Re-Run: Word With A Past–Maffick
The Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) started badly from the British point of view. British troops, supposedly the best trained and best equipped in the world, suffered a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of Boer farmers. (Anyone else hear echoes of another colonial war that pitted farmers against British regulars?)
The only bright spot in the morass of inefficiency and disaster was Colonel Robert Baden-Powell’s spirited–and well-publicized–defense of Mafeking, a small town on the border between British and Boer territory. (Yep. The guy who founded the Boy Scouts.)
The siege lasted for 219 days. Undermanned and inadequately armed, Baden-Powell improvised fake defenses, made grenades from tin cans, and organized polo matches and other entertainments to keep the garrison’s spirits high. The British public was able to follow “B-P’s” defense of Mafeking because the besieged town included journalists from four London papers, who paid African runners to carry their dispatches through the Boer lines.
When news of the garrison’s relief reached England, public celebrations were so exuberant that “maffick” became a (sadly underused) verb meaning to celebrate uproariously.
Maffick vt. To celebrate an event uproariously, as the relief of Mafeking was celebrated in London and other British cities.
Personally, I intend to maffick like mad when I turn this book proposal in.
Re-Run: If You Only Read One Book On Islamic History…
Last year I discovered the best general book on Islamic history I’ve ever read: Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tanim Ansary. I underlined as I read. I annotated. I put little Post-It tabs at critical points, the durable ones so I could go back to key arguments in the future. In short, I had a conversation with that book.
An Afghani-American who grew up in Afghanistan reading English-language history for fun, Ansary argues that Islamic history is not a sub-set of a shared world history but an alternate world history that runs parallel to world history as taught in the West. In Ansary’s account, the two visions of world history begin in the same place: the cradle of civilization nestled between the Tigris and the Euphrates. They end up at the same place: a world in which the West and the Islamic world are major and often opposing players. But the paths they take to the modern world, or more accurately the narratives that explain how “we” got to the modern world, are very different. Ansary’s book unfolds those two narratives side by side in clear, lively, and often amusing prose. I found his conclusions compelling.
If you’re only going to read one book on Islamic history, do yourself a favor: chose Destiny Disrupted. Then let me know what you think about it.
Re-Run: Road Trip Through History–The Utopian Communities of New Harmony
My Own True Love and I dearly love a road trip, especially if it includes a historical site or three, a quirky museum, a regional delicacy to try, walking paths, and plenty of roadside historical markers. (Anyone who thinks she might want to travel with us, be warned. We are the kind of people who turn off the road to find the historical marker rumored to be three miles to the west. )
Last weekend we packed cooler, notebook and walking shoes, said “hasta la bye-bye” to The Cat, and headed to southern Indiana.
New Harmony, Indiana, has been on our gotta-see list since last October, when I wrote about Robert Owen’s utopian community as part of a book on socialism. (Pausing for a blatant piece of self promotion. Close your eyes if it makes you queasy.)
New Harmony was home to two successive utopian communities.
The first was the Harmony Society, informally known as the Rappites: a German Pietist sect who split off from the Lutheran church at the end of the eighteenth century. They believed that the end of the world was near, but that didn’t stop them from hard work while they waited. Over the course of ten years, they successfully built a communal Christian republic in the Indiana wilderness.
In 1824, the Harmony Society sold their land and settlement to British reformer Robert Owen. Owen was a self-made factory owner with dreams of reforming society on communal lines. Self-sufficient Villages of Cooperation would replace private property. Owen’s New Harmony was less successful than that of the Harmony Society: too many artists and intellectuals and not enough farmer and tradesmen made self-sufficiency any more than a dream. In 1828, Owen sold the land to individuals at a loss.
Today the historic sites of New Harmony are well preserved and well presented, run by the University of Southern Indiana, the Indiana Historical Museums, and enthusiastic local volunteers.
We weren’t surprised that locals emphasize the achievements of the Harmony Society rather than Robert Owen’s failed experiment. We were surprised at their emphasis on weaving the past into the future. Museum architect Richard Meier, who later created the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, designed the visitor’s center, called the Atheneum in memory of Owen’s cultural experiment. Philip Johnson’s Roofless Church houses a statue by Jacques Lipschitz.
All told, we had a great visit: well designed historical exhibits, good food (eat at the Red Geranium if you go), a labyrinth to walk, old houses to look at, lots of historical markers along the way, and a few surprises. Just what a history road trip should be.
Everywhere you look, from the web site to the entrance of the Athenaeum, New Harmony asks its visitors, “What’s your vision of Utopia?” I don’t have an answer. What about you?