Historic Maps and Digital Mapping Roundup

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Historic Maps and Digital Mapping Roundup
"Was your street bombed during the Blitz?" Telegraph, December 6, 2012

The year-long mapping project, devised by geographer Dr Kate Jones of the University of Portsmouth, uses red bomb symbols to illustrate where each bomb landed.>>>

Neal Conan, "'A History Of The World' Through A Mapmaker's Eyes," WWNO npr, November 26, 2012

World maps help us make sense of the world around us, and our place in it.

While mapmakers may portray their world maps as accurate, scientific and neutral, every single one describes the world from a certain worldview and culture. From ancient Babylonia to the Renaissance, cartographers have been driven by politics, religion, emotion and math.>>>

Edel Howlin, "World Wants A Little Piece Of Texas On A Map," KUHF npr, November 29, 2012

The Texas General Land Office has been selling map reprints since 2002 with sales numbers jumping around November and December. James Harkins is with the Land Office and says many of their holiday orders come from customers across the pond.

“And that’s because during the 19th century there was a mass immigration movement into Texas from Europe and there are dozens of maps of Texas that were written in German that talked about what a great place Texas is. That the hills in the hill country remind Germans of what it’s like back in Germany.”>>>

Bill Bowden, "Researchers pinpoint historic Prairie Grove sites," Atlanta Journal Constitution, December 9, 2012

The locations were found using a combination of old and new technologies — everything from ground-penetrating radar to shovel tests. Historical descriptions, a map drawn by a Union soldier and aerial photographs from 1941 also provided valuable information.>>>

A Leadership Legacy: Happy 138th, Winston

Philip White

November 30 was Winston Churchill’s birthday. 138 years after his birth, historians, politicians and the public are still as fascinated as ever about this most iconic of British Prime Ministers. Of course, as with every major historical figure, the

Ivor Roberts-Jones statue of Churchill, Oslo, Norway

amount of one-sided deconstructionism has increased over the past few years, no more useful to the reader than one-sided hagiography. The truth, of course, lies somewhere in the middle–a deeply flawed (aren’t we all!) larger-than-life figure who botched a lot of decisions–notably his resistance to home rule for India and well-meaning but ill-conceived support of Edward VIII during the 1936 abdication crisis–who got the big things right.

Among the latter was Churchill’s foresight over the divisions between the democratic West and the Communist East. Since the inception of Communism and its violent manifestation in the Russian Revolution, Churchill had despised the movement, calling it a “pestilence.” Certainly, his monarchial devotion was part of this, but more so, Churchill believed Communism destroyed the very principles of liberty and freedom that he would devote his career to advancing and defending. Certainly, with his love of Empire, there were some inconsistencies in his thinking, but above all, Churchill believed that the individual should be able to make choices and that systemic freedom–of the press, of religion, of the ballot, must be upheld for individuals to enact such choices. That’s why he vowed to “strangle Bolshevism in its cradle,” though his plan to bolster anti-Communist forces was quickly shot down by Woodrow Wilson and David Lloyd George as another of “Winston’s follies.”

In this case, his plan to oppose Communism was indeed unrealistic. There were a small amount of British, Canadian, and American troops and a trickle of supporting materiel going to aid the White Russians toward the end of World War I, but once the Armistice was signed on November 11, 1918, the Allied leaders wanted to get their boys home, not commit more to a seemingly hopeless cause.

But over the next three decades, Churchill’s ideas on how to deal with Communism became more informed, more realistic and, arguably, more visionary. Though he reluctantly accepted Stalin as an ally when Hitler turned on Russia in the fateful summer of 1941, Churchill’s pragmatism and public admiration of the Marshal did not blind him to the ills of the Communist system. The Percentages Agreement he signed with Stalin in a late 1944 meeting has since been blamed for hastening the fall of democratic Eastern Europe, but what Churchill was actually doing there was essentially recognizing that the Communist takeover was a fait accompli, and guaranteeing Stalin’s agreement to largely leave the Greek Communists to their own devices in Greece after World War II. Though Moscow did supply arms and it took the Marshall Plan to prop up the anti-Communist side in Greece, Stalin largely honored this pledge.

