Welcome to the 106th Roundup of History Blogging, a double-sized edition. Fortunately, being a blog, we never really run out of space.

First, the two biggest events of the annual calendar happen in January: The American Historical Association Meeting and the Cliopatria Awards. Both, fortunately, have nice, tidy round-up posts I can link to! The Cliopatria awards for 2011 included

• Best Individual Blog: The Chirurgeon’s Apprentice
• Best Group Blog: Wonders and Marvels
• Best New Blog: Demography and the Imperial Public Sphere Before Victoria
• Best Post: Karen Abbott’s “If There’s a Man Among Ye: The Tale of Pirate Queens Anne Bonny and Mary Read,” Past Imperfect, 9 August 2011
• Best Series of Posts: Erik Loomis, “This Day in Labor History,” Lawyers, Guns & Money.
• Best Writer: Corey Robin
• Best Twitter Feed: @KatrinaGulliver. #Twitterstorian Doyenne
• Best Podcast Episode: Marshall Poe’s New Books In History episode from 14 January 2011: “Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People, W.W. Norton & Company, 2010.“

There was a LOT of blogging and tweeting at this year’s AHA, much of it centered on the groundbreaking #THATCamp — the first held in conjunction with a national organizational conference — which brought a lot of heavyweight and beginning digital history folks together. There were even some interesting historical papers delivered, I’m told. Check out the collection: it covers just about everything I read on the conference, and then some. Next Year In New Orleans!

A public service announcement: Sharon Howard has updated the Early Modern Commons blog aggregator, http://commons.earlymodernweb.org/, and the general history aggregator, http://thebroadside.org/. If you’re not getting enough history in your media diet, this is the one-stop shop. OK, two stop shop.

For the remainder of the carnival, I’m mostly going to be posting titles and what I hope are intriguing quotations: nothing fancy, but there’s some really neat stuff here.

Historiography and Method

Jeremy Bangs: Always More Pilgrim Books – What’s Next? – A Bibliographical Survey

This evening I’d like to lead us on a quick browse in the library, curious about when it was that we first thought we knew everything there was to know about the Pilgrims already.

The Award-Winning Wonders and Marvels: Impotence in the Archives: or, a Research Trip Failed

much of my work in archives is tied to physical memory. Looking back at my notes over the years, I can remember the way in which documents looked or smelled at the time. More importantly, I can remember where to find specific points in my notes.

Peter Rowlett: Apparently Gauss got in this bar fight with Hilbert…

Principle A tells me nothing should be produced with errors, but Principle B suggests work with minor errors should be taken in good faith. Both cannot hold.

Also, Einstein was a straight-A math student.

Jane Stevenson, Texts and Textiles: Self-Presentation among the Elite in Renaissance England is Not so much a blog post, as a full-fledged, open access journal article. How do we feel about that? I feel pretty damned good: open access journals, like blogs, make it easier to see what historians do and engage their work. Not sure we’ll make it a regular feature: host’s option?

Textiles and fashion were central to court life, and even, in themselves, a means of communication. They attracted what seems to us a completely disproportionate amount of available resources, infinitely more than the paintings and other more permanent artefacts which are now more familiar to us.

Award Winning Demography and the Imperial Public Sphere Before Victoria: Scottish Solidarity and the Historiography of the Tobacco Trade

Will Thomas at Ether Wave Propaganda has been doing a fascinating series on Tactile History, about recreating experiments and methods to study them directly.

What the Sumerians can teach us about data:

Gathering data is not a neutral act, it will alter the power balance, usually in favor of the people collecting the information.

Pedagogy And Public History

Open Plaques blog: Finding Flann O’Brien: plaques, places, tongues and names

Next in our investigation of the plaques we come to the matter of his three names (four if you include the Irish spelling of his first), possibly confusing for the Open Plaques naming system (we currently list two of them). Brian O’Nolan, the civil servant. Flann O’Brien, the pseudonym of the literary author. And Myles na cGopaleen – his pen-name as the famous satirical ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ columnist for The Irish Times newspaper, a column that brought him more notoriety in his lifetime than his books and made him unpopular with the grandees of the Irish state.

Joseph Adelman: Behind every good historian is someone who read an awful early draft and patiently explained what he/she was actually saying.

