The Trojan War may be well known thanks to movies, books, and plays around the world, but did the war that spurred so much fascination even occur? The excerpt below from The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction helps answer some of the many questions about the infamous war Homer helped immortalize.

By Eric Cline

The story of the Trojan War has fascinated humans for centuries and has given rise to countless scholarly articles and books, extensive archaeological excavations, epic movies, television documentaries, stage plays, art and sculpture, souvenirs and collectibles. In the United States there are thirty-three states with cities or towns named Troy and ten four-year colleges and universities, besides the University of Southern California, whose sports teams are called the Trojans. Particularly captivating is the account of the Trojan Horse, the daring plan that brought the Trojan War to an end and that has also entered modern parlance by giving rise to the saying “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts” and serving as a metaphor for hackers intent on wreaking havoc by inserting a “Trojan horse” into computer systems.

But, is Homer’s story convincing? Certainly the heroes, from Achilles to Hector, are portrayed so credibly that it is easy to believe the story. But is it truly an account based on real events, and were the main characters actually real people? Would the ancient world’s equivalent of the entire nation of Greece really have gone to war over a single woman, however beautiful, and for ten long years at that? Could Agamemnon really have been a king of kings able to muster so many men for such an expedition? And, even if one believes that there once was an actual Trojan War, does that mean that the specific events, actions, and descriptions in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, supplemented by additional fragments and commentary in the Epic Cycle, are historically accurate and can be taken at face value? Is it plausible that what Homer describes actually took place and in the way that he says it did?

In fact, the problem in providing definitive answers to all of these questions is not that we have too little data, but that we have too much. The Greek epics, Hittite records, Luwian poetry, and archaeological remains provide evidence not of a single Trojan war but rather of multiple wars that were fought in the area that we identify as Troy and the Troad. As a result, the evidence for the Trojan War of Homer is tantalizing but equivocal. There is no single “smoking gun.”

According to the Greek literary evidence, there were at least two Trojan Wars (Heracles’ and Agamemnon’s), not simply one; in fact, there were three wars, if one counts Agamemnon’s earlier abortive attack on Teuthrania. Similarly, according to the Hittite literary evidence, there were at least four Trojan Wars, ranging from the Assuwa Rebellion in the late 15th century BCE to the overthrow of Walmu, king of Wilusa in the late 13th century BCE. And, according to the archaeological evidence, Troy/Hisarlik was destroyed twice, if not three times, between 1300 and 1000 BCE. Some of this has long been known; the rest has come to light more recently. Thus, although we cannot definitively point to a specific “Trojan War,” at least not as Homer has described it in the Iliad and the Odyssey, we have instead found several such Trojan wars and several cities at Troy, enough that we can conclude there is a historical kernel of truth — of some sort — underlying all the stories.

But would the Trojan War have been fought because of love for a woman? Could a ten-year war have been instigated by the kidnapping of a single person? The answer, of course, is yes, just as an Egypto-Hittite war in the 13th century BCE was touched off by the death of a Hittite prince and the outbreak of World War I was sparked by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. But just as one could argue that World War I would have taken place anyway, perhaps triggered by some other event, so one can argue that the Trojan War would inevitably have taken place, with or without Helen. The presumptive kidnapping of Helen can be seen merely an excuse to launch a pre-ordained war for control of land, trade, profit, and access to the Black Sea.

In 1964, the eminent historian Moses Finley suggested that we should move the narrative of the Trojan War from the realm of history into the realm of myth and poetry until we have more evidence. Many would argue that we now have that additional evidence, particularly in the form of the Hittite texts discussing Ahhiyawa and Wilusa and the new archaeological data from Troy. The lines between reality and fantasy might be blurred, particularly when Zeus, Hera, and other gods become involved in the war, and we might quibble about some of the details, but overall, Troy and the Trojan War are right where they should be, in northwestern Anatolia and firmly ensconced in the world of the Late Bronze Age, as we now know from archaeology and Hittite records, in addition to the Greek literary evidence from both Homer and the Epic Cycle. Moreover, the enduring themes of love, honor, war, kinship, and obligations, which so resonated with the later Greeks and then the Romans, have continued to reverberate through the ages from Aeschylus and Euripides to Virgil and thence to Chaucer, Shakespeare, and beyond, so that the story still holds broad appeal even today, more than three thousand years after the original events, or some variation thereof, took place.

Eric H. Cline is Professor of Classics and Anthropology and chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, as well as director of the Capitol Archaeological Institute at George Washington University. He is Co-Director of the ongoing excavations at Megiddo (biblical Armageddon) in Israel and the author of Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction, winner of the 2011 Biblical Archaeology Society Publication Award for the Best Popular Book on Archaeology. His recent addition to the Very Short Introductions series is The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with Very Short Introductions on Facebook, and OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

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Image Credit: The Procession of the Trojan Horse in Troy 1773. Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo. Via Web Gallery of Art. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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I’ve been working on the ‘lived experience’ of early modern religion: what it was actually like to be a Protestant in 16^th or 17^th century Britain. And I’ve become more and more convinced there’s a crucial element of the story almost completely missing from the standard accounts: children.

Read most histories of early modern religion and you could be forgiven for concluding that there were no children in this period. But we are dealing with huge numbers of people: perhaps a third of the population of early modern England was under 12. And while every adult had of course been a child at some point, large numbers of children never became adults.

The sources are very thin. Most early modern Protestants saw childhood as a period of mere depravity, needing only correction. The period’s most popular devotional work, Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety, asked, “what is youth but an vntamed Beast? … Ape-like, delighting in nothing but in toyes and baubles?” But a few patterns do emerge. Saying grace at table was, almost routinely, a child’s role in a family. Children’s patterns of prayer can be glimpsed sometimes – learning prayers by rote, or making vows. And we do have occasional testimonies of children’s actual religious experience – a seven year old finding “unexpressible joys” in reading and prayer, a four year old stargazing and meditating on God’s power.

A unique image of a Protestant family at prayer, from Auckland Castle, County Durham. As usual, the children are there only as an afterthought.

But we would be stuck with these glimpses if it not for two extraordinary accounts written in the 1630s. Richard Norwood and Elizabeth Isham had both read Augustine’s Confessions, newly translated into English, and had learned from it that it was worth paying close attention to how God had worked in their lives before their actual conversions. So Norwood described his schoolboy psalm-singing, and how, aged seven or eight, he was “taken with great admiration of some places” in the Bible. He remembered (and counted as a sin) “at several times reasoning … about whether there were a God”. Adults assured him that God loved him, but he was not sure “how they could know it was so”. And when he tried to share his enthusiasm for Scripture with his parents, “they made me little answer (so far as I remember) but seemed rather to smile at my childishness”. This made him wonder whether what the preachers taught was true, “or whether elder people did not know them to be otherwise, only they were willing that we children should be so persuaded of them, that we might follow our books the better and be kept in from play.” Norwood was that rare thing: an adult who could remember what it was really like to be a child.

Or again, the Northamptonshire gentlewoman Elizabeth Isham described how her religion took shape in counterpoint to her mother. She was taught to pray from infancy, but when she was eight years old, “I came to a fuller knowledge of thee”, through praying earnestly “to avoyde my mothers displeasure”. Her mother’s wrath was no joke: in her rages, Judith Isham had a servant hold her daughter down, the better to beat her. Elizabeth recalled that “in these dayes feareing my parents I had no other refuge but to flie unto thee”.

It was her grandmother who showed her another way. When the old lady was ill, and the nine year old Elizabeth was caring for her, she was struck by the delight her grandmother took in her devotional reading. For Elizabeth, as for so many other children before and since, books were her liberation. As her reading accelerated from her tenth year, her religion blossomed. It also brought greater peace with her mother, who took advice from a clergyman friend and developed a new way of dealing with her daughter. When she saw Elizabeth misbehave, instead of flying into a rage, she would “holde her fan afore her face”, praying for patience and judgement. This gave Elizabeth time to reflect on her error, so that as soon as the fan was lowered she would go and ask forgiveness, and would be set a penitential task, “which I performed with the more dilligence she having delt so well with mee”. We rarely come so close to a happy ending.

These are very individual stories, and that is part of the point: children are individuals, and neither happy nor unhappy families all resemble one another. But they do remind us that children take their own lives, including their religion, immensely seriously, and can be very finely attuned to managing the loving, unpredictable, condescending, inattentive and sometimes incomprehensibly punitive adult world.

They also suggest to me that there is much more to be done here. We have long learned the importance of gender to any serious historical analysis. It is time to pay attention to this equally pervasive division, and to this even more forgotten slice of humanity.

Alec Ryrie studied History and Theology at the universities of Cambridge, St Andrews, and Oxford. He is now Head of Theology and Religion and Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University. His most recent book, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain, published in April 2013. His previous books include The Age of Reformation (2009), The Sorcerer’s Tale (2008), The Origins of the Scottish Reformation (2006) and The Gospel and Henry VIII (2003).

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Image credit: Courtesy of Alec Ryrie. Do not use without permission.

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When the first Eurovision Song Contest was broadcast in 1956, the BBC was so late in entering that it missed the competition deadline, so it was first shown in my native England in 1957. Nonetheless, it seems as if this curious example of pan-European co-operation, which started with seven countries and is now up to 40, has been around forever. Certainly as the 1950s gave way to the ’60s, the contest created a degree of national fervour in Britain, and I suspect in most other parts of Europe. At its peak, it’s estimated to have drawn in around 600 million viewers worldwide.

The competition’s only seldom been part of the pop mainstream, and at the time when the Beatles and Rolling Stones were becoming world famous in the 1960s, Britain entered the bland sounds of Kathy Kirby and Matt Monroe instead. It took Britain’s first two wins, by Sandie Shaw in 1967 and Lulu in 1969 to bring about a convergence of pop culture and the more mainstream vocal entertainment of the contest. Meanwhile 1950s heart-throb and subsequent film-star Cliff Richard was controversially beaten into second place in 1968 with “Congratulations” — a song that has stood the test of time rather better than Spain’s winning “La La La,” (sung in Spanish by Massiel after the original Catalan entry by Joan Manuel Serrat was withdrawn by the Franco regime). Abba’s success with “Waterloo” in 1974 marks one of the few genuine moments when the contest reflected wider international taste. They aimed squarely at winning and did so, bringing their distinctive sound and utter professionalism to a vastly greater audience through their success in the competition. Some other acts were successfully launched on the world stage as a result of first being seen by an international audience during the finals, including early appearances by Julio Iglesias and Céline Dion.

Yet that is one of the reasons the contest is so fascinating. At a time when European monetary and political convergence is a burning question for governments, the Eurovision contest demonstrates just how varied approaches are to popular songs and entertainment across the continent, from Portugal to Azerbaijan, and from Norway to Israel. Dance moves, costumes, gestures, lyrics, and language convey insights into how other European countries go about the business of entertainment in a far more insightful way than almost any other television spectacular. Ukranian drag queen Verka Serduchka’s antics and lyrics upset Russia in 2007, but in 2006 Finnish heavy metal band Lordi took the world by storm in an over-the-top performance with latex masks, prosthetic beards and horns. Amazingly, they managed to convey rock and roll as a religion without alienating too many special interest groups.

Even back in the 1960s as we crouched round the flickering image of our black and white televisions, the voting system seemed arcane. It still does. The results can sometimes be skewed by blocs of countries who vote together for, one suspects, not entirely artistic reasons. Announced first in French and then English, the underdogs who only score “nil points” often become popular with the viewing audience for that very reason. Poor old Jemini gave the UK its first “nil points” in 2003, but in 1997 Portugal and Norway shared the ignominy of no votes at all, and in 1983 the same fate befell Turkey and Spain. Norway still holds the record for the greatest number of “nil points”. The term has entered the European vernacular, in many countries, describing a competitor who tries hard but with no hope of winning.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So now this year’s contest is under way in Malmö, Sweden, what can we expect? The sheer number of competing countries now means two nights of semis before the final, which takes place this Saturday, 18 May 2013. The bookies are backing Denmark and Norway to triumph in this very Nordic contest, but I have a hunch that after Engelbert Humperdinck’s not entirely satisfactory entry last year, the Scandinavians will be given a run for their money by British entry Bonnie Tyler. A legend of 80s pop with her great hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” Tyler is a Welsh singer who has the rare distinction of also topping the charts in France. She has also had hit records in Norway, Austria, Switzerland and Germany. When it comes to tactical voting, she’s potentially got a lot of different countries on her side! At least the title of her entry is a little more modest than Cliff Richard’s from 1968: it’s called “Believe In Me”.

Alyn Shipton is the author of Nilsson: The Life of a Singer Songwriter, to be published on July 18. He is also a critic for The Times in London and presents jazz programmes on BBC Radio.

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14 May 1948

The following is a brief extract from The History of the World: Sixth Edition by J.M. Roberts and O.A. Westad by J.M. Roberts and O.A. Westad.

From the beginning of the Nazi persecution the numbers of Jews who wished to settle in Palestine rose. As the extermination policies began to unroll in the war years, they made nonsense of British attempts to restrict immigration, which was the side of British policy unacceptable to the Jews; the other side – the partitioning of Palestine – was rejected by the Arabs. The issue was dramatized as soon as the war was over by a World Zionist Congress demand that a million Jews should be admitted to Palestine at once. Other new factors now began to operate. The British in 1945 had looked benevolently on the formation of an ‘Arab League’ of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Yemen and Jordan. There had always been in British policy a strand of illusion – that pan-Arabism might prove the way in which the Middle East could be persuaded to settle down after post-Ottoman confusion, and that the co-ordination of the policies of Arab states would open the way to the solution of its problems. In fact the Arab League was soon preoccupied with Palestine to the virtual exclusion of anything else.