He was not so good on his word with many other things, however. Among the promises he made to Churchill and FDR were to include the London Poles (exiled during the war) in a so-called representative government in Poland. In fact, the Communist puppet Lublin Poles ran the new regime after the war, and the old guard was either shunned or killed. In fact, horrifyingly, many of the leaders of the Polish Underground were taken out by Stalin’s henchmen, and others were held in former Nazi camps that the Red Army had supposedly “liberated.” At the Potsdam Conference in July 1946, Stalin showed that his vows at Yalta were mere lip service to the British and American leaders.  He made demands for bases in Turkey, threatened the vital British trade route through the Suez canal and refused to withdraw troops from oil-rich Iran.

Churchill, still putting his faith in personal diplomacy, believed he could reason with Stalin, particularly if Harry Truman backed him up. But halfway through the Potsdam meeting the British public sent the Conservative Party to its second worst defeat in one of the most surprising General Election decisions. Churchill was out as Prime Minister and Clement Attlee was in. Off Attlee went to Germany to finish the dialogue with Truman and Stalin. Churchill feared he was headed for political oblivion.

Yet, after a few weeks of moping, he realized that he still had his pen and, as arguably the most famous democratic leader of the age (only FDR came close in global renown), his voice. And so it was that he accepted an invitation to speak at a most unlikely venue in March 1946 – Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri – not least due to the postscript that Truman added to Westminster president Franc “Bullet” McCluer’s invite, offering to introduce Churchill in the President’s home state. There he described the need for a “special relationship” between the British Commonwealth and the United States, which was needed to check the spread of expansionist Communism and the encroachment of the “iron curtain” into Europe. 

As I explained

Philip White speaking at the National
Churchill Museum, Fulton, Missouri, Nov 11, 2012

when I spoke at the National Churchill Museum on, fittingly, Armistice Day, last month, this metaphor entered our lexicon and was embodied in the Berlin Wall–the enduring image of the standoff. Yet the “special relationship” outlived this symbol, as did the principles of leadership Churchill displayed in his brave “Sinews of Peace” speech (the real title of what’s now known as the “Iron Curtain” address). Churchill was willing to speak a hard truth even when he knew it would be unpopular and then, a few days later, after a police escort was needed to get him into New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel as demonstrators yelled “GI Joe is home to stay, Winnie, Winnie, go away,” to boldly declare, “I do not wish to withdraw or modify a single word.” His critics again called him an imperialist, an old Tory and, in as Stalin said, a warmonger. The same insults he had endured when sounding the alarm bell about Hitler in the mid- to late-1930s. And in 1946, just as in the 1930s, Churchill was right.

Not only did Churchill define the Communist-Democratic divide, he also had a plan for what to do about it. Though his more ambitious ideas, including shared US-UK citizenship, did not come to fruition, the broader concepts were embodied in the creation of NATO, European reconciliation, and the Marshall Plan. He also understood not just the Communist system he criticized but the democratic one it threatened, and, the day after the anniversary of Jefferson’s inaugural address, gave a memorable defense of the principles that were, he said, defined by common law and the Bill of Rights. This is something leaders of any political persuasion must be able to do–to articulate what they and we stand for, and why.

As I think of Churchill just after his birthday, that’s what I’m focusing on: vision, understanding and bravery. Such leadership principles will be just as valid 138 years from now as they were on that sunny springtime afternoon in Fulton.

Index for September Issue of Historically Speaking

Randall Stephens

It will be a little bit before readers have the latest issue of Historically Speaking in hand, but in the meantime have a look at what will be between the covers.  The September 2012 issue will feature conversations with historians James Banner, Ilya Grinberg, George H. Nash, and Andrew Lambert.  It also includes essays on race and religion, colonial Britain, and religion and politics as well as a two forums on war.

David Lowenthal's "The Past Made Present" is the lead essay.  He explores themes laid out in the 2nd edition of his forthcoming Cambridge University Press book The Past Is a Foreign Country. Writes Lowenthal:

Branson, Mo, theme park Silver Dollar City. Photo by Stephens, August 2012.

Two opposing attitudes dominate recent discourse on the use and misuse of history. Many take refuge in the past as an antidote to present disappointments and future fears. They hark back nostalgically or formulaically to the fancied benefits, even to the fearsome burdens, of times of lost purity and simplicity, lapsed immediacy and certitude, in some Golden Age of classical serenity, Christian faith, pastoral plenitude, or childhood innocence. Sojourning in the past seems preferable to living in the present.

