In praise of hoodies

Here at the end of the semester I’ve been reading the French historian Régine Pernoud’s 1977 book Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths. A delightful excursus from chapter two:

But we can also, quite simply, illustrate this sense of ornamentation, always renewed on the basis of the same theme, with respect to a detail of everyday life that was very characteristic of a whole mentality: the hood. This was the usual headgear of the period. It goes back to the mists of time, since the medieval hood is nothing but the hood cape of the Celts, our ancestors. This humble cape covering the head and shoulders gave birth to the “cowl” of the monks, but also to most of the headgear of men and women between the sixth and the fifteenth century. It has always and everywhere continued to be worn as a hooded cape, like those of the shepherds on the rood screen of Chartres or the peasants of Jean Bourdichon. But this same hood, placed so as to frame not only the face but the skull, while still composed of the same elements, is found continually renewed, whether by the material of which is its made (wool, velvet, satin) or by the way in which it is draped (the ends drawn forward, held in a turban, enlarged into a two-pointed hat…), so that it gives birth to all headgear, those still seen in frescoes, miniatures, and even in the Fouquet pictures. This hood, whose initial form has not changed but is ever reinvented, is very characteristic of the man who wears it, both through its extreme simplicity and functional character and through that perpetual invention in which the personality of its possessor is expressed. (43-4)

This happened to jibe perfectly with a couple recent conversations with friends about the hoody. Comfortable, adaptable to a variety of climates and social settings, with a range of cuts, colors, functions, accessories, and ways of wearing it that allow the wearer—endlessly and effortlessly, without the show or ostentation of fancier, less useful clothing—to show what kind of man he is: the hoody has made a worthy comeback in the last decades. It deserves better than to be associated with criminals or slackers. Remember that it is a mark of academic achievement to be hooded.

In this as in so many things, we moderns are only rediscovering the wisdom of the medievals.

I have owned many. The first that I bought and wore as a conscious item of fashion and comfort was a North Face hoody in navy blue, which I bought when I was in grad school at Clemson. Five or six years later my wife insisted I replace it, as its long service had made it truly holey. She gave me a dark grey North Face hoody (also a size up, aging being what it is), which has in its turn been replaced by a green one from Carhartt and now one made by LL Bean in navy blue, with a striking plaid lining. All have been full-zip, the only significant improvement upon the early medieval originals.

Four years worse than 2020: 1968

Today will be the final post in this short series on years worse than 2020. I began Monday with a year of starvation for millions, 1315. Tuesday we looked at one of the worst pandemics in history and its effects on western Europe and the broader world in 1348. Wednesday we took a step back to survey six other years that I could have included—giving us not just four, but ten years demonstrably worse than 2020 in this project. And yesterday we took a deep, grim dive in what is, for my money, the most miserable year in human history, 1945.

Today, we’ll conclude with one more year that is still easily within living memory, a year of political upheaval, campus radicalism, racial violence, dramatic social change, and even worldwide disease:

1968

This was only fifty-two years ago, and if its events feel familiar, if it resembles the world we recognize it is not only thanks to proximity, but because in many ways its upheavals have in their turn given birth to conflicts we struggle over and fuss about online today.

As this is the year closest to our own, and recognizing that anything following even a summary of 1945 like the one yesterday might appear small potatoes by comparison—as well as in the interest of space—I’ve chosen to adopt the same stripped down organizing principle as that used for 1933 in Wednesday’s interlude post.

In southeast Asia

The year began with the siege of Khe Sanh and the Tet Offensive, each of which lasted months and resulted in thousands of killed and wounded, including civilians purged by the Viet Cong when they took South Vietnamese cities. The latter, which came as a shock to an American public given continuous mathematical assurance of impending victory, severely damaged LBJ and his government’s credibility and further stoked the American anti-war movement. Multiple war crimes occurred on both sides including the My Lai massacre, in which US troops killed over 300 civilians. LBJ declared an end to the ongoing American bombing of North Vietnam and, shortly thereafter, shifted the bombing campaign to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, including its routes through Laos. In Cambodia, local Communists affiliated with North Vietnam, the VC, and the Chinese Communist Party founded the Khmer Rouge.

In Europe

In the spring, leftist student protests occurred in countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain, though the largest, most radical, and most destructive were those in Paris and other French cities, a series of events too complicated even to begin to summarize. (Here’s a game attempt from NPR. Here’s a negative reaction from a well known eyewitness to the events.) Two stores in Frankfurt were firebombed by leftwing German terrorist Andreas Baader, who would go on to found the terrorist group RAF (Red Army Faction). Palestinian terrorists hijacked an El Al flight in Rome and diverted it to Algiers, where they held its passengers hostage for forty days.

In the United States

LBJ chose not to seek reelection following the Tet Offensive and poor showings against challengers in the Democratic primaries. A massive outbreak of tornadoes stretching from Arkansas to Iowa and including two F5 tornadoes killed seventy-two people, injured 1200, and destroyed over a thousand homes. A student protest at a segregated bowling alley in South Carolina ended with police firing on the crowd, killing three and wounding almost thirty. Students protesting the Vietnam War and a list of other grievances, inspired by the example of Parisian students, occupied buildings at Columbia University; the administration caved to their demands. A Palestinian terrorist and a white supremacist assassinated Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, respectively. The latter’s murder, in combination with the events in South Carolina and other violent incidents across the last three summers, triggered race riots in over a hundred cities. The National Guard, US Army, and Marine Corps were called in to reestablish order in some cities, especially Washington, DC. On a lower level, black nationalists engaged in a series of shootouts with police in several major cities including Cleveland and Oakland, and leftist groups fought with police outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, leading to the injury of over 700 people. Hijackers seized control of a Pan Am flight from New York and redirected it to Cuba, the beginning of a five-year period in which 130 American airliners will be hijacked. The November election was not close; Republican Richard Nixon defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey by a margin of 110 electoral votes. Third party segregationist candidate George Wallace carried five states. In December, the Zodiac killer murdered his first two victims.

Worldwide

The Hong Kong flu pandemic (aka “Mao flu”), a highly contagious virus originating in Asia and brought to the US by troops returning from Vietnam, killed between one and four million people. Over half of America’s 100,000 victims were under 65.

Conclusions

I began this series with a line from CS Lewis that I’ve returned to again and again: “Do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation.” Indeed. And this in the face of the terrifying new technology of the atomic bomb.

This series emerged from that historical understanding—that our problems are by no means unique, nor as severe as we want to believe. But this is not to say that our problems are not problems. Far from it. Let me reiterate what I said in the first post: 2020 has been a bad year for a lot of people. But what should we expect? Though offering many, many different solutions and means of coping, the greatest sages are all in general agreement with one of Jesus’s most overlooked and “unclaimed” promises: “In this world you will have trouble.”

