Göbekli Tepe, the Origins of Religion, and Early Societies

Randall Stephens

An amazing archeological find is changing what we think of ancient societies and human development. Göbekli Tepe is the first human site of worship--at 11,500 years old--a startling neolithic temple. The site, not attached to a village or settlement, also challenges what archeologists and anthropologists make of the roots of religious belief. Did civilization produce religion? Did religion produce civilization?

Newsweek's Patrick Symmes reports on the find and its chief archeologist, Klaus Schmidt. (Patrick Symmes, "History in the Remaking: A Temple Complex in Turkey that Predates Even the Pyramids is Rewriting the Story of Human Evolution," Newsweek, February 19, 2010.) "The site isn't just old," writes Symmes:

it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization.

See also:
Andrew Curry, "Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple?" Smithsonian Magazine, November 2008.

Gobekli Tepe was first examined—and dismissed—by University of Chicago and Istanbul University anthropologists in the 1960s. As part of a sweeping survey of the region, they visited the hill, saw some broken slabs of limestone and assumed the mound was nothing more than an abandoned medieval cemetery.

Sandra Scham , The World's First Temple," Archeology (November/December 2008).

Before the discovery of Göbekli Tepe, archaeologists believed that societies in the early Neolithic were organized into small bands of hunter-gatherers and that the first complex religious practices were developed by groups that had already mastered agriculture.

Nicholas Birch, "7,000 Years Older than Stonehenge: The Site that Stunned Archaeologists," The Guardian, April 23, 2008.

Never mind wheels or writing, the people who erected them did not even have pottery or domesticated wheat. They lived in villages. But they were hunters, not farmers.

Tony Judt Remembers

Randall Stephens

In its last several issues the New York Review of Books has published excerpts from historian Tony Judt’s fascinating memoirs. Judt, director of the Remarque Institute at NYU, is a keen observer of the human condition and his sharp wit comes through clearly in these pieces. Three have appeared since Judt wrote a wrenching account of his ordeal with Lou Gehrig's disease. "By my present stage of decline, I am thus effectively quadriplegic," he wrote. "My solution has been to scroll through my life, my thoughts, my fantasies, my memories, mis-memories, and the like until I have chanced upon events, people, or narratives that I can employ to divert my mind from the body in which it is encased."

Readers of the memoir excerpts have been treated to stories of growing up Jewish in post-war London, experiments with ethnic cuisine, life on a 1960s kibbutz, and the trials and tribulations of grammar school. The latest installment, "Historian's Progress," ranges over Judt's early fascination with trains, the waning of the French public intellectual, and includes his account of an odd midlife crisis. In the grip of 40-something doldrums, some purchase flashy cars, others try to reclaim the glory of yesterday, 1 in 100 will go out and buy a stunning new toupee. Not Judt. He learned Czech:

Early in the 1980s I was teaching politics at Oxford. I had job security, professional responsibilities, and a nice home. Domestic bliss would have been too much to ask, but I was inured to its absence. I did, though, feel increasingly detached from my academic preoccupations. French history in those days had fallen among thieves: the so-called "cultural turn" and "post"-everything trends in social history had me reading interminable turgid screeds, promoted to academic prominence by newly founded "subdisciplines" whose acolytes were starting to colonize a little too close to home. I was bored. . . .

In a bizarre series of events Judt took Czech classes and learned to read the language well enough. He became an active supporter of dissidents and even taught unauthorized courses in Czechoslovakia.

Without my Czech obsession I would not have found myself in Prague in November 1989, watching Havel accept the presidency from a balcony in the town square. I would not have sat in the Gellert Hotel in Budapest listening to Janos Kis explain his plans for a post-Communist but social democratic Hungary-the best hope for the region but forlorn even then. . . .

Above all, I could never have written Postwar, my history of Europe since 1945. Whatever its shortcomings, that book is rare for the determination with which I set out to integrate Europe's two halves into a common story.

