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Historical Perspectives on Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016)

April 4, 2016

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” Lawrence Walsh growls to Jake Gittes in the final moments of Chinatown, Roman Polanski’s iconic film noir about corruption and betrayal in Los Angeles. Walsh’s now-classic line reflects Jake’s utter disenchantment by the end of the film—he has has lost faith in the status quo, in honor, and even in love by the time he winds up in the lawless Chinese part of town. It’s a sentiment echoed again and again in Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. Throughout the movie, through explosions and dust and sweat, John Krasinski’s Jack Silva hears by way of explanation: “It’s Benghazi.” The message couldn’t be clearer: the rules don’t matter here.

Reactions to Michael Bay’s latest venture have so far cropped up along predictable lines. Some, looking to the film’s scrupulously non-political focus and standout performances by Krasinski and James Badge Dale, applaud the comparatively restrained, fact-driven story. Others challenge the film’s simplistic take on a complex geopolitical event, lacking historical context and rife with cultural assumptions. Michael Bay isn’t an auteur and nuance isn’t his strength—nor is it what most of his audience wants from a movie. But considering the tidal shifts in our current culture over war, over government, and over America’s place in the world, 13 Hours offers a provocative starting point for Bay’s applauders and scoffers to talk across the aisle.

The narrative follows a group of six ex-military contractors, hired to run security for a CIA annex in bullet-pocked Benghazi in 2012. Jack joins Dale’s Tyrone “Rone” Woods, on “one last job” because he needs the money—the economy at home is faltering. The contractors comprising the Global Response Staff (GRS) sweat away in a grubby CIA compound. The compound abuts “Zombieland,” the eerie village slaughter yard that seems to enjoy an abundance of ethereal breezes. Jack, Rone, and their crew of uniformly tall, rugged, and muscular contractors immediately clash with the pudgy CIA Station Chief, who sneers metaphorically and literally at the hired protection any chance he gets. This is one of the film’s major leitmotifs: the effete, bloated bureaucrat gets into the way of the seasoned, decisive GRS team at every turn of the plot, preventing them at best from doing good, at worst from doing their jobs.

Screenshot from 13 Hours.

When news of Ambassador Chris Stephens’s visit to Benghazi comes, the GRS team stops by the State Department’s diplomatic outpost, a well-appointed pleasure garden compared to Zombieland, to offer the Diplomatic Security (DS) team a gratis security assessment. The outpost is hopelessly vulnerable, another indication of bureaucratic—and departmental—incompetence. DS depends on a deeply unreliable local militia, the February 17th Martyrs’ Brigade for the majority of their protection. Jack and his fellow mercenaries make a congenial offer to help in case a crisis crops up during the visit. Of course, a crisis develops.

The climax of the film comes on September 11, 2012. Crowds of armed, organized militants storm the diplomatic outpost, and the DS team issues a desperate call to the GRS guys: “If you guys don’t come now, we are going to fucking die.” Geared up and ready, the GRS team turns to the CIA Station Chief for an official go-ahead. But, concerned about chain of command and protecting his own agents, the Chief instead issues a “stand down” order to the GRS team. A tense twenty minutes passes. Finally, Rone bests the Chief in a contest of will, and the heavily armored contractors swing into action. Piling tragedy upon insult, the Chief’s delay means the GRS team loses the opportunity to save the life of Ambassador Chris Stephens, who perishes from smoke inhalation after the attacking militants and the Mediterranean wind turn the outpost into a hellish inferno.

Survivors of the real Benghazi GRS team—who collaborated with Bay’s scriptwriters—have been vocal with journalists like David Kirkpatrick about the “stand down” order. The film suggests the order virtually eliminated any chance of saving Stephens from an avoidable death. The film abstains from directly criticizing initial, inaccurate State Department and White House reports of the attack on Benghazi, which called the attack a spontaneous act of riot violence. It also mercifully avoids the political morass of Secretary Clinton’s email servers. The movie does, however, contradict 2014 reports to the House Armed Services Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee, which quite clearly state that the CIA issued no such “stand down” order. The CIA itself has denied that the chief, who is still undercover, prevented the GRS team from rescuing their DS counterparts. It’s difficult for a secret agency to respond to such a public lashing, and viewers would do well to consider the order less a fact than an illustration of endemic problems in the way American government departments interact in foreign countries. Lack of coordination and competition for legitimacy, especially in conflict zones, carry real dangers.