I went into this project last week with a grab bag of ideas about how I would conclude it. I don’t set much stock by my own advice (and you shouldn’t either), but if I were to give any it’d be some of the things I’ve been shouting all this year:

• Quit reading the news.

• Use social media as little as possible, and ditch Twitter entirely.

• Read a book—preferably by someone who’s been dead a while.

• Mind your own business.

• Keep your nose to the grindstone.

• Go outside.

I’ll stand by those. But I’d rather wrap up this grim trek through a widely scattered decade of suffering and death with something more heartening. I settled on three things I think may help to—like the historical perspective I’ve tried to offer in these posts—vaccinate us against despair.

Be tough.

Look back at that verse from the Gospel of John above. That’s a guarantee from the mouth of Christ himself. A healthy adult must learn a certain tough-mindedness. How much of our own childhoods was spent learning this? And yet we lionize and enable whining, the louder the more prominent—a culture of spoiled children clamoring to be heard over each other. Remember that no hero, of whatever variety, ever achieved that status through softness, and certainly not through whining about whatever a given year had brought their way. As Richard Weaver put it:

Since he who longs to achieve does not ask whether the seat is soft or the weather at a pleasant temperature, it is obvious that hardness is a condition of heroism. Exertion, self-denial, endurance, these make the hero, but to the spoiled child they connote the evil of nature and the malice of man.

Toughness can be learned. I think it needs to be relearned on a broad cultural basis. That means embracing difficulty and not complaining—lost arts, arts I consistently fail at, but worth our while.

Be thankful.

For years now I’ve intended to write an essay called “Gratitude: The Historical Virtue.” I’m not sure I’ll ever get beyond the title, which pretty much conveys the message. I value historical perspective not just as a salve for anxiety about the present but for its necessity to gratitude. Without memory we cannot be thankful, and when a culture becomes as present-minded as our own we are bound to become entitled and ill-tempered, having forgotten where our comforts came from and having no perspective with which to view our hardships.

Where to start? Purposefully develop a sense of history, of a past. Start with your own and it will immediately take you outside yourself—to those two people who, whatever their flaws, are directly responsible for your existence. See this as an unmixed gift among whatever list of complaints our culture wants us to populate. As Chesterton wrote:

In being glad about my Birthday, I am being glad about something which I did not myself bring about. In being grateful for my birth, I am grateful for something which has already happened; which happened, sad as it may seem to some, quite a long time ago.

Note the simple historical thinking, and note the gratitude. Begin there and, having begun, don’t stop.

Have faith.

We are an idolatrous people. I’m a big believer in man as Homo religiosus; as Karen Armstrong once put it, “As soon as we became recognizably human, men and women started to create religions. We are meaning-seeking creatures.” So in one sense, to urge ourselves to have faith is redundant, as people will have faith in something—it’s our nature.

But let us not put faith in the weak, fragile, jealous gods that have demanded our loyalty and our blood—or the blood of others—this year, whether they be freedom, a strong economy, and pet theories about the real goings on behind the curtain on one side; safety, equality, and activism on the other; or, for both sides, power, autonomy, scientific certitude and control over the world, a wide selection of terrible political figures, and utterly owning the opposition. That’s not even getting into the broader therapeutic deities of the Universe or, worse, humanity. These gods are immanent; they exist in the here and now and rise and fall with it, which is why they are so jealous and so demanding, especially as they pretend to more and more transcendence.

It’s real transcendence that we need, which means we have a search ahead of us—more hard work. So if we have faith in something outside the tyrannical present, let us search it out with fear and trembling rather than confidence in our own righteousness.

Not only will looking outside ourselves to something beyond this world anchor and steady us in times of strife, for Christians like myself it can include a redemptive side effect, something notably lacking in 2020. To quote more fully from John’s account: “These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”

Be tough. Be thankful. Have faith. And most of all, be of good cheer—a real counterculture, the revolution we all really need.

Besides, 2020 ain’t over yet.

Four years worse than 2020: 1945

Shellshocked 16-year old German soldier Hans-Georg Henke weeps after surrendering to American troops, April 1945. Read more here.

This is the fourth and penultimate post in this short series on years worse than 2020. We began with 1315, a year of natural disaster and continent-wide starvation; continued with 1348, a year of pandemic like our own, but exponentially worse; and followed that yesterday with brief looks at six other terrible years I considered including. We resume with two years from within living memory. I start with the year that I think best qualifies to be called hell on earth:

1945

For Americans, who lost 400,000 servicemen killed but remained relatively untouched by a war fought on the other side of two oceans, it is easy to identify 1945 with V-E Day and V-J Day and imagine people cheering in the streets and sailors kissing nurses in Times Square. But that’s a moment in one corner of the globe at the tail end of the bloodiest war in all of human history.

The war in Europe

About that war: As 1945 began, in Western Europe the Battle of the Bulge, a massive German counterattack that aimed to break through the Allied lines and sunder the British and the Americans, had petered out and January saw the mopping up operations. American troops, angered over German massacres of American prisoners during the battle, committed their own massacres of surrendering Germans.

As the western Allies pressed across the Rhine and into Germany, they discovered Nazi labor camps, the most notorious being Dachau, liberated by the Americans, and Bergen-Belsen, liberated by the British. Skeletal survivors greeted the soldiers who captured the camps. The soldiers discovered railroad cars or storage buildings full of emaciated corpses, and sometimes neat rows of prisoners executed in batches before the guards abandoned the camp. At Dachau, some of the guards remained behind. The American infantry who caught them machine gunned them.

On the Eastern or Russian Front, the Soviets began massive assaults on the German lines in two zones—along the Vistula and Oder Rivers and against the German redoubts in East Prussia, offensives that committed four million men to the fighting, before making the final drive on Berlin. Along the way the Red Army liberated several concentration camps, including the extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, which the Nazis had evacuated at the beginning of they by sending the surviving prisoners on forced marches to the west. Thousands died. Some of the female survivors liberated by the Russians were raped.

A refugee crisis began as soon as Russian forces entered German territories like East Prussia or Pomerania, with millions of German civilians fleeing ahead of the Red Army. Many went on foot in the dead of winter. Eyewitnesses wrote of women staggering westward clutching babies that had already frozen to death. Those that were caught by the Red Army were brutalized; from the beginnings of the 1945 offensives through the fall of Berlin and beyond, Russian soldiers raped as many as two million women, sometimes gang-raping a single woman over a dozen times and raping any females from grandmothers to eight-year olds. German evacuations of civilians along the Baltic coast in Operation Hannibal resulted in the largest ever maritime evacuation, moving over two million people to the west, as well as the largest ever loss of life from a sinking ship, when a Russian submarine torpedoed the Wilhelm Gustloff, killing almost 10,000 people, most of them civilian women and children.

