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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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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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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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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In the fall of 1994, I was invited to offer my university’s first environmental history course. Entering this unchartered territory, I scrambled to find sample syllabi and appropriate books. Nearly two decades later, environmental history is a standard course offering and my university, like so many others, boasts a thriving Environmental Studies major as well as a major in Environmental Science. Environmental history books, textbooks, articles, blogs, podcasts, and documentary films are flooding the market. The ASEH/FHS has grown by leaps and bounds, and Environmental History is recognized as a leading journal.

Some historical fields have evolved slowly, with movement like a glacier’s—meaningful, but slow. Environmental history has been more like an avalanche—fast, furious, and undeniable. Some of this growth can be attributed to timing, as environmental history and the information revolution took hold almost simultaneously. Tools like GIS made unique contributions to the field’s success. And like all fields, environmental history reaps the benefits of the internet, such as immediate access to articles and essays. H-Environment has created a global community of scholars in which questions are raised and answered, and opportunities to present and publish scholarship are widely circulated. More importantly, even as some traditional fields of historical study are increasingly denigrated as no longer crucial to the historical canon, appreciation of the practical value of environmental history is on the rise on campuses all over the world. Many universities offer not only environmental courses, but are dedicated to applying lessons learned, making their campuses as green as possible. Their success is judged (and celebrated) by publications including E-Magazine and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

One of the best changes is the increasing interdisciplinarity of environmental history and its incorporation into a variety of related studies. This sets it apart from other relatively new disciplines. Women’s history, for example, too often still finds itself isolated in a kind of pink ghetto as professors (and texts) of history courses with more traditional emphases (political, economic, and specific periodization) either ignore women’s history entirely or incorporate it only superficially. Environmental history, on the other hand, has more quickly been accepted as crucial to the historical enterprise and is given considerable coverage in a wide variety of courses covering a range of places, historical periods, and topics (including science, religion, gender, race, economics, and politics).

Autumn scence. 6 October 2012. Photo by Dmitri Popov. Creative Commons License.

There are some drawbacks to all this exciting growth, and not just that it’s impossible to keep up with the mounting supply of new information. A common complaint among environmental history professors and students alike is that the courses are just so depressing. Students complain that, having gained a true understanding of the breadth, depth, and life-threatening nature of the problems, they feel overwhelmed and helpless. In the face of rapid global warming, their individual efforts, including recycling their bottles and cans and bringing their reusable containers to Starbucks, seem akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

One of the new challenges facing this thriving field is to replace, or at least temper, the doom and gloom with a sense of practical empowerment. In delineating the human role in the creation of our current environmental crises, some historians are taking care to teach, rather than preach or scold, and highlight the roles that people have played in responding constructively to those crises, and in heading off others entirely. Such approaches create not a false sense of security, but inspiration, instilling feelings of responsibility and providing tools to help implement positive change.

Environmental history continues to experience a variety of growing pains, but its growth, and its ability to inspire, challenge, and promote genuine understanding and meaningful reform, reveals in new and dynamic ways the profound value of the study of history.

Nancy C. Unger is Associate Professor of History at Santa Clara University. She is the author of Beyond Nature’s Housekeepers: American Women in Environmental History and the prize-winning biography Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer, and book review editor of The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

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Christians today owe a tremendous debt to the Roman emperor Constantine. He changed the place of the Church in the Roman World, moving it through his own conversion from the persecuted fringe of the empire’s religious landscape to the center of the empire’s system of belief. He also tackled huge problems with the way Christians understood their community. The three most important things the church owed to Constantine were a roadmap for reuniting communities split by persecution, a universal definition of the Church’s teaching, and a fixed date for the celebration of Easter. His solutions to the second and third issues remain in place to this day.

Constantine dealt with all three of the Church’s major issues at the conference he summoned at the ancient city of Nicaea (modern Iznik in Turkey) in June of 325 AD. The issue of persecution stemmed from a period of bitter conflict with the imperial government that had ended just over ten years before the council convened, while the debate over the Church’s teaching had exploded a few years before Nicaea (the issue was Jesus’ humanity). The Easter question had been festering for centuries, and the problems were inextricably tied up with the fact that no one recorded the actual day of the Crucifixion.

All that people could know on the basis of Christian Scripture was that the crucifixion was linked to the celebration of Passover, which meant that it should come at some point in the spring. But when? Since the date of Passover, then as now, is celebrated in accordance with the Jewish calendar, the correlation with the Julian calendar used by Christians and most other inhabitants of the Roman Empire was always inexact. Some Christians believed that the best way to solve the problem was to celebrate Easter on the first day of Passover according to the Jewish calendar, another group held that Easter should be celebrated on the first Sunday after the opening of Passover, while yet another group felt that the timing of the Christian festival should not be determined by the timing of Passover and should instead be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the Vernal Equinox.

Emperor Constantine I, presenting a model of the city to Virgin Pary. Detail of the southwestern entrance mosaic in Hagia Sophia (Istanbul, Turkey). Photo by Myrabella. Creative Commons License.

The Easter story was extremely important to Constantine. Conscious as he was that he had been raised as a pagan, and that he had done things in his earlier life of which he was not proud (he never tells us what those things were), he felt that he had experienced a sort of moral resurrection when he became a Christian. He credited his extraordinary military career to God’s willingness to forgive his past sins and he wanted to make sure that he ruled in a way that would repay the benefits he believed his God had given him. In a sense there was nothing more obvious to Constantine than that Easter shouldn’t be connected with the festival of another faith. It should stand on its own in connection with the natural world. Hence he ordained that Easter should be celebrated on the Sunday after the first New Moon of Spring.

The solution to the Easter issue had the added advantage of allowing him to make an important concession to the group whose definition of the Faith he was rejecting outright at Nicaea, the so-called Arian faction, named for the Egyptian priest who had aggressively preached a doctrine asserting the human aspect of Christ. Constantine liked his God, like his empire, to be completely united, which is what we see today in the Nicene Creed in the phrase “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.” That desire for unity also enabled him to arrive at an acceptable solution to the divisions that had arisen out of the period of persecution as he essentially argued that the two sides should bury the hatchet and recognize each other as Christians first. That approach has not had nearly so much influence as his approach to Easter or to the Trinity.

Constantine was a complex and at times difficult man, a passionate one with a ferocious temper. But he was also a man who was able to recognize his own weaknesses. It may have been that self-knowledge which enabled him to come to the new faith he hoped would make him a better ruler, and gave him the ability to find and forge compromises to build a better and more unified society.

David Potter is Francis W. Kelsey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Roman History and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan. His books include Constantine the Emperor, The Victor’s Crown, Emperors of Rome, and Ancient Rome: A New History.

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“Carnival time is over,” the newly-elected Pope Francis is reported to have said when he was offered an ermine-trimmed mozzetta such as most of his predecessors had worn round their shoulders during the winter season. He may not have been alluding to the thirteen-day sede vacante which had just reached its much-anticipated conclusion, but it does seem fair to say that this papal interregnum was arguably the jolliest on record. Previous interregna included a period of mourning before the cardinals entered the conclave; this one made history precisely because it didn’t. That did much to lighten the atmosphere.

In 2005, after the death of John Paul II, interest in the ensuing conclave did not seem to extend much beyond predicting — presumably for gambling purposes — who would be elected. The procedures of the conclave were explained for the benefit of the wider public, but opportunities to bring the entire experience to life with reference to what is known of past conclaves were rarely, if ever, taken. In some quarters there might still be an assumption that the history of conclaves must be a subject dry enough to rival Stubbs on Archbishop Stigand, but the greater variety of media platforms created during the last eight years has allowed a little more conclave history to trickle out this time round. We have also seen some splendid online graphics illustrating the balloting process as it currently exists, complete with cartoon cardinals waddling up penguin-like to cast their votes.

It would be interesting to know whether any broadcasters amended their schedules in the last few weeks in order to screen cinematic accounts of past conclaves: the nearest that most of us will ever get to the real thing. In 2002 the streets of Rome were deserted when RAI broadcast the John XXIII biopic Papa Giovanni, starring the American Edward Asner in the title role. In that production much attention is devoted to the reading of the ballot papers, with the number of votes for Cardinal Roncalli increasing scrutiny by scrutiny. When Cardinal Seán Brady spoke of his reaction at hearing the name “Bergoglio” read out time after time, it brought to mind the conclave scenes in Papa Giovanni. One feature of conclaves that has not survived since Pope John’s election in 1958 is the practice of cardinals — as collective rulers of the Church in the absence of a papal monarch — sitting beneath baldacchini which they cause to collapse when the new pope is elected. That particular carnival is well and truly over, but it is certainly instructive to see it on screen.

As conclave films go, rather more fanciful is The Conclave (2006), a loose dramatisation of Pius II’s account of his own election in 1458, twisted in order to feature Rodrigo Borgia, the most junior cardinal deacon, in scenes far removed from ecclesiastical politics. Pius’s unparalleled memoirs are as rich in inside information as they are overtly hostile towards his French counterparts. There is, however, something deeply unconvincing about the casting of Brian Blessed as Enea Silvio Piccolomini. Let’s settle for his beard as the source of the problem. Clerical beards deserve a blog post all of their own, and would doubtless have received one had the Capuchin Seán O’Malley been elected last week. In the fifteenth century the beard that mattered was that of the Greek cardinal Bessarion who, as Pope Pius relates, quite literally came within a whisker of being elected in 1455, until the Breton cardinal Alain de Coëtivy urged his fellow electors not to entrust the Latin Church to a man whose facial hair suggested that he was an easterner at heart. Bessarion is one of the lesser characters in The Conclave, the very existence of which suggests that we shall never see the conclave of 1455 depicted in film.

