digital history Archives - Page 6 of 8

Counterfactual History in a New Video Game

I have spent most of the last year applying for jobs, which means that I have spent most of the last year analyzing, constructing, rewriting, and generally just staring at my résumé. Writing a résumé is similar to creating a historical narrative – there is a protagonist (you), a cast of characters (employers and recommenders), a beginning, an end, a series of events in the middle, and a whole set of details that can be added or removed to suit particular audiences. Given the economy right now, there is pressure to make this narrative as broadly appealing as possible. Some career advisors have even encouraged me to engage in “creative truth-telling” to help me land a position. This practice, they tell me, isn’t lying, per se, but rather a gentle embellishment of the facts.

As an historian, however, this practice gives me the heebie jeebies. It reminds me too much of the push by some to make a selective reading of American history the standard for teaching the subject. American History, in many ways, represents the nation’s résumé. It is a catalog of achievements and events – some good, some regrettable – that are used to encourage citizens and outsiders to buy into the nation. As with my own personal narrative, the stakes for this résumé are high. There is the same pressure to embellish this history – both through addition and omission. But we must ask if it is really beneficial to avoid all the nasty bits when studying the past? When we consider our own personal failures, we often say that we learn from our mistakes. How can we learn from the nation’s mistakes if we remove them from our history?

BioShock Infinite is a game that uses a counterfactual history of the United States to force players to consider some of these mistakes. Set in 1912, the game takes place in Columbia, a floating city hovering over the United States. You play as Booker DeWitt, a veteran of the 7th Cavalry Regiment and a former member of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, who is sent to Columbia to retrieve a girl named Elizabeth in order to absolve his debt. Booker is racked by guilt for his participation in the Wounded Knee Massacre and for his role in putting down worker strikes as a Pinkerton agent. His personal remorse has driven him to drinking and gambling. Booker embodies several Progressive Era sensibilities, including the awareness of past wrongs, and the desire for redemption and reform.

In Columbia, however, Booker faces an unrepentant Gilded Age society led by firebrand preacher Zachary Comstock – a man who shares much of Booker’s personal history, but none of his remorse. Styling himself as a modern day Noah, Comstock sees Columbia as “another ark, for another time,” a place where he can preserve his vision of America while planning the destruction of “the Sodom below.” Comstock’s America is built upon a perverse worship of the Founding Fathers and rejection of the political and social developments in American society since the Civil War. Columbian society is committed to racial purity, religious zealotry, and unfettered capitalism, and promotes these philosophies through a set of distorted Sears Roebuck advertisements plastered around the city. Museums in the city present John Wilkes Booth as a hero and the Wounded Knee Massacre as a national triumph. The personal histories of DeWitt and Comstock reminds players not only of particular historical events, but also how the memories of those events can be perverted to attain political goals.

This sort of stylistic use of history is familiar territory for Irrational Games and its creative director, Ken Levine. The original BioShock, published in 2007, used Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy as the basis for a story set in the underwater city of Rapture. Levine’s BioShock games share many similarities in terms of plot and theme. Both games feature an antagonist bent on creating a utopian society based on warped notions of exceptionalism and capitalism. These antagonists are opposed in both instances by a group made up of dissatisfied, working class civilians, led by Frank Fontaine in BioShock and Daisy Fitzroy in Infinite. Thematically, the BioShock series grapples with the age old question of free will versus destiny, and stresses the potential role of the state in determining the answer.

Both BioShock games offer easy parallels with the present division between neoliberal capitalists and the Occupy Movement, yet these parallels become murky as both games progress. While the capitalist appears as the initial antagonist in both games, the player comes to learn that the opposition is capable of just as much destruction and violence. Levine’s message, then, is not a simple liberal critique of current politics, but rather a general warning about extremism in politics, whether that extremism comes from the left or the right. Writing as an historian of the 20th century, this is a warning that cannot be repeated too many times.

In addition to the plot and themes, BioShock Infinite encourages historicism through its music and gameplay. For reasons that become clear through the story, Infinite contains a jukebox musical score that features ragtime versions of popular twentieth-century hits, including songs by the Beach Boys, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Cyndi Lauper, Lead Belly, Soft Cell, and Tears for Fears. Additionally, Infinite’s gameplay often encourages the player to take on the role of historian. Major elements of the game’s narrative are left unexplained in cut scenes, but can be found by the player in voice recordings and kinetoscopes scattered throughout the city. These recordings and logs are not always easy to find, meaning that each player can come away with a different sense of the storyline depending on which, or how many, recordings they discovered. One of the game’s major side quests, then, is an oral history scavenger hunt.

This sort of detailed work would be lost on most players without exciting gameplay to draw them in. Infinite, however, builds upon traditional first-person action in interesting ways. In particular, it takes advantage of the game’s setting in the clouds, allowing players to move around the environment using skylines and zeppelins. This freedom of movement gives the combat sequences a frenetic feel and prevents them from becoming predictable. Unfortunately, this novelty is diminished by the rote nature of the game’s violence. The current debate on graphic content in video games is all too applicable here. Infinite’s storyline, including the player’s interactions with their companion Elizabeth, are best experienced by the reader themselves. The plot is a bit more precocious than profound, but it is well paced, matching the action of the game.

The BioShock series has become something of a bellwether for the video game industry and the release of Infinite has led to several “state of the medium” pieces online (listed below). What, then, does BioShock Infinite indicate about the future course of video games? On the one hand, we see a familiar reliance on violence and the first-person perspective, but on the other hand, we see a game that engages with complex, historically laced themes. Certainly, Infinite presents these themes in an exaggerated manner, but the fact that the game deals with them at all is encouraging. This further maturation of video games can only be seen as a good thing, for historians and players alike.

