood Roman movies (even Spartacus), whereas Ridley Scott, part of a largely secularized international elite, seems deliberately to avoid that particular topos.

The contemporary reception of movie might also be an interesting area for historian’s consideration. Braveheart, for example, boosted the polls for the Scottish Nationalist Party, and was extensive used in its advertising

C: A historical film can be considered as the product of a cinematic historian.

This is the category where straightforward considerations of accuracy and intent do come in.

Historians need to be careful, though. In the case of Braveheart, the star and director Mel Gibson was asked in one interview how he had learned about Wallace, and he respond that the "script had a lot of information." In this case, the "historian" was the scriptwriter rather than the director.

A film such as Gladiator, which caught a lot of flak from historians, in fact contained a good deal of accurate information, mixed in with inaccuracies, while The Seventh Seal, almost universally praised, has no relationship to its supposed period whatsoever (on the other hand, it is a pretty good way to consider Swedish existentialism in the 1950s).

When evaluting a film as "cinematic history," it cannot be just a matter of checking off points on an accuracy list.

Many historical films concern war and warfare. Military realism has little to do with wider historical accuracy. Taking the example of Mel Gibson's The Patriot, it may have had quite a lot right in terms of uniforms and buttons, but was wildly off target and full of simply atrocious lies in its presentation of race relations and British military actions against civilians. Still, so is the Declaration of Independence in its description of George III and two-timing assertion of human equality in slave-owning society, so perhaps Gibson was being more subtle than I give him credit for in celebrating a revolution that was supported at the time by myths with a film that was entirely fallacious. But I doubt it.

In regard to Joan of Arc films we have a figure who, after Jesus, perhaps the most celebrated historical personage in cinema.. Almost everyone's favorite Joan   film is Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), which with the current addition of Einhorn's cantata can reduce a class of students to whimpering pieces of jelly/jello. It is true that Passion of Joan of Arc did stick entirely to trial transcripts. No one, however, could claim that Passion is historically accurate, but almost everyone understands that Dreyer did capture an aspect of Joan's importance.

D: A historical film can be considered in terms of its way of presenting the past.

This approach directly challenges the primacy of the "historical accuracy" school. Instead of viewing a historical film as a product of "cinematic history," let us consider that a given film might manifest quite different genres of historically-oriented literature - myth, epic, romance, gossip, and inspiration.  Indeed an awareness of the multiplicity of historical genres in film brings us closer to how how "the past" was thought about in the past. Ancient and medieval historical literatures in particular consisted not only of "rational history" (e.g. Thucydides, various medieval writers), but also myth and epic (Beowulf, The Iliad, Anna Comnena in one light), gossip (Suetonius, Michael Psellus), chronicle, miracle story, moralizing (Plutarch, Tacitus) and even nationalist evocation.

Thinking about historical film in this way gives us an opportunity to think about the ways that people in the past understood their own history. The modern study of history is a scientific enterprise to understand things "as they really were." The various approaches of modern historians -- political history, women's history, social history, or even cultural studies -- all fall into this "let's get to the truth" paradigm. But the "past" that was important to medieval audiences was not the "past as it was" but the "past" as a series of somewhat disconnected explanatory myths, epic stories, legendary figures, and entertaining romances. In some respects, then, just the sort of "past" that enthralls modern filmmakers and audiences.

In the case of Braveheart, our opinion of the film's "inaccuracies" becomes more complex when we realize that the "sources" for the screenwriters were not "the historical records of the early fourteenth century" but the writings about Wallace by "Blind Hary" at the end of the 15th century, writings intended to arouse patriotic passions against English penetration. Faulty as it might have been as early fourteenth century history, as a reproduction of a late medieval "nationalist" use of history, it is hard to think of a better "historical movie" than Braveheart!

