09.17.05
Posted in at 10:26 am by Stephanie
(Note: Originally written 6 Jan, 2004)
About a year ago in my Western Civ class, we were asked to pick a book from a reading list and write a report on it. I picked Carolly Erickson’s book about the first Elizabeth. Since then I’ve watched the History Channel’s documentary (2 discs) and 2 of the 4 discs of the BBC’s 1971 miniseries “Elizabeth R” starring Glenda Jackson.
I watch them twice, once without the commentary and again with Alison Weir’s historical commentary. The last episodes I watched concerned Elizabeth’s “betrothal” to Catherine D’Medici’s youngest son, Duc d’Alencon and the decision to behead her cousin Mary Queen of Scots for treason and plotting to overthrow the English crown.
There must have been a school these women went to in circular logic. They were so good at it, their advisers could have bought stock in aspirin companies had they existed in the 16th century.
Elizabeth asks her privy council for advice about marrying d’Alencon but gives them no clue as to what she expects their answer to be. When they ask for input from them she tells them she cannot give it because they have not given her input. And then she leaves the council room in a huff because they will not tell her what to do and because they won’t, she is not going to tell them what she wants. I’m sure there were a lot of wooden beams with dents in them from all the head banging that went on.
Mary tells her “gaoler” that she does not recognize the power of Elizabeth as queen and as such is not guilty of breaking any laws, including conspiracy to kill Elizabeth and place herself on the English throne, as rightful heir. She has conspired, but she has not broken any laws because she doesn’t not recognize the law of the land she is “guest” in.
Makes the rules of cricket seem a bit simpler I think … maybe.
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Posted in , at 12:22 am by Stephanie
(Note: Originally written 25 May, 04)
I think I’m finally done watching all the videos having to do with the first Queen Elizabeth in my Netflix queue. There’s been many a documentary, the 4-disc set of the BBC miniseries and, last weekend, Elizabeth starring Cate Blanchette as the 25-30 year old queen.
Amazing work and while not always historically accurate, entertaining nonetheless. I’ve been a big fan of Geoffrey Rush since I saw him in Quills and his portrayal of Walsingham, the Queen’s spy master is eerie and ambiguous. Joseph Fiennes as her favourite “did they or didn’t they” Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester makes me hope that real Sir Robert was that handsome and did make her heart flutter, although his behaviour did ultimately lead to the iconic Virgin Queen that so many are familiar with. Oh, and then there’s Christopher Eccleston as the entirely wicked “in the name of the One True Religion” Norfolk.
The trick to watching movies and being an historian is to learn to suspend your belief for two hours. It’s a movie, not a documentary. Yet this movie got a lot more covered and right than much shorter documentaries have. Rent it, love it, enjoy it and move on.
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Posted in at 12:16 am by Stephanie
(Note: Originally written on 1 Dec, 2004)
During World War II, before the concentration camps became commonplace and after Hitler began his push into Russia, the city of Kiev was occupied by the Nazis. Troops would line citizens up and shoot them. In one day over 330,000 citizens of this beautiful city were shot and killed. That was one lynchpin episode that led to the creation of more concentration camps. So inefficient was the method of murdering people on that cold day in Kiev, Ukraine that Hitler and his advisors began drawing up plans for more efficient and effective ways of murdering everyone they didn’t like.
This little bit of history can be looked up in any textbook or history website. What made it come home for me was the guided tour my Ukranian co-worker gave me through a souvenir picture book of Kiev. The squiggly and square Cyrillic characters under the pictures captivated me. I kept sneaking glances at them, trying to figure out their meaning. The pictures were of beautiful old Orthodox and Catholic churches, squares, parks and paths along the river.
My co-worker pointed to one picture of a huge monument of a woman holding a sword upright, with a museum in her base. In her Russian accent, Sasha explained that everyone thought this monument was ugly and told the story of why this symbol of Mother Ukraine had been built on that particular spot. 330,000 people died on or near there at the hands of Hitler’s henchmen and, ugly or not, this monument with an elevator in her sword gives testimony to the horrors of that day and the days that followed.
