history – Page 11 – Wis[s]e Words

The Inheritance of Rome — Chris Wickham

Published on April 17, 2011

The Inheritance of Rome

The Inheritance of Rome 400-1000
Chris Wickham
651 pages including index
published in 2009

The way you learn about history as a kid, both in school and through pop culture is as discrete chunks. You got your prehistory, your Bronze Age, your Greeks and Romans, your Biblical Times if you’re in an Christian school, your Middle Ages and so on and so weiter. It’s comprehensible, makes history all very neat and tidy and of course completely wrong. This is not a new truth of course, but it was driven home for me once again by Chris Wickham in The Inheritance of Rome, which is all about showing the continuity the Early Middle Ages had with the Late Roman Empire, without being blind to the ways in which Europe evolved away from its Roman era roots during this period. There is no bright line you can draw that divides these two eras.

Nor is there a Dark Age. As Wickham puts it in his introduction, the centuries between the Fall of Rome and the Central Middle Ages, between 400 CE and 1000 CE, tend to fit it awkwardly with the traditionally whiggish view of history as one of inevitable progress leading from antiquity to modern times, where Classic Antiquity can be seen as a vanished Golden Age, with the Renaissance or Late Middle Ages as the starting point for that story of inevitable progress, the centuries inbetween banished to the awkward limbo of the Dark Ages. When these centuries were treated in traditional history it was because that’s when modern European nations like France or England got their first start. Neither view sits well with Wickham, who argues that these essentially teleogical views of this transitional period, judging them in the context of what came after them, give the wrong image. You have to look at this time on its own terms rather than trying to glean the beginnings of future developments in it.

The Goths — Peter Heather

Published on February 12, 2011

Cover of The Goths

The Goths
Peter Heather
358 pages including index
published in 1996

Most of Peter Heather’s professional output has, in one way or another, featured the Goths. Usually this has been in the context of their contribution to the fall of the Roman Empire in the west, which Heather has long argued they played a central role in. In The Goths his focus is slightly different, more concerned with the Goths themselves than with how they interacted with the Roman Empire, though that still of course is an important part of their story. The Goths is an entry in the Blackwell series The Peoples of Europe and is meant as a one volume overview of their entire history, for people largely unfamiliar with them. As Heather mentions in his introduction, the last book to attempt this was published in 1888, so it was high time for an update.

Heather’s divides his book in three main parts, preceded by an introductionary chapter. In this he discusses why the Goths were important and the problem of social identities, where the old assumptions of unchanging peoples recognisable by some checklist of unique features had been challenged in the 1950ties and 60ties by new research showing how individuals could change their identity when advantageous. Heather applies a synthesis of these approaches to the Goths, arguing that while there was such a thing as a Gothic group identity, it was fluid enough for non-Goths to join into and for the group as a whole to adapt to changing circumstances. He then goes on to first explore the origins of the Goths, thentheir invasion and defeat of the East Roman Empire and further wanderings through the Balkans into Italy and Gaul and finally looks at the history of the two Gothish kingdoms established on parts of the Western Empire. In all three parts Heather puts the search for Gothish identity central.

BBC history repeats as farce — threatened websites now available as torrent

Published on February 10, 2011

As Doctor Who fans know, the BBC has somewhat of a reputation for taping over its own history, more interested in saving some money by reusing video and audio tape than in preserving programmes deemed to not be worth of preservation, like countless hours from the golden age of radio comedy. You would’ve thought they had learned from this, but auntie Beeb is making the same mistakes again, by proposing to wipe some 200 or so of its websites, wiping out a huge chunk of British internet history. As Daryll at 853 put it:

Yesterday’s announcement was the latest in a long line of exercises in self-flagellation. Years of work put in by staff dedicated to the cause dismissed with a wave of the arm. And all for an easy headline to keep the BBC’s enemies happy. For now.

Daryll used to work for the BBC online’s ventures, so this was personal to him, as it was for Martin Belam who called it vandalism:

I’m really not sure who benefits from deleting the Politics 97 site from the BBC’s servers in 2011. It seems astonishing that for all the BBC’s resources, it may well be my blog posts from 5 years ago that provide a more accurate picture of the BBC’s early internet days than the Corporation does itself – and that it will have done so by choice.