Andrew D. Devenney, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Follow-up on Playful Historical Thinking Class Experiment”

In the end, I am glad I conducted the experiment and have already adopted small elements of it into a couple of my courses this semester (namely the modular topic format and a greater focus on non-lecture activities in class to stimulate playful historical thinking). However, in its current form, the class needs more polish to buff out the dents, smudges, and scratches.

Jonathan Rees, Why is there no history department at the University of Phoenix?

History departments die by efficiency because sitting around contemplating the answers to ageless questions doesn’t really do all that much for the gross national product. Therefore, I think we in history and many closely-related fields will disappear in the coming wave of technology-induced efficiency unless we offer a different set of values through which to justify our existence. I happen to be rather fond of joy. Sitting around contemplating the answers to ageless questions may not be efficient, but it is lots of fun.

Brandon Watson, “Correction in the Classroom”

there is a form of critical thinking most students engage in a lot….the assessment of whether a professor is worth learning from at all.

Historical Sources

In Pursuit of History: The Complaint of Christmas: A Serialised Christmas Tale

a story written in 1631 that … recounts the adventures of Christmas, who visits earth on the 25th December as an old man (a precursor to Father Christmas no doubt) along with his companions, the 12 days of Christmas. His adventures take him around Europe and then to England where he discovers what has become of Christmas charity and hospitality.

Mercurius Politicus, Seventeenth Century Crowd Funding

Taylor segmented his subscribers into seven categories:

1 Those that have paid.
2 Those that would pay if they could.
3 Those that walke invisible, and are not to be found.
4 Those that say they will pay, who knowes when.
5 Those that are dead.
6 Those that are fled.
7 Those Rorers that can pay, and wil not.

Ben Breen: American Monsters: Images of Brazilian Nature from Early Modern Europe

Although comparisons to the Garden of Eden were frequent, these images also reveal a profound anxiety about the abundance of nature in the Neotropics.

Historical Episodes

Interview with author Sarah Wise about her book on death and the illicit cadaver trade in early 19th century London

But Londoners loved these attractive, exotic-looking little Italian waifs, and would also defend other types of beggars if anyone appeared to be hassling them. Ordinary city-dwellers seemed to me, in reading the primary source material, to be a lot less withdrawn and in their own little world than we city-dwellers are today, and seemed to show more class, or social, solidarity.

Streets of Washington: The Prolific Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth and her Georgetown Cottage

Supposedly it was on his deathbed that Captain Nevitte persuaded a local priest to rechristen little Emma with two additional names so that here initials would spell out E.D.E.N., a melodramatic gesture particularly well-suited to the novelist-to-be.

Photo Essay: The History of Air Travel

Modern air travel’s safety and accessibility are greatly indebted to aviation’s long history of experiments, failures, accidents and deaths.

Romeo Vitelli: The Benjamin Rush Prescription (Part 1)

not only did Lewis and Clark set out on their expedition armed with microscopes, compasses, three mercury thermometers, and other scientific instruments, they also carried more than six hundred mercury laxatives, each four times the size of an aspirin

Natalie Bennett: Can we choose to descend to a less intensive, simpler level? Have we done it before? is reviewing Joseph A Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988)

Alan Flower, Napoleon’s Secret Navy

In October 1805, within days of the disaster at Trafalgar, the French minister of Marine and Colonies, Vice Admiral Denis Decres, started to lay the groundwork for the reconstruction of the French fleet.

Current Events and Echoes

What would New Years be without some Chinese astrological etymology and cultural appropriation? Also, in Asian connections, I had a short piece on Japanese food policy history in light of the Fukushima disaster.

A remarkable story of renegade historical preservationists:

UX’s most sensational caper (to be revealed so far, at least) was completed in 2006. A cadre spent months infiltrating the Pantheon, the grand structure in Paris that houses the remains of France’s most cherished citizens. Eight restorers built their own secret workshop in a storeroom, which they wired for electricity and Internet access and outfitted with armchairs, tools, a fridge, and a hot plate. During the course of a year, they painstakingly restored the Pantheon’s 19th- century clock, which had not chimed since the 1960s. Those in the neighborhood must have been shocked to hear the clock sound for the first time in decades: the hour, the half hour, the quarter hour.

