Violent History

In Case It Wasn't Obvious Already...

2006-09-10T14:42:00.000-04:00

Have been unavoidably detained by the world.
Expect us when you see us.

Update 12/10/2006: If you'd like to keep an eye on what I'm up to, I've started an open research journal over at http://zeerover.wordpress.com/. I don't expect it to be anything anyone will want to read, but it's not like there's anything going on here either.

Which Classic Female Literary Character Is Isaac?

2006-07-10T21:54:00.000-04:00

I came across this quiz while belatedly browsing over at Rebecca Goetz's (a)musings of a grad student. In the spirit of Johnny Depp's gender-bending rendition of Captain Jack Sparrow, I figured it couldn't hurt to subject myself to one silly little exercise. Since I am notoriously unrefined, I don't actually know enough about classic female literary characters to decide how I feel about the result. I suspect it is more a reflection of my obvious anticapitalist politics than it is of my dubious amorous proclivities, since pretty much every question was just a choice between love and money. I also resent having only one opportunity to express my assertiveness (it was either that or charismatic, and as anyone can attest I am quite a charmer). Anyhow, what do I care? I don't even know who Beth March is. Silly pirate, quizzes are for girls.

First Shot Over the Bow: A (Very) Preliminary Assessment of "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest"

2006-07-08T13:39:00.000-04:00

It was a fairly hot day in Dover, at least by my standards, and I was happy to spend the midday hours holed up in the UNH library photocopying articles from journals I can't get ahold of back in Maine. I was particularly excited to finally put my hands on Itinerario 1999/2, which contains a series of excellent introductory essays on Atlantic History. I recommend it to students at all levels, from undergraduates to the most seasoned sailors in the field, and twice over to the surprisingly large number of faculty and graduate students in Atlantic history who confess to me that they haven't heard of it.

Since all work and no play makes Isaac a dull boy, my sisters and I decided to go out for the night. We went to see "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest", the sequel to one of my favorite movies, "The Curse of the Black Pearl" (2003). I'm going to give it another look-see before I pass final judgment, but my initial reaction is fairly negative. I wasn't expecting "Godfather II" or "The Empire Strikes Back", but what I found was something more along the lines of "Matrix Reloaded". With a few fleeting exceptions, both sequels were a confused, confusing mess of hastily thrown together images, ideas and special effects. The Disney team, like the Wachowski brothers before them, appears to be operating under the assumption that fans of the first installment were only into it for the eye candy (in fact, "Dead Man's Chest" even has its own bullet time sequence, just in case you might be able to stomach any more of it after it was overdone in the Matrix sequels). It is contrivedly self-referential, straining to force in throwback lines that could have been hilarious ("Why is all the rum gone?!") with no concern for whether or not they work their particular context.

Taken as a whole, "Dead Man's Chest" is one long, obnoxious litany of jokes and special effects. This is litany in the classical sense, a sermon of call and response delivered through the silver screen. A tentacle rends an unfortunate sloop asunder and the audience dutifully gasps, another line from the original is regurgitated and the faithful laugh on cue. Kraken, ooh; swordfight, aah; look-- there's that hampster wheel again! Did he just ask where the rum went? LOL! The special effects fall victim to the same unsophisticated overapplication. One of the most striking successes in "Curse of the Black Pearl" was the moonlight effect, where Industrial Light and Magic doled out its wares in carefully measured quantities. There is nothing subtle about the effects in "Dead Man's Chest". Instead of treating us to flirtatious moonlit glimpses of something beautiful, Disney parades its wares before our eyes until the figure is not so much nude as naked, an awkward and unsightly creature when viewed in the full light of day. Like so many other movie franchises, attendance at this second episode of the Pirates series has become a liturgical exercise, a public display of faith in the writers, directors, and producers. That faith is misplaced.

We all came here to worship, so most of us won't know the difference, but it's there right before our eyes-- wriggling around on deck in one scene and half-heartedly delivering poorly-written lines in running eyeliner in the next. In his review for the New York Times, A. O. Scott goes so far as to compare Orlando Bloom unfavorably to a piece of wood, and I can't say that I disagree with him. All of this is not to say that I hated the movie. I was pretty disappointed through the first hour and a half, but it grew up as it went along. More than anything I'm upset at the obvious lack of effort on the part of the creative team behind the film. "The Curse of the Black Pearl" was a genuinely clever movie, and in particular I was excited by the way in which it tapped into what we all love about pirates. The second film only taps into our love for Pirates (with a capital P), and even that is an uninspired and insincere attempt. What is it that we love about pirates? I'll have to leave my thoughts on that for a future post.

What I hope for at this point is that the crew at Disney can succeed where the Wachowski brothers did not, to right the ship and get back on course with the final installment of the trilogy (and please, please, leave it at a trilogy). To be fair to the Wachowskis, there was still something of substance to the Matrix sequels, you just had to be willing to sit through mind-numbingly protracted fight sequences to find it. Like the crew at the beginning of "Dead Man's Chest", we came back to the Pearl looking for something shiny, and instead find ourselves staring blankly at Captain Jack as he blathers unintelligibly about nothing at all. A more accurate assessment of what was done to the Pirates franchise is what happened to other Disney classics like "The Lion King" and "The Little Mermaid". Does anyone even remember the names of their sequels? Screenwriters, ye be warned.