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09.16.05
Posted in at 11:58 pm by Stephanie
(Note: Originally written 18 Apr, 2005. With some editorial changes to make it more suitable for an history blog)
Sometimes, the world conspires to bring something to my attention and makes me believe that it’s important. Really important. Not just “remember to pay my bills” important, but “this has an affect on everyone” important.
This is the kind of stuff I really want to dig my teeth into: Authors Want Improved History Education and Re-writing History
The first story involves such great historians as Pulitzer Prize winner Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. lobbying congress to fix “No Child Left Behind” so history doesn’t get left behind. Studies are starting to show that studying history is the springboard to loads of other disciplines. It’s akin to what listening to Mozart can do for your study and retention skills. Is anybody out there listening?
The second story involves something I hadn’t heard about until today. The riots that happened in Beijing, China over the weekend by students because a new Japanese textbook whitewashes their involvement in World War II. This is tricky stuff going on here. It has more to do with politics than history. The discussion was absolutely fascinating. How do governments, educators and text book writers balance history? What gets left out (and what gets put in) because it’s advantageous to show a country in a certain light, that while it may be factual isn’t necessarily truthful.
Whose truth gets recorded and remembered? The saying used to be, “The winners write the history.” But is that true anymore? With the power of the internet and blogging available to so many, how does one go about sorting through the facts to get to the truth? Which truth is important and what will future generations have to say about that truth?
It’s a lot to chew on, folks. And let me just say one other thing, this country better get its educational priorities in line, because we are raising people who no longer have the tools to do the critical thinking required to be a participant in the democracy that America was built upon.
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Posted in , at 11:30 pm by Stephanie
(Note: Originally written 29 May, 05)
First, the full disclosure. This book is written by one of my instructors, Dr. Konnilyn Feig. I took three quarters of Western Civ from her at Foothill College. She is someone I admire and respect a great deal and had a profound effect upon me as a student of history. After reading this book, I have even more admiration and respect for her. I picked up the book because it was written by Dr. Feig and because it’s about a topic that fascinates me no end.
Hitler’s Death Camps - The Sanity of Madness is 16 years of Dr. Feig’s life work. Published in 1979, the work rings truthfully and honestly and reflects years of research, visiting each and every camp in that time period. To take on such a task requires a willingness to look evil right in the eye unflinchingly and look for the humanity of both victims and killers.
From the most famous; Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Treblinka to the most obscure; Kulmhof/Chelmno and Majdanek, Dr. Feig visited them all. Each has a chapter devoted to it; describing its physical characteristics then and now, the “work” performed there, how many died and how and what happened when it was liberated. There is also a chapter devoted to women and the Third Reich as well as a section titled, “The Indifferent, the Slaughterers, the Strugglers.”
More than just a detailed list of camps and their functions, Dr. Feig delves into the personalities and attempts to answer some of the unanswerable questions. Why and how did this happen? Why the Jews? Why didn’t The Allies work harder to put a stop to this? What goes on in the minds of the architects of The Final Solution? Why did some survive and others didn’t?
I was quite taken with Dr. Feig’s examination of Christianity’s part in setting the Jews up for hatred and eventual attempts at extermination of the “vermin.” From the time of Christ, Christians have had a difficult time understanding Jews and latched onto the “Christ Killer” label quickly which perpetuated centuries of hate. While not a complete answer to “Why”, this well-researched chapter goes a long way toward explaining the base upon which anti-semitism festered.
Dr. Feig also puts into perspective the “thingness” that Jews had become. They weren’t human in the eyes of their killers, merely “things” to be exploited until they died; some “thing” that stood in the way of the restoral of the idyllic Aryan nation Hitler and his followers so desired. A human can’t be dehumanized if they aren’t considered human to begin with.
She also delves into the psychology of the leaders and the passive support many German citizens gave to this “solution.” The closed eyes, the fear, the disbelief; it’s all covered here and makes a thoughtful person think even more. Dr. Feig trains her bright light on everyone, no one in the world is completely innocent. She rightly points out the ongoing genocides and the roles countries and their political leaders play in those crimes.
This book is not for the squeamish, it details graphically the horrors of what happened in each and every camp. It will leave you shaking your head in despair as you try to wrap your mind around the horrors that happened each and every second of 1939 to 1945 to people whose only crime was being “different.”
