history Archives - Page 6 of 10

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.

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

Could a Muslim – or a Catholic or a Jew – Be President? A 1788 Constitutional Debate

by Denise A. Spellberg

The Constitution’s ban on religious tests prompted the nation’s first debate in 1788 about whether a Muslim – or a Catholic or a Jew – might one day become president of the United States. William Lancaster, a delegate to the North Carolina convention to ratify the Constitution, worried: “But let us remember that we form a government for millions not yet in existence. I have not the art of divination. In the course of four or five hundred years, I do not know how it will work. This is most certain, that Papists may occupy that chair, and Mahometans may take it.”

Lancaster asserted these future fears of a “certain” Catholic or Muslim president on July 30, 1788 as part of a day-long debate on the Constitution’s Article VI, section 3: “… no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” His views are preserved as the final utterance in the most detailed attack on – and defense of – a uniquely American ideal of religious pluralism, one that included Muslims at the founding.

Thomas Jefferson’s 1764 copy of The Koran (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

The Constitution’s no religious test clause, intended to end strife among Protestants of varied denominations, also theoretically ended exclusive Protestant control over federal appointed and elected offices. An Anti-Federalist, Lancaster and the majority of delegates to the North Carolina convention, opposed not just all non-Protestant participation in the federal government but the Constitution itself. (Anti-Federalists would eventually defeat ratification by a landslide 184 to 84 vote.) Henry Abbot, an Anti-Federalist, worried at the beginning of the day’s debate that Protestant rights of conscience were not sufficiently protected: “They suppose that if there be no religious test required, pagans, deists, and Mahometans might obtain offices among us…”

For Federalists in North Carolina, support for the Constitution thus also included an inadvertent defense of the political equality of Muslims, Catholics, and Jews. James Iredell, later appointed to the Supreme Court by President George Washington in 1790, countered Abbot’s anxieties in the 1788 debate. He included Muslims in his country’s new blueprint: “But it is to be objected that the people of America may, perhaps, choose representatives who have no religion at all, and that pagans and Mahometans may be admitted into offices. But how is it possible to exclude any set of men, without taking away that principle of religious freedom which we ourselves so warmly contend for?”

James Iredell, a prominent Federalist and Supreme Court Justice who expressed support for the incorporation of Muslims into American society (Image courtesy of the U.S. Government)

Iredell’s universally inclusive stance shocked his listeners. At the time, there were 2,000 Jews in the United States and 25,000 Catholics; both were despised minorities. Catholics were perceived as dangerous because of their past persecution of Protestants in Europe and their allegiance to the Pope. All the delegates to the North Carolina ratification convention were, by law, Protestant, but seemingly none were aware of the thousands of enslaved West African adherents of Islam then in the United States.

The Muslim slave Omar ibn Said, for example, lived in Fayetteville, North Carolina from 1811 until his death in 1863, two years before the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution would have granted him his freedom. Omar is famous for writing his autobiography in Arabic, which is preserved still. A mosque in Fayetteville now bears his name. James Iredell, a slave owner, might argue for the rights of future Muslim citizens in theory, but even he assumed these “Mahometans” remained an exclusively foreign population. The majority of Americans associated Muslims with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ottoman Turkish military incursions in Europe. North African pirates remained a more immediate problem for Americans. In 1784, they began seizing American commercial shipping in the Mediterranean, left defenseless without British naval protection it the wake of Independence.

Omar ibn Said, a Muslim slave from Fayetteville, North Carolina (Image courtesy of UNC University Libraries)

At home, the fate of all non-Protestants, Muslims, Catholics, and Jews remained linked together in debate on the Constitution. The idea of Muslims and Jews as citizens with rights was not invented in the United States. John Locke, the English political theorist, first asserted the possibility in his 1689 tract on toleration. In 1776, Thomas Jefferson, who considered Locke his hero, copied this precedent: ““he sais ‘neither Pagan nor Mahomedan nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion.’” What Jefferson noted in Locke as theory, James Iredell first asserted in actual political debate in support of a Constitution that legally protected the equality of male Muslim, Catholic, and Jewish believers.

If you’d like to learn more:

The complete transcript of the North Carolina debate may be found online in Elliot’s Debates, The Debate in the Several States Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, volume 4, pp. 191-215, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lwed.html. This brief discussion is based on the author’s article “Could a Muslim Be President? An Eighteenth-Century Constitutional Debate,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 39, no. 4 (2006), pp. 485-506 and her forthcoming book, Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders, which will be published by Knopf in October 2013.

“Her Program’s Progress”

This Associated Press photograph was taken in 1966 to accompany an article by Frances Lewine about Lady Bird Johnson’s beautification project, entitled, “Her Program’s Progress.”

“Mrs. Lyndon Johnson has begun a national movement to eradicate blighted and ugly scenery from America, feeling ‘ugliness is an eroding force on the people of the land.’ On visits to small towns, large cities, national parks and points of scenic and historic interest, she related such visits to the benefits of natural beauty. She has been instrumental in legislation and donations to improve, clean up or renovate national eyesores everywhere. Here, before a backdrop of Lake Powell, Mrs. Lyndon Johnson speaks at dedication ceremonies of the Glen Canyon Dam near Page, Arizona, in late September 1966.”

