History

Earlier today I was reading some of Magnus Magnusson’s Scotland: Story of a Nation, which led me off on a bit of a peculiar web path. In the text, Lindisfarne Island was mentioned a few times, which is the site of the first Viking Age invasion in England. They attacked on June 8th of 793AD, sacking the abbey there.

I realized that while I was very familiar with the tale of the Viking’s attack, I wasn’t sure where exactly Lindisfarne Island was. I had it in my head that it was on the west coast of the England, but this ended up being wrong. Wikipedia informed me that it’s actually on the northeast coast of England. The article also told me that Lindisfarne is a tidal island. I wanted to get a better overall feel of the area, so I looked up the island on Google Maps, and in playing around with the zoom, I realized that one shot that was in use had caught the island during high tide; the other, during low tide. It’s actually pretty neat to see:

Lindisfarne at high tide

Lindisfarne at low tide

While you can see the differences here, it’s actually easier to see it at Google Maps, where you can zoom in and out to see the transition. Just punch in these coords at Google Maps: 55.679°N, 1.808°W (or just click here).

I wrote a couple of days ago about having some serious problems with getting started on a term paper for one of my classes. Things with it have moved forward a bit, and so I wanted to toss an update out:

I now have enough material to write the paper. However, only one of my sources is an article; the other two are books. Therein was my problem before. In a previous class with this professor, he specifically stated: articles only. In this class, he focused on getting everyone in the class up to speed with the school’s article databases, but, in hindsight, he didn’t specifically say that we had to use articles only.

I met with him last Friday and had him look over what I had. He came to the same conclusion I had come to: while each individual article would have been fine to use, they didn’t come together very well at all. While they all dealt with intelligence or espionage, they dealt with different spheres of it. His recommendation? Take one of the articles and get two books that the author of the article had cited repeatedly.

I ended up hurting myself by focusing so much on scholarly articles; while they were stressed much more over books (books were more or less not mentioned in class), I could have gone to the professor sooner and asked. Hell, my paper would be written if I’d done that; I had three different books on the influence that the American Revolution exerted on European countries! To be fair, though, he recognized that he’d stressed articles as well, and he’s going to alter the syllabus for later sessions of the class, to clarify that any academic source can be used - articles, books, etc.

As an aside to all of this, it’s funny how so many people have the peculiar idea that “history is done” - that is, there’s nothing to study per se, if you want to know something, you go and look it up in a book. While this is true for a lot of history, most - all, even - of our history can be expanded upon, and in some specific areas, there’s simply nothing written at all. While there are some books on espionage during the Revolutionary War period, there’s a relative dearth of academic articles on the topic.

It’s that time of the semester again - that is, close to its end. I think just about anyone who’s done the whole college thing would say that the end of the semester, the last few weeks, are the worst. Even if you stay on top of things the rest of the time, things start falling apart near the end - more and more things are due, more and more studying has to be done. That’s been my experience, anyway.

At the end of last semester, I actually said I’d be away from the blog for a week or two, due to lack of time. I’m not at that stage yet, but it may be quickly approaching.

Like last semester, I’ve got to write a term paper. 8-10 pages long, on anything I want, as long as it ties in with the American Revolution. Compared to the last term paper I had to do, which was about the American South, I figured doing one about the Revolution would be a piece of cake; I mean, it’s the Revolution, there should be plenty of articles about it!

Sort of.

There are indeed masses of articles about the period. However, I’m having a really hard time finding 3 good articles about the same thing. I’ve gone through hundreds of search results in research databases, probably having spent 8 or 9 hours on it at this point, and I’ve just not come up with anything solid. The first topic I wanted to tackle was how the American Revolution was received in European countries, and how the Revolution influenced conditions there (besides the obvious “It helped lead to the French Revolution!”). This ended up being a total flop. While I was able to find some books on Spain’s involvement, they didn’t lead me to any usable articles; I simply didn’t find anything at all in the research databases on the topic.

