Stacy Vlasits, Author at Not Even Past

The Pity of War by Niall Ferguson (2000)

by Yana Skorobogatov

In The Pity of War, Niall Ferguson dedicates fourteen essays to addressing the major historical issues associated with the First World War.The essays fall into three broad categories: war origins, execution, and aftermath. Overt militarism, Germany’s ascent to power, alliance-based foreign policies, arms racing, and British intervention are issues covered in the first part of the book, while wartime enthusiasm, propaganda, economy, and military strategy are discussed in the second. The final chapter, on the Versailles Treaty, advances the controversial argument (one that rests on a long-winded condemnation of John Maynard Keynes) that the peace terms were not unprecedented in their harshness and that German hyperinflation was due to irresponsible fiscal policies adopted by the Germans themselves. The question that informs Ferguson’s analysis is: who is to blame for the war? Ferguson is unambiguous in his belief that British statesmen overestimated their alliance obligations and the extent of the German threat, which led them to mistakenly intervene in and transform a regional conflict into a global war. This assessment colors each of the book’s chapters and leads the author to put forth many bold, unorthodox, yet startlingly fresh arguments about a topic that many of today’s historians have written off as overdone.

After finishing the book, the reader will realize that its subtitle, “Explaining World War I,” is far more clever than it appears at first glance. The Pity of War offers not quite a history of the First World War, but rather a history of Great Britain and the First World War; for Ferguson, the two are inseparable. In his eyes, a proper explanation of World War I must dedicate a significant portion of its narrative to Great Britain. This would have been construed as an outdated approach – most recent scholars of empire have stopped writing books centered in the City of London – if not for the innovative mix of social and cultural history added to Ferguson’s standard economic and military analyses. Fascinating chapters on the media purveyors of wartime propaganda, enthusiasm on the home front, and soldier motivation humanize other chapters that depict army recruits as little more than another item on the British government’s grocery list for war material.

Ferguson deserves praise for a book that is unique in scholarly insight, rigorous in its treatment of the secondary literature, and accessible to a non-academic reader. His excellent use of popular literature – the wartime poems, books, and songs he read and heard while growing up in England – testify to his personal connection to his subject. The book’s most convincing arguments are those that rely on evidence of Cabinet, Parliamentary, and popular political attitudes that contradict previous scholars’ explanations for British intervention in the conflict. For example, Ferguson argues that a militant culture, embodied by Army Leagues and immensely popular spy books, cannot even partially explain British politicians’ decision to declare war against Germany because such a culture lacked an electoral following. To the contrary, many of the most influential politicians at the time worked to uphold a liberal tradition defined by an aversion to excessive military spending and a historic dislike of a large army. Theorists like J.A. Hobson, whose widely-read books outlined the malign relationship between a nation’s financial interests, imperialism, and war, helped anti-militarist socialist parties gain a strong electoral following on the eve of war. Ferguson makes an interesting distinction between pacifism and anti-militarism, of which social and cultural historians should take note. Other anecdotes are less worthy of emulation. His strong belief that Germany would have guaranteed France and Belgium’s territorial integrity in exchange for British neutrality comes across as extremely optimistic, if not baseless. Ferguson seems naive to assume that a “Middle European Empire of the German Nation” could be maintained without German infringement on a rival nations’ sovereignty. Nazi Germany’s continental ambitions, though qualitatively different from Mitteleuropa, offer a hint to what France and Belgium’s fates would have been like had plans for a German-dominated and exploited Central European union been realized.

Photo credits:

Realistic Travels, “Three British soldiers in trench under fire during World War I,” 15 August 1916 (Image courtesy of The Library of Congress)

McLagan & Cumming, “The tank tour. Buy national war bonds (£5 to £5000) and war savings certificates,” 1918, Scottish War Savings Committee (Image courtesy of The Library of Congress)

You may also like:

Lior Sternfeld’s review of Erez Manela’s The Wilsonian Moment.

Joseph Parrott’s review of Churchill: A Biography.

The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan by Ayesha Jalal (1985)

Reflecting on the origins of Pakistan nearly forty years after the 1947 partition of India, Ayesha Jalal weaves a convincing revisionist narrative of the nation’s birth. Jalal’s focus falls on the political strategies employed by the Muslim League and its leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, in the run-up to the partition. Though it occasionally suffers from rough transitions and reads much like the dissertation from which it emerged, the work demonstrates great conceptual clarity. Painstakingly researched, Jalal’s work covers roughly a quarter century of Indian nationalist history, sensibly intensifying its focus as it advances through the final years of British rule in India. A blunt but insightful question drives Jalal’s inquiry: “[H]ow did a Pakistan come about which fitted the interests of most Muslims so poorly?”

Jalal pursues this question diligently, methodically investigating the relationship between the Muslim League and its varied constituents. She thoroughly exposes the province-level pressures navigated by Jinnah, his lieutenant Liaquat Ali Khan, and other Muslim Leaguers as they made their claim to represent all of India’s Muslims. Jalal charts the notion of Pakistan as it gains strategic viability and as Jinnah advances himself as the “one man to deal with” in Indian Muslim affairs. Pakistan thus emerges variously as a threat against Congress, a bargaining tool with the British, and a rallying cry for once disparate Muslim factions.