Screen shot from 13 Hours.

The world of Benghazi is a bewildering, hostile world. Bay’s nearly two-and-a-half-hour long film effectively conjures up the fatigue and bafflement with which most Americans regard the Middle East. Friends look like—and can quickly become—dangerous foes. By its end, the viewer, like Silva and his comrades, longs for treehouses, neat lawns, and McDonald’s drive-throughs. More sensitive viewers might decry the movie’s failure to offer real context for the embassy attack, or to portray ordinary Libyans as more than potentially malevolent scenery in a movie about Americans in peril. Gaddafi ruled Libya with an iron fist for 34 years – yet the failures of the revolution look through Bay’s lens like moral failures of a people unready for self-rule. The film opens with a shaky montage depicting Gaddafi’s murder, but it delves no deeper into decades of Libyan history that might help a viewer understand why the 17 Feb Brigade melted away from the embassy doors on September 11, 2012.

Conscientious viewers might consider why the movie doesn’t move beyond standard tropes about the Middle East. Why do audiences still accept Arabs in Adidas sweatpants and battered AK-47s as an existential threat to five skilled warriors in head to toe body armor? Critics will decry the movie’s hyper masculine, anti-intellectual bent, but perhaps it is more useful to question how Jack, Rone, and their muscular friends became so cynical and battle-ready in the first place. The GRS and DS teams face a bleak and bloody night virtually alone: the contractors and agents rail against their isolation in between bouts of heavy shelling. In the end, the GRS team—and the audience—never receive a satisfactory explanation for the mighty American military’s absence. What policies and decisions placed the GRS team in Zombieland, beyond the protective reach of American military power?

It’s easy to dismiss 13 Hours as a superficial tribute to the kind of aggressive nationalism that undermines American credibility in the world. It’s also easy to praise the film’s veneration of military contractors who risked their lives and their careers to do the right thing. But discussion of 13 Hours should not stop there—it captures a moment in American culture, warts and all, that is worth interrogating from both sides of the aisle.

Killing a King, by Dan Ephron (2015)

March 14, 2016

By Emily Whalen

Yigal Amir has never denied assassinating Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Days after he publicly shot Rabin at close range after a peace rally, the young extremist calmly recreated the event for police officers at the crime scene in Tel-Aviv. When police interrogating him informed Amir that Rabin had died from his wounds, Amir was “ecstatic,” asking for liquor to toast his accomplishment. Yet, to this day, conspiracy theories about Rabin’s death abound, with many on the Israeli extreme right suggesting that Shin Bet (or Shabak, the Israeli intelligence agency) orchestrated the killing to drum up sympathy for the Palestinian peace process. With an eye to understanding this surreal state of affairs, Dan Ephron interweaves two narratives: the story of Yitzhak Rabin’s efforts toward building a sustainable peace with the Palestinians and the story of Yigal Amir, whose interpretation of Jewish law and radical conservatism led him to plan and carry out the killing of a prime minister.

After Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat signed the first Oslo Accords in 1993, the divisions already splintering Israeli society cleaved even deeper, pitting liberal, secular Israelis against a conservative, religious right. By 1994, when Rabin and Arafat signed the Cairo Agreement, those divisions had widened into chasms. The Cairo Agreement initiated the second step in the Oslo Process, limited Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian territories. Withdrawal further fueled the already blazing anti-Rabin rhetoric in Israel. Ephron writes in lucid detail about anti-Rabin protesters “burning pictures of the prime minister, chanting ‘Death to Rabin’…’Rabin the Nazi’ and ‘In blood and fire, we’re drive Rabin out.’” The right wing of the Israeli political class, Ephron insinuates, took advantage of the charged rhetorical atmosphere to score electoral points. As one particular protest roiled in the streets of Tel Aviv, Benjamin Netanyahu and other Likud leaders silently watched from a hotel balcony—perhaps not actively complicit, but lending an air of legitimacy to violent, angry rhetoric.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, left, shaking hands with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, with U.S. President Bill Clinton in the center at the Oslo Accords signing ceremony, Sept. 13, 1993. (Vince Musi / The White House)