The next topic I chose, which I’m still fighting with, is espionage during the war. I’d prefer to focus in on one facet of it, such as military intelligence or political espionage, but again, I’ve not found enough on either of those to prop a paper on. I’ve found one excellent article on the development of the British military intelligence; one article about Britain intercepting letters from the colonies and creating extracts to see what colonial opinion was (not very suitable for what I’m trying to do); and one article that, while I thought it was going to be excellent, is ultimately, I think, not going to work. It had no abstract, but was entitled British Secret Service and the French-American Alliance. Well, hey, the title sounded great… Unfortunately, when I received it through interlibrary loan, I discovered that it’s an examination of a few people in London who were double agents. The extreme focus on these people, rather than a wider view, is not going to work, I’m afraid.

I’m at a standstill right now. I’ve one more article on the way via interlibrary loan which I hope will give me enough overall to work with. I’ve a long list of other articles I can request through interlibrary loan, but I’d really prefer to see if the one that’s (supposedly!) on the way will allow me to get to writing or not. The paper is due on the 2nd, so I’m running out of time, and ILLs take time. Furthermore, I have to pay for every article I get through interlibrary loan, and if I start requesting things willy nilly, I’ll soon have $50+ in my paper, which I’m not exactly keen on doing (at all). The articles are only $.10 per page, but those dimes add up quickly.

I’m meeting with the professor of the class Friday to essentially show him the articles I have and say “help!” Hopefully he can help me get things going. This is driving me nuts, as those of you who follow me on Twitter have probably noticed.

Well, I can finally admit a longstanding misunderstanding which I had; today in my world history class, I heard two separate questions from two different people which confirmed that I’m not the only one who has misunderstood centuries. Having at least two cohorts in totally botching a concept makes me feel at least a little less silly.

By “misunderstanding centuries”, what I mean is misunderstanding the periods of time that a particular century refers to. For the longest time - probably a good 7 or 8 years, from the time I was 12 or 13 up until a few years ago - I thought that, for example, “13th century” referred to the years 1301-1400. It seemed like a logical assumption at the time - the 13th century starts with 1300. The 12th century starts with 1200, the 10th with 1000. Except… when you roll back the clock to the time period of 1AD to 100AD… well, oops. If “the first century” were to be 100-200AD, what would 1-100AD be? The 0th century?

In my defense^[1], for a long while, I didn’t study any history earlier than the 8th century (i.e., 793AD, the first recorded Viking raid). I tended to have a pretty narrow field of vision when it came to history, and felt that “that other stuff” didn’t interest me. The more I learn about history, though, the more I find that it all interests me. I don’t recall what it was I was reading when I finally ran into my blunder.

The ultimate question, though? How in the world did I read about medieval history for years, and not pick up on the fact that when an author was writing about, say, the 12th century, that all of the dates were 11-something? I’ve no idea. For that matter, I know I read at one point or another - probably multiple times, in truth! - that the first Viking raid was at the end of the 8th century. Why did it never click? Thick skull, I suppose. Even to this day, I’ll occasionally read “in the such-and-such century”, and have to pause and think - okay, that would mean it ended with that number, not the other way around.

Oh well. My secret’s out now. At least I now know there are at least two other people who have the concept borked up. Any others want to admit to it?

1. As much of a defense as I can muster up, anyway. It’s pretty bad for someone who’s majoring in history to admit to this, isn’t it? [↩]

I recently dusted off Medieval Europe: A Short History, a book which I started reading months ago, but which was put on hold for other books and schoolwork. I’m not quite done with it yet - about 40 more pages to go - but I came across something that I thought was pretty interesting. It’s a letter from a medieval university student to his parents:

The city is expensive and makes many demands; I have to rent lodgings, buy necessities, and provide for many other things that I cannot specify. Therefore I beg your paternity that by the prompting of divine pity you may assist me, so that I may be able to complete what I have so well begun.

As the author of the text remarks, that has quite a modern ring to it. It’s almost a little too similar to emails college kids might send their parents these days, begging for more ramen noodles and gas money.

The book also includes a father’s response to his son:

I have recently learned that you live dissolutely, preferring play to work, and strumming your guitar while others are at their studies.

Heh. I guess some things never really change. It’s probably more likely, however, that a modern father’s response would charge the offspring with spending his or her time partying or playing Xbox rather than strumming a guitar.