That debate runs on still. A a minor level, it  hangs mainly on Hart’s use of evidence from official documents, his unwillingness to trust Forence O’Donoghue on a source, his infamous interview with a veteran of the Kilmichael Ambush, and his account of the killings of loyalists in Bandon at the end of the war. At a macro level, his opponents point out that he adopted a narrow, legalistic view on national self-determination which made every freedom fighter a terrorist.  There is a summary of some of the debate on indymedia – as you can see, it is a long, complex and heated argument which may now never be resolved.

His criticism of Tom Barry at Kilmichael depends on interviews which  he claimed to have conducted that shed fresh light on the events of that ambush. However, his research in West Cork was carried out at a time when all the veterans of the ambush were either dead, or known to be senile. Hart never satisfactorily explained this, in spite of being frequently challenged on it.  There is no real debate about what happened at Kilmichael – even Tom Barry, who led the IRA column, made no secret of the sequence of events – some of the “Auxies” raised their hands and said they surrendered, then shots were fired and several of the IRA men were hit and killed. After this, the fighting resumed (if it had ever really stopped) and all of the British were killed. Hart’s book opened a huge debate about motives and ethics, but the unanswered questions about his research undermine his interpretation. In warfare, things like this happen, either by accident or as deliberate subterfuge.  As long ago as 1971, John Keegan in The Face of Battle, devoted space to discussing the problems of surrendering in the middle of a fire-fight, and produced examples of false or partial surrenders, and of the shooting of enemies who had surrendered or who were trying to surrender.

In the case of the Bandon shootings, the facts are also pretty clear.  At the end of the War of Independence, a number of men, Protestants, and presumed to be both Unionists and to have provided help to the British during the war, were killed by men who were in the IRA. Whether or not is was organised ethnic cleansing or not is the debated issue. I don’t have Hart’s book here at home, so I can’t quote his exact words, but my recollection is that he characterised it as a mini-pogrom.

Hart’s interpretations are certainly open to debate, and his position was never helped by the his failure to address serious issues in his handling of primary sources.  Professional historians, notably UCCs John Borgonovo, or W. A Kautt, and others at several conferences in UCC, have dealt indirectly with some of those problems of sources in their own work. The problem of his ‘revisionist’ interpretation of the War of Independence in Cork still rouses amateur historians to fury. Ireland being a small country, many of his critics are related to the men whose motivation Hart criticised. Sometimes, I think his critics protest too much  – just or not, the War of Independence was a nasty and unpleasant terrorist war in which men on both sides were shot down in night and died in the cold wet ditches.  Hart’s interpretation may have swung too far, but there are still many people in Ireland who are not comfortable admitting how our state was born. Dealing with our past – and in the case of Northern Ireland, our recent past – is part of the contribution we can make to understanding and resolving conflict in the world.

If you are, were or know a student whose notes are a disorganised pile of illegible A4 pads, then apps like this will certainly help – go on, watch the video, it’s pretty and shiny:

What apps like this give students is a decent notetaking tool on a device which, if it measures up, is portable, fast to start, has decent battery life and has a screen large enough to do real work on. These are all big pluses. Apps with online synchronisation and backup will reduce the amount of “lost” notes and paper drafts left in the library, coffee shop or on the bus.

But while this will make the process of being organised easier, it won’t teach people to be organised, or make them smarter. Knowing you have X paper due on day Y doesn’t mean you will break that task down into its requirements – reading, notetaking, planning, drafting and actually get it done. If you do, it will certainly be easier to stop me crossing campus and  bluetooth your draft to my iPad so I can give you feedback and email it back.  There are things here that the iPad doesn’t do – draft a paper in time, submit it for comments, and actually read and action on that feedback – that relies on iPeople.

Equally, the iPad doesn’t resolve the content v process debate which has, foolishly, torn education into two camps. Just because you can, as the Course Notes demo shows, hook up to Wikipedia and pull down the definition of Ph; or use an app like Elements to look up the properties of the elements, doesn’t mean you know diddly. There is some content which you must have in your brain, not your iPad f you are going to do your job right. Knowing how to find content, integrate  it into your cognitive maps and use it are all important processes, but for a great many professions, understanding the process of finding information is not enough – you need enough information in your head to be able to spot things that are wrong. The chemistry student who know how to look up the ph of Gold on the iPad will always be a dozen keystrokes behind the one who knows it, and there will be times when that makes a difference.