Yigal Amir, a charismatic young activist from a Yemeni Jewish family, believed the Cairo Agreement amounted to treason. His roots in the extreme religious right and connections to the settler community had already placed Amir on Shabak watch lists by 1995, though the agency never scrutinized him individually. Shabak, designed to respond to threats from Palestinian terrorist groups, shifted clumsily to meet the rising menace of Jewish extremism in the years between Oslo I and Rabin’s assassination. Ephron’s book provides sensitive insights into the inner workings of the agency, exploring how bureaucratic inertia supported a series of questionable policy choices. For example, in the aftermath of the assassination, it came to light that a well-known right wing agitator close to Amir, Avishai Raviv, had in fact been an undercover Shabak agent. Questions regarding Raviv’s foreknowledge—and possible encouragement—of the assassination plot, plagued the agency for years (Raviv successfully defended himself against legal charges in 2000 for failing to prevent the assassination – he claimed that he had been operating under Shabak orders and that events spun out of control).

Binyamin Netanyahu speaks at the infamous “Rabin the Traitor” rally in Jerusalem, October 1995

Controversially, Amir justified his desire to assassinate Rabin within the parameters of Jewish law. Ephron explains din rodef, the law of the pursuer, a Talmudic principle permitting extrajudicial killing under extremely specific circumstances. Under din rodef, a Jew may kill a rodef—that is, someone who pursues another with an intent to kill—if absolutely no other means will stop the would-be murderer. Amir openly argued that Rabin’s concessions to Arafat and the Palestinians led to Jewish deaths, thus making Rabin a rodef. Most rabbis agree that din rodef doesn’t apply to public figures, but in Ephron’s interviews, Amir’s brother Hagai suggested the assassin “received at least an implicit confirmation [from right-wing rabbis] that din rodef applied to Rabin.” Confusion over din rodef, Ephron claims, and the rampant conspiracy theories surrounding Rabin’s death have allowed the religious extreme right in recent years to both justify Amir’s act and absolve the assassin of blame.

The latter part of the book develops a third narrative: Ephron’s own efforts to debunk conspiracy theories about Rabin’s murder. Ephron’s certainty about Amir’s sole responsibility wavers in the final chapters as the author attempts to identify a mysterious hole in the shirt Rabin wore the day of the assassination. The hole, troublingly, does not align with bullet wounds described in Rabin’s autopsy—not even Dalia Rabin, the prime minister’s daughter, can say with certainty if Amir was the only shooter. Ephron’s willingness to entertain all possibilities makes for a gripping conclusion.

Since the Rabin assassination, Israeli social and political culture has undergone a fundamental transformation—and a profound polarization. Violent rhetoric, it appears, does have consequences. After Amir murdered Rabin, the seemingly inexorable—although shaky—Palestinian peace process ceased, ushering in the Benjamin Netanyahu era of extreme-right politics. Killing A King offers a provocative perspective on how quickly the world around us can become unrecognizable. Dalia Rabin admits that now, “I don’t feel I’m a part of what most people in this country are willing to do.” Even the recent past, Ephron suggests, is another country.

You may also like Itay Eisinger’s NEP article published on the 20th anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.

Digital Teaching: Blending the Old with the New: In-Person Studio Attendance

February 25, 2016

Every year thousands of students take introductory courses in U.S. History at UT Austin. This spring Prof Jeremi Suri is experimenting with an online version of the U.S. History since 1865 survey course. He and his teaching assistants, Cali Slair, Carl Forsberg, Shery Chanis, and Emily Whalen will blog about the experience of digital teaching for readers of Not Even Past.

By Cali Slair

Students typically watch our online course from home, a local café, or at various locations on campus. In order to make the course more interpersonal, each student is also assigned two dates when he or she is required to attend class in the video production studio in Mezes Hall, where we film the live lectures.

Students attending a lecture. Courtesy of the Author.

