Doing History One Breath At a Time
This was the first. And for a cool $1,794US, all 16 volumes totaling 10,000 pages, Al-Tabari’s Annals of the Apostles and Kings: A Critical Edition can be yours. I’d love to get my hands on a copy, but more importantly I’d love to have the time to read it.
In the charming movie 84 Charing Cross Road, Anne Bancroft’s character, Helene Hanff, lovingly berates her transatlantic book dealer, Frank P. Doel played by Anthony Hopkins, for sending her an unacceptable copy of Pepys’ Diary. While cruising the internet, I found this article about a new film now in production in England based on his diaries.
We were asked to write a 2 page paper explaining why we wanted to study this history, this sums it up for me:
I also want to study this history because I am curious and have learned that religion informs everything about history. But mostly, I want to study the history of Islam because I am a historian and this is what I do.
This week’s lecture contained a really interesting resource: Imperial History of the Middle East, 5,000 years in 90 seconds.
I just haven’t been able to nurture Breathing History the way I would like. Events conspire to keep me busy elsewhere. So I have decided that I am going to try to make it more personal and maybe write at least once a week about what I’m studying. Just a few paragraphs with maybe some links if time allows. Instead of reaching for the grand researched posts, I’m thinking that making it a bit more personal will allow for more frequent updates. It’s always driven me up the wall that Breathing History goes stale so often. So I’ll try smaller posts and that may satisfy me. Reality really does bite from time to time.
This Tale From My Little Black Book has to do with Judas Iscariot, Gnostic Scriptures and the twisty windy web path one can get lost on while doing basic research.
The story begins with an interview by Terry Gross of Elaine Pagels and Karen King about their new book Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity. Pagels’ work with the Gnostic scriptures is well-known in the academic and Catholic clergy communities. It’s also a thorn in the side of many because Pagels makes the case that the Gnostic scriptures were left out of the New Testament because they offered a different view of the Christ and his teachings. There are those who date the Gnostic scriptures as centuries younger than the Gospels, making it impossible for the Gnostic scriptures to have any useful meaning or to be included in the New Testament.
I find all of this discussion utterly fascinating. The historical and theological implications are mind-twistingly delicious and play into the history student’s curiosity about how subjects are studied and written about.
What prompted Pagels’ and King’s book was the release of the contents of the Lost Gospel of Judas by National Geographic. It tells a very different story than the one we have come to known of Judas’ betrayal of the Christ which led ultimately to his death by crucifixion at the hands of the Roman guard. This gospel stirs the pot and makes people wonder if, instead of being the enemy of the Christ, Judas was a very dear friend whose part in this story was to set in motion the crucifixion - at the behest of Jesus himself.
The interview with Pagels and King was in March, 2007 on Fresh Air. Just this weekend I got around to watching the documentary, Judas: Traitor or Friend? (on the History Channel) which discussed the theme of Judas’ friendship with Jesus. So this is all fresh in my mind when I get out my little black book to look at the notes I have of various things.
In a search for Elaine Pagels, I came across the transcript of this interview originally aired in April, 2006 in which the Gospel of Judas is discussed. One of the people in the introductory part of the story is Bart D. Ehrman, a name I recognize from the documentary I just watched.
Not only has Dr. Ehrman written many books I am interested in reading - as if I really think I have time for them all - he also has a page that caught my eye. Ten Factual Errors in The Da Vinci Code. I admit to cackling with glee as I read on. My biggest complaint about Dan Brown, aside from the fact that he writes drivel, is that he purports the basic skeleton plot in his books are fact, when they aren’t facts. A friend thinks I should let this one go because, after all, Brown’s books are fiction. I know this, and treat them as such, but I have such a problem with liars and hypocrites that I can’t let Brown go for this.
Happily, in my wanderings across the web today, moving between Gnostic scriptures, the Gospel of Judas and the Da Vinci Code, I found an article by Bible scholar Darrell Bock whose book is already in my library just waiting to be read. It’s Breaking the Da Vinci Code and as soon as I’m done moving, I’m sure it will bubble up to the top.
