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Depicting The War in War Horse

Rebecka Black, Op-Ed Columnist

February 2012

Steven Spielberg’s 2011 film adaptation of War Horse is expected to earn quite the collection of gold at this year’s Academy Awards (six nominations). The story has also enjoyed success as a Tony award winning play originally adapted for the stage by Nick Stafford and with performance runs that began in 2007 in London. Based on a novel by British author Michael Morpurgo, War Horse is the touching tale of a young British boy named Albert and his horse Joey. Both the stage and film adaptations of Morpurgo’s novel follow the close relationship formed between Albert and Joey as they conquer family economic struggles and endure the terrors of World War I. Read More »

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The Search for a Western Identity

Helene von Bismarck, Op-Ed Columnist

February 2012

The “West” has never been much of a geographical term. The days when it was located west of the Berlin wall have been over for more than twenty years, even though the meaning of the word was never limited to this exclusively geographical description. During the Cold War, the West was an alliance in which far eastern Japan was as much a part as the western United States. Since 1990, international relations have, in many ways, become more complicated and ambiguous, and so have the terms that are used to describe them. With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the West lost its established antipode. Some people may still speak of the “East” today, but they rarely mean Russia or Eastern Europe. It is much more likely that they talk about China, India or Asia in general. While the “West” and the corresponding adjective “western” are omnipresent in media and public debate, no one seems to be quite sure anymore what these words actually mean, or if they really signify anything. Is the West a geopolitical entity? An economic system? A lifestyle? A philosophy? A set of values? What makes the West distinctively western?

These are the questions that two distinguished historians, Niall Ferguson and Heinrich August Winkler, have taken on in their latest books. The two authors come from dissimilar intellectual backgrounds. Ferguson, an Oxford-educated Harvard professor, is above all else an economic historian. Winkler, who is emeritus chair of contemporary history at Humboldt-University in Berlin and one of the most renowned historians in Germany, concentrates mainly on political developments and the discourses that inform them. While there are enormous differences between their books, Ferguson and Winkler have one important thing in common: they are both searching for the identity of the western world by looking into its history. However, their books represent two diverging ways of delineating an identity. Essentially, the first is outward- and the second inward-looking.

The title of Ferguson’s book, Civilization: The West and the Rest, not only looks catchy and somewhat provocative on the bookshelves, it is also indicative of the author’s methodology: to analyze the civilization of the western world by comparing it to others. His aim is an ambitious one. He seeks to answer the question of how, during the modern era, “did a few small polities on the western end of the Eurasian land mass come to dominate the rest of the world?” Imperialism, he argues, is not the answer. It was a symptom of, rather than the reason for, western supremacy over large parts of the world from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Ferguson is not interested in narrating the historical process of western expansionism. Instead, he wants to analyze the western capabilities that made this process possible. In his opinion, the civilization of the western world distinguished itself from all the others by the development of six characteristics, or, in his very hip iDiction, “killer applications”, that the rest of the world failed to “download”: competition, science, property, medicine, the consumer society and the protestant work ethic. He dedicates a chapter of his book to each of these western characteristics, using a wealth of historical episodes to illustrate his argument that they were responsible for the “gradual subordination” of the world’s other civilizations to the West after the year 1500. The problematic result of this structure is that Ferguson’s book provides the reader with a long list of western histories, rather than a coherent history of the western world.

It is therefore very good news that Heinrich August Winkler intends to have his epic History of the West (Geschichte des Westens), which takes us from antiquity to the end of the Second World War, translated into English. While the most evident differences between this book and Ferguson’s Civilization may be its length and detail (it already consists of two volumes containing 1200 pages each and Winkler is now working on a third volume), they are not the most important ones. What really distinguishes Winkler’s work from Ferguson’s is the fact that he concentrates on the West itself instead of analyzing its relationship with other parts of the world. He argues that the most essential element of the western identity is a political culture that respects universal human rights, the rule of law, pluralism, representative democracy and the separation of powers. This set of values, which Winkler calls the “normative project” of the West, was, for the first time, made explicit during the American and the French revolutions of 1776 and 1789 respectively. Its origins, however, can, in his opinion, be traced back to the invention of monotheism by Echnaton in the 14th century B.C. Winkler’s book has three major themes: the development of western political ideals, their fiercely contested implementation in Europe (the “old West”) and North America (the “new West”) and the huge contradiction between the “normative project” and the actual political praxis in large parts of the western world. Far from arguing that its history was a direct and un-interrupted march towards freedom and democracy, Winkler acknowledges that the West has spent at least as much time betraying its own ideals as formulating them. His book is a very readable and knowledgeable milestone of transatlantic history and especially relevant to those interested in Great Britain, France, Germany and the United States.

The search for a clearly-defined identity usually begins when this identity is no longer a matter of course. The discussion about who we really are and which characteristics distinguish us from others can be the expression of a crisis of confidence and a sense of uncertainty. During the last decade, the inner cohesion and solidarity of the western world has suffered more than one serious blow. The recent series of economic crises have given little occasion for optimism about the future and led many people to question their way of life. It can therefore be expected that the debate about the essence of being “western”, to which Ferguson and Winkler have made very different contributions, will continue for some time to come.

