A few of my favorite bits:

Let’s start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn’t look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn’t get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.

And:

So they invent a completely implausible superweapon that they’ve never mentioned until now. Apparently the Americans got some scientists together to invent it, only we never heard anything about it because it was “classified”. In two years, the scientists manage to invent a weapon a thousand times more powerful than anything anyone’s ever seen before – drawing from, of course, ancient mystical texts. Then they use the superweapon, blow up several Japanese cities easily, and the Japanese surrender. Convenient, isn’t it?

I love it.

Nicholas II of Russia

Tim Curry

See? Granted, Tim Curry looks like he might be a bit more fun, but still.  If someone would drum up some interest for a movie about Nicholas II, they’ve got the man for the part.

MacroHistory covers history from prehistory up to the 21st century. It’s obviously broken down into time periods, but also into geographic regions with a bit of pond-hopping, based on how various areas have affected each other through time. For example, on the page covering the 16th century up to the 19th century, there are sections on:

• Europe, Africa, and the Americas
• The Mid-East and India
• The Far East to 1700
• War and Revolution in Europe and America

… and much more besides. The articles themselves are quite well written, and the author has tried to be neutral in his assessment of things. In the comments, a few history professors have said that they use the site instead of an intro level textbook. I think that says volumes about the quality of the site. Also, if you find that an article has piqued your interest in an era, reign, or what have you, most of the articles have a list of recommended books at the end.

As an aside, the site, which is done as far as I can tell almost entirely by one fellow, is a fine example of what happens when you switch from watching TV to producing something: Clay Shirky on the Cognitive Surplus.

Enough about Bush, though. He’s gone, and at this point, I couldn’t care less what he does. I guess I already have some pride back, due to the fact that America really did vote a black man into office. Considering that people fought for blacks to use “white” water fountains in the ’50s and ’60s, go to “white” schools, sit in the “white” seats of buses, it’s still pretty amazing to me that we voted him in a mere 50 years later. Much more time has been taken in history for much smaller advances.

While I know that the naysayers could still be right – that he’s a rock star and that he will end up being all talk – he at least has the ability in his speeches to make me feel like he’s going to pull through. Unlike most political speeches, I actually want to listen to his, to hear what he has to say and, perhaps more importantly, how he says it. The guy has an air to him that, at least for me (and apparently millions of others), inspires confidence. I hope that that air can be seen by people around the world, and that America regains its position of respect which it once had, before rampaging off into Iraq, before setting up Gitmo, and before, basically, we made ourselves look like fools.

Finally, I don’t think a post regarding yesterday’s event would be complete without a link to the inaugural address. So, if you’ve not yet watched it, here you are; it’s worth your time.

Well done, America.

Update: This picture sums up my feelings quite well.

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 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.

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.

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 defense¹, 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?

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.

Speaking for myself, I can remember writing 2 letters within the past, say, 10 years; those were a couple of years ago when I was considering getting into a penpal thing. It didn’t go anywhere. Email has replaced the letter for me, and unless I’m way off the mark, it has done the same for millions of other people, too. For me and the people around me, the only time snail-mail is sent is around Christmas time, when holiday cards are sent out. The switch from paper letters to email will perhaps, in a few hundred years, lead to a curiosity: there won’t be any personal correspondence for historians to study.

Obviously, when people regularly corresponded via letters, their correspondence was in solid form. It was in a form that family members could store in a box after the receiver of the letters had died. How many of us have found a letter, two letters, a stack of letters in a dead family member’s dresser when cleaning it out? I have found a few, and my older family members have told me of finding large stashes of them.

On the flip side, how would you store email for a long period of time? Of course, printing it out is a possibility, but the only time I’ve ever found myself printing out an email was when it had directions in it that I needed to have on me while driving somewhere. Beyond that, all of my “correspondence” stays in my Gmail inbox – where it’s password protected from everyone but me. There’s nothing amazing in my inbox that I think would need to be shared, but suppose I died tomorrow. All of the emails I’ve received from family and friends would essentially be lost, just like that. No one would ever get into my account, and it would sit there until either A) Google went belly-up and Gmail died or B) Google decided that, after 20 years of inactivity, indeed, that user is gone. They’d scrap the account, free up the username, and that would be that.

Email isn’t the only “personal” primary source material that might simply disappear as technology changes (or breaks). I’m sure many people still keep bound journals, but I’m also sure that a huge percentage of journal keepers have leapt online. Will online journals that are in existence today still be floating around somewhere online in 300 years? Will there be a WayWayWayBack website? Or will millions of journals housed at, say, LiveJournal, just disappear in a century or so with the closing of Six Apart, a major hack attack, a massive datacenter fire?

With all of this, I’m not saying that paper correspondence and bound journals are necessarily better than their digital counterparts. Paper deteriorates, ink fades, libraries burn. Material sources are susceptible to destrution and loss just like digital sources. It does seem, however, that digital “stuff” has, relatively speaking, a much shorter existence in comparison to material stuff. I think we’ve all lost plenty of our favorite websites to the 404 void to realize that.

There is one positive to all of this, though. If all of our digitally based personal communications are lost to future historians, at least they won’t have to slog through billions of text messages, 160 characters or less, consisting of acronyms and bad spelling.