Posts Tagged ‘historiography’
“Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts”*…
In (what seems to your correspondent) a techno/progress-studies “update” of the Annales school of historiography) historian Stephen Davies argues that technology and ideas change our lives much more than politics do– and that history should reflect that…
Most of us recognize the following dates and years: 4th July 1776, 14th July 1789, 1914, 1933, 1917, 1215, 1815, and 1066.
But I imagine most readers will fail to identify what’s special about this second list of dates: 5th July 1687, 9th March 1776, and 24th November 1859. Or indeed this third list of dates and years: 22nd January 1970, 26th April 1956, 1st October 1908, and 1960.
Why are these first dates so recognizable and memorable? It is because the events in question (the adopting of the US Declaration of Independence, the fall of the Bastille, the start of World War I, Hitler’s coming to power, the Russian Revolution, the drafting of the Magna Carta, the Battle of Waterloo, and the Battle of Hastings) are seen as critical events or markers in a particular story. They are supposedly events that had a profound subsequent impact on the shape and destiny of society and so shaped the way that later generations lived.
Undoubtedly there is truth in this but what was the nature of the impact that these events had? What, if anything, did they have in common? The clear answer is that these are all political events. As such they are also thought of as being connected, as being key points or landmarks in a particular story that structures the past into a meaningful pattern and makes sense of it. It thus tells us what was important in bringing about both past worlds and the contemporary world and so, by extension, what we should see as important here and now.
This story is of the growth and development of government, the forms it has taken, and in particular the historical evolution of particular states or political entities, such as France, England/Britain, and the USA. Making these dates important and central to our understanding of the past implies that the driving force in history, the thing that shapes and determines the world we are in and that is crucial for our future, is politics and political power. The dates given are all about political power: Who has it, who contests it, and who wins it.
In this political story the important, memorable events are wars, revolutions, elections, the rise of certain kinds of governance and political institutions, and the doings of rulers – kings, emperors, popes, prime ministers, and revolutionaries. The fact that these kinds of dates are memorable and widely known shows us that this is the dominant way of thinking about history and of understanding the past…
… This predominant understanding of history is incorrect for three reasons:
- It places emphasis on the wrong events.
- It judges the relative importance of events incorrectly.
- It ultimately misunderstands which events had the most transformative effects on human life.
The political understanding of history leads us to view our situation in a distorted and inaccurate way. It implies that if you want to address social problems or challenges, then politics (whether electoral or revolutionary) is the only way to do it. It implies that the news and events we should pay attention to are political ones, because those are what will have the greatest impact.
But there may be other, better ways of looking at the past.
Let us return to our second list of dates: 5th July 1687, 9th March 1776, and 24th November 1859. These dates are associated with the publication of major works of intellectual inquiry that changed the human understanding of how the natural world works.
The first of these, 5th July 1687, has been rated as the second most significant date of the last millennium, as it saw the publication of the first edition of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. The text brought about a revolution in the understanding of the nature and mechanics of the physical world…
[Davies explains the other key dates…]
… These are all landmarks in a quite different kind of story, one in which the driving force is not politics but intellectual inquiry and discovery. This story’s main figures are scientists and philosophers and thinkers, not politicians and generals. The story is about the gradual growth and deepening of human knowledge, and with it understanding and mastery over the physical world…
… However, there are other, even more important dates, if we think of the impact the events associated with them have had on everyday life and the nature of society, that are even less known and considered. Here we have yet another story or way of thinking about history, one that is almost completely ignored.
Consider our third list of dates and years: 22nd January 1970, 26th April 1956, 1st October 1908, and 1960. Even fewer people would recognize these. However, if you want to understand our world, these are more important than those on the first or second list.
What were they, and why so important? They are when the way we lived changed.
The first, 22nd January 1970, was the first commercial flight of the Boeing 747, the first jumbo jet. This was the outcome of an amazing project, led by figures such as the inspirational head of Pan American Airways, Juan Trippe, and Boeing’s coordinating engineer, Joe Sutter. The project involved the creation of several new technologies and came close to bankrupting Boeing. The jumbo jet transformed air travel from a luxury good to a mass-consumer one. In doing so, tourism, migration, trade, and the exchange of ideas have all been transformed. The world we live in is now far more interconnected and integrated because of this breakthrough. The modern global city is a product of the 747 and the aircraft that followed it. Trippe called the 747 ‘a great weapon for peace, competing with ballistic missiles for the future of humanity.’…
[Davies explicates the other dates]
… Why should we count these events as more important and significant than the iconic events in the political understanding? One reason is that politics is, in a sense, downstream of these technological breakthroughs, as politics is determined and driven by the changes in material circumstances and lived experiences that those events brought.
