Note: The History Carnival is still looking for a May 1st host, as well as hosts for the summer and beyond. Contact Sharon Howard (sharon$@$earlymodernweb$.$org$.$uk) to volunteer.

This is not a timed test, but you will be required to account for your periodization afterwards. This is not a graded exercise, as the answers are usually blatantly obvious or impossibly indeterminate. Whether this is a professional or recreational exercise is entirely between you, your cooler students, and your tenure committee.

True or False: A Dutch-trained painter revolutionized British portraiture in the early 17th century.

Multiple Choice: The use of history as justification for political decisions is
a. common
b. often hypocritical
c. frustrating
d. all of the above.

Multiple Choice: According to A.I. Ross, the Archives nationales de France at le Caran
a. have complicated lockers
b. permit cameras, but not pens
c. have fancy red chairs for people accesing fragile documents
d. all of the above

Multiple Choice: The coolest military history submitted to this carnival was
a. a WWI US infantry sargeant’s letter home from France
b. comparative discussion of US Revolutionary War memoirs
c. Errol Morris’ investigation of a Civil War photograph
d.a study of the origins and practice of stormtrooper tactics
e. why choose?

Multiple Choice: Taking an historical perspective on our current economic troubles shows that
a. We’re not in that deep trouble yet
b. People take stuff out of context.
c. Some people want to take credit for the successes of the other side.
d. all of the above.
e. none of the above: this is a non-partisan disaster of epic proportions about which history teachs us nothing. AAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!

True or false: Darwin’s Origin of Species starts with an extensive discussion of fancy pigeons.

Essay Question: The tomb under Hatshepsut’s is typical of her close noblemen by virtue of the lack of other usually-present female figures in their drawings. Discuss.

Essay Question: Choose one of the following notable female scholars and discuss why the term “mensch” applies: Judith Bennett, Wendy Doniger.

Multiple Choice: In the course of discussing Rousseau with James Boswell, Voltaire
a. laughed at death
b. feigned fainting
c. explained his objections vigorously
d. all of the above.

Multiple Choice: Which is more likely to captivate your World History students:
a. erroneous Martian cartography
b. the discovery of wooly mammoths in Siberia
c. animated historical statistics
d. criticisms of postmodern epistemology
e. wartime rumors and urban legends
f. anti-journalistic screeds
g. police naming and organization practices
Explain your answer in five hundred words or less.

Homework: John Hope Franklin and George Totten III have died and the Cologne Municipal archives have collapsed. Your assignment is to advance historical scholarship in their absence and generally live up to their example.

Extra Credit Opportunity: Dr. Vanke has created a set of proposed graduate study fields for World History. Some of them may be suboptimal. Can you propose alternatives?

Many thanks to Sharon Howard, Ralph Luker and all the folks who submitted their own or other people’s articles for this carnival! You can keep up with the whole History Carnival community at the History Carnival Aggregator and you can submit blog posts to future history carnivals here.

Yet the costly Iraq war must also be recognised as a sideshow in the Bush global counteroffensive against Islamist militancy, just as the far more costly Korean war was a sideshow to global cold war containment.

So says Edward Luttwak, in an extensive attempt to speed up the process by which History justifies and valorizes the policies of this administration. [via] He’s mostly engaged in a bit of dramatic post hoc, ergo propter hoc whereby a shift in government policies towards extremist Islamic groups is the result of Pres. Bush’s Trumanesque firmness, but the damage done to the success — military and diplomatic — of the initial Afghanistan campaign by the Iraq campaign isn’t taken into account at all.¹ The Korean war — which I have a lot of trouble seeing as a “sideshow,” given the direct involvement of Chinese and Russian forces and a lot more actual shooting than in Europe — advanced the cause of anti-communism. It was a success, in the sense that it preserved South Korea as a non-communist state and it was the last full-scale conflict between the great powers for some time. The only sense in which Korea could be called a “sideshow” is that Truman’s containment policy engaged a lot of other parts of the world as well.

He then goes on to mangle Chinese history — Tang, Song and Ming dynasties never conquered anyone, right? — and to cast the future of Asia in binaries (China: convergence or communist collapse? India: corruption stagnation or “traditional” good Brahmin governance?), as well as giving the administration credit for North Korean disarmament instead of noting their years of footdragging on same which have exacerbated the proliferation problem.

Truman deserves better.

1. He’s also assuming that al Qaeda’s “call to action” attacks were likely to inspire imitators rather than revulsion in the short run, which seems like he’s taking their own rhetoric way too seriously. Romantic nihilists have been claiming that “the masses are on the brink of revolution” and “dramatic action will awaken them” for over two centuries now.