That said, the iPad and the new tablets which will follow it are better tools than those which we currently have to teach students effective autonomous learning skills. Tablets will probably make it easier to teach students how to make sense of the world around them, and provide better tools to help them to learn the content they need to know to function in their discipline.  But I still have students who write down everything I put up on my powerpoints, even though they know the powerpoints are available to them. We may have Star Trek style tools, but many of our students still approach college like medieval monks; and the iPad won’t fix that.

The case for Chinese is so obvious that it is surprising it hasn’t been made long ago. Up the the late 1400′s, it was a toss-up as to whether European or Chinese colonial expansion and technological development would dominate the age of exploration. Chinese has a literary culture going back as far as Europe, and was and still is the language of between 10% and 20% of the worlds population. Now that I see it, it seems pretty much a slam-dunk that any academic department that claims to be a department of Classics better find a Chinese classicist.

But is that enough? On twitter, Dave said “Heck I might even take Sanskrit, Arabic, or Classical Chinese over Greek and Latin” which is  fair point. I’m not an expert, but it seems that given the significance of Arabic scholarship during what us Eurocentrics quaintly call the “Dark Ages”, it may have a claim. It may have crystallized as a language round the same time as Chinese (potential for a huge argument there, but let’s sweep past it for now), and has global significance in the history science and theology,  and possibly other fields.

Classical Sanskrit apparently also dates from around the 4th Century CE, which makes it, like Chinese and Arabic, younger by a long stretch than Greek and Latin. However, like Chinese and Arabic, it still has a continous tradition of written literature in a range of genres and disciplines.

Chinese, Arabic and Sanskrit are, like Latin, parents to major groups of modern spoken languages.

If we were to move away from accepting Classics as being only Greek and Latin, and include Chinese, Arabic and Sanskrit, would this bring a new dimension to comparative classical scholarship? What challenges would this pose for the movement to get away from “Western Civ” in history to a “World History” perspective which seems to mire itself in a hopelessly egalitarian soup?

Oddly enough, I’m already using a textbook – Bayly, C.A. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons – which balances European, Middle Eastern and Chinese history in it’s period nicely, which may be why I’m happy to go along with the questions Dave asked, questions which may have been an interesting experiment in exploring the cultural biases of twitter users.

Sprawling Wargames is a book which deals with the work Griffith has done in moving away from old style miniatures wargames into large scale conference style games, a field in which he has made huge contributions. It is hardly surprising that he would, as a professional military historian who worked at the Royal Military Academy, have become less enthusiastic about ‘battles with model soldiers’ and moved to conference games which eschew figures to focus on the flows of information and command decisions made by humans.

I think, and this is a lengthy aside, there is a difference between hobby wargaming in Britain and the US. In Britain, hobby wargaming has been dominated by miniatures gaming, with a lineage going back to H.G. Wells Little Wars.  It tends very much towards the ‘Free Kreigspeil’ tradition.  Miniatures wargame rules from the UK tend  to be  rough rules of thumb rather than detailed simulations in the US boardgame tradition.  While there have been some miniatures wargamers in the UK who have been very knowledgable, and whose rules have been based on solid research, there have been many who have been mainly interested in moving and killing toy soldiers on the table rather than on representing how tactics really worked. This is not to say there aren’t US based miniatures wargames,  nor am I saying that there are no miniatures based rules which are good simulations; because there certainly are. However, the type of ‘analytical history’ simulation which was the staple output of US (and some European) board wargame companies like Avalon Hill, SPI, Decision Games, OSG and others is not mirrored in the UK. People will be offended if I characterise a lot of UK wargaming as ‘amateurish’ but, like much of the British approach to waging war, that is how it looks from here.  (I should also admit that I had a decently sized set of Napoleonic miniatures armies back in the day, and have shelf of partly painted Seleucids which will probably never be finished, so I do paint toy soldiers, and it is restful – I guess it is like fishing.)