The Lincoln-Douglas-Gingrich Debates

It’s already slightly creepy to challenge the first African American president to a debate modeled on debates over the legitimacy of slavery. It’s doubly disturbing if you look at the actual content and context of the original debates, which was circus like and full of racist demagoguery.

Ohio Woman Wants Whites Only Pool Sign Reinstated

A woman in Ohio continues to claim that having a ‘Whites Only’ sign hung at the public pool is not racist. … changing her argument to assert that the sign is an antique and therefore apart of her heritage.

That’s Not History: Equality and Fairness in Persia v. American Exceptionalism

So, freedom of religion and culture, civil liberties, property rights, freedom of movement, and the abolition of slavery. Not too shabby on the equality front. But wait! There’s more!

USIH on Charles Murray, inter alia: Post Civil Rights Intellectual Ferment and Race

Racial politics were persistently perplexing, despite the successes of the civil rights movement, largely because, as President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed in a Howard University speech on June 4, 1965, “equality as a right and a theory” was not the same thing as “equality as a fact and as a result.”

Moving Forward

The History Carnival is in good shape for upcoming hosts through June, but always looking for volunteers for later. Next month’s edition will be hosted at The View East by blogger and Twitterstorian Kelly Hignett. I hope this lives up to the “bumper edition” billing!

For a little entertainment this Thanksgiving, I read Andrew Rankin’s Seppuku: A History of Samurai Suicide (Kodansha, 2011).¹ Since I’m teaching both Samurai and Early Japan this semester, seemed like a good supplemental read, and this is the first thing resembling a lull I’ve had all semester. This is an attractive little book, substantially researched, but not much of a history. It’s more like a miscellany, a collection of materials in search of a thesis.

Andrew Rankin is a graduate student in literature, specializing in Mishima Yukio: no wonder then, that he has collected materials on extremes of samurai culture, though Mishima is conspicuous by his almost-total absence from this work.² Mishima is the subtext, though, as the entire work is dominated by discourses of aesthetics and authenticity, without the complications of anthropological or historical theory, economics or historical context. Thus you get sentences like: “Their chief aspiration, in its psychological essence, was to realize the perennial samurai fantasy of inviolable rectitude and fearless self-sacrifice culminating in sanguinary apotheosis.” (197) While Rankin acknowledges changes in practice over time, the view of samurai culture is anachronistic and stands little close scrutiny. Too bad, because even within the realm of performative aesthetics, there’s a fascinating set of problems on display here that deserve serious thought.

While academics are often accused of bibliography-dumping on our younger colleagues, that Kodansha would publish a footnoted, bibliography-laden book on samurai culture without references to Eiko Ikegami, Thomas Conlan or Paul Varley — to pick the first three that I looked for and didn’t find — seems a bit haphazard. This book could be an interesting counterpoint to Ikegami, in particular, because of her focus on the tensions between control and individual self-expression around the warrior class, but without any engagement or thesis statement, this work remains frustratingly aloof.

What this book does reasonably well is present nearly-raw materials on the stomach-cutting suicide practice, how it evolved from an exceptional display to a tradition, then to a routinized procedure and finally to a romantic gesture in the Bakumatsu-Meiji era, where it stops. This process is as close as the book comes to a thesis, though “point of view” might be closer. There are two substantive chapters chronicling this evolution. separated by one on the procedure of the mature seppuku ritual of the Tokugawa era. All of these chapters are more episodic than coherently narrative, focusing on individual events selected, as near as I can tell, for cultural impact or typicality: Well over half the book is short prose portraits of seppuku events and their ilk. There’s a great deal of interesting stuff here, details and terminology that will liven up lectures and spur the imaginations of historical novelists. There’s also a sort of epilogue, called “Paradigms” which is a collection of primary source quotations… well, it starts as primary source quotations, chronological, then Westerners and 20th century Japanese views start to slip in, material which was never addressed in the rest of the work. My favorite bit from that section is the “Death poem of Kanzawa Toko (1795)”

Death poems
are a delusion.
You just die.

It feels incomplete. Not just because I’m a scholar and I want analysis and counterarguments. But because the book doesn’t even hold together to the standards of a popular history. Despite the example above, the prose is mostly fine, though the endless progression of stomach-cutting does get to be a bit much: there aren’t enough synonyms, though Rankin doesn’t resort to euphemisms, which is good. While there’s great value in a detailed examination of a powerful social and cultural phenomenon like this, there should be some conclusion, some cohesion, which is just lacking.