Jalal’s analysis of the continued deterioration of relations between Muslim League and an obstinate Congress following the instatement of Louis Mountbatten, India’s ultimate viceroy, provides perhaps the most compelling passage. London’s desire to maintain a firm bond with a strong central government in the Subcontinent, along with the quickened pace of British withdrawal upended Jinnah’s underlying agenda in Bengal and the Punjab and confirmed Pakistan as a political reality. The possibility of a single Union of India collapsed and a truncated Pakistan emerged from Jinnah’s longstanding bluff. The answer to Jalal’s query thus boldly challenges earlier scholarship on Indian communalism and paves the way for a host of new questions on the origins of Pakistan.

Photo credits:

Hulton Getty, “New Delhi, Lord Mountbatten and the main leaders of India negotiate the partition India according to the British plan. From left to right: Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Vice-President of the Interim Government; Lord Hastings Ismay, adviser to Lord Mountbatten; Lord Louis Mountbatten, Viceroy of India; and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Quaid-e-Azam (All-India Muslim League,” 3 June 1947

Hulton Getty via Flickr Creative Commons (user Eye 4 It)

Jack Loveridge’s review of Jawaharlal Nehru’s biography.

Voices of India’s Partition, Part V: Interview with Professor Mohammad Amin

Voices of India’s Partition, Part IV: Interview with Professor Masood ul Hasan

Voices of India’s Partition, Part III: Interview with Professor Irfan Habib

Voices of India’s Partition, Part II: Interview with Mr. S.M. Mehdi

Voices of India’s Partition, Part I: Interview with Mrs. Zahra Haider

The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire by John Gallagher (1982)

by Jack Loveridge

Based on lectures first delivered in Oxford in 1974, The Decline, Revival, and Fall of the British Empire, commands sustained attention today. In his sharp analysis of Britain’s declining world system, Gallagher offers both a novel explanation of empire’s “discontinuous decline” and a critique of contemporary decolonization theorists. He rejects as vain the pursuit of unearthing a single domestic or international motive for imperialism, concluding instead that, “All theories of the growth of imperialism have been failures.” By extension, this assertion applies to theories of imperial collapse, freeing Gallagher to dismantle the idea that the shocks of the Second World War abruptly derailed Britain’s global system. He convincingly demonstrates that the interwar years saw little agitation in domestic politics for ending empire. Party politics discouraged efforts for total withdrawal from the colonies and encouraged a sort of imperial status quo. Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and his Conservative counterparts Andrew Bonar Law and Stanley Baldwin equally sustained a flexible empire during their tenures. The “official mind” of Whitehall propelled the empire along during these years, chiefly because the world system supported Britain’s interests and colonized peoples – and not the British public – footed the bill. Only when Britain energized the structures of empire to meet the challenges of the Second World War did empire see a resurgence that also spelled its doom.

Gallagher strays somewhat from his denunciation of a monocausal theory of imperial collapse in his assertion that empire’s price tag became too much for the British public to bear during the 1940s. He admirably demonstrates domestic and international considerations that played off one another and the disadvantages of formal rule compared to a system of influence. A single smoking gun emerges, however, in the material conditions shaping public opinion within Britain. In spite of this small flaw, Gallagher successfully paints imperial decline as highly contingent upon changing economic and political circumstances.

Photo credits

Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference. (Left to right): Rt. Hon. W.L. Mackenzie King (Canada), General Jan Christian Smuts (South Africa), Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill (United Kingdom), Rt. Hons. Peter Fraser (New Zealand), John Curtin (Australia),” London, 1 May, 1944.
Library and Archives Canada via Wikipedia

You may also like:

William Roger Louis, a UT historian of British Imperialism, wrote a piece about his professional and personal relationship with John A. Gallagher for the American Historical Association. You can read it here.

Jack Loveridge’s review of “Wavell: the Viceroy’s Journal,” along with his review of the biography of Jawaharlal Nehru.

Voices of India’s Partition, Part V: Interview with Professor Mohammad Amin

Voices of India’s Partition, Part IV: Interview with Professor Masood ul Hasan

University of Texas at Austin: History of the Physics Department

By Yana Skorobogatov

Since its inception, Not Even Past has dedicated itself to the idea that historians and history students aren’t the only ones capable of writing and enjoying history. The University of Texas at Austin’s Physics Department has proven us right with the release of its new website “University of Texas at Austin: Physics Department History.” The website, created by Emeritus Professor Melvin Oakes, offers a remarkable survey of the department’s history that stretches all the way back to 1883, the year the University of Texas at Austin was founded. Below are some of the highlights from the site.

Physics professor John William Mallet, an Irish immigrant and Civil War veteran, was a UT “founding father” who served as Chairman of the Faculty in 1883. Mallet, already a well-recognized and accomplished scientist when he received an offer to join the University of Texas, was allegedly lured by the challenge of building a new chemistry department entirely from scratch. He earned an annual salary of $4000 while the other faculty members earned $3500. Mallet sits all the way to the far left in the photograph below. (Left to right): John William Mallet, professor of physics and chemistry; Leslie Waggener, professor of English language, history, and literature; Robert L. Dabney, professor of mental and moral philosophy and political science; Robert S. Gould, professor of law; Oran M. Roberts, professor of law; Henri Tallichet, professor of modern languages; Milton Humphreys, professor of ancient languages; and William LeRoy Broun, professor of mathematics.

The Old Main Building (pictured below) was the first structure to house the physics department on UT’s campus. The department would eventually move to the Painter Building and the RL Moore Building, where it stands today.

