Der Spiegel on Afghanistan

Here's a German view of the situation in Afghanistan. It's not very cheery.

Guan Yu and the Canadian undergraduate

Students in HIST 1505 already know this, but I thought others would be interested.

On Thursday I was talking about the difference between offically sponsored religious cults and local cults in Ming China. Our textbook referred to the example of Guan Yu, a legendary warrior and Buddhist saint who was honored in both ways, officially and unofficially, with the difference being that even the imperial officials thought the unofficial cult was more worthy of support. I threw in the fact, which I'd learned by exploiting my subtle research skills (Google!) that Guan Yu went on to be the hero of a famous romance novel, then operas, and in recent times, video games.

And sure enough, several students had played some of those games and knew old Guan Yu well.

Good thing we started this World History survey a few years back, or we'd be seriously behind our students...

Zheng He in the People's Republic

Thanks to a correspondent on the H-World list, I've been alerted to an article in the Independent about the use of Zheng He in China "as a symbol of emerging modern China's peaceful rise." There is a replica ship being built for display at the 2008 Olympics.

Unfortunately the Independent article (of 15 September) has already gone behind a money-wall. If you are interested, though, keep an eye out -- it will pop up somewhere else.
For instance, see this World Security Network post reprinted from the International Herald Tribune.

Zheng He

Students in HIST 1505 -- History of the Modern World -- who today heard about Zheng He's voyages in the Indian Ocean might want to look at this older post. It's one of the ones that gets the most hits from outside readers.

The War in Context

I've just discovered a site called The War in Context, a collection of up-to-date news and analysis from a variety of sources.

Current problems in the history of democracy

I have a long-standing interest in the history of democracy as a world phenomenon. What I've written on this subject has been done in collaboration with Phil Paine.

Recently Phil has been writing in his blog about the coup in Thailand. Thailand, he points out, is a pretty important country with a lot of potential and a lot of problems. After reading various news sources and corresponding with people from Thailand, he has concluded:

The fact that Prime Minister Thaksin just happened to be the richest man in the country makes it plain that his regime was "democratic" in name only. That is not what happens in genuine democracies. It is clearly no real loss to the world democratic movement that he has been ousted, even though the precedent of military action is extremely damaging. But Thailand is still left in the position of having no real democratic infrastructure.

What is a democratic infrastructure? It is local democratic institutions well-integrated with higher levels of government:

In a functioning democracy, a head of state gets into their role by working their way through layers of public service, until they have proven themself responsible to larger and larger electorates. The most successful national democracies were built on foundations of democratic process on the local level.

Thai democracy, says Phil, was a "shell" or "mock" democracy, because no such process produced the regime of Prime Minister Thaksin.

Phil then makes this further point:

The existence of such shell democracies or mock democracies is more of a hindrance to evolving functioning democracies than outright dictatorship. With a crude dictatorship, the problem and the alternative are clear. With shell democracies, ordinary people are left with the impression that this kind of "big man" autocracy is what the word "democracy" is supposed to mean, and so the idea of democracy itself falls into disrepute.

Speaking of things that throw democracy into disrepute, what can one say about the current situation in the United States, a country that likes to think of itself as the foremost champion of democracy? Congress, under a great deal of pressure from the White House, seems set to pass a bill not only legitimating torture, but abrogating the principle of habeas corpus. Habeas corpus is a procedure which says no one can be imprisoned unless a court determines that there is legitimate reason to do so. Although the current bill is being presented as a defense against foreign terrorists, Americans too could be arrested and held indefinitely under its provisions.

I will restrict myself to saying that although English warlords of the 13th century, when writing Magna Carta, keenly appreciated how important the principle and procedure was to their continued freedom, Americans of 2006 seem to be largely oblivious to what is happening, and their elected representatives are going to pass the bill.

This is a major event in the world history of democracy.

Carnivalesque XVIII at Blogenspiel

Another Damned Medievalist offers the latest "Carnivalesque" collection of links to blogs discussing the Middle Ages.

Muhlberger speaks at the Royal Ontario Museum, October 12

Thursday October 12 (Study Week here at NU) I will be in Toronto speaking to the Friends of the Medieval Studies Society of the Royal Ontario Museum.

The talk is entitled "The Moral Economy of the Medieval Deed of Arms," and is scheduled for 7-9 PM. For more information see the ROM's website.

History students -- information on graduate funding

If you are a History student with ambitions toward graduate studies -- or an English Studies student, or a Philosophy student -- you will want to tap into Federal funding.

Fortunately our Research Office is holding two information sessions this week about funding through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Canada Graduate Scholarship (CGS-M).

They are running it on the theory that it's never too early to be informed. They want to talk to all serious students, 1st through 4th year.

There are two sessions, Wed. October 4 (in A 133) and Thu. (in H 108), both 10-11:30 AM.

They will also be talking about funding for the sciences through NSERC on Tues. Oct 3, at 10 (H 108) and 3 (F 214)

Part-time work for History students

Nipissing University has a student work-aid program called NIPWORKS. If you qualify on financial grounds, you can work for such august organizations as the History Department and the NU Institute for Community Studies and Oral History (ICSOH). In fact, those two bodies have positions they can't fill. For more information, contact the History Chair, Dr. Francoise Noel.

War today, again

Back on July 24th, while the most recent war in the Middle East was still raging in Lebanon, I wrote a post called War Today, in which I commented that "certainly non-state actors have done well against superpowers in the last generation."

