Historians to Cheney

Randall Stephens

"Former Vice President Dick Cheney has just signed a deal for his memoirs, reportedly worth around $2 million," write the editors of the New York Times. The Gray Lady asks a number of historians for advice to Cheney. The following weigh in: Joseph J. Ellis, Richard Reeves, Jean Baker, David Levering Lewis, Alonzo L. Hamby, Kathleen Dalton, Mary Stuckey, Robert Dallek, and H.W. Brands. "What advice exists," the NYT asks, "for a political memoirist who wants the work to last, given common pitfalls like self-justification, self-aggrandizement, vagueness and boring inside-baseball detail?"

"I would say that Grant’s presidential memoir is the best of the genre, unparalleled to date," writes David Levering Lewis. "And I’d also single out the Georgia coming-of-age remembrance by Jimmy Carter. As for the historical value of Cheney’s and Rice’s memoirs, I’d not expect much gain for the record of the republic."

New Issue of the Journal of the Historical Society

Randall Stephens

The new issue of the Journal of the Historical Society has been out for a couple weeks. Editor George Huppert and managing editor Scott Hovey continue to publish high quality, accessible essays with distinctly international/transnational themes. Full versions of the essays can be read at the Wiley site. If you can't access material at Wiley, download some featured essays here.

The Journal of the Historical Society, Volume 9 Issue 2 (June 2009)

"On Primo Levi, Richard Serra, and the Concept of History"
Johan Åhr

"Modernization, Socialism, and Higher Education in Mexico: The Instituto para Hijos de Trabajadores"
Ana María Kapelusz-Poppi

"A Modern Monarch: Dom Pedro II's Visit to the United States in 1876"
Teresa Cribelli

"Havana During the Nineteenth Century: A Perspective from Its Spanish Immigrants"
Translated by Franklin W. Knight
Rosario Márquez Macías

"'French' Immigrants in Naples, 1806–1860"
Marco Rovinello

The September issue of the journal will include essays by Keith Harper on Baptist missionaries in love; Stewart Justman on antisepsis and Victorian reticence; Adam L. Tate on Bishop John England, abolitionism, and Catholicism in the American South; and a forum on The Age of Lincoln, by Orville Vernon Burton with Eric Arnesen, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Stephen Berry, David Moltke-Hansen.

Mary Beard on Pompeii in Historically Speaking

Randall Stephens

The latest issue of Historically Speaking includes my interview with Mary Beard. I post an excerpt of it here. The full piece can be accessed on Project Muse.

Rome Unearthed: An Interview with Mary Beard on Pompeii and the Ancient World

Mary Beard is Professor of Classics at Cambridge University. She was Visiting Sather Professor of Classical Literature for 2008–2009 at the University of California, Berkeley. Beard is the author of a variety of essays and books on the ancient world, including: Religions of Rome, with John North and Simon Price (Cambridge University Press, 1998); The Parthenon (Harvard University Press, 2002); and The Roman Triumph (Harvard University Press, 2007). Beard is also the classics editor at the Times Literary Supplement, and she is the author of the popular blog, “A Don’s Life.”

Beard’s scholarship has long challenged certain widely held views of the ancient world. Her recent book The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found (Harvard University Press, 2008) introduces a note of mystery and uncertainty into what we think we know about Pompeii and the lives of ancient Romans. Pompeii was not frozen in amber, she argues. Its history stretches back centuries before the 79 A.D. eruption of Vesuvius, and it bears the marks of later excavations. “The bigger picture and many of the more basic questions about the town remain very murky indeed,” she writes. Historically Speaking editor Randall Stephens recently interviewed Beard about her work and popular perceptions of the distant past.

Randall Stephens: Do you remember your first visit to Pompeii?