Indeed, critics hailed Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 as the premier work in the field. "Aside from its sheer brickish heft," remarked one in the Boston Globe, "it is, without a doubt, the most comprehensive, authoritative, and, yes, readable postwar history."

In the January/February 2006 issue of Historically Speaking Donald Yerxa interviewed Judt on his recent work, Europe in the shadow of war, and more. I excerpt here a portion of that interview:

Donald A. Yerxa: I’d like to begin with the title of your book, Postwar. Why did you select that title and what does it imply about the period since 1945?

Tony Judt: The title originated with my eleven-year old son. He was getting frustrated with my inability to come up with a title and asked me what the book was about. I said that it was about the way in which the Second World War lasted so long in Europe in terms of memory, impact, and consequences so that much of Europe since 1945 was in a postwar shadow. So he said, “Well, call it Postwar.” The title very much reflects the book’s emphasis on the place of the Second World War and everything that happened in that war in the second half of the 20th century.

Yerxa: How did Europeans handle the burden of the war’s shadow?

Judt: If you want a general answer, I would say that they handled the burden by a form of selective forgetting. Although it varied in subject matter from country to country, it had in common the notion that the only way to put back countries which had experienced what amounted to five or six years of civil war as well as the complete destruction of civic, political, and legal institutions was to create agreeable myths about what had happened and forget the rest.

Yerxa: Why did the shadows last so long?

Judt: There are two answers. In the case of Western Europe, ironically the shadows lasted precisely because they were not actually addressed. Issues of memory of collaboration, of the whole question of what was done to the Jews and who was responsible, and of remembering the extent to which many people were quite happy with fascism or affiliated with the local forms of it—all of these couldn’t be comfortably integrated into post-World War II memory. It was only in the 1970s and 1980s—mainly because of a new generation as much as anything else—that it became possible to look back and ask different questions.

In Eastern Europe it was much more simply a consequence of the imposition of a new regime under the communists which not only made it impossible to look straight at what had happened before the communists, but imposed a whole new level of things for people to remember and feel bad about afterward. The war got conflated with the suffering of the postwar decades.

Yerxa: You maintain that the history of Europe in the second half of the 20th century must include both halves: East and West. What themes or patterns emerge when you include both in your narrative?

Judt: We are all aware that the East and West had very different experiences. But we are not accustomed to reflect on the commonalities. The most obvious one was that in the immediate postwar years, 1945-47, much of the policies pursued in the East were remarkably similar to those in the West: heavy emphasis on reconstruction, investment in infrastructure, economic planning, the direction of the economy, and so on. The Czechoslovak economic plan between 1945 and 1948 was remarkably similar to the first Monnet plan in France. Obviously, it changed once the communists came to power, but there was a common sense that the war taught that you had to plan the economy and control the society from above.

The second theme is the parallel disillusion on the part of the Left. We forget that many people—intellectuals and students, especially in Eastern Europe in places like Hungary and Czechoslovakia—had great hopes for communism if only because they could not go back to the past and there was no alternative. They had great illusions that were in a way comparable to the illusions of Western European progressives and fellow travelers, although they were shattered much earlier. The postwar generation in Western Europe still had hopes for a reformed, improvable, revisionist communism. That dream was shattered in 1968.

I suppose the third thing—though I wouldn’t want to push it—is that the extremely rapid economic and social change in Western Europe has a low-level comparable cousin in Eastern Europe in the shift from country to town, which explains why the towns in Eastern Europe have these God-awful housing blocks to accommodate the huge numbers of ex-peasants. Also there was a degree of underground Americanization, modernization, and youthification in Eastern Europe that was not apparent to the West. This goes a long way to explain what happened in Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Yerxa: Of all the things that have happened in Europe since 1945, which seemed the most predictable? Most unexpected?