And given the mounting surfeit of heritage sites and structures, more and more of the past is accessible. Critics find the collective legacy crushingly voluminous, backward looking, and crippling to present enterprise. Fifty years ago architectural historian Reyner Banham condemned “the load of obsolete buildings that Europe is humping along on its shoulders [as] a bigger drag on the live culture of our continent than obsolete nationalisms or obsolete moral codes.” The load is now heavier. In much of England one feels hardly ever out of sight of a listed building, a protected archaeological site, a museum-worthy work of art. The treasured past is said to overwhelm French culture and politics. “Everything is indiscriminately conserved and archived,” notes a historian of the patrimony. “We no longer make history,” charges Jean Baudrillard. “We protect it like an endangered masterpiece.” The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas calls preservation a dangerous epidemic. Noting that UNESCO and similar bodies sequester one-sixth of the Earth’s surface, with more to come, he terms heritage a metastasizing cancer.

The popular alternative to wallowing in the past is to dismiss it entirely. The past has ever-diminishing salience for lives driven by today’s feverish demands and delights. The sensory-laden penchant for computer gaming, coupled with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, betoken a here-and-now environment dominated by raw sensations, in which “we live perpetually in the present.” Being up-to-date now not only matters most, it is all that matters; knowing or understanding the past is an impediment in the present rat race. . . .

Historically Speaking (September 2012):

The Past Made Present

David Lowenthal

British Perspectives on the War of 1812

The War of 1812 in the Grand Sweep of Military History

Jeremy Black

“Faithful History”: British Representations of the War of 1812

Andrew D. Lambert

The Naval War of 1812: An Interview with Andrew Lambert

Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

From Light to White: The Place and Race of Jesus in Antebellum America

Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey

Freedom Betrayed: An Interview with George H. Nash about Herbert Hoover’s Magnum Opus

Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Along the Hindu Kush: Warren Hastings, the Raj, and the Northwest Frontier

Kenneth W. Harl

The Soviet Air Force in World War II

Out of the Blue: The Forgotten Story of the Soviet Air Force in World War II

Von Hardesty

Red Phoenix Rising: An Interview with Ilya Grinberg

Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

In Search of the City on a Hill  

Richard Gamble

On Being a Historian: An Interview with James M. Banner, Jr.

Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Documentary Films and History Features Roundup

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The Amish, American Experience (2012)

An intimate portrait of contemporary Amish faith and life, this film examines how such a closed and communal culture has thrived within one of the most open, individualistic societies on earth. What does the future hold for a community whose existence is so rooted in the past? And what does our fascination with the Amish say about deep American values?

Clinton, American Experience (2012)

The biography of a president who rose from a broken childhood in Arkansas to become one of the most successful politicians in modern American history, and one of the most complex and conflicted characters to ever stride across the public stage.

Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture, BBC Two

Melvyn Bragg explores the relationship between class and culture from 1911 to 2011 in a new, three-part series.

Into the White (2012)

Into the White is an anti-war movie. High above the harsh Norwegian wilderness, English and German pilots shoot each other to the ground after a violent chance encounter. Isolated, they must fight to survive the brutal winter. Though war has made them enemies, antagonism is hard to maintain as days go by. Through mutual need, unlikely friendships bloom. Somehow, they become comrades. War, after all, is absurd.

Nicolaus Mills, "Why 'Downton Abbey' is a hit in America," CNN, February 25, 2012

Americans love a period drama, and they dote on the British aristocracy. That's the way the popularity of "Downton Abbey," the British television series that drew 5.4 million viewers for the finale of its second season on PBS, is being explained these days.

It's an explanation that reflects our television history. In the 1970s, the British series "Upstairs Downstairs" was wildly popular on PBS. "Downton Abbey," which this season took place during and after World War I, covers much of the same social territory in following the trials of the fictional Crawley family, headed by Robert, the earl of Grantham.

Pardoning Alan Turing

Heather Cox Richardson

Last week the British House of Lords declined to pardon Alan Turing for the crime of being gay. Convicted of indecency in 1952, Turing chose chemical castration rather than a prison term. Two years later, he killed himself by ingesting cyanide. Perhaps not ironically—since such symbolism was almost certainly intentional when committed by such a brilliant individual—he administered the poison to himself in an apple.

Alan Turing is widely considered to be the father of the modern computer. He was a key figure in Britain’s World War II code breaking center at Bletchley Park, inventing a machine that could break ciphers, including the difficult German Enigma codes. After the war, he continued to work in the world of artificial intelligence. Engineers still use the Turing Test to judge a machine’s ability to show intelligent behavior.

