café historia

new images of colonial east africa

Northwestern University Library has just made public more than 7,600 photos chronicling the European colonization of East Africa between 1860 and 1960. Taken by European explorers, colonial officials, settlers, missionaries, military officials, travellers, and early commercial photographers, the photos document the changing relationships among Africans and between Africans and Europeans during a period of dramatic change.

Assembled by the British collector Humphrey Winterton over about 30 years, the collection depicts the breadth of African experience; documents African life; European life in Africa in all its manifestations; and the African landscape, in particular as it changed over time. Included are photographs showing the building of East Africa's railways, the growth of its urban centres and the development of European colonial administration. The photographs extensively document rural life as well as the travels and work of European colonial officials and private businessmen. There are outstanding examples of portraiture, some of which were taken by commercial studios. Other photographs produced by commercial studios were specifically taken for sale and distribution in Europe and North America. The Winterton Collection also provides an unsurpassed resource for the study of the history of photography in East Africa. In particular, the earliest images, from the 1860s, portray life in Zanzibar off the east coast of Africa. They were taken and annotated by explorer and British abolitionist James Augustus Grant, best known for his 1864 book A Walk Across Africa: Or, Domestic Scenes from My Nile Journal. A set of pictures from the Abyssinian Campaign of 1868 preserves the first surviving use of photography in a military campaign.

Jonathan Glassman, an associate professor of history at Northwestern who has used the Winterton collection extensively, says its special value lies in its unusual subject matter. "The most familiar photographs of this era," he says, "tend to dwell on what the photographer considered the glamorous aspects of East Africa: wildlife, landscapes, settler life, the occasional posed portrait of an African sultan or Maasai warrior. What makes the Winterton collection stand out is the large number of items that document more prosaic matters. Such matters are precisely the most difficult for the student of African history to get a handle on."

In addition to digitizing the materials, the Library set itself a further challenge with the Winterton project. Assembled over a 40-year period by Winterton, the collection contained seventy-six photo albums, scrapbooks, and boxes of loose items like postcards and stereoscopic slides. "To a researcher," says the Library's head of Digital Collections Claire Stewart, "it might be important to be able to browse the collection exactly as it was originally physically organized, or it might be more important to be able to search it as a database, with dates or keywords. So we felt it was important to design a site that would do both." The resulting website, attempts to achieve both those goals: making an extraordinary historical collection available to other universities, secondary schools, and museums worldwide, and inviting users to explore it in a variety of creative ways.

Because the images are tagged with extensive metadata, they can also be searched by date or certain kinds of keywords. A school group viewing the site in its pilot stage, for example, asked Easterbrook to check if there were any photos related to the ancestry of President Barack Obama. That search yielded a group of 31 photos of people and places.

Designed in consultation with both a group of K-12 educators and members of Northwestern's Program of African Studies, the site also includes a "Winterton in the Classroom" feature that explains how elementary and secondary school teachers can use the collection for classroom projects and curricula, and links to other resources on teaching about Africa.

Set out in thumbnail fashion just click on an image to enalarge it and see the information about its origin & provenance. An extensive search system (still it would appear, under construction) helps with a particular area of research. This will be a real boon to students of African colonialism, German East Africa in particular.

image origin          post source: Northwestern   

linked casahistoria site: Imperialiam    

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linked casahistoria site: Imperialiam    

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marie curie- the most inspirational women scientist of them all!

For the last few weeks I have been reading many, many papers on Women's Rights so it is fitting perhaps to report that the UK's New Scientist Magazine has just published a poll of the Most Inspirational Women Scientists. Top of the bill is Marie Curie the Polish-born researcher, who discovered radiation therapy could treat cancer, with just over a quarter of the poll (25.1 per cent) - almost twice as much as her nearest rival.

The results come out of a survey of 800 scientists and members of the public commissioned by cosmetics company L'Oreal as part of the L'Oreal UNESCO For Women In Science programme . L'Oreal claim their intention is to highlight the lack of modern role models and to encourage young women to pursue careers in science. The programme was founded ten years ago on the premise that "the world needs science and science needs women" and is designed to promote and highlight the critical importance of ensuring greater participation of women in science, by awarding promising female scientists with fellowships to help them further their research.

The full top ten was:

1. Marie Curie
2. Rosalind Franklin (14.2 per cent), the biophysicist who helped discover the structure of DNA.
3. Hypatia of Alexandria, played by Rachel Weisz in a recent film about the fourth century Egyptian philosopher, (9.4 per cent
4. astrophysicist Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell (4.7 per cent)
5. Ada, Countess of Lovelace, the mathematician who wrote the first computer programmes (4.5 per cent)
6. Lise Meitner (4.4 per cent) who discovered nuclear fission.
7. chemist Dorothy Hodgkin who pioneered X-ray techniques (3.8 per cent)
8. Sophie Germain, who was one of the world's greatest mathematicians (3.7 per cent)
9. marine biologist Rachel Carson who pioneered the global environmental movement (3.3 per cent).
10. Dr Jane Goodall, the world famous primatologist (2.7 per cent).

 

image origin                 post source:Telegraph / New Scientist   

linked casahistoria site: Women's History    

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linked casahistoria site: Women's History    

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historical evidence shows global warming may be good for some...

As a bit of light (!) relief from the exam scripts I am reading through at the moment I have come across a new study called "Putting the Rise of the Inca within a Climatic and Land Management Context" by Alex Chepstow-Lusty, an English paleo-biologist working for the French Institute of Andean Studies, in Lima.

He believes that the last time global warming came to the Andes it produced the Inca Empire.

His team has analyzed pollen, seeds and isotopes in core samples taken from the deep mud of small lake Marcacocha, not far from Machu Picchu and their report says that the success of the Inca was underpinned by a period of warming that lasted more than four centuries. These core samples show that there was a major cold, dry period in the southern Andes beginning in 880 AD and lasting until 1000AD which killed off the Wari and the Tiahuanaco cultures which had between them dominated the southern Andes for more than a millenium. This was followed by the long period of warming when the Inca empire arose.