Studio attendance is similar to taking a course in a classroom or lecture hall, but it is also quite different. Similar to a traditional lecture course, the students listen to a live lecture and take notes surrounded by their classmates. They also arrive to the studio approximately thirty minutes before the course begins which gives them time to ask questions and interact with their classmates, teaching assistants, and Professor Suri before class starts. A great feature of the in-studio attendance dates is that the twenty to twenty-three students who are assigned to each date are all in the same TA group. This allows the students to meet and interact with peers whose weekly response essays they have access to read online. The TA in charge of going over the studio rules and taking attendance for that day is also the TA for the students who are assigned to attend in person. This allows the studio TA to put faces with the names of his or her students, and vice-versa. While some students feel more comfortable taking the course through the online setting, there are also many students who feel more comfortable in the studio and prefer meeting and interacting with their TA and classmates in person. We have even had a few students request to attend more than the two required in-person studio attendance dates.

A main difference between our online course and courses held in a classroom or lecture hall is that having access to a computer is integral to being successful in this course. Despite being in the studio, the students cannot raise their hands and ask questions like in a typical lecture hall. The students still use their laptops to communicate through the Chat and Ask the Professor functions. The Ask the Professor button still functions as the equivalent to raising a hand during lecture. The Pings are another reason the students still need laptops for their in-person studio attendance dates. Students watch the lecture live, and at the same time keep the lecture video open on their laptops to watch for and respond to Pings. This allows the students to earn their attendance grades by demonstrating that not only did they show up to the studio, but they have also been actively listening to the lecture.

Cali Slair in the studio. Courtesy of Joan Neuberger.

We have found the students’ ability to multitask during lecture especially impressive. This is a generational phenomenon that our online course taps into and utilizes for rigorous learning purposes. While the in-person studio attendance dates are based on some traditional classroom learning styles, the studio still requires students to use technology in their learning. The technology encourages active participation during attendance, encouraging students to listen closely to the lecture and integrate what they hear with their reading.

Early in the course some students found the in-studio attendance dates to be a little challenging. Some students had difficulty finding the studio and others found the studio itself to be somewhat distracting. At this point in the course, the number of students who have difficulty finding the studio has declined significantly. For the students who find the studio itself distracting, one of the great things about this course is they can watch the recorded lecture online. As a TA, I value the opportunity to meet all of the students in my group in person. I hope these meetings help students feel more comfortable asking their TAs and Professor Suri questions and attending office hours online or in person. The in-studio experience is an innovative component of our course that helps us achieve our goal of making the course as participatory, engaging, and stimulating for students as possible. Come visit sometime!

Digital Teaching: Anywhere, (Almost) Anytime: Online Office Hours

February 18, 2016

By Shery Chanis

We hold office hours every week, but how do we get more students to come? One answer might be to do it virtually.

Shery Chanis (left) during the filming of the first lecture. Courtesy of Joan Neuberger.

In previous blog posts, Emily and Carl have discussed how we use online tools including Class Chat, Ask the Professor, and Pings to increase student interaction and participation, and to enhance their learning experience. This design extends outside of our class time, too. Our main goal for online office hours is to make office hours more accessible and convenient for our students, so more of them can come to get detailed feedback on their weekly writing assignments or ask questions about the course.

With this in mind, one of the most exciting features of our online office hours is the flexible scheduling. We hold office hours at different times every week to accommodate the schedules of as many students as possible. We post our office hours for the coming week on Sundays, so students can plan ahead. Of course, we are also available for appointments outside of office hours.

There are two primary advantages to having office hours online. First, they can be anywhere. Just as students can live stream lectures wherever they may be, they can log on to office hours without interrupting what they have been doing. My students have logged on from their apartments or dorm rooms, as well as different parts of campus. This makes going to office hours much more convenient, and for some, less intimidating. Students who might not be as comfortable going to their TAs’ offices for one-on-one conversations right away in the beginning of the semester can take advantage of the online format to make initial contact with their TAs and build professional relationships from there. Second, we can have office hours almost anytime, not only during the day, but also in the evening. So far, I have met with students as early as 9 o’clock in the morning and as late as 9 o’clock in the evening. Four weeks into the semester, the flexible scheduling has allowed me to meet with more than a quarter of my students during office hours and through appointments.

