Gary at Victoria’s Cross linked to yet another piece of lazy journalism about computer games. This is the other side of the coin from why aren’t there any World War I games: Why Are There So Many World War II Games? There are so many things wrong with this article that it should have been easy to knock up a critique of it in a few minutes, but I’ve been too busy with other things so I’ve only just got round to it. Anyone with half a brain might want to skip the rest of this post. Lazy blogging which just points out the obvious errors of lazy journalism in far too much detail is arguably as bad as the lazy journalism itself.
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The latest early-modern edition of Carnivalesque is up at Blogging The Renaissance.
I’ve turned off the comment timeout plugin, so comments on most old posts are open again, and should stay open as long as they don’t attract huge amounts of spam. I’ll be manually closing comments on posts which are getting spammed too much but I hope most of them will stay open.
Good news: Calendar of State Papers Domestic, one of the most important printed sources for British history, will be available online later this year. Bad News: it’s a paid subscription service. It remains to be seen how much it costs, but it’s particularly annoying because the project is funded by a charity, and the material is probably in the public domain, having been published by HMSO more than 50 years ago (although my understanding of Crown Copyright could be wrong here, as it was earlier in the week!). More details at the IHR website.
Battle Through Time was a computer game released for the Commodore 64 in 1984. It featured a time travelling car and levels based on World War 1, World War 2, Korea, and Vietnam. Just another example to bring up when lazy journalists say there aren’t any WW1/Korea games, or that WW2/Vietnam games didn’t start to be made until this century. And to emphasise the links between cinema and gaming, the background music included “Suicide Is Painless” for the Korea level and “Ride of the Valkyries” for Vietnam.
And I’m still looking for Military History Carnival Hosts for September and afterwards. If you’re interested, e-mail me or leave a comment.
I’ve had a reply to my last e-mail to the UK National Archives about the Your Archives terms of use. Your Archives is a wiki based website where users can share their knowledge of NA holdings and other British Archives. I’m very excited about the site, but I had some reservations about the terms of use (see here and here for more details of my objections and the NA’s first reply). The schwerpunkt is: I’ve received a satisfactory reply from the NA and no longer have any reservations, so I’ll be registering and starting to contribute as soon as I have time. But if you have too much time on your hands, here’s the more detailed version:
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The third Military History Carnival is now up at Behind Antietam On The Web. Many thanks to Brian for doing a great job.
I have hosts for July and August, but if anyone would like to host after that, please leave a comment on the Military History Carnival page, e-mail me at saber$@$4-lom$.$com, or use the contact form.
Last week I posted some thoughts in response to the discussions at A Historian’s Craft and Civil War Memory about history and philosophy. In that post I took some of the philosophical problems that affect history and tried to restate them in scientific terms. As Brett pointed out, this really amounted to stating the obvious in fairly uncontroversial terms, but I think that was worth doing in order to bypass the unproductive hostility between both extremes in the postmodernism wars (although the extent to which those extremes even exist is debatable). Whether the major problems we face as historians are philosophical, scientific, or a bit of both, the question remains: how much time should we spend thinking about these problems? In this post I’ll be discussing that question, but I have to warn you in advance that I can’t answer it. So there might not be much point reading any further…
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I promised more thoughts about thinking, but that’ll be coming next week. For now I have some news which is more exciting for me than it will be for anyone else: my first article has been accepted for publication by War In History. I’m almost a real historian now!
The article is titled “Horse Supply and the Development of the New Model Army, 1642-46″, a more succinct version of the main argument of my PhD thesis that the Earl of Essex’s army is more important than most people realise. If you want to know more than that, you’ll just have to wait and see. It’s likely to be another 18 months before the article appears in print, but being able to put a forthcoming article on my CV could make a lot of difference.
Rachel at A Historian’s Craft and Kevin at Civil War Memory have both been thinking about how much historians should think about philosophy. Although they take different positions on the issue, they both approach it in a refreshingly un-polemical fashion (contrast with the “that’s you that is” pettiness of this embarrassing exchange between Alun Munslow and Arthur Marwick). It’s almost inevitable that the p-word comes up, but it’s interesting that the word “postmodernism” seems to be used more often by people who are against it than people who are for it, whatever it is. Too often it seems to be a label attached to a conflation of lots of different (and not always compatible) theories, but let’s stick with the stereotypical view of postmodernism for now. Here are two recognisable stereotypes:
The traditional empiricist, who believes that what historians do is to scientifically examine archival evidence to find out what really happened in the past, something which is achievable if you eliminate bias.
The postmodernist who believes that everything is culturally constructed, that an objective scientific study of the past is impossible, and that even science itself is an ideologically suspect paradigm.
Whether these stereotypes are true or not (and you should always be suspicious of stereotyping - isn’t it funny how stereotypes are always someone else?) they crudely illustrate what I’m trying to get at in this post: that both extremes in the postmodernism wars seem to have a stereotypical and inaccurate view of science.
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The military history blogosphere just keeps getting better. Alistair Hollington is doing an MA in First World War studies at the University of Birmingham. His new blog, Historic Battlefields: War in the 20th Century, already has several interesting posts about the First World War, with a particular emphasis on Cambrai, Third Ypres, and London units.
And don’t forget that the next edition of the Military History Carnival is coming up on 17th June, courtesy of Brian at Behind Antietam on the Web. Send submissions to $bdowney$@$aotw$.$org$ (but remove the dollar signs!) or use the submission form.
I have hosts lined up for July and August, but if anyone would like to host in September of afterwards, please let me know.
And now a post about the English Civil War (you know, the thing that I’m actually qualified to write about). I’ve just read a really good article by Malcolm Wanklyn in the new issue of War In History, reassessing the Earl of Manchester’s generalship. In previous posts I’ve been quite critical of some aspects of A Military History of the English Civil War by Malcolm Wanklyn and Frank Jones, but I haven’t said enough about that book’s good aspects, so I hope this post will redress the balance to some extent. I had my doubts about whether there was a coherent “determinist” school dominating civil war historiography, but in this article Wanklyn successfully attacks something much more definite. Until now there has been almost total consensus among historians that the Earl of Manchester, commander of the Eastern Association army, was slow to react and unwilling to fight in the autumn of 1644, and did not want a decisive victory.
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