I’m very pleased to be hosting my 6th History Carnival, and I thought it would be fun to extend the carnival into a new medium this time: I’ve spent the whole day Tweeting the carnival at my twitter feed. Sharon Howard created a dynamic archive of the carnival, which can also be found by using the hashtag #HC84. I still haven’t entirely fallen in love with Twitter — 140 characters is very, very short — but I’m enjoying the flow of information it facilitates, and the way microblogging’s supplemented my regular history blog reading and writing. It exists in a very productive gray space between professional and informal communication.

Not all spam is content free: Fifty pretty good sites for ancient history by an online degree provider. Speaking of online education and spam, History of Economics blog found a neat visual history of online/distance learning.

Three from Holocaust Controversies:

• Auschwitz Blueprints: “ignorance and exaggerations from journalists are inexcusable, but… utterly unsurprising”
• Evidence of mobile gas extermination units in 1943 Minsk
• Critical reading of a survivor’s diamond-studded pastiche tale

In other war-related posts, Scandalous Women gave us an extensive summary of Mary Lovell’s biography of WW2 spy Elizabeth Thorpe. “America is in it now and forever if Germany chooses to look at it that way,” wrote 1st Sgt. Samuel E. Avery from a trench on 19 February 1918. Speaking of war correspondence, Letters of Note has great stuff, like President George HW Bush to his children before the first Gulf war. They also have Superman critiques directed at the creators. And if that’s not enough military history for you, there’s good news: the Military History Carnival Rises Again! Next month’s will be at Airminded. Speaking of next month, if you want to host a future History Carnival, check out http://historycarnival.org and contact Sharon Howard.

Comparison of the Haiti and Berlin Airlifts by Vintage Aeroplane Writer. Big History: The Origins of the Moon. Also at History Moments, The origins of (and fate of, in one case) the battleship in the American Navy

The Oklahoma History Center Blog shares a Smoking Jacket made of Cigar Ribbons. Classic recycling!

Manan Ahmed got visual this month: circa 1950 Adverts from a Pakistani anglophone pictorial weekly, including a bad history book of some interest. Also South Asian content in European Opera, with video!

In history of science, Brett Holman gave us WW2 Japanese Death Ray Experiments, and Ether Wave Propaganda gave us The Ray that Wasn’t wave OR particle, a fascinating discussion of a scientific blind alley.

Culture&Stuff’s inaugural blog post recounts painful relationship between George II and Frederick of Hanover.

Zunguzungu (aka Aaron Bady) looks for the maybe-African or maybe-Irish origins of TR’s “Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick”

Tim Burke on the Scarlet Letter, canon, historical pedagogy and culture, as only Tim Burke can. Or should.

The Desi Knitter had a thoughtful discussion of the ambiguities of restoration and orientalism in Melghat.

MidtownG at Progressive Historians on small but telling clashes: Klan gets beat and Revolutionaries get beat.

Speaking of revolutionaries, Howard Zinn died. Many, many posts. My favorite, though, was Acephalous who shoehorned JD Salinger’s death in, too. Also at Scott’s place, sometimes the URL says it all: http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2010/01/class-canceled-on-account-of-black-death.html Life is stranger than fiction, most of the time.

There was some news out of the AHA conference this year, which I followed on twitter. The AHA’s own roundup covers a lot of ground, including Dan Cohen’s provocative Is Google Good For History? The Historical Society had it’s own roundup of AHA news items, especially the job market debates. As always, the AHA is the venue for announcing the 2009 Cliopatria Awards for Best Blog, New Blog, Group Blog, Post, Series, and Writer, a great crop this year.

All was not happy: LGBTQI historians were not mollified by the mini-conference (though the AHA is calling it a victory and doing one again next year). Speaking of gender history, the Tenured Radical looked at historians in the California Prop 8 trial.

That’s it for this edition of the History Carnival. My wife described it as a “Carnival Parade” approach, which I like.

I was going to post about it here, but Another Damned Medievalist raised the question of how to deal with primary sources in a class where students lack important background concepts, and so I’m going to share the comment I made over there and then expand on it a bit:

I’m not sure if I’d call it a ‘brilliant’ idea, but I faced a similar dilemma in my Early Japan course: rich primary sources, but weak general knowledge. The way I handled it this time was to break the semester up into two units: in the first, we went through the textbook and political/economic source reader, covering the basic narrative, political and economic and religious history in a fairly traditional fashion; in the second half of the course, I went back over the same history through the primary sources — Genji, Heike, etc. — with a big secondary work on mentalite at the end. The goal, obviously, was to give the students the context first, along with some basic skill-building, then to delve deeper into the material that they were now more comfortable with, without all the “you don’t know it yet, but this is important because…” stuff that drove me crazy. The class size wasn’t big enough for a definitive result, but I think it worked pretty well. Our second-half discussions, in particular, were much better informed than I’d gotten in the past.

As a side benefit, by the way, we’d gone through the entire history before students got into their end-of-semester research projects, so they actually could pick topics they were interested in with some level of informed judgement and without a bias towards the early stuff (or pop culture-privileged topics in the later stuff).