I can’t help thinking that in 10 years time there will be comparisons with the short-sighted junking of 60s TV shows – including Doctor Who episodes – that was done in the 70s to save money and space.

Adaction lists some of the websites up for the slash, the most outrageous of which has to be the threatened deletion of the WW2 people’s war, which collected some 47,000 stories and 15,000 or so images from the great British’s public’s folk memories of World War II. That’s not just an important part of BBC history, that’s actually an invaluable historical resource, an archieve of what ordinary people experienced during one of the most important periods in British history, especially important now that World War II has almost slid out of public memory, with fewer and fewer survivors of the war still alive.

Luckily, some anonymous geek actually did something about this incipient act of barbarism while there was still time and copied, archived and torrented the threatened sites:

The purpose of this project is to show how the entire 172 public facing websites that are earmarked for deletion have been copied, archived, distributed and republished online – independently – for the price of a cup of Starbucks coffee (around $3.99).

In other words the true cost saving of this horrendous exercise is nothing more than your morning’s grande skinny caramel latte.

[…]

When I found out the BBC would be deleting 172 of its websites, I spidered and downloaded all of the content under each of these top level directories on the bbc.co.uk domain. I purchased a $3.99 ‘low end box’ type VPS server and began the crawl. In total this took just under 24hrs – and would have been quicker if I had been less kind to the BBC’s servers. For the aforementioned cost of $3.99 for a cup of Starbucks coffee, anyone can obtain, store and keep this content alive and accessible to the general public. And with this torrent I’ve already done the heavy lifting of retrieving the data for you.

This $3.99/month box is now hosting the content and making it available both via both the web and via bit torrent.

Clearly the BBC has additional costs associated with its size and scale, compounded due to the poor decision to sell off the organization’s technical infrastructure to Siemens from whom it now rents those services back from. But even rounding up those 12 cups of coffee/year to £10,000/year, this still represents negligible budget impact and significant license payer value.

Here’s the torrent; almost 2 gigabyte of BBC sites. Do your bit to save history and download and seed this torrent as long as you can.

The Making of Late Antiquity – Peter Brown

Published on February 5, 2011

Cover of The Making of Late Antiquity

The Making of Late Antiquity
Peter Brown
135 pages including index
published in 1978

Peter Brown is the historian who popularised the idea of Late Antiquity as a transitional period between classic antiquity and the early Middle Ages, with the emphasis on the continuity between Rome and the Middle Ages, rather than on the collapse of the western Roman Empire. Brown first publicised his theories in The World of Late Antiquity; this isn’t that book, but was the closest to it I could get. The Making of Late Antiquity is based on a series of lectures Brown gave at Harvard University in 1976 and focuses on the transformation of Roman society between the second and fourth centuries CE.

A topic which is of course closely connected to the political and economic turmoil which the Roman Empire was subjected to in that period, with civil wars, “barbarian” invasions and a resurgent Persia, but you wouldn’t know it from this book. Brown concentrates on the inner lives of the Romans and ignores politics. This alone makes it an odd bedfellow with the other histories I’ve reading about this period, but Brown’s writing style makes it even odder. His writing is very oldfashioned, almost nineteenth century like, sometimes hard to come to grips with. The combination of inner focus and his writing style made this book fussy and a bit prissy, at least to me.

Challenger: it was twentyfive years ago today

Published on January 28, 2011

I’m not sure where I was twentyfive years ago when the Challenger space shuttle exploded slightly more than sevnety seconds into its launch, but I do remember that I felt devastated when I first heard the news. Even at age eleven I was a science fiction reader and space fan and the shuttle was supposed to be how we were going to get a proper space programme and L5 O’Neill colonies and ultimately the stars. They were not supposed to blow up! It was only much, much later that I understood how much of a kludge the shuttle was and how it was possible for Challenger to blow up. The documentary above was made by NASA in 1986, after investigations into the explosion had concluded. It tells how the shuttle exploded, but not why, what the root causes were. That would take much more time.