World History Blogspot

Arts, Crafts And Socialism

2011-08-29T23:25:00.000-07:00

Sheila Rowbotham introduces the ‘hands-on’ utopian, C.R. Ashbee, and the Guild of Handicraft he established in 1888, shedding light on late nineteenth and early twentieth century Arts and Crafts ideas about work, consumption and society.

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.com - One of many movements aiming to transform society in the 1880s and early 1890s, Arts and Crafts was marked by the utopian hopes of the era. Thoughtful and sensitive members of the upper-middle class like the artist and writer William Morris (1834-96) were becoming disenchanted with the social order. Amid depression, unemployment was mounting and the unemployed, led by the newly formed socialist organizations, were angrily protesting on the streets of the West End of London. Panic about foreign agitators spread and on Sunday November 13th, 1887, Morris took part in a demonstration against coercion in Ireland, led by the socialists, and by Radicals in the Liberal Party, along with Irish Nationalists. It was cleared from Trafalgar Square by a violent police charge followed by Guardsmen with drawn bayonets. Three people died and hundreds were injured on what came to be known as ‘Bloody Sunday’.

The following month, William Morris (who was trying desperately to build up the small revolutionary organization, the Socialist League, that he had founded three years earlier) was still pondering the lessons of ‘Bloody Sunday’ when a young architect, Charles Ashbee (1863-1942) came to see him with an idealistic plan for a Guild and School of Handicraft in the slums of London’s East End. To Ashbee’s profound dismay, Morris dismissed the project with derision, sweeping aside the idea that a small experiment such as a craft guild could help the suffering of the unemployed. Ashbee was not as convinced as Morris about the need for a socialist revolution but as a student at King’s College Cambridge, he had been affected by the mood of class guilt and social unease which troubled the young intelligentsia. Voluntary work in Toynbee Hall, Whitechapel (the social settlement established in 1884 for Oxbridge graduates to live and work among London’s poor in the East End), and contact with Radical working men’s clubs had made him aware of the consequences of poverty and inequality. Appalled by the waste of ability and inadequate training available to the working class he decided to start his own classes, and lectured to workers on his heroes John Ruskin and Walt Whitman. Despite his admiration for Morris, he ignored his mentor by setting up the Guild and School of Handicraft in the East End with just five members in June 1888. It operated from an empty warehouse opposite Toynbee Hall at 35 Commercial Street and soon expanded.

Initially Ashbee envisaged that the Guild would provide a means of livelihood for the most wretched slum dwellers. While some members were recruited from among the very poor, he also collected cabinet makers, wood carvers, metal workers and silversmiths who already possessed some skill. Over the years the Guild produced pianos, bedsteads, wallpaper and clocks displayed at Arts and Crafts exhibitions and sold at first through commissions and later in a Bond Street shop.

In 1891 Ashbee broke away from Toynbee Hall and moved the Guild to Essex House, a large building on the Mile End Road. In 1902 the Guild migrated to the Cotswold village of Chipping Campden. Though not all the Londoners were happy about being transported to the countryside, new members arrived including a few women. With over seventy workers the Guild was bigger than other craft guilds, a factor which contributed to its collapse. But it survived until 1908 and acquired an international reputation, inspiring artists in Europe and North America.

From the start the Guild adopted an experimental, unconventional approach to production. Ashbee believed in co-operative labour and an organic connection between design and manual craft. In practice however he played a key role as co-ordinator and designer, conceiving the Guild’s celebrated ‘Arts and Crafts’ silverware with its delicate flowing lines and intricate patterns set with semi-precious stones. Ironically, because he was trained as an architect, not a silversmith his visions could cause the craft workers problems. In the late 1960s when I interviewed one of the former Guildsmen, George Hart in Chipping Campden, he was still complaining about Ashbee’s impractical designs.

Ashbee believed work and art were inextricably linked. Pragmatically the aim was to improve the design and quality of goods, and behind this lurked an aesthetic of daily life which owed much to Morris. Though Arts and Crafts enthusiasts took Morris’ ideas about art on board, they were not always prepared to accept his socialism. Ashbee, for example, though a socialist was a more conciliatory one than Morris. Ashbee’s biographer Alan Crawford has observed that his Guild was in the more radical wing of Arts and Crafts because it set out to solve the problem posed by the writer John Ruskin (1819-1900) of how to secure satisfying work in industrial conditions. Throughout the 1860s and 70s, Ruskin had been denouncing what he called the ‘Occult Theft’ of market capitalism and insisting that a true political economy should be concerned with the production, preservation and distribution of useful and pleasurable things. In his long work Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (1871), Ruskin insisted it was impossible to paint, read, examine the beautiful patterns of minerals or do any of the things he liked, amid environmental blight and human misery. In November 1883, he had famously taken the chair of a meeting in Oxford when William Morris had stunned the audience with his lecture on Art and Democracy by saying that the much vaunted economic progress of British capitalism produced only waste. Morris even invited Ruskin to join the first Marxist organization to be formed in Britain, the Social Democratic Federation, though Ruskin declined.

The rise of the socialist groupings in the late nineteenth century was accompanied by a rethinking of Liberalism. A key figure was the Oxford Idealist philosopher T.H. Green who sought to add a social dimension to individualism. His concept of social citizenship pervaded social settlements such as Toynbee Hall along with a movement for adult education, University Extension, which provided courses for thoughtful artisans and lower-middle-class students unable to gain access to universities. As well as propagating his ideas through the Guild, Ashbee gave lectures for Oxford University Extension, in which he fused arts and crafts with Green’s conception of social citizenship. The course on English Handicraft in West Wickham run by Ashbee in 1892-93, attracted local furniture workers and examined the relationship of the designer to craft workers and suggested how trade unions could contribute to developing design skills.

Eventually Ashbee, like others, would become disillusioned by the failure of the Extension movement to reach workers, but in a 1905 course aimed at carpenters, joiners, cabinet makers, metal-workers, masons and builders at the South West Polytechnic, The Workman and Craftsmanship, he made another attempt. The ambitious Ashbee took his students through the economic and social history of industry in Britain, including the medieval Guilds and raised contemporary sociological questions about the role of machinery and what he called the ‘humanizing’ of modern industry. Disdaining the demarcations of academic disciplines, along with mundane details like a reading list, Ashbee took a practical approach which included visiting buildings and museums.

Ashbee’s approach to education was innovative. Critical of the purely academic, as well as the narrowness of existing forms of craft education, he believed in learning through practical activity and his University Extension lectures show him dealing with specific crafts and then moving outwards to wider social and historical questions – a unity of hand and brain. He was in accord with progressive educationalists of the day who were rejecting purely academic ways of learning. The influence of Ruskin encouraged efforts to make the upper and middle classes less parasitic on manual workers’ labour. A pioneering progressive school for boys, Abbotsholme, was started by the educationist Cecil Reddie in Derbyshire in 1889 with a curriculum which taught a range of manual skills, from cookery to potato picking. A carpenter was recruited from the Guild to go up and help with the teaching of furniture making and pieces of Guild work are still at the school.

Ashbee saw the Guild as an educational and social model of how co-operative association could develop every individual’s creative capacity. It was to be a site for nurturing new relationships of social citizenship in practice. In an 1892 lecture to the Architectural Association, published in his A Few Chapters in Workshop Re-Construction and Citizenship (1894) Ashbee insisted that those who argued ‘social questions and ethics’ had no place in art was wrong. No doubt thinking of his ongoing argument on this very topic with his close friend, the art critic, Roger Fry, Ashbee used the platform of the A.A. to assert:

The origin of style lies not in the theories, not in the forms of Art, but in the social relations of men to men … in the leisure they may have for the thinking out of problems and the creation of forms. In short, the origin of style is a social not an artistic question.These new social relations for Ashbee were not just about external change, they involved inner, spiritual and personal sentiments. Here, too, he was in tune with a wider cultural radicalism. During the late nineteenth century a questioning of established religion contributed to interest in unorthodox Christian doctrines and Eastern religion. A secular search for alternative personal ethics led to attempts to find new simple lifestyles in country cottages, to experiments with free love, with vegetarianism and bohemian clothing. Heterodoxy thus extended beyond the distribution of material goods to debates about how to live and how to be. This rethinking of relating and being included efforts to comprehend all forms of sexual desire.

While he was at Cambridge, Ashbee had come under the influence of the socialist advocate of the simple life and sexual freedom, Edward Carpenter. Carpenter, too, had taught in University Extension and then escaped to a small holding in Millthorpe in Derbyshire. When the socialist movement formed in the 1880s, he became known as an advocate of ‘simplification’ in everyday life, proposing stone floors, bees-waxed boards, recycled clothes and nudism. Carpenter was inspired by the American poet, Walt Whitman’s vision of personal fellowship and union with nature. He cultivated Ashbee and his friends at King’s, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and Roger Fry, and encouraged Ashbee to see love between ‘comrades’ as the source for new kinds of human relationships. Carpenter’s comradeship was not only political and spiritual but sexual. In 1894, he wrote a pamphlet called Homogenic Love, a remarkably courageous defence of homosexuality which was then a criminal offence.

Entwined in Ashbee’s vision of the social citizenship fostered by the Guild was his own homoerotic attraction to young working-class men. Fellowship was at once social and personal; recruitment was based partly on the intuitive rapport Ashbee felt towards a potential Guildsman. In 1894 he described the spirit of direct, open community which would presage social relations in the future as the ‘Whitmanic love of comrades’.

On the sexual aspect of this love he was circumlocutory; not only was homosexuality illegal it tended to enter public discourse in the context of scandals or denunciations of decadence. This made it all the more important to stress the lofty spiritual character of attraction to one’s own sex. When Ashbee was courting Janet Forbes, a stockbroker’s daughter, in 1897, he offered her loyalty and reverent affection, while issuing the announcement:

Comradeship to me so far – an intensely close and all-absorbing personal attachment ‘love’ if you prefer the word, for my men and boy friends, has been the one guiding principle in life.

It was a bewildering statement for a Victorian woman, still in her teens and shielded from sexual knowledge.The marriage survived, albeit with some tensions, and the resourceful Janet Ashbee became a committed supporter of the Guild in Chipping Campden. She was also an advocate of lifestyle changes such as dress reform, adopting bohemian sandals along with fishermen’s smocks which enabled her to move freely, though she possessed a strong streak of commonsense and joked about the stringencies of some simple lifers who adopted diets of bananas and brown bread.

In a less extreme form, ideas of an alternative lifestyle, along with Arts and Crafts designs featured in both the socialist and the feminist movements of the 1900s. While the upper middle class bought the new décor in Liberty’s elegant department store, lower middle-class and working-class Manchester vegetarian socialists could sit proudly in the Clarion newspaper’s café in Market Street, with its arts and crafts decoration. For women of slender means there were the aesthetic dresses designed by Ann Macbeth at the Glasgow School of Art made from cheaper materials like linen and cotton with detachable embroidered collars.

However the high cost of most Arts and Crafts products jarred with Ashbee’s social aims. The Achilles heel of the movement was that working-class people were unable to afford the aesthetic commodities produced by craft labour. The Arts and Crafts Guilds were competing with the machine in a period when scientific management was beginning to break down skills and replace them with repetitive actions which could be reproduced exactly. This way of organizing the labour process greatly enhanced the possibilities of mass production. It did not however provide for the creative skill of workers to be expressed.

Some Arts and Crafts enthusiasts saw the introduction of machinery into production as a kind of contaminating blight, but this was not Ashbee‘s position. While he had been profoundly influenced by Ruskin’s rejection of modernity, he had acquired, from his liking of Walt Whitman, a fascination with the energy and majesty of new forms of technology and production.

The Arts and Crafts Movement which took off in the United States during the 1890s wrestled with precisely these polarities. As in Britain, it emerged alongside ethical and social anxieties about the human devastation which an unbridled capitalism left in its wake. The influence of Arts and Crafts extended beyond art institutions to community projects. Among these was the social settlement Hull House, modelled on Toynbee Hall and set up in Chicago in 1889.

In 1900, on a trip to America, Ashbee met the then relatively unknown architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, who showed him round Chicago. Though Wright was inclined to scoff at arts and crafts as sentimental and argue that the artist should be in control of technology, the two men became close friends. Ashbee never celebrated the machine as Wright did, but, like Morris and Carpenter, he did not dismiss technology either. In his An Endeavour Towards the Teaching of John Ruskin and William Morris: Being a Brief Account of the Work, the Aims and the Principles of the Guild of Handicraft in East London (1901), Ashbee explained:

‘Broadly, the revival [of Arts and Crafts] implies a rebellion against inutilities, a conviction that machinery must be relegated to its proper place as the tool and not the master of the workman, that the life of the producer is to the community a more vital consideration than the cheap production which ignores it, and that thus the human and ethical considerations that insist on the individuality of the work man, are of the first importance.’The machine, of course, was to win. Technological imperatives and the drive for profit, rather than the human needs of workers determined production processes. In 1908, during an economic downturn, Ashbee’s Guild was forced to close, though individual craft workers stayed on in Chipping Campden. With hindsight it is evident that the economic odds were stacked against the Guild of Handicraft; indeed it is a tribute to Ashbee and the Guild members that it survived so long.

Arts and Crafts’ protest against how things were made and consumed had arisen in a period when the capitalist economy seemed to be stagnating. In the years of the Great Depression an excess of competition was reducing the profitability of commodities. However, from the mid 1890s, capital was finding ways of increasing productivity through technological innovation and new kinds of organization of the labour process. A ‘Second Industrial Revolution’ was underway and nowhere was it more evident than in the United States, able to attract wave upon wave of young eager immigrant labour and able to rely on a vast internal market. By 1920 the vibrant, if brutal, American economy had overtaken Britain to become the main global power. Against the mighty Massachusetts mills, arts and crafts workshops looked puny indeed.

The social vision of Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft, with its emphasis on every worker as an individual with creative potential came to seem irrelevant in the era between the wars when scientific management ruled supreme. The argument over the relation of craft skill to the machine was increasingly fought out on the sidelines of the productive system in craft workshops which were divorced from production. Henceforth modernity belonged to the machine, rather than the establishment of new patterns of work for all workers. Over time Ashbee would move closer towards Walter Gropius’ early vision of the Bauhaus – the designer-craft worker in close connection to modern industry, attuned to, rather than subordinated by, technology. Mass production had become an established fact which might be modified but was not going to be transformed.

Towards the end of the 1930s in Britain and in North America, clashes between labour and capital eventually forced big employers to concede higher wages and shorter hours. This new working class, having learned the rules of the game, knew how to bargain for cash and time through increasing productivity. They were not out to make labour more joyous, they were after monetary rewards and leisure.The Arts and Crafts Movement, along with the simple life associated with it, came to seem cranky and backward-looking.

In recent decades however the social wing of the Movement that Ashbee represented can be seen as containing a critique of production for production’s sake. Modern capitalism has proved adept at generating things and devising new types of technology, yet the escalation of productive capacity has not been accompanied by a corresponding enhancement in the quality of human relationships and daily life. New technology determines the patterns of work in more and more kinds of jobs, including the professions. Instead of enabling human control and creativity, it increasingly determines how employees’ activities are structured and how both public and private services are provided. Dissatisfaction with work and stress in the workplace are pervasive and go too deep to be wafted away by aromatherapy.

Hence the questions Ashbee posed about the purposes of production, about the workers’ relation to technology, about the creative expression of skill and about the human relations of the work place are not of purely historical interest. Though the circumstances of the early twenty-first century differ, his preoccupations are still relevant. The arts and crafts effort to connect art, labour and living may have vanished into an underground stream for several decades, but it contains insights much needed today. Further Reading

Sheila Rowbotham is currently working on a biography of Edward Carpenter. She would like to thank Felicity Ashbee for her assistance with this article.

