An Open Letter to Donald Trump

Tags

19th Century America, Donald Trump, slavery, The American Civil War

Dear President Trump,

Normally this blog is about is the intersection of history with film and television, but occasionally I offer my thoughts about political comments about history. And recently you drew attention by saying “But why was there the Civil War? Why couldn’t that one have been worked out?” A lot of commentators have attacked you for asking the question and arguing that you ought to have known the answer. But as I tell my students occasionally, there is no shame in not knowing something about the past. The whole point of taking history courses is to learn things about the past that you didn’t know (and to learn a set of incredibly useful general skills that can be applied to almost any situation you’re in). So rather than shaming you, I’m going to answer the question for you.

As it happens, the answer to that question is both simple and complex at the same time. I’m not a specialist in American history but I do teach Modern Western Civilization pretty regularly, which requires me to discuss the issue, and here’s my take on the question. The Civil War couldn’t be “worked out” because 1) the Southern states were committed to the principle that black people were not truly humans but merely property that white people could own and use for labor, 2) the Constitution was written in such a way that, short of a massive change of heart across the South, there was no legislative solution to the dispute over slavery, and 3) Southern politicians were committed, not just to maintain their “peculiar institution” (as they liked to refer to slavery) but also to expanding slavery into areas where it was not currently allowed. (By the way, if you need to practice your writing, that previous sentence is what’s called a “thesis statement.” It summarizes my main point in this essay. You sometimes have trouble expressing your arguments clearly, so you might try using a thesis statement.)

Southern Attitudes toward Slavery

My first point is that the Southern states were deeply committed to the principle of owning black people as property. You can see that in the statements the Southern states made when they were justifying their secession from the United States. For example, the Mississippi Declaration of Secession says in its second paragraph,

“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery – the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.”

Seven of the ‘facts’ it cites are explicitly related to slavery and most of the remaining ones are indirect references to slavery or issues related to slavery.

South Carolina’s Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union takes somewhat longer to get to the point, but eventually explains that Northern states were refusing to live up to their Constitutional obligation to return fugitive slaves (as expressed in as the Fugitive Slave clause) and that the non-slaveholding states have sought to undermine the ownership of slaves as property.

Texas’ A Declaration of the Causes which Impel the State of Texas to Secede from the Federal Union says in its third paragraph “[Texas] was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery – the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits – a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.” It goes to say a few paragraphs later that many of the Northern states have violated the Fugitive Slave clause of the Constitution, and that these states have formed a ‘sectional party’

“based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color – a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.”

Notice how explicit the Texas statement is about the moral value of slavery. It calls it a “beneficent and patriarchal system” supported by “the plainest revelations of Divine Law.” That sort of language is surprisingly common among Southern politicians in the decade before the Civil War. Albert Gallatin Brown, a prominent politician from Mississippi who served in the House of Representatives and the Senate and two terms as governor of Mississippi declared in his 1858 Speech at Hazelhurst, “I think slavery is a good thing per se; I believe it to be a great moral, social, and political blessing—a blessing to the master and a blessing to the slave, and I believe, moreover, that it is of Divine origin.” In the face of pressure from abolitionists, Southerners had developed a justification of slavery that argued that it was not just useful, but actually one of the greatest moral goods in human history. While shockingly racist by modern standards, these sentiments were quite common in the Old South.

Albert G Brown

The Confederate Constitution, which is largely modeled on the United States Constitution,   generally makes explicit references to slavery where the US Constitution was more discreet about the issue. It forbids the important of “negroes of the African race”. It declares that “No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.” (The italicized text is new.) Should the new Confederacy acquire new territory, “In all such territory, the institution of negro slavery as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress, and by the territorial government: and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories, shall have the right to take to such territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the states or territories of the Confederate states.” Clearly, the Confederate states wanted to ensure that slavery was guaranteed permanetly in their government.

 

Slavery in the Constitution

The American Constitution is in many ways a wonderful document. You should read it some time; my students are always surprised by the rules it establishes for how we can run our political system. But one of the places where it fails to live up to its promise is in its acceptance of slavery. The Constitution was very much a compromise document, seeking to balance the interest of large states against small states and of Northern non-slaveholding states against Southern slaveholding states. Without that compromise, it wouldn’t have been accepted by different states. It enshrines political compromise as a basic principle in our system. If the House and the Senate can’t agree on a law, that law can’t get passed, and if the President can’t agree with Congress, that law is probably not going to get enacted. One of the places where the authors of the Constitution compromised was by allowing slavery. In fact, slavery is written into the Constitution so deeply that achieving a legislative solution to the dispute over slavery was essentially impossible.

You might be surprised to hear that slavery is entrenched in the Constitution. The words ‘slave’ and ‘slavery’ never occur in the document. But that doesn’t mean it’s not in there. The men who wrote the Constitution (James Madison in particular) were aware that Northern states were hostile to slavery, so they sought to disguise the presence of slavery in the document by referring to it obliquely. By my count, the Constitution discusses slavery 3 times, mostly with an eye to protecting it.

James Madison

For example, Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 says “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.” Did you catch that reference to slaves? They’re the “all other Persons” who aren’t “free Persons” or “Indians not taxed.” This is the famous 3/5^th Compromise, which declared that slaves were to be counted as 3/5 of a person for purposes of apportioning representation in the House.

Maybe you knew about the 3/5 Compromise, but you probably didn’t stop to think about what the practical effect of it is. By treating slaves as a form of property that still counts toward political representation, this clause over-represents the Southern states relative to the Northern states (which didn’t allow slavery). That guaranteed that even if there were an equal number of slaveholding and non-slaveholding states, the slaveholding states would always have a larger voice in the House, thereby ensuring that no law hostile to the interests of slave owners would be able to pass.

Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1 states “The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.” That sounds innocuous until you realize that the “importation of such persons” is a reference to importing blacks as property. The purpose of this clause is to forbid Congress from forbidding the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade until 1808 and forbidding Congress from trying to stop the trade by imposing steep tariffs on imported slaves.

Then there’s Article 4, Section 1, Clause 3, the aforementioned Fugitive Slave clause. “No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.” In other words, no runaway slave can escape his slavery by fleeing to a non-slaveholding state. Slave owners could legal require that the authorities in non-slaveholding states had to turn over escaped slaves. One could also argue that Article 4, Section 1, Clause 1, the Full Faith and Credit clause, deals with slavery as well, since it requires non-slaveholding states to acknowledge the purchase and sale of slaves in other states.

But that’s not the end of the ways the Constitution protects slavery. Article 1, Section 7, Clause 1 says that all bills dealing with taxation must begin in the House. That means that Congress would not be able to tax slavery out of existence, because slaveholding states were over-represented in the House. Article 1, Section 9, Clause 5 specifies that “No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.” Slaveholding states were perhaps the major exporters in the United States because slaves were primarily used to run plantations that produced crops like cotton and indigo, so it would not be possible to abolish slavery by taxing the exports that made slave owners wealthy.

The 3/5 Compromise also affected the election of presidents, since the number of electors that a state received was based on the number of Representatives it had plus the number of Senators it had. So the over-representation of slaveholding states skewed the presidency toward slaveholding states. It’s no wonder that 10 of the first 16 presidents were slave owners, although two of them, Van Buren and W.H. Harrison inherited their slaves. (Despite being a Northerner, Harrison was a supporter of slavery.)

George Washington, slave owner

Eventually, the higher population growth of the Northern states began to enable the free states to overcome the artificial bonus that slaveholding states had, but at that point, the fact that all states got an equal number of senators began to work in the South’s favor by preventing anti-slavery laws from passing in that chamber. Since ties are broken by the Vice-President and a majority of the Vice-Presidents were supporters of slavery, slavery remained protected.

The cumulative effect of this entrenchment of slavery in the Constitution was that a peaceful, legislative solution to the dispute over slavery was nearly impossible to achieve, because slaveholding states and politicians had a decisive upper hand in the Federal Government. That meant that the only way slavery could be abolished was through violent conflict.

The Expansion of Slavery

Post-Civil War propaganda in the South has sought to depict the Civil War as a “War of Northern Aggression”, but the reality is that it was Southerners who wanted to expand slavery. Southern states insisted on the enactment of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which was designed to overturn Northern states laws intended to make the return of escaped slaves harder by fining government officials who did not arrest alleged slaves; the law provided that government officials had to accept a slave-owners sworn testimony that a particular black man was a runaway slave. This made it quite easy for Southerners to essentially kidnap free blacks into slavery. The 1857 Dred Scot decision declared that blacks could not be citizens and therefore could not easily bring lawsuits alleging that they were free. It also declared that the Federal government had no power to regulate slavery in federal territories acquired after the American Revolution. By suing to force the return of slaves from free states, Southern slave-owners were often seeking to overturn free state laws, thereby undermining the ability of free states to remain free states.

