How Bills Got Passed: President Lyndon B. Johnson and His Treatment

Former FBI Head James Comey expressed in his testimony to the Senate that the reason he kept notes of his meetings with Donald Trump and circulated them as memos was because he was very uncomfortable being left alone in a room with him. Now, that feeling is more than understandable, but politics aside, it's worth noting that Trump isn't the first man in the White House to intimidate the bejesus out of others. Andrew Jackson might take the prize, seeing that it was well known that prior to his presidency he had killed quite a few people (and as president beat up one would-be assassin), so that certainly was on his visitors' minds. However, the true champion of Scrubs-style tear inducing has to go to President Lyndon B. Johnson. The direct threat of violence was unnecessary for the greatest nightmare to haphephobics ever to take office, and in fact probably made the idea of dying seem like sweet relief to his victims. Johnson wasn't known as the Master of the Senate or able to get Civil Rights and Great Society bills to his desk by being a nice pencil-pusher. He used his God-given size, strength, and drive to make goal-based intimidation an art: The Johnson Treatment. Let's analyze one notable case here:

It should be pretty obvious who Johnson is in this picture. The other one though is Abe Fortas, not only Johnson's own Supreme Court appointee but also a longtime supporter of his. So this is Johnson parodying his own treatment. Still, Fortas doesn't seem to be at his best here. Let's go over the Johnson Treatment in detail:

Two witnesses looking like they just managed to snag tickets to the last gladiator match of the season. Except Fortas is the doomed gladiator and Johnson is the lion about to rip him to shreds. Note the safe distance the men are at, knowing very well they could be next.

Though both men appear to be sharing a laugh, it comes from opposite ends. Johnson is almost certainly roaring with laughter at one of his own jokes, whereas Fortas is laughing the kind of way horror-movie teenagers do between hopelessly concealing their fear at their current situation and getting axed. Note how Johnson is using his height to stare directly into his eyes from above like a fighter jet about to do a strafing run.

I don't know what Fortas is clutching here but he seems to be holding onto it for dear life, like it were a life jacket or a pitiful shield. Note the continuous decline of Fortas's back and how Johnson's abdomen is still parallel to his head and neck, like an industrial crane lowering steel.

I definitely don't think that this detail has to do with this picture, but it's impossible to paint an accurate picture of Johnson, let alone his Treatment without bringing up this aspect of him. I'll let the link do the talking. (PG-13 content ahead)

Finally, my favorite part of this photo. Whereas Johnson's right leg is planted like a Redwood and his left leg is barely leaning forward at all, not only does Fortas's left leg seem like it's trying to nonchalantly escape and leave the rest of his body behind, but his right heel is barely able to balance his falling body. In fact, it appears that if Fortas is forced backward one more inch, he'll just straight-up run away from the White House altogether, which Johnson knows, so instead of crossing the line he just keeps stomping his foot on it.

And this picture is just one aspect of the Johnson Treatment. There were loads of other methods Johnson incorporated into his treatment, whether it was driving his car into his ranch's lake (without letting his passengers know the car doubled as a boat) or making his aides follow him into the bathroom. Remember, however, that like a martial arts master, Johnson did his best to use his Treatment for good. Without it, his Great Society, Medicare, Medicaid, and Civil Rights Acts would likely never have happened. And he did it all without Twitter, for one, and knew exactly what he was doing. Domestically, anyway.

My Top Four Favorite Historical Subjects

In my first post on this site, I explained that when it comes to studying history and learning from it, it's often the particular era's connection to the present that interests me the most. However, that's not to say I don't find history in of itself fascinating. If it wasn't for that, this blog wouldn't exist. So I thought today I would share my four favorite historical subjects/periods to study.

These particular histories strike a chord with me. They're so rich in content and so magnificently detailed that anyone could spend several lifetimes studying each period alone. Some of these capture my imagination so vividly that I can almost imagine I'm there. Some are so distant and seemingly so alien that it's almost hard to believe it took place on the same planet. However, in both cases, I feel the drive to discover and make connections between the past and the present more than ever.

