The Titanic, Time, and the Fragility of Human Life

Heather Cox Richardson

I have been pretty vocal about my inability to understand why people are so gripped by the Titanic disaster. Just a shipwreck, I’ve said. I don’t get it. Why not the Lusitania, which was by a torpedo in the same era, or any of the thousands of disasters that happen every day?

Titanic survivors. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Maybe I get it now.

The RMS Titanic set out from Southampton on April 10, 1912, a luxury ship carrying more than 2,200 passengers. She made port in France and Ireland before heading out to sea on April 11.

I’ve just started experimenting with ways for historians to use Twitter, and for the last several days have been tweeting snippets about the voyage, day by day: the vessel leaving port; the crew member who jumped ship in Ireland; the ten-course dinner of April 14; the radio operator’s determination to send out passenger messages as soon as he could raise the Newfoundland station late in the night of April 14; his brusque dismissal of a nearby ship’s warning of an ice field. As I trawled through little events, what I began to see was just how calm and safe and, well, unremarkable, the experience of the Titanic’s passengers was.

Jesse James and Anwar al-Awlaki

Heather Cox Richardson

There has been a great deal of debate over whether or not it was legal for the Obama administration to order the September 30 killing of Anwar al-Awlaki. It seems unlikely to go far in the realm of political discussion, since al-Awlaki was not on American soil, and since few Americans seem to have digested the fact that, although he had a foreign name and was clearly implicated in major terrorist attacks on the United States, al-Awlaki was born in America and was thus an American citizen.

A similar question did, though, roil American politics in the 1880s: should the government be able to order the assassination of an American citizen? Then, unlike now, it was discussed on both sides of the political divide as a principled question of executive power and the rights of citizens.

The targeted citizen, in that case, was Jesse James.

James had fought for the Confederacy as one of Quantrill’s Raiders in Missouri. These men were so hated by the pro-Union Missourians that, when the end of the war permitted most Confederate soldiers to go home in peace, Unionists refused to acknowledge the Raiders as Confederate soldiers. Someone put a bullet in Jesse as he made his way home from the fighting.

For their part, James and his buddies were not cheerfully reconstructed ex-Confederates. They survived by robbing trains, banks, and express companies, all of which were associated after the Civil War with the Republican federal government. But James insisted that he was not a criminal; he had been forced outside the law by the government itself. After the war, ex-Confederate Democrats in Missouri could not vote, sit on juries, work as lawyers, or hold government offices. James maintained that the true perpetrators of the crimes for which he was blamed were Republicans. In his view, state laws barring Democrats from access to legal protection, juries, and offices guaranteed that he could never get a fair hearing. According to a sympathetic biographer (he referred to Jesse as “an angel of light”), their manhood forced men like James to “turn upon that law that hounded them and that society that hunted them, and outrage and defy it.”

Missouri officials had no luck bringing James to justice. Neither did Pinkerton detectives, hired by angry express company owners. (The James Gang robbed stagecoaches, banks, and trains and committing a host of murders along the way.) Finally, in desperation, the Missouri governor, T. T. Crittenden, persuaded a member of James’s own gang to murder him. Bob Ford shot James as he straightened a picture on the wall. When Ford and his brother pled guilty to the murder and were sentenced to death, the governor promptly pardoned them and paid them the bounty he had placed on James’s head.

Predictably, Democrats were outraged by the prospect of an elected Republican official arranging for the murder of a Democrat. But many Republicans were also unsettled. Crittenden had “hired an assassin” as if he were a potentate, one Republican newspaper editor wrote. Popular opinion swung quickly to an acknowledgement that James was a criminal, and even rejoiced that he was out of commission, but rejected entirely the idea that government officials should have the power to ignore legal processes and simply murder their domestic enemies. James’s portrayal as a man persecuted by the government made him a popular hero.

While any parallels should not be pushed too far, James’s situation was not unlike that of al-Awlaki. Both appear to have been criminals who protested a government that would not acknowledge their grievances. At the same time, al-Awlaki’s case raises questions the James case did not, questions, for example, about the nature of war powers during times of undeclared war, and how international terrorism should affect Constitutional rights. These are not unimportant issues. It’s too bad that they will most likely not get the bipartisan public airing they need in the wake of al-Awlaki’s death, the same public debate that followed Jesse James’s assassination.

The Conspirator Roundup

.
The Conspirator, a 2011 film about the plot to kill president Lincoln, is now out on DVD and Blu-ray.

