Something that struck me from C. Vann Woodward's "On Believing What One Reads" in The Historian as Detective: Essays on Evidence:

Americans use their history not only as a source of myth and an object of filial piety, but as a substitute for political theory. Developing this thesis in a recent book, Daniel Boortsin has pointed out that America has never produced a political theorist of first rank, and that as a people they have exhibited a singular indifference to political theory and dogma. Instead they have sought their values, the meaning of their experience, and a chart for their future in their history. The assumption has always been that there is in their past a sort of proto-American theory that, if properly understood, will prove adequate to all exigencies. If it is flouted or ignored, on the other hand, the result will be disaster or peril. Any flouting of it is labelled "un-American." And any new policy or legislation or administrative change must be squared somehow with this proto-American theory before it is acceptable.

The American Clio has been placed in the role of a sacred oracle from whom the meaning of events and the pathway of the future are periodically sought. The answers the oracle has given have been in the form of reinterpretations of American history. And the interpreters of the Oracle have not always belonged to Clio's ordained priesthood of historians.

One of the major official interpreters of the Oracle is the Supreme Court of the United States. Although that august body is concerned with the interpretation of a written constitution, it has not considered itself bound by earlier opinions. It has felt free to overrule former decisions, to re-examine the words of teh Founding Fathers, and to discover in them different and hitherto unsuspected meanings, remarkably applicable to the issues of the moment. By this means an eighteenth-century document, the oldest written constitution in existence, has been found to anticipate magically the strange and sudden shifts of policy and the unforeseeable needs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Similarly the framers of our foreign policy have diligently consulted the Oracle. Washington's Farewell Address and Monroe's Doctrine have been found to mean one thing at one time and another at another time. Sacred text has been used to sanction both isolationism and, within a very brief interval, interventionism and internationalism as well.

When Americans fall upon hard times and it becomes clear that drastic remedies must be used, as in the late depression, they do not evolve theories of revolution to justify change, but reinterpret their past and seek therein precedent and sanction for radical experiment with old institutions. In this manner little difficulty has been encountered in finding sanction for such diverse movements as Jacksonian Democracy, Reconstruction, Theodore Roosevelt's Square Deal, Wilson's New Freedom, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, and Truman's Fair Deal. All have been found to be orthodox and to square with the proto-American theory. In fact American radicalism has typically, though not always, rallied to the cry of restoring the true faith and throwing the corrupters out of the temple. The American Revolutionists, with assistance from Burke, proclaimed their cause to be the protection of constitutional rights against English innovators. Abolitionism made little headway so long as its leaders believed in burning the Constitution, and succeeded only when Lincoln presented it as a means of conserving the system which, in his own words, "our fathers brought forth on this continent" some "four score and seven years ago"! During the American Civil War both North and South declared themselves to be fighting to preserve the true interpretation of the Constitution, the true faith.

My mountain of microfiche finally arrived! I've been waiting a month to get the district surgeons' reports for my draft chapter on health and native policy in South Africa (due in two weeks, oh God, I'm so screwed--it's not like the teaching ceases) and they're finally here. So it's going to be a busy day of scanning and compiling data. I suppose that's good.

In other news, the chapter I wrote on the connection between India and East Africa both before and during the First World War--as a consideration within Indian Ocean history as well as African history more widely--has been accepted, and the publisher has agreed to accept the volume as a whole. I may have to make some changes, but that's a nice piece of news.

Beyond that, I got to sit on my first PhD committee a couple of weeks ago. It was very weird to be on the other side of the table, and I clearly overprepared. The candidate did a ton of work, and the subject was extremely interesting, so it was an easy pass with only one point of substantial revision. I think that the chair and I were the only ones to read the whole thing page by page by page, but I did feel obligated for the candidate's sake.

I'm not sure where else to put this question, even though it is the exact opposite of light-hearted banter:

How do you, as historians, cope with the crueler sides of history?

Personally I can't imagine dedicating my whole academic career to topics like genocide or war atrocities. I once did a term paper on Alfred Rosenberg and couldn't read more than two pages at a time out of sheer disgust on the topic. This may have something to do with the distance to the studied period, though. Medieval reports about war atrocities – like William the Conqueror chopping of hands and feet of the soldiers in Alençon – don't get to me as much as accounts of the world wars.

I'm doing some casual research into different possible topics for my undergrad dissertation next year, and I've been running into this idea that military history is, in the words of one of my lecturers, "pooh-poohed" in academia, and I'm wondering if anyone here could shed some light on this? Maybe I'm missing something essential here, but it doesn't really make sense to me - is it any history that looks at aspects of a military that is frowned upon, or is it just certain approaches to military history that are looked down on, like would a social or cultural history take on a military would be welcomed? Or am I totally wrong and there's no stigma attached to military history anymore?

I did run across a discussion in Understanding Early Modern Primary Sources about recent attempts to reintegrate military history into mainstream academia, but it calls it "New War History". This may be nitpicking, but doesn't that imply a heavy focus on specifically the war and combat elements of militaries? After all, combat is obviously a big part of militaries, but part of having a standing army is that those people are still there during peace time, and depending on time/place even during war time there would be military people that weren't in combat/served as support troops.

Sorry for the wall of text and I hope this is okay in this thread, I was just kinda surprised at finding all this out and am looking for some insight, thank you.