Proposed UN partition of Palestine 1947 (c) Helicon Publishing Ltd

The other novelty was the Cold War. In the immediate post-war era, Stalin took the view that Britain and the United States would rival each other for world dominance, and that the Soviets would be served by stirring the pot. Verbal attacks on British positions and influence therefore followed, and in the Middle East this, of course, coincided with traditional interests … The Americans struggled with making out their position. There was major public support in the United States for Zionist views, fueled by the terrible revelations that were coming out of the Nazis’ death-camps.

Thus beset, the British sought to disentangle themselves from the Holy Land. From 1945 they faced both Jewish and Arab terrorism and guerrilla warfare in Palestine. Unhappy Arab, Jewish and British policemen struggled to hold the ring while the British government still strove to find a way acceptable to both sides of bringing the mandate to an end. American help was sought, but to no avail; Truman wanted a pro-Zionist solution. In the end the British took the matter to the United Nations. It recommended partition, but this was still a non-starter for the Arabs. Fighting between the two communities grew fiercer and the British decided to withdraw without more ado.

On the day that they did so, 14 May 1948, the state of Israel was proclaimed. It was immediately recognized by the United States (sixteen minutes after the foundation act) and the USSR; they were to agree about little else in the Middle East for the next quarter of a century.

Reprinted from The History of the World: Sixth Edition by J.M. Roberts and O.A. Westad with permission from Oxford University Press, Inc. Copyright © 2013 by O.A. Westad.

J. M. Roberts CBE died in 2003. He was Warden at Merton College, Oxford University, until his retirement and is widely considered one of the leading historians of his era. He is also renowned as the author and presenter of the BBC TV series ‘The Triumph of the West’ (1985). Odd Arne Westad edited the sixth edition of The History of the World. He is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics. He has published fifteen books on modern and contemporary international history, among them ‘The Global Cold War,’ which won the Bancroft Prize.

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When perusing the internet for innovations in the oral history discipline, I generally seek out new voices, intuitive platforms and streamless presentations. Embarrassingly, I rarely consider the basics of oral history collection and production, the act of sharing someone’s story with a wider audience. That is one of several reasons I so enjoyed Brad Rakerd’s contribution to Oral History Review issue on Oral History in the Digital Age, “On Making Oral Histories More Accessible to Persons with Hearing Loss.” In his piece, Rakerd discusses the obstacles people with hearing loss or other limitations on speech understanding face when engaging with oral history, and offers several recommendations to allow scholars to make their material more accessible. Mad with the power of the OUPblog post, I contacted Rakerd to prod him for more information.

What is your relationship with Oral History in the Digital Age?

I am one of the developers and editors of the Oral History in the Digital Age website, and have contributed two tutorials on speech audio to its essay collection. I also worked on the IMLS Field Work Survey and, of course, I wrote my article for the Oral History Review as an outgrowth of the OHDA project. I have very high regard for the work that oral historians do and it has been a great pleasure to be able to contribute in these ways.

And how did you become interested in hearing loss?

I am trained as a speech and hearing scientist, and when I conducted my dissertation research and other early career studies of speech perception, I worked exclusively with listeners who had normal hearing. It was only later, after I joined my current department — the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders at Michigan State — that I had the opportunity to learn about hearing loss and its consequences. I did so through conversations with my very supportive audiology colleagues, and later, through a series of research collaborations with them as well.

When did you first think about your work in relation to oral history?

I first learned about oral histories when a former student of mine introduced me to the MATRIX folks here at Michigan State. It was our discussions about best practices for digitizing oral history collections and improving the audio quality of future oral history recordings that ultimately led to my participation in the OHDA project. Those discussions also prompted my thinking about ways to make oral histories more accessible to persons who have hearing loss.

Which lead to your article in the current issue of the Oral History Review?

Yes. Something about oral histories that has stood out to me from the start is that they must be listened to at great length and with great care if they are to be fully appreciated. Listening in this way can be a challenge for anyone. But the challenge can become especially great if the listener has a hearing loss or other limitation on speech understanding. Therefore, the purpose of my article is to recommend some steps that oral historians can take to ease some of this added difficulty.

There are recommendations for capturing and delivering oral history recordings in ways that can make the audio more accessible to anyone who has a hearing loss and who may use either hearing aids or cochlear implants. And there are recommendations for using video and other technologies to supplement the audio in ways that should make it easier to understand. One example of the latter is to make a video of an interviewee available for viewing in synchrony with the audio so that a listener can have access to lip reading cues. Another example is to allow the pace of an oral history presentation to be adjustable so that it can match the information processing preference of an individual listener.

Between this conversation and your article, you’ve provided a lot for us to mull over. Anything else you would like people to consider when working with oral histories?

There is one point about speech that I would make to everyone who works with oral histories, one that applies equally to those of us that work with speech in the lab: It is almost guaranteed that you are a poor judge of the degree of challenge that your own speech recordings will present to first-time listeners. This is true because you have heard those recordings many times over and, in the process, have become deeply knowledgeable about their content and about the speaking characteristics of your interviewee(s). As a consequence, the speech will almost certainly sound more intelligible to you than it does to anyone else. You might therefore think about working out a “buddy system” with some fellow oral historians, one where you serve as a fresh listener and critic regarding the challenges posed by their recordings, and they do the same for yours.

While Brad’s article focuses on making oral history more accessible to those with hearing loss or other speech comprehension obstacles, this last response demonstrates how working through seemingly “niche” issues can actually benefit the practice as a whole. Now, who needs a buddy?

Brad Rakerd is a professor in the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders at Michigan State University. His speech research focuses on perceptual processing issues, often as they relate to hearing loss. His article “On Making Oral Histories More Accessible to Persons with Hearing Loss” in the latest issue of Oral History Review is available to read for free for a limited time.

Caitlin Tyler-Richards is the editorial/media assistant at the Oral History Review. When not sharing profound witticisms at @OralHistReview, Caitlin pursues a PhD in African History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research revolves around the intersection of West African history, literature and identity construction, as well as a fledgling interest in digital humanities.

The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. Follow them on Twitter at @oralhistreview, like them on Facebook, or follow the latest OUPblog posts to preview, learn, connect, discover, and study oral history.

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Image credit: What? Closeup for hand on ear. Image by zwolafasola, iStockphoto.

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The Great Gatsby is one of the best-known American novels, but weirdly, and strangely reflective of Gatsby himself, one of the least understood. The much-awaited Baz Lurhmann version of The Great Gatsby opens in the United States tomorrow, and like Gatsby himself — as a new trailer reminds us — the novel is “guarding secrets.”

In the course of the novel, and no doubt the new film version, we find out what Gatsby is hiding: not only his criminal bootlegging, but also his family name, Gatz, and his poor, ethnic-American roots, which in the end exclude him from the upper-class Anglo-American social circles he hoped to enter. We understand his frustrated American dream, and we understand too why he felt the need to fabricate for himself the pedigree of a patrician family with the Anglo-sounding surname Gatsby.

We’ve all been taught the novel is about the disappearing American dream, but that’s only part of the story, the postwar part. The other part, the “back story” set during World War I, is about the American dream suddenly and dramatically on the rise: how Gatsby, this “Nobody from Nowhere,” as Daisy’s husband Tom calls him, gets to meet Anglo-American princess Daisy on equal terms, so she can fall in love with him. Tom will be “damned” if he sees how Gatsby “got within a mile of [Daisy] unless [he] brought groceries to the back door.”

Of course, what got Gatsby in the front door of her house during the war was his officer status: “he went to her house, at first with other officers from Camp Taylor.” The novel makes clear how the war gave Gatsby a new social status when it made him an officer. He crossed the “indiscernible barbed wire” between classes when he put on the “invisible cloak of his uniform.”

What the novel doesn’t answer is how Gatsby, a poor farm boy from North Dakota and apparently a German-American to boot, got to be an officer in the US Army when Germany was the enemy. The novel definitely “guards secrets” on this point. Did Gatsby fool the army the way he fools most of the people in the novel about himself, with his polished manner, his false name, and his invented family background? The novel’s narrator Nick Carraway naturally comes to doubt Gatsby’s account of a military commission that was supposed to have been issued out of a made-up upper-class background.

Then how does Gatsby make officer? The novel gives two hints on the subject, which most critics have ignored and most readers, informed by the criticism, read right past. In fact, as a college professor, I’ve taught many students who think they remember the novel pretty well from high school but have forgotten that Gatsby was even a soldier.

Nick eventually corrects Gatsby’s romantic saga of his promotion in the American Army, from lieutenant to major at the front as a result of his combat heroics, and notes, “He was a captain before he went to the front.” That’s the first hint. The second is that Fitzgerald put Gatsby at Camp Taylor though it was at Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama that he met his future wife Zelda — for many critics, the obvious inspiration for Daisy.

Photograph of F. Scott Fitzgerald c. 1921, appearing in “The World’s Work” (June 1921 issue)

Take these tiny, seemingly meaningless hints to the library and the archive, and here’s what you discover. The World War I American army, which had to build an officers’ corps of 200,000 rapidly and almost from scratch, needed some quick methods for identifying men who might be officer material, and specifically those who might make good captains. It developed a couple of unprecedented programs to do so: a rating system for identifying captains, and an intelligence test that identified potential officers and superior officers. The even more radical move that the army made — shocking to privileged young men, such as Fitzgerald, who expected traditional class and ethnic discrimination — was not to exclude immigrants and ethnic Americans from consideration for officer. (Indeed, the army’s initial plan was to have no racial prejudice and to open up such promotions to blacks as well, but the government under pressure from Southern civilian officials nixed the original idea of a complete meritocracy.) The army designated four training camps at which to pioneer the intelligence tests in late 1917 and Camp Taylor was one of them.

Fitzgerald would have known about this because he was at Camp Taylor in 1917, which is when, in the novel, he has Gatsby pass through. Someone like Gatsby — that is, someone born in America and a high-school graduate in an era when the average white man completed less than seven years of schooling — would have aced the intelligence tests, which, as we know, tested for education and cultural literacy, not native intelligence.

The other thing to know about Camp Taylor is that there were a large number of men of German descent there; by end of the war, they numbered nearly 1500. There is no doubt that the American army, though it was fighting Germany, had plenty of German-American officers. A French soldier reported with shock in 1917: “You could not imagine a more extraordinary gathering than this american [sic] army, there is a bit of everything, Greeks, Italians, Turks, Indians, Spanish, also a sizable number of boches [Germans]. Truthfully, almost half of the officers have German origins.”

Why would Fitzgerald have cared about how Gatsby made captain — and more to the point — why would he have been secretive about this information? Here it helps to know that Fitzgerald was frustrated in his own military ambitions and his army record was an embarrassment to him. Though he made it into officer training by taking an entrance exam open to college students, he never got sent to Europe, and captain was precisely the rank he desired and had fantasies about, but never achieved. He stalled at first lieutenant, the rank below. And this was at a charged wartime moment when masculinity was being equated with combat service and army rank. To make matters worse for him, he watched men who he considered his social inferiors make that rank of captain and pass him by.

It is unlikely that Fitzgerald imagined Gatsby making it into officers’ training on the basis of fabrications because fabrications were irrelevant to the army’s personnel processes. One of the reasons the army liked the intelligence tests so much, flawed though they were, was because they got around the problem of relying on soldiers’ possibly false accounts of their own education and skills. As the wartime Committee on Psychology put it in a memorandum, they eliminated “the danger of charletans” (sic).

In short, the particular American mobilization for the World War I, with its new and very particular methods for selecting officers meant that a nobody like Gatsby could be chosen for officer training and specifically promoted to captain while still at camp. The novel reflects this moment — the moment Gatsby wants to recover, in his desperate effort to “repeat the past.” 

It also reflects the backlash of the WASP establishment against upstart “war heroes” like Gatsby after the war. And, unfamiliar with obscure US Army history and taking our current world of meritocratic promotion for granted, that’s all that strikes us about the novel.

Will the new movie reveal Gatsby’s secret? Probably not. But I was happy at least to see that one of the official trailers put emphasis on the mystery of Gatsby’s rise as well as his soldiering in World War I.

Keith Gandal is the author of the 2010 Oxford paperback, The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization. He is currently working on a comic memoir on the subject of researching Fitzgerald and the other Lost Generation writers, titled Moments of Clarity, Years of Delusion: A Scholarly Detective Story.

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Image credit: Images one and three from The Great Gatsby movie copyright Warner Brothers Entertainment. Used for purposes of illustration. Image two from The World’s Work (The World’s Work (June 1921), p. 192) Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Just when, where, why, and how should American power be used? Current assumptions about the near omnipresence—though far from omnipotence—of US power, its influence and its reach are now shaky. Yet these same assumptions coexist alongside widely shared views that such power could and should be used. Perspectives on the application of US power are hotly contested—ranging from the advocacy of using force and providing “lethal aid” to revolutionaries in Syria, to the idea of strategic (née preemptive) bombing of nuclear facilities in Iran. Only idealistic aims—e.g. humanitarian intervention and foreign aid—in the use of power are generally acceptable. Indeed, even as the President and Secretary of Defense aver that “all options are being evaluated,” they do not “foresee boots on the ground.” These choices reflect recent developments. Such alternatives simply did not exist for most of US history. Nor, of course, did the nation always hold the power it possesses today.

For the majority of American history weakness, not strength—and certainly not “power” as we understand it now—defined how American policymakers, thinkers, activists, military leaders, and citizens tended to understand their nation’s place in the world. Protecting the state, not using scarce power or resources abroad, and holding European—especially British—encroachment as far off as possible, were the preferred military and diplomatic strategies of US leaders and citizens through the late nineteenth century and, for many, well into the twentieth century.

Three policy pillars in American foreign relations are the foundation for past as well as present considerations of whether and how to deploy US power. The premise for all three was an understanding of weakness, what we might term cautious realism coupled to a vision of isolation, which sought to stay out of power politics, foreign wars, and binding international treaties and regimes.