The Basic Concept Of SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

2011-08-29T21:14:00.000-07:00

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.com - This paper describes the basics of SEO. To master the SEO it helps you understand the basics of SEO. This paper I got from fellow blogger, then I translate into English.

As Kang Rohman wrote in the previous that Blogspot Tutorial will be focused to study SEO (Search Engine Optimization) especially for bloggers/ BlogSpot users. I just want to skim someone’s opinions out there that blogger engine is not SEO friendly, it certainly not true because all get back to the engine users itself, whether to use blogger, Wordpress, Drupal, etc. If you didn’t understand how to apply various SEO techniques on the engine you used, it just a big zero.

Previously, Kang Rohman wants to instill the basic concepts of SEO that you should to remember, there are among others:

Natural and think like human being
Search engine indexes the blog content
SEO is a competition
SEO techniques is not only one
Natural And Thinking Like Human Being

In research, there are similarities in pattern of thinking between search engine and human being, perhaps it because the programmer of search engine is indeed human being. Here are a few:

Search engine prefers blogs with original posting. In real world, other people’s act of piracy is consider unpleasant and it’s against all aspects of community, as well as search engine itself, it refers blogs with original contents than those with other blogs copied from another resources or in other word copy paste.

Don’t like to be deceived. In SEO there is term named Black Hat SEO, that is SEO optimize which applies search engine deception technique for examples hidden text, hidden link, keyword repetition, etc. which basically are deception techniques, and some of techniques that are not desirable by the search engine.

Glad to informative blogs. Many people pay attention to others just because the others often to put forward some useful information, as well as personal or especially for public. Search engine is the same.

Do not like excessive. Only few peoples who like overact behavior, as well as search engine it doesn’t like overload blogs.

Like the recommended blogs by many parties. Search engine would like the recommendation, in this case is given a backlink by other blogs. Backlink in blogosphere is like recommendation or endorsement.

And many others

Search Engine Indexes The Blogs Content

All you have to bear in SEO that is search engine indexes the entire contents in our blog and as the search engine consideration to prioritized your blog position.

Maybe you have heard of SEO tips before in choosing a domain name , at least one keyword from your blog’s main topic, the post tittle should contain the target keyword, the first paragraph should contain the target keyword. Or maybe you have heard about “Content Is the King”, it’s not apart from the search engine has indexes what you have provide in blog and forward it in search engine.

An illustration, I tried to write the “Blogspot Tutorial” keyword in Google search engine, and here are the results.

Optimizing Your Blog Titles As Keywords

2011-08-28T23:17:00.000-07:00

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.com - In my previous posts I've been sharing and how to optimize the speed of a good blog for access to our blog visitors, we will discuss how important the title of our blog to further optimize our blog keywords on search engines, etc.

As we know, the title of our blog is a brand or a characteristic that is owned by the blog. For example the title of this blog is "Sharing SEO | Information Tips Tricks Tutorials About SEO and Blog", so the blog title that I made it the brand or the hallmark of my blog is "sharing the SEO". So obviously, sharing SEO keyword here is that I reinforced to achieve rated first page of google. Another example that we can take, I have a blog with a brand "Khamardos Blog". So, for this case I increase the keyword is "Khamardos Blog" too.

Why the blog title (Brand) is so important for us ? , Examples of benefits that have a major influence of the brand that is sitelink (Insya Allah will be discussed at the next post), by improving the quality of our brand that we've done a google sitelink tips on how to obtain easily.

How to make a good blog title for our blog? Tips fundamental here is how do we create a word that is logical, correct, and not hard to be remembered by visitors. For example this blog brand "Sharing SEO | Information Tips Tricks Tutorials About SEO and Blog", so it is clear from the brand we know that my blog is delivering a variety of info, tips and tricks and tutorials about seo and blog for the readers.

Another example, never use the attributes (except the comma (,), and the vertical line (|)), numbers, symbols, and so forth in the title of our blog. It is clear, because in its use to use a brand that is memorable and simple for visitors. Some blogs that I met, many use the phrase "Welcome to ...". "Hello ..." etc. in the use of his blog title, I think it is less effective because of competition for those keywords I think it is very difficult, and visitors are also rare to find keywords with the word.

There is one important tips in improving the title of our blog is to emphasize the title of our posts. The point here is our post title includes us as our blog title, it could certainly improve the quality of our posts as well. For these tips I've discussed it in my post about the Swap Blog Title with Post Title in Blogspot

Hopefully this time my article useful to you, do not forget to comment if there is something to ask.

Installer Related Post With Scrool Function

2011-08-28T21:23:00.000-07:00

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.com - Hello my friend, how are you today, hopefully in good health. In the my previous post about seo tips I've talked about the importance of using heading tags H1 on the blog title and post title and Breadcrumb Navigation for Your Blog.

In this post, I will share about how to make Related Post With the scroll function. Related post useful as a reference for visitors to find articles related to the article he was reading. It can make our blog visitors last a long time to read our article on the our blog.

Okay, let's start how to build widgets Related Posts With Scrolling Functions under your blog post.

1. Login to your blogger
2. From Dashboard, click the Layout
3. On the menu tab, select Edit HTML
4. Check the small box Expand Widget Templates
5. Find the code <p> <data:post.body/> </ p>
Put the following code after the code :

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<H2>Related Post:</H2>
<div class='rbbox'>
<div style='margin:0; padding:10px;height:200px;overflow:auto;border:1px solid #ccc;'>
<div id='albri'/>
<script type='text/javascript'>
var homeUrl3 = "<data:blog.homepageUrl/>";
var maxNumberOfPostsPerLabel = 4;
var maxNumberOfLabels = 10;
maxNumberOfPostsPerLabel = 50;
maxNumberOfLabels = 3;
function listEntries10(json) {
var ul = document.createElement('ul');
var maxPosts = (json.feed.entry.length <= maxNumberOfPostsPerLabel) ?
json.feed.entry.length : maxNumberOfPostsPerLabel;
for (var i = 0; i < maxPosts; i++) {
var entry = json.feed.entry[i];
var alturl;
for (var k = 0; k < entry.link.length; k++) {
if (entry.link[k].rel == 'alternate') {
alturl = entry.link[k].href;
break;
}
}
var li = document.createElement('li');
var a = document.createElement('a');
a.href = alturl;
if(a.href!=location.href) {
var txt = document.createTextNode(entry.title.$t);
a.appendChild(txt);
li.appendChild(a);
ul.appendChild(li);
}
}
for (var l = 0; l < json.feed.link.length; l++) {
if (json.feed.link[l].rel == 'alternate') {
var raw = json.feed.link[l].href;
var label = raw.substr(homeUrl3.length+13);
var k;
for (k=0; k<20; k++) label = label.replace("%20", " ");
var txt = document.createTextNode(label);
var h = document.createElement('b');
h.appendChild(txt);
var div1 = document.createElement('div');
div1.appendChild(h);
div1.appendChild(ul);
document.getElementById('albri').appendChild(div1);
}
}
}
function search10(query, label) {
var script = document.createElement('script');
script.setAttribute('src', query + 'feeds/posts/default/-/'
+ label +
'?alt=json-in-script&callback=listEntries10');
script.setAttribute('type', 'text/javascript');
document.documentElement.firstChild.appendChild(script);
}
var labelArray = new Array();
var numLabel = 0;
<b:loop values='data:posts' var='post'>
<b:loop values='data:post.labels' var='label'>
textLabel = "<data:label.name/>";
var test = 0;
for (var i = 0; i < labelArray.length; i++)
if (labelArray[i] == textLabel) test = 1;
if (test == 0) {
labelArray.push(textLabel);
var maxLabels = (labelArray.length <= maxNumberOfLabels) ?
labelArray.length : maxNumberOfLabels;
if (numLabel < maxLabels) {
search10(homeUrl3, textLabel);
numLabel++;
}
}
</b:loop>
</b:loop>
</script>
</div>
<script type='text/javascript'>RelPost();</script>
</div>
</b:if>

6. Now find this code ]]></ b: skin>
Place the following code before the ]]></ b: skin> code :

. rbbox {border: 1px solid # D8D8D8; padding: 5px;
background-color: # E0F8E0;-moz-border-radius: 5px; margin: 5px;}
. rbbox: hover {background-color: # EFFBEF;}

Note:
Change the code marked in accordance with the color of your blog, if you do not know the color code, please check theHTML Color Code
# D8D8D8 : Color edge (border)
# E0F8E0 : Color Background
# EFFBEF : Background Color, too, but will be visible when the box is highlighted with the pointer

7. Then Click Save Template

Problems for Using Readmore :
For users of the facility Readmore then you sometimes see Related Post Widget also appears on your Home page, if you just want a Related Post only appear on pages Post! So Here's the solution!!

Find the code <data:post.body/>, When you find the code then you find there are two codes in your template (Usually there on the blog users readmore). Paste Code Related to the post after searching a second code of <data:post.body/>
Then Click Save Template

Look at the results ! Ok so this tutorial, hopefully useful for all of you, Do not forget to comment. Thanks

Add Nofollow Tags To All Your Blogger Label Links

2011-08-28T21:15:00.000-07:00

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.com - In the my previous post I was sharing how to make a Showing Only Post Titles on Label Pages, but we need to know, use the tag "rel=nofollow" on the label / category is very important.

As we know, google algorithm newest panda is very concerned about the relevant content on our blogs, and google algorithms pandas did not like the name duplicate content blog. If your blog contains too many irrelevant content or duplicate content or your post quantity is less than 300 words and you have too many tags / category labels on your blog That makes no sense then you can be the next target of Google panda update. Will your traffic drop significantly.

Statement that the use of "rel=nofollow" on the label has been much discussed by seo experts, they concluded that the use of "rel = nofollow" on the label is an attempt to prevent spamming blogs that might occur on our blog.

If you're feeling confident and believe in, then please take the following steps:

1.From Dashboard - Design - Edit HTML - dont forget to give check "Expand Widget Template".

2. Search for this,

<a expr:href='data:label.url' rel='tag'>

3. Replace it with this,

<a expr:href='data:label.url' rel='tag,nofollow'>

You have now successfully protected your links in the post labels from panda effect. Now lets correct the Label Cloud Links also.
4. Search for this,

<a expr:dir='data:blog.languageDirection' expr:href='data:label.url'><data:label.name/></a>

5. Replace it with this code,

<a expr:dir='data:blog.languageDirection' expr:href='data:label.url' rel='nofollow'><data:label.name/></a>

6. And click Save Template.

I hope this article useful to you, do not forget to give comments

Installer Breadcrumb Navigation On Blogspot

2011-08-28T21:08:00.000-07:00

The meaning of Breadcrumb Navigation is a row of links internal links on the top or bottom of the page of the website that allows visitors to return to the previous page or to the bottom quickly.

So, how do I make? Follow these steps:
1. Login to Blogger
2. Go to the Layout -> Edit HTML
Back up your Template by clicking: Download Full Template
After that, check the Expand Widget Templates.

3. Copy the code below:

. Breadcrumbs {
padding: 5px 5px 5px 0;
margin: 0; font-size: 95%;
line-height: 2.3em;
}

Paste the code above ]]></ b: skin>

4. Copy the code below:

<b:if cond='data:blog.homepageUrl == == data:blog.url'> <b:else/> <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType "item"'> <div class = 'breadcrumbs'> Browse »<a expr:href='data:blog.homepageUrl'> Home </ a>» <b:if cond='data:post.labels'> <b: loop values ??=' data: post.labels 'var =' label '> <a expr:href='data:label.url' rel='tag'> <data:label.name/> </ a> <b: if cond =' data: label.isLast! = "true" '>, </ b: if> </ b: loop> </ b: if> »<data:post.title/> </ div> </ b: if> < / b: if>

Code Paste the above code <div class='post hentry uncustomized-post-template'>

5. Then click Save Template.

Look at the results ! Ok so this tutorial, hopefully useful for all of you, Do not forget to comment. Thanks ...

Make Showing Only Post Titles on Label Pages

2011-08-28T21:02:00.000-07:00

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.com - Some blog template that currently exist on the page click on the label that appears is the entirecontents of the blog, the content of their blogs or some of the content on that page. Well, in this tutorial, I want to discuss how to make the display labels on the blog page that appears only the title of our blog posts only (As the picture).

1. Login to Blogger
2. Go to the Lay Out, then to the Edit HTML
Back up your Template by clicking: Download Full Template
After that, check the Expand Widget Templates.

So for this tutorial is divided into 2 different versions:

1. Display Label Without Box
Look at the preview image, the image is a view that uses the box, then what purpose Without BoxDisplay Label? Without the box that appears here means only writing course (post title only).
Immediately, we begin the tutorial:

     <! - Posts ->
     <div class='blog-posts hfeed'>

     <b:include data='top' name='status-message'/>

     <data:adStart/>
     <b:loop values='data:posts' var='post'>
     <b:if cond='data:post.dateHeader'>

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Simon Forman The Astrologer's Tables

2011-08-28T20:21:00.000-07:00

Lauren Kassell reveals how the casebooks, diaries and diagrams of the late-16th-century astrologer Simon Forman provide a unique perspective on a period when the study of the stars began to embrace modern science.

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.com - On a September evening 400 years ago, Jean Forman, the wife of the astrologer, Simon, teased him over supper. Could he tell which of them would die first, she asked, mocking his art and his age. He was 58, she 30 years his junior. His reply was simple. She would bury him within a week. This was a Thursday. On Friday nothing happened. On Saturday nothing happened. By Wednesday the astrologer’s skill was happily in question. But on Thursday, as Forman set off by boat from Lambeth to the City – presumably to visit clients, attend to business or see friends – he fell down, shouted ‘An impost, an impost’ and died.

Some years later Jean told this story to William Lilly (1602-81), then England’s most famous astrologer. Lilly had tracked down Forman’s widow in pursuit of the deceased astrologer’s papers and he included the story of Forman’s death in the account of his own life that he wrote in 1668 for his friend Elias Ashmole, the great antiquary and founder of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Lilly’s autobiography set out a genealogy of English astrologers culminating with himself. Lilly praised Forman as ‘judicious and fortunate’ in horary questions and stressed that [diagnosing] sickness was his ‘masterpiece’ [meaning his specialism]. But he also insinuated that the Elizabethan practitioner was an old-fashioned magician, in contrast to himself, whose numerous prognostications during the Civil Wars and Protectorate combined politics and prophecy, improved the astrological literacy of the nation and advanced the art. Forman’s death, then, marks not the end of an era when astrologers thrived, but the beginning of a period of a more systematic and public pursuit of the science of the stars.

Astrology was a serious business. The roots of learned astrology lay in ancient texts. In second century Egypt Ptolemy set out the sophisticated mathematical model of the geocentric cosmos that prevailed until Copernican cosmology was adopted in the 16th and 17th centuries. Ptolemy also outlined the principles of astrology, the study of the influences of the stars and planets on the natural world, the fate of nations and the lives of men and women. In the 12th century Latin translations of Arabic astrological books began to circulate in Europe. Astrology was typically taught as part of the medical curriculum at universities. With the Protestant Reformation theologians increasingly complained that astrology was overly deterministic. This, combined with the rise of Copernicanism, prompted efforts to reform astrology in line with empirical observations of the motions of the stars and their effects on life on earth.

Throughout Renaissance Europe astrologers taught at universities and practised in royal courts and for private clients. They published almanacs and prognostications, bolstering their incomes and advertising their expertise to potential patrons. Theologians questioned whether astrology was compatible with concepts of free will and divine providence. Poets and playwrights used astrological language to convey correspondences between the human body and the terrestrial and celestial realms, often expressed in terms of an analogy between the microcosm and the macrocosm.