The forms that events such as wars and revolutions or peaceful politics took were both made possible by the kinds of events we are looking at here but were also limited by them. Certain possibilities were not possible or no longer possible because of the changes brought by these events and the way that they also created systems with limits or unavoidable requirements. For example, after the jumbo jet, containing pandemics with quarantines, as was common in the nineteenth century, has become difficult or impossible.
In this materialist way of thinking, it is material lived experience that determines consciousness and shapes things like culture and politics, and so things that influence or shape that material lived experience are what we should give more weight and attention to…
[Davies offers other examples– the telegraph, the telephone, and radio broadcasting, observing that “almost every aspect of our lives today is shaped in some way by these three events and what followed from them.”]
… If the shared element of the first set of dates was the part played by power in human affairs, what unites the latter ones? These are the dates when technological shifts changed our lives. Human beings, through cooperation, exchange, exploration, experiment, and inquiry, can create novel solutions to challenges and problems, with enormous effects. These are cases when those solutions worked, with predominantly good, but also bad, effects.
Certainly, on an initial comparison the fruits of technology seem to have created more good than the battles of history. This would be even clearer if we thought about other events that could be added to this kind of list, such as the discovery of anesthesia and antisepsis, the synthesizing of antibiotics by Ernst Chain and Howard Florey, the fundamental breakthroughs in our understanding of the biology of infectious disease that were brought by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, or the discovery of the Haber-Bosch process for taking nitrogen from the air to create artificial fertilizer, which reduced the threat of famine and starvation to a historical low.
An understanding of the past in which not just our intellectual successes but our technological breakthroughs occupy pride of place would be very different from the political one that dominates now. Instead of politics and war, and the growth, rise, and decline of states and empires being the focus, the central story would rather be one of human cooperation and inventiveness, innovation and scientific and technological progress and discovery, and the improvement in human well-being than the deeds (often diabolical) of those with power…
If it is the case that human ingenuity solving problems is the most potent force in history, why do so many still fixate upon politics, wars, and revolutions?
Part of the reason is obvious: Those events are dramatic, as unpleasant things often are. A more cynical explanation is that this flatters the self-importance of the most immediately powerful people in society, and also causes the rest of society to see them as more important than they are. It also legitimizes and justifies the actually existing systems and institutions of political power by making it seem that these are the keys to human well-being and advancement.
If our alternative, technology-focused way of thinking about history became the default mode of understanding the past and how our world came to be, rather than the first, many things may change. We might pay less attention to politics and more to technology, science, and business. We would think more about trade and innovation. We might think of technological solutions to social and environmental problems…
… John F Kennedy memorably captured this sentiment in the peroration to his ‘Moon Speech’ delivered at Rice University in Texas in 1961. As he said:
If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in the race for space.
The vision of history and the optimism for the future that he expressed that day is something we should recover…
Do we misperceive politics to be at the center of history? “History is in the making,” from @SteveDavies365 in @WorksInProgMag.
(Image above: source)
* “Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts — between individuals in economic life, between groups in politics, between creeds in religion, between states in war. This is the more dramatic side of history; it captures the eye of the historian and the interest of the reader… History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks.” – Will Durant
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As we parse the past, we might recall that it was on this date in 1865 that the 27th (and conclusive) state (Georgia) ratified the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude (except as punishment for a crime). Proclaimed on December 18, it was the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments adopted following the American Civil War.
The Emancipation Proclamation (made in September 1862; effective January 1, 1863) had freed all current slaves in the U.S. (though as a practical matter freedom took years longer). The Thirteenth Amendment assured that it would never be reinstated.
