This mosaic of Thucydides comes from the Altes Museum in Berlin, though I have no further information. I swear I did not retouch his noble historian’s schnoz.

Here is edition forty four of the History Carnival, co-ordinated by Sharon Howard at Early Modern Notes.

I feel like a small inquisitive beetle, safe in a bright red waistcoat which says “Ptah! Tastes disgusting!” I am out on a vast spider’s Web, climbing busily but randomly from strand to strand.

Various carnivalists send links they enjoy, but I keep going just that one step further…

Joseph R. Gousha Jr. was born in 1921, in Manhattan, and turned out to have some kind of mental difference which we would now call autism. We know quite a lot about him because his mother, Dawn Powell was a novelist and playwright who wrote diaries and kept letters. There’s a poignant remark in the index to her papers at Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts libraries about “4 journals of her son”. As Penny Richards says atDisability Studies, Temple U., “There’s a disability history project calling out to be done here”. And a story still only half told.

She also retells a couple of Ciq?neq?s stories from the Chumash Native American culture. Ciq?neq?s is a kind of Simple Simon, a figure described in one legend like this:

“The ?alaxlaps asked who the child’s father was. One brother said to ask the child’s mother. Then the mother said her baby was a sowing of the clouds. When the ?alaxlaps heard this, he said to her: “Ah, girl, you were born to be happy. For it is your lot to give birth to this child of the clouds. Name him Ciq?neq?s.”

I particularly enjoyed the wonderfully playful study of The Broken Windows Theory of policing at That’s Plenty. Dylan compares it to the desperate battles fought by Charles Babbage, “the analytical philosopher, mechanical engineer and (proto-) computer scientist who originated the idea of a programmable computer.” He fought terrible and useless campaigns against street musicians, documented the origins of broken windows and loathed the common people – the mob. (I can’t find it on the web, but I do remember a theory that he suffered from a terrible ear condition which amplified the slightest noise into agony. )

Archeoastronomy points to a stunning piece of research on the “the Antikythera Mechanism”, a corroded lump of metallic stuff found on a Roman wreck which sank around 76 B.C. Recovered early in the last century, it was found to contain gears – gears! – which created an enduring mystery which has been conclusively solved a century later with X-ray tomography. I’ll let Alun Salt tell you the answer, and point you to the relevant note in Nature.

But he in turn links to his article on HNN about The Needham Question, or rather, to the philosophical twists which underly the idea that there is a question. He describes the NQ as

“Why, given China’s amazing technological achievements, did the Chinese fail to develop modern science?”

The N (meta) Q is

“What exactly is the relationship between science, technology and society in ancient China?”

As I guess any historian would point out, the thing is contingent, and not necessary. Or, to put in my way – “Why the fuck do you think it was progress?” A failure?

dcat or Derek Catsam confronts us with the wrong end of the pineapple about the poitical importance of history. Twenty years ago, the Iran-Contra scandal revealed a bunch of criminals who debauched the Presidency and the constitution. Today, many of those figures are at the heart of the moral and practical debacle of the Iraq War. The truth has made no difference to these people; I suppose historians can argue sadly that huge forces were marshalled to erase their inconvenient truths. After laying out his own point of view, he links to a Nation article which brings the whole disgusting episode back like a corpse on the tide at a tourist beach.

” This sordid episode hardly served as a warning–either for the Iran/contra alumni who would lead the United States into the debacle in Iraq or for voters who would support an administration staffed with people who twenty years earlier had made their bones in a scandal involving war and truth. One can hope, though, that the disingenuous, reality-defying engineers of the current disaster will be too old or too discredited to return to power two decades from now.”

The comments, too, provide evidence for historians.

Dcat also links to Eric Rauchway, another good blogger, who discusses trends in employment for American historians.

Jon Swift, who describes himself as a reasonable conservative, has a fair stab at defining by practice the term “disingenuous”, when he writes about the extreme incivility of civil wars. He leaves me clutching the web and remembering that we in the Coalition of the Willing did such an un[civil]ised thing. Perhaps Jon needs to read a little Latin.