This book is also a must read for those interested in the theories of the psychology of “Why” and “How did we let this happen?” It is not, however, a book of despair. There are passages about resistance movements, and thoughts about how to keep something of this scale from ever happening again. Hitler’s Death Camps - The Sanity of Madness gets a permanent space on my shelf and I am sure it will be referred to again and again as I continue my own academic career.
The Details
Title: Hitlers Death Camps - The Sanity of Madness
Author: Dr. Konnilyn G. Feig
Publisher: Holmes & Meier
Copyright: 1979
ISBN: 0-8419-0676-9
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Posted in at 10:51 pm by Stephanie
(Note: Originally written 29, 2005, with some editorial changes to make it more suitable for an history blog)
Unbelievable stories like this keep happening.
[Siegfried Kampl of Austria] had said he would relinquish his seat amid pressure from all sides after he deplored the “brutal persecution” of Austrian Nazis after World War II.
Last month, he said his father was a member of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party like “more than 99%” of Austrians.
He also referred to Austrian deserters of Nazi Germany’s armed forces as “assassins of battle comrades”.
And there’s more:
Days after the Kampl controversy broke on 19 April, another right-wing member of the Bundesrat, John Gudenus, contended that the existence of Nazi gas chambers “remains to be proven”.
As an historian in training, I am supposed to try to be objective and dispassionate but honestly, What is WRONG with people?
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Posted in at 12:01 am by Stephanie
For Tim’s evil twin Tom:
Sep 15 1956, Play Doh is introduced
(c)Copyright 1990-2005 by Robert Heckendorn, All Rights Reserved.
(links to come at a later date)
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09.15.05
Posted in at 10:09 pm by Stephanie
Please excuse the dust, I’m putting all the links for research here for easy access. I just got approval today to do an individual project for this class. My topic: Indigenous peoples of Latin America and Human Sacrifice.
Google: latin america + human sacrifice
Google Print: latin america + human sacrifice
Google Scholar: human sacrifice
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Posted in at 8:12 pm by Stephanie
I don’t have anything profound to say about 9/11. It was 4 years ago and we still haven’t caught Osama bin Laden. Instead, we went to Afghanistan. Then we went to Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction which weren’t there and toppled a dictator in the name of democracy.
How will history look at this? I’m too close to say anything even remotely objective and academic. If you’re looking for personal opinions, try Blither, Blather, Bloviate, I might write something there.
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09.14.05
Posted in at 11:18 pm by Stephanie
The assignment: read John Arnold’s book History: A Short Introduction and take notes as if I were going to have to write a report or something at some point without having the book available.
Thoughts: very interesting, I learned some new techniques for taking notes and the discussion in the class forums was fascinating, as they all are. Mostly, I took notes the way I usually do for a paper and turned them in. I got to colour code my comments to differentiate them from direct quotes and paraphrases.
The Grade: Good. At first, my heart sank a little bit when I saw the number but when I saw the letter grade and the comments, I felt better. Mostly, I lost ground on the “mechanics” of taking notes. I learned to include the chapter title with the heading (I had just used the chapter #), write the page # after even the paraphrases and perhaps add some organization (like bullet points) so as not to repeat myself. Overall, I’m pleased with the encouragement I received.
The Praise: I have a good grasp of Arnold’s concepts and provided good insight. (This was especially nice to hear while I was going through my crisis of faith.)
The Quibble: Not so much a quibble as a stylistic difference. I will address this in email, not so much as fishing for more points, because that isn’t what this is about but as an explanation of my background and why I chose the particular “shorthand” phrases in the section that had to do with perceiving patterns and themes in history.
I used “pattern matching” with no other words. Because of my background working in high tech and with programmers for so long (not to mention my specatacular failure in a Perl class), this phrase means what it looks like, a search for patterns. And I would remember what that meant in 3 months time.
As I said, it’s a stylistic thing and Dr. N. wants to make sure that the notes we take will help keep the material fresh when we need it, whether a week or 3 months from the date of taking notes. I don’t disagree with any of her critique, or my grade.
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