(My own state, Wisconsin, I am proud to say, openly defied the Supreme Court on this issue and refused to hand over the escaped slave Joshua Glover. A mob broke him out of his prison at what is today Cathedral Square in Milwauee.)

There was also a vehement quarrel over the admission of new states to the Union. Abolitionists hoped that by admitting more free states, they might eventually be able to overcome the lock the slaveholding states had on the Federal government. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 maintained the balance of power by admitting Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state.

Southern states, in contrast, wanted to export slavery wherever they could. In Albert Gallatin Brown’s speech, he declares the importance of exporting slavery.

“I want Cuba, and I know that sooner or later we must have it. If the worm-eaten throne of Spain is willing to give it for a fair equivalent, well—if not, we must take it. I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason—for the planting and spreading of slavery… I would spread the blessings of slavery, like the religion of our Divine Master, to the uttermost ends of the earth, and rebellious and wicked as the Yankees have been, I would even extend it to them. I would not force it upon them, as I would not force religion upon them, but I would preach it to them, as I would preach the gospel.”

Apologists for the Confederacy have often claimed that the Civil War was caused by the issue of ‘state’s rights’. But in fact, when you read the various Declarations of Secession, you find the seceding states complaining that the Federal government wasn’t enforcing the Constitution on the Northern states. So they were actually opposing the idea of state’s rights.

Obviously the causes of the Civil War are complex. I’m not a specialist in American history, and I’m sure a good Civil War historian could greatly elaborate on (and perhaps in a few spots correct) my argument. But that’s the basic reason why the problem of slavery couldn’t be “worked out.” All avenues for resolving the dispute peacefully had essentially been foreclosed by the way the Constitution was written and by the insistence of Southerners that their system was inherently good and needed to be expanded.

Most of the confusion about the Civil War’s causes has been due to Confederate apologists seeking to justify their failed secession after the Civil War and by 20^th century racists who began to glorify the Confederacy during the Civil Rights era (for example by insisting on raised the so-called Confederate Flag at state-houses in the South). But that’s an issue that can be addressed with more emphasis on history education. I’d encourage you to do some reading about the subject or talk with an historian of the Civil War. Ignorance of the past is nothing to be ashamed of, but committing to ignorance of the past is.

Want to Know More?

One simple place to start is David Waldstreicher’s Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification. It does a good job of showing how slavery was enshrined in the Constitution.

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The Milwaukee Riots

Tags

Milwaukee, Milwaukee Riots, Sylville Smith

I live in Milwaukee, and over the past day or so, I’ve gotten calls and text messages from friends and relatives elsewhere wanting to know what’s happening in Milwaukee. The riot that broke out on the night of Saturday, August 13th has made headlines around the planet.

This blog isn’t about politics. But I’m a scholar, and at the moment, my professional research is focused on student violence at the University of Oxford in the Middle Ages, so I tend to notice things about riots these days. And while I’m a medievalist and not a scholar of contemporary America, I think I have something to add to the discussion about the riots in my home city. So I hope you can forgive me for digressing from my normal topic of historical movies for a post. As a scholar, I feel I have a duty to offer the perspective my research provides on contemporary events.

Urban riots seem shocking to modern Americans. At least up until the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO in August of 2014, there was little discussion of them in the media, and you might be forgiven for thinking they rarely happen in the US. In reality, however the United States experiences at least a half-dozen riots every single year, because college students riot with almost predictable regularity in this country. Let me demonstrate with a survey of just the past two years.

In March of 2014, several hundred students at the University of Arizona mourned the loss of a NCAA tournament game by throwing fire crackers and beer bottles at police.

In April of 2014, students at Iowa State University  rioted during the university’s annual Veishea celebrations. Students flipped at least three cars, pulled down three lamp poles and a number of street signs, and threw things at police. One man was knocked unconscious when he was hit with a light pole. Rioting is something of a tradition during Veishea; previous riots happened in 1988, 1992, 1994, 2004, and 2012 (when a student fell to his death). In 1997, a student was murdered during Veishea.

The same month, University of Connecticut students celebrated a basketball victory by lighting fireworks, flipping cars, smashing the windows of businesses and at least one academic hall, and pulling down a street light. The defeated University of Kentucky students rioted in Lexington, KY, lighting at least 38 fires, including 19 couches, 18 trash cans and a vacant house. Similar riots happened in Lexington in 2012 and 2013. The 2012 riot involved a reported 10,000 students and at least one shooting.

Also in April of 2014, about 200 students at Colorado State University shouted and threw objects at police after a party spiraled out of control. No injuries or property damage was reported.

Also that same month, a crowd estimated to be about 15,000 UC-Santa Barbara students (and others) tore down at least 6 traffic signs, lit small fires, attacked a car, and threw things at the police. Several dozen people, including 6 officers, were injured. This was to celebrate the university’s Deltopia Spring Break event.

A flipped car at the Deltopia Riot

(Photo: AP Photo/The Boston Globe, Jeremy Fox)

In October of 2014, University of New Hampshire students rioted during Keane’s annual Pumpkin Festival. Students set fires, tore down street signs, tried to flip a car, and threw rocks, pumpkins, skateboards, and bottles at the police. At least 30 people were injured.

 

The same month, about 5,000 students at West Virginia University caused an estimated $15,000 worth of property damage by starting fires and pulling down street signs and threw things at police and firefighters. WVU students are famous for doing this after athletic victories. In the past 15 years, athletic events have provoked 1,799 street fires and 633 dumpster fires. In 2012, they lit cars and light poles on fire.

On Nov 1st, a series of Halloween parties in Berkeley, CA got out of hand. An estimated 3-5,000 students rioted. At least three people were assaulted, a car was vandalized, and someone drove a car into a lamp post.

A smashed windshield at the Berkeley Riot

(Photo: Atreyue Ryken)

In April of 2015, our student friends in Lexington, KY rioted again after losing an NCAA game. They lit lawn furniture on fire and threw things at riot police.

In May of 2015, an argument at a formal night event at Plymouth State University turned into a riot of about 300 people when students began throwing things at police who arrived to break up an argument.

In January of 2015, students at Ohio State University rioted to celebrate a football victory. A  crowd of around 8,000 started a dozen small fires, lit several dumpter fires, forced their way into the stadium after the game, and tore down a goal post.

A street fire during the Ohio State Riot

(Photo nbcnews.com)

On May 24th of this year, a crowd of 200 to 250 students at Colby College, ME used furniture to make a bonfire in the street and started a dumpster fire the night before commencement. When firefighters and police arrived, the students brawled with them and threw bottles. Burning furniture and similar items is apparently something of a tradition at Colby at graduation.

This list leaves out riots that developed out of political protests of various sorts. If I had included those, the list would have been much longer. And I could easily have gone back further than 2014. When I was a graduate student at UW-Madison in the 1990s, the annual Halloween party often reached near-riot levels, with windows on State St being smashed and cars tipped. My husband has told me about the annual St. Patrick’s Day riots at UW-Oshkosh; that a decades long tradition was only ended when the university changed its Spring Break to coincide with St Patrick’s Day. Ohio State has a tradition of arson accompanying games against rival Michigan; in 2002, a single game triggered 10 dumpster fires. And as I’ve noted, some of the riots on this list are part of a tradition of rioting going back years.

 

The Milwaukee Riots 

Now let’s talk about the Milwaukee riots. Let me say that I have no first-hand knowledge of these events; my knowledge comes entirely from the local news media and a few discussions on Facebook. So I am reporting the facts as best I know them, but some of the details may be wrong, because the reporting on the events is still developing.
The Milwaukee riot started on August 13th, when police officers pulled over a car in the Sherman Park neighborhood. Sylville Smith, a black man who was reportedly carrying a gun, fled the car on foot, but apparently was cornered in a back yard by a pursuing police officer (who is black), who fired two shots into the man and killed him. The incident was reportedly caught on the officer’s body camera, but the footage has not yet been released. A crowd of about 100 black protesters gathered later that day, and the protest escalated into violence. Several cars were set on fire, a gas station was looted and set on fire, three other businesses were set on fire, and at least one other business was looted. Objects were thrown at police officers, shots were fired, and at least four officers were injured.