While we are wondering about human progress, Trench Fever adds a small piece of detailed evidence that opens the door into the hidden story of wounded veterans.

Fortunately, Brett Holman, another blogger on matters military at Air Minded, rescues us from this grim fragment with a post about the mysterious and peremptory rules of Lending Libraries. It ends with a plea for further information, which I hope you can provide.

Over at Westminster Wisdom, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus contemplate a biography of Robespierre. My mind fails when I try to perform that particular mental mash-up. Their experience of Roman politics leads them to describe the French revolutionary thus:

“his idea that rather than policy difference or actual treason, the substance of politics was the intentions of politicians or citizens. Robespierre held an opinion much like that expressed by Ireton or Cromwell that intentions made the good citizen. He beleived that betrayel was a matter of the heart and mind, not a matter of concrete action. Therefore he endorsed execution after execution, refused compromise and argued that nobody once found guilty could again be trusted. This kind of politics based on intention and incorruptibility has its contemporary resonances…”

The slightly Shakespearian spelling is in the original. Phonetic Latin is so much easier.

Axis of Evil Knievel, inspired by hosting the last History Çarnival, has turned his Alaskan mind to Hawaiian colonial politics. He memorialises the death of the last “po’o-uli — one of more than two dozen species of Hawaiian honeycreeper, all of whom are either extinct or critically endangered..” of avian malaria, and twists the story to the crucial documents by which Hawaii ceased to be an independent nation. Reading the absorbtion document, it is hard to imagine a single sentence which contains more lies or self-serving inversions of the real world.

The previous posts on the Axis make grim but salutary reading. He roams from the story of General Pinochet to the murdered Brazilian rebel and folk hero Zumbi, and a genocidal slaughter of the Danes in England, known as the St. Brice’s Day Massacre, on the orders of King Aethelred the Unready.

“Explanations for the slaughter are varied. According to the 12th century chronicles of John of Wallingford, the English — particularly the men — resented the Danes because of their impeccable cleanliness, which made them somewhat more appealing to the local women. More plausibly, Ethelred was motivated by concerns that the Danes were plotting against his rule..”

How many enslaved Africans were Muslim? How did they lose a faith which Muslims regard as tenacious? After some details about early Islamic communities in the US, Abu Sahajj is determined to run the argument that they numbered something over thirty percent, and that the conditions of slavery were sufficiently terrible to extirpate the religion. In passing, he mentions the extraordinary Moorish Science Temple of America

Investigations of a Dog has reviewed Diane Purkis’ book The English Civil War: A People’s History -

“Above all, this book is about diversity, complexity, ambiguity, and the chaos of war. Purkiss shows that everyone had their own unique experiences of the civil wars. While giving enough of a broad outline of events for newcomers to get their bearings, she tries to bring out varied and engaging stories of individual experience. We get to hear the voices of ordinary men and women, but no class is privileged here because kings and aristocrats were people too.”

She is an obvious post-modern monster, who should be harried from the land by the likes of Richard J. Evans, who names her as a demon.

The dog inquisitive has another treat. The history of modern military campaigns is documented digitally from bullet to laser cannon. It gives us an entirely new way of doing history – building computer simulations, games driven entirely by their devotion to accuracy. This approach is distinctly different to the average war game, which simulates merely a certain kind of isolated hero. With a certain affinity for matters digital, the pooch has also been thinking about the way “technology has brought huge changes to historical research and opened up new possibilities.” That is a casual introduction to a huge topic.

The dog quizzical also mentions Breathing History run by Gary Smailes, who is a “children’s history writer and researcher”. Besides a discussion of trade directories, he points to a site where you can build your own Bayeax Tapestry, and some intriguing rules for a successful blog.

How much historian’s practice is about playing with the past? Heaps, surely. Andy Goldsworthy creates environmental sculptures that play with materials in a landscape, that rhyme with weather and sky. Ephemeral, they embrace the notion of time, the condition of entropy and transformation. They are about things as sensorium, as touch and sight, sound and smell. Morgan Jahnke draws a connection – incomplete but intriguing – between Goldsworthy and Skara Brae, the Neolithic settlement in the Orkneys. Perhaps his form of exploration mirrors excavators’ meditations. Touch of stone, sound of wind, smell of earth held five thousand years ago.