At the same time on the other side of the Pacific major migrations from East Asia took place into Polynesia, an indication of a major Niño event; a Niño sees western Pacific currents switch to flow from West to East. The message may be that climate change is especially forceful in the Andes, sandwiched thinly between the world's biggest ocean and the world's biggest jungle. The peaks are so high that they have had until just a few years ago deep ice on or near the Equator.

Today's warming is also following on a colder spell that started, the core samples say, not long after the arrival of the Spaniards in the 16th century. For instance, the pollen in the cores says that there was maize being grown under the Incas around the lake at 3,300metres above sea level. Until recently the upper level for maize around the Urubamba valley was lower at 3,000-3,100metres with the old inca terraces long abandoned due to the cld ckimate. In the past few years though the maize level has moved up and today there is maize being grown again above Marcacocha.

Today there are thousands upon thousands of fine flights of Inca terraces all over the upper ends of the valleys of Central and Southern Peru but few of them are used on a regular basis. it may be though that with a warmer climate they become usable again including the use of the terraces in the valleys above Machu Picchu.

The next problem is then how to get the combined harvesters up to them……

image origin: editor      post source: Caretas   

linked casahistoria site: Peru    

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linked casahistoria site: Peru    

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the beetle is 75 this week!

This week sees the 75th birthday of the VW Beetle, one of the few motor cars to have a played a genuine role in history.

June 22nd 1934 was the day that the Reich Ministry signed the contract to build a Peoples Car (ie Volks Wagen) as part of the Nazi Kraft Durch Freude (Strength through Joy) workers programme.

The prototypes were built in the garage of Ferdinand Porsche and were ready by October 1935 but serious mass production did not begin until after World War II. The heyday of the beetle was in the 1950's and 1960's. When I was first in Germany in the early 60's I remember nearly every car seemed to be a Käfer (a beetle in German!!). We had one too - a black 1300 "export" model which you can see in the picture alongside. Yes, that is the editor and his sister, making the Beetle feel at home!

Eventually over 21.5 million were sold worldwide. Final production took place in Mexico with the last beetle rolling off the lines there as recently as 2003!!

There is a good photo history of the beetle here.

image origin: editor      post source: Motor Klassik  

linked casahistoria site: Hitler's Germany    

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linked casahistoria site: Hitler's Germany    

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looking at terrorism’s history – and its present

I have just finished reading Michael Burleigh's Blood and Rage. Initially I was attracted to it as it promised an interlinking survey of terrorism ( a pretty disparate topic) from the mid 19^th century to the present.

It is soon clear that there is nothing new in our current preoccupation with bombings, even suicide bombings, and acts of political or religious terror. Burleigh starts with the Irish Fenians of the 19^th century (bomb factories, innocent deaths, deaths of bombers, pre-emptive arrests and "hard" questioning by the authorities – it was all there in the past too ) then progresses (regresses?) through Russian bombers, anarchists onto the 20^th century terrorist groups: Israeli, Palestinian, Irish, Basque, the European Red Brigades. The final (largest) section encompasses contemporary Islamist terror groups.

Some is done well. Burleigh is best on the more focused sections where he can follow a linear history: Fenians, Basques & Israeli terrorism as well as the final section on contemporary Islamist terror movements. Elsewhere (anarchism especially) exposition is at times over complex and confusing. I felt even a timeline would cope better with the huge amount of chronology and undeveloped personalities and events offered. Perhaps its scope is over ambitious. It may have been better to break it down into a couple of volumes (and so also include the latin American movements of the 1970's: tightly linked in many ways to the Red Brigades/RAF but a curious and large omission, even if admitted to by the author in the introduction).

At its best this a very good survey despite being openly opinionated, (increasingly so as chapters near the present). It could also do without the authors own explicit "solutions" at the end – many of these are certainly valid but are largely implicitly clear to the perceptive reader and do not require reinforcement. Perhaps more for research and dipping into rather than reading from cover to cover, this remains a valid and accessible addition to the topic.

linked casahistoria sites: Russia in 1900, Ireland & British, Arab-Israeli Conflict     

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linked casahistoria sites: Russia in 1900, Ireland & British, Arab-Israeli Conflict     

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calvin ’09: celebrating 500 years of sobriety & modesty

Jean Calvin, reformer, theologian, teacher was born nearly 500 years ago on July 10, 1509. The quincentenary is being observed around the globe with the Geneva-based World Alliance of Reformed Churches acting as a central organizer of "Calvin 09." Events marking the Calvin year range from congresses and exhibitions to concerts and theatre performances. His portrait is on a special Swiss postage stamp and souvenirs are for sale. "John Calvin Superstar, Geneva celebrates its saint," the Swiss daily Neue Zuercher Zeitung headlined an article on the "Calvinomania."

Yet this is perhaps not what the man himself would have wished for. Born into a middle-class Roman Catholic family Calvin became a lawyer, but soon came to sympathize with the anti-papal theses of Martin Luther that had rapidly spread to France. His religious outbursts forced him to go into exile in Switzerland. At 26 he began writing the "Institutes of the Christian Religion," the first compendium of Reformed doctrines, much more profound than Luther's theses of 1517. They won him an invitation from newly Protestant Geneva.

There he eventually introduced a revolutionary church constitution based on the democratic principles of division of powers. Whilst he stood for social solidarity with the poor and refugees, this was a society based on austere principles. Rules of morality ranged from bans on swearing, gambling and fornication to a strict no to dancing, even at weddings. Unexcused absence from worship service was penalized. Some modern theologians describe Calvin's Geneva as being near to tyranny. He would probably have understood much of the social beliefs of modern Taliban, whilst abhorring their violence.