By the time Berlin fell, Hitler had killed himself and taken millions with him—including hundreds of thousands of old men and boys conscripted as militia, the vast majority of whom were slaughtered. In just the three offensives it took the Soviets to capture Berlin, a quarter million Soviet soldiers died and almost 900,000 were wounded. Half a million German soldiers were captured, many of them not to be released until the mid-1950s, and an unknown number—but likely in the hundreds of thousands—were killed. And reflect again on the civilians caught in between. Thousands committed suicide, sometimes en masse.

The war in the air

The air forces of the Allied countries continued strategic bombing campaigns both of Germany and Japan, wreaking widespread destruction and massive civilian casualties. The most notorious single incident in Europe occurred in February of 1945, when Dresden was annihilated overnight, killing over 20,000 people.

Meanwhile, long-range bombers stationed on Pacific islands captured from the Japanese in the previous years of the war—and always captured with heavy loss—began fire-bombing Japanese cities. Incendiary bombs of the kind dropped on Dresden had even more devastating effect in the timber- and paper-constructed houses of Japan. In one nighttime raid in March, firebombing destroyed sixteen square miles of Tokyo and killed at least 90,000 people—the most destructive air raid of the war, even including those that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Piles of bodies clogged the streets where civilians fleeing the fires bottlenecked and were trapped. Most of the corpses were too badly burned to be identified and were buried in mass graves.

67 cities in Japan were targeted with firebombing, and some suffered much greater destruction than Tokyo. Millions who survived the bombings were left homeless.

The war against Japan

Through the Spring and Summer in the Pacific the Allies—chiefly the British and Americans, but with help from other Allied countries including offensives launched by the Chinese—pressed in toward the Japanese home islands and did so with renewed vigor following the surrender of Germany. The British pressed through the jungles of Burma; the Americans landed on the islands of the Philippines and the volcanic island of Iwo Jima. The US Marine Corps committed over 100,000 Marines to the latter, an island of eight square miles, and lost almost 7,000 killed and 20,000 wounded. Almost all of the Japanese defenders were wiped out.

Worse yet was the Battle of Okinawa, which lasted from April 1 to mid-June and saw American casualties, both killed and wounded, doubled. These losses were controversial at the time and would only prove more so following the revelation of the atomic bomb.

The two bombs that ended the war are probably the most notorious single thing to come out of 1945, and justifiably so. The figures are murky, owing both to the nature of the bombs, which vaporized their targets instantaneously, and to the political debate surrounding them, which has tempted people to fudge the numbers both upward and downward for decades. But by a conservative estimate, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima instantaneously killed 70,000 people and wounded as many more; the bomb dropped on Nagasaki killed at least 35,000 and wounded almost twice as many. And this is not even to raise the issue of the firestorms started by both bombs, or the much longer-lasting effects of radiation poisoning.

The aftermath

And so the war ended. But the killing did not. The German refugee crisis was ongoing and would continue for years, as “ethnic cleansing” purged the bloodlands of Eastern Europe of unwanted elements, especially ethnic Germans. A million Germans would die in the year after the war ended. Eastern Europe saw widespread ethnic cleansing, including waves of anti-Semitic violence, even before the war had ended, violence to which Soviet authorities turned a blind eye, often allowing it continue for years.

The Soviets were busy, after all; they continued systematic purges both of their own ranks—it was at this time that Soviet authorities netted Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who had served in the East Prussian campaign, for criticizing Stalin in a private letter and sent him to the Gulag—and of any possible resistance to Soviet overlordship of the lands they had “liberated” from the Nazis. They were really fighting two wars—one against the Nazis and one against any local resistance that arose to reclaim control of their countries following the expulsion of the Nazis. In some places, especially remote regions of Yugoslavia and Hungary, the fighting would continue into the 1950s. The last Polish soldier fighting the Soviets would not be killed until 1963.

Ultimately 70-85 million people were killed in the war itself—a number that has been continually revised upward. The majority of these deaths were civilians and the vast majority of those were Chinese and Russian, many of the latter being victims of the Holocaust. Here are some very safe, lowball estimates of the death toll. For the many who apparently like infographics, let me recommend this chart, which also includes some conservative estimates but is carefully designed to convey the proportion of dead from each country pulled into the war. This widely shared video makes a similar point. Averaged out across the six years from 1939 to 1945, 27,000 died per day.

And, in addition to the manmade destruction that peaked in this year, there were typhoons and earthquakes.

Just the beginning

The events of 1945 brought about the end of World War II, to be sure, but history does not consist of discrete episodes that begin and end on precise dates, and, as I hope I’ve made clear in the descriptions above, 1945 not only saw tremendous upheaval and loss of life but set up future conflicts, disasters, and upheavals. The entire endgame of the war created the conditions out of which the Cold War would emerge, including not only the overarching US vs USSR conflict but the many proxy wars in which satellites of the First and Second Worlds would bleed each other for fifty years.

To name just one example, in 1945 a Communist guerrilla leader who had spent years fighting the Japanese occupiers of his country declared the newly liberated French territory of Indochina the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. That leader was Ho Chi Minh.

That will prove relevant to this series in its final installment, tomorrow.

Further reading

The literature on these events is enormous. What follows is a short selection of some of the best books I’ve read or consulted on these topics over the years.

Antony Beevor’s The Fall of Berlin 1945 is a well researched and powerfully presented account of the war in Europe’s climactic months. This book’s account of the fall of Danzig to the Russians depressed me so much that I took a two-week break in the middle of it. For a broad look at the war’s terrible aftermath in Europe read Keith Lowe’s Savage Continent, which first made me aware of the ethnic cleansing and warfare that continued long after the war. Anne Applebaum’s Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe tells the story of Soviet domination of half of Europe beginning during the war. For yet broader Eastern European context, read Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.

For the end of the war against Japan, I recommend Downfall, by Richard B Frank. Though parts of its examination of World War II’s most famous photograph are dated owing to subsequent research, James Bradley’s Flags of Our Fathers is a good popular history of the Battle of Iwo Jima—and the only book that has ever given me nightmares. A good short history of the Battle of Okinawa is that by Marine veteran Robert Leckie.

Good histories of the war that do not neglect the massive losses of life and the scale of human suffering involved include those of Andrew Roberts, Max Hastings, and Antony Beevor. The book I recommend for a comprehensive history of the Nazi camp system, from beginning to liberation, is Nikolaus Wachsmann’s KL.

