Historicity

Just another concatenation of links for you.

The American School of Oriental Researches list o’ links to museums, journals, and archaeological excavations. Be sure to check out Ashkelon (there’s more content in the National Geographic article) and Bethsaida–I’ve dug at both, and have the T-shirts to prove it. I might have been at the site of Tell Atchana (ancient Alalakh) in the Amuq Valley in Turkey, had things been different; and might find myself there yet some time. Alas, no new dig shirt for me this year.

If you can tolerate yet another WW2 link, here’s a moving piece about Hiroshima and its place in Japanese cultural memory.

The Second World War has always been a topic of interest to me, but it’s been especially on my mind as the 60th anniversary of the war’s end approaches. Today I started reading Max Hasting’s Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, which sets out to tell the tale of the bloody, drawn-out, and surprisingly difficult defeat of Germany after D-Day.

Armageddon asks a simple question: why did it take the Allies so long to defeat Germany after D-Day?

I first took note of Hasting’s book when Christianity Today flagged it as one of 2004’s top 10 books. This interview with the author several months ago cemented my interest. Hastings, from the interview:

I have always had a nagging fascination with what happened [after D-Day], in particular with why the Allies didn’t win in 1944. At the beginning of September 1944, most of the Allied leadership, with the notable exception of Winston Churchill, was completely convinced that the war was going to be over by the end of the year. In the West, the Germans seemed completely beaten. The Western Allies had overwhelming superiority in tanks, aircraft, everything—you name it. So I wanted to look at this question of why we didn’t end the war in 1944. Secondly, and almost as important, virtually all the books that have been written about this period look at either the Eastern or the Western front—not both. And I wanted to set the two in context: to see what happened to the Western Allies in the context of what happened with the Soviets.

I’ll report back again when I’ve finished the book.

My Mom sent me this link about preserving the original Declaration of Independence. It’s interesting!

August is no time for serious reading and research. Hence, in place of a serious post, here is a fun quote followed by some Egyptian eye candy to peruse while you’re waiting to head out to the beach.

History is not in the sources. The sources are nothing but the universe in which the historian’s hypotheses are tested. The sources are the remnants and relics of the historical processes that the historian wants to reconstruct. The sources challenge the historian’s creativity by being the most painful obstacle in his path: there are always too few, or too many, or both, and taken together, they never square…The sources are the scattered remnants of a past world that is irretrievably lost, because it is past. Although we have only the sources to reconstruct that lost world in our imagination, the sources are nothing if they are not used by our imagination. A house is more than a number of bricks, and a picture more than seven ounces of paint.

-Knauf, Ernst Axel. 1992. The Cultural Impact of Secondary State Formation: The Cases of the Edomites and Moabites. In Early Edom and Moab: The Beginning of the Iron Age in Southern Jordan, ed. Piotr Bienkowski. Sheffield Archaeological Monographs 7. J.R. Collis Publications, p. 47

Let’s play Stump the Grad Student. After six years of studying this stuff, I knew numbers 1, 2, 5, 9, 12. So often I hear myself saying this, but I hope my profs at the U of C never hear of this.

There are many pictures of Egyptian artifacts on the internet, but I feel they look their best at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and there’s more than the usual mummies.

If you feel you need more words with your pretty pictures, here are some, and some more.

On the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima, newly-uncovered information provides fresh perspectives on Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb.

My apologies for the long period of silence here–other duties have been taking priority lately. Now that Real Life is calming down a bit, I will be posting more frequently again.

Happy Independence Day! Celebrate your freedom by reading about the Declaration of Independence and other documents from American history. If your fireworks show gets rained out–which looks to be a good possibility around here–and you’re looking for some patriotic reading, try the Federalist Papers, a series of writings by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, arguing for the adoption of the Constitution. There were, of course, some naysayers whose writings can be found in the “anti-federalist” papers. My apologies for any political content you may find on any of the above sites–over 200 years later, the Constitition is still getting people riled up.

Just wanted to share a few links on religious history:

Material History of American Religion Project: An interesting idea: studies religion in America through ephemeral documents and artifacts like these.

American Religious Experience at WVU: Online essays about the history of various religious movements in the United States…and, as an added bonus, Canada!

Guide to Early Church Documents: All sorts of writings from folks with Roman-sounding names.

Virtual Religion Index: A plethora of links on world religions.

Voice of the Shuttle-Religious Studies: Religion, history, and religious history. If you want to know what the name means, here is a gross story about it.

“Each day an event from American history is illustrated by digitized items from the Library of Congress American Memory historic collections.” Today’s topic is World War I–check it out!