Mary Beard: I have a very vivid memory of my first visit. I went with a friend. I’d been studying Pompeii at Cambridge as an undergraduate, and she hadn’t. I was going to be the guide. I was devastated when we got there. So much of what I’d learned, particularly about the art and the wall decorations, had been made to seem so clear and so important and so sort of fixed. But none of the stuff I saw in Pompeii matched what I’d learned. There seemed to be a huge gap between people’s desire to explain it and systematize it and what you actually saw when you walked around.

Stephens: In The Fires of Vesuvius you write, “The fact is that we know both a lot more and a lot less about Pompeii than we think.” Could you say a little about what you mean here?
Beard: What is amazing about Pompeii is that you can walk around and try to reconstruct the life of the town. I remember walking down the street a few years ago and noticing little holes drilled in the curbstones, often outside houses, but not always. I’d never seen these mentioned in books. My husband and I started trying to hash this puzzle out, and we decided that they must be where they tied up animals. There had to be tethering posts because there were loads of mules and other animals going through the city. I eventually found a few articles debating what they were. So all you need to do is go to Pompeii with your eyes open and say: “I wonder what that was.”

Stephens: Even ancient graffiti, which you point out is so ubiquitous at Pompeii, gives us a more complex picture of this world than one might think.

Beard: You can go into a house and, even if you don’t read Latin, you can see that some of the graffiti scrolled on these walls is about three feet high. Well, that’s obviously someone kneeling down, or it’s a child—much more likely a child. I think there’s an enormous amount of fun in trusting your innate powers of observation and going from there.

Stephens: The layers of interpretation and the layers of ruins that you’ve uncovered in the book are intriguing. How much of what we know of Pompeii is shaped by what happened after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius?

Beard: It has an interesting history after the eruption—in the period, that is, when we think of Pompeii as happily asleep, waiting for rediscovery. While I’m suspicious of the view that the Romans undertook an enormous and systematic rescue operation soon after the eruption, it seems extremely likely that salvagers came to get the really valuable stuff—statues from the forum, and so on. It must have been frightfully dangerous, and some of them almost certainly died in the attempt because the tunnels would have collapsed. Some of the bodies that you can now see—casts of bodies made where their remains left a vacuum in the lava—are almost certainly bodies of looters, not those of the unfortunate Pompeii victims. . . .

June 2009 Historically Speaking On-line

Randall Stephens

The new issue of Historically Speaking (June 2009) was mailed out a couple weeks back. And now it's up on Project Muse. This issue includes several authors who have not appeared in our pages before--Wendy Moore, Mary Beard, Mike Bowen, Brenda Wineapple (whose recent book, White Heat, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), Steven Ward, and others. It also features interviews, letters, two essays on literary history, and a lively lead piece by Peter Coclanis, which has my vote for best title. And . . . to top it off, Chris Beneke returns with a provocative piece about progress in history.

"Two Cheers for Revolution: The Virtues of Regime Change in World Agriculture"
Peter A. Coclanis

"Love and Marriage in 18th-Century Britain"
Wendy Moore

"Adam’s Ancestors: An Interview with David N. Livingstone"
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

"Nelson: Searching for the Sublime"
Andrew D. Lambert

"Rome Unearthed: An Interview with Mary Beard on Pompeii and the Ancient World"
Conducted by Randall J. Stephens

"Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson"
Brenda Wineapple

"The Fictive Transformation of American Nationalism after Sir Walter Scott"
David Moltke-Hansen

"The Spartacus War: An Interview with Barry Strauss"
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

"America’s Whiggish Religious Revolution: An Instance in the Progress of History"
Chris Beneke

"From Gentleman’s Club to Professional Body: The Evolution of the History Department in the United States"
William G. Palmer

"Religious History and the Historian’s Craft: An Interview with Amanda Porterfield"
Conducted by Randall J. Stephens

"Iran’s Challenging Victory Narrative"
Steven Ward

"The Lessons of 1948"
Michael Bowen

Letters

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part VI: Tips for Writing Research Papers for a College History Course

Heather Cox Richardson

My first, and maybe most important, piece of advice for writing a research paper is to give yourself the room and the time to enjoy the process. We use harsh words in our society for writing assignments—“I have to write an essay,” “how many words does it have to be?”—but writing is, at heart, a creative enterprise that should be, at some level, fun. Think about it. If you were asked to paint a picture, or act out a play, or make a video, you wouldn’t groan, and yet those activities require far more practice than you’ve already had with writing. So try to think of an essay as an enjoyable assignment, rather than a hurdle to throw yourself over, groaning. (If you need more of a pep talk than that, read Stephen King’s On Writing).