Photo Credits:

Promotional Photos of Bioshock Infinite (Images courtesy of Irrational Games and 2K Games)

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

If you’d like to read more about Bioshock Infinite:

Leigh Alexander writes that Infinite represents “a crucial moment in

canon,” but not one without flaws.

Giantbomb.com editor Alex Navarro collects and discusses the major threads of criticism that Infinite has encouraged in the gaming press.

Gamespot.com interview with Ken Levine on the development of Infinite and the current state of the video game industry.

Digital History: A Primer (Part 2)

By Joan Neuberger

Each fall I take my first-year seminar students to one of UT’s archives. They’re pretty sure this will be the most boring class ever. The archivists and I talk a bit about the people whose things are stored in the cardboard cartons and plastic containers piled up on the table, lowering their expectations even further. But then we open the boxes. Someone pulls out a local journalist’s datebook and starts flipping through the weeks of alternating banal and extraordinary events. And someone else finds a poet’s meticulously detailed correspondence with her lawyer. Another student opens a container to find an abstract sculptor’s childhood sketchbook that’s filled with ornate fantasy drawings. Skeptical silence gives way to animated conversation and suddenly everyone is walking around sharing their treasures with their friends. It never fails. Even if you don’t love history, there is nothing like original documents for connecting us to the past.

Russian State Archive of Literature and Art

Historians won’t be giving up their visits to archives or their days picking notebooks and letters out of boxes any time soon. But the path to those boxes has changed dramatically as institutions and history enthusiasts have been digitalizing and posting their treasures online. Virtual documents are not the same as little leather bound notebooks and papers signed by presidents, but they are the next best thing and now you can find a lot of them while sitting at home on your couch. Scholars and graduate students can do substantial research at their desks and undergraduates can do much more sophisticated original research using online documents collections. And history enthusiasts can create personal archives for every niche interest just by setting up a Tumblr or Pinterest account.

Like blogging, the world of online collections is too large to cover fully here –- or probably anywhere these days. I’ve picked a few representative collections to give you a sense of what’s out there.

But first, the big news in online collections is the launch this week of the Digital Public Library of America.* The DPLA, in the words of its founding director, Dan Cohen, a leading digital history pioneer, will be

connecting the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums so that the public can access all of those collections in one place; providing a platform, with an API [application programming interface] for others to build creative and transformative applications upon; and advocating strongly for a public option for reading and research in the twenty-first century. The DPLA will in no way replace the thousands of public libraries that are at the heart of so many communities across this country, but instead will extend their commitment to the public sphere, and provide them with an extraordinary digital attic and the technical infrastructure and services to deliver local cultural heritage materials everywhere in the nation and the world.

The DPLA is poised to become the main hub in the universe of online collections. The US National Archives has already “donated” 1.2 million of its objects and documents to the DPLA and other public institutions are lining up to make their collections available there. This is one to watch.

In the meantime, the growing number of online collections fall roughly into three categories: big and varied collections of documents, photographs, and other objects, smaller curated collections focused on a specific topic, or blog-like publications of images on a single topic.

In the first category, one of the earliest and best major online collections is just celebrating its tenth anniversary. The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London’s Criminal Court, 1674-1913, with documents on almost 200,000 trials and biographical information on 2500 individuals, is the largest collection of “texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published.” The individual documents are available as typed text and as scanned facsimile. In addition to the documents, background essays offer the historical context for understanding the court proceedings and the place of the court in London social history. A variety of search techniques are offered (and very clearly explained), some using quite complex digital technologies. The site also offers essays and smaller, curated collections on specific topics, like Black Communities in London or Gender in the Proceedings that require no prior knowledge and can be of interest to general readers as well as specialists. These features make The Old Bailey website a model of organization and accessibility.

The Portal to Texas History is another huge collection with close to 300,000 items, including full runs of rare local newspapers, photographs, books, and maps. The Portal’s education pages, linked to the state history standards for 4^th and 7^th grade, are especially good. Individual topics (The Battle of San Jacinto) come complete with primary sources, visual and text, instructions on reading sources, and classroom activities. Sets of primary sources on broader topics (Native Americans in Tejas, Cowboy Culture, Civil Rights, and individuals including Sam Houston and Quanah Parker), are a good place to start a research project, but they’re fun to read for anyone interested in history, especially local history.

Smaller, curated collections can present a wide variety of sources on a single topic. My favorite recent discovery is Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran (1786-1925) at the Harvard website. Like a lot of these sites, WWQI can be used for research or it can be browsed for fun: texts of letters, poetry, essays, diaries; legal documents on wedding contracts and dowry agreements, wills and finances; photographs and works of art; everyday objects and oral histories on a topic that was completely new to me, can all now be enjoyed by anyone with a computer.

Another thematically focused collection is the Digital Archive from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, which makes available declassified government documents from all over the world. The documents are organized by topics like Sino-Soviet Relations (242 documents), The Berlin Wall (28 documents), or Intelligence Operations in the Cold War (111 documents). Want to read up on the history of North Korean foreign policy? The home page has Featured Collections, which today include what they call North Korean Military Adventurism (72 documents dating back to 1967). We often have students who want to write an honors thesis or research paper on an international topic but don’t know the languages well enough to do research; sites like these make international research projects possible. World History Matters is another George Mason site that offers links to online collections, both specific, such as Women in World History, and general, Finding World History, which includes an annotated list of sites organized by world region and time period.