When Lady Bird took the podium, as one of a host of national and local politicians, she pointed out that the region surrounding the dam “consists of eons of time laid bare – on stone pages and in the treasure troves of Indian myths and artifacts” that would make the resulting Lake Powell “a magnet for tourists.” Evoking the genius of technology, the conservation of water, and the spirituality of nature, she remarked, “To me, the appealing genius of conservation is that it combines the energetic feats of technology – like this dam – with the gentle humility that leaves some corners of the earth untouched – alone – free of technology – to be a spiritual touchstone and a recreation asset.”

Only a decade earlier, the area that Lake Powell flooded had been a vast, arid desert, peppered with ancient American Indian cliff dwellings and majestic rock structures, like Rainbow Bridge. The resulting reservoir was impressive given that it filled up a network of side, slot, and crater canyons measuring more than 150 miles long and with a shoreline longer than the east coast of the United States. The dam — a barrier of five million cubic yards of reinforced concrete (more concrete than was used in Hoover Dam) — was hailed as one the “the engineering wonders of the world” by the Bureau of Reclamation as well as local newspapers, and state and local officials in both Arizona and Utah. It was honored as “the outstanding engineering project” by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Yet, among environmentalists it was (and is) considered one of the nation’s most controversial projects. Flooding the canyon disrupted the free flow of the Colorado River, destroyed the original natural beauty of the site, and made dozens of plant and wildlife species extinct.

Clearly, beautification was in the eye of the beholder. For Lady Bird Johnson, as well as many other Americans, technology did not necessarily ruin nature. Later on this leg of her 1966 Beautification tour, she also paid a brief visit to San Ildefonso Indian Pueblo, dedicating a highway and a park and planting seedlings. All of this earned her the nickname: “Our First Lady of National Beautification” from the New York News on November 13, 1966.

Often when thinking about Lady Bird Johnson’s Beautification Program, we overlook the ways she celebrated technology as much as nature — especially if it aided people’s access to nature or natural resources.

For more, see Erika Bsumek’s book: The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam: Infrastructures of Dispossession on the Colorado Plateau (University of Texas Press, 2023)

The text of the speech may be found: Lady Bird Johnson, “Glen Canyon Dam Dedication Ceremony,” item display 75982, Cline Library, Northern Arizona University.

Photograph: from the author’s private collection.

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”

2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse by Matthew Restall and Amara Solari (2011)

by Kristie Flannery

While many in the US thought the world would end on November 6 when the guy they didn’t vote for won the Presidency, another whole section of the population is convinced that the apocalypse will come on December 21, 2012; the fast approaching winter solstice, in accordance with predictions made by ancient Mayans. A Reuter’s poll of 16,262 people in 20 countries conducted in May this year showed that “nearly fifteen per cent of people worldwide believe the world will end during their lifetime and ten per cent think the Mayan calendar could signify it will happen in 2012.”

These are striking figures, and ones that you might find easier to believe after scanning the results of a Google search for the terms “Maya prophecy.” Only last week the electrician visiting my apartment told me that he thinks something like the apocalypse is coming: according to 70 year old Austinite Sonny, there will be a big earthquake on the east coast of the USA, and something like 9/11, but bigger, pretty soon.

Why are so many people convinced of the world’s impending destruction? There is no doubt that pop-culture has nurtured the apparently widespread fears of the looming end of the world. Roland Emmerich’s blockbuster disaster film 2012 (released in late 2009) surely played a role in translating the Mayan apocalypse from a fringe discourse into the mainstream. Furthermore, in the past twelve months, serious news-media outlets including The Guardian have discussed the end of days as predicted by the ancient Mayans (this British newspaper published the comforting words of expert archaeologists who reassure us that “the end of the world is not quite nigh”).

What is going on here? Should we start filling the bathtub with water and hoarding stocks of canned food, flashlights, and medical supplies as December 21 approaches?

Clay rendering of a Mayan priest (Image courtesy of Wolfgang Sauber/Wikimedia Commons)

Thankfully two historians, Mathew Restall and Amara Solari, have come to the rescue with the publication of a new book 2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse. In the authors’ own words, this study “takes seriously a potentially silly topic.” Restall and Solari provide an interesting discussion of pre-conquest Maya texts, including the famous but poorly understood Long Count calendar and “Monument 6” that form the basis of the present-day “2012-ology,” a the authors call it, which anyone interested in the approaching end of the world will want to read.

Albrecht Dürer’s 15th century woodcut, “The Revelation of St John: 4. The Four Riders of the Apocalypse” (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Restall and Solari’s most important contribution is showing that the belief in a near apocalypse is a deeply-rooted tradition in Western society. Drawing upon the Bible, the writings of the twelfth-century theologian Joachim di Diore, and Albrecht Dürer’s beautiful set of fifteen engravings of the apocalypse, Restall and Solari make a compelling argument that the origins of the Maya Apocalypse lie in the medieval European millenarian tradition. “Whereas millenarianism is not easily and clearly found in ancient Maya civilization, it is deeply rooted and ubiquitous in Western civilization. Whereas Maya notions of world-ending Apocalypse – with a capital A – was a profound and pervasive presence in the medieval West.”