For grunt’s eye views of some of these events: Siegfried Knappe’s memoir Soldat begins with a long description of the final battle for Berlin. Knappe served as the adjutant to the commander of the city’s defenses, in which capacity he met Hitler several times. His memoir is also valuable for including his years spent in Soviet captivity after the war. The Forgotten Soldier, by French-born German soldier Guy Sajer, describes in nightmarish detail the final stages of the war along the Baltic coast. Novelist George MacDonald Fraser’s memoir Quartered Safe Out Here recounts his experiences in the Burma campaigns of 1945 and deserves to be more widely read among Americans, who are mostly unaware of the British contribution to the defeat of Japan. And the great memoir to come out of the war is EB Sledge’s With the Old Breed, the second half of which offers a harrowing account of the 24/7 nightmare of Okinawa.

I also recommended some books about the fall of Berlin and Hitler’s suicide back in the Spring.

Four years worse than 2020: An Interlude

Monday I began a series on four years worse than 2020. That day I covered 1315, a year of famine and starvation. Yesterday we looked at 1348, the first full year of the bubonic plague epidemic in Europe commonly known as the Black Death. This year struck a little closer to home, albeit with much greater mortality and severer political, economic, and cultural effects. Today I want to take a step back for

An interlude

I had initially planned on including five years in this series, but lowered it to four as what began as one blog post grew longer and longer and longer. But even narrowing “worse years than 2020” to five was difficult at first. Here are six I considered including, both from the ancient and the more recent past, but that I want to at least look at briefly as way of further broadening our perspective.

1177 BC

I decided not to include this one because there’s no set, specific year for the Late Bronze Age Collapse. This is just the year the archaeologist Eric H Cline used as the title of his excellent book 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Invasion, warfare, the widespread and destructive raiding of the mysterious Sea Peoples, and natural disasters drove the civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean—Egypt, Mycenaean Greece, the Hittites, the Canaanites, and others—into total collapse, with a domino effect that took down the Assyrians and Babylonians.

AD 536

I include this date because I had several people independently mention it to me during the earlier parts of the year, when there was more hysteria and less numbness than now. 536, like 1177 BC above, is a bit of a catch-all for a series of events that played out over a decade or so in the 6th century, including a massive volcanic eruption that caused years of climatic disruption with knock-on effects including crop failure and the first major round of bubonic plague in Europe (“Justinian’s plague,” so called). Serious demographic decline, economic stress and collapse, military upheaval, and other problems resulted everywhere from Britain to China. This year was popularized as a “worst ever” by an article in Science a few years ago. You can read that here.

1863

To look at the United States alone:

At the beginning of the year the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, a measure that has been lionized in the mythology of the national civic religion but actually accomplished little and was extremely unpopular, creating further upset in a North still reeling from the losses of defeats like Fredericksburg late in the previous year. Resentment over the draft and the unpopular shift of the war aims toward emancipation led to the New York City draft riots, racially-inflected mob violence that ripped through the city for almost a week. Several hundred were killed and many more beaten, including freedmen living in the city. The threat of violence was so serious that at one point a Gatling gun was even deployed on the roof of the pro-draft New York Times’s offices.

The Confederacy continued to struggle with supply problems and runaway inflation, and the heavy taxation necessary to support the war effort as well as draft laws viewed as tyrannical caused widespread dissatisfaction among ordinary Southerners. Women in overcrowded, underfed Richmond rioted when turned away by the governor of Virginia, who refused to hear their complaints. Numerous similar incidents occurred in other cities across the South.

On the front, Confederate guerrilla William Quantrill carried out his second raid on Lawrenceville, Kansas; several of the largest and most consequential battles of the American Civil War took place including Chancellorsville, the siege of Vicksburg, the battles of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge; and the two bloodiest battles of the war, Gettysburg and Chickamauga. Just the latter two accounted for over 85,000 casualties.

1916

The years of the Spanish Flu took more lives but have been talked about a lot this year, but 1916 was no less awful. World War I looms large as it continued to rage on multiple European fronts and in Africa and the Middle East. The wasteful Gallipoli Campaign ended in failure, the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, a revolt that had as its aim the creation of a unified Arab nation-state and ended in the partition of the Ottoman Empire by the Western powers, began; and the Battles of the Somme and Verdun took place which, between the two of them, killed over 600,000 men and wounded many more; and the Russians launched even bloodier offensives in the east. The Armenian genocide, begun by the Turks the year before, continued, with hundreds of thousands more Armenians killed in concentration camps, forced marches through the Syrian desert or in harsh winter conditions, and thousands of women raped. Natural disasters made the war even worse, as on the alpine Italian front, where avalanches in the Dolomites buried thousands. Elsewhere, the United States became further involved in the Mexican Revolution, committing thousands of troops in futile border raids to catch Pancho Villa, as well as invading the Dominican Republic; and the Easter Rising occurred in Dublin.

1933

In Germany: the seizure of power by Hitler and the Nazi Party; the construction of the first Nazi concentration camps; the establishment of the Gestapo; the arrest and brutalization of Jews and political opponents; and the first moves toward rearmament, war, and the Holocaust.

In the United States: peak unemployment as part of the Great Depression and the first Dust Bowl storms; the beginnings of years of political controversy (for those who are into that kind of thing, especially where it concerns the Supreme Court) as FDR is sworn in.

In the Soviet Union: the completion of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, an infrastructure project using political prisoners that killed over 25,000; and peak starvation as a result of a man-made famine in the Ukraine, a punitive measure undertaken by Stalin the knowledge of which is suppressed with the active collusion of Western journalists. The famine ultimately kills over three million through starvation.

Natural disasters: earthquakes in California, China, and Japan, the latter with a resulting tsunami.

2001

This one really shouldn’t need an explanation. Not for my generation, at least.

Next

Tomorrow and Friday we’ll discuss the remaining two years that I’ve chosen for this project. Both of these years occurred within living memory.

Four years worse than 2020: 1348

Death comes for a peddler in a woodcut by Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497-1543)

Yesterday, heartily sick of complaints that 2020 is the “worst year ever” and hoping to bring a sense of historical perspective to our times, I began a short series on four years that were demonstrably worse than 2020. The first, 1315, was a year of famine and starvation. This, in the following generation, was a year of epidemic—something with which we are all too familiar, albeit on a much smaller scale.

1348

The Plague or Black Death, the second major epidemic of bubonic plague in recorded history, devastated both Europe and Asia. I know the most about the European outbreak, so that’s where I’ll concentrate for this post, but be aware that much of what I’m describing occurred in the Middle East and as far away as China, as well. The world was much more deeply interconnected back then than is often assumed.

Already under way

But the Plague arrived in a Europe that already had problems. Agriculture was still recovering from the famines of the 1310s and 20s and from the economic, demographic, and social disruptions that resulted. Politically there was upheaval in Italy, as usual; the already weakened Byzantine Empire was fighting a civil war; the Reconquista, the Christian reconquest of Spain from the Muslims who had invaded in the 8th century, had recommenced after one of many lulls; the Swedes were at war with Novgorod, the kingdom that would eventually grow into the Russia we know and love; and the Hundred Years’ War between England and France was in its tenth year. Religiously, the Church remained mired in controversy over the Avignon Papacy, a seventy-year period in which a series of popes served—in France, rather than Rome—as yes-men to the French king, weakening the power and moral authority of the office of Bishop of Rome and worsening preexisting political crises.