Geneva at the time was a flourishing European trading centre and the influx of wealthy refugees and craftsmen caused a further boost in the economy from banking to watch making. To Calvin, hard work through the six-day work week was equal to worship service and the wealth thus obtained was justified. In this he had a share in developing capitalism. A process linking Protestantism & Capitalism which is well documented by historians.

500 years may seem a long time ago but the puritan ethics that emerged are still present in much of the world today (if somewhat submerged by our consumerist, liberal society) As for Geneva there are important, and surprising links beyond the Calvin statues: The Geneva-based International Red Cross was founded by a devout Calvinist, Henry Dunant. And the League of Nations, forerunner of the United Nations, was set up in Geneva because U.S President Woodrow Wilson, a Presbyterian, preferred the city to Catholic Brussels.

And what of Calvinomania '09? Perhaps the most fitting indicator of Calvin's views on this is the fact that he asked that bon his death he be buried without a gravestone in Geneva's common cemetery.

Not the type of modesty seen very often in modern celebrity-centred society.

(no image - as the man might have preferred!)  post source: AP  

linked casahistoria site: English Civil War: Beliefs & Ideas  

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linked casahistoria site: English Civil War: Beliefs & Ideas  

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please sir, why did hitler hate jews so much?

One of the most fundamental questions pupils ask when they first study the interwar period of German history is what made Hitler so antisemitic? The accepted wisdom generally has it that it was the period in pre Great War Vienna that sparked off his hatred - the general central European antisemitism amongst the middle classes especially that was prevalent as well as his own rejection from the Art College by whom he perceived as Jews. Perhaps even that his mother died at the hands of an inept Jewish physician.

However, a new book 'Hitler's Jewish Hatred; Cliché and Reality', by historian Ralf-George Reuth (a Nazi-era biographer who wrote an acclaimed book about Third Reich propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels), claims that Hitler's obsessive hatred for Jews was sparked by his experiences after World War One when it became fashionable to decry the loss of the war on Jewish financiers who owned almost half of all German private banks, dominated the stock exchange and who owned 80 per cent of Weimar's chain stores.

Reuth argues that what made Hitler particularly antagonistic was that he also blamed Jews for the Russian revolution, citing Leon Trotsky's faith, as well as that of Marx whose theories he followed and even Lenin, who was one-quarter Jewish. When left wing revolutions erupted in early Weimar Hitler identified German Jews not only with causing defeat in World War 1 but also as unpatriotic revolutionaries set on destroying the German state. Although this is not especially new as a factor, Reuth suggests this is the key factor, much more significant than his pre 1914 experiences.

Reuth draws on a wealth of archival material showing how Hitler fed off the intellectuals of the day to shape his belief. For example he quotes Nobel prize-winning novelist Thomas Mann who wrote in 1919 that he equated the Bolshevik revolution in Russia with the Jews.

Want to read more? Click on the post source below to go to the original article.

image origin          post source: Daily Mail  

linked casahistoria site: Weimar Germany, Hitler's Germany    

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linked casahistoria site: Weimar Germany, Hitler's Germany    

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a fitting statue to the real heroine of the crimea

One of the great heroines of women's history is the nurse who served in the Crimean War, used her own money to get there and to care for the soldiers by basing herself as near to the frontlines as possible. No this is not Florence Nightingale (who was funded by the government to go to Scutari hospital in the same conflict but which was some considerable distance from the front. This is Mary Seacole, who in many ways did more to help the troops but who has received far less notice ever since. Perhaps because she was black.

In recent years there has been an attempt to make up for over a century of neglect (my own ignorance of Mary Seacole continued until 15 years ago when I came across her in an unseen examination Source Paper for a course I was teaching). In 2004 this Jamaican born daughter of a Scottish soldier and Jamaican mother was voted the greatest Black Briton of all time. It was also decided to erect a statue and the chosen design has now been announced. Artist Martin Jennings created the winning sculpture, which will stand in the grounds of St Thomas' Hospital (the hospital where Florence Nightingale trained nurses) in central London facing Big Ben. It is expected to be erected by the end of 2010 or early 2011 .

The BBC report the artist as saying "She'll be facing Big Ben and marching towards the river - a wind, as it were, coming off the river - representing in some ways perhaps the wind of the resistance that she had to push against constantly in order to achieve what she wanted to achieve with her vocation.

image origin          post source: BBC 

linked casahistoria site: women's history 

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linked casahistoria site: women's history 

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britain rejects welsh visitor from south america

Foreign policy can be a strange at times...

Evelyn Talcadrini, from Puerto Madryn, Argentina, was on her way to Glyndyfrdwy, near Llangollen, to spend six months living with a local family to practise her Welsh. She had endured a 15-hour flight from Buenos Aires and before that a 20-hour bus journey from her home in Puerto Madryn (not a journey to be taken lightly - the editor has survived it twice!!), a town which has close links with Nefyn in Gwynedd. However, upon arrival in the UK she was quizzed by border officials then put on another flight back to South America within hours. Apparently speaking Welsh, an official language in Wales, was not considered a qualification of entry for the reasons given for expulsion were a lack of English as well as insufficient funds (she had a letter though from her Welsh host family confirming they would look after her, support her and ensure she would comply with her visa requirements.)

Talcadrini is an Argenine descendant of the 20,000 Welsh people who settled in Patagonia in the mid-19th century (the first group sailed aboard the Mimosa from Liverpool in May 1865) because they wanted to settle in a place where they could keep their language and religion at at time when English was becoming the predominant tongue. She had been due to spend her time in Wales with Eos Griffiths and his Patagonian-born wife Carina at their home in Glyndyfrdwy, and showed a letter from them to the immigration officials at Heathrow.