These smaller curated collections allow readers to see connections between various media or authors or historical actors. They can give a newcomer to the field a broad familiarity with the kinds of documents, objects, opinions, experiences, and forms of communication produced by a discrete group. They differ from the big collections like The Old Bailey or the Texas Portal because their pages have been carefully selected from an even larger pool of raw documents. None of these sites or collections claims to be definitive; just the opposite. They all offer links to other collections, or lists of further reading for placing their materials in historical context.

Another form of curated documents can be found on websites that publish clusters of documents organized primarily for classroom use. The National Humanities Center runs a site, America in Class, that is also organized for teachers but is fun to explore on its own. Sources (including visual images and sound files) and classroom guides, as well as links to many other online collections, cover US History from 1492 through the 1920s. I found the collections on the Revolution and on African American history especially interesting. Similar US History collections that select and organize documents with teaching in mind include History Matters from George Mason University, Digital History from the University of Houston, and Primary Sources at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. These are similar to documents collections published in books, except that they often include audio or visual clips and they can take advantage of the web’s primary function and provide links to related material. The reading experience is enhanced by these possibilities for expansion.

Internet technology has been especially useful for any libraries with collections of photographs and other visual images to make their collections available. The Library of Congress and the New York Public Library have enormous image collections. The NYPL collection, for example, is divided into topical collections, the richness of which is hard to capture. Just scratching the surface these include: Russia and Eastern Europe in Rare Photographs, cars, cigarette cards, nature, New York City, the Middle East, more than 2000 Medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts are a few of the topics listed in their index. Wikimedia Commons, the visual branch of Wikipedia, contains some 16 million images that are all in the public domain. More specialized collections are becoming available as well. On a smaller scale, the Winterton Collection of East African Photographs is a stunning collection of over 7000 photos. And like most of the collections that come from educational institutions, this one comes with a page devoted to Winterton in the Classroom that provides historical analysis (timeline, essays, links to other historical sources) and context for thinking about the images.

The context is what’s missing from many popular history collections online. The Tumblr Spotlight: History page links to blog after blog of related but skimpily identified images. One of my favorites is called Turn of the Century, which describes itself as “everything strange and beautiful from 1850s-1920s.” I also like “My Daguerreotype Boyfriend,” a collection of handsome men in early photographs.

As a professional historian and public history promoter, I have mixed feelings about these sites. They’re fun and very popular and I enjoy the time I spend looking at them, but they exist only to be collected, quickly glimpsed, “liked,” maybe “shared,” and soon forgotten. Half the time, this doesn’t bother me at all: people have been collecting random objects and displaying them for all of recorded history. If nothing else, these sites show us that there’s a real public interest in history; these uncontextualized collections may even represent the dominant public interest in history. And are they that different from the Wilson Center’s selected collections or the images posted by The Library of Congress? The historian in me wants more information about provenance and historical context, but lacking that, there is still a visceral pleasure in the looking, which is worth cultivating, and may inspire the kinds of questions that lead people to seek more.

Optimism about the desire to both look at and learn more about such images comes from an unlikely place: the enormous link aggregator, Reddit, which has pages of links on every topic under sun. The aptly named HistoryPorn, is a subreddit for posting pictures of historical events. It’s not that different from a Tumblr blog, except that instead of being organized chronologically, the image links that appear at the top of the page are the ones that have received the most votes from other subreddit readers. The top link today as I write is “Burst of Joy,” a 1973 photo of ecstatic family members greeting their father who has been in a POW camp in North Vietnam. But there are also dozens of subreddits on major historical topics. The “History of Ideas” subreddit, for example, leads off with podcasts from Oxford on Shakespeare, a review of a book about Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau, and a lecture by Stanford professor Paul Robinson on Darwin. There is even a subreddit for recommended books in history and a page devoted to links to other history websites and resources on line.

The history pages on Reddit lack consistency but offer a way for history lovers to talk to each other, ask questions, and share their discoveries. HistoryPorn readers can look-and-run if they want, but if they’re curious, they can google “Burst of Joy,” and find themselves at Iconic Photos or Mechanical Icon or the Newseum to read or watch a video or listen to the photographer talk about the Pulitzer Prize winning photograph and its surprising back story. And then if one wants more, anyone can go straight to the website of the US National Archives to find original documents on photojournalism during the Vietnam War. These virtual images and texts can’t replicate the pleasure of holding original documents in your hands, but they make up for that by being so easily accessible and searchable, by being so seamlessly linked, and in many cases, by being so pleasurable to see.
*
Stay tuned for Part 3: Digital History For Real.

You might also enjoy:
Digital History: A Primer (Part 1).
Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web
Blog post about whether the DPLA will define what counts in Digital Humanities

*The Launch of the DPLA was postponed after the bombing at the Boston Marathon.

Lady Bird Johnson, In Her Own Words

by Michael L. Gillette

Between 1977 and 1991, Michael L. Gillette, executive director of Humanities Texas and former director of the LBJ Library Oral History Program, sat down with Lady Bird Johnson to discuss her childhood, family life and experiences as First Lady. For the first time anywhere, Not Even Past is publishing audio segments from these incredible conversations.

Lady Bird, 1915 (Image courtesy of the LBJ Library)

What happened when a young Lady Bird and a friend traveled to New York City in June 1934? Hear her impressions of Chinatown, Depression era poverty and a “museum for fish” she visited.