Learned astrology was based on the motions of the known ‘planets’ – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the sun and the moon – in relation to the 12 signs of the zodiac. Most astrologers did not look to the skies. They used an ephemeris, a table of planetary motions, to calculate the positions of the planets. These were plotted on a horoscope, a diagram of the heavens divided into 12 parts, each known as a ‘house’ and corresponding to one of the signs of the zodiac. Once the astrologer had drawn a horoscope he could judge past or future events from the locations of the planets within the houses and their relationships (e.g. conjunction, opposition) to one another.

Astrological judgements came in four main types. A ‘revolution’ was a general prediction, calculated annually, which forecast the fate of the nation in terms of weather, plague, war or famine. A ‘nativity’ was a map of the position of the planets at the time of a person’s birth. These were often calculated retrospectively, based on the major events, known as ‘accidents’, in a person’s life. A third sort of judgement was known as an ‘election’ or ‘favourable hour’. This determined the best time to do something (embarking on a journey, getting married, letting blood, making an amulet), usually calculated by assessing the position of the stars at a person’s birth and projecting their motions forward in time. Finally an ‘interrogation’, or ‘horary’ question, was based on the moment at which a person asked a question. A ‘decumbiture’ is a refinement of this based on the time that an ill person took to bed. General prognostications were considered natural astrology and were in principle intellectually credible. Nativities, elections and interrogations were considered judicial. Because they related to the fate of individuals, this was the aspect of astrology that theologians and natural philosophers debated. Forman, as Lilly noted, was a master of horary astrology.

When Forman died that Thursday in September 1611 his study was filled with books and papers. Perhaps a wall-mounted shelf held his working library, a motley collection of texts ranging from medieval astronomical and alchemical manuscripts, bound in vellum, inscribed and stained by previous owners, to recent printed works such as a volume by Roger Bacon on the prolongation of life printed in Oxford in 1590 and a second-hand copy of the 1567 Paris edition of Henricus Cornelius Agrippa’s magical manual, De occulta philosophia. An ephemeris probably sat on the desk and perhaps also a recent almanac or satirical pamphlet. Heaps of paper, folded into notebooks, covered in Forman’s scrawl, filled the room. Some of these contained the dozens of alchemical and magical works that Forman copied, a common means of acquiring esoteric or out-of-print texts in this period. Others contained Forman’s reading notes, records of his astrological practice and original writings. These included manuals on medicine, astrology and geomancy, plague tracts, alchemical commonplace books, various musings about historical, prophetic, Biblical and literary themes and a series of autobiographical works. Pots of brown and red ink, a clock, jars of strong waters and a commissioned portrait of the astrologer in his purple robes furnished the room. This was the habitat of the self-styled astrologer-physician of Lambeth.

Forman fashioned himself as a modern magus, driven by a passion for learning and chosen by God to overcome adversity and ultimately to acquire knowledge of health and disease, life and death and the secrets of creation. His autobiographical writings chart his early life. He was born in Quidhampton, a small hamlet on the outskirts of Salisbury, in 1552. He attended a grammar school in Salisbury and, while apprenticed to a hosier and grocer, he secretly studied in the evenings. He made it to Oxford for a year and a half as a poor scholar and attended the school attached to Magdalen College. His studies, he complained, were disrupted by the frequent trips to hunt rabbits and to court women of the young gentlemen scholars he served. Through the 1570s and 1580s Forman worked as a teacher and studied astronomy, medicine and magic. Caught repeatedly with magical books and antagonistic to the authorities, he served a series of prison sentences. He also began to establish himself as a medical practitioner. After an especially unsettled period in the late 1580s, during which he pursued the philosophers’ stone in vain, was taken captive by pirates, imprisoned by the Bishop of Salisbury, accumulated debt and suffered venereal disease, he settled in London in 1592 and established a thriving astrological practice. At this point his autobiographical writings tail off and, to seek more information, we have to refer to his diaries, casebooks and astrological manuals.

William Lilly's 1651 prediction of a great fire of London (the twins, Gemini, were the zodiacal sign associated with the capital).Through the 1590s Forman was consulted more than 2,000 times a year, mostly on questions about health. His success attracted the attention of the College of Physicians of London, which regulated the practice of medicine in the capital. In 1599 they fined him for practising physic without a licence but he continued with his work. They imprisoned him and he sought the protection of noble patrons. They harried him and he moved out of their reach to Lambeth. In 1601 the college complained that Forman was the most obnoxious of the ‘unlearned and unlawful practitioners, lurking in many corners of the City’ beyond the college’s jurisdiction. The antagonism continued and Forman’s paranoia grew. He worried that the physicians were trying to murder him. In 1603, in an effort to establish the legitimacy of his credentials as an astrologer-physician, he spent a few months at Jesus College, Cambridge and secured a doctorate in physic and astronomy and a licence to practise medicine. The physicians remained unimpressed and the feud was never resolved.

What made Forman’s approach to astrology so appealing to his clients and so opprobrious to learned physicians? Part of the answer lies in the politics of medicine in Elizabethan and early Jacobean London.

The College of Physicians of London was founded in 1514 (it received a Royal Charter in 1674). Its powers waxed and waned over the coming centuries, depending on support from the Crown and courts. It issued licences to practise physic, inspected the wares of apothecaries and heard cases of malpractice. Physic was defined as medicine that concerns the internal workings of the body. It was rooted in the teachings of Galen, adapted and augmented as it was transmitted through the Arab world and into the universities of medieval and Renaissance Europe. The four humours – blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile – had elemental properties (hot, cold, moist, dry) and an imbalance resulted in illness. Physicians advised their clients about how to maintain health through attention to diet, sleep and exercise and prescribed remedies to maintain the correct balance or to moderate a disruption. As directed, barber-surgeons performed blood-letting and apothecaries filled prescriptions for substances to evacuate the body through vomits, purges or sweats. Physicians and a minority of surgeons learned their art at the universities. Apothecaries and most surgeons trained through apprenticeships. These occupations were regulated through urban guilds.

This was a hierarchy of knowledge and status. Physicians were the medical elite, though they represent only a fraction of the medical practitioners in early modern London. Between 1580 and 1600 there were 50 licensed physicians in London. During this period the college identified 150 people practising physic in the city without due authority, some of whom were licensed but most of whom represent a larger body of irregular practitioners, many holding multiple occupations. These people ranged from highly educated men with medical degrees from foreign universities to people (mostly men, the occasional woman) who were schooled through experience alone. These practitioners came to the attention of the college through informants, during disputes over contracts or in cases of malpractice. From the perspective of the college, Forman was a quack. They examined him and found that he had little Latin learning and his knowledge of astrology was risible. Other practitioners defied the college’s authority but Forman alone professed the supremacy of his astrological methods and attracted such an extensive clientele.

Forman actively challenged the established hierarchy in the name of astrology, promoting a model of medicine in which a single practitioner managed his patients’ health by reading the stars to judge the cause of the disease, advising on regimen, performing blood-letting and minor surgery as necessary and prescribing his own distillations and drugs. Not only did the astrologer provide a complete service in tune with the cosmos, he alone could judge whether a disease was natural, demonic or divine. He alone could fashion amulets and potions charged with occult forces.

Forman’s papers provide a unique perspective on a moment when the definitions of orthodox medicine and the authority to practise it were contested. They are also especially rich with details of the dynamics between the practitioner and his clients. Because he was an astrologer and because he needed to record systematic information and map the celestial motions, Forman recorded his consultations. His casebooks (a modern term; he called them books of judgements) record thousands of meetings with clients and his manuals of astrological medicine instruct us in his methods. Someone consulting him at his house would find him in his study, sitting in front of his desk with a large notebook open in front of him and a pen in his hand. The astrologer usually wrote down the client’s name, age, whether they appeared in person or had sent a letter or messenger, the moment at which the consultation began or the message arrived and the question posed. Ninety per cent of Forman’s cases related to health, usually ‘what is my disease’ or ‘am I pregnant’. This information provided a heading for each consultation.

Beneath it Forman drew a horoscope, mapping the position of the stars within the 12 celestial houses at the moment when the question was asked. To establish these positions Forman consulted an ephemeris. He then read this figure according to a series of rules about the positions of the planets within the houses. Thousands of stellar configurations were possible and the compendious rules of astrology were lodged in handbooks – such as Forman’s guides to astrology, the Latin works which were his model, or, later, Lilly’s Christian Astrology (1647). Beneath the chart the astrologer recorded his judgement about the cause of the disease, the identity of the thief, fidelity of the spouse, fortune of the merchant, soldier or cleric and so on. In some cases he also recorded further information stated by the client, a prediction, remedy, recommended course of action or payment.

Six volumes of Forman’s casebooks survive, containing 10,000 consultations between 1596 and 1601 plus a brief run in 1603. Together with the records of Forman’s protégé, Richard Napier (1559–1634), a clergyman in Buckinghamshire who had studied the art of astrology with him in the late 1590s and kept records of his astrological practice until his death in 1634, these number among the most extensive sets of surviving records of medical practice before 1800. Forman’s clients included courtiers and their mistresses, merchants’ wives and their servants, clergymen seeking preferment, actors suffering delusions and ordinary people worrying about their health and seeking lost and stolen property. Forman’s casebooks came to embody the two-fold nature of his reputation. Some considered him an excellent astrologer; others perpetuated his identity as a quack by focusing on his magical aspirations, alleged demonic allegiances and lurid details of his sexual prowess.

Forman’s skill was legendary. This is why, decades after the astrologer’s death, Lilly sought papers in which Forman had documented the secrets of his art. Most of these had passed to Napier, who in turn bequeathed them to his great-nephew, from whom Ashmole bought them to add to his collection of astrological, alchemical, magical and heraldic books and manuscripts. Ashmole sorted and indexed Forman’s papers and had them bound in the thick calfskin volumes, which strain the brass clasps, which their readers must gently unfasten. When Ashmole died in 1692 he had ensured that Forman’s papers were preserved with the rest of his collection of manuscripts, books and rarities in the newly founded Ashmolean Museum. The Ashmole Collection, now housed in the Bodleian Library, holds the majority of Forman’s papers. A few items are in the Sloane Collection at the British Library, the odd volume has strayed further afield and some are lost. (I recently discovered an unidentified work by Forman in the Ashmole Collection itself.)

The dark side of Forman’s reputation also persisted through the 17th century and beyond. Four years after his death Forman was implicated in the trials of Frances Howard, Countess of Somerset, and her servant Anne Turner for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, spawning a rash of gossip and pamphlets. The women had consulted Forman and the court considered evidence that implicated Forman and portrayed him as an agent of the devil. This included a letter from Howard to Forman requesting magical potions to alienate her then husband, Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex and attract the love of James I’s favourite, Robert, Earl of Somerset, whom she hoped (and did go on) to marry; obscene wax images for use in love magic; and a book, perhaps a casebook, in which ladies at court had signed their names, engaging the services of the astrologer and perhaps also entering into a pact with the devil. From Jacobean plays to 19th-century novels, Forman became the stock cunning man of old whose work was sinister and foolish in equal measure.

Victorian bibliophilia exposed Forman to further scandals. When cataloguing the Ashmole Collection, William Black directed Shakespearean scholars to Forman’s papers. Notes headed The Bocke of Plaies record rare eyewitness accounts of the performances of Macbeth, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale at the Globe in April and May 1611. Forman also saw a play called Richard II, though this seems not to be the work by Shakespeare of that name. The manuscript was printed by John Payne Collier in 1836. Collier’s other ‘discoveries’ have been exposed as forgeries and questions about the authenticity of the Forman record were raised by Shakespeareans in the 1930s. Literary scholars remain divided about the authenticity of The Bocke of Plaies, though the content and format of the manuscript is typical of the astrologer’s writings in his final years.

The literary scholar James Halliwell prepared an edition of Forman’s autobiographical writings in the 1840s but the text was deemed too unsavoury for publication and prurient readers needed to wait more than a century for the historian A.L. Rowse to use Forman’s papers to identify Emelia Lanier – who consulted the astrologer a number of times and became friendly with him – as Shakespeare’s alleged Dark Lady and to christen Forman the Elizabethan Pepys. Forman, like Pepys, would have been insignificant to the historical record if he had not exercised an excessive compulsion to write things down. And, like Pepys’, Forman’s papers are more than source material for the historical voyeur. His autobiographical works have informed social histories of family and youth; references to his medical writings adorn histories of medicine; his copies of alchemical and magical texts feature in histories of the occult; his casebooks document the popularity of astrology in early modern England; and, following Rowse, they’ve been pillaged, especially by literary scholars, for details of the lives of notable Elizabethans.

Forman’s casebooks are legendary for the rare gems that reward the scholar who braves page after page of Forman’s crabbed hand. But to treat these records as biographical repositories is to misunderstand their complexity and to underestimate their value. A project to produce a digital edition of Forman’s casebooks is underway. This project marries the history of medicine and digital humanities. Through searching and sorting facilities it will make Forman’s casebooks accessible as never before. It will also coach its users in the nature of these records. Each encounter between the astrologer and his client was inscribed within an astrological cosmology. When the astrologer recorded that a woman had a toothache it is as likely that he knew this from the position of the stars as from the woman’s indication of pain. To begin to disentangle the astrologer’s judgements and the client’s experiences, we need to learn to understand the science of the stars. Astrology, moreover, factored in the dynamic between the astrologer and his clients. Through the language of the stars they negotiated the causes of disease. This is one of the reasons why Forman worked with a pen in hand. Record-keeping was both practical and performative. Healing was a process in which practitioners and patients collaborated in constructing narratives about the causes of disease, the dispersal of corrupting influences in the body and the restitution of health. Seldom are such medical transactions limited to a circumscribed exchange between a client and his patient. The edition will trace the links between people, allowing scholars to explore the ways in which matters of health and questions about fortune more generally were socially constituted.

Perhaps the greatest virtue of Forman’s casebooks is not what they can tell us about the experiences of any individual or his or her family, friends, associates and enemies, but the perspective this edition will afford on cohorts of the astrologer’s clients and the questions they asked. So far the most striking data to emerge from the edition relates to gender and fertility. Why did 50 per cent more women than men ask the astrologer about their health? What does it mean that six per cent of these women asked if they were pregnant? Is it possible that for people living in London 400 years ago Simon Forman provided the services of a gynaecologist, fertility counsellor and sex therapist?

Lauren Kassell is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Fellow of Pembroke College, University of Cambridge.

Further reading:

Lauren Kassell, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman, Astrologer, Alchemist, and Physician (2005, Oxford University Press)
Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in 17th-Century England (1981, Cambridge University Press)
Charles Nicholl, The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street (2007, Penguin)
Margaret Pelling, Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London: Patronage, Physicians, and Irregular Practitioners 1550-1640 (2003, Oxford University Press)
A.L. Rowse, Simon Forman: Sex and Society in Shakespeare’s Age (1974, Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Barbara Traister, The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of Simon Forman (2001, University of Chicago Press)

Rescue The Hitchcock 9

2011-08-28T20:07:00.000-07:00

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.com - Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) directed ten silent films during the 1920s, nine of which have survived and are currently preserved in the air-locked film vaults of the National Film Library in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. Most early silent films were destroyed when talkies were introduced at the end of the 1920s. The cellulose nitrate film on which they were produced was often melted down for its silver content and they were expensive and dangerous to store as the nitrate was very easily flammable. It is remarkable that Hitchcock’s silent films have survived – only his second film The Mountain Eagle (1926) has been lost.

The BFI National Archive recently launched a major campaign to restore all nine surviving films - The Pleasure Garden(1925), The Lodger (1926), The Ring(1927), Downhill (1927), Easy Virtue (1927), The Farmer's Wife (1927), Champagne(1928), The Manxman (1929) and Blackmail (1929) – to their original 1920s versions. The project is the biggest single undertaking in the archive’s history. The films are due to been shown to the public in London in 2012.