Peter Rainer, "The Conspirator: movie review," Christian Science Monitor, April 15, 2011

Robert Redford’s workmanlike “The Conspirator” is about Mary Surratt (Robin Wright), a Confederate sympathizer who was

executed for her complicity, which she denied, in the plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. Tried in a military court as a civilian along with eight other alleged conspirators, she became the first woman to be executed by the United States federal government.>>>

Anthony Lane, "Casualties of War," New Yorker, April 18, 2011

Of the many questions posed by “The Conspirator,” and left unresolved, the most pressing are these: How much did Mary Surratt (Robin Wright) know of the plot to kill Abraham Lincoln? How could she not have known of it, given that some of it was hatched within the respectable boarding house that she ran in Washington, D.C.? If her son John (Johnny Simmons), who certainly did know of the plot, had surrendered to the authorities, rather than remaining on the run, could he have saved his mother’s skin? Why did Andrew Johnson, the new President, reject the last-minute, late-night application by Surratt’s lawyer for a retrial? And was there ever any likelihood, considering the public revulsion at the murder, that she would receive a fair trial in the first place?>>>

Jason Solomons, "The Conspirator – review," Guardian, July 2, 2011

Almost by decree, British actor Tom Wilkinson turns up in mutton chops to play an American senator in Robert Redford's starchy period piece The Conspirator. Has Tom pinched those whiskers from the Hollywood props cupboard, forcing studios to cast him in every historical movie just so they might wrench them back off him during make-up? He's clearly too quick for them. I swear Tom Conti did a similar thing and nicked the FilmFour moustache back in the 1980s. He never gave it back either – he just secretly handed it on to Alfred Molina. I hear the 'tache now lives in Malibu and has its own agent.>>>

Rex Reed, "Movie Review: The Conspirator is Redford’s Best Film in Decades," New York Observer, April 12, 2011

As an iconic actor, conscientious director and liberal political activist, Robert Redford loves history lessons. Everybody knew about white-collar crime in the White House during Watergate, but nobody knew anything about the two reporters who exposed the story until Mr. Redford and Dustin Hoffman played them in All the President’s Men, in the interests of the great profession of journalism. In The Conspirator, Robert Redford the director addresses another footnote to American history that’s left out of textbooks: the little-known story of Mary Surratt, an innocent woman caught up in the U.S. government witch hunt following the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. It’s an exhaustively researched, brilliantly scripted, carefully made film that cautiously avoids preachy propaganda of yesteryear, while unavoidably reflecting the similar anxiety, tension and fear of a polarized nation today. What goes around, Mr. Redford seems to be saying, comes around.>>>

Democracy on Trial: The Differences Between Protest and Mob Criminality

Philip White

In the past year, we have seen protests lead to the fall of autocrats in Yemen and Egypt, and incur the full wrath of dictators in Iran, Libya and Syria—where President Bashar al-Assad has used the army to crush resistance in the cities of Hama and Deil-al-Zor. With the use of jerry-rigged web connections in Egypt that overcame the government’s internet shutdown, and social networking tools such as Twitter in Iran, Libya and Syria, we in the West have had real-time insight into these demands for democracy and the repression they have prompted. From the living room to the highest office in the land, this coverage has prompted outrage over the denial of the right to protest that we take for granted. Indeed, Britain and America have led an international task force to prevent the slaughter of civilians and to remove the odious Colonel Gaddafi in Libya.

The common theme in each of these protests has been twofold: an indictment of the ruling regime’s abuses and control, and a call for elected, representative government through open and free elections. Have some of the protesters resorted to violence in the face of troops and tanks? Most certainly, but on the whole, these demonstrations have been peaceful. Perhaps this is because the protesters realize they cannot decry regime violence if they use violence in return, or maybe they know the world is watching. Whatever their motivation, they have not used their leaders’ harsh tactics as an excuse for widespread looting, vandalism, and brutality toward ethnic minorities.

Meanwhile, in my native England, one of the world’s oldest democracies and a supposedly “civilized” nation, armed mobs stalk the streets, burning cars, assaulting police officers and looting shops. As with the riots in Los Angeles in 1992, this was not a pre-meditated campaign of violence at its inception, but rather a spontaneous response to the death of a young man at the hands of the police. It should be noted that the mob did not wait for the results of the inquest before reacting in the worst possible way. Now, with five days of rioting passed, the disturbances are indeed coordinated, with the ringleaders using the same tools—texting, tweeting et al—as protesters in the Middle East and North Africa to spread their call for anarchy.