George Washington in his Farewell Address of 1796 designed this architecture: “to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” Yet even before that speech, Washington had established the nation’s neutrality as a formal policy tradition with the Proclamation of Neutrality (1793) and the Neutrality Act (1794). These neutrality declarations ran contrary to the alliance with France, which had helped win the Revolutionary War. They officially distanced the US from allies and enemies alike and asserted the guiding principle that America would pursue “a conduct friendly and impartial towards the Belligerent powers.” Washington’s Farewell Address, partly written by Alexander Hamilton along with James Madison and read in Congress almost every year until quite recently, set the explicitly isolationist tone. It aimed to recognize the nation’s limited power in order to nurture the safety and progress of the state (and hence, national power one might say). These, in turn, became the basis for virtually all subsequent invocations of a “tradition” in American foreign relations. Washington built on this notion of the new nation as neutral and impartial when he put forward the classic formulation:

The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible…. Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concern…. Therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.

These Washingtonian principles did not turn the nation away from the world. Instead, the ideas formed the crux of foreign policy realism and argued for a cautious sense of America’s place in the world and for choosing “war or peace, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.” Washington took into account the inherent fragility of American power and the nation’s precarious place in the world, emphasizing America’s distant geographical position as a key to strategic separation and as a brake on involvement in Europe’s hazardous political system. These views were then established as precedent by John Adams and reaffirmed by Thomas Jefferson, who allayed the fears of many Federalists when he underscored a shared set of Washingtonian-Adamsian foreign policy principles in his own inaugural address in 1801.

Jefferson asserted this ideal as “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” Jefferson held a clear belief grounded on the practicality of a type of isolation: enter no enduring alliances with the Old World and steer clear of Europe’s petty squabbles. Jefferson’s daring and farsighted purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1803 propelled the great mission of continental expansion and improvement, doubling the nation’s territory. And of course the Purchase limited the amount of North American land that European powers could claim or conquer. When regarded in this light, his unilateralist efforts were consistent with the idea of isolation as a guarantee toward maintaining and protecting national sovereignty—of giving the weak, fledgling nation time to develop and grow while avoiding entanglements such as those that Ben Franklin derisively termed Europe’s “romantick Continental Connections.”

A circumspect view of American power still was evident in 1823, when President James Monroe pronounced his doctrine. An ambitious articulation of American hemispheric power, the Monroe Doctrine evolved as the guiding view for later foreign policy advocates of interventionism as well as isolationism, many of whom agreed that unilateral involvement across the Americas was perfectly legitimate, but that beyond the Western Hemisphere the nation should avoid foreign wars and the corruptions of particularly Old World political intrigues. Monroe centered this argument on what he saw as an obvious fact: “With the movements in this hemisphere we are of necessity more immediately connected,” and therefore he declared that “we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”

Thus, in three bold strokes, Washington, Jefferson, and Monroe laid out the essential isolationist mode of thinking about their young nation’s most advantageous relationship to the world. As we will be discussing at the Oregon State University American Military and Diplomatic History Conference today, 7 May 2013, these arguments became the benchmarks that a broad range of subsequent politicians, thinkers, and citizens later had to confront as they built their own cases for engagement abroad and justified their developing visions of internationalism. One point is clear about interpreting the meaning of their words in their own time. This dedicated triad of America’s founders articulated a commerce-first form of unilateralism and a sense of cautious realism, which at its most fundamental level sought to protect their young, weak nation by favoring isolation from almost all entangling alliances as well as conflicts abroad, particularly those involving Europe.

Americans today debate possible new interventions, withdrawals, disputes over what does and does not constitute a “red line,” and other applications of power abroad in light of enormous geopolitical changes and challenges. Let the debate consider the long history of cautious realism, the recognition of the limits to power, and the concern about the unintended consequences of foreign policy adventurism. The history cannot be blinked away. It is central to American diplomatic and military policy.

Christopher McKnight Nichols is a professor at Oregon State University and a Senior Editor for the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History. View the Melbourne launch of the Encyclopedia, or attend the American Military and Diplomatic History conference at Oregon State University on 7 May 2013.

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Each year on 8 May, the Red Cross and Red Crescent societies of dozens of nations unite in celebration of World Red Cross/Red Crescent Day. This global event observes the birthday of Henry Dunant, one of the founders of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (ICRC), and commemorates the humanitarian principles that this organization represents. This year’s Red Cross Day is a particularly noteworthy occasion for the year 2013 marks the 150^th anniversary of the ICRC’s founding.

This 8 May 2013, the American Red Cross (ARC) will join 186 other national societies in marking this momentous occasion and honoring the ICRC’s sesquicentennial. This probably comes as little surprise: after all, the ARC is an important and influential humanitarian organization, both domestically and globally. And yet, this has not always been the case. It was not until 1881, 18 years after the ICRC’s creation, that US citizens formed their own national Red Cross society. Only in the early 20^th century, moreover, did the ARC come to be recognized as a major international war and disaster relief society. The story of these developments — of the creation of the American Red Cross and its path to becoming the official voluntary aid association of the United States — is an important part of the history of US international engagement, and of its evolution at the turn of the last century.

This process began in 1859, when a young Swiss citizen named Henry Dunant observed a bloody battle in Solferino, Italy and witnessed the horrors of wartime suffering firsthand. The experience convinced him of the necessity of establishing permanent associations of humanitarian volunteers, ready to provide neutral medical care on the battlefield whenever the need arose. These ideas started coming to fruition when, in February 1863, Dunant met with four fellow Swiss citizens in Geneva to develop an organization dedicated to the relief of wounded soldiers. The result of their meeting would be the formation of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The ICRC’s founding members lobbied for two goals: the creation of Red Cross societies in every nation and the passage of new international laws to protect both wounded soldiers and aid workers. By August 1864, their mission had achieved considerable success. In Geneva, representatives from twelve nations signed a treaty to establish international standards for wartime humanitarianism, the First Geneva Convention. In the ensuing months and years, additional countries would become signatories as well.

Jean Henri Dunant (1828-1910), Swiss author and philanthropist, founder of the Red Cross society. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

In 1864, the ICRC’s leaders invited the United States to participate in this fledgling international humanitarian movement. However, the US government demurred. Preoccupied with the nation’s ongoing Civil War, policymakers had their hands full with domestic concerns. Yet even after the Civil War came to an end, US diplomatic officials chose not to follow the growing number of nations that had signed the Geneva Treaty. Citing longstanding precedents in US foreign policy, dating back to the 18^th century, government officials declared it best for the United States to avoid entering any entangling political alliances with Europe.

Not all Americans agreed with this decision. Several former members of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, an agency that provided aid to sick and wounded Union soldiers during the US Civil War, lobbied the government to join the International Red Cross Movement. Beginning in the early 1870s, so did an American woman named Clara Barton. Barton had served as a volunteer during the Civil War, helping to deliver medical supplies to Union field hospitals and to identify wounded and dead soldiers. After the Civil War ended, she traveled to Europe to rest and recover. Soon, however, she became involved again in war relief. After the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Barton volunteered with the newly formed ICRC to assist its medical aid efforts. It was there that she met Dunant and became inspired by his international humanitarian mission.

Clara Barton, (1821-1912), president of the American Red Cross from 1882 until 1904. Image courtesy of The Library of Congress.

In 1873, Barton returned to the United States and began to lobby against the U.S. government’s policy of non-engagement. For nearly a decade, she led a twin crusade for US ratification of the Geneva Convention and the formation of an American Red Cross society. Eventually, Barton achieved both of her goals. In May 1881, she and fifty-one other US citizens drafted and signed a charter to create the American Association of the Red Cross. The next year, in the spring of 1882, the United States joined a growing body of nations — in Europe and throughout the world — in ratifying the Geneva Convention. US government officials had come to see signing the Geneva Convention as compatible and consistent with US foreign policy goals. As Secretary of State James G. Blaine put it, the American tradition of non-entanglement in foreign political affairs “was not meant to ward off humanity.” Thus, in the early 1880s, the United States became a belated entrant into the world’s foremost international humanitarian movement.

The ARC remained quite limited, in terms of its membership, finances, and power, for several decades to come. It was not until 1900 that the US Congress granted the organization its federal charter. Although President William Howard Taft designated the agency as the “official volunteer aid department of the United States” in 1911, it was only during the First World War — fifty years after the First Geneva Convention — that the ARC began to attain broad popular support and financial stability. It took US entry into the conflict, in April 1917, for the ARC to truly solidify its status as the recognized face of American humanitarian aid.

American Red Cross Parade, Birmingham, Alabama. Birmingham View Company., 05/21/1918. Image courtesy of the U.S. National Archives.

Despite this slow progress, the creation of the American Red Cross and the subsequent US ratification of the Geneva Convention in the early 1880s marked a major milestone in the histories of US humanitarianism and international cooperation. On 8 May, as the world unites in celebration of the 150^th anniversary of the ICRC, it is worth taking a moment to remember how the United States and its citizens came to see relieving the suffering of others as a national and an international obligation.

Julia F. Irwin is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Florida. She specializes in the history of U.S. relations with the 20^th century world, with a particular focus on the role of humanitarianism in U.S. foreign affairs. She is the author of Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening. Her current research focuses on the history of U.S. responses to global natural disasters.

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The high-profile marking of John Snow’s bicentenary on the fifteenth of March would have surprised the great man. The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the WellcomeTrust, and The Lancet were among the august UK organisations to honour him with events including an exhibition, three days of seminars, and a gala dinner. The physician was also celebrated in the United States where he has a large fan base.

By the time of his death, on 16 June 1858 at the age of 45, Snow was convinced beyond doubt that his theory on the mode of transmission of epidemic cholera was correct but had little expectation that any credit would accrue to him. His friend, the Soho curate Henry Whitehead, said Snow predicted that he might not live to see the day when great cholera outbreaks were in the past — which was true — and also that his name would be forgotten when that day came, which was not. On the contrary, he is now widely regarded as the father of the science of epidemiology, with his life and work the subject of countless books, articles and web pages, while 200 years after his birth his legacy remains the focus of lively academic debate.

But it’s an unfair world. Achievement alone isn’t always enough to ensure that an individual, however deserving, secures a place in history and in Snow’s case, myth had a role to play. Not that Snow appeared at all interested in fame, posthumous or contemporary. Another friend, Josuah Parsons from his student days, remarked: “The naked truth for its own sake was what he sought and loved. No consideration of honour or profit seemed to have the power to buy his opinions on any subject.” That was just as well, for both honour and profit were in short supply, at least where his groundbreaking work on epidemic disease was concerned.

By the mid-1850s when Snow published his seminal work on cholera he was enjoying some success in the fast-developing specialism of anaesthesia, even attending Queen Victoria at the birth of two of her children. His thinking on disease was largely ignored, however, mainly because he rejected the then widely accepted belief that foul air, or miasma, was to blame. He reasoned, correctly, that cholera was spread when some of the matter thrown off by a victim — the vomit or the massive cloudy discharges from the bowels — found its way into a healthy person’s mouth. He also explained the disease’s frightening habit of striking hundreds of people simultaneously without warning: the cause was infected sewage leaking into the water supply, a common occurrence in the first half of the 19th century. He was not believed.

In the summer of 1854 in order to test his theory Snow carried out what become known as the Grand Experiment, tramping the streets of South London while the country was in the grip of its third cholera epidemic, knocking on doors and asking which of two water companies the householder used. He discovered that customers of the company that took its supplies untreated from the Thames, right next to where the sewers of London were discharged, were between eight and nine times more likely to die of cholera than those whose supplier had recently moved its source upriver, out of reach of the filth.

It was as Snow was putting the finishing touches to this work that he became involved in the Broad Street episode. His serious academic reputation is largely based on the South London research, but it is Broad Street that has contributed most to his enduring reputation, linking as it does a compelling story with two icons — a “death map” and the image of a street pump — with the addition of a little fiction along the way.

Overnight on Thursday, 31 August 1854, 200 people in a tiny part of Soho around Broad Street and Golden Square were struck down by a massive explosion of cholera, the fastest and most deadly ever seen in Britain. Whole families were carried off together. The epidemic continued for 10 days, still confined to a few streets, before petering out. The eventual death toll was over 600.

When Snow heard what was happening, he first looked at the addresses where the fatal cases had occurred and then went on to pioneer what is now a vital tool in epidemiology, disease-mapping, marking the deaths, house by house, on a street plan. The map showed just how local the outbreak was; all the deaths clustered in and around Broad Street. What interested Snow, however, was that those deaths either plummeted or stopped altogether at every point where it was easier to go to another pump than the one in Broad Street.

On the night of 7 September then, a week into the epidemic, Snow gate-crashed a parish meeting at St. James’s church, Piccadilly, where the Board of Guardians responsibly locally for public health were discussing the outbreak. Polluted water from the Broad Street well was to blame, he told the Guardians. They must put the pump out of action.

So far, all true. At this point in some accounts though a little creative licence creeps in. After a bitter row with the recalcitrant authorities, we are told, Dr Snow then storms off, either to chain up the pump handle himself or wrench it off with his own hands. In fact while the authorities were far from convinced, they did take Snow’s advice and the pump was disabled.

The next piece of fiction is that the deaths then stopped in their tracks and, hey presto, overnight John Snow was vindicated. Truth was, the epidemic had already peaked of its own accord; putting the pump out of action proved nothing. The longer, more complex story of how John Snow was proved right is actually more interesting but it’s easy to see why such a satisfying ending to the tale has evolved. And if myth has proved helpful in ensuring that a brilliant man who was dismissed and reviled during his lifetime is now so rightly celebrated, it’s no bad thing.

Sandra Hempel is a writer and editor who specialises in health and social issues. Her book The Medical Detective – John Snow, Cholera and the Mystery of the Broad Street Pump won the British Medical Association book award for the public understanding of science and the Medical Journalists’ Association book award. Her next book The Inheritor’s Powder, which looks at arsenic poisoning and forensic toxicology, is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson on 13 June 2013. She recently gave a talk at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine about John Snow.

