Steve Harris
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Historical Fiction and History

2/26/2021

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The touchstone of historical thinking is to present “what actually happened.” Or so prescribed Leopold von Ranke in 1824 as our conception of history was taking its modern form. “Historical fiction” was only just getting going about that time (e.g., Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe). So, it’s not likely Ranke was thinking about distinguishing history from historical fiction; at least not “fiction” as we know it now. He was more concerned with mythologies and, even more, with writings that purported to be accurate histories, but which were guided more by ideologies (national or religious) than by a devotion to the facts.

Still, as a historian, I have to say that I love well-done historical fiction. By “well-done,” I mean more than the quality of the writing and the dimensionality of the characters. Really good historical fiction has to be “factual,” as far as it can and it has to make use of the novelist’s skill in implanting the reader into the scene and the characters’ mentalité from an earlier period. Very few historians are good at these arts and, having reading a fair number of monographs and articles, the percentage of good scholarly history works which are “page-turners” is quite small.

(I also want to insert a nod and distinction vis-à-vis “alternative histories” (e.g., Len Deighton’s SS-GB about England after a successful Nazi invasion, or  Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union about a post-Israel Jewish settlement in Alaska). These are often fun, but they are future-oriented, speculative fiction, set in the past; they send the world off on a new vector and, thus, are illustrations of the vast complexity of the world and human choices. They can also be a useful route to understanding the “meaning” of events by highlighting the assumptions which are embedded in “history as it actually happened.”

In terms of historical fiction as such, just borrowing a historical setting for a story isn’t enough. By this standard, even Tolstoy wasn’t a great historical novelist. War and Peace has been overpowering readers with its characterizations, intricacies, and philosophical insertions (more about which in a later posting) since it was published in 1869. It is set during the Napoleonic Wars, starting in 1805 and culminating in Napoleon’s grand and disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812-13. However, it’s hard to see Prince Andrei and Natasha et al. as distinctly creatures of the early 19C (ditto for Tale of Two Cities). Portraying the mindsets of earlier times wasn’t the goal for either Tolstoy or Dickens, it seems to me, and so it’s not fair to judge them by that standard.

I feel quite differently about Hillary Mantel’s trilogy centered on the life of Thomas Cromwell during the tumultuous years of the reign of Henry VIII in the early to mid 16C. I read the three books last year, starting with Wolf Hall (which, together, are even longer than W&P!) and they are excellent as novels and psychological character studies. Rigorously researched (as far as historical facts were available), they shine even more as attempts to transport the reader to the different mindset prevalent in Tudor England. Their interior vividness carried me further than yet another retelling (“factual” or “fictional”) of the complications of the royal life and death of Anne Boleyn. The “fiction” part of historical fiction is, generally, “fill-in-the-gaps,” which, given our limited access to the conversations (much less thoughts) of most historical actors, is the only way to get at that detail and texture of humanness. A few created characters are only literary license and hardly detract from the effort to understand what it was like to be the confidant of Henry VIII.

By contrast, I read Diarmaid MacCulloch’s hefty biography of Cromwell right afterwards. Mantel notes that she utilized MacCulloch’s work in her own research. It’s a fine piece of biographical writing, but it doesn’t sing or envelope the way that Mantel does. It’s also entirely true (at least within the parameters of historical aspirations). Mantel makes no such claim. As she has acknowledged, she invented a few characters and virtually all the detailed scenes, interactions, and dialogue. MacCulloch allows himself a smattering of historian’s interpretations and speculations.

So, which is closer to the “truth”? MacCulloch wins on footnotes, but because, as a historian, he limits himself to plausible/reliable/documentable sources, there is much outside his reach. Mantel, unconstrained, gives us an immediate connection with the past; the predicate to a type of historical understanding unavailable to those who stay within the academic discipline.

As a history teacher, I often remark that gaining this immediacy, this connection with the mentalité of another era, is the historian’s greatest challenge. It’s especially hard for young people who usually lack enough of their own history to have a perspective on the differences wrought by time. But, at any age, the ability to unthink our modern milieu is tough enough. L.P. Hartley, the English novelist, notably said: “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” As a result, writing history (fact or fiction) is akin to translation from one language to another. We are limited to the tool-kit of the English language which, in either its British or American versions, falls short in conveying the formidable langue Francais or the complexity of Mandarin or the nuanced angst of Yiddish.

