1517: A Year in Review
On October 31, 1517, one man with a hammer changed the course of history. Thirty-three-year-old German monk Martin Luther nailed a list of 95 complaints about the practices of the Catholic church to a church door in Wittenberg–the sixteenth century equivalent of pinning them to a community bulletin board. (Or perhaps, as some scholars argue, the church door story is comic-book history* and Luther simply sent out copies to church officials.) Whether nailed or mailed, Luther was hoping to start a conversation within the church. Instead he started the Protestant Reformation.
Historically-aware media outlets highlighted Luther and that church door throughout October. But the distribution of his 95 theses wasn’t the only event to change the world in 1517. Here are a few other high and low points of 1517:
- The Ottoman Turks defeated the Mamluks of Egypt, thereby adding Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula to their empire and transforming the Ottoman state from a kingdom at the edge of the Islamic world to a mighty empire, with control over the Muslim holy places at Mecca and Medina
- The Portuguese, also in the process of building an empire, established a trading post in what was then Ceylon and sailed all the way to Canton: making the world just a little bit smaller.
On a smaller scale:
- Italian physician/poet Girolamao Fracastoro suggested that fossils are the petrified remains of once-living organisms–still a controversial subject in some circles.
- A new luxury good, coffee, made its way to Europe.
- Moroccan explorer Leo Africanus (ca 1494-1554) traveled to Timbuktu and back. His travel account, Description of Africa, was the West’s primary source on the Islamic world for some 400 years.
- On May 1, remembered as Evil May Day, artisans and apprentices rioted in London because they believed foreigners were taking their jobs. The story is complicated but the short version is that times were hard and the foreign-born minority who lived in London were a visible scapegoat. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
*The storybook version of history that we learn as kids and carry in out heads and hearts as adults.
1917: A Year in Review
In 1917, the War to End All Wars continued to dominate the headlines. On April 6, the United States finally abandoned isolationism and entered the war, after being given a strong shove by Germany in the form of the Zimmerman Telegram. On the Eastern front, Russia suffered devastating defeats, which contributed directly to the Bolshevik revolution (here and here) and separate peace talks between Bolshevik Russia and Germany. In the Middle East, Britain continued to support the Arab tribes in their revolt against the Ottoman empire, while at the same time the Balfour declaration committed Britain to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. (Anyone with half a brain would see that this was trouble in the making.)
It’s easy to forget that the war wasn’t the only news that was fit to print. Here are a few events that occurred off the battlefield in 1917 that are worth remembering:
- The first jazz recording was made in New York by a group of white musicians from New Orleans, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, led by cornet player Nick LaRocca. Their 1917 recording of “Livery Stable Blues” and the “Dixie(land) Jass [sic] Band One Step” on the Victor Records label was a huge success. Many older people thought the music was just noise. (Thomas Edison, the inventor of the phonograph, claimed that he played jazz records backwards “because they sound better that way”.) Young people loved the new music; they bought more than one million copies of the first jazz recording, more than any record had sold before. (Just to put this is context: The first commercial record player was released in 1895.)
- Clarence Birdseye developed freezing as a method of preserving food, triggering decades of foodie arguments about flavor and nutrition.*
- Sigmund Freud published Introduction to Psychoanalysis, triggering decades of other types of debate.**
- Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, also triggering debates, alas!
*As far as I’m concerned, the only thing frozen peas should be used for is an ice pack.
**You can argue that frozen food and/or Freudian analysis is good. You can argue that they are bad. But you can’t deny that they changed the way many of us live.
On War, Part Three: Lest We Forget
For those of you who missed the last blog post:
A couple of weeks ago I spent the day attending the fifth annual “On War” military history symposium at the Pritzker Military Library. This was the third time I’ve attended and the third time I’ve come away with a notebook full of ideas, factoids, and hot leads that I want to track down—complete with stars, arrows tying ideas together, and an occasional streak of highlighter. It was the first time I came away feeling like I was there as part of the community rather than an interested outsider. By day’s end I was both exhausted and energized. Most importantly, I was ready to write.
In previous years I’ve written reports on the conference as a whole. This year I’m exploring a couple of the ideas that caught my attention over the next few blogposts. You can see the previous posts here and here.
There were three more panels to the symposium. Here are the highlights:
Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried, on the difference between writing fiction and non-fiction: Nonfiction aims for the reader’s brain. Fiction aims for the reader’s stomach, the back of the throat, the nape of the neck. (Personally, I don’t think it’s that cut and dried. I’ve read fiction that is an intellectual puzzle and non-fiction that has made me rage and cry.)
Michael Robbins, author of the Pritzker Library’s beautiful new coffee table book commemorating WWI, on the causes of that war: It was triggered in part by the size of the standing armies and the speed with which they could be mobilized.
Peter Paret, winner of this year’s Pritzker Literature Award, on what’s sometimes described as the “new military history”: It isn’t new. Historians were writing the history of wars together with the history of society, culture ,and ideas in the nineteenth century. You can’t get answers to the big questions about war by staying at the level of tactics and operations. (Can we get an “amen”?)
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As often happens at events of this time, a recurring, and presumably unplanned, theme emerged across the panels. This year it was the idea that war doesn’t end just because the opposing powers sign a treaty. * Here’s the form that idea took in three different panels:
Allan Millett, discussing the transition from Japanese control to nationalist resistance, made the point: “In a lot of these places, the war didn’t really end; it changed.”
Michael Robbins took Millet’s point a step further, and said that wars never stop when the treaty is signed: “It’s not just that people down at the end of the line didn’t get the news. Chaos has been unleashed.”
Tim O’Brien: “There’s an illusion that wars end when the the peace treaty is signed.” He then argued that wars live on in the lives of the veterans, what he described as “the things I carry with me.”
Moral of the day? Wars end not with a bang, but a whimper.
*Sometimes a treaty doesn’t ever get signed. I was stunned to learn that Russia and Japan never signed a peace treaty at the end of World War II—the ownership of a string of desolate volcanic islands off the coast of Hokkaido, known as the Northern Territories in Japan and the Kuril Islands in Russia, is still an unresolved issue. It’s not a meaningless pissing match: the islands are rich in minerals, control prime fishing grounds and have the potential to be strategically important. In other words, you don’t sign the peace treaty because you’re crossing your fingers behind your back and anticipating the needs of the next war.