Throughout the year, the International Journal of Epidemiology will be publishing special reprints marking John Snow’s bicentenary, including The Siege of Krishnapur by J. G. Farrell and Cholera, with reference to the geological theory: A proximate cause – a law by which it is governed – a prophylactic by John Lea. The IJE is an essential requirement for anyone who needs to keep up to date with epidemiological advances and new developments throughout the world. It encourages communication among those engaged in the research, teaching, and application of epidemiology of both communicable and non-communicable disease, including research into health services and medical care. OUP publishes the journal on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association.

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Image credits: (i) John Snow, seated, resting right arm on table, anon. (ii) ‘A cholera patient’, caricature of a cholera patient experimenting with remedies (Robert Cruikshank’s random shots No. 2) (iii) Street Map of Soho, around Golden Square, illustrating incidences of cholera deaths during the period of the Cholera Epidemic, 1853. All three images are used with permission from the Wellcome Trust. Do not reproduce without express permission.

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On the fifth of May, many in the US and Mexico will celebrate Cinco de Mayo, the commemoration of Mexico’s victory over the French at the Battle of the Puebla in 1862. In this excerpt from Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food, Jeffrey Pilcher looks at Cinco de Mayo and the first written instance of the word “taco.”

Although Manuel Payno introduced the taco to many readers in the 1890s, there was at least one prior literary reference to the snack, which likewise revealed ambiguities and social divisions within the national cuisine. This earlier mention, by another liberal author, Guillermo Prieto, came at a critical moment in Mexican history—the Cinco de Mayo victory at the Battle of Puebla by largely indigenous troops over the French invaders. But rather than exalting a national dish, Prieto used the taco to spoof the Europeans and bring them down to the level of Indians. Throughout the nineteenth century, elites perceived indigenous food as a shameful category within the national cuisine; such food was undoubtedly Mexican but associated with Aztec barbarism and backwardness. It was not a treasure to celebrate but rather a condition to overcome on the path to modernity. [...]

Tortillas and Tacos by Peggy Greb, U.S. Department of Agriculture. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Good Forey!
You drank wine of the maguey
until you lost your head:
ate pipián and tamalli,
tlemolito with xumiles,
and tired yourself of mextlapiles
in your tacos of tlaxcalli.

In these brief verses, Prieto first spoofed the Frenchman for going native, getting drunk on pulque while eating tamales, pumpkin seed sauce (pipián), and, most degrading of all, stinkbugs (xumiles) in chile broth (tlemolito). Unspoken in the text, but obvious to contemporaries, was an equally cruel jibe at Almonte, the illegitimate son of a Native American woman, Brígida Almonte, and the priest and independence war hero Father José María Morelos. Although the conservative diplomat moved comfortably in European royal courts, speaking fluent English and French, Prieto dismissed him with racist stereotypes of the ancient Aztecs. As a final insult, the taco served to emasculate General Forey. The mextlapil on which he tired himself was a stone rolling pin, used to grind corn by hand for making tortillas (tlaxcalli), the most stereotypically feminine task in Mexican society and one that no self-respecting man would ever be seen undertaking. What may be the first recorded taco thus served as propaganda in the campaign to expel French invaders and restore the Mexican Republic. Yet Prieto was not celebrating the indigenous troops who had helped to defeat the French.

Jeffrey M. Pilcher is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of several books including Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food. He also edited the Oxford Handbook of Food History.

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Bird Day began in 1894 as part of the wildlife conservation movement that sprang up in response to the slaughter of the bison and the Passenger Pigeon. Birds always had a large role, for they were threatened but also familiar and fascinating. More than any other form of life they drew and held people, becoming for many a lifelong interest, passion, and even obsession. This generation made identifying birds by sight or (less frequently) song a popular hobby, and with it a new kind of book: the field guide. Birding now draws more people than any other outdoor recreation, from every part of the country and ranging from those who want to see every bird on earth to the much greater number who keep a field guide on the windowsill and a casual eye on the bird feeder in the backyard. They buy guides of every kind and check websites with up-to-date information on migration, rarities, and oddities. Some birds become celebrities. “Pale Male,” one of a pair of red-tailed hawks nesting in New York City, attracted a local, then a national following, and their courtship and nesting led to a book, Red-tails in Love.

Birders always went with bird conservation for Audubon’s founders saw the hobby as a way to get women outdoors and interested in nature so they would support bird conservation. Their political work began with campaigns against market hunting and for the protection of songbirds, went on through work for nature reserves, then the banning of pesticides like DDT, and saving the ecosystems on which birds—and all of us–depend. Birders’ cooperation with science goes back as far and has a rich a history. In 1900 amateurs sent their observations to ornithological journals; in the 1920s they joined the national bird-banding program organized by the Bureau of Biological Survey; in the 1980s signed up for the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s Breeding Bird Survey; and now they contribute to citizen science programs gathering data to analyze changes in bird populations across the continent. In a world of climate change and growing human populations, birds provide one of our best windows on we affect nature, and birders serve as the eyes and ears and the interested hearts of that effort.

Reed’s sparrows Reed’s shirt pocket-sized books were easy to carry. From Chester A. Reed, Bird Guide: Part Two, Land Birds East of the Rockies from Parrots to Bluebirds (1906; reprint, New York: Doubleday, Page, 1912).

Because the world keeps changing research never stops, but what keeps the scientist active also makes birding a continuing adventure, as much an exploration of nature as a matter of checking off species. Even on their home grounds birders see annual variation as birds expand their ranges or move out of their area, and occasionally the spectacular irruptions of new species or the occasional collapse of established ones. In the 1950s the self-introduced cattle egret spread through the country, and now the introduced Eurasian collared dove is doing the same. Cave swallows began nesting in the square drainage pipes under large highways, and ornithologists and birders remade their range maps. Recently West Nile virus devastated birds in many parts of the United States. As residues of the banned pesticide DDT leached out of the environment, bald eagles and peregrine falcons returned to parts of their old ranges, and now we can hope to see a eagle soaring over Minneapolis or an urban falcon taking a pigeon over Fifth Avenue.

Birders support conservation and work for it, but they go to the field because birds fascinate them, and here we come back to Bird Day’s original purpose — celebrating birds and inviting us to learn more. Those who want to learn about birds have many more resources than their ancestors. The few field guides available in 1894 treated a small selection of birds, had poor illustrations, and gave only hints about how to tell one bird from another—not surprising when even experts could not reliably distinguish all species in the field. Now every bookstore has shelves of guides with the latest tips on field identification, illustrated with digital photographs or expert paintings even more expertly reproduced, arranged to guide the reader to the right name, and catering to every interest and level of expertise. Roger Tory Peterson’s books, written for people with some experience but not a great deal, sit on bookstore shelves next to David Sibley’s guide, the National Geographic guide, and a dozen more for those who have outgrown “Peterson.” Further along we find volumes on identifying hawks at a distance or sorting out immature gulls, and a new form that offers on one page a dozen or more views of the species sitting, standing, and soaring — a miniature library of images. Audio guides make learning bird songs as easy as sorting out their distinctive plumages, and software puts field guides on our phones. Those tired of identification or just interested in birds in other ways can consult handbooks about birds’ lives, their evolution, and their development.

Seton’s raptors, Auk 14 (Oct. 1897): 395-396

Birders can pursue their passion as far and in as many directions as they wish, for the hobby, though identified with listing, gives us a way to pay attention to the natural world. We can wander, study, and marvel in whatever ways attract us. It has never been a better or more important time to be involved with birds and never a better time to celebrate Bird Day.

Thomas R. Dunlap is Professor of History at Texas A&M University, He is the author of In the Field, Among the Feathered: A History of Birders and Their Guides and Faith in Nature: Environmentalism As Religious Quest.

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Image credit: Both images in the public domain and courtesy of the author.

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Despite lying at the intersection of both history and international relations — two of the most popular disciplines in the contemporary arts academy — diplomatic history is seen as old-fashioned. New, trendier, and leftier approaches have risen. Consider that of the 45 historians at the University of Wisconsin in 2009, 13 (or 29%) specialized in gender, race, and ethnicity; only 1 (or 2%) studied diplomatic history or US foreign policy. Between 1972-2009, the Journal of American History published 36 articles that expressed some sympathy for American communism and not a single one which was critical.

The bestselling history textbook remains Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980). Zinn was unabashedly liberal-leftist in his approach. His book is currently the 860^th bestselling book in America. Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People, a conservative interpretation, is 19,331^st. This is not to argue over the academic merits of both books but to observe that Zinn’s leftism has necessarily affected how many students and their teachers understand US history. Despite over 40% of Americans describing themselves as conservative, less than 16% of academics identify that way. The American academy, no less American historiography, is a liberal hegemony.

Why this imbalance? After all, diplomatic history has hardly been the preserve of conservative scholars. Perhaps the most important 20^th century work of diplomatic history was William Appleman Williams’ Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959) — the inspiration for a wave of left-leaning revisionist histories of US foreign policy. Christopher McKnight Nichols and David Milne, my two associate editors for the Oxford Encyclopedia, would comfortably locate themselves on the progressive wing of modern politics. Liberal historiography is a very broad church.

One possible answers lies in the necessary focus on the ‘great man’ thesis of history — either implicitly or explicitly — in the work of many diplomatic historians. Men, and it largely is men, have been the key foreign policy makers until comparatively recently. They have lead nations, fought wars, and dictated the terms of peace. All the great commanders-in-chief in US history have been men because all 42 presidents have been men.

As a way around this, university students are increasingly presented with impersonal forces and told these are responsible for injustice or are, conversely, the locomotives of progress. Racism, economic deprivation, and gender inequality color the research agendas of a substantial number of historians. Ameliorate these forces and we can enter the sunny uplands of progress and equality. It is not individuals that move history but forces, pressures, classes, sexes, races, even climate. Nations, led by individual leaders, are made to matter less than the United Nations, led by supposedly progressive impulses.

The diplomatic historian, of course, may be in sympathy with some of this. But he or she must also acknowledge the elite nature of much of what he or she studies: the president and his foreign policy principals, ambassadors and military commanders. And that elite, until the era of Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, was overwhelmingly white and male.

This modern bias against elitism and ‘great men’ and in favor of the explanatory power of impersonal forces is inherent in much contemporary historiography. Diplomatic historians find themselves having to bridge the divide. If only there were more of them — liberal and conservative — doing it.

Timothy J. Lynch is an Associate Professor, Director of the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Associate Dean for Research at the University of Melbourne. He is the editor-in-chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History. View the Melbourne launch of the Encyclopedia, or attend the American Military and Diplomatic History conference at Oregon State University on 7 May 2013.

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The central story of China’s economic reforms and the resulting economic miracle has been the move from a centrally planned to a largely market economy, and the emergence of a market-based and mainly private sector alongside the old state-owned sector. Most quantitative trends are still in that direction, and legal and institutional reforms, notably stronger property rights within a situation of limited rule of law, have provided some support. Nevertheless, China has maintained its distinctiveness from other varieties of capitalism, both in rhetoric (“socialist market economy”) and in reality. The Communist Party state retains a more powerful role in the economy than is the case with most capitalist countries, and the trend has by no means been unidirectional from state to private or from planning to market.

Indeed, over the past several years there has been a lot of discussion in China over a counter trend, that is “the advance of the state and the retreat of the private” (guo jin min tui). On the one hand this reflects the on-going perception in the Chinese leadership that only the “national champions”—the massive state-owned companies—are likely to be able to compete on the international stage. Moreover, the nature of the 2008 stimulus package—heavily weighted to large-scale infrastructure—meant that many of the resources went to state-owned companies. At the same time, the trend also involves struggles for power and wealth between different groups in society. Thus as the Economist reported, state interests were successful in the mid-2000s in seizing some 4,000 privately run oil wells in north-west China.

Chinese President Hu Jintao (L) talks with Vice President Xi Jinping as they leave after the closing session of the National People’s Congress on March 13, 2009 in Beijing, China. (Photo by Guang Niu)

One of the main arenas of contention between state and private interests has been the coal industry. Of course this is an arena where genuine claims of public interest can be made. China is critically dependent on coal as a source for its energy (coal provides around 70% of China’s total energy needs), a dependence that causes major environmental problems, and in that situation the state could be expected to pay close attention to the industry in any society. Moreover safety, or rather the lack of it, has provided a major reason and pretext for state intervention. Up to the early 2000s China’s coal safety record was an international embarrassment, with far higher levels of fatalities and fatality rates per million tons of coal produced even than other developing countries. This became a matter of concern both for the leadership and for the educated public in general. Wen Jiabao’s history as a geologist contributed to making this issue a major focus of the more “populist” agenda of the Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao leadership. The worst safety record was found among the smaller rural and private mines, and therefore provided the pretext for a series of attempts to curtail or control such mines. It also allowed the state and the press to paint the small mine owners as “black-hearted coal owners,” and they received public sympathy.

The two trends—a general extension of state power in the economy and concern for coal safety—came together in the attempt to consolidate and rationalize the coal industry in the late 2000s. This happened most famously in Shanxi province, until 2008 China’s largest coal producer, and similar policies were then extended to other provinces, though with some variations. In Shanxi, the policy took the form of empowering State-owned mining enterprises to take over the resources of small mines within an area allocated to each of the large mines, thus ruling out any competition over resources. This was widely perceived, though not official described, as the (re-)nationalization of coal resources.

Private enterprises and owners not surprisingly felt bitter at the implementation of this policy, and argued strongly that any compensation that was paid was entirely inadequate. Owners among the local rural population were angry at being forced to sell below value, with dark rumours about bribes paid to local officials. But many of the targets of the policy were extra-provincial investors, and thus people for whom the provincial government would feel no particular responsibility. The largest group was from Wenzhouin Zhejiang, whose investors had sunk tens of billions of yuan into the Shanxi coal industry in the 1990s and 2000s. The overall trend towards the strengthening of property rights was shown by the fact that the Wenzhou owners felt able to fight the takeover, using media campaigns to denounce the nationalization and the state’s encroachment on private rights. They also attempted to call on the rule of law, hiring lawyers, who held workshops and conferences in Hangzhou to protest the policy, arguing that it contradicted the principles of the socialist market economy. Nevertheless the trends towards stronger property rights and the rule of law were only incipient, and it would appear that the mine owners’ protests had limited effect, and the nationalization went ahead.

