Ye Very Olde English

Randall Stephens

Ammon Shea's enlightening piece on a comprehensive Old English Dictionary has been making the rounds from Humanities magazine, to Arts and Letters, to the Chronicle, and beyond. ("Violent but Charming: The Dictionary of Old English Explores the Brutality and Elegance of Our Ancestral Tongue," Humanities (Jan/Feb 2010.) Rightly so. Shea's essay is a fun romp through the twisty, turny (er, higgledy piggledy) story of Old English and its fastidious scholars. Why devote so much time and energy to a moribund tongue, some might ask. Is there an extensive dictionary of Nesili?

"The [Dictionary of Old English] corpus is comprehensive," observes Shea, "and contains about four million words, which makes it almost five times the size of the collected works of Shakespeare. It represents at least one copy of every piece of surviving Anglo-Saxon writing, although in some cases the corpus has more than a single copy of a work if it is in a different dialect or from a different date."

The essay made me further appreciate the importance of the evolution of language to history. Where's the Society for More Philological Studies in History when you need it? Trapped in the 1890s, maybe? Anyhow, historical and comparative linguistics, along with etymology, shed much light on the peoples and cultures of the past. Will it make the average history student fall asleep sitting upright? Not sure about that.

Take Shea's musings on the meaning and context of OE for example:

Browsing through a small section of the alphabet, I happened across gederednes, derian, gederian, gederod, deriendlic, deriendnes, derung, gedeþed, and gedigan, all of which are words that have to do with injuring, harming, or killing (with the exception of the last word, which means ‘to survive’). But lest you come away with the idea that

the speakers of this language were linguistically brutish, I would draw your attention to a word that appears shortly after all of these bruising terms: digollice.

Digollice is one of those words of which any language should be proud. It is elegant yet robust, clear yet multi-faceted—a description that perhaps sounds like that of an overpriced wine, but which is apt nonetheless. Among the meanings of this single word are the following: in a manner intended to avoid public attention, stealthily or furtively, in a manner that is unnoticed, with a lack of ostentation, in hiding, secluded in monastic life, spoken in a low or soft voice, spoken with circumspection or restraint, whispering slander, relating to secret thoughts of inward affliction, obscure or requiring interpretation, and a handful of others that I’ll let you find on your own.

Robert MacNeil's unsurpassed 9-part 1986 PBS series The Story of English is perfect for premodern and early modern history courses. (I've used it in my colonial America class to explore the divide between southern and northern accents, West Country vs. East Anglia. Watch selections from many of the episodes here.)

Dancing about Historiography: At the Movies with a Methods Course

Randall Stephens

It's very difficult to find movies to show in a historiography or history methods course. Think about it. Reminds me of the line: "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." How many major motion pictures deal with historical interpretation or portray scholars "doing" history. (Lord Macaulay reading intently. A Franz Liszt piece wafting in the background. "The Dutch archives and the French archives must be ransacked," shouts the actor playing the Baron. Or, a shot of a tweedy, pipe-smoking C. Vann Woodward delivering his UVA lectures that will become The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Pan out on the audience of white southerners.) Real movies. Unlikely.

Still, I've found some films and interviews that get the conversation going in a methods course I teach. I'm using a selection of clips from the play-adapted-to-screen History Boys (2006). Questions about truth, value in history, and E.H Carr-like "What is History" head scratchers animate several scenes. The film admirably moves the viewer into some epistemological water without any major trouble.

Charlie Rose interviews with historians or on history-related topics can work well enough. Though the average student will slip into a boredom coma. The Roger Mudd American Heritage series Great Minds of History (VHS, 1998) is similar, but not limited to the Charlie Rose spartan set with darkly lit room. UC Berkeley's Conversations with History program, now available on YouTube, features several interviews with prominent historians. I've also tried showing bits from the Matt Damon-hosted Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (2004). That's quite good for analyzing the historian as advocate. A similar film, produced by Alabama Public TV, is the Gospel According to Wayne (1993), a bio of the southern historian and Christian activist Wayne Flynt.