Idle Summertime Meta-Wankery or: The Blind Leading the Blind or: An Anti-Imperialist's Guide to the Round of 16

2006-06-27T10:42:00.000-04:00

It's a cool, wet morning here in Maine, and I'm enjoying a little down time before starting the next book in my intense (but thus far amazingly successful) summer reading list. I have all sorts of half-written posts saved to finish at a later date: book reviews and reviews of book reviews and reflections on Atlantic history and lists of what I'm reading and whatnot, but I've been working so hard for the last month I don't have the energy to write anything here that feels like work. Since I've been carrying around a nagging urge to post something here just to stay in the rhythm of writing, I figured I'd pass along this entertaining tidbit of British lefty humor. Maybe it will be lost on some of you, as it certainly has been on that pathetic dullard Kos, standard-bearer of American liberalism and beacon to every listless dolt on the blogosphere's "radical middle", but I won't hold it against you. If you can't follow Monty Python, don't bother.

(Hint: Daniel Davies doesn't really want Kos blogger ct dead and Terry Jones doesn't really want to kill Mr. Johnson. For crying out loud... American liberals wouldn't know what to do with Stephen Colbert if Jon Stewart hadn't told them to laugh.)

I only had the time to come across this foolishness because the World Cup (which should be occupying all my free time right now) has been a total sleeper. My interest has steadily waned since Trinidad & Tobago failed to advance after avenging the fiasco of WC '74. Now that the Trinis are out of the mix, I find less and less worth watching as the winners become increasingly predictable and the officiating becomes increasingly ridiculous (picture Haiti - T&T 1973 over and over and over and over and over). We've already seen a game where a single player was yellow carded three times and another which saw sixteen yellows and four reds handed out and an inexplicably brief six minutes of stoppage time (given what must have been nearly twenty minutes during which there was no actual football taking place on the pitch), and that's just the tip of the iceberg. I'm actually relieved that this is the last pair of games for a few days, maybe things will be better after the break.

With the Soca Warriors sent packing, I'm pegging my anti-imperialist sympathies to Ghana, though the heirs to Nkrumah face the absurd task of overcoming perennial goliath Brazil if they wish to advance to the quarterfinals. My political orientation aside, I don't think I can bear to see a rotund Ronaldo cherry-pick his way to history in the midst of the most utterly uneventful World Cup of my life. I suppose I won't be too upset either way, because Brazil shares much of the same legacy as the former Gold Coast, but in this match I'll be pulling for the upset.

Raise high the flag of Ghana,
And one with Africa advance;
Black Star of hope and honour,
To all who thirst for liberty.

Joga bonito, sons of Africa.

Happy Mother's Day

2006-05-14T13:10:00.000-04:00

I can't seem to get my mother on the phone this morning. Since I have to head in to campus and pick up a few books, and since I know she is a frequent visitor to this site, I thought I might post a brief message here in the event that it might find her before I do.

My mother is the standard against which every person I have ever known has had the unfair fate of being measured. Not to be left out, my grandmother has been (along with my uncle) the anchor for our family for as long as I can remember. My every success has been the product of their loving kindness, and my every failure a deviation from the example they have set before me. To them, and to all mothers, I wish a happy Mother's Day.

Yo Ho! (It's a Pirate's Life for Me)

2006-05-13T20:44:00.000-04:00

I'm keeping pretty busy of late, but I need a break from research and figured I ought to keep my loyal readership abreast of recent developments in my academic life. For those who haven't already heard, I've taken up buccaneers as the subject for my master's paper. The buccaneers were a band of land-based, seafaring pig thieves who haunted the Spanish in the 17th century Caribbean. They were much more, of course, but that's become my one sentence reply to inquiring family and friends. The buccaneers take their name from the French term boucaniers, from boucan, which was in turn derived from the indigenous word bukan, alternately used to refer both to the spit over which they roasted their pilfered pork and the wooden sticks on which the meat was skewered. A fairly literal translation would be to dub them the barbecuers, spit-roasters, or shishkabobbers (my personal favorite).

The word buccaneer actually has a very interesting history of its own, but one that I'm saving to tell another time. It entered the English vocabulary via the 1684 translation of Alexander Exquemelin's 1678 De Americaensche Zee-Roovers, a wildly popular account of Henry Morgan (above left), Francis L'Ollonais (right), and a few other lesser-known figures. The book has hardly been out of print since its first press run, and a 2000 edition is available new for less than $10 on Amazon. I managed to pick up a copy of the highly recommended (for reasons I don't yet understand, not having read the others) Classics of Naval Literature edition, with an introduction by Robert Ritchie. All this talk about books makes me anxious to get back to work, though, so I'll leave you with a list of what I've been reading and be on my way.

Published Primary Sources

Ayres, Philip. 1684. The voyages and adventures of Captain Bartholomew Sharp and others in the South Sea: : Being a Journal of the Same. Also, Capt Van Horn with his Buccanieres Surprising of la Vera Cruz. To Which Is Added the True Relation of Sir Henry Morgan his Expedition against the Spaniards in the West-Indies, and his Taking Panama. London: Printed for B.W., R.H., and S.T. [read online]*

Dampier, William. 1697. A new voyage round the world describing particularly the isthmus of America, several coasts and islands in the West Indies, the isles of Cape Verd, the passage by Terra del Fuego, the South Sea coasts of Chili, Peru and Mexico, the isle of Guam one of the Ladrones, Mindanao, and other Philippine and East-India islands near Cambodia, China, Formosa, Luconia, Celebes, &c., New Holland, Sumatra, Nicobar Isles, the Cape of Good Hope, and Santa Hellena : their soil, rivers, harbours, plants, fruits, animals, and inhabitants : their customs, religion, government, trade, &c.; illustrated with particular maps and draughts. London: Printed for James Knapton. [read online]*

Exquemelin, Alexander O. 1684. The buccaneers of America. London: Printed for William Crooke. Reprint: Annapolis: United States Naval Institute, 1994. [read online]*

