Joseph S. Lucas and Donald A. Yerxa, Editors
Randall J. Stephens, Associate Editor
 
 
  Volume VII, Number 3

OLAUDAH EQUIANO, THE SOUTH CAROLINIAN? A FORUM 
--Vincent Carretta, "Does Equiano Still Matter?"
--Paul E. Lovejoy, "Construction of Identity: Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa?"
--Trevor Burnard, "Goodbye, Equiano, the African" 
--Jon Sensbach, "Beyond Equiano"
--Vincent Carretta, "Response to Lovejoy, Burnard, and Sensbach"

--Postwar: An Interview with Tony Judt [full text]
--Michael Kort, "Racing the Enemy: A Critical Look"

THE FUTURE OF WAR: A FORUM
--Colin S. Gray, "Been There! Done That! Blood in the Crystal Ball"
--Peter Paret, "Comment on Gray"
--T.X. Hammes, "The Crystal Ball Is Bloody but Still Clear"
--Victor Davis Hanson, "Comment on Gray"
--Antulio J. Echevarria II, "History and the Future of War"
--Andrew J. Bacevich, "Comment on Gray"
--Colin S. Gray, "With Clausewitz to Eternity"

--Historical Thinking is Unnatural, and Immensely Important: An Interview with Sam Wineburg [full text]
--Derek Wilson, "History over the Water"
--What Have Historians Been Reading? [full text]
 
 

Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

OLAUDAH EQUIANO, THE SOUTH CAROLINIAN?
Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African is widely used in college classrooms to acquaint students with the horrors of the transatlantic voyage on slave ships as well as with life in 18th-century West Africa. As Vincent Carretta notes below, “it is difficult to think of any historical account of the Middle Passage that does not quote… [Equiano’s] eyewitness description of its horrors as primary evidence.” But what if this definitive account was created by an ex-slave born in South Carolina, not Africa? In the newly published Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (University of Georgia Press, 2005), Carretta, who has also edited the Penguin edition of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, argues that Equiano may have fabricated his African identity. That said, Carretta maintains that Equiano is still extremely valuable to historians because of his constructed identity as an “Atlantic creole.” 

Carretta’s thesis is grist for a very lively forum. He begins by laying out the contours of his argument developed in Equiano the African. Paul Lovejoy, Trevor Burnard, and Jon Sensbach respond. The forum concludes with Carretta’s rejoinder.
 

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Does Equiano Still Matter?
Vincent Carretta

I have been invited to address the question of whether—despite the possibility that he fabricated his personal and African identities—the man best known today as Olaudah Equiano remains a central figure in the reconstruction of Atlantic history, and to our understanding of the Atlantic world. Before I do so, let me briefly summarize his life, as he recounts it in his autobiography, and touch on the significant role he has played in historical and literary studies.

According to The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (London, 1789), Equiano was born in 1745 in what is now southeastern Nigeria. There, he says, he was enslaved at the age of eleven, and sold to English slave traders who took him on the Middle Passage to the West Indies. Within a few days, he tells us, he was taken to Virginia and sold to a local planter. After about a month in Virginia he was purchased by Michael Henry Pascal, an officer in the British Royal Navy who brought him to London. Pascal ironically renamed him Gustavus Vassa after the 16th-century Swedish monarch who liberated his people from Danish tyranny. During the 18th century slaves were often given ironically inappropriate names of powerful historical figures like Caesar and Pompey to emphasize their subjugation to their masters’ wills. With Pascal, Equiano saw military action on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean during the Seven Years’ War. In 1762, at the end of the conflict, Pascal shocked Equiano by refusing to free him, selling him instead in the West Indies. Escaping the horrors of slavery in the sugar islands, Equiano managed to save enough money to buy his own freedom in 1766. In Central America he helped purchase and supervise slaves on a plantation. He set off on voyages of commerce and adventure to North America, the Mediterranean, the West Indies, and the North Pole. He was now a man of the Atlantic. A close encounter with death during his Arctic voyage forced him to recognize that he might be doomed to eternal damnation. He resolved his spiritual crisis by embracing Methodism in 1774. Later, he became an outspoken opponent of the slave trade, first in his letters to newspapers and then in his autobiography. He married an Englishwoman in 1792, with whom he had two daughters. Thanks largely to profits from his publications, when Equiano died on March 31, 1797, he was probably the wealthiest, and certainly the most famous, person of African descent in the Atlantic world.

Over the past thirty-five years, historians, literary critics, and the general public have come to recognize the author of The Interesting Narrative as one of the most accomplished English-speaking writers of his age, and unquestionably the most accomplished author of African descent. Several modern editions are now available of his autobiography. The literary status of The Interesting Narrative has been acknowledged by its inclusion in the Penguin Classics series. It is universally accepted as the fundamental text in the genre of the slave narrative. Excerpts from the book appear in every anthology and on any Web site covering American, African-American, British, and Caribbean history and literature of the 18th century. The most frequently excerpted sections are the early chapters on his life in Africa and his experience on the Middle Passage crossing the Atlantic to America. Indeed, it is difficult to think of any historical account of the Middle Passage that does not quote his eyewitness description of its horrors as primary evidence . . . . 

Vincent Carretta is professor of English at the University of Maryland. He has edited the works of Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, Ottobah Cugoano, and Phyllis Wheatley.
 

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Construction of Identity: Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa?
Paul E. Lovejoy

Vincent Carretta claims that recently discovered documents concerning the baptism of Gustavus Vassa and his subsequent employment in the British navy “cast doubt” on the early life of the person usually recognized as Olaudah Equiano, author of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself.1 The two documents in question are his baptismal record at St. Margaret’s Church in London and the muster records from the Arctic expedition of Sir John Phipps (later Lord Mulgrave) in 1773, both of which attest to his birth in South Carolina. Carretta casts his web of doubt even broader, suggesting that Vassa/Equiano was born in 1747, not 1745 as claimed in The Interesting Narrative, and certainly not in 1742, as I argue in an article appearing in Slavery and Abolition.2 For Carretta, the author of The Interesting Narrative was a “self-made” man, adopting a public image as Olaudah Equiano, who had been born in Africa, when in fact he was known as Gustavus Vassa and had been born in South Carolina. For Carretta, “self-made” has a double meaning, including both his success in achieving his emancipation and becoming famous and the fictionalization of his childhood to achieve this end.

According to Carretta, the recent discoveries suggest that “the author of The Interesting Narrative may have invented rather than reclaimed an African identity,” and if this is the case, then it follows that “he invented his African childhood and his much quoted account of the Middle Passage on a slave ship.” In short, documentation for a South Carolina birthplace and problems in Vassa’s own chronology of his youth raise sufficient grounds to express “reasonable doubt” about Vassa’s claim to an African birth. Indeed, Carretta considers that “the burden of proof . . . is now on those who believe that The Interesting Narrative is a historically accurate piece of nonfiction.” My response, therefore, is in part a reaction to Carretta’s challenge that “anyone who still contends that Equiano’s account of the early years of his life is authentic is obligated to account for the powerful conflicting evidence.”

The methodological issues here relate to how historians engage oral tradition, memory, and other non-written sources with the written record. If Equiano was an eyewitness to events and practices in Africa, that’s one thing. If his account is a composite of stories and information gathered from others, it’s another matter. Despite some qualifications, Carretta essentially claims that the first part of The Interesting Narrative is a fictionalized account of life in Africa and the horrors of the Middle Passage, whereas I think that there is sufficient internal evidence to conclude that the account is essentially authentic, although certainly informed by later reflection, Vassa’s acquired knowledge of Africa, and memories of others whom he knew to have come from the Bight of Biafra. The reflections and memories used in autobiography are always filtered, but despite this caveat, I would conclude that Vassa was born in Africa and not in South Carolina. . . .

Paul E. Lovejoy is Distinguished Research Professor at York University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and holds the Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora Studies. He has authored, co-authored, edited, or co-edited more than twenty books on African history and African diaspora studies.

1 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (Penguin Books, 2003). 

2 “Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah Equiano, the African,” Slavery and Abolition, forthcoming 2006.
 

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Goodbye, Equiano, the African
Trevor Burnard

One of the interesting narratives in political and intellectual life in the last decade has been the reappearance of old-fashioned concerns about the importance of being truthful and the irretrievable damage that being caught in a lie does to a person’s character. Whatever Bill Clinton did as president is overshadowed by his lie about his encounters with an intern that led him to falsely claim that “I did not have sex with that woman.” Tony Blair’s distinguished record is diminished for many Britons who, like me, believed him when he said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. In intellectual life, proponents of postmodernism suffered grievous blows when the postmodernist literary theorist Paul de Man was exposed as having obscured portions of his earlier life and suffered again when Alan Sokal, a physicist, submitted successfully a deliberately ridiculous article to a leading postmodernist journal. Periodic controversies about people assuming identities that were fabricated keep on emerging, such as when the distinguished scholar of early America Joseph Ellis was alleged to have invented a story about himself as a Vietnam War veteran. What is significant in all these cases is that the lie mattered, even in the last instance, where the lie was not related to what Ellis did. No one has suggested that Ellis writes untruths in his published work. Yet his rather harmless fabrication of a war past led to public humiliation.

