Investigations of a Dog

Objectivity and neutrality are very controversial topics in historiography. There has been lot of acrimonious debate about how the preconceptions we bring to history affect what we write, and whether it’s possible or desirable to leave those preconceptions behind. This is what I had to say on the issue when I wrote the introduction to my PhD thesis in 2001:

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This week I’ve been looking at early seventeenth-century cavalry manuals. Although many drill books and treatises on military theory were written in the first half of the seventeenth-century, very few of them covered cavalry. Only four English authors wrote on the subject. Their works are all prescriptive: they claim to tell cavalrymen what they should be doing. They don’t necessarily reflect what was actually being done. Since I was an undergraduate I’ve been aware of the potential difference between theory and practice, but I used to think that if theory didn’t agree with practice, it could simply be discounted as “wrong”. Now I’m approaching these texts from a cultural perspective and reading them very differently. Even the physical process of reading feels different. In my empirical days I developed a useful habit of skimming through text and picking out relevant information, but now I’m reading slowly and carefully, thinking about the choice of words, what isn’t there as well as what is there, how the text relates to other texts and to early-modern culture in general. I’m mostly looking for traces of gender ideology (see my previous post about Horses, War, and Gender) but I’m also picking up a lot of Renaissance culture (see Military Revolution or Military Renaissance?). This post examines what military theorists thought were the criteria for a good war horse.

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Since last week I’ve been playing the demo of Making History: The Calm and the Storm. My first impressions are that it’s a good game, but it is very much a game and not a simulation. It’s hard to believe that this is what Niall Ferguson was getting so excited about, or that he could be in awe of anyone who has won as Germany. If you approach the game on its own terms (as I suggested in my first post about games and simulations), the initial strength of Germany and the inherent weaknesses of Artificial Intelligence make it quite easy to win.

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Over the last 10 years or so, technology has brought huge changes to historical research and opened up new possibilities. Computers have solved some old problems, but also created some new ones. Meanwhile there has been an increasing focus on the problems of epistemology: what can we know about the past and how can we know it? The debate has mostly been about the relationship between textual sources and the reality of the past. Even if you reject theory and take a purely empirical view of what the sources can tell us, there are some potential problems with the transmission of the information that they contain.

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Review of Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006; ISBN: 000715061X).

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The free demo of Making History: The Calm and the Storm 2.0 is now out, but be warned it’s 251MB! I talked about the game and Niall Ferguson’s view of it it two previous posts (games and simulations, and more games and simulations). Now I can try it out for myself, so expect to see another post when I’ve played it.

Other news:

Children’s history writer and researcher Gary Smailes has started a blog at Breathing History, which is well worth reading.

History Carnival XLIII is now up at Axis of Evel Knieval (clearly the best name for a blog ever). Next edition is on 1st December at Barista. Submit posts about any aspect of history using the submission form.

Since my previous post about Niall Ferguson’s article on computer games and the Second World War I’ve had some more ideas and found some new information. While I was searching Google for something else, I came across the article Theatres of War: The Military-Entertainment Complex by Tim Lenoir and Henry Lowood. This article looks at the development of computer simulations for training the US military, and the relationship between the defence industry and the games industry. It includes a particularly interesting account of an attempt to reconstruct a battle from the 1991 Gulf War.

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This is the first post in a new category: blogging (I nearly called it “spam”, but decided that would be bad idea). I was originally intending to concentrate on writing substantial original posts, and avoid posts which are just a link to something else. However, for the greater good of the blogosphere I’ve decided to do whatever I can to promote blog carnivals. For anyone who isn’t familiar with the strange terminology of blogging sub-culture, a carnival collects links to interesting blog posts on a certain theme. Carnivals happen on a regular basis (often once a month), and each edition is hosted by a different blog. Authors and readers can submit their favourite posts to the host to be considered for inclusion. Carnivals are a great way to discover new blogs and find out about things you’re not familiar with. The best way to find out what it’s all about is to go and look at some carnivals yourself, so here are the most prominent history carnivals that I know about:

History Carnival: Tales place every two weeks and covers every aspect of history. The current edition is at Holocaust Controversies. The next edition will be on 15th November at Axis of Evel Knieval. You can use this submission form to suggest posts (or e-mail suggestions to the host), as long as they’re about history and were posted after 1st November 2006.

Carnivalesque: A monthly carnival which alternates between early-modern and pre-modern (as in ancient and medieval) editions. The current edition is early-modern and is hosted at Recent Finds.

Carnival of Bad History: A monthly carnival exposing, critiquing and ridiculing bad history, including misrepresentations of the past, dubious analogies, and historians behaving badly. The current edition is at Archy. The next edition will be at Philobiblon on 21st November.

Feeding an early-modern army was a major logistical problem. The New Model Army had a centralised supply system to take care of most things (weapons, armour, clothing, horses, saddles) but food was a big exception. Aryeh Nusbacher has noted that the quantities of food supplied through centralised purchasing were far too small to keep the army fed (see “Civil Supply in the Civil War”, English Historical Review (115, 2000, pp. 145-60), which summarises some of the most important points in his PhD thesis). His answer to this problem is that food was mostly supplied by private victuallers who brought food from London and sold it directly to the soldiers. This makes a lot of sense, because compared to the population of London (estimates for the civil war period are usually between 200,000 and 300,000), feeding an army of 20,000 was not such a big deal. In contrast, most of the areas where the army campaigned were unlikely to have enough food supplies to support the army. Ben Coates (The impact of the English Civil War on the economy of London, 1642-50, 2004, ISBN: 0754601048, pp. 91-2) questioned this view, partly because Ian Archer pointed out that it would have been difficult for the victuallers to find the army when it was on the move. Having spent years studying military operations and logistics I would suggest the opposite: it would have been difficult to miss an English Civil War field army.

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It’s a truism that computers and the internet are changing the way we do research. This might have major implications for the academic publishing industry in the future. Books aren’t going to disappear completely. There will always be a market for books because people buy them for the aesthetic appeal of the object itself as well as for the content. Vinyl records haven’t been killed by MP3s or CDs, and have outlived tapes. While the major labels are whining about file sharing hurting their profits, sales of 7″ vinyl singles (a format particularly associated with small independent labels) are actually increasing in the UK, according to Artrocker magazine. Similarly, many people will continue to buy books because they like books more than alternative formats. However, for academic researchers for whom reading is a large part of their job, the printed book is starting to look like an outdated and inconvenient way of presenting and accessing research.

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