Welsh Nationalist Plaid Cymru politicians have taken up Talcadrini's case and pushed the London Government into launching an investigation into her treatment.

What is strange is that the British Government spends millions annually (and went to war) to sustain the descendants of one group of immigrants who settled in the mid 19th century off the coast of Patagonia, yet rejects even cultural links with the descendants of another British group who came to live just 60 minutes flying time away on Patagonia itself.

Let's have some consistency and fair play please.

Perhaps it was a lack of this that drove the Mimosa to south America in the first place...

image origin          post source: North Wales Daily Post   

linked casahistoria site: Emigration to Argentina  

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linked casahistoria site: Emigration to Argentina  

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ikea style raj hotel to shut 140 years after being shipped into india

It is well known that the British and other European Empire builders of the 19th century would export complete ships, bridges and trains in pieces, only to rebuild them bit by bit wherever they were required. Less well known is that the same principle was applied to buildings....

One of these is Mumbai's Watson's Hotel, a crumbling remnant of the Raj, and which has now been forced to shut down more than 140 years after it was shipped over from England. Just like these gunboats, river ferries, trains and bridges of empire its external cast-iron frame was made in England in numbered pieces then shipped to India to serve as a home-from-home for European guests, where it was reconstructed "by numbers" in a method that would look familiar to anyone trying to construct a piece of IKEA furniture.

The 1871 design has a good pedigree - by Rowland Mason Ordish, who is known for his detailed work on the single-span roof of the recently restored St Pancras High Speed Rail station in London. When opened the hotel was a majestic structure ahead of its time that served as the grandest hotel in Mumbai (it was the venue for the screening of the Lumiere Brothers moving film just six months after it had been screened in Paris). Named after its original owner, John Watson, the building was among the first cast iron structures constructed in India.

But its very exclusivity was to be its downfall: The hotel, which had a strict whites-only policy, employed English waitresses in its lavish bars and restaurant. Shortly after its opening, a Gujarati, Jamsetji Tata of the Tata industialist dynasty, was allegedly refused entry to Watson's one evening. Humiliated by the racist snub, Tata promptly built the Taj Mahal Hotel down the road, (the centre of last November's terrorist attacks) and which remains today an icon of modern India. As for Watson's, the hotel fell into decline after the death of Watson, and was rented out as office space. Today, the atrium (shown in the image) is smashed and the ballroom is now used as a rubbish dump by the current occupants. Several of the balconies, which once looked out over the Arabian Sea, have collapsed, many of the windows are broken and the building has barely seen any paint since the British left in 1948.

Despite being placed on the Global Watch List of 100 World Endangered Monuments by the New York-based World Monuments Fund Watson's has become a health hazard - in 2005, part of the hotel's façade collapsed, killing one person. Attempts at restoration, supported by Renzo Piano, who is the architect of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, have failed so The Mumbai housing authority has urged the Grade II–A heritage structure to be evacuated before the onset of the monsoon next week and has registered the 138-year-old building in the "most dilapidated" category of its pre-monsoon survey of dangerous structures.

image origin          post source: Daily Telegraph   

linked casahistoria site: The Raj     

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linked casahistoria site: The Raj     

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anne frank at 80

June 12th is the 80th year since the birth of Anne Frank and somewhat strangely, the Anne Frank Trust UK have produced an image (shown alongside) of what she might look like were she to be alive today for her 80th birthday and not have died of typhus and starvation at the age of 15 in Bergen Belsen in March 1945.

The image was produced by a Michigan firm called Phojoe which has worked with US police on dozens of missing persons cases to artificially age them to meke it easier to recognose them long after they have gone missing. This company created the recent picture of an "older" Madeleine McCann. Phojoe bases its aged image on whatever photographs are available - which in Anne Franks' case were of a carefree young girl.

As to the purpose of the Anne Frank image, the Trust hope the picture will help inspire Britain's school children to think about the kind of lives they would like to lead, and to remember the loss of six million people in the Holocaust. The Trust will launch a competition for children to write a letter to their 80-year-old selves, one of a number of projects being run across the world to mark the anniversary and challenge racist attitudes.

If you want to read more and see the reaction of Anne's surviving sister to the reconstruction click on "Post Source" below.

I am not too sure how justified it is to manipulate the deceased from history like this - even if the cause is worthy. How long before the ideas of past writers, Herodotus, Hegel, Marx, Darwin et al are amended to be written as they might have done had they lived in the world of today to serve the needs of contemporary politics? Counter factualism in another form but with a veneer of respectability perhaps.....

image origin          post source: Daily Telegraph   

linked casahistoria site:  Hitler's Germany    

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linked casahistoria site:  Hitler's Germany    

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the mystery of red rosa’s body

For over 90 years, Rosa Luxemburg, known also as "Red Rosa," has been an inspiration for leftists and feminists the world over. A communist revolutionary in post-World War I Germany, her grave in Berlin's Friedrichsfelde Cemetery in former East Germany is visited every year by a procession of old communists and young left-wing activists, who lay red carnations on her gravestone.

But Michael Tsokos, head of the Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences at Berlin's Charité hospital, claims that Luxemburg's body is not in that grave but has been stored in the hospital's basement since 1919. Tsokos recently found a corpse -- with no head, feet or hands -- stored in the cellar of the hospital's medical history museum. He found the autopsy report suspicious and decided to perform new tests. The result was something of a surprise. The body showed signs of having been waterlogged, and the test indicated that the body belonged to a woman who was between 40 and 50 years old at the time of death and that she had suffered from osteoarthritis and had legs of different lengths. He concluded that the corpse bore "striking similarities with the real Rosa Luxemburg.":

• At the time of her death, Luxemburg was 47 years old.
• She suffered from a congenital hip ailment that left her with a permanent limp, which in turn caused her legs to be of different lengths.
• After her violent death at the hands of right-wing paramilitaries, her body was thrown into Berlin's Landwehr Canal.