Here, we come to the need for clear delineation. The tech tools of the desired “revolution” may be similar, but the motives, methods and mentality are not the comparable. Participators in the “Arab Spring” are rebelling against regimes that deny them freedom of speech, expression, worship and the ballot box. Every aspect of their lives—from what they’re allowed to read in a newspaper to what they can view on a throttled internet—is controlled by the state.

In contrast, the criminals, and criminals they are, who are smashing up London, Birmingham, Manchester and other English cities live in a tolerant, open society that, despite its flaws, provides all citizens with the right to vote, to speak their minds, and to express themselves. Their recent acts are like the tantrums of a toddler who is trying to intimidate his parents into getting his way. Yet a toddler is more sophisticated, for he knows that he has a defined goal—to tip a bag of flour over his head or steal a toy from his baby sister, for example. These rioters, hooded and baseball bat-wielding—have no such clear aim. Instead, they rage against “the system,” and the politicians who are supposedly keeping them “down.” To punish the rich who they despise for their monetary success, they’re robbing diners at posh Notting Hill restaurants, trying to rip wedding rings off their fingers and demanding phones and cash. They’re also breaking into and stripping clean the businesses that they think represent the “evils” of capitalism. And it’s not just electronics and luxury goods chains that are under attack, but also those run by individuals who work as hard to eke out a living as the people who built up the nationwide businesses. Gangs of armed youths killed three innocent men, and others beat up journalists and those trying to stop the looting. These are not the actions of a group that deserves the “respect” they demand for their gangs, nor the right to indict anyone for their actions.

Democracy guarantees the right to protest, and in Egypt and Yemen we have seen that this can bring about change. Hark back to the March on Washington and we see that peaceful protests led by Martin Luther King, Jr. achieved their goals. Some of the rioters in England are from ethnic minorities (although just as many, or more, are white), and live in areas blighted by drugs, crime and absent fathers. There are doubtless problems spanning several generations that could be better addressed by Cameron’s coalition government. Yet these minorities are not denied places at lunch counters, made to use separate toilets or forced to sit at the back of buses, like King and those who stood alongside him.

The fundamental, liberating thing that they’re denying themselves is personal accountability. They are just a small, unrepresentative portion of the populaces they come from—99 percent of their neighbors watch in horror as their homes, businesses and cars burn. Many have joined mass cleanup operations, have decried the rioters’ actions and have protected their homes, businesses and places of worship from the mob. Those who are not on the streets indulging in mindless violence understand that you must take responsibility for yourself, and only you can make sure you stay out of a gang, stay in school, and obtain the job that your skills merit. The government is not forcing anyone to make poor choices, nor is it preventing economic, social or geographic mobility. Yet, regardless of whether they are Caucasian or another ethnicity, the rioters are making the all-too-common mistake of blaming others for their position, while abdicating responsibility.

The only way to bring about change in poor urban neighborhoods is for each person to be accountable for their thoughts and deeds, and to work to better themselves. Government programs can help, but handouts merely perpetuate the cycle, creating fiscal reliance on the state, removing the incentive to work and further encouraging the individual to avoid looking into the mirror of accountability.

If they want to truly protest, the English people who are raging on the streets should instead exercise their democratic right to demonstrate peacefully, and be thankful that they have the chance. In other parts of the world, people who are truly oppressed risk their lives for such rights. And they’re not beating cops, stealing TVs or burning down buildings with children inside to achieve them. Those English citizens who are doing such things should also recognize that democracy is not an a la carte menu from which you can pick certain bits while leaving others on the table. Thus, the rule of law in England must be upheld, and those guilty of vandalism, murder and arson will be rightly punished in the court of law, while they set themselves and their “cause” back even further in the court of public opinion.

Kaboom! The Legacy of World War I

Randall Stephens

The past is never dead. It's not even disarmed.

Among the many legacies of World War I: the unexploded bombs that still litter Europe. (This

is also a major inheritance of the Second World War. See the DW clip embedded here.) The Christian Science Monitor's Randy Dotinga discusses the problem in a brief review of Adam Hochschild 's new book, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (Houghton Mifflin, 2011). "I had my own encounter with an unexploded shell in 2006," says Dotinga, "during a tour of World War I battlefields and cemeteries in the region of Belgium known as Flanders. We dropped by an archaeological site in a field next to a gas station and found volunteers who'd just uncovered an unexploded German shell. You can see it in the accompanying photo. The date on the shell, which was about 20 inches long, is 1916. Holding the shell – carefully – was probably harmless. Banging it with a hammer, however, would have been a very bad idea."