As far as we non-cardinals are aware, the most dramatic conclave of the modern period was that of 1903, when the Austrian veto was pronounced against Cardinal Rampolla, whose votes steadily declined while the name “Sarto” was read out with increasing frequency. That might well have cinematic potential, but at least it seems to have inspired the novel Hadrian VII, which was published the following year. Had this month’s conclave lasted any longer than it did there might have been serious anxiety in many a Catholic household, as clerics and laymen alike suspected they might be about to experience their Corvo moment. Productions of Peter Luke’s play of the novel allow us to revel in a stage full of cardinals.

The dramatic impact of Pope Benedict’s helicopter flight into the sunset is not something that could be repeated with anything like the same effect. Indeed, in the light of recent events, papal resignations now look like becoming the norm, with papal elections therefore becoming less of a surprise and more matter-of-fact. After decades of inertia in the Vatican, Pope Francis probably needs to be a pontiff in a hurry and, thus far, is proving to be precisely that. If his simplifying agenda extends to papal elections, perhaps we shall have all the more need of fictional conclaves to illustrate what we have lost.

Stella Fletcher was a founding editorial board member of Oxford Bibliographies in Renaissance and Reformation, and has made a number of contributions, including Cardinals. Her publications include Princes of the Church: a history of the English cardinals (2001) and Roscoe and Italy (2012). She is honorary secretary of the Ecclesiastical History Society, of which she has also written ‘A Very AgreeableSociety’: The Ecclesiastical History Society, 1961-2011.

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: Vatican, Vatican City State – March 13, 2013: Black smoke emerges from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican after the cardinal vote for a new pope. Black smoke indicates that no pope was elected. It is the second day of the conclave to elect a pope. Photo by omada, iStockphoto.

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To celebrate the imminent release of Oral History Review (OHR)’s latest issue, 40.1, on oral history in the digital age, we’re delighted to share a chat between managing editor Troy Reeves and contributor Lindsey Barnes. Barnes and her colleague Kim Guise are co-authors of “World War Words: The Creation of a World War II–Specific Vocabulary for the Oral History Collection at The National WWII Museum,” a case study of developing controlled vocabulary for the oral history collections at the National WWII Museum. It — and the rest of issue 40.1 — will be available at OHR Oxford University Press page soon. Keep an eye on our twitter (@oralhistreview) and Facebook page to see when articles go live.

In addition to the article, Troy and Lindsay discuss the creation of http://ww2online.org and Lindsay reveals how those outside the field see oral history. The words “problem child” are used and no one is surprised. Enjoy!

[Troy: When Lindsay refers to problem child, she means oral history cataloging and metadata, not me.]

[See post to listen to audio]

Or download the podcast directly.

Lindsey Barnes is the Senior Archivist/Digital Projects Manager at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. She is currently working to provide online access to the museum’s many collections including oral histories, photographs and artifacts.

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 and like them on Facebook to preview the latest from the Review, learn about other oral history projects, connect with oral history centers across the world, and discover topics that you may have thought were even remotely connected to the study of oral history. Keep an eye out for upcoming posts on the OUPblog for addendum to past articles, interviews with scholars in oral history and related fields, and fieldnotes on conferences, workshops, etc.

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Where did your interest in the cult of the Virgin Mary come from?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Why is Joan of Arc such a figure of heroism and inspiration?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Marina Warner is a writer, historian, cultural critic, novelist, and Professor of Literature at the University of Essex. She is the author of Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism and Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary released in their second editions this month among other works. Marina Warner was created a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French in 2002, and a Commendatore by the Italians in 2005. She was awarded the Warburg Prize in Germany in 2004, and is an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She is Professor of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex and President of the British Comparative Literature Association. In 2005 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Oxford gave her an Honorary Doctorate in 2005.

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My interest in the Cold War has developed over many years. In fact, as I look back, I would say that it began around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in the early 1960s when I was still in high school. Over the years, as a college student and then as a university professor, I began to look more closely at the vast literature that developed on the topic and to examine the bitter controversies that had raged since 1945. In the process, I stumbled upon several illuminating studies, but there was no one “school” of interpretation that I found satisfying. As with my other books (on Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union), I wanted to find out for myself what really happened, what the Cold War was all about.

Why did I end up focusing on Stalin? He turned out to be the key figure at the epicenter of events when the East-West conflict began. However one might explain the motives behind his actions, it is clearly the case that his initiatives led to the Cold War. Moreover, by the time he died in March 1953, he had helped to create the communist world that seemed impervious to change, as well as the terms of engagement with the West. These configurations were all but frozen in place.

Where to begin an account of this fateful turn of events? I found that it is misleading at best to make a division, as we often do, between the end of the Second World War in May 1945 and the post-war period. Not only did the mayhem continue after VE-Day, but massive violence in the name of the communist cause occurred simultaneously with the years of the conflict against Nazism and spilled over into the post-war. There were savage retributions, multiple ethnic cleansing operations, and civil wars, which became entangled in the establishment of new communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Similarly in Asia, there is a seamless web of connections from the war against Japan to the Cold War.

As far back as August 1939, the Soviet Union, as Hitler’s ally, had begun to renew its mission, on hold since the early 1920s, to extend the communist Red Empire. According to Stalin, Hitler was unknowingly playing a revolutionary role by destroying old regimes and ruling classes. The Nazi invasion of the USSR in mid-1941 represented a setback, but Stalin still perceived possibilities for advancing the cause even when the capitalist British and Americans came forward with offers to help. What is remarkable is that his faith in the inevitability of world-wide communist revolutions never diminished. He was the master of disguise. When he spoke with his accidental allies he neither used the language of the Communist revolutionary, nor whispered of any aims for the post-war besides guarantees for the future security of the USSR. Who could argue with that?

Privately, Stalin never wavered in his hatred for all the capitalist countries, be they German, Japanese, British, or American. His strong immediate preference was to milk the wartime alliance for all it was worth. Yet he was always prepared to go over to the offensive for the Red cause, or to encourage others to do so. As he put it succinctly to Yugoslav comrades in 1948: “You strike when you can win, and avoid the battle when you cannot. We will join the fight when conditions favor us and not when they favor the enemy.”

The story that unfolded between the beginning of the Second World War and Stalin’s death exactly sixty years ago in 1953, is gripping, momentous, and tragic. The once seemingly impregnable Red Empire that he, along with millions of true believers, had created began to dissolve in 1989 and the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist in 1991. Although they all bristled with armies and their secret police forces were larger than ever, they barely fired a shot. It was as if there was nothing left to defend.

Now that the dust has settled, it turns out that political cultures, authoritarian traditions, and command economies do not change as quickly as regimes. So the nations over which Stalin and his disciples ruled for so long still carry the telltale signs of his curse. These include a penchant to tolerate a strongman at the top, fragile regard for the individual, and stunted civil societies. Although people will have to struggle for years to overcome these deficits, the indications are, in spite of setbacks, that they will succeed.

Robert Gellately is Earl Ray Beck Professor of History at Florida State University. His publications have been translated into over twenty languages and include the widely acclaimed Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: the Age of Social Catastrophe (2007), Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945 (2001), and The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933-1945 (1990). His most recent work is Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War.

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Image credit: Yalta summit in February 1945. Photograph from the Army Signal Corps Collection in the U.S. National Archives via Wikimedia Commons.

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Seventy years ago this month, Americans came to know Casablanca as more than a steamy city on the northwest coast of Africa. On 23 January 1943, the film Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, a tale of doomed love and taking the moral high ground, was released to packed movie houses. The next day, a Sunday, President Franklin Roosevelt ended two weeks of secret World War II meetings in Casablanca with Prime Minister Winston Churchill by announcing at a noon press conference, in a sunlit villa garden fragrant with mimosa and begonia, that “peace can come to the world,” only through the “unconditional surrender by Germany, Italy and Japan.”

The Academy Award-winning movie, of course, became a classic.

Title screen of Casablanca, the Academy-Award winning classic directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Paul Henreid. Image in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Similarly, Roosevelt’s supremely confident proclamation reverberated throughout the world and shortly entered the history books. Choosing just a few words, the president for the first time sought to firmly establish Allied war aims and determine the framework of the peace.

But both the emotional power of the film and the president’s lofty words blurred if not obscured some inconvenient facts. American audiences must have been persuaded that their government, like Bogart’s Rick, would do the right thing by turning its back on the Nazi collaborators (the French puppet government, the Vichy regime) and casting its lot to fight alongside Charles de Gaulle’s Free French. In fact, the Roosevelt administration did not act to cut its ties with Vichy, continued to rely on Nazi sympathizers to run the Moroccan government, and did not officially recognize de Gaulle until October 1944. Like the political and military realities confronting the Obama administration today in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria and Iran, the situation on the ground in North Africa in 1943 was murky, complicated and ambiguous. It did not lend itself to the high-minded moral clarity that Hollywood screenwriters enjoy.

So too the policy of unconditional surrender announced by the US president at Casablanca, and endorsed by the British prime minister, masked some stark realities. Unless and until the Soviet Union decided once and for all to reject German peace-feelers and its Red Army had achieved sufficient size and strength to break the back of Germany’s military machine, “unconditional surrender” could be nothing more than a hollow slogan. Though the president’s confident rhetoric was ostensibly aimed at lifting the morale of the populations of the United States and Great Britain, it was in fact directed at the man who was conspicuously absent from the Casablanca conference—Joseph Stalin. Roosevelt was aware that many would argue that the unconditional surrender policy would prolong the war by encouraging the Nazis to fight to the last man and woman, but he believed that this danger was outweighed by the need to allay Soviet suspicions that the Americans and British would conspire to negotiate a separate armistice with Germany. Roosevelt saw his policy as another way to convince Stalin of his goodwill, a political and psychological substitute for a second front—a phrase that would keep the Soviets in the war, killing German soldiers by the bushel.