Another way of looking at this is that big, expensive, technologically sophisticated military establishments have done, and indeed are doing poorly against movements and organizations that the media call, with doubtful accuracy, "militias."

Have a look at this New York Times article about the poor condition of United State Army's Third Infantry Division and ask yourself, what mighty enemy has inflicted this damage?

Lucy's baby: Really, really early history

I must have been pretty busy this week to miss commenting on "Lucy's baby," the most important find relevant to human origins in quite a few years. I always talk about this stuff in connection with HIST 2055, Ancient Civilizations. If this announcement had been made this time last year, it would have been quite a treat to bring it into the classroom.

The find is an almost complete 3-year-old girl child who lived in what's now Ethiopia about 3.3 million years ago, and then was killed and buried by a flash flood in the desert. This flood led to the fossilization of nearly all her bones, producing a very unusual situation for paleontologists: they can actually see the just about the whole structure, not just extrapolate what it might have been.

The girl is being called "Lucy's baby" because the previously most complete human ancestor of the same early species, Australopithecus afarensis, discovered in 1974, was called Lucy by her discoverer. Since Lucy was an adult and the two individuals are of the same species, it clearly felt natural to designate the girl this way, even though she lived many thousand years before Lucy.

I will leave interested readers to look for more details and read on the significance of this find -- it's all out there -- but I will raise an interesting point from the BBC account. Paleontologists found the fossils back in 2000 and have been chipping them out of sandstone ever since. This gives you some idea of how difficult and painstaking is the work of the paleontologist. Working as I do in a university, I can't help thinking about their funding problems.

A story from the steppes

In both World History and Islamic Civilization we've discussed nomads and their environments. Here's a story from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty -- one of the best news services around -- about the collapse of populations of saiga antelopes in Central Asia.

There are two kinds of students

There are two kinds of students: those who know where the money is, and those who don't.

Guess which kind gets the money?

For Nipissing University students looking for internal scholarships, bursaries and awards, this is your guide. (Or you can look in the paper copy of the University Calendar.)

The deadline for applying for many of these is November 1.

Don't forget to look for outside sources, too.

The Carnival of Bad History #9

Miland Brown of the World History Blog is hosting the latest Carnival of Bad History. Check it out!

A giant of world history

In a comment to my post entitled What You Can Look Like at 41, Phil Paine seconds my remarks on the historical significance of public health measures and says:

People like Dr. John Snow, who discovered the link between water delivery systems and cholera, and who fought heroicly against established powers to institute the necessary legal and technological solutions, will someday be regarded as the true giants of history.

A quick look at the web revealed that there is a very large and substantial site on John Snow. From the Urk! department I note that I am already quite a bit older than he was when he died.

A woman jouster -- Dionisia

Ramon Lull's opposition to the possibility of women knights reminded me of this story:

The 13th century records of the English Hotot family preserve a story of one of their ancestors, Dionisia, who “when a maiden, clad in a tunic, with a hat upon her head and armed only with a hollow shield, about the seventeenth year of King Stephen (1151) …attacked a certain knight, with one blow of her spear bringing him to the ground, and carried off his horse.” Edmund King, ed., A Northamptonshire Miscellany (Northampton, 1983), 8.

This from my Deeds of Arms, p. 3 n. 5.

Problems with HIST 1505 web documents?

Some students in History of the Modern World, HIST 1505, have told me that they are finding their way to an out-of-date course outline. I have tried going to it from my academic home page and more indirectly by going to the home page for the course and from there to the course outline. Both routes seem to get me to the identical and correct course outline.

Can someone explain the problem to me in detail?

Ontario Graduate Scholarship

This scholarship, valued at $10,000 for two terms or $15,000
for three terms, is available to students who have a minimum 80%
average on their last 20 one-term courses and who intend
to register in an approved graduate program at an Ontario university.

The internal (NU) deadline for applications is October 20.

What you can look like at 41

In yesterday's Globe and Mail there was an interview with designer and actress Sadie Frost concerning her recent nude anti-fur poster for PETA, which also appeared in the paper. (I can't find it in the on-line G&M but an article at the PETA -- People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals -- UK site shows the poster.)

The Globe article in the paper quotes Frost, who has been a looker all her life and no doubt holds herself to a high standard, as referring to her age of 41 and her four children, and saying about the picture, "Hopefully people won't be too repulsed by it."

Not much chance of that.

I thought a lot about this picture, because I think Frost, beautiful as she is, is no genetic freak. Nor has she been raised in extraordinary luxury, as far as I can tell. (She would insist I mention she's a life-long vegetarian.) I have concluded that this shows what a woman can look like at this stage of life if she hasn't been working the whole time in a rice paddy or a textile factory, or rotting in a refugee camp. And face it, if there are a lot of people in bad circumstances, there are millions who have lived, by historical standards, very healthy lives.

And it's not just a matter of wealth or living in an "advanced" society. In April 2005 I was in Delhi for a week, and most of the people on the street looked quite healthy to me -- in part because they weren't carrying the extra weight so many in North America now do. It was quite a revelation.

This summer, in a New York Times article I haven't been able to find again, there was a detailed discussion on historical medical research that suggests that good fetal health and good health in the first two years of life makes all the difference -- delaying degenerative diseases that used to be common in what we would now consider young adulthood for decades.

I've often thought that effective, and often very simple and relatively cheap public health measures are the best investment a society can make. We can afford, as a world society, lots more than we do now. It would make a world of difference. It already has.