Recently in History Repeats... Category

I'm cleaning my desk and ran into an alumni magazine with the provocative headline Did the Samurai Have a Sense of Humor? Gee - I wonder if the answer is "Yes!". Oh look the subtitle is The Phenomenon of 18th-Century Japanese Comic Books - and we all know how silly they are. Hey if you don't believe me, ask Harvard 18th century Japanese expert Adam Kern

The article goes on at great length to explain that not only was there 18th century satirical manga in Japan, but that it was a criticism of modern political and social events. But let's just cut to some compelling dialogue from 1785's Playboy, Roasted à la Edo

Plot: The semi-attractive mercantile son Enjiro asks friends and geisha for advice on obtaining the love of many women proclaiming: "For a lifetime of memories, I'd kill myself."

Best Advice: When placing tattoos representing fake women on your arm, don't forget to remove some later to show that you have "discarded" them.

Kinosuke: (experienced playboy) It'll look suspicious if some tattoos aren't erased, so we'll burn them off later with moxa

Enjiro: (aspiring playboy) Who'd've thought becoming a playboy would hurt so much?

Now that you're done giggling, I do have a point which is that it's still a shock when we discover that an ancient/foreign culture is capable of "sophisticated" humor or irony. Somehow we expect people far outside our culture to either be so serious or so "different" that they could not really understand Western humor or "abstract" concepts like social satire.

For instance, Vikings, Celts and Saxons are portrayed as fierce warriors whose idea of a good idea was binge drinking in the mead hall and that their comedic range was restricted to maybe bad Three Stooges pratfalls with helmets. Yet one of the best "parodies" of the fantasy quest is from the Middle Welsh Mabinogi. When the hero Pwyll, who spends a year chasing the beautiful Rhiannon on horseback, finally catches up with her, she asks him why he didn't just yell out to her to stop in the first place. And you thought Princess Leia's spunk was a modern invention.

So watch the Discovery Channel carefully the next time a Caucasian adventurer wants to experience a more primitive life and see if you don't spot an "indigenous" citizen barely containing snickers at the complete idiocy that only a city slicker can display.

Many cities have "official" founding dates like 1797 for Baltimore, 1237 for Berlin, 332 BC for Alexandria Egypt and 753 BC for Rome (some sources give April 21, 753 BC as the date). Yet archaeologists keep finding evidence of human settlements before these dates (sometimes well before these dates).

Today it was Berlin (see Berlin dig finds city older than thought), earlier it was Rome (see Tomb dating from 10th century B.C. found in Caesar's Forum) and even Alexandria (Ancient Alexandria Older than We Thought?).

I don't know about you, but I'm starting to see a pattern. Clearly the founding dates aren't initial settlement, but dates when it gets founded as a political entity (or gets rededicated as a capital). For instance, 1797 is the date when Baltimore incorporated itself as a city - there had actually been multiple settlements at the head of the Patapsco River almost a century before that (which is how Baltimore got to host the Continental Congress in the Revolutionary War even though it didn't exist yet).

I'm glad that archaeologists are figuring out that founding dates don't mean initial settlement, but I'm intrigued that we continue to be "shocked" by this. The older cities are merely following a pattern found even in North American cities. If you do live in the U.S. and Canada, look up the founding date of your local municipality some time - chances are there were European settlers in the area at least a few years before an actual incorporation date. Apparently the founding date time lag is a time-honored tradition.

In case you were wondering, the Pilgrims were not the first people from England to visit New England. The native tribes had been contact with English traders before 1620, which is how Squanto (or Tisquantum) was able to learn enough English to communicate with the settlers. He actually sailed with John Smith of Pocahontas legend  (OK I really didn't know that before today).

The old conventional wisdom was that dates were important, hence an "educated" person is supposed to know that 1776 was the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Civil War lasted from 1860-1865 and that William the Conquerer successfully invaded England in 1066. So generations of school children memorized lists of dates and events in hopes of passing their final exam...and often forgot them 15 minutes later.

But are the dates important or is it the trend that matters? After all what's the point of knowing that the Civil War took place in the 1860s if you don't understand that it was a major conflict over racial equality vs. states rights and the impact of both on Western expansion of American territory (more or less). So the modern trend in historical instruction has often been to focus on the the trends behind the dates and not worry so much about dates. Memorizing trends instead of dates is now the new conventional wisdom.

Makes sense right? Actually I've found there is a teeny problem. It's often the case that if you completely skip dates you lose some nuance that really could help you understand history at a deep level. If you're not careful history can become a weird melange of events of that happened sometime between WWI and the Moon landing.

And if you wish to ANALYZE history instead of just reading about it - you have to deal with dates. Using dates to sequence events is critical to constructing a "narrative". Without an accurate chronology, your analysis will not just be wrong but usually wrong in a howlingly inaccurate way that will have the date dweebs on floor screaming, laughing or crying.

Picture, if you will, a confused child of the 22nd century who can't quite distinguish the two president Bushes claiming that we invaded Kuwait to avenge the the loss of of the World Trade Center and the simultaneous Oklahoma City bombing. Of course this is someone who has merged the 1st Persian Golf war in Kuwait with two separate events.

