Blog Love
I'll warn you ahead of time: today's post is going to be a little different than my normal posts. Instead of blogging about history, I'm going to blog about history bloggers. If your eyes are beginning to glaze over, you can leave now and my feelings won't be hurt. But you're going to miss out on some good stuff. Honest.
Last week I was pleased to have a fellow Genghis Khan fan tag me for a Liebster* blog award. For those of you who haven't heard of it,** the Liebster award is a little like a blog chain letter. Someone nominates you. You nominate another five blogs with (presumed) small readerships***. In theory, they nominate five more. The idea is to introduce new readers to blogs you enjoy and hopefully give those blogs an increased readership. Everyone wins.
First stop: The blogger who tagged me is novelist Bryn Hammond. Her blog Amgalant is a treasure trove of information about Genghis Khan, the Mongols, and steppe culture in general. If Central Asia fascinates you, she's your girl. If it doesn't fascinate you yet, she might give you a shove in that direction.
And now, drum roll please, my nominations:***
1. I loved Nancy Marie Brown's The Abacus and the Cross: The Story of the Pope Who Brought the Light of Science to the Dark Ages so I was thrilled to discover her blog God of Wednesday. She blogs about Vikings, Norse myth, Iceland, and miscellaneous things medieval. I learn something new from her all the time.
2. Donna Segers' Streets of Salem is local history at its best. She uses the history of Salem, Massachusetts, as a jumping off point for topics large and small, from historical ephemera to world historical events. Great photos and interesting commentary.
3. My guess is that Two Nerdy History Girls, the blog home of novelists Loretta Chase and Susan Holloway Scott, has too many followers to really qualify for a Liebster. I'm including it anyway. After all, what female history nerd can resist eighteenth century fashion and mores, historical hotties, and tough broads from the past? Not me, ladies.
4. I don't collect vintage clothing and I don't know much about it, but Lizzie Bramlett's The Vintage Traveler has me hooked. She talks about the clothes, and does it in an interesting and intelligent way. More important to me, she talks about the context for the clothes: the fashion industry, clothing manufacturers, cultural norms. Smart stuff, and great pictures.
5. Jack el-Hai tells stories about fascinating people from the past, well-known and obscure, at Jack's Blog. There are some common threads (medicine, hypnosis, psychology, and the FBI come to mind), but the main thing that holds them together is Jack el-Hai's formidable intelligence and wide-ranging curiosity. I learn something new even when I think I know the subject.
Five very different blogs. Go check them out.
*From the German for favorite
** Including me, up to a week ago.
***The rules I've read vary about how small is small, ranging from 200 to 3000 readers.
**** I going to limit my nominations to history blogs, which leaves out lots of other great blogs that I read, including some written by dear friends. Sorry, guys.
From The Ruins of Empire
If you've been following along for a while, you've probably figured out that I like books that look at familiar history from another point of view. (For example, here, and here, and here.) It should be no surprise that Pankaj Mishra's latest book caught my eye.
In From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, Pankaj Mishra returns again to the intersection between Asian and Western cultures that informed his earlier work, Temptations of the West.
Misra begins with the statement that the intellectual and political awakening of Asia was the central event of the twentieth century for a majority of the world's population. That event came about as a result of a new class of western-educated Asian elites. As a group, they typically rejected their traditional heritage in favor of western modes of thought, then later re-embraced their native traditions, transforming those traditions in the process.
Instead of concentrating on well-known Asian historical figures, Mishra centers his book on the intellectual journeys of three men who are important historical figures in their own cultures but largely unfamiliar to most Westerners. Journalist and political activist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-97) was a founder of Islamic modernism. Chinese intellectual Liang Qichao (1873-1929) inspired a generation of young Chinese activists with his calls for reform. Indian poet and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a leaders of the Bengal Renaissance.
Over the course of the book, Misra shows how his characters are shaped by and respond to the familiar events of European imperialism in Asia, giving those events a new perspective for the Western reader. His stated goal is not to replace a Euro-centric view with an "equally problematic Asia-centric one", but to look at both the past and the present from multiple viewpoints. For the most part, he succeeds
This reviewe appeared previously in Shelf Awareness for Readers
Ibn Who?