I do not propose that any one of these ways of thinking about film and history is better than another. Rather I suggest that by using all of them, we can think more clearly about advantages and disadvantages of film as a way to present pre-modern history; assess more critically the different approaches taken by to directors; and come away from a historical movie with understanding rather than nit-picking concerns about accuracy.

--
Paul Halsall
drhalsall@gmail.com
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall

  Internet History Sourcebooks Project
University of Manchester academic staff.

Back online

The week of Canadian Thanksgiving, Nipissing University has  no classes. I was off-line for most of the time, and I've been pretty busy since the normal schedule resumed. As a reward for those of you who came back to see how I was, I am going to be posting some material that came in recently.

Of particular interest to me were Phil Paine's reports on his trip to Orkney. He was thinking that his life had become too ordinary recently, so he went someplace interesting and eccentric. here is a sample of why you should read his trip journal (starting here):

I had been warned that the Orkney dialect was “dif­fi­cult,” but it is per­fectly com­pre­hen­si­ble to any Cana­dian, and extremely pleas­ing to the ear. The into­na­tion pat­tern, in par­tic­u­lar, reminds me of Cana­dian speech in the Atlantic Provinces. Though the con­so­nants are dif­fer­ent, its vowel and diph­thong s only a short shift away. The “Cana­dian ris­ing” that Amer­i­cans find so amus­ing is taken a step fur­ther. Sim­i­larly, the Orca­dian pitch pat­tern is only slightly dif­fer­ent from what you would hear in Canada’s north­ern­most regions. Except for some pecu­liar­i­ties of vocab­u­lary, I never had any dif­fi­culty under­stand­ing Orca­di­ans, while I often had to work a bit to under­stand peo­ple in Glas­gow, and many of the dialects of Eng­land are prac­ti­cally Mar­t­ian to me. Some­times, the announce­ments in the Lon­don Under­ground were com­plete gib­ber­ish. But when I eaves­dropped on the con­ver­sa­tion of two elderly Orkney farm­ers, whose speech was obvi­ously unvar­nished Orca­dian, it was no chal­lenge. Orca­di­ans are soft-spoken, spar­ing in their words, and not rapid speak­ers. They are not arm wavers or fin­ger point­ers. Even teenagers stag­ger­ing out of the pubs are not keen on shouting.

The old Orca­dian dialect is not, of course, the only form of Eng­lish spo­ken here. There is much pres­sure from schools and media to replace it with Stan­dard Scots. The pres­ence of sev­eral thou­sand new­com­ers from all over the British Isles also influ­ences speech, as does Orca­di­ans trav­el­ling to other places and return­ing home. Many of the new­com­ers believe the dialect rep­re­sents back­ward­ness and stu­pid­ity. Some native Orca­di­ans have absorbed this atti­tude, and either tone it down for out­siders, or aban­don it all­to­gether in favour of what they feel is more pres­ti­geous speech.

Lots more where that came from, including some very good pictures.

Grim news from Afghanistan

An inexperienced US 101st Airborne unit replaces a more seasoned group, 2 Charlie.  This Atlantic article,
"The Last Patrol,"shows hard fighting and the strain on morale in the Kandahar region:

Two days later, on July 8, a dozen soldiers, the platoon’s noncommissioned officers, crowded into the outpost’s tactical-operations center, a 12-by-six-foot room jammed with computers, radios, and maps, to talk about the situation they faced. They passed an empty water bottle, their version of Ralph’s conch shell in Lord of the Flies, so each man could speak without interruption. Earlier in the deployment, this scene would have been unthinkable. Infantrymen volunteer to enter dangerous environments, a task many of them enjoy. And they know a hard truth of war: that they or some of their men must sometimes die to accomplish objectives. But with so much loss, and with the end of their time at Combat Outpost Tynes so near, the worth of a single patrol had been thrown into question. If the men of 2 Charlie walked south, some of them would likely not come back. But if they didn’t go, then their replacements would likely suffer for it.