On the 14th, a peaceful protest occurred at the police station, and a large group turned out to help clean up the damage from the previous night. That night, there was more violence, with rocks being thrown at police and shots being fired; four more officers were wounded, as well as a young man. Governor Scott Walker activated the National Guard on Sunday night but it was not actually deployed. Here is a summary from Wikipedia, which links to numerous news stories on the riots.

(Photo: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

 

Comparing the Riots

What does this have to do with student rioting? On the surface, nothing. So far as has been reported, the Milwaukee protesters were not university students. The cause of the riot was something far more serious than student athletics. At least two businesses were looted and shots were fired, neither of which seems to have occurred during any of the riots I’ve noted above. The student riots tend to be one-day but often semi-annual events, whereas the Milwaukee riots happened two nights running.

But the scale of the Milwaukee riots is far smaller than the student riots I’ve mentioned. The crowd was 100 or so people, whereas the smallest of the student riots was 200-300 people, and the Santa Barbara riot was an estimated 15,000 people. These student riots tend to be much larger in scale than the rioting we see around various police killings of black men.

While the looting of businesses does not typically happen during student riots, buildings certainly get vandalized, fires are lit, city property destroyed, and police officers are assaulted. Most of these riots triggered dozens of arrests.

Now here’s the key point of my post. You’ve probably never heard about most of these student riots. They get local news coverage, but most of them don’t make the national news. The only one that I recall seeing a major news outlet cover was the Ohio State riot. So the media treats student riots as minor affairs, even when they involve thousands of people, multiple fires, cars and other property being destroyed, and police officers being injured. The impression this gives is that when white, middle-class college students riot over trivial things like football games or Halloween parties, it’s nothing serious. It’s just students being students. A little student violence is nothing to get worked up about, even if it perhaps results in the death of a student (as in Iowa), flipped or torched cars (many of these riots) or arson (most of these cases). In fact, news organizations are sometimes reluctant to call these events riots; sometimes the word riot is put in quotation marks, suggesting that these aren’t really riots, no matter what they look like.

But when a comparatively small group of black people violently protest a very serious issue, the killing of a motorist, it’s treated as world-level news. The governor thinks seriously about calling out the National Guard. The national news media suggests that the whole city is in flames (as I said, I’ve gotten worried messages from friends and relatives who were concerned for my safety).

Milwaukee-area police have killed at least four black men in the past two years. In April of 2014, a police officer shot the unarmed, mentally ill Dontre Hamilton 14 times during an altercation in a public park, killing him. In July of 2015, police in suburban Wauwatosa fatally shot a mentally-ill black man who was brandishing a sword. In June of 2016, Wauwatosa police fatally shot Jay Anderson, who was sleeping in a car in a parkway at 3am; he reportedly had a gun. And now this weekend, Sylville Smith. Regardless of whether any of these shootings were justifiable or not, many black Milwaukeeans are concerned about police violence toward their community, and the tendency of police officers to kill black men during traffic stops and for minor crimes like selling cigarettes is obviously an issue of serious concern nationally. And yet somehow it is the black riots over police violence that are seen as unacceptable, and not the student riots.

As a scholar, it’s hard for me to escape the conclusion that there is something seriously out of balance in the way people respond to these two very different sorts of riots. When white people riot over small issues, it’s barely news, no matter how large the crowd of rioters may be. When black people riot over a genuine issue of human lives, it’s treated as an alarming offense. Middle class white people apparently possess some unnamed right to engage in rioting that black people don’t possess.

That is not in any way to defend or justify this weekend’s violence. The destruction of businesses and the injuring of police officers and ordinary citizens is a serious matter, and those who committed crimes should be prosecuted. Nor is this to deny that some of the student rioters were prosecuted for crimes and suspended or expelled; typically these riots seem to produce one or two expulsions. My point is entirely about how we as people and the media as a body respond to these events in drastically different ways.

Because right now, the media seems to be suggesting that the lives of black citizens are less important than university students’ right to be upset about a football game.

Next time, I promise I’ll get back to posting about something far less important.

 

Correction: an earlier version of this post incorrectly identify the Veishae riots as occurring at the University of Iowa; in fact they occurred at Iowa State University. My apologies for the error.

But What Does an Historian Do?

Tags

Medieval Europe, The St Scholastica's Day Riot

I’ve been traveling for the past two weeks and haven’t had a chance to finish my review of 1776. One of the reasons I’ve been traveling is to do some research, and as I was doing it, it occurred to me that it might be worth posting about the work I was doing, because I think most people have only a vague idea of what it is that historians actually do. So in this post, I’m not going to talk about movies at all. I promise the next post will get back to my regular lamentations about historical films.

 

The Project as a Whole

My research focuses on violence at medieval universities, and I’m currently in the middle of writing a book about the St. Scholastica’s Day Riot, the most famous incident of town/gown violence in the history of universities. On February 10^th, the feast day of St. Scholastica, two students from Oxford University got into a quarrel with a local tavern-keeper and dumped a pot of wine on his head. The incident spiraled out of control into a three-day battle between the students of the university on the one hand, and the townsmen and local peasants of the region around Oxford on the other. By the time the violence calmed down, about 40 people were dead; at least 20 buildings had been set on fire; one of the town’s gates had been battered down; the students, having lost the fight, had fled the town; and the townsmen had looted student housing. Why the quarrel at the tavern got so out of hand, what happened in those three days, and what the consequences of the riot were are the subject of my book.

 

The Immediate Research Issue

One of the documents that survives for this shocking event is the records of the subsequent trial in which more than 150 townsmen were found guilty of either felony or trespass or both. 14th century English trial records aren’t like modern trial records; they don’t contain transcripts. Most of the document is actually just a long list of names of the men (and one woman) convicted, sorted into conviction for felony or trespass. (The distinction between those two categories is that trespasses were crimes minor enough that a fine was an acceptable punishment, whereas felonies were major crimes whose punishment was, in theory, death.)

Last year, I was able to secure a digital copy of the trial record to transcribe. But the document is quite faded and discolored, and so I was only able to get about half the names off of it. So last week, I went to inspect the original document at Britain’s National Archives in London.

The National Archives in London

 

Getting Into the Archives

Professional historians spend a fair amount of time looking at original documents from the periods we study to learn whatever those documents can tell us. Many documents have been edited and published somewhere and so are easy for us to access, but the vast majority of all documents have never been transcribed, edited, and published, and therefore remain available only in their original form, which means that they have to be studied wherever the document happens to be.

That means we have to get access to whatever library, archive, private collection, or government office houses the original. These collections vary considerably in how easy they are to get into. My experience at the National Archives is a good example of how complex the process can be.

Unlike some collections, the National Archive is open to anyone who wishes to conduct research, so I didn’t need to submit a letter of recommendation from a fellow scholar. I just had to go online and register with them. I could have done that the day I showed up, but I did it ahead of time. As part of the process I had to watch a short video about how to handle various types of old documents to avoid damaging them.

Wednesday morning, I went to the National Archives, which are conveniently located at the same London Tube stop as Kew Gardens, which gave my ex-horticulturalist husband something to do while I worked. First, I had to go get my Reader’s Ticket, which is basically the National Archives’ version of a library card; I couldn’t get access to the collection without it. To get the Ticket, I had to show two forms of ID and get my picture taken. That was pretty routine. (At the Bodleian Library in Oxford, I had to swear a 400-year-old oath that I wouldn’t burn the building down.)

My ‘library card’ to the National Archives

Then I had to check my bag because I was only allowed to take a few things into the collection with me. Among the things I could take in were my laptop, my cell phone, my wallet, a pencil and some paper, and (fortunately) a portable battery to recharge my cell phone. Among the things I wasn’t allowed to take in were pens (so I couldn’t write on the original documents), my pocketknife (thieves occasionally cut pages out of old manuscripts to sell on the black market), my water bottle (don’t want to spill water on old documents), or my lip balm (actually I was just assuming they wouldn’t allow that in). Everything I was going to take in had to be put in a clear plastic bag.

Then I had to go to a computer to order the document. In most archives, scholars aren’t allowed into the actual storage stacks where the documents are kept. Instead, I had to request that document be brought up to the reading room from the stacks. So I had to wait about 45 minutes before I could get into the reading room and collect my document.

As part of that process, I was assigned a seat number, which confusingly isn’t actually a seat. In the reading room I was allowed to use any available desk I wanted. The seat number is really more of an ID number. But I needed that seat number to get the document I ordered.