Private owners were not the only interests adversely affected. By concentrating ownership in the hands of state owned enterprises at the provincial level, the policy also deprived local governments of the major part of their revenue streams and local populations (and migrant workers) of many employment opportunities. Thus there was much less enthusiasm for the policy at the county level and below than at the level of the province, though outright opposition was limited by the heavy weight the central state was giving to the improvement of work safety in assessing officials for transfer and promotion: the policy does appear to have very substantially reduced the accident rate, and resistance could be made to seem irresponsible. In addition to generating tax revenues, local governments had previously been able to pressure private mine owners into contributing to a wide range of social expenditures. As one local official complained, although they could get the private owners to build roads or schools almost at will, they couldn’t even get the new province-level owners to construct a public toilet.

One must be careful in extrapolating the experience of the Shanxi coal industry to the national economy, but at the minimum this episode shows that the state retains levers and the willingness to use them to impose its will on the enterprise sector to a far greater extent than in most other capitalist countries. While private owners appear to have a greater ability now to articulate their interests in public, they are still not able to roll back the advance of the state at the expense of the private where the state—or key elements of the state—sees its core interests involved.

Tim Wright, Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Bibliographies in Chinese Studies, is Emeritus Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Sheffield, UK.  His research focuses on modern Chinese economic history, in particular natural and economic shocks to the economy, and on the political economy of contemporary China. His publications include Coal Mining in China’s Economy and Society, 1895–1937, The Chinese Economy in the Early Twentieth Century: Recent Chinese Studies, and The Political Economy of the Chinese Coal Industry: Black Gold and Blood-stained Coal.

Developed cooperatively with scholars and librarians worldwide, Oxford Bibliographies offers exclusive, authoritative research guides. Combining the best features of an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopedia, this cutting-edge resource guides researchers to the best available scholarship across a wide variety of subjects.

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Image credit: National People’s Congress 2009 via iStockphoto.

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When you hear the name “Henry Ford” do you feel a certain shiver inside? Does a sober look come over your face as you mumble, “Well, he was a terrible anti-Semite”? You aren’t wrong of course, as many books and articles have documented through the years. In fact, that reaction probably places you in the majority. Of course, you know about the Model T and the assembly line too.

But do you also know that 100 years ago he wrote about the ruinous effects of tobacco, and promoted the salubrious effects of a healthy diet and a good deal of exercise on a long and productive life? Furthermore, since he realized that oil wouldn’t last forever, he spent years trying to invent alternative fuels made from vegetable materials. Due to his abhorrence of waste, some 53 industries were created through his attempts to find uses for the byproducts of his factories — just one was the invention of the charcoal briquette from the wood shavings on his shop floor.

The assembly line itself was only one aspect of his most important creation: mass production, which was the foundation of our modern culture of material abundance, that replaced the age old culture of scarcity and want. The Model T, built on the assembly line, was probably the most important and influential piece of technology since the printing press. It was the basis on which mass production was built; the end result of the process was a new type of person, the worker-customer. Ford’s employment policies toward blacks, women and the handicapped, among others, were decades ahead of their time. His work in agriculture on soybeans alone would have made him a significant figure in 20^th century American history.

But then there was the other side. His relentless self-promotion led to self-aggrandizement that was breathtaking in its scope, eventually allowing him to live on a reputation for socially-advanced ideas and achievements long after they began to warp and break down. Uneducated though he was, a rural 19^th century man in background and outlook, he nevertheless came to believe that his preeminent success as a businessman ordained him as a modern sage, a leader who could guide ordinary men to a better life through his ideas. Unfortunately, many of his ideas were regressive and small-minded; sometimes they were far worse.

One of these ideas was anti-Semitism. He spent over six years and millions of dollars promoting vile Judeophobia through a series of articles called The International Jew in his Dearborn Independent periodical, reprinting them in books and publishing the notorious (and discredited) Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which even today have a pernicious anti-Semitic effect in certain parts of the world.

Furthermore, by 1937 a growing meanness in this increasingly isolated man led to an oppressive, militaristic atmosphere in his workplaces. The friend of the workingman had nearly become his enemy. Another demerit in his ledger was his ability to clothe personal greed in a mantle of civic virtue, as he did in the Muscle Shoals affair in the Tennessee Valley in 1923 and the Detroit banking Crisis of 1933.

Soaring heights and abysmal depths in his character produced a wildly mixed record in his public life and subsequent reputation. He remains an ambiguous figure, as much of a puzzle and a mystery today as he was when he lived.

Vincent Curcio is the author of Henry Ford; Suicide Blonde: The Life of Gloria Grahame; Chrysler: The Life and Times of an Automotive Genius; and, with Steven Englund, Charlie’s Prep. He was the General Manager and Producer of Lucille Lortel’s White Barn Theater for 25 years.

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Image credit: (1) Henry Ford, full-length portrait, standing, facing slightly left, leaving the White House after calling on the president. 1927. National Photo Company Collection via Library of Congress. (2) Vincent Curcio author photo by Michael Domenick Tedesco.

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According to the Daily Mail, Oi! records were ‘evil’. According to the Socialist Worker, Oi! was a conduit for Nazism. According to the NME, Oi! was a means to inject ‘violent-racist-sexist-fascist’ attitudes into popular music.

The year is 1981, and on 3 July the Harmbrough Tavern is set ablaze in the London borough of Southall. Trapped inside the pub are three bands aligned to the Oi! movement initiated the previous year from within the pages of the Sounds music weekly. Therein, by contrast, Oi! is defined as a form of ‘working-class protest’, a ‘loose alliance of volatile young talents, skins, punks, tearaways, hooligans, rebels with or without causes united by their class, their spirit, their honesty and their love of furious rock ‘n’ roll’. Oi!, for most of those involved with it, was punk without the art school pretensions; a street-level music that sought to align working-class youth cults in the face of welfare cuts and growing unemployment. And there lay the rub. For Oi! comprised skinheads; and by 1981, skinheads were being recruited as foot-soldiers for the British far right, both the National Front and the British Movement. An Oi! gig in Southall, therefore, where a large Asian community had previously felt the brunt of cowardly racist attacks and witnessed the violent aftermath of an NF election rally in 1979, was a red-rag to a community fed up with being on the defensive and ready to respond. And respond the community most certainly did.

Covers of the first four Oi! compilations, released 1980–2. Source: “Oi! Oi! Oi!: Class, Locality, and British Punk” by Matthew Worley in Twentieth Century British History

The events of July 1981 have forever tainted Oi! Caught in the reductionist media snare, Oi! fell into an equation the broadly read: Oi! = skinheads = racism. In truth, however, Oi! was a rather more complex phenomenon. Though its lyrics and imagery tended to combine social resentment and patriotism in a way that provided a potential pathway to and from the far right, Oi! also contained a class awareness and a cultural heritage that suggested it was far more than a musical wing of the NF or BM. Indeed, many involved in Oi! actively (and literally) fought back against right-wing attempts to appropriate their music, a struggle that led eventually to the NF setting up its on ‘white power’ scene circa 1983. Rather, Oi!’s focus and lyrical preoccupations reflected tensions inherent within the socio-economic and political realities of late 1970s and early 1980s Britain. Like the punk culture from which it emerged, Oi! provided a contested site of critical engagement that allowed voices rarely heard in public debate to articulate a protest that cut across existing notions of ‘left’, ‘right’ and formal political organisation. More specifically, it revealed and articulated processes of political and socio-cultural realignment directly relevant to the advent of Thatcherism and collapse of the so-called ‘consensus’ that informed British politics from 1945.

As this suggests, an analysis of the bands, audience and ephemera associated with Oi! reveals much about class identity in the late 1970s and early 1980s, offering a snapshot of working-class youth in a period of significant socio-economic change. Notably, too, the debates that surrounded Oi! were informed by realignments on-going within British politics, both in terms of youthful disengagement from the political mainstream and the ‘cultural turn’ generated by a growing emphasis on ‘new’ spheres of struggle (race, gender, sexuality, youth, culture, language, consumption). Put bluntly, the politics of class were being overtaken by what some on the left called a ‘consciousness of oppression’ located in personal identity. This, in turn, shifted attention from the socio-economic to the cultural and, in the process, served to scramble some of the class and racial certainties that had once underpinned the politics of left and right. As the left became associated with students and ‘minority groups’ that made headway on questions of race and identity, so sections of the far right set out to ensure that the ‘grass-roots movement of workers and leadership of the working class does not rest with the communists and left but with the right’. In amidst all this, Oi! was caught in the crossfire: a medium for working-class protest interpreted as a recruiting ground for fascism.

Oi! then was not a vehicle for ‘evil’, Nazism or any other sort of ‘ism’. Its protest was made in primarily class terms, with its working-class origins serving as a common denominator across those associated with it. True, politics – along with youth cultural identities and, on occasion, football rivalries – provided points of tension. But the bands, poets, writers and audience associated with Oi! forged a class-conscious version of punk that sought for a political and cultural impact that looked beyond the rarefied confines of the students’ union, Daily Mail and NME.

Matthew Worley is a professor of modern history at the University of Reading. He is the author of several books and articles on British politics, and is currently writing a study of British youth culture and politics in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His article “Oi! Oi! Oi!: Class, Locality, and British Punk” is available free in Twentieth Century British History for a limited time.

Twentieth Century British History covers the variety of British history in the twentieth century in all its aspects. It links the many different and specialized branches of historical scholarship with work in political science and related disciplines. The journal seeks to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, in order to foster the study of patterns of change and continuity across the twentieth century.

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By John Randolph Fuller

From April 1888 to February 1891, history’s most infamous cold case emerged when a series of 11 murders ripped through London’s working-class Whitechapel district. All of the murdered were women, and most were prostitutes. Whitechapel was one of the poorest areas in London and by the 1880s some of England’s grimiest industries, such as tanneries and breweries, had become established there. Poor Londoners, rural English folk, and immigrants crowded in looking for work, but the district’s poverty was so overwhelming, many of the women who found themselves there became prostitutes, living and dying in squalid anonymity.

These conditions made Whitechapel the perfect hunting ground for killers. Of the 11 murders committed, five murders of prostitutes were attributed to a person called Jack the Ripper. The Ripper probably killed more than five women, but only these could be directly connected to him. The crimes were shocking and fascinating: the shock brought attention to the plight of Whitechapel’s poor which led to some transitory social reforms, but the fascination brought attention to the crimes of Jack the Ripper into the 21st century.

Jack the Ripper’s murders have been the subject of a slew of fiction and non-fiction books, films, short stories, graphic novels, and web pages. The murder even got his own “ology,” with people studying the murders calling themselves “Ripperologists.” Every few years, it seems, someone arrives with a new theory about the Ripper’s identity or some “startling new” evidence. In 2002, crime novelist Patricia Cornwell published a controversial book offering up artist Walter Sickert as Jack the Ripper. In 2012, author John Morris insisted Jack was a woman. Another researcher insists the Ripper was an American murderer named H.H. Holmes. The suspect list doesn’t end there. Lewis Carroll is on it, along with the Duke of Clarence, Sir John Williams, and on and on.

Why do we still care? Serial killers and murderers are at work somewhere in the world every day. For example, since 1993, hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico have been routinely killed, with some being dumped into mass graves. The explanations are prosaic: jealousy, drugs, domestic violence, gang wars, robbery, rape. Some may be the product of a serial killer, but so many women have been murdered, it’s hard to tell. The police make arrests, but the murders continue. This story and others like it have been repeated for a couple of decades, but those murders don’t seem to have the appeal of Jack the Ripper. Why?

Is it the lack of a catchy moniker for the killers? “Jack the Ripper” does have a ring to it. Is it the gruesomeness of the murders? The Ripper not only killed his victims, he eviscerated them with surgical precision. Whoever the Ripper was, he knew his way around a human corpse. Is it the era? Victorian London was certainly an evocative place, and Victorian Whitechapel is stuck with all the sooty baggage the term “Dickensian” couldn’t carry. Whitechapel was much as one Ripper suspect was described: “of shabby genteel.”

The scores of years that separate us from the Whitechapel murders might make the whole business seem gloomily romantic to us, but it was terrifying to those who lived through it. Although serial murder had doubtless been committed prior to 19th-century England, the Ripper murders were systematic and one of the first times the public could really get its hands on all the juicy details. News about the murders were not just passed by word of mouth, they were printed in newspapers along with photographs of the victims. Both the murderer and the victims became individuals in the minds of the public. It was just the killer that they couldn’t put a face on.

It can be argued that the traditional systems of English—and by extension, American—justice has something to do with the Ripper’s popularity. These systems evolved to focus on the individual offender and his or her rights: the police are under pressure to arrest the person who is actually responsible, not just anyone. (The police in London arrested several people for the murders, but had to let them go.) The courts are under pressure to convict the correct suspect. Everyone looks foolish when suspects are in jail, and the slaughter continues. These factors, combined with a freewheeling media that publicizes any new information it can get, tend to individualize the offender.

Recall that 11 women were murdered between 1888 and 1891, but only five were attributed to Jack the Ripper. Who killed the other six women? Many Ripperologists say those, too, were the work of Jack, but others disagree. Two or more killers might have been at work separately, or “Jack the Ripper,” might have been several people working together. But the public likes to imagine the killer as a single person, an individual. It is much easier to put a face on, and a personality into, one person rather than many. It is thrilling to imagine one person bursting with that much evil.

We will never fully understand the Ripper’s methods or motive, or why the murders stopped, although most criminologists would say that serial killers only stop when they can no longer kill. They are either dead or incarcerated. It is unlikely that Jack the Ripper chose to stop killing. Something stopped him, but nothing will stop us from wondering who he was.

John Randolph Fuller is Professor of Criminology at the University of West Georgia and author of Juvenile Delinquency: Mainstream and Crosscurrents, Second Edition.