“History gives answers only to those who know how to ask questions”*…
Scott Spillman on the uses– and abuses– of popular history…
The story of popular historical writing since the middle of the twentieth century is often told as a narrative of decline: there were giants on the earth in those days, but now academic historians have forsaken their responsibility to write for a broader public, which in any case doesn’t really care what they have to say. Back in the golden days, or so the story goes, great scholars such as Arthur Schlesinger, Richard Hofstadter and C. Vann Woodward could make field-defining contributions—such as Schlesinger’s The Age of Jackson (1945), Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition (1948) and Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955)—that also crackled with energy, reached a wide audience and informed public debates. But since the 1960s, academic historians have splintered into narrow subfields that speak only to one another in increasingly esoteric jargon, while the public has become incurious and incapable of reading anything longer than a few paragraphs. Popular history has come to mean political biography and military history, two fields that academic historians often avoid or even disdain.
This story is obviously a caricature. Like all caricatures it gets certain major features right, albeit in exaggerated or distorted form. It also leaves a lot out—not only the details that would bring our gauzy image of the golden days into sharper focus, but also a better sense of what popular history actually looks like today. Because history remains popular. As I write, in the spring of 2024, Erik Larson’s new book about the start of the Civil War, The Demon of Unrest, is the bestselling nonfiction book in the country, while David Grann’s The Wager, about an eighteenth-century shipwreck, has consistently ranked in the top fifteen for more than a year. These are particularly fine examples of a certain genre of history—heavy on character and plot, somewhat lighter on analysis—that is perennially popular and, in the hands of a Larson or a Grann, can be quite rewarding.
But I want to think about a different kind of popular history. What books by writers like Larson and Grann don’t offer, at least not usually, is a broader interpretation of the world, a new perspective on the past that also leads to a new understanding of the present, something that is accessible to a reasonably broad public and offers at least the potential to rearrange a reader’s mental furniture. That, or something like it, is what people mean when they refer with nostalgia to the mid-century moment of Schlesinger, Hofstadter and Woodward.
This kind of serious but popular history does still exist. Our most well-known academic historian in this mode is probably Jill Lepore, the Harvard professor whose snappy essays in the New Yorker have won her a large and admiring readership for the way they put a human face on the historical antecedents of our own time. Yet if Lepore represents the liberal center, the driving force of contemporary interest in history has been the challenges we have seen to the liberal order from the left and the right, symbolized originally by the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, and more recently by Donald Trump and Black Lives Matter—challenges that have sent readers searching through the past for lessons about revolution, capitalism, fascism, racism and liberalism itself…
… In broader public discussions it often seems to be taken for granted that history, and historians, can help us to understand the problems we face. But this consensus obscures deep disagreements about what that help should look like. So it is worth asking: What role do we really want history to be playing in our public life? And is the history we have actually doing that work?…
[There follows a fascinating– and enlightening– historiography of the last 75 years or so.]
… One major role of the humanities, in addition to enabling us to understand ourselves, must surely be to open our minds to lives and perspectives that are very different from our own. It should come as no surprise, then, that the ongoing half-century decline in humanistic education, which has only accelerated in the past fifteen years, has been accompanied by a striking decrease in our ability to understand ideas that diverge significantly from our own, or to imagine ourselves in the position of the people who hold them. Sometimes it seems as if we no longer believe in the possibility of such an act.
Contemporary academic historians who aim to influence public debate often make the problem worse. In the postwar period, Hofstadter could criticize the reform movements that shaped his own political education, while Woodward could express sympathy for both civil rights activists and aristocratic slaveholders. In contrast, historians today are more apt to take sides with their historical heroes lest they give any comfort to their present-day enemies. Often in their books you see a neat division of the past into two teams, such that history becomes little more than a spectator sport…
In the work of these authors, the people whom they supposedly care about are too often depicted as passive creatures who would choose correctly (that is, support civil rights and gun control and national health care) if only they weren’t being hoodwinked and manipulated by nefarious forces beyond their control. If only everyone knew the correct story of American history—namely, the story told in these books—then they would all see the light and be proper liberals. The books often lack any acknowledgment that people of good faith might hold conflicting ideas about the story of American history or that, even if they agree about the basic story, they might draw starkly different lessons from it…
… The purpose of serious popular history should be to make people more self-conscious about their society, to unearth its underlying values and assumptions and to show how past events, in all their contingency and subterranean logic, managed to produce the world we live in today. With the neoliberal order having come to an end, we are at a moment when the meaning of American society is up for grabs in a way that it hasn’t been since the late 1960s and 1970s. It was in that earlier period when many of the writers we think of as the great postwar historians—Hofstadter and Woodward above all—sold tens of thousands of books a year, helping Americans make sense of who they were and what they wanted their society to be. Particularly with the 250th anniversary of independence arriving soon, we may be entering a similar period today.
