Investigations of a Dog

I’ve just read two of the most important recent books on the First World War: Gary Sheffield’s Forgotten Victory (ISBN: 0747264600), and Dan Todman’s The Great War: Myth and Memory (ISBN: 1852855126). This post is somewhere between a review and a collection of random thoughts on these books and the First World War in general. It will also allow me to use the word “metanarrative”, which I seem to have been neglecting lately.

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[Looks like I won't be using Wordpress 2.1 as my host doesn't have the right version of MySQL. I should've checked that before starting to the upgrade, but everything's back to normal now.]

A lot of military history bloggers have been debating the distinctions between different types of historian: professional versus amateur, and academic versus non-academic. Mark Grimsley at Cliopatria has summed up and linked to various contributions. Having read all of these, I’ve been trying to work out where I stand, which necessarily involves working out how my own “career” and experiences fit in with what has already been said. Unsurprisingly, I think that binary oppositions are an oversimplification. Mark identifies the two oppositions (professional versus amateur, and academic versus non-academic) as meaning essentially the same thing. In the terms of the debate that he’s describing this is probably more or less true, but I’d like to make things more complicated.

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Yesterday I went to that London. I spent the afternoon in the Public Records Office (it will never be the National Archives!) looking at seventeenth century wills and more First World War stuff. The most exciting discovery is that the PRO has started a wiki in which readers can contribute their knowledge of the documents. This is a fantastic idea, as some classes are very poorly catalogued and barely documented at all outside the class lists. I’m thinking particularly of SP28, which is a very important source for the English/British Civil Wars and Interregnum, and which I know an awful lot about (probably more than most PRO staff), so I’m looking forward to contributing. At present it’s in beta and only seems to be available at Kew, but I hope they’ll put it on their website soon.

Afterwards I went up to the IHR to hear Patrick Little’s paper on Cromwellian studs. It was interesting to find out more about horses in the 1650s as my thesis stopped in 1646. Patrick pointed out that whereas most histories of the period ignore Cromwell’s interest in breeding and racing horses, or put it down to the utilitarian aim of breeding cavalry horses, there is a lot of evidence that a common interest in horses was an important aspect of social and political networks during the protectorate. The paper also got me thinking about bloodlines and heredity, which I’d like to look into a bit more as it has possible implications for patriarchy and masculinity.

I hope it wasn’t too intimidating for Patrick to be asked questions by Peter Edwards and me. Peter knows more than anyone about horses in early-modern Britain. He was an unofficial mentor to me during my PhD and has given me all kinds of help, but this was the first time I’d seen him in person since I came back from my career break so it was good to catch up.

Expect some proper posts next week, if I survive the upgrade to Wordpress 2.1. It seems to be going wrong for other people, but it hasn’t caused any problems on my test blog on localhost.

This is a progress report on the First World War digitization projects I outlined previously in my post on planning.

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Oh no! Bill Turkel has tagged me for a meme! Is this the end of civilisation as we know it? When I started this weblog I was determined to stick to substantial original content. There would be no room for memes or other self-indulgent timewasting — I already have a LiveJournal for that. However, Bill managed to turn this particular meme into some interesting analysis of memetics and the blogosphere. That’s inspired me to move even further away from the original meme and post some random thoughts about memes. I won’t be tagging anyone at the end, because I hope to demonstrate that history bloggers don’t need to tag each other.

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More details of my great-grandfather’s experiences in the First World War, up to the night he got captured in December 1916. Since my last post on the subject we’ve uncovered a few more details of his life, including copies of his birth and marriage certificates. I’ve also had some invaluable help from Steve Bramley and Chris Bailey who are writing a new history of 5th Battalion Lincolnshire Regiment, based on years of research. It turns out that Chris has been trying to trace William’s descendants to find out what happened to him after he went missing but had drawn a blank! Even with this new information it’s difficult to trace the movements of one individual, so this post is as much about the battalion as about the man. Most of this is paraphrasing the official history of the battalion written by its commanding officer (Lt. Col. T. E. Sandall, A History of the 5th Battalion the Lincolnshire Regiment, Oxford, Blackwell, 1922), along with some quotes from the battalion war diary (Public Records Office, WO95/2691). It should at least give an impression of what things were like.

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Welcome to the 46th History Carnival. It’s a big one to make up for the Christmas break, so I hope you don’t have anything important to do this week. While hosting a blog carnival isn’t quite as impressive as breaking through the Hindenburg Line, I’m still pleased to be contributing to the illustrious history of the number 46. (And talking of numbers, here’s a last minute addition: The Probabilist on why we count the way we do and how things could be different. It’s old but good.)
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I’ve finally got round to sorting out a Creative Commons License for this blog (see the bottom of every page for details). I kept putting it off out of a combination of laziness and false modesty (why would anyone want to use my work in any way that isn’t covered by fair use?). I don’t know whether it’s going to make any difference in practice, but at least it demonstrates my commitment to Open Access, and my dissatisfaction with existing copyright law. There seems to be increasing dissent about copyright. I’ve just discovered (like Columbus: it didn’t exist until I’d read it!) CopyrightWatch.ca: a Canadian blog devoted to exposing myths about copyright and fighting for wider access to historical material. I’ve been trying to write about my thoughts on copyright in more detail, but it keeps coming out as incoherent rubbish so I’m just going to make an unsupported assertion:

Copyright serves no useful purpose for historians and is detrimental to the study of history.

Make of that what you will.

My next post will be the 46th History Carnival on Monday 15th January. I’ve had lots of good submissions, but there’s always room for more. Use the submission form, or e-mail me at hc46@4-lom.com, but try to get them in by Sunday as I want to compile the carnival ahead of time and post it at midnight if possible. And a quick recap of the rules:

No polemic on current affairs without substantial historical content.

No posts published before the last History Carnival (15th December 2006).

No multiple submissions of the same blog by the same person. If you submit more than one post from the same blog written by the same author, I will only pick one of them. Same blog different authors is fine, as is same author different blogs.

No folk etymology.

Apart from that, anything historical goes. You don’t have to be an academic or a well known blogger to contribute, and you can nominate other people as well as yourself.

In my New Year post, I mentioned that I’m thinking about carrying out a couple of digital history projects in connection with my First World War research. These projects are very small and should be relatively easy to carry out on my own, but there will almost certainly be challenges. Overcoming these will give me more experience of carrying out a digital history project (this is starting to sound like a job application again!), and produce useful resources. After that, I can move on to consider some more advanced issues, such as collaborating with other people, and dealing with seventeenth-century manuscripts. To make the experience even more useful, I’m trying to blog it as I go. This post is an outline of my plans so far. Now that I’ve published my plans I’ll have to carry them out!

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Last week I played and finished Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30, yet another First Person Shooter set in the Second World War. It focuses on a squad of the 101st Airborne Division over a period 8 days in Normandy in June 1944. From what I’d heard about the game before I bought it, I was expecting it to be very different from Call of Duty and Medal of Honor. The biggest difference is that it’s a tactical shooter in which the player has to command a squad rather than doing everything single handed. In some ways Brothers In Arms lived up to my expectations, but in other ways it didn’t.

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