Western Civ Since 1600

History 107 at the College of Wooster

To Entertain and Instruct

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Well, I know we still have one more presentation to watch, but I thought I’d offer a couple quick comments about the whole idea.

As professors, faculty members are often critical of the idea that we should be forced to entertain students. A lot of this study is hard work. But it reaches to profound questions of meaning and identity. We shouldn’t have to be stand-up comedians to engage our students. But at the same time, there are some powerful ways to approach the past – that bring the past to light, that reveal the lives of those who are gone, that help us wrap our minds around the past – that are both informative and attention-grabbing.

Altogether, I’ve really enjoyed these presentations. They made us sit up a bit and pay attention AND delivered some important messages about the past. My young friends from the Montessori enjoyed them immensely. And these were just a first effort. I felt that with a bit more research and preparation and a bit more practice, these kinds of presentations could reach a broad audience of students, introducing them to the excitement of historical study and to the complexity of the past.

Well done.

Diplomacy in the News

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It seems that everyday I open the paper there is some bit of news or commentary that calls to mind the history we’ve been studying. Here’s one from this past week.

You’ve all surely heard the news about the WikiLeaks release of tens of thousands (I don’t know the full number, but it is a lot) of confidential diplomatic cables from U.S. Embassies and Consulates. It’s been an embarrassment for the American government and for many foreign friends (and enemies). Each day seems to bring a new revelation: Arab countries warning about the dangers of Iran, cutting remarks from American diplomats about allied leaders (Berlusconi, Sarkozy, etc.), U.S. fears over Pakistan’s nukes, and much more.

In an opinion piece in the New York Times from last week, Paul Schroeder, a historian at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and an expert on European politics, discusses the challenges that follow when diplomacy is carried out in the light of public opinion. In brief: there are lots of them.

In preparing the U.S. for entry into the war in Europe, Woodrow Wilson called for “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at.” After the difficulties of negotiating a settlement at the Paris Peace Conference – as British crowds were calling for hanging the Kaiser – Wilson and the other members of the Big Four holed up to work out the details of agreement.

Schroeder also discusses the strategic leak of diplomatic messages. He tells the very famous story of Bismarck working to goad the French into war by creating a diplomatic incident. After a meeting between the French Ambassador and the Prussian King at the spa town of Ems, a meeting in which the Kaiser rejected the French position on a question of European diplomacy, Bismarck released a doctored version of a telegraph to the foreign office describing the meeting. The leaked telegram precipitated a European diplomatic crisis, which led to war between France and Prussia, which led in turn to the establishment of the German Empire in 1871.

The German military theorist von Clausewitz is famous for writing that (I translate loosely) “war is diplomacy by other means.” It was a sentiment that Bismarck heartily agreed to. In the case of the Ems telegram affair, he showed that he also believed that diplomacy was war by other means.

World War I Officially Over

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Alright, well, it was officially over when the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918. That marked the end of hostilities. The peace treaties of 1919, such as the Versailles Treaty, promised an accounting of the war. But it was only a couple weeks ago that the war reparations charged to Germany in the Versailles Treaty were fully paid off. See CNN’s story for the full details. (And thanks, Nick, for this reference).

The War in Moving Images

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The Battle of the Somme has become a symbol of the destructive power of the First World War. The offensive, begun on the first of July, 1916, was to be the Big Push that would end the war. Instead it was a bloodbath. Some 20,000 British soldiers died on the first day. By the fall, some 1.5 million soldiers could be counted among the dead and the wounded.

That is not the impression that you would take away from the British documentary, “The Battle of the Somme,” which was shot in the days before and during the early offensive. The film does show the casualties of war, though much of the ugliest violence was censored. The filmmakers – and the British Topical Committee for War Films  which sponsored the production – wanted to help build support for the war through film.

And so they did. While the battle in northern France continued, cinema goers in London could get their own taste of war. The film was an enormous success with critics – who saw it as a tribute to the heroism of war – and audiences alike.

This short clip gives you some sense for the film’s content.

“Burn” and Free Trade Imperialism

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We’ve given some close attention to the “new imperialism” of the late nineteenth century, which is typically dated from the 1880s (the  Berlin Conference of 1884 was an important turning point) down to the First World War. I mentioned in passing the “free trade imperialism” of the nineteenth century. It’s worthy of some attention. It refers, above all, to the relationship between Britain and the world in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars until the 1870s. In these decades, Britain managed a system of free-trade that served its national interests — dominating colonies and free states with an economic form of imperialism.

“Burn” (Quemada), the 1969 film from Gillo Pontecorvo, offers a pointed critique of the whole idea. It is at once an indictment of British 19th c. colonialism and a powerful critique of the U.S. war in Vietnam. Marlon Brando stars as Walker, the British official who first spurs the slaves of Quemada, a fictional island in the Caribbean, to revolt against their Portuguese masters and put in place … a new government dominated by rich planters. See his speech on the advantages of prostitution to marriage, which he offers the plantation owners as a guide to why free laborers should be preferred to slaves…