In 2009, Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a formal apology to Dr. Turing. Noting that the brilliant scientist had truly helped to turn the tide of war, Brown called it “horrifying” that he was treated “so inhumanely.” “While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time, and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair, and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him,” Brown said. “So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work, I am very proud to say: we're sorry. You deserved so much better.”

The formal apology was followed by an on-line petition asking British government officials to pardon Turing. By February 2012, 23,000 people had signed it. Last week, the Justice Minister declined to do as they asked. “A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turning was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence,” he explained.

Never shy about his defense of gay rights, columnist Dan Savage compared the conviction of Turing to the conviction of a Swiss man who also broke a law we now find appalling. In 1942, Jakob Spirig helped Jewish refugees from Germany cross into Switzerland, and was sent to prison for his crime. In January 2004, the Swiss government pardoned Spirig, and all other people convicted for helping refugees escaping Nazi Germany. Savage asked the House of Lords: “Did the Swiss government err when it pardoned Jakob Spirig? Or did you err by not pardoning Alan Turing?

Much though I hate to disagree with Dan Savage, who could rest on his laurels for the It Gets Better Project alone, I’m not a fan of pardoning people who have committed the crime of being human under inhumane laws. This describes Turing. He doesn’t need a pardon; the society that made him a criminal does. As the Justice Minster went on to explain: “It is tragic that Alan Turing was convicted of an offence which now seems both cruel and absurd, particularly... given his outstanding contribution to the war effort…. However, the law at the time required a prosecution and, as such, long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times.”

An apology is appropriate; a pardon is not.

Some things can never be put right. Pardoning a dead victim for the crime of being hated is a gift to the present, not the past. It lets modern-day people off the hook. They can be comfortable in their own righteousness, concluding that today’s injustices have nothing to do with such right-thinking people as they are. But they do. Laws reflect a society, and the ones that turned Turing and Spirig into criminals implicated not just their homophobic or pro-Nazi fellow citizens, but all of the members of their society who accepted those laws. A pardon in a case like Turing’s is a Get Out of Jail Free card not for him, but for us.

It’s way too late to pardon Alan Turing. And it’s way too early to pardon ourselves.

Timothy Snyder Lecture, April 10, 2012

Women in World War II: A Photo Essay

Heather Cox Richardson

My mother was a WAC, so I’ve always paid particular attention to women’s participation in WWII. But this new photo essay in The Atlantic took my breath away. It shows female snipers, field workers, nurses, executioners, prisoners, and pilots, from a whole range of countries.

These photos are stunning. My patience is short for photo essays. I rarely make it past the first few images, but I’ve examined this essay in its entirety twice already. It’s worth it.

Aside from their individual significance, these photos together make a statement about women, history, and women’s history. The resistance fighters, condemned prisoners, harvesters, and so on, in these images are not shown as wives and mothers, or in any role that highlights their gender; they are integral actors in the wide range of extreme roles humans assume during wartime.

Seeing these photos begs the long-standing question of under what societal conditions we can study women separately from men. Surely, in these images, ideology, survival, and nationalism trump gender. But just as surely, gender trumps other social impulses at other times. Is there any reliable way to gauge gender’s relative importance compared to other factors? Or does it have to be studied on a case-by-case basis?

Death, Memory, and Oral History

Morgan Hubbard

A recent piece in The Root on World War II-generation African Americans got me thinking about memory.

When people die they take their memories with them. Their memories become inaccessible forever. Our understanding of events that shaped our world can be lost with the death of one woman, man, or child.

When memories have contemporary political valence, this can be dangerous. Allesandro Portelli’s The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and the Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) illustrates this point well. Portelli shows how nationalist Italians have purposefully misremembered the circumstances of a Nazi massacre sixty-five years ago for present political purposes. In 1945, anti-fascist Italian partisans attacked a column of German soldiers in Nazi-occupied Rome. The Nazis retaliated less than 24 hours later by massacring more than 300 Italians. Pro-fascist Italians at the time concocted a counter-narrative that blamed the partisans, not the Nazis, for the massacre, alleging that the partisans ought to have turned themselves in to forestall the murders. The documentary record demonstrates that this was never possible, but the counter-narrative is persistent, even among young right-leaning Italians today. Portelli's work rescues the truth, but only in the nick of time—the citizens of Rome who remember what really happened are now elderly. Many have already passed away.

