Urbana.org All Things New Blog - history

Botched Revolutions

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 02:01:00 -0600

I’ve been boning up on my revolutionary history lately with a great account of the wildest European year of the nineteenth century: 1848.

There were attempted revolutions nearly everywhere in Europe, from France to Romania. It was the year of the Communist Manifesto. It was the most important year in the abolition of serfdom.
And yet, most of the revolutions failed, with for the most part, after a “Springtime of Peoples” and riotous summers, the monarchs holding on to power and ultimately prevailing.

Author Peter Rapport does a really good job of holding the myriad simultaneous uprisings together in one unified narration. At first glance, the Parisian events have nothing to do with the Prussian war in Denmark, or the Neopolitan supression of Sicilian organized crime, or the Romanian peasant revolt against Hungarian landlords. But Rapport pulls it off.

Structuring the story in seasons—the Red Summer, the Counter-Revolutionary Autumn, etc.—Rapport can dart between hotspots in such a way that he can show commonalities across the continent, while returning to the same subplots and characters lets him go deeper in the particular places. It works.

Rapport expresses sadness that democracy by and large failed in 1848, a victim of popular (and justified) fears the revolutions would go too far (meaning Communist). Because although most of 1848’s revolutionaries were aware of simultaneous events around Europe, they were in the first instance local affairs. The common engine of revolution was consciousness-raising of local identities against distant and absolute rulers, with the exception of France—where a republic was replaced with a dictatorship.

It was this local consciousness, the Springtime of Peoples, that was certainly the most ominous development, as the communists at this point were bumbling idiots. But human flourishing was envisioned in ethnic terms, and the bloody wars and genocides of Europe’s awful 20th century are present here. Rapport never lets the spectre of genocide slip from view.

Rurbanism in Asia

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:05:00 -0600

I’ve just attended a series of terribly fascinating lectures on the geography of the Indian Ocean world—the area from the Zambezi River on north, through Swahili, Arab and Persian lands, to India and Southeast Asia.

Building off a terrific paper he wrote on the topic, professor André Wink was trying to correct two main errors in Western understanding of Asia:

That stable landscapes are needed for stable societies; and
That cities are the engines of civilization.

Especially when compared with the Mediterranean world, the Indian Ocean area has an incredibly unstable landscape. Catastrophic floods and Earthquakes, along with shifting rivers make for a very small number of permanently inhabited cities; the exception, perhaps, Varanasi.

Up until modern times, cities rarely lasted many centuries: Calicut, Malacca, Angkor: these are, for the most part, insignificant places today, and largely because of natural disasters.

Second point, related to the first: Cities have never looked, to visitors from Europe at least, like “cities”, until the 20th Century, that is. There was no real boundary between city and country; houses were made of perishable materials, and even the densest populated areas retained a degree of agriculture in the middle of all the hubbub. It makes more sense to speak of densely settled villages for most of Indian history. Hence the neologism “rurban”.

What this means, then, is that few cities are “eternal” like Rome. India is a massive graveyard of cities, and yet: Indian Civilization is unbroken from ancient times. What this means is that we have to drop our western prejudice toward cities as engines of civilization: Indian civilization wasn’t reliant on cities.

Wink proposes an alternate lens to replace the two he’s just done away with: the interplay between settlement and mobility. On two fronts—in sea-travel, and in nomadic grasslands and deserts—the collision between peasant societies and mobile societies provides the greatest impetus for change in this part of the world.

Passions that leave societies in ruin

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 02:01:00 -0600

In a terrific first lecture in a class I’m taking on the history of modern European religious thought, my professor gave us two contrasting quotes. We're looking at Political Theology, and William Cavanaugh and Peter Scott write, in the introduction to their Blackwell Companion to Political Theology:

Political Theology is the analysis and criticism of political arrangements (including cultural-psychological, social and economic aspects) from the perspective of differing interpretations of God’s ways with the world (page x).

Believers might call this looking for God’s hand in our power relations; Unbelievers can track the exact same histories and call it the history of religious thought.

Mark Lilla, on the other hand, sees even the study of religion as amounting to letting in the back door the evils we (meaning the West, although Lilla is dangerously close to using the Royal We in the quote below) have with great effort successfully driven out the front door:

We find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still inflame the minds of men, stirring up passions that leave societies in ruin (The Stillborn God, page 3).

Hitler meets a real Man

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:01:00 -0600

I'm sorry to go on and on about Hitler. But I couldn't resist another entry when I found this picture. It's Hitler greeting President Hindenburg in 1932.