President Roosevelt, with Prime Minister Winston Churchill at his side, reading the “unconditional surrender” announcement to the assembled war correspondents. Casablanca, French Morocco, Jan 1943. Image courtesy the Library of Congress.

The policy announced by Roosevelt at Casablanca not only failed to acknowledge the essential role of the Soviets, it also did not have the impact on surrender and peace that he intended. Italy would soon surrender under “conditional” terms. Japan would eventually surrender on condition that her Emperor would be retained. And FDR’s dream that he would turn the page on balance-of-power diplomacy in central Europe and broker the postwar peace would be shattered by the man who could not attend the Casablanca conference in January 1943 because he was busy directing the crucial struggle at Stalingrad.

In the years since Casablanca, experience has shown that presidents would do well to emulate Roosevelt by defining war goals and outlining a framework for peace before engaging the enemy (or at least at an early stage of the conflict). Indeed, the failures of presidents Truman, Johnson, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush to do so in Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Iraq, and Afghanistan seriously soiled their legacies.

Still, the lessons of Casablanca run much deeper and are far more nuanced than the articulation of war aims and peace terms. Casablanca—the movie and the conference—teaches us that human conflict, particularly armed conflict, usually does not end on predictable terms and in conformance with unilateral decrees. Often family, clan, or tribal affiliations trump national loyalties making it difficult if not impossible to distinguish between friends and enemies, neutrals and belligerents. Religious and cultural differences befuddle American peacekeepers. These problems test the mettle of the Obama administration today in places like Benghazi, Waziristan, Damascus, and Teheran.

In Casablanca, Rick was led to believe that he had come to that city because of the healthful waters. Told by Captain Renault that he was in the desert, Rick responded, “I was misinformed.” When it comes to waging wars and structuring peace, US presidents and policymakers should humbly revisit the lessons of Casablanca.

David L. Roll is a partner at Steptoe & Johnson, LLP and founder/director of the Lex Mundi Pro Bono Foundation, a public interest organization that provides pro bono legal services to social entrepreneurs around the world. His latest book is The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler.

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When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, neither the Atomic Bomb nor the Holocaust were on anybody’s agenda. Instead, the Nazi’s top aim was to rid German culture of perceived pollution. A priority was science, where paradoxically Germany already led the world. To safeguard this position, loud Nazi voices, such as Nobel laureate Philipp Lenard,  complained about a ‘massive infiltration of the Jews into universities’.

The first enactments of a new regime are highly symbolic. The cynically-named Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service, published in April 1933, targeted those who had non-Aryan, ‘particularly Jewish’, parents or grandparents. Having a single Jewish grandparent was enough to lose one’s job. Thousands of Jewish university teachers, together with doctors, lawyers, and other professionals were sacked. Some found more modest jobs, some retired, some left the country. Germany was throwing away its hard-won scientific supremacy. When warned of this, Hitler retorted ‘If the dismissal of [Jews] means the end of German science, then we will do without science for a few years’.

Why did the Jewish people have such a significant influence on German science? They had a long tradition of religious study, but assimilated Jews had begun to look instead to a radiant new role-model. Albert Einstein was the most famous scientist the world had ever known. As well as an icon for ambitious young students, he was also a prominent political target. Aware of this, he left Germany for the USA in 1932, before the Nazis came to power.

How to win friends and influence nuclear people
The talented nuclear scientist Leo Szilard appeared to be able to foresee the future. He exploited this by carefully cultivating people with influence. In Berlin, he sought out Einstein.

Like Einstein, Szilard anticipated the Civil Service Law. He also saw the need for a scheme to assist the refugee German academics who did not. First in Vienna, then in London, he found influential people who could help.

Just as the Nazis moved into power, nuclear physics was revolutionized by the discovery of a new nuclear component, the neutron. One of the main centres of neutron research was Berlin, where scientists saw a mysterious effect when uranium was irradiated. They asked their former Jewish colleagues, now in exile, for an explanation.

The answer was ‘nuclear fission’. As the Jewish scientists who had fled Germany settled into new jobs, they realized how fission was the key to a new source of energy. It could also be a weapon of unimaginable power, the Atomic Bomb. It was not a great intellectual leap, so the exiled scientists were convinced that their former colleagues in Germany had come to the same conclusion. So, when war looked imminent, they wanted to get to the Atomic Bomb first. One wrote of ‘the fear of the Nazis beating us to it’.

Szilard, by now in the US, saw it was time to act again. He knew that President Roosevelt would not listen to him, but would listen to Einstein, and wrote to Roosevelt over Einstein’s signature.

When a delegation finally managed to see him on 11 October 1939, Roosevelt said “what you’re after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up”. But nobody knew exactly what to do. The letter had mentioned bombs ‘too heavy for transportation by air’. Such a vague threat did not appear urgent.

But in 1940, German Jewish exiles in Britain realized that if the small amount of the isotope 235 in natural uranium could be separated, it could produce an explosion equivalent to several thousand tons of dynamite. Only a few kilograms would be needed, and could be carried by air. The logistics of nuclear weapons suddenly changed. Via Einstein, Szilard wrote another Presidential letter. On 19 January 1942, Roosevelt ordered a rapid programme for the development of the Atomic Bomb, the ‘Manhattan Project’.

Across the Atlantic, the Germans indeed had seen the implications of nuclear fission. But its scientific message had been muffled. Key scientists had gone. Germany had no one left with the prescience of Szilard, nor the political clout of Einstein. The Nazis also had another priority. On 20 January, one day after Roosevelt had given the go-ahead for the Atomic Bomb, a top-level meeting in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee outlined a “final solution of the Jewish Problem”. Nazi Germany had its own crash programme.

US crash programme – on 16 July 1945, just over three years after the huge project had been launched, the Atomic Bomb was tested in the New Mexico desert.

Nazi crash programme – what came to be known as the Holocaust rapidly got under way. Here a doomed woman and her children arrive at the specially-built Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination centre.

As such, two huge projects, unknown to each other, emerged simultaneously on opposite sides of the Atlantic. The dreadful schemes forged ahead, and each in turn became reality. On two counts, what had been unimaginable no longer was.

Gordon Fraser was for many years the in-house editor at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Geneva. His books on popular science and scientists include Cosmic Anger, a biography of Abdus Salam, the first Muslim Nobel scientist, Antimatter: The Ultimate Mirror, and The Quantum Exodus. He is also the editor of The New Physics for the 21st Century and The Particle Century.

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Image credits: Atomic Bomb tested in the New Mexico desert. Photograph courtesy of  Los Alamos National Laboratory; Auschwitz-Birkenau, alte Frau und Kinder, Bundesarchiv Bild, Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons.

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There has rarely been a more interesting time to study secession. It is not just that the number of separatist movements appears to be growing, particularly in Europe, it is the fact that the international debate on the rights of people to determine their future, and pursue independence, seems to be on the verge of a many change. The calm debate over Scotland’s future, which builds on Canada’s approach towards Quebec, is a testament to the fact that a peaceful and democratic debate over separatism is possible. It may yet be the case that other European governments choose to adopt a similar approach; the most obvious cases being Spain and Belgium towards Catalonia and Flanders.

However, for the meanwhile, the British and Canadian examples remain very much the exception rather than the rule. In most cases, states still do everything possible to prevent parts of their territory from breaking away, often using force if necessary.

It is hardly surprising that most states have a deep aversion to secession. In part, this is driven by a sense of geographical and symbolic identity. A state has an image of itself, and the geographic boundaries of the state are seared onto the consciousness of the citizenry. For example, from an early age school pupils draw maps of their country. But the quest to preserve the borders of a country is rooted in a range of other factors. In some cases, the territory seeking to break away may hold mineral wealth, or historical and cultural riches. Sometimes secession is opposed because of fears that if one area is allowed to go its own way, other will follow.

For the most part, states are aided in their campaign to tackle separatism by international law and norms of international politics. While much has been made of the right to self-determination, the reality is that its application is extremely limited. Outside the context of decolonisation, this idea has almost always taken a backseat to the principle of the territorial integrity of states. This gives a country fighting a secessionist movement a massive advantage. Other countries rarely want to be seen to break ranks and recognise a state that has unilaterally seceded.

When a decision is taken to recognise unilateral declarations of independence, it is usually done by a state with close ethnic, political or strategic ties to the breakaway territory.Turkey’s recognition of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and Russia’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia are obvious examples. Even when other factors shape the decision, as happened in the case of Kosovo, which has been recognised by the United States and most of the European Union, considerable effort has been made by recognising states to present this as a unique case that should be seen as sitting outside of the accepted boundaries of established practice.

However, states facing a secessionist challenge cannot afford to be complacent. While there is a deep aversion to secession, there is always the danger that the passage of time will lead to the gradual acceptance of the situation on the ground. It is therefore important to wage a concerted campaign to reinforce a claim to sovereignty over the territory and prevent countries from recognising – or merely even unofficially engaging with – the breakaway territory.

At the same time, international organisations are also crucial battlegrounds. Membership of the United Nations, for example, has come to be seen as the ultimate proof that a state has been accepted by the wider international community. To a lesser extent, participation in other international and regional bodies, and even in sporting and cultural activities, can send the same message concerning international acceptance.