A research paper is not a book report, or a journal entry, or a reflection paper. Those have formats and rules that are different than those I’ll discuss here.

Here I’m not covering grammar or much structure. You should read Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style every year, and keep it handy on your desk, next to your dictionary and your thesaurus. The Elements of Style covers all the most common grammatical errors in clear, interesting prose. It also offers great tips on structuring essays. If you don’t want to invest in a copy, Professor Strunk’s original write-up of grammar rules for his college classes is available on-line at Google books. Take the time to read it (it doesn’t take long). Paying attention to it will improve your writing by at least one letter grade on each essay.

These are just some of the tips I’ve told students over the years, gathered into some sort of order.

Beginning your research paper:

First of all, be certain you understand the assignment. You need to know exactly what the professor expects before you begin your work. What kind of research is appropriate? How long should the paper be? What kind of citations and bibliography should you compile? (This is much easier to do while you work than to recreate after the fact).

You should begin your research paper THE DAY IT IS ASSIGNED. I hear you laughing, but let me tell you why this is important. There’s a practical reason, first. Most students put off long-term assignments, so early in the process that the library tends to have all the books they’ll need, the microfilm readers will all be free, university wifi networks will be empty and fast, librarians will have plenty of time. In contrast, in the panic in the week before the paper is due, the library will be stripped bare and everyone will be fighting over resources.

There are also academic reasons for starting early. The hardest part of writing an essay is not the research, it’s the thinking. You need to let things percolate in your head, which they simply can’t do if you try to write a paper in a week. You need to give yourself plenty of time to let your ideas gel. You also need to leave yourself time to chase down those things that occur to you as a project develops. How many times have you finished a paper at the last minute and thought, “If only I could do these last few things, it would be a better paper”? Give yourself the time to do those last few things.

Plan to work on your research paper a little every day, or at least a bit every other day. This way, you will remember where you are in the process, and won’t waste time redoing what you did before or trying to remember what needs to be done. Keep a record of the questions your day’s work has raised, and jot down what you plan to begin with in your next session, so you can start right up.

Always plan to have your project finished a full week before it’s due. That will leave you time for revisions (even a thorough reorganization if necessary), for proofreading, for tracking down final points. It will leave time for someone to read it for you and tell you what works and what doesn’t. LEAVING ENOUGH TIME TO REVISE A PAPER IS CRITICALLY IMPORTANT.

Clifford K. Berryman, Herblock, and More On-line

Randall Stephens

The political cartoon. At its best, sublime. A staple of the history classroom.

Over one hundred Clifford K. Berryman (1869-1949) political cartoons can be viewed and downloaded at the National Archives' Clifford K. Berryman Political Cartoon Collection. (I see that this has been on-line since 2008. New to me, though.) Berryman's lifelike political cartoons work great in courses on 20th century history:

The Center for Legislative Archives holds approximately 2,600 original pen-and-ink drawings by cartoonist Clifford K. Berryman in the U.S. Senate Collection. Berryman was one of Washington's best-known political cartoonists in the first half of the 20th century. Berryman drew for the Washington Post from 1890 until 1907, and then for the Washington Evening Star from 1907 until his death in 1949. Over one hundred of Berryman's cartoons are available for on-line viewing through the Archival Research Catalog by using the keyword Berryman.