So why 1348? While, as I mentioned above, the Plague entered Europe through port cities like Messina and Split in the fall of 1347, I choose 1348 because by the summer the Plague had reached much of Western Europe, with cases as far north as England. The effects were already severe. COVID-19 and the Plague are both highly contagious, virulent diseases. But where COVID kills about 1.9% of those it infects (based on my reading of data at the CDC and Johns Hopkins as of today), the Plague had a mortality rate possibly as high as 80%. (In American records from before the availability of antibiotics, the rate was 66%, still catastrophically high.) The Plague eventually killed a third to over half of the population of Europe—an estimated 75,000,000-200,000,000 people in Europe and Asia combined.

What happened

So much for statistics. What happened in Europe in 1348 in concrete terms?

First, the Plague attacked the human body. The bacterium responsible, Yersenia pestis, can infect a human in several ways, most famously through flea bite but also through airborne transmission or touch, resulting in bubonic, pneumonic, or septicemic plague. The three related infections attack the body in different ways. According to medieval historian Morris Bishop:

In the bubonic plague the bacilli in the bloodstream settle in the lymph glands. They act against the walls of the blood vessels, producing hemorrhages, dark patches that eventually cover the entire body, and the tongue turns black. . . . Under the arms and in the groin appear swellings and carbuncles, the buboes that give the plague its correct name. Sufferers from the bubonic form of this disease occasionally survive, but most die within three days. In the septicemic form, the blood is fatally infected. The pneumonic form causes gangrenous inflammation of the throat and lungs, resulting in violent pains in the chest, vomiting and spitting of blood, and a foul smell. Victims of the pneumonic form almost always die; fortunately death comes to them very quickly.

We’ve discussed the mortality above. Now imagine watching the spread of this disease among your region, your parish, you neighbors, and your family, and the winnowing that followed—and how suddenly it began.

The food supply was affected as the Plague struck the peasantry. Theft and other crime, as in the Great Famine, increased. Prices rose. Kings could not marshal armies—the Hundred Years’ War entered a de facto truce. Entire families died. Others abandoned sick family members to their fates. Priests and doctors died while attending to victims. Cities and villages emptied, further spreading the disease to the countryside. Wolves scavenged among the corpses. So many people died that they could not all be given customary burial, and mass graves became common. According to an English chronicler writing in Rochester:

A great mortality . . . destroyed more than a third of the men, women and children. . . . Alas, this mortality devoured such a multitude of both sexes that no one could be found to carry the bodies of the dead to burial, but men and women carried the bodies of their own little ones to church on their shoulders and threw them into mass graves, from which arose such a stink that it was barely possible for anyone to go past a churchyard.

Here’s a contemporary depiction of a mass burial in Belgium. Here’s a modern photo of a partially excavated mass grave in France. Note that in the medieval depiction from Tournai the living have at least been able to build coffins for the dead. Even this luxury would not last. Here’s Boccaccio, in the shockingly vivid introductory passages of the Decameron, describing the effects of the Plague in Florence:

And many would meet their end in the public streets both day and night, and many others, who met their ends in their own houses, would first come to the attention of their neighbors because of the stench of their rotting corpses more than anything else; and with these and others all dying, there were corpses everywhere. And the neighbors always followed a particular routine, more out of fear of being corrupted by the corpse than out of charity for the deceased. These, either by themselves or with the help of others when available, would carry the corpse of the recently deceased from the house and leave it lying in the street outside where, especially in the morning, a countless number of corpses could be seen lying about. Funeral biers would come, and if there was a shortage of funeral biers, some other flat table or something or other would be used to place the corpses on. Nor did it infrequently happen that a single funeral bier would carry two or three people at the same time, but rather one frequently saw on a single bier a husband and a wife, two or three brothers, a father and a son, or some other relatives. And an infinite number of times it happened that two priests bearing a cross would be going to bury someone when three or four other biers, being borne by bearers, would follow behind them; the priests would believe themselves to be heading for a single burial, and would find, when they arrived at the churchyard, that they had six or eight more burials following behind them. Nor were there ever tears or candles or any company honoring the dead; things had reached such a point, that people cared no more for the death of other people than they did for the death of a goat: for this thing, death, which even the wise never accept with patience, even though it occur rarely and relatively unobtrusively, had appeared manifestly to even the smallest intellects, but the catastrophe was so unimaginably great that nobody really cared.

That’s just an excerpt, selected arbitrarily from the horribly detailed descriptions he gives. Read more here.

Fake news

And, then as today, there were conspiracy theories. (Incidentally, the story of “thieves oil” we’ve all heard from the MLM ladies at church is nonsense.) Notoriously, some directed their suspicions toward Europe’s Jews, whom a widespread rumor accused of poisoning wells. Despite a papal bull placing the Jews under the Pope’s protection and arguing vigorously against the illogical rumors, anti-Semitic pogroms broke out and some Jews were lynched or executed on trumped up charges or confessions extracted under torture, as in these accounts from Geneva and Strasbourg.

The consequences

The year 1348 saw the Plague already working destruction to its fullest, and it had not yet run its course. By the end December of 1349 the Plague had reached Scotland, Denmark, Norway, and the heavily populated river valleys of central Germany. By the end of 1350 it had reached al of Scandinavia as well as the Baltic.

In addition to outbreaks of violence against Jews, other popular movements emerged. German penitents known as flagellants took to the roads. According to a French chronicler,

They were men who did public penance and scourged themselves with whips of hard knotted leather with little iron spikes. Some made themselves bleed very badly between the shoulders and some foolish women had cloths ready to catch the blood and smear it on their eyes, saying that it was miraculous blood. While they were doing penance, they sang very mournful songs about the nativity and passion of Our Lord. The object of this penance was to entreat God to put a stop to the mortality.

The flagellants were excommunicated.

With the ranks of every class depleted and the agricultural economy a shambles, authority tottered, and the generations after the Plague saw multiple peasant uprisings. The largest and most famous occurred in France in 1358, ten years after the time we’ve discussed in this post, and in England in 1381—the famed rebellion under Wat Tyler, the participants of which were also fired with the populist religious teachings of John Ball. Both uprisings destroyed and were destroyed in their turn.

Between 30 and 60% of the population died regardless of age, sex, or social status. Everyone lost someone—a reality reflected in the art of the next several generations—and Europe would stagger through these years and the rest of the century, a civilization hobbled by the chunks taken out of its body at every level.