I can't believe how much Hitler looks like a wiener next to the storied general. Bear in mind that Hindenburg is in his eighties when this picture was taken. He had absolutely no respect for Hitler, but was a little concerned about the Nazi movement Hitler was leading, so he tried to include Hitler in government as a way of containing him, which of course turned out to be an incredibly stupid political move.

But I can't get over how manly Hindenburg looks and how scrawny Hitler looks.

The Poverty Hitler Hated, continued

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 02:01:00 -0600

Hitler hated Jews, rich and poor alike. He also hated German poverty. And even in war, he managed to do something about it. That is the astonishing story here.

Götz Ali is a German historian whose research on the Third Reich and Second World War has made him a bit of a rock-star in the German-speaking world, to the degree that detractors have been known to protest his book signings. I doubt such a fate would await any American historian, in part because Americans are heirs to a centuries-old attempt to bury the past. To be a historian, in certain respects, is an un-American vocation.

But Germans and their neighbors live with the consequences of WWII, and as Ali points out in Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, there remain many untold stories of what happened and what remains for us, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the perpetrators.

Hitler managed to retain legitimacy in part, Ali argues, because of the material benefits he brought to German daily life. These came in a few forms. First was war-time spending, of which the greatest profits went to major industrial and financial institutions. This is a well-known story, and Ali finds it important to qualify it in the preface:

There is no question that many leading industrialists and financiers were complicit in Hitler’s regime. … And indeed many Germans had a stake in … [shifting] the burden of blame for Nazi barbarism to a handful of individuals.

This book was conceived as an attempt at redressing the balance, at redirecting public attention toward the potential advantages everyday Germans derived from the Nazi regime.

Nazis occupying much of Europe carefully plundered their victims infrastructure, returning untold prosperity to Germany. We’re not talking about crude pirate chests here. Noting old hearsay that the “American care packages that helped Germans survive the early years after the war were dismissed as mere chicken feed. … “

It was only when I began work on this book that the truth behind these stories became clear to me. The women of the Third Reich were accustomed to far better than chicken feed. The packages their husbands had constantly sent back from German-occupied countries between 1941 and 1944 contained staple and gourmet items that supplied well beyond the minimum calories necessary for human survival.

But it was more than a private criminal enterprise: local government was involved. The creepiest picture in the book is a propaganda poster proclaiming that Jüdisches vermögen wird volksgut, or Jewish wealth is becoming the people’s. They were carefully expropriating, for instance private Jewish libraries, and distributing the volumes to local public libraries around Germany.

In this and many other ways, the war didn’t hurt people at home. Chickens landed in people’s pots, and dissent dissipated.

Enter the Academy

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 02:01:00 -0600

For the rest of the week I'm off to my first academic conference as a grad student, to the Yale-Edinburgh Group on the History of the Missionary Movement and Non-Western Christianity.

I’m actually going to be studying German Christianity, which is not exactly Non-Western, but I’m intending on looking at how missions and non-Western Christianity have impacted the homelands of German Christianity.

So I'm keen to meet people and absorb methodologies and ways of thinking about the remarkable changes to the church that have come down in recent decades.

Two Opposite Revolutions

Wed, 27 May 2009 13:24:00 -0600

Here’s a really interesting assessment of the difference between Paris’ and Prague’s 1968 upheavals, by French historian Jacques Rupnik.

The first half of 1968 was a remarkable season of youth rebellion around the world, from Mexico to the US, to Europe on both sides of the Iron Curtain. But it was in France and Czechoslovakia that protesters came closest to overthrowing a government.

In France, the Paris movement was a leftist one, led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, opposed to various cultural and political (the two are inseparable in the minds of the Paris movement) developments post-WWII, most importantly the material culture, or the culture of commercialism.

The Czech movement was more political in nature and was focused on restoring various liberties (such as the press) that the Soviets had been suppressing.

Jacques Rupnik suggests that we have remembered the events falsely: the only quality they had in common was their simultaneity. More importantly, both movements were out to achieve what the other was trying to shake off: the Czechs trying to rid themselves of the very Marxism the French wanted; the French rejecting the democracy (“an illusion”) the Czechs wanted.

The Prague Spring was brutally put down by communist troops and tanks, while the Paris Spring simply ran out of gas. But the Soviet occupation of Prague, Rupnik argues, had a significant long-term impact on the French Left: it disburdened them of their delusions about the workers’ paradise USSR.

By making human rights, civil society, and European culture central to its activity, [Czech] dissent had an impact that was by no means negligible on the anti-totalitarian Left in France in a new political and intellectual context post-1968.