Black and white photograph of the Old Main Building at the University of Texas

An image of the department’s earliest demo equipment. A Wimshurst state electricity generator, an electric egg (for discharges in rarefied vapors), four Leiden jars, and a Bohnenberger electroscope sit on the top shelf, while the bottom shelf holds a thermoelectric generator. The magnetic dip needle (in the third bay) and the two wave machines sitting on the lower half of the end cabinet are still in use today.

A black and white photograph of the physics department's earliest demo equipment on rows of shelves

A collage of faculty portraits taken in 1904. (Bottom row, left to right: Lulu Mary Bailey (Physics), Conrad Louis Benoni Shuddemagen (Physics); Second row, middle: William Tyler Mather, Chair (Physics); Fourth row, far right: John Matthias Kuehne (Physics); Top row, far left: C.T. Dowell (Chemistry).

A black and white collage of faculty portraits from 1904 from the University of Texas schools of chemistry, mathematics and physics.

This student group shot, taken in 1900, features the department’s first Master of Arts and Master of Science candidates.

Black and white image of the University of Texas' first Master of Arts and Master of Science candidates in 1900

One section of the site is dedicated to the department’s many academic award recipients. The department is home to two Nobel Prize recipients: Ilya Prigogine and Steven Weinberg. Ilya Prigogine, a Moscow native whose family fled to Belgium after the Russian Revolution, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1977 for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures.

Ilya Prigogine

Steven Weinberg won the Nobel Prize in Physics shortly after Prigogine, in 1979, for his work on the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including, inter alia, the prediction of the weak neutral current. Weinberg shared the award with Sheldon Lee Glashow and Abdus Salam, and joined UT’s physics and astronomy department in 1982. Other notable award recipients in the department include: John A. Wheeler, winner of the Enrico Fermi Award in 1968; Marshall N. Rosenbluth, winner of the National Medal of Science; and Cecile DeWitte-Morette, winner of the American Society of the French Legion of Honor 2007 Medal for Distinguished Achievement in 1997.

Steven Weinberg

Women played an indelible role in the UT Physics department’s growth and success. Female physics professors and students alike provided invaluable departmental support through their service as scholars, instructors, and laboratory assistants. They produced superb scientific scholarship that helped the University of Texas become one of the top scientific research institutes in the county.

Lulu M. Bailey was the first professional female physicist to walk the halls of the UT physics department. She enrolled at the university as an undergraduate student in physics in 1892 and quickly rose to become the department’s first female Assistant in Physics in 1899. She worked alongside J.M. Kuehne, a Fellow in Physics in the department. Kuehne earned a yearly salary of $500, while Bailey earned $350. Bailey became an official Instructor in 1914, a promotion that increased her annual salary to $1500. However, for reasons not explained on the site, Bailey did not receive a pay increase after being appointed acting Assistant Dean of Women Students in 1916.

Female graduate students, like female instructors, did much to bolster the department’s reputation during its early years as an academic institution. Emma Townsend was the first female UT alumna to receive a doctoral degree in physics. She began her career as a masters student in UT’s physics department back when the department did not confer doctoral degrees. She graduated from the university in 1924 after writing a master’s thesis entitled “A Study of Residual Inductances of Resistance Coils.” She continued her studies at the University of Chicago before finishing her PhD at Columbia University in 1930. The first woman to receive a University of Texas doctoral degree in physics was Janice Sears Bloom Fain, who received a PhD in Physics in 1956 for a dissertation entitled “Complete [pi]-electron Treatment of the Butadiene Molecule and Ion.”

A page from the 1898 Cactus Yearbook from the University of Texas depicting the academic class of '98.

One of the more notable alumni was Sister Michael Edward O’Byrne, an active nun who earned an MA in 1926 with a thesis entitled “An experimental test of the reciprocity law in photography over a wide range of continuous and intermittent exposures.” She continued her studies at the Catholic University of America, where she wrote a dissertation entitled “Combination frequencies and infra-red absorption spectra of certain alkaloids.” The work was published in the The Journal of the Optical Society of America in 1933 and earned her a doctoral degree in 1932.

Sister Michael Edwards O’Byrne

She became the head of the science department at Incarnate Word College in San Antonio, TX, and helped the school raise $500,000 for a new science building. Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York dedicated the three-story structure to Sister Michael Edwards O’Byrne in December 1950.

Learn more about the physics department’s fascinating history by visiting the website on which this article is based.

Photo credits:

All photos courtesy of the University of Texas at Austin Physics Department History.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Was Einstein Really Religious?

When he was a boy, yes. He lovingly studied the Bible, sensed no contradiction between Catholicism and Judaism, stopped eating pork, wrote little songs to God, and sang them as he walked home from school. But at the age of twelve, by reading science books, he abruptly abandoned all of his religious beliefs. He kept a “holy curiosity” for the mysteries and wonders of nature.

It is well-known that decades later, he made witty statements about God: that He does not play dice and that God is crafty but not malicious. Einstein famously wrote: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” And the year he died, in 1955, a student quoted him as having once said “I want to know how God created this world. I’m not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts, the rest are details.”