The story of Luxemburg's death is one of the most famous in modern German history. Originally a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Luxemburg broke with her party when it supported the Kaiser's war in 1914. After spending most of World War I in prison, the Polish-born academic emerged to help found Germany's Communist Party (KPD) with fellow leftist leader Karl Liebknecht.

In the chaos of postwar defeated Germany Liebknecht and Luxemburg supported the left wing Spartakist uprisings. The new SPD government feared a Bolshevik style revolution and gave right-wing paramilitaries, the Freikorps, the go-ahead to crush the revolts. They captured and tortured Luxemburg and Liebknecht who were then driven away separately into the nearby Tiergarten park and murdered. Liebknecht was taken to the city morgue, while Luxemburg was shot and dumped into the icy waters of the canal where her body was only recovered five months later after the winter ice had melted. After an autopsy at the Charité hospital, she was allegedly buried in the Friedrichsfelde Cemetery next to Liebknecht. The two have been honoured there ever since as martyrs to the communist cause.

So surely the next stage would be to DNA test the body in the tomb – but not possible: In 1935, Nazis attacked Luxemburg's and Liebknecht's graves, and the remains vanished. Subsequent searches for them by cemetery workers in 1950 were unsuccessful. For much more on the intriguing forensic study and how Tsokos intends to find DNA material of Luxemburg read the post source indicated below.

However, what is not provided in the Spiegel report is any suggestion as to why the wrong body was placed in the grave.......

image origin          post source: Der Spiegel  

linked casahistoria site: Weimar Germany

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linked casahistoria site: Weimar Germany

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letters from the revolution of 1917

Materials related to the 1917 revolutions in Russia continue to appear. The latest are a set of 60 letters from the Grand Duchess Olga to her mother and sister which reveal a desperation to discover the truth about the disappearance of her older brother, Tsar Nicholas II and his five children.

Nicholas was executed along with his wife, children, on July 17^th 1918. While an announcement was made about the death of the Tsar the fate of his wife and children was not known. The Olga letters reveal the stress and tension concerning their fate.

• February 12, 1919, Olga wrote to her sister: "Oh! Do you think it is true that all the poor relations who were imprisoned in Petersburg have been shot. We read it in the papers here. It seems so probably and yet so awfully impossible to believe and grasp."
• July 1919: "For the last month and a half I have been getting in despair and felt they were gone and we should never see them again and pictured in my imagination all sorts of horrors about them. Again it was in the papers here they were all killed.... who is one to believe?"

On a more personal note in May Olga writes about the relative hardship she had to endure after the Oct/Nov Revolution. "Yes, my stones are all lost with the rest of the things. It seems strange I shall never see them again. I am sorry for my pearls because Papa gave them to me."

The letters also cover part of the two-year period during the First World War when Olga voluntarily served as a nurse in a military hospital.

The letters are being sold next week by the Mayfair philatelist Argyll Etkin at the Olympia International Art Fair. A reserve price of $150,000 has been put on the collection. They were discovered after the death of Olga above a Toronto coffee shop. Olga had escaped by fleeing to Denmark then to Canada. She died in a suburban Toronto apartment on Nov. 24, 1960, and is buried beneath a cross-shaped gravestone inscribed: "The Last Grand Duchess of Russia.''

Click here for the Alexandra Palace excellent site on the Letters with images of Olga compiled by Sarah Miller.

image origin          post source: Canada.com  

linked casahistoria site: Russia, 1917 

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linked casahistoria site: Russia, 1917 

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puerto rico - us colony by choice?

A recent article in Slate takes recent the appointment of Puerto Rican Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court as an opportunity to question why the US is still involved with Puerto Rico, a Spanish colony until the United States pushed Spain out in the Spanish-American War. That was 1898 (the image is of U.S. troops entering Mayaguez, Puerto Rico in August 1898) the same year the United States acquired the Hawaiian Islands. Hawaii became a state. Puerto Rico did not. Timothy Noah explains how almost from the beginning, the United States was at a loss about what to do with Puerto Rico. Latin America had plenty sugar cane and coffee, the two possible products that could have been grown there at the time. The Puerto Rican population was too poor to provide much of a market for manufactured goods. But the island had military value although after World War 1 the island became strategically negligible.

The article then outlines the mixed fortunes of various Puerto Rican secession movements. Noah argues this was probably due less to U.S. opposition (for the past half-century the U.S. position on this question has mainly been indifference) than to the risk independence posed to Puerto Ricans' ability to migrate to the mainland, as they started doing en masse in the 1940s. Today, although that migration has slowed, the Puerto Rican diaspora in the continental United States exceeds the island's own population.

A worthwhile item, deserving to be read in full (click on post source below). This is aptly subtitled "An imperial primer." The other interesting factor (not looked at in the article) is why the development of US Puerto Rican relations has been so different to Cuban-US relations.

Sounds like an exam question.... 

image origin          post source: Slate 

linked casahistoria site: The US and Latin America

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linked casahistoria site: The US and Latin America

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flights of historia

While I was flying south last night and reading the G2 section of the Guardian (being small, it is the only part of the newspaper which can be read – and even then, just – in the cramped seating space of these Irish Boeings....) I came across an interesting item by Bettany Hughes about the nature of the crucial role history has to play in modern education. After explaining that the meaning of the original Greek word historia means a combination of "inquiry, analysis, observation and myth" she goes on to argue that history connects to the past, not just by artefact or interpretation of human behaviour but crucially by promoting a shared memory, a process that is essential to being human and to the process of living with the past to live better. This is history as cultural vehicle.