Adobe Connect is the multi-media platform we use to hold office hours. Much like social media with video chat functionalities such as Skype, Adobe Connect enables us to see students face to face and have conversations with them. I can also share my screen to go over their writing assignments in detail. After the students have logged on, they are placed in a general meeting room. Unlike the hallway outside of the office, students can sit comfortably where they are while they wait. We ask students to sign in with their arrival times, so we can meet with them in the order they arrive. To meet with a student one-on-one, we move the student and ourselves from the meeting room to a breakout session to discuss their work in private. Once we are finished with one breakout session, we place another student in a new breakout session.

Shery Chanis talks to a student using Adobe Connect.

Like other technology, Adobe Connect requires training and some practice. While it was straightforward to learn the tool before the semester began, in practice I have had to go through a learning curve. As I was getting ready to meet with my students for the first time, I had a few technical difficulties. Unfortunately, I had to ask the students to wait for a little while, but thankfully, my students were extremely patient and gracious!

Me: Hi everyone, unfortunately, I’m still having a bit of technical difficulty. Do you think you can log back in in about 5 minutes?
Student 1:Yes that is fine! No worries.
Me: Thanks, so much!
Student 2:Yes no problem!.

On the other side of the screen, some students have also had technical issues about getting their camera or audio to work. I have had to meet with some of them without seeing their faces or hearing their voices, but we have also been able to supplement our conversation with the chat feature and the students did not seem to mind this at all.

Shery Chanis using Adobe Connect.

Through online office hours, I have also gotten to see a different side of my students. The biggest lesson I have learned so far is that students are very flexible with technology, (even though some might say they are not good at it!). They are equally comfortable with chat, video chat, or conversation. They are also quite funny at times! For one of the appointments, my student and I used the chat feature to discuss his writing assignment as we were both in quiet study areas. While he could see me, I could not see him because his camera was not working. As we were signing off at the end of our conversation, I waved goodbye through my camera, and he got creative by writing his goodbye!

Me: You are welcome! My office hours are mainly online, but like Prof. Suri said this morning, we can meet in person as well.
Student: oh ok. I’ll remember that for future reference. Thanks again! I have to get ready for my next class now.
Me: Ok, have a great rest of the day! See you soon!

Student: thanks! you too!
Student:(waves bye)

This is the first time I have held office hours online. It has been different from what I am accustomed to, but it has been a great experience and the flexible nature of online office hours has allowed me to see more students than usual. I am looking forward to getting to know my students more and getting to know more of them as the semester progresses.

Digital Teaching: Ping! Are you listening? Taking Digital Attendance

February 4, 2016

By Carl Forsberg

How do you know if students are actually watching a live-streaming online lecture? Excellent question!

Carl Forsberg. Courtesy of Joan Neuberger.

Online courses offer a number of tools to counter the potential distractions that accompany online formats. Our class uses the “ping” to keep students accountable and engaged, supplementing the chat function that Emily described in last week’s blog post.

During each lecture, one of the teaching assistants sends three randomly spaced ping questions to every student in the real-time audience. Students see a multiple choice question pop onto their screen, and have two minutes to answer before it disappears.

Screen shot of a comprehension question ping.

If you are surfing the web or answering e-mails during lecture – beware! You might miss your ping and your chance to prove you were tuned-in to the lecture. Pings are intended to motivate students to stay engaged in lecture. You might think of them as a kinder, gentler, form of the cold-call!

They also offer several labor saving functions. Teaching Assistants can easily calculate attendance grades by pulling up a log of students’ ping answers, eliminating the need to keep and compile a separate attendance roster each week.

Pings serve a pedagogical function as well. Rather than testing students on whether they caught a passing reference to a date or name in the course of a lecture, a well-crafted ping question can reinforce Professor Suri’s conceptual points.

Screenshot of the results to a ping question.

TAs get immediate feedback on how the class has answered the ping question, allowing them to see when a large number of students didn’t grasp an important point, and providing an opportunity to clarify. Pings can also be used to allay students’ confusion about logistics: for example, a poll question might ask students what time their weekly reading responses are due, after Professor Suri covers the point.

Screenshot of a logistical ping question.

For the TAs, crafting multiple choice answers for our pings provides an enjoyable exercise in pedagogical creativity, as we aim for questions that are not too obscure, drive home key points, and maybe even add a little levity.