With that in mind, it’s worth looking ahead to a more hopeful project, still in progress, from the Princeton historian Matthew Karp. Like the popular mid-century historians, Karp’s political and historical outlook was forged by a few searing experiences in young adulthood: America’s failed adventure in Iraq, which shaped the questions he asked in his first book (a look at the expansive foreign policy of another group of conservatives, the slaveholders of the Old South), and then the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders, which turned him from a liberal into a Marx-quoting Democratic Socialist. “I was really swept away by the ideas and the energy behind that campaign in 2016,” he later recalled. “It felt distinct from anything I had experienced in my life not just in terms of what the campaign stood for, but the extent to which it felt like it had developed a mass base for what it was fighting for.”
In addition to his day job as a historian at Princeton, Karp became a contributing editor at Jacobin, where he has been a sharp analyst of election returns. In contrast to historians who merely pretend that their expertise affords special insight into contemporary electoral politics, Karp has actually put in the work. His chief concern has been what is known as “class dealignment,” with upper-class voters now breaking more Democratic while lower-class voters trend Republican. Karp has prodded his readers to honestly grapple with this phenomenon precisely because it poses such a deep challenge to his preferred form of class-based politics, at least insofar as that project might be pursued through the current Democratic Party. Refreshingly, he does not regard the mass of American workers as former or future fascists, but instead as voters who, just like the rest of us, can be won over with better politics and policies. “Underneath the partisan fear and loathing,” he wrote in his first Easy Chair column for Harper’s, published in June of this year, “‘a wide and arduous national life’ still murmurs on, linking city and countryside, crossing lines of race, gender, and culture, waiting to take hold in our politics.” The column used the novels of George Eliot to suggest some of the moral and political limitations of the typical urban Democrat’s condescending attitude toward rural workers.
For his next project, Karp is looking at the greatest example in American history of a political party that assembled a winning coalition around radical class politics: the Republican Party of the 1850s, which managed to go in six short years from nonexistence to control of the federal government by rallying Northern farmers and workers around the politics of anti-slavery. Karp published the first overview of his new research in 2019, just as the presidential campaigns were gearing up, in Jacobin and its more scholarly companion Catalyst. The piece made no present-day comparisons, but it did note that slaveholders in the 1850s made up only one percent of the American population and that the Republicans were successful in overthrowing their power and completely reorienting the policies of the federal government precisely by “building a mass movement to overthrow a ruling-class oligarchy.” “The Republican achievement in the 1850s,” he declared, “was not to isolate moral, cultural, or economic arguments against slavery, but to combine them into a compelling and victorious whole.”
Here, in other words, was a road map for radical movements today, a precursor that people could be proud of and from which they might take some inspiration. Notice that this does not require Karp to whitewash the past or to pretend its arc has always been progressive. More historians might follow his example of reminding readers that American history is at heart not a Manichean tale of good versus bad, or a deterministic tale based on some original sin, but a story of real people struggling to make moral and political decisions in a complex world. Perhaps then more of us would realize that we can exercise a similar agency and responsibility, humor and hope, in the choices we make in our own lives.
This is, and has always been, part of the promise of America—the promise that our inheritance need not define our experience, and that even as we rely on the past for our models we might also begin the world anew. The past can be instructive and informative, but it is not determinative; it surely constrains, but it doesn’t coerce. History can tell us something about who we are and where we have been, but it cannot tell us everything. At its best, it does not consign the story of the present either to epilogue or to tautology, but rather prepares us to appreciate the irony, the unpredictability and the unforeseen possibilities of the chapter we are writing for ourselves…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Popular History” in @thepointmag.bsky.social.
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As we ponder the past, we might send side-eyed birthday greetings to Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay; he was born on this date in 1800. A historian and politician, Macaulay’s hugely-influential The History of England, which manifest his belief the superiority of the Western European culture and of the inevitability of its sociopolitical progress, was an exemplar of the sorts of history against which Spillman argues.
