My summary would be, that America is not perhaps what you thought it was.
Muhlberger's World History
Ancient, medieval, Islamic and world history -- comments, resources and discussion.
Wednesday, November 06, 2024
David Kurtz of TPM reacts to the Trump victory
Thursday, October 31, 2024
Wednesday, October 30, 2024
Carolingian Civilization: Marginal?
The manuscript so far focuses the creation of new communities (through conquest mainly) and religious movements that sometimes changed the whole cultural and political scene. Charlemagne is obviously significant in both aspects, but it is easy for me to see him as one of the most successful warlords (emphasis on war). Of course that's far from being the sum total of Charlemagne. I have already included in my outline a section called "Ruling Like an Emperor" as opposed to ruling like a king. Kings were a big deal but Emperors, and Caliphs for that matter, had a wider conception of their powers and responsibilities. (See "Mandate of Heaven.") So I was sensitive to that dimension of Charlemagne before I read today's review by Francesco Veronese of Rankin, Susan. Sounding the Word of God: Carolingian Books for Singers. Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022. Pp. 490. $95.00. ISBN: 978-0-268-20343-6.
The review is in the extraordinarily useful Medieval Review, which is distributed digitally. This allows reviewers to write long reviews if they think it appropriate, and encourages them to introduce the field they are discussing to people who know little or nothing about it. I would never take the time to read a book on Carolingian books for singers, but Professor Veronese begins his review by showing that there is a lot to learn from this aspect of this "marginal civilization."
The calls for the improvement of the morality and the religious practices of Christian society voiced by Carolingian rulers, as well as the resulting struggles made by local communities to achieve those improvements, have been the objects of hot debate and intense scholarly work in recent years. What was once perceived as an essentially top-down, royally-driven endeavour aiming at the establishment of standardized texts, beliefs, and practices for the devotional and religious life of the whole Carolingian world, especially by the means of authoritative texts mostly of Roman origins, is now understood and described in very different ways. [1] Standardization and homogeneity were never fully accomplished, and most probably never were the goal pursued by all those involved--in the first instance, the rulers. The Carolingian kings were more concerned with establishing a general consensus around the idea that religious things needed to be done better in order to win and maintain God’s approval toward his people and its rulers. Everyone’s eternal salvation was at stake. The Christian faithful entrusted to the spiritual care of the Carolingians were to be properly taught about the pillars of their faith, the practices they were to perform during rites, the very words they were to hear and say, and their correct meaning. Those intellectuals closest to kings actively promoted and spread models that could be used locally to improve liturgical practices and amend texts, but these models were never formally imposed as the only authoritative and acknowledged ones by the royal power. Negotiations and crossings between them and previous local traditions could bring about very different results and solutions. This is the reason why, despite a strong emphasis by Carolingian authors on an ideal authority attributed to Roman texts (or texts presented as coming from Rome), Roman liturgy, texts, and books were always only one of the possibilities available and accepted for the performance of Christian rites in the Carolingian world. As long as the words of Scripture and the key concepts of the faith were correctly transmitted to the people by a spiritual army of well-trained priests, the practicalities of how all of that was done were the matter of local, even individual choice.Don't you feel smarter already?
Sunday, October 20, 2024
"If Jimmy Carter can vote early, you can too."
An enlightening essay on economics for people like me
Noah Smith is an economist who writes interesting things, mostly on contemporary problems, and he has written a long piece on what is the appropriate standard for winning the Nobel Economics Prize is. In doing so he says a lot about the state of the field.
If this interests you, have fun.Saturday, October 19, 2024
Correction; and my silence
Friday, September 20, 2024
An amazing rescue of a famous and important work of art
The reason Medievalists.net is interested is that this masterpiece of 16th century art recently was sold for a lot of money. The money doesn't interest me; its the backstory.
There are various copies of this engraving around, but this one seems to be done by Durer himself. The reason we have it is that some years ago a woman pulled up to an English garbage dump and started emptying her car of stuff she didn't want, including this engraving (My initial feeling on reading this was anger. Who could do this? But I've learned that there is always more to a story than the headline.)
Luckily there was an 11-year-old boy presentwho made a habit of checking out the dump for unloved treasures and he asked if he could have it. He's no longer 11 and he's sold it. We who appreciate art are richer for it.
I realized that I have never thought about the significance of this image. I understand that Durer did not invent this image -- he just created the most lasting version. As a historian of chivalry, I really should look into it.
Wednesday, September 18, 2024
On the Abolitionism of the Ancients
Sunday, September 08, 2024
Kent State
Wednesday, August 21, 2024
Moonbows
Back when this blog was new, indeed when blogging was new, I used to post pictures of astronomical wonders. I got out of the habit. But today Space.com posted a picture by Aaron Watson of a double moonbow.
Did you know South Korea has put two orbiters around the moon? I didn't!