In the June issue of Historically Speaking, Sean McMeekin–who teaches diplomatic history in the department of international relations of Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey–considers the enormous impact of the Great War and the ongoing scholarly discussion/debate surrounding it. I excerpt a portion of that essay here.

Sean McMeekin, "Jihad-cum-Zionism-Leninism: Overthrowing the World, German-Style"

It is often said that the First World War marks a watershed in modern history. From the mobilization of armies of unfathomable size—more than 60 million men put on uniforms between 1914 and 1918—to the no less mind-boggling human cost of the conflict, both at the front and beyond it (estimated military and civilian deaths were nearly equal, at some 8 million each), the war of 1914 broke all historical precedent in the scale of its devastation. Ruling houses that had endured for centuries—the Romanov, Habsburg, and Ottoman—shook, tottered, and fell, unleashing yet more misery as these precariously assembled multiethnic empires were wracked by internecine warfare. As the war of 1914 spread beyond Europe into the Balkans and Middle East, racial and religious score-settling and reprisals led inevitably to large-scale ethnic cleansing, with millions of civilians uprooted from their ancestral homes, which most would never see again. Even the victorious Western powers, France and Britain, suffered a collapse in cultural confidence that arguably has never been repaired. After centuries of progress had brought the West to a position of unparalleled domination of global affairs, it took only four years for the whole glittering edifice of European civilization to fall apart.

If 1914–18 marked an epitaph for Old Europe, we may usefully ask: Was it murder or suicide? Popular historians have usually leaned toward the latter verdict, viewing the catastrophe of 1914 as a tragedy of miscalculation, the idea being that no European statesmen were truly guilty of intending the war, at least not the horrendous global war of attrition that it turned into.1 Since the Fritz Fischer debate of the 1960s professional historians have generally favored the former explanation, explaining the war’s outbreak in terms of German and/or Austrian premeditation, coming down with a verdict of, if not outright homicide, then at least civilizational manslaughter. The German decision for war in 1914, Holger Herwig writes in a recent scholarly collection on the conflict, was not quite Fischer’s aggressive and deliberate “bid for world power” but rather “a nervous, indeed panicked ‘leap into the dark’ to secure the Reich’s position of semihegemony on the Continent.” In the new “consensus” interpretation, Berlin still bears primary responsibility, no longer for premeditated imperial aggression in the sense implied by the Versailles Treaty and by Fischer, but for an impulsive preemptive strike to ward off incipient strategic decline, with further mitigation in that the Germans received a strong assist in unleashing the dogs of war from their equally panic-stricken (and equally pessimistic) Austrian allies.

This sort of moderate academic consensus is usually welcomed. Now that so few historians have a real personal or patriotic stake in the controversy (as many Germans with memories of both world wars still did in the 1960s), scholars working in the field today are spared the bitter acrimony of the Fritz Fischer years. Even on the level of practical politics, with the centennial approaching, there is now a sense of “goodbye to all that”—literally, as the last German reparations payment was finally processed in 2010!>>>

Bloody Sundays

Dan Allosso

I was driving home from work the other day, listening to music instead of audiobooks for a change; randomly playing the “top-rated songs” from my iPod. It’s surprising how songs you forgot you’d loved show up there from time to time. I found myself driving along to the snare-drum beat of U2’s 1983 hit, “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” which got me thinking about the events behind the song and about popular protest.

The U2 song refers to the 1972 shooting of unarmed protestors in Derry, Ireland. But the name Bloody Sunday has also been used to describe the reaction to the first Selma March (1965), police violence against unemployed protestors in Vancouver, BC (1938), a 1905 St. Petersburg massacre that helped spark the Russian Revolution, and two other days of violence in the Irish conflict (1920, 1921). The original Bloody Sunday was a November 1887 demonstration in London that was routed by the Army and Metropolitan Police.

The issues that led to 1887’s Bloody Sunday included the 1885-86 Irish Coercion Acts, but the demonstration was really a culmination of tensions brought on by England’s “Long Depression” of the 1870s. East Londoners had been demonstrating against unemployment and poverty in their section of London for several years. The difference in November of 1887 was, they marched westward with their protests, to Trafalgar.