The British government’s decision to accept a referendum over Scotland’s future is still a rather unusual approach to the question of secession. Governments rarely accept the democratic right of a group of people living within its borders to pursue the creation of a new state. In most cases, the central authority seeks to keep the state together; and in doing so choosing to fight what can often be a prolonged campaign to prevent recognition or legitimisation by the wider international community.

James Ker-Lindsay is Eurobank EFG Senior Research Fellow on the Politics of South East Europe at the European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of The Foreign Policy of Counter Secession: Preventing the Recognition of Contested States (2012) and The Cyprus Problem: What Everyone Needs to Know (2011), and a number of other books on conflict, peace and security in the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean.

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Image credit: Photograph of Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus sign by James Ker-Lindsay. Do not reproduce without permission.

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Bushranger Ned Kelly belongs to Australia, doesn’t he? You might think so, but Australians are surprised to find that there is interest in Ned Kelly far beyond our shores. There are quite a few UK titles from the past, and Australian volumes about him turn up on US book sites all the time.

Sidney Nolan’s popular caricatures of Ned have reinforced the heroic legend. Just last weekend the Canberra Times repeated the silliness that the Gang’s actions were political rather than criminal. The gang were part of an organised crime network stealing farm animals, including draught horses, from their neighbours.

Although born just outside Melbourne, the Irish saw and still see Ned as a revolutionary Irish spirit. I disagree. The gang shot five police (six if the police trooper from Queensland, one of the so-called blacktrackers wounded at Glenrowan, is included).

Melbourne artist David Milne’s Nolanesque portrait of Ned Kelly. Used with permission.

Hardly a week goes by without another Kelly Gang story. Australian debate always boils down to heroes or villains. The last time the police case was detailed in a book was in 1968, fifty years ago. So today’s ‘facts’ tend to be from the vast pro-Kelly Gang folklore.

For me, writing about the gang was like treading on eggshells and broken glass. My book has hundreds of citations to archival documents. But that won’t guarantee immunity from criticism. Luckily for me, the pro-Kelly folk on internet forums nowadays are feuding among themselves.

My demographic ranges from people who know little, to experts in micro-details. One example is Bill Denheld who spent nine years identifying exactly where the Stringybark Creek murders of three police took place. Australia has a knack for losing its prime heritage sites. I devoted a chapter of Eureka: from the official records to discussing the lost location of the 1854 Eureka Stockade.

Best-selling author Ian Jones is the Kelly Gang’s staunchest champion. But I question his 2005 attack on Alex Castle’s posthumously published Ned Kelly’s Last Days as ‘poisonous’ and inaccurate. Jones’s reliance on 1960s interviews with descendants of people whose parents may have known the Kelly Gang is odd. This has skewed his portrayal of gang members. In his books they seem to be personable young men dogged by ill fortune.

The Ned Kelly I found in the official records and newspapers was forever waving a gun in people’s faces and threatening to ‘blow their brains out’.

I found several unpublished documents about the Kelly Gang. These included a plea from Constable Alex Fitzpatrick for a new police pullover. His had a bullet hole in the sleeve and other damage, and was being kept as evidence. Fitzpatrick’s claim that Ned Kelly shot at him three times at the Kelly home in 1878 has been hotly debated. Kelly said he was not there. The document seems to settle the matter. In a strange unpublished note from his prison cell, Ned requested the chief of police to return a saddle.

There are missing records too. The Kelly Gang sent between fifty and sixty letters as part of their hate campaign against police. There were drawings of coffins, the gang shooting at police, and a piece of funeral crepe. The letters were full of blood-curdling threats which would shock most Australians if revealed today. But they have strayed. So many pivotal archival documents are missing that I say in the book ‘there is a possibility that the records have been systematically plundered’ and, if so, ‘the nation itself has been robbed’.

Ned’s .32 pocket Colt revolver was stolen from the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry during the US Bicentennial in 1976. It had been lent by the State Library of Victoria. I believe there was something radically wrong with this revolver, and that it caused the superficial wounds suffered by Constables Fitzpatrick and Thomas Lonigan in 1878.

Ned’s execution took place 132 years ago at 10:00 a.m. on 11 November 1880. After the post-mortem a death mask was made. He was buried next morning in a rough wooden box. The executed prisoners were dug up in 1929 for transfer to grounds at Pentridge prison. Last year, DNA analysis proved the bones to be his. But his skull is still missing…

Ian MacFarlane is a former journalist, court reporter, archivist and historian. He is the author of The Kelly Gang Unmasked from Oxford University Press Australia and New Zealand. With eminent historian Michael Cannon, he co-edited the Historical Records of Victoria series, a primary source in eight volumes documenting pioneer European settlement in Victoria, Australia. With Lt-Col Neil Smith in 2005, he wrote Victoria and Australia’s First War that dealt with the colony’s naval contribution to New Zealand’s First Taranaki War in 1860-1. MacFarlane was recently interviewed in Melton Weekly and the book was recently reviewed by The Police Association Victoria.

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Image: Melbourne artist David Milne’s Nolanesque portrait of Ned Kelly. Used with permission of Ian MacFarlane. Do not reproduce without permission.

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Americans, think fast: pause those (no doubt) raucous Columbus Day festivities and tilt an ear to the north. Sounds from beyond the 45^th parallel should emerge. These may include Molson-fueled merriment and the windswept yawning of those huge CFL end zones. That’s right, it’s Canadian Thanksgiving! Yeah, they have one too.

It’s pretty much like ours, only on the first Monday of October, presumably because gravy freezes up there in late November. Born of the same pagan-turned-Christian impulse to commemorate another death-stalling harvest, Thanksgiving in both the United States and Canada got serious during the sanctimonious back half of the nineteenth century. The US made things official in 1863, when Abraham Lincoln created a federal holiday in gratitude for “fruitful fields” and to atone for American “perverseness and disobedience”; Canadians took their first steps in 1872, giving thanks to God when the Prince of Wales got better from typhoid fever. These pious urges, however, have gone the way of whalebone corsets. Now stripped of religious significance, Thanksgiving is just another commercialized red-letter day on North America’s non-liturgical calendar.

Trying to differentiate between today’s Canadian and American holidays gets silly fast.  In the short film “Crappy Canadian Thanksgiving”, for instance, actress Ellen Page (the pride of Halifax, Nova Scotia) seems destined to spend her holiday in the US among unknowing neighbors, quietly reading a Canadian translation of Twilight. But American friends come to the rescue with an “authentic” Thanksgiving complete with Canadian Club whiskey (under the influence of which Ellen says R-rated things about — gasp — Céline Dion), poutine, flipper pie, and maple syrup. Turns out, though, that the Americans cook and eat Ellen, declaring her tastier than last year’s rack of Martin Short.

The underlying jokes here are the absurdity of (a) distinctions between American and Canadian Thanksgiving, and (b) the idea that Americans would want to consume a nice Canadian. Continental sameness and good feelings reign now, but it wasn’t always the case.

Before there was Canada there was New France, and before there was New France there was Acadia, whose first settlers had some pretty wild Thanksgivings. In the late summer of 1606, a group of Frenchmen sailed up the Bay of Fundy and planted a little colony called Port Royal on the western shore of present-day Nova Scotia. Led by a would-be fur trade baron, the sieur de Poutrincourt, and the future founder of Québec, Samuel de Champlain, the French soon realized how nasty the winter was going to be.  So melding their own harvest traditions with those of the local Mi’kmaq (whose “banquets” featured piles of meat, lots of smoking, and tall tales), the French founded l’ordre du bon-temps, or the Order of Good Cheer.

Beginning that November, members of the order took turns hosting Thanksgiving parties complete with music, plays, wine, fish, and game. Not to stereotype, but moose pâté and beaver tail were apparently favorites. Membertou, the bearded sagamore of the Mi’kmaq, had a place at the table, as did the heads of other clans who brought plenty of goodies to the events. Indeed, the natives “ate and drank like us,” reported one French observer: “We took pleasure in seeing them, and their absence caused us sadness.”

I like to think that the party-people reputation earned by the Order of Good Cheer had something to do with the first “American” Thanksgiving. When Puritans landed at Plymouth in 1620, the nearby Wampanoag wanted nothing to do with them. English slave-raiders had lately been active around Cape Cod, spreading disease and ill-will. When contact became unavoidable, the Wampanoag chief Massasoit talked an Abenaki visitor named Samoset into breaking the ice. Abenaki country stretched from New England to the Maritimes, so Samoset’s people were familiar with the French in Acadia, and knew English traders on the Maine coast too. So he stripped down, painted up, and walked into Plymouth, welcoming the pilgrims in their own tongue. Perhaps hoping for some French-style Good Cheer, Samoset then asked for a beer.

The next year, the Puritans held a Thanksgiving feast to celebrate their survival and to mark a treaty with the Wampanoag. It wasn’t so different from the parties Poutrincourt and Champlain held at Port Royal: natives and Europeans sat around and ate.

But from a common starting point, the French and English took different paths. The 20,000 or so migrants to the Massachusetts-Bay Colony in the 1630s demanded land, which drove the Puritans into conflict with just about all of New England’s Indians. Fewer in number, the French in Acadia and the Saint Lawrence Valley were more cautious. Everywhere they went, they built alliances with natives who helped them sustain the fur trade and fight the English. Not that they loved all Indians; ask the Iroquois or the Fox, pounded by French-led attacks for much of the seventeenth century. But the intercultural links were so enduring that the Puritans saw little distinction between “French and Indian Demoniacks.”