It sounds funny, but it's also a little dangerous. As an adult, the same person could wonder why we've invested so much in Kuwait when they're our mortal enemies and underestimate the dangers of domestic terrorists who are the ones who actually set off the bomb in Oklahoma City.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't explore deeper issues such as "Why is Al Qaeda attacking us?" but that knowing details such as dates and locations really help form a fuller picture of what's really going on. I have to say, a lot of modern Middle Eastern politics did confuse me until I learned more about the Ottoman Empire in Turkey and how some of it was divvied up after WWI into French and British territories for a while. Suddenly...a few more things made sense and I really understood some of what Al Qaeda was mad about (it's not really just the US by the way).

So if we are serious about students learning higher-order thinking ... I really do think we have to teach students how to memorize and use dates (and locations) in their thinking as well as social trends like "nationalism" and "colonialism".

It's true that "full human rights" is a relatively new concept. That is - the concept that any competent adult has the right to vote and the same basic legal protection as the richest people in the land is relatively recent.

After all, it wasn't until the early 20th century that adult women were considered competent enough to vote. Even the U.S. Founding Fathers really only trusted the state legislators to appoint the U.S. Senator (the direct vote was only fully implemented in 1913 when the 17th Amendment was ratified).

But how did this evolution begin? The British Library starts the process in 1215 with the Magna Carta. This is pretty much what I was taught in my high school civics class as well (although it's crushing to realize the Magna Carta is really guaranteeing the rights of a bunch of angry barons and really says nothing about the general populace).

Does this mean that there was no concept of human rights before 1215? Although our popular notions may date human rights to 1215, the issue has been present for large portions of Western history. Peasant revolts were quite common in the Roman Empire, so the lower classes certainly felt they were owed something more. In fact the Roman government created the office of tribune specifically to mediate disputes between the plebes and the patricians (the aristocracy). The basis of Athenian democracy (and the Roman Senate of the Republic) was to allow "eligible citizens" full participation. Both the Ancient Athenians and the Roman Republic rejected the notion of an absolute monarchy - this is the concept echoed in the Magna Carta. On a side note, Athenian democracy was innovative in allowing any adult non-slave male to vote in the city assembly. In Rome, only designated patricians could participate in the Senate.

In the British Isles, the concept of civil rights was also found in both Anglo-Saxon England and Celtic Wales and Ireland. Before the Norman invasion of 1066, the selection of the next Saxon king had to be ratified by the witengemot Assembly Similar elections were held for Welsh and Irish kings - although the candidate pool was usually pretty limited.

Finally in Irish law, the aristocracy were legally obligated to provide certain provisions to the peoples within their territories including feasts (some with ale, some without). Non-slaves were also guaranteed certain rights in terms of seeking redress, even from the ruling class.

So I would have to say that civil rights were a concept that had been around for a while. The interesting question is - why do we choose the Magna Carta as a starting point? It's pretty much an Anglo-centric quirk. England generally dates the start of English history to the Norman Invasion of 1066. Not only did this bring in a new dynasty from France, but a brand new aristocracy as well. The native Saxon male nobles were pretty much displaced and replaced with French imports, and all the major government institutions replaced.

Events before 1066 are "prehistory" (even if we have documents). The events of 1215 (less than 150 years after the Norman Conquest) is one the first events in the NORMAN ERA where civil rights were successfully asserted. Before that Norman king had much more power, even over his nobility.

Although I begin this blog with a complaint that the Magna Carta wasn't the beginning for Civil Rights, I realize that it actually is a milestone for the English aristocracy. The native Saxons, on the other, hand still had a fair bit to travel...although they did get there eventually. It is a little disconcerting to realize how much history can be written by the winners, even ones from nearly 1000 years ago.

If you haven't heard this before, there's a lot of schlock on the Web. If you're out on the loop on this, check out this review from the Times Online of The Cult of the Amateur.

In an alarming new book The Cult of the Amateur. [Andrew Keen] argues that many of the ideas promoted by champions of web 2.0 are gravely flawed. Instead of creating masterpieces, the millions of exuberant monkeys are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity: uninformed political commentary, unseemly home videos, embarrassingly amateurish music, unreadable poems, essays and novels.

I actually agree with Keen's assessment on the schlockiness of most Web 2.0 content, but do we have any right to stop it? Don't we have a right to express ourselves...even if others find it tacky? Maybe you find this blog tacky, but I know that I've had a chance to express myself in a way I couldn't before. Unlike child pornography, tacky content doesn't really hurt anyone except for the media that might be used up (which is usually pretty cheap).

Actually any media that is accessible to the mass populace will inevitably be dominated by schlock in the short term. Jane Austen is a notable author from the Regency Era, but she was hardly the only one out there. Dime novels are a cliche based on reality.

Even writing itself is dominated by schlock. How many grocery lists have you written in your lifetime? Or silly postcards? And would you want your teen diaries to be published? I didn't think so... Even letters from the Roman outpost of Vindolania include requests for socks.

What Keen forgets is that the marketplace actually filters out the worst of the content. You Tube contains some trite material, but little of it will ever reach the front page. Pretty much every "featured video" (as determined by votes) has been what I would deem "quality" (if not literary masterpieces).

Sometimes a genuine new talent will be discovered.

Yes the tacky "bestseller" will still sneak through, but then there's the power of time which may be the deadliest foe of all to schlock. The surviving cannon of Greek drama and poetry is all first caliber, but scholars still wonder what other gems we lost in the meantime.