Questions about lying have also become increasingly important in understanding the past, dramatically so in early American history, especially in the history of slavery. The biggest controversy has surrounded Thomas Jefferson, who has been shown, pretty much conclusively, to have fathered children with his slave, Sally Hemmings.1 Less well publicized but of as much moment has been Michael Johnson’s devastating demolition of a century-long scholarship that presumed that Denmark Vesey was the leader of a putative slave revolt in Charleston in 1822.2 Another controversy has surrounded the discovery by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. of a novel, The Bondswoman’s Narrative, by Hannah Crafts, which Gates claimed as the only surviving novel about slavery written by an American female ex-slave. The problem here is that conclusive proof that the author was an ex-slave is missing. Although it probably shouldn’t matter when evaluating literary excellence, whether Crafts was black or not makes all the difference in the world. As Gates notes in the case of Emma Dunham Kelly-Hawkins, a writer once thought to be black, and now known to be white, when black writers are redefined as white, “people won’t write about her any more,” because what is important is discovering black voices not interesting new white writers.3

To my mind, the most intriguing discovery that a fundamental text in African-American writing is not what it seems has been made by Vincent Carretta about Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative. Carretta has discovered evidence—not conclusive but compelling enough for him to consider it more likely to be true than to be false—that Equiano was not an African but was probably born as a slave in South Carolina. Thus his vivid recollections of his childhood in Africa, his enslavement and transportation to the coast, and the trauma of the Middle Passage are inventions, “combinations of printed sources, memory, and imagination.” Equiano was unable to resist, Carretta implies, the siren lure of becoming an authentic African voice describing the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade at a time when the abolitionist movement most needed such a voice. In market terms (and Equiano was acutely attuned to marketplace concerns—his construction of an Igbo identity was not a disinterested intellectual act but brought him sizeable financial benefits), Equiano saw a market need for a firsthand account of how Africans experienced the Middle Passage and proceeded to supply that voice, creating in the process an Igbo identity that probably did not exist at the time. If we accept Carretta’s contention that Equiano was actually an American slave who had never lived in Africa, then Equiano is guilty of perpetrating two lies. He pretended to be offering an authentic account of himself as a victim of one of the great crimes in Western history when he was not a victim—partly in order to advance an honorable cause, partly to make money. He also invented himself as an Igbo and attempted to create, through his writings, a pan-Igbo identity that suggests more connections between peoples in Africa than actually existed. These are serious charges, which should lead us, in my opinion, to question whether Vassa is a reliable witness in other areas and which, by casting doubt upon his truthfulness, should also lead us to be more suspicious of his character and less effusive about his “genius,” as Carretta sees it, and his “exemplary status as an Atlantic creole” . . . . 

Trevor Burnard is professor of American history at the University of Sussex. His most recent book is Mystery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 

1 Forum: “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings Redux,” William and Mary Quarterly 57 (2000): 121-210.

2 Michael Johnson, “Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators,” William and Mary Quarterly 58 (2001): 915-976.

3 Elaine Showalter and English Showalter, “Every Single One Matters,” London Review of Books, August 18, 2005.
 

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Beyond Equiano
Jon Sensbach

Of course Olaudah Equiano matters. Vincent Carretta contends that the 18th century’s best-known person of African descent might have been born in South Carolina rather than in West Africa, as Equiano claimed in his autobiography. Whether we agree or not with Carretta—and I find his evidence quite intriguing—we’ll read Equiano differently now, and perhaps even more urgently. The possibility that he was born in America makes him more interesting, not less so; it opens up, rather than forecloses, inquiry into the autobiography and the world in which its author moved, giving new vitality to a man who’s become something of a stick figure in recent years. For all the layers of meaning in his life’s narrative, we’ll need to excavate many more now. Whatever his birthplace, his autobiography remains the gold standard for the genre. So, yes, Equiano still matters. At the same time, this new version of his life poses new questions about the 18th-century black Atlantic that transcend its enigmatic exemplar himself.

It’s easy to see how Equiano, after being virtually forgotten for 150 years, became an icon again in the late 20th century. For modern students eager to hear the voice of the people, his story bears the same authentic witness to the slave trade and African survival as it did for antislavery activists two centuries ago. In our own writing and teaching, he’s an irresistible resource, always handy with a quote or anecdote from his amazing “I was there” exploits to make the point for us. What were conditions like during the Middle Passage? Equiano endured them; through his description, we imagine the stench and shudder. How did African captives from different language groups communicate? He overheard their conversations through middlemen and learned several new languages himself; he’ll tell us. What was it like for a young Igbo boy in America to hear a book “talk” for the first time? Undergraduates don’t have to take the professor’s word for it—they can read that memorable passage for themselves.

Equiano’s autobiography, as Nell Painter has remarked, “works as a kind of founding myth for African-American history,” an epic tale of idyllic African life, Atlantic slavery, American self-liberation, and international leadership for human rights—one man’s narrative of progress and redemption that represents  the struggles of millions.1 Equiano can be whatever we want him to be, equally popular among historians and literary scholars alike and a convenient bridge between them. When “identity” and “self-fashioning” became the buzzwords of the 1990s for both groups, Equiano furnished the perfect memoir to show how those slippery concepts could be applied to African narrators during the age of the slave trade.

Above all, as Carretta rightly notes, Equiano is a classic Atlantic creole, that new breed of people shaped not only by the confluence of Africa, Europe, and the Americas but by their own movement across and around the ocean between those points, a hybrid transnational group adept at maneuvering among a medley of people, languages, and situations. Creoles embodied a defining irony of the world that produced them. Scholars generally define the “Atlantic world” of the early modern period as the integrated and cohesive product of economic, social, and intellectual capital that flowed in many directions across the ocean—“a unitary whole, a single system,” as Philip Morgan has described it.2 Yet the lives of Atlantic creoles were anything but unified. Deploying multiple identities was their way of negotiating chaos and uncertainty, not coherence. We usually hail that strategy as a positive survival mechanism to cope with a system heavily weighted against them. But while we can applaud the creoles’ savvy adaptability, we can forget that they were casualties of the Atlantic system as well, uprooted outcasts grasping for meaning and stability in a world that offered little.

In light of Carretta’s new version of Equiano’s life, then, the question becomes: what kind of Atlantic creole was he? The answer is crucial . . . . 

Jon Sensbach is associate professor of history at the University of Florida. His most recent book is Rebecca's Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2005), and he is working on a study of religious awakenings in the early South and Atlantic world.

1 Jennifer Howard, “Unraveling the Narrative,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 9, 2005, 3.

2 Philip D. Morgan, “The Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade: African Regional Origins, American Destinations, and New World Developments,” Slavery and Abolition 18 (1997): 122.
 

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Response to Lovejoy, Burnard, and Sensbach
Vincent Carretta

The three responses elicited by my initial essay fall into two distinct categories. Burnard and Sensbach, coming to opposite conclusions, consider possible implications of the recently discovered evidence in baptismal and naval records that suggest that Equiano may have invented an African birth. Lovejoy, however, challenges the validity of the evidence by mocking the sincerity of the baptismal record and ignoring the questions raised by the muster lists in 1773. Since Lovejoy also says that my “analysis of the available data is seriously flawed and does not withstand the test of historical methodology,” I feel a bit like Equiano, who believed that some of his critics wrote “with a view to hurt [his] character, and to discredit and prevent the sale of [his] book.” And like Equiano, I feel compelled to issue an apologia in my own defense . . . . 

End of Forum
 

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Postwar: An Interview with Tony Judt
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (Penguin, 2005) offers a sweeping narrative of Europe from the fall of Berlin to the present. The Second World War cast a long and deep shadow on Europe, and Judt explains how both Eastern and Western Europe emerged from that shadow decades later. Throughout his monumental work, Judt emphasizes the themes of collective amnesia, remembering, and putting aside and demonstrates that the important civic task of the historian is to make sense of the past for the general public. Judt is the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies at New York University, where he also serves as the founding director of the Remarque Institute. Donald Yerxa, editor of Historically Speaking, interviewed Judt on November 14, 2005.

Donald A. Yerxa:  I’d like to begin with the title of your book, Postwar. Why did you select that title and what does it imply about the period since 1945?

Tony Judt: The title originated with my eleven-year old son. He was getting frustrated with my inability to come up with a title and asked me what the book was about. I said that it was about the way in which the Second World War lasted so long in Europe in terms of memory, impact, and consequences so that much of Europe since 1945 was in a postwar shadow. So he said, “Well, call it Postwar.” The title very much reflects the book’s emphasis on the place of the Second World War and everything that happened in that war in the second half of the 20th century.

Yerxa: How did Europeans handle the burden of the war’s shadow?

Judt: If you want a general answer, I would say that they handled the burden by a form of selective forgetting. Although it varied in subject matter from country to country, it had in common the notion that the only way to put back countries which had experienced what amounted to five or six years of civil war as well as the complete destruction of civic, political, and legal institutions was to create agreeable myths about what had happened and forget the rest.

Yerxa: Why did the shadows last so long?

Judt: There are two answers. In the case of Western Europe, ironically the shadows lasted precisely because they were not actually addressed. Issues of memory of collaboration, of the whole question of what was done to the Jews and who was responsible, and of remembering the extent to which many people were quite happy with fascism or affiliated with the local forms of it—all of these couldn’t be comfortably integrated into post-World War II memory. It was only in the 1970s and 1980s—mainly because of a new generation as much as anything else—that it became possible to look back and ask different questions.

In Eastern Europe it was much more simply a consequence of the imposition of a new regime under the communists which not only made it impossible to look straight at what had happened before the communists, but imposed a whole new level of things for people to remember and feel bad about afterward. The war got conflated with the suffering of the postwar decades.

Yerxa: You maintain that the history of Europe in the second half of the 20th century must include both halves: East and West. What themes or patterns emerge when you include both in your narrative?

Judt: We are all aware that the East and West had very different experiences. But we are not accustomed to reflect on the commonalities. The most obvious one was that in the immediate postwar years, 1945-47, much of the policies pursued in the East were remarkably similar to those in the West: heavy emphasis on reconstruction, investment in infrastructure, economic planning, the direction of the economy, and so on. The Czechoslovak economic plan between 1945 and 1948 was remarkably similar to the first Monnet plan in France. Obviously, it changed once the communists came to power, but there was a common sense that the war taught that you had to plan the economy and control the society from above.

The second theme is the parallel disillusion on the part of the Left. We forget that many people—intellectuals and students, especially in Eastern Europe in places like Hungary and Czechoslovakia—had great hopes for communism if only because they could not go back to the past and there was no alternative. They had great illusions that were in a way comparable to the illusions of Western European progressives and fellow travelers, although they were shattered much earlier. The postwar generation in Western Europe still had hopes for a reformed, improvable, revisionist communism. That dream was shattered in 1968.

I suppose the third thing—though I wouldn’t want to push it—is that the extremely rapid economic and social change in Western Europe has a low-level comparable cousin in Eastern Europe in the shift from country to town, which explains why the towns in Eastern Europe have these God-awful housing blocks to accommodate the huge numbers of ex-peasants. Also there was a degree of underground Americanization, modernization, and youthification in Eastern Europe that was not apparent to the West. This goes a long way to explain what happened in Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Yerxa: Of all the things that have happened in Europe since 1945, which seemed the most predictable? Most unexpected?

Judt: No one anticipated the scale of economic recovery, demographic explosion, prosperity, stability, depoliticization—all of which we recognize as parts of the economic miracle in parts of Western Europe. Everyone expected more of the same, more of what had happened after the First World War: civil conflict, violence, depression, possibly a retreat once again into political extremes of left and right. This didn’t happen, and that was totally unexpected.