Young Albert Einstein circa 1890. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Yet Einstein’s statements on God were notoriously ambiguous. Therefore, many Jews, Christians, atheists, and others have embraced Einstein as one of their own—by picking his most appealing quotations. Atheists such as Richard Dawkins are glad that sometimes Einstein clarified that by “God” he actually meant to say “nature.” Yet sometimes he remarked “I am not an atheist.” Other times Einstein said that he believed in the God of Spinoza. In the 1670s, the Dutch philosopher expressed great reverence for the lawful harmony of nature, arguing that God has no personality, consciousness, emotions, or will. In 1929 Einstein praised Spinoza’s outlook as a “deep feeling in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience.” Yet at the same time he expressed doubts as to whether he could fairly describe himself as a pantheist like Spinoza.

In his #1 New York Times bestselling biography of Einstein, Walter Isaacson argues that Einstein did not use the word God as just another name for nature. Isaacson insists that Einstein was not secretly an atheist but instead, that Einstein believed in an impersonal Creator who does not meddle in our daily lives. Likewise, many other writers also think that since Einstein did not believe in a personal God, a fatherly Creator who cares about us, and not being an atheist, that therefore he believed in an impersonal God.

In 1936, Einstein wrote a letter to a little girl, in which he explained: “Everyone seriously engaged in science becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest a spirit which is vastly superior to man, and before which we, with our modest strength, must humbly bow.” This certainly sounds religious, but what did he mean by “a spirit”? Einstein’s replies to inquisitive strangers, children, reporters, or close friends sometimes were markedly different. In some cases, he used colloquial expressions that he preferred to rephrase in more exacting contexts. He voiced regrets that many of his casual expressions later became subject to public dissection.

In contrast to the famous quotations that portray the old Einstein as a religious man, it is less well known that he privately described himself as agnostic. In 1869, “Darwin’s bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley coined the word “Agnostic” as an attitude of temporary reasoned ignorance, to not pretend to know conclusions that have yet to be demonstrated scientifically. Twenty years later, Huxley commented: “I invented the word ‘Agnostic’ to denote people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of maters, about which metaphysicians and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatise with the utmost confidence…” Popularly, agnosticism became known simply as the position of admitting that one does not know whether God exists.

Albert Einstein 1921 by F Schmutzer.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

In 1949 Einstein wrote a letter to a curious sailor in the US Navy, explaining that “You may call me agnostic.” In 1950 he replied to another correspondent: “My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am convinced that vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment.” Then in 1952, in a letter to a philosopher, Einstein frankly expressed his unsweetened opinions: “The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends aplenty. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can change this (for me).” Einstein added that the Jewish people were no better that any other groups of people: “I can ascertain nothing Chosen about them.” He said that all religions are “primitive superstitions.”

He wrote such stark comments in private letters, in contradistinction to his published pronouncements about God and religion. So, was Einstein really religious? Or was he politically correct in public? In 1930, at the age of fifty-one, an article was published in which he described himself as “deeply religious.” But by then he was a world-wide celebrity. He knew that every word he said might be analyzed and interpreted. Over the years, he explained that he was religious only inasmuch as he felt a deep sense of wonder and reverence for the laws and mysteries of nature.

But what do we usually mean when we say that someone is religious? Most of the beliefs and practices that we distinctively associate with religious people were absent in Einstein. He denied the existence of a God that cares for humans, he argued that there is nothing divine about morality, he did not believe in any holy Scriptures, he had no faith in religious teachings, he rejected the authority of all churches and temples, he belonged to no congregation, he denied the existence of souls, life after death, divine rewards or punishments. He denied the existence of miracles that suspend the laws of nature. He rejected all mysticism, he did not believe in free will, he did not believe in any prophets or saviors. He denied that there is any goal in life or in the order of the universe, he practiced no religious rituals, and he did not pray.

Having rejected most aspects of religion, the young Einstein had some options: either say that he was not a religious person, or instead, find an alternative way to define religiosity. He chose the latter path. In science, Einstein had great success by redefining traditional concepts: he redefined concepts of time, energy, mass, gravity, and more. So he tried to do the same thing with religion. In 1950, he explained to his close friend from youth, Maurice Solovine: “I have found no better expression than ‘religious’ for confidence in the rational nature of reality as it is accessible to human reason.”

Instead of accepting Scriptures, rituals, or traditions, Einstein focused on the wonders of nature. By redefining religion to include at its core the emotions and attitudes that Einstein did cultivate, then and only then could Einstein describe himself as a deeply religious man. For example, he called himself deeply religious, but he did not pray. Therefore, in his new definitions, not praying became an act of a deeply religious man, one who fully trusts the laws of nature. He once wrote to Leo Szilard: “as long as you pray to God and ask him for some benefit, you are not a religious man.”

Summing up, good old Einstein was agnostic, I don’t think that he was very religious. Forgive me for making an unscientific analogy. Suppose someone tells us that he really loves pizza, but then he says that he prefers no sauce, dislikes dough, is allergic to cheese, and believes that anyone who asks for toppings does not really like pizza. Then we ask: but how can you say that you really love pizza? He answers: “because I have a deep appreciation for its essence.”

The Letter

In 2008, the letter from Einstein on the subject of religion stunned the public and was sold at auction for a staggering £207,000 ($404,000) instead of the £6000-8000 estimated by Bloomsbury Auctions.

Einstein-Gutkind_1954_p2 — Einstein’s letter.
Source: Albert Einstein to philosopher Eric B. Gutkind, 3.1.1954, Einstein Archives, item 33-33.

