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!

In honor of the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on the US at Pearl Harbor, the Society for the History of American Foreign Relations has published a series of essays on the event and historical memory issues; HNN has reprinted it (with a useful index post). John Gripentrog’s “The Road to War” is a solid discussion of the political and ideological differences which put the US and Japan on a collision course. HNN’s supplemental piece, by Rupert Colley, tracks how the attack brought the US into the European conflict. And Emily Rosenberg discusses how iconic attacks like Pearl Harbor and 9/11 and their rhetorical and cultural resonances.

Those are fine, but the articles I find most interesting are the other two. Greg Robinson writes about the effect of the Pearl Harbor attack on Japanese Americans at that time and the way in which it becomes part of the rhetoric of race and bias in the decades to come.¹ Finally, Yujin Yaguchi describes an intercultural teachers’ seminar which brought together Japanese and American teachers with time to explore their biases, perspectives, and to encounter new ones. The historiographical issues aren’t terribly new to academic historians, but for teachers working in a national curriculum context, it was quite enlightening.

Update: This article by Jonathan Parshall and J. Michael Wenger is the first interesting new scholarship I’ve seen on Pearl Harbor in years. Mostly it’s about the development of the Japanese aircraft carrier group as an operational unit, an unforseen shift in naval tactics.

1. The twitter chatter as the disaster this spring unfolded frequently, shockingly, referenced Pearl Harbor with a vicious karmic glee

The ninja question came up last week in my Samurai class — we were talking about possible writing projects — so I had to do my ninja spiel, which has become a bit of a set piece. The history of ninja in three stages: Sneaky samurai, literary device, and school.

The first stage covers the history up through the Warring States, possibly including the early Tokugawa, and it’s the age when, as Karl Friday put it, ““ninja” denotes a function, not a special kind of warrior–ninja WERE samurai … performing “ninja” work.” Turnbull describes this period in some detail, and it’s fairly clear from his collected episodes that there may have been some warriors who were especially sneaky, but not a continual tradition. There are a variety of figures that are credited as “the first ninja”: I’m partial to the yamabushi theory, just because it does highlight the warrior-priest tradition, and because it attributes to the ninja magical powers and ethical principles which are clearly absurd. Ignoring, though, the origins snipe-hunt, there clearly was a place for stealth, surprise and spycraft in the free-for-all conflicts of Japan’s warrior ages, when samurai honor was based more on “victory or death” than battlefield procedure.¹ So some warriors did that.

As the Hideyoshi-Tokugawa peace takes hold, and Samurai become a more cohesive class with an interest in Confucian ethics, a more rule-oriented value system,² they become ashamed of the sneaky successes of their predecessors, and also start to become more specialized and formalized with regard to combat styles. Most schools of martial arts have both public and secret teachings, so the idea of a separate class of stealth specialists with secret traditions is entirely consistent with the Tokugawa-era samurai tradition. This is where the second stage begins: the cultural ninja.

Ninja were a lively part of the Tokugawa entertainment industrial complex: plays, fun houses, books, and visual art all explored the idea of the secret warrior, turning him in to a mighty, nearly mystical, foe, a haunting presence which could only be beaten through preparedness and righteousness by the mightiest samurai.³ Ninja become Robin Hood/Jesse James type outlaws, a friend to the common man — sometimes said to be of peasant origin themselves — and a blight on the establishment. By being a kind of anti-hero, occupying a rhetorical tactical space that the samurai could not, the ninja helped to legitimate the samurai as ethical warriors, as well as providing a kind of outlet for anti-samurai frustration and fantasy. This version of the ninja enters the western literary tradition through, among others, Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels.⁴ This stage is still very much in existence, of course, as the literary/cinematic tradition persists, even adding new themes like environmental consciousness.

The third stage overlaps the second — a common problem for historians attempting stage theories; perhaps ‘state’ or ‘thread’ would be a better unit — from the early modern to the modern. At some point in the Tokugawa or Meiji eras, depending on the form and who you believe, styles of martial arts became formalized more or less at the same time that they become largely irrelevant. As noted above, most have some form of “secret teaching” for advanced adepts, and a “hidden history” as well tracing back to a noteworthy ancestor-teacher, and most of them also have well-established rivalries with related schools. In that regard, Ninja as a modern “warrior way” isn’t distinguishable from other Japanese or Chinese martial practices. In the modern age, when combat techniques are as much a matter of market forces and fashions as military necessities, the secret traditions have largely become routinized; the mythology of the ninja requires an overlay of mystery, which is maintained both by the continuing use of ninja legends as entertainment⁵ and a passionate defense of the narrative of ninja as a secret, continuing tradition which has emerged into the light with modernity.