With the exception of the first image, all images are courtesy of the author.

Digital Teaching: Talking in Class? Yes, Please!

January 28, 2016

By Emily Whalen

Some scholars wince a little when they hear the words “online class.” But what if online education wasn’t meant to supersede traditional teaching methods? What if online tools enhance the student experience? Instead of increasing the quantity of enrolled students, what if we increased the quality of the course through the use of online learning?

Emily Whalen. Courtesy of the Joan Neuberger.

Emily Whalen talking during the filming of the first online lecture on January 21, 2016. Courtesy of the Joan Neuberger.

The first week in our new, online US History survey course was a whirlwind, but the teaching team and the studio team have both entered with open minds. We all feel a little bit like we’re a part of a thrilling new experiment and that air of excitement and flexibility has carried over into our interactions with the students. The first few classes were not without slight hiccups—technical difficulties for one or two students as they learn the new engagement tools—but for the most part, we’ve had positive results.

The biggest feature for many students to adjust to, and for the teaching team to navigate, is the Class Chat. During lecture, students have a chat room open in another window, where they can talk to their classmates, ask TAs questions, and respond to prompts that Prof. Suri asks them throughout the lecture. Few students in lecture halls tapping away at laptop keyboards are only taking diligent lecture notes – many are answering emails, checking social networks, and messaging each other, much to the lecturer’s chagrin. With Class Chat, we are trying to ensure that multitasking students engage in multiple tasks without diverting their attention away from the course. In the last class, Prof. Suri asked students to share ways in which war had affected their lives, at the start of a section about how the Civil War shaped the social and cultural landscape of the American South. Students chimed in with their responses and the TA moderating the chat was able to share some of their answers on screen – something the students really enjoy! It was also eye-opening for us to see the amazing diversity of our UT student body unfold in real time. For the students to get a sense of the rich variety of their peers’ backgrounds was an additional benefit –and one that’s not easily achievable in a lecture hall.

Students share some of the ways that war has affected their lives. Courtesy of the author.

Even better, Class Chat seems to be cultivating a congenial, supportive atmosphere among the students. We see students answering each others’ questions, reinforcing their own learning, and creating a unique collaborative environment during lectures. Students can immediately ask their peers if they’ve missed an important point in lecture or where to find next weeks’ readings. This way, students can improve their note-taking and immediately reinforce the salient points in Prof. Suri’s lecture. Last class we had a student create a Facebook group for the course to facilitate group study throughout the semester.

Students ask each other questions during the lecture. Courtesy of the author.

Of course, some questions are worth stopping the lecture for – and we’ve had students pose some really insightful questions already in our first two lectures. This is where the “Ask the Professor” feature comes in handy. In our first class, Prof. Suri discussed the effect slavery had on the Southern economy in the early years of the American Republic. Using the “Ask the Professor” button, one student asked Prof. Suri to clarify what he meant by the difference between working for a wage and working for survival. As Prof. Suri responded to the question, he realized that the distinction between the two wasn’t as clear-cut as his lecture had suggested. The student was able to see Prof. Suri reassess and refine his phrasing to better reflect that ambiguity. It was a wonderful illustration of the ways these interactive tools create dialogue and benefit scholars as well as students.

One goal of this course was to harness the multitasking abilities of our students and demonstrate a participatory approach to knowledge to make the class both more interesting and more educational for them. Just a week in, we’re realizing that it’s a tremendous educational experience for the teaching team, too!

Digital Teaching: Taking U.S. History Online

January 20, 2016

By Jeremi Suri

This semester we are experimenting with a new online version of the bread-and-butter undergraduate survey course, “US History since 1865.” This is not a MOOC. It is an effort to use digital tools and online delivery to offer a course that will increase the rigor, fun, and participation among enrolled students. The course seeks to motivate students by bringing the material to them in accessible, thought-provoking, and creative ways. It asks them to actively engage with the material offered in lectures and to participate outside the lectures through online platforms, including a live chat, an “ask the professor” forum, and online office hours. Future posts will describe how each of these innovative online functions works and how the students use them.