Harlow, Vincent T., ed. 1923. "The Voyages of Captain William Jackson, 1642-1645" in Camden miscellany, vol. xiii. London: Royal Historical Society.¹

de Lussan, Raveneau. 1695. Les flibustiers de la mer du Sud: Journal d'un voyage fait à la mer du Sud avec les flibustiers de l'Amérique, depuis le 22 novembre 1684 jusqu'en janvier 1688. Reprint: Paris: France-Empire, 1992.²

Ringrose, Basil. 1685. Bucaniers of America the second volume : containing the dangerous voyage and bold attempts of Captain Bartholomew Sharp, and others, performed upon the coasts of the South Sea, for the space of two years, &c. : from the original journal of the said voyage. London : Printed for William Crooke. [read online]*

Wafer, Lionel. 1699. A new voyage and description of the Isthmus of America, giving an account of the author's abode there the form and make of the country, the coasts, hills, rivers, &c. woods, soil, weather, &c. trees, fruit, beasts, birds, fish, &c : the Indian inhabitants, their features, complexion, &c. their manners, customs, employments, marriages, feasts, hunting, computation, language, etc. : with remarkable occurrences in the South Sea and elsewhere. London: Printed for James Knapton. [read online]*

Secondary Source

Haring, C. H. 1910. The buccaneers in the West Indies in the xvii century. London: Methuen. Reprint: Hamden, Connecticut: Archon, 1966.

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* These texts are only available on a network with access to the Early English Books Online collection. They will work with a single click from anywhere on the Pitt campus, or any other campus with access to the collection. From off campus you can login with your Pitt account by clicking once, entering your email username and password, and then returning to this page and clicking the link again. If you know of free versions of any of these texts online let me know and I'll post them here. To be honest I put these up as much for my own reference as anyone else's.

1 This text was mentioned in Robert Ritchie's Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates (248, n. 47) but it wasn't properly sourced and thus I scarcely believed it existed until now. In the process of writing this post I felt obliged to come up with a full citation and tracked it down in the Royal Historical Society's published collection. I haven't put my hands on it yet (my library appears to have an incomplete set of the Camden Miscellany series, and of course they're missing vol. xiii), but I'm a tad perplexed as to why it doesn't show up in the Early English Books Online, and further still by the publication date. The reason I footnoted it, however, was because I would have postponed this search if it hadn't been for this post. In fact, I've spent almost the whole time at the computer this last hour combing through the books I've read or searching for sources online. I remain thoroughly convinced that for every two minutes I waste on here there's a minute I save in work someplace else (with the possible exception of that penguin tangent).

2 This is the only other source which I haven't actually browsed yet, but I deserve some slack because I couldn't find a single copy in the western hemisphere. I had the good fortune of finding a copy in France for $10 + shipping, which is more than I usually spend on books but a steal under the circumstances. Of all the skills I've developed in my first year of graduate school, one of the most prized is my uncanny knack for tracking down cheap books online.

History Carnival #30

2006-05-07T01:20:00.000-04:00

I should have announced this when it came out on Monday, but History Carnival #30 is up at ClioWeb. Here are some of my favorite selections:

"Methodology for the Infinite Archive" mulls the prospect of writing for a machine audience.
"Unknown to Readers of Arabic" refutes Juan Cole's arrogant insistance that the key to improving our relations with the Arab world is translating our great works for them so they can understand us better. I don't know about Juan, but have you read any of the Arabic classics lately?
"May Day with Heart: a Strike, a Boycott, a Holiday, a Refusal", the essay by Peter Linebaugh that I just recommended here, got the nod as well.
"What's for Dinner?" raises some interesting questions about the Donner Party and, implicitly, about Wikipedia and historical knowledge.
"Don't Know Much About History" and "The Importance of History" take up the Holocaust and slavery as their respective topics, confronting pop-history on the one hand and presentism on the other.
"Tejas por los Tejanos" sparks a great discussion of the age when migrants were going the other way across the U.S. - Mexico border.
Finally, I really enjoyed "The Half-way House" which compares the abolition of nuclear weapons to the abolition of the slave trade, as well as this spinoff debate and Caleb's follow-up, "The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons". As it turns out, I wasn't alone. These were the #1 and #2 nominated posts for the Carnival, which I encourage you all to look over in its entirety.

All in all this Carnival was decent, though not one of my favorites. I'd love to have comments posted by anyone who finds something else interesting that I neglected to mention, as well as any thoughts you have on these pieces. Have a wonderful weekend.

Happy May Day!

2006-05-01T03:08:00.000-04:00

We want to feel the sunshine;
We want to smell the flowers;
We're sure God has willed it,
And we mean to have eight hours.

We're summoning our forces,
From shipyard, shop and mill;
Eight hours for work,
Eight hours for rest,
Eight hours for what we will.

It's that time of year again. Sisters and brothers, friends, neighbors, and comrades, workers of all nations and immigrants of all durations, it's May Day, our day, the original labor day, the holiday of the international working class. This is the first time in years that I haven't worked a "real job" on May Day (I'm a grad student who's done teaching for the year) and I feel somewhat out of place without any organizing to do. May Day this year has taken on added significance as "Un día sin inmigrantes", a nationwide boycott and general strike in support of immigrant rights. I'll be marching in Pittsburgh, and I encourage everyone to find an event in your community where you can take part as well. If you can't participate directly, you can show your support by wearing a white t-shirt and not making any purchases for 24 hours.

I also urge everyone to sample one of my very favorite May Day traditions: reading the latest May Day essay from historian Peter Linebaugh. Peter is the co-author (with my advisor, Marcus Rediker) of The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, the book that convinced be to become a historian. I strongly encourage you all to check out this year's installment, "May Day with Heart: a Strike, a Boycott, a Holiday, a Refusal". Be sure that you keep reading to the end. While I found his writing style a tad quirky at first, I now recognize it as the most brilliantly, beautifully schizophrenic prose I've ever come across.