Among the most predictable things that occurred was the Cold War. We forget that the Cold War wasn’t coming out of nowhere in the 1940s. The suspicions that the Soviets, especially Stalin, had of the West and the Western doubts about the reliability and desirability of the Soviet Union as an ally go back to the 1920s and 1930s. The Second World War was the aberration, not what comes afterward. If we look—as we now can—at the archives of the Soviet Union, as well as those of the U.S. and UK, we know, for example, that the British Foreign Office was under no illusion that there was bound to be some sort of division of Europe after the war, and that division would take the form of a freezing of the Russian zone, on the one hand, and a desperate attempt to establish a Western zone, on the other. If anyone was a bit surprised by this, it was the Americans, but that’s because they had the least experience with European politics in the interwar years.

Yerxa: In terms of your own engagement with postwar Europe, did anything surprise you during the course of researching and writing the book?

Judt: Something that wasn’t a real surprise but which struck me powerfully was that you simply cannot write the story of the European Union the way it is conventionally written as though a bunch of well-intentioned men sat down and said: “Never again. We must build a happy, united Europe.” That is simply not the case. I am struck again and again by how often the processes that lead to some new stage in the integration or unity or coming together of Europe—whether it’s in the early 1950s, late 1950s, 1970s, or so on—are always a product of separate national interests. There was until very late in the day no great European project.

There is probably one other thing that did surprise me, although once I got over the surprise, I realized I had seen it coming, and that is just how much of postwar Europe was built unknowingly on the foundation of things that happened in the Second World War, indeed under the Nazis. Many of the economic policies, the idea that there should be a European-wide zone of policy making and so on, were largely the consequence of the experience of World War II itself. Particularly in Western Europe, many young administrators got their first experience of being able to construct economic policies and planning without the annoying interference of democratic politicians when they worked for Vichy or the occupying forces.

Yerxa: Was the Cold War as dangerous as those of us who were children in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s remember it?

Judt: That’s a very good question. It struck me while writing the book how very different the Cold War was when seen from Europe than when seen from America. The American memory of my contemporaries was of nuclear alert and of being warned about what to do if the Russians came. I grew up in London, and most of my friends grew up in Europe within a few hundred miles of the Red Army, and we weren’t aware of this most of the time. Until I was about ten years old, I think that most of my conscious sense of “goodies and baddies” was directed more toward the Germans. All British and most European films about the war were still heavily focused on fighting the Germans. There was something of a mixed view of the Red Army. I remember when the Red Army Choir and the Bolshoi Ballet came to London in the mid-1950s. They were welcomed with open arms, cheering, and unambiguous affection, even by people who politically were unquestionably right of center and anti-communist. So I think it was a different experience in Europe as felt and remembered. Now, whether it was objectively just as dangerous—in other words, whether the Europeans were living in an illusory sense of safety—is another matter. I think there was probably only one really dangerous moment in the Cold War, and that was of course Cuba. We now know that pressures particularly on Kennedy and to some extent on Khrushchev to play much harder ball than they wanted to were quite strong. But I do not know of any instance earlier or later when we were really close to nuclear or even non-nuclear war in Europe. The Cold War was extremely dangerous in East Asia, and there were times that it got risky in the Middle East. We know that Nixon came very close to mobilizing American strategic forces over the 1973 war. But I don’t know of any similar occasion in Europe. One of the reasons for this was that Stalin was extraordinarily cautious in Europe. He had no interest in pushing further than he had already got. He discouraged communists in Greece, Yugoslavia, Italy, and France from making trouble because it didn’t suit his strategic purposes. So I think that we Europeans were not totally wrong to remember the Cold War as stabilizing, in an odd kind of way. It certainly was in Western Europe. The Eastern Europeans, of course, remember it not as particularly dangerous, but as horrible. Horrible because there really was a war going on, but it was a war between the state and society.

Yerxa:  Who is on your short list of the most influential people in the history of Europe since 1945?

Judt: Charles de Gaulle, no question. Like it or not, Margaret Thatcher, and like it or not intellectually, I suppose Jean-Paul Sartre. His influence was considerable in a gloomy sort of way. Back to politics, I would include Mikhail Gorbachev. Absent Gorbachev it is hard to envisage the events of the 1980s. I would also have to rank the Polish pope, but below Gorbachev. And much though I deeply dislike the man, Konrad Adenauer was crucial in the stabilizing of West Germany. In a different way, I would include Willy Brandt, who was really a political failure, but who played a vital role in shifting the gears of internal European relations from the Cold War to détente. In terms of public figures, those would be the ones whom I would emphasize. I would be less inclined to include other major intellectuals or writers because so many of them went off to America.  Tragically, many of the most important people that would otherwise be associated with “the European mind” were in fact living in New York or Chicago as a consequence of the Depression, Nazism, communism, and World War II.

Yerxa: To list such people as these is to suggest human agency is a major factor in your narrative. To what extent was agency tempered by forces unleashed by the war?

Judt: I hate to sound like Marx: people “make their own history, but not under conditions of their own choosing.” There is no question that the circumstances of postwar Europe are remarkably constraining. The European states—even the major ones like Britain, France, or Germany—have little freedom of maneuver, either because they have been shattered or impoverished or because the world became divided between two great powers, one of which is not European and the other only half-European. The interesting developments, therefore, tend to be within the nation-states rather than what they manage to do on a world scale. But the things they do seem to be a function of agency, and I wanted to emphasize that because so many people in the historical profession today may talk a big line about agency, but they really are not all that interested in what men and women do, especially what people in charge manage to achieve as a result of being in charge. So I do emphasize agency. De Gaulle, for example, played an absolutely crucial role in reinventing France twice in the postwar period (in 1944-45 and again in 1958). Without de Gaulle it is hard to imagine France recovering even to the extent that it did as a major international power. I certainly emphasize agency in the case of someone like Margaret Thatcher, because although the mood at the time was moving toward reduction in the role of the state, increase in the role of private sector economy, etc., it took someone like Thatcher, an absolutely ruthless ideologue coming at just the right moment in just the right country, to shift the whole burden of proof, so to speak, from what it was before when the default position was in favor of the state to the default position being against the state. That is agency indeed.

I emphasize agency in the breakup of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. It was not written in the stars that the Czechs and the Slovaks were doomed to breakup or that as the result of age-old squabbles the Yugoslavs could not remain united in one state. I narrated the history of the breakups of these countries at some length in Postwar, and I took pains to indicate how often individuals took advantage of particular combinations of circumstances to effect change in places where change might not otherwise have happened. I emphasize people like Slobodan Miloševic   in Serbia, Vladimír Meciar in Slovakia,  and Václav Klaus in the Czech Republic, not because they are very interesting or important men in their own right, but because at a crucial moment they were the agents of things that otherwise would not have happened. So while I never would deny the scale of the limitations and structures within which people have to work, especially in postwar Europe, I do emphasize agency and believe in it quite strongly. I don’t see how one could write interesting history without it.

Yerxa: You mention how America was often viewed negatively in Western Europe: it was “economically carnivorous;” its culture was crass; it was seen to harbor imperialist ambitions. Do you believe America, not the Soviet Union, presented a more insidious long-term challenge to Europe?

Judt: The Soviet Union was a real and present danger. If the Red Army had been able to get to Paris and Rome, freedom, political prosperity, economic prosperity, and much else would have been destroyed, postponed, or threatened. So there is no question that the Soviet Union was the real, actual, material threat to Western Europe. Having said that, I have no doubt that America has served—and continues to serve—as something of a problematic future, the future that Europe both wants and doesn’t want at the same time; an alternative model different enough to be undesirable, yet familiar enough to look as though it might be where Europe is going. Going back to the 1880s, America has had an ambivalent place in the European imagination. The feeling that America represented a threat to European values was strong in the European far Right during the 1920s and 1930s. It migrated to the far Left in the 1940s and 1950s. It is probably true that the United States poses a cultural challenge to Europe. Mass modern culture played a much more important role in the U.S. than it did in Europe, and so Europeans saw America as a threat to their own high culture. The emergence of a European popular culture, in particular a European youth culture, in the 1950s and 1960s was therefore perceived—and I think rightly—as an unwelcome American import, the so-called Americanization of Europe. That feeling has not endured, however. The sense that Europe was under siege by the American way of life—there was that famous wartime joke in England: What’s wrong with America? Americans. Overpaid, oversexed, and over here!—changed after the 1970s.

Yerxa: And today, more than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, what poses the most significant long-term challenge to Europe: internal cohesion? American culture or foreign policy? Muslim immigration?

Judt: The insidious threat to Europe for the past ten or fifteen years doesn’t come from America—if it ever did—it comes from a lack of any clear sense of what European culture and identity is. What does it mean now to be Dutch? Or British? It’s not that the Americans are doing anything to them; it is the rapid transformation that is going on within their own societies that matters, whether it is a function of immigration, generational issues, or in the British case, the virtual collapse of most social norms and norms of collective behavior. This has triggered all sorts of self-doubt and worries, but you can’t blame America for this.

The choice now is not between the American way of life (minimal state, maximizing market forces, reducing the social welfare state) or the European social model. There is no realistic way politically to move much closer to the American model. What is the challenge—and it is one the Europeans haven’t really thought about collectively and very carefully—is the scale of internal changes as a result of immigration and the great difficulty in balancing the loosening national forms consequent upon globalization (more globalization than Europeanization, I think) and the need for some kind of national identity to function as an integrator of all these rapid demographic transformations. The Europeans could continue to believe that they can modernize and remain prosperous on the 1950s-1960s model with all its many virtues, but which excludes black and brown people, people living in God-forsaken suburbs, and so on, and which also doesn’t address the problem of immigration generally, the need for younger people to find work, and so forth. Or, they could go in a different direction. These problems are European-generated.

Yerxa: How should Europeans deal with their horrific past? In particular, what are the roles of memory (in particular the memory of Europe’s dead Jews), forgetting, and history in providing meaning and moral purpose for the new Europe?

Judt: Memory, forgetting, and history are all important. When I write as a historian, I see that forgetting, for example, worked wonders in stabilizing postwar Europe. If people had been forced to remember in the years from 1945 to 1960 everything that had gone on between 1939 and 1945, many countries would have had trouble functioning as united polities: France, Italy, the Netherlands, not to mention points further east. But at the same time, you have to be careful because you might as well say one of the reasons postwar Europe was so stable was that Hitler and Stalin between them solved the problem of minorities by killing everyone. Obviously, you cannot go around recommending that as a solution for problems. So I have to jump back and forth: as a historian, I say this is why forgetting worked, but as an engaged citizen I must say this is also unacceptable.