1. The Victorian Era (UK) and The Gilded Age (US)                                                      
   These are fairly recent interests of mine, and despite taking place in different countries the overlap is so apparent  that I decided to include it as one. Though this usually isn't the case for me, what entices me most about these periods are the social histories. In fact, especially in the United States, the political history at this time is one of my least-favorites to study, largely due to a long string of mediocre presidents. However, with industrialization and the scientific revolution in full swing, the massive changes to life at that time in nearly every way is nothing short of remarkable. Soaring skyscrapers were matched by skyrocketing economic inequality, producing social movements that have until very recently been all but forgotten. Though I'm fairly new to the game, one of the best books to capture this new life of wondrous and horrifying possibilities is the Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson. It's a vivid snapshot of life at that time, with the Chicago World's Fair taking off at the same time as the first serial killer in American history claims his first victims. The same can be said for the Victorian era and its ubiquitous duality, prudishness in the front and madness in the back. Jekyll & Hyde and the Picture of Dorian Gray are two of my favorite books, and give me insight into an era that fascinates me but I would never want to live in!                                                        
2. Classical Civilizations
   
   This one casts a wide net, and I could never hope to get a firm grasp on it all. However, nearly every time I learn something, it changes my view of that civilization. This is the period from about 500 BCE to 500CE. Now, that does cover from the early days of the Roman Republic through to its fall, but I include the Chinese Han Dynasty there too. When I was in high school, my teacher made an extra effort to talk about the Han as much, maybe even more so than he did of Rome, to emphasize how important yet overlooked it was to history. My friend has extensive knowledge of this period, and he often tells me facts of Roman traffic jams and Han attempts at domesticating horses and I'm just astounded. These eras are almost an ocean of knowledge unto themselves.                                                  
3. The American Civil War
   
   How could I not be into this era? It's one of the few aspects of American history that even the most ignorant citizen knows is important. This is because the Second American Revolution is still right at our side. Just turn on the news and for any issue that pertains to citizenship, economic and social divides, war powers, or anything related to the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, each has echoes of the Civil War. It's not just its-more-than-usual relevance that captures me though. Whether it's the speeches and proclamations for or against slavery and the war, the incredibly idiotic or brilliant decisions on the battlefield, the political cage matches between politicians, or the fact that so many men-- and a few women-- gave their lives for a better country or a worse one still affects me very deeply. We owe an incredible debt to Abraham Lincoln. Had it not been for him and his incredible skill, courage, love, and humor, we could have lost it all.                                                   
4.  The Second World War
   
   I imagine this one is also hardly a surprise, given it's the biggest and by-far deadliest conflict in human history. You can thank Call of Duty for capturing my imagination and later my zeal for wholehearted study of WWII. The scope and depth of the war, in almost every facet imaginable, from military to political to technological to human stories is so vast that you could very well make new books, movies, shows, plays and video games from it over and over and never lose interest.
   
   I believe, however, that there's another reason that the war continues live in so much of the world's consciousness. Though it's hardly as clear-cut as most people make it out, there's really no denying it: It was a "Good War." Great evil was stopped. Great good came from it. It was a war worth fighting unlike few others. Humanity both then and now has been measured by this conflict, and proved capable both of horrifying evil and magnificent good. And the good won.
   
   Though I would never, ever wish for another war even close to its magnitude, at a time when it seems like there's so much senseless and unnecessary fighting, sometimes it's difficult to not be nostalgic for that clear choice between good and evil. Then I remember what led to that choice even being possible, and how much suffering resulted from it. That war was fought so that no other of its kind could ever happen again. We must continue to make sure of that.

A Short History of Wars Starting By Accident

The recent headlines of a U.S. fighter jet shooting down not just a Syrian Air Force jet but also one of its drones definitely raised an alarm or two in my head.  It was made even more disconcerting by the fact that the Russians said they would target U.S. warplanes west of the Euphrates River and were cutting their avenue of communication to us. And that's not even accounting for Syria or Iran's feelings about it. It seemed like yet again that the situation in the Middle East was spinning out of control.

Now, I don't think that these two instances will escalate to a war with Russia or even fundamentally alter the current situation in the region. Everyone just might get off easy. However, if the parties involved aren't careful and mindful of the implications of their actions, in the future a similar incident could occur. If heads are too hot, it could prove to be the spark to greater quagmire and bloodshed, if not in Iraq and Syria then elsewhere.

Sadly, there's plenty of wars that by accident. I'm not referring to instances where deliberate attacks were staged with full awareness of the potential consequences, such as the Nazi invasion of Poland or the Confederates firing on Fort Sumter. Nor am I referring to parties being tricked into fighting, like the French in the Franco-Prussian War. No, here are just a few wars that started because some people unable to keep their #$%& together.