I still have to read Peter's writing with one page open to the Oxford English Dictionary (here and then here if you're a Pitt student off campus, or use dictionary.com if you're not) and another open to Wikipedia to keep up with his vocabulary and cultural references. How many other writers juxtapose Haymarket, Humpty Dumpty and hobgoblins? Ozymandias, Morris, and Martí? The result is a wildly eclectic collage of words and images. In the tradition of the late Marxist literary critic Walter Benjamin, Peter's every writing is a Passagenwerk of the international working class, a "literary montage".

Even if you can't get out in the streets today, I encourage you to put on a pot of coffee, bake some cookies, and take your time with this wonderful piece of writing. Better yet, print off a copy and cuddle up in an easy chair. Whether you're a veteran labor historian or someone who's never heard of Haymarket, you'll find something for you in this essay. Happy May Day.

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For those who would like to learn more about May Day and read more from Peter Linebaugh in the process, check out the following essays from the CounterPunch archives:

"A May Day Meditation" (2001)
"Against Defeat, Laughter: May Day at Kut and Kienthal" (2003)
"Breaking the Chains of Command: Magna Carta and May Day" (2005)

WWJD?

2006-04-27T22:15:00.000-04:00

I know, I know, it's been a while. But why do a half dozen of you keep checking back here every day, anyway? I haven't taken a day off in nearly two months now and I'm still behind in schoolwork, and as issues in my personal life have taken a toll on my productivity I've found it simply impossible to justify spending any time playing around with this site. I came across something today, however, that I felt compelled to post here, if only for the few people who are still kicking around.

Fifteen year old Ava Lowery of Alabama recently posted an extraordinary animation entitled "WWJD?" on her website, Peace Takes Courage. I came across it via coverage of her story in this article by Matt Rothschild of The Progressive. Just today Ava posted a new animation that is a collage of the death threats, rape threats, and other expletive-riddled (frequently misspelled) emails and phone calls and letters she has received since posting the WWJD piece. I encourage everyone to check out both of them while you wait for me to get through with school and get my act together with my own site. Peace.

In Defense of Penguins

2006-03-09T11:04:00.000-05:00

As a result of my recent foray into the (unfortunately sparse) literature on Utopian Socialist societies, I've been experimenting over break with a Shaker lifestyle. I get up very early, work steadily but not relentlessly, and commit myself to a new standard of cleanliness and simplicity. By experimenting, that is to say I got the idea two nights ago, worked fairly seriously at it yesterday, and threw in the towel when I turned off my alarm this morning at whatever ungodly predawn hour it was when it rang. Dragging myself out of bed at the much more reasonable spring break hour of 9:30, I was ready to beat a hasty retreat from modernity once more when I saw the staggering volume of emails in my inbox. I've gotten most of the way through them, though, and this one from my friend Niklas made it worth my time:

Isaac,

While I think Darwin's Nightmare is one of the best documentaries I've ever seen, if not the best, there surely is no need to slag off penguins [see my previous post]. For they are the coolest, and motherfuckin' hardest, wonders of the animal kingdom. And they practice mutual aid. At 50 degress below, in arctic snowstorms. After not having eaten for four months. So there.

Niklas may or may not be aware that the morality of penguins has in fact been a point of contention recently. Conservative columnists have had a field day with this movie, claiming that it underscores that lifelong monogomous heterosexual relationships are the only natural form. They had to be disappointed to discover that penguins have their share of gay partners (successfully raising a child!) and prostitutes (on a serious note-- please don't mistake me as equating the two). Last but not least, there is always gang rape, exhibitionism, group sex and cross-dressing. Credit to Long Sunday and Crooked Timber for some of these references.

While I would like to see a source for the communistic tendencies of our Arctic comrades, I'm willing take Niklas' word for it. At the very least I can agree that it may be inappropriate to "slag off penguins" just because I don't like the turnout at the Oscars. But I don't see anything wrong with just hitting them with a club, especially since it sounds like he says "whee!" when he bounces off the snow. And if you can read Latvian (and Niklas probably can), this guy seems to agree with me. For those of you not offended by the exploitation of pingu labor power, you may also enjoy the other offerings from Yeti Sports. I used to be especially fond of Flamingo Drive, but I haven't actually had time to play those games since I came across them a year or two ago with my brother Josiah and friend BJ.

One final note: the promised writeup on the visit with Marcel van der Linden is still forthcoming. I'm feeling pressed to get going on this because the email from Niklas reminds me of the last time I was supposed to write something on a visiting scholar (Gary Nash) and completely dropped the ball. So, since I'm somehow maintaining a steady pool of about 12-15 regular visitors and another 5-10 strangers each day, I ought to get on top of that. Look for it this weekend.

And the Oscar Goes to...

2006-03-05T21:36:00.000-05:00

A bunch of stupid birds. Birds, I might add, that do not even know how to fly. I know it is supposed to be expected that we are all dismayed by Oscar results, but this defeat was particularly disappointing. Though it will go down in Oscar history as an also-ran (and thus I'll probably have to wait even longer before it becomes available on Netflix), Darwin's Nightmare is an incredibly important film for people concerned with questions of history and violence.

Some time in the 1960's, in the heart of Africa, a new animal was introduced into Lake Victoria as a little scientific experiment. The Nile Perch, a voracious predator, extinguished almost the entire stock of the native fish species. However, the new fish multiplied so fast, that its white fillets are today exported all around the world.