No society, however, can live indefinitely with the weight of impossibly painful memories constantly being dragged into the public sphere. No society can move past those memories until it has addressed them. It is quite striking that from the late 1960s until the mid-1990s France was obsessed with the problem of Vichy: apologetics of Vichy, attacks on it, how to make sense of it, etc. And then in 1995 Jacques Chirac, in the one unambiguously heroic act of his presidency, went to the memorial for the dead Parisian Jews and acknowledged for the first time France’s role in the extermination of European Jews. That sort of ended it. There was no longer the sense on the part of the Jews that this had not been acknowledged, on the part of the French that this was a painful thing that you didn’t want to talk about, and on the part of the political class that maybe you should talk about it a bit, but not be too honest because it would be disruptive. All this ended and is no longer a painful issue. It is an issue for historians. So I do recommend this combination of remembering and then setting aside. The publication of Jan Gross’s Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (2001) had the effect of detonating a small nuclear weapon in the heart of Polish public debate. But it brought out, and to some extent resolved, Poland’s inability to see what Poles did to Jews during the war and that this recognition did not mean that the Poles didn’t suffer terribly during the war as well. It just meant you had to tell all the truth.

On the history question, I am adamantly convinced that what is going dangerously wrong in many European countries, beginning in Britain, my own country, is the collapse of serious history teaching. We have replaced real history with the use of history to teach moral lessons. In Britain and in the U.S. very often students are no longer taught modern European history in junior and senior high schools. But they do get one course in either Germany 1933-1945, World War II, or the destruction of the Jews in the Holocaust. This has the distorting consequence of building the whole of students’ inadequate understanding of the past around one horrendous and therefore misunderstood event without a larger context. Memories, memorials, monuments are always partial in two senses. They only deal with part of the past, and they have a bias toward one particular group’s suffering or achievement. History has to go beyond that. I press the case for teaching the history of Europe as the necessary condition for keeping Europeans aware of why they are now doing what they do and where they came from.

Yerxa: Some of the most intriguing lines of the book, for me at least, appear on the penultimate page: “Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world. Most of what it has to offer is discomforting, even disruptive . . . .” Should historians see themselves as sources of disenchantment and disruption?

Judt: The historian’s first responsibility is to get it right—to find out what happened in the past, think of some way to convey it which is both effective and true, and do it. But if you are a historian of, say, medieval social life, then you don’t necessarily have a civic obligation to get out there in the public square and give speeches about what is wrong with wife dunking. It happened a long time ago; it’s no longer an issue; and the historian can deal with it professionally and not have to feel moral responsibility in his other capacity as a member of the community. But I don’t think that historians of the 20th century, particularly of Europe’s 20th century, have that option. The historian’s task is not to disrupt for the sake of it, but it is to tell what is almost always an uncomfortable story and explain why the discomfort is part of the truth we need to live well and live properly. A well organized society is one in which we know the truth about ourselves collectively, not one in which we tell pleasant lies about ourselves. Historians have a special role in this, probably a more important role than moralists. The latter start from some sort of universal set of propositions that may in fact not be shared by many of their audience, whereas the historian is simply saying, “Look, this is something you all share, because it is part of your common past. You have this in common, and you have to recognize it.” So, yes, we have a disruptive duty. This is one of the reasons why I get so annoyed with those of my colleagues who only write for each other. We have a duty to the larger community. We can only perform that duty by writing good professional history, but we do have that duty. I’ll give you a practical example. When the Papon trial happened in France in 1997—the only major trial of a Vichy war criminal—the prosecution asked historians of Vichy to testify in the French courts as expert witnesses to set the context for the accused’s behavior. Most of them refused, not wanting to get involved in a tricky public arena, but also on the grounds that it was not the historian’s duty to enter a court of law. The historian writes books, and that’s it. But Robert Paxton of Columbia University, who wrote the first book on Vichy France that blew open the whole debate in 1952, agreed to serve as an expert witness and played a crucial role informing the trial not only of the real world of France in 1942, but also of what was morally and politically possible in terms of personal choices and courage for a bureaucrat in that time and place. That seems to be the role of the historian as it should be: it is truthful but inevitably therefore disruptive.

Yerxa: What would you hope the reader would take away from your book?

Judt: I would hope that any reader close enough to have some direct experience of the period would say: “Yes, that is what it was like, and now it makes sense to me.” I would want the younger reader to feel how complicated the past was—that there were no simple stories that got you from A to B and to the present—and how the past is always with us. 

We cannot make any sense of where we are unless we know it. I want somehow to show that the European present is so deeply imbedded in the past that you cannot be an educated citizen without at least a good general knowledge about that past. I also wanted to write the kind of history book that people would want to read, even though it may be too long, so that they would feel that the past is accessible.

Yerxa: Who has influenced your work the most?

Judt: Four people come to mind. One of them is someone that I do not agree with much, certainly not politically: Eric Hobsbawm. He writes brilliant, large-scale, narrative-analytical history. He takes on huge subjects and writes about them in a clear way which is accessible to a general audience. A second person is the French philosopher Raymond Aron, who I knew a little bit in Paris when I was a student. I was always in awe of his capacity to move unselfconsciously between disciplines for the purpose of understanding things. A historian also has to be an anthropologist, also has to be a philosopher, also has to be a moralist, also has to understand the economics of the period he is writing about. Though they are often arbitrary, disciplinary boundaries certainly exist. Nevertheless, the historian has to learn to transcend them in order to write intelligently. The third person was George Lichtheim, who was a central European Jewish refugee to England. He provided a major influence on my understanding of intellectuals and ideas. He wrote brilliantly on Marxism, left-wing intellectuals, and the history of socialism. More than anyone, he helped me understand the 20th century as a history of modern thinkers, for good and ill. I suppose the fourth is Albert Camus, though he was neither a historian nor a scholar. There is a quote from Camus that particularly captures my sense of what the historian has to do in order to be honest with himself. If I can remember the quote, at one point Camus said: “If there were a party of those who are not sure whether they are right, that would be the party I would be a member of.” I admit to being an opinionated stylist, but I try to cultivate the sense that I’m not quite sure that I am right. The historian must have a measure of intellectual humility.

Yerxa: What are you working on now? How do you follow up a massive work like Postwar?

Judt: The first thing you do is go out and play baseball. [Chuckling] You relax and absolutely refuse to answer questions like “What are you working on now?” But I do have two ideas in mind, which will take a long time to germinate. One is a book on the contemporary Mediterranean world. I don’t mean to pretend to be a modern Braudel, but it seems to me that the Mediterranean space is a sort of edge where languages, cultures, memories, religions, economies are all now going to meet in very uncomfortable ways. So I’d like to write a contemporary historical anthropology of the Mediterranean. And I would like to write a historical essay on the 20th-century intellectual condition—the ideas and intellectual exchanges, for good and ill, that shaped the 20th century.

 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

Racing the Enemy: A Critical Look
Michael Kort

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Harvard University press, 2005) has received a great deal of favorable press since its publication last year. Reviewers in leading newspapers have called it “brilliant and definitive,” “a landmark book,” “the definitive analysis” of the American decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan, etc. Hasegawa’s extensive use of Japanese and Russian sources has added to the book’s luster. His multilingual source base is what presumably gives his book the vital “international context” allegedly missing from earlier volumes on the American use of atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Japanese surrender that finally put an end to World War II.

Racing the Enemy is an opportune arrival for the increasingly beleaguered critics of the American use of atomic weapons against Japan, who, in the historians’ debate over the bomb, usually have been classified as “revisionists” (as opposed to “orthodox” or “traditional” historians who have evaluated the atomic bomb decision as necessary to end the war). As made by Gar Alperovitz more than forty years ago, the original revisionist argument maintained that the atomic bomb was used primarily to intimidate the Soviet Union in order to gain the upper hand in Eastern Europe and to keep Moscow out of the war in the Far East. While the whole cloth of this “atomic diplomacy” thesis was too extreme for most revisionists, they wove bits and pieces of it into their own critiques of the bombing of Hiroshima.

Revisionism’s heyday lasted until the 1990s. Then the historiographical ground began to shift. A new body of scholarly work emerged, often based on hitherto unavailable documents, which countered revisionist arguments that the atomic bomb was primarily a diplomatic weapon in 1945, that Japan would have surrendered prior to the planned U.S. invasion had the bomb not been used, and that projected casualty figures for the anticipated invasion of Japan were far lower than those cited by supporters of the decision to use the bomb. The scholars producing these books and articles provided powerful support for Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan. Thus Edward Drea’s MacArthur’s Ultra: Codebreaking and the War against Japan (1992) chronicled how Allied intelligence tracked the Japanese military buildup on the southernmost home island of Kyushu in the months prior to Hiroshima, a buildup that demonstrated Tokyo’s intent to fight to the bitter end and rendered all “low” casualty estimates dating from the spring and early summer of 1945––the estimates relied upon by revisionist historians––obsolete and irrelevant months before American soldiers were scheduled to land in Japan. In 1995 Robert P. Newman’s Truman and the Hiroshima Cult demolished the credibility of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey’s claim that Japan would have surrendered in the fall of 1945 absent both the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war, while Robert James Maddox’s Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision Fifty Years Later effectively dismantled what was left of the “atomic diplomacy” thesis. Two years later, in “Casualty Projections for the U.S. Invasion of Japan, 1945-1946: Planning and Policy Implications” (The Journal of Military History, July 1997), D. M. Giangreco conclusively documented the existence of enormous casualty projections, some of which undeniably reached Truman and his top advisors. The next year, in “The Shock of the Atomic Bomb and Japan’s Decision to Surrender––A Reconsideration” (Pacific Historical Review, November 1998), Sadao Asada, relying on a thorough review of Japanese-language sources, exposed as untenable the contention that Japan was prepared to surrender before Hiroshima or that a modification of the Potsdam Declaration guaranteeing the status of the emperor would have produced a Japanese surrender.