“I don’t want my guys going,” Sgt. Andrew Bragg said. “I’ll go for them.” He passed the bottle to Knollinger, one of 2 Charlie’s most aggressive soldiers. “I want revenge,” he said, in a plain, deep-throated speaking style that reminded me of Rocky Balboa. “It’s not worth another casualty, but I personally want to go.” Knollinger passed the bottle to Lachance, who seemed to thrive on the battlefield, exposing himself to enemy fire to call in airstrikes with a surprising calm. “I don’t want to see people get blown up, because that sucks,” Lachance said. “I don’t think that this entire war is worth losing people for, so that sums it up for me.”

The bottle traveled, hand to hand, deeper into the debate: could they explain a soldier’s death to his family, days away from his leaving the Arghandab? But could they live with unprepared 101st soldiers dying, if they could have helped prevent their deaths? And if they stopped pushing into Taliban-held areas, the Taliban would gladly, and quickly, come to them. That morning, an IED had blown up on a foot patrol 200 meters from the combat outpost. Somehow, no one had been injured.

Staff Sgt. Rosa, 2 Charlie’s senior squad leader, took the bottle and looked around the room. Soft-spoken but regarded as the toughest soldier in the platoon, he’d won an 82nd Airborne boxing title. “This is a tough one for me. This is my third deployment with this platoon, and this is the first time we’ve gone through all this bullshit with casualties,” he said. “My guys have been going out every day. We’ve lost a lot. But at the same time, we can’t lose ground. Especially with the unit coming in. They need a good handoff. They could get slaughtered out there.”
His voice betrayed both pride and resignation. “If I gotta go out, and I’m going out with this group here, that’s fine with me.” He held the water bottle in both hands, elbows propped on knees, his massive shoulders hunched. “When we cross that second canal,” he said, “I think there’s going to be so much shit set in there, we’re going to have a catastrophic IED that’s going to take out a bunch of people.”

 ...

The day after the joint patrol, the 101st leadership met with Gerhart, Knollinger, Farnsworth, and Lachance for an after-action review, to discuss what had gone right and wrong during the mission. Gerhart flipped through index cards on which he’d prepared notes. His suggestions were sound—better hydration, classes on patrolling techniques and using radios, pre-patrol inspections of soldiers’ equipment—but his delivery was abrasive and accusatory. Why, he asked, had it taken the reinforcements from Combat Outpost Tynes six hours to show up after the first casualties were reported?

 The IED threat was extreme, Tom Banister, the new unit’s first sergeant, said, and he hadn’t wanted to risk more heat casualties while trying to reach the compound on foot. So they ended up waiting for helicopters.

“I guess I’m just used to being out there with hard-charging guys,” Gerhart said.
Since arriving at Tynes, Banister had found himself in the bizarre situation of deferring to men who weren’t yet born when he’d joined the Army, 24 years earlier. He accepted that his and his soldiers’ learning curve was steep. But he couldn’t tolerate Gerhart’s near-constant impertinence, and the general condescension from the 82nd paratroopers toward their replacements. “We appreciate all you guys have done, we really do,” he said. “What I don’t appreciate, what gives me the ass, is your holier-than-thou attitude that we’re incompetent and unprepared for this mission. Roger. I got that. We’re a field artillery unit tasked with an infantry job. Are we going to take casualties? Hell yeah, we are. We know that.” His vocal cords tightened with emotion. He paused. “Don’t count us out,” he said. “We’re a fighting force. We’re not going to leave you hanging. We evacuated our guys, but we brought you 20 more.”
The room fell quiet, and emotions settled. The soldiers seemed to have tired of both blame and anger. Any unit has trouble adjusting to a new area, especially one as dangerous as the Arghandab. In a few weeks, the 101st soldiers would be unrecognizable as the men who had walked into the valley days earlier. They would learn how to lead patrols, where to walk, and how to fight. And with an influx of additional men and aggressive clearing operations, they would push into areas that had become de facto no-go zones for 2 Charlie, killing dozens of Taliban fighters and even establishing an outpost south of the second canal and taking the town of Babur, near where Moon was hit. They would pay for these lessons and victories with gunshot wounds and amputations and soldiers so mangled they couldn’t be saved. And they would learn on their own, because 2 Charlie was leaving.