• First World War

Perhaps the most well-known example of a seemingly distant geo-political conflict spiraling out of control. The assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire by the Serbian separatist-terrorist organization the Black Hand quickly roped in treaty-bound (and opportunistic) European nations. Austria-Hungary threatened war with Serbia if its government wouldn't turn over the terrorists. Then Russia jumped in to protect a fellow Slavic/Eastern Orthodox nation. Then Germany stood up for its ethnic German sibling and attacked Russia...'s ally France first because they bordered Germany, which drew Britain in shortly after. Within a couple of short months, a Balkan regional squabble had escalated into a full-scale European war, engulfing the world within a few years.

• Sino-Japanese War

China had already been mired in civil war between communists and nationalists, and in 1931 the Japanese decided to take advantage of the chaos and annex Manchuria in the north, renaming it Manchukuo. Then 1937, nationalist soldiers traded shots with a Japanese dispatch along the Yongding river outside of Beijing. The skirmish itself passed without incident as no one was killed, but the next day when a Japanese soldier was missing at roll call, it was all the Japanese command needed. By the time that soldier returned from the local brothel, fighting had already broke out and in just a few weeks the Japanese crossed the Marco Polo Bridge into China proper. 

• Seven Years War

Frederick the Great of Prussia thought (with good reason) that the rest of Europe was gearing up to attack him. So in 1757 Frederick launched a preemptive attack against where his enemies would most likely strike, Saxony. Though the attack itself was perfect, unfortunately Frederick guessed the wrong country, and it turned out he attacked a neutral country without a declaration of war or a provocation. This made it easy for Russia, France, and Austria to declare war on Prussia. However, Frederick's tactical brilliance and huge war chest would keep the war going for years. 

Again, these are just a few examples of wars, and and only wars. That being said, we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves and curse past stupidity. Just because some of these wars started by accident doesn't mean they probably weren't going to happen at all. In many cases, one or both sides were itching for a fight anyway and it would have come to blows sooner or later, by accident or on purpose.

The point is that wars rarely, if ever, start from nothing. Tensions often grind on for years or even decades between parties, steadily escalating until someone makes one final provocation and someone else starts shooting. Long fuse or not, the spark has to be snuffed long before it reaches the dynamite.

George Orwell is STILL Upset About Some Things...

We all know and love Wikipedia. It remains one of the most extensive, user-friendly databases on the internet, and is the go-to place for anyone looking for basic summaries for almost any subject. It's so ubiquitous that I remember the shift that occurred in high school on Wikipedia policy. After years of my teachers saying that Wikipedia absolutely could not be used under any circumstances, the administration finally acquiesced, and almost overnight it went from being entirely off-limits to just not being an acceptable source for citation. However, it would still be used "to get the gist" of any given subject, or to find other sources. 

Still, it doesn't mean Wikipedia is without its flaws, even beyond issues of citation and accuracy (though to be fair they've improved tremendously in recent years, citing more often and saying upfront when there's not enough sources). My problem with it is that it often leaves the most interesting things out. I know of course Wikipedia is meant to be only summaries of subjects, however I believe they omit facts that are essential to understanding the topic.

George Orwell in Spain, above the man with the machine gun

Take Wikipedia's entry on Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell. Orwell is one of my absolute favorite authors and 1984 is both my favorite book and probably has had a bigger impact on me than any other before or since. But another one of his best works is his own account of his participation in the Spanish Civil War, fighting on the government's side against German and Italian-backed fascist rebels. It's a remarkable piece about period geopolitics, Spanish culture, and the absurdities of the conduct of this particular war. It provides wonderful insight into Orwell himself, with his dry wit, his sharp commentary, and his willingness fight for and stick with the loyalists even in the face of death or arrest. There's one particular bit in chapter six that provides clues to his character that Wikipedia chose to omit. Here is the original:

Chapter six[edit]One of these operations, which in chapter five had been postponed, was a "holding attack" on Huesca, designed to draw the Fascist troops away from an Anarchist attack on "the Jaca road." It is described herein. Orwell notes the offensive of that night where his group of fifteen captured a Fascist position, but then retreated to their lines with captured rifles and ammunition. The diversion was successful in drawing troops from the Anarchist attack.