Huge hulking ex-Soviet cargo planes come daily to collect the latest catch in exchange for their southbound cargo… Kalashnikovs and ammunitions for the uncounted wars in the dark center of the continent.

This booming multinational industry of fish and weapons has created an ungodly globalized alliance on the shores of the world’s biggest tropical lake: an army of local fishermen, World bank agents, homeless children, African ministers, EU-commissioners, Tanzanian prostitutes and Russian pilots.

Maybe next time the director will have the good sense to recruit Morgan Freeman as narrator. I'll post a genuine review of the film when I am, in fact, able to re-view it. Until that time I suggest you explore the film's official website. You can view the trailer online here, as well as this extended excerpt. If you're still upset about the unjust verdict, remember the words of Gandhi, who said:

"To banish anger altogether from one's breast is a difficult task. It cannot be achieved through pure personal effort. It can be done only by playing this game. Or, if you are really angry, this one."

Violent Art

2006-03-05T16:27:00.000-05:00

I just came across this beautiful artwork in a New York Times article, "Military Maneuvers With Computer and Color". The piece is "PTG.32 APUS", short for "Painting No. 32, Art Project United States", by Eric Chan and Heather Schatz. The image here, the most complete unaltered version I could find online, does not include the entire 14-foot-long composition. An interactive graphic of the full piece is available online here, and there is also an audio slideshow narrated by the artists discussing this piece and another selection on "the contrast of the history of the [Manhattan] meatpackers with the proliferation of commerce and fashion."

In the article, reporter Hillarie Sheets describes how the artists, who work under the collective name ChanSchatz, developed the piece:

Using an interactive Web page featuring 12 phrases, 28 color combinations and 32 motifs by the artists that they refer to as characters, participants selected elements they liked. To represent each individual, ChanSchatz used that person's chosen motif and colors; the selected phrase of text governed how each element acted within the work. The artists were struck by how receptive the troops were to collaborating, given that the New York art world could seem as distant to them as the war seemed to the artists.

The result, as you can see, is extraordinary. While I don't want to overstate the point in my initial excitement, it seems to me a Detroit Industry for our digital age. "PTG.32 APUS" creatively and provocatively displays the violent, human, collective, alienating experience of military labor. To their credit, the artists allow their work, with its manifold political implications, to speak for itself:

"The minute you bring up war, there's politics. But we're more interested in the human side — and that there are people out there every day doing this work, just like we come to our studio every day and do our work.

"This is how we discovered the war."

Bush at Gandhi's Grave

2006-03-03T23:35:00.000-05:00

In India yesterday to negotiate a nuclear deal with the South Asian superpower, Bush visited the Rajghat, the black marble memorial to Mahatma Gandhi located in Delhi. Lawrence Wittner, professor of history at SUNY-Albany, has written a good Gandhian analysis of Bush's visit in "Gandhi, Bush, and the Bomb". Another historian, UCLA's Vinay Lal, chimed in with an entertaining satirical piece entitled "I Believe in Big Dreams".

All of this discussion, however, leaves me feeling ultimately unsatisfied. It seems to me there are many profound questions here that we are only beginning to scratch the surface of. As an historian, and as a scholar-activist increasingly influenced by Gandhian philosophy, I wonder both about the historical significance of this event and the implications it has for progressive social change. First of all, Bush paying his respects to the Mahatma was not some cleverly-orchestrated public relations maneuver. This has been on the standard itinerary of all visiting dignitaries for decades. In "Bush in India: Just Not Welcome", Arundhati Roy reminds us that

[Bush is] by no means the only war criminal who has been invited by the Indian government to lay flowers at Rajghat. (Only recently we had the Burmese dictator General Than Shwe, no shrinking violet himself.)

And yet she contends that

When Bush places flowers on that famous slab of highly polished stone, millions of Indians will wince. It will be as though he has poured a pint of blood on the memory of Gandhi.

And she is correct. At one location where police expected 50,000 demonstrators, a contingent of 9,000 officers was faced with an estimated 1.5 lakh (150,000) protestors. As historians, how do we understand this phenomenon? And whether or not we are Gandhians, as human beings concerned with the struggle for social justice, what are the opportunities and limitations that emerge from this situation?

In 2000, Bill Clinton visited the Rajghat. He was on a trip with Madeleine Albright, who in 1996 declared that the 567,000 deaths of children under the age of five resulting from Iraqi sanctions were "worth it." This economic policy killed five times as many Iraqi children (no statistics were compiled for adults) than even the highest estimated total casualty counts of Bush's invasion (as of 10/29/2004), and over seventeen times the named and identified civilian casualties to date. Though Albright later regretted vocalizing this sentiment, it was the policy of the Clinton Administration and clearly it had to have been "worth it" to them or they would not have continued it. Furthermore, her actual "regret" warrants further analysis. What she actually wrote in her book was:

I must have been crazy; I should have answered the question by reframing it and pointing out the inherent flaws in the premise behind it. Saddam Hussein could have prevented any child from suffering simply by meeting his obligations.... As soon as I had spoken, I wished for the power to freeze time and take back those words. My reply had been a terrible mistake, hasty, clumsy and wrong. Nothing matters more than the lives of innocent people. I had fallen into the trap and said something I simply did not mean. That was no one’s fault but my own.

This is something quite different from regret. What Albright wishes to take back is not a policy that killed 567,000 children under the age of five, but rather a statement that allowed the responsibility for that policy to be placed squarely at the doorstep of those who crafted it.

