The 14th Military History Carnival will be here next week on Thursday 15th May. We still need more submissions: you can submit your own posts or someone else’s, relating to the Contested Boundaries theme or anything else within MHC’s usual remit. Please e-mail submissions to fallon.young@4-lom.com or use the the submission form.
More details of the Contested Boundaries theme:
This can cover disputed territories and borders, which are a big part of many wars. It can also cover cultural boundaries. How does war complicate, question or shift the boundaries between races, genders, classes, and sexual orientations, between able and disabled, or between human and animal? Above all, how is the boundary between war and peace constructed and contested? Just use your imagination.
You can submit your own posts or posts written by someone else. If you feel inspired to write something on this theme, then go for it. Considering the number of submissions we normally get it’s unlikely that your post will be rejected unless it’s outside the scope of the carnival or fails to meet basic standards of factual accuracy. Submissions don’t have to be limited to the theme. As usual, anything about armed forces and conflicts in any part of the world is eligible. Only wars that happened after 1 January 2001 are excluded. See the Military History Carnival page for more details of the carnival’s aims and scope.
Last week I read:
- Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire (Allen Lane, February 2008).
- Ian Gentles, The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms, 1638-1652 (Longman, March 2007).
Both are very good books. And the Dauphin’s horse “is a most absolute and excellent horse”. That is, they’re as good as books which attempt to synthesize the state of the field at the time of writing can be. But can we do better than that? There are at least two problems with this genre which might be solved by using the web instead of print.
First, it’s impossible to keep a printed book up to date. As both authors acknowledge, there will always be something more to be said. It’s inevitable that other people will be saying some of it while the book is going through the process of typesetting, proofreading, printing and distribution. Just one example: Gentles and Braddick both take a traditionally hostile view of the Earl of Manchester. In April 2007 Malcolm Wanklyn published an article which reassessed Manchester’s generalship and concluded that the traditional view is largely based on lies that Cromwell told after the events. I’m convinced by Wanklyn’s arguments, but even if other people aren’t, it’s obvious that this new interpretation needs to be discussed. It wasn’t possible for Gentles or Braddick to discuss it because the article came out too late. If books were published on the web instead of print this wouldn’t be a problem. There would be no physical limit on updating them like there is with printed books.
Second, history books, especially ones intended to be accessible to non-experts, generally need a coherent linear narrative. But this conflicts with the need to explain things to non-experts. This is a general problem with all history books. A more specific problem that Braddick and Gentles have to deal with is explaining complex interrelated events in three kingdoms. Both authors are good at dealing with these challenges, but there’s no reason why these things even need to be challenging. Hypertext can free us from the constraints of linear narrative to a certain extent. A web page which contains a basic outline of some events can also contain links to other pages giving background details of people, places, and related events. Just look at the internal links in Wikipedia, and the way that blogs often link to Wikipedia.
This isn’t just fantasy or wild speculation about the future. It’s happening now. Bill Turkel and Alan MacEachern have published The Programming Historian on the web instead of in print, and are making full use of the opportunities that web publishing offers. Let’s hope more people try it soon.
Yesterday Bill Turkel announced that The Programming Historian is now available. This is a book, but not as we know it. It’s published in the form of a website and is completely free to access. As the name suggests, it’s an introduction to computer programming aimed specifically at historians. The tutorials will get you doing useful things as soon as possible, even if you have no previous experience of programming. If you do know programming it’s also worth a look. I found lots of useful tips in it.
By enabling more historians to make better use of digital technology the book is helping to change the way that we do history. And it’s also helping to change the way that we present our research, because it’s a concrete example of the advantages of open access publishing on the web. This means a whole lot more than not having to pay to read it. Although the book has been published, it’s still a work in progress. New chapters will be added in future, and existing ones can be improved in response to feedback from readers. Any typos, factual errors or unclear sentences can all be corrected very easily. Comments from reviewers are displayed on accompanying discussion pages so you can see how the text developed and what people thought of it. The book can keep growing to meet the needs of digital historians: there doesn’t ever have to be a point when it’s finally finished like there is with a printed book.
