Here's one way to get a ground level view of what WWI was like: read this blog, which consists of letters from Harry lamin, who served in the British Army back then. One of his grandsons has been posting the letters on the blog on the same day (90 years later) that Harry originally sent them. Fascinating stuff.

Like the Alamo before it, and 9/11 after it - December 7, 1941 is a somber day in American History

I visited the memorial, years ago - if you visit Hawaii, it's worth a stop.

You have to love the elitist idiocy of Time Magazine's "50 worst cars of all time list" - check out page 2, where they list the Model T - and get a load out of the summation:

And by the way, with its blacksmithed body panels and crude instruments, the Model T was a piece of junk, the Yugo of its day.

Um, right. Maybe the author (Dan Neil) should consider the era it was built in, the materials available, and the goals Ford had at the time - which was to make the car affordable for enough people to make it mass marketable. When you look at things in history, it's often tempting to apply modern standards - but it's not fair. The people who lived then had different ideas, and had grown up with different constraints.

I rate this particular article one of the 50 worst of all time for not remembering the basics of history and journalism.

Technorati Tags: stupidity

Readers of this blog know that I read a lot of history, so imagine my astonishment at this news: Britain is dropping a bunch of prominent figures as required parts of the curriculum:

Britain's World War II prime minister Winston Churchill has been cut from a list of key historical figures recommended for teaching in English secondary schools, a government agency says.

It doesn't stop there:

But although Adolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi, Joseph Stalin and Martin Luther King have also been dropped from the detailed guidance accompanying the curriculum, Sir Winston's exclusion is likely to leave traditionalists aghast.

This is fairly stupid. I can't even tell why they think this is a good idea. They claim to be giving teachers "more flexibility" in covering history; how do you propose to cover the 1930-1950 era without mentioning those people?

This is pretty neat. Back in October of 2006, I posted about some photos of the Crimean War that had surfaced. So imagine my surprise to see that the entire collection has been posted online - and the original photographer, back in 1855, was a James Robertson. There's an explicit notice on the site about permission being needed before you use the photos, so just follow the link to the King's Own Royal Regiment Museum.

Thanks to Peter Donnelly, the curator at the museum, for letting me know about this!

One of the things that drove me nuts about the show "Jericho" was that they got so many little things wrong. The people didn't look dirty or hungry enough, for one thing - and illnesses that we no longer think about would come back with a vengeance - things like Cholera and Dysentery, for instance, and Scurvy.

In any event, I was listening to a podcast that hit on that yesterday - Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" talked about the Black Death as a way of understanding what a post apocalyptic time would look like. It's really hard to conceive of just how bad things were - England's population dropped from 6-7 million down to 2 million between 1348-1400, for instance. Just imagine what modern life would look like under such a death toll - we might even do worse than they did, since medieval people fed themselves from local supplies.

To get a feel for it, consider this chronicle passage by John Clyne, who lived through the plague in Ireland (from Wikipedia):

That disease entirely stripped vills, cities, castles and towns of inhabitaints of men, so that scarcely anyone would be able to live in them. The plague was so contagious that thous touching the dead or even the sick were immediately infected and died, and the one confessing and the confessor were together led to the grave ... many died from carbuncles and from ulcers and pustles that could be seen on shins and under the armpits; some died, as if in a frenzy, from pain of the head, others from spitting blood ... In the convent of Minors of Drogheda, twenty five, and in Dublin in the same order, twenty three died ... These cities of Dublin and Drogheda were almost destroyed and wasted of inhabitants and men so that in Dublin alone, from the beginning of August right up to Christmas, fourteen thousand men (i.e., people) died ... The pestilence gathered strength in Kilkenny during Lent, for between Christmas day and 6 March, eight Friars Preachers died. There was scarcely a house in which only one died but commonly man and wife with their children and family going one way, namely, crossing to death."

The plague had so many far reaching effects, including a number of peasant revolts after the first wave had passed. There were also large population movements - throughout Europe, people blamed Jews for the plague (people always love a scapegoat) - and many Jews resettled in Poland (across what is now Poland, the Baltics, Eastern Russia, and other parts of Eastern Europe). That community is now gone, due to the Holocaust - but the original movement there was an echo of the Black Death. I'm sure that none of the people who fled there in the 1400's could possibly have conceived of something worse.

Here's what I take away from all this - we have it pretty good now. The next time someone complains to you about how hard they have it, ponder the 14th century for a moment.

It's anecdotes like this that fascinate me:

The biggest impact of the Civil War was on the Middle East rather than the Middle East on the Civil War. The biggest impact was cotton. When the North blockaded Southern cotton the textile mills of Europe went dry. So they turned to the only other place in the world that had cotton of a similar quality and that was in Egypt. The price of Egyptian cotton went up about 800 times. Egypt made a lot of money. And with that money they built wonderful buildings and palaces, they built the opera house where Verdi used to perform, and they also built the Suez Canal which completely changed the face of the Middle East.

In 1869 the cotton market in the South came back and the Egyptian cotton market went bankrupt. Egypt went bankrupt and that led to the British occupation of Egypt that lasted for 70 years. There was actually a direct line between the Civil War and the Suez crisis of 1956 during which the Egyptians tried to nationalize the Suez Canal. Britain and France invaded. And so, really, the reverberations from the American Civil War in certain ways continue to course across the Middle East.

I've read a lot about the Civil War, and a fair amount about European history - and there's a connection that I had never seen before. History continues to echo back at us, with current events being influenced by things long forgotten - and many times, things that are seemingly unrelated.

Yesterday, I was listening to this podcast over at Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" site - I like his podcast quite a bit, and the topic yesterday - the Bronze Age Collapse - was fascinating. You can get some information on it here, at Wikipedia - but the problem is, we're talking about an era beginning around 1300 bc - so as you might expect, records are sketchy.

I don't know why I find systemic collapses so interesting, but I do. I really liked "The Fall of Rome and the end of Civilization", for instance - and while we know more about the fall of the western empire, historians still argue over what went wrong, why it went wrong, and why it got so bad (and even over whether it got so bad).

One thing seems to stand out in these kinds of collapses - before-hand, you had a world with a working system of international/long distance trade - which brought a fairly high level of specialization. Afterwards, you had a loss of connectivity, and - without local access to the kinds of specialized knowledge they had become dependent on, people fell backwards - sometimes very far backwards.

That makes me consider the modern world - just in time manufacturing, international trade that ties most of the world together, extremely high levels of specialization. The modern world is a fragile thing, and we sit just as much on the edge as the citizens of 4th century Rome did, or the citizens of 1300 bc Anatolia. As catastrophic as WWI and WWII were, they were like small hiccups compared to a systemic collapse. Something to think about, I guess.