If you spend any time studying history in a serious way--whether in school and/or as a dedicated history nerd--you end up with a list in your head of Great Historians of the Past: Herodotus*, Thucydides, Tacitus, the Venerable Bede, Gibbon, Macaulay, Prescott. Even after their historical works were revised or even rejected by later scholars**, they remain as monuments of thought, analysis, and masterful story telling.
I had finished my graduate school coursework and was well into my dissertation before I added fourteenth century Arab historian and social observer ibn Khaldun to my personal list of history all-stars.
Ibn who? I thought you'd never ask.
Ibn-Khaldun is sometimes seen as the last great scholar of the Islamic golden age, now considered by those in the know as one of the founders of modern historiography, sociology, and economics. He was born in Tunis in 1332 to an Andalusian family of scholars and officials who had fled Spain after Seville fell to Ferdinand of Castile in 1248.*** When he was seventeen, his parents and teachers died in the Black Death, as did almost half the population of Europe and Asia.
Like many others caught in the chaos that followed the Black Death, ibn Khaldun left his home in search of something: stability, a career, adventure, a life. He was very well educated and had no trouble finding work in the courts of North Africa and Islamic Spain. Although he claimed that he wanted to devote his life to scholarship, he repeatedly became entangled in court intrigues thanks to either bad luck or bad judgment.
In 1375, after he failed to save a friend who was tried and executed for heresy, ibn Khaldun withdrew to the Castle of ibn Salamah, near Oran in Algeria, to immerse himself in his books and try to make sense of his experiences. During his years of retreat, he completed what would be his best-known and most original work: the Muqaddima, or Prolegomenon.**** Intended as the first volume of history of the Arab peoples, the Muqaddima is an introduction to the writing of history and a discussion of the nature of the state and society. In it, he explores the idea that writing history an act of interpretation and suggests a rigorous process of fact checking as a necessary part of the work.
The most important part of the book is the Islamic equivalent of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Drawing on his personal and family experience and the history of the Arab world, ibn Khaldun analyses how civilizations breed their own decline, moving from strength to luxury to moral laxity and decay. Historian Arnold Toynbee, himself the author of a twelve-volume study of the rise and fall of civilization, described the Muqaddima as "undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place…the most comprehensive and illuminating analysis of how human affairs work that has been made anywhere."
After four calm years at the Castle of ibn Salamah, ibn Khaldun needed conversation and a research library so he could work on the main body of his history. He returned to Tunis, where he was immediately sucked into the usual morass of academic, religious and political intrigues. He escaped Tunis under the pretext of going on the hajj, only to fall into similar turbulence in Cairo. Over the course of twenty-five years, the sultan appointed him as a judge and subsequently dismissed him six times.
In 1400, ibn Khaldun was given another chance to help write history, this time as a source. The sultan of Cairo insisted that he join a delegation to Damascus to negotiate with the renowned Mongol conqueror, known in the west as Tamurlane. When the delegation received word of the rebellion back in Cairo, they returned to the west, leaving ibn Khaldun behind in the besieged city of Damascus. The historian was determined to meet with the renowned conqueror. Since the gates of the city were locked, he had himself lowered over the walls in a basket. Ibn Khaldun met with Timur several times over the course of the month, enjoying wide-ranging conversations about history*****, North African culture and Timur's conquests. Ibn Khaldun recorded those conversations, as well as a first hand account of the siege of Damascus in his autobiography, now a major resource for anyone writing about Timur.
Ibn Khaldun returned in Cairo in 1401 and resumed the cycle of appointment and dismissal. He died there five years late.
* AKA the "father of history" and a man who never met an unconfirmed story he didn't like
** If you're lucky, what you write is important enough for someone to argue with you after you're dead.
***NOT the Ferdinand of Ferdinand of Isabella. The Christian reconquest of Spain took several centuries.
**** I'll save you the trouble of looking it up. A prolegomenon is a critical introduction to a book, as opposed to just a regular introduction.
***** When he wasn't too busy conquering someplace, Timur was a history buff.