As a Whig politician, Macaulay put the “lessons” of his history to work: he served as the Secretary at War between 1839 and 1841 and as the Paymaster General between 1846 and 1848; he also played a substantial role in determining India’s education policy.
“All cannot be lost when there is still so much being found”*…
We may be close to rediscovering thousands of texts that had been lost for millennia. As Justin Germain explains, their contents may reshape how we understand the ancient world…
We used to play this game in graduate school: find one, lose one. Find one referred to finding a lost ancient text, something that we know existed at one time because other ancient sources talk about it, but which has been lost to the ages. What if someone was digging somewhere in Egypt and found an ancient Greco-Roman trash dump with a complete copy of a precious text – which one would we wish into survival? Lose one referred to some ancient text we have, but we would give up in some Faustian bargain to resurrect the former text from the dead. Of course there is a bit of the butterfly effect; that’s what made it fun. As budding classicists, we grew up in an academic world where we didn’t have A, but did have B. How different would classical scholarship be if that switched? If we had had A all along, but never had B? For me, the text I always chose to find was a little-known pamphlet circulated in the late fourth century by a deposed Spartan king named Pausanias. It’s one of the few texts about Sparta written by a Spartan while Sparta was still hegemonic. I always lost the Gospel of Matthew. It’s basically a copy of Mark, right down to the grammar and syntax. Do we really need two?
What would you choose? Consider that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are only two of the poems that make up the eight-part Epic Cycle. Or that Aristotle wrote a lost treatise on comedy, not to mention his own Socratic dialogues that Cicero described as a ‘river of gold’. Or that only eight of Aeschylus’s estimated 70 plays survive. Even the Hebrew Old Testament refers to 20 ancient texts that no longer exist. There are literally lost texts that, if we had them, would in all likelihood have made it into the biblical canon.
The problem is more complex than the fact that many texts were lost to the annals of history. Most people just see the most recent translation of the Iliad or works of Cicero on the shelf at a bookstore, and assume that these texts have been handed down in a fairly predictable way generation after generation: scribes faithfully made copies from ancient Greece through the Middle Ages and eventually, with the advent of the printing press, reliable versions of these texts were made available in the vernacular of the time and place to everyone who wanted them. Onward and upward goes the intellectual arc of history! That’s what I thought, too.
But the fact is, many of even the most famous works we have from antiquity have a long and complicated history. Almost no text is decoded easily; the process of bringing readable translations of ancient texts into the hands of modern readers requires the cooperation of scholars across numerous disciplines. This means hours of hard work by those who find the texts, those who preserve the texts, and those who translate them, to name a few. Even with this commitment, many texts were lost – the usual estimate is 99 percent – so we have no copies of most of the works from antiquity. Despite this sobering statistic, every once in a while, something new is discovered. That promise, that some prominent text from the ancient world might be just under the next sand dune, is what has preserved scholars’ passion to keep searching in the hope of finding new sources that solve mysteries of the past.
And scholars’ suffering paid off! Consider the Villa of the Papyri, where in the eighteenth century hundreds, if not thousands, of scrolls were discovered carbonized in the wreckage of the Mount Vesuvius eruption (79 AD), in a town called Herculaneum near Pompeii. For over a century, scholars have hoped that future science might help them read these scrolls. Just in the last few months – through advances in computer imaging and digital unwrapping – we have read the first lines. This was due, in large part, to the hard work of Dr. Brent Seales, the support of the Vesuvius Challenge, and scholars who answered the call. We are now poised to read thousands of new ancient texts over the coming years.
But first, a bit of background on the provenance of ancient texts. We don’t have original copies of anything, not of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or Herodotus, or the Bible. Instead of originals, we find ourselves dealing with copies. These were first written on scrolls but later in books – the Romans called books codexes – starting in the first century AD.
Did I say copies? That’s actually not correct either. We don’t have first copies of anything. What we do have is copies of copies, most of which date hundreds of years after the original was penned. Even many of our copies are not complete copies. Take, for example, the earliest surviving piece of the New Testament: a fragment from the Gospel of John known as P52. Far from a complete copy of the book, this fragment is about the size of a credit card and dates to, in the earliest estimation, 125 AD. That is over 100 years after Christ was crucified. The fragment is without a doubt at least a copy of a copy because its dating is too late to be either an original or a first copy. It was also found in Egypt, far from both Judea or Syria, where John is thought to have originated. Finding a complete copy of a text – let alone an early Christian Bible – is a home run. We have only found two such Bibles, the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, both dating to the mid-fourth century.