Nathaniel at The Rhine River uses the story of Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man to explore the relationship between risk, the environment and urban experience.

My random climb across the web seems to have taken us into some contemplation of the sensorium. Geekcounterpoint explores the life and contributions of the much-maligned Jean-Baptiste Lamarck – but it’s a podcast, a sound file. Where’s the written word, dammit.. do you think we are monks, our vellum too scarce for mere ephemera? Humans have been hearing history a lot longer than we’ve been reading it – but surely the notion of history changed when we wrote it down. The audially fecund Geekistas also have a history of flying aircraft carriers, triggered by the research into the wreck of the USS Macon, the last great American dirigible.

Mary Beard, classicist and citizen extraordinaire, resolves the spoken v written word tension by simply writing about her radio program. Here she finds the classical parallels for the tragedy of George Bush, but suspects she is dignifying him too much by the references. He’s a disaster for other people, but surely not tragic to himself. I love her version of

“the classicist’s dilemma.: do you come up with the classical parallel (even at the expense of elevating something that doesn’t deserve elevating) or play the Tom and Jerry card? Most of us choose the former — not entirely cynically, it should be said.”

When I opened Progressive Historians, my first thought was “Oh look, hippies do history too.” But I was COMPLETELY WRONG and simply revealed my DREADFUL TRASHY PREJUDICES. Instead, Unitary Moonbat offers a clear account of the history of slavery reform in the US, which wears its learning lightly. I particularly like a potted history of American social realist paintings.

Dodo at European Tribune has now finished a five part series on the history of the Hungarian Revolution. For the blogosphere, it is a monumental work. Again, it is an engaging and personal interpretation. (I found a link to this also at Histologian; a blog I want to share around).

Over at The American Presidents Blog, librarian Michael Lorenzen samples Eisenhower’s response to the Hungarian uprising.

“I request the Congress promptly to enact legislation to regularize the status in the United States of Hungarian refugees brought here as parolees. I shall shortly recommend to the Congress by special message the changes in our immigration laws that I deem necessary in the light of our world responsibilities.”

As two thousand people leave Iraq every day, the parallels with those more European fugitives are obvious – a point explored further on Crooked Timber.

These days, of course, contemporary events become instant history. Michael points out that the Republican losses in the mid-term election fit the pattern in which six year Presidents lose seats in the House. The only except for a century was Bill Clinton.

Der Spiegel provides some sketches with compelling details about the collapse of the Soviet Union (via Cliopatra):

“Beginning in 1985, three close advisors to Gorbachev recorded much of what happened at top secret meetings of the Politburo, the Presidential Council and the Council of Ministers, and of what Gorbachev discussed in smaller groups, including some one-on-one meetings with these advisors. They were Anatoly Chernyayev, Gorbachev’s advisor on international issues, Vadim Medvedev, the secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and an expert on ideology, and Georgiy Shakhnazarov, an expert on socialist countries.”

How can fiction match that? Sooner or later, the evidence takes us beyond what we can imagine. Reality has a unique power to change our own mental universe.

One of the recommendations for a post to this History Carnival turned out to be from Barista, concerning a certain lion, and a jigsaw puzzle that has taken a working lifetime to solve. Thanks to Alun – I am touched.

If you are not completely sated by now, let me point you to the estimable Natalie Bennett at Philobiblion, who hosted the last Carnival of Bad History.

Beyond the bustle of the historian’s work, there is a sort of peace – it is surely a contemplative discipline. Let’s spend a moment in Sunday 29 November, 1663.

“(Lord’s day). This morning I put on my best black cloth suit, trimmed with scarlett ribbon, very neat, with my cloake lined with velvett, and a new beaver, which altogether is very noble, with my black silk knit canons I bought a month ago. I to church alone, my wife not going, and there I found my Lady Batten in a velvet gown, which vexed me that she should be in it before my wife, or that I am able to put her into one, but what cannot be, cannot be.”

Samuel Pepys, of course.

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