[…] The post-68 "new philosophers", when they asked themselves questions about the origins of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, of the Gulags and of "barbarism with a human face" (Bernard-Henri Lévy), traced the intellectual and political ancestry of Soviet Russian Bolshevism back to the German "master thinkers" (A. Glucksmann) and further back to the Enlightenment, discovering along the way some of the concerns of Czech dissenters including Jan Patocka and Vaclav Havel.

The Czechs were trying to turn (quoting a protester from the time) “From Asia and toward Europe;” to French ears “Europe” carried more than a whiff of imperialism. Thus is was significant for both movements that the Czech return to Europe after 1989 was marked by adsorption into the European Union (by which Rupnik means the common market).

Norwegians and Mexicans

Wed, 13 May 2009 02:01:00 -0600

Syttende Mai is this weekend. That’s May Seventeenth in Norwegian—Norway’s Constitution Day.

In the US Syttende Mai occupies similar social territory as St. Patrick’s Day, Cinco de Mayo, and similar days of immigrant ethnic memory and fervor.

Outside of Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, and parts of Iowa and Washington, the concept of Norwegian-American is a bit of a mystery, but it is one of the most important stories of American immigration—in part because of the nearly complete (or at least apparently complete) assimilation to Anglo-Saxon society of a group previously thought would never assimilate.

Last year sheer curiosity led me to the colorful person of Waldemar Ager (wikipedia here), a journalist and community organizer who lived in a small city in Wisconsin. Ager worked hard to unify Norwegians, who until then largely identified by their regions of origin in Norway; he worked harder to preserve Norwegian as a language in immigrant families. His novel On the Way to the Melting Pot, written in Norwegian and subsequently translated into English, depicts that most familiar of all immigrant family sorrows: children who cannot communicate with their parents and grandparents.

Waldemar Ager lost. In all but a few communities, Norwegian Americans have melted into the pot, and America has both gained and lost from that development. But the story of how and why this took place is eerily similar to the stories currently developing among Asian, African, and Latin American immigrants in the United States.

We neglect the story of Norwegian struggles for and against assimilation to our own impoverishment and worse: we learn from scratch what we could much more easily learn by listening to those who tackled these problems before us.

Is Evangelicalism an offshoot of Romanticism?

Thu, 07 May 2009 02:01:00 -0600

I’m reading this terribly great book right now, The Roots of Romanticism by Isaiah Berlin. Berlin was a renaissance man of culture; this book, released posthumously, collects lectures he gave in Washington, DC, some 40 years ago.

Accordingly, this is a work of rhetoric, not research, but builds upon an unbelievable amount of research. What he’s trying to do is twofold:

Establish the Romanticist movement as the most decisive intellectual revolution in western history (and knocking the Enlightenment off its pedestal); and
Figure out where this revolution came from.

He succeeds marvelously at the first task, if Christianity’s impact on pagan Europe is excluded. He seems to hardly concern himself with the cross-cultural translation of an initially Jewish sect into Greek/Roman society in the first centuries of the Common Era—he takes the Christian West for granted. That’s a problem, but hey: these are lectures, and I can grant him that point, if it helps his case.

His first major problem is defining romanticism, which is as slippery as soap. After explaining, with characteristic dry wit, that (regarding the hopeless task of supplying a definition) “I do not propose to fall into that particular trap,” he ultimately settles on calling Romanticism a (particularly German) critique of the (particularly French) Enlightenment, the latter with its voracious appetite for imposing quantifiable human categories on everything, from miracles to natural laws to ethnography.

Again, he’s on thin ice, but:

"Unless we do use some generalizations it is impossible to trace the course of human history. Therefore, difficult as it may be, it is important to find out what it was that caused this enormous revolution in human consciousness."

Where it gets really interesting is when he, moving from definitions, actually starts this revolution. And what he finds starts with pietism, that German (Lutheran) spiritual movement roughly analogous to Anglo-Saxon evangelicalism. Pietists took faith from an external point of connection to church and community, and made it individual and experiential.

The personal experience of faith opens all kind of new capacities inside one’s brain, as one can now conceive, for instance, of one’s fellow believers on the other side of the world as closer kin than one’s next-door neighbor unbelievers. This kind of intellectual leap is taken for granted today, but was incredibly destabilizing to the societies it landed in.

Berlin himself found pietism fairly pathetic, an internalization of spiritual energies because of the political weakness of Germany at that time. Never mind that: he’s uncovering something important: Inasmuch as we who concern ourselves with world Christianity believe in experience outweighing life station, we are all romantics.