More often than finding such complete copies, scholars instead compile the various fragments of copies and try to reconstruct the original work. Once scholars agree on what the original text should be, and in some cases they never reach agreement, the text is ready for publication in the original language. Where there are still variants in the text, scholars will include an apparatus criticus citing the manuscript from which the text is published and listing manuscripts with variant readings. The last step is to add a translation in the vernacular, and there are bilingual and even polyglot editions. These could range from the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, a magnificent, six-volume work printed in Madrid in 1519 giving the scriptural text in no less than four languages – Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Aramaic – to the popular Loeb editions printed with both the ancient text and an English translation, for those with some limited knowledge of the ancient languages.
To most fully acclimate the reader to how tenuous this process is, this essay will focus on three different texts. The first will be a very well-known work that was never lost. Nevertheless, almost no one read it in earnest until the nineteenth century. I will then focus on a text that was lost to history, but that we were able to recover from the annals of time. Such examples are fortuitous. Our third example will be a text that we know existed, but of which we have no copies, and consider what important ramifications its discovery could hold. Finally, we’ll turn our attention again to the Villa of the Papyri and the gold mine of texts discovered there that new technologies are currently making available to classicists. By examining the history of the first three texts, I hope to sketch out a picture of how new discoveries from the villa might change our understanding of the ancient world…
[Germain considers Aristotle’s Poetics (“While it’s not accurate to say, as one of Aristotle’s unpublished works, the Politics was ever lost, it was certainly rediscovered”), the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia (a group of fragments that cover Greek history in same period– from the closing years of the Peloponnesian War into the middle of the fourth century BCE– covered by Xenophon, but that tell a different story), and the Constitution of the Spartans, also by Aristotle– a work often cited in other extant texts, but never found (“Imagine an alternate universe where all sources about America were written by Soviets at the height of the Cold War. The historians of the future might get a warped sense of reality. That’s exactly the case with ancient Sparta [e.g., Thucydides]… Although still an outsider and Athenian, Aristotle wrote about the Spartan state in the Politics, and he did not have good things to say. It is safe to assume that whatever Aristotle’s Constitution said, its testimony was not influenced by the Spartan mirage, giving us perhaps a more accurate picture of life inside the city-state.”)]…
… Resurrecting the dead is difficult; Jesus knew that. And the only reason we know that he knew that is because the church saw the preservation of scripture as a core duty. Not one scrap of text from the ancient world has come to us without untold numbers of heroes quietly working to hand down, from generation to generation, the texts that have primarily shaped the modern world. We are thankful for documents like the Politics, documents whose life cycle we can narrate from conception to the present moment. Even then, such texts can fall in and out of fashion, and their knowledge can be lost to entire generations. Texts such as the Hellenic Oxyrhynchia are windfalls of good fortune, ones that are completely forgotten in their own day, then lost a second time to history, buried in some ancient Egyptian trash heap. All the work necessary to make texts like the Politics accessible need also be done for texts like the Hellenica Oxyrhinchia.
Yet there is still another monumental step: the texts must first be discovered. Dwarfed in comparison to the first two groups are texts – such as Aristotle’s Constitution of the Spartans – that were attested to by ancient sources but have been completely lost to the annals of time, like the vast majority of Greek and Latin texts. These sources, while now completely unavailable to us, might yet be discovered at any time, on any dig. On any given day the earth might bestow its blessing, uncovering wonders from the past, as was the case with many of the works of Epicurus, which would have fallen into this latter category of lost works, until we discovered the Villa of the Papyri. Yet even such a fortuitous discovery could not be taken advantage of were new techniques not developed for reading scrolls whose survival depends on not opening them. I always tell my Greek and Latin students that there is a point where the science of translating becomes pure art. Likewise, there is a point at which the recovery, translation, restoration, and, finally, the study of ancient texts becomes treasure seeking. You never know what treasure might be hiding in the next ancient Egyptian trash heap…
Filling in the blanks in ancient history: “Doom Scrolling” in @WorksInProgMag.