How did Lady Bird and LBJ meet? In this segment, she describes their very, very brief courtship and Lyndon’s almost immediate proposal.

After LBJ’s proposal, Lady Bird went out to San Marcos to meet Lyndon’s parents. Here she talks about first meeting Mr. and Mrs. Johnson and her impressions of the old Texas family.

“You’ve brought a lot of boys home, and this time you’ve brought a man.” These were the words of Lady Bird’s father after meeting Lyndon for the first time. Hear more about that initial encounter and life at the “Brick House,” Lady Bird’s family home in Karnack, TX.

Credits:

Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson Oral History Interviews, by Michael L. Gillette, LBJ Library

Digital History: A Primer (Part 1)

by Joan Neuberger

Internet technology is starting to have a profound influence on the ways we do history. Historians have found new places to write history, new ways to make sources available, and some historians have mastered the digital technology to create new kinds of data and new kinds of sources for asking new kinds of questions about the past.

How important are these changes? At this year’s annual convention of the American Historical Association, there were 43 panels on some aspect of what we are calling digital history. The two main showcase sessions, the Presidential and the Plenary panels, were also devoted to topics in digital history.

At Not Even Past we are committed to making good history accessible online, so I have developed an interest in all the ways history was becoming available to anyone with access to a computer. Over the last few years, digital history and digital humanities more broadly have moved from the esoteric margins of the profession to center stage.

In this series of blog posts, I will offer a survey of the digital landscape. That landscape has become so large and varied that it is impossible to cover completely. The good news is that the world of digital history is deeply interlinked. When you click onto one website or blog, you will find links to many more projects, blogs, sources, visualizations, and more. If you’re not careful, and if you’re like me, you could get lost on the enticingly unfamiliar pathways and spend far more time exploring than you expected. But you will have fun!

Digital History refers to many things, but I’m dividing it into three basic categories:

Putting history writing online. That’s what we’re doing at Not Even Past, and there are many other forms that great history writing takes online.
Putting sources online that used to be harder to learn about or harder to get your hands on or that required a walk to the library or a research trip halfway around the world.
Creation of new kinds of sources that make use of digital, web-based technology to tell historical stories in new ways or answer questions that require massive digital power or even make new kinds of documents.

Today I will write about how you can find high quality history writing online. There are far too many history blogs to attempt a representative survey so I have listed sites that I like because they consistently offer compelling writing on subjects that interest me even if they are outside my own field. Most blogs also include a “blogroll” of related sites, so once you start clicking you will find much more of what interests you; far more, probably, than you have time to read. And if you have a favorite history blog or two, send them with using the “Comments” and we’ll share them with the rest of our readers. Let’s start talking about Digital History.

Modern aeronautical map, from “Mapping the Earth, Mapping the Air,” by Felipe Cruz

Not Even Past is unusual in that it offers articles on a wide range of topics and in a wide range of formats. It’s also unusual in that it’s a collective project that makes accessible the research of professional historians in a single history department at a single university. Some other groups at The University of Texas at Austin have also developed some magazine-like collective blogs that are excellent. Four of our graduate students have started what they call “a new journal of narrative and experimental history.”

The Appendix posts long-form articles and short blog posts on sources and topics that don’t usually find their way into professional publications. They play with different styles of narrative – including an article written as a dialogue and an adaptation of a sixteenth-century travelogue by a Portuguese merchant as a graphic novel. Articles are both informative and provocative, encouraging us all to think about what it means to write history. The End of Austin is another group blog, this one produced by the American Studies department. It is devoted to thinking about Austin’s peculiar culture as a “city of perpetual nostalgia… where rapid change pulls against profound attachments to the way things are (or how they are imagined to be).” Another great collective effort from my own field of history can be found at Russian History Blog. A pretty eclectic site, they publish articles on historical documents, contemporary films, teaching issues, and several very interesting group discussions of recent books in the field. Asian History is superbly well served by Frog in a Well, a collective blog on Korean, Japanese, and Chinese history. Religion in American History and the US Intellectual History Blog are two excellent blogs that post just what the titles say. What’s the Deal With and Origins offer historical background to contemporary events; as does the behemoth History News Network.

Many blogs are written by individual historians about their specialized fields. Some very popular blogs include The Chirurgeon’s Apprentice, by medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris devoted to the horrors of pre-anesthetic surgery. Renegade South is Victoria Bynum’s blog about anti-slavery, mixed-race, and other unconventional southerners.

Timothy Burke’s Easily Distracted is an eclectic blog that might broadly be described as covering the encounter of professional history and contemporary public intellectual issues. BibliOdyssey is a primarily visual blog of historical book illustrations. Some mainstream publications have experimented with various kinds of history blogs. The New York Times, for example, has been running Disunion, a blog begun by Adam Goodyear and continued by additional historians, that is devoted to the history of the US Civil War.

If you don’t want to take my word for it you can Google “history blog” to find blogs that interest you. If you’d like a more reliable guide to the best history blogging you can check out the History Carnival.

History Carnival is a monthly selection of the best individual history blog posts from the previous month, chosen and posted on a different blog each month. (Not Even Past hosted the History Carnival in May 2012.) There’s a general History Carnival and then there are HCs on specific topics: Carnivalesque covers early modern Europe and others are listed here.

There are also a number of good blogs about Digital History. Two of the earliest and best digital historians blog at Dan Cohen’s blog and Miriam Posner’s blog. Benjamin Schmidt’s digital history blog, Sapping Attention, can get very technical but is innovative and interesting. Digital Humanities Now and Global Perspectives on Digital History keep up with the latest news on projects, people, software, and conferences about digital history and other fields.