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Image credit: Jack the Ripper’s “Dear Boss” letter (part 1) postmarked 25 September 1888. (National Archives MEPO 3/142). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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There’s a lot we still don’t know about the Vikings who raided and then settled in England. The main documentary source for the period, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, simply tells us that Viking armies raided Britain’s coastline from the late eighth century. Raiding was followed by settlement, and by the 870s, the Vikings had established a territory in the north and east of the country which later became known as the ‘Danelaw’. Here, the Chronicle famously records, Scandinavian armies ‘shared out the land… and proceeded to plough and to support themselves’.

Despite over 50 years of research, many fundamental questions about the Scandinavian settlements remain unanswered: which areas of England saw the greatest settlement? How many settlers were there? Did they get on with the locals? Were they all men? Until recently, there was little in the physical record to provide answers. Archaeological traces of Scandinavian settlement were notably few: just a handful of Scandinavian-style burials and rural settlements have been found in England, for instance, while the Scandinavian contribution to urban development and certain strands of material culture, such as stone sculpture, remains elusive.

Within the last 20-25 years, this picture has changed dramatically. Thanks largely to metal-detecting, there has been an explosion of new finds of Viking-Age metalwork recovered from areas of known Scandinavian settlement. Surprisingly prominent within the new finds is female jewellery in Scandinavian styles: brooches and pendants worn by women in everyday dress. To date, over 500 such items have been found, scattered across large swathes of rural England.

The date of the jewellery chimes exactly with written accounts of the settlement (c. 870-950). Its careful study reveals that while some items were made locally after a Scandinavian fashion, others are likely to have been imported from the Scandinavian homelands, probably on the clothing of female settlers. Although Anglo-Saxon women also wore brooches, they were of a very different style to those favoured by Scandinavian women, so it’s clear that the new jewellery finds represent a distinctly ‘foreign’ dress element. The jewellery being unearthed in England is strikingly similar to that found in Scandinavia, particularly its southern regions: there are disc, trefoil, lozenge, oval, and bird shaped brooches decorated with animals and plants from the Scandinavian art styles of Borre, Jellinge, Mammen and Urnes. Encountering women on a walk around tenth-century Norfolk, you could be forgiven for thinking that you were in Denmark.

Viking-Age Scandinavian-style brooches from England

The discovery of such artefacts is unexpected, not only because such jewellery was unknown in England a generation ago, but also because it helps to elucidate a population group with has, until now, been largely invisible. Faced with a dearth of both archaeological and written evidence for Scandinavian women in England, historians have tended to assume that settlement was carried out entirely by men, who took wives among the local population. The jewellery offers the first tangible archaeological evidence for a significant female Scandinavian population in Viking-Age England, potentially numbering in the thousands. In this way, it is revealing the presence of women we never expected to see.

Women were not merely participants in the settlement process; they were active agents in negotiating relationships with the existing, Anglo-Saxon population. Their jewellery became a platform for the expression of cultural values, usually in a way that maintained Scandinavian traditions. One observable trend is that female dress in the Danelaw preserved Scandinavian preferences for particular brooches long after they had fallen out of fashion in the homelands. This deliberately archaising suggests that articulating historical ties via jewellery was important in a new settlement context, when cultural memories were likely to be challenged. The fact that it was done through women’s dress highlights a role for women as bearers of cultural tradition in Danelaw society.

The jewellery also provides a fresh perspective on one of the most elusive of topics regarding the Viking settlements, namely, their location. We tend to think of Yorkshire and the north-east Midlands as Viking hotspots, due in part to the areas’ Scandinavian-style place-names and stone-sculpture (as well as the success of the Jorvik Viking centre). Yet female jewellery here is rare, being concentrated instead in rural Norfolk and Lincolnshire. These areas are not commonly associated with Viking activity, but it is clear that they were exposed to strong Scandinavian cultural influence, at least in terms of female dress. Of course, the distribution pattern has to be interpreted with care: jewellery is eminently portable, and levels of metal-detecting can vary from county to county. Nonetheless, it does seem that East Anglia and Lincolnshire were vibrant centres of Scandinavian culture in ninth- and tenth-century England, to an extent not previously recognised. Once again, the jewellery shines new light on this historically dark period of British history, revealing the presence of peoples in areas we never knew were there.

Jane Kershaw is a British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at University College London. Jane Kershaw is the author of Viking Identities: Scandinavian Jewellery in England (OUP, 2013).

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Image credit: Both images © Norfolk County Council; do not reproduce without permission.

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Despite the recognized virtues of democratic rule, both for protection of personal rights and liberties and for economic progress, the current list of world governments still classifies 46 of all countries, or 25%, as dictatorships. Rulers in these existing dictatorial regimes resist the transition to democracy, often at a high cost each year in lives and resources. One would hope that the potentially sizeable benefits of democracy could be shared to the mutual advantage of the once ruling elite and the poor majority. The gains are there, why can’t they do a deal? The answer turns on the inability of a new democracy’s poor majority to credibly promise the elite that they will not be exploited once democracy becomes the new order.

Yet, in one of the most important political events of the 20th century, South Africa solved this problem. In April 1994, Nelson Mandela was elected President of the new Republic of South Africa, and on 11 October 1996, a democratic constitution was approved unanimously by the National Parliament with the full support of the once autocratic National Party. In President Mandela’s words the new constitution offered the citizens of South Africa “a democratic government… that (has) an inbuilt mechanism which makes it impossible for one group to suppress the other” (speech by President Mandela, Stellenbosch University, May 1991). That built-in mechanism was federal governance, of a particular kind.

How can federal governance using both democratically-elected national and state or provincial governments provide the essential protections for the elite needed for a peaceful transition from autocracy to democracy? Three elements are necessary. First, having given up political and military control, the old ruling elite will need to find its future influence in another way — through the economy, perhaps. Since land and machines can always be expropriated, it will have to come from the labor skills of the elite that the majority will need but cannot import or master quickly on their own. In South Africa these elite skills were found in the provision of public services, and in particular, in health care, education, and efficient public administration.

Second, the elite must be able to withhold these needed skills if the majority threatens to expropriate elite-owned land, nationalize elite-owned firms, or to set tax rates on income at excessive rates. It is often thought that the elite’s ability to migrate would be a sufficient deterrent to expropriation or excessive taxation. In South Africa, migration from the country has been modest. You cannot take land and machines with you when you leave, and for all but the most talented, comparable jobs in a new homeland may not be readily available.

What then is an alternative way to withhold needed talents? Perhaps a “strike” or a “work slowdown” organized through elite control over the provision of essential government services? But since the elite is now a political minority, it cannot be a country-wide slowdown. However, it can be a slowdown in one important part of the country where middle and upper income households might constitute a political majority. Local political control could be assured by a constitution that creates provincial governments and draws the provincial borders so that first, there are enough new (lower income) majority residents in the province so that the majority-run national government cares what happens to these constituents, but second, not so many that the middle and upper income households lose political control over the province. We call this requirement the Border Constraint and it must hold so that the elite controls at least one or two important provinces in the new democracy. In South Africa, that important province has become the Western Cape, home of Capetown and South Africa’s wine country. Further, so that this local control can be used as a credible deterrent to excessive national taxation, the provinces must be assigned responsibility for providing important public services. We call this requirement the Assignment Constraint. In South Africa, these constitutionally assigned services are primary health care, K-12 education, and the administration of social security payments.

President Bill Clinton with Nelson Mandela, 4 July 1993.
Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Third and finally, the elite-run provinces cannot become economic islands unto themselves, as indeed the National Party had originally proposed during constitutional negotiations. President Mandela and the ANC rejected this approach to federalism by insisting that all important taxing powers remain in the hands of the national government. But without significant taxing powers, how can provincial governments provide important public services? The answer is the last element in the design of the federal constitution: a clearly specified formula for sharing national tax revenues with the provincial governments. In South Africa’s constitution, this formula is called the “Equitable Share” and is recommended each year by a constitutionally protected commission called the Financial and Fiscal Commission composed of representatives from each of the nine provinces.

The elite’s expertise in the provision of important public services, empowered through an appropriately designed federal constitution, gave Nelson Mandela the “inbuilt mechanism” he needed to assure F.W. de Klerk and the National Party that their economic interests could be protected in the new democracy. Having fashioned a federal constitution for South Africa’s democratic transition, and it is holding so far, who has benefitted?

Crime and unemployment remain serious problems, but crime rates are no higher than those in many of the largest US cities and there is a thriving black market for those who are formally unemployed. Taxes on middle and upper income households have increased to finance expanded public services to lower income households, and there remains an important significant inequity in the distribution of education, health care, and infrastructures. All said, while pressures on education and other public services have continued to grow, tax rates are still below our estimates of maximal taxation and there have been no exploitive land transfers or wholesale nationalization of private capital. Adult disability and child mortality rates continue to fall, new lower income housing is being built, school enrollment is up, class sizes are shrinking, and literacy has increased. When we compare what lifetime earnings would have been for the majority of South Africans had apartheid continued (with negative growth!) to earnings today and into the foreseeable future, the typical poor majority resident has become 160,000 Rand ($20,000) richer and the typical elite resident about 350,000 Rand ($45,000) richer over their lifetimes.

To be sure, South Africa continues to face important challenges to its economic and political futures, but there is little doubt that by almost any measure of personal welfare, the average elite and majority resident are better off today than they might have been under the continuation of apartheid. Our argument here is that federal governance, appropriately constructed, made this possible. Perhaps South Africa’s experience holds lessons for others seeking a peaceful transition to a stable democracy.

Robert P. Inman and Daniel L. Rubinfeld are the authors of “Understanding the Democratic Transition in South Africa” in the American Law and Economics Review, which is available to read for free for a limited time. Robert Inman is the Richard K. Mellon Professor of Finance, Economics, and Public Policy at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Daniel Rubinfeld is the Robert Bridges Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley and Professor of Law, New York University School of Law. Professors Inman and Rubinfeld served as economic advisors to the Financial and Fiscal Commission and to the national government’s Departments of Finance, of Education, and of Welfare on matters of fiscal policy for the period 1994-2000.

The American Law and Economics Review is a refereed journal which maintains the highest scholarly standards and that is accessible to the full range of membership of the American Law and Economics Association, which includes practising lawyers, consultants, and academic lawyers and economists.

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“That was my radio show!” narrator David Goldman exclaimed, looking at copies of classified ads placed in the University of Chicago’s student newspaper during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he was an undergraduate student. Goldman, a retired math teacher and one of the founders of the gay liberation movement at the University of Chicago, recently contributed his story to the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS) research project Closeted/Out in the Quadrangles: A History of LGBTQ Life at the University of Chicago. During his interview, Goldman spoke at length about coming out in the late 1960s and gay student organizing at the University in the early 1970s. His interview is just the first of many we at CSGS hope to collect from LGBT alumni, faculty, and staff over the next two years.

Chicago Maroon newspaper (ca. 1970), University of Chicago Library.

Building on the success of a previous oral history and exhibition project documenting the experiences of women at the University of Chicago, Closeted/Out in the Quadrangles speaks to a vibrant and growing partnership between the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the University Archives at Special Collections Research Center, one aimed at building archival collections in gender and sexuality studies. With support from CSGS’s undergraduate oral history internship program and archives-based undergraduate seminars (created specifically for the Closeted/Out project), we expect to deposit more than one hundred oral histories to the University Archives by 2015.

While scholars have documented the University of Chicago’s rich and numerous contributions to the academic study of homosexuality, we actually know very little about the experiences of LGBTQ individuals and communities who have passed through the campus gates. Filling that knowledge gap is our team of undergraduate student interns, who bring an important dose of energy, enthusiasm, and insider knowledge about campus life to the Closeted/Out interviews. Molly Liu, a fourth-year Biology major who first trained in oral history methods for an African history course, notes:

The loose, undirected format of oral history means that I get to hear people’s stories without needing to dig for any particular piece of information, and in doing so I’ve felt like I’ve understood these people in some way. Their words about gay identity, the University, and Chicago in particular have given me a lot think about. Plus, it’s very fulfilling on a personal level to talk to LGBTQ alumni who are happy and successful.

Kelsey Ganser, a fourth-year History major who is completing an internship with the project while working on her senior thesis in Russian history, reflected on both the academic and personal value of her work:

Working [on the project] has given me the skills to conduct oral history interviews, which are frequently overlooked in my history courses. As a young queer person, through the project I have been able to connect to my history in a way that was never available to me before. The pleasant and easygoing interviews help me feel how strong and welcoming the gay community is, and the difficult ones help me appreciate how far we have come. I had never met an adult gay person until I came to college, so discovering our history through the life stories of other LGBTQ people has been hugely important for the development of my identity. In this regard, I don’t think I can overstate how much this project has influenced my personal understanding of queer identity and history.

Molly, Kelsey, and our other student interns have also found themselves working on the front lines of gathering new archival donations for Special Collections Research Center. As Cal State scholar David A. Reichard has discussed in the Oral History Review article “Animating Ephemera through Oral History: Interpreting Visual Traces of California Gay College Student Organizing from the 1970s,” oral histories not only help us interpret student ephemera, they also help us collect it. Our interns have returned from their interviews with photos, event flyers, stickers, zines, and promises of future loans and donations to the Closeted/Out project. Their friends and classmates have offered to save materials documenting current feminist and queer organizing on campus. And the courses we offer in conjunction with the Closeted/Out project have also brought new undergraduate users to Special Collections Research Center, where they find archivists and librarians eager to help them explore an activist and social history of LGBT life.

University of Chicago students marching at Chicago Pride (1991), Chicago Maroon collection, University of Chicago Photographic Archive, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

As our students continue to interview, we also begin work on plans for a campus exhibition showcasing our findings, scheduled for the Spring of 2015. Shortly thereafter, the LGBTQ oral history collection will be available to researchers at Special Collections Research Center.