Go and read it. Now.
Via Archaeozoology, an interesting but difficult to spell blog about about the archaeology of non-human animals, I discovered another interesting archaeology blog. Middle Savagery is written by Colleen Morgan, a PhD student at UC Berkeley. She’s doing lots of innovative things with Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and Second Life (don’t let the Goreans get you!).
I think maybe historians and archaeologists don’t talk to each other enough despite supposedly having a common interest in the past. My BA was originally going to be archaeology but I was bored with it after two terms and switched to history - I don’t think I would’ve done very well if I’d stuck with it. That bad experience has affected me for far longer than it should have done, and it’s about time I got over it. I was similarly disgusted with history after finishing my PhD but it only took me 5 years to get over that. (Disgust is a vice.) Studying the non-human is one obvious place where historians and archaeologists need to get together.
The web could well offer a way of breaking down barriers between disciplines. Since getting involved in blogging I’ve come into contact with lots of different ideas which I wouldn’t ever have thought about if I’d just been doing history in the traditional way. Reading blogs has given me easy access to literary theory, philosophy, cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, linguistics, various feminist perspectives and much more. Writing my blog allows me to try out ideas that are outside my specialist area without investing too much in them. And trying to think differently benefits my “proper” work.
The next edition of the Military History Carnival will be here at Investigations of a Dog on Thursday 15th May. As always we need as many submissions as possible. To make it more interesting I’ve decided to give this edition a special theme: Contested Boundaries.
This can cover disputed territories and borders, which are a big part of many wars. It can also cover cultural boundaries. How does war complicate, question or shift the boundaries between races, genders, classes, and sexual orientations, between able and disabled, or between human and animal? Above all, how is the boundary between war and peace constructed and contested? Just use your imagination.
You can submit your own posts or posts written by someone else. If you feel inspired to write something on this theme, then go for it. Considering the number of submissions we normally get it’s unlikely that your post will be rejected unless it’s outside the scope of the carnival or fails to meet basic standards of factual accuracy. Submissions don’t have to be limited to the theme. As usual, anything about armed forces and conflicts in any part of the world is eligible. Only wars that happened after 1 January 2001 are excluded. See the Military History Carnival page for more details of the carnival’s aims and scope.
Please e-mail submissions to fallon.young@4-lom.com or use the the submission form.
If this is a success there might be more themed editions in future.
I’ve just successfully upgraded to Wordpress 2.5.1. You won’t notice much difference at the front end, but the admin area is much nicer than the 2.2 version I was using before. The best thing is that the editor doesn’t screw up HTML code any more which makes it easier to embed YouTube videos and Google Maps.
As part of the spring cleaning I installed a couple of new plugins. Maintenance Mode shuts down the front-end of the blog for everyone except admins and lets people know that maintenance is going on. This is a much better solution than password protecting the blog’s directory, which is what I used to do during upgrades.
TD Word Count is a cool plugin which counts all the words in your posts and generates a report in the admin area. According to this report I’d published 174,471 words before writing this present post. That’s quite a lot isn’t it? Even if you deduct the 7,000 word seminar paper which I posted in its entirety, and all the routine carnival posts and brief links to other blogs/sites, the substantial original content that I’ve posted here in the last year and a half still probably adds up to more than the average monograph. Of course if you just put all my posts together and printed them it wouldn’t make a very coherent or well-written book. But I’m increasingly getting used to the idea that writing little and often is the way to get things done.
The conference paper that I’m currently drafting has come together in short bursts of activity - maybe only a couple of paragraphs at a time - but that soon adds up. Partly it’s been easy because it’s quite an exciting piece to write, it’s intended to be very short, and it doesn’t need lots of detailed evidence, but I think making myself write for a short period (maybe only an hour or even half an hour) first thing in the morning then stopping as soon as I’ve made my target means less time staring at the screen thinking “there’s sooo much to write, I don’t know where to start, it’s too difficult”.