Judt: No one anticipated the scale of economic recovery, demographic explosion, prosperity, stability, depoliticization—all of which we recognize as parts of the economic miracle in parts of Western Europe. Everyone expected more of the same, more of what had happened after the First World War: civil conflict, violence, depression, possibly a retreat once again into political extremes of left and right. This didn’t happen, and that was totally unexpected.

Among the most predictable things that occurred was the Cold War. We forget that the Cold War wasn’t coming out of nowhere in the 1940s. The suspicions that the Soviets, especially Stalin, had of the West and the Western doubts about the reliability and desirability of the Soviet Union as an ally go back to the 1920s and 1930s. The Second World War was the aberration, not what comes afterward. If we look—as we now can—at the archives of the Soviet Union, as well as those of the U.S. and UK, we know, for example, that the British Foreign Office was under no illusion that there was bound to be some sort of division of Europe after the war, and that division would take the form of a freezing of the Russian zone, on the one hand, and a desperate attempt to establish a Western zone, on the other. If anyone was a bit surprised by this, it was the Americans, but that’s because they had the least experience with European politics in the interwar years.

Yerxa: In terms of your own engagement with postwar Europe, did anything surprise you during the course of researching and writing the book?

Judt: Something that wasn’t a real surprise but which struck me powerfully was that you simply cannot write the story of the European Union the way it is conventionally written as though a bunch of well-intentioned men sat down and said: “Never again. We must build a happy, united Europe.” That is simply not the case. I am struck again and again by how often the processes that lead to some new stage in the integration or unity or coming together of Europe—whether it’s in the early 1950s, late 1950s, 1970s, or so on—are always a product of separate national interests. There was until very late in the day no great European project.

There is probably one other thing that did surprise me, although once I got over the surprise, I realized I had seen it coming, and that is just how much of postwar Europe was built unknowingly on the foundation of things that happened in the Second World War, indeed under the Nazis. Many of the economic policies, the idea that there should be a European-wide zone of policy making and so on, were largely the consequence of the experience of World War II itself. Particularly in Western Europe, many young administrators got their first experience of being able to construct economic policies and planning without the annoying interference of democratic politicians when they worked for Vichy or the occupying forces.

Yerxa: Was the Cold War as dangerous as those of us who were children in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s remember it?

Judt: That’s a very good question. It struck me while writing the book how very different the Cold War was when seen from Europe than when seen from America. The American memory of my contemporaries was of nuclear alert and of being warned about what to do if the Russians came. I grew up in London, and most of my friends grew up in Europe within a few hundred miles of the Red Army, and we weren’t aware of this most of the time. Until I was about ten years old, I think that most of my conscious sense of “goodies and baddies” was directed more toward the Germans. All British and most European films about the war were still heavily focused on fighting the Germans. There was something of a mixed view of the Red Army. I remember when the Red Army Choir and the Bolshoi Ballet came to London in the mid-1950s. They were welcomed with open arms, cheering, and unambiguous affection, even by people who politically were unquestionably right of center and anti-communist. So I think it was a different experience in Europe as felt and remembered. Now, whether it was objectively just as dangerous—in other words, whether the Europeans were living in an illusory sense of safety—is another matter. I think there was probably only one really dangerous moment in the Cold War, and that was of course Cuba. We now know that pressures particularly on Kennedy and to some extent on Khrushchev to play much harder ball than they wanted to were quite strong. But I do not know of any instance earlier or later when we were really close to nuclear or even non-nuclear war in Europe. The Cold War was extremely dangerous in East Asia, and there were times that it got risky in the Middle East. We know that Nixon came very close to mobilizing American strategic forces over the 1973 war. But I don’t know of any similar occasion in Europe. One of the reasons for this was that Stalin was extraordinarily cautious in Europe. He had no interest in pushing further than he had already got. He discouraged communists in Greece, Yugoslavia, Italy, and France from making trouble because it didn’t suit his strategic purposes. So I think that we Europeans were not totally wrong to remember the Cold War as stabilizing, in an odd kind of way. It certainly was in Western Europe. The Eastern Europeans, of course, remember it not as particularly dangerous, but as horrible. Horrible because there really was a war going on, but it was a war between the state and society.