Here's a reading surprise, from Clement Eaton's downright ancient (1940, revised 1964) The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South:

While Leonidas Polk [yes, the future CSA general] was seeking to found an institution at Sewanee that would satisfy the most conservative planter of the Cotton Kingdom, within the interior of Kentucky John G. Fee was struggling to establish a radical college, modeled after the notorious Oberlin College. [...] Since the very name abolitionist was anathema to Southern people, he joined the cause [abolitionism] only after he had wrestled with the Lord in a vacant lot. His father disinherited him as a result of this decision. Fee resolved to carry on his work as a preacher and as a propagandist in his native state, despite the great dangers he was bound to encounter. He was mobbed twenty-two times, but continued to preach his antislavery views until his final expulsion in 1859. He carried no weapons, and would pray for the mobs or start preaching to them as they persecuted him. [...] With grim satisfaction, he noted in his autobiography, however, that the violent deaths that, one by one, overtook the leaders of these mobs. He established an academy and a church at Berea in Madison County on a plot of land given him by Cassius Clay. [Not the Champ.] Here a little community developed, devoted to the principles of race equality, co-education of Negroes and whites, and opposition to sectarianism. Several Oberlin students came to Berea to teach in the only school in the South where black and white children studied side by side. But even Cassius Clay frowned upon such recognition of race equality and the acceptance of higher law doctrine.

That was 1858. John Brown visits Harper's Ferry in 1859 while Fee is on a fundraising tour in the North. He says he wants more John Browns in spirit and conviction, not action. That ends up in the New York Tribune and picked up by a paper in Louisville, which has Fee calling for more Browns without qualification. Somewhere along the way, a crate of rifles gets added to Fee's fundraising.

the people of Kentucky rose in wrath against the settlement at Berea. Seven hundred and fifty men met at Richmond [KY] and pledged themselves to remove Fee, JAR Rogers, and their co-laborers. The citizens of Berea appealed to the governor of Kentucky for protection, but he refused to intervene, and, as a result, the reformers were forced to cross the Ohio River into a free state.

That all went down before Fee got home. On his return, a public meeting ordered him and an associate out of the state. They landed in Cincinnati. He came back after the war and this is the place now.

I, for one, am pretty stoked for the President's speech on Islam. In a "this is fine" sort of way.

I'm continuing on translating/reading the May 28, 1892 edition of Gaelic-language newspaper Mac-Talla (Echo). It's a lot of fun, full of unexpected moments of history, like the hopeful story I translated last week about the end of the fishing war between Canada and Newfoundland (spoiler: it wasn't. This week, I got a little preview of a bill before Parliament:

There is currently a bill in front of the Parliament of Canada that would make it illegal for people not to be able to vote at voting time. It is likely that this bill will become law, and if it does, there will be no uncertainty among the those in this country. In Britain currently, no man can vote unless he can read and write.

That bill did become law, and is an important part of Canadian legal history--it enfranchised many men from groups who were previously not allowed to vote, such as those of African and Asian decent. However, it did not allow indigenous men to vote, which seems to indicate that they were not even considered "men" at this time. There's a nice little bit of explanation on an Elections Canada site around this.

Right now, though, I'm working on a translation of Victoria Day celebrations. I'm not done yet, but it's charming and kind of funny to me how many mistakes these newspapermen make in this article (their spelling is always a little creative, which likely speaks to the quality of available Gaelic education in this time and place). Victoria is given a 20-gun salute -- not a 21-gun salute, and I'm pretty sure it's not a typo. This leaves me to wonder if they really DID somehow miss a gun (and would that be an insult to Her Majesty?) or if the newspaper editors did think their construction made 21 somehow.

Edit: Just corrected the date of the paper. I was 6 years ahead of myself for some reason.

Hi. I asked a few questions this week that were not answered. I was wondering if one of these could be answered here? Thanks in advance!

In John Irving’s novel A Prayer for Owen Meany, the first person narrator, John Wheelwright, says the average American in the late 1980’s did not care about Iran-Contra and other controversial aspects of Ronald Reagan and his administration. Is this an accurate statement?

Hollywood and the movie industry are stereotyped as overwhelmingly “liberal.” What in the history of cinema led to Hollywood being seen as so left-wing?

How historically accurate is Dennis Prager's video "Why Isn't Communism as Hated as Nazism?"? Is it true that historically "the left" has not condemned communism?

This might be worth a question of its own, but to what extent does critical theory explicitly inform methodological and theoretical approaches in history. Secondary to that, do historians tend to identify with critical outlooks (e.g. postmodernism, postcolonialism, Marxism, feminism, you know the drill etc.) explicitly or is it not really in vogue to do that?

Cheers, have a good weekend.

Tough days for me recently:

https://gunlord500.wordpress.com/2017/05/19/living-the-good-life-episode-33-may-19-2017-minor-setbacks-but-no-big-deals/

Most relevant for here, my main pc pooped out and took my third draft of my dissertation with it ;-; Fortunately, that third draft was just minor grammatical errors fixed as I hadn't started hardcore writing and reorganization, so not too much work lost :D

A thought that I've been mulling over for some time.

The last couple of years have been - as someone I saw put it: "this is the chapter in the history book called "origins", isn't it? Just before you start getting maps with arrows on them".

I wonder if there is already a place, or if one could be made, where people could discuss current events from a historical perspective - under the same kind of strict moderation and atmosphere of mutual respect and calm academia as /r/askhistorians.

Obviously there's a whole can of worms there, but it would be a potentially useful thing. Thoughts?