These and other works culminated in Richard B. Frank’s Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, published in 1999. Frank brought together the evidence already mentioned and a great deal more, including crucial Japanese-language sources, leaving virtually every aspect of the revisionist case in tatters. It was not long before Downfall gained widespread recognition as the definitive work on the subject. Against this background, the cancellation of the Smithsonian Institution’s proposed exhibit to mark the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, which relied almost exclusively on revisionist scholarship, was only the most publicized setback suffered by proponents of the revisionist case during the 1990s.

Hasegawa’s Racing the Enemy runs counter to this scholarly current. Racing the Enemy, however, is not all good news for revisionists. Hasegawa rejects some parts of the revisionist case, including the critically important thesis that Japan could have been induced to surrender prior to the events of August 6-9, when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9) and the Soviet Union declared war on Japan (August 8). Instead, Hasegawa attempts to resuscitate the revisionist critique of Truman by arguing that the United States wanted to use the atomic bomb against Japan prior to the Soviet entry into the war in order to thwart Moscow’s ambitions in the Far East. This in turn created a race to use the bomb and get Tokyo to surrender before the Soviets declared war on the beleaguered empire. That race, of course, was lost, for although Hiroshima preceded the Soviet entry into the Pacific War, the Japanese surrender did not. Beyond that, Hasegawa argues, Japan surrendered not because of what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki but because of the Soviet declaration of war that took place between those two dreadful nuclear explosions.

Despite Hasegawa’s sources in three languages, his evidence does not back up his claims. Furthermore, at times his methodology is faulty. In particular, Hasegawa at key points in his narrative takes excessive liberty in interpreting his sources . . . .

Michael Kort is professor of social science at Boston University’s College of General Studies. He has written several books on the Cold War and the Soviet Union, including The Columbia Guide to the Cold War (Columbia University Press, 1998). 
 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

THE FUTURE OF WAR: A FORUM 

Have recent spectacular developments in military technology changed the fundamental character of war? This is not a new question. New weapons or innovative ways of using existing ones have often inspired enthusiasts to claim that war will never be the same. These claims are challenged by other military thinkers who argue that while the conduct of war is certainly affected by new hardware and techniques, the fundamental character of war does not change. One such strategic analyst is Colin Gray of the University of Reading. In his recent Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare (Cassell, 2006), he argues that despite advances in hi-tech warfare, future war will resemble wars in the past because “in their essentials war, warfare, and strategy do not change.” To explore these important matters we asked Gray to summarize his views on the future of war for Historically Speaking. A blue-ribbon panel of military historians and strategic analysts respond, after which Gray offers a rejoinder. We follow up this forum with another on the “future warrior” in our next issue.
 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

Been There! Done That! Blood in the Crystal Ball
Colin S. Gray

A few years ago I was invited to write a book on “future warfare.” My first reaction was to be skeptical. How could I write a book about nothing? There is no evading the fact that the future has yet to happen, a condition which necessarily leaves the ambitious author with no choice but to speculate. There is and can be no direct evidence. My sense of unreality was enhanced when I was requested to supply a list of illustrations and also of maps of future wars. Happily for my mental equilibrium, it did not take me too long to realize that we know a very great deal about future warfare, notwithstanding the contrary verdict one might derive from the laws of physics that prohibit time travel. The result is my text, Another Bloody Century:  Future Warfare. The principal title reveals most of the plot.

It may be important for me to underline the fact that I am a social scientist, not a historian. By this admission I confess to being unafraid of big concepts, perhaps even to a fault. I am unhealthily attracted to theory and to examples that illustrate its workings. Moreover, I am perilously apt to seek, and therefore find, precedents and parallels across the ages (among my other sins against careful historical scholarship). In my defense I have to plead the professional bias of a social scientist and, scarcely less significant, thirty or so years of employment as a professional defense analyst.

Slowly, but inexorably, it dawned on me that to write a book about “future warfare” was really only an attempt on a rather grand scale to do what I have been paid to do for most of my working life . . . . 

Colin S. Gray is Professor of International Politics and Strategic Studies at the University of Reading, UK. He is the author of twenty books, most recently Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005). His next book will be Strategy and History: Essays on Theory and Practice.
 

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Comment on Gray
Peter Paret 

There is much that I agree with in Colin Gray’s statement on the future of warfare, and much that puzzles me in his exuberant declaration of independence from constraints that too often afflict historians. On a major point we see eye to eye. Technological development will always create new ways of fighting, but it has not changed the non-military and military elements of intent and violence that together make up war. To the people who do the fighting, technological innovation necessarily looms large, and it is understandable if it colors their thoughts about every aspect of war. But a new level of destructiveness or more rapid and secure delivery systems cannot override such matters as the relationship between political goals, military aims, and the efforts to achieve them. Any attempt to predict how wars will be fought in the future must take account of this relationship, as well as of further technological development. It is easier to recommend ways in which the relationship may be strengthened, than to predict how—or even that—it will be changed.

Since the 1960s, this country has confronted opponents whose ideas on war and how to wage war have not always matched our expectations. Too often our political and military leaders have assumed that the other side would react as we might, a psychological and intellectual error difficult to avoid, perhaps especially so for a society with worldwide interests and commitments that nevertheless remains somewhat insular. Recent administrations have not always adopted realistic aims nor developed appropriate methods to achieve them. And neither in the 1960s nor today have they been good at explaining to the American public the broad lines of political and military policy in reasonably factual terms. But substantial public support may do more to win a war than a new weapons system. Perhaps not too much should be made of these deficiencies. In war the enemy is often misunderstood and yet may be defeated, and even a malfunctioning political and military leadership may succeed—though presumably success would come at unnecessarily high cost.  But with whatever means future wars will be fought, the familiar interaction of violence and politics between opponents (intensified by the interaction in each belligerent of domestic and external politics with the use of, and exposure to, violence) will again play itself out, whatever the technology employed . . . . 

Peter Paret is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study.  His principal interests are the history of art and culture, and the history of war.  In the latter field he has written among other works: Clausewitz and the State (Oxford University Press, 1976, Princeton University Press, 1985) and Understanding War: Essays on Clausewitz and the History of Military Power (Princeton University Press, 1992). He edited Makers of Modern Strategy (Princeton University Press, 1986), and with Michael Howard translated and edited Clausewitz’s On War (Princeton University Press, 1976, 1984). 
 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

The Crystal Ball Is Bloody but Still Clear
T. X. Hammes

Colin Gray has nailed it again. His essay draws upon history to lay a solid foundation for thinking about the future of war. As a professional defense analyst he is keenly aware of the incestuous relationships within the defense community among analysts, policy makers, and weapons producers. In particular, he refutes the notion that technology has fundamentally changed warfare.

This may be a bit of a shock to many Americans who have a great faith in technology’s transformative effects. For the past fifty-five years the United States has invested very heavily in maintaining the technological edge in most military fields. This investment has paid off handsomely as some of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s wildest dreams have come true. Today, American technology, training, and investment allow U.S. forces to dominate conventional battlefields. Many Iraqi soldiers never even knew they were targeted before they were hit. Based on the “success” there and in Afghanistan, the Pentagon continued to push technology hard, confident that the network-centric future would change the fundamental nature of war. It is only in the last few months that reality has begun to creep into the Quadrennial Defense Review as the Pentagon has acknowledged that enemies may not choose to fight a high technology war . . . .

T.X. Hammes, colonel USMC (Ret), is author of The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century (Zenith Press, 2004).
 

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Comment on Gray
Victor Davis Hanson

As a long admirer of Thucydides I must plead guilty to agreeing with almost all of the sensible points that Colin S. Gray has made.

Not long ago in the inaugural issue of The New Atlantis (Spring 2003 www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/1/hanson.htm) I wrote a brief article entitled “Military Technology and American Culture,” which addressed, in the immediate aftermath of the three-week victory over Saddam Hussein, similar misplaced giddiness about the new technology and its role in the perceived “revolution” in war:

The most dangerous tendency of military planners is the arrogant belief that all of war’s age-old rules and characteristics are rendered obsolete under the mind-boggling technological advances or social revolutions of the present. Tactics alter, and the respective roles of defense and offense each enter long periods of superiority vis-à-vis each other. The acceptance of casualties is predicated on domestic levels of affluence and leisure. But ultimately the rules of war and culture, like water, stay the same—even as their forms and their pumps change.

So I find very little in Gray’s essay that I could argue with, inasmuch as he hits on themes of unchanging human nature that sober thinkers such as Angelo Codevilla, Michael Howard, and Donald Kagan have reiterated in warning us about believing that war reinvents itself ex nihilo each generation . . . .

Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of numerous works, including A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War  (Random House, 2005).
 

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History and the Future of War*
Antulio J. Echevarria II

Most historians would probably agree with Colin Gray’s contention that future wars will resemble past wars. Many of us have, in fact, been trying for years to get that point across to contemporary defense experts, particularly those possessed by the idea of creating a military revolution based on a few new pieces of technology and several dubious theories. In some cases our points have struck home, but more often they have not. The main reason is not, however, that defense experts or “social scientist-strategists” lack historical perspective, as Gray implies, especially since historians are willing and able to provide them with one. Some of the staunchest advocates of the view that airpower is, and will continue to be, the decisive arm of the future are established historians who certainly do not want for historical perspective. Instead, there are at least two main reasons for our lack of success. First, defense analysts tend to have a vested interest in seeing a theory or concept, usually connected with a particular piece of technology, succeed. Second, the defense business is not about getting ideas right. It’s about getting them past the competition and into production. The rewards for success are high. History is, therefore, appealing even to proponents of revolutionary transformation because it can be made to provide the trappings of legitimacy for any number of undeserving concepts, such as network-centric warfare, effects-based operations, and shock and awe. Not only do such theories lack an objective basis, such as Clausewitz established for his own theory of war, but their subjective basis—history—is dubious as well. Gray would like to avoid the details that professional historians are wont to embrace, but such a “death by a thousand cuts” is the best, often the only, way to destroy a theory supported by an erroneous historical interpretation. If only it mattered!

While most historians would agree with the contention that future wars will resemble wars of the past, they would also vigorously disagree with any suggestion that the wars of tomorrow and those of yesterday will not have important differences . . . .

Antulio J. Echevarria II is the Director of Research and Director of National Security Affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute, U. S . Army War College. He is the author of After Clausewitz: German Military Thinkers before the Great War (University Press of Kansas, 2001), and is currently working on two books, one that examines Clausewitz’s On War as an “unfinished symphony” and one that compares amateur and professional military views of future war in the West before 1914.
 