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A Crusade against The Crusades

Michael Talbot, Op-Ed Columnist

February 2012

As with history books, there is no need for history television, or indeed radio, to be dull. There have been some absolute crackers of shows on British television in recent years. Some of the best are the ones that do not take themselves too seriously, such as the wonderful The Supersizers Go… (2008) and The Supersizers Eat… (2009) in which Giles Corran and Sue Perkins munched their way through historical cuisines from Roman feasts to 1980s piss-ups, exploring how food can shed light on historical cultures.

Tony Robinson – more famous perhaps as Baldrick in the comedy Blackadder – produced a very interesting and hands-on examination of the filthy and backbreaking labour the majority of historical actors had to endure in The Worst Jobs in History (2004-2007). This series was the exact antithesis of its contemporary, David Starkey’s nauseating Monarchy (2004-2006), so top-down and teleological that it would have seemed antiquated to even the most established of establishment nineteenth-century gentlemen.    Read More »

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Lecture Series – For the Better Management of the Poor: The Welsh Society of Philadelphia and the Relief of Emigrants, 1798-1850

Dr Richard C. Allen, Reader in Early Modern Cultural History

1 March 2012

University of Wales, Newport. Performing Arts Lecture Theatre (Room A16) City Centre Campus

18.00 – 20.30

This lecture provides a fascinating insight into one of the oldest benevolent societies in America with a history that stretches back to their first meeting on St David’s day in 1729. It explores the Society’s earliest origins, membership, cultural activities, and the efforts of members to provide relief for the poor Welsh exile.

This lecture is aimed at anyone who has an interest in the cultural activities of Welsh-Americans or those working on emigration studies.
***
Charity, members of the Welsh Society of Philadelphia recognised, began at home but also needed to be dispensed to the ‘remotest parts of the Earth’. This was articulated in the preamble to a constitution they drew up on 4 February 1799. It stated that newly arrived emigrants should be taken by the hand ‘instructing him in what he is ignorant of and providing for his Immediate necessities’. Sixty-four Welshmen (or the descendants of Welsh emigrants) held the first meeting of the Society a year earlier on 1 March 1798 in Philadelphia with the aim of continuing the work of its predecessor (the Society of the Sons of Ancient Britons c.1729). As part of its remit, members were expected to provide moral support, financial assistance and practical relief for Welsh exiles who would struggle in a foreign land without help. It is a Society which has enjoyed an uninterrupted history to the present day and, naturally, a long-lasting association with Welsh-Americana, particularly its promotion of Welsh cultural activities and its annual St David’s day celebration. This organisation was one of many similar Welsh societies which sprang up in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain and in America. The purpose of this paper is not, however, to record the complete history of this Philadelphian Welsh Society, but rather it will focus primarily on the development of this cultural body, its early membership and the significant position and experiences of members in Philadelphia – the spiritual home of the Welsh exile in America. Additionally, it will explore why this Society appealed to Welsh exiles and their wealthy descendants. Finally, it will consider the role of the Society as a provider of charitable assistance to the needy, who from the late-eighteenth century onwards saw America, especially Philadelphia, as an alternative to a life of hardship in Wales.

About Dr. Allen:

Dr. Richard C. Allen is a Reader in Early Modern Cultural History at the University of Wales, Newport. He was formerly (2006-7) the Fulbright-Robertson Visiting Professor at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, and the beneficiary of a Gest Fellowship at Haverford College. He has published widely on Welsh emigration and Quakerism, including Quaker Communities in Early Modern Wales: From Resistance to Respectability published in 2007 by the University of Wales Press. He is currently completing a follow-up volume entitled, Transatlantic Connections: Welsh Quaker Emigrants and Colonial Pennsylvania, 1650–1776 and a Manchester University Press joint-authored study on Quakers in the North East of England, 1650-1850: Identities, Networks and Discipline. He has edited three volumes: Irelands of the Mind: Memory and Identity in Modern Irish Culture (2008); Faith of Our Fathers: Popular Culture and Belief in Post-Reformation England, Ireland and Wales (2009), and The Religious History of Wales: A Survey of Religious Life and Practice from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day (currently in-press).

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A Marriage of Inconvenience

Mark Doyle, Op-Ed Columnist

February 2012

As plans for a 2014 referendum on Scottish independence begin to take shape, people on all sides of the question will raid history to support their case. Unionists will point to the economic and cultural benefits that Scotland enjoyed in the wake of the 1707 Union with England, and nationalists will point with equal certainty to the economic and cultural costs of the Union. The gist of the unionist argument-from-history (if I may put it thus) is that the Union gave Scottish writers, businessmen, scientists, engineers, soldiers, and investors a larger stage on which to perform, a larger market from which to benefit, and an enormous empire to conquer and settle. The gist of the nationalist argument-from-history is that the Union led to economic policies that benefited England at Scotland’s expense, eviscerated Scotland’s unique Gaelic culture, and subjected Scotland to the whims of an indifferent, Anglocentric Parliament. Read More »

