Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 7 i BBC World Histories Magazine

All nations are to some extent defined by their past – but the United States seems to have a particularly complex relationship with its history. Indeed, for a nation built on ideals of equality and liberty, the US seems surprisingly divided in its understanding of how to translate those founding principles into modern life. Is the South’s Confederate heritage something to be honoured, for example, or a source of present-day shame? Why is police violence against African-Americans still a recurrent problem? In the year since Donald Trump was elected president, many of these contradictions have once again been exposed: in the clashes between white supremacist and anti-racist campaigners in Charlottesville in August, for instance, and in ongoing protests about police brutality. In this, our final issue of 2017, we explore…

Inscribed above the dais in the wood-panelled Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre in University College London is a quotation from the Biblical book of Deuteronomy: “Remember the days of old; consider the years of each generation.” It’s a poetic and even rather inspiring injunction, but if you think about it too much it’s not obvious how to live up to it. Remembering the days of old is complicated enough, but what exactly are “the years of each generation”? Professional historians don’t always deal well with the concept of generations. Once you move beyond family history, it’s not obvious how a generation should be defined. How can the beginning and end dates for a generation be anything other than arbitrary? Nor is it clear whether one’s generation is a marker of ‘identity’…

Born to mixed-race parents in Baltimore, Maryland, and orphaned at the age of three, Anna Pauline (‘Pauli’) Murray grew up in Durham, North Carolina, in the home of her maternal grandparents and two aunts. From an early age, Pauli felt ‘in-between’ – darker than other family members yet lighter than her local friends. She felt in-between in her gender, too. Identified at birth as female, Pauli insisted that she was a boy. Her family acknowledged her as their “boy/girl” and allowed her to wear boys’ clothes. They also instilled in her a deep reverence for education, civil rights and the Episcopal Church. Pauli might have stayed in Durham but for the tightening grip of ‘Jim Crow’ – the southern United States’ racial segregation laws and racism. At the age of…

On 22 December 1920 the Nazi Party sponsored a Winter Solstice festival. The festival was important, according to the Völkischer Beobachter (People’s Observer), the main Nazi newspaper, because it would help restore racial and spiritual unity in the wake of the war and the leftwing revolutions of 1918–19. The renaissance in Aryan civilisation symbolised by the solstice, declared one speaker, was prophesied by Nordic mythology and religion in ancient times. The “National Socialist solstice,” according to Anton Drexler, co-founder of the Nazi Party, was a “visible sign of the return to German thought”. Another speaker talked of Baldur, the Nordic sun-god, pagan deities and heroes, and the great history of Nordic mythological hero Siegfried (“his birth in us – that is our solstice prayer”). The Nazis did not invent the…

The reaction in Moscow to the launch of Sputnik was, at first, extremely tame. In fact, when news of the successful launch arrived, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev wasn’t even in the capital but instead was dining in Kiev. According to his son Sergei, Khrushchev’s immediate response was blasé: “It’s just another one of Korolev’s rockets”. As with every aspect of the Soviet missile – and, by now, rocket – programme, Korolev’s activities were shrouded in secrecy. Any failure went unacknowledged, preserving the impression of Soviet scientific perfection. Thus it was not until the following morning, with the satellite safely in orbit, that most of the Soviet public first learned of the “scientific experiment conducted at such a high altitude” through a down-page article at the front of official Communist Party…

Belonging: The Story of the Jews 1492–1900 by Simon Schama Bodley Head, 800 pages, £25 As (mainly) an academic historian, little of the work I’m asked to review turns out to be ‘fun’. However, Simon Schama’s new book, though often harrowing, is more entertaining than not, and occasionally even provokes laughout- loud hilarity. This meandering, massive book is a sequel to The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BCE–1492 CE (2013) and a further companion to the author’s acclaimed BBC television series of that year. A message for those who will be reading a physical copy on public transport: you can skip one of your usual days at the gym. The hardback weighs in at some 700 pages, excluding the illustrations, footnotes and bibliography. Those who tackle this…