I had a chance to watch a Korean movie from the colonial period, called “Homeless Angels (집없는 천사, 家なき天使),” at the Korean Film Archive (KFA) in Susek, Seoul, the other day. This movie was made by the infamously pro-Japanese director of the time, Choi Inkyu, in the late 1930s, and released in 1941. The Korean Film Archive listed it as one of 100 representative works that reflect Korean cinema, “because it is one of the very few surviving movies from the Japanese colonial era” despite the fact that the last scene (where all the children recite the pledge of allegiance to the Japanese Emperor) was propagandistic for the  Japanese imperialist cause.

The movie is about the founder of an orphanage called 香隣園 and the Korean boys who joined the orphanage. Conversations took place mostly in Korean, except for some occasional code switching with Japanese. Since Matt at GUSTS OF POPULAR FEELING has featured this movie a while ago, giving details of the plot and pictures of various scenes, I will not explain the story in detail here. I would rather like to point out the key historiographical issue in the discussions related to this movie among Korean film scholars, the KFA and GUSTS OF POPULAR FEELING.

The KFA interprets this movie as mostly a humanist story of enlightenment by Koreans for Koreans, and argues that “the propagandistic sequence is inserted irrespective of the plot and thus does not pose a substantial threat to the text’s actual subject.” In critique of this interpretation, Matt has highlighted the militaristic nature of the training that children receive, and indirect expressions that praise Japanese military advancement in the film. His interpretations suggest that children could represent Koreans in general, and that the film could leave the audience with the lesson that Koreans could have become real Japanese citizens if they had made a great effort.¹ The interpretations of this movie among film scholars today are similarly divided on how to interpret the nature of this movie in the same way as the Japanese imperial authorities were bewildered.² Is this a mere Japanese propaganda? Or is this a ‘Korean’ humanist story of rescuing and enlightening homeless children?

Let’s step back from this question for a moment. There are many elements in this movie that reflect the global trends at the time. The first thing to notice is that in the movie there is clear pastoral idealism depicted as a reaction to industrialization. The film shows the decadence and corruption of urban culture, and its contrast to the healthy, disciplined, frugal and simple rural life. The idealization of rural agricultural life is found in media and intellectual discourse, not only in Korea and Japan, but also in Britain, Germany and other places in the world since the 1900s. Secondly, the special role of children as ‘our future’ and ‘our hope,’ but at the same time, as those that adults have to lead in the right direction, can be considered as a new concept that rapidly spread around the world in the 1910s. Historians often point out Stanley Hall‘s theory of developmental child psychology as having helped create and spread such an image of children. With these two elements combined, it is not surprising to see that large-scale youth movements were launched around the world around the same time — the Boy Scouts, Hitler Jugend, Japanese Seinendan, Communist Komsomol, etc. All these youth groups praised militarized discipline and pastoral ideology. Lastly, while idealization of rural life is clearly a rejection of modern consumerism, the movie seems to imply that Western Enlightenment itself was the basis of their activities. In the movie, the founder of the orphanage gains support from his brother-in-law, a rich doctor who owns an empty Western style house, a sizable farm and a farmhouse outside of Seoul available for use. There was a quick flashback scene in which this brother-in-law was spending time with his German girlfriend there, showing that he was educated in the Western style and is familiar with European culture. More interestingly, the founder names his son and daughter “ Johann (요한)” and “Mary (마리아)” respectively, which we can’t help but see as bizarre given the setting of Japanese colonialism. Overall, the adults who help the children in this film are all “Westernized.” This close relationship between the Enlightenment thought and anti-industrial youth movements was also prevalent in other parts of the world.

Coming back to the question of how to interpret the nature of the movie “Homeless Angels,” it is clear that the film was not simply about “Koreans helping Koreans.” At the same time, the question of “to what extent it was Japanese” has become a much harder question to answer because Korea, as well as Japan, was embedded within the larger historical trends of the time. The same difficulty of separating “Japanese” colonial modernity from world-historical trends is a common problem with many of the writings about the Korean colonial history. I wish that historians had better tools to capture the interaction of all the world, regional, national, provincial, and personal contexts instead of endeavoring to fit all the elements into narrower national terms. 