As Berryman road off into the sunset, another Washington cartoonist was coming of age. Herb Block, "Herblock," (1909-2001) had a fast, bold line style. Nixon was a favorite target. Herblock's NYT obit noted: "He started drawing Nixon, who was usually depicted as shifty and grizzled, in 1948. Sometimes Nixon appeared as a vulture, other times as an undertaker, always as a man ready to benefit from the failure of others. But Mr. Block said he took no pleasure from the fact that the disgraced president was a cartoonist's dream. 'I didn't enjoy it,' he said, 'I really wanted him out.'" See the 2003 Library of Congress site, Herblock's History: Political Cartoons from the Crash to the Millennium, for an excellent survey of his work and for a number of medium to high resolution cartoons.

For earlier matieral, see Harpweek's World of Thomas Nast site; look for satirical prints from Puck Magazine, Harper's Weekly, and Frank Leslie's Illustrated on the Library of Congress Prints/Photos database; type "satirical" into the Beinecke Rare Books and MS Library search engine; or query the British Museums on-line archives for George Cruikshank, Thomas Rowlandson, Honoré Daumier, and others.

Which History?

Randall J. Stephens

Patricia Cohen reports on the steady drop in college courses offered on diplomatic, economic, and intellectual history in "Great Caesar’s Ghost! Are Traditional History Courses Vanishing?" NYT, June 10, 2009. "To the pessimists evidence that the field of diplomatic history is on the decline is everywhere," writes Cohen. "Job openings on the nation’s college campuses are scarce, while bread-and-butter courses like the Origins of War and American Foreign Policy are dropping from history department postings."

Cohen's comments are sparked by a roundtable on the topic at the upcoming meeting of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, June 25th - June 27th at the Fairview Park Marriott in Falls Church, Virginia. That session is titled "What’s in a Name?: Diplomatic History and the Future of the Field" and includes the following participants: Thomas Zeiler, University of Colorado at Boulder; Matthew Connelly, Columbia University; Christopher Endy, California State University, Los Angeles; Barbara Keys, University of Melbourne; Robert J. McMahon, Ohio State University; Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, University of Kentucky; Emily Rosenberg, University of California, Irvine.

According to Cohen the percentage of history departments with faculty who specialize in intellectual, diplomatic, or economic history has declined sharply since the 1970s. By contrast greater numbers of faculty work in gender, women's, or cultural history. There's also been a slight increase in the number of faculty specializing in military history, oddly enough. (The latter bit contradicts what John Miller wrote in his 2006 National Review essay, "Sounding Taps: Why Military History is Being Retied.")

There are many reasons why some areas of history lose lines and why others gain them. Cohen cites David Kaiser, history professor at the Naval War College: “The boomer generation made a decision in the 1960s that history was starting over. It was an overreaction to a terrible mistake that was the Vietnam War.” To what extent has post-1960s identity politics shaped the profession?

As I read on I wondered what other fields could be added to those that Cohen mentions. I'm no longer certain that religious history would qualify as "neglected" or "underrepresented.” There is much interest in religious history. (See this interesting thread at Religion in American History on a recent conference on religious history/American religion.) Though it’s debatable whether or not that interest has bubbled up into curriculum and/or publications. I conducted a little informal, crude, utterly unscientific study of my own a couple years back. I went through journals like American Quarterly and the Journal of American History for the years 1997-2007. These rarely include religious history topics. (The American Historical Review was a little better.) Only 5% of the articles in the American Quarterly, the premier publication for American studies, covered religion. Only 4.3% of the essays in the Journal of American History dealt with religion over the same period. Thumb through most professional history conference programs and find much the same. (See John Butler's now-classic 2004 essay in the JAH: "Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History.")

What else? Would political history count as underrepresented? What about the history of science? This could probably be extended to include periods that receive less attention, too. I’m looking at you, Early Bronze Age.