As Gandhians, or at least as people with a fundamental commitment to the struggle for peace and social justice, we ought to confront the tendency among some people to apply Gandhi only selectively and to consume themselves with their hatred of Bush. As historians, or at least as people concerned with history, we ought to investigate the particular conditions that are responsible for this outrage over Bush-- an outrage that was virtually nonexistent for Clinton or, for that matter, for General Than Shwe. Finally, we must remember that Gandhi is not infallible. He was wrong on many important questions, not the least of which being history:

Remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall. Think of it-- always.

Gandhi cannot by himself lead us to an understanding of history. The study of history, on the other hand, is a cold and inhuman science without a pratical framework to guide our active efforts to redirect its course. To deal with questions of history and violence together seems to me a very promising way to move forward.

What Violent History Will Be, What It Will Not Be, How Often It Will Be, and Why

2006-03-01T00:06:00.000-05:00

With my partner Hannah back in Maine for the week, I began this morning with a full mug of Fair Trade Viennese Cinnamon coffee (1 cream & 1 sugar-in-the-raw per cup) and the goal of plowing through a hefty backlog of student emails. Before checking my email, however, I opened up Firefox. Since StatCounter is one of my homepaged tabs, I had a look at the numbers, and was simultaneously frustrated and encouraged (and confused) by the fact that I am continuing to earn more than thirty unique visitors per day to this site. Largely by virtue of Mark Grimsley prematurely stumbling across my "maiden post" (see my earlier entry), this site has garnered a steady stream of visitors some two weeks before it was meant to be presented for public consumption. Since that time, and especially while staring at my site stats at 8 a.m. this morning after a half pot of coffee, I have felt the cumbersome obligation to post (and to post frequently and well) in order not to lose this accidental audience.

A bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios took the edge off my caffeine stress, and the daunting load of student emails helped rid me of the delusional obligation to my imagined fan club. But as I was replying to emails, I started to reflect on this feeling. I was frustrated with the fact that I had the good luck of this accidental audience and yet I was not posting frequently and well. In fact, with 560 pages of essays to grade last week, I posted neither frequently nor well. But who cares? Is the goal of this project really, as I seem to have constructed it in the back of my head, to post frequently and well? I wasn't even expecting to have a single reader outside my family and friends for months, and certainly not a few dozen total strangers per day in my first week.

By the time I was done with emails I had started to grapple with the important questions that I hadn't taken seriously before: "What is Violent History going to be?" "What won't it be?" Equally important in this particular up-to-the-second medium: "How often will it be?" And finally, the ultimate question: "Why?" Just as I was about to put all these thoughts to rest, adding them to the laundry list of Save as Draft notes to self of would-be posts, I got a phone call saying that the reserve readings for my grad seminar tomorrow got screwed up at the library and we had just one copy that would be left in the grad student lounge for people to wait in line for. With only a dim prospect of getting my hands on the reading until much later tonight, this seems as good a time as any to start dealing with these questions.

Let me start by saying that I don't feel it necessary to go into any detail about myself personally right now, or even into my particular interests as an historian. My academic pursuits will be a topic for another day, and my personal life is something that I suppose will unfold in layers over a long period of time, since it's not something I plan to put front and center here. What I want to talk about is how this project fits into the online community. While this is my first original content "blog" (a term I only grudgingly resign myself to use, because I have hated it and its spinoff puns and neologisms for years), I am fairly computer and web savvy. I've participated in a range a different online communities for over a decade, many of which fit to varying degrees within the alternative media genre that blogs supposedly now exemplify. I read an extensive amount of material from a wide range of sources in several languages online each day, and this includes a number of blogs. I even have a decent familiarity with the field of metablogging, the discussion of blogs by blogs. I think that this is a useful place to start, particularly for those few readers who are friends, family, and co-workers, most of whom don't know their blogosphere from their mesosphere.

While there have probably been the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of printed pages written on the topic of weblogs, very little has been written that I would ever recommend for anyone to read. Violent History exists at the intersection of the blogosphere (the world of weblogs) and academia, and fortunately this is a conjuncture that has produced some of the very best metablogging (discussion of weblogs, presumably by other bloggers, but I'm using the term loosely here). The best most recent discussion of blogging and the academy came in the latter half of 2005 in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

In the July 8, 2005 article "Bloggers Need Not Apply", the pseudonymous Ivan Tribble fired the first shot of what would become a fierce debate over the job prospects of blogging grad students and untenured faculty. While he claims to recognize the potentially "legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum," Tribble focuses on his apparently horrifying experiences with "Professor Turbo Geek," "Professor Shrill," and "Professor Bagged Cat," all semifinalists in a faculty search at his college. His conclusions, though at times contradictory with respect to the importance of honesty and deceipt at various points in the application process, seem logical enough: don't exaggerate your qualifications, don't publicly disseminate rants about your colleagues and employers, etc. This would all be decent advice. As it turns out, however, it wasn't the bloggers but the googlers who were making inappropriate use of the internet. It appears that Professor Tribble & Co. only came to their damning conclusions about bloggers after putting in a substantial number of late nights scouring cached pages of material deleted by candidates (one would presume to protect their own privacy) and by stalking applicants across not only their own web pages but those of their friends. Mr. Tribble, it seems, is not the type of person who should be trusted with so much as an unsealed interoffice memo, and as such he doesn't belong in the position of courier, let alone search committee member at "Quaint Old College." A final testament to the unhelpful nature of Tribble's analysis is his paranoid dismissal of all weblogs, including the best and most professional among them, because "past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum."