Here are my additions:

Chapter six[edit]One of these operations, which in chapter five had been postponed, was a "holding attack" on Huesca, designed to draw the Fascist troops away from an Anarchist attack on "the Jaca road." It is described herein. It is one of the most significant military actions that Orwell participates in in his entire time in Spain. Orwell notes the offensive of that night where his group of fifteen captured a Fascist position, but then retreated to their lines with captured rifles and ammunition. However, despite these finds, Orwell and his group were forced to pull back before they could secure a large telescope they had discovered in a machine gun case, something more badly needed to their side than any single weapon. However, the diversion was successful in drawing troops from the Anarchist attack. The chapter ends with Orwell lamenting that even now he still is upset about losing the telescope.^[16]

First, my additions show that Orwell actually saw fairly little fighting against the Fascists by this time, which informs the efforts he makes to join an International Column later in the book. Second, the detail about the telescope helps the reader comprehend the nature of the war and how lo-tech it was for a time. Would you have ever thought that a telescope would be more highly valued than machine guns or rifles in 1937? You would have to go back to before the 20th century for that to be the case. So this war's conduct was quite an anachronism! Finally, the fact that Orwell still goes to pieces about losing the telescope illustrates some of the man himself. He risked life and limb for that telescope and got nothing for it. The telescope mattered so much to him in his entire time in Spain, and he probably felt that its capture would have made a difference in his sector. If you were in his place, would you feel any different? George Orwell, for all his experience and wisdom in a lot of ways is no different from us. The lesson here is that while Wikipedia is a good place to start, you should never stop there. It's just the tip of the iceberg. 

The Only History Book You'll Ever Need to Read

If I was only ever to do one review of anything for this blog, it would be for The Great Big Book of Horrible Things, by Matthew White. If you seem unsettled, or skeptical with the title, don't; I really don’t think anything else I would potentially recommend would surpass or even equal the impact that this book would have on you, as it did for me when it was first bought for me as a throwaway Christmas present five years ago.

Neither a macabre coffee table book nor an impossibly dense collection of stats, this book is essentially an editorialized reference book. Now that may seem like a contradiction, and in most cases it would be, along with being not all that interesting. But White, a self-described “numbers freak” with a gift for historical writing masterfully weaves bold classifications with sober analysis and goofy commentary to create an utterly unique work, one that almost seems unrecognizable from others. White's goal in this book is to bring the best justice he can to the countless of overshadowed or altogether forgotten victims in historical killings, and those efforts shine bright. Horrible Things is credited by distinguished psychologist Steven Pinker, who provides the foreword, as the "the most comprehensive, disinterested and statistically nuanced estimates available." Ever since I’ve read it, I’ve tried to emulate White’s approach and style and I’ve proudly cited it multiple times in my own reports.

In assessing history's deadliest man-made events, White, who has no formal training in history or statistics, approaches the subject with a scientific method. He rejects consensuses about the death toll of a given event, instead going straight back to primary and secondary sources. He throws out the highest and lowest numbers and plugs in the median. How does he get these sources, you ask? "The short answer is money," White replies. "Even if a general is reluctant to tell the newspapers how many men he lost in a bungled offensive, he still has to tell the accountants to drop 4,000 men from the payroll... Head counts (and by extension, body counts) are not just an academic exercise; they have been an important part of government financing for centuries." The length of each chapter is proportional to the deadliness of the event.

However, it's not the numbers that are of the most interest in this book, even if it is the selling point. It's how White incorporates them into his writing. Each chapter is categorized rather surprisingly, and loaded with unexpected, juicy terms of White's invention, like 'atrocitology,' 'multicides,' and 'hemoclysm' that capture the reader's imagination much more than dry terms like 'genocide.' His commentary captures the ironies, tragedies, and downright absurdities of history. Here are some examples, starting with his chapter on Timur:

TIMUR

Death toll: 17 million
Rank: 9
Type: world conqueror
Broad dividing line: Timur vs. everyone he could get to
Location: central Asia, the eye of the hurricane being Samarkand
Who usually gets the most blame: Rimur; also called Tamburlaine (old version) or Tamerlane (newer version) from his insulting nickname, Timur Lenk ("the Lame")
Another damn: Mongol invasion

Here's an example of White describing Saladin In his Crusades chapter (3 million deaths):

In reality, Saladin's sense of honor was flexible... []Two leading crusaders were brought to him in chains. He fed the first one, explaining that the rules of hospitality now forbade him from killing a prisoner who had been given food and drink by his captor. Another prisoner... lunged for a cup of wine and downed it before anyone could stop him. [He] thought, Aha! I'm safe! But Saladin killed him anyway because no one likes a smartass.

