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.
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 reviewedThe 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?
Ah, France. The country most visited by tourists. The home of wine, perfumes, and fashion. The only major European country the United States has never fought against. The country that played a critical role in our war of independence and whose sacrifices here helped bankrupt it and thus ushered in the French Revolution.
France is our friend, yet Americans sometimes ridicule or disdain the French—they are a safe target since relatively few French people chose to immigrate here. In 1995 an episode of “The Simpsons” called the French “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” and in 2009, only 62 percent of Americans had a favorable view of France, compared with 77 percent for Britain.
For historians, especially economic historians, France doesn’t fare too well, either. The Industrial Revolution, which occurred roughly between 1750 and 1850, started in England, not in France. Answering the question “why” sometimes means arguing that there was something “wrong” with France.
Let me begin by saying that word errors (typos, grammar mistakes, misspellings) can happen to anyone. As an editor, I am still embarrassed by some of mine, including a few on this blog. I once thought I would lose my job at Business Week when I wrote an inaccurate caption (I didn’t). And then there was, “The mountain peaked through the clouds.”
That said, ever since I began studying history, I have noticed proofreading errors, more than in my past reading. I’m not talking about esoteric archival footnotes, just normal words.
After being bothered by this for awhile, I started making a list. For example, I read “shielings,” not “shirelings,” “Homan’s” not “Homans,’” “few woman,” not “few women,” “countries,” not “counties,” “sixty” not “sixth,” “Repreinted,” not “Reprinted,” “pampleteer,” not “pamphleteer,” Athansian, not Athanasian, Michael Berklin, not Michael Berlin, and “within and outwith” (unless that is a British expression I’m unfamiliar with).
My class on English history this fall touched on the witch craze that spread through Europe for about a century following 1570. Six hundred “witches” were executed in England, and 1500 in Scotland (a much smaller country).[1]
What caused this persecution, which occurred in the supposedly modern century after Protestantism appeared? Typical explanations, says Derek Hirst, are patriarchal misogyny (four-fifths of those executed for witchcraft were women), feuds and disputes among neighbors, even failure to help the poor, which led to imprecations and presumed maleficia. But to Hirst, ”the role of the elite was crucial.” Bishops, divines, and other luminaries became convinced that there was an active devil unleashed in the world. “The state put machinery in the hands of local persecutors, but the impetus came from the intellectuals,” says Hirst.[2]
Hirst does not elaborate on this power-elite theory, but R. I. Moore does, in his book The Formation of a Persecuting Society.[3] Moore didn’t write about seventeenth-century witches, but about the Church’s rooting out of heretics, Jews, and lepers in the Middle Ages in Europe. Those efforts, he believes, established a machinery of persecution that operated almost automatically.