In June, an amazing find was dug up at Vindolanda, site of a Roman fort near Hadrian’s Wall. This cache of 25 preserved letters written by Roman soldiers offers insights into the wants, complaints and thoughts of men living far from home on the front line of the empire. One is written by a man called Masclus who, in a missive unearthed in an earlier discovery there over 40 years ago, requested more beer. In the newly discovered letters, he asks for leave. The new Vindolanda tablets got me thinking about what historical letters – and, particularly, epistles to those back home – tell us about life in distant, unfamiliar lands. Other Vindolanda documents record requests not to camp commanders but to family: one asks for more warm socks and…

Michael Burleigh The historian and writer discusses why the past can be misused or misinterpreted, with sometimes worrying results. “A major point I wanted to make in my new book is that so many people talk about the lessons of history, but actually there are lots of bad lessons that we should actively avoid,” he says on page 82. Benjamin Houston The riots that set Los Angeles ablaze 25 years ago left a lasting legacy, not least in perceptions of police racism and violence. On page 28, Benjamin Houston explores the causes and impact of the episode. “What this particular instance of a ‘multi-ethnic riot’ underscored was the racial dimension of police brutality,” he says. Olivette Otele On page 48 historian Olivette Otele joins our panel discussing how we should…

JOIN THE DEBATE Could a better understanding of its history really help resolve America’s present-day social tensions? Share your views and join the conversation at @historyextra on Twitter and Facebook, or email worldhistories@historyextra.com Thomas S Kidd on Civil War symbolism “ The ostensible reason for the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville in August was for participants – including white supremacists, one of whom drove a car into a counter-protest, killing one woman – to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E Lee. To outside observers, this issue may seem odd. Why does the American Civil War continue to haunt America? One might think that this was simply a Southern issue, but controversies over Confederate monuments have also arisen in Northern states. For example, city officials…

Aztecs, in the guise of bloody priests and brutal warriors, have long stalked the pages of history, myth and fiction, responsible in the popular imagination for the mass murder and cannibalism of thousands of hapless victims. And when the discovery of a great “tower of skulls” in Mexico City was announced in July 2017, it seemed to many people that the stereotypes had been confirmed. The structure – actually an Aztec tzompantli (skull rack) – was first revealed in 2015, unearthed during excavations around the Templo Mayor (Great Temple) that stood at the heart of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. But the true scale and size of the tzompantli, and the 6-metre-wide “tower of skulls” at its edge, have become clear only after two years of painstaking archaeological work. Even…

Berlin in the mid-1970s had an air of danger and intrigue. And that was exactly what attracted British singer, songwriter and actor David Bowie when he chose to move there in 1976. It was a conscious effort to reboot his creative processes, which had become severely depleted after months of living in what he described as “hell on earth” in Los Angeles. Bowie had always been restless, changing musical styles and personas several times since his first album was released in 1967, searching for the formula that would propel him to stardom. He scored his first hit in 1969 with the song ‘Space Oddity’, recorded during his hippie phase. Then, in the early 1970s, his exotic alien alter ego Ziggy Stardust became a founding force in the glam rock scene.…

Not all Nazis were enthusiastic about occultism and paganism. In May 1941, Martin Bormann, soon to become Hitler’s deputy, sent a memorandum to Nazi officials. “Confessional and occult circles,” Bormann wrote, “have attempted to spread confusion and insecurity amongst the people through the conscious dissemination of miracle stories, prophecies [and] astrological predictions of the future.” We “have to be careful,” Bormann added, “that no party members, especially in rural areas, take part in the propagation of political fortune telling, confessional belief in miracles or superstitions, or occult miracle-making.” Bormann’s circular invites the question: after eight years in power and two years of war, why hadn’t the Third Reich moved more aggressively to curb occultism? The answer is that the Nazis themselves embraced many occult and fringe scientific practices. In order…