Behind the scenes shot of Jeremi Suri delivering a lecture for the course. Courtesy of Joan Neuberger.

The course incorporates more primary documents, photos, recordings, videos, cartoons, and maps than I usually use in my traditional survey course — all delivered and accessed online. I deliver the lectures in a film studio in Mezes Hall on campus, and they are live streamed to students. Students will attend some live, in-class lectures on designated days, but they will all primarily participate by watching the lectures online each Tuesday and Thursday morning, encountering history as a serious learning experience from the laptop screens in their dorm rooms. It is time to consider that learning can indeed work best today in that personal setting, rather than a musty old lecture hall.

The course is built around about 150 pages of assigned reading each week and twice weekly lectures. Each lecture includes a mix of fire-and-brimstone preaching, Socratic questioning, and light entertainment. We want the students to enjoy watching their screens. They should feel included in real-time discussions about the presented material, and they should feel free to ask questions and pursue their interests.

Assessments of student work include a test of their listening within each lecture, weekly response papers on the assigned reading, and exams. Students will get frequent feedback on their comprehension of key concepts, their interpretation of major events, and their written expression through the online platform. They will also have increased opportunities to communicate with teaching assistants and the professor — both online and in-person.

A view of the studio used to film the lectures.

The goal of this teaching experiment is to raise the quality of the history survey and re-energize it for a new generation of students. If this experiment works, the course will be better and more popular than ever. If it works, the online platform will bring history alive for our undergraduates. That is the fundamental mission for a top history department and a top research university in the twenty-first century. US History Online is a more rigorous and fun history for a new generation.

The lecture delivered online.

Take a look at the course syllabus here.

All images were taken on January 21, 2016, by Joan Neuberger.

Faith Misplaced, by Ussama Makdisi (2010)

March 9, 2015

By Emily Whalen

Open a news website these days and there’s likely to be a story about violence in the Middle East. There’s a good chance that the article will refer to extremist Islamists, possibly even mentioning the rising tide of anti-Western sentiment in the Middle East more broadly. Among academics, pundits, and politicians there is no shortage of opinion on why this state of affairs exists. Explanations often attribute anti-Westernism (and more specifically, anti-Americanism) to a “clash of civilizations,” drawing on the assumption that Middle Easterners (and, more specifically, Arabs) refuse to accept a secular, peaceful, democratic global order. All too often, the history of the Arab-American relationship is subject to misunderstanding and misuse by both Arabs and Americans seeking to forward a particular political agenda. Missing from the conversation is a critical examination of the decisions and forces that contributed to our current situation. The question of “Why?” has become a minefield of polemic, even for historians—what we need instead is to ask “How?” How did suicide bombings and invasions become the norm? How did refugee camps and political assassinations become routine? How did we get here?

Ussama Makdisi seeks to answer this question by using American and Arab voices to tell a nuanced story of events in the past century. He recounts a tale of mutual disenchantment, of reciprocal misunderstandings and an increasing—though not inevitable—opacity. He punctuates this broad narrative with moments often evoked in histories of the relationship: British colonialism, American support of Israel, the 1967 war, the oil embargo, etc. However, Makdisi is careful to dissect these events, delving into their complexity and texture. Moreover, he draws into his narrative less visible moments, giving new weight to often overlooked incidents, such as President Eisenhower’s intervention in Lebanon in 1958, which many Arabs saw as an infringement on Lebanese sovereignty to protect American interests. Unlike many other histories of America’s relationship to the Middle East, Makdisi reinforces the contingency of historical outcomes, underlining the missed opportunities and moments of apparent engagement that might have led to different paths.

U.S. Marine sits in a foxhole and points a machine gun towards Beirut, Lebanon, in the distance.