Of course, the suggestion that we history teachers might use historical fiction as a vehicle by which our students could understand history is fairly heretical. Perhaps it is lack of imagination, perhaps it’s just a pedagogical rigidity. I once suggested to an early modernist colleague that they use Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle in conjunction with standard historical works to explore the world of the 17C. In addition to increasing the chances of students actually reading (it’s a rollicking good tale), it’s likely the students would have understood that world/period in a more visceral way than a textbook, or even a primary source. Moreover, it would have provided the opportunity to show the difference between history and fiction, and framed the same types of analytic/critical thinking skills as some actual “history” of that period. My colleague wouldn’t bite: “but it’s not true!, we can’t use that.” Too bad.

History (whether scholarly or popular) isn’t true either; although we aspire to truth. It’s just that writers of historical fiction approach truth from a different angle.
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History of Globalization

2/19/2021

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I'm pleased to announce that I will be teaching a public Zoom course this Spring via the OLLI Program. We will cover the history of globalization from the (very) ancient to the 21C. The course runs 6 weeks (starting April 5) on Mondays from 1230-230 PDT.I  hope you'll clink on the link below,  join OLLI, and sign up.
Harris on Globalization
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Democratic (small-d) Federalism

2/19/2021

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Last year (October 9), I wrote about the long-term crisis facing the country in the form of a US Senate that was out-of-whack with democratic principles; a Senate where the 582,000 people of Wyoming had the same clout as the 30 million of Texas (ditto: Delaware with California). For constitutional reasons this is not easily changed, but today I talk about a few ways to think about better allocating this power.

The incremental solutions involve letting each state have one senatorial seat (just for chuckles, let’s include DC and Puerto Rico), so that’s 52. Then the balance could be distributed on the basis of population, so that California would have six in total, and Texas would have five, New York and Florida four each, 27 with two or three and 21 with one. Or, more modestly, you could divide the states into three groups and give three seats to the those in the top third, two seats to those in the middle, and one to those states in the bottom third. Both these approaches are plausible, sensible, and inadequate to meet democratic norms.

The underlying problem is the hoary notion that we are the United…States; a group of independent jurisdictions who have banded together to deal with common problems and the external world. The debates at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 are full of concerns about the joining of the 13 states into one union. The previous system (the Articles of Confederation) had proved inadequate to most people at the time and a greater degree of integration was the core of the new Constitutional structure. The elites in each state secured their power in the new government by reserving half of the legislative power to themselves (as chosen by their representatives in the state legislatures).

Somewhere between the Civil War and WWII, it became pretty clear that this wasn’t actually the case anymore. The national government was dealing with a majority of significant issues and, more importantly, people identified as “American” more than they did as Floridians or Michiganders. However, our national mythology is pretty sturdy, so we like to pretend that states are not only important but essential to the organization of our society. This was perpetuated by such anti-democratic inter-state contests such as Miss America and the staunch supporters of the University of Texas Longhorn Football Team and of its many counterparts.

Now, there is much to be said for localism/tribalism and, indeed, for local political communities to control local political issues; but promoting those groups to national political status is problematic, since they vary widely in size and equal power (one person, one vote) is the essential element of democracy.

Many countries have this federative aspect to their histories; smaller pieces were amalgamated and, over time, merged into a national whole. The exceptions are those (usually ex-imperial colonies) that were defined as a whole for administrative purposes at the time of their creation and those whose amalgamation is relatively recent. The result is a strong “federalism” and can be seen not only in the US, but also Belgium, Canada, and Germany. The US is the oldest of these and so, its founding structure is most outdated.  

There is another rationale for constitutional federalism, however, that isn’t rooted in historical quirks and which retains considerable vitality today: separation of powers.