Alberto Martínez translates part of the letter here:

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends aplenty. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can change this (for me). Such refined interpretations are naturally highly varied and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the unmodified Jewish religion, like all other religions, is an incarnation of primitive superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mindset I have a deep affinity, have no different quality for me than other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better at anything than other human groups, though at least a lack of power keeps them from the worst excesses. Thus I can ascertain nothing “Chosen” about them.

Overall, I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and seek to defend it with two walls of pride: an outer one as a man, and an inner one as a Jew. As a man you claim a certain exemption from otherwise valid causality; as a Jew, a privilege for monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer causality, as our wonderful Spinoza had first said in the strongest terms. And the animistic interpretations of natural religions are also through monopolization not invalid. With such walls we fall essentially into self-deception, but they do not help us in our search for a higher morality. On the contrary.

Now, though I have in all honesty expressed our different beliefs, I still have the certainty that we largely agree on important matters, e.g. in our assessment of human conduct. What separates us, in Freud’s terms, are intellectual “supports” and “rationalizations.” I therefore believe that we would understand each other well if we were to talk about concrete things.

With friendly thanks and best wishes,

your

A. Einstein.

Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography (Volume I: 1889-1947) by Sarvepalli Gopal (1976)

After serving in Jawaharlal Nehru’s government for ten years, Sarvepalli Gopal opens his biography of India’s first prime minister with a pledge to maintain objectivity. Gopal appears to overcome his biases, tracking Nehru from his privileged upbringing in Allahbad to his assumption of power in New Delhi in 1947. The author’s focus on the evolution of Nehru’s political thinking proves particularly compelling. We see Nehru as an enthusiastic young Congressman embrace Gandhian nationalism, writing in 1922: “In the golden days to come when the history of our times and our country comes to be written, the present will occupy a glorious chapter.” Gopal dampens this trademark romanticism of Nehru’s writings, putting his subject’s assertions and musings into conversation with the correspondence and observations of a wide range of contemporaries. The sources depict a wavering politician becoming a respected national leader. Nehru steps out of the shadows of his father, Motilal, and Mohandas Gandhi, forging his own intellectual path and developing a concrete vision for an independent India. He maneuvers the cause of Swaraj (home rule) toward a call for independence, proves instrumental in negotiations with the British Raj, and deviates from Gandhian ideals, embracing notions of industrialization and democratic socialism.

Despite his balanced assessment of Nehru and his Congress allies, Gopal leaves a gaping hole in his analysis of Nehru’s controversial role in India’s partition. The author neglects to consult primary sources surrounding Muslim League leader Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Indeed, the papers of Muslim leaders fail to appear in Gopal’s work while the collections of top Congressmen and British administrators garner manifold citations. The resulting imbalance paints Jinnah as obstinate and prideful, particularly in the Muslim League’s rejection of the 1946 Cabinet Mission Plan. In spite of this substantial shortcoming in engaging available sources, Gopal’s work provides an intimate and appropriately critical view of Jawaharlal Nehru’s development as a nationalist leader and statesman.

Photo credits:

Photographer unknown, “Jawaharlal Nehru hands out sweets to students at Nongpoh in Meghalaya”

Flickr user ktravasso via Wikimedia Commons

A Medieval Nun, Writing

by Martha G. Newman

On a research trip last summer, I found a previously unidentified thirteenth-century manuscript in a library in Poznan, Poland, and recognized that it contains the writings of a late twelfth-century monk named Engelhard of Langheim. One of the Latin texts in this manuscript is the saintly biography of a religious woman named Mechtilde of Diessen. The following story, found only in this one Polish manuscript, appears as a postscript:

Saint Mechtilde, as was said earlier, was in the habit of writing. She did so to avoid eating the bread of leisure, and in this especially she believed she greatly pleased her God. She frequently brooded like a mother hen over the writing of missals and psalters because she thought – or rather she hoped – to serve the divine more earnestly in doing this. Her hope did not betray her. For one day, when she still had work remaining, she wished to repair a blunt pen, but she did not succeed. The pen was very troublesome to prepare. She was knowledgeable about cutting quills, but once cut, this quill did not respond when tested. This caused in her not a little disturbance of her spirit. “Oh,” she said, “if God would only send me his messenger, who could prepare this pen for me, for I have rarely suffered this difficulty, and it is now greatly troubling me.” As soon as she said this, a youth appeared. He had a beautiful face, a shining robe, and sweet speech. He said, “What troubles you, O beloved?” And she said, “I spend my time uselessly, I toil for nothing, and I do not know how to prepare my pen.” He said, “Give it to me, and perhaps you will not be hindered anymore by this knowledge when you wish to prepare it.” She gave it to him, and he prepared it in such a way that it remained satisfactory for her until her death: she wrote with it for the many years that she lived. After this miracle, when she spent time writing, no one could write so well, no one so quickly, no one so readily, and no one so correctly, nor could anyone imitate in likeness her hand. The pen’s preparation, as I said, was permanent, but the preparer disappeared and appeared in the work of which he was the maker. I have reported this just as the daughter of the duke of Merania, herself a holy virgin, has testified. She, reading this little work on the life of Mechtilde, asked to add what was missing.[1]