Granted, most cases of memory are not so politically and morally fraught. But the fact remains that the loss of memory accompanying a person's death is also tragic for the historical record. Since the inception of large-scale oral history projects in the 1940s like the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers Project—and the cultural turn in the humanities since the 1960s—academic historians in America have increasingly considered this. This is a good thing; memory enriches the documentary record.

The next step is to understand that generational memory loss is no longer as inevitable as it once was, thanks to technology, which has made democratized/amateur oral history a reality. If you have a laptop, or even a smart phone, you can conduct an oral history. StoryCorps has an excellent Do-It-Yourself guide to oral histories; the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress is another good place to start.

Dispatches from the Historical Society Conference, Day 2: Notes on Friday Sessions

Donald Yerxa and Randall Stephens

On Friday morning, Allan Kulikoff (University of Georgia) was offering a provocative proposal to solve the crisis in the history profession that included wholesale changes in the way graduate school programs are structured. (Listen to audio from the session):



And two rooms down the hall, sociologist Ricardo Duchesne (University of New Brunswick) suggested that "restlessness" was at the heart of Western uniqueness. Duchesne's presentation couldn't have been more different from Peter Coclanis's (UNC-Chapel Hill) plenary address the night before (which should appear soon on C-Span). And it is perhaps indicative of the culture of open conversation that the Historical Society works hard to foster that Coclanis, a past Society president, engaged Duchesne rather than dismiss him.

In the afternoon, there was a terrific session on the "Comparative Ways of War," featuring Brian McAllister Linn (Texas A&M and current president of the Society for Military History), Robert Citino (University of North Texas), and Peter Lorge (Vanderbilt). They combined formidable expertise in (respectively) American, German, and Chinese military history with healthy doses of caffeine-enhanced humor.

In the evening's Christopher Lasch Lecture, “How History Looks Different Over Time: The Case of the First World War," Adam Hochschild traced the development of two views of World War I in Great Britain that continue to confront each other today. One considers the war as noble and necessary. (Listen to the audio file here.)



It was the dominant view during the war and throughout most of the 1920s. But there was a minority view of the war during the same period that saw it as senseless slaughter inflicted by an incompetent military leadership. In the 1930s this second view gained ascendancy. World War II took center stage in the 1940s and 1950s, but since the 1960s the senseless slaughter view is almost universally held in Great Britain--save among academic military historians who have been influenced by Fritz Fischer's findings of Germany's bellicose intentions prior to 1914 and who have a greater appreciation for British generalship. As we approach centennial commemorations of WWI, Hochschild predicts that the competition between these two views will be on full display.

A Woman in Berlin

From NPR:

"Silence Broken On Red Army Rapes In Germany"
by Eric Westervelt

This week, the American premiere of the German film A Woman in Berlin brings new attention to an issue long considered a taboo in Germany: the mass rape of women by Soviet Red Army soldiers after the fall of Hitler's Third Reich. The movie is based on the real diary of an anonymous Berlin woman. Historians believe some 2 million German women were raped after Soviet and Allied forces defeated Hitler's army in the spring of 1945....

Dr. Phillip Kuwert, a senior physician at the University of Greifswald's department of psychotherapy and psychiatry, estimates that about 200,000 children were conceived by native German women raped by Russian soldiers. >>>

History Battles: Hitler Tree in Poland

Randall Stephens

Der Spiegel recently reported on an oak seedling planted in Nazi-occupied Jaslo, Poland in 1942. Seldom does a tree spark a controversy about memory and history. But... Almost seven decades after the planting, writes a journalist in the paper, "the tree is the subject of heated debate as the city mayor, previously unaware of its history, calls for it to be felled":

Getting permission to chop down a tree for the building of an intersection is not unusual. What is slightly rarer is the discovery that that tree was bequeathed to the city by the most famous dictator of the last century. An oak tree that had been growing in the Polish city of Jaslo for almost 70 years now faces the chop as its links with Hitler are revealed. . . .

The campaign to save the oak is led by 80-year-old Kazimierz Polak, who witnessed it being planted firsthand. He is organising a petition to challenge plans to fell the tree, which he watched being brought into the city in a box wrapped in the swastika flag in 1942. The oak, originally from Hitler's birthplace of Braunau am Inn in Austria, was given to the city on the occasion of the Führer's birthday and was part of attempts to 'Germanize' the town. >>>