My Very Own Carrel

Well, sort of. Actually I have to share it with two other people. But this is not to be underestimated. I’m a real man now, or at least, a real graduate student. Even though I’m a lowly G1 (Gadfly Level 1) just starting out on my path to enlightenment in a history Phd, I have been granted a Carrel on the second floor of the musty stacks of Widener library. A Carrel, is defined as, “A partially partitioned nook in or near the stacks in a library, used for private study,” but I have always thought of it more as meaning something similar to the “sitting at the back of the bus” in graduate school terms.
carrelCarrel Shelves

The way I understand it, I now get to check out tons of books with my very special “Carrel library card” and then put them on my “Carrel shelf” (both on the desk and behind it) for my indefinite personal access. That is, until, of course, someone comes along and presses the “Recall” button in the online catalog of the library. Then I, reluctantly, will have to return to book to the control of mere mortals.

I also get a little combination lock controlled locker, just like high school! Ok, so I have to share that with two other people too. But I think there is more at work here than just a need to fairly distribute the carrels amongst the thousands of graduate students here.
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Fool’s Quotes

My little online database of quotes is growing. It has temporarily dissapeared from the top right of my blog due to a bug but will be back once I switch this blog to WordPress. You can see the quotes from the PHP script that I wrote: Fool’s Quotes script page. Just keep reloading for a new random quote. I should strongly emphasize that I don’t agree or endorse all the ideas in the quotes, some of them were chosen for their absurdity, shock value, or “historical” value.

Pepysdiary.com

Phil Gyford is blogging the Diary of Samuel Pepys. (Link thanks to Keywords). What a fantastic application of this medium.

Imagine if there were some idle, but careful and dedicated hands that were willing to blog the diaries of other fascinating people of the past. I can think of dozens of figures in modern East Asian history alone whose diaries I wouldn’t mind skimming in my RSS feeder while eating breakfast…in small irregular doses. Not all of them are likely to be as full of interesting observations as Pepys, despite their fame and importance, but I’m sure we can all think of a few that are.

UPDATE: Kerim has found all sorts of other sites which are posting books in the form of blogs, including some other diaries.

The Month of the Flying Squirrel

In celebration of the month of the flying squirrel, a holiday spanning late September and most of October with a 3000 year long tradition in the land of Muninn, I have resolved that for about one month this blog’s name will change to the Chinese for Flying Squirrel (鼯鼠 or wushu in Chinese, musasabi in Japanese, naldaramjui in Korean). Because I have a horrible memory, can someone remind me to do this next year? Oh, and can someone else remind me to change the name back again in late October?

鼯鼠: My Life as a Flying Squirrel

Many of us here on earth cultivate for ourselves an identity. After some reflection and a little imagination, we take extra pride in identifying with some particular configuration of abilities, characteristics, or even physical or ethnic features.

I am one of these people, and I have long cultivated, and perhaps taken pride in, my “jack-of-all-trades” nature. I remember making a business card on some vending machine in London back in 7th grade. On the card I made “Jack-of-all-trades” the “title” attached to my name. Perhaps from around that time I decided that my interests and abilities were so diffuse and I was so utterly incapable at excelling in any one of them that I would have to develop some unique combination that would get me through life. What is somewhat odd about this, though, is that this ended up leading me to celebrate my own mediocrity in any and all of my pursuits.

I was reminded of this tonight. After rereading a book by Kenneth Pyle on The New Generation in Meiji Japan for my modern Japan historiography class, I wanted to see how Pyle’s portrayal of the Japanese intellectual Hasegawa Nyozekan meshed with Andrew Barshay’s portrayal of him in the latter half of his book State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis (Whole book is online). There I found quoted an old passage from Nyozekan’s journal that I had highlighted a few years ago:

He is a good jumper, but can’t reach the roof; a skillful climber, but can’t make it to the top of the tree; an easy swimmer, but can’t cross the stream; a deep digger, but can’t cover himself up; a fast runner, but can’t outrun a man…

Five skills you possess
Yet not in one are you accomplished.
Flying squirrel, how can you brag?

Barshay notes that this is a reference to a passage in the first book of Xunzi (“The wingless dragon has no limbs and yet it can soar; the flying squirrel has many talents but finds itself hard-pressed.”) I really like this little passage, and I think that, like Nyozekan, I feel very much like a flying squirrel. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not the least bit unhappy with my fate as a flying squirrel. I believe that I have successfully developed a combination of skills and interests so bizarre and unlikely that my very presence in the world helps mitigate its monotony. I believe I am the only squirrel in the entire world to have precisely this particular configuration and by golly, there was a niche for me in society after all.

Sheer Humanity

I’m reading an interesting book focusing on the early postwar period in Western Europe called The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945-1965. It focuses on three groups: veterans, drafted wartime laborers, and victims of Nazi persecution. The section on veterans highlights some of the diverse and often bizarre disputes involving the recognition of resistance fighters and such as war veterans – something important in the process of rebuilding national pride after liberation by the Allies. In one interesting Belgian case, a volunteer of a relief action for victims of Allied bombing applied for recognition in one such veteran organization and was questioned as to how such activities were appropriate for inclusion:

‘…our activity had no clandestine character whatsoever. We usually wore an arm-badge to be allowed on the site of the disaster. There was no risk involved and the Germans were quite positive about our action.’