It is an interpretation that sits well with history as a shared, multi-stranded narrative. Indeed a narrative that often can (indeed should) have more than one ending, more than one beginning, and certainly no authorised version (national, political or otherwise - see previous post). It is this that enthuses (Hughes uses the success of Zack Snyder's "300" which has a huge web following and which took much directly from Herodotus) students and makes the celeb historians with their massive narrative series (a recent TV history of the Baroque was an excellent example of this) so popular. In recent years history in schools has suffered too much from being done to death by an almost all encompassing promotion of skills, crucial tools to the historian but all too often put to little real use in a school context where these skills were not placed into a narrative context that could provide real involvement with that shared memory.

However, just as we crossed the Pyrenees I came across another item further into G2 that shows how much work is still needed to broaden that concept of "shared memory". Marcel Berlins wrote in support of Spain's decision to award citizenship finally to the survivors of the International brigade. No issue there but he then went on to write of the war as "the last great romantic conflict, in which young men fought and died not for their own country but for an ideal". Has he not heard of the neutrals who enlisted in the Allied forces during the Second World War to help defeat Hitler? The Argentine RAF squadron is a case in mind. More controversially, young militant islamist suicide bombers might be interpreted as dying for an ideal. This is not to support or apologise for their actions, but perhaps to acknowledge their motivation and so begin to deal with the issues that caused it. That shared memory must endeavour to be thorough and based on as much evidence as possible.

In this sense Bettany Hughes draws attention to a series of videos produced by Queen Rani of Jordan (which won her YouTube's first ever "Visionary" Award) that show the shared medieval heritage of east & west (– I cannot verify this. I need a faster broadband for YouTube at the moment). Developing links to different historias so that modern society might advance, not regress.

History should, after all, be that multi stranded narrative.......

image origin          post source: The Guardian  

linked casahistoria site: Teaching History

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linked casahistoria site: Teaching History

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russia tries to close down those history barn doors - again

In its ongoing battle to control the interpretation of the past, the Kremlin has now posted a decree that aims to prevent what are described as efforts to falsify history and harm the interests of Russia. The decree signed by President Dimitry Medvedev authorizes the establishment of a presidential commission to counter what are described as attempts to falsify history. Writing on his Internet blog, Mr. Medvedev said Russia is being increasingly confronted with determined, malicious and aggressive historical falsifications, especially to do with Russia's successes in the Second World War. He acknowledges that every field of knowledge can have its own analysis, but says perhaps the reason for reinterpretation of the war is because there are fewer and fewer people who fought in it and saw it with their own eyes. The vacuum created is being filled by a new vision and new (often false) interpretations of the war.

And he has support from the Russian history community:

The president of Russia's Academy of Military Sciences, Makhmut Gareyev, claims there has been

• an endless stream of suggestions in Russian media that the Soviet Union did not win the war, or that it would have been better had Hitler won.  
• Gareyev also rejects the contention of many historians in Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics that they were occupied by Soviet forces. He notes that American troops remain in Germany and wonders why they are not considered occupiers, but Soviets in Eastern Europe were.

Meanwhile Russia is aggrieved by the interpretations (of an often shared history) by its neighbours:

• Moscow and Kyiv are at odds over the Holodomor, an event described in Ukraine as artificial famine perpetrated by the Kremlin, which claimed the lives of millions in the early 1930's. Ukrainians consider it an act of genocide. Russia says it was not genocide, because peasants of various ethnicities, not just Ukrainians, were also victimized.
• Moscow was also outraged two years ago when Estonia relocated the statue of a Red Army soldier from a central location in Tallinn.

As a last resort against non Russians primarily, the Russian Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu has introduced legislation that would make it a crime to deny the Soviet victory in World War II. Foreigners deemed guilty will be banned from entering Russia. Historians have expressed concern the measure could also create a climate of fear that would further close access to already limited Russian archives.  

At least this is a public debate, 50 years ago it would have been a closed book. Progress is always relative…..

image origin          post source: VOA  

linked casahistoria site: The Stalinist State

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linked casahistoria site: The Stalinist State

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france remembers its colonial liberators…..

Last weekend I watched the DVD of Indigènes (see earlier post) which is based on the role of the 150,000 North Africans from the French colonies who fought for France and helped liberate it in World War II. The took part in the Italian campaign from 1943 onwards, and in the invasion of Provence, in August 1944. The film ends with an indication of how little (as indeed with the recent case of the British Governmet and the Gurkhas) the government has kept its promises to these colonial troops.

Yet this week it would seem the survivors have been remembered once more. The French Secretary of State for Defence and Veterans, Jean-Marie Bockel, has just visited Algiers, to discuss the pensions of the Algerian veterans. Seven veterans were awarded a military medal in recognition of their contribution to the war effort and a centre was opened which is is designed to provide medical and administrative assistance to the almost 40,000 surviving Algerian veterans.

Le Monde reports that Bockel recieved a mixed welcome with an 89 year old claiming that the medal was useless and explained that what he wanted, above all, was to be granted a visa in order to return to France. The ceremony was criticised for coming far too late, over 65 years after the events and close to the anniversary of the Sétif massacre on May 8th, 1945, a catalyst for the Algerian War.

There is still some way to go to end such criticism. 47,000 war pensions are currently paid to Algerian veterans of the French army and to their families in Algeria but only in 2007 (partly in response to the film) did France begin to increase the pensions of Algerian veterans to the same level as those of French war veterans.. During the Second World War, 150,000 Algerian soldiers fought alongside French troops; 200,000 Algerians fought on the French side during the First World War.

