History Blog

So I noted on Saturday during the Kentucky Derby that the Queen was visiting the US, with a stop in Jamestown, Virginia to mark that settlement's 400th anniversary. Mention of the Jamestown settlement always makes me think of Port-Royal, a slightly older European settlement only about 150 kilometres from where I live.

In 1603, a Frenchman by the name of Pierre Dugua de Mons was granted a charter for thousands of square kilometres of land in present-day Canada and the north-east US, where he was to develop the fur trade with the natives and establish a colony. The first colony was set up by de Mons - and his lieutenant, the explorer and map-maker Samuel de Champlain - in 1604 on the island of St. Croix in the Bay of Fundy. The next year, the colony was moved to the mainland, to a place called Port-Royal. There they built a small village, or Habitation.

In those days, royal charters for thousands of square kilometres of land in the New World could change hands at the King's whim, and by 1607, de Mons had fallen out of favour of the royal court, and his charter was revoked. Lacking the financing to keep the colony afloat, most of the settlers sailed back to France, leaving Port-Royal in the hands of a local Mi'kmaq chief named Membertou. By 1610, de Mons had his charter back, and he dispatched his partner, Sieur de Poutrincourt, with a small group of colonists back to Port-Royal. There he was greeted warmly by Membertou, who had kept the place just as the French had left it.

For the next few years, the little colony struggled along, and children born there became the first Canadians. However, in 1613, the English colonists at Jamestown, preparing to mark their own sixth winter in the New World by starving to death, sent a raiding party, led by a man named Samuel Argall, to steal what they needed to get through the winter from the scattering of French settlements along the north-east coast. If, in the process, they could send the French packing back across the Atlantic, so much the better.

The Argall party sailed into Port-Royal in November 1613. Finding most of the inhabitants away on a hunting trip, the Brits-slash-Americans looted everything of value from the village and burned it down. Without a home to call their own, the French settlers drifted into the surrounding woods, where they basically took up the life of their native friends.

The Habitation at Port-Royal may likely have disappeared into history, if not for a woman named Harriet Taber Richardson, a native of Massachusetts, who, in the 1930s, spent her summers in the Port-Royal area. Upon learning the history of Port-Royal, the story goes, Taber Richardson was so appalled by what her ancestral countrymen had done, she started a movement to have Port-Royal restored, kicking in thousands of dollars of her own money to get the ball rolling.

The Canadian government rebuilt the Port-Royal settlement in 1940. It now stands as a National Historic Site, under the stewardship of Parks Canada.

An article in yesterday’s local paper made mention of the fact April 20th was the anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birth. Had he eaten right, gotten a little exercise and stuck to his water-colour painting rather than trying to rule the world, the German dictator would have been 118. Whoopee.

The point of the article, however, was not to commemorate Hitler, but to point out that administrators at Moscow University had warned all foreign students to stay indoors throughout the day, as Russian skinheads were planning to honour the Fuhrer by cracking a few foreign skulls.

I had to read that twice. Russian Nazis? These guys might be scholars when it comes to goose-stepping and giving the one-armed salute, but apparently they skipped out of Second World War History 101.

If Hitler had had his way, these guys wouldn’t exist. Second only to the Jews, Hitler hated the Russians with a maniacal passion. He waged a war against Russia that killed 25 million of what would have been the current generation’s grandparents and great-grandparents. Heading east to attack Mother Russia, the German army stole entire crops and anything else of value that could be shipped back to Germany, loaded a large chunk of the population onto boxcars destined for the slave labour camps, and killed as many others as they could. Heading back west in retreat, they tried to kill all those they missed the first time around, and for good measure scorched the earth in their wake.

Corporal Hitler and his friends, of course, had a very narrow world view. There were the Aryans, and then there was everyone else, with everyone else further broken down into two groups – those who could be worked to death, and those who would just die. Blue-eyed and blonde people of Slavic descent need not apply for anything but the second group. Even eastern Europeans – Russians, Poles, Hungarians or others – who fought on the German side during the war were second-class soldiers, primarily suitable for cannon-fodder. Had Germany actually won the war, one has to think the career of an eastern European soldier in the Wehrmacht would have been nasty, brutish, and short.

Far be it for me to take anyone to task for their political leanings, but I have to ask again. Russian Nazis?

There’s just no understanding some people.

So I was on the phone with my mum the other day, and she told me my aunt, her oldest sibling, was recently hospitalized. Thankfully, she's home now and recovering. Without getting into family dynamics, let me just say that although my mum talks to her sister every couple of weeks, I haven't seen or spoken to her myself in about 30 years.

