Tag Archives: history

Just another day…

Posted on by

As Pearl Harbor Day slid past more or less unnoticed by the vast bulk of the country last week, my mind set off wondering how long it would take for the anniversary of the great traumatic events of our lifetime to be considered “just another day” on the calendar. Pearl Harbor was one of, if not the defining event of our grandparent’s generation – the clarion call that freedom itself was imperiled across the globe. In their millions, that generation answered the call and rolled Japanese imperialism back across the Pacific and stomped out Nazi fascism in Europe. They did the impossible because the only other choice was to accept a world where the very idea of personal liberty was an endangered species.

Seventy-two years later, when we collectively remember Pearl Harbor, it’s as grainy newsreel footage or from three inch pictures in a textbook. We remember it as a singular event and not as part of a grand, sweeping epoch of history that saw democracy in the world fighting for its survival. Worse, we see those events as something so far removed from our daily lives that they might as well have been made up by Hollywood.

Like the attack on Pearl Harbor for our grandparents, for us the terrorist attack on New York and Washington are slowly slipping into history. Even now, students in our nation’s high schools are too young to have first hand memories of that clear morning in September. How long do you suppose it will be before that too is something confined to the pages of history and 20-second “filler” clips on the news channels?

We owe it to ourselves and to the future to be better stewards of our history. They should know as much as possible about the world they’re inheriting. We’re not doing anyone any favors when we play down or neglect the sacrifices of the past. If I can be so bold as to paraphrase one of the great heroes of my youth – We must always remember. We must always be proud. We must always be prepared, so we may always be free.

We’ve simply poured out too much blood and too much treasure for landmark dates to pass as just another day.

Annual history…

Posted on by

It’s that magical time of year where you get to distill the essence of your professional accomplishments down to less than 1000 words and then try not to slit your wrists as you realize how you’ve spent the last 365 days. Whether you’re compiling the annual unit history report or creating a list of accomplishments for your yearly performance appraisal, the one thing they serve to remind you of is how much time you’ve spent working on stuff that you have no actual interest in doing.

I’m the last person on earth to recommend that you need to find personal fulfillment in your profession. As I discovered with my ill-fated sojourn as a history teacher, having a deep and profound love for a subject doesn’t a fulfilling career make. For as much as I love all things historical, I despised most other elements of the job. Still, I’d like to think I’m doing more than writing reports, enduring meetings, and building the world’s most complex PowerPoint briefings.

The beauty part of these brief moments of professional clarity is that they only come on once a year, so for the other 11.5 months I can maintain a blissful level of willful ignorance on the topic. I think in the end, everyone is better served when I’m ignoring just how much time I’m spending on mundane, routine tasks and just keep churning out reams of paperwork on demand… because really, if I were stop and think about it for any sustained length of time, I’d be tempted to run off and join the damned circus.

I’m glad a have a job that keeps me employed (almost) full time… but I’m even more glad I don’t mistakenly identify what I do with who I am.

The obligatory post…

Posted on by

As a blogger I’ve found that some posts are obligatory. In November we talk about being thankful. In December, about the gathering together of family and friends. In July, of patriotism and love of county. Arbor day, however, is optional for most of us. Today, almost as far as the eye can see, is a celebration of Veterans Day. While I’m not taking anything away from those tributes to the men and women who served, after seven years of blogging, I’m just not sure I have anything new to say on the topic. That’s certainly not intended as a slam against any veteran, but a simple admission that I’m just not that creative – which is why I’ve obviously decided to take this in a different direction today.

Starting today, I’m going to try to avoid the obligatory posts or at least make them something other than the usual. How successful I’ll be at that kind of outside-the-box posting remains to be seen, but there’s nothing wrong with a challenge now and then to keep things interesting.

In keeping with that theme, I want to take you back to a world before Veterans Day; to the spark that ignited the world and led us to where we are today. I had a passing conversation last week with someone who bemoaned the fact that World War I is fast becoming another forgotten war, but Veterans Day traces it’s historic roots back to those bloody trenches, so it feels like an apt topic for today.

Don’t worry, this is just a suggestion, not a history lesson. I know World War I feels like a far away time and place now that it’s almost 100 years removed. Still for those who care to look, it’s jam packed with lessons about how great powers blunder their way into total war. The Guns of August isn’t all inclusive, but he’s a hell of a primer about what led Europe to war in 1914. It’s also surprisingly accessible for all you non-history majors. If you’re at all curious about what led us to Veterans Day, it’s about a good a place to start as I can recommend. Go ahead and pick up a copy from your favorite bookseller and see what I mean.