But worst of all has been the treatment of those north Africans who fought with France, known as the Harkis, in the Algerian War of Independence. (The image shows a Harki villager receiving a machine gun from the French Army minister in 1960). After the ceasefire in March 1962, the French government forbade the repatriation of Harkis (by 1962 almost 200,000 fought for France) and their families to France. It is estimated that approximately 150,000 Harkis were murdered by the FLN, the Algerian independence forces. Those who were able to escape to France were placed in camps. (The term harki continues to be an emotive one in the French-Algerian community; Zinedine Zidane, the ex-captain of the French national football team, was described as acceptable by the far right National Front because, allegedly, his father was a Harki. This led to death threats from extremists of all stripes, and the disruption of a friendly encounter between the French and Algerian football teams in October 2001.) Only in 2003, was a national day of remembrance instituted for the Harki soldiers. Up to 1999 the Algerian conflict was not officially war so this impacted on any eligibility they might have had for pensions...

Who said old style colonialism was over?

image origin          post source: History Today   

linked casahistoria site: Decolonisation

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linked casahistoria site: Decolonisation

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lost in the ussr

I have just finished reading "The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia" by Tim Tzouliadis. It tells what at first glance might appear to be an ephemeral tale of Stalin's Russia but as it progresses it is clear that the story is one that is central to understanding the true nature of the Soviet state and one which should serve as a primer for any student wishing to get to the heart of the Stalin terror-state.

The "Forsaken" are initially a small group of baseball playing US citizens who move and settle in the USSR to escape the Depression and work in a society they believed promised more than the capitalist USA in the 1930's. Many were Ford line workers and engineers who go to help set up Ford funded factories in the USSR. Indeed Henry Ford encouraged many to go (but is careful to keep them at arms length and deny any responsibility for them). Yet within a couple of years all goes wrong as they get caught up (as dangerous "spies") in the 1930s Terror. One by one they disappear and this is where their tragedy begins.

Firstly they are clearly innocents caught in Stalin's and then the NKVD's paranoia. Siezed off the street, they are tortured, forced to confess then shot or sent to the Siberian Gulags to be worked to death and vanish without trace. Just like the anything up to 20 million other Soviets that Tzouliadis includes in the narrative.

However what is especially appalling about these US victims is that they are disowned totally by the US. The first ambassador, the city millionaire Joseph Davies is taken in totally by Stalin, believing the accuracy of the show trials and convincing the US government of his sincerity. The Embassy ignores appeals for help (In fact it fails to even protect its own employees from disappearance) believing too easily the Soviet lie that all have voluntarily become USSR citizens and renounced their US when the truth was that upon arrival the US passports were taken "for processing" by the Soviets and never returned. One of its key figures in the 1930's is Kennan of the containment telegram fame. He also sees little point in pushing to help these US citizens, who are perceived by many in officialdom as pinks and reds linked to US unionism. Tzouliadis shows a key factor in running the worst, far eastern Gulags where many of the US ended up was the need to mine gold and a key driver behind this was the US need for gold. The irony for the Forsaken now being that they were loaded onto virtual slave ships built in the USA and worked with US supplied equipment and tools.

Worst of all perhaps is the performance of the White House. FDR's Vice President Henry Wallace visits the Kolyma area in World War II where most Gulags were and is taken in by a Soviet charade to believe the camps are kindly, pioneering settlements (well fed NKVD men replaced the skeletal gulag workers for the visit). For me though the key disappointment was the apparent lame response of FDR himself to the tragedy of the US citizens and the failure to perceive the true nature of the Stalin regime (even given the need to have cordial relation for the duration of the world war). Apart from anything else this helps understanding of Churchills frustration with FDR-Stalin relations at the wartime meetings.

Tzouliadis writes well and the book becomes a real page turner. He uses the Forsaken focus to allow for a wider survey of the process of arrest, horrendous Gulag conditions, execution and disappearance during not one but three waves of Terror including US troops siezed during and after World War II. He describes how the process came to an end of sorts, providing brief accounts of the outcome for the key figures described in the text. He outlines the key role today of Memorial, the Russian organisation which today helps uncover the secrets of the Terror.

It is for these reasons that "The Forsaken" is a valuable addition to the work on Stalin's Russia. Perhaps it will also start to show a wider audience that Stalin was no better than Hitler, in all probability much worse, in creating a society that dehumanised its members and eliminated millions.

linked casahistoria site: The Stalinist State

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linked casahistoria site: The Stalinist State

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vietnam photographer van es dies

The photographer who took one of the most iconic photos of the end of the Vietnam war, Dutch photographer Hugh Van Es, has died at the age of 67.

His is the famous image showing US citizens queuing on a rooftop to board a US helicopter owned by Air America, the CIA-run airline during the evacuation of Saigon in 1975, which was clearly too small too carry them all (shown alongside). The photo gained further coverage after the musical "Miss Saigon" featured the final Americans evacuating from the city from the Embassy roof by helicopter (in reality they were not on the embassy roof).

Van Es covered the Vietnam War between 1969 and 1975, working first for the Associated Press new agency and then for United Press International. His photo of a wounded soldier with a tiny cross gleaming against his dark silhouette, taken 40 years ago this month, became the best-known picture from the May 1969 battle of Hamburger Hill. This was the proudest of the pictures he took during the conflict — not the evacuation photo. It was in 1975, as North Vietnamese forces were approaching Saigon, that he photographed the thousands of US military personnel and Vietnamese civilians trying to flee the city.

After the war, Van Es returned to Hong Kong from where he continued to photograph conflicts including the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Moro rebellion in the Philippines.

image origin          post source: Yahoo News  

linked casahistoria site: Vietnam War

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linked casahistoria site: Vietnam War

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argentina, the uk & the sovereignty of a seabed

The world economy is in its biggest recession for generations, a possible pandemic is lurking in the wings ready to strike in an increasingly virulent form after a few months of mutations, global warming is causing massive climate change in Africa and Australia, yet the governments of Great Britain and Argentina continue to argue over that small group of wind swept islands in the south Atlantic

Last month Argentina lodged a claim with the United Nations over an area of seabed extending from the islands. Now the United Kingdom has laid its claim to the same area. Both applications (for an area of 460,000 square miles/750,000 square km around the Falkland/Malvinas islands and South Georgia) have gone to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, countries have sovereign rights over their continental shelves up to 200 nautical miles from their shorelines. They can apply to extend the boundary to a radius of 350 nautical miles from their coastlines.