Next

Tomorrow we’ll step back for have a brief interlude in which I talk about a few of the years I thought about including but didn’t.

Further reading

Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century is a classic popular history that covers a thick slice of the 1300s. She includes a vividly written and detailed chapter on the Plague.

You can read more of Boccaccio’s descriptions of the Plague’s devastation of Florence at the link above or here. You can read more of the descriptions of the flagellants and the French peasant revolt from Jean Froissart, a French chronicler famous for his account of the Hundred Years’ War, here and here, respectively.

Yesterday I recommended the Penguin Monarchs volume on Edward II, who was king during the Great Famine. His son, Edward III, reigned for fifty years—from the lean years following the famine to end of the Avignon Papacy—and Jonathan Sumption’s entry in the series, Edward III: A Heroic Failure, is also worth your while, especially to see how the Plague influenced the long reign of a very busy monarch.

The University of Kansas lecture I linked to about the Great Famine yesterday also covers the Plague and includes a useful map of its spread through Europe; you can visit that page here. You can also see an animated .gif of the disease’s spread on Wikipedia here.

Four years worse than 2020: 1315

“You know what I’m craving? A little perspective.” —Anton Ego in Ratatouille

A week or two ago the Babylon Bee published the story “2020 Rated Worst Year Ever, Provided You Never Lived At Any Other Time In History”—a precision strike piece of satire. Not to be outdone, but missing the joke, last week Time published this.

The Worst Year Ever. While I thought perhaps the internet-inflected childishness might just be an attention-grabber, the cover story embraces it. The author of the piece, a film critic, makes a formal acknowledgement that “[t]here have been worse years in U.S. history, and certainly worse years in world history,” such as those of the Spanish Flu, the Depression, or World War II. But from there the writer turns inward, self-ward, implying that, where previous generations were somehow prepared for the Spanish flu or the Depression, we “have had no training wheels for this.”

That metaphor says more than I think the writer intends.

Back in the Spring, when all of this was just getting started, I shared a post on CS Lewis’s essay “On Living in an Atomic Age.” That essay is worth revisiting in its entirety, but let me quote one of its great lines and leave it at that:

“[D]o not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation.”

— CS Lewis, On Living in an Atomic Age

Lewis’s essay was written and delivered to students in the late 1940s, then living with the new and unprecedented fear of atomic warfare. The line above, which comes early in the essay, introduces what I think is the most helpful concept in the essay: perspective.

With that in mind, in September I began to fiddle with a blog post about the many, many years that are demonstrably worse than 2020. That Time piece finally irritated me enough to complete it—not as a single post, but as a short series I’ll be sharing this week. What I hope to accomplish with these posts is what I hope to accomplish anytime I get to talk about history: to offer perspective, to participate in broadening the range of our experiences so that the now, the tyrannical present, cannot dominate us with its fleeting concerns, however serious they may be. “One of the great merits of history is that it takes us out of ourselves,” Christopher Dawson once wrote. A vaccine against the hysteria of the present, if you like.

2020 has not been a good year. But there have been worse years—much, much worse years, unimaginably worse years—and it is not hard for a history teacher to think of a few. Here are four—two from the more distant past and, since it became abundantly clear this year that many do not care about anything that happened before the present, two from within living memory.

1315

The obvious choice for a bad year in the 14th century is some date in the late 1340s because of the Plague. Granted—and we’ll take a look at that shortly. But I’m starting with 1315, as it was not only a bad year in its own right but began a century of calamity.

How it happened

Contrary to “Dark Ages” myths, the early Middle Ages was a time of flourishing and growth. Thanks in part to the Medieval Warm Period, which lasted from the 10th to the 13th century, growing seasons lengthened, crop yields increased, and the population of Europe exploded. That changed in the 14th century. After the Medieval Warm Period ended in the mid-1200s the summers slowly shortened and average temperatures slowly, slowly fell, eventually to bottom out in the “Little Ice Age.” 1315 is the year western Europe felt the first serious effects.

What happened

First, it began to rain. It rained and rained and barely stopped—for two years. Flooding became a continent-wide problem, especially in many already marshy coastal areas, and many coastal settlements, including well-established and prosperous towns, were partially or totally abandoned.

Most seriously for a world built entirely on farming and the stewardship and control of farmland, agriculture became nearly impossible. There was too much rain and therefore not enough sunlight, the temperatures were too cool, and even those crops that could be planted failed, either not germinating or rotting on the stalk. In other places the rains reduced fields to mud or washed the topsoil away. Other broad, flat regions of ploughland in northern France or England became lakes. Hay could not be kept dry and so livestock starved for lack of fodder or succumbed to disease.

The lack of food caused prices to rise exponentially and the vast peasant population of Europe was reduced to scavenging for wild plants, eating their livestock—even draught animals like horses. Perhaps as much as 80% of livestock died of disease or were eaten during the famine. Some ate dogs, pigeons, or bird droppings. The most desperate ate their seed grain, the grain set aside for the next year’s planting, thus only postponing starvation. Others, it was darkly rumored in many places, resorted to cannibalism.

According to one English chronicler:

Four pennies worth of coarse bread was not enough to feed a common man for one day. The usual kinds of meat, suitable for eating, were too scarce; horse meat was precious; plump dogs were stolen. And, according to many reports, men and women in many places secretly ate their own children.

Armies could not march or fight because the ground was so swampy, and the king of England, perhaps the wealthiest kingdom in northwestern Europe in these centuries, could not find food during some of his progresses through the country. Grain proved so scarce in his kingdom that even brewing beer was prohibited. The peasantry, unable to survive in the villages and on the manors to which they were bound, sometimes abandoned their ancestral homes to live wild or to roam in search of work and food. As the chronicler quoted above noted: “There can be no doubt that the poor wasted away when even the rich were constantly hungry.”

And, as I mentioned earlier, 1315 was just the beginning. The rains continued through 1316 and into 1317 before the weather returned to its more accustomed patterns.

The consequences

But the damage had been done. Widespread starvation led to a breakdown of social order, with sharp rises not only in prices (for those mostly concerned economic effects) but in crime and violence, food riots, and even the prevalence of conspiracy theories—rumors that so-and-so in the village, often the miller, had a secret stash of grain, sometimes leading to lynching and disappointment when the stash was not found—and, of course, most fundamentally, a massive loss of life. According to historian Christopher Given-Wilson, in his short biography of England’s king at the time, Edward II:

Around 10 per cent of the population starved to death, not just in England but in much of northern Europe, a terrible human tragedy compounded by war and social unrest. Flocks of sheep were decimated, and wool exports, the basis of England’s customs revenue, fell by 40 per cent between 1313 and 1316.