Henry Miller explains the restoration process in an article in the Guardian.

The Contrarian : North-South Divide

2011-08-28T09:56:00.000-07:00

The American Civil War was not a simple struggle between slaveholders and abolitionists, argues Tim Stanley.

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.comThis year marks the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the American Civil War. Karl Marx defined it as a struggle between two historical epochs – the feudal and the capitalist. The victory of the latter made possible the eventual recognition of the human dignity and the civil rights of African-Americans.

Yet throughout the war British public sentiment favoured the slave-holding South. In October 1861 Marx, who was living in Primrose Hill, summed up the view of the British press: ‘The war between the North and South is a tariff war. The war is, further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery and in fact turns on Northern lust for sovereignty.’ That view was shared by Charles Dickens, who wrote: ‘The Northern onslaught upon slavery is no more than a piece of specious humbug disguised to conceal its desire for economic control of the United States.’

What Marx and the modern reader understands to be a moral question – the question of whether or not one man could own another – many contemporaries understood in terms of economics and law.

Prior to fighting, relations between the North and South had been poisoned by disputes over taxes. The North financed its industrial development through crippling taxes imposed by Congress on imported goods. The South, which had an agricultural economy and had to buy machinery from abroad, ended up footing the bill. When recession hit in the 1850s Congress hiked the import tax from 15 to 37 per cent. The South threatened secession and the North was outraged. An editorial in the Chicago Daily Times warned that if the South left the Union ‘in one single blow, our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one half of what it is now. Our coastwise trade would pass into other hands. One half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves. We should lose our trade with the South, with all of its immense profits’. War was the only alternative to financial ruin.

The North was broadly opposed to slavery and this cultural difference shaped the rhetoric of war. Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party was a free labour movement – rabidly so. Northern popular culture depicted Southerners as decadent, un-Christian sponges. Lincoln’s election in 1860 put government in the hands of the man most identified with anti-Dixie prejudice. Inevitably Southerners interpreted it as a Northern coup d’état.

Economic and cultural fear propelled the country into war. But slavery was rarely the issue at hand. While the Republican Party was anti-slavery, it was not abolitionist. In his 1861 inaugural address Lincoln stated: ‘I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so … If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it.’ High-minded though its rhetoric was, the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 only freed slaves in areas occupied by Union forces. Slave-holding states fighting for the Union were exempted. Secretary of State William H. Steward commented: ‘We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.’

The roots of economic difference between North and South lay in their labour systems. As Marx observed: ‘The whole movement was and is based, as one sees, on the slave question. Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the existing slave states should be emancipated outright or not, but whether the 20 million free men of the North should submit any longer to an oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders.’ But the record shows that Northern greed and anti-Southern prejudice played a big role in the Civil War too.

Siam Officially Renamed Thailand

2011-08-27T12:15:00.000-07:00

Richard Cavendish explains how the proposal to change the name of Siam to Thailand was eventually accepted on May 11th, 1949.

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.com - On July 20th, 1948, the Siamese constituent assembly voted to change the name of Siam to Thailand, the change to come into effect the following year. Muang Thai or Thailand means ‘land of the free’ and the name had been changed before, in 1939 under the fascist military dictatorship of Field Marshal Luang Phibunsongkhram, but the anti-Axis powers refused to recognise the new name after Siam allied herself with the Japanese and in 1942 declared war on the United States and the United Kingdom.

Phibun and his nationalist supporters in Siam took the Japanese side, partly because it initially looked like the winning one, partly because they hoped to recover long-lost territory in Laos, Cambodia and Burma, and partly because of their profound hostility to the Chinese in Thailand. They had already restricted Chinese immigration, closed hundreds of Chinese schools and shut down Chinese newspapers. In any case, when the Japanese late in 1941 demanded free passage across Thailand to invade Malaya and attack Singapore, the Thais were in no position to resist.

As the war went on, however, and it became clear that the country had picked the losing side, the resources of Thai diplomacy were skilfully marshalled to make the country’s peace with the Allies while taking care not to offend the Japanese unduly. Phibun’s regime ended in 1944. After the war the United States decided that the Thai regime had acted under duress and no objection was raised to the change of name. Phibun returned to power in 1948 and his hostility to Communist China now put him in an altogether better light with the Western powers. He lasted until 1957, when his military cronies decided they had had quite enough of him and sent him packing. He retired to Japan and lived in Tokyo until his death in 1964.

Richard Cavendish is a longstanding contributor to History Today, having penned dozens of the Months Past columns. He is also author of Kings and Queens: The Concise Guide.

Thailand’s Modernising Monarchs

2011-08-27T12:03:00.000-07:00

Tony Stockwell looks behind the exotic facade to examine the role of the kings of Siam and Thailand in modernising their country.

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.com - In the days before global tourism, Thailand was for many in the West a faraway country of which they knew little. Siam, to use the country’s pre-war name, conjured up images of imperious cats, white elephants, conjoined twins and oriental despots. These images were reinforced by The King and I, the musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein, which was first performed in 1951, released as a film in 1956 and recently revived on stage. Their story was based on Margaret Landon’s Anna and the King of Siam which in turn derived from The English Governess at the Siamese Court written by Anna Leonowens and published in Boston, Mass., in 1870. The widow of an officer in the Indian Army, Mrs Leonowens came to Bangkok in 1862 to take up the position of governess in the royal court. For five-and-a-half years she tutored the children of Rama IV, who was also known as Mongkut. The account of her experiences in Siam is a keenly observed, if somewhat sententious, description of life in the enclosed court. She portrays the king as an enlightened though capricious monarch and harps on their differences over the position of women and particularly her own role and status.

The film version of The King and I, with Yul Brynner playing the king and Deborah Kerr as the governess, caused great offence in Thailand and is still banned there. This confection of the exotic and the absurd – like Gilbert and Sullivan’s interpretation of Japan in The Mikado – appeared to patronise, if not to ridicule, King Mongkut. When Twentieth Century Fox embarked on the recent, non-musical re-make, Anna and the King (starring Jodie Foster and Chow Yun-fat), the Hollywood company was prevented from filming in Thailand and instead shot it in various locations in neighbouring Malaysia. On its release in December 1999, the chairman of the Thai censorship board (Police Major-General Prakard Sataman) proscribed the film, although the police estimate that at least 10,000 illegal copies of it have filtered into Thailand. It was, he declared, historically inaccurate and the Thai people, ‘particularly uneducated upcountry villagers’, needed to be shielded from misrepresentations of the royal family. It is true, a romantic imagination runs riot in Anna and the King which deteriorates into an orientalist ‘High Noon’ towards the end of the film when, apparently against all the odds, the king takes on and defeats rebels and reactionaries. Moreover, while it handles with some sensitivity the dilemmas confronting a modernising monarch, it grossly exaggerates the influence of Anna both on Mongkut and on his son and successor, Chulalongkorn.

In the light of Thailand’s reputation for media freedom, such strict controls on historical dramas may seem surprising. Censorship in support of the country’s laws of lèse majesté, however, dates back to the period before the introduction of democracy in 1932 when the priority was to uphold the authority, religion and institutions of the state. A leading Thai documentary producer, one of whose films was banned in 1998 because it was considered damaging to Buddhism, has commented:

The law is an instrument of power – it has nothing to do with protecting the public from bad influence.

Indeed, it remains in the national interest to protect the reputation of the king who still commands enormous popular respect. Even the mildest criticism of the monarchy can incur criminal prosecution and at least two people face up to a year in jail for alleged intent to distribute Anna and the King.

In the month that the film was outlawed, the present king, Bhumibol Adulyadej, celebrated his seventy-second birthday. Bhumibol has been on the throne for fifty-four years and is the world’s longest reigning monarch. His golden jubilee in June 1996 was a great national occasion. His latest birthday was another; for Thais, who believe in the importance of twelve-year cycles, the monarch’s sixth-cycle anniversary was a particularly auspicious event. To commemorate it another film, called Suriyothai, was made, this time by Thais and for Thais. Employing hundreds of elephants and thousands of extras, the director, who is a royal prince, recreated the epic battle between Thais and Burmese forces in the sixteenth century. Although Suriyothai is no less cavalier with history and presents the court in a more lurid light than Anna and the King, it enjoys unreserved official support. Suriyothai has been acclaimed a fittingly heroic tribute to Thailand’s glorious past, whereas Anna and the King has been condemned for traducing the ‘Father of Modern Thailand’ who secured Siam’s independence from Western colonialism and laid the foundations of the nation-state. Indeed, although the monarchy may appear to be a relic of traditional Siam, in fact it has been central to the creation of modern Thailand.

For centuries, the history of Thailand was a chronicle of the rise and fall of dynasties. Kingdoms expanded and collapsed as a result of internal power struggles and periodic wars with the neighbouring Burmese. In the fourteenth century the kingdom of Sukhotai was succeeded by another at Ayudhya, further south on the Chaophraya river. When in 1767 Burmese forces captured and destroyed Ayudhya, P’ya Taksin, who had been a provincial governor under the former regime, took advantage of Thai disarray to seize power. Taksin defeated the Burmese and founded a new capital at Thonburi, fifty miles south of Ayudhya and across the Chaophraya river from present-day Bangkok. Constant military campaigning to expel the Burmese, unify his kingdom and eliminate rivals, however, unhinged P’ya Taksin and provoked rebellion. In 1782 he was overthrown by one of his own generals, Chakri, who, taking the title of King Rama I, inaugurated the Chakri dynasty with its capital at Bangkok.

The origins of modern Thailand – the structure and bureaucracy of the state, the centrality of Bangkok to the economy, the development of the army, the flexibility of Thai foreign policy – date from this time when the independence of the indigenous kingdoms of Southeast Asia was threatened by Western imperialism. Like contemporary regimes in Burma and Vietnam, as well as in China and Japan, the Siamese at first tried to keep European traders and diplomats at bay. But, whereas the Konbaung kings of Burma, the Nguyen emperors of Vietnam, and sultans of the Malay states succumbed to foreigners’ demands, successive Chakri rulers managed to preserve Siam’s independence. Indeed, as the Dutch, British, French, and from 1898 the Americans, established various forms of empire over, respectively, Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma, Indochina and the Philippines, Siam was the only country in Southeast Asia to escape formal colonial rule. This was in large measure due to the policies of Rama IV or Mongkut (r.1851-68) and Rama V or Chulalongkorn (r.1868-1910). Father and son adjusted to alien pressures in ways similar to those adopted at the same time by the advisers to Emperor Meiji of Japan.

Thus, in 1855 Mongkut abandoned the closed-door approach characteristic of so many Asian monarchies and concluded a free-trade treaty with Britain. This was followed by similar agreements with many other Western governments. Moreover, determined to secure the heartland of his kingdom, he surrendered territory on the periphery, notably conceding to France in 1867 his claim upon that part of Cambodia to the east of the Mekong river. Furthermore, in order to anticipate criticisms of ‘oriental misrule’, which might have been used as excuses for foreign intervention, he embarked on a programme of reform. For example, he relaxed court ritual which had so frustrated foreign diplomats in the past. He also employed Western advisers, astutely recruited from a range of countries to avoid becoming excessively beholden to any single foreign power. These advisers played a leading part in improving the administration, the army and the infrastructure, such as the construction of canals in the Bangkok area.

Chulalongkorn continued this strategy. Like his father, he pursued a subtle foreign policy: by ‘bending before the wind’, accommodating foreign interests and making appropriate territorial concessions, he secured Siam as a buffer between the empires of Britain and France. He also employed foreign advisers, and carried modernisation much further than had his father: he abolished slavery, bureaucratised hereditary provincial government, built railways, and sent royal princes overseas to be educated in the ways of the West. By the time Chulalongkorn died in 1910, royal absolutism was underpinned to an extent never achieved by previous regimes in Siam by a country-wide bureaucracy and a standing army.

Mongkut and Chulalongkorn are revered by Thais for having saved their country from colonial rule. Ironically, they were greatly assisted in this feat by those very imperial rivalries which were carving up Southeast Asia. The reason for this lies in Siam’s geographical position between French Indochina and British Burma and Malaya. Given Siam’s strategic location, it was a cardinal principle of British foreign policy to preserve its ‘independence’. Yet, although the country did not fall under the colonial rule of any great power, it was drawn into a Western web of economic and diplomatic interests. Indeed, its so-called independence was gained at a price: Britain and France were bought off with land over which the Thais had once been suzerain; Western (especially British) business interests established control of Siam’s banking, shipping and the import-export trade in, for example, rice and teak; foreign nationals occupied key positions in government and enjoyed special privileges (known as extra-territoriality). Finally, by the end of the nineteenth century Britain to all intents and purposes directed Siam’s external relations.

Modernisation from the top created tensions in Thai society. First of all, the old order resented the loss of patronage and privileges. Chulalongkorn’s modernisation programme adopted colonial models and, like colonial rulers elsewhere in Asia, he ran into opposition over the centralisation of power and restrictions on the historic autonomy of vassal regions. Attempts by the Ministry of the Interior to assert control over out-lying areas, where warlords were prepared to show allegiance to the king but were hostile to direct intrusions by carpet-baggers from Bangkok, led to a number of rebellions in 1902 affecting Pattani in the south, the north-east region bordering upon Laos and the area abutting the northern frontier with Burma’s Shan states. Moreover, although the traditional order may have been inefficient and heavy-handed in its exactions, it still commanded considerable support from a peasantry which was fearful that drastic change would threaten the very order of things, even bringing about the end of the world. The military and civil arms of the new Thai state quelled this provincial unrest, displaced old ruling families and re-educated their sons for service in modern government. A second group that grew increasingly restless under the absolute monarchy comprised military officers, civil servants and professionals. These elites, which in large measure were the product of enlightened absolutism, now aspired to greater influence and felt frustrated by the royal monopoly on power. At the end of Chulalongkorn’s reign, for example, nearly all ministerial appointments were still made from his own family.

Chulalongkorn’s successor, Vajiravudh or Rama VI (r.1910-25) who had been trained at Sandhurst and educated at Oxford, encouraged these new forces in Thai society. Wishing to escape the overbearing influence of his uncles and brothers at court, he built up a personal following ostensibly to defend ‘nation, religion and king’. Recruited from the civil service, yet operating outside the bureaucracy, his Wild Tiger Corps not only antagonised members of the royal family but also incited junior military officers to conspire to clip the powers of the king. Although their attempted coup in 1912 failed, it goaded Vajiravudh into making changes; he appointed commoners to senior posts and embarked on a populist campaign to arouse Thai nationalism. Education, cultural initiatives and sheer propaganda were harnessed to the task of binding Thais in allegiance to their king, country and religion. Vajiravudh’s targets were, firstly, the unequal treaties granting Westerners extra-territorial rights and economic privileges. By 1926 Siam had successfully renegotiated these engagements. Another object of his loathing was Thailand’s community of immigrant Chinese, who had achieved an economic importance out of all proportion to their numbers (they amounted to 12.2 per cent of the population by 1932). The king roundly condemned them as ‘Jews of the East’. Vajiravudh’s brand of xenophobic nationalism did not, however, hold out the prospect of more inclusive or representative government. On the contrary, it remained restrictive and hierarchical. Moreover, his habit of advancing favourites together with financial extravagance fuelled criticism of the monarchy and not just the person of the monarch.