Yerxa: Who is on your short list of the most influential people in the history of Europe since 1945?

Judt: Charles de Gaulle, no question. Like it or not, Margaret Thatcher, and like it or not intellectually, I suppose Jean-Paul Sartre. His influence was considerable in a gloomy sort of way. Back to politics, I would include Mikhail Gorbachev. Absent Gorbachev it is hard to envisage the events of the 1980s. I would also have to rank the Polish pope, but below Gorbachev. And much though I deeply dislike the man, Konrad Adenauer was crucial in the stabilizing of West Germany. In a different way, I would include Willy Brandt, who was really a political failure, but who played a vital role in shifting the gears of internal European relations from the Cold War to détente. In terms of public figures, those would be the ones whom I would emphasize. I would be less inclined to include other major intellectuals or writers because so many of them went off to America. Tragically, many of the most important people that would otherwise be associated with “the European mind” were in fact living in New York or Chicago as a consequence of the Depression, Nazism, communism, and World War II. . . .

Disappearing History, Reappearing History

Randall Stephens

A recent TNR review, NYT essay, and a piece in the Chronicle shed light on the contested nature of history and memory here and across the pond. Mostly dark business. On the bright side, long-lost reels from the dark classic Metropolis are finally being shown. Der Spiegel reports on the recovery of the reels from the 1927 Fritz Lang film. Berliners recently previewed the restored classic. Turns out that this more than 20 minutes of extra material alters the story. (Hat tip to my wife Beth on the latter.)

Mark Mazower, "History's Isle," The New Republic, February 3, 2010

Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent
by Richard J. Evans

The effects of a great financial crisis ripple in many directions and last long. After a decade of expansion, for example, austere times lie ahead for British universities, with deep cuts on the horizon. There will be consequences for British scholarship and British culture. Richard Evans’s new study of the historical profession in Britain serves as a timely reminder both of what Britain’s historians have achieved over the past half-century, and what may be lost if their legacy is squandered. In particular, Evans celebrates his colleagues’ outward-looking mindset and their love-affairs with Europe, an engagement that is striking when compared to the introversion of their peers across the Channel, and—though he does not come out and say so—with the parochialism of contemporary British political and cultural life. read on >>>

Russell Shorto, "How Christian Were the Founders?" New York Times, February 11, 2010

The Christian “truth” about America’s founding has long been taught in Christian schools, but not beyond. Recently, however — perhaps out of ire at what they see as an aggressive, secular, liberal agenda in Washington and perhaps also because they sense an opening in the battle, a sudden weakness in the lines of the secularists — some activists decided that the time was right to try to reshape the history that children in public schools study. Succeeding at this would help them toward their ultimate goal of reshaping American society. As Cynthia Dunbar, another Christian activist on the Texas board, put it, “The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.” read on >>>

John Castellucci, "The Night They Burned Ranum's Papers," Chronicle Review, February 14, 2010

At about 2:30 a.m. on May 22, 1968, as New York City police entered Hamilton Hall, on Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus, to clear it of demonstrators, files belonging to Orest A. Ranum, an associate professor of history, were ransacked, and papers documenting more than 10 years of research were burned. . . .

The papers were irreplaceable. They dated back to Ranum's time as a student at the University of Minnesota, where he got his Ph.D. in history. The notes were going to lay the basis for a textbook on early modern European history that he had been commissioned to write for a series edited by the British historian Sir John Plumb. read on >>>

Siobhán Dowling, "Back to the Future in Berlin: Restored 'Metropolis' Comes Home," Der Spiegel, February 13, 2010

After 83 years, Fritz Lang's Sci-Fi classic "Metropolis" has returned to Berlin in its full glory. On Friday night 2,000 fans braved the snowy weather to watch the restored classic at the Brandenburg Gate. It took restorers a year to repair the damage to the newly discovered scenes. They say the original film was much more complex and interesting than just a sci-fi cult classic. read on >>>

See Roger Ebert on streaming the restored version.