These three phases of the ninja tradition help separate out the fact from the fiction, clarify how and why ninja might be a substantial historical topic, and why the entertainment tradition has strayed so far from anything resembling reality.

1. see Conlan, State of War, which we’ll be reading in a few weeks.
2. see Ikegami, The Taming of the Samurai, which we’re reading now
3. Friday and Turnbull both address this
4. There’s a whole history yet to be written on the relationship between US military presences in East Asia, kung fu movies and the rise of Japanese martial arts in the US. But nobody’s written it yet.
5. From children’s literature to Mito Komon….

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

What makes Louise Young’s Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism such a fascinating, troubling work is that she details the way in which the Manchurian experience, and the strategic vulnerability of the Manchurian adventure, rebound into the politics and culture of Japan itself. It reverses, in a way, the traditional narratives of colonialism which see influence flowing from the metropole to the periphery rather than the other way around. And as consciousness of Manchuria became increasingly central to Japanese political and cultural identity, Japanese politics became increasingly radical: nationalist, racialist, expansionist, militarist; in a word, imperialist. Not that Japan wasn’t an empire before that — Taiwan, Korea, Liaodong, and a large swath of the South Pacific attest to Japan’s willingness to take control of other peoples — or that the cultural elements weren’t in place. But under the influence of the ongoing crisis in Manchuria, a crisis experienced by many who travelled there, worked there, and seen and heard through music, movies and other outlets, liberal alternatives like internationalism became unpalatable, even unacceptable. If you’re tied to the usual nation-bound histories of culture and politics, and the one-way influence of the standard metropole-periphery model, this is a paradigm-shifting piece of scholarship. As Albert Szent-Gyorgyi said, “Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought.”

I thought of Young’s work when I read this NYT profile of David Yerushalmi, one of the architects and driving forces behind the anti-Shariah movement in the United States. Yerushalmi’s radically political and hostile view of Islam have become common-place opinions in certain segments of the US political spectrum — primarily Republican, Tea Party, Buchananite Isolationist, Dominionist and similar groups — and have been put into legislative form in Oklahoma, as well as as other states. Especially in the context of US involvement in the Middle East, the specific focus of the xenophobia against the very kinds of people who are the target of US policy, the anxiety about subversion by global networks of muslims based on the statements and actions of a radicalized few, really does remind me of the Japanese turn in the 1920s and 1930s against communism, socialism and anarchism, against the Korean and Chinese activists, and their Japanese allies, who were the strongest proponents of those theories.

What really fascinated me about the profile, though, was Yerushalmi’s background. Or rather, a combination of his background and the way in which the article glided over the interesting bits.

His interest in Islamic law began with the Sept. 11 attacks, he said, when he was living in Ma’ale Adumim, a large Jewish settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

At the time, Mr. Yerushalmi, a native of South Florida, divided his energies between a commercial litigation practice in the United States and a conservative research institute based in Jerusalem, where he worked to promote free-market reform in Israel.

After moving to Brooklyn the following year, Mr. Yerushalmi said he began studying Arabic and Shariah under two Islamic scholars, whom he declined to name.

He is an American Hasidic Jew — literally the third thing we learn about him after his name and age — and lawyer, hostile to the secular socialist roots of Israel¹ who suddenly became troubled by the nature of Islam after the 9/11 attacks.

Maybe. But I don’t think that it’s coincidental that Yerushalmi was an American living in Israel — a state often described as an agent of American power in the Middle East² and in particular living in an areas which is easily (and I think fairly) described as an Israeli colonial territory. I think it’s more likely that the experience of living in occupied territory radicalized him, hardened his views on Islam. He was engaged in a struggle at the frontier of civilization, in his own mind, when members of a group he already percieved as the enemy struck at his homeland, to which he returned to share his hard-won perspective on the issues. And because of the shock of that attack, compounded by the ongoing challenge of war overseas and economic troubles, he found people receptive to his message of a subversive force at work in the world, an existential conflict.

Being an empire means having peripheries, and those peripheries are going to have troubles, in no small part because of their relationship with the metropole. But mistaking the tensions of the periphery for an existential crisis is the kind of lack of perspective which signals weak leadership, a distorted public sphere, and a high probability of escalating sunken cost fallacies driving policy.

1. Note that the “conservative research institute” isn’t named, begging the question of whose definition of “conservative” the reporter is using in this description.
2. though I think “stalking horse” or “scapegoat” might be more precise