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Comment on Gray
Andrew J. Bacevich

I concur with Colin Gray. Indeed, I am almost tempted to say that I agree with every jot and tittle of his essay and to leave it at that. Almost, but not quite.

Gray expects others to find his essay “shocking” and “unfashionable” and “controversial.” He should prepare to be disappointed. Serious students of war will judge his views to be commonsensical and even conventional. There is not a lot new here. Simplifying only slightly, Gray’s argument reduces to a single sentence: “Clausewitz got it about right.”

Indeed, he did, especially in fixing the relationship of war to politics. The ugly truth is that as long as politics persists so too will large-scale, politically motivated violence. That the innocent, the naive, and the idealistic will bridle at that prospect is to be expected. As with those who rail against the market or deny the existence of Original Sin, theirs is an exercise in futility.

To be sure, those opposing all war as a matter of principle serve a useful purpose: they make it harder for ambitious or bloodthirsty politicians to portray the conflict lurking over the horizon as high-minded, moral, and unavoidable. So two cheers for those who protest and demonstrate and proclaim “hell no, we won’t go.” Yet no amount of emoting for peace, however well intentioned, will succeed in making an end to war . . . .

Andrew J. Bacevich teaches international relations at Boston University and is the author most recently of The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford University Press, 2005).
 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

With Clausewitz to Eternity
Colin S. Gray

This mini-essay is content to consider some points raised by each commentator in turn. More often than not, I find that I wish to endorse and perhaps amplify the points that have been raised . . . . 

End of Forum
 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

Historical Thinking Is Unnatural, and Immensely Important: An Interview with Sam Wineburg
Conducted by Joseph S. Lucas

For the past twenty years Sam Wineburg, professor of education at Stanford University, has studied what he calls “historical habits of mind.” He believes that when it comes to thinking about history, a huge gulf divides professional historians from their students. A passionate advocate for the importance of history in our high school and college classrooms, Wineburg has published widely on history education and how it can be improved. His essays have appeared in journals such as the American Journal of Education, Cognitive Science, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Journal of American History, among others. His Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Temple University Press, 2001) won the 2002 Frederic W. Ness Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities for the book “that best illuminates the goals and practices of a contemporary liberal education.” Joseph Lucas interviewed Wineburg in October 2005.

Joseph Lucas: How do you carry out your research? 

Sam Wineburg: I put together sets of primary and secondary documents, go into historians’ offices, and say, “Will you sit down and read these for me?” That’s the basic idea, which obviously has countless variations. For example, we just completed a study in which we gave two groups of historians—those who profess a religious sensibility and those who claim they’re agnostic or atheists—documents about the biblical exodus. Then we gave the same historians documents about the origins of the first Thanksgiving. We wanted to understand how people who are steeped in historical knowledge and skill read documents that call on different aspects of their core beliefs.

Whenever I do this kind of study, I sit down with the historian and ask, “Tell me, when I give you these texts, what are you going to do? How will you approach them?” Back in the early 1990s I did a study like this with a group of texts about Abraham Lincoln’s ideas on race. Before reading these, one historian said, “This topic calls to mind the latest book by McPherson and Blight’s new book on memory. And the classic book by Thomas Pressley.” I asked: “Is there anything specifically that you’ll do?” The historian—as historians tend to do—launched into a mini-lecture, holding forth on everything he knew.

Here’s where it gets interesting. The historian took the document and read the first words of the first sentence. Then he shifted attention to the attribution and dwelled on it forever. He situated the document in place and time, and came up with a series of questions that formed a kind of scaffold for reading the rest of document. In other words, he brought a prepared mind to the body of the text. He had already identified the kind of document before him, its genre, the implications of the genre, the normal expectations you would bring to the genre. At the end of the task I said to this gentleman, “I notice when you read, this is what you did. And yet when I asked you what you were going to do, you didn’t mention this.” And, in a kind of dismissive wave of the hand, he said, “Well, everyone does that.”

I gave the same document set to about fifteen of the students in a 100-level lecture course this historian was teaching at the time. Not a single one of these students did what their professor had done. These findings correspond to what I discovered when I first performed this kind of study nearly twenty years ago. Historians do this kind of reading of the source 99% of the time. And bright undergraduates on their way to good colleges—taking AP courses, scoring well on the SAT—do this less than one-third of the time (and when they do, it’s usually because they’ve come across a pronoun and aren’t sure what it refers to). The kind of textured interrogation that comes automatically—but not naturally—to historians is a very special skill.

Historical thinking is unnatural. It goes against the grain of how we ordinarily think. We are psychologically conditioned to see unity between past and present. A colleague of mine teaches at Queens University in Belfast. He gives his undergraduates a 16th-century quote from Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) where she refers to the Irish as “mere Irish,” at which point the Catholic kids take umbrage. But when you go to the Oxford English Dictionary and look at 16th-century references for “mere,” it means “pure, unadulterated”—it’s a compliment, not an insult. It is an impossible psychological challenge to check every word, to read documents from the past and constantly ask, “Does this word mean the same thing that I think it means now?”

There is an effect in the brain called the spread of activation. When we read or hear certain things, pathways in the brain that hold that information in a localized area are highlighted or activated. We can’t stop that process—it goes on automatically. But historical thinking creates—in a way that is not natural—a kind of caution. It brings to the fore questions that alert us to the fissure between past and present, and we begin to say, “I register the emotional reaction that I’m having to this text. But I have to stop myself. Is the past simply a convex image of the present or have there been fundamental changes? Is there both continuity and change? I suspect that what I’m reading could mean something different from what I think it means.” This is a cultivated way of approaching texts that you will not typically find among undergraduates. It’s not what happens when we go to the movies as lay people and see Alexander or watch the History Channel late at night. It’s the problem of students saying, “Well, you know, uh, they needed a scapegoat” when they try to understand the Nazis’ policies toward the Jews. They don’t ask themselves questions about the context. They assume a fundamental, timeless past, to invoke David Lowenthal’s term. They conflate past and present, and everything becomes the here and now. Historical thinking, practiced maturely, tries to chip away at these tendencies to cultivate an abhorrence of simplistic either/or thinking. 

Lucas: Do you think that this way of reading and thinking is something that teachers at both the college and the secondary level should try to impart to their students? Is that the key to successful history teaching? 

Wineburg: Our young people come to us from high schools where they see the learning of history as the amassing of information, and not a way of thinking and being. And so this particular way of approaching a text reflects a larger epistemology. It reflects a belief on the part of historians that the document before them is not a piece of information. It is a fragment that betrays human authorship. And one cannot engage with that fragment unless one knows to whom one is speaking. It’s a fundamentally different approach from how history is taught in most high schools. And, in that sense, we don’t teach kids explicacion de texte. Look at the behemoths of high school textbooks—800 pages of neon-flashing gimmickry. Compare them to Charles and Mary Beard’s Rise of American Civilization: a well-written, interesting text. Our kids don’t know how to read carefully. Teachers, particularly in history classes, do not see close reading as one of the goals their students should attain. 

Lucas: Current debates over how history is taught focus on content, what’s included and what's not. Are you saying that content is less important than method? 

Wineburg: In part. But with several important qualifications: I think that the discussion of content is an essential discussion. We teach content. We must have that discussion. Without the ongoing, civil argument over the kind of history that should be in the curriculum, our democracy loses its potency. In countries that don’t have this discussion you can be sure the history curriculum lacks any excitement or verve. I do not want to disparage the importance of having that ongoing discussion, a discussion whose vibrancy is a reflection of our civic health.

Lucas: A lot of people recently have been complaining about the lack of historical knowledge on the part of both high school and college students. Was there a time when people were satisfied with the degree to which American students knew their history? 

Wineburg: Let me give you a quote: “Surely a grade of 33 out of 100 of the most basic facts of American history is not a grade of which any high school can be proud.” Did this come from the 1987 National Assessment of Educational Progress report by Diane Ravitch and Chester E. Finn? Did it come from the 1976 bicentennial test that Bernard Bailyn did with the New York Times or the one that Allan Nevins did in 1942? No. This is a quote from a study done in Texas high schools by J. Carleton Bell and D.P. McCollum, published in the 1917 Journal of Educational Psychology. It was the first large-scale factual test of American history that we have in American education. Think about who went to high school in Texas in 1915 and 1916; only 10% of the population, the elite, and yet they scored horribly on this test.

There is something almost comical about a group of adults wringing their hands, yearning for a time that never was. I published an article in the Journal of American History in March 2004 called “Crazy for History” where I challenge the soothsayers of the historical profession: show me the money; show me the evidence. David McCullough, who continues to sell this canard, is simply wrong. He cannot adduce the documents to prove his point. It’s quite ironic to listen to historians who claim that the basis of historical thinking is evidentiary, except when they go on the rostrums and make policy pronouncements, at which point—whether it’s Sean Wilentz writing in the New York Times or McCullough testifying before Congress—they seem to feel that they’re absolved from providing the warrants for their claims. 

Lucas: Given that this is a perpetual problem, do you think that teachers in both high school and college can do a better job of getting students interested in history? 

Wineburg: Yes. In that Journal of American History essay I quote a remark by Wilfred McClay from the Albert Shanker Institute’s “Education for Democracy.” McClay says that in times of crisis we must triage. No sentient being can retain all of the material contained in our contemporary textbooks. And what is at stake here is a usable narrative that can unite the disparate parts of the population and give them some basis for talking across their differences. We need to distinguish between those aspects of our history that are extraneous and those that are absolutely central to effective citizenship. My fourteen-year-old son had to stop and think when I asked him if the Korean War came before or after World War II. Our young people need to understand basic issues of chronology. The aftermath of World War II created a power grab that positioned the United States against the Soviet Union, which ultimately played out on the battlefields of Korea. If one doesn’t understand the basic links of that narrative, how can one understand Vietnam, how can one think about the dissolution of the Soviet Union?

We cannot have the situation where we have these standards tests that ask seventeen-year-olds in Massachusetts who Ludwig von Mises was when kids don’t know the Korean War—you can’t have both. The mind will not countenance it. We need to make tough choices, but those tough choices have political implications. I will feel better when every elected legislator in the state of Massachusetts sits for the factual test we give seventeen-year-olds and the results are posted in the Boston Globe. When that day passes we will finally do something about the hypocrisy that is laced through the tests we administer to teenagers. 

Lucas: Should high school history teachers be trained differently? 