For more on the Vesuvius Challenge– its process and progress– see here (source of the image above).
* Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler)
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As we revise, we might send carefully excavated birthday greeting to Karl Alfred von Zittel; he was born on this date in 1839. A geologist and paleontologist, he was a pioneer of evolutionary paleontology and was widely recognized as the leading teacher of paleontology in the 19th century. His five-volume Handbuch der Paläonologie (1876-93) was arguably his greatest service to science, and it remains one of the most comprehensive and trustworthy paleontological reference books.
But he also noteworthily proved that the Sahara had not been under water during the Pleistocene Ice Age.
“Morning, boys, how’s the water?”*…
Dan Bouk (whom I knew primarily for his fascinating book on the census) on the challenge of fielding a carefully-grounded critique of power. He begins with Emerson on Napoleon…
I imagine Ralph Waldo Emerson (Waldo, to this friends) entering a lecture hall in the mid-nineteenth century. His listeners packed tightly against one another, the better to fend off the winter cold. The old sat alongside the young, “bald heads and flowing transcendental locks” abutting “misanthropists and lovers.” This would have been the sixth day and the sixth lecture on this leg of a five-year-long tour for Emerson. Those in the audience who had stuck it out this far would have already heard the great man Emerson explain PHILOSOPHY by explaining Plato, and MYSTICISM with the (now forgotten) Emanuel Swedenborg, and SKEPTICISM through Montaigne, and POETRY via Shakespeare. The critic Andrew Delbanco reports the crowds were “rapt and grateful,” and so we can presume that most in fact stuck it out to the end. Recall that there was no internet to distract them. And so on the final day of the lecture series, Emerson turned his audiences’ attention to the “man of the world,” the practical man, the person who could GET THINGS DONE. His subject was Napoleon Bonaparte, a subject he had every reason to believe would fascinate the entire auditorium…
… Emerson, in the late 1840s, could presume that his audience already knew a lot about Napoleon, that they were likely among the “million readers of anecdotes or memoirs or lives” of the great man. People in the mid-nineteenth century US read about Napoleon for many reasons, and yet it seems that many treated him as a hero. The great social thinker, activist, and feminist of the turn of the twentieth century, Jane Addams, also studied Napoleon’s life. According to her biographer, Louise Knight, Addams spent much of her childhood reading from her father’s library. He paid her a nickel for every book she read and discussed with him. According to Knight, “Great men such as Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Cromwell, and Napoleon were heavily featured.” Napoleon sat alongside the American founders. These were the lives that Addams would later try to emulate. When she founded the settlement project Hull House in Chicago, she was seeking a way to overcome the limits society put on her because of her sex. She too could get things done. Knight says that the biographies of great men taught Addams that “her gender was irrelevant to heroic dreams.”
Emerson’s or Addams’ contemporaries read about the life of Napoleon the way that people today read biographies of Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, and, well,…Napoleon, I guess…
[Bouk then provides a close reading of Emerson’s account of the Le Petit Caporal…]
… I have, over the last fourteen years, assigned this lecture to students many times. I give it to them because it is fascinating, and also because it is confounding. As I seek to get them to think about how and why an author might lead an audience in a strange or unexpected direction, there is no better text, nor a more frustrating one. Because the reader sticks with Emerson for 30 pages; we are pummeled by story upon story and assertion atop assertion of Napoleon’s greatness; then, in the last five pages, Emerson takes it all away from us, and makes the sudden forceful case for the opposite of everything we’ve just been reading.
Early in the lecture, Emerson explained that Napoleon “wrought, in common with that great class he represented, for power and wealth.” His advantage was always that he cared nothing for feelings or morals: “all the sentiments which embarrass men’s pursuit of these objects, he set aside.” And yet, it is still shocking when Emerson turns on Napoleon with full force and asks us to sit with exactly what it meant to be untroubled by sentiment:
His doctrine of immortality is simply fame.
He was thoroughly unscrupulous.
He would steal, slander, assassinate, drown and poison, as his interest dictated.
For thirty pages, Napoleon surpassed all in his abilities and powers.
For the final five pages, he is revealed to surpass all in sociopathy.
What does it all mean?
