Via Aaron Bady, I saw a wonderful article by Imke Sturm-Martin about the challenges of integrating migration history into the mainstream of European historical consciousness.¹ Europe is not the only place where migration history has complicated traditional narratives, and where migration history has contemporary political implications, but it is a bit ahead of the curve, thanks to the usual patterns of economic and social change, compounded regional integration. I don’t have time to give this the full treatment it deserves, but Sturm-Martin’s most interesting point is that the full integration of history into master national narratives is very much hindered by those national narratives.

Which migration should become part of a European narrative? The question is not an easy one – the only uncontroversial instances are migrations that lie so far back in time that all can agree on their consequences for European history. It is much harder to agree about migration in recent history and the present, and even individual national historiographies have trouble with such cases. Whenever and wherever the consequences of migration are felt in the present, questions arise of minority rights, group rights, inequality and discrimination, and demand that any “official” history be politically correct.

Like any other public presentation of history, the House of European History in Brussels, due to open in 2014, will be unable to avoid taking a political stance on such questions. … Visitors are to be told about the great migrations of antiquity, about migration from the countryside to the cities during the industrial revolution, and about the refugees and displaced or expelled persons who migrated after both World Wars. This list does not mention the “international” aspects of seasonal migration in Early Modern Europe, a well-researched topic by now; nor does it mention the vast scale of emigration to the Americas from various European countries, or the substantial migration from outside Europe at the end of the colonial era. Even the workforce recruitment campaigns in the southern countries during Europe’s boom years in the 1950s and 1960s is omitted. Such large-scale historical processes have fallen victim to the necessary selection process, but they might perhaps be part of the section “Questions for Europe’s Future”, which aims to throw up questions for visitors to ponder. One of these is, “How can the EU react to the demographic change affecting all its member states? Is encouraging immigration an effective response?”

There is a very powerful trend to turn history into a balance sheet of justice, which migration history often runs right into. But it’s also possible that migration history may make that kind of accounting impossible, done properly.

1. Sturm-Martin, Imke. Translation by Samuel Willcocks. “Migration: Europe’s absent history,” Eurozine 30 April 2012. http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2012-04-30-sturmmartin-en.html

Not much of a post, given the nature of my frenetic academic life these days, but Alex Wellerstein’s post at Nuclear Secrecy raises fascinating question about the WWII-ending atomic bombings: what if the Japanese hadn’t surrendered after Nagasaki?

According to the documentation he offers, a third bomb would have been ready to go in a few weeks, with the likely prospect of about three more per month after that for the remainder of 1945. Given how narrowly the decision to surrender won the day after Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Soviet entry into the war, and how elements of the military tried to forestall the surrender after the decision, it’s a much more plausible (and frightening) discussion than the “what if we hadn’t dropped the bomb” question.

(Thanks to Brett Holman for the tip. Brett’s liveblogging WWII, mostly the Blitz, but some interesting Japan material popped up today)

The Japan Times article on Japan’s application to UNESCO to have 和食 [washoku, Japanese cuisine] declared an internationally recognized “intangible cultural asset” is a fantastic display of modern cultural discourses. The combination of bad food history, the distortions of modernism, and abject credentialism is really quite disturbing.

The attempt to leverage international affirmation into economic and cultural power is striking.

• “If washoku gets UNESCO heritage status, it will motivate Japanese chefs across the globe — and also enhance the quality of chefs in this country.”
• “Exports of Japanese agricultural and marine products were hit hard by radiation concerns, so international endorsement of washoku would be seen as a big plus.”
• “Chefs from high-ranked restaurants across the world are enthusiastic about learning how to cook Japanese food and also learning about the tableware and culture”

Japanese cuisine has been immensely influential in the world — attested to by the number of Chinese buffet places in my own little corner of the midwest with sushi bars, not to mention three Japanese restaurants in neighboring Joplin, Missouri — and Japanese cuisine in Japan already has an immense amount of respect and power. But it’s not enough, apparently.

