Investigations of a Dog

90 years ago today 46th Division broke through the Hindenburg Line. You can read about 1/5th Lincolnshire Regiment’s part in the battle in the relevant chapter of Sandall’s history (and if you click linked names in the text you can get to medal citations and an interactive map). Although my great-grandfather served with the battalion he missed this action - by this time he’d been a prisoner in Germany for nearly 2 years.

It’s interesting to note that although people who are down with the revisionist work that’s been done in the last 20 years or so know this as one of the greatest achievements in British military history it still doesn’t seem to have broken into popular awareness in the way that the Somme or Third Ypres have. The coverage in Wikipedia is very poor, with 46th Division’s spectacular success on 29th September given only one sentence! The article gives far more attention to the less successful American and Australian attacks. Is this because people still can’t help thinking about the First World War in terms of failure?

Bill Turkel has been testing a really cool piece of equipment. The MDX-20 can turn 3D computer models into physical objects, and can automatically scan physical objects to make 3D computer models of them. And it doesn’t rely on magic, alchemy, or the Dark Side of the Force. There are so many interesting things that could be done with this (not all of them related to SL avs, Weird Science, and “In Every Dream Home A Heartache”…). As Bill says, “the possibilities seem nearly endless”. Strangely, the first thing that came into my mind when I read about it was palaeontology. Maybe if this technology gets good enough it might be possible to digitize collections of fossils, then researchers could easily run off life size replicas instead of flying to China to measure dinosaur bones (but there might be drawbacks that I haven’t thought of because I don’t know enough about dinosaur measuring). As the David Baird quotes in Bill’s post make clear, objects created by the MDX-20 are models, not recreations of the thing itself how it really is. Just like theroetical models and digital resources, what we get is some aspects of the thing (usually the ones we’re most interested in) but not all of them.

Nick at Mercurius Politicus points out that while digital collections like EEBO give us easier access to some aspects of early modern texts, there are other aspects that we don’t get to experience unless we go back to the originals. “Reading them on a screen today is inevitably a different experience to reading actual copies.” Like Nick, I’m not sure what impact this has or is going to have on how we read these texts. Even with the original physical books in our hands we’re still a very long way from being able to reconstruct the meanings that readers found in them in the 17th century. Holding a book, feeling the paper, seeing the colour of the ink, will necessarily suggest more or different meanings to me than when I see a PDF on screen, but those are still my perceived meanings, and not necessarily anyone else’s. On the other hand, being able to see a physical difference between two books which isn’t apparent on EEBO gives a new insight and has to affect the range of possible meanings, even if we’re not sure exactly how.

This isn’t something that only applies to early-modern print culture. Brett at Airminded mentioned in his excellent series of posts on the Sudeten crisis that British newspapers in the 1930s tended to have the most important stories in the middle, not on the front page. I had absolutely no idea that this was the case. It’s not something that’s obvious if you’re just dipping into the Times Digital Archive as you just get one page out of context.

And it doesn’t just apply to print. The same issues come up with old computer games. I can play my old favourite C64 games on my PC using an emulator, but the experience isn’t the same as playing them on a real C64 in the 80s. In many ways it’s better - you don’t have to wait for tapes to load, there aren’t as many crashes - but from a historian’s point of view it’s obviously not a perfect way of reconstructing the past.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Nottingham Trent University FORWARD Early Modern Social History Symposium

This symposium will take place at Nottingham Trent University on Wednesday 12th November 2008 from 1:00pm – 5:00pm

Proposals are invited for 20 minute papers, which explore the latest unique approaches to research in any aspect of Early Modern British and Irish Social History, including but not limited to topics of Family, Order, Reform, Women, Anarchy, Rebellion & Dissent

Abstract proposals should be no longer than 300 words and submitted to RitaWierzbicki_FORWARD@hotmail.com by Wednesday 22nd October 2008

For more information or to book your place for attendance, please direct your inquiries to the above e-mail address

Thanks to Amazon I’ve just picked up very cheap second hand copies of:

1. Sarah Barber, A revolutionary rogue Henry Marten and the English republic (Sutton,: Stroud :, 2000).
2. Ivor Waters, Henry Marten and the Long Parliament (Chepstow Society: Chepstow, 1976).

I’m planning to write an article about Henry Marten’s attempt to raise a cavalry regiment in 1643, so I want to read everything that’s been written about him. That seems to be surprisingly little considering how interesting he is. The RHS Bibliography only returns 8 results for titles containing the words “Henry Marten”. He was arguably the most radical member of the Long Parliament, but perhaps he’s difficult to deal with because he doesn’t fit the puritan stereotype. That’s always a problem for arguments that the English Civil War was a war of religion, and it’s not really enough to say that he was just the exception that proves the rule.

This project was going to be my third article, but now it’s been promoted as the Difficult Second Article is officially dead. It was just too difficult to give it a strong enough argument to stand up as an article, but I haven’t given up on my analysis of horse donations. I think it would work better as a sample chapter for a book proposal. Then it would fit in with bigger arguments about negotiation of property rights and authority, and the construction of identities. And it won’t have to take in the causes of the civil war, which is a relief. As I mentioned before I’ve realised that I’m really not very interested in that question, and there’s no point trying to write about things you’re not interested in. That’s probably one of the reasons why it was so difficult. Also I have a theoretical problem with causation in general: in order to explain why things happened we need to know why people did things. But other minds are unknowable. Therefore we can’t really explain any historical events if the causal chains pass through people’s minds.

The September edition of the Military History Carnival is now up at Military History and Warfare. Thanks to Alex for doing a great job. Details of the October edition are still to be confirmed.

[Edit: the next edition will be at Chronologi Cogitationes on 20th October. Submissions can be e-mailed to blakemore_9 [at] hotmail [dot] com or use the submission form. Hosts for November onwards still needed.]

The next MHC will be at History of Warfare on 14th September. Please e-mail submissions to alexanderclark999 [at] gmail [dot] com or use the submission form.

And we need a host for the October edition otherwise there won’t be one.