Cross-posted from Logs of the Written Word
Finished Reading: Completed 17 Feb, 2007
Status: Remains in Library
Book Name: Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce
Author: Stanley Weintraub
ISBN: 0452283671
LOC: N/A
Publisher: Plume - a division of Penguin Putnam (New York, NY)
Synopsis:
In the early months of World War I, on Christmas Eve, men on both sides of the trenches laid down their arms and joined in a spontaneous celebration. Despite orders to continue shooting, the unofficial truce spread across the front lines. Even the participants found what they were doing incredible: Germans placed candlelit Christmas trees on trench parapets, warring soldiers sang carols, and men on both sides shared food parcels from home. They climbed from the trenches to meet in “No Man’s Land” where they buried the dead, exchanged gifts, ate and drank together, and even played soccer.
Throughout his narrative, Stanley Weintraub uses the stories of the men who were there, as well as their letters and diaries, to illuminate the fragile truce and bring to life this extraordinary moment in time.
From: Penguin Books
UIS Spring 2007 Independent Study
A much more straightforward, and easier to read (than Modris Ecksteins’), history of the Christmas Truce.
Cross-posted from Logs of the Written Word
Finished Reading: Completed 19 Feb, 2007
Status: Remains in Library
Book Name: The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period
Author: Patricia Buckley Ebrey
ISBN: 0520081587
LOC: HQ684.A25 1993
Publisher: University of California Press(Berkeley, Los Angeles, London)
Synopsis:
The Sung Dynasty (960-1279) was a paradoxical era for Chinese women. This was a time when footbinding spread, and Confucian scholars began to insist that it was better for a widow to starve than to remarry. Yet there were also improvements in women’s status in marriage and property rights. In this thoroughly original work, one of the most respected scholars of premodern China brings to life what it was like to be a woman in Sung times, from having a marriage arranged, serving parents-in-law, rearing children, and coping with concubines, to deciding what to do if widowed.
Focusing on marriage, Patricia Buckley Ebrey views family life from the perspective of women. She argues that the ideas, attitudes, and practices that constituted marriage shaped women’s lives, providing the context in which they could interpret the opportunities open to them, negotiate their relationships with others, and accommodate or resist those around them.
Ebrey questions whether women’s situations actually deteriorated in the Sung, linking their experiences to widespread social, political, economic, and cultural changes of this period. She draws from advice books, biographies, government documents, and medical treatises to show that although the family continued to be patrilineal and patriarchal, women found ways to exert their power and authority. No other book explores the history of women in pre-twentieth-century China with such energy and depth.
From: UC Press
UIS Spring 2007 Women in Chinese and Japanese history assigned reading.
A very thorough study of life in the Inner Quarters for Chinese women. Ebrey presents ideas that may be familiar to western readers: Chinese girls were the property of their father, then their husband upon marriage; footbinding; wives had very few legal rights, boy children were preferable to girl children. Yet, behind each of these stereotypes is reasoning and the story of an exception. Fascinating in its subject matter and the depth Ebrey plumbs to bring us the full story of Chinese women in the Sung era.
Favourite quotes:
For Ebrey, women played their assigned, even longstanding roles in the great drama of Sung history, but they were also extraordinary improvisers in a world that seemed structured to their disadvantage. (From Bonnie Smith’s forward - p. ix)
Emphasizing women’s victimization … only tends to obscure what women were able to accomplish. (p. 2)
Footbinding was an alteration of the body that changed everything about a woman’s body. (p. 41)
… new notions of masculinity stimulated the creation of revised standards of feminine beauty. (p. 42) [Editor's note: The Sung era was the time in Chinese history when civil service exams became the way to advance in government, therefore an emphasis on intellectual acuity was now placed on men, making them "softer" and less warrior-like. With this less physical lifestyle, men began to look differently physically, changing their outlook on masculinity and therefore revising the standards of feminine beauty.]
Monogamy, in this model, did not limit a man to one woman at a time; but it did limit him to one wife. (p. 47)
Symbolically women were associated with cloth, and since ancient times the sexual division of labor had been epitomized by the saying that men plow and women weave. (p. 132)
Long-entrenched practices of sexual segregation, after all, were built on the assumption that sexual desires were easily stimulated in both sexes. (p. 162)
Girls who expected to marry one day and women alread married were taught to look on rape as a violation of their personal integrity so fundamental that suicide was the most appropriate response. (p. 163)
For a woman, remarriage meant renouncing the family she had joined. It was comparable to a son abandoning his parents, not a man taking a new wife. (p. 199)
Most people in Sung times looked on second marriages for women as an expedient - a course of action that was routine and often necessary, but less admirable than remaining a widow. (p. 215)
To establish a firmer sense of security in such a negotiable world, Confucian scholars wanted to fix people in well-defined roles. (p. 269)
The first part of Sr. Seminar was based on Modris Ecksteins’ Rites of Spring. While we are not completely done with the book as I write this, we did turn in the first of our papers for this semester.