Through it all, Thanksgivings continued. Geopolitics, however, turned them cruel. The French in Canada celebrated Louis XIV’s European wars and native-aided victories against English colonists. In Massachusetts, Thanksgiving was folded into a calendar of religious holidays turned-royal pep rallies. By the 1690s, Cotton Mather, the ne plus ultra of Bostonian priggishness, styled Frenchmen “the worst of Harpys.” In 1760, when Montréal fell to the British, a New England minister reminded his Thanksgiving congregation that it was hardly “sinful to rejoice in the Ruin and Downfall of an unreasonable and implacable enemy.” “Tis’ our Duty,” he proclaimed, “to praise GOD when we are able to set our feet upon their necks.” These guys might not have eaten Ellen Page, but they’d have been happy to see her go.

Our dull, undifferentiated North American Thanksgivings, then, hearken back to a time when early Canadians, New Englanders, and native Americans were grateful for each other’s deaths. So tonight, I’m embracing the modern. I’ll try to get my hands on some caribou jerky and flip between Roughriders vs. Alouettes and Texans vs. Jets. And thankfully, I’ll do it in peace.

Christopher Hodson is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.  He is the author of The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History.

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The Roman Republic: A Very Short Introduction

By David M. Gwynn

When we gaze back at the ancient world of the Roman Republic, what images are conjured in our minds? We see senators clad in togas, and marching Roman legions. The Carthaginian Hannibal leading his elephants over the Alps into Italy, Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon and his murder on the Ides of March. These images are kept fresh by novels and comic books, and by television series like Rome and Spartacus: Blood and Sand. Nor are we the first to seek inspiration in Republican Rome. The last years of the Republic gave life to two of Shakespeare’s most compelling plays, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, and perhaps the most famous speech in the Shakespearean canon (‘Friends! Romans! Countrymen! Lend me your ears’). The Founding Fathers of the United States of America took Rome as their model in drafting the US Constitution, while the French Revolution drew upon the same ideals with dramatically different results. Across two thousand years, each passing generation has turned to the Roman Republic in search of lessons to apply to their own times.

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At the heart of history’s fascination with the Roman Republic lies a paradox. After the expulsion of the last of its legendary seven kings in 510 BC, Rome evolved a unique constitution intended to prevent any return to tyrannical autocracy. Power was shared between the elected magistrates who ran the daily business of government, the popular assemblies which conducted elections and approved laws, and the Senate which debated all major decisions and was in effect the Republic’s ruling body. The result was a stable, conservative, but adaptable form of government that far surpassed the city-states of contemporary Greece. The Republic wasn’t a democracy and far less vulnerable to popular whims than classical Athens, and possessed a practical flexibility that the equally militaristic Spartans lacked. On the battlefield the Roman legion in turn superseded the Greek phalanx, and one by one Rome defeated Carthage and the Hellenistic successors to Alexander the Great. When we think of conquering Roman legions we tend to think of the Roman Empire, but it was the Republic that brought the Mediterranean under Roman rule.

Yet this juggernaut, the most powerful state that the ancient world had ever known, collapsed under the burden of its own success. The fall of the Republic was not due to external attack, for no enemy remained that posed a serious threat to Rome. On the contrary, the Republic’s collapse was driven by the same forces that underlay its triumph. The senatorial aristocracy who dominated Republican life competed from birth for prestige and to surpass the achievements of their ancestors. Desire for dignitas and gloria, the cardinal values of the Roman elite, became ever greater as Rome expanded and the stakes of competition increased. At the same time, the vast wealth amassed through Rome’s conquests brought social and economic crisis that gave ambitious nobles new opportunities. Warlords commanding private armies duelled for supremacy, from Gaius Marius and Cornelius Sulla to Pompeius Magnus and Julius Caesar, and the Republic disintegrated into chaos and civil war.

Like all great historical epics, the Republic’s fall was not a story of inevitable or irreversible decline. Republican champions sought to turn back the tide. The Gracchi brothers aspired to social and economic reform, and were murdered for their pains. Cicero raised Roman oratory and philosophy to new heights and offered moral guidance to restore stability to the Republic, although in his priceless letters he reveals a more personal and at times vindictive side (‘How I should like you to have invited me to that most gorgeous banquet on the Ides of March’). Ambition and desire for power, however, proved too strong. Julius Caesar took the title dictator after defeating Pompeius Magnus, and Caesar’s murder by Brutus and the ‘Liberators’ in 44 BC merely plunged Rome into another decade of conflict. Finally, Caesar’s adopted son Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus defeated Marcus Antonius and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BC, and four years later took the name Augustus. The Roman Republic, a state whose very raison d’être had been to prevent autocracy, had given way to the Roman Empire.

In the modern world where change comes ever more rapidly, it is hardly surprising that our attention is drawn above all to the drama of the Republic’s final years. But there was more to the Republic than senators and legions. To understand ancient Rome we need to look deeper: at the women whose crucial roles our male-dominated sources conceal, at the slaves upon whose labour Roman society depended, at the religious values and customs that defined what being Roman meant. Popular culture no less than academic scholarship can play an essential role in bringing the Roman Republic to life, and in doing so allow us to seek our own lessons from the triumphs and tragedies of the Republic and Rome’s transformation into Empire.

David M. Gwynn served as Tutor in Greek History at Auckland University (1998) and as Lecturer in Greek and Roman History at Massey University (1998-9), before coming to Oxford to commence doctoral studies in 1999. Gwynn’s doctoral thesis, on the polemic of Athanasius of Alexandria and the “Arian Controversy”, was completed in 2003. He then took up a Junior Research Fellowship at Christ Church, Oxford, which he held until 2007. During that time he taught a number of courses in the Faculties of Classics, Modern History, and Theology, and published his thesis with the OUP as the monograph The Eusebians. Upon leaving Oxford in 2007 Gwynn took up the post of Lecturer in Ancient and Late Antique History at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he remains to this day. He was promoted to Reader early in 2012. The Roman Republic: A Very Short Introduction publishes this month.

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 OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

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Take a trip to the Polish town of Będzin today, and there is not a lot to see. The ruins of the old castle rise above the town; a Lidl supermarket helps the casual traveller searching in vain for an open pub or restaurant. And for anyone arriving by public transport, the bus terminus and neighbouring railway station seem about as desolate as can be. This certainly does not seem to be a key location on the trail to Auschwitz, now the epicentre of what might be called Holocaust tourism.

Będzin Bus Terminus. Photo courtesy of Mary Fulbrook.

But think back seventy years, and things looked very different here. What is now the bus terminus was then the Jewish ‘Hakoach’ sports field – Hakoach meaning, roughly, ‘The Strength’. And on this sports ground, on 12 August 1942, some 15,000 Jews were brought together under the cruel pretext of an identity card check. They were forcibly held there for several days, without food, water or shelter, surrounded by armed police, members of the Gestapo and the SS; those who sought to resist, or to flee, or who even stood up or sat down at the wrong times, were brutally beaten or shot dead on the spot. One by one they had to come up to a table where they were directed into different groups, with the elderly, the infirm, and the very young pointed to a corner headed for death. A further 8,000 Jews faced a similar ordeal at another nearby sports ground; there were also selections in the neighbouring town of Sosnowiec at this time.

In an ‘action’ that lasted nearly a week, from 12 to 17 August 1942, some 4,700 Jews from Będzin were sent down the railway tracks to the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a mere 25 miles to the south. Thousands of others were chosen for the slave labour camps run by the SS across Upper Silesia, a part of the Greater German Reich. The rest were allowed to go home – for the time being – as still potentially useful workers in the locality. Within a year they too would be headed for the gas chambers, wiped out in the final ghetto clearance of the summer of 1943.

One of those at the Hakoach sportsground was a teenager by the name of Rutka Laskier. She recalled the selection of August 1942 just a few months later, in a diary entry written in the ghetto. After describing her own experiences, she added:

Oh, I forgot the most important thing. I saw how a soldier tore a baby, who was only a few months old, out of a mother’s hands and bashed his head against an electric pylon. The baby’s brain splashed on the wood. The mother went crazy. I am writing this as if nothing has happened. But I’m young, I’m 14, and I haven’t seen much in my life, and I’m already so indifferent. Now I am terrified when I see ‘uniforms’. I’m turning into an animal waiting to die. One can lose one’s mind thinking about this.

Rutka died in Auschwitz just a few months later. Another Jew, who was lucky enough to survive, later recalled the days following the deportations of August 1942 in her memoirs:

For the next several days Będzin was a city of tears. Mostly people just stayed in their homes mourning and praying. I would say that, at the most, only about one fourth of the people from our apartment complex returned to their homes the night of this devastating selection. The rest were on their way to Auschwitz or a slave labour camp.

By the time the area had finally been rendered ‘Jew-free’, a total of perhaps 85,000 Jews – more than were deported from the whole of France – had passed through the linked ghettos of Będzin and Sosnowiec on their way to Auschwitz.

There is nothing at Będzin’s decrepit bus terminus or forlorn railway station today to commemorate the frightful events of those days in August 1942; nothing to indicate what had gone on in this place of terror. There are no memorial ‘sights’ at what should have been a key ‘site of memory’.

Contrast this with the veritable rash of ‘stumbling stones’ (Stolpersteine) across the streets of Berlin (below), commemorating former Jewish residents who were killed, or the massive Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, located by the Brandenburg Gate at the very heart of Germany’s capital city. The Federal Republic of Germany has (belatedly) come to identify overwhelmingly with the victims of Nazi persecution.