When most of the people who think of separation of powers (admittedly a small group), do think about it, they think (a la Locke and Montesquieu) of keeping the executive, legislative, and judicial powers independent of each other. All well and good. However, the idea of dispersing power to different groups can also operate at the ‘vertical’ as well as the more traditional ‘horizontal’ mode. We have lots of experience with constitutionally protecting states’ rights and powers from federal overreach. There is no reason why this can’t continue and no reason why its continuation has to depend on the use of states as electoral constituencies for the federal legislature. In other words, the two aspects of federalism: electoral and administrative, can be handled differently. The distribution of power and responsibility to the states can be constitutionally protected; electoral districts for the Senate can be different.

Senators and Representatives from large states and small states have a long history of arguing  to limit federal overreach. Indeed, such an argument isn’t based on the state-defined nature of their electoral district; it’s based on a belief that too much power in any one power center is dangerous to others and to individual liberties.

In other words, Senators and Representatives can be effective in representing the individuals and local communities in their constituencies, regardless of whatever intermediate political entities those individuals are also part of. No one worries that a Representative’s district covers three cities and parts of two counties; why worry that a Senator represents parts of multiple states.

What would this look like? In principle, the solution is no different than what we have for US representatives: (more-or-less) equally-sized electoral districts. At the current level of population, this would mean fifty districts of about 6.6 million people each. Some would be entirely within one state (e.g., the Senator from Houston), but most would overlap multiple states (e.g. the Senator from Washington-Baltimore).

Imagine if California changed its Constitution so that each of the 58 counties had one State Senator, whether LA County (10M people) or Amador (~1100 people). It would be held up as a travesty of democracy and struck down as unconstitutional. Well, the Article I of the US Constitution cannot be, by definition, unconstitutional; but it’s still a travesty.


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Contingencies

2/12/2021

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One of the challenges of teaching history is getting students to appreciate that nothing is inevitable (yes, yes,…death and taxes). We are so embedded in the world we know that it is difficult to imagine an alternative. What would things be like if John Wilkes Booth had tripped on stage that night in Ford’s Theater? What would have happened if my dad had already had plans when his brother asked him if he wanted to join a group (which happened to include my mom) going to a Red Wings hockey game?

Alternate histories can be fun, but they are (inevitably) inadequate. The world is too complex for anyone to capture a comprehensive picture of the changes from a butterfly flapping its wings twice instead of once or the implications of a member of Hitler’s staff unknowingly moving a briefcase that held a bomb to the far side of a heavy oaken table leg, leaving the Fuhrer to fight another day.

My favorite example is the famous incident in Sarajevo in June, 1914. Serbian assassins had planned to throw what we would call a hand-grenade under the car in which Archduke Ferdinand rode to a banquet from the train station. The bomb rolled too far and exploded in front of the second car. The Archduke sped away to his banquet, but afterwards decided it would be appropriate to visit the injured driver of the second car in the hospital. The Archduke’s chauffeur didn’t know the route and made a wrong turn. He stopped to back up and get back on the right road. As it turned out, he stopped the Archduke’s car right in front of a café in which Gavrilo Principe, another of the Serbian conspirators, was sitting, trying to figure out what to do since their initial plan had gone awry. Hmmm…Principe saw the Archduke stop, stood up took out the pistol he had in his pocket and shot the Archduke and his wife dead.

So, World War I started because of a fluke. If the barista had taken another few minutes preparing Principe’s macchiato, no assassination, no confrontation between Austria and Serbia, no revving up of the German military plans, no invasion of France, etc. etc. etc.

Now the broad geopolitical trends might well have pushed Europe into a war at some point, but not that war, at that time, with that particular configuration of technologies, manpower, and alliances. Everything since then is different. Among other things, my grandfather would not have gone to France to drive an ambulance for the US Army and returned safely home to the life that eventuated. Instead, he would have gone over two years later, met and married a French countess from the Loire (et maintenant, un centenaire plus tard, je vous ecrirais en Francais).

But here I am (writing in English) trying to get students to understand that if everything is different, then extracting meaning from the world around us is a fool’s errand. If we define ourselves from our cultural milieu (ok, un peu mot francais) and that milieu is the product of a fluke (as I have shown), then we can’t be too sure we know who we are—as individuals, groups, countries etc.

