Category Archives: History

“We are digging up the foundations of a very old world.” -Alan Sharp

Alltagsgeschichte

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It’s not gobbledygook. It’s just German. The word Alltagsgeschichte translates into “everyday history,” and refers to a method of historical research connecting everyday citizens or communities with major political or social changes. It’s a way of examining history from a bottom-up perspective by studying the lives of voters rather than presidents and peasants rather than monarchs.

Sapphire Street 2

This method of study was developed by German historians after the Second World War, and ideally fits well with Marxist theory by emphasizing workers and farmers. Although it is still a relatively recent  notion, I think that everyday history is a useful way of understanding a plethora of historical events. It can be applied to populist movements in Latin America, the effects of globalization in western Africa, and women’s rights in Afghanistan through the past century’s regime changes.

Everyday historians can use social media to understand recent events, such as how the protests in Tahrir Square unfolded from the vantage point of the protestors themselves. When women wrote fan letters to Shirley Jackson in the 1940s about how much they enjoyed writing on their own, they produced a collection of documents that enables historians to understand day-to-day life among housewives during that time; through these letters, historians can see that Betty Friedan’s assessment of middle-class women in The Feminine Mystique was accurate two decades prior to its publication. Love letters between soldiers and their spouses give historians access to everyday life on both the battlefield and the home front.

I am drawn to this method of research because I find hope in it. There is something comforting in the thought that the average citizen can exert influence over the state. When I feel that my vote is thrown away, or that my day-to-day life is a waste of time and energy, I can reassure myself that the average person with a pen, a phone, or an instrument has the potential to make a difference, and that the little things, correspondences and recordings and photographs, will up make the bulk of historical documentation long after we are gone. The next great revolution will be the product of our tiniest actions, our minute protests, one by one building up until power has to shift. Everyday life does not impede us. I think, in fact, it empowers us.

There Are Heroes and There’s Pete Seeger

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This week, Pete Seeger passed away at the age of 94. If you are not familiar with him or his work, he was a folk singer who popularized songs like “This Land is Your Land” and “If I Had a Hammer.” He also composed controversial songs such as “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” a veiled criticism of the Vietnam War. He was a musician, activist, for a while a communist, and as far as I’m concerned he was a hero. He did not have powers beyond his voice; he could not fly or turn invisible, and he did not hide his identity. Instead, he openly challenged what he viewed as wrong. He was a public figure, not private martyr, as so many heroes are portrayed in our TV and movies today.

Unlike many of our fictional heroes, he was not a cyborg, a CIA-trained assassin, or a mutant from a lab accident. He did not use his fame or wealth to fly around cities beating people up. Instead, he relied on his banjo and his voice to make the world a better place. People like Pete make me wish that our media would create more realistic heroes, activists who use music, art, humor, and speech to save the world, rather than fists, guns, bombs, and money. Such depictions, I think, expose a collective fantasy in which a stranger solves our problems with simple violence. Pete, along with heroes like Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and Rigoberta Menchú, saw peaceful activism as the only solution. In stark contrast, the people we often describe as villains are murderers and dictators, those who resort to brutality and violence to bend the world to their will.

I wish we could see more fictional heroes portrayed accurately. I would like to see people use books as weapons. I would like to see heroes replace guns with speeches and super strength with musical talent. Pete Seeger was a hero, and he challenged the world’s villains with nothing more than a few songs and a little determination. If we can learn anything from him, it’s that truly heroic actions are for the commoner, for you and me and everybody else with a little talent and a lot of ambition. We do not need to have been born on Krypton to save the world when traveling with a banjo on our knee will suffice.

So rest in peace, Pete Seeger. You left us with a brighter world than the one you knew.

Why a Liberal Education? Your Guess is as Good as Mine

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I study English, poetry and fiction writing, literature, twentieth century history, the Western and Central Asia, colonialism, post-colonialism, feminism (waves 1-3), war, culture, comparative religion, social movements, world religions, and philosophy. I spend my time reading, then writing about what I read, and then reading what people wrote about what I wrote about what I read. Why do I do it? Because I have no choice. I am compelled to study the world as it is today by studying the way it was. I read and write fiction and poetry as a way to make sense of the world, only to find that I am still as ignorant. I pore over Persian poetry, Soviet policy records, and Twitter feeds from Tahrir Square, even when I’m not required to for a class, and I still have no answers.

That’s what it feels like to study in the liberal arts. You want answers to questions, but the only answers you find lead to more questions. You are taught to question all answers. There are no answers. For that matter, there are no questions. But that is an answer, so it must be wrong. Right?                                                            When I Return