Monday, August 19, 2024
Tuesday, August 13, 2024
The decline and fall of the American Empire -- and what I'm doing now
This week marks the 75th anniversary of the signing of the Geneva Conventions, an attempt by the world's nations to restrain and prohibit the horrors and terrors of modern warfare. The victors of World War II were the authors. Somehow and in some way, after the destruction and death of WWII, humanity had to progress. The Geneva Conventions were the world's attempt to do so. As this anniversary is marked, the United States is seemingly doing everything possible to demean, diminish and demolish the world's work 75 years ago. The US political and diplomatic protection of Israel, the mass supply of money and munitions by the US to a well-understood genocide, and a willingness and ease to lie by US civilian, military and diplomatic officials out of loyalty to what is politically expedient and advantageous rather than a duty to law and treaty commitments, makes it clear to the world the profound degree of cynicism and dishonor that characterize the American state. Direct and indirect violations of international law by the US are not confined to its current support of Israel but span the actions of successive US administrations across the globe. A view of the US as an outlaw or rogue state, in light of its flagrant disregard for international law, is held by many throughout the world, and such a charge cannot be dismissed for lack of evidence. The war crimes the US is openly supporting and subsidizing do not just carry a moral penalty but a practical consequence, contributing to a rush by the nations of the world to escape US hegemony. The decline and dismantling of the American Empire is hastened by the US' own deliberate decisions and actions. To do justice in telling our imperial tragedy, we need the likes of an Aeschylus, a Gibbon or a Vidal.My interest in Hoh's post is increased by the last line of the excerpt:To do justice in telling our imperial tragedy, we need the likes of an Aeschylus, a Gibbon or a Vidal. The reference to Gibbon, a towering figure in the historiography of the Middle Ages as much as the Roman Empire, strikes me because I have been thinking about the Middle Ages -- and writing up my interpretations. I will be sharing some of my thoughts here, to give any of my readers who have come here looking for medieval stuff, some of that medieval stuff.
Friday, July 26, 2024
Umar Haque has something to feel good about
The following passage really struck me: I went to Canada to go to grad school, motivated by the excellent program and the cheap tuition which applied, then, even to foreigners. I had no grand expectations of life in Canada. My situation was different from Umar Haque's. I wasn't a "desperate, depressed 'brown' kid in America, I was a blond white invisible immigrant with a barely detectable American accent. But I think I know why his experience speaks to me. Eventually I came to feel that Canada represented a superior idea of civilization. You may call me an idiot but I actually said that to a student, and I meant it.
Life in America feels bad most of the time. Depressing, stressful, hostile. That is because America has been ceasing to be a democracy for many years now, and I don’t mean that in the sense of voting, but in the truer one, a place where the values of peace, justice, equality, and truth are paramount, enacted, expressed, embodied, in even the humblest everyday interactions. Contrast that ugly feeling with the euphoria of that moment. This, my friends, is what a normal society feels like. Let me quickly tell you a little story. At 16, I went to Canada, for university. I’d never been before, and I didn’t know what to expect. And the feeling of being in Canada was so different to America, I couldn’t understand it. Couldn’t understand it. I was a desperate, depressed “brown” kid in America, bullied, beaten, abused, hated just for existing. Life was torture. I didn’t know much else, apart from the other collapsed societies I’d grown up in. But in Canada, I felt these new emotions. And I didn’t understand them. I couldn’t put words to them. I could just…exist…here? And nobody would…attack me? Beat me? Insult me? Hate me? I could…walk down the street? Have friends? I could date girls and just sit at the cafe or the bar…and everyone beside me would be chatting and smiling and laughing? Not angry, upset, or looking at me with hostility, that would soon explode? It took me a long time to understand it all. But this was happiness. The happiness of a kind of existential level. Just existing, in a happy way. In peace. As an equal. With justice. In the truth of the fragility and mortality of each of us. This is what a normal society feels like.Go, Umar!