Even so, there remain massive difficulties in Germany with confronting the personal legacies of parents and grandparents who had supported the Nazi regime. One such conformist was the former principal civilian administrator of Będzin, who had implemented the ghettoization of the Jews in his area while growing increasingly uneasy about the transformation of everyday racism into policies of mass murder. His own role at the time, his ambivalence, and the subsequent gaps in his memory of these events, shed much light both on how it was possible for Hitler’s murderous policies to be effected, and how so many Germans after the war could profess that they were ‘always against it’ and had ‘known nothing about it’.

How should we remember these events of seventy years ago? Should there be a plaque at the Będzin bus terminus, or the railway station, to the deportation of tens of thousands of victims of Nazism – or should today’s inhabitants be able to live undisturbed by the ghosts of the past, untroubled by the murder of half the former residents of their town? Memorialisation is anyway always partial, in both senses, selectively highlighting aspects of the past while serving particular interests in a later present. Certainly the reintegration of former Nazis helped establish a powerful democracy in postwar West Germany, even while it explicitly rejected its Nazi heritage.

Perhaps letting the dust settle on this awful past was the best way to try to heal the wounds – at least among those who were not too scarred by its tragedy. Or does this desire to cover or ignore the traces do an injustice to the pain of survivors and the memory of so many victims?

Mary Fulbrook is Professor of German History at University College London. She has written widely on modern German history. Her most recent books are A Small Town Near Auschwitz
Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (OUP, 2012) and Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence through the German Dictatorships (OUP, 2011). A fellow of the British Academy, she is former Chair of the German History Society and a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Foundation for the former Concentration Camps at Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora.

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Images: Będzin Bus Terminus, photo courtesy of Mary Fulbrook; Entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, by alessandro0770, iStockphoto; Stolpersteine, Berlin, from the private collection of Mary Fulbrook.

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At the time of the collision, Hanna Touma was standing in the doorway of the family’s cabin. She was talking to one of the other migrants from her village. It was just a jolt, but it made the door slam shut, cutting her index finger. Two of the men went to find out what had happened while Hanna went to the Infirmary to get her hand bandaged. Everyone she passed wondered what had caused the jolt and why the ship had stopped. The people looked worried, but Hanna could not understand what they said. The men returned and said the ship had struck an iceberg. They were told to stay in their cabins, to remain calm, and pray. The time was 11.40pm, the day Sunday, the date 14 April 1912.

It was four days earlier, on the evening of Wednesday 10 April, that the family had joined the ship at Cherbourg. They had been waiting in a hotel in the French port for six days. While the Titanic had been undergoing its sea trials, Hanna and the children had been travelling to Beirut, in the Lebanon, thousands of miles to the East. Hanna Youssef Razi was born in the tiny village of Tibnin on 10 April 1885 and her future husband Darwis Touma in 1870. They had got married in 1899. Hanna had been 14, Darwis 29. The couple had two children: Maria (born in October 1902) and Georges (born in February 1904).

Working in the onion fields, Darwis had saved a little money to pay for a passage to America. His brother Abraham had gone with him. They settled in the small town of Dowagiac, Michigan. Their plan, like that of most migrants, was to earn enough to send for their families to join them. Darwis had little success in this and seven years passed. He couldn’t save as he had been sending Hanna a little money from time to time. Abraham, on the other hand, had saved enough since he had no dependants to support. He sent his sister-in-law enough money for the trip, along with a piece of paper which said ‘Dowagiac, Michigan’. His intention was to surprise his brother.

Hanna treasured this piece of paper. Even though she had no idea where this place was, it was where her husband lived and that was where she was going. Hanna and the children travelled from Tibnin to Beirut by camel caravan. The days were long and exhausting, the nights short, and they did not have enough sleep or rest. The caravan company supplied the tents that they slept in and the food which they ate: yoghurt, cheese, and olives stuffed in pitta bread, spiced with onions and garlic. While this was a typical Arab meal, washed down with homemade wine, Hanna was a Christian. About a dozen other families accompanied the Touma family. Since the villagers brought their own musical instruments with them, the evenings were enjoyable. They had homemade flutes made from hollow pipes, and small hand drums covered with goat skins. Everyone, children and adults, danced in a circle with the men spinning their handkerchiefs high in the air.

When Hanna and the children reached Beirut, they left the camel caravan behind and took a freighter to Marseilles. On the voyage, the food was poor and the cabin cramped. It took five days. The migrants boarded a train in France and on the three-day journey to Cherbourg the children ran through all the carriages to see if there were any other children on the train besides the ones travelling with the villagers. Maria and Georges found that the other children spoke differently and they could not understand them, but they found ways to amuse themselves.

Half an hour after the collision, Hanna took Georges by the hand and headed for the top deck. She instructed Georges to stay put. She had to return for Maria, and the precious piece of paper that stated where her husband lived. She quickly helped Maria into her coat, grabbed her money and the slip of paper, and raced down the passageway that led out of Third Class. They climbed up from deck to deck, stopping only to grab three lifejackets, and they found Georges just where Hanna had left him. He related in tears how some of the people wanted to put him in a lifeboat, but he would not go without his mother.

When the Engelhardt C collapsible boat was lowered, the rowing started at once. The rowers then stopped, and the passengers could see the ship very clearly, badly down by the bow. It was freezing cold and the view was something Hanna would never forget. The enormity of the ship looked unreal, with hundreds of portholes all lit up and slowly being extinguished one by one. The cries of the people in the water soon stopped and it became very quiet. The sky was black with millions of stars all the way into the distance where the sky and waterline became one. It was so black you couldn’t see who else was in the lifeboat. They were all in a state of shock.

Although all the lights seemed to be on, suddenly they all went out and a loud explosion was heard. The tail end of the ship aimed straight up towards the stars. It stayed that way for several minutes. Then another slight noise was heard, it very slowly began to go lower, and then completely disappeared. Hanna covered Georges and Maria with her cloak so that they could not see. She cried for her fellow villagers: Fatima Mousselmani; the farm labourers Mustafa Nasr Alma, Raihed Razi, Amin Saad, Khalil Saad, and Assad Torfa; and Yousif Ahmed Wazli, a farmer.

Hanna and the other survivors were rescued by the Carpathia. Georges Touma was placed in a sack and pulled up on deck. After arriving in New York and having lost everything other than a few documents and mementos, St Vincent’s Hospital helped Hanna and the children. Meanwhile in Dowagiac, Abraham was shocked at the news of the disaster. How was he to tell his brother that his wife and children had been on the Titanic and now were gone? When he told Darwis, the two cried in sadness and rage, both devastated. Five days later, on Saturday 20 April, they received a telegram from a priest who spoke Arabic. He had a message for someone in Dowagiac that his wife and children had been saved. The little piece of paper had enabled Hanna to find her husband.

While the Touma family were reunited, Fatima Mousselmani was the only other survivor of the Tibnin villagers. The stories of the Titanic’s Third Class passengers are some of the most poignant. Unlike the Astors, the Guggenheims, the Thayers, and the Wideners, very little is known about their lives and it is only because of the Titanic that they have gained a place in history.

John Welshman is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at Lancaster University. He is the author or editor of six books on twentieth-century British social history, including Churchill’s Children: The Evacuee Experience in Wartime Britain. He is also the author of Titanic: The Last Night of a Small Town (Oxford University Press, 2012). Read John Welshman’s previous posts: “One Voyage, Two Thousand Stories,” “Fellowes and the Titanic,” “Everyday people aboard the Titanic,” “Images from the Titanic Disaster” and “Tales of the Titanic Disaster,” and “Titanic Street.”

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28 June 1919

Treaty of Versailles signed,

establishes peace after World War I

The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, 28 June 1919 by William Orpen. Source: Imperial War Museum Collections

The treaty was the result of months of bitter negotiation, in which Wilson tried in vain to create a nonpunitive piece. Clemenceau, whose nation had suffered severely at the hands of the Germans, was disinclined to mercy. He insisted that Germany lose land (with some of it coming to France), be demilitarized, admit responsibility for the war, and pay reparations to the victors. The German delegates had no choice but to accept the terms; they were given no voice in the conditions.

On the day of the signing, two German officials walked slowly into the room, led in by military officers from the United States, Britain, France, and Italy. A member of the British government delegation described the scene: “They keep their eyes fixed away from those two thousand staring eyes, fixed upon the ceiling. They are deathly pale. They do not appear as representatives of a brutal militarism. The one is thin and pink-eyelidded. The other is moon-faced and suffering.”

After Clemenceau addressed the audience with some uncharitable remarks, the signing began. The Germans were first, followed by many others. The vast room was a buzz of conversation, as diplomats exchanged comments on the historic scene. Outside, cannons boomed in celebration, and crowds cheered.

The War to End All Wars was officially over. It would only take 20 years for the next one, caused in part by the punitive terms of the Versailles Treaty, to begin.

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We sat down with author John Welshman to discuss the people on this star-crossed voyage.

Titanic Histories with John Welshman

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Twelve stories from RMS Titanic

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The Titanic and one Third Class family

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John Welshman is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at Lancaster University. He is the author or editor of six books on twentieth-century British social history, including Churchill’s Children: The Evacuee Experience in Wartime Britain. Read John Welshman’s previous posts “One Voyage, Two Thousand Stories,” “Fellowes and the Titanic,” “Everyday people aboard the Titanic,” and “Images from the Titanic Disaster.”