Island Records Turns 50 and Nick Drake

Randall Stephens

Island Records, one of the most influential labels in 20th-century pop music, is marking its golden anniversary. Chris Blackwell started recording Jamaican bands under that name in 1959. Over the decades the label's roster included such luminaries as Bob Marley, U2, Free, Traffic, Cat Stevens, Fairport Convention, and King Crimson. It's latest hitmaker is Amy Winehouse, the troubled retro-vulgarian with a voice. The BBC reports a series of anniversary concerts to celebrate the benchmark. MOJO, Uncut, and Q also feature material on Island's 50th.

MOJO's cover story on one of the label's legends, Nick Drake, enigmatic chamber folk phenom, is a treat. (Drake, who died of an overdose of antidepressants in 1974, has been the subject of myth for some time.) The MOJO piece recounts Drake's toff years at Cambridge and his work with legendary producer Joe Boyd in the heady days of the late 1960s. Chris Blackwell, too, reflects on his experience with Drake.

One of the best accounts of this era, and the flurry of artistic activity, is Boyd's very entertaining White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s (Serpent's Tail, 2007). "His accent was at the aristocratic end of 'received pronunciation,'" Boyd writes of Drake. "Born in Burma, where his father was a doctor in the Colonial Service, he attended Marlborough and was now at Cambridge, reading English. I had met many public schoolboys (Chris Blackwell, for example) who seemed to have not an iota of doubt in their entire beings. Nick had the accent and the offhand mannerisms, but had somehow missed out on the confidence."

And on his abilities and creativity Boyd remarks: "One evening, Nick played me all his songs. Up close, the power of his fingers was astonishing, with each note ringing out loud - almost painfully so - and clear in the small room. I had listened closely to Robin Williamson, John Martyn, Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. Half-struck strings and blurred hammerings-on were an accepted part of their sound; none could match Nick's mastery of the instrument. After finishing one song, he would retune the guitar and proceed to play something equally complex in a totally different chord shape."

(A superb poetic documentary of Drake in context, A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake (2004), can be watched on youtube in three sections. Joe Boyd is featured as are Gabrielle Drake, Robert Kirby, and modfather and Island Records labelmate Paul Weller.)

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part V: Tips for Discussion Sections

In this installment of Richardson's Rules of Order Heather Cox Richardson describes the purpose of discussion sections and offers advice on public speaking and how to have a successful discussion.

Tips for Discussion Sections
Heather Cox Richardson

Discussions sections (in my courses, at any rate), are designed primarily to do two things. First, they give students an opportunity to explore in-depth material that pertains to the class, but which we don’t have the time to cover in lecture. Second, they give students a forum in which they can practice speaking and arguing in public.

My discussion sections are usually designed around a problem raised by the course material. This problem is identified in the “discussion question” part of the syllabus, listed for each week, near the readings. To prepare for discussion, do the readings and think about the question. How would you answer it? Why? What do the readings (or films) have to do with the question? What other ideas or issues have the readings raised? You should have a clear idea of what you are going to argue in class before you get there. If you are required to write your answer, remember to do so and to bring your response to class.

In discussion sections students can learn to present ideas and argue through problems. This is a critical skill that you really must have as you go out into the world. There is not a single profession you can choose in which this skill is not important. Almost no one is comfortable speaking in class at first, so don’t think you’re alone in being nervous about it. But wouldn’t you rather develop the ability to speak in public in a setting where your performance earns only about 1/12 of 20% of your grade in one of the many courses you’ll take in your college career, rather than at your first job, where your performance in meetings might well determine your employment status? There are tricks to making speaking in class easier (below).

History discussion sections are not supposed to mimic lectures, with a teaching assistant reiterating what the professor has said in lecture. The purpose of a history section is not to clarify the lectures (as is often the purpose of sections in science courses). History discussion sections have a different format, and a different goal. If you’re confused about lecture material, of course you should ask the T.A. if s/he can help, but don’t be surprised if s/he refuses to spend class time going over what has already been covered. S/he has a different agenda, set by the professor, and cannot spend large amounts of time going back over lecture material. If you’re confused and can’t find your way clear using the textbook or reviewing your notes, then visit your T.A. during his/her office hours.