1. It helps to have friends who are journal editors: my colleague at Midwest Quarterly passed it on to see if it was worth a review, shortly before the journal gave up reviewing.
2. Three references, mostly directed at the presentation of suicide in his writing, and one brief mention of the Mishima’s own “anachronistic seppuku suicide.” (18) The Satsuma uprising is also missing, except for its role in General Nogi’s own anachronistic death.

As an historian, I consider anniversaries irrelevant. However, as a social function, naturally, they matter a great deal, and the internet itself moves so quickly at times that it’s worth looking back regularly to maintain perspective. Twitter itself, for example, is less than five years old, and I’ve been using it for about two years. About a year two years¹ ago, our erstwhile colleague Katrina Gulliver began cataloging historians on twitter under the title Twitterstorians, and now has a list of a few hundred participants, ranging from personal accounts to institutional ones to historical recreation and quotation lists.

Like any social media, a lot of what happens on twitter appears to be fluff and nonsense, even a lot of what comes from the accounts of bona fide historians. I consider twitter to be a kind of semi-professional discussion: not a private, personal space,² nor a professional project,³ but a space for informal discussions on political, cultural, historical and educational matters (with the ocassional foray into fluff and nonsense, for fun). I do have some local colleagues on twitter, and there are a few other Japanese historians⁴ as well as a pretty good collection of non-historian Japan-interested folks.

The population of historians, and Japan people, on twitter has a very strong overlap with the blogging world, naturally. Six years ago I wrote a meditation on academic blogging in which I argued that the blog was capable of enhancing or extending most of the core functions of the academy, especially the social ones — teaching, seminars, colloquia, conferences, faculty lounge, writing groups⁵ — and that remains true. Twitter is less useful for some of these function, because of the 140 character limit, but even that doesn’t preclude serious and extended discussions: it just breaks it up.⁶ You can also use Storify to collect a discussion into a more coherent form. And twitter is, arguably, more conducive to the chatting-around-the-coffee-pot (or -over-beer) aspects of academic life, as well as being an excellent medium for quick updates and the “comment-and-link” which was the origin of “web-log.” Twitter doesn’t replace blogging as a medium or long form writing platform, but it has effectively displaced some of the shorter, lighter material that might otherwise have appeared on the blog. The immediacy of twitter is also a powerful tool in rapdily emerging situations, though the signal-noise problem is always real.

I’ve made connections that I might not have otherwise, and strengthened others. I’ve live-tweeted political events and pre-semester movie screenings, I’ve watched other people live-blog conferences⁷ and joined in conversations about the scholarship. I’ve traded syllabus tips and book recommendations. Nothing earthshatteringly new, mind you. But a lively medium, with a good mix of professional and unprofessional conversations, that helps me stay connected, up-to-date, part of the ongoing discussions.⁸ It combines the open platform of blogs, the deliberate creation of connections between people which makes facebook interesting, and the ability to have quiet discussions without the whole world following. On the whole, I’ve enjoyed twitter quite a bit.

I’ll link here to other Twitterstorian 2nd Anniversary Blog posts as they become available: Check it out!

1. What a shameful mistake for an historian!
2. I use facebook for that, where I limit my contacts to family, close friends and long-time acquaintances. No, I don’t assume it’s secret (which is what most people mean by ‘private’ but that it’s out of easy reach, and personal rather than professional)
3. Like this blog, or my course blogs
4. not a complete list. Morgan Pitelka has an account, though he doesn’t say much. I’m sure there are more, too. There always are.
5. I didn’t include that last time, but I’ve seen some great examples both on and off twitter
6. and since there’s overlap between the twitter and blogging world, it’s not at all uncommon for a discussion to move back and forth from twitter to a blog, and back again.
7. I’ve tweeted from conferences, but mostly didn’t want to take focus away from my note-taking, which was conspicuous enough
8. Like all social media, it can be a little addictive/overwhelming at times. I deliberately follow a relatively small number of feeds – and check a larger number irregularly through the ‘lists’ feature – to keep the flow of information manageable. Selection is key: ‘curation’ is the buzzword now, and it’s not a bad description, as I’m deliberately trying to maintain both personal connections, and add a small number of high-quality feeds (i.e., people who serve as information gatekeepers!) in areas that I want to know more about. It’s a learning process

Stephen Turnbull, one of the most prolific and controversial writers on Japanese military history, has written a book on the 47 Samurai incident. The Samurai Archives review is quite positive, though Turnbull’s involvement as historical consultant on the upcoming Keanu Reeves version does raise concerns.