Succeeding his brother in 1925, Prajadhipok, who had been educated at Eton and at the Woolwich Military Academy, was unable to cope with growing financial and economic problems or, despite attempts to liberalise government, to appease the opposition. Prajadhipok had not expected to become king and was ill-prepared for the task, which was made all the more difficult by a lack of personal authority, the legacy of his predecessor’s wild policies, princely squabbles and, ultimately, the depression of the 1930s. Notwithstanding institutional experiments such as the introduction of the Supreme Council of State, Cabinet of Ministers and Privy Council, the press and intellectuals who had experience overseas now openly criticised royal absolutism and government inefficiency. Nonetheless, an opportunity to challenge the regime did not arise until the world depression in 1930-32 punched gaping holes in both government finances and the staple rice economy. In a desperate attempt to appease disaffection caused by crisis measures to retrench expenditure and raise taxation, Prajadhipok produced plans for constitutional reform. It was too late. A combination of army officers (led by Colonels Pahol and Pibul Songkram) and civilians (organised as the People’s Party by Nai Pridi Phanomyong) brought the absolute monarchy to an end in a peaceful coup on June 24th, 1932.

Prajadhipok remained king. He complied with the provisional constitution, which was largely drafted by Nai Pridi Phanomyong, who was professor of law at Chulalongkorn University as well as leader of the People’s Party. Although the king was stripped of his prerogatives and ministers were to be responsible to an elected legislature, he retained immense symbolic authority. As it happened, the liberal experiment did not last long. Constitutionalists were soon marginalised by army officers who, with their common background, shared values and sense of hierarchy, formed a more coherent leadership group than did any political party. In 1933 Nai Pridi was condemned as a socialist and forced to live in France for a time. Two years later, Prajadhipok abdicated; he found military dominance intolerable. He was succeeded by his nephew, Ananda Mahidol (r. 1935-46). But the new king was only ten years old and spent most of his reign in Switzerland. The army was now in the ascendant and propagated military values and a populist nationalism. Xenophobic and racist towards Siam’s Chinese, the military aspired to a greater Thai state embracing all people of ethnic T’ai stock, whether they lived in Siam or Laos or the Shan states of Burma. In keeping with this nationalism, Field Marshal Pibul Songkram (prime minister 1938-44) changed the name of the country from Siam to Thailand. In 1941-42 Pibul followed the traditional strategy of bending before the wind, and negotiated agreements with Tokyo whereby Japan had access to key resources and overland routes while Thailand avoided occupation and even regained territory formerly surrendered to the French. Just as fifty years previously it had reached a modus vivendi with imperialists from the West, Thailand now established a similar position within Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.

The upheavals of war and its aftermath to all intents and purposes swept the Thai monarchy to the sidelines. As the Pacific War ended, the military briefly gave way to constitutionalists, while Americans assumed the influential position which had once been enjoyed by the British. Although Ananda Mahidol returned from abroad, in June 1946 he died of a gunshot wound in circumstances which have never been explained. Ananda was succeeded by his nineteen-year-old brother, Bhumibol, who immediately departed for Switzerland. He did not return for his coronation until 1950 by which time, it might be thought, there was no significant place for the monarch. After all, one king or another had been absent from the country more or less continuously for fifteen years and the military were back in the saddle. Thailand was now a front-line state in Asia’s Cold War and monarchical trappings seemed vestiges of a bygone era. In fact, during the last fifty years the king has been of immense significance as a symbol of national unity, an arbiter at times of political crisis and a revered guardian of the people.

The reinstatement of the king in public affairs started in 1957 when Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, who in that year seized power from Pibul Songkram, started to groom Bhumibol for a much more active role. Beginning with ceremonial and civic duties, Bhumibol soon took up the promotion of rural development and welfare schemes. In addition, although he regularly aligned himself with the forces of law and order, at moments of crisis the king has intervened to safeguard democratic institutions from being entirely overwhelmed by the armed forces. For example, in October 1973 he mediated to end the bloodshed that resulted from the violent suppression of student demonstrations on the streets of Bangkok and was consequently responsible for an interlude of parliamentary politics. When, however, Communist successes in Indochina led to the victory of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the fall of Saigon, as well as the overthrow of the monarchy in Laos, Bhumibol sided with the military against student protesters. On October 6th, 1976, a student demonstration at Thammasat University protesting against the return from exile of Field Marshal Kittikachorn was savagely broken up. Well over forty-six (the official death toll) were killed, hundreds wounded and thousands arrested. The massacre was used as a pretext for a military coup which Bhumibol condoned. The king’s popularity plummeted.

From time to time thereafter he cautiously interceded in the interests of more benign military rule and greater probity in public affairs. In February 1991, although he did not dissent from the military coup which ousted the elected government of Chatichai Choonhavan, he distanced himself from the in-coming junta. When, the following year, the army opened fire on protesters against the return of a military regime, he brought an end to violence by holding talks between the principal protagonists at the palace. He was then instrumental in the restoration of civilian rule through democratic elections held in September 1992. Bhumibol’s contribution to political stability is widely recognised as a major factor in fostering Thailand’s rapid economic growth in the 1980s and also in assisting the country to weather the economic storms of the late 1990s. Indeed, no matter the differences between them, all aggrieved groups actively profess loyalty to the crown. As one minister has recently put it: ‘The present king provides the bridge between traditional politics and democracy.’

Although Bhumibol has grown in stature and respect, the future of the monarchy is by no means assured. While the people of Thailand still regard the king as a semi-divine figure linking them with the cosmic order, they are increasingly inclined to expect from him the attributes of a ‘just king’. Judged according to the standards of the ‘just king’, the dutiful Bhumibol scores well, as was demonstrated by the celebrations of his golden jubilee. He has emerged as a figure of virtue, publicly taking to task politicians for neglecting Bangkok’s horrendous traffic and flooding problems and regularly calling for greater honesty and less corruption in government. His son and heir apparent, Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn, on the other hand, is held in far lower esteem on account of his extravagance and frivolous lifestyle. Since Bhumibol is only too aware of the history of succession crises and the chaos that in the past regularly engulfed the country on the fall of a dynasty, he has tried to reinforce the institutions of civil society so that the stability of Thailand will in future be less dependent on the personal qualities of the king. In so doing, he has moved from being a more or less passive upholder of the forces of conservatism to endorsing the 1997 constitution. Known as ‘The People’s Charter’, this constitution has devolved more power to the public and promises greater transparency in government. Meanwhile, the majesty of kingship is rigorously preserved: few Thais openly discuss the future of the monarchy; the law preserves the royal family from the obsessive media coverage that has afflicted the House of Windsor; and the authorities proscribe foreign films like The King and I and Anna and the King.

Empowering the people to question traditional authority, however, is a risky strategy. Indeed, Bhumibol is facing today the same dilemma encountered by Mongkut 150 years ago: How to keep change within bounds? Since the 1850s the monarchy has been a symbol of both tradition and modernity. But it has been more than that; it has acted in turn as a dynamo for and as a brake upon change. If it is to survive, the Chakri dynasty cannot opt for one role or the other, but will have to continue straddling the contesting forces of conservatism and reform.

Further reading:

Nicholas Tarling, ed., The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, vol 2 (Cambridge, 1992)
D.J. Steinberg and others, In Search of Southeast Asia: A Modern History (Honolulu, 1987)
David Wyatt, Thailand: A Short History (New Haven, Conn., 1982)
Ian Brown, (Singapore, 1989)
Patrick Tuck, The French Wolf and the Siamese Lamb: The French Threat to Siamese Independence, 1858-1907 (Bangkok, 1995)
Judith A. Stowe, Siam becomes Thailand: A Story of Intrigue (London, 1991)
For current affairs see the weekly Far Eastern Economic Review published in Hong Kong and Michael Leifer, Dictionary of the Modern Politics of South-East Asia (London, 1995).

Singapore's Token Conservation

2011-08-27T10:00:00.000-07:00

Ann Hills examines the reconstruction of Singapore's 19th-century buildings to accommodate tourism.

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.com - Under the arches of nineteenth-century houses along the Singapore River – only yards from where Sir Stamford Raffles landed in 1819 and founded the British colony – a barber was shaving a client. He has been in the same spot for thirty years, but within months he will be moved. The houses where generations of traders have lived alongside packed quays are being variously renovated as showpieces or destroyed to make way for developments in a tiny country short of land and with mixed views on preservation.

The riverside statue to Raffles is safe; so too is the nearest building – Empress Place, until recently an office for the immigration department. At a cost of nearly £4 million, the 1860s neo-classical structure with a central hall supported by a double row of Doric columns, is to become a museum of Chinese cultural relics by 1988. This is one of the first steps in creating a Heritage Link (linking sites of historic, notably colonial value). The proposals have the backing of Dr George McDonald, director of the Canadian Museum of Man in Ottawa. Didier Reppellin, leading French architect and official adviser to the government on historic buildings, was also summoned last autumn to advise on specific projects including Empress Place, and will monitor renovation.

The most famous of all the Singaporean buildings – the Raffles Hotel, which celebrated its centenary in 1986 – is likely to be restored to its original appearance enhancing its reputation, endorsed by the famous: Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward and Rudyard Kipling. More recently it was a setting in the wartime Tenko series. Visitors soon learn its history, including the hotel's role in providing shelter to people rescued from internment camps after liberation in 1945; the saga of the tiger shot under the billiard table, the origins of the Singapore Sling, and how the silver roast beef trolley was hidden from the Japanese, buried in the garden. A centenary brochure has been published.

Forty years after the war, the world's tallest hotel, the seventy- three storey high Westin Stamford has risen a stone's throw away on the Raffles City complex. It occupies the site of the Raffles Institution, founded in 1823. Ironically, too, the Archives Department and Oral History Department with a total of forty-two staff, is cataloguing a changing world as fast as possible. A few weeks ago, as houses and shops were being bulldozed in the street outside, a party inside marked the opening of Singapore lifeline: the river and its people – a photographic exhibition and book. Tapes are being made on vanishing trades, the cultural diversity, on the river-life that passes. I listened to the recording of a British survivor describing the sinking of the war- ships Repulse and Prince of Wales.

The river has been tidied up: that entailed removing all the bum boats, clearing store rooms, resurfacing quays and taking anti-pollution measures. Next September a fortnight of celebrations with fireworks and cruises will mark a decade of renovation. Gone from the vicinity are pig and duck rearing, boat yards, squatter colonies and hawkers. What do exist, are modern hawker centres where independent food traders are allocated space to serve meals and fresh fruit drinks through the day.

Nearby, Chinatown is still flourishing, even though newer buildings dwarf the bustling streets where families peer from shuttered balconies above crowded shops. The future of Chinatown is being- debated by a national steering committee whose members are said to be sensitive to traditional skills from medicine making, to specialist food stalls, calligraphy and fortune telling. But the government refuses to comment yet on steps being taken to amend rent acts, which have depressed the cost of living for tenants and restrained capital investment by owners in the past decades.

The old Indian sector retains its hectic oriental atmosphere, but rows of old houses are being torn down in side streets off Serangoon Road. Temples have better chances of lasting – like the extraordinary statue- studded 1844 Hindu temple called Sri Mariamman.

Some colonial buildings retain their functions: Victoria Hall is the concert hall, and across the road is the Cricket Club at one end of the sward with a backdrop of skyscrapers housing banks, offices and hotels. Modernisation continues in a country noted for its financial empire, vast expansion of hotels and emphasis on education under the rule of Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. Another area of investment is transport. Within a year or two the 2.6 million Singaporeans will have their own subway- the Mass Rapid Transit system, entailing massive excavations, tunnelling and raised routes.

History has to take a back-seat, allocated to the realms of tourism. Fort Canning Park, on a hilly, central site, is being developed with a 'historical zone' containing relics of an old Christian cemetary, the grave of the last ruler of ancient Singapura, Sultan Iskandar Shah with bunkers from the Second World War, and the site of Raffles' house.

Haw Par Villa, one of three; built by the Aw brothers for private residences, is being redeveloped at a cost of £10 million to offer visitors a sophisticated introduction to Chinese history, myths, legends and traditions with a mythological theme park, including 'encounters' with the spirit world through a ride in the dark, and incorporating the latest in laser and holographic technology.

Beyond the town centre, out in the diminishing countryside, the last of the Malay kampungs – tropical jungle villages – are threatened with the incursion of satellite towns with numerous blocks ten storeys high. A model kampung will be recreated in Geylang Serai, a still predominantly Malay-populated district, combining cultural and commercial activities from bird-singing contests to kite marking. The buildings, including prayer hall or 'surau', will be clustered and linked with covered walk- ways.

Second hand, nostalgic experiences may have to suffice for the visitor in future; such is the price of progress. Destruction is rampant – a fact the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board would prefer to turn a blind eye towards as they present packages for future conservation.

Lee Kuan Yew becomes Singapore’s Prime Minister

2011-08-27T09:55:00.000-07:00

June 31st, 1959 - Richard Cavendish remembers how a former-British colony gained a long-serving leader.

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.com - After the expulsion of the Japanese in 1945, British plans for a united Malaya left Singapore, the island at the foot of the Malay peninsula, out because its population was heavily Chinese, not Malayan. It became a separate British colony run by a governor with a mainly appointed, mainly Chinese council. Pressure for independence grew and in 1954 the socialist politician Lee Kuan Yew founded the People’s Action Party (PAP).

Lee came from a rich Chinese family which called him Harry and brought him up speaking English, but he was bent on bringing an end to British rule.

In 1955 Singapore was given an elected legislature and its own administration in charge of all matters except foreign policy and defence. Lee’s party won only three seats in that year’s election. But in 1958 he helped to negotiate in London for a Singapore with a fully elected government responsible for all internal affairs. His party won 43 of the 51 seats in the subsequent 1959 election and, after securing the release of imprisoned communist colleagues, Lee took office as Singapore’s prime minister in June.

The PAP had called for union with Malaya and in 1963 Lee crushed the communists, who opposed it, and Singapore joined the new Federation of Malaya. It did not work. The island’s Chinese character proved an impossible obstacle and the federation asked Singapore to leave two years later. It became a separate, sovereign republic and in the elections from 1968 to 1980 the PAP won every single seat in the legislature. Lee became one of the most important political figures in south-east Asia and by the time he stood down in 1990 he was the world’s longest-serving prime minister.

Richard Cavendish is a longstanding contributor to History Today, having penned dozens of the Months Past columns. He is also author of Kings and Queens: The Concise Guide.

Time for Dutch Courage in Indonesian

2011-08-27T09:48:00.000-07:00

Paul Doolan looks at the continuing controversy over Dutch 'police operations' post-1945 in Indonesia.

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.com - Last year marked the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the Dutchman, Cornelis de Houtman, on the island of Enganno, off the coast of Sumatra in Indonesia. Now, over four centuries later and nearly fifty years after the ending of their rule in Indonesia, the Dutch are engaged in a soul-searching debate concerning their colonial past.

Between 1946 and 1949 two military campaigns, euphemistically called 'police actions', resulted in the deaths of over 100,000 Indonesians and, according to one Financial Times Service report, 6,000 Dutch soldiers. However, the colonial power found itself politically isolated as well as economically near bankruptcy, and independence was reluctantly conceded in December 1949; a fact that even today causes controversy.

Criticism of Dutch colonial policy dates back at least to the appearance of Edward Dakker, the Dutch master known as Multatuli's Max Havelaar . At the time of its publication, in 1860, this 'J'accuse' was considered a biting attack against the exploitation and abuse of the poor majority of Javanese by their European and local masters. Today, the novel is generally regarded as a classic work of nineteenth-century Dutch literature, its criticisms been neutralised and made safe due to the passing of time.

