Thomas Campbell (right) with the vice minister of agriculture of the Kazakhstan Soviet Republic. For credit see below.
Thomas D. Campbell was a farmer and mechanical engineer. In 1918, when he was 36 years old and World War I was spurring demand for wheat, he started a 95,000-acre wheat farm in southeastern Montana. It was the largest farm in the United States and possibly the world. Located primarily on land leased from the Crow Indian reservation, the farm obtained a $2 million investment from New York financier J. P. Morgan.
As time went on, Soviet agricultural experts visited Campbell’s farm to learn how to use so many machines efficiently, and Campbell went to the Soviet Union as a technical adviser, where he met Josef Stalin. Campbell was famous, influential, and popular. His farm continued well beyond his death in 1966.
The Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C., which depicts Abraham Lincoln standing over a kneeling freed slave, is being scrutinized and reconsidered these days. But the dispute over the statue (also called the Freedmen’s statue) has had a remarkable result for historians: An 1876 letter by Frederick Douglass has been found in which he expressed disappointment in the statue.
For me, what is so intriguing is how it was discovered and how that illustrates the wonderful world that digital technology has brought to historians—a world in which artifacts of the past are readily available.
In a previous post I critiqued an author for wasting enormous talent trying to write something “new.” In this column I will discuss three books that ushered in new ways of thinking, but did it better. These books aren’t easy reading, but their density is proportional to their content. (I can cover three books because praise takes less space than criticism.) Two were readings assigned in class; the other was recommended.
The Strippingof the Altars
The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy[1] overturned decades, perhaps centuries, of stultifying complacency about the Protestant Reformation in England (including my own). Duffy challenged the widespread presumption that the Reformation brought a true and purified religion to a country gripped by ritual, magic and saint worship—in other words, the Catholic Church.
While the title refers to the destruction of the traditional church under Protestant kings Henry VIII and Edward VI, more than half the book is devoted to describing Christianity before the Reformation. Duffy shows how the Catholic Church was woven into the texture of people’s lives through holy days, celebrations, pageants, processions, veneration of saints, deathbed donations, prayers, and, above all, the miraculous Eucharist. Overseeing that world and everyone in it were the saints, from the Virgin Mary to little-known local martyrs, all of whom could help people in various kinds of trouble. Continue reading “Three Good Books That Revised History”
If you are anywhere close to my age, you probably took a college course called “World History” even though it was primarily about Europe. Today some students take courses in “World History” that are actually designed to cover the world. This reflects a genuine effort by historians to “go global.” However, it is not as easy—nor perhaps as valuable—as it seems.
The field of world history got its start in the 1960s, perhaps with William McNeill’s book The Rise of the West (a powerful book I wrote about here). [1] In spite of the name, his book was an effort to get beyond thinking about Europe and offshoots like the United States. In fact, McNeill viewed world history as starting with the Middle East civilizations of the Sumerians and Egyptians and dramatically changed by the Mongols, who moved south and west of the Asian steppes in the 1200s. Only after 1500 did Europe begin to dominate.
Last semester I took a graduate seminar in “Thinking about World History in the Early Modern Era.” As the name implies, the class was a creative effort to determine how, on the college level, to study the whole world in a single period, the early modern period (usually described as between 1500 and 1800). Each student had to devise a syllabus for teaching such a course. (In a previous post I discussed the difficulties of breaking up history into meaningful periods, but this post is about trying to encompass the world in one of those periods. )
I don’t have a problem with teaching world history during the early modern period. I do have a problem with the entire concept of world history as it has been developed over the past few decades. Many barrels of ink (a metaphor, of course) have been spent on trying to define the discipline.
For years I’ve heard about the academic pressure to publish. Now, as a graduate student, I’ve come across some results of that pressure. These are books that make an interesting subject dull.[1] I’ll consider one of them, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures, in this post.
To be sure, my professors have taken pains to assign only books they consider important and relevant, the “cream of the crop.” (One professor advised his class that if we didn’t like these, we would hate the ones he had rejected.) Nevertheless, a few clunkers come through. Well, I consider them clunkers. As an editor (current and past), I am frustrated when I see tremendous talent combined with disappointing execution.
The book I’m commenting on was praised on its cover as “superior and fascinating.” It reflects enormous research (12 years’ worth), including meticulous gathering of visual artifacts across two continents and several centuries. And it exhibits heroic efforts to come up with new interpretations. But, in my view, its impact is restricted by having to meet the academic goals that lead to tenure and full professorship.
Marcy Norton’s Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World[2]is the story of how tobacco and chocolate, substances that were part of pre-Columbian social and religious rituals in Mexico and Central America, became popular products in Europe during the 1600s.