Plaque on Main Gate of American University, Beirut

Makidisi’s story begins not at the dawn of Islam or during the crusades as many “clash of civilizations” narratives do, but rather with the arrival of evangelical missionaries in the Holy Land in the late 19^th century. Though these men and women arrived in the Protestant spirit of conversion, they quickly found the Bible had lost some value as a reliable travel guide over the course of nearly 1,000 years. An ethnically and religiously heterogeneous region for millennia, the Levant was not a stable foothold from which the missionaries could launch their latter-day spiritual crusade. Makdisi skillfully tracks how, instead of leaving, most missionaries took the surprise in stride and the mission of conversion evolved into a mission of education with the establishment of institutions like the American University of Beirut based on Western educational ideas. Never losing the hope of long-term conversion, missionaries in the region adapted their fantasies to the realities of the region and encouraged a community of understanding and respect. Arab intellectuals saw in American ideals of democracy a parallel to their own struggle for freedom from the imperial yoke of Britain and France; the second generation of Western missionaries who grew up in the Middle East had a more nuanced appreciation for the diversity and dynamism that characterized the region. Not until the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20^th century did this begin to fray. The failure of Wilsonian principles of self-determination at the 1919 Paris Peace coupled with Western concern about massacres of Armenians in Turkey were the first significant breaches in the relationship.

Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau and David Lloyd George confer at the Paris Peace Conference (Noël Dorville, 1919)

The invitation to the Israeli ceremony declaring independence, dated 13 May 1948.

The invitation to the Israeli ceremony declaring independence, 13 May 1948

Another important watershed moment for Makdisi occurs in 1948 with the declaration of the state of Israel, which was and remains the foundational event for much of the 20^thand 21^st century turmoil in the Middle East. Today, many Americans take support for Israel for granted as a natural state of affairs. Makdisi skillfully disassembles this assessment, describing President Truman’s decision to recognize Israel shortly after its creation as hotly contested by many prominent members of the Truman administration, including Secretary of State George Marshall and US diplomat par excellence George Kennan. These men and their supporters were reluctant to undermine America’s strategic relationship with Arab states and skeptical of the long-term benefits of an alliance with Israel. But, as Makdisi points out, even recognition of Israel was not initially antithetical to accord between Arabs and Americans: American support for Israel made Arabs suspicious of American interests, but not fundamentally hostile to American values of democracy and capitalism.

Makdisi’s book whips through the last half of the 20^th century, chronicling a series of moments in which entrenched incomprehensibility and bureaucratic inertia underpin an atmosphere of escalating rhetoric, and, eventually, violence. For Makdisi, this is a story as much about anti-Arabism in America as it is about anti-Americanism in the Middle East. He notes the acerbic racial stereotypes that proliferated in American popular culture during the 1970s. A cursory glance at political cartoons about the oil embargo or airplane hijackings provides cringe-worthy proof of casual xenophobia directed toward Middle Easterners. Here is where the narrative enters into all-too familiar grounds. As rhetoric on both sides has become more extremist, violent incidents have increased in scale and frequency. Terrorists and occupying armies are part of the same violence, Makdisi argues, and represent not the cause of Arab-American antipathy but its symptoms.

The book ends on a hopeful, if inconclusive note. Faith Misplaced does not answer the question of whether there is a place for the U.S. in a peaceful Middle East, nor does Makdisi offer concrete ideas about what solutions might look like. Yet, to his credit, he avoids the pessimism that plagues many scholars of the region. Politics, argues Makdisi, led us to our current circumstances, and politics—presumably with a more nuanced understanding of recent history—holds hope for the future.

Ussama Makdisi, Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations (New York: PublicAffairs, 2010)

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Not Even Past is a digital magazine that serves as a robust platform for Public History with a global reach. It was founded in 2010 and developed by academics in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. It is read by around half a million users each year. The site has three main goals. Not Even Past aims, first, to bring great History writing to the public. The faculty and graduate students in the Department of History are committed to making our research freely accessible to anyone interested in History and Not Even Past provides a key vehicle for this. Second, the site serves as a reliable and frequently updated resource for History online. We publish extended research features, book recommendations, reviews of historical films and digital archives, teaching and course profiles, and stories that shed light on intriguing corners of the past. Although much of our content comes from scholars associated with the University of Texas at Austin, we also publish the work of academics and students from different institutions across the world. Third, Not Even Past provides a way for past graduates and supporters of the History program to stay in contact with the department and the full range of its activities. The title of the magazine reflects our professional and ethical commitment to bringing the work of professional historians into a public conversation that illuminates the importance of the past in shaping our actions, values, and beliefs in the present. In short, we believe that the past is never dead, it’s not even past.

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