Feature films like The Return of Martin Guerre (1982), Name of the Rose (1986), Cold Mountain (2003), or any number of others could get students to think about the use of evidence, narrative arch, and pacing.

For the first time this year I'm going to use episodes from PBS's History Detectives, an ongoing series "devoted to exploring the complexities of historical mysteries, searching out the facts, myths and conundrums that connect local folklore, family legends and interesting objects." I'll be selective in how I use it. Some episodes are better than others, to paraphrase The Smiths.

Students relate to films in ways that they don't to books and articles. (That is doubly true of the reading material in a methods course.) Fifteen to twenty minute clips work best for me and open class discussions up in unexpected ways.

In Praise of Worldcat and Recent and Forthcoming History Films

Randall Stephens

What would I do without Worldcat? 1.4 billion searchable items and counting. Sure, that monster library search engine is great for hunting down obscure books, magazines, theses that were read by only five people, and what have you. But I particularly like to use it to find films. I've tracked down loads of documentaries--on everything from serpent-handling West Virginians in the 1980s to Enlightenment philosophes in 18th-century France--and feature films like The Return of Martin Guerre and Andrei Rublev. You can find the most obscure titles on Worldcat. And, if you locate more than a few libraries that have a given movie, there's a good chance you'll be able to get a copy loaned to you.

I'm a firm believer in showing short film clips (15-20 minutes) in class. It breaks things up nicely and provides much needed visuals. (Moving pictures, I hear they call these things.)

I offer up some recent titles, all well worth watching in our out of the classroom. Yet, unfortunately, the BBC Four documentaries are only viewable on-line on the other side of the water.

Influenza 1918
January 18, 2010, 1 hour
It was the worst epidemic in American history, killing over 600,000 people—until it disappeared as mysteriously as it had begun.

American Experience: Wyatt Earp, 2010
Jan 25, 2010 at 9/8 C
Wyatt Earp has been portrayed in countless movies and television shows by some of Hollywood’s greatest actors, including Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, and more recently, Kevin Costner, but these popular fictions often belie the complexities and flaws of a man whose life is a lens on politics, justice and economic opportunity in the American frontier.

Sam Cooke: Crossing Over
PBS, American Masters Series, 2010
American Masters celebrates the wonderful world of music game-changer and definitive soul singer Sam Cooke.

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind ‘Little Women’, 2009
PBS, American Masters
The author of 'Little Women' is an almost universally recognized name whose reputation as a morally upstanding New England spinster masked a literary double life.

The Pacific
HBO Films, coming in 2010
The miniseries tracks the intertwined odysseys of three U.S. Marines - Robert Leckie (played by James Badge Dale), Eugene Sledge (Joe Mazzello) and John Basilone (Jon Seda) - across the vast canvas of the Pacific. The extraordinary experiences of these men and their fellow Marines take them from the first clash with the Japanese in the haunted jungles of Guadalcanal, through the impenetrable rain forests of Cape Gloucester, across the blasted coral strongholds of Peleliu, up the black sand terraces of Iwo Jima, through the killing fields of Okinawa, to the triumphant, yet uneasy, return home after V-J Day.

Killer Subs in Pearl Harbor, 2009
PBS, NOVA
Military and forensics experts investigate the sunken wreck of a Japanese sub and unravel a lingering mystery of WWII.

Lost Kingdoms of Africa: Ethiopia BBC Four
Historian Gus Casely-Hayford explores the history of the old African kingdom of Ethiopia.

Orson Welles over Europe, 2009
BBC Four
Simon Callow looks at the career of Orson Welles after he went into self-exile in Europe.

Ken Burns's National Parks and John Muir

Randall Stephens

Ken Burns's new, epic documentary The National Parks runs a whopping 12 hours. Reviews have been largely positive. Hank Stuever weighs in at the Washington Post:

As usual, Burns is best with history and certain feeling for the past. Segments on the creation of the "park ranger" are suffused with nostalgic stoutheartedness -- the invention of a magnetic, enduring icon. Also as usual, Burns is worst at relating the then to the now. "The National Parks" lets its story peter out in the late 20th century, relying on home movies to get across what it's like for tens of millions of present-day visitors. Underneath its wonder, 'The National Parks' is really about how Americans learned (or failed to learn) proper stewardship of nature. Here, the acoustic guitar is really cranked up. Burns does that when he wants to indicate despair, guilt, importance.