1. I would add the fact that the orphanage was available only for boys. It reflects the tendency of Japanese colonialism that regarded Koreans as military and labor human resources at the time.
2. See 강성률, 영화로 보는 우리 역사 3 [집 없는 천사]와 찬일: 계몽을 가장한 자발적 친일, 내일을 여는 역사, no. 20, 2005.6, pp.227-232

This is a “dump”: all the Asia related stuff I’ve saved over the last…. two months? Anyway, nobody else has blogged about it, so I thought I’d toss it out there. I hope to resume more … measured blogging soon.
[Crossposted at all three Frog Blogs; sorry about the irrelevant stuff.]

The increasingly inaptly named JapanFocus website has a fantastic study of ethnic Koreans in Yanbian, China and their economic connections to both Koreas and Korean diaspora communities. The existence of this community — the origins of which are rooted in Korean refugee migration from the Japanese incursions of the 1590s and early 20th century — has provided a conduit for FDI, but has also been a factor in the ongoing historical/territorial debates between Chinese and Koreans (Even Salon has noticed!). Perhaps the most interesting section for me was the last third, where issues of remittances and the social standing of the Yanbian Korean-Chinese were raised: “famliarity breeds contempt” seems to be the theme, as relations between the Yanbian community and both Korean and overseas communities have gone through euphoric phases but generally been lukewarm in person, with the China-based community coming out on the short end.

In related news, JapanFocus also has an excerpt of a new translation by Joshua Fogel of Yamamuro Shin’ichi’s Manchuria under Japanese Domination. Prasenjit Duara is not mentioned by name, but his works is, I think, implicitly criticized; Yamamuro’s view of Manchuria is closer to Louise Young’s …someone should do a review essay drawing on all three.

It appears that our recent historiographical nightmare is over because Abe has apologized “as prime minister” for Japan’s use of “sex slaves” (there was a fascinating debate on the terminology at H-Japan the end result of which is that a really concientious commentator cannot refer to the phenomenon of wartime military brothels with coerced participants except by using quotation marks or by going into long, long discussions of terminology).

I’ve been staying out of this whole brouhaha, mostly because of the rank ahistoricality of most of the discussion. Abe’s initial point, that coercion was overstated and reevaluation is needed, is absurd on the face of it, replacing legalistic standards of evidence for historical ones. Regarding the rejection of the 1993 government finding by nationalist legislators, I can only repeat what I’ve said before, which is that if your pride or legitimacy rests on a denial the realities of history, it’s time to find new sources of pride and legitimacy. The personal testimonies of former sex slaves before Congress, members of the Japanese military, etc.

Of course, the “debate” about the Nanjing massacre goes on: Joint historical committees come and go. Revisionist textbooks in Japan downplay atrocities, and Taiwanese textbooks seem to be focusing more on Chinese crimes than Japanese (and what can I say about the Taiwanese Nazi party? It would take a whole post…). A Chinese legislator even proposed “Humliation Day” as a commemoration of Japan’s 1931 invasion.

I was struck by a Korea report of a new planed textbook which would take both Chinese and Japanese historical errors to task, while another report suggests that unique Korean errors are being promoted. This follows Presidential scolding of Japan and a lawsuit over Yasukuni Shrine.

The Matteo Ricci map [via] is fascinating, but I can’t figure out why there are katakana readings of many of the place names, unless it is a later Japanese copy. Speaking of Japanese sources, the UC Japanese Historical Text Initiative looks like a great multilingual resource; a password is required to get at the texts, though not for their very detailed electronic publications, including a list of “Basic terms of Shinto” (which goes well beyond basic), their “Shinto Shrine atlas” and Contemporary Papers in Japanese Religion series.

Joe’s Brief History of Lawyers in Japan (MutantFrog seems to be having some trouble at the moment, but I’m assuming it’ll be back shortly) is a great example of timeline construction.

1854: The second known reference to European-style lawyers in Japanese literature. They are described as “accompanying stupid people to court and writing documents for them.”

There’s a new history resource, WikiHistory [via]. While I have grave doubts about the wiki “movement” I do think that it could be a good tool for creating valuable resources. This is one such attempt, though the strictly chronological format means that it’s going to be useful for people looking for very specific kinds of connections, rather than general users, at least for a while. Still, if you’re interested in contributing to a wiki, this wouldn’t be a bad place to start. Certainly the only one I’ve considered, so far.