This brief little anecdote tells us a great deal about the literacy of medieval nuns. First, it reminds us that nuns as well as monks copied manuscripts. In recent years, our understanding of medieval literacy has become more nuanced. Scholars have separated the ability to read, to write, and to compose texts into discrete aspects of what we now call “literacy.” We know that many nuns and many aristocratic women could read: noble women in the later middle ages commissioned elaborate prayer books called Books of Hours, mothers were pictured reading to their daughters, and convents sometimes had extensive libraries. We also know women composed texts, but they often did so with the cooperation of male scribes who wrote down what the women dictated. Female scribes, however, are hard to locate. Scribes did not always sign their names to their work, and women may have been particularly reticent to do so. But we are beginning to realize that writing was a form of work for nuns as well as for monks and that, at times, religious men and women even worked together to produce manuscripts. Monks also sent drafts of their compositions to nuns to be copied. As one twelfth-century monk told the abbess of a convent, “having no scribe at my disposal, as you can see by the irregular formation of the letters, I wrote this book with my own hand.” As a result, he asked to have his text “copied legibly and carefully corrected by some of your sisters trained for this kind of work.”[2]

This is a 15th century image of Christine de Pisan (1363 – c. 1430), one of the best known authors of medieval Europe. She is shown writing her own book, but she is using the same tools that Mechtilde would have employed: she has a pen in one hand and a scraper in the other

Mechtilde probably did not copy texts that she herself composed. The story depicts writing as a form of spiritual labor that prevented a dangerous leisure: Mechtilde’s irritation that she wasted her time trying to fix her pen demonstrates her concern for purposeful work. But the content of the books still mattered.

A second interesting element of this story is that Mechtilde associated her careful copying of missals and psalters with serving God, a phrase more frequently used to describe the prayers and rituals that these texts depicted. The Psalms formed the fundamental prayers for monks and nuns; in praying six times a day and once at night, monks and nuns sang the entire psalter every week and repeated some Psalms daily. By copying psalters, Mechtilde could pray while she wrote. Copying missals, however, had a different implication, for the missal was the liturgical book for the mass. Mechtilde could not perform the mass, but the story suggests a parallel between her writing and the actions of a priest. Although Mechtilde asked God to send his messenger to assist her, the young man’s appearance and his reference to Mechtilde as his “beloved” suggest that he was Jesus. Just as a priest, using the prayers and instructions laid out in a missal, transformed the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, so Mechtilde, in copying missals with devotion, filled those books with the presence of Jesus: “he appeared in her work of which he was the maker.” As a woman, Mechtilde was unable to serve at the altar, but she had found another way to participate in the performance of the mass.

Finally, the transmission of the story is noteworthy. The author of Mechtilde’s life, the monk Engelhard of Langheim, never met Mechtilde, but he knew members of her family: they were important patrons of his monastery. In the saint’s life, Engelhard had mentioned briefly that Mechtilde was a scribe but he did so only to emphasize her willing obedience to put down her pen immediately when summoned. He learned the story about the pen from Mechtilde’s niece. The niece, a daughter of a duke, was also a nun, and she placed more emphasis on her aunt’s writing. Her memories of her aunt suggest that in the middle ages, as today, family histories were often the preserve of women and that tales were often recounted orally from one generation to the next. The niece’s story, as Engelhard recorded it, gives us a brief glimpse into the family legends of this one aristocratic lineage.

Che: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson (2010)

by Edward Shore

In July 1997, a Cuban-Argentine forensic team unearthed the skeletal remains of Comandante Ernesto “Che” Guevara in Vallegrande, Bolivia.Thirty years earlier, on October 9, 1967, CIA-trained Bolivian Special Forces agents had captured and executed the thirty-nine-year-old revolutionary before dumping his body in a shallow pit near a dirt runway. While writing Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, Jon Lee Anderson had gathered new intelligence that led directly to the location of Guevara’s body. The forensic experts immediately distinguished Guevara’s remains from the others. After his death, Che’s executioners had amputated his hands, placed them in a jar of formaldehyde, and sent them to Fidel Castro. Following exhumation, the fallen guerrillas’ remains were placed in coffins and flown to Cuba. That summer, Che Guevara had finally returned to his adoptive homeland.

Fifteen years after its publication, A Revolutionary Life remains the definitive work on Che Guevara, the dashing Argentine rebel whose “epic dream was to end poverty and injustice in Latin America and the developing world through armed revolution.” Jon Lee Anderson traces Che’s extraordinary life, from his comfortable upbringing in Argentina to the battlefields of the Cuban Revolution; from the halls of power in Castro’s government to his failed campaign in the Congo, and assassination in the Bolivian jungle. Unlike past biographers of Che, Anderson gained unprecedented access to personal archives maintained by Che’s widow, as well as Cuban government documents long kept secret during the Cold War. He conducts extensive interviews with Che’s comrades and enemies, including Felíx Rodriguez, the mercurial Cuban-American CIA operative and Bay of Pigs veteran who ordered Che’s execution.

Anderson paints the portrait of an idealistic, ambitious, and complex man whose unshakable committment was made even more powerful by his unusual combination of romantic passion and coldly analytic thought. He recalls Ernesto Guevara’s epic motorcycle journey through South America as a medical student while underscoring how U.S. intervention in Latin America crystallized Ernesto’s revolutionary consciousness. In June 1954, Ernesto sojourned as a physician in Guatemala, providing free medical care to the poor in the countryside. When a CIA coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz, he sought refuge in the Argentinean Embassy. That summer, Guevara became convinced that only armed revolution could secure the future of oppressed and marginalized Latin Americans everywhere.