A look at the Spanish Flu

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 08:29:00 -0600

As the swine flu story continues to grow, I felt the need to look up the main reference point: the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic. This for two reasons: people keep saying “this one could be as bad as the Spanish Flu—while I know nearly nothing about it.

As it turns out, the US Government has a great site on the "Great Pandemic", put together by the Office of the Public Health Service Historian, itself a really neat service I just discovered.

There are debates about its origins, but it struck at the end of WW1, and killed far more people than that war. Globally, the Public Health Service Historian reports, 20 million people died; in the United States alone, about 675,000 people in a population of 105 million would die from the disease. 15 Million people died in World War 1.

There is a family story for me in the Spanish Flu: My wife’s grandmother, a farm girl in rural North Dakota at the time, lost both parents to the pandemic. In a scene reminiscent of today’s African AIDS stories, my wife’s grandmother and her sisters were brought in by an adolescent girl and cared for.

[Photo Credit: Office of the Public Health Service Historian]

Unser Kampf

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:09:00 -0600

News Flash: we follow in our parents’ footsteps, often even in the way we reject our parents.

I really want to read this book: Unser Kampf: 1968—Ein Irritierter Blick Zurück, by German historian Götz Aly, but I can’t access it, because I don’t want to fork over € 40 to buy it from Europe. But it seems to be a particularly juicy book of recent history, one that has triggered quite the brouhaha in Germany (link in German-sorry).

Unser Kampf means “our struggle” and refers to Adolf Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf (“my struggle”). The title alone is the first punch: it’s hard for North Americans to understand the feelings such a title can arouse. Germany is a modern liberal democracy, yet one which has made exceptions to freedom of speech in matters of the Nazi past: Mein Kampf is banned; holocaust denial is illegal; the Neo-Nazi party is illegal, and so on.

A major public debate in recent decades has focused on situating the Nazi moment in German History. Put crudely, the question is: was Hitler the exception or the rule? With “our struggle”, (again, which I haven’t yet read), Aly seems to be pushing those buttons and more.

The book is about the “68 Generation,” or those young people involved in revolutionary (leftist) movements of 1968. Aly, as a young man, was a leading participant at the time. Forty years later, as a scholar of the Nazi period, he looks back to his own youth and concludes: we too had totalitarian tendencies.

As the 1968 protests were part political rebellion and part generational struggle between those born before and after World War 2, it is particularly belligerent of Aly to highlight the similarities between the camps. As one reviewer has put it, Aly is far from disinterested here; with many of his fellow 68ers, he’s writing through a bullhorn.

And, writing forty years later, this bullhorn says: the seduction of belonging to mass movements; the thrill of believing that the solution to most of the world’s problems may be at hand; the intoxicating feeling of being on the correct side of progress—all these are shared by both the 68er youth and their Nazi youth parents.

What does all this mean for North America? 1968 here was more fragmented. After Martin Luther King’s murder that spring, all hope for a revolutionary coalition between black and white youth withered away; plus the anti-Vietnam element here drew attention away from a leftist social transformation as envisioned by the Port Huron crowd.

But generational battles are always new, and full of mutual incriminations. It’s tempting to Monday-morning quarterback the mistakes of one’s parents’ youth. It’s a lot harder to admit we were wrong.

Many readers of this blog, I assume, are of student age. We too will one day have to swallow withering critique from our children. Some of it will be ignorant; some of it deserved. How will we face that moment? More importantly, how will we handle the bullhorn of our own youth, as we speak to our own parents?

Our Mongrel Future

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:20:00 -0600

San Antonio, Texas: The Public Library

Here’s a good time for a book (and what a title): Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America by Gregory Rodriguez.

It's a panoramic history of the 500 years of cross-cultural mingling, encounters, marriages, and quarrels, leading from the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire through to today’s debates about Mexican Americans in the US.

Rodriguez focuses mainly on the emergence of two new peoples—first Mexicans, arising from the conflation of dozens of formerly distinct native tribes under the conquerors’ caste system (along with generous servings of Spanish and African DNA)—and later Mexican Americans, an indefinite but very big subset of the US-American population.

Rodriguez has one overarching goal here: to demonstrate what he calls the mongrel nature of Mexican America—these are children of many nations, created largely by mixed marriages, and held together by family ties, rather than any racial, linguistic, religious, national or social glue.

The Spanish language doesn’t seem to hold after a few generations; race never made sense anyway; the rise of Pentecostalism has brought an end to religious homogeneity among Mexicans and Mexican Americans alike—it’s family relationships that define these millions of Americans.

