History in the Margins

From the Archives: In which I consider soccer, or at least books about soccer

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I first ran this in 2014. Looks like it’s time to run it again.

soccer The World Cup is over and some of you are suffering from soccer* withdrawal. Unlikely though it may seem to those of you who know me in real life,I have some reading suggestions that will let you feed both lingering soccer mania and history curiosity.

Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains The World: An {Unlikely} Theory of Globalization looks at soccer as both an international phenomenon and as rooted in “local cultures local blood feuds and even local corruption”. (Think British soccer hooligans, the role of soccer in the Balkan Wars of 1990s, and the success of Jewish soccer clubs in 1920s Europe.) How Soccer Explains the World is a wonderful piece of social/historical reporting and totally accessible for the soccer-challenged.

David Goldblatt’s The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer directly addresses historian Eric Hobsbawm’s observation that “The twentieth century was the American century in every way but one: sport.” Goldblatt describes his work as the only history of the modern world in which the United States is “a transatlantic curiosity rather than a central attraction.” Beginning with ancient games involving a man kicking a ball and ending with soccer in Africa post-Cold War, The Ball is Round is an exhaustive account of history as a game, with a heavy emphasis on “American exceptionalism”.*** At 900 pages, this is a work for the hard-core soccer fan, or perhaps someone with ulterior motives for learning more about the game.

A lagniappe: Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch is a brilliant account of one fan’s relationship to the game, set in a specific time and space. This one is worth reading even if you are sports averse.

Score!

*Or football, depending on where you kick the ball.

**A term normally applied to the relative failure of socialism in America. And now that I think of it, there are some interesting parallels between the distribution of soccer and socialism in America. Any social scientists out there looking for a research topic?

History on Display: The Vikings Begin

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Photo credit: Joe Michael/Mystic Seaport Museum

While we were at Mystic Seaport, we were lucky enough to see an exhibit titled The Vikings Begin: Treasures from Uppsala University, Sweden. Curated by the Gustavianum Museum at Uppsala University, the exhibit is based on a ten-year research project that began in 2016. Known as “The Viking Phenomenon”, the project is designed to study the emergence of Viking society by looking at Iron Age culture in Scandinavia prior to the Viking era. The resulting exhibit tells a slightly different story than the version of Vikings with which most of us are familiar.*  Among other things, they do a nice job of changing ideas about women in Viking society, with a special emphasis on the upset surrounding the “Birka Man”.**

At first I sputtered a bit: The first Viking raid took place in Estonia in 750? Really?”*** Then I told myself to shut up and learn. Once I calmed down, I was particularly fascinated by the suggested relationship between Viking culture and that in other Baltic countries.**** Subsequent poking around revealed that archaeologists have been studying the connection between Estonia and the Vikings since 2008, when utility workers discovered Viking remains in the course of laying cables. In some ways the real lesson I learned here is that the popular understanding of history often lags behind what scholars are working on. Not a new lesson, but one I have to learn over and over.

The Vikings Begin is visually spectacular. Most of the artifacts on display have never traveled outside of Sweden before. The exhibit will be at Mystic Seaport through September 30. The exhibit will then travel to the Nordic Museum in Seattle and the American Swedish Museum in Minneapolis. Well worth the effort if it comes to a museum near you.

*Raids on the British Isles. Explorers landing in North America. Dragon boats. Etc.

** Who turned out to be the Birka Woman.

***As opposed to the raid on Lindisfarne in 793, which is generally considered the start of the Viking era.

****It makes sense if you look at a map. Suddenly the idea that the Vikings made their way to Russia doesn’t look so surprising.

Road Trip Through History: Mystic Seaport

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My Own True Love is not my only co-conspirator when it comes to road trips through history. I met fellow historian Karin Wetmore my first day in graduate school while we were standing next to each other in the part of the registration line dedicated to people with names beginning with letters at the end of the alphabet.* Shortly thereafter we headed downtown to the Field Museum to see an exhibit of the terra cotta warriors from the tomb of the first Chinese emperor, which had been discovered several years before and were making their first guest appearance in the United States.

We’ve been taking each other on historical adventures ever since, though not as often as either of us would like. When I recently visited her in Boston, we hit the road for a day trip to Mystic Seaport in Connecticut.**

Mystic Seaport is a living history museum devoted to the the Yankee whaling ships of the nineteenth century. Like other living history museums I have visited over the years, it includes a row of small period shops devoted to the crafts and businesses that would have played a role in the port during the days of the whaling industry. Some of them, like the printing shop, the barrel maker, and the apothecary, were familiar from inland living history programs. Others, like the sailmakers, the rope walk, and the chandlery, were not. I came away with a greater appreciation of rope making and the role of a printing shop in small town America in the nineteenth century.***

Much as I enjoyed the “village”, the real focus of Mystic Seaport is the whaling industry—just as it would have been in the late eighteenth century. We began our visit with a tour of the Charles W. Morgan, a restored whaling ship that first launched in 1841 and made 37 voyages over an eighty-year career. In its day, the Morgan was known as a lucky, or “greasy”, ship—that is one that regularly got its whale. I suppose you could say it’s still a lucky ship since it is the last of its kind that is still afloat. I was fascinated by a close-up look at the ship’s fittings, all of which looked cozy enough until you thought about sharing quarters with thirty-five of your (unwashed) fellow sailors and a hold full of rendered whale blubber. Presumably the nose grows numb with time.

Once we had seen what a (seriously cleaned-up) whaling ship looked like, we moved on to the whaling museum, which provided context. The museum tells the stories of Yankee whaling, aboriginal whaling, and the “save the whale” movement. It looks at how the popular image of whales changed over time, and how nineteenth century naturalists created a body of data about whale movements that remains the foundation for the work of modern marine biologists. It displays the range of products that depended on whalebone, baleen, and whale oil. (I was fascinated by a video demonstrating scrimshaw carving.) It considers the role of whale oil in the second wave of the Industrial Revolution. (The short version: machinery needs to be oiled and whale oil was cheap.)

Here are some of the bits that caught my imagination:

  • The use of whale oil lamps on city streets changed urban life. Streets were safer (at least in “good” neighborhoods) so more people moved around after dark.
  • In the American Civil War, the Union sunk old whaling ships to block southern harbors.
  • As late as 1972, Dexron transmission fluid contained whale oil.
  • The term “whale on” comes from the use of a buggy whip made from baleen.

If we’d come later in the year, we might have chosen to participate in the annual Moby-Dick Marathon: a twenty-four hour public reading of Hermann Melville’s long-winded classic in honor of Melville’s birthday. It’s a communal event, in which visitors are encouraged to read a chapter or two. Then again, maybe not. Reading Moby-Dick in high school was enough of a marathon.

*Alphabetization has always been my friend.

**As those of you who follow me on Facebook or Twitter may have seen, I also took the opportunity to meet with the publishing team at Beacon Press, which is publishing Women Warriors. It’s starting to feel real, people.

***Just because I’m familiar with the mechanics of the printing press (at least in theory), it doesn’t mean there wasn’t stuff to learn. The printer at Mystic Seaport was willing to talk at length about the types of documents that would have been printed in a shop like his in addition to the local newspaper: bank notes issued by the local bank, job announcements, theater bills, election ballots, wedding announcements, menu cards, etc. There was a *headsmack* element to the experience. Sometimes the obvious is surprising.