Monica L. Mercado is a Ph.D. Candidate in U.S. History at the University of Chicago and a dissertation fellow at the University’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, where she is a coordinator of the Center’s public history initiatives. Before coming to Chicago, Monica worked in exhibitions and programs at the Museum of the City of New York. You can find her musings on women’s and LGBT history, teaching, and Chicago’s unpredictable weather at @monicalmercado.

The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. Follow them on Twitter at @oralhistreview, like them on Facebook, or follow the latest OUPblog posts to preview, learn, connect, discover, and study oral history.

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America has a rich and diverse history which shows itself in its music, politics, film, and culture. The power of biography helps to illuminate larger questions of war, peace, and justice and in exploring the lives of the figures that helped shape America’s history we can discover more about our past.

The American National Biography Online (ANB Online) allows you to discover the lives of over 18,700 men and women who have helped to shape American history. This April, 41 new lives have been added to the resource including radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, chess genius Bobby Fischer, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and singer and actress Peggy Lee. We are also delighted to announce a new partnership between the ANB Online and the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution to allow National Portrait Gallery images to be used alongside ANB Online biographies.

Browse through the portraits and discover the famous and, not so famous, lives of some of the key figures who have been added this April.

• James A. VAN ALLEN

   

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  James A. Van Allen, (7 Sept. 1914-9 Aug. 2006), astrophysicist. Courtesy of NASA

• Robert MCNAMARA

   

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  Robert S. McNamara, (9 June 1916-6 July 2009), business executive, president of Ford Motor Company, U.S. secretary of defense, and president of the World Bank. Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the artist.

• Peggy LEE

   

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  Peggy Lee, (26 May 1920-21 Jan. 2002), jazz and pop singer, songwriter, and actress. Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Creative Commons License.

• Martha GRIFFITHS

   

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  Martha Griffiths, (29 Jan. 1912-22 Apr. 2003), U.S. congresswoman, lawyer, and women's rights advocate. Courtesy of Library of Congress (LC-U9-23069-20)

• Paulette GODDARD

   

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  Paulette Goddard, (3 June 1910-23 Apr. 1990), actress. Courtesy of Library of Congress (LC-USE6-D-001602)

• John Kenneth GALBRAITH

   

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  John Kenneth Galbraith, (15 Oct. 1908-29 Apr. 2006), economist and author. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USE6-D-000368)

• Orville FREEMAN

   

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  Orville Freeman, (9 May 1918-20 Feb. 2003), governor and secretary of agriculture. Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Mrs. Boris Chaliapin

• Florence FOSTER JENKINS

   

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  Florence Foster Jenkins, (19 May 1868-26 Nov. 1944), singer. Courtesy of Library of Congress (LC-DIG-ggbain-33928).

• Lucy BURNS

   

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  Lucy Burns, (28 July 1879-22 Dec. 1966), suffragist and vice chairman of the Congressional Union. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-DIG-hec-03870)

Gemma Barratt is an Associate Marketing Manager for Oxford University Press.

The landmark American National Biography (ANB Online) offers portraits of more than 18,700 men & women — from all eras and walks of life — whose lives have shaped the nation. The wealth of biographies are supplemented with over 900 articles from The Oxford Companion to United States History and over 2,500 illustrations and photographs providing depth and context to the portraits. It is updated twice a year with new biographies, illustrations, and articles. Find out more about the latest update by visiting the Highlights page. American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) sponsors the American National Biography (ANB Online), which is published by Oxford University Press.

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The post The life of a nation is told by the lives of its people… appeared first on OUPblog.

On 24 April 1993, the city of London was brought to a standstill. A massive terrorist bomb exploded at the NatWest tower, killing one person and injuring at least 40 more. The truck bomb, planted by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was designed to strike at the financial heartland of London, and it succeeded. In addition to the human casualties, what has since become known as the Bishopsgate bomb caused $1 billion in financial damages.

Twenty years later, the IRA is no more. Its members have laid down their arms and its leadership committed to a hard-fought peace process that has since brought stability and prosperity to a region of the world that has suffered four decades of terrorism. Perhaps the most visible signal of that progress came with the official visit of Queen Elizabeth II to the Republic of Ireland in 2011.

In a week in which terrorism came to the streets of Boston and was foiled in Canada, the past several years has seen the slow rise of terrorist activity on the streets of Northern Ireland.

The problems in Northern Ireland are mostly over. However, despite the extraordinary progress made via a hard fought peace process, the legacy of Northern Ireland’s Troubles is still deeply felt. Many people remain disaffected, disillusioned, and impervious to the prosperity brought by the stability of the peace process. Sectarian tensions occasionally bubble to the surface, and communities remain deeply divided with polarized identities. Visitors to Northern Ireland today will see a great change from the region’s darker days, but visitors will also see even greater signs of attempts to keep those communities separate via the increase in intimidating ‘peace walls’ (large structures that keep those divisions alive and visible). Given how deeply affected Northern Ireland has been from the Troubles, inter-community tensions will understandably take generations to fully heal, and that road will not ever be an easy one. But there are those who would quickly see that healing process stopped in its tracks.

Though the Irish Republican Army is no more, several small groups have split away from the ‘mainstream’ Republican movement, shunning the peace process and condemning the IRA leadership for compromising on the core ideals of traditional Irish Republicanism – to gain a United Ireland. The result has been a prolonged attempt at developing and sustaining campaign of low-level terrorism, characterized by intermittent though influential and impactful attacks.

These groups have many names. Known collectively as “dissident Republicans,” they comprise several small militant splinter groups. The “Real IRA” and the “Continuity IRA” are probably the most well known of these, though both of these entities have given rise to what my colleague Dr. John Morrison once called serial splintering, spawning several further sub-groups. They operate both in Northern Ireland and in the Republic of Ireland. What unites them is their hatred for the Sinn Fein leadership, their rejection of the authority of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and their equally abject rejection of the various peace agreements that emerged in recent years. The differences between the various dissident factions will seem inconsequential to onlookers, but carry immense significance to respective followers. The various groups are as divided by personalities, jealousies, and petty rivalries as they are divided along geographical, ideological, and strategic lines.

Aside from a clichéd call to “uniting Ireland,” what they want is never entirely clear because their aims are often lofty and obscure when you examine the respective groups’ ideological statements. On a day-to-day basis, what drives and sustains them is their utter hatred for Sinn Fein and the IRA leadership for what the dissidents feel is a ‘sell-out’. The dissidents view the peace process as an abject failure, a compromise that hasn’t delivered the Irish Republican fantasy of a 32-county Irish Republic. They want a united Ireland, but won’t engage in democratic means of achieving that. They take great psychological solace from their ‘outsider’ status, with one faction reveling in what they call a state of ‘noble isolation’.

There are some important tactical differences between the various factions, but in a nutshell, they engage in low-level terrorist tactics in an attempt to grab attention. They’re aware of their ability to carefully choreograph media attention and they commit semi-regular acts aimed at disruption (e.g. by leaving a pipe-bomb in a public place) and targeted killings. They have killed prison officers and police officers, and have increasingly threatened members of Sinn Fein. Though their ranks include former senior members of the IRA, they have attempted to recruit adolescents and young children in recent years. They are adept at social media. They engage in public displays of strength, marching and protesting, and in intelligence gathering on future potential targets. They are aware of the fact that they are heavily monitored by the security services but view this as a badge of honor, affirmation of their importance.

These dissidents are characterized by remaining a heterogeneous and divided cluster of small groups. There is always the danger, however, that a highly symbolic act of violence could serve to unify them in ways that will appear obvious only with hindsight. Entrepreneurial dissidents have made multiple attempts to form a coalition, but these have failed to gain much traction. There is a sense, however, that the forthcoming 100th anniversary of the 1916 Irish Republican rebellion may ultimately serve to focus the dissidents in ways we haven’t seen before. We should not rule out the possibility of a high profile, targeted attack in the next two years.

Nobody is overestimating the dissident Republican threat, but it would be very dangerous to underestimate them. They continue to recruit and train, and they are deeply embedded in crime, especially in the Republic of Ireland. A single successful attack (especially if the target is psychologically significant to them) could serve to unify their otherwise divided elements and re-energize their (albeit small) base of supporters. Their small size and lack of popular support should not be taken as a measure of their weakness. Instead it points to their unpredictability given their insensitivity to the broader community consensus that the dissidents are fighting a fantasy war that nobody wants. But unpredictability and insensitity to the broader public make for very dangerous conditions in the context of terrorist threat assessment. The current consensus is that the dissidents may well be infiltrated by police and intelligence agents given a fairly persistent track record of foiled and failed bomb plots in recent times. But they have often found inspiration from high visibility targeted attacks, and given that the 2016 anniversary may well be their last opportunity to prove relevant, it would be wise to keep a close eye on their efforts.

John Horgan is author of Divided We Stand: The Strategy and Psychology of Ireland’s Dissident Terrorists. He is Director of the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at the Pennsylvania State University, where he is also Associate Professor of Psychology. He is a member of the editorial boards of multiple journals, including Terrorism and Political Violence, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling, Behavioral Science of Terrorism and Political Aggression, and Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict. Dr. Horgan is a member of the Research Advisory Board of the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC).

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The post 20 years since the Bishopsgate bombing appeared first on OUPblog.

When I was invited to review the second volume of Odd Arne Westad’s and Melvyn Leffler’s The Cambridge History of the Cold War in 2010, I compared the enterprise to Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie — which I intended both as a compliment and as a criticism.

Sweeping in its coverage, the Encyclopédie aimed to capture the main currents of Enlightenment thinking. Diderot’s intention in editing the volume was “to change the way people think,” yet it didn’t achieve that grand aim. The collection contains an important introduction by D’Alembert, and carries essays by Rousseau, Voltaire, and Montesquieu. But contemporary scholars don’t spend much time poring over its volumes. Rather, they focus on the seminal single-authored books: Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. These books are alive, but the Encyclopédie is locked in a particular place in time. Over the past three years I have served as an editor on the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History. Before accepting the commission, I queried its purpose on similar lines.

Of course, today’s editors face a challenge that did not confront Diderot: how to retain scholarly authority in a Wikified world, to paraphrase the title of William Cronon’s thought-provoking essay in Perspectives published in 2012. Cronon compares the supple and constantly evolving Wikipedia to the ossified Encyclopedia Brittanica, registering a strong conclusion: “I don’t believe there’s much doubt that Wikipedia is the largest, most comprehensive, copiously detailed, stunningly useful encyclopedia in all of human history.”

Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Bookshelves in the president’s office, École Nationale des Chartes, Paris. Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen. Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons.

Perhaps Britannica’s board of directors read Perspectives for they closed the print edition of the Encyclopedia the following month. The Los Angeles Times described it as perhaps the “single most powerful symbol to date of our rapidly changing media world, a world in which hard copies of books could become a quaint thing of the past.” Print aficionados of a conservative disposition, like Jonathan Franzen, were stunned. On this lamentable trend toward digitization, Franzen wrote “Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around.”

In light of the foregoing, then, is there any benefit in having a named, credentialed scholar write an entry for a hardcopy Encyclopedia — that most old fashioned of enterprises? I’d say yes, and I have a few examples to justify my optimism. Some of the most interesting articles that I commissioned were written by major scholars, forced to condense a huge body of work into two or three thousand words. So to give just a few examples, Thomas Schwartz wrote on LBJ, Richard Immerman on Eisenhower, Jussi Hanhimaki on Kissinger, Geoffrey Stone on Civil Liberties, Andrew Preston on Religion, and Paul Boyer on “War and Peace in Popular Culture.”

What these scholars chose to omit and include was utterly fascinating. Thomas Schwartz’s monograph, Lyndon Johnson and Europe, is a wonderful study. But upon finishing that book, part of me yearned for more reflection on how LBJ’s success in managing relations with Europe slotted into a broader assessment of his foreign policy record. This is exactly what Tom’s succinct and perceptive entry provides.

To refer back to the Enlightenment, if Adam Smith wrote three thousand words on the taproots of economic growth — combining insight from the entirety of his career — the emphasis might be rather different to that presented in The Wealth of Nations. And it is certain that such a hypothetical essay would be read and studied closely today. Brevity can sometimes deepen the profundity of a particular conclusion. Each contributor has been remarkably successful in distilling the essence of their chosen subjects. It is for this reason, and others, that the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History will stay close to my desk.

Dr. David Milne is a Senior Lecturer in American Political History at the University of East Anglia. A historian and analyst of US foreign policy, he is a senior editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History. View the Melbourne launch of the Encyclopedia, or attend the American Military and Diplomatic History conference at Oregon State University on 7 May 2013.

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When I started researching the environmental history of Russia’s steppes, I planned my visits to archives and libraries for conventional historical research. But I wanted to get a sense of the steppe environment I was writing about, a context for the texts I was reading; I needed to explore the region. I was fortunate that several Russian and Ukrainian specialists agreed to take me along on expeditions and field trips to visit steppe nature reserves.

The scientists took the time to explain to a visiting historian how they conducted their research into the steppe environment: studying the flora, fauna, climate, and soil; monitoring human impact; and above all observing the interconnections between all of these. I learned, a little hesitantly, to identify the main wild grasses and that different types of plants grew on different types of soils. On one expedition, I was even permitted to help collect samples of soil for analysis (and carry them back to the expedition’s van).

On my first visit to the Rostov steppe nature reserve in the arid southeast of the region, I felt disorientated in a landscape of almost unbroken flatness that extended to the horizon with no shelter from the hot sun. Later, I visited more rolling countryside with a high steppe bisected by ravines and the valleys of steppe rivers, including the Don, Kuban’, Volga, and Dnepr. On my last visit, to the Askaniya Nova nature reserve in southern Ukraine, I explored the area of unploughed steppe that has been protected since the end of the nineteenth century and also the woodland park planted at around the same time.

In between the field trips, I was reading about expeditions of  naturalists and scientists to the steppes going back to the eighteenth century. I visited some of the locations they had and compared my impressions with theirs. Like me, visitors from outside the steppe — from the more humid, forested lands to the north and west — at first felt disorientated and exposed in the flat lands with no shelter.