The period 1945-49 in Dutch colonial history, however, is still highly sensitive. Indeed, this chapter is conspicuous among colonial studies by its absence. Unlike Vietnam, which Hollywood has transformed into an icon of contemporary culture, post-Second World War Indonesia constitutes something of a collective blind-spot in the Dutch psyche. The case of one of the Netherlands' leading historians, the late Jan Romein, is enlightening. His wife, Annie Romein-Verschoor, had grown up in colonial Dutch East Indies. They were both self-confessed Communists, progressive idealists and committed to Indonesian independence. Yet when Jan Romein published his major study of decolonisation, De Eeuw van Azie (The Asian Century) in 1956, Indonesia earned only a superficial mention. Of the 300 pages, twenty-five were on Indonesia, while the bibliography of 267 titles contained only ten relating to it.

In 1980 a leading Indonesian historian, Taufik Abdullah, referring to the loud Dutch silence, remarked that international historiography was the monopoly of the conquerors. After all, far more works have appeared analysing German and Japanese brutality during the Second World War than the Dutch police actions – actions which took place while Nazi leaders were standing trial for crimes against humanity in Nuremburg. If the Dutch historians were not prepared to do it, announced a historian from Singapore, Yong Mung Cheong, then he would attempt his own analysis of the complex events of 1946-49.

A significant breakthrough in terms of Dutch historiography occurred in 1988 when a new volume of L.de Jong's The Kingdom of the Netherlands in the Second World War appeared in Dutch bookstores. Each volume of de Jong's massive work had been awaited with anticipation, not only by professional historians, but also by the Dutch reading public. Bestseller status was assured. Of the eleven volumes the arrival of each invariably led to praise, criticism and open discussion in the national press. When the 1988 addition appeared, however, the outcry from some veterans of the colonial army and the conservative press was bitter and the ensuing debate more heated than usual. De Jong, who is considered a figure of national importance, had dared to criticise the atrocities that the Dutch had inflicted during their police actions.

Another writer, Ewald Vanvught, published Legal Opium in 1983 in which he argues that the control and expansion of the opium trade was a prime motor in Dutch colonial policy. Vanvught says that his work has been inspired by the inertia of the professional historians – he himself is a freelance author. More recently he has claimed that the record of the Dutch presence in Indonesia is one of systematic and continual atrocity, while he accuses Dutch historians of disguising this fact under a cloak of silence. He has cited certain established historians as presenting misinformation as a science, and of forming a tradition in which painful features of the past have been deliberately suppressed.

A number of incidents in recent years have further highlighted how painful this whole issue really is. Ponke Princen was a young Dutch man drafted into the army in 1946 and sent to Indonesia. There he deserted and switched sides, fighting for Indonesian independence. For Indonesians he became a hero but to the Dutch he was a traitor. As the decades slipped by many progressive Dutch citizens began to see Ponke Princen as a principled individual who had been sickened by the immoral acts he was ordered to carry out. But when he applied in Jakarta for a visa to revisit his former homeland for the first time in nearly fifty years, all the old cries of 'traitor' were heard again. Despite having the support of the Dutch Minister for Foreign Affairs Princen was initially refused entry into the Netherlands. In 1992 Gra Boomsma published the novel The Last Typhoon . It was the first fictionalised account of the police actions to have appeared in Dutch. In a newspaper interview the young writer made the mistake of saying that Dutch soldiers, while certainly not the same as the SS, could be compared to the SS in some ways. Both he and the interviewer attracted the wrath of the colonial veterans and were charged in court with slander. In June 1994 they were acquitted.

January 1995 saw the appearance of a book of photographs of the Indonesian campaign taken by the late Dutch photographer, Hugo Wilmar. These included shots that had been banned by the military censors at the time. A leading national weekly carried excerpts from the book and the Dutch Photo Institute in Rotterdam held a five-week exhibition. These pictures are in some ways reminiscent of images that we are familiar with from Vietnam; wounded and dead lie on the jungle floor, guerrilla suspects are being interrogated and manhandled by Western troops. For a country that has enfolded a significant part of its past in silence, these are disturbing reminders.

This was followed in July 1995 by the publication of Verboden voor honden en inlanders (No Dogs or Natives), a collection of interviews in which Indonesians who had experienced Dutch colonial rule were given the opportunity to tell their stories. The following month, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands arrived in Jakarta for a ten-day official visit. At home, her visit had been preceded by a bitter debate over whether she should apologise to the Indonesian people for 350 years of colonial rule. Her main speech stopped short of an outright apology. Instead she spoke of feeling 'very sad' at the deaths that had been caused by colonialism.

Ironically, the majority of the Indonesian population are barely aware of their historical link with the Netherlands. The Dutch left little cultural heritage behind and many Indonesians are more interested in the future, rather than in any study of the past. However, for the Dutch, the integration of their recent past with the image of their country as a bastion of tolerance and human rights is a dilemma not yet resolved.

The well-known Dutch cultural critic Ian Buruma recently published his The Wages of Guilt , an excellent analysis of how the Germans and the Japanese have reacted and coped with the horrors of their not-too-distant past. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before his countrymen feel able to turn the lens to their own past too.

Paul Doolan is the Head of History at the International School of the Sacred Heart, Tokyo.

Independence For Indonesian

2011-08-27T09:43:00.000-07:00

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.com - When the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the East Indies nationalists seized the opportunity to throw off the colonial yoke of the Dutch and proclaim the independent state of Indonesia which the Japanese had promised them. Neither Communism nor Islam much appealed to the nationalists, who were led by Achmed Sukarno and Muhammad Hatta. Sukarno, the son of a school-teacher and Theosophist, had little time for religion or ideology and believed himself a man of destiny. He had been imprisoned and exiled by the Dutch. So had Hatta, a Sumatran with a Rotterdam University degree in economics. Both had collaborated with the Japanese and helped to organise a Japanese-backed Indonesian army.

Equipped with Japanese weapons, the nationalists waged an armed struggle against the Dutch, who had powerful economic reasons for recovering the East Indies and believed that most Indonesians wanted them to return. Dutch forces made substantial headway in Java and Sumatra, but there was fierce criticism in the United Nations, and the United States pressed for a negotiated solution. Eventually a conference of 120 delegates assembled at The Hague in August 1949 under the chairmanship of the Dutch prime minister, Willem Drees.

The nationalist delegates were skilfully led by Hatta. On November 2nd, after ten weeks of haggling, the conference reached an agreement which transferred Dutch sovereignty to the United States of Indonesia, with Queen Juliana of the Netherlands as titular head of a new Netherlands-Indonesian Union, Sukarno as Indonesian president and Hatta as prime minister. The thorny question of Dutch New Guinea (Irian Jaya) was put aside for later. The Dutch released thousands of political prisoners before independence was formally celebrated on December 27th. The new Indonesia, with a population of 78 million on an archipelago approaching 2 million square kilometres of land, immediately became an important factor in the Southwest Pacific.

Richard Cavendish is a longstanding contributor to History Today, having penned dozens of the Months Past columns. He is also author of Kings and Queens: The Concise Guide.

The Future Of Indonesian

2011-08-27T09:39:00.000-07:00

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.com - There is much speculation, and not a little worry, about the future of Indonesia – the giant of Southeast Asia, the most populous Muslim-majority nation in the world, the world’s third-most-populous democracy, a nation which sits astride some highly strategic sea-lanes, and a place sometimes identified in the rhetoric of ‘war against terrorism’ as a potential source of al-Qaeda-linked, or al-Qaeda-type, terrorist movements. The most pressing question seems to be how – or whether – the nation can be held together. It seems that the government of Megawati Sukarnoputri (from July 2001 to the present), and certainly the Indonesian military, believe that the use of force to that end is justified and necessary, at least in the case of Aceh. Some military leaders see the broader American-led ‘war against terrorism’ as an opportunity to re-establish the military as the predominant political force in the nation.

Indonesia consists of the world’s largest archipelago. Running it as a centralised administrative unit would be an immense challenge for any government, let alone one with as many problems as that of President Megawati. So what might the future hold? Will Indonesia fall apart?

Concern about Indonesian unity commonly rests upon a view of its history which is too short-term. Most observers have in mind the Soeharto years (1966-98). All are aware of the extravagant corruption of President Soeharto, his family and his cronies. The regime’s human rights abuses earned it an international reputation for brutality and for an inability to recognise its own long-term self-interests. This was a regime which was often stupid, brutal and corrupt. Yet it also achieved remarkable economic development and, until the crash of 1997, most of Indonesia’s citizens benefited as did many foreign investors. In the context of the Cold War and in the wake of the Iranian revolution of 1979, Indonesia seemed to the United States to be a nation which, while remaining non-aligned, was nevertheless non-aligned in ways the West found helpful. The regime was anti-Communist, seemed to have domesticated Islamic political forces, was open to capitalist investment, and was achieving high levels of growth.

The most promising period of the Soeharto regime was the late 1980s. By that time economic development was achieving impressive results. Health, education and welfare standards were rising significantly. Corruption was bad but perhaps not dysfunctional. There was a rapidly growing urban middle class and signs of political openness from time to time. The country was not yet seriously challenged by separatist sentiments, religious radicalism or inter-ethnic conflict. There was plenty that was wrong by the standards of universal human rights, transparency and honesty, but it would not have been unreasonable to think that there was a real chance that things could get better. Indonesia might evolve into a middle-income, ‘soft authoritarian’ or maybe even nascently democratic state, unified, stable, and friendly to the West and to its economic and strategic interests. It may well be this idea, or something like it, that President Megawati has in mind today.

But the centralising model of the Soeharto regime has been discredited in the eyes of a large proportion of Indonesians. Too much freedom was lost, too many corruption became obvious, too much of its forests fell to regime cronies, too much blood was shed, too much brutality was suffered. Above all, the administrative capacity of the bureaucracy, the resources of the military and the general capacity of the government to govern are all far too limited to run Indonesia as an administratively unified state.

It is probable that there is no going back to the late 1980s. However, a longer-term look at Indonesia’s history suggests a different sort of future might be possible.

Looking at the archipelago in the period 1400 to 1800 reveals some distinctive factors. These give the area a distinct identity and continuity which enables us to speak meaningfully of the history of the Malay-Indonesian region as an entity. It used to be said that colonial regimes created the modern states of Indonesia and Malaysia, and there is some truth in that. But the Dutch and British colonial empires broke continuities, too.

The boundaries of this cultural, political and economic continuity were different from modern national ones. The Malay peninsula and Borneo were part of it, and the southern Philippines was at its outer fringes. Papua was not in this world, except for peripheral trading contacts.

This was a maritime world. Seas were not, as in modern states, where lines were drawn to divide polities, but highways that connected polities with each other. Trading towns of east Sumatra had more to do with the other side of the Malacca Straits (in modern Malaysia) than with the remote interior of Sumatra. North Java coastal states were linked to places across the Java Sea in south Kalimantan and resisted attempts to control them on the part of the interior empires of Java itself. Much of the commerce of the great Malay trading state of Malacca, which prospered during the fifteenth century, depended on the seaborne import of the spices of Maluku, the rice of Java and the slaves of the eastern archipelago.

Trade was thus important in linking these places. The astute Portuguese apothecary Tomé Pires, who was in Malacca in 1512-15, shortly after its conquest by the Portuguese in 1511, visited Sumatra and Java and recorded information from across the archipelago. His Suma Oriental described a vast seaborne trade system which handled bulk items like rice, textiles and slaves, but also high-value, low-bulk products such as spices, gold, benzoin, honey, rosewater, wax, rattan, sandalwood and diamonds. These products circulated around the archipelago on the basis of natural comparative advantages. This Malay-Indonesian network was connected, principally at Malacca, to wider international networks which traded Indian textiles, Chinese goods, and much else from as far afield as Europe.

Cultural continuities also connected the archipelago’s population centres. Islam provided a shared reference, networks of books, teachers, laws and ideas; and the powerful experience for some of the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. The mystical Sufis were important in spreading ideas and commitment to Islam. Some major Sufi works written in early seventeenth-century Aceh spread across the archipelago, in Malay and in local translations. This was, at least until the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not a puritanical or reformist faith. But there were certainly people for whom Islam was a moral imperative and banner of political action: Sultan Alauddin who Islamised South Sulawesi by force of arms in 1608-11; Shaikh Yusuf Makasar who resisted the Dutch East India Company’s intervention in West Java in the 1680s; Trunajaya of Madura who toppled a king of Java in 1677; Kyai Tapa who inspired a Bantenese rebellion in 1750 and prince Dipanagara who led the last great Javanese resistance against Dutch rule in 1825-30, known as the Java War.

Although Hindu Bali did not convert to Islam, it was part of this archipelagic continuity because of its intimate connections with Java and Javanese culture. Until the late eighteenth century, Balinese were involved in the turbulent politics and complex cultural transitions of the easternmost extremity of Java. And Balinese products, not least slaves, were an important element of the trading system.

When Malay-Indonesian kingdoms went to war or made peace, they did it with their fellows within this vast archipelagic community. The sultans of what is now Malaysia rarely battled the rulers of Siam or Burma; their alliances and conflicts were with peoples from Aceh to east Indonesia. The Bugis and Makasarese of Sulawesi traded widely, but their political and trade heartland was the Malay-Indonesian archipelago. When a Javanese king had imperial pretensions, it was to other states in the archipelago that he turned for tokens of obeisance – which they, under most circumstances, refused to give.

In all of these states, the forms of government were pre-modern, with low levels of institutionalisation. The state whose form of governance is best known is the Mataram empire of central and east Java, which was founded in the late sixteenth century and whose descendants still occupy the courts of central Java today. Here we see irregular processes for collecting taxes and levying manpower for public works or war. Such low levels of institutionalisation were in part necessitated by the difficult facts of geography. Java now has a population of over 100 million, but its population around 1800 was probably no more than 3-4 million. Vast tracts were unpopulated, roads were extensive, but easy for brigands or local overlords to cut or tax, and often impassable in the wet season. Smart Javanese kings recognised that they needed alliances with local lords (which meant making sure they shared in the rewards of loyalty), a cultural position which made the monarchy appear to be supported by supernatural powers, military success whenever challenged, and, of course, lots of spies and poisoners. What was true of Java was true of the entire archipelago. It was not run like a modern state.

Thus, there was continuity in the area before the high colonial period of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, but it did not rest upon administrative unity. Rather, it rested upon a shared sense of cultural community, shared histories of interaction, and above all on shared trade links. This trade provided the solid ties of mutual benefit that knitted the archipelago together. The Malay-Indonesian archipelago was not a nation, but it had something that looked like a nascent national economy, with comparative advantage and mutual benefit making it sensible for the region to work together. It was not unlike the European Union: it even had its parallel to the Euro the Spanish (Mexican) Real , the silver ‘piece of eight’, which was the common unit of exchange throughout the region. The coming of the northern Europeans in the seventeenth century soon changed that.

What the Dutch and British colonial powers did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was to break the continuity of the region even as they worked for administrative centralisation of their colonial territories. They did this firstly by separating the two sides of the Straits of Malacca into different spheres of interest in the Treaty of London of 1824. Then, the Dutch sought to make the archipelago an administrative unit by conquest. Finally, they broke up the economic continuities of their new colonial state by redirecting its economies towards export destinations outside of Indonesia. At independence in 1949, Indonesia was an administrative unit, but no longer an economic one.

The administrative and political unification of what is now Indonesia began under the Napoleonic governor-general H.W. Daendels (1808-11), who sought to make Java a real colonial territory, governed from Batavia. The interim British administration that followed (1811-16) intervened in the affairs of the Javanese courts in the name of bringing to heel what it regarded as a corrupt ancien régime . This newly interventionist approach precipitated the Java War (1825-30) which, in the end and not without difficulty, the colonial forces won. Thereafter Java became truly a Dutch colony, with its resources developed for the benefit of the mother country. Java’s sugar, coffee, tea and other products helped to make Amsterdam one of the world’s great markets for colonial produce, paid off the Netherlands’ national debt, kept Dutch domestic taxes down, built the Dutch state railway system and did much to stimulate the industrialisation of the Netherlands in the course of the nineteenth century. Java’s trade, once a part of networks involving Sumatra, southern Malaya, south Kalimantan, Bali and east Indonesia, was now to a great extent focused on Amsterdam.