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“As a college student, I created and pursued an independent major in Victorian and Edwardian Studies at Brown and St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, but the Edwardians and the impact of World War I on the world they knew was where my greatest interests lay. Fussell’s analysis of the interplay between history and literary output on the young men who experienced ‘the long weekend’ and then the trauma and tragedy of modern war was deeply influential to me. It particularly inspired me to look at the cultural experiences of the young women who faced the war alongside the men, especially those who went up to Oxford and Cambridge and left to do war work, such as Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby. The Great War indelibly shaped their futures and they used literary forms, memoir and fiction, to express themselves as survivors of the lost generation. Paul Fussell pioneered the cultural history of war, which had long been sidelined to hardcore military history, and his loss is particularly poignant as we approach the centenary of World War I. No doubt there will be an outpouring of worthy new books on the war but no one will ever replace The Great War and Modern Memory.”
– Susan Ferber, Executive Editor, Oxford University Press USA

“For anyone who studied the period — or merely fascinated by it — The Great War and Modern Memory came as a revelation. For students of literature, it pointed to what became Historicism, grounding literary texts not in free-floating theory but in the mud of World War One, and showing how these poems, diaries, novels, and letters reflected the massive change — in every respect, including language itself — brought about by the cataclysm of the war. For general readers Fussell’s book offered the experience of war in a way they hadn’t had with Barbara Tuchman or others; this wasn’t military history, but something richer, deeper, and far more disturbing. As you read, you sensed that he knew war, that this was far more than merely an academic exercise. The book is dedicated to the memory of, ‘Technical Sergeant Edward Keith Hudson, ASN 36548772 Co. F, 401th Infantry killed beside me in France, March 15, 1945’. For generations of readers, The Great War and Modern Memory represented and embodied Oxford’s list: a model of accessible scholarship, huge ambition, hard-minded research, and haunting detail.”
– Tim Bent, Executive Editor, Oxford University Press USA

“Over 30 years ago, when I walked into my first account selling books from Oxford University Press, the buyer handed me a book and told me that if I were to represent OUP, I should begin by reading The Great War and Modern Memory by Fussell. Now, so many years later, I still consider this book one of the top 5 books I have had the pleasure of selling and reading. It is not only was a great read, it sparked a life-long interest in me for WWI poetry and history.”
– Gerry Kallman, Sales Representative for Oxford University Press

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May 17, 1642

Montréal is founded

Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve, jumped from the wooden boat onto land. Falling to his knees, he blessed the ground. His followers also came ashore and built an altar, where a Jesuit father offered a blessing. “You are a grain of mustard-seed,” he said, “that shall rise and grow till its branches overshadow the earth.” With these words, French settlers founded Ville-Marie de Montréal — Montréal, Canada — on May 17, 1642.

Jacques Cartier had first recommended the site of Montréal for a settlement on his second voyage to Canada, in 1535–1536. In fact, he gave the name Mont-Réal to the 760-foot hill rising above the St. Lawrence River. At the time, the land was home to a large settlement of some 1,000 Huron Indians, who called the site Hochelaga.

Though Cartier claimed the St. Lawrence River valley for France, further exploration and settlement of the region did not begin until the early 1600s. Samuel de Champlain, who led the colonization effort, also saw the site of Montréal as a favorable location, as it lay at the junction of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence rivers and just below rapids that made the upper reaches of the St. Lawrence unnavigable.

Montréal as viewed from Mount Royal in 1784 by James Peachy. Source: National Archives of Canada.

Still, it took nearly four decades after Champlain founded Québec before Maisonneuve and his few dozen settlers finally established the first French settlement at the site. He had been put in charge of the company by a group of men who had religious as much as economic goals in planting the colony. They wanted to convert and educate the local Native Americans and found a religious hospital. Thus, along with building a stockade for defense and homes for the settlers, Maisonneuve had a chapel and hospital built as well.

Despite the colony’s lofty goals, it had poor relations with the Native Americans of the area for decades. Not until 1701 did the settlers and the indigenous peoples agree to a lasting peace. By then, Montréal was well established. The mustard seed had grown.

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Each age finds new questions to ask about the Roman Empire. Edward Gibbon, the English historian dedicated to the study of the Roman Empire, chose to entitle his seminal masterpiece The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire because for him, as for others at the end of the eighteenth century, it was decline and fall that was the real puzzle. The Romans had, so it seemed, achieved so much of the what European states of the day still strived to create. There was peace, the rule of law, and some measure of religious toleration. He documented economic progress too, noting advances in navigation and agriculture and the growth of commerce. Gibbon and his peers knew very well that the authors of the Greek and Roman classics on which they have been brought up were not Enlightenment scholars. But they felt some affinity for the spirit of the age. “The love of letters, almost inseparable from peace and refinement, was fashionable among the subjects of Hadrian and the Antonines, who were themselves men of learning and curiosity.” So for the subjects of the last generation of European monarchs who did not quake before the French and American Revolutions, the real question was: “Where did it all go wrong?” What brought ancient Rome to its knees and let in the barbarians?

Things look different today. It’s not just that we are less confident about those Enlightenment values, and more sceptical about Roman toleration and the quality of Rome’s emperors. We live amidst the ruins of European and Soviet Empires, empires that rose and fell in the blink of a Roman eye. Most historians consider the British Empire was in its infancy in Gibbon’s lifetime which gives it a lifespan of two and half centuries at best. Depending on how you count it the Roman Empire lasted between one and half and two millennia. Our question today is not ‘why did it fall?’ but ‘why did it last so long?’

Greek General and historian, Polybius

The Romans, of course, had no idea. Or rather their answers no longer convince us. Most saw their success as resting on the virtue of men and the favour of the gods (and so their decline on the growth of vices and the loss of that favour). The first analyst of Roman imperialism — the Greek general and historian Polybius — thought the answer might lie in the comparative advantage given by the Roman constitution. Rome was a Goldilocks city, not too democratic, not too monarchical, with a well-ordered military system and a religion in which the right people were firmly in control. That sort of analysis appeals more to modern political science with its interest in institutions. Yet every single institution changed in the course of Rome’s long history.

One new approach to the question is to follow Polybius’ comparative instinct but cast our net more widely. Rome was just one of a number of vast empires that appeared around the globe in antiquity. It seems astonishing at first that Persian, Chinese, Indian, Macedonian, Arab, Inka and Aztec conquerors, to name just the most famous cases, could create imperial states thousands of miles across and sustain them for centuries. The European empires of the nineteenth century had gunpowder and telegraphs, ships that could cross the oceans and were powered by dynamic economies back home. Yet they began to collapse almost before they reached their greatest extent. Early empires in Europe and Asia depended on iron technology and animal traction. All their documents were painstakingly written out by hand. In the New World they even lacked iron, ploughs, and writing! Seeing the Roman Empire against this backdrop does not make it less remarkable, but it helps us understand better what went right for it.

To take just one example: every early empire had to survive the end of expansion. Many early empires – that of the Mongols for instance – expanded fantastically rapidly but failed to stabilize their rule and collapse almost at once. China’s first imperial dynasty, the Qin, lasted just one generation. The Persian Empire of Cyrus nearly collapsed in the second, until Darius the Mede seized power. In all the success stories we see the same basic strategies played out. Conquerors form alliances with elements of the defeated peoples, share some power and some profits, and bind them into the new empire with a cosmological vision that made their own self-interest seem in some sense noble. And suddenly the emperor Augustus’ investment in creating a tax system and filling the empire with monuments makes sense. Successful conquerors invest in infrastructure: the Persian Royal Road, the Great Canal of China….and the Roman roads. Fast communications meant knowing the enemy’s moves earlier, making the most of a smaller army, and provisioning the great capitals that arose at the heart of every empire.

There are differences of course between the early empires. Almost no other empire made the use (as Romans did) of slavery or citizenship; many had much less use for cities; some cultivated the scholars Gibbon identified with; some did without. Those contrasts too are revealing, helping explain some of Rome’s genuinely unique features. The trick, as always in comparative history, is picking the right comparisons. Rome in the Antonine Age was not quite like Enlightenment Europe, and it was not very like the British Empire either, for all that it was admired and taken as a model by both.

Greg Woolf is Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews. His research specialities include ancient literacy, the Roman economy, the sociology of ancient empires, ancient science, and Roman religion. His latest book, Rome: An Empire’s Story, publishes this month. See Greg Woolf discussing what’s new in Roman studies via our YouTube channel.

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As Captain Scott sat in his tent in the Antarctic in 1912, pinioned between the dead bodies of Birdie and Uncle Bill, he wrote countless valedictory notes to people he would never see again, in places half a world away.  One was to the godfather of his son, expressing his love and admiration for the man and asking him to look after the boy.  A hundred years ago that letter was lying unread in the death tent.  But eventually, of course, it was delivered – to J. M. Barrie, foremost playwright and author of his day.

As Scott set off for Antarctica, Barrie sat down to write the book-of-the play of Peter Pan.  When he received Scott’s note three years later, he not only obeyed Scott’s wishes, he carried the letter with him everywhere, ever after – his most prized possession.  He read aloud from it during his inaugural address as Rector of St Andrews University: an address entitled simply ‘Courage’.  It is hard to imagine two men more different than Scott and Barrie, but the love and admiration was entirely mutual.

Geraldine McCaughrean and Peter Pan

In 2005, I suddenly found myself writing the sequel to Peter Pan and Wendy, titled Peter Pan in Scarlet.  (I know authors are not generally caught unawares by books, but I had entered the competition for the commission without expecting to win, so it was a bit of a shock.) I had just finished a novel, The White Darkness, in which Captain Oates featured heavily; a lot of Antarctic research was still shunting about in my head.  That mortally sad little letter became my ‘travel pass’ into Barrie’s world.  When the door opened on to Neverland, a blizzard inevitably blew through.