The 1887 East End protestors were not the first to march on London’s centers of power. In 1848, Chartists had planned to march on Parliament, and had only been turned away when the Duke of Wellington placed cannons on the Westminster bridge over the Thames. But less than a generation later, Britain’s Reform League led demonstrations that brought hundreds of thousands of protestors to Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park in 1866, and to the Agricultural Hall and Hyde Park again in 1867. These protests had been declared illegal by government authorities. So how did the reformers “get away with” these massive demonstrations?

The leaders of the Reform League demonstrations had learned from the 1848 intimidation of the Chartists. Charles Bradlaugh was an East Londoner who had been beaten by police at age 15, while leading an East London sympathy demonstration on the day the Chartists surrendered to Wellington. Bradlaugh was subsequently posted to County Cork with the British Army, where participating in the eviction of starving Irish peasants helped to radicalize him, and where he learned cavalry battle techniques and tactics. Bradlaugh insisted on public protests, against the wishes of many of his fellow Reform League leaders, and personally led them with the military discipline he had learned in Ireland.

200,000 Londoners marched on Hyde Park in July 1866. Home Secretary Spencer Walpole had outlawed the protest a few days earlier, and threatened military action. Bradlaugh and his radical allies in the Reform League leadership declared the government’s position unconstitutional, and announced they would challenge Walpole’s illegal attempt to bar peaceful, free assembly. Of course, in order to be legal, Bradlaugh realized the protest would have to be peaceful. And, aside from the famous destruction of some railings around the “Marble Arch” gate, which marchers led by a carriage of Reform League executives were prevented from entering by a troop of 1,600 police and soldiers, the demonstration was disciplined and nonviolent. Bradlaugh wasn’t at the railings, he was leading another column of protestors across Knightsbridge toward Hyde Park at the time.

To make a long story short, Spencer Walpole resigned in disgrace and the Reform League’s demonstrations established the right of Londoners to march, occupy public parks and squares, and demonstrate for their political rights. In 1868, the Reform Act passed, extending voting rights to working-class people for the first time in British history. And yet, twenty years later, Bloody Sunday. What had changed?

In 1887, Charles Bradlaugh was not at the head of the demonstration. He was exhausted and ill, following a six-year battle to take the seat in Parliament he’d been elected to in 1880. And he had doubts about the programs proposed by the Social Democratic Federation, which was sponsoring the protest. Bradlaugh advised readers of his National Reformer to stay away, and warned SDF and Fabian Society leaders to be cautious and consider the security of their people. Believing the precedent set by the Reform League had established their rights once and for all, Annie Besant, George Bernard Shaw, and the other leaders of the demonstration defied the government and marched. The results were disastrous.

Men, women, and children marchers were beaten by London police. Over two hundred people were hospitalized. Three were killed. Infantry and cavalry troops were on hand, with fixed bayonets; but luckily were not called into action. Several of the march’s leaders were arrested and held behind bars for six weeks.

It’s difficult to pinpoint all the factors that had changed, between 1866 and 1887. There was a new government, with new people in key positions—although in both cases, the Tories were in power. Chicago's Haymarket riot of 1886 was fresh in the minds of both the protestors and the government. The radicals who had been united behind the Reform League had split into factions. Socialists who seemed to be gaining ground in London political circles offered utopian ideals but had little connection with actual working people (the Labour Party was established in 1893, partly in response to these issues). But it’s possible that the key difference was the 1887 leaders’ belief that their right to protest, established 20 years earlier, was inviolable.

The lesson of Bloody Sunday, it seems to me, is that we can’t take our rights for granted. If we are not prepared to defend them, they can be taken from us. Like Charles Bradlaugh and his fellow reformers, we have to be resolute, disciplined, and nonviolent—but prepared to defend ourselves. It’s not insignificant that when Bradlaugh died four years after Bloody Sunday, one of the mourners at his simple secular funeral was twenty-one year old Mohandas Gandhi.

History and America's Most Wanted

Randall Stephens

"The United States adheres to its own theory of history," writes Paul Berman in the New Republic. He weighs in on the country's peculiar view of the past and American ideas of progress and looks at the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound and the larger meaning of his death. History, in the view of many citizens, has a clear direction, an identifieable purpose. "In our own liberal and democratic theory of history," says Berman, "doctrines like Al Qaeda’s are doomed to defeat. This is because, in our estimation, the mad and fantastical doctrine about resurrecting an ancient caliphate is comparable to other such doctrines that we have encountered during the last century—e.g., the doctrine about resurrecting the Roman Reich in an Aryan version, or the doctrine about resurrecting the ancient Russian peasant communes in the form of a proletarian Soviet civilization." Here's the sort of inevitability that historians find so out of whack.