Of course, most contingencies are closer to the hockey-game-date or butterfly-wing-flapping variety than Von Stauffenberg’s briefcase bomb or Principe’s pistol; but the lack of drama doesn’t make them less powerful. They’re just harder to see.

I was fortunate a few years ago when students in one of my historical (not-quite-) reenactment classes made the point for me. It was the last day of the 1787 Constitutional Convention. The student playing George Washington was stalling the final vote (he didn’t think he had enough support to approve the adoption of the Constitution and one of his supporters had texted him that he was stuck on a BART train and would get to class as soon as he could). Finally, I had to force Washington to call the vote. As the period expired and the Convention Secretary was about to announce the results, the door flew open, the supporter dashed in, looked at a delighted Washington, and voted “Aye!”

As the next group of students came into the classroom, our group was in an uproar. I ruled that the vote counted and, as it tipped the balance in one state from abstain to “aye,” the Convention now had the nine votes required to approve the Constitution as a whole. In the end, a far better lesson than I could ever have designed.

That’s the history of what happened. However, there are so many different stories that can be told from those facts: the power of individual perseverance, the influence of student commuting patterns, or George Washington’s savvy time-management. If all this had happened IRL, no Constitution (at least not adopted in 1787), a different line of development for 13 small states on the east coast of the American continent, etc. etc.

With the weight of history bearing down on us, it’s hard to see that it all could easily have been different. We’re hungry for the (apparent) certainty, for the epistemological security that history brings.

Living day-to-day, we’re buffeted with instant interpretation and media hyperbole. The fate of the universe is made to depend on small things. In 2016, we were told that but for a swing of 80,000 votes, Hillary would be President and we could avoid all the dire predictions (generally accurate, as it turned out) about the implications of a Trump presidency. Last year, we saw the end of that particular worldview and a “return to normalcy” with Biden’s win. But Joe only won because 45,000 votes (in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) swung his way. Is America a different place because of 80,000 votes, or 45,000?

I suspect the same is true with regard to the events of January 6. Let’s imagine that Trump had said what he said and the crowd had marched as they marched and the Capitol police had kept the fences up and all we had was a loud protest/demonstration on fringes of the Capitol for a few hours. It’s not likely that we would have seen more than a tiny fraction of the hand-wringing about the state of the nation which has dominated the news for the past month. Yet, would the state of America and the meaning of democracy in the 21st century be all that different?

So, yes, there is contingency and there are underlying trends and patterns. The art is figuring out which is which.

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ConCon.2

2/5/2021

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I recently (Dec. 11) put forth the second in an occasional series on potential changes in the US Constitution, arguing for a 4th branch to oversee governmental ethics and elections. Previously (Oct. 9) I noted the upcoming crisis involving the worsening problem of an anti-democratic Senate. Today I take on a threshold issue: the broad concept of revising the Constitution.

I have taught courses on the famous gathering of the “Founding Fathers” in Philadelphia in 1787.  On the final exam, I ask students to take a position on calling for a new Constitutional Convention. Most are generically in favor; but this year,  a couple of the more thoughtful essays argued that our body politic was too skewed to face up to such a fundamental reconsideration.

At the time of the first one, the idea that a large country (we were about 865,000 sq. mi, a quarter of today’s size) could be a republic was novel and contentious. The only close example was the Netherlands which was run as an oligarchy dominated by merchants’ councils in its component provinces. The idea of the separation of powers had been bandied about (e.g. Montesquieu), but had no place in a monarchical system with a few arguable exceptions such as the Parlements of France. Perhaps the most radical concept in the document was the document itself: a written constitution: A government of laws, formally structured and put down in black-and-white.

It has been a greater success than anyone had a right to expect. With the addition of the Bill of Rights in 1791 and the post-Civil War Amendments (13/14/15) adopted in 1865-70), the package has been basically unchanged. The other 14 amendments have been, by-and-large, tweaks.