Anderson revisits Guevara’s diaries to recapture his first meeting with Fidel Castro in Mexico City. Seeking to recruit new volunteers for a revolutionary war against the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship in Cuba, Castro took an immediate liking to the zealous doctor from Argentina who longed to prove his revolutionary credentials. In November 1956, Guevara, Fidel Castro, his younger brother Raul, and eighty volunteers set sail for Cuba, launching a guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra mountains that would oust Batista on New Years Day 1959.

In January 1959, Che personally oversaw the revolution’s consolidation. He implemented the Agrarian Reform Law of 1959, presided over the trials and executions of ex-Batista functionaries, represented Cuba at the United Nations, and commanded revolutionary forces during the Bay of Pigs invasion. By 1965, Che grew tired of his desk job at the Economy Ministry. Anderson argues that the thrill of battle gave Che meaning. He dreamed of exporting the Cuban Revolution to the rest of Latin America and he chose Bolivia to open a new front. However, unlike Cuba, the Bolivian campaign was a disaster from the start. It was also Che’s last. The local Bolivian Communist Party refused to support the Cuban revolutionary effort on their soil. Che’s team also failed to recruit Quechua Indians. In autumn 1967, the guerrillas ran out of weapons, ammunition, and supplies. CIA-trained Bolivian Special Forces ambushed Guevara’s troops in Vallegrande. On October 10, 1967, the world woke up to the news that Che Guevara had been killed in the Bolivian jungle.

A Revolutionary Life is a must-read for Latin Americanists, Cold War buffs, and aspiring revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries everywhere. Anderson sheds light upon little known details of Che’s life, including his harsh criticism of the Soviet Union and his ardent support for the emergent “nonaligned” movement in the Third World. Most important, he emphasizes Che’s unyielding commitment to his beliefs. While other Marxist-Leninists exploited their privilege, Che remained a full-time revolutionary. When he wasn’t studying political economy, Che could be found teaching literacy and arithmetic to his young bodyguards or working eighteen-hour days cutting sugar cane as part of his voluntary labor program. He believed firmly in the possibility of a pan-Latin American revolution, a cause for which he readily gave his life.

Finally, Anderson’s is a biography that calls into question the dismissal of revolutionary socialism and alternative paths to development in Latin America. Today, leftists in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina breathe life into Che’s pan-Latin American vision, rejecting orthodox neoliberalism in favor of state-sponsored development and regional integration. They threaten to boycott the upcoming Organization of American States (OAS) summit in Cartagena, Colombia, if the United States continues to prevent Cuba from participating. Meanwhile, Bolivian President Evo Morales recently ordered the armed forces to adopt Che’s famous salutation, “hasta la victoria siempre” or “forever onward toward victory,” as its official slogan. Ironically, the very institution that killed Che Guevara forty-five years ago now immortalizes his legacy. In 2012, Che still lives.

Photo credits:

“Memorial service march for victims of the La Coubre explosion,” 5 March 1960

Museo Che Guevara via Wikimedia Commons

Carol M. Highsmith, “Hand painted mural showing the Cuban flag and Che Guevara, neighborhood in Old Havana, Cuba,” 11 January 2010

Photographer’s own via The Library of Congress

You may also like:

Takkara Brunson’s “Making History” podcast, where she talks to us about her research in Cuba and her dissertation on gender and social identity in pre-revolutionary Cuba.

Aragon Storm Miller’s review of “Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba’s Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis.”

Yana Skorobogatov’s review of “Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976”

Wavell: the Viceroy’s Journal by Archibald Percival Wavell, ed. Penderel Moon (1973)

Archibald Percival Wavell served as the penultimate viceroy of India from 1943 to 1947, meticulously chronicling his experience through the twilight of the British Raj. With only light edits from Penderel Moon, Wavell’s journal delivers a lucid account of declining imperial power and rising nationalist aspirations in India during the Second World War. Wavell’s frustrations multiply through the journal, revealing not only the viceroy’s suspicions of key Indian leaders, but also the growing intractability of continued colonial rule.

The journal confirms Moon’s opening assertion that the structural limitations of the viceroyalty crippled Wavell. His entries reveal his claustrophobic position between the competing factions of Indian nationalism and the British government itself. Indeed, Britain’s War Cabinet, headed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, demonstrates remarkable stubbornness through the 1943-1944 Bengal famine, cynically dismissing the viceroy’s relief proposals. Similarly, the Simla Conference of 1945 crumbles as much from pressures imposed by London as by the recalcitrance of the Congress and the Muslim League. Even after the Labour Party’s victory in the summer of 1945, Wavell reveals the government’s rigidity in its approach to Indian nationalism by exposing its refusal to grant the viceroy greater autonomy in negotiating the transfer of power and excluding him from the inner workings of the 1946 Cabinet Mission. In these ways, Wavell’s writings provide strong evidence for the charge that the British government’s failure to innovate in an administrative capacity precluded a smoother road to Indian independence.

Wavell candidly admits his own limitations as a negotiator, stating flatly: “I do not pretend to be a diplomatist.” Yet his journal reveals a creative and introspective individual, concerned both with the practical politics and the moral ramifications of his imperial role. While highly critical of India’s nationalist leaders, Wavell clearly aspires to deliver on promises of self-government. Evidence pours forth, condemning the inflexibility of that very role and redeeming the individual. Wavell emerges as a complex and contemplative character, in sharp contrast with his contemporary image as unimaginative and out of touch.