The Dutch had initial misgivings about expansion into the outer islands (except for Sumatra) but, in the more intensive imperial scramble for territory of the later nineteenth century, felt that they had to move to prevent other European powers or Americans from becoming established there. This meant a series of costly wars: in south Sumatra (1819-1907), west Sumatra (1821-38), Bali (1840s, 1906-8), Lombok (1894), south Sulawesi (1858-60, 1905-6), Kalimantan (1859-63) and elsewhere. This process of conquest culminated in the Aceh War, which began with the defeat of the first Dutch expeditionary force in 1873. The war went on for four decades, with significant resistance continuing until 1910-12 – the longest colonial war in history.

As the Netherlands colonial state was being brought together by force, it was being unified by the KPM shipping line. The KPM brought people, products and mail from one part of the archipelago to another, with everything in the end centralised around Batavia (modern Jakarta).

The products which now developed most dramatically were those needed by an industrialising and modernising world, such as petroleum and rubber, tobacco, sugar, coffee, tea, copra, tin and quinine. The new products of the archipelago were mainly directed to international, not Indonesian, markets. By 1914, the ratio of inter-island trade to foreign trade was only 5.5 per cent, 10 per cent in 1921, 17 per cent in 1939. The outer islands now became more important than Java as sources of exports to international markets.

With the Netherlands East Indies fully established by the 1910s – except for remote areas like Papua, barely controlled even by the time of the Second World War – there occurred a degree of administrative unity never before witnessed in the history of the archipelago. It is this which justifies the claim that the modern state of Indonesia was created by the Dutch. But the economic continuities that had once knitted the archipelago together had been broken.

After five years of revolution beginning in 1945, Indonesia’s independence was conceded by the Dutch in 1949. Now Indonesia’s political elite had to decide how they were going to run their new country. Not surprisingly, they shared the assumptions of the Dutch regime under which they had lived, the conventional political orthodoxies of Europe and America, and a commitment to democracy as an abstract idea (although their social and educational backgrounds made them elitists at heart). During the revolution, the Dutch, crucially, had sought to counter the unitary Republic of Indonesia by setting up sham independent states in territories they still controlled so as to create a federal Indonesia in which Dutch influence would remain strong. In December 1949 a federal Republic of the United States of Indonesia was indeed created by the Round Table Conference which brought the Indonesian Revolution to an end, but this Dutch attempt at continuing influence had the effect of discrediting federalism in the eyes of nationalists. Within eight months the federal states were all gone, collapsed into the unitary Republic.

Through the 1950s, governments came and went with alarming rapidity. Administratively they proved inadequate. The bureaucracy was highly politicised and became for the most part a bloated, incompetent and corrupt cancer on the nation. The military was involved in various political ploys, rather poorly, in the earlier 1950s, resulting in it being under-funded, under-trained, ill-equipped and divided. An Islamic rebellion, the Darul Islam movement, had begun in West Java in 1948, even before independence, and even here, in the hinterlands of Jakarta, the army had difficulty in re-establishing control. By late 1956 military commands in the islands outside of Java themselves were setting up regional councils (i.e. carrying out regional coups) – financed in part by the proceeds from smuggling local products to markets outside of the country. Political parties hardly had national electoral bases at all. There were no national elections until 1955 and most parties concentrated on the only game in town: dividing up the spoils in Jakarta.

Cultural unification was a greater success. President Sukarno (1945-66) hammered the theme of national unity incessantly, and struck responsive chords. The national Indonesian language was a powerful tool in this respect. It was adopted throughout the national educational system and in the media. Nevertheless, it remained a minority language; as late as 1971 only 40.8 per cent of Indonesians were literate in the national language. However, the idea that Indonesians were members of a single nation nevertheless was beginning to take root.

The forces of disunity were still powerful. Among the regionally based rebellions the most important was the Sumatra-based PRRI (Pemerintah Revolusioner Republik Indonesia , Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia) rebellion of 1958, which was crushed quickly, and rather surprisingly, by Indonesian military combined operations. Yet this was not a Sumatran breakaway movement, but an attempt to change the government in Jakarta. Even these regional rebellions took place in a context which assumed that Indonesia was a single state.

Sukarno sought to enhance this national unity and to crush his political opponents by building a sense of ongoing revolution. Both the military and the Communist Party saw advantages in this and played along. Thus was ushered in the chaos of Sukarno’s Guided Democracy government, a teetering house of cards which finally collapsed in the failed coup of 1965 and the bloody anti-Communist violence that followed, in which between 300,000 and 2 million people were murdered and over 100,000 taken political prisoner without trial.

From this bloodshed came Soeharto’s so-called New Order government. Now the national unity project was pursued by putting trusted military men in crucial governmental positions and trusted military units in places which were, or might become, troublesome. Already by 1968 seventeen of Indonesia’s twenty-five provincial governors and over half of itsbupatis (regency heads) and town mayors were military men. If it was necessary to apply violence, there was no hesitation in doing so. The new presidency was born in violence and remained, at heart, a military regime, working with a depoliticised national bureaucracy. And so the politics of the New Order became largely the politics of Soeharto himself and of the military.

If Soeharto could be seen to follow the agenda of his colonial predecessors in maintaining the unity of the archipelago by force, his regime departed from the past in its economic programme. Its first task was to stabilise and rehabilitate the economy. Having achieved this within the first five years, the regime’s technocrats turned their efforts towards development.

The revolution in oil prices of the 1970s not only gave Indonesia vital resources for development, but also made possible a degree of economic nationalism. From the mid-1970s real local industrial and business growth occurred. Java now experienced what Howard Dick calls ‘a belated industrial revolution based on the resource of cheap labour’.

By the time the Soeharto regime fell in 1998 real progress had been made towards creating a national economy, for the first time in nearly two centuries. Various parts of Indonesia were again being tied to each other, rather than to overseas markets, principally because of the development of manufacturing industry in West Java. Now raw materials for that industry were being drawn from the outer islands and the products of that industry were being sold throughout the archipelago (as well as in overseas markets). Indonesia was again becoming an area tied together by economic advantages and self-interest.

The history of the past two centuries suggests that unifying the archipelago administratively can only be done by the use of force. Despite all the developments in communications and other technologies over this period, only compulsion has produced administrative unity. Once the capacity of the Soeharto regime to enforce unity collapsed, anti-Jakarta sentiments bubbled up in many places. In East Timor these have ended in the independence of the area. In Papua there are demands for independence. Throughout the country there is an insistence on greater autonomy from Jakarta. In strife-torn, tragic Aceh a historical sense of déjà vu may be prompted by the thought that the Indonesian military has been fighting to crush the local independence movement for well over a decade already.

Indonesia is now tenuously unified in administrative terms. From 2002, a policy of regional autonomy has been implemented. No one dares call it federalism, but that is what it looks like. The problem for Indonesian policy circles is that the Dutch having discredited federalism and Soeharto having discredited centralisation, there are few middle options to choose. The critics of Megawati Sukarnoputri suspect that she wishes to roll back regional autonomy, being inspired by her father Sukarno’s calls for national unity but far more inclined to embrace Soeharto’s use of force to achieve it than her father’s style of revolution.

Comparison with the colonial and earlier independence periods suggests that administrative unity is unlikely without force, while present social and political realities suggest that force is unlikely to be acceptable to most Indonesians. Therefore any government recourse to force might tear the country apart. Indeed, military force has already done much to destroy Acehnese allegiance to the nation.

In the pre-colonial period, however, Indonesian continuities were products of cultural and economic connections, and of political interaction between autonomous polities, and these continuities are now stronger than they have ever been. Indonesia is now a much more uniformly Islamic country than it was even forty years ago. Ongoing Islamisation has dramatically reduced opposition to Islamic values and norms. Throughout the country are thousands of Islamic schools, many – but certainly not all – of which support the tolerant pluralism which Indonesian religious elites have generally embraced. Notably, there is a widespread network of the State Islamic University in Jakarta and the State Islamic Religious Institutes, university-level establishments which form a powerful institutional base for the liberal, tolerant Islam for which Indonesia is well known. The two largest Islamic organisations, Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama, have vast educational networks, a dominant philosophy of liberalism and openness, and something like 60 million followers between them.

The sense of Indonesianness is strong. By 1980 61.4 per cent of Indonesians were literate in the national language and the 1990 census reported the figure to be over 80 per cent for Indonesians above the age of five. Three generations of Indonesians have got used to the idea that their nation is something to be proud of. Although Soeharto did much to discredit major symbols such as the national (Sukarnoist) philosophy of Pancasila (Five Principles), nevertheless in most of the country the sense of being Indonesian seems still to matter.

It now makes sense for the various parts of Indonesia to work together as an economic entity, employing comparative advantages to mutual benefit. Reverting to the European comparison, Indonesia not only has the foundations for economic co-operation and a common currency, but things the European Union still lacks: common laws, a common foreign and defence policy, and a common language.

This review of the archipelago’s history suggests that those with an interest in Indonesia’s future might do well to consider how the archipelago functioned in the 1480s. They might then do everything possible to encourage economic interdependence and order the military to limit its role to the defence of the archipelago from external threats. That is, sell Aceh’s energy resources to Java, sell Java’s manufactures to Aceh, and send the military back to the barracks. This policy might marginally enhance the prospects of a peaceful settlement in Aceh. And it may point the way to a new kind of state in Indonesia.

For Further Reading:

M.C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1200 (3rd ed.; Palgrave; Stanford UP, 2001); Howard Dick, Vincent J.H. Houben, J. Thomas Lindblad and Thee Kian Wie, The Emergence of a National Economy: An Economic History of Indonesia, 1800-2000 (Asian Studies Association of Australia in association with Allen & Unwin and University of Hawai’i Press, 2002); Armando Cortesão (ed. & transl.), The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires and the Book of Francisco Rodrigues (2 vols. Hakluyt Society, 1944); Anne Booth, The Indonesian Economy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A History of Missed Opportunities (Macmillan in association with the Australian National University, Canberra, 1998).

The History Of Sexuality

2011-08-27T07:37:00.000-07:00

Historytoday.com - We cannot find distinct gay men or lesbians in the past because distant cultures had no conception of sexuality as an identity, as Michel Foucault, James Davidson and Giulia Sissa have shown (Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self, Vintage, 1988). The ancient Greek man may have cruised the Acropolis looking for teenage boys, but he was just as happy to find a female slave – and he went home to his wife. It is tempting to imagine such past cultures as oases of toleration, when people didn’t care who a man slept with. Tell that to Timarchus, deprived of his citizenship in ancient Athens for supposedly selling sex (James M. Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008; Giulia Sissa, Sex and Sensuality in the Ancient World, Yale University Press, 2008).

Today we think of Islamic societies as sexually repressive and homophobic. But, unlike in early Christianity, sexual pleasure in early Islam was not seen as bad in itself, as long as a man just had sex with his own wives or slaves. Muslim authorities even excused coitus interruptus for the purposes of birth control. Sufi mystics adored the beauty of male youths, with their downy cheeks, as a pathway to adoring the beauty of God and some men adored young men for more sensuous reasons. At the same time the effeminate man who had sex with other men was scorned and stigmatised. During the 19th century western orientalists began to denigrate (or sometimes exoticise) Islamic societies for what they saw as a tolerance for homosexual relations. In response Persian and Arab intellectuals began to repudiate the heritage of male-male love. They were not just echoing government mandates or western experts, however. Rather, nationalists were demanding that their governments modernise society by supporting modern monogamous romantic marriage (Janet Afary, Sexual Politics in Modern Iran, Cambridge University Press, 2009; Afsaheh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity, University of California Press, 2005).

The French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault argued that Victorian sexual repression was a myth, that instead of a silence there was a proliferation of discourses about sex. Medical doctors, psychiatrists and sexologists obsessively categorised sexual variations. But Hera Cook argues that sexual repression was a reality. She does not see sexual desire as a natural force that was suppressed; rather, if sex was constructed, people had to learn about sex and, if the only messages they received were negative, sexual expression would be inhibited. In fact, she argues, abstinence was an important means of birth control just about until the invention of the pill. ‘I have a headache tonight, dear’, was a way middle-class women refused to have too many children (Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex and Contraception 1800-1975, Oxford University Press, 2004).

Victorian sexual silence had its advantages for some – close female friendships were celebrated, even when women longed to kiss and hug each other all night – because society thought they weren’t sexual. In fact, Sharon Marcus argues, intimate female friendships and even female partnerships bolstered conventional Victorian marriages (Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928, University of Chicago Press, 2004; Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, Princeton University Press, 2007). But, as the recent BBC film The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister shows, some of these women were having passionately sexual relationships.

By the late 19th century, and even more in the first decades of the 20th century, sex radicals broke through into public debate, agitating for birth control and sexual rights. In Weimar Germany they founded birth-control clinics and spread sex education. A gay and lesbian subculture flourished – think Cabaret, but less depressing: more like lesbian cruises down the Rhine and sexy working-class men in tight Tshirts. We think of the Nazis as repressive, persecuting homosexuals and banning abortion and birth control for the ‘fit’Aryans; abortions could be forced on the ‘unfit’Jews, disabled people and those of mixed race. But Dagmar Herzog, in Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in 20th- Century Germany (Princeton University Press, 2005) has revealed that many Nazis were very much for sex – as long as it produced more little Aryan Nazis. Some Nazis even thought that men who had sex with other men could be rehabilitated as soldiers.

More recently historians have complicated the familiar narrative that the 1960s exploded the sexual repression of the 1950s in Europe. Matt Houlbrook has argued that the increased tolerance extended to ‘respectable’homosexuals in 1950s’London yet further marginalised the ‘poofs’, working-class men who enjoyed being effeminate and who even sold sex (Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, University of Chicago Press, 2005). Frank Mort cliams that the sexual revolution actually began in the 1950s in the sexy subcultures of Soho (Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society, Yale University Press, 2010). But Hera Cook asserts that the widespread use of the contraceptive pill from 1960 onwards really did make a substantial difference to women’s sexual freedom.

Today the new sexual horizon is online. Prostitution seems to have declined a great deal, but in part it is because streetwalkers now face competition from women (and men) selling sex on the Internet, as Elizabeth Bernstein has found in her fascinating book about sexual commerce in San Francisco, Amsterdam and Stockholm (Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex, University of Chicago Press, 2007). Online, more than ever, we understand that sexuality is something created by culture – virtual desires rather than a natural, unchanging force.

50 Years Ago Building the Berlin Wall

2011-08-27T05:58:00.000-07:00

Historytoday.com - Construction work on the Berlin Wall began fifty years ago, on August 13th, 1961. Overnight, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) closed the last gap in the Inner German border between East and West Germany. It became illegal to cross the border and barbed wire was installed around the three western sectors of Berlin and along the 43 kilometres that divided East and West Berlin. The foundations and first stones of the concrete wall were laid three days later. The mayor of West Berlin at the time, Willy Brandt, described the closing of the border as an ‘outrageous injustice’.

The Inner German border, the frontier line between the GDR and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), was formally established on July 1st, 1945, as the border between the Western and Soviet occupation zones of Germany. It was almost 1,400 km long and ran from the Baltic Sea to Czechoslovakia. The Berlin Wall was a physically separate and shorter barrier surrounding West Berlin.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall Spiegel Online has launched a special interactive feature, which enables users to view and compare sites along the border before and after reunification. The interactive map features the photographs of Jürgen Ritter, which show the cities, villages and natural reserves along the border zone both while the border existed and after reunification. By clicking on a particular area users can drag a slider back and forth to compare the site before and after reunification.