This has been due to two factors: 1) the amendment process is actually pretty difficult and 2) the document has accumulated an almost religious sanctity. Neither of these is inherently bad, but together they have left us not only with an out-of-date structure, but, more fundamentally, a rusted mentality that has trouble conceiving of necessary change.

This is not to say that there haven’t been a wide range of proposals from all corners of the political spectrum for adding or limiting rights. Nor do we lack examples (sometimes abusive) of other countries’ changing their foundational documents (after we did it in the 18C, most everybody (except the Brits) have written one). Still, outside the politico-legal corner of academe, we lack a robust conversation about the need for constitutional change.

I am no fan of willy-nilly constitutions. There is great value in stability. Jefferson famously argued for constitutions to be revised every 20 years to allow each new generation to adapt the premises of their political society to changing circumstances. Since our lifespans/generations are a bit longer, I would go for 50-year expiration cycle, but I agree with him that institutionalizing change would be a good thing.

Here is where the question of defining our political culture intersects with current judicial politics. The latest round of Supreme Court appointments claim descent from Antonin Scalia’s judicial philosophy of originalism; i.e. the idea that courts shouldn’t adapt constitutions to changing social circumstances and should stick with the original language and the actual intent of the authors of that language. This is not a ridiculous philosophy, but it can only work, as a practical matter, in a constitutional environment in which the ordinary amendment process is reasonably supple. Our current requirement of 2/3 of both houses of Congress plus ? of the States makes change way too hard to implement. (The Scylla to this Charybdis is exemplified by the recent British Brexit fiasco where a fundamental (constitutional) change was made as a result of a single, popular, simple majority, vote). If we had a more accessible means of changing the constitution, it would go a long way towards making judicial originalism quite sensible. (The best argument against originalism that I have seen lately proposes the question: since the Constitution authorizes Congress to provide for an Army and a Navy, does that make the Air Force (or the new Space Force) unconstitutional?)

In the meantime, we got what we got. Congress can propose changes for state ratification. Or, there can be a convention, i.e. a second Constitutional Convention (“ConCon.2”), called either by Congress or the States.

I can think of no better way of energizing our political culture than such an event.

At the same time, there are many who are afraid of democracy and fear that current provisions, protections, rights, etc. would be at risk in such an event. And they may be right. Certainly the current political environment is a mess; rife with hyper-partisanship and short-sightedness (and the Dems are only marginally better).

What is clear to me is that the world has changed a lot in 240 years. A document written at the dawn of the industrial revolution for a collection of 3-4 million folks scattered on the eastern seaboard of a continent, where slavery was sanctioned and women dismissed, is, simply, outdated. So, too, is the nature of state-centered federalism. We are no longer a federation of sovereign states, but one country with historically-fixed boundaries. There’s a lot to be said for limiting the power of the federal government and states can be useful in this regard, but not as the basic unit of organization and identity. In other words, it is long past time we lived in a country governed by rules laid down by a group of well-off white guys in wigs.

Beyond the issue of rights and governmental structure, we live in a world where medical science (and, soon, computer science/AI) pushes at the definition of what it is to be a human and eligible for rights. We have examples and practice from scores of other countries to draw upon and adapt.

In my Constitutional History course, I show a clip from the musical 1776 (Broadway debut 1969) in which Ben Franklin asks rhetorically about posterity’s view of the Founding Fathers: “What will they think we were, after all, demigods…?” Well, apparently, we do. It reminds me of those in the middle ages who thought no one could understand nature better than Aristotle and that humanity had been in decline since Eden. Much of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment were about recognizing new modes, types, and levels of understanding the world.

This is not to say that Barack Obama or Amy Coney Barrett is our equivalent of Isaac Newton. But we, as a society, ought to have a bit more confidence in ourselves. A new constitution will be no panacea, but how can we take on the future without one?

I will, from time to time, chime in with other specific suggestions about the kinds of changes we need. In the meantime, let me know: What would you like to see in our new country?

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    Condemned to Repeat It --
    Musings on history, society, and the world.

    I don't actually agree with Santayana's famous quote, but this is my contribution to my version of it: "Anyone who hears Santayana's quote is condemned to repeat it."

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