Tips to Make Speaking in Class Easier:

Act. Of course you’re uncomfortable putting your ideas out there. Everyone is (including me!). But imagine how you would act if you weren’t nervous. Then do the act. Gradually speaking your ideas out loud becomes easier and more natural.

Learn the names of your classmates. Your college years are the time for you to meet new people and, yes, make contacts for the future. Can you imagine working with a colleague for three months without learning his or her name? Of course not. So why pretend that your classmates are so interchangeable that you don’t need to bother recognizing them as individuals? You may well end up meeting someone whose interests coincide with yours, or by whom you are impressed enough that when you need a graphic designer for your new start-up company, you know whom to call. At the very least, you won’t have to deal with the ridiculousness of referring to your classmates by pronouns after spending three months in their company.

Discuss things. Sections are not supposed to be a time to chat with the teacher. Discussions mean that you should talk to your classmates, while the T.A. acts primarily as a facilitator. This is not unlike a discussion of the last Red Sox game around the lunch table. You may not have something wildly original to say; actually, you agree with what the gentleman sitting two seats away just said. If that were the case, you wouldn’t sit there woodenly, watching other people talk. You would nod, or interject “I agree with Mike on that. The Red Sox should never have traded Clemens,” or in some other way indicate your interest in the conversation. If you’re not a fan, and the Red Sox discussion is losing you, you wouldn’t sit at the table silently. You would say: “Wait a minute. I’m lost. Who’s Clemens, and why is he so important?” Or you would even say: “I can’t get into the Red Sox. Baseball leaves me cold. European football is a far more important sport nowadays, since it’s followed by the entire world.” And if someone at the table wasn’t involved, you would ask him or her what s/he thought. Often, that would turn out to be the person with a slightly different perspective that s/he thought didn’t really fit the conversation and so was quiet, but when asked, made a point that got you to rethink the whole issue. This is exactly what should happen in classes, although the material should, obviously, be related to the week’s class material.

Now, how can you participate if you’re really lost? Ask questions about what people say: “Carole, could you say a little bit more about that? I really don’t understand how this material shows that Andrew Jackson was operating for the good of the majority.” And in the rare instance where you’re caught out having not done the week’s reading? Pass the ball to someone else. “I’m not sure what I think about this issue yet. I’m interested in the approach Maya is taking, though, and I wonder what Oleg would say about it.”

Speak up in the first two weeks of class, even if it’s just to say, “I agree.” No one has any expectations about your behavior in the beginning of the semester and, even if you’ve never made a peep in a class before, no one will know that. You can start speaking up and people will just assume you’re comfortable speaking in class. If you wait much beyond the third week, though, it will get harder to speak with each passing class.

Remember, too, that you have a responsibility to your classmates in discussion sections. Because of the nature of sections, you need to pull your weight to enable them to learn. We’ve all been in discussion sections which are deadly because only two students have done the work and the rest sit like statues. That’s not fair to anyone, and there’s no way a teacher can save such a class, since it won’t work without the students doing their share. Your responsibility includes making a section work well. If someone is floundering, help. If someone never speaks up, include him or her in the discussion. If you find yourself talking too much, work to throw the conversation to someone else by asking what a classmate thinks. While there is an ultimate payback for this behavior in your better understanding of class material, there is also a more immediate one. Did you save a classmate who was lost? Next time you falter, s/he’ll help you. But if you don’t….

And yes, all these skills translate directly into the skill set you need for your career—any career.

Rules for Discussions:

No fist fights. (I had to put that in… and yes, I had one in a class, once, but not over the class material).

Comments of any sort that make your classmates or T.A. uncomfortable are never appropriate. This includes political statements, incidentally. You are always welcome to talk and even argue about politics in my classes, but you must be respectful of all opinions that are not hate speech. No attacks on fellow classmates; no blanket name calling, as in: “All ------s are idiots! They all think that….” No referring to a group with which a classmate identifies by a derogatory name: “babykillers,” “fascists,” or “treehuggers.” All statements need to be backed up with verifiable facts, not just talking points from a political party.