Sprawling Wargames includes some priceless material. The bulk of the book is made up of the briefings for large games Griffith has run over the past 36 years.  The star of the collection is the 60 pages of the briefing for the version of the Sealion Games run at the Imperial War Museum at Duxford – we are not told how closely it follows the briefings from the original 1974 Sealion game, but I think we can assume they are pretty close. The other big game briefing is from Operation Mercury, the airborne invasion of Crete in 1941, a game with Griffith has run over 20 times with different groups. Griffith calls these ‘sprawling wargames’ but in this he is referring not to the number of players or the extent of the game but the lack of fixed rules – the classic free kreigspeil model.  I don’t think the term ‘sprawling’ is very good – free kreigspeil is a the common term.  Alternatively conference wargames would do equally well – and both would make fine titles for the book.

Where I would have liked to see more in the in the reports on the outcomes of the games, especially the Sealion and Barabrossa games – the latter is one of a number of games in the book run by email, and I hope the emails  were archived! I have run simulations which were part face-to-face and part email, and the email part  has often been both extensive and more detailed and considered than the “F2F’” parts.  The Barbarossa game was run as part of the research for Andrew Roberts’  history of WWII, Storm of War, to explore the possible range of outcomes of Operation Barbarossa.

One thread running through all the brief after action reports on these games is that the outcomes, while different to reality,  generally fell close the the actual or likely historical outcome. Both the 1974 and the IWM runs of the Sealion game produced slightly different results, but both outcomes fell well within the range of what might be accepted as plausible by most historians. Now of course the cynics will note that the Germans lost in most of the games in the book and may ask if this wasn’t a case of the biased refereeing, but both these games involved knowledgeable players and umpires. Indeed, the 1974 Sealion game included former WWII leaders like Admiral Frederich Ruge and air ace Adolf Galland. Similarly, while I can’t answer for some of the naval games in the book,  the Barbarossa, Crete and Suvarov in Alsace games all look ‘right’ the outcomes are plausible, and the games do show the range of likely alternatives in those real or hypothetical campaigns.

This is the difference between amateur and professional wargames – amateur games can, and often do, indulge wishful thinking with lax rules, whereas professional games – and professional analysis – based on knowledge of what actually happened and more importantly why it happened and explore the parameters of the possible more accurately.  Sprawling Wargames provides a set of solid scenario briefings which, with a good umpire and knowledgeable players allows a sensible, evidence based exploration of the dynamics of a particular campaign.

There is more in the book – it includes some of Grifftih’s writing from minor journals and unpublished reflections which would not otherwise be available.  Apart from the shortness of the ‘after action reports’  if it has a flaw, it is that running the games in the book requires  umpireswho know enough real military history to run a ‘free kreigspeil’ .  There are snippets scattered through the the text, but there isn’t a handy set of  base rules for running a theatre level ‘free kreigspeil’ in the modern period. There are very useful references in the bibliography which will help people interested in running this sort of game, but they are mostly to UK literature, with no mention of important works from the US like Mark Hermon’s Wargaming for Leaders, the reports of US Navy War College Games published in the Newport Papers or Brock Tessmans book on simulations on International Relations teaching.

Sprawling Wargames is a Print on Demand title because while it is published by John Curry Events through Lulu.com, and listed as printed by amazon.co.uk.  John Curry is republishing a number of out of print classics which, while some are no longer state of the art, represent important benchmarks in the development of wargames in the UK.  POD is good – these titles will always be in print, and this volume is evidence of how the quality of POD titles has improved over the past few years – it looks well, has solid binding and comes at a reasonable cost.

He talks about counterfactual history, and makes the usual, and I think solid case for investigating ‘what if’s in history. You can’t really say how significant something is in history, unless you consider the possible alternative paths which events might have taken had it not happened – we peg both the election and assassination of Lincoln as important, but if he had not been elected, American history might well have been very different, whereas if he had not been shot, the difference to the subsequent course of US history would probably not have been as great.

In looking at the concept of ‘Past Futures’, Martin goes beyond this commonplace of ‘what if’ to address the reality that people in the past made decisions based on how they, at that time, expected the future to turn out. Now, we do in history try to understand the worldview of historical figures in their time, but only in their time; and not in terms of their future. Thus we interpret the actions of Louis XVI in terms of his upbringing, the influence of his family and wife, and how he understood the world in 1788-89. However, we hardly ever wonder how Louis expected his world to look in 1792, or 1800, or 1815.  No major study of the French Revolution addresses what Lousi expected to happen in his future, or even if he had a vision of the future. The argument Martin makes is that we can really only understand the choices made by people in the past if we have some grasp of how they expected those choices to play out.  Of course, most of the interesting bits of history arise when those choices play out  rather badly!