But the thing is, I've been meaning to. I have a photo of my aunt from when she was a toddler. At the time my grandfather worked in road-building camps in western Canada, and my grandmother was camp cook. In the photo, the hide of a recently-killed black bear can be seen in the background, stretched over a tent to dry. My aunt is the oldest surviving member of her immediate family, and her memory and life-experience stretches back a long time. There are a lot of things I want to ask her about my family history.

A few years ago, I started looking for information on a family member - my mum's cousin - who was killed fighting with the US Army in WW II. This family has a fascinating history that I knew nothing about when I was young. The father, my great-uncle, had served in WW I, and then for four years with the North West Mounted Police in the Yukon Territory, at a time when the Mounties still used dog-sleds. He had then moved to Chicago in the 1920s and opened a private detective agency, at the height of prohibition and the Al Capone years. He drowned in a fishing accident in the 1950s.

In addition to the son who was killed in the war, there was a younger son, who I eventually tracked down, living in retirement in Arizona. But before calling him up, a stranger, out of the blue asking details of his family and their tragedies, I thought I should gather more background information. Six months later, in a round-about way I found out the fellow had passed away. My opportunity to speak to the last person with a direct memory of that branch of the family was lost. I've been kicking myself ever since.

Here's hoping my 80-something aunt lives for another decade. But this weekend, I'm giving her a call.

A lengthy article in the New York Times last week by writer Katie Hafner underlines the major dilemma faced by archivists of some of the world's largest and most significant document holdings, as they try to go forward into the digital age.

The article points out, for example, that in the "foreseeable future", staff at the US Library of Congress expect that no more than 10 percent of the 132 million objects held in their collection will be digitized and available for on-line research. As of now, the Library has only been able to digitize just over 5,000 photos of the 1 million the Library holds from the collection of the New York World, Telegram & Sun newspapers; only 366 of the 1.2 million images the Library holds from US News and World Report; and only 313 of the 5 million images from Look magazine in the Library's collection.

Due to the sheer volume of material, and in some cases the incompatibility of many historical documents with digital technology, most archivists acknowledge that many objects will never be available on-line.

The concern is that as more and more readers, researchers and historians buy into the notion that everything and anything worth knowing is on the Web, valuable information and key artifacts will be overlooked, leading to an inevitable dumbing-down of our historical knowledge.

While the Internet and World Wide Web are invaluable tools, the fact is it behooves any researcher to keep in mind that while information gleaned on-line may be accurate, it is also just as likely to be incomplete.

There's an interesting article elsewhere in these pages by writer David Keith Shurtleff, in which he takes the media and modern historians to task for "trashing the titans" of history. Shurtleff puts this "revisionist history" down to envy of these great figures and the own moral failings of said media and historians.

Shurtleff raises his argument due to consternation over recent historical claims that "Lincoln was a depressed homosexual" (first reported in an extensive piece in The Atlantic magazine some months ago), that "Thomas Jefferson (was) a slave-keeping hypocrite who fathered children by his slaves" and "Columbus was a racist native-phobe and tyrant", among others. All, Shurtleff says, unsubstantiated and untrue.

Well, really? Given what we now know about human psychology - as opposed to what was known in the 1860s - is it so far-fetched to believe Lincoln suffered from depression? The man was never well, never looked happy, had the blood of tens of thousands of Civil War deaths on his mind and the weight (in fact, the very existence) of a nation on his shoulders. He was a man, not a superman, and given the circumstances, bouts of depression wouldn't seem out of the question. As for his sexuality, claiming he was homosexual is only trashing him if you believe homosexuals are trash.

The fact is, by his own accounts Thomas Jefferson did own slaves. It's not even in dispute. That he fathered children by one of them, Sally Hemmings, is more contentious. But this is not a claim made only by modern historians. As far back as 1802, his political foes were already suggesting it, and Jefferson himself never admitted or denied it. In 2000, no less a body than the Thomas Jefferson Foundation weighed all the evidence, including DNA evidence, and concluded that there was a "high probability" Jefferson fathered at least one child with Hemmings, and perhaps as many as six.

And as for Columbus, given the fact racism abounds in the 21st century, is it not common sense to conclude it was likely present in the 15th? Particularly among the elite of Europe, who regarded any non-Europeans they encountered through exploration as heathens and savages? Was there an explorer-cum-ship-captain of the time who wasn't a tyrant? Tyranny to maintain discipline on the high seas over men who didn't always share your vision and who feared you were leading them to certain death was almost de rigueur.

In his article, Shurtleff asks us to apply logic to refute these claims, and maintain these historical figures were flawless, or at least did not exhibit the so-called flaws with which they have been ascribed. He wants us to believe they could not have achieved what they did if there was any chink in their armour of greatness. It would seem more logical to conclude these men - these humans - were flawed figures. As are we all.