Photo credits:

No. 9 Army Film and Document Unit, “Field Marshal the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein KG GCB DSO 1887-1976. Montgomery as CIGS (Chief of Imperial General Staff) designate in the Vicerehal Gardens, New Delhi with the Viceroy, Field Marshall Wavell and Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, Field Marshal Sir Vlaude Auschinleck,” 17 June 1946.

Bruce Hunt on Technology & Science in the 19th Century

Albert Einstein is perhaps the most recognizable figure of modern times. In 1999 Time magazine picked him as its “Person of the Century,” and in the public mind he certainly stands as the iconic scientist. He is generally pictured as an otherworldly genius, inhabiting a cosmic realm far above the mundane affairs of ordinary life, and in some ways he was. Yet when Einstein hit on his most famous and revolutionary idea, his Theory of Relativity, in 1905, he was working as a patent examiner at the Swiss Federal Patent Office in Bern, spending his days scrutinizing the designs of electrical machinery. How are we to reconcile our image of Einstein as the pure thinker, advancing scientific knowledge of the universe simply through the unfettered exercise of his mind, with the fact that he came up with revolutionary ideas while working in the thoroughly practical and technological setting of a patent office?

In Pursuing Power and Light: Technology and Physics from James Watt to Albert Einstein, I’ve tried to show that Einstein’s situation was really not so anomalous and that physics and technology had been tightly intertwined for more than a century before he went to work in the Swiss patent office. In fact, many of the most important advances in physics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — including aspects of Einstein’s own relativity theory — had deep roots in the technologies that, in the same period, had so profoundly transformed material life. When the nineteenth century began, everyday life in even the most prosperous and technologically developed parts of the world hardly differed, in many basic ways, from that of the ancients. People still relied on their own muscles, or those of their horses and oxen, to carry their loads and pull their plows; on the wind to drive the sails of their ships; and on falling water to turn their mill wheels and grind their grain. By the end of the eighteenth century, there had been some first efforts to harness the power of steam, but at first it was used for little more than pumping water out of some mines in England. Transportation and communications remained, by later standards, woefully slow; a message could travel no faster than the person who carried it, and it typically took weeks or months for a traveler to cross an ocean or a continent.

By 1905, when Einstein first began to formulate his new conceptions of time and space, the world was very different. Steam engines and turbines were driving giant factories and power plants, and networks of electrical lines were spreading power and light through cities around the globe. Railroads and steamships had reduced travel times from weeks or months to a few days; the first automobiles had begun to appear on the roads and the first airplanes in the skies. Communication had not just been sped up, but had become almost instantaneous; a vast network of telegraph cables circled the globe, and telephone lines now carried distant voices right into one’s home. Wireless telegraphy had begun to appear, and the advent of radio broadcasting was just around the corner.

Along with these technological changes came equally sweeping transformations in the scientific understanding of matter, heat, energy, and electromagnetism. But the relationship between this new scientific knowledge and these new technologies was not always quite what one might expect. Today technology is often seen, or even defined, as simply “applied science,” as abstract knowledge cast into the form of concrete and useful devices. When we look more closely at some of the most important technologies of the nineteenth century, however, we find that the arrow of influence ran in the opposite direction, from technology to science. Historians of science and technology have often remarked that the steam engine did far more for science than science ever did for the steam engine. When Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen built the first practical steam engines in the years around 1700, they were guided in part by ideas of their own about heat and pressure, but they didn’t draw on any store of solid scientific knowledge about work and energy, for no such body of knowledge yet existed. Even James Watt’s famous improvements in the efficiency of steam engines were based more on inspired tinkering and careful experimentation than on a knowledge of anything resembling the modern laws of thermodynamics. The first steam engines did not emerge from an understanding of the fundamental laws of heat and energy; rather, those laws themselves emerged from the efforts of Sadi Carnot and others in the nineteenth century to analyze the workings of the steam engines they already saw around them.

Much of my own research concerns the history of electrical science in the nineteenth century, and here we find a very similar story. Beginning in the 1820s, electrical inventors took up a few basic scientific discoveries, particularly Alessandro Volta’s electric battery, and began to make them into practical devices, guided more by trial and error than by any deep scientific understanding. By the 1830s, they were building working telegraphs, and within a decade entrepreneurs in both Europe and America were spreading their networks of wires across the countryside. Soon they began to run into puzzling phenomena that scientists had never encountered in their laboratories, and a rich new field of scientific research began to open up. This was especially true after British telegraphers took to laying insulated cables beneath the sea, first across the English Channel in 1851 and then, in an especially bold attempt, across the Atlantic in 1858. The “retardation” and distortion that electrical signals suffered in passing along a cable pointed toward an influence coming from outside the wire itself — from what British physicists began to think of as the electromagnetic “field” that, they said, filled the space around charges, currents, and magnets. Field theory cast all of electromagnetism into a new and clearer light and proved immensely useful not only in telegraphy, the technological ground from which it had grown, but also in the design of motors, dynamos, and the rest of what became the electric power system.

When Albert Einstein was hired by the Swiss patent office, it was largely for his expertise in field theory, which was important in evaluating designs for electrical machinery. When he formulated his Theory of Relativity, he drew on field theory and on puzzles that had come up with the design of motors and dynamos. Of course, Einstein’s ideas would carry him into much wider realms, but it is worth bearing in mind how deeply his work, like that of his nineteenth-century predecessors, was rooted in the technological context of the time.

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