John Muir features heavily in the first installment, which aired on Sunday. Muir's eccentric, novel life, and his significant impact on later environmentalists gets the full Burns treatment.

Donald Worster's essay "John Muir and the Religion of Nature" appeared in the the April 2009 issue of Historically Speaking (available on Project Muse here). "Muir did more than find a home in the mountains," writes Worster. "He also found there a new religion: the religion of nature. If he didn’t single-handedly invent it, he, more than anyone else, was responsible for propagating its message far and wide. Like Moses or Buddha, Martin Luther or Mary Baker Eddy, he was a prophet, a creative spiritual leader responding to his times with a vision of ultimate meaning and purpose."

In the same issue Donald Yerxa interviewed Worster on his Muir biography and spoke to Worster about some of the broader historical themes related to this fascinating American naturalist.

Donald A. Yerxa: What drew you to write a biography of John Muir? Donald

Worster: There was a mix of reasons, some personal, some scholarly. The scholarly side is that there has not been a full-blown comprehensive study of the man’s life since the 1940s. There have been a number of books on Muir, but their authors didn’t draw extensively on archives and letters, or they haven’t told the full scope of Muir’s life or tried to put it into the context of his times. For all of us in environmental history, John Muir is such a crucial figure. To know him and understand him better seemed to be an important contribution to that part of our history. On the personal side—and this does get personal—I suppose as one gets older, you start looking back on your life and thinking about where you’ve been and the turns in the road your life has taken and how you got to where you are, for good or bad. In other words, you get into a biographical mood. I had been drawn to a couple of people in recent years, John Wesley Powell and John Muir. Both of them grew up, as I did, in evangelical, Protestant, midwestern American families. Muir was even closer to my roots. I had a Scottish grandmother who was a Campbellite, part of the same religious tradition Muir grew up in. So I’ve always felt an affinity for him, and I wanted to understand his life along with my own life a little better.

History on TV

Randall Stephens

Worth noting are a couple of history documentaries and dramatic features that are airing, or will soon air, on TV. Since John Adams premiered last year on HBO the bar has been set quite high. Corny CGI and bad acting no longer suffice. (I've finally ditched showing the rather primitive Mary Silliman's War in an American history course.) The current crop of history-related TV offerings does not disappoint.

Episodes of the PBS American Experience series on Indian history, We Shall Remain, have been beautifully presented and look well suited for the history classroom. PBS describes the series as a "multi-media project that establishes Native history as an essential part of American history. Five 90-minute documentaries spanning three hundred years tell the story of pivotal moments in U.S. history from the Native American perspective." My favorite episode so far has been Wounded Knee. Questions that this installment raises are particularly interesting and don't lend themselves to easy answers. As a bonus, full episodes can be watched here on the PBS site.

Also currently playing on PBS is WWII: Behind Closed Doors, a three-part docudrama directed by Laurence Rees. According to the PBS site, the "award-winning historian and filmmaker Laurence Rees (Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State, Nazis – A Warning from History) uses documents to tell the story of the backroom deals that cost many lives but were seen as necessary evils to keep the Soviet Union in the war." "At six hours, playing out over three nights," comments a reviewer in the LA Times "'Behind Closed Doors' requires a commitment from viewers, but for anyone interested in the complexities of WWII and, indeed, the moral impossibilities of war itself, it is a commitment worth making." Attention to detail will draw in viewers. The actors are spot on. A portly, jut-jawed Paul Humpoletz plays Churchill to great effect.

There's more Churchill over at HBO. Into the Storm will premier on that channel on May 31, 9pm. The production site indicates that the movie will pick up the "story of Churchill told in HBO's award-winning film, The Gathering Storm." Into the Storm "is set against the backdrop of World War II, and offers an intimate look at the making of a nation's hero, whose prowess as a great wartime leader ultimately undermined his political career and threatened his marriage to his lifelong supporter, Clemmie."