There’s also a powerful conservative impulse on display, pushing back against changing times

• “help Japanese people recognize the splendor of their culture as a whole and encourage more people to work in the traditional food industry.”
• “The Westernization of food in Japan is not necessarily a bad thing, but the move (toward an UNESCO listing) will be an opportunity to urge Japanese not to let their food culture fade.”
• “If washoku gets UNESCO heritage status, it will motivate Japanese chefs across the globe — and also enhance the quality of chefs in this country.”
• “an opportunity to urge Japanese not to let their food culture fade”
• “A government online survey shows … nearly 100 percent said they want to see the washoku tradition passed down to succeeding generations.”

I don’t put a lot of stock in online government surveys, mind you, but there’s a very common dynamic at work there: everyone wants to preserve what’s special about the past, about the tradition, but there’s a shrinking number of people who want to actually live and work under traditional strictures or limit themselves to traditional artistry, and a shrinking number of people willing to pay enough for culinary or cultural artifacts to make strictly traditional methods economically viable.

The predictable reiteration of cliches about distinct values and habits of Japanese food culture is probably what attracted the attention of celebrity chefs, though their claim that “Washoku is ‘respect for nature’ and serving to strengthen the bonds of family and community” actually goes beyond the original article. There we see a hash (so to speak) of claims about aesthetics — almost as many mentions of appearance as flavor — and healthfulness. I think my favorite, because of how much it reminds me of living in Japan, talking to Japanese about their own culture is

Makoto Osawa, director of policy planning of the agriculture ministry, said, “Japan, thanks to its shifting seasons, has a rich variety of food ingredients, while cooking methods vary depending on local conditions.” As an example of the diversity found in Japanese cuisine, the ministry cites “nabe” pot cooking from the Tohoku region, which developed out of the cold winters and active fishery industry.

The implication that other societies don’t have shifting seasons, cold winters, active fishing traditions, or seasonal foods like the Japanese takes me back to our year in Yamaguchi, where nobody would believe that Americans from the mid-Atlantic and MidWest could have experienced anything like the heat or humidity of a Japanese summer. Washoku in this regard is an interesting mix of real regional traditions and an elite aesthetic heavily influenced by poetic aspiration.¹ Of course, Japanese consumers are full participants in a globalized industry of constant food production and availability — or they would be if their government didn’t continue to practice some fairly extreme forms of food security protectionism. Foods like eel which are now available year-round still have strong seasonal associations, and possibly even a seasonal consumption shift, but it’s unclear whether the Japanese are “locavores” in any meaningful sense.

And the claims of healthfulness are interesting as well. Life expectancy and obesity rates compare favorably to the US, of course, but that’s not the highest standard in the world at the moment. Japan’s longevity has a great deal to do with their system of socialized medicine. Japan’s lack of obesity has a great deal to do with other factors as well, including low rates of automobile use and a mid-century rationing/famine that lasted over a decade. Food patterns matter, of course, and it’s certainly true that Japanese food patterns seem to persist longer than some other cultures² but it’s also true that Japan’s “traditional” food cultures are heavily shaped by deprivation and isolation rather than aesthetics or conscious healthful choices.³ Humans have eaten seasonally and locally for thousands of years, though Japan’s early modern isolation extended the patterns.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Japanese cuisine is great food, a worthy addition to global food culture, and the idea of a more seasonal, localized agriculture is economically and environmentally sound. But the modernist institutionalization of Japanese food culture as a traditional repository of modern virtues rests on a shaky intellectual foundation.

1. I just got a book announcement for Haruo Shirane’s Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons that argues for “the central role of waka in constructing a vision of nature that influenced all the arts.” blurb credited to Andrew M. Watsky, Princeton University
2. e.g. Susan B. Hanley. Everyday Things in Premodern Japan: The Hidden Legacy of Material Culture (1997)
3. ibid, plus WW Farris, Japan To 1600: A Social and Economic History

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