Of all the things to know about Barrie’s life, it might seem a minor one, but in fact it says a lot about the man.  His personal heroes were exactly the kind who would go on reckless adventures to the ends of the earth and think their lives well lost so long as the endeavour was noble. If I was going to write a sequel to his book, my first obligation was towards Barrie. I could not ask the man’s permission, but I could at least try and be true to his ethos. So I took phrases from Courage and put them into Pan’s mouth. I made courage Peter’s watchword.

As a character to hijack, Peter Pan was splendidly interesting, of course. He might be brave but he is also egocentric, obnoxious and violent. If the Lost Boys grow too big, he kills them. Disney chose to overlook this, so that a public perception grew up of an impish, cute little chap well suited to being a logo on the front of romper suits. Since Peter Pan in Scarlet aimed to be a counterpart to Barrie’s book, it came out quite dark. So it was dismaying to find it being bought for tiny rompered children and as Christening presents for babies, while readers over ten assumed they were too old to enjoy it. Hence the younger, picture book version of Scarlet published three years later.

Barrie only wrote the book-of-the-play because he grew irritated by other people publishing their own versions. Seven years into the play’s run, some of the shine must surely have come off the story as far as he was concerned. It is quite a self-conscious book — full of asides to the adult reader. Yet for all his flippant whimsy, Barrie was drawn back in by the idée fixe that had haunted him since 1900. He found expression for all his bitter-sweet insights into the nature of children, childhood, belonging, loneliness, aging and, of course, courage: universal things that kept the book selling and the play running long after all his other work fell out of fashion. Peter Pan is the boy who never grows out of date.

For a boy who never grew up, and therefore forfeited his right to birthdays, Peter Pan enjoys more celebrations than most. In place of his own, he acquired ‘Peter Pan Week’ in March and J.M. Barrie’s birthday – today – not to mention Christmas – as annual opportunities to renew himself in people’s imagination. As unbirthdays go, these are more important than most because, of course, Barrie gifted his copyright in Pan to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, so the more exposure he gets the better. In 2005, certain exclusive rights were about to expire, curtailing a source of income that has been vital to the Hospital for 80 years. So they hit on the idea of the “Official Sequel” whose copyright would remain with them.

Publication of Peter Pan in Scarlet was timely, then — you might even say, in the nick of time. Yet Peter Pan, thank God, lives in a place where Time does not move on at all. He could afford to forfeit his birthdays. Child readers are impervious to anniversaries anyway: one hundred, two hundred years signify very little when you have experienced only ten. As far as a child is concerned, a centenary is a birthday party with no cakes, for someone you haven’t heard of and who is extremely dead.

As for Scott, Titus, Birdie and the rest, the emotions they stir up have remained cryogenically fresh ever since 1912. The power of Antarctica to symbolise all manner of things — lives freezing and thawing,  arrogant mankind dwarfed by nature, life against a backcloth of lifelessness, self-sacrifice, blind disorientation, the hideous void colour-rimmed with beauty — these are the stuff of universal angst and fascination. Francis Spufford said that the reason the story of Captain Scott enthrals us is that we travel with him to the very brink of death — and (unlike him) return alive, with a fuller appreciation of life itself. The arrival of 2012, or any ‘topical’ anniversary, cannot fabricate that reaction — not in an author and not in a readership; only age, fear, loss and the creak of ice within our blood streams bring it on.

Geraldine McCaughrean was born and educated in Enfield, North London. She trained as a teacher, worked for ten years in publishing, and in 1988 became a full-time writer. Since then Geraldine has written over 160 books and plays for both adults and children, including Peter Pan in Scarlet, the official sequel to J M Barrie’s Peter Pan, which was one of the most talked about and successful children’s titles of 2006. Geraldine McCaughrean has won the Carnegie Medal, the Whitbread Children’s Book Award (three times), the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the Smarties Bronze Award (four times), the Blue Peter Book of the Year award and the Blue Peter Special Book to Keep Forever award.  In the States, accolades have included the Printz Award, America’s most prestigious teen-book prize. Geraldine’s most recent title, Pull Out All The Stops!, was published in October 2010 by Oxford University Press.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online has granted free access for a limited time to the biographies of J.M. Barrie and Captain Scott.

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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. In this week’s VSI column, we give you Russian History: A Very Short Introduction. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series!

Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

By Geoffrey Hosking

After a decade of a chaotic but exhilarating democracy in the 1990s, Vladamir Putin as president and prime minister has been restoring a strong state. At least, that is how we usually understand it. He has certainly restored an authoritarian state. On assuming office in 2000, he strengthened the ‘power vertical’ by ending the local election of provincial governors and sending in his own viceroys – mostly ex-military men – to supervise them. Citing the state’s need for ‘information security’, he closed down or took over media outlets which exposed inconvenient information or criticised his actions. Determined opponents were bankrupted, threatened, arrested, even murdered. He subdued the unruly Duma (parliament) by making it much more difficult for opposition parties to register or gain access to the media, and by encouraging violations of electoral procedure at the polls. Until recently, the Russian public seemed to accept this as part of the natural order.

This is all part of a well-established historical pattern. There are good reasons for Russians’ attachment to strong leaders. They fear both external invasion and internal subversion. A glance at their history reveals why. Their frontiers are very long and open, and over the centuries they have suffered invasion many times. In 1237 the Mongol onslaught brought devastation of towns and mass murder or enslavement of citizens. In Suzdal, for example, according to the Chronicle, “They plundered the Church of the Holy Virgin and burned down the prince’s court and burned down the Monastery of St Dmitrii, and the others they plundered. The old monks and nuns and priests and the blind, lame, hunchbacked and sick they killed, and the young monks and nuns and priests and priests’ wives and deacons and deacons’ wives, and their daughters and sons – all were led away into captivity.”

Older people can still remember the German invasion of 1941, in which such scenes were reproduced over broad swathes of the country. Russians will support almost any regime which offers them security from attack, even if they distrust and resent the local officials with whom they have everyday dealings. And that means that almost any regime can legitimise itself by claiming that Russia is in danger. Putin has done so by insinuating that NATO is threatening Russia militarily and subverting it from within through foreign-financed NGOs.

The latter accusation resonates with Russians, since they also fear troublemaking underlings inside the country. Three times in the last four centuries the Russian state has collapsed: in the early 17th century ‘time of troubles’, in the revolution of 1917-21 and in the collapse of the USSR in 1991-3. In the first two cases the result was civil war, and that nearly happened in 1993 as well. Even without civil war, if the state is weak, rich and powerful local bosses can throw their weight about unrestrained. They enrich themselves and their clients, seize the property of opponents and beat them up or murder them, if they see fit. Russians still vividly remember the 1990s, when state property was dispersed among oligarchs, and as a result many hospitals, schools, and old people’s homes became impoverished and decrepit, while pensioners, teachers, and nurses were paid late in inflated rubles – if at all.

These memories help to explain why Putin is still trusted by many Russians, especially of the older generation. Under him material life has greatly improved. But this is largely because the price of Russia’s main export, oil, has soared. Trust in Putin is wary and was declining even before autumn 2011. Russians are aware that he encourages or at least tolerates unsavoury practices which damage their lives. They know that their immediate superiors are corrupt and overbearing, and that redress for abuses is unattainable. An authoritarian state is not necessarily a strong state. On the contrary, rather than enforce the law, it may merely co-opt greedy underlings and licence their depredations.

Here too Russians are re-enacting familiar scenarios. In past centuries serfs generally accepted their lot as necessary and in any case ineluctable. Besides, it offered them modest benefits: some cultivable land and membership in a village community which usually ran its own affairs by negotiation with the landlord’s steward. (The British Empire, by contrast, could not manage without enclosures, the Poor Law and the workhouse.) But there were always discontented serfs who escaped the burdens and injustices to resettle in the empire’s open frontier lands. If opportunity offered, moreover, or if new abuses were inflicted on them, even the peasants who stayed at home could and did cause serious trouble. There were massive rebellions in the 1660s, 1770s, 1905-6 and 1917-18, and continual smaller-scale protests in between.

Nowadays there are no more serfs in the literal sense, but ordinary citizens often feel like semi-serfs. Young professional people find their careers blocked by local power brokers; businessmen in official disfavour see their premises raided, their tax affairs minutely examined, and sometimes their businesses bankrupted. Many of them have visited or even lived in other countries; they know that at least in some of them the authorities are restrained by the rule of law. They would like to see it established in Russia too.

That is why, when the parliamentary elections of December 2011 were blatantly falsified, the passivity abruptly ended. Massive protest demonstrations took place in the major cities, calling for a rerun of the elections and ‘Russia without Putin’. Young professional and commercial people, using the new social networking sites, were at the core of the demonstrations. But many ordinary workers, pensioners and others participated too. There was no mistaking the widespread anger and resentment. They all know that the state is not doing its proper job of enforcing the law.

It is impossible to tell at the moment whether the population will once more relapse into sullen acquiescence, or whether an effective opposition movement will take shape. Nor can we tell whether Putin, back in full power as president from May 2012, will continue to crush his opponents by force, or whether he will introduce serious reforms. What we do know from the past, however, is that once change starts in Russia it tends to be cumulative and sweeping, and to result in greater changes than seemed possible at the outset. We also know that when Russians yearn for a strong state, they also yearn for a just one.

Geoffrey Hosking is Emeritus Professor of Russian History at University College London. Geoffrey Hosking was formerly Professor of Russian History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL from 1984 to 2007. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.

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