It is not the job of the historian (or the media) to accept on face value the record of history. It is in fact the duty of the historian to question and challenge the conventional wisdom. And it is the duty of the historian to set the record straight where it is warranted.

Not to revise, but to enhance, history.

Lloyd Clark is an esteemed British military historian and senior lecturer at Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He recently released the book Anzio: Italy and the Battle for Rome – 1944, an overview of one of the most costly and frustrating battles to take place during the Italian campaign of WW II.

The book primarily takes the big picture view of how the battle unfolded as per the decisions of those at the very top of command, including British PM Winston Churchill, by far the biggest backer of an aggressive Allied push in Italy, and US Fifth Army General Mark Clark, whose every decision appeared calculated to bring about the capture of Rome by US troops alone (once this goal was achieved, Clark threatened that any British troops trying to enter the city would be shot).

The writer Clark does a very good job of detailing how the personalities and personal ambitions of those in charge on both sides of the line dictated how the fighting progressed. At the same time, he does attempt to bring in enough anecdotes and reminisces from troops who did the fighting to paint a picture of what the common soldier was forced to endure for four months on the small beachhead.

But herein lies a problem. One such soldier Clark refers to is described as a US 45th Infantry rifleman by the name of Paul Brown. In a section outlining the misery faced by the fighting men and how they dealt with it, Clark quotes from Brown’s diary, in which he describes how he was quite often drunk, sometimes for days on end. Clark presents this information in one short paragraph, and then leaves it there.

The problem is, I’ve read some of Paul Brown’s Anzio diary myself. And from what I've read, Brown was not squatting in an outpost line of resistance, battling the Germans with an M1 in one hand and a bottle of vino in the other, as Clark seems to infer. He was actually posted to the Division Graves Registration unit, where his duty, day after day and night after night, was to venture out into no-man’s land under the flimsy protection of a Red Cross armband, and collect, bury, and sometimes re-bury, the dead.

On the stalemated Anzio beachhead, where artillery was the bane of dug-in troops, these bodies had often been decapitated, dismembered or disemboweled by shrapnel, and it was his job to collect the head, limbs or entrails whenever possible. The bodies may have lain on the battlefield or in a hastily dug shallow grave for days or weeks and were thus in various stages of decomposition. Getting blotto every night as a coping mechanism in the face of such relentless horror may not have been the healthiest or wisest choice, but it’s certainly understandable in the circumstances.

Without this context in the story of Paul Brown, it raises for me the nagging question of what else is missing from Clark’s book, specifically in the telling of the foot-soldiers’ experience at Anzio.

Clark’s book is a good, interesting read. It’s also an example of how what to leave out is often a tougher decision than what to leave in when a historian starts to write.

Although some may not remember more about Martin Luther King, Jr. other than the first four words of his "I Have a Dream" address, his words and actions are responsible for spearheading the civil rights movement in the late 1950's and 1960's. You can read more about Martin Luther King, Jr. on our American History site beginning with his early life, continuing on through his marriage and the beginnings of the civil rights movement, to becoming a pastor and winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and finally to him speaking out against poverty and the Vietnam War, and his assassination in 1968.

One of the newer sites in this section is Henry Ramsager's Latin American History site. If your knowledge of this region's history is limited, look no further. Here you'll learn about the ancient civilizations of the Maya, Aztec, Toltec, Inca and Caribs, follow the paths of the Europeans who arrived to conquer and settle there, and explore the evolution as each country in the area charts its own course. Past articles have discussed Che Guevara, Caribbean pirates, and Incan burial practises.

As we sat down to watch the Da Vinci Code on DVD a few nights ago, I got to wondering about some of the aspects of medieval history brought up in the movie. I wondered not so much about the truths of these historical events, but about the public's fascination with them. Why is medieval history so popular? Why do people flock to films set in this period? Why do people take part in medieval fairs, dressing up to play the parts of characters from that period?

The answer, I believe, it that it was just such a fascinating period that we can't help but get caught up in it. Not to mention that the idea of knights and battles and castles and feasts is just plain exciting. Our Medieval History writer Paula Stiles will lead you through the stories of the time and tell you about the Knights Templar, the Black Death, All Saints Day, and many of the people who lived in this time period.

Anthropology is the study of humankind, and it covers every aspect from the physical to the social to the mental development of people. Our Anthropology writer Gerda Wever-Rabehl discusses man's differences and similarities in the areas of culture and language, and delves into topics as diverse as mental illness, sex, trauma, food, and kinship.