Wineburg: Of course. Let’s start with having them know their subject. According to data that appeared in a book I edited with Peter Stearns and Peter Seixas, 86% of all of the people who are teaching a subject called history in the high school or middle school curriculum have neither majored nor minored in history. We teach something in schools of education called social studies, an atavistic, anachronistic, stuck-in-a-Procrustean-bed artifact of the 1930s. Until state legislatures start to pass laws saying that, just like in mathematics and just like in biology, future teachers of history should know their subject deeply, not much is going to change. Right now, the body that accredits schools of education, NCATE, mocks the importance of knowledge by claiming that social studies teachers should be deeply educated in everything: sociology, global studies, psychology, anthropology, political science, art and music, and somewhere in this brew, history. When will we have the nerve to tell the emperor that he has no clothes? By saying the future teachers should know everything, we are really saying that they don’t have to know anything. It’s scandalous. 

Lucas: Do you know any really exceptional high school history teachers who are doing a great job of getting their students interested in history?

Wineburg: Absolutely. In my book there is a chapter called “Models of Wisdom in the Teaching of History,” where we show and create profiles of people who are doing extraordinary things in circumstances that you would not believe—the kind of graffiti-colored, urinals-hanging-by-a-screw, urban high schools that are blights in many other respects. But you walk into the history classroom, and you’ve got young people of all different colors and ethnicities passionately engaged in absolutely central questions of American history. And they are learning the intellectual skills that actually might allow them to get a university degree and enter the culture of power. 

Lucas: Do you think that history, as opposed to say political science or sociology or literary criticism, has a uniquely important role to play in both secondary education and the liberal arts college curriculum? 

Wineburg: Without a doubt, I would say that that’s my core belief. Literary criticism? I mean, we’re talking about stories that aren’t true. History deals with truth. History is the training ground for the kinds of stories that we tell each other in the daily news or in every courtroom in the country. A knowledge of history gives us the ability to wrestle truth from the noise created by the cacophony of voices in the social world. Death in Venice could have happened in Florence, but Kennedy’s assassination didn’t happen in Waco. Political science? There is obviously a lot of overlap, but history locates events in place and time and teaches us about the inescapable Kantian dimensions of human life. History teaches things that no other subject in the curriculum has even the potential to teach. History teaches us that we are part of the species, that the entire history of the species is our own. And so I take membership in the species by understanding that the past is much larger than the circumstances that placed me in this particular incarnation with these particular racial, ethnic, religious, and national characteristics. This to me, is the most powerful antidote to the identity politics that fracture our country today. 

Lucas: How did you get interested in history?

Wineburg: When I was nine, my father bought me The Illustrated History of the United States, the American Heritage twenty-two volume set. It was a prize possession that not only graced my bookshelf as I was growing up, but which I still keep in my office today.

A second event occurred when I was ten. I found a book as we were cleaning our basement to make room for a ping-pong table. It was a dog-eared, dusty copy of Eichmann, Man of Terror. It was the first time that I had seen black and white images of piles of bodies in open pits. I sat down and I read the book. It lit a fire. I then became a passionate reader of the first topic that I really plumbed in depth, the Holocaust.

My dad was a World War II veteran, and he never met a World War II documentary—though he died well before the History Channel—he didn’t like. And he was a voracious reader. We received Time, Life, and Newsweek. My father, who was uneducated and never went to college, was passionate about historical topics. World War II became—certainly well into high school—my frame of reference for viewing the past.

After high school I went off to Brown and in my first semester took a history of religion course with Jacob Neusner, who asked students to think about the “problematic” of the text. The course was over my head but I came out of it certain that the history I understood from high school was not adequate for what I needed in college.  In a one-on-one meeting Neusner confronted me and said that if I was serious about the topic I had addressed in my final paper, I would leave Brown and go study Hebrew in Israel. Being impressionable, that’s exactly what I did. I went back to get my BA three years later, this time at Berkeley. I wrote an honors thesis on a group of Jews that thrived in northern Germany prior to the First Crusade called Hasidei Ashkenaz, under the direction of Danny Matt at the Graduate Theological Seminary. These Jews were heavily influenced by the movement of monasteries from the outskirts of civilization into urban centers. And this movement, particularly in the early part of the 11th century, resulted in books called penintentials, recipe books for the penance one would serve for particular sins. The Hebrew I had learned in Israel prepared me to  work with an untranslated text, The Book of the Pious, produced by Hasidei Ashkenaz. I argued that this was the only moment in traditional rabbinic Judaism when Jews flirted seriously with celibacy as an aim in and of itself, even though it directly contradicted the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply.

Lucas: How did you move from your immersion in historical research to studying historical habits of mind and how people learn and teach history? 

Wineburg: I was sitting in a seminar taught by Jacob Milgrom, the world’s foremost expert on sacrifices in the book of Leviticus. It was a Ph.D. level seminar—even though I was an undergraduate I got in because I had the requisite language skills. There were four students in the class. I was considering Ph.D. programs in ancient history at Yale or Brandeis and was chumming around with the other Ph.D. students. One of them was just about to file her thesis, a 450-page dissertation on the word “prostitute,” zona, in the Bible. I had an epiphany. I just couldn’t see myself writing on a topic that would interest at most a few dozen people in the world.

I had been tutoring at an inner city public school in Richmond, California. A position opened up for a leader of reading groups in a Chapter One federal program, and I took it. It seemed like a great delay tactic. I ended up teaching for several years, and realized that I was very interested in how young people read. One day I went to my supervisor and said, “I really don’t understand why some kids ‘get it’ and some don’t.” And she said, “Well, why don’t you go study that in graduate school?” 

I had never taken any course in psychology or education or anything about the mind—nothing. That there was even a field was a surprise to me. But I investigated it, and the rest was fate. I applied to Stanford. My application ended up on the desk of Lee Shulman, now the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He is an educational psychologist with an undergraduate background in philosophy from the University of Chicago. He saw my lack of background in psychology as an advantage. He said that given what I’d studied already, the stuff I wanted to learn in graduate school would be easy. 
 
Lucas: When you started graduate school, was there a body of literature on how students learn history?

Wineburg: Not really. However there was some excellent work being done on how people learn other subjects. In 1981 Andrea diSessa, an MIT physicist, published a paper in the journal Cognitive Science called “Unlearning Aristotelian Physics,” which showed that MIT undergraduates, who could skillfully compute Newtonian responses to the physics problems that they were given at the end of their freshman year, nonetheless retained in a qualitative way—essentially unchanged—the beliefs that they brought to the class, which were basic Aristotelian beliefs of force and movement. This essay challenged conventional means of assessment and highlighted the intractable nature of prior beliefs and how difficult it is to unlearn them. Alan Schoenfeld, a mathematician at Hamilton College, was also doing brilliant work on problem solving in the calculus classroom. Both diSessa and Schoenfeld were college instructors who just became flummoxed by what they were finding among their undergraduates. They did not write in the kind of larded jargon of psychological research. Their work stemmed from the very brass tacks issues of practice. I became a groupie of these people, and I read everything they wrote. Then I turned to the studies on reading literature. There are the classic studies by I.A. Richards of how students learned literature at Cambridge. So I started to read voraciously—and I patched together a kind of approach. I read widely in historiography. I became a student of the philosopher of history Louis O. Mink. His collection of essays, Historical Understanding (Cornell, 1987) became a guide for me to the problems of interpretation. Mink wrote an essay that appeared in the journal History and Theory in 1966 called “The Autonomy of Historical Understanding.” That piece is the most brilliant explication of historical knowing in the English language. 

Lucas: You said earlier that when you were a boy the Illustrated History of the United States gave you a coherent narrative of American history. Do all kids come to their first history class with some sort of narrative in their heads, and, if so, is it worthwhile for history instructors to take that narrative into account? 

Wineburg: Absolutely. No young person who has lived through seventeen or eighteen Martin Luther King Days and Thanksgivings is lacking a narrative of beginnings, of the origins of the race problem that riddles this country, of Manifest Destiny and Western settlement, of the wars that have punctuated U.S. history. Now the chronology might be off, and these narratives would probably not be approved by Lynn Cheney or Gary Nash. But they are powerful narratives nonetheless. When we don’t reveal the narratives that young people bring to classrooms, we are teaching to whom it may concern. And good teachers never teach to whom it may concern. Good teachers teach to Joe and to Sam and to Susan and to Paul and to Shakira. An absolutely central part of good teaching is to try to engage the narratives that students bring to us so that, like skillful sculptors, we can move, shape, even destroy them when necessary. Otherwise we’re just putting a patina, a layer, onto something whose fundamental structure we have left untouched.          

 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

History over the Water
Derek Wilson

May the Great God whom I worship Grant to my Country and for the benefit of Europe in General a great and Glorious victory, and may no misconduct in any one tarnish it, and may humanity after Victory be the predominant feature in the British Fleet. For myself individually I commit my life to Him who made me, and may his blessing light upon my endeavours for serving My Country faithfully, to Him I resign myself and the Just cause which is entrusted to me to Defend. Amen. Amen. Amen.

 -Admiral Nelson

I write this essay on the evening of October 21, 2005. From across the valley I hear the pops and whines of bursting rockets. Someone is having a firework party. I have just been watching on television one of those exercises in military pageantry which, if I may be forgiven for saying so, the Brits still do better than anyone else—the band of the Royal Marines beating the retreat at Portsmouth in front of the Queen and assembled naval dignitaries. Following this, her majesty went aboard HMS Victory to dine in the admiral’s day cabin. All this, of course, because today is Trafalgar Day and we are being exhorted to remember Britain’s greatest naval victory, exactly 200 years ago, and the death of one of our major national heroes.

And how we have responded! It is estimated that over 6000 special events have been staged throughout the country. Church bells have been rung. A chain of beacons has been set ablaze. Commemorative plaques have been unveiled. Religious services have been held and wreaths laid at Nelson’s tomb in St. Paul’s Cathedral.  The journey of Lieutenant Lapenotière has been reenacted. It was he who left the scene of the battle in the fast schooner, HMS Pickle, landed at Falmouth, then traveled overland by chaise to Westminster to carry the news of the victory. There have been TV programs and exhibitions aplenty. Bizarrely, at one site in Devon a half-size replica of Nelson’s flagship was burned. And, of course, there has been a plethora of new books . . . .