The steppes have few trees (in spite of attempts to plant them), low and unreliable supplies of water (my spring and summer in Rostov coincided with a serious drought), burning hot sun and winds in the summer, but very fertile soil that yielded bumper harvests in good years. The lands to the northwest, in marked contrast, are heavily forested, have abundant supplies of water, especially in the spring when the snow melts, long, cold winters, and not very fertile soil. The steppes were conquered, settled, and ploughed up by people from the northwest who coveted their fertile soil and warmer climate, and expelled the indigenous, nomadic, population.

Not all farmers who worked the land or authorities who governed them appreciated the environment. When things went wrong, which they did periodically, bumper harvests were replaced by dust storms, crop failures, and famines. People agonised over who was to blame. Was it the farmers’ fault for ploughing up the steppe and felling the small areas of woodland? Or were the recurring droughts natural phenomena?

Over time, scientists came to understand the steppes environment, in particular the origins of its very fertile soils. Over time, moreover, they learned the need to work with the steppe environment, rather than against it, in order better to promote sustainable farming.

David Moon is Anniversary Professor, Department of History, University of York, UK, and the author of The Plough that Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700-1914. He recorded a podcast ‘A transformed landscape: the steppes of Ukraine and Russia’ for the Exploring Environmental History podcast on his methodology. A specialist on Russian history, in recent years his research has focused on environmental history in a transnational context. He combines conventional historical research in archives and libraries with field work in the environments he studies. He has spent much of his career teaching at universities in the north of England and Scotland. He also has extensive experience of both Russia and the USA. While a postgraduate student at Birmingham University, he studied for a year at Leningrad State University in what was then the Soviet Union. He makes regular visits to Russia and Ukraine, including the steppe region, for research and field work. For more information listen to his podcast on the steppes of Ukraine and Russia.

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Image Credits:(1) The steppe at the Askaniya Nova nature reserve. Photo by David Moon. Do not reproduce without permission. (2) Feather grass blowing in the wind, southeastern Rostov region. Photo by Antonina Shamareva, Rostov Botanical Garden. Do not reproduce without permission. 

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Forty-three years have passed since Senator Gaylord Nelson’s teach-in first made its mark on America. Since then, Earth Day has become as regular a fixture on the US calendar as Labor Day and Halloween, albeit without the shopping and candy. As Adam Rome explains in his new book, The Genius of Earth Day, the original event in 1970 mobilized millions of students, teachers, and housewives and brought together a broad, bi-partisan coalition. It seemed that half the population had become environmental activists, at least for a day.

While Earth Day made waves around the US, a few miles across the Canadian border a different kind of environmental activism was taking shape. Its focus was on stopping a very real and potentially destructive wave, one that would emanate from a giant nuclear bomb that the US military was planning to explode on Amchitka, a small island in the North Pacific. In Vancouver, a group of self-exiled American peace activists and draft evaders had begun to mingle with younger Canadians who were part of the city’s burgeoning counterculture. Together they formed a protest group with the evocative, if somewhat cumbersome name, the Don’t Make a Wave Committee, and they started making plans to sail a protest boat to Amchitka the following year to bear witness to the insane ecological destructiveness of nuclear weapons testing.

One of the DMWC’s founders was Irving Stowe, a 54-year-old American lawyer who had become a full-time activist. As he was leaving one of the group’s meetings, Stowe flashed the two-fingered V-shaped hippie salute and mumbled “peace.” Bill Darnell, a young Canadian social worker, spontaneously replied, “Make it a green peace!” Stowe’s wife, Dorothy, recalled that those final two words “lit up the room,” and the group resolved to name their ship the Greenpeace.

Despite an epic attempt, the Greenpeace, an aging halibut seiner the DMWC hired from a local fisherman in Vancouver, never made it to Amchitka. Nevertheless, the campaign gained considerable coverage in Canada. As a result, Irving and Dorothy Stowe, Bill Darnell, and the other activists felt that the DMWC could become a vehicle for a unique new style of direct action protest against environmental destruction throughout the world, particularly in difficult to reach places such as remote nuclear testing sites. So in early 1972, they changed the DMWC’s name to the Greenpeace Foundation. Within a decade, it would become the most well-known environmental organization in the world, with multiple branches in numerous countries and a global headquarters in Amsterdam.

The older generation of American activists, such as Irving and Dorothy Stowe, imbued Greenpeace with the ideas and tactics of the American peace movement, particularly the style of nonviolent protest that Quakers had adapted from Gandhi’s program of civil disobedience against British rule in India. The Amchitka protest, for example, was directly inspired by similar campaigns that various Quaker organizations had mounted during the 1950s, all of which were based on the Quaker idea of “bearing witness” to the injustices perpetrated by the powerful against the weak.

The younger generation of predominantly Canadian activists was equally important in shaping Greenpeace’s values, tactics, and priorities. Chief among them was a chain-smoking, acid-dropping, I Ching-reading journalist named Bob Hunter. Hunter shared the ecological apocalypticism that characterized much of the environmentalism of the era. He fervently believed that the only way to save the world from destruction was to foment a consciousness revolution that would completely alter the way that humans viewed themselves in relation to other species on the planet. This new consciousness would reflect the holistic worldview of ecology—at least the kind of popular ecology with which Hunter was familiar—and would help humanity reach a stage of sustainable co-existence with the rest of nature.

Hunter felt that the North American counterculture, with its openness to alternative worldviews, its embrace of Native American spirituality and other forms of holistic thought, and its rejection of crass consumption, was already well on the way to achieving the new consciousness. But how could the values held by a relatively small minority reshape the entire world? The media—and particularly television—was the key. Hunter was a devotee of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian communications scholar who developed such enduring concepts and aphorisms as “the global village” and “the medium is the message.” By using the mass media as a vehicle for what Hunter called “mind bombing,” groups like Greenpeace could help fast-track the countercultural consciousness revolution throughout the world. While revolutionaries of the past had required armed struggle as a means of achieving their ends, the modern mass communications system provided a “delivery system” through which the agents of the new consciousness could “bomb” people’s minds, creating new archetypal images and reframing standard narratives of human progress. Television, Hunter argued, could be “targeted with complete accuracy to strike at a point precisely two inches behind the victim’s eyes. No bullet flies so fast, so far, with such unerring accuracy. Not even a hydrogen bomb can affect so many people at once.”

This combination of mind bombing and bearing witness was subsequently employed against French nuclear testing in the South Pacific, Soviet and Japanese whaling, and numerous other environmentally destructive activities around the world. Greenpeace’s small cadre of professional environmental activists alerted millions of people to environmental problems that were often remote and hidden from public view. Eventually, they created a powerful international NGO with branches in over 40 countries. Subsequently, Greenpeace diversified its repertoire. Its activities now also include sponsoring scientific studies and environmentally-friendly technology, as well as political lobbying. When combined with the judicious use of mind bombing, Greenpeace’s environmental activism still exerts a degree of political influence, albeit at the cost of a more bloated administrative structure than Irving Stowe or Bob Hunter would have liked.

Earth Day and Greenpeace offered two very different models for raising environmental awareness. Earth Day was based around mass participation and focused on local issues in people’s communities. Its goal was to create an environment conducive to widespread political reform at all levels of government. The Greenpeace model, by contrast, relied on a small cadre of activists to carry out spectacular direct action protests, frequently in remote regions or against difficult targets, in the hope that the striking visual images would embarrass the perpetrators of environmental crimes, as well as generally altering people’s perception of humanity’s relationship to its environment.

Despite its global profile, Greenpeace has never really been a social movement. True, it has a substantial worldwide support base, but it is largely a checkbook membership. For most supporters, participation involves sending money to finance the activities of professionals. Thus the evolution of a more corporate structure, with its attendant hierarchy and managerialism, has in many ways strengthened Greenpeace’s ability to carry out its work. Hunter’s dream of a consciousness revolution has been diluted, but Greenpeace remains a reasonably effective NGO, particularly in Europe and Australasia, where its profile is higher than in the US.

Like Greenpeace, Earth Day is today also a global phenomenon. But is it a successful one? Rome argues that the subsequent professionalization of Earth Day, with its top-down directives, its governmental seals of approval, and emphasis on marketing at the expense of concrete participation, diluted its effectiveness. Unlike Greenpeace, Earth Day started as a broad social movement; it had little to gain from professionalization. Perhaps it’s time take Earth Day away from the politicians and marketers and give it back to teachers, students, and local communities.

Frank Zelko is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and History at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Make it a Green Peace!: The Rise of Countercultural Environmentalism, which has just been published by OUP.

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The post On Earth Day, remembering counterculture environmentalists appeared first on OUPblog.

It has been thirty years this month since the master forger Konrad Kujau had his fifteen minutes of fame. Kujau managed to fool Stern magazine in Germany and the Sunday Times into believing that Hitler had secretly kept a diary. On 25 April 1983, Stern went public with the sensational story that Hitler’s diaries – which Kujau had penned in the late 70s and early 80s – had surfaced and that the history of the century had to be rewritten. By 6 May, it had become clear that two of the most venerable German and British publications had become the laughing stock of their nations. While no-one still believes that Hitler kept a diary, many other untrue facts about Hitler have been surprisingly resilient:

1. Hitler was really called Schicklgruber.

Adolf Hitler as a child

Would Germans have been prepared to greet each other with a hearty ‘Heil Schicklgruber’ every day? Could Hitler have become a dictator if he had used his real name, Schicklgruber, or would this have been just too ridiculous aname for a dictator? These are the kind of questions that continue to be discussed regularly on internet discussion sites. They are, however, historically pointless questions, as Schicklgruber never was Hitler’s name. Hitler’s father had been born out of the wedlock to Maria Anna Schicklgruber. Yet he had changed his name to Hitler, the name of his step-father, who by all likelihood also was his biological father, well before Adolf Hitler was born. While the claim that Adolf Hitler was really called Adolf Schicklgruber is historical nonsense, it is nevertheless telling that people continue to spread the claim. It points to the urge of people to turn Hitler into an object of ridicule.

2. Hitler had a Jewish grandfather.

The idea that the nemesis of the Jews of Europe was, according the logic of his own Nuremberg laws, a ‘quarter-Jew’ himself dates back to the attempt of some of his opponents to prevent Hitler from coming to power. As Hitler’s father was born out of wedlock, the claim was that Hitler had been fathered by the head of the Jewish household for which Hitler’s grandmother Maria Anna had worked for a while.

If the results of the unethical DNA testing of Hitler’s Austrian and American relatives, carried out a few years ago by the Belgian journalist Jean-Paul Mulders, are to be trusted, we now finally know for certain that the step-father of Hitler’s father was indeed his biological father and therefore Hitler did not have a Jewish grand-father. Yet what may be more important than the question of whether objectively speaking Hitler had a Jewish grandfather is what Hitler himself thought of the matter. It is likely Hitler feared being the grandson of a Jew, as he seems to have commissioned Hans Frank, his chief jurist, to look into the claim that he had Jewish ancestry in 1930.

3. Hitler fathered a child in World War I before losing one of his testicles.

Another ‘fact’ which was exposed as untrue by Jean-Paul Mulders, if his DNA testing is to be trusted, is the idea – only revived by a French news magazine last year – that Hitler fathered a child with a French woman during the First World War. Most other evidence also suggests that Hitler was neither heterosexual nor, as some claim, homosexual but asexual. Then again, German authorities seem to have made payments to Hitler’s French family during World War Two which is odd if no relationship of any kind had existed between Hitler and the mother of Hitler’s purported son.

The belief popularized by an English Second World War rhyme that Hitler had only one ‘ball’ was recently claimed to have finally proven to be true as a result of newly available testimony of a German medical orderly who claimed to have treated Hitler after being wounded in his groin. However, nothing in this story really adds up.

4. Hitler survived World War II.

If we are to believe recent news reports, Adolf and Eva Hitler escaped from Berlin in the eleventh hour, as the Russians were closing in. On board a submarine they made their way to Argentina, where they lived happily ever after until Hitler died of old age in the 1960s. The Hitler-escaped-to-Argentina story is only the latest tale in the saga that has tried to explain why, in 1945 and after, no Western investigators managed to locate Hitler’s corpse. Yet eyewitness testimony of several people exists that confirms that Hitler committed suicide and that his body was soaked with petrol before being burned. Furthermore, parts of Hitler’s skull and teeth are almost certainly held in a Russian repository. Even in the absence of eye-witness testimony and forensic evidence, Hitler’s psychological make-up makes it implausible to argue that he would have wanted to continue to live after his downfall at the hand of the allies.

Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler

5. Hitler himself was the most significant creator of untrue Hitler facts.

What Hitler told the world about how he had turned from a postcard painter into a fascist leader was seldom supported by true facts. A pathological and talented liar, Hitler told people whatever they wanted to hear and what was politically opportune. The core of his invented story were the four years that he served in the German Army on the Western Front. It was a story that he told so successfully that it was believed for almost a century after the end of the Great War. Hitler used it when he wanted to tell his core supporters that National Socialism had been born in the trenches of the First World War and that the war had made him. He also used it when he tried to broaden his appeal to a skeptical public in the late 1920s. And he used it in 1938 to court and fool Neville Chamberlain by telling the British prime minister a tall story of how a British soldier had saved his life in 1918. Many other canards of Hitler and untrue facts created by his propagandists persist to the present day. As the young historian Norman Domeier recently put it, “today’s perception of Nazi Germany by the public at large is still dominated by Nazi propaganda.”

Thomas Weber teaches European and international history at the University of Aberdeen and directs the Centre for Global Security and Governance. He is also Fritz Thyssen Fellow at Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. Since earning his DPhil from the University of Oxford, he has held fellowships or has taught at Harvard University, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago, and the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Hitler’s First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War (2010).

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Image credits: Adolf Hitler, Kinderbild [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F051673-0059 / CC-BY-SA [CC-BY-SA-3.0-de [Creative Commons Licence] via Wikimedia Commons

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