Modern History Notes

by Cliopatria

A security camera closely monitors all the action in Barcelona, Spain's George Orwell Plaza. Hat tip.

Germany will adopt a new citizenship test on 1 September; and the United States adopts a new test on 1 October. Seven sample multiple choice questions from the German test are here; and ten sample questions from the American test are here. They are not easy, but I aced the American exam and got six of seven correct on the German. How about you? Hat tip.

Maurice Isserman,"Will the Left Ever Learn to Communicate Across Generations?" CHE, 20 June, revisits the conflict between the Old Left's Michael Harrington and the New Left's Tom Hayden.

Antonia Quirke reviews Joseph Lanza's Phallic Frenzy, Ken Russell and his Films for the London Times, 15 June.

Michiko Kakutani,"After One Wall Fell, Before New Ones Rose," NYT, 17 June, reviews Derek Chollet's and James Goldgeier's America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11: The Misunderstood Years Between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Start of the War on Terror.

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Alan Allport - 6/18/2008

Apparently I'm a better German than I thought.

Ralph E. Luker - 6/18/2008

Point taken, Alan. But I see your hand waving in the air. How did you do?

Alan Allport - 6/18/2008

Orwell, Such, Such Were the Joys:

"There was in those days a piece of nonsense called the Harrow History Prize, an annual competition for which many preparatory schools entered. It was a tradition for St Cyprian's to win it every year, as well we might, for we had mugged up every paper that had been set since the competition started, and the supply of possible questions was not inexhaustible. They were the kind of stupid question that is answered by rapping out a name or quotation. Who plundered the Begams? Who was beheaded in an open boat? Who caught the Whigs bathing and ran away with their clothes? Almost all our historical teaching ran on this level. History was a series of unrelated, unintelligible but — in some way that was never explained to us — important facts with resounding phrases tied to them. Disraeli brought peace with honour. Clive was astonished at his moderation. Pitt called in the New World to redress the balance of the Old. And the dates, and the mnemonic devices. (Did you know, for example, that the initial letters of ‘A black Negress was my aunt: there's her house behind the barn’ are also the initial letters of the battles in the Wars of the Roses?) Flip, who ‘took’ the higher forms in history, revelled in this kind of thing. I recall positive orgies of dates, with the keener boys leaping up and down in their places in their eagerness to shout out the right answers, and at the same time not feeling the faintest interest in the meaning of the mysterious events they were naming.

‘1587’

‘Massacre of St Bartholomew!’

‘1707?’

‘Death of Aurangzeeb!’

‘1713?’

‘Treaty of Utrecht!’

‘1773?’

‘Boston Tea Party!’

‘1520?’

‘Oo, Mum, please, Mum—’

‘Please, Mum, please Mum! Let me tell him, Mum!’

‘Well! 1520?’

‘Field of the Cloth of Gold!’

And so on."