Some sites invite the equivalent of public blogging. One of the most popular is History Pin. Anyone can pin a photo on this site and tell a story about it, or join it to a group of similar photos. History Pin is used by individuals as well as institutions. The US National Archives, for example, has its own “collection” on History Pin.

Finally, there are a number of photoblogs that run photography rather than text. Three of the best are produced by mass media news publications so they are usually focused on the contemporary, but they often run historical series. This month The Atlantic’s In Focus is running a series on the Bosnian War of the 1990s. The Big Picture, produced by the Boston Globe, recently ran a series called “Searching for America,” that displayed photos from the DOCUMERICA project run by the Environmental Protection Agency in the 1970s. Lens, the photoblog of The New York Times often features historical photographs. There are also blogs that post older historical photos. Shorpy runs several new historical photographs a day, usually from US history. The Retronaut is more international in scope, such as color photos of China in 1912, or, today’s post, Korean Girls playing on a see-saw.

The posting of historical photographs online begins to shift us away from the blog-world of historians writing history toward the massive project of digitalizing historical documents and making them available to the public. In the next blog in this series, I’ll turn to the availability of online sources for studying history and introduce you to everything from smaller sites with sources on, for example, women in 19c Iran to large collections of documents on US History from the National Archives and the National Humanities Center.

Digital History: A Primer (Part 2). Putting Sources Online.

Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject by Saba Mahmood (2004)

by Janine Jones

Pakistani anthropologist Saba Mahmood began her field research among Muslim women’s revival (da’wa, Arabic “call”) movements in Cairo in 1995 with a number of admitted preconceptions. An ardent feminist and leftist scholar, Mahmood assumed a certain degree of internalized subordination in women who find solace and meaning in deeply patriarchal traditions. Yet, over the course of two years listening to and learning from several religious revival groups run by da’iyat (female “callers”), she discovered an entirely different understanding of religious devotion. Her innovative ethnography of that time, Politics of Piety, sets out a new vision of feminist theory that re-examines the complicated, underexplored relationship between gender and religion from the perspective of women who participate within – as opposed to fight against – patriarchal systems. In doing so, Piety advances a new and timely approach to the study of ethics, identity, agency, and embodiment in post-colonial cultures.

Popularly accepted da’iyat are historically quite new. Concerns about possible gender-mixing improprieties and the belief that only men are intellectually and spiritually able to lead Muslim communities mean that, generally speaking, Islamic preaching and community leadership have been the prerogative of men alone. Female Islamic preachers arose as part of the resurgence of Islamic devotion that swelled region-wide in the Middle East beginning in the 1970s. They continued to gain popularity and acclaim as modern communications technologies facilitated women’s access to Islamic education. By the 1990s, Muslim women from different social classes and backgrounds, all interested in rediscovering their religious community’s rich traditions and ethical moorings, were regularly attending classes associated with local mosques, learning at the feet of dai’yat known for their moral rectitude and religious wisdom.

Mahmood describes Hajja Samira, a da’iya associated with a working-class mosque, and Hajja Faiza, a quiet, articulate Qur’anic exegete who teaches women from upscale neighborhoods, both of whom are deeply concerned with what they view as the modern abstraction of Islam into a private, personal affair that can be distinguished from other aspects of life. They teach their students to counter this secular division, emphasizing the “old Islamic adage: ‘All life is worship.’” Other da’iyat engage in lively debates with their students and each other about the purpose and function of the hijab, or Islamic headcovering.

“Marching Women,” a mural in Cairo dedicated to the women of the Egytian Revolution (Image courtesy of Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen)

Mahmood meets with students as well, interviewing participants in the mosque movement from all walks of life, educational levels, and philosophies. She notes the complex self-awareness with which many women seek to negotiate the conflicting claims of modern life and Muslim morality, including, for example, women whose work demands require them to participate in practices of dubious piety like transacting business with men or traveling in mixed-sex vehicles. Throughout, Mahmood observes that the wilting, oppressed Muslim woman of popular imagination is nowhere in sight. This is, in part, because the women of the urban women’s mosque movement are not primarily concerned with political equality or the implications of gender hierarchy. Rather than view their lives through a filter of political rights, they orient their understandings of self and role in terms of their obligations to God. Mahmood explores the intersection of that understanding with embodied practices, ethical issues, and personal identity, elaborating a theoretically dense and evocative approach to religion that will be useful to scholars in a variety of fields.

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

Einstein, Relativity and Myths

by Alberto A. Martínez

We’ve all heard of the theory of relativity, but what factors really led Einstein to that famous work? In this fascinating talk, Professor Al Martinez discusses how young Einstein formulated relativity, by focusing on debunking several historical myths. His talk is based on his books: Science Secrets: The Truth About Darwin’s Finches, Einstein’s Wife, and Other Myths (2011), and Kinematics: The Lost of Origins and Einstein’s Relativity (2009).

Al Martínez’s piece about Einstein’s religious beliefs

Michael Stoff’s piece about the evocative “Einstein Letter”

“You have died of dysentery” – History According to Video Games

Right now millions of people worldwide are reliving the American Revolution through a new historical fiction. This fictionalized revolution, however, is not televised on PBS, nor is it directed by Steven Spielberg or written by Ken Follett. Instead, this version of the Revolution comes to us through a video game called Assassin’s Creed III. Developed and published by the French gaming company Ubisoft, Assassin’s Creed III follows the story of Connor Kenway, a half-English and half-Mohawk assassin battling the British and the Knights Templar (don’t worry, I’ll explain later) during the period of the US Revolution. From Connor’s perspective, players are able to interact with famous historical figures such as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, and explore virtual recreations of colonial cities such as Boston, New York and Philadelphia. The game, released on October 30, has already met with critical acclaim from gaming journalists and it promises to become the most consumed and financially successful historical fiction, in any medium, this year.