This initial piece in the Chronicle sparked a firestorm of debate on the web, some of which made its way back into the publication's own pages. Most noteworthy of the blogged replies was that of Matthew Kirschenbaum, Assistant Professor of English and Acting Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland. His post, "Why I Blog Under My Own Name", is a very brief and very good reply to Tribble that places weblogs within the framework of the excellent (but massive) work of Philip Agre, "Networking on the Network: A Guide to Professional Skills for PhD Students". This is an important contribution not only to the blog debate but to Agre's volume on networking, which as of its 14 August 2005 formulation does not contain a single instance of the word "blog" or any of its variants. Kirshenbaum's blog was important enough to be referenced in a followup article by Tribble published in the Chronicle on September 2, 2005. That piece, "They Shoot Messengers, Don't They?", apparently scuttles the more ridiculous portions of Tribble's thesis by gleaning it down to the truism "be careful what you say" and wondering "why is it so controversial to add the word 'online'"? What remains is the same uninsightful, unhelpful original piece in its now unprovocative reformulation, that is noteworthy only because it is a necessary segue into the following excellent rebuttal.

"Do Not Fear the Blog" was written by Rebecca Goetz for the November 15, 2005 Chronicle. Before going any further, I want to congratulate Rebecca (whose (a)musings of a grad student is one of my favorite history websites), for winning a tenure track position! I should also point out that I refer to Rebecca by first name not because I know her (I don't) but because I detest referring to people by their last names-- a cold and impersonal practice of deference that was unfortunately abolished only incompletely by the American Revolution (yet another topic for a future post). In addition to Rebecca, the pseudonymous history blogger Another Damned Medievalist received similarly good news this weekend (and has since accepted the position). These brief asides actually underscore the legitimacy of Rebecca's rebuttal in the Chronicle. Though it deserves to be read in its entirety, some highlights are the emphasis on emerging communities of scholars in "carnivals" (the equivalent of online academic journals for bloggers) and the importance of blogging as both a resource and an outlet for those battling through the dissertation phase of their graduate work. "In short," she concludes, "I find that blogging makes my work better. What isn't to like about that?"

The experiences of Rebecca and ADM are certainly not universal. Last month saw the withdrawal of Indiana University Law School professor Jeff Cooper's weblog, Cooped Up. "The Amazing Disappearing Blog: Parts One, Two and Three" is a model for how to make a graceful exit, and it is as important as Rebecca's CHE article in considering whether or not to participate in this community.

By way of this very long introduction, I find myself back at the beginning. What is it that I intend to do here? To quote Ivan Tribble:

Why? What is the purpose of broadcasting one's unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world? It's not hard to imagine legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum. But it's also not hard to find examples of the worst kinds of uses.

Fair enough. There are websites I have come across that I do not personally find useful to me. Included in a longer list of posts on academia and weblogs that I didn't have space to discuss here was this one by New Kid on the Hallway, a tenure track medievalist at a small liberal arts college. I found this post very useful, and I check by her site once in a while because I enjoy reading her mix of personal and academic writing, but it's not a priority for me because I'm usually just too busy. To be clear: the site is great, but it's not usually what I personally am looking for. What I would like to do with Violent History is something different. Rather than cite the various websites I would like to emulate or avoid, I think I have narrowed down three key goals that I have.

1. To learn from others.
2. To contribute to the learning of others.
3. To have fun.

These may seem like fairly straightforward objectives for a graduate student venturing into the online community, but to me they are an important realization. I'm sure that NKotH would agree with these goals, but I know that there is something different about the way these goals come together for me that will in turn make Violent History something different from her blog. For example, it should have been great fun to see that I had several dozen people coming in to read what I had to say each day, but by imposing upon myself the obligation to contribute I took the fun right out of the whole process. What I didn't want to do, however, was what many bloggers do, and that is to maintain the illusion of activity during quiet periods with some personal stories or silly chatter. That's just not my thing, at least not at this point in time. I want to provide a portrait of myself as a human being in this medium, but I want to do it subtly and incrementally. You've already learned from this post that I like flavored coffee, that I support fair trade, that I have a significant other named Hannah from Maine, and that I like Honey Nut Cheerios. There's a lot more to me, but that's enough for today. I prefer that you get to know me in bits and pieces as part of a longer and more meaningful process of interaction, rather than in otherwise purposeless entries meant to fill idle stretches with personal anecdotes.

What does this all mean? Well, it means that I want to write something that has a fairly high signal : noise ratio, and that I want the process of writing to contribute both to my own development and, at least eventually, to the development of others. I'm not pretentious enough to think that masses of people will care deeply about the things I have to say, but I also know that I wouldn't be putting my thoughts out in a public forum like this if I didn't hope others would read it. It also means that I'll be posting fairly slowly, because I'll usually need time to catch my breath between thoughts so that I can write things I'll be happy with. As much as I'll be disappointed to lose my few dozen daily visitors by only dropping weekly posts, other bloggers have gotten off to slower starts (often monthly at best for two years), and they did just fine.

So that concludes a very longwinded and multitiered introduction-- an introduction to the discussions on blogs and academia for friends and family, an introduction to who I am and what I'm doing here for those who don't know me, and an introduction for myself to the important questions that get at the root of what I want out of this experience. Like all things, I'm sure much of this will change. A big part of what I expect to enjoy about this project is its flexibility. I like knowing that I'll have a space where I can write and read about many different interests long after I'm busy working on a narrowly-defined dissertation topic. I look forward to learning, to sharing, and to having a good time. I'll close with a quote which I've recently become fond of, because it sets the standard that I like to think I might be working toward here, with varying degrees of success:

True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written; in writing what deserves to be read; and in so living as to make the world happier for our living in it.