The volunteer had been urged to apply for membership because the actions might be included in the clause, “works of patriotic solidarity.” But there is more,

The administration rejected the demand on the behaf of his relief work, but assured him that he was entitled to the statute under another heading of the law, since he had given shelter to two Jewish clandestines during the occupation. This the applicant refused, since, according to his own declaration, this had nothing to do with resistance, but with sheer humanity.1

There are a number of fascinating things which come out in this little anecdote. Among other things it shows the difficulty in weighing the “value” of resistance in wartime, which might include publishing anti-German pamphlets or sabotage and which implies a nation’s active contribution in its own liberation, as compared to the non-national, potentially even “collaborationist” humane act of relief work in the face of Allied bombing in a German occupied Belgium, and then the non-national, non-resistance action of hiding Jews from death at the hands of the Holocaust. Ultimately, however, what naturally got privileged in the early aftermath of any war of “resistance” were acts which contribute to a national epic of salvation from the humiliating experience of occupation or, as in the case of recognizing help for Jewish clandestines, those which counter the evils of the enemy. As the author Pieter Lagrou clearly goes on to show, however, these too become almost comically co-opted, manipulated, and recreated by the early postwar regimes that came into power.

In applying for recognition, however, this volunteer shows on the one hand a willingness to interpret an act which embarrassingly preserves the reality of Allied bombing in national memory, as “patriotic”, while on the other exposing the absurdity of recognizing aid to Jews in hiding as some kind of national service.

1. Lagrou, Pieter The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945-1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) p. 55-56

Charles Maier: The Question of Meaning

I’m really excited about starting my history PhD. I’m sure the misery and loneliness of grad school will hit me eventually but not yet. One of the professors who I hope to learn a lot from is Charles S. Maier, a professor of modern European history. I knew him from the introduction to a book on the historiography of the Nanjing Massacre and a book called The Unmasterable Past on the German historiographical debate of the 1980s called the Historikerstreit.

Since I’m meeting him soon I have been reading up on his other stuff. In an opening essay in an old 1978 book called The Origins of the Cold War and Contemporary Europe he writes about the debate between “revisionist” left leaning historians who have been motivated by the horrors of the US involvement in Vietnam to reexamine the US role in the origins of the Cold War and more traditional historians. While I don’t like a few of his terms that much, he actually has a much more balanced approach than the use of that word might imply.

He concedes several points to the “revisionist” scholarship even as he critiques it, but more importantly, I think that his article, which might otherwise be considered quite outdated in its portrayal of the field now, can be used with almost exactly the same terms to describe one of the central points of contention between “empirical” or “positivist” or “traditional” history on the one hand, and more theoretically framed, self-reflective, but perhaps more ideologically charged history that might be said to descend from the very group of scholars he is talking about here. Here is how he frames the two approaches in the case of Cold War historians of the late 1970s:

For those who stress history as bureaucratic process, all questions of historical responsibility can appear ambiguous and even irrelevant. Foreign policy emerges as the result of a competition for fiefs within governmental empires. Bureaucratic emphases can produce a neo-Rankean acquiescence in the use of power that is no less deterministic than the revisionist tendency to make all policies exploitive in a liberal capitalist order. But what is perhaps most significant about these alternative causal models is that they are addressed to different questions. The non-revisionists are asking how policies are formed and assume that this also covers the question why. The revisionists see the two questions as different and are interested in the why. And by “why?” revisionists are asking what the meaning of policies is in terms of values imposed from outside the historical narrative. The revisionists charge that the historian must pose this question of meaning consciously or he will pose it unconsciously and accept the values that help to uphold a given social system. History, they suggest, must serve the oppressors or the oppressed, if not by intent then by default. The historian who wishes to avoid this iron polarity can reply that social systems rarely divide their members into clear-cut oppressors and oppressed. He can also insist that even when one despairs of absolute objectivity there are criteria for minimizing subjectivity. On the other hand, he must also take care that the history of policy making not become so focused on organizational processes that the idea of social choice and responsibility is precluded.1

When Professor Maier quotes the “revisionists” as claiming, “The historian must pose this question of meaning consciously or he will pose it unconsciously and accept the values that help to uphold a given social system,” I think he has really struck on one of the central points here which is just as much an issue today. I would also go so far as saying that not only “traditional” history but also the field of Political Science in American universities today apply when he says, “The non-revisionists are asking how policies are formed and assume that this also covers the question why.”

What I’m getting here at is that one more obvious element of the clash between the kind of history which, in my understanding, has dominated the field for some time now, and the theoretical crisis that many find it in today, is not that there is an iron polarity between necessarily serving oppressors or the oppressed. However, I do think there is a growing consensus around the idea that there isn’t a way to just skip the “question of meaning” all together. This is something, I think Professor Maier hints at in the last line of the quote and one he goes into more detail in his work on German historians debating the historical relevance of the Holocaust.
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Orwell: Politics and the English Language

I met a nice Australian guy by the name of Gregory. He lives on my floor here in Perkins hall and popped in last night for a chat. He has been a consultant, taught communications in Denmark, and studied Danish and Chinese languages. During our talk he introduced me to Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language which has apparently become the basis of the Economist‘s style guide.