So after 45 minutes, I was allowed to go in to the reading room. I had to swipe my Reader’s Ticket through a scanner, and then let the attendant go through my clear plastic bag to make sure I wasn’t trying to bring anything inappropriate in. I needed to bring in my Dictionary of Latin Abbreviations, which wasn’t on the list of approved items, so I had to get a special form filled out giving me permission to bring in the book to help me with my work. (When I left for the day, they searched everything again, to make sure I wasn’t trying to steal any documents. So I had open my laptop and let them page through my dictionary to make sure there wasn’t anything hidden in them.)

Once through all that, I found a desk, and then went to the room where the requested documents are held to claim my document, which came in a very large heavy cardboard box that turned out to contain about a dozen parchment documents, one of which was my target, PRO KB 9/98B, the records of the trial of the St. Scholastica’s Day Riot. Finally, I was ready to actually look at my document.

The first page of PRO KB 9/98B

The second page of PRO KB 9/98B

 

Working with PRO KB 9/98B

My document was two long strips of parchment bound together between two modern cloth covers to protect it. But as I noted, it’s very faded and discolored. So simply seeing what the author wrote is a challenge. The author in this case was an anonymous scribe attending the court and making a record of who was convicted.

To read the document, I had to lay it flat with the help of a weighted cord. Then I used a sheet of paper to cover the part of the document I was working on; as I worked, I slid the paper down slightly to expose a new line of text. In addition to helping keep my place in the document, the sheet of paper helped me not touch the document directly, which is generally a big no-no when working with old and fragile documents. (When I was a graduate student and doing some work at the ‘Secret Vatican Archives’, I made the mistake of touching the manuscript too often. I get yelled at in Italian, which I don’t speak, so I was terrified they were threatening to drag me away and torture me or something.)

As I exposed a new line of text, I’d check my transcription from the digital copy to see what I had initially thought the line said. Then I’d look at the document with my eyes to see if I could read it. If I couldn’t, which was the case more often than not, I’d use my cell phone’s magnifier app and study the line on the highest magnification to see what I could see. If I still couldn’t read it, I’d turn on the magnifier light to see if that helped, which it often did. On the second day, I got talked to by a very polite attendant (“we don’t use the flashlights on our phones, sir,” which seemed a very British way to yell at someone), so I had to stop doing that, even though several other researchers were doing exactly the same thing.

And if I still couldn’t read the line, which was frequently the case, I had to resort to using a hand-held UV light, which can be remarkably useful in making black ink stand out. Frequently text that was simply too faded to read popped out plainly when exposed to UV light, and sometimes I’d discover the line was longer than I thought because there was text that is now completely invisible to the eye but which UV brings out easily.

That white rectangular box is the UV light

Of course, UV lights are the same thing used in tanning salons, so I had to be really carefully how I used it, because I didn’t want to give myself a sunburn or screw up my eyes. So normally I’d turn the light on, read the line as best I could, and then turn it off. Then I’d transcribe whatever part of the line I had figured out, and then go back with the UV light and do it again. It was long, tedious work, going line by line. It took me about 8 hours over the course of two days to work my way through both parts of the trial record. And even with all that, there were still parts of the text too damaged for me to be able to recover.

Other scholars working at the National Archives

 

But Wait! There’s More!

The challenges of working with the document don’t end with the physical challenge of making out what’s written on the page. 14^th century English court documents weren’t written in English. They’re written in Latin (mostly). As a medievalist, I’ve had to learn to read Latin simply so I can read the documents from the period.

But the real challenge is not the language that the document is written in, but the script. The simplest way to explain the concept of a script is that it is to handwriting what a font is to typing on a computer. Historically, the Latin alphabet itself has not changed too much over time (other than the addition of the letters ‘J’ and ‘W’), but the way the letters of the alphabet have been written has varied enormously. The most obvious example in modern English is the difference in letter forms between cursive and printed letters, which are technically separate scripts. The difference between lower case and upper case letters is another example. Some scripts are easier to read than others, and while the script used by the scribe in this document is not the most challenging I’ve ever encountered, it does present some difficulties.

The most basic stroke in Latin calligraphy is a simple vertical line, technically called a minim. The letters ‘I’, ‘M’, ‘N’ and ‘U’ are all comprised of minims: ‘I’ is a single minim (usually undotted, as it is in this script), ‘N’ and ‘U’ are two minims, and ‘M’ is three. ‘M’ and ‘N’ are theoretically minims joined at the top, while ‘U’ is joined at the bottom, but a scribe writing in a hurry is often careless about this. So picture a word like minimum. It’s composed of 15 minims that may or may not be clearly joined at top or bottom, and it’s up to the reader to figure out which minims belong together as letters. Is it ‘minimum’? ‘iminimum’? ‘imnuniim’? ‘unumum’? Are they all one word, or two words run together? Fortunately, only one of these is a Latin word, but you get the idea. And minims aren’t the only challenge. ‘L’, ‘S’, ‘T’ and ‘H’ can all look quite similar, being made with long strokes. So simply transcribing the correct letters is a challenge.

Additionally, because this scribe, like many others, was essentially taking dictation, he had to write as quickly as possible. So the scribe resorted to a variety of strategies to allow him to write faster. He employs ligatures, a device in which two letters are run together. A modern example of this is the ampersand (you know, the ‘&’ symbol); that’s a ligature for ‘E’ and “T’, or ‘et’, which is the Latin word for ‘and’. The scribe also abbreviates a lot, particularly with first names. For example, instead of writing ‘Robertus’ he writes ‘Robtus’ and makes a quick mark indicating that he’s dropped a few letters.

The one that I really struggled with an abbreviation I hadn’t send before, and which isn’t included in my Dictionary of Latin Abbreviations. It is a man’s first name, and occurred about a dozen times over the two pages. Here’s a picture of it. It’s the first word in the third line. (Ignore the thing that looks like a funky ‘A’; it’s a ligatured “IT’, short for ‘item’, meaning a new entry on the list.)

I initially read it as ‘Piais’. But I quickly realized that the first letter was an ‘R’; note that in the previous two lines, he makes the ‘R’ in ‘Robertus’ this way. But Riais wasn’t much better. Notice the line drawn over it; that’s a contraction mark, so he’s dropped a few letters (the Robtus also has a contraction line, running through the ‘B’). I knew it wasn’t ‘Robert’. What about ‘Richardus’? Well that almost works, but there’s only one ‘I’ in ‘Richardus’ and it would be a weird abbreviation that dropped all the consonants. So I was stumped. Finally, a fellow scholar pointed out what should have been glaringly obvious to me. That third letter probably isn’t an ‘A’, because the scribe usually (not always) adds a second chamber to his ‘A’ by extending the last stroke of the letter upward and curving it to the left. Instead, this scholar suggested it was a ligatured ‘CU”, meaning it was ‘RICUS’. I had subconsciously been reading as “AI” because it looks like a modern lower-case cursive ‘A’. ‘RICUS’ is a pretty obvious abbreviation for ‘Richardus’. So the man’s name is Richard Dyere.

 

Where Did the Rioters Come From?

The fun doesn’t end now that I’ve transcribed more of the document. Some of the lines were still too faded for me to read, even with UV light. I’ve gotten more of the document, but not all of it, and I’ll just have to be content with that. But one challenge I have to finish is identifying all of the place names, because I’d like to know where these men came from and often the document tells me. Some of them are pretty easy to work out. ‘Oxon’ is ‘Oxoniensis’, or ‘Oxford’. It makes sense that many of the rioters were from Oxford. However many of them are identified as coming from other communities, and it would be good to map that out. But trying to identify modern places from medieval spellings of medieval places gets a bit tricky, because medieval place names didn’t always have standardized spellings, especially not when they were small villages.

The scribe identifies several men as coming from a town he variously spells as ‘Hengey’, ‘Hengesteye’, and ‘Henyate’, all of which seem to be the modern Hinksey, a small village just outside Oxford. Clearly, without a standard Latin form, he was unsure how to write the town’s name and made a different choice each time the name came up. Three men are identified as coming from ‘Cornewalle’, which I initially read as ‘Cornwall’. That’s a long way from Oxford, but maybe they were there on business. But after looking at a map, I realized that they were much more likely to be from the small manor of Cornwell, which is only about 40 miles from Oxford, still a considerable distance, but not as far as Cornwall. Since Oxford is the nearest major town to Cornwell, it would make sense that these men might have gone there to sell goods or produce or buy something.

But what about the two men identified as coming from ‘Salesbury’? I can’t find any community with a name like that in Oxfordshire. Is it Salisbury, the cathedral town in Wiltshire? Salisbury is about 50 miles from Oxford as the crow flies, but closer to 70 miles by modern roads. It’s not inconceivable that two men from Salisbury might have had business in Oxford, but it’s more of a stretch. But perhaps these two men were originally from Salisbury but moved to Oxford a long time ago. Demonyms (“of Cornwell”) were a common way to identify people in the Middle Ages, especially in the period before surnames became standard. But they could indicate current place of resident, place of birth, or sometimes even just a former residence. So Richard of Salesbury might have been born there and left decades before, or he might currently reside there or maybe even just have some important connection to that place. And the same is true of the men from Cornwell. Just because they came from somewhere near Oxford doesn’t mean they had just made the journey.

What’s clear, however, is that the rioters weren’t all from Oxford proper. Some of the accounts of the riot mention that peasants from the countryside got involved in the riot, and the trial records allow me to confirm that.

 

Who Were The Rioters?

One of the most valuable details from the trial records is that it often, though not always, identifies the rioters by occupation. Sometimes it uses Latin, for example when it identifies someone as a sutor (a shoemaker) or a pastor (a shepherd). Sometimes it uses English; almost a dozen men are identifies as a “bocher” (butcher) and several others as a fullere (fuller, a type of cloth-worker); one is a shether, which I take to mean a sheath-maker. But what do I do with several men identified as cister? The ‘er’ ending suggests it’s an English word, but cista is the Latin word for a box or basket; is the scribe saying these men are box-makers or basket-weavers?

Several men are listed as being a serviens, which can mean a servant or a serf; since they are always listed as being the serviens of another man, I’ve concluded that they are probably domestic servants rather than peasants, but that’s an assumption I can’t prove. A number of men are listed as being a famulus. The term can mean an apprentice or just a laborer employed by someone. And one man is listed in the trespass list as a serviens and in the felony list as being a famulus, which suggests that the scribe was using the two Latin words interchangeably in their general sense as someone who is subordinate to an employer. However, I can’t eliminate the possibility that there was a technical difference between the two.

The most startling thing in the trial records, however, is this entry:

It reads “John de Bedeford mayor ville”. That’s right, the mayor of Oxford was convicted of trespass in the riot. And he wasn’t the only member of the town government to be convicted. Both of the town’s bailiffs (who were basically the mayor’s assistants) were also convicted, as were several other men who had served in town government or who had represented the town as a member of Parliament. In fact, nearly everyone who had played an official role in Oxford’s political life in the past decade was convicted in the riot, sometimes right along with their servants.

(But there is a mistake in this entry. The scribe confused John de Bedeford, a former mayor of Oxford who was convicted of both felony and trespass, with John de Bereford, the current mayor, who was convicted only of trespass. That wasn’t the only time that mistake was made; several months later, the Crown issued an order to release Bedeford from prison, but some official seems to have accidentally released Bereford, because he was later recorded as being absent from the prison without permission.)

Before I looked at the trial records, it was already clear that the Edward III blamed the Oxford government for the riot. But the trial records seem to suggest that the town leadership did not just permit the violence but actively participated in it. The mayor, the bailiffs, the former mayor, and other leading citizens in the riot were personally involved in attacking students, looting their property, or other related crimes.

Even though most of the people mentioned here are just names on parchment, looking at the social make-up of the rioters, we see a wide cross-section of the townspeople and nearby peasantry engaging in violence of the most extreme sort against the university. That’s why this document is important and why I needed to study it so closely. It reveals the scope of the violence and raises intriguing questions about how the town and university related to each other. Whatever grievances drove this riot, they were clearly ones felt by most segments of the town population. So as I finish my book, I’m going to have think a lot about what factors might have united such a wide range of men in violent opposition to the institution that made the town famous.

Hopefully this very close look at one small research project (or piece of a project, really) will give my non-historian readers some insight into exactly what it is that historians do and some of the various challenges that the work involves.

 

Want to Know More?

Buy my book when it finally comes out.

An Open Letter to Kentucky Lt. Gov. Jenean Hampton

Tags

Jenean Hamptom, Miscellaneous

Dear Lt Gov. Hampton,

You probably don’t know me. I run a modest little blog where I talk about history and film. But I’m also a professional historian. I teach history at the college level. I’d like to think I know a few things about studying history.

So I was distressed when I read an interview you gave recently in which you said, in reference to university degree programs, “I would not be studying history. Unless, you have a job lined up. Unless there’s somebody looking for a history major. And there are some places that are looking for that sort of wide background, but…” Elsewhere in the interview, you compare studying French literature unfavorably to studying electrical engineering, and you seem to say that universities shouldn’t subsidize the study of the Humanities with tax dollars.

There are a lot of things in that interview I disagree with, but let me focus on just that quote and the assumptions underlining it. Your comment reveals that you, like a lot of people, don’t see much value in studying history, that it’s something one does purely for personal enjoyment. You seem to think that studying history doesn’t really have much value in terms of a career, unless one wants to be a history teacher.

But a lot of people would beg to differ. Those who have studied the past at a university understand that it has a great deal of value in a wide range of fields.

Just ask Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, or Sonia Sotomayor or Elena Kagan, or the late Antonin Scalia, all of whom earned a bachelor’s degree in history. I’m sure they think that the training in close reading of historical documents that their history degree gave them is enormously useful in doing a close reading of a legal brief. (Incidentally, Clarence Thomas studied English literature, and Stephen Breyer studied philosophy, two more Humanities fields. Interesting that 6 out of 9 member of the Supreme Court chose the Humanities for their entrance into law.)

Or just ask a few of our past presidents, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Richard Nixon, or George W. Bush. (Eisenhower and Kennedy didn’t study history academically, but they both wrote on the subject.) Or maybe ask a few other important politicians such as George McGovern, George Mitchell, Henry Kissinger, Newt Gingrich, Orrin Hatch, Eric Holder, Robert Gates, Porter Goss, Joe Biden, James Baker, Dianne Feinstein, Jerry Brown, and Cory Booker, all of whom studied history or classics. I’m sure they found a historical perspective on politics and international conflicts an asset while they were in office.

Or if you want an explanation of how a history degree might be useful in business, try asking Carly Fiorina, Lee Iacocca, Martha Stewart, Jeff Zucker at NBC, William Clay Ford, Jr. of Ford Motor Company, James Kilts of Gilette, Robert Johnson of BET, Patricia Russo of Lucent, Ted Turner (who did classics), or any one of a large number of other CEOs. I would imagine they find the broad perspective we take in history useful in a variety of business situations.

Or ask J.K. Rowling, whose love of Latin and Classics shows itself every time one of her characters calls out “Expelliarmus’ or “Expecto Patronum!” She’s not the only famous author with a degree focused on the past; others include Annie Proulx, Rita Mae Brown, Willa Cather, C.S. Lewis, Ayn Rand, Salman Rushdie, and P.G. Wodehouse (although he dropped out for financial reasons before finishing his degree).

Think it’s only intellectual types who study history? Think again. Successful athletes like Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Grant Hill, Leo Lett (three-time Superbowl champion), and Troy Polamalu (another Superbowl champion) are all history degree holders; Vince Lombardi studied classics.

How about some successful entertainers, like Katherine Hepburn, Larry David, Sasha Baron Cohen, Jimmy Buffett, Jeanane Garofalo, Michael Palin of Monty Python fame, Chris Martin of Coldplay, Conan O’Brien, Tom Hiddleston, Lauryn Hill (although she never finished her degree), John Lithgow, Edward Norton, and Steve Carell, to name just a few.

Do I need to go on?

My point here is that history degrees don’t just prepare you to teach high school. They prepare you for a wide variety of careers. A history degree can prepare people for nearly any field that involves reading, writing, and thinking critically, and what fields DON’T require those skills?

But you’re skeptical. I get that. You have a sense that there really aren’t a lot of jobs of history majors. So let’s look at the numbers, and compare history majors against your favored example, electrical engineers. According to this study of employment rates in 2010-11, history majors fresh out of college have an unemployment rate of 10.2%, compared to an electrical engineering major’s 7.3% That looks bad, until you take into consideration that an engineering degree is closely aligned with a specific career, and a history degree isn’t. So the history major takes a bit of time to find his or her career path. But once history majors gain some work experience and find a career direction, their unemployment rate drops to 5.8%, just slightly above the electrical engineer’s 5.2%. This is hardly evidence that history majors don’t have careers to look forward to.

And look at the poor architecture majors. Their unemployment rate is 13.9%, and only drops to 9.2% with some experience. And yet, somehow, you don’t seem to have a sense that architecture is a useless major.

Furthermore, what happens to the electrical engineers who don’t find work in their field or who decide that the field isn’t for them? They’ve trained for a very specific sort of work, and are likely to have a substantial retraining period ahead of them. In contrast, history majors who decide not to pursue, for example, teaching or working in an archive can easily transition to business, or law, or a host of other fields. History degrees don’t prepare you for a specific field; they prepare you for a wide range of fields, which means that a shortage of jobs in one specific field doesn’t hurt history majors the way it would hurt engineering majors. In a complex business world, where job needs are unpredictable and workers are likely to switch careers several times, history and other Humanities degrees are in many ways a safer bet than many single-track fields.

There’s also the fact that Humanities degrees train students in creative thinking and clear communication, which might be why Silicon Valley has been hiring so many non-tech people lately.

And I haven’t even raised the personal benefits of studying something you love rather than something you think is employable. I haven’t brought up the fact that the Humanities are about quality of life, not just quantity of income. I haven’t gotten around to pointing out that life has more value than just the one you can measure with dollars. I haven’t looked at the way that studying history changes and enriches the way you understand the world around you, the news, and maybe your own life. As I tell my students, history is the most interesting thing there is to study, because everything you’re interested in has a history.

Don’t just take my word for it. Try studying it a little. I guarantee you’ll learn something worthwhile.

Jagged Little Pill: Why You Oughta Know “You Oughta Know”

Tags

Alanis Morissette, Amanda Marcotte, Jagged Little Pill, Taylor Swift, You Oughta Know

This post has absolutely nothing to do with movies, but it does have something to do with (very recent) history, and I don’t have time to write the post I intended to write today (looking at Leyrac de la Mole in Queen Margot).

There’s a couple of articles going around the internet about Alanis Morissette’s appearance at a Taylor Swift concert, during which the two of them sang Morissette’s signature hit “You Oughta Know”. Apparently large numbers of Millennials in the audience had no idea who Alanis Morissette is, and tweeted about their ignorance. This was the cue for a Jezebel piece lamenting the ignorance of Millennials and asserting that kids these days ought to know who Alanis Morissette is. That piece elicited a response from Slate’s Amanda Marcotte, “Teens Don’t Oughta Know“, in which she asserts that “Morissette’s big hit protested guys who break up with you” instead of saying anything meaningful. Both articles piss me off.

The Jezebel piece is an example of how previous generations often assert arbitrary standards for cultural literacy. “Kids these days don’t know what kids back in my day knew, and surely it’s a sign of the collapse of Western Civilization.” What the article doesn’t bother to do is offer any justification at all for why teens growing up in the 2010s ought to know about a performer who hasn’t had a major hit since they were in kindergarten. Don’t get me wrong–I love Alanis Morissette; I think she’s a great lyricist. But her cultural relevance rests primarily on 1995’s Jagged Little Pill. Gen Xers complaining that Millennials don’t know Jagged Little Pill is like Baby Boomers complaining that teenage Gen Xers didn’t know The Mamas and the Papas.

Jagged Little Pill was a hugely important album for Generation X, particularly the second wave of Gen X (the ones born in the late 70s and early 80s, as opposed to the ones born in the late 60s and early 70s). But that’s because it spoke to that age group’s needs and experiences. They were a generation that had grown up with the first female rockers but still hadn’t quite absorbed the idea that women’s experiences are just as valid as men’s experiences. All that uber-masculine hair metal and David Lee Roth sexual swagger was still about prioritizing male sexual pleasure, Joan Jett and Pat Benatar not withstanding. Perhaps “You Oughta Know” can speak to Millennials the same way, but if Jezebel wants to say that Millennials need to know this album, it needs a better reason than ‘just cuz’. Otherwise it’s just an exercise in stroking feelings of generational outrage and superiority. So Marcotte was right to push back against the article.

(Also, can I point out that tweeting that you don’t know who Alanis Morissette is may not be a sign of ignorance so much as a way of punning on the title of the song?)

But Marcotte’s form of pushing back was worse. In the article, she argues that the song is basically about a woman who won’t accept that she’s been put into the female version of the “friend zone” and simply won’t “take no for an answer.” She accuses the narrator of “begging” and “clumsy emotional blackmail” and argues that it’s a mistake to view Jagged Little Pill as being feminist.

There’s a lot wrong with that analysis. The narrator of the song is describing a relationship in which the couple has had sex repeatedly and then broke up. So she’s not being put in the the Friend Zone; she’s been dumped. And what she’s objecting to is not being broken up with, but rather being told that her boyfriend will love her until he dies and then immediately being broken up with and quickly replaced. So she’s angry that she’s been lied to, apparently used to get sex, and then abandoned in favor of another woman. Additionally, this other woman is “an older version of me”, suggesting that the narrator’s boyfriend has taken advantage of her youth and inexperience purely to get sex and then moved on to someone else more sexually experienced as if the relationship meant nothing at all. She’s also angry that he wasn’t emotionally available for her (“the love that you gave that we made wasn’t able/To make it enough for you to be open wide”); so she’s been trying to meet his sexual needs (fellating him in theater) but he hasn’t responded by meeting her emotional needs. She’s not refusing to take no for answer, nor is she begging him to take her back; she just feels no reason to take the blame for what happened, because she’s done everything he asked her to. And she’s not letting this bad break-up keep her from exploring her sexual desires; she’s running her nails down some new boyfriend’s back, and not apologizing for it.

Yes, the narrator is having trouble dealing with her experience and has called him at dinner time; she’s expressing her naive faith in his promises of undying love and telling him he’ll be sorry some day because she’s a worthy romantic partner. So she’s being a bit out of control. But what the song is trying to do is express the female side of a bad break-up by insisting that the young woman has a right to feel angry about her ex’s duplicity and shoddy treatment of her. If Marcotte can’t see how the song expresses a feminist viewpoint, perhaps she ought to re-examine the song lyrics.

So should Millennials know “You Oughta Know”? Personally I think they should. It’s a fun album with a lot of great music on it. And Morissette’s rather confrontational song is one of the first big songs I can think of to express female anger at the way men sometimes take advantage of women. Sure, she was hardly the only female rock star of the 90s to make songs like that; my memories of the 90s are heavily colored by the likes of Tori Amos, Sheryl Crow, Fiona Apple and more. But we don’t have a lot of female performers like that at the moment, and I think it’s too bad. In an era when female performers often have to be sexy and show a lot of skin to get the space to speak their minds (like Beyoncé and Rihanna; compare how Swift and Morisette are dressed in that performance and you’ll see what I mean), Morissette’s barely-controlled fury and ownership of her sexual agency in this song still feel fresh.

Like every generation of teenagers, Millennials need to understand that their cultural moment is predicated on the cultural moments of the previous generation. Taylor Swift was clearly trying to show her audience one of her important influences. I hope the audience listens and takes the time to explore Jagged Little Pill, not because it’s on some useless Buzzfeed list of 50 albums you have to know because arbitrary, but because I think the album still has valuable things to say to kids these days, like what feminist music can sound like.

Update: A female friend of mine just made a very important comment that develops something I said here, and I decided it was worth adding to the post. Women are traditionally taught that expressing anger is inappropriate; good women are supposed to suffer in silence and put in lots of hard work and eventually that’s going to be rewarded, traditionally with a loving relationship that supports them. Complaining is seen as nagging and shrewishness. “You Oughta Know” is one of the first songs in which a woman simply expresses her anger openly and bluntly and refuses to be silent. In the 90s, that was a pretty radical act, and in many ways still is. In that sense, Morissette’s song is very feminist.

Want to Know More?

Jagged Little Pillis available on Amazon.

Taking a Short Break

I’m in the middle of teaching three summer classes, and unfortunately that means near-constant grading and putting together of class handouts, which leaves me little time for watching movies. So I’m going to take a short break, probably until early August. If I find some time, I’ll try to get a post up; otherwise I’ll see you then!

Why There’s No Such Thing as an Historically-Accurate Movie, part 3

Tags

Braveheart, History, Ian McKellan, Richard III

Ok, so I’ve explained why the concept of an historically accurate movie doesn’t work, here and here. But this would seem to contradict the purpose of this blog, which is to examine the historical accuracy of films. How can I criticize films like Braveheart for being inaccurate if true accuracy is impossible?