The assignment was to answer this question:
According to Eksteins, what was the significance of the Christmas cease fire in December 1914? Why does he argue that it could never happen again during the Great War? Do you find his argument(s) convincing? Why or why not?
As mentioned in the book review, this is a dense and chewy book, provoking lots of thoughts, not all of them congruent. In essence, I found the significance of the truce as a call to some of the “old fixities.”
Britain’s Edwardian and Victorian social mores called for a following of sportsmanlike behaviour and believed that even though soldiers were on the field to kill each other, it still had to be done in a sporting manner.
Germany, on the other hand, had become a unified country not so long before the war and was in the throes of birth pangs, so to speak. The Germans believed in the internal, metaphysical search for meaning. It was almost tone deaf in the ways it dealt with the rest of Europe and clearly didn’t understand why its actions caused such an uproar. Germany believed its ways were superior and wanted to be a major actor on the European stage.
At Christmas, 1914 the war was only 4 months old. Everyone concerned still believed it would be a short war. With Britain’s call to mannerliness and Germany’s almost adolescent belief in its place in the world, the truce sprung up spontaneously. Many, many books have been written about World War I, and the significance of the Christmas Truce.
One of the things I find significant about it is that it was the last of its kind, and the potential for a major impact on the rest of the world and the future history.
My friend C put it this way, “everyone still had money so they were inundated with packages from the government and from home that were treasured but overwhelming.” Add to this plethora of riches, the prevailing Christmas spirit, the newness of the way and the belief it was only a matter of time before it was over and a change in the weather that lifted spirits because the mud was frozen over enough to walk on which meant trench repair could be effected.
In my mind, it was the last time in any war that the tension between old and modern created an atmosphere where such behaviour was accepted by the men fighting the war. The truce was not officially condoned but happened nonetheless.
After the New Year things returned to “normal” but new technologies that wracked the sense of mannerliness were put to use. The Germans introduced mustard gas, those in power made the war one of attrition and ground down the morale of the soldiers. It was a one-time event and the a grand puzzle that is debated almost 100 years later.
Cross-posted from Logs of the Written Word
Finished Reading: Completed 12 Feb, 2007
Status: Remains in Library
Book Name: Rites of Spring
Author: Modris Eksteins
ISBN: 0395937582
LOC: N/A
Publisher: Mariner Books - a division of Houghton Mifflin (New York, NY)
Plot:
Dazzling in its originality, witty and perceptive in unearthing patterns of behavior that history has erased, Rites of Spring probes the origins, the impact, and the aftermath of World War I — from the premiere of Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring in 1913 to the death of Hitler in 1945. “The Great War,” as Modris Eksteins writes, “was the psychological turning point . . . for modernism as a whole. The urge to create and the urge to destroy had changed places.” In this “bold and fertile book” (Atlantic Monthly), Eksteins goes on to chart the seismic shifts in human consciousness brought about by this great cataclysm through the lives and words of ordinary people, works of literature, and such events as Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight and the publication of the first modern bestseller, All Quiet on the Western Front. Rites of Spring is a remarkable and rare work, a cultural history that redefines the way we look at our past and toward our future.
From: Houghton Mifflin Company
UIS Spring 2007 Sr. Seminar assigned reading.
If you’re looking for a general history about World War I, this isn’t the book for you. Rich, dense and complex, Ecksteins explores the cultural ramifications of modernity and its affect on the soldiers on the Western Front. Using Stravinsky’s The Rites of Spring as its framework, this book goes beyond a “simple” chronology of events as they unfold. What effect on the war did modernity have, and what effect did the war have on modernity? A case can be made for the seeds of Nazism arising from the seeds of modernity as portrayed in the premiere of the Russes Ballet’s production of Stravinsky’s (produced by Diaghilev) The Rites of Spring as choreographed by Nijinsky. The production which so affronted many of those in the audience that it engendered a riot.
Rich in anecdotal stories with quotes from war-time poets, Ecksteins presents a unique way to interpret the war.