If you want to make general comments linking the week’s material to a different issue, fine, but you cannot try to turn the week’s discussion into a detailed fight over another issue unless the entire class has access to the same materials to which you’re referring and unless the entire class wants to have that particular discussion. If an issue needs clarification and a resort to outside materials, it needs to be deferred to the following week, when everyone has looked at the relevant materials.

Actual explanations of outside issues and how those issues might relate to the week’s material are always welcome.

What you wear can make your teachers and classmates uncomfortable. If you want to wear something that makes a statement because you want to take a stand, that’s fine. But don’t carelessly put on a shirt that makes a sexual statement or show up in clothes that would be inappropriate to wear to your job because you’re not thinking. How you dress does affect the way you’re regarded. It’s hard to take seriously a student who shows up in a shirt that celebrates drinking or drug use, and it’s downright offensive to have to deal in a professional setting with someone wearing a shirt that makes overt sexual comments (women are just as guilty of this as men are, by the way). Someone once told me that the more powerful you are, the less flesh you show. Think about it. When was the last time you saw Dick Cheney in ratty shorts and a “The Liver is Evil; it Must be Punished” t-shirt?

See previous posts for more Richardson's Rules of Order.

Rivals in Venice

Randall J. Stephens

Theodore K. Rabb reviews the Boston MFA exhibit—Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese: Revivals in Renaissance Venice—in the May 27 issue of the TLS. ("Old Masters

at War: Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese—Great Venetian Artists, but also Great Rivals, Full of Venetian Ruthlessness")

The March 15-August 16 show is stunning and well worth the fee. It's also a fascinating window on 16th-century Venice. "Venice is the ultimate Darwinian city," Rabb remarks. "Sharp elbows were second nature to its Renaissance patricians, and throughout the society animosities and feuds were endemic. Even a distinguished man of letters and a cardinal, Pietro Bembo, lost the use of a finger in a street fight over a lawsuit." These paintings bring that colorful world to life in exquisite detail.

Rabb summarizes the exhibit:

The purpose of the remarkable exhibition Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice, now at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, is to elucidate this context: the competitiveness that inspired the achievements of even the greatest artists. An adroitly positioned display of fifty-four canvases convinces us that, in this respect, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese were unmistakably Venetian. What is astonishing is that this is the first exhibition to approach them in this way, despite Vasari and modern accounts such as Rona Goffen’s pioneering Renaissance Rivals (2002). We know about the protean Picasso, and his uneasy connections with Braque, Matisse and others. But the old masters? >>>

For more, read Holland Cotter's review in the NYT: "Passion of the Moment: A Triptych of Masters," NYT, 12 March 2009.

See also Rabb's recent essay "Teaching World History: Problems and Possibilities," Historically Speaking (January 2009).

Adam’s Ancestors

An Excerpt of Donald Yerxa's Interview with David Livingstone from Historically Speaking (June 2009)

David N. Livingstone is a professor of geography and intellectual history at Queen’s University Belfast. He is a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Arts. One of the most talented and perceptive scholars currently working on the history of science and religion, Livingstone is especially interested in exploring the spatial as well as the temporal contexts within which ideas are produced and consumed. Among his many books are Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2003) and most recently Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Historically Speaking senior editor Donald A. Yerxa caught up with Livingstone on March 3, 2009, to discuss his latest book as well as his approach to intellectual history.

Donald A. Yerxa: Your most recent book, Adam’s Ancestors, is a history of pre-Adamite thinking. What is pre-Adamism?