Pliny the Elder

Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

2006-02-24T23:33:00.000-05:00

One of the more cleverly titled history blogs on the web, not to mention the 2005 Cliopatria Award Winner for Best Individual Blog, OSU professor Mark Grimsley's Blog Them Out of the Stone Age has the additional distinction of being the first website to post a link to Violent History. To receive any sort of attention from a website of note such as War Historian (Blog Them Out of the Stone Age's parent site) is good fortune to be sure, but in this case it happened to be particularly serendipitous, given that my site was in pre-alpha format at the time (no links... no banner... no layout). Even close friends and family hadn't heard of this project yet when Mark provided this generous referral from his site. While things here won't really be presentable for another week or so (I'll be using spring break to really whip it into shape), I'm pleased to return the favor in the vain hope that one or two wayward web-wanderers might just click through.

[Above: Che Guevara and Robert E. Lee in the WarHistorian.org logo. The site's flash intro alone is worth the trip.]

Historians Against the War Conference

2006-02-24T17:41:00.000-05:00

Last weekend, the Universtity of Texas - Austin hosted a summit entitled "Empire, Resistance, and the War in Iraq: A Conference for Historians and Activists." I had hoped to attend this conference back when my financial, professional, and academic life was in better shape. Unfortunately, the same forces that kept me from crafting my second post here for six days also kept me from participating in this important event. The conference was put on by Historians Against the War (HAW), an ad hoc group started in 2003 by members of the Mid-Atlantic Radical Historians Organization (MARHO), publishers of the Radical History Review. You can view the founding statement of Historians Against the War online here, and you can see the list of signatories (including yours truly) here.

While I didn't attend the conference, I did follow it closely, and since I haven't seen it mentioned on the websites of any other historians I think it's important to bring attention to it here. The keynote speakers were Howard Zinn and Andrea Smith, and they were followed by an impressive list of scholars and activists who spoke on a wide range of topics. The schedule of events, which includes numerous photos as well as the full texts of many presentations, is online here. I have not had time to review every paper, but several stand out as particularly worthy of mention here. Non-academics in particular will benefit from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's provocative introduction to the history of U.S. imperialism, which replaces the liberal mythology of a democracy hijacked by neocons circa 09/11/2001 with an honest historical analysis of American foreign policy in the long durée.

For those who don't mind reading the language of the Ivory Tower, an excellent example of the interdisciplinary scholarship that was on display at the conference is "Toward a Sociology of Foreign Policy" by Joe Conti and John Foran of UC Santa Barbara. This paper calls for "conceptual tools that draw on a variety of disciplines and perspectives, capable of identifying the range of structural factors at work – from global political economy to the environment, the militarization of foreign policy, the geo-politics of social control, and the domestic side of foreign policy." It draws on a range of academic traditions including racial formation theory, cultural Marxism, and peak oil analysis to provide a useful starting point for the new subfield they propose.

Finally, teachers of history at all levels will benefit from reading "No Good Wars: Teaching the History of Modern American Wars as a Means of Resisting Current Ones" by Kenneth Long of St. Joseph College. This excellent piece is accessible to all audiences and includes a syllabus that should be particularly valuable to University faculty, graduate students, and high school teachers struggling to develop courses and teaching methods that deal with these important issues. I'll return to a discussion of this paper and its implications in a few days in a dedicated post.

A summary of these and other presentations, available online here, was compiled in advance of the summit by Jim O'Brien of The Nation and is still useful. An entertainingly awful piece in the UT campus paper is online here. The article (without tongue in cheek) discusses empiricism and misquotes speakers on the ways in which the U.S. is behaving "like all the empirical powers of the past." The best and most comprehensive coverage of the conference was published by Judy Atkins in Portside, an e-journal I came across by way of my friend Suzanne Moulton in the history office back at the University of Maine. The article, "Historians against the War Sponsors Unique Academic Conference", is an excellent account of the weekend that covers far more than I could hope to do in this short post (and from a participant).

The conference on the whole appears to have been a success. Like so many events at this stage of antiwar mobilization, it has no measurable direct impact, but it clearly represents another step forward in the development of a culture of resistance. Historians can choose to play a number of important roles in the antiwar struggle, and I hope that this conference can help us to engage the past with the present in increasingly concrete and meaningful ways.

[Above: Historian Howard Zinn delivers the keynote at the Historians Against the War conference.]

Hello, Violent World

2006-02-18T17:56:00.000-05:00

For students of computer science, the first step into a new programming language usually begins with the obligatory "hello, world" program. This exercise has been repeated in hundreds of languages as a way of introducing students to their diverse structures, vocabularies, and meanings. As I take my first step into the online community with this weblog, this post is both an introduction for me to this new medium as well as an introduction for readers to the central themes that will shape my writing here in the future.

Our world, as we all know, is an extremely violent one. Like everything else in the world, this violence has a history. As a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, I have dedicated the forseeable future of my life to the study of that history. History and violence will be the focus of most of the discussions here. My interest in these topics emerged from my experience in struggles for social justice, where my efforts in recent years have been concentrated in the antiwar movement. Perhaps as a result of the fact that I still haven't locked myself into a dissertation topic, it still feels perfectly natural to talk about a wide range of material. Right now I'm bouncing around ideas on subjects as diverse as the recent Cheney hunting debacle and a review of the new video game Civilization IV.

My goal here is to create a space where I can write about an exciting range of topics related to history and violence that will complement my academic work while allowing me to branch out into new areas. For readers, I hope that the overarching themes of history and violence will bridge the diversity of material to create an eclectic but coherent website worth coming back to. For myself, I hope that this space will continue to provide an outlet for my interest in these subjects long after I shackle myself to a specific dissertation topic. That being said, I'm sure it will develop into something that I can't predict at this point, and I look forward to seeing what that is.

[Above center: The "Hello, world!" program in Ada, the primary computing language of the United States Department of Defense.
Above left: A soldier works on his computer.]