It’s nice to see Turnbull stepping up his game a bit, using front-line scholarship and taking a critical approach, rather than the mish-mash of his earlier books. It seems unlikely to me, though, that the debunking scholarship which has advanced over the last decade or so will have a significant impact on popular versions of the incident. It’s possible, I suppose, that Turnbull’s involvement in the new movie means that it will be a thoroughly revisionist statement¹ but the entrenched romantic version is going to remain authoritative until the revisionist history starts to get traction in Japan.

Even then, there’s the Shakespeare problem. We know that his portrayals of English kings and other historical moments were partisan and/or heavily fictionalized, but they remain some of the most enduring images and themes in historical fiction and movies, so that historians are still forced to routinely debunk these myths.² Chushingura and its ilk created a solid mythology by the dawn of the modern age, and the imperialist valorization of the Ako Roshi and other self-destructive samurai tendencies reinforced a vision of the samurai as abstemious, effective, principled, selfless and frequently violent. It would take a dramatic cultural shift to wipe out this tradition, one that seems unlikely given Japan’s rightward tendencies these days.³

I was screening movies for my Samurai course and came across recommendations (on twitter, I think) for The Twilight Samurai. I was very impressed: the portrayal of samurai poverty, bureaucracy, domainal politics, bakumatsu confusion, and the diversity (and, generally speaking, irrelevance) of fighting styles (and illegality of dueling) was very nicely done. The romantic side was a little over-generous, perhaps, but more realistic that an awful lot of other historical pieces. If you’re looking for a solid historical movie, one that will educate more than it will obscure, it’s very good.

1. assuming that all the pre-release publicity is wrong
2. It doesn’t help that “most historically accurate portrayal ever” in movie advertising usually means precisely the opposite, as the most recent Robin Hood versions demonstrate
3. more likely you’d see something like the American transformation of cowboy films: more internal focus and diversity, and an obscuring of the historically undeniable negative sides (i.e., Dances with Wolves and the death of the cowboy-and-indian film) with perhaps some culturally acceptable complications. Frankly, a good Brokeback Mountain treatment would go a long way, plus being historically credible.

The Asia/Pacific Journal, aka Japan Focus, has a fascinating interview with Heinrich Reinfried, Senior Lecturer in East Asian Studies at the University St. Gallen, Switzerland, conducted by a Swiss weekly. “Sushi and Samurai: Western Stereotypes and the (Mis)Understanding of Post-Tsunami Japan” begins and ends with a credible historical and thematic deconstruction of some of the less helpful stereotypes of Japan: Japan as samurai state, kamikaze, zen masters. I particularly liked the short bit on Herrigel

Nazi Germany made use of the samurai ideal of one who obeys orders unconditionally, who sacrifices himself on orders from above, who although not a Christian has a noble soul. This is the ideological basis of Zen in the Art of Archery by the Nazi Eugen Herrigel, a book which has exerted a powerful influence over the years. Some Swiss still today regard this book as the open sesame to Japan. It is amusing to hear of Europeans with an anti-authoritarian upbringing who go to Japan to let a Zen master hit them should they doze off during meditation.

He mentions early 20th century ideas about national character, and Saidian othering

we use Japan as a negative role model incorporating the opposite of the positive qualities we attribute to ourselves.

And he talks about the Cold War re-exoticisation of Japan as a land of Geisha and gardens, class-less capitalism. I’m not sure Henry Luce is as much to blame as Reinfried, nor am I terribly convinced by his analysis of Japan’s response/role in the process:

Reinfried: Japanese are quick to realize what others see in them. They are eager to incorporate foreign images into their self-image, above all, of course, those which are self-aggrandizing. This is what happened during the Cold War when Japanese adapted and subsequently internalized the positive image that the Western world had propagated in order to mark Japan off from communist China. This self-perception enabled the country to reach the goal it had envisaged since the Meiji-Period, namely to “catch up to and go beyond“ the West. It made Japan unique but also nurtured its own brand of nationalism.