Judge Ye Not?

Randall Stephens

I assigned John Lewis Gaddis’s The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past for my history methods course. It did not go swimmingly. Students were perplexed and overwhelmed by the technical terms, bewildered by Gaddis’s one-man crusade against the social sciences, and distracted by the deluge of citations and the flurry of references to everything from cubism to chaos theory to postmodern nominalism. Rough going.

Still we managed to glean something from the book, which I find to be a fascinating work, as insightful as it is provocative. (That gap between what students like and what profs like.) Students got into his map analogies even if their eyes glazed over as they read of "a preference for parsimony in consequences" (105).

We spent some time delving into a theme from Gaddis’s last chapter. Historians, he writes, without being too grandiose, have some role in liberating the past. "To the extent that we place our subjects in context, we also rescue the world that surrounded them," he notes (140). Earlier he observes that "History happens to historians as well as everyone else. The idea that the historian can and should stand aloof from moral judgment unrealistically denies that fact" (128).

It got me thinking. How and why do historians make judgments about the past? Is it even possible to withhold judgment or bracket it? Selection of material in itself is a kind of judgment.

Anyhow, my mind went back to historians' wisdom on the matter. I excerpt below bits on judgment/liberation in history:

Lord Acton, "The Study of History," 1895. (To be distinguished from Lord Action, an aristocratic, late-Victorian superhero.)

But the weight of opinion is against me when I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong. The plea in extenuation of guilt and mitigation of punishment is perpetual. At every step we are met by arguments which go to excuse, to palliate, to confound right and wrong, and reduce the just man to the level of the reprobate. The men who plot to baffle and resist us are, first of all, those who made history what it has become. They set up the principle that only a foolish Conservative judges the present time with the ideas of the past; that only a foolish Liberal judges the past with the ideas of the present.

Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931; 1965), 107-108.

It is the natural result of the whig historian’s habits of mind and his attitude to history--though it is not a necessary consequence of his actual method--that he should be interested in the promulgation of moral judgements and should count this as an important part of his office. His preoccupation is not difficult to understand when it is remembered that he regards himself as something more than the inquirer. By the very finality and absoluteness with which he has endowed the present he has heightened his own position. For him the voice of posterity is the voice of God and the historian is the voice of posterity. And it is typical of him that he tends to regard himself as the judge when by his methods and his equipment he is fitted only to be the detective. His concern with the sphere of morality forms in fact the extreme point in his desire to make judgements of value, and to count them as the verdict of history. By a curious example of the transference of ideas he, like many other people, has come to confuse the importance which courts of legal justice must hold, and the finality they must have for practical reasons in society, with the most useless and unproductive of all forms of reflection--the dispensing of moral judgements upon people or upon actions in retrospect.

Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft (1954; 1992), 115-116.

Are we so sure of ourselves and of our age as to divide the company of our forefathers into the lust and the damned? How absurd it is, by elevating the entirely relative criteria of one individual, one party, or one generation to the absolute, to inflict standards upon the way in which Sulla governed Rome, or Richelieu the States of the Most Christian King! Moreover, since nothing is more variable than such judgments, subject to all the fluctuations of collective opinion or personal caprice, history, by all too frequently preferring the compilation of honor rolls to that of notebooks, has gratuitously given itself the appearance of the most uncertain of disciplines. Hollow indictments are followed by vain rehabilitations. Robespierrists! Anti-Robespierrists! For pity's sake, simply tell us what Robespierre was.

E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), 12.

I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.

Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (1994), 66-67.