There is also a slideshow of 33 photographs which depict the history of the Berlin Wall.Despite Willy Brandt's condemnation of the Berlin Wall and closing of the border, was the Berlin Wall in reality more convenient to the Western democracies than their rhetoric suggested? Frederick Taylor addresses this issue in 'The Berlin Wall: A Secret History' (History Today, February 2007)

Tabloid Scandals Hacks And Aristocrats

2011-08-27T05:47:00.000-07:00

Historytoday.com - Almost two centuries ago, on the southern side of the Thames at Blackheath, the worlds of press, politics and court were drawn together by the pen of Bridget, Viscountess Perceval. She counted herself a friend of the troubled Princess Caroline, who had separated from the Prince Regent and had been installed in a rented house near Blackheath, distraught at being separated from her daughter, the Princess Charlotte. While Caroline had powerful Opposition friends, such as Lord Brougham, to make her case in Parliament, Lady Perceval sought to use the power of what was termed the ‘public mind’: appealing to the growing power and popularity of the newspaper press, resorting to methods which may bring to mind some of those deployed in modern-day Wapping.

Although elite patronage and manipulation of the press was not new, such involvement demanded contact with a shady underworld of hacks, blackmailers and other scribblers. In Lady Perceval’s case, it also brought the genteel, and feminine, world of the drawing room into contact with a male arena.

According to Lady Anne Hamilton, the viscountess had taken an interest in the same school to which the editor of the Pilot sent his two girls and recommended a cure when they caught whooping cough, ‘winning the Pilot’s heart’. In 1812 the paper offered her ‘steady and warmest support in the laudable and natural struggle which engages the Princess of Wales.’ Lady Perceval was soon placing letters in the paper on, she believed, Caroline’s behalf. The publication of the ‘Regent’s Valentine’, a spurned appeal to the prince by Caroline asking for ‘the society of my child’, on February 10th, 1813 was the explosive opening barrage in the press war between the prince and his Tory supporters and the princess and the Whig opposition. A flurry of leaked or forged letters ensued, including the news that the prince was planning a second ‘Delicate Investigation’ into the princess’s marital fidelity.

The placing of the letters in the press required the services of intermediaries, including ‘Captain’ Thomas Ashe, the author of the somewhat fraudulent Travels in America, and John Mitford, a distant cousin of Lady Perceval. Tempted by the offer of a civil service job, Mitford delivered a series of notes to newspaper editors, putting forward the princess’s case. The viscountess had procured a medical certificate, releasing him from naval service and placed him in a Hoxton asylum, in order, Mitford recalled, to ‘remove suspicion from the parties at Blackheath, where they were watched’. He was not detained, but could visit editors and also hire ‘vagabonds to hoot the Regent whenever he appeared in any place of public amusements’ and ‘thereby convince him that the people were decidedly against his conduct’.

The campaign quickly unravelled. The prince’s party threatened the viscountess’s middlemen. One note read: ‘We can do you a great deal of good and a great deal of harm’. Crucially, they succeeded in turning the editor of the News, who revealed Lady Perceval’s role. She and her husband sued for libel, believing that Mitford could not be called as a witness from the asylum. Nonetheless the judge summoned him, Perceval lost the case and was pilloried in the press as ‘Lady P Aragraph’. Caroline dropped her and left for the Continent.

As the historian Hannah Barker notes, the view that the Georgian and Regency press was ‘rendered impotent by political corruption and manipulation’ is in need of substantial revision, since growing circulation and revenues gave papers greater editorial independence. The Blackheath Affair shows both sides of this equation. Ashe (who sold his memoirs after attempting to blackmail Lady Perceval) and Mitford continued to make money from the contacts and information they had gathered, while the circulation of the papers, such as the News, rose by as much as a third. Scandal sells.

Death of Nancy "White Mouse" Wake

2011-08-27T05:13:00.001-07:00

Nancy Wake was Australia’s most decorated servicewoman. She worked for the French Resistance and the British Special Operations Executive and was nicknamed ‘white mouse’ by the Gestapo because she was so elusive. She died in London yesterday, August 7th, 2011, aged 98.

Born in New Zealand in 1912, Nancy Wake’s family then moved to Australia and settled in Sydney. She worked for a period as a nurse, but travelled to Europe when she was in her twenties and trained herself as a journalist. Living and working in France, Wake married the wealthy French businessman Henri Fiocca, in 1939.

The couple were living in Marseille at the time of the German invasion and occupation of France and became active in the French resistance. Working initially as a courier and then as a saboteur and spy, Nancy Wake became the Gestapo’s most wanted person, with a 5 million franc price on her head. She was arrested in 1943, but was released four days later and managed to escape over the Pyrenees to Spain and eventually to England. She then worked for the British Special Operations Executive and was parachuted into France in April 1944 to deliver weapons to French resistance fighters before D-Day. She coordinated resistance activity prior to the D-Day landings, helped to recruit new members and carried out attacks on the Gestapo Headquarters in Montluçon in central France.

Her husband, however, was captured, tortured and executed by the Gestapo, in October 1943, for refusing to give her up. She was not aware of his death until the end of the war. She returned to Australia after the war and stood as a Liberal candidate in the 1949 and 1951 Australian federal elections. When she failed to win a seat in the 1951 election, she returned to England and married the ex RAF pilot John Forward in 1957.

Wake was awarded the French Légion d’Honneur and as well as Britain’s George’s Medal in 1945 and the US Medal of Freedom. In 2004, she was made companion of the Order of Australia. Her autobiography The White Mouse was published in 1985.

Talking about her wartime activities, Nancy Wake stated that: ‘Freedom is the only thing worth living for. While I was doing that work, I used to think it didn't matter if I died, because without freedom there was no point in living.’

In a statement issued, today, the Australian Prime Minster Julia Gillard described her as ‘a woman of exceptional courage and resourcefulness whose daring exploits saved the lives of hundreds of Allied personnel and helped bring the Nazi occupation of France to an end.’

She continued: ‘Today our nation honours a truly remarkable individual whose selfless valour and tenacity will never be forgotten. Nancy Wake will remain an abiding inspiration to generations of Australians’.

Nancy Wake is expected to be cremated and her ashes scattered at Montluçon.

The Riots And The Lessons Of History From Blogspot

2011-08-27T05:05:00.000-07:00

Historytoday.com - The fact that Waterstone’s book shop was the only store left untouched during Monday night’s disturbances at Clapham Junction in south London tells us a great deal about the intellectual aspirations of London’s rioting community. It’s probably safe to assume that History Today is not their journal of choice and that their shelves are not stacked with the works of Gibbon, Macaulay or Trevelyan. Nevertheless, as editor of History Today, I usually feel bound to draw historic parallels with contemporary events of import, which these nights of riot seem to be.

Had the events that took place in Tottenham on Saturday night and Sunday morning ended then and there, I would have drawn parallels with the Brixton Riots of April 1981: both, it appears, were the result of a suspicious death inflicted on a black person by the police. But the events that followed suggest that this has been something quite different, in scale and motivation. There is an interesting piece from our archive on a racial aspect of the Gordon Riots of 1780, the viciously anti-Catholic demonstrations that scarred London and became a byword for violent bigotry, and themselves a distant echo of the 'Evil May Day' race riots of 1517. But, again, though interesting in itself, I am not sure what, if any, illuminating parallels can be drawn with the events of the last few days.

In fact, the author who appears to bring most light to the riots is not a historian but a futurologist: the science fiction writer J.G. Ballard who, in his later novels such as Kingdom Come (2006), offers a remarkably prescient vision of what might be called ‘psychopathic consumerism’. He may have been influenced by the bizarre riot that occurred at the Edmonton branch of Ikea, the nightmarish but inexpensive home fittings store, in 2005. This extreme form of consumerism appears to have entered a new phase heralded by the Internet, and the creation of a culture in which everything must be free, whether music, museums, education, trainers, or mobile phones.

Consumerism has become the religion of our age, replacing what the ‘Blue Labour’ advocate Lord Glasman calls ‘flag, faith and family’, the traditional values on which the early British welfare state was born and that informed the postwar consensus of both the Labour and Conservative parties. That consensus has long gone, though as it has broken down, Britain’s political and media class have come closer together. All three major parties are now essentially headed by liberals, all three of whom are the product of metropolitan, sometimes cosmopolitan privilege, their ideas a hybrid of the social liberalism of Roy Jenkins and the economic liberalism of Margaret Thatcher. In the Conservative Party, traditional Tories, such as David Davis and Patrick Mercer are marginalised; as are the socially conservative guardians of the Labour Party’s traditional values, such as Jon Cruddas and Frank Field. I don’t claim to have the predictive abilities of J.G. Ballard, but I will take a punt that, to paraphrase George Dangerfield, we are about to witness the quick death of liberal England. Who will fill the gap remains to be seen.

Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, has been one of the few members of government to be willing to do the rounds of the TV studios this week, offering his usual mix of pugnacious political ambition and apologetic humility. He, or whoever takes his place, has the most important and immediate task of all. For, as the historian Correlli Barnett says today: ‘We have long had the worst education and training system in northern Europe. The result is that we have a vast number of young people, not through their own fault, who are not really trained in any practical sense for life at all.’ When one sees the television pictures of the looters, many of them schoolchildren, one may be reminded of this line from Geoffrey Hill’s great meditation on English history, The Triumph of Love: ‘Strange Children, pitiless in their ignorance and contempt.’

But they have been betrayed, as we all have, by governments whose mantra was that of that charming buffoon Bill Clinton: ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ Well, who is stupid now that we have seen where that monomaniacal obsession with ‘things’, and the accompanying debt, has got us? And who will articulate the alternatives?

Tacitus: The Continuing Message

2011-08-27T04:34:00.000-07:00

Historytoday.com - The Iron Curtain did not flutter. No masses chipped the wall that scarred Berlin and symbolised the restrictions and repression endured by millions in Eastern Europe. When History Today published Irene Coltman Brown’s article Tacitus and a Space for Freedom in 1981 informers organised by the Stasi in the German Democratic Republic still spread uncertainty and fear. Tacitus (AD 56-117) wrote of the Stasi’s Roman predecessors who ‘divested the people of the free exchange of words’. His works, including the Annals and Histories, present a detailed pathology of power under the Roman emperors and were called upon by Coltman Brown to analyse the politics of the 20th century. History Today labelled the article ‘The continuing message’. But what exactly is that continuing message?

Since the 16th century Tacitus has enjoyed a reputation as a political realist. His Annals in particular reveal the slippery mechanics of rule: the ‘secrecies of the imperial family; the advice of confidants and soldiers’ services’, in the words of an imperial adviser. A reader of Tacitus and friend of Machiavelli, Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540) succinctly stated that the historian taught subjects how to comply with a tyrant and the tyrant how to check his subjects. Generations of subsequent readers, eager to find lessons for the present in the past, were quick to adapt Procrustes’ method: like the mythical robber who made his victims fit his bed by severing or straining their limbs, they cut and stretched meanings to make Tacitus’ message fit their needs. They ignored the historian’s ironies and perplexing ambivalences, content with their selective readings of his works but blind or blinded to the philosophical dimension that caught Brown’s interest some 30 years ago.

She joined a minority of scholars who appreciated Tacitus’ moral complexity and accentuated his ambivalence. She lingered over his vexed hesitation in the face of the ‘dreadful peace’ at Rome: Roman autocrats, it is true, stifled individual freedom, but they also provided stability for society; they suppressed their subjects who were, however, all too ready to stoop down in servitude. And the Germanic tribes – Rome’s northern nemesis – warded off her rule, but only to war against one another. Tacitus, the philosopher, thought in adversatives which, though tightly woven into his historical accounts, were less often savoured than sundered.

Of Tacitus’ texts none suffered more cuts to its intricacy than his weirdly influential booklet Germania, or On the Origin and Mores of the Germanic Peoples. An account of the Teutonic tribes east of the Rhine, it is also and more profoundly a subtle reflection on core human values.Yet after its rediscovery in the 15th century it was quickly reduced and celebrated as the birth certificate of the German people. For most readers it contained a simple message: it presented a pure, heroic and virtuous people; it incriminated its author’s contemporaneous Romans; and it provided a lesson in character for German youth. When in Munich in 1933, at the height of nationalistic infatuation with Tacitus’ Germania, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber attempted a subtler reading, his speech was burned by members of the Hitler Youth and two shots were fired at his residence.

Brown, however, who discusses Tacitus’ Germania in some detail, reveals the contradictions and rightly emphasises the historian’s ‘weigh[ing] the attractions and the cost of the barbarian alternative [i.e., to Rome’s civilisation]’. Once again there are two sides to a coin: the simple Germanic lifestyle affords higher morality – but at the price of primitiveness. In recent years interpretations of Tacitus’ works have become increasingly nuanced and a simplistic view of him as a teacher of politics or morals looks exceedingly implausible – but not any more so than would have the crumbling wall in 1989 seemed in 1981. Thus, given Tacitus’ many afterlives, one ‘continuing message’ might be that it is each reader’s responsibility to look carefully on the past when studying it in the light of the present.

Christopher B. Krebs is Associate Professor of the Classics at Harvard University and the author of A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’ Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (W.W. Norton, 2011).

The Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial

2011-08-27T04:00:00.000-07:00

Historytoday.com - This Sunday, August 28th, the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial will be inaugurated in Washington DC on the 48th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, when King delivered his historic ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. The effort to build the memorial took over 25 years. The story of its creation is complex and marred with controversy.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial is situated on the National Mall in Washington DC on the northwest corner of the Tidal Basin. Its address is 1964 Independence Avenue in reference to the 1964 Voting Rights Act, which King played a key role in achieving. It is surrounded by 182 cherry blossom trees which will blossom every April on the anniversary of King’s death.

The design of the monument is inspired by a quote from King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech: ‘out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope’. It consists of a granite boulder, which is split into two stones inscribed with 14 quotes from King’s most famous speeches and sermons. A sculpture of King emerges from the missing piece of the boulder, which is pushed forward and symbolises the ‘stone of hope’.

The idea to build a memorial was first suggested in 1984 by Alpha Phi Alpha, the African-American fraternity of which King was a member. Congress authorised the memorial in 1996, and two years later, a foundation was set up to raise the $120 million (approximately £73 million) necessary for its construction. An international design competition was launched in 1999, which yielded over 900 entries from 52 countries. Submissions were judged by a panel of 11 architecture and fine arts professionals from China, France, Mexico, India and the United States.

The design submitted by ROMA Design Group, an architecture firm based in San Francisco, was eventually selected and the Chinese artist Lei Yixin was chosen to carve the image of Martin Luther King in the ‘stone of hope’. However, the decision caused significant controversy: some argued that a black American artist should have been chosen and Lei Yixin was criticised because his public works include more than a dozen icons of Mao Zedong. In 2008, the US Commission of Fine Arts argued that the style of the colossal statue was too stern and confrontational, and the announcement that the memorial would be carved in Chinese granite rather than American stone met further criticism.

The memorial will be nevertheless be inaugurated this weekend. It is the first on the National Mall to honour a man of peace and a man of colour.

Further information about the memorial is available on the Martin Luther King National Memorial website, including photos of the memorial at various stages during its construction, a virtual tour and information on its design, construction and the events organised to mark the inauguration.

How accurately, however, does the memorial represent the achievements of Martin Luther King? In Martin Luther King’s Half-Forgotten Dream Peter Ling argues that by adulating King for his work in the Civil Rights campaigns we have misrepresented the complexity of those struggles and ignored some of the equally challenging campaigns of his last years.

In Recording the Dream Brian Ward reveals some of King's little-known experiences as a recording artist.

Let's Exchange Links with My Blog

2011-08-25T21:37:00.000-07:00

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