DM: There are those who maintain that Japanese just love playing the exotic role assigned to them by foreigners.

Reinfried: To some extent every country puts on a show for others. That is part of the success story of many nations. We Swiss, too, like to pretend that we are cowherds addicted to cheese. It is only when disaster occurs that we take note of the fact that we all live in one and the same world. Exceptionalist claims regarding culture then immediately fade into irrelevance.

There’s an argument to be made there, I suppose, but there’s too much going on here which glosses over complications: tourism, nationalism, the extent to which Japan’s self-image created or was created by foreign discourses, and the China-Japan cultural tension which was over a half-century old before the Cold War started.

This is typical, though, of the middle section of the interview, in which Reinfried engages in substantial myth-making and othering of his own. Aside from a well-earned swipe at foreign journalists shallow reportage, there’s a whole litany of chestnuts, conventional images of Japan, highly questionable generalizations presented as nearly-universal truths about all Japanese, without a hint of the critical perspective of the rest of the article. Most of them are about Japan as a collective, connected society. For example:

• “In Japan, even a disaster is handled in an organized manner. Japan is generally characterized by a very high degree of organization. This also applies to disaster management. Japanese rely heavily on organization, simply because they do not see any real alternative to getting themselves organized.”
• “People in the Western world basically believe in their capability to live on their own, whereas Japanese tend to see themselves as part of a system. They do not see themselves as being capable of existing without an external system such as the state.”
• “In Japan, man and nature are not in contradiction, since in their view man was not blessed by God with a mind and then placed in Nature. In Japan, man and what we call Nature together form a unity. This realm can be either orderly or chaotic, bestowing blessings at times, at other times demonstrating that its might cannot be controlled, such as when it produces huge tsunami or rattles the earth. At the same time, the conviction that man can keep the dangers of Nature at bay with the help of technology is being nurtured. Scientists refer to a disaster as an “occurrence.“ A disaster is the result of the fact that man settled in places he is not intended to settle.”
• “Religious beliefs are a strictly private concern. There is, however, a strong link with one’s ancestors, to whom Japanese feel very close. Religious feelings do exist in the form of gratefulness towards them as well as towards fellow human beings in general. The notion is widely accepted that in a society based on division of labor, one’s existence depends precariously on one’s fellow citizens doing their jobs properly. This, in essence, is the least common denominator in Japanese religion.”
• “In Japan there is the view that man is neither good nor bad, but malleable: Just as water assumes the form of the vessel it is contained in, man must always be embedded in a vessel, be it family, community or company.”
• “In Japan, public discourse constitutes mainly an exchange of factual information, not of worldviews or personal convictions. … Japanese public debates on TV generally run in orderly fashion. In Japan, differences of opinion are attributed to differences in the level of information and not to ideological differences. We have behind us a long tradition of disputes between believers and non-believers. In Japan, there are only those who know and those who do not. In case of disagreement, people do not raise their voices to outshout each other but go home to recheck the vital facts. Saying this, I don’t in any way want to suggest that Japanese are unable to raise their voices in a quarrel if they feel the need.”
• “Japanese are not successful because they are ready to die for their company. Japanese are successful because they think in terms of systems. The individual is of little importance in this dimension of strategic thinking, so these handbooks are misleading. In Japan, everything is conceived as a system. Individuals and their achievements are of secondary importance.”

I could go on. The idea of Japan as a systematic, organized society has deep roots, and there are ways in which these statements could be construed as true, with caveats, limitations, and an awareness of the way in which these ideas serve the needs of the state and a kind of social order. What’s most odd, I suppose, is the degree to which Reinfried fails to recognize that these are cultural tropes of great power as well as fairly commonplace images of Japan, both within and abroad. There’s a saying I heard once, and can’t find a source for, that man for man, the Chinese can beat the Japanese, but that four Japanese can beat four Chinese because they work together.¹ There have been movies² and books galore on these themes, not to mention a whole cottage industry of debunking scholarship on most of them.

This ended up being a very frustrating article to read, because it started out so well….

1. I’m pretty sure I heard it about economic productivity regarding Japan and the US, too. If anyone can find sources, I’d be interested to see them.
2. Gung Ho, among others