Revisiting Katrina…

Posted on by

The 50% of my job that doesn’t deal with PowerPoint is almost exclusively taken up by reading and writing. (We’re going to pretend for purposes of this discussion that good productive time isn’t serially wasted by the requirement to attend meetings.) This week I’ve been katrina_satellitereading up on some rather elderly documents that led me all the way back to late August 2005. To set the stage, it was hot and humid in Washington, DC and all hell was breaking loose along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and Louisiana.

My memories from Katrina differ pretty significantly from what most people remember seeing on the news. I remember a federal response effort that practically pleaded and begged state and local leaders in Louisiana to ask for assistance and that staged people, equipment, and mountains of “stuff” as close to the Louisiana border as possible when it became obvious to everyone but those officials that Katrina was going to overwhelm their capacity to respond. The Louisiana governor and New Orleans mayor had a different perspective, of course. All I know is the information showing up hourly on my desk in stacks of reports didn’t jive with the story they were telling in front of the camera. The real truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

I’d be hard pressed to reveal myself to be a bigger geek than you already think I am, but for me it was fascinating combing through the files of a different organization with a wholly different mission and reading their take on what was going on in Louisiana that summer. Reading accounts that weren’t filled with statistics of water, ice, temporary roofing material, and body bags on hand or tons of debris removed gave me a little fresh appreciation for what we were trying to do that summer. I guess that’s not all that surprising. With a degree in history I’ve always had a penchant for looking to the past to make informed guesses about what the future may hold.

Katrina was what one might call a significant emotional event for many and I’m not trying to make light of that in any way. At the same time, for me, Katrina started 60 days of some of the best professional work I’ve ever done. It was equal parts rewarding and exhausting – often simultaneously. Eight years after the fact, I won’t deny that I’m finding myself looking back on it with a bit of fond nostalgia. I suppose that’s fairly easy to do when you rode out the storm and its aftermath hunkered down in DC with electricity, running water, and a Starbucks in the lobby.

Celebrating Columbus…

Posted on by

I’m told by today’s endless media loop that celebrating Columbus Day isn’t cool. Blah, blah, genocide, blah, blah, conquest, blah, blah not a very nice man. Blah. Here was a guy who loaded three small wooden ships, pointed them west, and hoped at some point to find land waiting for him on the other side of the ocean before he ran out of food and water.

Christopher_Columbus“But, but,” they say, “He was looking for the Indies and only landed in the Caribbean by accident.” I suppose that’s true… but since I know people who can’t go across town without using their in-car navigation system, Google Maps, and hand written directions, I’m willing to cut the guy some slack considering he decided to cross an ocean using wind power and maps that were, at best, a wild ass guess of what might be out there.

“But, but,” they say again, “He killed all those nice natives.” Yeah, he did that. Can’t deny it. What seems to be forgotten in the discussion is Europe in the 1400s was a regular charnel house. Between the black plague and the Hundred Years’ War, letting the bodies hit the floor in the new world most likely didn’t particularly strike anyone as an unnatural state of affairs. All of our contemporary assessments of Columbus come from a 21st century perspective that is at least a full lifetime removed from any real concept of mass die-offs caused by war and pestilence.

We simply lack a point of reference for what “normal” was in the late 15th century. Even as a student of history, I always had a problem with those in the business who feel the need to apply contemporary morality to historical events. History is all about subtlety and context… and both are completely lacking when we try to hold Columbus to the standards of modernity.

Today, I’m celebrating Columbus Day. If that’s not cool, well, so be it.

Change…

Posted on by

Most people don’t pay any attention to pocket change. It usually ends up in a jar, run through a sorting machine, and traded in for fresh folding money at the first opportunity. As is my way, I’m a bit of a contrarian on the issue. I’ve always like loose change. Every time I get a handful of the stuff, I pick though it looking for the illusive steel penny or wartime silver nickel. I don’t put enough effort in or find enough of the “good stuff” to even consider it a hobby, but I still look. If you’re patient, every once in a great while you’ll manage to pull out a real gem.

Not long ago I pulled a 1917 “Mercury” dime out of a handful of change picked up over the course of the day. It was beat to hell and back, worn almost slick by the passing of time and changing hands. It was almost a dime sized slug rather than an actual coin. Still if you knew what you were looking at, the barest outline of Winged Liberty was right there waiting for someone to recognize her.