"But let us also recognize that, beyond the details of an efficient operation," Berman remarks, "the symbolism is hard to mistake."

And, since the present war is ultimately a war of ideas, let us not fail to recognize that symbolism is ultimately crucial. The symbolism of this present raid says: Relentlessness expresses history. History is not on bin Laden’s side. History is on the side of democracy and freedom. History will not be deterred. Yes, we should ask ourselves: Does it make sense to speak about abstractions like “history”? Does the relentlessness of a manhunt contain any deeper meanings at all? There is an answer to these questions. The abstractions express a meaning if we choose to endow them with meaning. Ten years of man-hunting suggest that we have chosen to do so.>>>

What is the larger meaning of bin Laden's demise? How will it shape America's relation with the world? After shouts of "USA, USA, USA" have died down and revelers have put away their gigantic flags, will we see what the larger significance or symbolism of his death is? Perhaps it will take many years for the implications to play out.

In the meantime it might be interesting to consider other "most wanted" figures who have plagued the government and struck fear in the hearts of citizens. (Caveat: I don't intend any sort of moral equivalency with bin Laden.) The list below could include many more, but here's a partial who's who:

* Geronimo, mid to late 19th century

* Billy the Kid, 1860s-1880

* Frank and Jesse James, late 19th century

* Pancho Villa, nineteen-teens

* John Dillinger, 1930s

* Al Capone, 1920s-1930s

* Ted Kaczynski, 1970s-1990s

* Timothy McVeigh, 1990s

* Mohammed Farah Aidid, 1990s

* Eric Robert Rudolph, 1990s-2000s

Take Pancho Villa. The Mexican revolutionary and guerilla fighter brought Americans to new heights of anxiety. This feared bandit killed 34 Americans in 1916 and became, for Americans at least, one of the most reviled figures of the day. Villa--a liberator in the eyes of many of his countrymen--was thought to be a murderous blackguard, a villainous butcher, a subhuman thug. President Woodrow Wilson sent General John J. Pershing to hunt down Villa in Mexico. But, because of the outlaw's widespread support and the unfamiliar, hostile terrain, Pershing failed.

In 1916 the Atlanta Constitution excitedly reported what proved to be a false account of Villa's death: "Villa's body has been dug up out of a two weeks' old grave by Carlos Carranza, nephew of General Carranza" (April 17). He "Died in Agony" so went the report. The writer, at the end of the piece, did mention that some doubted the claims.

Villa did finally meet his end in 1923. He had received a pardon and was retired to a ranch. Villa, said Will Rogers in what passed for humor back then, died of Mexican natural causes. He was shot in the back. Americans let their rage melt into laughter.

Historians now can read from the Villa trouble something about American culture and diplomacy in the Wilson years. What did he symbolize? What did his menacing presence on the U.S. southern border mean for Americans? For that matter, what have so many other criminals, arch-villains, terrorists, and "blackguards" at home and abroad meant to Americans over the decades, centuries?

A Personal Reaction to Arizona’s New Campus Carry Measure

Heather Cox Richardson

Last week, the Arizona legislature passed a bill permitting students to carry guns on public thoroughfares through state college and university campuses. This was a pared down version of a measure permitting guns in buildings, which was too extreme even for Arizona. Supporters of campus carry, though, suggest that yesterday’s measure will make the next step—that of making guns legal everywhere on campus—easier to achieve. They argue that the only way to stop violence on campus once and for all is to make sure everyone is armed for self-protection.

There has been much ink spilled over whether or not guns stop crime, and I don’t aim to revisit those debates here. I would like, though, to deal with one aspect of the campus carry argument that I have never seen addressed. It is to me one of the most significant.

This measure is a blow to female historians in the academy.

We don’t talk about it a lot in mixed company, but women, especially young petite women, face a particular problem in a history classroom far more often than male professors usually do. Female professors routinely have to assert their authority over young men and women whose pre-collegiate life has left them unaccustomed to treating women as authority figures. In history courses, it has been my experience that classes are often skewed toward men; in the more popular subjects like the Civil War, the class may be overwhelmingly male. Every semester, I have at least one student who refuses to accept that he must complete assignments for a female professor, or that he might earn anything less than an “A” in my class regardless of whether or not he does the work.