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January 2012

In this issue:


I.     Announcing the Inaugural Global Britain Lecture: Humboldt University Berlin, 10 May 2012
II.   Conference Accommodation Now Available
III. Conference Dinner Party at the National Gallery of Scotland
IV.  Conference Lectures Announcement
V.    Our January Op-Ed Columns
VI.  In Memory of David Atkinson MP (1940-2012)
VII. Book of the Month

Read More »

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Sea Power vs Land Power: the Geopolitics of Germany’s Defeat in the First World War

2012 Global Britain Lecture

10 May 2012, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Co-sponsored by the Centre for British Studies (http://www.gbz.hu-berlin.de/the-centre)

Professor Hew Strachan
MA, PhD, FRSE, FRHistS, Hon D.Univ (Paisley)
Chichele Professor of the History of War, University of Oxford

In 1904 Halford Mackinder, in the lecture which established the study of geopolitics in the English-speaking world, divided the world into the heartland, which he also called Eurasia (the land mass which runs from the Atlantic and the Pacific), and the rimlands. He predicted that the latter would diminish in relative importance as the heartland industrialised and in particular as the railway made land mass an asset, rather than an obstacle, to communication.  Russia would be able to tap its manpower and its natural resources, and would become the dominant power of Eurasia, overshadowing the west European powers. Read More »

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Women and Empire – Aphra Behn

Allegra Geller, Op-Ed Columnist

January 2012

I tend to shy from the present, preferring to focus on the past.  I am inclined to examine history for and within itself. It has been said that ‘History should be studied because it is essential to individuals and to society, and because it harbors beauty[i] which I hold to be true.  Much like art, I view history as something once created in which great beauty can be found. Although my studies thus far have remained within the Tudor and Stuart periods, over the past year I have enjoyed studying British literature with a focus on Empire (I am indebted to Dr. George S. Christian for introducing me to numerous great works). With that in mind, in this column I will strive to provide interesting glimpses into British imperial history, albeit liberally strewn with literary themes and references whenever possible. Read More »

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January 2012: Ross McKibbin’s “Parties and People: England 1914-1951″

Reviewed by:  Peter Catterall, Queen Mary University of London

Ross McKibbin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 224 pp. £20 (hardback).

Some twelve years later this book seeks to explore how the social changes examined in McKibbin’s Classes and Culture: England 1918–1951 impacted in the political sphere. There were certainly substantial political upheavals between 1914 and 1951: the effect of the First World War and the subsequent franchise reform and implosion of the Liberals; the electoral dominance of the Conservatives in the inter-war years; and the advent of the first majority Labour government in 1945. These developments can broadly be explored through four principal and inter-related prisms. One is high politics, focusing upon the role of the parties in structuring the political marketplace and the resulting forced choice offered voters in a political culture which, as the Royal Commission on Electoral Systems pointed out in 1910, treats general elections ‘as practically a referendum on the question which of two Governments shall be returned to power’.[i] Then there is electoral geography, analysing how local characteristics and boundaries can both have broader effects and embed distinctive voting cultures. McKibbin’s conclusions, however, particularly emphasise the final two factors, which are contingent events such as war or the 1931 budget crisis and electoral sociology, reflecting influences such as generational change or social class.

Issues such as foreign policy, which might have been expected to play a role in voter choice in such a difficult period internationally, are seen as marginal (p. 192). This was a problem for the Liberals who, as Richard Grayson has persuasively argued,[ii] were increasingly distinguished by the 1930s primarily by their approach to this field as other distinctive policy positions, such as Free Trade or Irish Home Rule, passed out of the realm of practical politics. Even before 1914 Protectionism had a cross-class appeal that enabled the Tories to make inroads in northern cities like Sheffield. It made a contribution to the location of the Conservatives within a broad set of patriotic values that a Labour party, often successfully portrayed in the 1920s and 1930s as both sectional and disloyal, could not reach. Yet this did not prevent Labour seizing and retaining power in Sheffield during the inter-war years. Read More »

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Wikileaks and the Problem of Public Secrecy

Leslie Rogne Schumacher, Op-Ed Columnist

January 2012

As a senior in college I wrote a column for my university newspaper.  Eventually I decided to withdraw it voluntarily as the editors kept making small changes that I nevertheless felt were significant at the time.  As the years have passed I’ve decided that I was probably being too much of an egoist about the whole thing, and my editors undoubtedly had the right of it.  As the beneficiary of many years of hard-hitting executive critique from my professors (i.e. what I must do, not what I might) on my work, I’ve learned to look forward to and indeed depend on such commentary.  I write this first column with the hope that my readers take this anecdote to mean that I will do my best to convey my thoughts about the subjects I plan to explore in a way that opens the door for discussion rather than closes it.  With this in mind, my column will primarily be concerned with issues of British international and diplomatic history, especially those which relate to the Victorian period.  The lessons and legacies of this history as they present themselves in the present day will also be of interest, as will the theoretical and disciplinary concerns of The British Scholar Society members’ shared field of interest.  I look forward to the debates that will hopefully ensue from my humble contribution to the discourse. Read More »

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