Ministers from both governments are currently denouncing the actions of the other and talking in terms of the timeworn chestnut of "national sovereignty", however the reality is perhaps less noble. The islands already have rich fish resources which skilful licensing has given greater economic autonomy to the islands compared with either before, during or after the 1982 conflict but future prospects however are in a different league. Although no commercially viable deposits have been found despite years of exploration, the South Atlantic may have rich reserves of oil and gas. Far more than the already fish wealthy islands could ever need. Such potential though could make a big difference to the much larger (and currently very weary) economies of the United Kingdom and Argentina, so both are submitting claims probably to safeguard their future options.

The UN Commission has no power to arbitrate between countries and, in practice, the claims will remain frozen until and unless Britain and Argentina reach agreement. Is it too much to hope that this might happen at some time in the future? That both might agree a modus vivendi (Argentina has the nearby local infrastructure and markets given its position in the South American oil & gas pipeline networks whilst the UK has access to funding) that gives both countries and the islands a separate stake in any future finds? Or will the future too be mired in the politspeak of that "national sovereignty".

Even if it is the sovereignty of a notional seabed. Then perhaps the governments will stop distracting us and get on with more serious issues, like recession, pandemics. Global warming perhaps…

Latest: By coincidence the latest edition of The Economist has a detailed briefing on the seabed scramble which places the above post in context (click here). Looks like the 1884 Berlin Conference all over again, only this time it’s not the industrialised powers but those with a coastline doing the expropriating of a global resource. What happened to the (1970’s?) idea of a UN trusteeship over the seabed which would distribute the dividends of seabed exploitation to all members, including those landlocked states which (in the southern hemisphere especially) are often the poorest?

 

image origin          post source: Telegraph 

linked casahistoria site:  Falklands/Malvinas Conflict, Visiting the Islands

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linked casahistoria site:  Falklands/Malvinas Conflict, Visiting the Islands

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germany’s old phone books go online for family searches

The German National Library (Deutsche Staatsbibliothek) has completed its digitisation of Germany's old phone books issued from the middle of World War I though Weimar and Nazi Germany and the Bonner Republic through to 1981. The actual database consists of telephone books covering the years 1915-1981 for five of Germany's major cities: Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Leipzig, and Munich.

Obviously the key period of value to researchers will be the interwar period. As well as ordinary Germans, the collection includes details of Marlene Dietrich, Nobel Prize winner Albert Einstein (his phone number - Berlin 2807), Hitler's wife, Eva Braun, and his deputy, Rudolf Hess. However the real significance is likely to be their value to family historians seeking to find records of families who fled to safety or to the unlucky ancestors lost in the camps.

The telephone books can be searched on a free membership as part of the Ancestry.com International web.

And it works - I found my own family phone number from when I grew up in Bonner Germany in an earlier phone book! I also found my friends old numbers - just the thing before we meet again this autumn for the first time in.......... Just click on Deutsche Telefonbücher, 1915-1981 to go to the search page.

image origin          post source: Daily Mail  

linked casahistoria site: Weimar Germany, Hitler's Germany    

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linked casahistoria site: Weimar Germany, Hitler's Germany    

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the short term gratitude for military sacrifice

It is odd the way in which governments are quick to recruit in times of war but are slow to recognise this participation when it does not suit the post war world.

It was 40 years ago this summer that U.S. Marine Gunnery Sgt. Enrique Valdez was nearly killed by shrapnel in Vietnam and 15 years ago that he died from wounds suffered that August in 1969. After being wounded in Vietnam at the age of 32, Valdez spent the rest of his life as a quadriplegic. The shrapnel had cut his spinal cord. When he died of pneumonia in 1994, bureaucratic delays seemed to rule out that he might be recognized for his service to the country, even although his death was a direct result of his war wounds. His family though worked for years to have his name added to the Washington Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and the notification has finally come. Enrique Valdez will now join 58,260 other names listed on the Vietnam Memorial, and his is the only name added under 1969, for combat deaths that year or later deaths from injuries sustained in combat that year.

In Britain this week it has taken the involvement of a well known and photogenic female celeb to shame the Government into giving (previously understood) rights of residence to elderly Gurkhas who have traditionally fought for the British Army. Changed attitudes to immigration in recent years had resulted in the Government adopting a pretty insensitive and hardline approach which set up so many hoops to residence that an enraged public has forced a climbdown.

Meanwhile in a small cemetery on the outskirts of Madrid, the 2,300 British volunteers who risked their lives to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War will finally be remembered in a brief ceremony. But for almost all those who served with the International Brigades, the granite plaque unveiled in their honour has come too late as most of those who travelled to Spain to fight General Franco's Nationalist uprising are now dead. There are only seven frail survivors, now in their 90s, and none is well enough to travel to the ceremony on Thursday. The plaque, at Fuencarral Cemetery, north of Madrid, is dedicated to all the English speaking members of the International Brigades who served on the side of the Republican Government between 1936 and 1939.

Athough the British Ambassador along with members of the Spanish and French Governments will be present,The British Embassy has refused to pay for the plaque. The veterans have had to do so.

But Spain appears also to easily forget. The present Socialist government Government has begun to open up and heal the wounds of the war but has still to offer the veterans the dual Spanish citizenship first promised thirteen years ago. As recently as last year, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Spanish Prime Minister, repeated the promise of joint citizenship but no date has been set for them to receive the honour.

Short term state memory, despite long term individual sacrifice.

image origin          post source: CNN (US) The Times (Spain)  

linked casahistoria site: Vietnam War, Spanish Civil War  

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linked casahistoria site: Vietnam War, Spanish Civil War  

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