Even though nothing could have been further from his intention, Hegel opened the way to relativism, that is, the idea that truth depends on historical circumstances. If truth is revealed over time, then any truth, moral, scientific, or political, also changes over time and is never permanent. What seems to be true today may not be true in the conditions of tomorrow; what is true for some people is not true for others. Thus, even as Hegel's views lent great prestige to history, now conceived as an essential framework for philosophy, they also created potential problems for the idea of historical truth itself. Were there no absolute moral standards that transcended the particularities of time and place? Was the role of historians simply limited to explaining how previous people had thought and acted without passing judgment on those thoughts and actions?

Stephen Prothero "Belief Unbracketed: A Case for the Religion Scholar to Reveal More of Where He or She Is Coming From," Harvard Divinity Bulletin (Winter/Spring 2004).

Since Jonestown, religion has shown its dark side repeatedly—with Heaven's Gate, at Waco, and on 9/11. In each case, we Religious Studies scholars have been largely irrelevant to the public debates. True, we drew out the parallels between the Heaven's Gate website and medieval Daoist immortality texts. But we could not explain what produced the worst mass suicide on American soil. No surprise, then, that radio and television producers turned instead to self-styled "cult experts" to explain what happened when Heaven's Gate swung shut. And to experts on the Middle East rather than Islamicists when it came to parsing Islam as "a religion of peace."

Robert Orsi, "A 'Bit of Judgment,'" Harvard Divinity Bulletin (Winter/Spring 2004).

Predictable judgments occlude their implication in power, but this becomes clearer if we think about what a "little bit of judgment" looks like in relation to religious practices that subvert normative modernity or that are simply uncomfortable to the good hearted. It's one thing to come out boldly "for" ecological responsibility. What about "for" speaking in tongues and creating a religious environment in which one's children are expected to speak in tongues as a sign of their religious status? But apart from the boldness and deliciousness of judgment, how exactly does a scholar's being "for" or "against" the practices, say, of rural Pentecostals help us understand the nature of relationships in this world, the press of authority, the meanings of gender and class, the experience of kinship? Wouldn't battering, sneering, and castigating keep us from approaching ways of loving and being that are unfamiliar to us, ways of being and loving which we cannot imagine ourselves being and loving?

Now and Zinn: Drake Bennet on New Directions in History

Randall Stephens

In Sunday's Boston Globe, Drake Bennet calls the late Howard Zinn "an unabashed political radical." The appeal of Zinn's People's History of the United States "stemmed from something conceptual: He took a story that generations of American schoolchildren had had drilled into them and he turned it on its head." ("Changing History: Four new ways to write the story of the world," Boston Globe, February 7, 2010.) Others had written history from the bottom up long before Zinn's People's History. But, Zinn's populist history for the masses won an enormous audience.

Bennet uses that hook to look at new approaches to the study of the past. Such essays are not without pitfalls. What looked so "new" in one era can lose some luster in another. Praise for psycho history, prosopography, the linguistic turn, now looks a little overwrought. More than thirty years ago Laurence Veysey summarized the "new" social history, with a healthy dose of skepticism, in the pages of Reviews in American History:

What, then, finally of social history-the aggressor-itself? The "new" social history emerged in the 1960s quite separately from Marxist history, though riding the climate of engaged interest in the nonelite population. Its canons might be summarized as follows: that history should be viewed in terms of the processes affecting the great majority of people alive at any given time, with special attention to the anonymously downtrodden, those whose standard of living and prestige are the lowest (this corollary helped build a specious bridge toward Marxism), and that the historian should be intensely skeptical of literary sources of evidence, always the product of a small elite, instead making use of whatever bare quantitative data exist to assure that one's conclusions are truly representative of the social aggregate being discussed. To be sure, most social historians continued to milk conventional evidence as well, to help dramatize realities, but only with the sternest reminders that one could not accept it apart from the backdrop of careful attention to the problem of typicality.