Derek Wilson, a freelance historian and contributing editor to Historically Speaking, has hundreds of books, articles, and media appearances to his credit. He is also organizer of the annual Cambridge History Festival, which attracts a growing number of overseas visitors. His latest book, to be published this spring by Doubleday, is Charlemagne. For more details see his Web site—www.derekwilson.com.
 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

WHAT HAVE BEEN HISTORIANS BEEN READING

Jeremy Black, University of Exeter
Part of the pleasure of being invited to lecture abroad, particularly to the U. S., is that the long flights and the waiting in terminals provide plenty of opportunities for lateral reading away from my research topics.  Lately, I have been much taken by the capturing of atmosphere in some of the novels set in “my period,” for example those by Kate Ross or Susanna Clarke’s enigmatic Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Based on what I read, historical fiction appears to be getting better.

For the world of academic scholarship, I remain unconvinced about the star system, but delighted at the high quality of work produced by scholars who are not “stars.” For military history, I have particularly enjoyed Jon Lendon’s Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity (Yale University Press, 2005), an effective and wide-ranging use of the cultural interpretation of military history, and Brian Farrell’s The Defence and Fall of Singapore,1940-1942 (Tempus, 2005), a searching examination of command faults, which focuses on misplaced central direction. Having just finished a biography of George III, I was most interested in the consideration of non-political dimensions of his reign in Jonathan Marsden,ed., The Wisdom of George the Third (Royal Collection Enterprises, 2005) and, more widely, at the insights on identity and ritual offered by Philip Mansel’s Dressed to Rule: Royal and Court Costume from Louis XIV to Elizabeth II (Yale University Press, 2005), which is full of interest on topics such as Stalin’s dress rules. Historiography and political thought are ably linked in Julia Stapleton’s Sir Arthur Bryant and National History in Twentieth-Century Britain (Lexington Books, 2005), while well paced illumination from fireworks on the longue durée of British history is offered by James Sharpe’s Remember, Remember The Fifth of November: Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot (Profile Books, 2005), which shows how subsequent remembrance was entwined with political, religious, and social issues.  All views are covered including the recent advice that, in preparation for the night of offstage bangs, dogs be given a relaxing early evening meal of overcooked brown rice laced with Marmite, the aptest description I know of government without representation.  Hedgehog safety also became of concern as, until ignited, bonfires are ideal hibernation nests. Britain’s Wildlife Trusts suggested that bonfire organizations create an alternative hedgehog home for any of the animals they found. Nothing escapes the panoptic gaze of Clio.

Barry Strauss, Cornell University
Peter Padfield, Maritime Power and the Struggle for Freedom: Naval Campaigns that Shaped the Modern World, 1788-1851 (Overlook, 2005); Michael Palmer, Command at Sea: Naval Command and Control since the Sixteenth Century (Harvard University Press, 2005).

The lessons of the battle of Trafalgar—200 years old in October 2005—go far beyond sea power. So Peter Padfield argues in a dazzling book that marries naval, political, economic, and cultural history. Having earlier traced what he calls maritime supremacy and the opening of the Western mind from 1588-1782, Padfield now takes the story into the era of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. In Maritime Power and the Struggle for Freedom he describes what he sees as a classic conflict of “the warrior horde against the ruthless merchant trader” (349).

That may not sound like a struggle for freedom, but Padfield enjoys paradox. His intriguing but controversial thesis is to deny “that liberal values stem from the ‘Enlightenment’ rather than the necessities of trade and a monopoly of violence at sea” (28). Trade requires freedom and inspires dynamism, which in turn gives maritime merchant empires an advantage at making war at sea. Padfield cites the Dutch Republic and the United States as examples but here his emphasis is on Britain and its victory over Napoleonic France. After 1815, Britain was free to bring liberal democracy to fruition, to end the slave trade, and to broker the European peace of the 19th century, all thanks to her bloody triumphs at sea.

Michael Palmer, too, puts Trafalgar in broad perspective, but with a narrower focus. In Command at Sea, Palmer surveys naval warfare in detail since 1650, with an emphasis on command and control. The result is a powerful piece of analysis that, ironically, demonstrates the limits of rationality in sea battles.

For Palmer, Nelson is the supreme example of decentralized command. Having acquainted his captains with his plan before battle, Nelson preferred to fight with as few signals as possible, in spite of recent advances in signaling technology. He trusted in his subordinates, a confidence rewarded at Trafalgar and elsewhere. Palmer’s Nelson is less technician than prophet. The admiral’s decision-making process, he argues, was a matter of intuition and not analysis. The son of an Anglican rector, Nelson always valued faith. His staff meetings were a kind of communion; his subordinates, almost disciples.

In Palmer’s expert hands, Nelson illustrates a broader theme about the history of naval warfare—and, we might say, of land warfare as well. No war plan survives contact with reality; what Clausewitz called “friction” generally gets in the way of the best preparations. On-the-spot judgments trump technology, because even the best inventions cannot eliminate uncertainty from warfare. In fact, they sometimes increase uncertainty: for example, modern naval communications are infinitely better than in the age of sail but also infinitely more pressured, which leaves commanders little time to weigh evidence.

Command at Sea is a hymn to the persistence of uncertainty in an age of precision. In spite of scientific and technological improvements from the astrolabe to GPS, the most important factor in war is the same as it was in Herodotus’s day: good judgment. Three cheers for the fog of war.

Carol Thomas, University of Washington
Two concise books figure among my recent reading: Christian Meier’s From Athens to Auschwitz (Harvard University Press, 2005; translated from the earlier German publication) and the 6th edition of Pierre Briant’s Alexandre le Grand (July 2005) in the Que Sais-je? series. Although dissimilar in subject, approach, and presentation, they are worth sharing for their common value of providing insight on big subjects to academics who are interested in a quick, solid update on important topics outside their own fields of concentration.

Both studies address my own focus in ancient Greek history, albeit in different ways. Meier pursues the connection between the ancient and the present in reaching back to the nature of classical Athens as “the start of Europe’s special path in world history” (1). The essence of that path was the discovery that ordinary peasants are capable of their own governance in all aspects of life: political decisions, lawsuits, religious festivals, defense of the state—all were communal affairs not mandates of a monarch or prescriptive religion. Classical Greece disappeared but its notion of citizenship and active participation did not. From Athens to Auschwitz traces the preservation of the “latent potential” that persisted and, in Meier’s view, was reactivated in more recent European history. Auschwitz demonstrates both the fragility of the principles of democracy even as it was practiced in Athens in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C.E. and its corruption in the 20th century. Although Meier defines Auschwitz as the end of the special European path, the questions he raises in his final chapter—“A Legacy without Heirs?”—undercut that stark perspective. History is more than an inheritance; it is also “a challenge, an obligation, which we can acknowledge and accept—or reject” (185). Historians have a civic responsibility to interpret the past—with its horrors as well as its merits—and provide “a sense of orientation in one’s own time, and assist in the process of self-determination” (192).

Alexandre le Grand is an account of the young Macedonian who is credited with turning the ancient world in new directions in the short span of a dozen years. In a compact volume of 121 small pages, 7 ½ x 4 inches, it traces Alexander’s life from the time of his birth to the uncertainties of succession on his death. However, “it is not a biography but attempts to explain the principal aspects of an historical phenomenon that cannot be reduced to a single person” (3). As a renowned scholar of ancient history, Briant knows this context well: his From Cyrus to Alexander:  A History of the Persian Empire (Eisenbraum’s 2002; an English translation of the original French publication) is the source for discussion of the subject, references to sources, and critical analysis. He sets the frame of reference for Alexander’s conquests as the Persian Empire into which Alexander introduced the ferments that led to dismemberment and disappearance. This volume typifies all that is admirable in these brief surveys.My recent search located 1378 titles in the series, many translated into other languages. With the pledge that I have no connection with the publisher, I recommend the series enthusiastically to readers seeking excellent studies in limited space.

For anyone interested in the ancient world, these two studies have the admirable quality of demonstrating the extent of the Greek legacy: geographically to the Indus River valley in the east and into Europe in the west; chronologically forward to modern Europe and as a frame of reference for the future.

Derek Wilson, Cambridge History Festival
Among the advantages of not living in the professional academic world is that the possibility remains of sometimes being taken by surprise. Those who belong to specialist networks have a pretty good idea of who is working on what and who will be publishing when. I can still enjoy the serendipitous pleasure of walking into a shop or opening a publisher’s press release and discovering exciting new books of whose immanence I was unaware. Books like John Guy’s My Heart Is My Own—The Life of Mary Queen of Scots, which appeared to great acclaim in 2004 and, a year later, justifiably was awarded the Whitbread Biography Prize. Seldom does one come across a book that is based on fresh and immaculate scholarship and yet which is fully accessible to the general reader. John Guy has completely reinterpreted the popular (and “romantic”) character of Mary Stuart by going back to the original documents and, particularly, the celebrated “casket letters.” Guy’s book is of enormous historical significance because it enables us to penetrate the enigma of Mary’s character and also to unravel some of the stratagems of Elizabeth’s politicians who used fraud and false evidence to bring down their quarry.

Almost an exact contemporary of the Scottish queen but someone who can hardly have been more different was Ivan the Terrible, and this year has seen the publication of Isabel de Madariaga’s stunning biography—another book I stumbled across. It is very hard for Western students to get their heads round the monumental paranoia, behavioral excesses, and mind-blowing cruelty of Russian rulers such as Ivan, Peter the Great, and Stalin. Madariaga takes us very much closer to an understanding of both the politico-religious system and the character of this truly terrifying tsar. In particular, she enables us to grasp those convictions of semi-divinity (not greatly different in kind from those of other European rulers of the 16th and 17th centuries) that justified appalling actions, not only to Ivan, but also to many of his subjects. Another absorbing and awesomely well researched biography.

After such somber reading material one may well feel in need of a little light relief, and it is with great pleasure that I have turned to Le Ciel lui Tombe sur la Tête, the latest cartoon adventure by Goscinny and Uderzo featuring the adventures of Asterix the Gaul. If this recommendation should appear too frivolous for such a prestigious scholarly organ as Historically Speaking, I spring to its defense with three observations. The adventures of these invincible 1st-century B.C. Gauls have introduced thousands of children (and probably adults) to the early history of Europe. The books are a revelation of how the French see themselves and other nations. And, in this latest escapade, the authors pay affectionate tribute to a great American confrère whose name is scrambled as “Tradsylwien.” I’ll leave my readers to solve that one.
 

 

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