European countries with significant Muslim immigrant populations -HIST 3805

Does this sound like the country you are researching?  If so, you may want to look at what Juan Cole has to say about the situation in Germany. For the population background to immigration debates,  see this article in the Guardian. 

Prof. Gendron invites NU students to Model NATO

He says:

I'm in the process again of organising this years' Nipissing University student Model NATO team.  As part of the team, a group of 5 or 6 Nipissing students take part in a conference in Ottawa early in 2011 during which they will be part of a simulated NATO meeting.  The conference includes teams from other universities across Ontario and sometimes outside the province and is a great opportunity for students with an interest in international diplomacy/debate/crisis management and the like to get involved in a very enjoyable conference and to represent NipU outside the university, while interacting with their peers from other universities.

 

An organisational meeting for the 2010-11 Model NATO team is being held tomorrow, Oct 6 from 11-11:30 in room H304.

 

What I'd rather be doing...from the Big Picture

More here.

Brazil!

Saith the BBC:

Number-crunchers say rising incomes have catapulted more than 29 million Brazilians into the middle class during the eight-year presidency of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a former trade unionist elected in 2002.

Convivencia?

Have, historically, Jews and Muslims got along better than Jews and Christians?  Marc Cohen argues for the "yes" side:

The idea that modern Arab antisemitism comes from a medieval, irrational hatred
of the Jews, similar to the antisemitism of Christianity, with its medieval origins, cannot be sustained. Understood as a religiously-based complex of irrational, mythical, and
stereotypical beliefs about the diabolical, malevolent, and all-powerful Jew, infused in its
modern, secular form with racism and belief in a Jewish conspiracy against mankind--
antisemitism is not an indigenous or inherent phenomenon in Islam.11 It was first
encountered by Muslims at the time of the Ottoman expansion into Europe, which
resulted in the absorption of large numbers of Greek Orthodox Christians.12 This
Christian antisemitism became more firmly implanted in the Muslim Middle East in the
nineteenth century as part of the discourse of nationalism. Seeking greater acceptance in
a fledgling pan-Arab nation constituted by a majority of Muslims, Christians in the Arab
world, aided, among other things, by European Christian missionaries, began to use
western-style antisemitism to focus Arab/Muslim enmity away from themselves and onto
a new and, to them, familiar enemy. This Christian antisemitism has since become
absorbed into the fabric of Islam as if it were there from the start, when it was never there
from the start at all. The widely read Arabic translations of the late-nineteenth century
Russian-Christian forgery, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," seems to many
Muslims almost an Islamic text, echoing old themes in the Qur'ān and elsewhere of
Jewish treachery toward Muhammad and his biblical prophetic predecessors. The
"Protocols" seem all the more credible in the light of the political, economic and military
success of Israel. Sadly, the pluralism and largely non-violent attitude towards the Jews
that existed in early and classical Islam seems to have lost its public face. Equally sad,
age-old Jewish empathy with Islamic society among Jews from Muslim lands, and
memory of decent relations with Muslim neighbors in Muslim lands in relatively recent
times, have similarly receded. Comparative study of Jewish-gentile relations in
Christendom and in Islam explains the difference between the two societies, though it
does not make present-day Arab antisemitism any less unfortunate than its Christian
roots. One can only hope for a time when a just and peaceful solution to the Arab-Israeli
conflict will allow a correct memory of the past to play a role in attitudes of the present.

Thanks to Medievalists.net and Al-Biruni.

Orkney

Phil Paine is in (one of) Canada's mother countries:   Orkney.  He's seeing stuff like this: