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Satan’s dangerous fiction, or Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be bogomils
A Concise History of Bulgaria, Second Edition by R. J. Crampton (Cambridge University Press) yields us some thoughts on fiction from an intriguing and, as Crampton labels them, heretical group of Christians called the bogomils. All this below is a riff on material from his chapter on Mediaeval Bulgaria. When I quote, it’s from Crampton…
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History in the hands of the populists, or Zinn v. Horowitz settled out of court
I don’t think the late Howard Zinn would approve of Vicksburg’s Old Court House Museum in A People’s History of the United States. Too much power, too many portraits, too many weapons and flags, all the oppressed and small movers of history overwhelmed or on the sidelines. And yet, we should not have to suffer…
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Did they ever let him go? Or do we just make it up?
On 31 August [1865] only one Confederate prisoner remained at Gratiot Street [Prison] (there is no record of his release). So ends Louis S. Gerteis’s engaging chapter “A Friend of the Enemy” in Civil War St. Louis. In a dearth of good record keeping at an overwhelmed prison, this understated conclusion is the topper. If…
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Let us now praise “mediocre” men
In his illuminating chapter, “The Classical Form of the Historical Novel,” Georg Lukács outlines writing strategies that would set the historical novelist at odds with the historian. First Lukács argues that the historical novel makes a major departure from the age-old form, the national epic. In an epic, “Achilles is not only compositionally the central…
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History makes fiction of history
Christopher Phillips’s book, Missouri’s Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of the Southern Identity in the Border West, makes many very interesting points about how much of history involves personally or familialy adopted story. Contemporary Missourians who “celebrate their Southern heritage , whether through family genealogy, as Confederate reenactors, or by touring the state’s…
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Nobody’s Fault But Mine
It’s hard not to think of Donald Harington when reading this passage from W. H. Tunnard’s A Southern Record. Tunnard, a cultured and well-to-do Louisiana soldier from Baton Rouge, reports on the speech of Civil War-era Arkansawyers in the Ozarks. Though he is looking down on us Ozarkers, we should hold our heads high. I…
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Confronted with the inexpressible
Considering that within a few years of these scenes the first Jewish Rebellion breaks out, Roman historians might not have seen the humor in this. And it’s quite possible none of my Catholic brethren or fellow Christians will see any humor in it either. But I find the predicament of Porcius Festus quite funny faced…
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A little knowledge rocks
It is true that where an engineer, contractor or miner works all his life in one locality he becomes so expert in his knowledge of the methods and costs of rock excavation that he sees little practical value to himself in a knowledge of minerals, rocks or geologic principles. But when, possibly late in life,…
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Our question is first what nose, then whose nose by way of how nose
This split in the cognitive and pragmatic approaches has a major influence on the claim of memory to be faithful to the past: this claim defines the truthful status of memory, which will later have to be confronted with the truth claim of history. In the meantime, the interference of the pragmatics of memory, by…
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The historian, the fiction writer, and the uncorroborated airship
Promoting the books of historians at University of Arkansas Press was one of the great pleasures of working there. Working with colleagues trained in history was an even greater pleasure. Kevin Brock, then the acquisitions editor, pointed out the passage below. We both latched onto it with glee, but with very different reactions. This is…
Fiction and History 