White understands, however, the issues and contention that really do affect our modern life and knows when to be serious, not tolerating some minority opinions. Believe it or not, there's a sizable minority of people who believe that the Western democracies fought on the wrong side of WWII (along with the faction that denies the Holocaust). White responds with this: 

In this case, revisionists seem to forget the world went to war against Hitler because he was dangerous, not because he was evil. This is an important distinction in international relations. You can do whatever you want inside your own country, but when you start invading your neighbors, the rest of the world gets jumpy. No matter how brutal Stalin may have been to his own people, he was content to stay inside the borders of the Soviet Union. By the time Stalin began grabbing small countries for himself, the West was already committed to war with Hitler. The choice wasn't between fighting Hitler or Stalin. The choice was to fight Hitler or both of them.

Despite his unorthodox form and his use of black humor, it’s understandable to think that reading White’s book about humanity’s worst achievements might get a little depressing after a while. However, with each chapter I absorbed, I got steadily more excited until I felt downright enlightened by the end. This is because what happens as you travel across time and the world in White’s book is that you feel a remarkable sense of discovery. Because of White’s information, style, and arguments, you really do feel that you understand not just history but humanity so much better. White passes the historian’s ultimate test with flying colors and imprints it on the reader: He effectively makes history relevant to the reader, and uses it to better understand our present and prepare for the future. It worked for me and it will surely work for you. 

For more on Matthew White visit his website (don't be fooled, it deliberately looks old-school) or the New York Times review of Horrible Things.

To check out the book itself, click here. 

Was the US Getting Involved in the Korean War Worth It?

A friend of mine, who is from China, already seems to have a lifetime full of stories. One she doesn’t consider especially noteworthy—but I certainly do—is her trek to the Chinese-North Korean border.

“It’s really boring,” she says dismissively, “there’s nothing there and it takes hours of hiking to get to it.”

Considering that the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) of North Korea and South Korea is one of the most militarized, increasingly dangerous borders in the entire world, maybe you can understand my amazement at how the situation seems completely different a few hundred miles north.

Though recently overshadowed by domestic political crisis and Islamic State-related attacks, the threat posed by North Korea, steadily growing with each provocation and nuclear missile test should arguably be taken more seriously than any other global security threat. With events like these, it got me thinking: was the Korean War worth fighting if it only led to this increasingly unstable stand off? Was too little, or too much for that matter done all those years ago? 

For this piece, I won’t give the same amount of context I usually give for a historical event. Rather, I’ll try to talk solely about American involvement in the war and assess its gains and losses, and have it serve as a potential introduction for another post in the future.

The Korean War, succeeding the Second World War and preceding the Vietnam War for American forces, is often forgotten due to being sandwiched between these greater conflicts. While WWII is perennially considered a, ‘good’ war, and Vietnam a ‘bad’ one, which side does the Korean War fall on, if any?

The first major post-WWII conflict of the Cold War was never intended to take place in Asia, but rather in Europe. Neither the Americans nor the Soviet Union wanted to fight there, even though they were each backing their own puppets in the region, north and south, respectively. Kim Il-Sung however, founder of the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea following the Japanese surrender, and installed by the Soviets, decided to take his chances and reclaim the southern Korean peninsula. The South was lightly defended, and its capital, Seoul, was captured in a matter of days. It was expected that the rest of the country would soon follow. However, President Harry Truman shocked the world, and much of America for that matter, by throwing US troops stationed in Japan into the fray and stating his determination to protect the South.

Truman’s rationale for this was that communism simply could not be allowed expand from where it already existed, otherwise one country after another would fall under the communist influence. US commitment sent a clear message to the Soviets in particular that hostile military takeovers of free (and "free") countries would not be tolerated. However, as we'll see later on, the US-led forces in Korea soon overplayed their hand.

So far though, American forces weren’t doing much protecting. For the first time in American military history, the Americans were forced to retreat on a large scale in the face of overwhelming North Korean numbers. With their backs to the wall in the southeast corner of Korea, Pusan, the odds didn’t look good. Then General Douglass MacArthur, hero of the Pacific in WWII launched an amphibious invasion behind the North Korean lines at the port island of Inchon. With the North Koreans cut off, within a few months American-led forces recaptured Seoul and pushed them back to their border.