The video game is a relatively new medium, but it has a long record of using history to tell stories like the one found in Assassin’s Creed. Given the mass popularity of video games and gaming culture, it seems appropriate that we begin to analyze the history portrayed in this medium in the same way we consider a historical novel or period film. Why and how is history used in video games? How has this use of history changed over time? How does the use of history in video games compare to the use of history in other media? Finally, are these uses of history merely a pretense for entertainment or do they offer a real opportunity to learn about the past?

Early examples of history in video games came from titles designed explicitly for classroom use. Probably the best and most famous of these is The Oregon Trail. Developed by a group of teachers and released by the Minnesota Educational Company Consortium (MECC) in 1974, The Oregon Trail positions players as American settlers leading their families from Independence, Missouri to Oregon in 1848. While on the trail, players are required to manage their provisions as well as a number of impromptu crises, including broken wagon wheels, spoiled food, overworked oxen, and the sudden death of caravan members (usually from dysentery).Success is not guaranteed and the player’s expedition will end in failure without careful planning. Despite its rudimentary visuals and gameplay, The Oregon Trail gives players a rather accurate sense of the difficulty of transcontinental travel in the nineteenth century. It also provides players with something they cannot get from a book or film: an understanding of the past introduced through direct interaction. This interaction, however, is limited to the journey on the trail, and leaves the surrounding historical context (e.g. motivations for the journey, relations with Native Americans, etc.) up to the players, or their teacher, to fill in.

As The Oregon Trail and its imitators proliferated in classrooms during the 1980s and 90s, commercial games also began to adopt historical settings and topics. Early ventures in this genre included adaptations of historically themed board games, such as Axis and Allies, Diplomacy, and Risk, as well as digital versions of turn-based, tactical military games focused on the campaigns of the Second World War. These games were joined later by a large number of real-time strategy games (RTSs), including The Ancient Art of War, as well as games from the Total War and Age of Empires series. Like the vast majority of historical novels and films, these games focus on high politics and military history. Unlike these media, however, video games often range across long historical time periods and allow players to engage with a wide variety of subjects and events.

A key example of this type of work is the Civilization series, which debuted in 1991. Developed by the legendary Sid Meier, Civilization puts the player in charge of one of the world’s civilizations in 4000 B.C.E., with the objective of establishing and maintaining an empire until they reach either the game’s time limit (the game usually ends in the early 21st century) or one of several victory conditions (conquer all other civilizations by force, establish a colony on Alpha Centauri, be elected leader of the United Nations, or establish cultural hegemony). Players determine nearly every facet of their civilizations: agriculture, construction, demographics, diplomacy, economic policy, religion, and scientific research. The player’s civilization faces challenges from not only computer controlled competitors, but also from unhappy citizens and random natural disasters.

The Civilization series, in many respects, reflects a triumphalist, neoliberal conception of world history. Playable civilizations include crude stereotypes of current nation states, with many civilizations being completely out of place at the beginning of the game in 4000 B.C.E. For example, gamers can choose to play as the United States “civilization,” complete with an Abraham Lincoln avatar, dressed in a bearskin toga. Players often find that the game’s victory conditions are easier to achieve if they maintain a civilization that is democratic, culturally liberal, and secular. Play at all difficulty levels rewards aggressive foreign policy and the military conquest of neighboring civilizations is often a simpler path to victory than diplomatic or financial incentives. An aggressive foreign policy, however, can end in disaster if competing nations have nuclear weapons.

These problems aside, the Civilization series has much to recommend it from a historian’s perspective. It is the only history game that offers a global perspective on the past as well as an appreciation of contingency in history. The game does not follow the historical record – a player could successfully lead the Carthaginian Empire past Rome and begin the Industrial Revolution in Africa in the seventeenth century. Moreover, players can use a custom map or other modifications to create counterfactual situations in order to test variables. How different would European history be if the British Isles were connected to the continent? What if societies in the Americas had access to horses before contact with Europe? Civilization encourages players to consider the longue durée of cultural, economic, and ecological structures. And for players who seek a deeper knowledge of the game’s concepts, each edition of Civilization provides a “Civilopedia” with encyclopedia-size synopses of historical events and figures.

Though the Civilization series remains popular today, the most popular and profitable history video games of recent years come from the first-person shooter (FPS) genre. Beginning with 1992’s Wolfenstein 3D and continuing with the Call of Duty series in the 2000s, FPS games use the history of the Second World War as window dressing for what are essentially action movie simulators. Players take the role of a soldier from one of the Allied powers and shoot their way through levels filled with either German or Japanese enemy soldiers. These games make no effort to contextualize the player’s actions or to consider the moral implications of those actions. Moreover, the Second World War portrayed in these games remains firmly entrenched in the “Good War” narrative: Allied soldiers in these shooters are always heroic and righteous.