In 1917, when this little dime rolled out of the die at the Philadelphia Mint, Woodrow Wilson was President of the United States and the First World War raged in Europe. By the time the Korean War was halted by a ceasefire in ‘53, it had already been in circulation longer than I’ve now been alive. Sixty years have passed since then, yet here’s a little dime sitting on my kitchen table. Minted before prohibition and before women in America had the right to vote, it’s been out there circulating for the better part of a hundred years. It’s banged up and gritty, but I should hope to be doing so well in the summer of 2072 when I’m as old as that dime is today.

If you ever happen to wonder why I’ve paused to look though my handful of change at the gas station or fast food drive through, now you know. It’s because every now and then you get to hold a sliver of history right there in your own grubby little paw… and you can’t have that much fun anywhere else for just ten cents.

Wellington…

Posted on by

I’ve been reading alot about the 1st Duke of Wellington this weekend. Say what you want about the duke, but the guy lived a life. From colonial Ireland to the wars in India, Portugal, Spain, and France to post-Napoleonic politics, he kept himself busy. Now I’m a busy guy too, but somehow I don’t think Arthur was much worried about keeping the lawn trimmed back home or making sure dinner was on the table by 5PM on the dot. It seems the problem with reading biographies is that every now and then they remind you of all the incredible stuff you’re not out there doing yourself. Then again, the Iron Duke seemed to be a bit preoccupied with exactly those kind of details, so maybe I’m just getting too much sleep.

On Boston…

Posted on by

Boston, the cradle of the American revolutionary spirit was attacked this afternoon by nameless, faceless cowards. Brave Bostonians did not cower under the cannon fire of the worlds most powerful empire and I have the greatest faith that they will not cower in the face of these craven assaults. My thoughts are with the good people of Boston tonight where the spirit of America is again tested by those who would do us harm.

The difficult right…

Posted on by

The obvious direction to take tonight’s post is towards a memorial for Baroness Thatcher. The trouble with having a job and not being able to update the blog in real time, of course, is that the major outlets are already doing a fine job of lionizing the only Prime Minister other than Churchill that Americans know by name. Lady ThatcherI’m not sure that I can add much in the way of new information or even original thought. Still, marking the passing of one of the 20th century’s great statesmen only seems fitting.

​For those of us of a certain age, the world we’ve inhabited all our lives was largely shaped by the Cold War trinity of Thatcher, Reagan, and John Paul II. ​Even though she’d been out of the public eye for more than a decade, with Lady Thatcher’s death this morning the one last living thread connecting us to our much younger selves is severed. Through the benefit of 30-years worth of hindsight, it seems she was on the leading edge of a political movement that got a lot more right than they got wrong. In a career that spanned some truly tumultuous times, that’s as much a mark as anyone could hope to leave.

Long after anyone reading this has made their own final exit from the world’s stage, it will be left to the historians to judge the merits, unencumbered by personal memories of their subjects. The historian in me has a lingering suspicion that our successors will be far kinder to them as a group than their contemporaries have been.

Godspeed, Lady Thatcher. The world is a safer and more free because you chose to stand on principle and do the difficult right rather than ​following the path of ​the easy wrong.

The way ahead…

Posted on by

If New Year’s Eve is our annual opportunity to look back on the year that was, then New Year’s Day seems to be the natural counterpoint – a day to look at the 364 days ahead and try to discern the way ahead. Since I’m not psychic, the best I can do is assume that 2013 is going to look fairly similar to 2012 in some ways… and bear no resemblance to it in many others. History, at best, is an inexact guide to what might happen in the future. Like the stock market, past performance is no guarantee of future returns. Still, the year that was sets the starting point and the foundations of the year to come. That means you ignore it at your peril.

So what does 2013 hold? For me, I like to think it holds more time to focus on writing and less time being annoyed by work. I hope it means less money spent fixing rental property and more time spent enjoying the fruits of my labor. Optimistically, I would love it to mean that the blog finally breaks through the 10,000 visits per year mark. As a reach goal, I’m still holding out hope of becoming a professional lottery winner and finding some nice out of the way island to call home. Yeah, so some of that wish list is more practical than other bits. Even so, most of it seems to be in reach and that’s a comforting thought.

Come on, you guys weren’t expecting some batshit crazy idea like find the love of my life, move into the house with a picket fence, and raise 2.5 kids and an airedale, right? I said history is an inexact guide, not that I was going to throw it over the side and charge off in the opposite direction. I’m feeling a touch nostalgic, not suffering from head trauma after all.

I hope this little note has helped set the tone for 2013. It’s a brave new year with more snark, less tolerance of stupid, and even better writing than ever before… so stick around. I have a feeling that 2013 is going to be a real trip.