The war could have ended there. However, MacArthur, sensing blood in the water, wanted to invade North Korea and finish the job, knocking the communists out of North Korea. Truman was uneasy. Defending the South from communist aggression was one thing, but driving through the North would alter the pre-war communist boundaries and status quo of Asia. He was worried China might perceive such a move as a threat. However, Secretary of State Dean G. Acheson and MacArthur advised Truman that China, led by Chairman Mao Zedong, was too concerned with building their own nascent People’s Republic and consolidating their power. An intervention would not be in their interests. With this advice, Truman gave MacArthur approval, and within another few months, the North Korean forces were driven back to their northern border along the Yalu River. Victory was within reach.

However, Mao and the Chinese Politburo saw the invasion as a direct threat. A US base along its border could mean they themselves could be invaded in the near future. As a result, the war was of vital interest into the Chinese. In one of the more understandable things Mao has ever done, without any warning he quietly flooded North Korea with Chinese troops, taking American forces by surprise. Once again half of Korea was rolled over by an invading force, but the American-led forces made a stand at the 38^th parallel. After that, there’s not much to say about the war. Over two years, little change came to the stalemate that formed there. The key point however is how the war ended. What happened was simply an end to the fighting was negotiated (the sticking point for a long time were prisoners of war returns for both sides) and reluctantly agreed upon. No ‘armistice’ or peace treaty was signed. That means we, along with South Korea, are still technically at war with North Korea, 64 years later.

So where does that leave us today? In the decades following the war, for a while the North Korean GDP per capita was larger than the South’s. However, in the late 70s and early 80s, the South Korean economy took off and its hard-right government liberalized. Today, South Korea is an incredible success story of a country with few natural resources. It has one of the largest GDPs in the world, a flourishing democracy, has gifted the world with numerous products and is an excellent global citizen. North Korea, by contrast, has doubled and tripled down on its tyrannical rule, especially after losing its strongest backer with the fall of the Berlin Wall. North Korea is one of the poorest, most illiberal places to live and its government has grown increasingly erratic, desperate even, and has grown increasingly dangerous. It is a “loose-cannon” in every sense of the phrase, aggressive enough to provoke the world but risking even full-scale nuclear war if it perceives any outside response as a threat. It believes disarmament invites annihilation, or reunification, which for them without Kim Jong Un leading would be even worse. There are certainly options available for disarmament—consistent sanctions and cooperation with China to use their leverage on the North is probably the best option. However, that policy needs to be fundamentally overhauled, otherwise it risks falling apart.

So did the 35,000 American troops killed in the war and the thousands of others who fought in it do so for a good cause? I believe so. Not only did their actions save South Korea, a country that bloomed into an invaluable gift to the world that otherwise would have made the Northern regime even stronger, their actions likely saved more. Under Truman’s “Containment” doctrine of communist countries, those troops sent a clear message to communist countries that they would not allow invasions to go unopposed. Such an action in Korea likely prevented one occurring in Europe, which would have involved the Soviet Union and would have risked all-out nuclear war. These men indeed gave their lives for good.

However, the work they were thrown into is undone. War cannot be allowed on the Korean peninsula again. It carries grave risks for the region and possibly the world. I don’t think most people understand that, something that could have dire consequences maybe sooner than later.  

What the Heck is 'Historiography'?

"As if it couldn't get any worse," my Irish professor expressed half-jokingly two years ago, " there's not just history to learn. There's historiography too." 

No, it doesn't have anything to do with geography, or mapping out history per se. At its base level, it means the process of writing history, and how evidence is examined, interpreted, and finally taught. It can be seen as the history of history—how new evidence, fresh interpretations, and paradigm shifts affect the way a period of history is seen. However, historiography is crucial to how history is understood. Even if all the bare facts and figures of a particular topic are agreed upon by all to be true, depending on how they're interpreted could dramatically alter history's meaning; this has very real consequences, both immediate and long-term.