Other recent games, including the FPS series BioShock and the strategy series Command and Conquer: Red Alert, use history as the basis for adventures in counterfactuals. The first BioShock places the player in the city of Rapture, a submerged metropolis under the Atlantic Ocean built in the 1940s by a Howard Hughes-esque industrialist who hoped to create a utopian society based on Randian, or Objectivist philosophy (spoiler: it didn’t turn out so well). BioShock: Infinite, scheduled for release next year, is set in the floating city of Columbus in 1912, and will see the player engaging with Progressive Era ideas of American empire, eugenics, and exceptionalism. Command and Conquer: Red Alert begins with Albert Einstein using time travel to murder Adolf Hitler in 1924 in order to prevent the Second World War. Unfortunately, this event creates a parallel timeline in which the Soviet Union embarks on world domination during the 1950s.

The Assassin’s Creed series, which debuted in 2007, also revels in counterfactual fantasies, but attempts to place these stories in realistic historical settings. In Assassin’s Creed, players take the role of Desmond Miles, a modern day bartender who is kidnapped by a shadowy multinational corporation called Abstergo Industries. Abstergo forces Desmond to use a virtual reality machine called the Animus, which allows the user to relive the lives of their ancestors using their DNA (hold on, it gets crazier). During the first game of the series, Desmond relives the life of his ancestor Altaïr ibn-La’Ahad, a Syrian assassin who lived during the third Crusade. The second installment of the series finds Desmond reliving the life of Ezio Auditore da Firenze, a fifteenth-century Italian assassin. Eventually, Desmond learns that Abstergo is the modern incarnation of the Knights Templar and that the organization is using Desmond’s ancestral memories to search for the “Pieces of Eden,” objects of immense supernatural power (think the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark). Famous historical figures make appearances throughout the series. Assassin’s Creed II, for instance, sees Leonardo Da Vinci, act as an early modern Q to the player’s James Bond, providing the protagonist with an assortment of gadgets, including his famous tank and flying machine models.

The story in Assassin’s Creed – the Illuminati meets Ancestry.com – has much in common with the conspiratorial history seen in the fiction of Dan Brown and Neal Stephenson. This fantastical story, however, is couched in a largely accurate and detailed historical setting. The first installment of the series, set in Palestine, features period recreations of Acre, Damascus, and Jerusalem. Assassin’s Creed II, set in Italy, provides recreations of Florence, Monteriggioni, Venice, and Rome.

This game also adds historical descriptions to the buildings players encounter (and climb) while playing, including St. Mark’s Basilica, Santa Maria del Fiore, Santa Croce, and the Ponte Vecchio. A direct sequel to Assassin’s Creed II, called Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, takes place in Istanbul and provides a similar level of detail. Developer Ubisoft’s effort at recreation also extends to the human characters who populate the game world. Careful attention is paid to clothing, demeanor, and language. In pre-release coverage for the third game, creative director Alexander Hutchinson described the process of research and consulting that went into creating a Native American protagonist. Hutchison boasts of reading Wikipedia entries and watching documentaries, but his company also relies on a multinational group of professional historians and in-house researchers.

Of course, Ubisoft’s recreations are far from perfect and not always completely accurate. Yet their work demonstrates the potential for video games to provide consumers with history that is both interactive and instructive. To be sure, this history continues to focus on blood and guts, but a desire for different stories is emerging. For instance, Xav de Matos of Joystiq.com suggested last month that developers create a game focused on Harriet Tubman and the abolitionist movement. The recent growth in the popularity of video games has forced the industry and traditional gamers to begin to confront some of their biggest demons regarding racism, violence, and, most importantly, sexism. Ubisoft, for its part, published a portable game called Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, which follows the life of a female African-French Assassin in eighteenth century New Orleans. If this trend continues, there is little doubt that new and different video game histories will emerge, and it will be exciting to see if those narratives lead to better opportunities for learning about the past.

The author would like to thank Dr. John Harney for his comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

You might also like:

Keith Stuart, “Assassin’s Creed and the Appropriation of History,” The Guardian

Here on Not Even Past: Joan Neuberger, “Telling Stories, Writing History: Novel Week on NEP.“

A free version of the original Civilization is available here

For ideas on using video games in the classroom, see Jeremiah McCall’s Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History (2011)

More by Bob Whitaker on gaming can be found on twitter @whitakeralmanac and his Playstation, Steam, and Xbox gamertag is hookem1883.

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines: See Wikipedia:Non-free content.

Using History to See the World

by Gustavo Fernandez

(Photo courtesy of Gustavo Fernandez)

To some, the term “international history” may come across as vague and unfamiliar. Gustavo Fernandez, a student at UT Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, has dedicated an entire website, “Using History to See the World,” to demystifying this academic field. Fernandez defines international history as a sub-field of history that describes how nations, non-state actors, and non-governmental organization interact in the international arena. On his website, Fernandez talks about the different ways that historians, policymakers, and students use history to address, understand, and solve present-day policy issues. What historical examples, for instance, do today’s historians turn to before offering advice on how the United States should react to Iran’s decision to develop its nuclear program? What do Fox News pundits mean when they criticize Barack Obama for being an “appeaser”?

“Using History to See the World” contains book reviews, videos, links to relevant online news publications and course syllabi, and a blog to help readers answer these and other policy-related questions.

Photo credits:

Mario Tama,“Ahmadinejad,” 22 September 2008

Getty Image via tonygido/Flickr Creative Commons

University of Texas at Austin – Department of History

(Professor: Jeremi Suri)

Debating Bolshevism

by Andrew Straw

Communism acquired many different faces during the twentieth century. In the Soviet Union, it became known as Bolshevism. Named after the political party, led by Vladimir I. Lenin, that defeated the rival Menshevik Party in the October Revolution in 1917, Bolshevism would become the official political dogma of the Soviet Union for decades to come. The domestic response to Lenin’s revolutionary doctrine has inspired nearly a century’s worth of historical literature. Yet one question remains: how did other countries worldwide understand and react to what seemed like a particularly Soviet brand of communism?