When I posted about Brian Manning’s The Far Left in the English Revolution I wondered whether it was worth investigating any of his other works. Mercurius Politicus said it was, so I got a copy of The English People and the English Revolution out of the library. It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that MP was right as he knows a lot more about civil war historiography than I do. As well as a lot of useful material on the outbreak of war in 1642 there are plenty of examples of poaching, deer massacres, and livestock being driven onto disputed enclosures, which is an unexpected bonus for my work on animals.
The Stour valley riots get good coverage, pre-empting many of the major points of John Walter’s argument, apart from Manning’s determination to see class war everywhere . As Walter pointed out, the victims were all suspected royalists or catholics. Manning took elite perceptions of the mob’s motives too much at face value. Sir Thomas Barrington and Harbottle Grimston might have been alarmed by the many-headed monster, but they weren’t attacked themselves and probably weren’t in much danger compared to Countess Rivers. As Manning acknowledged, the Earl of Warwick’s steward was saved from a mob when someone recognised that he really was the Earl of Warwick’s steward.
The thing I found most interesting was an enclosure dispute in Huntingdonshire in 1641 in which Oliver Cromwell supported the commoners and Lord Mandeville acted on behalf of his father, the Earl of Manchester. This was the same Lord Mandeville who, after succeeding to his father’s title, became general of the Eastern Association. The feud between Manchester and Cromwell in 1644 is very well-known but I had no idea that animosity between them might go back this far. Other people might well have made the connection, but there isn’t any mention of it in Malcolm Wanklyn’s reassessment of Manchester.
- Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 1640-1649 (Heinemann Educational: London, 1976).
- Brian Manning, The far left in the English Revolution 1640 to 1660 (Bookmarks,: London :, 1999).
- John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).
- Maclolm D. G. Wanklyn, ‘A General Much Maligned’, War In History, 14 (2007), pp. 133-156.
Mercurius Politicus linked to Gilbert Mabbott, a new blog about print culture in the English Civil Wars and Interregnum. From this blog I discovered that Calendar of State Papers Domestic is starting to appear on Google Books. There’s a James I volume available with full access. I’m hoping that the rest of the series, particularly the Charles I volumes, will follow soon. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t as they’re all in the public domain. Since the original documents were under Crown Copyright and the calendars were published by HMSO in the 19th century the copyright must have expired by now. Despite that, British History Online are trying to charge money for access to digital versions of the calendars for the reigns of James I and Charles I. I always thought that was a bad decision. If all of the volumes end up being freely available on Google it’s going to look even more stupid.
The latest early-modern edition of the Carnivalesque blog carnival is now up at Walking The Berkshires. Tim has hosted editions of just about every history related carnival and as usual he’s done a fantastic job. There are loads of fascinating posts, but my favourite has to be the one about pissing dogs in the American Revolution.
The 13th MHC is now up at The Cannon’s Mouth. In this case 13 isn’t unlucky at all as Ken has done an excellent job.
The next edition will be coming home to Investigations of a Dog on 15th May. This is a special edition with a theme of Contested Boundaries. As well as territorial disputes, we’d like to see posts about how war complicates boundaries of race, class, gender, sexuality, species etc. Above all we want to question the boundary between peace and war. If you see anything on these themes, please submit it. Or you could even write something if you feel inspired.
Submissions don’t have to be on these themes - you can still submit posts about any aspect of military history, war and armed forces. The usual limits apply: posts mainly about wars that happened after 1 January 2001 are not eligible.
E-mail submissions to fallon.young@4-lom.com or use the the submission form.
And we still need hosts for June and July - I’m not doing it two months in a row! If you’d like to try hosting please get in touch.