This is a perfectly sensible point, and it is true that we fail to pay enough attention to it in seeking to explain historical events. But, and there must always be a but, it may fall on the problem of whether people had  a reasonable or even any vaguely formed expectation of how they future might work out.

One of the chapters in the book is about how people in the past have made decisions, or rather, as it happens, about how they have drifted over the threshold of decisions. In seeking to explain how people have made choices, he deals with people and cases where significant decisions have been made for trivial or illogical reasons. More to the point, he enumerates several cases, like the conversion of Newman, or William Croaker’s decision to support conscription in Newfoundland in 1918, where there was no clear moment of decision. He shows in many cases how people could point to a time before they made a decision, and a time after the choice was made, but cannot say exactly when or why they made the particular decision.

I understand this – sometimes I make decisions with reasonable care, based on my expectation of the best course of action to meet how I expect the future will play out.  I know a quite a few friends whose choice of what car to buy next is definitely shaped by the prospect of parenthood, and the impossibility of fitting baby seats and buggies in the back of zippy little hatchbacks. However, I also know that the most expensive car I ever bought was based on an “Oh -  that’s pretty” followed by an almost squealing U-Turn back to the dealership.  It was a Volvo, and I certainly envisaged a ‘past future’ in which boy racers in the little hatchbacks bounced off my tank, leaving me unharmed but I know I gave no consideration to a future in which my beautiful Volvo could pass everything except a petrol pump.

This is a fairly central contradiction – trying to understand how people in the past made poor choices in order to equip my students with better decisionmaking skills is one of the cornerstones of my teaching.  Martin refers to refers to Niall Ferguson: “we profit from our mistakes by analysing how we might have done better had we acted more wisely”  Martin’s emphasis on ‘past futures’ is an important addition to our analytical toolkit, but it also forces us to recognise that many decisions are not informed by a clear expectation of what their consequences will be.

There is a difference between having a poorly thought out expectation of the ‘past future’ and having none at all. If we could depend on historical figures to have employed poor reasoning in their future projections, we could make use of that. But We do have to admit that many decisions are made without any consideration of consequences. This is an interesting contradiction between two of the most powerful ideas in the book.  Apart from these, he also takes on the question of time in history, and historical significance, and other issues, but since the book title is Past Futures it seems to me that this problem is central to a very interesting argument.

Shane McAuliffe’s blog has had a certain elegant simplicity right from that start – I imagine he would say it has something to do with Macs being better!  He  uses his blog to capture reflections on his thesis in progress  in medieval history in posts like The Magi:Thesis Musings but what really impressed me was his carefully put together demonstration of how to use powerpoint for the medieval MA class – I’ve done presentations like this and I know how much work goes into doing them properly. (and I really can’t claim credit for teaching him how to do this sort of work – he knew it already, but he’ll get marks for applying it).

Wordle of Carter's Farewell Speech

I’ve encouraged all my Digital History students to use Wordle for quick and pretty text analysis, and Shane has usefully fed some Magi-related text at it.  Frances  has wordled some of her writing in progress while a very different source was used by Jackie Fitzgibbon, who is working on US Foreign Policy. She ‘wordled’ Jimmy Carter’s inaugural and farewell speeches, and captured the resulting images using the screen clipper in Evernote in a post that note only shows good use of screen capture but also shows significant differences in language between those two speeches – the farewell speech is more nuanaced and less hopeful than the inaugural.

Jackie went on to delve deeper into text analysis, using the tools on the TAPOR portal. Using the same two speeches, she has begun to extract wordlists and move towards looking a Key Words in Context lists which will throw up more interesting linkages.  I think I got everyone hooked on Zotero, although only some people have posted about it.  Brendan has reflected on the nature of the blogging process itself with some useful insights.

This sample doesn’t cover all the dozen or so course blogs; but it gives an idea if what is going on at the moment. The other teaching related work that is ongoing this weekend is that my second year undergrads are finishing their wargame design assignment. Those are due tomorrow, and some of them should be very good indeed – once I get them in, I may post a few images to show off their brilliance as well.