The point I am making is not that there is no reason to be interested in historical accuracy in film, but rather that “Is this film historically accurate?” isn’t really the right question to ask. All historical films are inaccurate; that’s just a given. The question we should always be asking instead is “why is this film being inaccurate about some things and not others?” This question asks us to analyze a film, the intentions of the screenwriter and the director, and the overall message the film is offering to the viewers.

In other words, if all historical films are inaccurate, what matters is not whether they’re inaccurate, but where. What parts of a film does the director care to ‘get right’ and what parts does he not care about, or actively desire to get wrong? There is a big difference between getting the costuming wrong or simplifying a complex series of events on the one hand, and, for example, claiming that a basically patriotic man was in fact guilty of treason and cowardice because he was gay. In the first case, the intent was to appeal to a teen audience, in the second case, the intent was to keep the film from getting bogged down in obscure details, and in the third case, the intent was simply to gin up third-act drama rather than tell the real story.

Braveheart offers an excellent example of the importance of asking the right question. One of its biggest inaccuracies is the decision to introduce Princess Isabella into the story, despite her being 2 years old and living in France at the time of the movie. If you simply ask whether it’s accurate, the answer is simply no. But if you ask why is she included in the story, why the film has chosen to be inaccurate on this issue, you very quickly start realizing that the romance between Isabella and Wallace goes beyond simple romantic window-dressing and is in fact the reason Wallace can die triumphant at the end of the film. Wallace wins by knocking up the princess. And that, to my mind, is the key to understanding the whole damn film. It’s a movie about sexual conquest, not military conquest.

A Simple Thought Experiment

Hollywood has trained audiences to think about historical accuracy largely in terms of costuming, weapons, and sets. They want the audience to think that a historical film ‘looks right’. Let’s leave aside the fact that they usually get a lot of those details wrong; what matters is that they give an impression that the clothing, the locations, and the violence seems correct. For example, one element of Braveheart that got some publicity was how they achieved the stunts during the Battle of Stirling Bridgeless; Gibson claimed (and I see little reason to doubt him on this point) that someone from an animal welfare organization objected to the shots of horses being impaled because the man assumed that the shots had to have been achieved by actually killing horses. On the DVD, Gibson explains that he had to show the man the mechanical horse they used and how they had made the scene look realistic enough to fool audiences. The point of Gibson’s anecdote is that he was extremely concerned with accuracy, and his concern was so great that he was able to fool someone whose job is to monitor animal welfare. In other words, “see this movie, because I did a really good job being accurate.”

I find it very striking that audiences apparently want a sense of accuracy about violence, but not about plot. They cheerfully accept absurd plot developments (like Isabella being way too young and way too far way to have an affair with Wallace), but will complain if the sword fighting looks too fake. (Compare contemporary film violence to that from the 60s, for example, to see just how much effort Hollywood has put into improving the realism of its violence.)

Imagine for a moment a film in which the emphasis was on accuracy of the plot, but not on accuracy of the costuming or weaponry. Picture William Wallace running around in a 20th century British military uniform carrying an AK-47 but engaging in fairly accurate political maneuverings.

Most people would react to that poorly, I suspect, because Hollywood trains us that accuracy means specific things and generally excludes other things. But theatrical and cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare employ this device fairly frequently. Instead of setting his Richard III in the 1480s, like the historical Richard III, or in the 1590s, when the play was first performed, Ian McKellan set his version of the play in the 1930s, depicting Richard as a would-be fascist dictator. A particular favorite detail is the arrangement of 16th century poem “Come Live with Me and Be My Love” as a sort of Swing-era piece. The famous “Now is the winter of our discontent” speech becomes a political speech. It works beautifully, and while the setting isn’t faithful to the play as Shakespeare envisioned it, it works marvelously and offers a wonderful comment on the politics of both the 15th and the 20th centuries while still being true to the spirit of the play. This is a film making careful, clever use of its choices about historical inaccuracy.

So being historically inaccurate is not inherently a bad thing. All films have to do it to some degree. My goal in this blog is to illuminate the various inaccuracies that films employ and then discuss what the choice to be inaccurate means for that film. Hopefully, this can educate people to be more critical film-goers and maybe, in my wildest dreams, to demand a slightly higher calibre of historical film.

Why There’s No Such Thing as an Historically-Accurate Movie, part 2

Tags

Braveheart, History

Last time I laid out an argument that there is no such thing as an historically accurate movie because film requires far too many concessions to literary devices such as plot and narrative and main characters. Film has to be highly selective about which moments it will include and which it will exclude, because to include them all would be too boring to viewers.

But let’s put all those cinematic conventions aside. Let’s concede the need to make our hypothetical historically accurate movie watchable in the short space of 2-3 hours, and to offer a coherent and satisfying narrative to the viewer. Even with all of that granted, it’s still impossible to make a truly historically accurate film. Let’s get back to Braveheart to see why.

In our accurate version of William Wallace’ life story, we’d need to find actors who closely resembled Wallace, or could pull it off with the help of make-up and prosthetics. So we’d need to find actors who were a little shorter than Mel Gibson and who have less than flawless skin, teeth and hair. Of course, less physically attractive stars probably mean less success at the box office, which is why American film stars are always absurdly good-looking people. Who really wants William Wallace kissing with a mouthful of crooked teeth? More seriously, we’d have to actually know what Wallace looked like, which we don’t. So once again, we have to make concessions. We can’t expect our actors to actually look like the people who they are portraying.

Additionally, the script would have to be written at least partly in Scots English, which most audiences would find unintelligible, and the actors would need to use appropriate accents as well. Most Hollywood films employ a subtle convention of having the characters speak English even if they’re supposed to be speaking Old Norse or Latin or French or whatever. Again, it’s a concession to the needs to the viewers, especially since Hollywood assumes that Americans won’t tolerate too many subtitles. Historical films do occasionally acknowledge this convention in some way, but other films can be completely inconsistent about what language the characters are speaking.

The question of what William Wallace looked like is actually a far bigger problem than it seems on the surface. For a film to be truly accurate, it would have to stick to the known facts. But no historical subject is so well-documented that we can actually make a film about him or her without employing an enormous amount of speculation, guesswork and invention. Often we have only a faint idea what a particular person looked like. More seriously, we usually only know a small fraction of what they said to other people, and we almost never know what they were wearing. So in the scene when Wallace has his council of war before the battle of Stirling Bridge, we don’t know how many people were there or where it happened. We don’t know what he actually said. And we don’t know what clothing he was wearing when he said it.

If I sit down to write a historically accurate book on William Wallace, as a historian, I have an obligation to be clear about which facts I can know for certain (or with relative certainty) and which ‘facts’ I’m speculating about and what I’m using as the basis for my speculation. If I have no sources that physically describe William Wallace, I cannot offer a physical description of him because that simply isn’t historical. I have to be bound by the limits of what my sources tell me. And if I don’t know what he looked like, I can simply say that we don’t know what he looked like and leave it at that. No scholar will fault me for not describing him if we have no information about his physical appearance. (This is a common problem with popular history books by non-scholars; they frequently offer descriptions of their subject based on little to know real evidence.)

But a filmmaker doesn’t have the luxury of glossing over the things we don’t know about Wallace. The filmmaker has to decide whether Wallace was short or tall, thin or fat, slightly built or muscular, because he can’t not decide. He has to cast an actor to play Wallace and that requires him to decide which actor will best capture what the filmmaker thinks Wallace was like physically. And when the filmmaker films that council of war, he can’t have all the actors naked because we don’t know what they actually wore; he must clothe his actors in something. A truly accurate film about William Wallace would give Wallace exactly two pieces of dialog, because we only know two things he said or wrote; one is a letter offering German merchants safe conduct in Scotland, and the other is a rather uninspiring battle speech. But a film in which the main character says almost nothing is going to be a very hard sell to most modern audiences, and so the screenwriter has to invent his dialog. All of these are entirely reasonable things to do (which is not to say that Randall Wallace did a good job of making things up), but the moment the filmmaker decides that Wallace was wearing brown at his war council, the filmmaker has abandoned historical accuracy for fiction.

A further problem, which I’ve mentioned elsewhere, is that in some situations, historians have more than one possible way to recreate the historical events. Different sources often give contradictory versions of events. One source says someone was at a particular event, while another source says he or she wasn’t at that event. Or a sources fails to mention the participation of someone who would logically have been involved. When I’m writing an historical work, I have to note the discrepancy in the sources and explain which source I am going to believe and why. If I simply choose one version of an event without explaining my choice, other scholars may rightly criticize me for being sloppy or making unwarranted assumptions. But film-makers can’t do that. They have to settle on a version of events that makes sense narratively, and they cannot tell the audience that there was another way to reconstruct the events, unless they want to get into a Rashomon-style scenario (which would actually be sort of an interesting approach, I think). Murder mysteries sometimes do this, giving us the same crime committed by multiple possible killers as the detective reconstructs the events of the murder. Our historically-accurate Braveheart would have to do this multiple times for no dramatic pay-off.

So my point is that historically accurate movies are impossible, because making films requires so many assumptions about what was said and done and worn that historical accuracy becomes literally impossible, at least in any way scholars would understand the term. Instead we need to think about historical scholarship and cinema as two different ways of exploring the past, both with advantages and disadvantages of their own.

While I complain a lot about the inaccuracies of various films and tv shows, it’s not because I think they need to be 100% accurate. It’s because I think they’re being inaccurate about stupid things they could easily have been more accurate about. Reign, before you say anything, take off those damn high heels and that sequined strapless dress and put on something more period. And wear a chemise under it, for God’s sake! Do you want to chafe your nipples off?

Why There’s No Such Thing as an Historically-Accurate Movie, part 1

Tags

Braveheart, History

So I’ve said a couple times that there is no such thing as an historically-accurate movie, and it’s time for me to start explaining what I mean by that. And let’s use that most irritating of historical movies, Braveheart, as an example to illustrate the issues involved.

Let’s say we want to make a movie about William Wallace’ rebellion, and unlike Mel Gibson, we want to make it 100% accurate. As far as we know, Wallace started his rebellion in 1297 with his killing of Sir William Heselrig, and it reached its final conclusion when he was executed in 1305. To be 100% historically accurate, our movie would have to be 7 ½ years long, because the moment you start compressing the time scale of the film, you’re no long being historically accurate, since you’re omitting a lot of time. You’re editing out an enormous range of actions like Wallace bathing and getting dressed, Wallace have boring conversations about the weather, and Wallace taking a crap. But in doing this you’re declaring that some actions, like Wallace combing his hair, aren’t important enough for the viewer to have to sit through. That’s a reasonable judgment call, but strictly speaking you’re departing from history, because he has to have done all these things, hundreds of times over. So right away, you can see why historically accurate movies aren’t really possible. This sounds like a tiny, niggling issue, and it is. But I think it’s an important issue to acknowledge.

So let’s make a concession to watchability and agree that we’re not going to expect our audience to sit through all the times when Wallace was sleeping and eating, and riding across the countryside and so on. We’re going to compress the time scale and just show the important events, the ones that matter to the story of his rebellion. But here we run into another problem. To really tell an accurate account of Wallace’ rebellion, we need to include everyone’s story. We have to include the actions of the William Wallace and Andrew Moray and all their lieutenants and soldiers and other people who helped them. And we’re going to have devote equal time to all the English players in the events. Remember that historical events themselves don’t have a perspective or point of view. Edward I’s decisions and actions are every bit as important to telling the story as Wallace’ decisions and actions are, and to exclude them is going to fundamentally misrepresent the events. From a purely historical point of view, Wallace isn’t the ‘hero’ of the rebellion. History doesn’t have ‘main characters’ and ‘supporting characters’. His individual soldiers are as much the center of the events as he is, and the same is true for Edward I. Indeed, for the men who died at the battle of Stirling Bridge, that moment is more important in their lives than in Wallace’ life, so an argument can be made that Wallace is far less important to the story of Stirling Bridge than the men killed fighting there.

But obviously we cannot tell all the stories of all the people involved in all the events of the rebellion. That would just be impossible, even if George R.R. Martin was writing the script. So we must again make a concession to watchability. We have to decide to focus on a small number of people, simply to make the material manageable. So now we have to make a judgment call about whose stories matter and whose stories don’t. We have to designate some people to be main characters. Again, this sounds like a small point, but it’s actually a big step away from history, because as I said, history don’t have main characters and supporting characters. Nor does it have good guys and bad guys. Edward I may be a villain in Wallace’ story, but Wallace is a villain in Edward’s story, and in Sir William Heselrig’s story, for that matter. But let’s decide that we’re going to tell Wallace’ story; he’s going to be our main character.

History doesn’t have a plot. That means that even if we omit all the boring moments of Wallace tying his shoe laces, we still have to include everything else that’s directly part of the rebellion. A simple battle, like the battle of Stirling Bridge, doesn’t just happen. It’s made up of dozens of smaller events, like Wallace and Moray raising forces, marching to Stirling, discussing strategy, taking up their position and waiting for the English to arrive. And that’s just the pre-battle stuff. But that’s still an enormous amount of stuff to film, so again we have to make a concession and decide just to film the most important stuff. But in doing this we’re leaving out lots of important stuff, like the military decision-making and the deals Wallace had to cut in order to get the troops he needed. So at this point we’ve deviated substantially from history and what we’re filming is really only a subset of events that we’ve chosen, somewhat arbitrarily, to call ‘the really important events’.

Furthermore, Braveheart illustrates another problem with historically accurate films. In his depiction of the battle of Stirling Bridge, Gibson claims that the turning point of the battle was when Wallace tricked the English into making a cavalry charge into a Scottish pike unit. (That’s absolutely not what happened, but let’s pretend for a moment that it was.) Wallace would have made the decision to use that tactic in a meeting before the battle. And Gibson shows us that meeting, but he cuts the scene off at the moment when Wallace first has the idea. This allows Gibson to give the battle a surprise twist by not telling us the Scots will use spears at the battle (that, and some camera work where the spears aren’t in the scene until they magically appear on the ground just when they’re needed). But the decision to use that tactic would be a “really important event”, because it was that decision that made the difference in the battle. Gibson has skipped that moment because it makes the battle scene more dramatic. (He pulls the same trick in his depiction of Falkirk, where the decision of the Irish mercenaries to switch sides is entirely unforeshadowed.) This is entirely false from the standpoint of historical accuracy. An historically accurate movie doesn’t get to have surprise twists in it, because history isn’t written like a murder mystery. The facts are laid out in chronological or themetic order, not in a way that elicits surprise from the audience. (This is something a few of my students need to learn when they write term papers.)

My larger point here is that even movies that genuinely strive for historical accuracy aren’t anywhere close to true accuracy because they’re trimming out all sorts of stuff in order to make the film conform to a set of rules that we’ve agreed upon as to how movies are going to be made. The Hollywood film style we’ve been trained to accept as natural requires every scene to have some degree of plot advancement in it, and all those scenes of Wallace eating lunch don’t advance the plot. Hollywood has trained us to accept a limited viewpoint that privileges certain characters over others and certain facts over others, and these cinematic rules don’t leave much room for genuine historical accuracy. There’s no such thing as an historically accurate movie, because ‘historical accuracy’ and ‘watchable movie’ require drastically different approaches to the same material. What people are really asking when they ask “Is this film historically accurate?” is “Is this film historically accurate within the arbitrary conventions for making a movie I would be willing to spend time watching?”

Part of the issue here is that most movies conform broadly to the general rules of narrative literature. They have main characters and supporting characters, protagonists and antagonists, plots, and themes. History doesn’t have these things. Every real person is the main character of his or her life story, and a supporting character in the life stories of those around them. To designate one person as the main character is to a considerable extent to step away from history and toward literature (although, obviously, historical biography does have a main character in its subject). To tell William Wallace’ story from his point of view is to make a moral judgment that Edward I was a ‘bad guy’, which inherently privileges one side of the conflict. While that was a popular way to tell history in the past, modern historians generally try to be more even-handed on this issue.

Similarly, plots have to have a clear trajectory, with action that slowly rises toward a climax and eventually arrives at a resolution. But history doesn’t work that way. There is no ‘plot’ to history. Wallace’ story was not a simple linear progression that began with the English brutally conquering Scotland and raping Scottish women and ended with a triumphant shout of freedom during his execution. The story of his rebellion began long before Wallace was born, with the turbulent history of Scotland and England generations before, and his failed rebellion was simply one moment in that long conflict. But it wasn’t a plot; it was a series of events that did not have an overarching plot imposed by an outside power.

So to sum up, history’s ‘rules’ are entirely different from cinema and literature’s ‘rules’, and a movie that honestly tried to adhere to historical rather than literary rules would be entirely unwatchable by most people’s standards.

But even within these somewhat arbitrary rules for how a cinematic narrative is constructed, it’s still not possible to make a historically accurate movie, for reasons I’ll get into in my next post.