Vesey also covered some of the trends of the previous decades--intellectual history in the 1950s then Marxist interpretations. In like manner Bennet zeroes in on recent developments: "Pacific History," "Archeoscience," "Environmental History," and "Neurohistory":

Environmental historians, for example, are looking not just at society but its interaction with the natural world, exploring the ways that man has altered and been altered by it. Proponents of so-called neurohistory are looking at the human brain, arguing that it is not solely the product of evolution, but of culture and technological advances - of history, in other words, rather than just biology. Other historians are rearranging the boundaries their colleagues use to partition the past into useful categories, creating fields like “Pacific history” that focus on the ways that navigable bodies of water have linked and shaped societies as much as national borders have. Still others are using the tools of science to answer longstanding historical questions - melding history, archeology, and sciences ranging from genetics to computer programming to climatology into a sprawling new field called “archeoscience.” read on >>>

[Bennet's observations nicely parallel the overall theme of the Historical Society's 2010 conference: "Historical Inquiry in the New Century," June 3-5, 2010, George Washington University, Washington, DC. Early registration forms and hotel info are now on-line.]

The Underworld and a Book Series I'd Like to See

Randall Stephens

Over 100 years ago the sociologist Emile Durkheim observed “There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms. No people exists whose morality is not daily infringed upon. We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social

organization, as they are understood, logically imply it.”

Just like a sociologists to make that sort of generalization. "Over the ages, man has . . ." But, he was right, right?

The history of ever-present crime tells us about the parameters of a society and reveals something profound about social structure. But there is also a deeply historical component to it. A criminal act or a perpetrator in one era may also be deemed law-abiding or acceptable in another era.

Historians can also learn something significant about the past by looking at all those outcasts, misfits, pariahs, and unfortunates, who show up in police records or make cameos as evil foils in pulp novels. Besides that, it makes for interesting history. No one needed to tell that to Hebert Asbury. His books like The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld‎; The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld; and The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld are serious page-turners. Asbury wrote the latter "to chronicle the more spectacular exploits of the refractory citizen who was a dangerous nuisance in New York for almost a hundred years, with a sufficient indication of his background of vice, poverty, and political corruption to make him understandable." But, it was, more than anything, a good yarn.

So, I imagined a collection I'd like to see: a Lowlifes of America Series, which might include excerpts from the memoirs of scoundrels, rakes, and what have you. It could also include selections from letters back home from infamous gamblers, biographies of notable sporting men, the diary of an inebriate, articles from the penny press, account books of a New York madame, and on and on.

In the fall of 2008 I interviewed Patricia Cline Cohen Timothy J. Gilfoyle and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz for Historically Speaking on a related subject: "Sporting Male Weeklies in 19th-Century New York." Here's an excerpt:

In the 1840s a collection of sporting men's weeklies, called the flash press, reported on the sexual underworld of New York City. The papers—with titles like the Flash, the Whip, the Rake, and the Libertine—were widely condemned by the city’s moral reformers and middle-class evangelicals. But that did nothing to diminish the popularity of the flash press. In oyster bars and brothels scattered across the city, bachelors read local gossip and scandalous stories of treachery in the sex trade industry.