Clint Eastwood’s movies on the Iwo Jima battles have gotten a lot of attention. Ian Buruma cites them as models for humanistic storytelling, and Noriko Manabe chronicles some Japanese reactions (which got a really sharp response on H-Japan). Both of them, I think, miss the point: Buruma cites the exceptional humanity of a few Japanese characters but he seems to ignore the basic inhumanity of the vast majority of them. I don’t fault Eastwood for this, mind you: a movie exploring the human emotions and motivations of most Japanese soldiers would be very different indeed. I don’t think Shintaro Ishihara’s kamikaze valentine is going to quite fit the bill, though. Manabe’s piece attacks Eastwood as a cultural imperialist, an essentialist position that would obliterate anyone’s ability to do history in any form; she also cites “critiques” of the movie by online Japanese without ever trying to evaluate the strength of those critiques.

Chinese cultural heritage preservation is a huge task, with potentially large payoffs. China is considering legislation to auto-patent indigenous knowledge to prevent western bioprospectors from exploiting China’s resources. Great Wall reconstruction is a perennial favorite. Language preservation is trickier, but essential to China’s claims to be a multi-ethnic and culturally diverse and responsible nation. 700 year old Korans are great sources, and Chinese can even learn from foreigners. It can even be fun: Han Recreation Society is a huge hit in Beijing, reportedly, reinforcing my belief that in any given large city, you can find a group of people that will do anything for fun. And a new movie commemorates a young Englishman in China during WWII particularly his efforts to help orphans.

New materials from the Japanese Imperial house may shed light on WWII, of course. In case you missed it, George Weller’s dispatches from Nagasaki have been published, but a Japanese translation of this expose of the Royal family will not be. And new material from the CIA sheds light on an aborted coup attempt, the postwar careers of Japanese war criminals, and CIA agents imprisoned in Communist China (I highly recommend that last one, by the way, for the great details and real drama, though I think the discussion of “brainwashing” is a bit cavalier). The agents came home right around the time of Nixon’s ping-pong diplomacy (There’s a whole book about it, now).

Lafcadio Hearn is having a renaissance, as is whaling. There’s a new Japan Blog Matsuri which will run at the end of each month. Speaking of blog carnivals, there’s a new History Carnival Aggregator, a “One-stop shop for announcements about history-related blog carnivals.”

The opium problem in the late 19c US wasn’t Chinese. The Moon Cake problem, however is. Former “rightists” are starting to speak out in China.

In southeast Asian monarchical news, archaeologists get environmental and discover that an early Cambodian capitol was abandoned due to water shortages. Vietnam’s old imperial city is getting refurbished with lots of help from overseas. And “Balthazar Napoleon de Bourbon, a jovial Indian lawyer and part-time farmer,” is the entirely unofficial heir-apparent to the pre-Revolutionary French monarchy. The only way this next item is “royal” is the nature of the pain: Buddhism prevents extermination of poisonous ants. Religious convictions can be inconvenient (no, I’m not ready for Passover!).

Many, perhaps most, of the above links without hat-tip credit came from HNN.

Welcome to History Carnival #22, the final edition of 2005. I’m deeply grateful to Sharon Howard for starting this whole thing off eleven months ago, and take some pride in the only other person (besides herself, for the time being) to host this carnival twice. (oops. see comments)

In the past I’ve inflicted some odd arrangements on carnivals which I’ve hosted. This time I’ll try to be reasonably clear and straightforward, not least because I, like so many of you, am still in the middle of grading final exams and papers. Since we can all use some comic relief and light reading at this point…

Humor

My vote for funniest story of the fortnight is eb’s retelling of the wine cache discovered in the process of building a high-speed rail in France, and the distinctly French solution to the problem. It also highlights a very real issue: people hide things, which can make doing history a great challenge.

There’s a few bloggers out there reproducing ancient humor for us: Mutant Frog pointed me to translations of Roman graffiti which make you wish that modern graffiti “artists” paid more attention to content that style. Philip Harland has begun (Thank You!) a series of translated ancient jokes that’s gotta find its way into my lectures somehow. It’s not ancient (to us; our students might feel differently) but the reposting of Woody Guthrie’s Great Historical Bum, includes a link to a great digitized primary source version (as well as links to alternate versions which illustrate what Pete Seeger called the “folk process.”) which could make for nice lecture fodder, too.

As if humor itself weren’t enough, historians are actually pretty funny, too. Check out the debate over Gerbarians, “the proto-Germanic, pseudo-tribal, demi-migrants formerly known as barbarians” and the comments on textbooks and scholars. And, in a fine display of cliometric skill produced without further comment, it is proven that US Turkeys are getting bigger. We needed to know that. Now we need research on US ovens….

And, when you can’t find anything funny, make something up: The Archaeological Anomalies contest has a small but very high quality group of entrants, some of which require more than a glance to understand. And Mark Rayner continues his Lost PowerPoint Slides Series with the Elizabethan Edition. Francis Bacon’s my favorite.

