National History Day
National History Day is almost upon us. It’s the sort of event that should make history buffs stand up and shout. Maybe even dance a conga line through the local library.
I will admit, Natural History Day first came to my attention in a less than positive way. Several months ago, I began to receive emails from students asking if they could “interview” me regarding the Meiji Restoration, based on a blog post I wrote on the subject. I was flattered when I got the first email. Then I was outraged when the young woman sent me a list of many, many, many questions clearly written by an adult.* (“During the Versailles Peace Conference, why did the delegates refuse to include a clause for racial equality and how did the Japanese react to this exclusion and discrimination?” is not a question written by an eighth-grader–or at least not by the eighth-grader who wrote the original ungrammatical email.) By the fourth request I went looking on-line to find out what the *&(*^&%% this was about.
I was impressed with what I found. Founded in 1974, National History Day is the history equivalent of a nation-wide robotics contest for students from the sixth through the twelve grades. Its intention is “to provide an opportunity for students to push past the antiquated view of history as mere facts and dates and drill down into historical content to develop perspective and understanding.” (I assume that if you’re a regular reader of this blog this is a goal you can get behind.) Each year the organization chooses a theme for student research projects, which can include documentaries, exhibits, papers, websites or even performances.** If I had know about this in 1974 (or 1975. Or 1976) I would have been all over it.
On June 11, winning teams of young history nerds from across the country will converge in Washington for the final stage of the competition. This year’s theme is “Taking A Stand in History”. *** As far as I’m concerned, that means “Shin-kickers From History”. I can’t wait to find out what they come up with.
We need to know our history. We need to know other people’s history. Here’s hoping National History Day hooks a few history buffs.
*This was not my first experience at having a student try to get me to do their homework for them. About every six months some kid contacts me about a topic in my book on socialism. I am not alone in this. Grrr.
**Perhaps a Hamilton-style mini-musical?
***The Meiji Restoration is not the first thing I think of when I hear that phrase. Somewhere in California there is an eighth-grade teacher with a bee in her bonnet.
The Storied City
In 2013, Charlie English, then international news editor of The Guardian, became obsessed with the news coming out of Timbuktu. Jihadists were destroying the city’s religious monuments because they were not properly Islamic and librarians were smuggling medieval books out of the city in order to preserve them from the jihadists. He was not the first Westerner to be obsessed with the city and its treasures: throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries European explorers had tried to find their way to the legendary golden city of Africa.*
In The Storied City: The Quest for Timbuktu and the Fantastic Mission to Save Its Past, English intertwines the history of Europe’s relationship with and quest to “discover” a city that few Europeans had ever seen and first-hand reporting on the threat to Timbuktu’s historical heritage. The result is a parallel set of adventures, both of which are shaped by personal danger, the search for funding, the difficulties of traveling across the desert, the possibility of being stopped by armed bandits, the frustrations of dealing with international cultural organizations, and a passion for medieval documents.
The contemporary story will be familiar to readers of The Bad-ass Librarians of Timbuktu. English adds a layer of complexity to that story by placing it in the context 100 years of European attempts to reach a city that had taken on a mythic quality in the collective imagination and their failure to understand Timbuktu’s continued importance as a treasure trove of knowledge.
*If English leaves you with a taste for a more in-depth account of European explorers in the Sahara, I strongly recommend Steve Kemper’s A Labyrinth of Kingdoms, one of the best works of historical non-fiction that I’ve read in recent years.
Most of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
Warriors, Bishops and Long-Haired Kings
These days I’m not reading many Big Fat History Books that I’m prepared to recommend to the Marginalia. It’s not that I’m not reading. At the moment I have five different library cards on active rotation in my wallet and carefully segregated piles of books from three different libraries on my study floor. When I reach the point where my brain is too bleary to write or brainstorm, I settle down with the latest BFHB and a stack of slightly used sticky notes, prepared to learn more about the woman warrior who is next in the queue. For the most part, they (the books, not the warriors) are solid, scholarly works, written with thought and care and impenetrable prose. They come with a full complement of footnotes, bibliography, maps, and genealogy charts. They are very good, but they are not the kind of books that I review here.*
But there are exceptions. Last Sunday I settled down on the porch with a glass of ice tea and read Katharine Scherman’s The Birth of France: Warriors, Bishops and Long-Haired Kings. I was on the track of Brunhild and Fredegund, a pair of rivals queens in the sixth century CE who stood at the heart of forty years of war between the Merovingian kings in what would later become France. I came to the conclusion that for my purposes they were not women warriors, though they often appear in biographical dictionaries of the same.*** Brunhild was embattled, which is not the same as going to battle. Fredegund appears to have led troops into battle on occasion, but she is best know for hiring assassins**** to get rid of her political rivals, not to mention people who just irritated her.
Scherman not only convinced me that Brunhild and Fredegund were critical historical figures, she placed them beautifully in the complex world of post-Roman Europe. ***** She combines lively prose with a gift for explaining complex events and ideas. I came away with a clearer sense of Roman Gall, the Germanic tribes, the confusion of new kingdoms that arose out of the dust of empire, the role of the Church, and the transition from the Merovingian kings to their Carolingian successors. By the end, the Dark Ages were a little less dark as far as I was concerned.
I’m happy to have spent an afternoon with Scherman, even if it mean voting Brunhild and Fredegund off the island.
*I’m also spending time with another breed of book that I don’t review: special pleading built on sloppy scholarship. These are largely useless, though carefully reading will sometimes produce a thread back to something interesting, usually in the footnotes.**
**Always read the footnotes. Especially in books built on sloppy scholarship.
*** Which may simply mean the authors/editors are working from a different definition of what constitutes a woman warrior. As I discussed in a recent edition of my newsletter, the definition is a matter of debate. (And speaking of my newsletter: if you’re interested in discussions about the process of writing history and hot off the presses news about speaking gigs, etc, you can subscribe here: http://eepurl.com/cobpk9 )
****Or perhaps seducing them into doing her dirty work. Contemporary accounts suggest she was a femme fatale in the metaphorical as well as the literal sense.
*****For those of you who like to place things in the Big Timeline: The western Roman Empire officially “fell” in 476 CE, when the Germanic leader Odacer deposed the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus. The eastern Roman Empire (aka Byzantium) survived, and even thrived, for another thousand years.