In 2008 Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz published The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York (University of Chicago Press). Their landmark study sheds light on the rowdy sexual cultures of a bustling metropolis. The book reveals much about mid-19th century views on race, sex, consumption, religion, and morality.
Randall Stephens: Why had so few historians used “flash” newspapers before the 1980s?
Patricia Cline Cohen: The “flash” newspapers of the early 1840s didn’t surface in any library or repository until the mid-1980s, when eighty-six issues of the Flash, the Whip, the Rake, and the Libertine were brought to the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) by a New Hampshire man whose father had acquired and then carefully saved the set in the early 20th century. That first owner was George Underwood, a well-known New York City and Boston sportswriter who covered the boxing world. Our hypothesis is that the flash papers—which covered sports and particularly boxing—had been retained by one of the original editors and then handed down in sports journalism circles until Underwood got them, somewhere between 1910 and 1930.
Timothy J. Gilfoyle: Some issues could be found in the New York City District Attorney Indictment Papers in the New York City Municipal Archives. Most were related to the libel charges involving the flash press editors. But these prosecution files contained only single issues, so historians who might have seen them as the indictment papers were processed after 1975 would never have known how many issues of the various flash papers were ever published.
Cohen: Scholars have long known about the many satirical newspapers that existed in the 1830s-1850s. The English weekly Punch is the leading example, with its cartoons, sharp political humor, and masculine community-building attributes. But Punch is quite tame compared to the New York flash papers, which took the sexual underworld of the big city as their main theme. The U.S. did not lack for humor papers either; many cities had short-lived weeklies with jokes, tall tales, and local gossip, written by and for “loafers,” young men who proudly embraced this term of opprobrium. But scholars haven’t used them much. They haven’t been objects of collection; they have survived mainly in isolated issues. What is unique and significant about the four papers published in New York City between 1841 and 1853 is that we have a lot of them, perhaps 75% of the entire print runs, and they reveal an alternative sexual universe.
Stephens: Could you say something about why these periodicals emerged in the early 1840s, ran for a few years, and then ceased?
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz: Quite simply, the courts shut them down. New York did not have anti-obscenity legislation at the time. But conservative forces were able to use the power of the common law to charge the editors with “obscene libel.” Judges then followed the rules of English courts, which were oblivious to what we now call First Amendment freedoms. These rules shaped the definition of obscene matter and limited evidence presented to the court by the defense. The editors were found guilty and served terms in jail. Interestingly enough, after they served their time, a number of them had fascinating, even important careers. . . .

Dancing about Historiography: At the Movies with a Methods Course

Randall Stephens

It's very difficult to find movies to show in a historiography or history methods course. Think about it. Reminds me of the line: "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." How many major motion pictures deal with historical interpretation or portray scholars "doing" history. (Lord Macaulay reading intently. A Franz Liszt piece wafting in the background. "The Dutch archives and the French archives must be ransacked," shouts the actor playing the Baron. Or, a shot of a tweedy, pipe-smoking C. Vann Woodward delivering his UVA lectures that will become The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Pan out on the audience of white southerners.) Real movies. Unlikely.

Still, I've found some films and interviews that get the conversation going in a methods course I teach. I'm using a selection of clips from the play-adapted-to-screen History Boys (2006). Questions about truth, value in history, and E.H Carr-like "What is History" head scratchers animate several scenes. The film admirably moves the viewer into some epistemological water without any major trouble.

Charlie Rose interviews with historians or on history-related topics can work well enough. Though the average student will slip into a boredom coma. The Roger Mudd American Heritage series Great Minds of History (VHS, 1998) is similar, but not limited to the Charlie Rose spartan set with darkly lit room. UC Berkeley's Conversations with History program, now available on YouTube, features several interviews with prominent historians. I've also tried showing bits from the Matt Damon-hosted Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (2004). That's quite good for analyzing the historian as advocate. A similar film, produced by Alabama Public TV, is the Gospel According to Wayne (1993), a bio of the southern historian and Christian activist Wayne Flynt.

Feature films like The Return of Martin Guerre (1982), Name of the Rose (1986), Cold Mountain (2003), or any number of others could get students to think about the use of evidence, narrative arch, and pacing.

For the first time this year I'm going to use episodes from PBS's History Detectives, an ongoing series "devoted to exploring the complexities of historical mysteries, searching out the facts, myths and conundrums that connect local folklore, family legends and interesting objects." I'll be selective in how I use it. Some episodes are better than others, to paraphrase The Smiths.

Students relate to films in ways that they don't to books and articles. (That is doubly true of the reading material in a methods course.) Fifteen to twenty minute clips work best for me and open class discussions up in unexpected ways.