And as with all extended families, the boundaries are extremely fuzzy. This is mongrel America, and this is the case Rodriguez is brilliantly building: Mexican Americans, by their very mixed nature, have a hugely important gift to give the US at large: the gift of becoming a mixed people.

Mexican American history, he argues, has developed a few tools that could be put to use in overcoming American racial problems. The most basic and radical of these is intermarriage (as distinct from loveless interracial procreation: he’s talking about homes and families). Left unspoken but implied here is the idea that the US at large can become a mongrel people, for whom race is not significant.

What’s not unspoken is Rodriguez’ contempt for Mexican American race-making projects, like Aztlan and Chicanismo. These, he argues, are misguided attempts to pound the square plug of Mexican America into the round hole of the American racial hierarchies. Rodriguez sympathizes with college students looking for their roots, but has no time for Chicano Studies departments, which he calls all range of dismissive names.

What Rodriguez fails to adequately address is classism. Class predates race by millennia, and will probably outlast it, as a means of social status. Strategic marriage-making has been a pastime of parents around the world and for many a generation. Intermarriage may be a means for overcoming race, but it won’t solve our fundamental human problems of human divisiveness.

But this is petty, because Rodriguez isn’t out to solve the world’s problems. He is convincing in his primary goal, and his prose is great. Look up this book if you can. It's worth the time.

[photo credit: flickr user teachandlearn, under a creative commons licence]

Church Death and Church Depth

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:10:00 -0600

What does is mean for our faith to acknowledge that vast territories of Christian presence are gone? The Iraqi Church, for instance, 5% of the population a half century ago, is now around 0.5%—and dropping quickly.

Most of this decline has come from persecution. It’s too early to tell in Iraq, but there are other places, Libya, for instance, where the original Christian church is dead. Does it mean that God has grown weary of those believers?

Philip Jenkins, one of my favorite thinkers on the global church, has given a great interview to Christianity Today on the subject of his new book, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died.

From the perspective of missions, here’s the key exchange with CT editor Stan Guthrie:

Why does persecution sometimes strengthen a church and other times wipe it out?

The difference is how far the church establishes itself among the mass of people and doesn't just become the church of a particular segment, a class or ethnic group. In North Africa, it's basically the church of Romans and Latin-speakers, as opposed to the church of peasants, with whom the Romans don't have much connection. When the Romans go, Christianity goes with them.

But Christianity establishes itself very early as a religion of the ordinary, everyday people in Egypt as things get translated into Coptic. As a result, after almost 1,400 years under Muslim rule, there is still a thriving Coptic church that represents [perhaps] 10 percent of the Egyptian people—which I would personally put forward as the greatest example of Christian survival in history.

In other words, missions plays an extremely important role in anchoring the faith. Jenkins is thinking deeply here, and asks us to develop a theology of Church death, to balance our progressive vision of the church’s forever global growth. The point is: churches can die, and a lot has to do with how we love our neighbors, or how deeply we've reached our cultures.

On a side note, the Global Urban Trek's Cairo-Mokattam project works among the Coptic Christians in Egyptian slums. Here's Scott Bessenecker's story My Encounter with Osama.

The Leper Saint

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 02:01:00 -0600

Hawai’i’s Leper priest has just been canonized, the Vatican has announced.

Father Damien was a Belgian missionary in the islands, from the age of 24 on, working in a leper colony on Molokai (now a state park), until he died at age 49 from the same disease.

Here’s a two-part biography of the man, written by Jack Voelkel for Urbana.org: one two

It's really a marvellous story. Voelkel quotes Robert Louis Stevenson, who met the man:

Of good old Damien, about whose weaknesses, and worse, I have perhaps heard everything, I now have a higher opinion. He was a European peasant, dirty, bigoted,... foolish, cunning, superb in his generosity, his openness and his fundamental good humour [sic]. If you could convince him he was wrong (sometimes after hours of fierce protest) then he would repair his error and appreciate the people who had complained the more. A man of all human grime and insignificance, and yet all the more a saint and a hero for that.

Also, InterVarsity students in Hawai’i have spent time out on the colony during the last few summers, as part of a program called Ho’olohe Pono; here’s a report from the project from 2005.

Great Archive of Missionary Pictures

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 02:01:00 -0600

Here are the three teachers at the missionary girls’ school in Wuhua, a Hakka district of China. The picture is from sometime between 1905 and 1930.

This image—and any others from all over the world—comes from the archives of a Swiss mission agency, the Basel Mission, who’ve put the archives online for not-for-profit use.

Dig in. It’s nice, if a little clunky. The navigation is top-down and works better for search than for browsing.