Poster shows a Bolshevik leaning on a map of Europe and setting fire to Bavaria. The text below says: “The Bolshevik is coming! Throw him out on Election Day! Bavarian People’s Party.” (Courtesy of The Library of Congress)

Andrew Straw, a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin, created “Debating Bolshevism” to answer this very question. While even Stalin questioned the relevance of the term in as late as 1952, one glance at primary and secondary literature from across the globe during the twentieth century demonstrate that while the term may seem obsolete now, understanding what Bolshevism meant, how it was used, and why people had such strong reactions to it is crucial to understanding twentieth century history. The fact that the Soviet Union was the only official Bolshevik state in no way confined the idea of Bolshevism to the USSR. After all, Bolshevism’s own origins came from a transnational dissident group in European exile, one in which Lenin himself claimed membership. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Bolshevism entered into an ideological debate taking place on a world stage. Supporters presented it as an alternative to Western goals and principles of the West. Debating Bolshevism demonstrates that the international community from all points of the political spectrum took it seriously: its detractors maligned its violent excesses, and its supporters exalted its unhinging of imperial powers and rapid change.

Lenin leads the October Revolution wearing a proletarian workers’ cap on the front page of a 22 January 2009 issue of Pravda. The front-page article is etitled “On the Crisis,” referring to the recent spread of “Occupy Wall Street” protests in cities around the world. The accompanying text states that unemployed workers in Putin’s Russian (unemployment had reach nearly 20% in some areas) are ripe for communist revolution and calls on all concerned to attend a communist rally that was held on January 31 in Moscow.

Further down the page, a picture of pre-revolutionary Russian workers stands side by side with an image of currently unemployed Muscovites to underline the point. In addition, the newspaper includes a flyer for the demonstration that prominently displays the clenched fists of workers.

Mao Zedong was one of the prominent leaders of the 20^thcentury, and the road leading to his successful consolidation of power in the People’s Republic of China was heavily informed by the Bolshevik idea of a radically revolutionary break and guerilla warfare tactics. Mao was a firm believer that a potential revolutionary situation exists in any country where the government consistently fails in its obligation to ensure at least a minimally decent standard of living. While guerilla warfare certainly existed before Bolshevism, Mao was inspired by Bolshevik anti-imperialism, revolutionary self-determination of colonized populations, and civilian participation. Mao’s literature on military strategy drew heavily from Lenin’s On Guerilla Warfare, citing both Lenin’s political ideas and military tactics and sharing the belief that a “people’s” revolution was inevitable. Furthermore, even Western military men viewed Lenin as key to the Marxist revolutionary trends because they thought, “only when Lenin came on the scene did guerilla warfare receive the potent political injection that was to alter its character radically.

But despite the influence, Mao did not adhere to Moscow demands calling for a proletarian revolution, but instead he believed China’s revolutionary potential was housed entirely in the peasantry. Mao “knew and trusted the peasants, and had correctly gauged their revolutionary potential.” At least at this seemed to by the case to Samuel B. Griffith wrote the 1961 introduction to his translation of Mao’s on Guerilla warfare. While Mao’s Cultural Revolution and collectivization would later bring cause take a huge toll on the countryside, his initial use of peasants contrasted with the distrust and disdain Lenin and especially Stalin had for the Russian peasantry. Mao’s view was a such source of dissension between him and the Kremlin that Moscow even sanctioned the attempt by Zhou Enlai and a group known as the “28 Bolsheviks” who tried to replace Mao in 1934. These tensions would remain and only grow into the Sino-Soviet split during the Cold War.

Visit Andrew Straw’s graduate student homepage.

University of Texas at Austin – History Department

(Professor: Jeremi Suri)

Photo credits:

Zhou Zhenbiao, “Marx’s – The Glory of Mao’s Ideologies Brightens Up the New China,” Peking, 1952

People Fine Arts via The Library of Congress

The Civil World: A Global “War Between States”

by Henry A. Wiencek

Can historians reinterpret the American Civil War as a global event? This question inspired Henry Wiencek, a first year doctoral student in history at the University of Texas at Austin, to create the website “The Civil World: A Global ‘War Between States.’”

A rendering of the naval battle between in the infamous CSS raider, Alabama, and the Union Keasarge.

Weincek designed the site to provide an “intellectual portal” for historians, students, and general interest readers alike to consult in order to learn about the economic, diplomatic, and social changes ushered in by the Civil War on the international stage. That the Civil War can be interpreted as an international event may come as a surprise to many readers. The conflict, after all, is often taught and thought of as a regional phenomenon: its origins, key players, events, and consequences are traditionally thought to be constrained within U.S. borders. Wiencek’s website tells a different story. Through its diverse collection of maps, newspaper clippings, and recent historical literature, “A Civil World” argues convincingly that the war’s international stage played a significant role in the war’s origins, trajectory, and eventual outcome.

(A Harper’s Weekly cartoon satirized the widespread fear that a post-bellum, pre-Reconstruction America will descend into a “Mexican” state of constant civil war.)

Abraham Lincoln as the “Federal Phoenix” in the British magazine Punch.

University of Texas at Austin – Department of History

(Professor: Jeremi Suri)

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