Tuesday, July 02, 2024
Yes, it's this bad
Sunday, June 23, 2024
A history of American intolerance -- from Talking Points Memo
Some of the American dream is real, of course. As a second-generation Jew, I’m a beneficiary of it, as are the descendants of many of the other immigrant groups that came here voluntarily. Many Americans — including Black ones — really have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and for all of its many failures in practice, our system leans toward more rather than less liberty and opportunity. But America’s past, like most countries’, is not just marred by but defined by force and violence and fear and hate; worse still, as William Faulkner put it in Requiem for a Nun (a novel whose plot turned on the legacies of race and rape), “it’s not even past.” Among the fiercest of America’s old hatreds, I would argue, is the hatred of Catholics. The first colonists brought it with them from England. A recent archaeological find sheds new light on this. In 2013, the remains of four men were discovered at the site of a chapel in Jamestown. One of them, Captain Gabriel Archer, had been buried with a silver box that a CT scan showed contained bone fragments and a lead ampulla. It was almost certainly a Catholic reliquary, and it was, in the words of The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance, “a bombshell,” potential “proof of an underground community of Catholics.” They would have had to have been secret because Catholic worship had been banned in England since 1559, when Queen Elizabeth issued the Act of Uniformity. The English Protestants who colonized the New World feared hunger, illness, and childbirth, which killed one out of eight expectant mothers and a third of their children who were born alive by their fifth birthdays. They feared the raw wilderness and its indigenous inhabitants, who they knew were servants of the Devil, and the witches and other minions of Satan that dwelled among them, disguised as their wives, children, neighbors, servants, and enslaved people. They feared their own sinful natures and Antinomianism or “Free Grace” Protestantism, the radical doctrine that once they were saved, Christians were no longer bound by the moral law, a philosophy, they believed, that could not but lead to licentiousness and attacks on property and the political order. Most of all, they feared Catholicism, which they had been at war with since the time of Henry VIII. The Catholic French had forged alliances with native tribes in the north and west. The Catholic Spaniards controlled the south. The threat of internal subversion was real as well; the Gunpowder Plot conspirators had been executed less than a year before the Jamestown settlers departed England. Many of those Puritans’ descendants still see the world much as their ancestors did, though their great enemy is no longer godless papists and savages but depraved liberalism, or at the conspiracy theorist extreme, some differently titled ism that in practice looks and sounds an awful lot like Catholicism.Recommended.
Wednesday, June 05, 2024
George C. Marshall
The Gettysburg Address it wasn’t. Seventy-seven years ago, on June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall, who had been a five-star general in World War II, gave a commencement speech at Harvard University. Rather than stirring, the speech was bland. Its long sentences were hard to follow. It was vague. And yet, in just under eleven minutes on a sunny afternoon, Marshall laid out a plan that would shape the modern world. “The truth of the matter is that Europe's requirements for the next three or four years of foreign food and other essential products—principally from America—are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help or face economic, social, and political deterioration of a very grave character,” he said. “It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.”In his short speech, Marshall outlined the principles of what came to be known as the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe in the wake of the devastation of World War II. The speech challenged European governments to work together to make a plan for recovery and suggested that the U.S. would provide the money. European countries did so, forming the Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) in 1948. From 1948 to 1952, the U.S. would donate about $17 billion to European countries to rebuild, promote economic cooperation, and modernize economies. By the end of the four-year program, economic output in each of the countries participating in the Marshall Plan had increased by at least 35%.
This investment helped to avoid another depression like the one that had hit the world in the 1930s, enabling Europe to afford goods from the U.S. and keeping low the tariff walls that had helped to choke trade in the crisis years of that decade. Marshall later recalled that his primary motivation was economic recovery, that he had been shocked by the devastation he saw in Europe and felt that “[i]f Europe was to be salvaged, economic aid was essential.”
But there was more to the Marshall Plan than money.
The economic rubble after the war had sparked political chaos that fed the communist movement. No one wanted to go back to the prewar years of the depression, and in the wake of fascism, communism looked attractive to many Europeans.
“Marshall was acutely aware that this was a plan to stabilize Western Europe politically because the administration was worried about the impact of communism, especially on labor unions,” historian Charles Maier told Colleen Walsh of the Harvard Gazette in 2017. “In effect, it was a plan designed to keep Western Europe safely in the liberal Western camp.” It worked. American investment in Europe helped to turn European nations away from communism as well as the nationalism that had fed World War II, creating a cooperative and stable Europe.
The Marshall Plan also helped Europe and the U.S. to articulate a powerful set of shared values. The U.S. invited not just Europe but also the Soviet Union to participate in the plan, but Soviet leaders refused, recognizing that accepting such aid would weaken the idea that communism was a superior form of government and give the U.S. influence. They blocked satellite countries from participating, as well. Forcing the USSR either to join Europe or to divide the allies of World War II put Soviet leaders in a difficult position and at a psychological disadvantage.
With a clear ideological line dividing the USSR and Europe, Europeans, Americans, and their allies coalesced around a concept of government based on equality before the law, secularism, civil rights, economic and political freedom, and a market economy: the tenets of liberal democracy. As Otto Zausmer, who had worked for the U.S. Office of War Information to swing Americans behind the war, put it in 1955: “America’s gift to the world is not money, but the Democratic idea, democracy.”
In the years after the Marshall Plan, European countries expanded their cooperative organizations. The OEEC became the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 1961 and still operates with 37 member countries that account for three fifths of world trade. And the U.S. abandoned its prewar isolationism to engage with the rest of the world. The Marshall Plan helped to create a liberal international order, based on the rule of law, that lasted for decades.
In his commencement speech on June 5, 1947, Marshall apologized that “I’ve been forced by the necessities of the case to enter into rather technical discussions.” But on the ten-year anniversary of the speech, the Norwegian foreign minister had a longer perspective, saying: “[T]his initiative taken by Marshall and by the American Government marked the beginning of a new epoch in western Europe, an epoch of wider, and above all more binding, cooperation between the countries than ever before.”
Not bad for an eleven-minute speech. —