This is something which I’ve considered doing for a long time, but not all of my courses break down quite so neatly in terms of the material I use. On the whole, as I said, I think it was quite successful. One of my students suggested a change which makes a great deal of sense: instead of putting Mary Beth Berry’s Japan in Print at the end, after the primary sources — I was using it instead of any particular 17th century reading — she pointed out that it would be a good transition reading. That made a great deal of sense: it introduces a great deal of theory about reading and audiences, and the argument creates a tension between classical/medieval and early modern culture which would be give more focus to the primary source discussions. I would have to add another 17th century reading: Given the rumors of a Chushingura movie in the works, maybe it’s time to bring that back into my syllabi!

Paul Krugman wrote a column in which he argued that the last decade in the US has been a waste of time, economically speaking:

But from an economic point of view, I’d suggest that we call the decade past the Big Zero. It was a decade in which nothing good happened, and none of the optimistic things we were supposed to believe turned out to be true.

It was a decade with basically zero job creation. …
It was a decade with zero economic gains for the typical family. …
It was a decade of zero gains for homeowners, even if they bought early …
… it was a decade of zero gains for stocks, even without taking inflation into account. …
So here’s what Mr. Summers — and, to be fair, just about everyone in a policy-making position at the time — believed in 1999: America has honest corporate accounting; this lets investors make good decisions, and also forces management to behave responsibly; and the result is a stable, well-functioning financial system.

What percentage of all this turned out to be true? Zero.

What was truly impressive about the decade past, however, was our unwillingness, as a nation, to learn from our mistakes.

Even as the dot-com bubble deflated, credulous bankers and investors began inflating a new bubble in housing. Even after famous, admired companies like Enron and WorldCom were revealed to have been Potemkin corporations with facades built out of creative accounting, analysts and investors believed banks’ claims about their own financial strength and bought into the hype about investments they didn’t understand. Even after triggering a global economic collapse, and having to be rescued at taxpayers’ expense, bankers wasted no time going right back to the culture of giant bonuses and excessive leverage.
…
So let’s bid a not at all fond farewell to the Big Zero — the decade in which we achieved nothing and learned nothing. Will the next decade be better? Stay tuned. Oh, and happy New Year.

My mother sent me the column, and I wrote back the following comparison:

It’s almost like we had the same Lost Decade that the Japanese had in the 90s, but in a much more dramatic fashion. They had the Aum Shinrikyo gas attacks; we had 9/11. They had the Hanshin Earthquake, we had Katrina; both triggered a discussion about emergency preparedness and civil society. They had a bubble burst and zero growth; we had several bubbles burst and, ultimately, zero growth.

Unfortunately, it’s very clear that Japanese leaders and citizens didn’t learn very much from the experience: it took almost another decade before a major change in leadership, and their economy remains extremely weak. Not a happy comparison.

I really didn’t want to get into the discussion about James Bradley’s op-ed and interview because it’s finals season, and because the argument was so obviously wrong. Other historians have weighed in with a fairly negative review of the argument,¹ but there’s a book behind it, so I suppose the discussion has to happen. Eric Rauchway did a reasonably good job of taking the Americanist side against Bradley; I’ve been in the comments over there, arguing, effectively, that there’s a bizarre amount of reality you have to ignore to make the connection between the Portsmouth Treat and Taft-Katsura on the one hand and the Manchurian Incident and Pearl Harbor on the other.

The presumption that Roosevelt doing something more aggressive with regard to Japan’s claims in Korea and elsewhere wouldn’t have produced the Pacific War sooner seems unlikely to me. The combination of US expansion in the Pacific (Hawaii as well as the Philippines) and anti-Japanese/anti-immigrant racism was already leading some Japanese to consider the US a likely competitor and enemy in the near future: an intransigent or pro-Russian Roosevelt would have failed to negotiate the Portsmouth treaty (against which the Japanese people rioted anyway, because there was no indemnity payment) and the US would likely have been unable to integrate Japan into the Wilsonian treaties of the ’20s, and the military would have been even more likely to move aggressively in China and the Pacific sooner than 1931.

From both sides, the US and Japanese, it’s hard to see what Roosevelt could have done differently, even assuming that he had the ahistorical inclination to do so that would have produced a better result.

There’s a satirical theme in Edge of the American West comments which routinely blames people for things that happened many, many years after or before their time. As absurd as it is, I had to point out that some people take it way too seriously. I also noted something which I’m going to have to be sure to emphasize next time I teach this, because I think it’ll clarify things for students:

Nobody intervened on the side of the Chinese, ever. Even the “Open Door policy” was pretty much a dead letter from the beginning. That’s why the Japanese thought they could get away with so much: the 21 Demands make it very clear the direction things are going to go, unless the Chinese can get their acts together quickly (which they didn’t). This is part of what made FDR’s intervention on their behalf so infuriating: it was out of character with the 19th century paradigm, and nobody had ever made a League of Nations decision the foundation of a diplomatic relationship (there was an attempt with the Italy/Ethiopia thing, but it didn’t stick).

I don’t know why people never get tired of “original sin” counterfactual arguments, but they sure don’t.

1. There’s even a comment from D. Giangreco that I agree with, a rare event.

PMJS has published William Clarke and Wendy Cobcroft’s annotated translation of Ueda Akinari’s Tandai Shoshinroku, available as a free PDF and also as a book-on-demand from Lulu (and eventually Amazon). I leave the commentary on the value of scholarly networks, non-profit online publishing, and the finally-growing body Early Modern translations as an exercise for our readers, who don’t need me to tell them what they already know.