Even those that got enough to eat to survive remained more susceptible, owing to the wet weather and their dramatically diminished nutrition, to disease. The population growth typical of the Medieval Warm Period was not only ended but reversed, with huge numbers dying as a result of the famine. The consequences were not limited to the time of the famine itself, though, as it took years for European agriculture to recover, with many localized famines in the coming decades.

And, finally, the Great Famine of 1315-17 left Europe—its economy, its political and social institutions, and most of all its people—weakened ahead of the arrival of the Plague.

We’ll talk about that tomorrow.

Further reading

The book I quote on the effects of the famine on England is, Edward II: The Terrors of Kingship, by Christopher Given-Wilson, part of the excellent Penguin Monarchs series. While this book’s treatment of the Great Famine is brief, it will give you a view of the broader context of the famine, especially the difficult and complicated political situation of the time and how Edward in particular, already a weak king, struggled with the aftereffects. You can read the transcript of a short lecture on the famine by Lynn H Nelson of the University of Kansas here. Note that he links the famine directly to the later Plague. Medievalists.net’s listicle “10 Things to Know About the Great Famine” is a handy introduction to the events of 1315-22. Finally, you can read a lengthier excerpt of English chronicler Johannes de Trokelowe’s eyewitness description of the famine here.

When authors throw shade at each other

Novelists Ursula K Le Guin (1929-2018) and Elmore Leonard (1925-2013)

Last month I read the sci-fi novelist Ursula Le Guin’s book Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story. It’s a brisk, delightful book of practical writing advice for those who already have some experience and are dedicated to refining the mechanics, the nuts and bolts, of their writing—hence her emphasis on craft. It was very good.

A small thing that caught my eye, especially coming in “An opinion piece on paragraphing” at the tail end of a chapter on sentence length and syntax:

“Rules” about keeping paragraphs and sentences short often come from the kind of writer who boasts, “If I write a sentence that sounds literary, I throw it out,” but who writes his mysteries or thrillers in the stripped-down, tight-lipped, macho style—a self-consciously literary mannerism if there ever was one.

This is an obvious dig at Elmore Leonard, an author of westerns and crime thrillers. I happen to be a fan.

In a famous 2001 piece in the New York Times titled “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points, and Especially Hooptedoodle,” Leonard published his rules for writing. There are ten. His rules include things like “Avoid prologues,” “Never use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry dialogue,” “Avoid detailed descriptions of characters,” and “Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly,” and at the end of his ten rules, Leonard includes another “that sums up the 10”:

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

LeGuin apparently interprets this as pretension, a phony posture of unmannered prose—as if Leonard is claiming to pick his sentences off a tree somewhere and do nothing to them. But it’s clear from the piece itself—and from the rule itself!—that Leonard too is talking about craft, about the rules he sets himself “to remain invisible” and how many tries it may take to achieve the desired effect. It takes conscious effort, something Leonard himself, who was unfussy about his craft and refused to make it mysterious in the manner of some writers (usually hacks), freely admitted. From an interview with Charlie Rose about the rules (and his short story collection When the Women Come Out to Dance):

Rose: A lot of people say that great writers never let their technique show. Does your technique show?

Leonard: Well, I say that my style is the absence of style. And yet, it is obvious, because people say they can tell by reading a passage that I wrote it. I mean when they read one of my books they know it’s my book and not someone else’s book.

Rose: Is that good?

Leonard: Sure. I think it’s good.

Rose: Because it has a certain… style, a certain zing.

Leonard: Because it has a certain sound. Whether it’s a zing or… I think of style as sound.

Leonard goes on to describe how a writer’s sound originates in his attitude, which brings to mind LeGuin’s accusation that Leonard writes in a “macho style,” something I’ve seen repeated elsewhere. I’ve read a bunch of Leonard’s novels now and honestly can’t say where this comes from. My sense of his narration is that it is terse, detached, and matter-of-fact; masculine perhaps, if we’re going to have this argument about omniscient third person narration, but by no means the bro-ish tough guy grunting that LeGuin implies.

(And for what it’s worth, Leonard has written a lot of compelling female characters. Read Out of Sight and Rum Punch for two of them. Both were adapted into films with strong female leads.)

A final thing about Leonard’s rules, and something I’ve noted here before, is that everywhere Leonard wrote or talked about his rules he made it clear that they were his rules. They were not for everybody. In the opening paragraph of the New York Times piece he writes that

If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.

This is a pretty weak and genial “boast,” especially considering the number of counterexamples—Tom Wolfe, Jim Harrison, Margaret Atwood, and others—he offers in the same piece, often immediately following one of his own rules. One of the things I’ve enjoyed about listening to Leonard in interviews is his straightforwardness about his work and his self-effacing attitude about it. I think that bespeaks a humility about his craft that comes through in that most difficult piece of advice to give—What works for me works for me and might not for you. Do what works.

So is LeGuin’s criticism fair? No. It’s strikingly uncharitable. But it got me to revisit a favorite writer and really pore over his advice, and made me appreciate it more—which also made me appreciate her book more. Because even with this short, one-paragraph jab LeGuin offers much of the kind of advice I think Leonard would have appreciated, too, and much of it comes down to that difficult piece of advice above.

More if you’re interested

Steering the Craft was very good. You can find it on Amazon here. The New York Times sometimes paywalls Leonard’s original piece; you can also find almost all of it here—with a delightful illustration of the opening scene of Freaky Deaky—or the rules themselves at the Guardian here. You can also buy the article as a lavishly illustrated hardback gift book. By all means read the older blog post I linked to above, in which I compare Leonard’s rules with those of George Orwell and CS Lewis and find some helpful commonalities. And I highly recommend watching Leonard talk through his rules in some detail here.

The Odyssey VIII-IX on Core Curriculum

Odysseus and Polyphemus, by Arnold Böcklin (1898)

The Core Curriculum Podcast’s odyssey through Homer continues! This morning the fourth episode of the season dropped, in which David Grubbs and I discuss books VIII and IX of the Odyssey.

These are two of the most well-known parts of Odysseus’s story, relating the feast and games held in Odysseus’s honor by his host Alcinous, who finally prompts the mysterious stranger—who may or may not be a god in disguise—to tell his story. This gives us the beginning of Odysseus’s story of woe and perhaps the most famous incident in the book, his story of his encounter with and narrow escape from the cyclops Polyphemus. Along the way David and I talk more about the poem’s rich theme of hospitality as well as a possible cameo by Homer himself, the (mostly) bloodless and (totally) sacred aristeia of athletic competition, and whether or not Odysseus is a bad guest.

Had a great time hosting this conversation with David and talking about one of the great works of the Western canon. I hope y’all will enjoy listening as much as we did recording.

You can listen to Core Curriculum by subscribing on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms. You can look at this episode’s excellent shownotes on the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s site here. Subscribe to the show—and the other shows on the CHRN—so you can catch up on previous episodes of Core Curriculum and won’t miss future episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Andrew Roberts on how to write history

History, a mosaic in the Library of Congress by Frederick Dielman

National Review recently published an excellent short piece by British historian Andrew Roberts entitled “How to Write History.” Roberts—an accomplished military historian who has written studies of Waterloo and the Second World War and, most recently, big fat biographies of Napoleon and Churchill—offers a surprisingly simple reminder of what makes good historical writing:

When our forefathers sat around the fire in their caves telling stories about the famous mastodon hunts of yesteryear, they found it easy to do, because their listeners always wanted to know the answer to the eternal question “What happened next?” When the veterans of the Trojan War enthralled their grandchildren, and the Vikings told their sagas of long-ago raids, they knew they had their audiences riveted because they could tell them the next stage of the story. Nobody ever asked them to tell the tale thematically or in modules or in a postmodernist format; they just wanted to know what happened next.

He goes on to write about mankind’s innate sense of story and chronology. At the beginning of every semester, when I explain to my students how I approach history and how I will present it, I point out that if I asked them “How did you get to class this morning?” they would almost certainly tell me a story—they could craft it instantly, in fact, without thinking about it. Telling stories comes naturally to us (one of the many ways in which we are subcreators) both as explanation and entertainment. Ideally as both.

But Roberts notes one other serious advantage to narrative history:

The chronological approach also has the great advantage over other ways of writing history in that it is true (something the postmodernists ignore, since they despise the concept of truth in history per se).

We explain ourselves chronologically because that is how we experience our lives and literally everything else.

The inside of history

Roberts goes on to address something I care very, very deeply about: “To try to immerse oneself in the mindset of the long-dead is easily the hardest part of the historian’s craft, and the most treacherous. The further one goes back in history, the harder it is.” I’ve written about this before here, here, here, and here, for starters.

Alas, Roberts gives one good example, and then missteps into stereotype:

Reach back much earlier than the Western Enlightenment and one must be good at theology, because educated people spent what is to us an inordinate amount of time thinking about God and how He should best be worshiped. Go back much further than the Renaissance, and people spent a good deal of their time simply being scared. Recall the very earliest moments of COVID-19 a year ago, when we didn’t know how lethal it was but a lot of people were starting to die. That was what it was like living in the Dark Ages all the time, only with a good deal less information.

This is hardly giving the medievals their due; anyone even casually acquainted with the literature—of any variety—of medieval people can’t help but think of the exuberance, the piety, the joy with which they embraced life. Even their horror or mourning, as in the accounts of the plague in the 14th century, have a gusto to them that stands in marked contrast to our own time. Modern people have proven a good deal gloomier, even with all their information. Food for thought.

But Roberts’s overall point stands. I strive every semester to get my students inside the departed people we study, “to immerse [them] in the mindset” of our subjects. Every semester I see some successes but also conclude discouraged. As it happens, the very last item I graded today was a paper heavily salted with social justice platitudes, that roundly condemned members of several long-gone societies for their racial prejudices and inequality, and that overlooked the manifest evidence to the contrary. So Roberts’s essay, and this point particularly, struck me especially hard. Roberts:

Trying to impose our mindset—let alone our values—upon the past is self-evidently ludicrous, however often it is tried and however well intentioned. There is no such thing, for example, as “the right side of history.” We might want people in the past to be more like us, but they resolutely refuse to be, and we must respect their right to be different.

To understand the dead is difficult work, but worthwhile. The work must continue. And in the meantime, I may save that paragraph to copy and paste into student feedback in the future.

Words, words, words

Roberts also indulges in one of my favorite pastimes—hating on specific words:

Any book with too great a reliance on the words “perhaps,” “maybe,” “possibly,” or—the worst—“probably” is usually one to approach with caution. When the great Oxford historian Martin Gilbert saw the word “probably” in a history essay, he would circle it in red and write in the margin “Probably not?”

Similarly, never, ever use the word “inevitable,” because nothing is inevitable in history. (Except, as my Cambridge professor Norman Stone used to say, for German military counter-attack.) Marxists and other determinists will disagree, but unless you are one of them, beware the word as profoundly philosophically unsound.

This is fun to read but also excellent advice. Watch out for probably and bayonet every inevitable you come across.

Conclusion

Roberts touches on several other big topics—conspiracy theories, tendentious monocausal explanations of history like the 1619 Project, and woke or intersectional history and its popularity in the academy—before bringing his essay back to its starting point: Answer the question What happened next? and you’ll be on your way to good history.

None of which, I should add, is to suggest that analysis or the deep dive into the archives, German-style, is irrelevant. Roberts is no stranger to the archive, having dug up previously unknown or unpublished sources for his history of the Second World War and having read every single one of Napoleon’s 33,000 letters for his biography of the man. But all of that was in the service of chronology, of keeping the pages turning and the reader asking that question.

To keep readers or students interested, to make your history true, it should be a story.

Addenda

You can read the entirety of Roberts’s essay, which appears in the December 17 print edition of National Review, at NRO here.

A few months ago I quoted a longish excerpt from Land of Hope, a one-volume narrative history of the United States by Wilfred McClay. (I am, in fact, still reading it, the Gilded Age having had its usual effect on me by killing my interest for a few months.) McClay makes similar and, as the introduction to a book rather than an essay, deeper arguments in the same vein. You can read that excerpt and my glosses on it here.

Ancient Racist Aliens on the Sectarian Review

Last month I posted some thoughts on the implicit, and sometimes not so implicit, racism of the assumptions behind ancient astronaut theories of the kind peddled by authors Erich von Däniken and Zechariah Sitchin and, most recently and popularly, by the History Channel via the series “Ancient Aliens.” That post got a lot of traffic, including my friend Danny Anderson of the Sectarian Review podcast. Danny read and enjoyed it and suggested we discuss the post itself and the broader implications—and dangers—of ancient astronauts theories.

That episode dropped today. Joining us is David Grubbs of the Christian Humanist Podcast, whom you might remember from our discussion of CS Lewis’s Space Trilogy on City of Man earlier this year.

Between the three of us we have enough interest in the “weird and old” to sustain a spirited and fun discussion of ancient astronauts, racism old and new, the mystery of existence, and good old fashioned chronological snobbery. I had a great time and hope y’all will enjoy this as much as we did.

The Sectarian Review is a show on the Christian Humanist Radio Network. You can listen to the episode via iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms, or via the MixCloud player embedded below. Be sure to subscribe for future episodes, and dig through Danny’s extensive back catalog. You can read the blog post that inspired our episode here or at the link in the first paragraph above. Take a look at Danny’s shownotes for the episode here. And be sure to visit the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s site and Facebook page for more.

Thanks for listening. Hope y’all enjoy!