Author: Jane Shaw Stroup

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Crime and Punishment

Punishment should fit the crime. Last fall, taking a course on the Tudors and the Stuarts, I noticed that in early modern England (1485-1688) the punishments almost never fit the crime. A few examples follow, with comment below.

  • The great Catholic humanist Thomas More, author of Utopia, was Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor when Henry made himself the head of the Church of England in order to divorce Catherine of Aragon. Thomas More refused to accept Henry’s rejection of the Pope and Church doctrine, so he was beheaded for treason.
  • Archbishop Hugh Latimer, Bishop Nicholas Ridley, and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer were not as lucky as Sir Thomas More. When Catholics returned to power under Mary I, they were burned at the stake, a horrific fate worse than beheading. In fact, nearly 300 Protestants were burned during Mary’s reign. (And Lady Jane Grey, the nine-day Protestant queen before Mary, was executed.)
  • Moving forward to Charles II’s reign, we find that at least 24 Catholics were executed by being hanged, drawn, and quartered (another horrific way of dying) because they were accused of being part of a ”Popish plot.” Yet there was no Popish plot. It was invented by Titus Oates, a disreputable renegade who had been kicked out of many places, both Protestant and Catholic.

What troubles me most is that these (and other [1]) travesties of justice took place in a time when the English touted their liberties and judicial protections.

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Can Historians Be Funny?

“The Political Drama,” from the British Library (1834-35). “I govern the people. I pray for the people. I legislate for the people. I fought for the people. I preserve the peace for all four. And above the devil on the extreme right is; And I’ll have all five.”

Recently, I was asked whether historians avoid humor. My recent experience shouted “yes,” but I recalled that when I was a child my parents owned a small, amusing book about history. The author’s name was Richard Armour. I googled him and bought two of his books. I find him funny.

Armour was the author of at least 35 books and all kinds of poems, jokes, and essays. He was also a professor at such schools as Northwestern University and Claremont Graduate School and even dean of the faculty at Scripps College. 

His best-known book, It All Started with Columbus, is a riff on the education that most Americans received in the 1950s.[1] (Every year in elementary school, like clockwork, we learned about the explorers: we never seemed to get further.) It All Started. . . is often just silly, as Armour makes puns or tangles up the facts, most of which Americans probably knew at the time.

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On Military History

Sadly, much of European history is about wars. Yet in textbooks and general histories, many of the wars are off-stage. Taking most of the bows are diplomatic negotiations, advantageous marriages, and court intrigues. How and why one side wins militarily is something of a mystery, at least to me.

This isn’t always the case, of course. Mark Kishlansky describes the British civil war campaigns in the 1640s—but not the Duke of Buckingham ‘s European military failures. “The English campaigns at Cadiz, the plan to relieve La Rochelle and the landing at Isle de Rhé were progressively catastrophic.”[1] But why?

For me, the biggest puzzle is the transformation of the French army during and after the French Revolution of 1789. Austria and Prussia attacked in 1792, routing ill-prepared French armies. But suddenly, “Military reversals and Austro-Prussian threats caused a wave of patriotic fervor to sweep France … Volunteer armies from the provinces streamed through Paris….[2] By 1794, the French were winning. How did that happen?

Military historians know the answers. However, according to the American Historical Association, in 2015 only 2.6 percent of all historians were military historians, slightly more than the field’s share 40 years ago.

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The Past That Isn’t Past: Pearl Harbor

This will be my most controversial post—perhaps my only controversial post. [1] December 7 has come and gone again, and there was little discussion of the details surrounding Pearl Harbor, except for appropriate remembrances of those who died.

A decade ago I began to research the history of the Pearl Harbor attack. I  had happened upon the book Infamy by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, John Toland, which raised disturbing questions about foreknowledge of the attack. [2] This was Toland’s third book about World War II. His prize-winning Rising Sun had treated the attack as a dastardly Japanese act; the second revealed poor communication between Washington, D.C., and Hawaii; and Infamy blamed the U.S. president and his high-level advisors for allowing the attack to go forward.  

In Liberty magazine in 2010 (you can read the article on p. 39 of the October issue in  Liberty Unbound ) I reviewed The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable, a 2007 book by George Victor. [3] And I took the opportunity to discuss the long-standing controversy over the question, Did President Roosevelt and/or his advisors know about the potential attack and could they have taken action to prevent it?

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