T he media furore in the US after the launch was patchy in coverage. It was used as a political tool by Democrat politicians and armed forces chiefs, but was soon overtaken in the minds of the wider American population by the down-to-earth drama of the baseball World Series. However, Eisenhower did slip up in his initial reaction. Soviet scientist Leonid Sedov had announced in September that the USSR was on the verge of launching a satellite; this was confirmed by U-2 overflights of the Tyuratam launch site. Ike was unconcerned. Though Sputnik proved that the Soviets had a powerful launch vehicle, Ike knew that it was not a missile platform and offered no increased threat. But his information had been obtained through secret reconnaissance – so he couldn’t tell…

What was the thinking behind your new book’s title, Belonging? The title was very important to me, and I wanted Belonging to have top billing rather than be relegated to a subtitle. At the heart of the book is the issue of whether or not it’s possible to belong to two communities at the same time. In some cases, such as Britain (eventually) and America, it was. And in others, such as Germany, it turned out not to be. That was a constant paradox and a constant dilemma, and it remains an issue for all sorts of communities all over the world. The book features a wide array of Jewish voices and stories. How did you choose which to feature? I really wanted to feature Jews who wrote their own biographies…

The Near East: A Cultural History by Arthur Cotterell Hurst, 360 pages, £20 This ambitious book was inspired by a Mediterranean cruise. When fellow travellers asked Arthur Cotterell to recommend a book that would make sense of the near east, he set out to fill the gap – to write an accessible introduction to the region’s history, from the genesis of civilisation to the present day. It is a narrative that encompasses the great empires of the ancient world (Hittite, Assyrian, Persian); the rise of Islam and the long struggle of the medieval caliphates and the Ottoman empire with Byzantium; and the creation of the region’s modern nation-states and their turbulent recent years. Inevitably, the task of painting so vast a canvas within a few hundred pages necessitates a breakneck…

Andrew Roberts “If we topple Nelson, what do we do about the pyramids, built at least in part by slave labour?” Although it is completely illogical, ahistorical and unfair to natural justice to judge the people of the past by today’s morals, it is also very hard not to. If we merely judge them by the morals of their own times, that doesn’t tell us very much. If we don’t judge them morally at all, we let off the likes of Hitler and Stalin in a welter of moral relativism. Yet because Oliver Cromwell might not have believed in socialised medicine, say, but did believe in slaughtering Roman Catholics in Drogheda at a time when that religion was widely thought to pose an existential threat to Britain, what does that…

In summer 1943, the Regional Education Office of the Nazi Party published a pamphlet with the evocative title Der jüdische Vampyr chaotisiert die Welt (The Jewish Vampire Brings Chaos to the World). Part of a propaganda series on “The Jew as World Parasite”, the pamphlet argued that the Second World War was defined by an existential conflict between Aryans and Jews, who had “propagated political and economic black magic for three millennia”. “Wherever a wound is ripped open on the body of a nation,” the Nazi propagandist continued, “the Jewish demon always feeds in the sick place,” like a “powerful parasite from dreams”. This propaganda was not empty rhetoric. Nazi leaders genuinely viewed the Jews as omnipotent, supernatural monsters responsible for the devastation of the Second World War (as well…

ONE MOMENT, TWO VIEWPOINTS The race for space was a proxy battle contested by the US and USSR in the early years of the Cold War. Initially the aim of both superpowers was not to launch satellites and manned space missions, but to produce effective missiles upon which to mount nuclear warheads. In January 1953, General Dwight D ‘Ike’ Eisenhower became the 34th US president, inheriting a largely moribund rocket programme. In the 1950s the rocket development team, led by Wernher von Braun (who had worked on Nazi Germany’s rocket programme), had been largely ignored, while the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command was tasked with delivering the country’s nuclear capability. However, Ike’s New Look defence strategy shifted that nuclear deterrent from conventional aircraft to rockets. In 1954 Eisenhower’s Technological Capabilities…