A 1701 transcription of the “Popol Vuh,” a compilation of Mayan K’iche’ creation myths (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

This book examines the survival of the apocalypse discourse from the early-modern period through to today. Restall and Solari make the bold claim that Chilism (the specifically Christian version of the belief that an impending transformation will dramatically change society), is at the heart of Western modernity – in Christianity as much as in Marxism.

A Mayan alter excavated in Caracol, Belize. (Image courtesy of Suraj/Wikimedia Commons)

Those interested in colonial New Spain will appreciate Restall and Solari’s analysis of Mayan documents such as the books of Chilam Balam (the Books of the Jaguar Prophet), which reveal how the Western apocalyptical discourse influenced Mayan conceptions of time and the world.

Watch for our December post on Milestones on the Mayan calendar and the history of the concept of Apocalypse

“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.

Henry Wiencek Sr on Thomas Jefferson, Slave owner

Laura Miller begins her review of Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, with this:

“No founding father wrote more eloquently on behalf of liberty and human rights than Thomas Jefferson, and none has a more troubling record when it comes to the “peculiar institution” of slavery. At present, the popular understanding of Jefferson’s shilly-shallying on this issue doesn’t extend much deeper than knowing smirks about Sally Hemings and the (unacknowledged) children Jefferson fathered with her. We tend to assume that the dirtiest secrets of the past have to do with sex. But, as Henry Wiencek explains in his new book, “Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves,” the real filth is in the ledger books.”

On Friday, October 26, 2012, Mr Wiencek visited us at the UT History department to discuss the new book with Professors Jacqueline Jones and Robert Olwell and answer questions from the audience. Listen to the discussion here or click the link above.

Henry Wiencek, “The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson,” Smithsonian, October 2012

Laura Miller, Master of the Mountain reviewed, Salon, October 14, 2012.

Posted Monday, November 5, 2012

How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century, by Tonio Andrade (2008)

by Shery Chanis

Focusing on seventeenth-century Taiwan, the island east of mainland China populated by aborigines who specialized in deer hunting, Tonio Andrade seeks to explore the theme of early modern colonization in a much larger context as part of his greater effort of analyzing global history. According to Andrade, Taiwan, neighboring China, Japan, the Philippines (controlled by Spain), was part of a colonial trade network and soon a focus of contention between the Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Japanese and the Chinese.

Employing a variety of sources including travel and missionary accounts from Europeans, official records and correspondence from the Dutch East India Company (VOC), and documents from the Chinese, Andrade discusses the early modern colonization of Taiwan, known as Ilha Hermosa by the Portuguese, La Isla Hermosa by the Spanish, or Formosa by the Dutch. Spain strategically established a colony in northern Taiwan while the Dutch established theirs in the south in the first quarter of the seventeenth century.

1640 Dutch map of “Formosa,” the colonial term for Taiwan (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Fort Zeelandia, the Dutch East India Company’s Taiwanese headquarters (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

After Spain’s decreasing interest in Taiwan and their defeat by the Dutch gave it control of the island, the VOC corrected the Spanish mistake of not making their colony self-sufficient by developing an interesting strategy which Andrade calls “co-colonization”. Having determined that it would be too costly to send Dutch to Taiwan, the VOC introduced various incentives including free land, tax exemptions and property rights to attract Chinese from the nearby Fujian province in China to immigrate to Taiwan. The plantation of sugar and rice soon became lucrative business not only for the immigrants but also the VOC. In the process, the VOC also developed a lord-vassal relationship with the aborigines and gained control over the native population. Andrade argues that this co-colonization strategy was a key difference between the Spanish and the Dutch in their colonization efforts in Taiwan. This period of co-colonization between the Dutch and the Chinese was successful so long as the interests of both parties were met. Towards the end of the century, however, the VOC’s tax increase lost the support of the Chinese immigrants, ultimately leading to rebellions from many Chinese settlers and to the Dutch defeat by Zheng Chenggong, the Ming loyalist of great military power.

Dutch sketch of a native “Formosan” circa 1650 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

1661 Dutch engraving of Chinese soldiers in Taiwan (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Andrade’s study of the colonization of Taiwan demonstrates the connections between Europe and Asia, which helps to illustrate a larger picture of early modern colonization beyond the Atlantic world. The multiple European and Asian colonizing powers in Taiwan also highlighted the intricate network of colonization in terms of not only military power but also trading relations and migration patterns. Interestingly, Andrade does not include any maps or other supplementary illustrations in the original/English version of his work, but he does so in the Chinese translation. Even more thought-provoking is the book title of the Chinese version. Instead of How Taiwan Became Chinese, the Chinese title is How Formosa Became Taiwan Prefecture, carrying a much more Sinocentric undertone. Nonetheless, Andrade’s book is a fascinating study on early modern global relations.

« Previous Page

Recent Posts