It’s not just me. Female TAs, especially petite ones, face a constant battle. Over the years, I have fielded complaints that students are in the class of a “dumb” female instructor when they could have the “smart” male TAs instead. I have had to transfer students out of the sections of female TAs because they heckled the instructor incessantly and refused to accept any grade other than an “A”. (At that particular university it was almost impossible to get a student removed from a course.) This phenomenon is frequent enough that I finally began as a matter of routine to give my female TAs tips on how to maintain control of a classroom that contains hostile male students, and to remind my male TAs to work visibly with their female colleagues to reinforce for the students that they stand together.

Unhappy young men, convinced that their female instructor is ruining their future with a low grade, can turn vicious. Over the years, I’ve dealt with crazy rants, threats, and a student who ambushed my every turn over a period of weeks, and I am neither petite nor a pushover. I can think of three times in my 23-year academic career in which I would have been afraid for my life if I had suspected that the hostile student confronting me carried a gun. Let me be clear: these were not your run-of-the-mill angry students disappointed in a grade; these were irrational young men convinced that some stupid woman who had no rightful place in a university and who had no rightful authority over them was destroying their future.

And the members of the Arizona legislature want to let those men carry guns?

With a campus carry law, female history professors become a special kind of sitting duck. I am comfortable with guns themselves—and am actually a big proponent of hunting—but my comfort with weapons stops dead when they come onto campus in the hands of young men who don’t believe in the crazy idea that women can legitimately be history professors.

Numbers

Chris Beneke

And the LORD hearkened to the voice of Israel, and delivered up the Canaanites; and they utterly destroyed them and their cities. (Numbers 21:3)

Estimating mass deaths requires an accounting in which the sums are always grievous. For the twentieth century, the numbers are so terribly large that the researcher could be tempted to discount the meaning, and the value, of each one. For those who study other times, the scale of the twentieth century’s killing is both humbling and edifying . In the early hours of April 19, 1775, eight provincials were killed on Lexington Green; in the spring and early summer of 1994, eight hundred thousand Tutsis were killed in Rwanda. We’re certain about the number killed in Lexington on that morning. We’ll probably never know how many Rwandans were killed in those grim months. The lives lost in the former were no more dear than the lives lost in the latter. But proximity, collective memory, and relative connection to transformative events can easily obscure that moral truth. As Yale Historian Timothy Snyder puts it:

Discussion of numbers can blunt our sense of the horrific personal character of each killing and the irreducible tragedy of each death. As anyone who has lost a loved one knows, the difference between zero and one is an infinity. Though we have a harder time grasping this, the same is true for the difference between, say, 780,862 and 780,863—which happens to be the best estimate of the number of people murdered at Treblinka. Large numbers matter because they are an accumulation of small numbers: that is, precious individual lives.

Snyder’s essay in the latest New York Review of Books (“Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Killed More?”) focuses on death tolls but also addresses moral culpability. In some cases, as when the Nazis gassed Jews or the Stalinists shot dissidents, the evil and its sources are transparent. On this ledger, the Germans were directly responsible for the death of 11 to 12 million noncombatants (depending on the measure), and the Soviets 6 to 9 million. But these figures do not include the millions who died on the battlefield, nor the millions who starved as a result of invasion, collectivization, and murderous indifference. Snyder’s striking point here and in the bestselling book from which the essay is derived is that the “most fundamental proximity of the [Hitler and Stalin] regimes … is not ideological but geographical.” In the great mass of land between Berlin and Moscow, where colossal armies clashed in both World War I and II “we must take seriously the possibility that some of the death and destruction wrought in the lands between was their mutual responsibility.” Killing there was multiplicative, rather than merely additive.

Moving from west to east, Roderick MacFarquhar’s review of Frank Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 (NYRB, Feb. 10) presents some chilling tallies as well. According to Dikötter, the longstanding estimate of 30 million deaths attributed to China’s Great Leap Forward needs to be revised upward to “a minimum of 45 million.” These deaths resulted primarily from food shortages, rather that secret police forces, mobs, machine guns, or forced labor camps. At the same time, MacFarquhar observes, the “exploitation of the peasantry during the GLF and into the famine was so unprecedently excessive that provinces were left with virtually no food for the people who had produced it.” As with the terror unleashed by the Nazis and the Stalinists, the relative degree of culpability may be in dispute, but the fact of incalculable loss is not.

Writing History and the Crisis in Punditry

Heather Cox Richardson

Participating in the discussion over the media’s role in the tragedy in Tucson, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi makes the point that media figures get their market share by offering their audience a certain kind of emotional charge, reassuring them that they are better than “the other.”

Where entertainers will go for inspiration now that that dog-whistle kind of performance is suspect, he doesn’t have a firm idea.