Here is a recapitulation of the entire lecture: an accounting of unbelievable effects, and then somehow the assertion that NONE OF IT MATTERED…
[Bouk analyzes similar trajectories in Robert Caro’s account of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, and in Jack London’s fictional account of a similar character, Burning Daylight, observing that in each case, as with Napoleon, the vivacity of the portrayal of the subjects actions can overshadow the summary critique…]
… This is the fundamental problem of a well-constructed critical expose. The act of exposure can attract at the same time that it condemns. (See also, every book or film about Wall Street. I’m thinking especially of Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker, which asserted the emptiness of investment banking and still drove masses of its readers to seek out jobs on the street.)
When we swim in the sea, who is prepared to condemn the water?
The dilemma of critique is that it requires using the values of a society to win and keep the attention of readers. But having used those values, what effect can the exposure of their limits really have?…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Oceans of Power and a Tincture of Reproof,” from Bouk’s terrific newsletter Shrouded and Cloaked.
[Image above: source]
* “There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?” -David Foster Wallace (source)
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As we draw conclusions, we might that it was on this date in 1815 that Napoleon boarded the “Bellerophon” and was officially informed that he was being deported to St. Helena.
… At 10.30 am, Admiral Lord Keith, accompanied by Sir Henry Bunbury, Under Secretary of State for War, boarded “Bellerophon” and asked to be received by the one which the English refuse to address as “Emperor” and that they refer to simply as “General Bonaparte”. Without preamble, the Admiral, with the help of General Bertrand, the Grand Marshal of the Palace who acted as interpreter, communicated the decision by the British government to deport him to the island of St Helena so as, he said, “not to allow him the opportunity again to disturb the peace of Europe.” Lord Keith added that the “General” could be accompanied by the three French officers who had accompanied him aboard “Bellerophon,”, as well as a surgeon and ten servants. He concluded by stating that the departure would take place in a few days.
Lord Keith, at the request of the French, then provided some details on the conditions under which the proscribed transportation to the place of their future residence would take place. Since “Bellerophon” was unfit to accomplish such a trip, the French would board “Northumberland” [a few days later]…
Napoleon, indignant, reminded them that he had boarded “Bellerophon” voluntarily; he was the host and not the prisoner of England; that that nation would be covered with opprobrium if it performed such action against him and in violation of its own laws. Both Englishmen remained unmoved. When Napoleon finally stopped talking, they simply replied that they would transmit this protest to the Prince Regent and insisted that “the General” swiftly make known to them the names of his future companions in exile.”
“Having to read footnotes resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love”*…
Gertrude Himmelfarb begs to differ: “The footnote would seem to be the smallest detail in a work of history. Yet it carries a large burden of responsibility, testifying to the validity of the work, the integrity (and the humility) of the historian, and to the dignity of the discipline.”
Matthew Wills channels the estimable Anthony Grafton in defense of the oft-maligned marginalia…
“The history of the footnote may well seem an apocalyptically trivial topic,” writes historian Anthony Grafton. “Footnotes seem to rank among the most colorless and uninteresting features of historical practice.” And yet, Grafton—who has also written The Footnote: A Curious History (1999)—argues that they’re actually pretty important.
“Once the historian writes with footnotes, historical narrative becomes a distinctly modern” practice, Grafton explains. History is no longer a matter of rumor, unsubstantiated opinion, or whim.
“The text persuades, the note proves,” he avers. Footnotes do double duty, for they also “persuade as well as prove” and open up the work to a multitude of voices.
Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), the founder of source-based history, is usually credited with the “invention” of the scholarly footnote in the European tradition. Grafton describes von Ranke’s theory as sharper than his practice: his footnoting was much too sloppy to be a model for scholars today. But various forms of footnotes were used long before von Ranke. Sources were of vital importance to both Roman lawyers and Christian theologians in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, as they strove to back up their own arguments with the weight and gravitas of others…
The history– and importance– of annotation: “History’s Footnotes,” @scaliger via @JSTOR_Daily.
* Noel Coward
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As we check our references, we might spare a thought for James MacGregor Burns; he died on this date in 2014. A historian and political scientist, he is best known for his biographies of American Presidents; his work on America’s 32nd president, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in History and Biography in 1971.
His work was influential in the field of leadership studies, shifting its focus from the traits and actions of “great men” to the interaction of leaders and their constituencies as collaborators working toward mutual benefit.
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