David N. Livingstone: Pre-Adamism is actually a notoriously simple idea, though its consequences are multifaceted. It’s the idea that the Adam of the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament is not the first human being. In some incarnations Adam is simply the father of the Jewish people, whereas in other versions Adam is viewed as the father of Caucasian people. But the material point of pre-Adamism, at least in its early days, is that there were, and perhaps indeed continue to exist, peoples who are descended from a pre-Adamic or at least non-Adamic source. This would mean that there were at least two (and arguably more than two) creations of the human species. In pre-Adamism lie the origins of what anthropologists used to call polygenesis. And, indeed, that has been and continues to be something of an issue right up to contemporary paleoanthropology. Should we look at all humans as derived from a single source, let’s say, a “mitochondrial Eve”? Or did the human species emerge in many different places? So the debate in that sense, without the biblical significance of Adam, continues to be important in thinking about human origins more generally.

Yerxa: How significant was pre-Adamism in Western intellectual history prior to Darwin?

Livingstone: There are a couple of things to be said about this. Another historian who worked on this subject some years ago, Richard Popkin, made the arresting suggestion that pre-Adamic theory was much more destabilizing to European intellectuals in the 17th century than the Copernican revolution or indeed the mechanical universe of the Newtonians. Popkin reasoned that pre-Adamism challenged human beings’ sense of their own identity, of who they really were. For a very long time, going back to the church fathers, to Augustine, and indeed to much earlier times, descent from Adam came to be a definition of what it was to be human. So I’m inclined to agree with Popkin because while you can scarcely find an advocate for the idea after 1655 when it first began to achieve wider publicity, you find many, many refutations. Although pre-Adamism seems initially to have had few converts, a lot of people felt the need to refute it.

Yerxa: Throughout your book it is clear that this notion is quite versatile and can be adapted to a number of arguments. Could you speak to that?

Livingstone: Pre-Adamism can be used for many contradictory purposes and is hugely adaptable in different environments. Let me just pick out three or four of these. Initially, when it was first put forward in the 1650s by Isaac La Peyrère, it was rapidly castigated as a heresy. Emissaries from the Vatican picked up La Peyrère when he was traveling in what is now Belgium and took him off to Rome, where he was forced to recant before the pope. Clever devil that La Peyrère was, however, the recantation never really admitted he was wrong. Pre-Adamism was considered heretical because it plainly challenged a literal reading of the Genesis narrative. One has to rethink a sequence of other related theological precepts if one accepts the notion that there were pre-Adamites. For example, did they also fall from grace? How representative is Adam of the human race? How does original sin come into the world? How is it transmitted?

Pre-Adamism has been quite versatile, however. In the 19th century—and indeed on into the 20th century—the idea was promulgated by those who were much more conservative in their theological outlook. It was adopted in a new guise by conservative believers who wanted to hold onto the historic significance of Adam while at the same time take some notion of human evolution seriously. So pre-Adamism, once deemed a massive heresy, was later taken up by conservative, orthodox believers.

Let me provide another instance of its adaptability. In the 1650s La Peyrère thought that Adam was the father of the Jewish race, but he was convinced that we all, whether Jews or not, participate to some degree in the benefits of the Jewish religious tradition and divine action in the world through the children of Israel. So in that sense, pre-Adamism is inclusive, humanitarian, and sweeps all of humanity—whether Jewish, Adamic or non-Jewish, non-Adamic—into a human family that benefits in Israel’s redemption. But later, pre-Adamism was used for the grossest forms of racism by depicting certain racial groups as non-Adamic and thus inferior and perhaps even subhuman. So pre-Adamism has been used for both humanitarian and racist purposes. . . .

Yerxa: You were trained as a geographer, and yet much of your recent writing has been in the area of intellectual history and the history of science. Is this an unusual intellectual trajectory? Or is this question premised on a false assumption about what it is that geographers do?

Livingstone: Being trained in geography in my generation encompassed aspects of physical science as well as the humanities and social sciences. Geography integrates nature and culture, or environment and society. Since its institutionalization in the 19th century, geography has always had considerable interest in the history of exploration. If you go back to early examination papers at the University of Oxford, you will find papers dealing with the history of what was then called, in those colonially unconscious days, the Age of Discovery or the Age of Exploration. So there was always interest in the history of growing geographical knowledge about the globe. . . .