It seems to me that historians have, at this point, a great opening to jump into the public conversation. My friend and literary agent, Lisa Adams, is always reminding me that readers want to feel smarter after they invest time reading something. If, indeed, there is a market for making people feel superior, why can’t we invest our energies in making people feel smarter with good facts and argument, presented accessibly?

There is an unfortunate tendency among academics to suggest that anything written for a popular audience must be “dumbed down.” This is wrong. On the contrary, pieces written for non-academics must be smarter than anything we consume within the academy. Untrained historians will not accept a book that uses theory as shorthand in place of an explanation for how something actually happened (but they will happily accept theoretical constructs if they are proven). They will not endure poor writing, or incomplete explanations. Indeed, rather than dumbing down our arguments, it seems to me that writing for a non-academic audience often forces academic historians to give up the jargon and shortcuts that allow them to advance arguments their facts don’t prove.

At a time when there is a vacuum in the public arena waiting to be filled by writers who can offer a new kind of intellectual rush, historians have a unique opportunity to step up to the plate.

And it might just be good for us.

Poltical Assassination and Motivation

Randall Stephens

On November 23, 1963 the New York Times announced "Leftist Accused: Figure in a Pro-Castro Group is Charged--Policeman Slain." Will Fritz, head of the Homicide Bureau, Dallas Police Department, linked Lee Harvey Oswald to the left-wing "Fair Play for Cuba Committee." Such connections proved more complicated than originally imagined. Oswald lied and was, by any account, a shiftless loser. Journalists and commentators grasped for a motive in the chaotic hours and days after President Kennedy's assassination. Texas, and Dallas in particular, was a hotbed of anti-Kennedy feeling and theories of a right-wing plot circulated widely. (Replace Texas then with Arizona now and some striking similarities in public discussion are apparent. Tea Partiers and John Birchers . . . anti-immigration and anti-communism . . .)

There was, in fact, enough hard-right political terrorism in the South to make such views seem credible enough. The Klan harassed and threatened civil rights workers and dynamited churches and schools. Pundits called Birmingham "Bombingham." In rare cases, gunmen assassinated black leaders and activists. The murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968 created a political firestorm and produced innumerable theories as Kennedy's murder had less than five years before. After King's death in Memphis riots erupted across the country's cities and conspiracy theories of Klan involvement and a government assassin gripped the imagination of Americans roiled by the events of a turbulent year. Writing in Life magazine in June 1968 Paul O'Neil observed, "No real criminal organization conspired with [James Earl] Ray," King's alleged killer. Ray was, in O'Neil's words, like Robert Kennedy's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, prone to bizarre fantasies and unreal self conceptions.

Medical professionals, journalists, and the general public have often questioned an assassin's sanity. And the current debate over the political motivations of Gabrielle Giffords' mentally unstable shooter parallel related events in history.

Was Leon Czolgosz, who shot and killed President McKinley nearly 110 years ago, insane? The American establishment, observes Eric Rauchway in Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), could not "admit that a low criminal had accomplished so much, and so from the start they insisted he was insane, and his action an accident of a callous fate" (x).

What of America's most infamous assassin? "One is naturally tempted to ask whether John Wilkes Booth, son of the 'Mad Tragedian,' might have been found insane under existing laws," writes Michael W. Kauffman in American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies (New York: Random House, 2005), 353. Wilkes's brother thought madness ran through the male portion of the family. But, in this case, notions of melancholy and madness were closely linked. And diagnosing someone from the the remove of nearly 150 years would certainly be difficult.

Historians often ask why people do the things they do. Is it trickier to answer that question about current figures than about those from ages past? Figuring out the motivations of men and women from long ago, like judging why an unstable young Arizona man went on a shooting spree, can be a tough game. David Hackett Fischer explored motivation in his controversial, argumentative Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1970):

Historians have often used motivational explanations in their work. Almost always, they have used them badly. Problems of motive in academic historiography tend to be hopelessly mired in a sort of simple-minded moralizing which is equally objectionable from an ethical and an empirical point of view. Lord Rosebery once remarked that what the English people really wished to know about Napoleon was whether he was a good man. The same purpose often prevails among professional scholars who are unable to distinguish motivational psychology from moral philosophy, and even unwilling to admit that there can be a distinction at all. Moreover, many scholars tend to find flat, monistic answers to complex motivational problems, which further falsifies their interpretations (187).

But that won't keep Americans from wondering, speculating, and trying to make some sense out of seemingly senseless acts of violence, past or present.