![BRIEFLY THROUGH SOME WARS…
On difficulty | What makes “difficult” history difficult?
Difficult history comes from the concept of difficult knowledge, itself coined in
relation to traumatic, sensitive, and violent pasts
***
“What makes difficult history difficult is not how it confirms or complicates a
particular [person’s] prior historical understanding but the degree to which it
challenges or undermines the dominant societal narratives.”
-Magdalena Gross and Luke Terra (2018)
Difficult Wars, Some examples:
• Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino
• World War I (?)
• Vietnam
Comparison: World War II as the “good war”](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/nichols-230301231604-851e9511/85/Why-Difficult-Wars-Make-Good-Lessons-Christopher-Nichols-7-320.jpg)
Why Difficult Wars Make Good Lessons (Christopher Nichols)
- 1. CONFRONTING DIFFICULT HISTORY, WHAT MAKES IT DIFFICULT, WHY DIFFICULT WARS MAKE EXCELLENT LESSONS Christopher McKnight Nichols Professor of History, Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair in National Security Studies, Mershon Center for International Security Studies, The Ohio State University
- 4. “‘Instead of making history, we are made by history.’ The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. meant the words as an admonition to his congregation when he addressed them in 1954. King saw these two things — making history and being made by history — as opposing forces. As historians, we see them as two parts of a process: In order to make history, we first have to understand how history has made us.” –Brian Rosenwald and Nicole Hemmer, June 26, 2017, Washington Post
- 5. DIFFICULT HISTORY Approaches • Confronting the past, collective memory • Present evaluation, revisionism, presentism • The importance of context (usually multiple) • For example, (de)naming, monuments Applications • Research, education, conversation(s) • Solid principles, agreed on starting points Challenges/Strategies • What wider publics want to hear, can hear, can take on board, can take with them -- a “useable past” (key words, phrases, ideas) • The good, the bad, the ugly
- 6. DIFFICULT WARS WHAT THEY REVEAL AS “GOOD” LESSONS •American Way of War •Myth of America •Ideology and Ideals J.S. Pughe, Peace (Puck,1905)
- 7. BRIEFLY THROUGH SOME WARS… On difficulty | What makes “difficult” history difficult? Difficult history comes from the concept of difficult knowledge, itself coined in relation to traumatic, sensitive, and violent pasts *** “What makes difficult history difficult is not how it confirms or complicates a particular [person’s] prior historical understanding but the degree to which it challenges or undermines the dominant societal narratives.” -Magdalena Gross and Luke Terra (2018) Difficult Wars, Some examples: • