The Good Old Days

And The Uses Of History

This painting by Thomas Kincade exemplifies a widespread and common nostalgia for the “good old days” when everything was warm and safe and nice and cozy, bathed in soft and soothing light. This nostalgic image is completely false. It's not that the past was inferior to the present in every way. Like many if not most history buffs, I have my own favorite little corners or aspects of the past that I wish could be revived in the modern world. But an across-the-board nostalgia for the ways things used to be is by definition a nostalgia for racial segregation, for a time when women weren't even allowed to vote, for colonial conquest and maybe even worse things like slavery and genocide.

It's not that “those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The past will repeat itself, because (as Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius warned us many centuries ago) human follies remain the same over time. But the study of history is a tool, and we can use that tool in more than one way. We can use it to lie to ourselves and romanticize some imaginary idealized past- and by doing so, we'll help create an awful present. Or we can use it to try to understand what really happened, as complex and multifaceted as it might be. And when we try to do that, we often find that just being exposed to history gives us a different perspective on the present- a perspective in which we fully understand that evil must be resisted, no matter how ancient and no matter how respected.

 

 

 

Saving the World’s Languages – Insubstantial Artifacts of History

 

Estimates place the number of languages that exist in the world today at approximately 7000.  This is a number that steadily declines over time as the world becomes more globalized and small native populations abandon their roots or die out.  Around half of the languages that still exist are considered threatened and will, if left unchecked, most likely disappear in the near future.

Linguists are looking to counter this trend and preserve this linguistic heritage before it is too late.  This could be seen as a process similar to the way archaeologists might preserve an artifact or a site.  Though no one may again speak a given language, at least the record of it will remain.  Projects to protect these dying languages have been going on for years, though new technologies are making the process much easier.

One such manifestation of technology is that of social media.  Applications are being developed which teach or translate some of the more obscure languages.  This also enables the members of what are sometimes very widespread linguistic communities to communicate in their native tongues, thus keeping the language alive.

This process is an important part of recording historical knowledge to be passed down through the generations.  Different cultures have different world-views and different tales to tell, but much of what can be translated can not be fully understood without knowledge of how the language genuinely works.

Luckily, there are a great many researchers devoted to this cause, wandering into the most obscure places to retrieve nearly-lost languages and preserve them for the future.  Technology may even help to keep some of these from dying out, encourage native speakers to spread the heritage of their language to others across the world.

The Bloody White Baron

Ungern Von Sternberg

The Baron Ungern Von Sternberg is a legendary evil madman, the “Bloody White Baron” or “Mad Baron of Mongolia.” He was a warlord of the White Russians during the Russian Civil War, but his army was largely composed of Buriat Mongols from Siberia, among whom he was regarded as the avatar of an obscure Tibetan/Mongolian war god.

The Mad Baron considered himself to be a Buddhist, but his interpretation of Buddhism would shock and horrify most people. He believed himself capable of freeing people from their bad karma by having them tortured and executed in vast numbers, particularly communists and Jews but also any random people he happened to stumble upon. The Baron was a monarchist on a grand scale. He wanted to restore not only the Czarist empire in Russia, but also the Qing empire of China and the Mongolian khanate.

 

In pursuit of the last goal he moved his army into Outer Mongolia and drove out the Chinese, restoring the Bogd Khan to power for a time. Unlike the khans of the medieval Genghisids, the Bogd Khans were religious rather than temporal rulers. The Bogd Khan was a Tibetan lama, essentially the Mongolian equivalent of the Dalai Lama. Like the Mad Baron himself, the Bogd Khan was a sadist, and he used his newfound power to help the Baron with his mad schemes.

 

The communists weren't about to put up with an independent Mongolia ruled by a White Russian warlord and his allies, so they invaded and killed the Baron, and overthrew the Bogd Khan. That's how Mongolia became a communist country as part of the Soviet bloc.

 

 

 

Sardinian Iron Age Soldiers Rising from the Dead

On the Italian island of Sardinia lie the remains of the ancient Sardinian culture.  Though they existed as a major power from the 16th to the late 6th century BCE, their history is relatively unknown today.  The big news in Sardinia concerns the progress of 8 years of work in restoring the remains of a small army of stone warriors that date back more than 2,700 years.  These stone monuments met their end at the hand of Carthaginian invaders who smashed them after conquering Sardinia, no doubt in an effort to remove the influence of Sardinian cultural practices.

Though the site of these stone puzzles was discovered in the 1970s, it was not excavated until nearly 10 years later.  At this point, the found stone remains were packed away to a museum.  It was not until 2004 that a serious effort was begun to restore the stone warriors to their former glory.

For 8 years, archaeologists and others have been working tirelessly to reassemble the statues.  The damage was extensive, reducing the 33 stone figures to thousands and thousands of separate parts.  These statues represent the archers, swordsmen and shield-bearers of the Sardinian army.  Currently, workers have been successful in restoring most of 25 of the warriors.  They hope to be able to put the reassembled army on display at the nearby Cagliari Museum come this summer.

Perhaps not as impressive as the terracotta army discovered at the tomb of the Chinese Emperor Qin, these statues have their own uniqueness in that they are more than 500 years older than their counterparts and crafted of stone as opposed to pottery.  It is believed that the soldiers were placed on the graves of celebrated Sardinian warriors either as representations of those warriors or to act as guardians to the dead.

It is always a shame when history is subjected to such violence.  We can only imagine at some of the things which are lost to time because of people’s urges to replace one culture with their own in the name of conquest and subjugation.  Unfortunately, these sorts of crimes are still going on today in many areas of the world.  How much more history will be lost before people learn to hold onto the past for all the lessons that it can teach?

Jacobites

Past and Present

If you think this is a picture of the King of England, then you must be a Jacobite!

The Jacobites were once a powerful political movement, dedicated to restoring the Stuart Dynasty to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland. The Stuarts had never been very good kings in the first place- their reigns tended to be marked by a unique combination of incompetence, tyranny and sheer bad luck- but they did have one advantage. Because they were descended from the ancient Gaelic royal house of Scotland (as well as a lot of other non-Gaelic royal houses), they had a certain appeal to the Gaelic clans of the Scottish Highlands. Those exact same clans had never shown any inclination to do what the Stuarts told them when they were actually in power, and the Stuarts for their part had always shown a pronounced dislike for their Gaelic subjects. But many of the clansmen sincerely believed that no one had the right to overthrow their lawful and ancient royal house, even if no one was really obligated to let it govern anything either.

 

The Stuarts managed to play into this abstract loyalty by repositioning themselves as protectors and defenders of the Gaelic way of life, which was a very compelling argument for a threatened culture like that of the Gaels. Many of the Highlanders managed to convince themselves that if the Stuarts regained the throne they would behave differently than any Stuart who had actually held the throne, and would restore the autonomy of their warrior society against the increasing threat of Anglicization and centralized government. Thus, the Highland loyalty to the Stuarts during the Civil War of the 1640s, and the Jacobite rebellions of 1688, 1715, 1719 and 1745.

 

Most people think the Jacobite cause was lost forever at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, or at least with the death of the last Stuart “pretender” (or person claiming to be the king) a few decades later. But there are diehards, and then there are diehards. Members of the “Royal Stuart Society” are modern Jacobites, who support monarchical government, oppose democracy, and consider the man in the picture above to be the legitimate heir to the British throne. This man is actually Franz, the Duke of Bavaria, but for complicated genealogical reasons he is believed by Jacobites to have inherited the Stuarts' claim. Why anyone would devote any mental effort to wishing that a Bavarian Duke held one powerless symbolic position instead of another is quite beyond me, but you have to admire their stick-to-it-iveness!

 

 

China Losing Its Past?

One more nail in the coffin of history, China’s lack of concern for their heritage sites has ended in the destruction and disappearance of thousands of them.  Of the 765,000+ registered sites, around 44,000 have been destroyed in the last 20 years and another 25% of those that remain are falling apart.  The question comes to mind as to how and why so many important pieces of the past could be neglected so thoroughly as to leave them in complete devastation.

The big villain in this story is, as always, economic expansion.  Construction of new projects has resulted in the demolition of several sites, despite the fact that there special groups assigned to protect them.  These groups have been incredibly ineffective at performing their jobs when facing down the onslaught of progress.  What’s worse is that many of these sites appear to have been destroyed without any rational explanation at all.  Also, there is a rash of lootings which further compromises them.  The new breed of looter is not your typical treasure hunter either, but is usually involved in organized groups who cater to dealers and 

collectors of artifacts worldwide.

The Chinese government has voiced a desire to preserve the cultural heritage of the country, though in practice this doesn’t seem to be working out too well.  Trying to guard hundreds-of-thousands of sites is an expensive and almost impractical task.  No matter how many people are assigned to protect them, there will always be those who ignore their duties or, worse yet, take bribes to look the other way while the sites are pillaged.

So many destroyed sites are bringing to light the debate between the importance of preserving the past and the need to think about the future.  One thing is for sure – if China does not find a solution to this problem, they can expect to lose a great deal more of these sites, and their historical heritage, with each passing year.

Color Photos from the Depression Era

A new perspective.

Today, we feel a disconnection from our not-too-distant past perhaps because of the color of the photographs. We have changed our viewing lens from black-and-white to color, and sometimes, when we look at black-and-white photos from the 1930’s and ‘40’s, it’s easy to think of them as historical, something dead and something gone. Perhaps that’s what’s so jarring about the Denver Post’s online gallery Captured: American in Color from 1939-1943. The photographs were some of the only color photographs taken during the Great Depression.

The color photographs were originally shot by the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information to demonstrate the effects of the Depression on rural and small town populations. The photographs now belong to the Library of Congress, and were displayed for the public in a 2006 exhibit called Bound for Glory: American in Color.

The photographs are fantastic. They show a number of different populations: poor, migrant workers in their jean overalls and shift dresses, female workers at plants during World War II, poor blacks in urban and rural areas, and soldiers in their uniforms and planes. Although we’ve seen many colorized images, these are particularly striking since they were shot originally in color. There’s no guessing about the colors that the images in the photos were.

Some of the most striking photographs feature their subjects staring into the camera. The first photograph in the series features a couple named Faro and Doris Caudill from Pie Hill, New Mexico staring into the lens, arms crossed, with a sky storming behind them. The photo was taken in 1940. Another shot from Pie Hill features a family of seven sitting in their home, which seems to have been constructed from cardboard and plywood.

Particularly intriguing are the series of photos taken in Washington, D.C., mostly because of their contrast with the other mostly-rural snapshots. One photo features a bunch of young children bundled up in coats using pieces of as toy guns. Another photograph shows a little white girl in a red dress sitting on the stoop of a grocery store as a little black boy and his mother look on it her. The obvious separation between the races—the little girl sits with her head hung and the little boy’s mother pulls him from her—is particularly poignant.

What photographs are your favorites? Do you feel more connected to these photos than other historical depictions?

The Haitian Revolution

What Went Wrong?

The Haitian Revolution is the only successful slave revolt in human history- the only one. Yet Haiti today is a country with crushing problems at every level of society, from the rape gangs that terrorize its women to the fact that many of its people are literally eating dirt cookies in order to survive. So what went wrong? How could one of the most hopeful events in all of human history go so tragically astray?

The answer is not some mythical pact with Satan as Pat Robertson would have you believe- unless the Satanic force in question is the world power and financial system, which was just as corrupt in the nineteenth century as it is today.

 

The French colonial system was based on creating and maintaining harsh distinctions of class and race. Your position in the social order was based primarily on your percentage of white blood, so that Haitian people were turned against each other by a race-based class structure. The Haitian Revolution drove out the French and ended slavery, but it failed to abolish these class divisions. The vast majority of Haitian people went from being slaves before the Revolution to being serfs after it.

 

Even then, Haitian society may have been able to address this issue through a series of reforms over time, but Haiti was an international outcast after the Revolution. Without any ability to engage in trade with other nations, its economy was ruined. The only way the new leaders of Haiti were able to restore relations with the international community was by agreeing to “compensate” the former plantation owners. This boggles the mind, but instead of being held accountable for their crimes against humanity, the plantation owners had to be paid back for their losses on a massive scale, leaving Haiti in an economic shambles from which it never recovered.

 

So there you have it. Haiti never got the chance to make a fresh start because its revolution was incomplete. The external name of slavery was removed, but the internal reality of it largely continued, producing a society twisted by social divisions, injustice and lack of opportunity. The Haitian people are still suffering for it even today.

 

Stepping into the Uncomfortable Past

While perusing the archaeological news recently, I came across an article which was talking about five students in Estonia who decided that they were going to attempt to live like people did in the Iron Age for five days.  While five days may not seem like a long time, when you think about what has to be given up, you might believe otherwise.  No electricity, no flushing toilets, no laundry, no washing machines or microwaves and no comfy chairs.  More importantly, however, is the fact that this experiment is a unique way to gain perspective on a time in history that is very different from our own.

The students built a wooden hut on the site of an old Iron Age settlement to live in.  They dressed in wool and felt clothing, slept on a pile of hay, sheepskin and cloth, gathered their water from the melting snow and dealt with the horror that is fire-generated indoor heating without the benefit of a chimney.  All this while in the middle of winter in a very cold place.

It is innovators like this that are going to benefit the world with their attempts to 

understand the past.  They were willing to put themselves into the middle of things to get a real taste of what it might have been like to exist in the Iron Age.  It is hard to determine the complete truth of a matter without actually experiencing it.  All the study in the world won’t reveal the true discomfort that comes along with living without the luxuries of the modern world.

So what were the students’ conclusions from this experiment?   That the Iron Age was a cold, dark and smoky place.

Kudos to these young seekers of truth in their quest to enlighten themselves and the world a bit more to the realities of a distant past.

Prehistoric Social Networking: Turns Out It May Not Be A "21-Century Thing" After All

Researchers have discovered that the same features of social networking today existed over 100,000 years ago.

The Pleistocene was a kind of “first Imperialism” for the human race. We emerged from the continent of Africa like an 18th century European power, spreading across the globe and growing exponentially in numbers. Evolutionary biologists predict that, in order fo those kinds of numbers, it would be necessary for cooperation and socialization to take place between the various groups of people, rather than just within their own communities. It was this theory that lead a group of researchers to look at our ancient ancestors inter-social behavior, or for a more 21st century-sounding term: social networking.

As reported by Ars Technica, the findings published in Nature last week, showed that these stone-aged ancestors may not have been entirely different in the way that they networked social groups together. Kate Shaw of Ars Technica writes:

“Modern human social networks share several features…the number of social ties a person has, the probability that two of a person’s friends are also friends, and the inclination for similar people to be connected.”

These common features seem to be ubiquitous throughout all human societies, and across ages. The presumption that our penchant for interconnectedness is somehow a modern trait, or a product of the Internet Age, is false. Instead, the internet has allowed a vastly greater degree of the kind of networking that, according to the researchers, has existed since we first started coming together in communities.

In order to test this hypothesis, the researchers visited 17 Hadza camps in Tanzania, surveying 205 adults. The Hadza are a very isolated group hunter-gatherers, and live very much like humanity would have 130,000 years ago. They organize themselves in camps which are routinely abandoned and reinhabited. In addition to this constant movement, individuals will also move between camps, leaving one group and joining another. In this way, Hadza resemble modern industrialized communities. They tend to react more warmly to individuals that live closer to them, and those Hadza that name more friends are more likely to be named by other Hazda, even those that don’t consider themselves friends. Also, Hadza find friendship within circles that share similar traits, such as age, body fat, and handgrip strength.

One last characteristic that is noteworthy is the group’s study of the sharing or donating of “honeysticks”, a sweet treat to the Hadza. Those that were more likely to donate honeysticks tended to be friends with others that were similarly charitable and cooperative. Likewise, non-cooperators tended to be connected to one another.

Social-networking, it can be said, has existed since societies have, and it seems that those features that have held true in our modern society, may not be so modern afterall.

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