history

We also walk dogs…

Published on December 30, 2011Leave a comment

So I’ve been reading Virginia Nicholson’s Singled Out, a social history of the post-WWI “surplus women”, the two million women whose (potential) husbands had died at the front and how they coped and had to find their own way in the world since the traditional role of wife and mother was denied them. It has a lot of moving stories of how individual women coped and by doing so, changed Britain. One of those women was Getrude MacLean, who had long been the devoted aunt to her brothers’ and sisters’ children, caring for them when her siblings had been scattered all through the Empire due to the war. But now they were back and if she could no longer be an aunt, what could she be?

One elderly uncle had the answer:

“why not do for others as you have been doing for your family?” Gertie’s reply was instantaneous, “and be a universal aunt?” She decided to offer a personal service with the motto “Anything for anyone at any time.”

Having found a partner, Miss Emily Faulder, she started her business in a little room behind a bootmaker’s in Chelsea. Their lease did not allow them to work in the afternoons, so they went, with their papers in a capacious knitting bag, to Harrods’ Ladies’ Rest Room where they received clients and applicants on a sofa in the corner.

And so Universal Aunts was born and became a huge succes according to Singled Out. I found this interested so I googled it. Guess what? They still exist. That’s a brilliant bit of social history still alive today, like something out of the background to a Heinlein novel, if one co-written by P. G. Wodehouse. But it’s also the sort of consequence of a big historical event that is difficult to get right in science fiction, right up there with Isaac Asimov’s quip about that an intelligent person in 1900 might have foreseen the mass adaptation of the car as the primary transportation of America, even foreseen traffic jams and oil shortage, but that it would’ve taken a genius to have foreseen the drive in movie and backseat romances…

Medieval Warfare — Helen Nicholson

Published on December 29, 20111 Comment

Cover of Medieval Warfare

Medieval Warfare
Helen Nicholson
232 pages including index
published in 2004

Helen Nicholson’s Medieval Warfare is, as she puts it in her introduction, “intended to provide a point of entry tpo the subject of medieval warfare for students and others with an interest in the subject who are perplexed by the rapidly expanding body of scholarship in this area”. Which is just what I needed, as this is indeed a subject I’ve become interested in following on from my earlier readings in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Medieval Warfare is an ambitious book for trying to cover this whole period (300 to 1500 CE) even in overview in just 166 pages, excluding index. But Nicholson is a reader in history at Cardiff University who has written extensively on Medieval military matters and therefore is well suited to the task.

As any good historian should, she sets out how she will go about it in her preface. What she attempts to do is to look at the development of the main aspects of medieval warfare from just after the end of the (western) Roman Empire to the end of the Middle Ages, using concrete examples to illustrate these developments. She chose the period 300 to 1500 CE to emphasise the continuity between the military practises of the Late Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, with the latter date providing a convenient cutting off point between them and the Renaissance. The fourth century was chosen as a starting point because it was in the late fourth century that the Roman bureaucrat Vegetius wrote his manual on military strategy, a book that was hugely influential in European warfare until at least the sixteenth century. Geographically, Nicholson limits herself mostly to Europe, particularly France, Italy, England and Germany for her examples, though she does look to Eastern/Byzantine examples as well when appropriate.

The Crusades c. 1071 – c. 1291 — Jean Richard

Published on December 17, 2011Leave a comment

The Crusades c. 1071 - c. 1291

The Crusades c. 1071 – c. 1291
Jean Richard
Jean Birrell
516 pages including index
published in 1999

The Crusades are not my favourite subject in Medieval history, as I tend to concentrate my reading on the early Middle Ages, but The Crusades c. 1071 – c. 1291 is part of the Cambridge Medieval Textbooks series which I have good experiences with. The volumes in this series I’ve read so far all have been good introductions to their subjects. Of course, much still depends on the writer and I didn’t know Jean Richard, but he turns out to be a French historian who is well known enough to have an entry on the English language Wikipedia; this book was first published as Histoire des Croisades. The translation is by Jean Birrell and is good enough that you don’t really notice it is a translation.

Because of the American shenanigans in the Middle East in the past decade, the Crusades have been used quite a lot as a metaphor for these adventures, as well as an example for internet jihadists and Keyboard Kommandos both of the War Between Christianity and Islam as an universal war. The crusaders themselves feature as either the heroic defenders of the free west or bloodthirsty invaders of the peaceloving Islamic world. Reading a history like this is the best anecdote to that sort of nonsense. Jean Richard is careful to show that the motivations on both sides were slightly more complex than “Christ v Allah”. Religion obviously played a key role in the Crusades and there were certainly fanatics on both sides, but the realities of the Crusades and life in the Holy Land were more complex than the Crusading myths make out. What Richards contineously emphasises is that the key motivation for the Crusades was not the idea of forcibly converting heathens to Christianity, but rather of safe guarding the Holy land for Christianity, making it safe for pelgrims to visit, keeping the holy places safe for Christian worship.

Soviet Storm

Published on December 14, 2011Leave a comment

In between the reality show nonsense on the History Channel, one of the best documentary series on World War II has been shown recently. Unlike most of these series, Soviet Storm: WW2 in the East focuses exclusively on the Eastern Front and the Russian experiences in the war, which in itself is enough to recommend it to me. But it’s also very good in itself, giving a clear and honest picture of the war in the East, combining the big picture with quick sketches of what the war was like at the sharp end. Especially good is how CGI is used to enhance battle replays. It’s always clear that these are reconstructions, the CGI generated tanks and guns and such slightly plastic looking, probably deliberately, but still fairly realistic and convincing. Also counting in its favour is that it’s not too fetishist about the tanks and other weapons used in the war.

Soviet Storm was originally a Russian production, first broadcast in 2010 and this is noticeable, if only due to the Cyrillic letters shown on the maps. More seriously, it’s the way that the focus remains almost exclusively with the Soviet soldiers, showing the Germans only as the enemy, that shows its origins. Most western documentaries on the Eastern Front are shown from the German point of view, something which can minimise the very real accomplishments of the Red Army. Soviet Storm is a good corrective to this.

A lot of this series is available on Youtube; check it out.

Hellenistic and Roman Sparta — Paul Cartledge & Antony Spawforth

Published on December 8, 2011Leave a comment

Hellenistic and Roman Sparta

Hellenistic and Roman Sparta
Paul Cartledge & Antony Spawforth
312 pages including index
published in 2002

When most people think of Sparta their first thought will probably be about that godawful movie based on that godawful Frank Miller comic 300: This! IS! Sparta! and all that. For all its faults, it does mirror the common view of Sparta as a warrior state, one of the superpowers of classical Greece, indomitable in its resistance to tyrannical Persia, if not quite a democracy itself. But there is more to Sparta’s history. There’s a tendency in pop history to look only at the classic Sparta, to lose interest once it has been overtaken by Thebe and lost its supremacy, just before the rise of Macedon under Philip and Alexander. What happened to the city once it became just another polis doesn’t interest us all that much, it seems.

We should therefore be grateful for books like this: Hellenistic and Roman Sparta: a Tale of Two Cities which does look at Sparta’s history after its fall from grace, first under Macedon rule, then under Rome. It was originally published in the early nineties, but updated for a second edition in 2002. More of a textbook than a pop history book, but I’ve struggled through much drier texts. At the very least it was an effective treatment of a part of Greek history I’m not that familiar with.