Popular Culture

Do we have to talk about TV biopics of John Paul II, the “medieval appeal” of Harry Potter (isn’t it enough we work in the last bastion of medievalism in the modern world?), Memoirs of a Geisha, Mel Gibson projects, and ninja?

Yes, we must.

But sometimes we can talk about good historical fiction or beautiful 17c books or surprisingly feminist popular Victorian authors or fine exhibits of women’s European and Asian art.

This Time of Year

Lew Rockwell connects the “Save Christmas” crew to the Blue Law Puritans, and it’s not a comfortable pairing. If Santa Claus is indeed a deity or demigod, he has to knock or otherwise be invited in; that’s why you open the flue and put out cookies, I guess….

On less pleasant anniversary notes, December 7 was the 64th anniversary of Pearl Harbor and we still haven’t made peace with it. It’s been 25 years since John Lennon’s death. December 21st (Solstice!) will be the 140th anniversary of Sherman’s entry into Savannah (that’s got some interesting contemporary parallels, too)

Origins

Just because we came out of Africa doesn’t mean that we were forced out. Just because we came out of Africa doesn’t mean that we came out of a single ancestor.

Surprising Sources

As always, the real fun is in the primary sources. The Elfin Ethicist discovered that the South was surprisingly sympathetic to Native Americans though also deeply racist. Eric Muller went into the National Archives and came out with thought-provoking materials (nicely scanned) related to both the internment of Japanese Americans but also US official attitudes towards the Holocaust.

Natalie Bennett’s diary blogger visits Germany and dishes dirt. Sometimes it’s what you find, sometimes it’s what you make of it: an archaeological dispute over Roman Slavery gets a good look here. And Eric Rauchway shares some of the materials his uses to teach the history of lynching.

Hmmm….

In the “I don’t know what else to do with these, but I can’t leave them out because they’re too good” category:

• Blaming the Middle East on William Gladstone by way of the Trotskyites
• First notes towards a History of Swimming in Early Modern Europe.
• A meditation on technology and history which includes a line I’ll have to use again: “It is the crucible of free will, and hence, of responsibility.”

Trouble

Yes, genocide is difficult to talk about. But one thing that bloggers seem to largely agree on is that talking about it should be legal in Europe and in Turkey. How do you respond, though, to those who deny the historical reality of great atrocities? with good sources and with every legal remedy available that doesn’t seriously infringe on free speech. Even if genocide is not the issue, colonialism and its legacies is also a matter for responsible historians, not politicians.

A few gross errors were noted in the historical blogosphere:

• the world’s first terrorists were not anarchist Russians. Though there were some Slavic terrorists in New York long ago.
• Christianity probably was not the origin of science
• Medieval Europe was not a good place for women to live
• Education has not been turning boys into girls for a century now.
• Jury’s still out on this one

Endings
A very unscientific survey of obituaries Richard Pryor, Eugene McCarthy,
Robert Sheckley.

And the last Routemaster buses in London, the ones with the platform you can hop on and off, have finished their runs.

Meta-Blogging and Meta-History

Sharon Howard attempts to define blogging and I turn in my personnel file. Meanwhile, a great, if oft-repeated, debate broke out about the judgments of History and historians of the future on the present administration. From Caleb McDaniel to eb to Alan Baumler: curiously, or not so curiously, none of them has been convinced by the discussion to give up on contemporary commentary or blogging. Yay!

Finally, a few theoretical and historiographical musings:

• Alonzo Hamby on Forrest McDonald’s autobiography
• Caleb McDaniel rejects The Only History Course as a justification for our pedagogical choices, while Nathanael Robinson considers where you can find the themes in Western Civ.
• Konrad Lawson (below) comments on odd handling of sources in Tonghak History and Owen Miller (also below) discusses developmental theory as a means to integrate Asian History
• In military history, a comparison between past and present objectors and Mark Grimsley returns to discussing counterfactuals

Not Enough?
Since the last History Carnival, two of the finest specialty carnivals have been published: Carnivalesque XI and Asian History Carnival #2. Also, Caleb McDaniel is looking for on-line history resources: help him out!

Special Thanks to Natalie Bennett, Alun Salt, Sharon Howard, and Orac for their assistance (Any errors of interpretation or presentation are my own; no warranty on the posts to which I link), and, after a New Years’ hiatus (but never fear, the Cliopatria Awards will be announced in the interim), the next host on 15 January will be Rob MacDougall at Old is the New New, electromail[at]robmacdougall[dot]org