history – Page 8 – Wis[s]e Words

Europe after Rome — Julia M. H. Smith

Published on November 17, 20111 Comment

Cover of Europe after Rome

Europe after Rome
Julia M. H. Smith
384 pages including index
published in 2005

To be honest I only took this book out of the library because there was little else in the way of good history books that day. Europe after Rome was a bit of a safe choice, on a subject I’d already read a lot about and if perhaps it would offer little new knowledge, I knew I would at least enjoy the refresher. I had no high hopes for this book, but sometimes gambles pay off — this was one of these cases. Because Europe after Rome is, as the subtitle makes clear, A New Cultural History of the period between 500 and 1000 CE, between the “fall” of the Roman Empire and the start of the “true” Middle Ages.

Traditionally historians have treated this period as a transitional one between this two high points of civilisation, as a story of collapse and rebound, when the seeds were laid for what would become the familiar nations of modern Europe: France, Germany, England. Europe after Rome abandons this teleological view deliberately in favour of an approach that follows three interpretative threads: the role of the Roman heritage in the formation of Early Medieval cultures/policies, the diversity of experience for these cultures — this is not a book about European culture, but about the cultures of Europe — and finally, the dynamism of these cultures, all changing a lot over this period, which Smith is careful never to imply as meaning that these were evolving towards a set goal. To help her with this approach, she takes care to look at a wide range of European experiences, both geographically by looking at a region that reaches from Spain to Scandinavia and from Italy to Hungary and by crosscutting between cultures within each chapter for her examples.

Full of dicks

Published on November 12, 20114 Comments

These are the choices History Today gives you for for the most important historian of the last sixty years:

Anthony Beevor
Asa Briggs
Fernand Braudel
EH Carr
Richard J. Evans
Niall Ferguson
Eric Hobsbawm
Simon Schama
David Starkey
AJP Taylor
EP Thompson
Hugh Trevor-Roper

One does wonder if having a weewee is the first requisite for being an important historian… Could History Today readers really not think of any female historians with the same stature as Niall Ferguson? No Mary Beard or Rosamond McKitterick or Judith Herrin?

On the other hand, what Chris Williams said in the comments thread on this at B&T makes a lot of sense too:

I think that the best history is usually done at a level which tends not to impact on the consciousness of the general public: to understand the past we need 300 brilliant historians, no one of whom need stand head or shoulders above the others. We can’t do it with just 10 geniuses whom the public recognise.

So what elevates the ‘top ten’ over the other 290? Usually, sicking their necks out in some kind of synthesis – but alas! this tends to take them either to places best occupied by social scientists or philosophers, or to the Schamaverse. There are a lot of good female historians in the top 300 (I work, or have worked, with or for some of them), but very few if any in a notional top ten, perhaps because aside from the odd genius (EPT) you get there by proving that you are very clever rather than finding out new things about the past. And that’s why I would put AJPT in the ‘baddies’ column rather than the ‘goodies’.

Troy and Homer — Joachim Latacz

Published on October 18, 2011

Cover of Troy and Homer

Troy and Homer
Joachim Latacz
Kevin Windle (translator)
342 pages including index
published in 2004

My first encounters with Troy, Homer and The Illiad came through one of those ubiquitous Time-Life books on Classical Greece and more memorably, through the serialisation of an adaptation of both the Illiad and the Odyssey in the Dutch Donald Duck weekly comic that ran in the early eighties. The story of how that Teutonic romantic Schliemann had found the remains of Troy and the city of Agamennon, Mycene where everybody had always thought these were just pleasant myths, was of course part of the mythology. The recieved wisdom at the time I first got to learn about all this was that though Schliemann had indeed found something where nobody had expected there to be anything, but that it would be wrong to think that this was indeed the Troy of Homer. The experts supposedly all agreed that at best, Homer had been inspired by half remembered stories of a golden age, that any attempt to answer the question of whether the Trojan War had “really happened” was pointless. That at least was the impression I got reading pop history books.

As Joachim Latacz makes clear in Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery that impression was wrong. It is not only possible to answer the question of whether Troy really had existed, whether the city Schliemann had discovered was the Troy of the Illiad and therefore whether this meant it too was based on historical fact, but these questions have been answered, and answered in the affirmative. The Troy Schliemann dug up was the Troy of legend, the Illiad is based on historical fact and there was in all likelyhood a Trojan War similar to the war Homer uses as the background to his epic poem.

The Wars of the Roses — Christine Carpenter

Published on September 29, 2011

Cover of The Wars of the Roses

The Wars of the Roses
Christine Carpenter
293 pages including index
published in 1997

I’m not really that familiar with English history of the kings, queens and battles variety, neither having been taught it in school nor having had much interest in it during my own dabblings in history. So all I knew about the Wars of the Roses was that they were what got the Tudors their start. Most of my current historical interests lie in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, but that doesn’t mind I wouldn’t be interested in this particular period, if the right book comes along. Christine Carpenter’s The Wars of the Roses: Politics and the Constitution in England, c. 1437-1509 was that book.

Though this isn’t quite a history of the Wars of the Roses as such but rather, as the subtitle indicates, more of a look at how the politics and the constitution of England evolved during this period. Carpenter attempts to show how governance was supposed to work in the fifteenth century and how and why it went wrong, how it was put right again and what the effects of this restoration were. It’s in this context that Carpenter then discusses the wars themselves, having first build herself a firm theoretical foundation. This approach makes for some abstract and frankly dry reading at times, especially in the first chapters, with Carpenter even recommending that readers new to the period should start with chapter four.

The Last Valley — Martin Windrow

Published on September 27, 2011

Cover of The Last Valley

The Last Valley
Martin Windrow
734 pages including index
published in 2004

Dien Bien Phu is the battle which as The Last Valley‘s front cover blurb succintly puts it, “doomed the French empire and led America into Vietnam”. An European army, equipped with the most modern weaponry it could field and superior in firepower was defeated by a peasant guerilla army in exactly the sort of standup fight all the experts said such a guerilla army could never win. It was proof that France could never win this war and all it could do now was withdraw with honour. At the same time Dien Bien Phu was both the proximate cause for the United States to get itself deeper involved in Vietnam as well as a terrible warning, a warning that was not heeded, that its involvement would not be succesful. Finally, for those so inclined, it was yet more proof of France’s inherent incompetence at waging war, the way its army allowed itself to be caught in a trap and destroyed. For all these reasons Dien Bien Phu is one of the few post-war battles that have stayed in the general public’s consciousness.

Which doesn’t necessarily mean that this image of the siege is accurate of course. As The Last Valley shows, Dien Bien Phu wasn’t a trap the French just blundered into, but part of a deliberate strategy to get an elusive guerilla enemey to stand down and fight. It was a strategy that had worked before and had been designed to make the most of the limited resources the French forces in Vietnam had available. Because unlike the Americans after them, the French neither had the money nor the men or material to go after the Viet Minh, so had to find some way to get them out where they could be got at. Dien Bien Phu wasn’t lost because the French were dumb or cowardly, but because the Viet Minh were smarter, had prepared better and had learned from their experiences at earlier battles.