It's no accident that I first learned about the influence of historiography in my 20th Century Ireland history class. Though we absolutely shouldn't, (as many have learned or are learning), in this country it's fairly easy to take history for granted, due to its apparent distance and overall consensus. In another one of my professor's examples, if you were at a bar and there was a drunken fellow on the end raging on about how George Washington's conduct at the Battle of Monmouth was absolute folly, you might get a bit annoyed at him insulting our first president but still wouldn't give him much thought. However, an equivalent comment in Ireland could lead to a vicious bar fight, even with family. This is because Ireland is still in history and living as a direct result of events that occurred decades or even centuries ago, setting in motion a population in near constant insecurity and soul-searching. How any given Irish person sees history could either justify them joining the IRA, the UK, or the European Union, depending on their interpretation.

In Ireland alone, there's at least 9 (!) historiographical views, and none are or have ever been shared by all or are exclusive from one another. There's the granddaddy of all historiography, Whig history, which committed the cardinal sin of history and wrote it backwards from the perception of a known outcome. Written by Englishmen, it stated that "God is an Englishman" (no joke) and were destined to rule the world, spawning ideas like Social Darwinism and “the white man’s burden.” In response to that, around when Ireland gained its independence Irish Nationalism, embodied in “800 years of English oppression” began to be taught in schools, and to this day it remains dominant in and out of Ireland. Both of these views are uncritical and have no perspective.

Suddenly, in the late 60s, the government reversed course and adopted the much more even-handed and objective Revisionism to keep citizens from getting involved in terrorism in the North. In response to that view, Father Brendan Bradshaw pioneered his own Post-Revisionist history, mixing emotion with objectivity, with the goal of keeping the humanity in history. Since then there have been other schools of thought, some emphasizing ties with Europe, others with a “New Britain” view. The points are these: modern history is built upon previously written histories, and depending on how it is written, history can be used as a weapon or rob a people of its national identity or be anything in-between.

Ultimately, I believe that the goal for any historian is to do the best they can in their research and arguments so that the narrative doesn’t change over after their time, and acknowledge that the past needs to be understood in its own terms, not the present’s. So that the three main stages of historiography—early written history, revisionism, and post-revisionism—comes to be minimally altered as time goes by, even with the potential discovery of new evidence or paradigm shifts. It may be the historian’s greatest challenge. 

Welcome to The History Behind the Headlines!

Hello and welcome to History Behind the Headlines, the first post on my first blog! My name is John Chiarella and I’m very excited (and a bit anxious) to get started! And I think the best way to do so is to explain the mission of this site and why I believe in it…

I’m often asked what kind of history I’m into or would like to specialize in. While there are different times and places that are more attractive to me personally, I always respond by saying it’s not so much the era that interests me—it’s about that era’s connection to today and how that era still has an impact on us. The relevancy of history is what drives me to make it a career instead of just a hobby.

I believe that most people don't have access to the full story. I’ve always felt that across the majority of run-and-gun news reports about current events, the most insightful and consequential information, namely the big ‘Why?’ is either pushed out or ignored altogether. My hope with this blog is that I can provide greater context to a number of current events and therefore a better understanding of the world around us. Nothing exists in a vacuum; there are plenty of reasons for why the world looks the way it does. A better understanding of the past might dispel fear and confusion about the present. There’s an explanation for everything—though as to how satisfying or complete it is can’t be determined by me.

This blog also exists because I hope to provide a better path to teaching history.  All too often, history is seen (and usually taught) as bare dates, bland descriptions, and with an overwhelming sense of indifference. There’s crucial relevancy in history. It is vivacious and complex, full of boldness and intimacy as well as tragedy and hilarity, and is never without further discovery or amazement. It’s not facts and figures—it’s quite literally a “story” stretching across all of time. Over the years, I’ve read several non-fiction authors who will serve as a model to my writing, which is meant to bring history out of the dank boredom of most classrooms and into the light of discovery.

There’s a quote that’s often attributed to Theodore Roosevelt (most likely through The Night at the Museum), and while I’m sure he believed it, I can’t confirm its authenticity: “I believe that the more you know about the past, the better you are prepared for the future.” That principle has guided me through both my academic as well as my personal life. Information is what we act on—how could we not try to get more of it from the easiest and most readily available source, the past? How could we not learn from it, to look back and see what worked and what didn’t, what mistakes were made, what patterns of thought and action were present? With history understood, we have the greatest preparation possible.

I won’t pretend like I believe historical understanding is a panacea to contemporary issues or that I know or understand it all myself, even within the narrow confines of this post. I’m right with you, learning more every day, reading across the packed pages of history right up to today. I hope that with this blog, we’ll be able to understand the page we find ourselves still writing in and to predict the ones coming up.  That’s all for now.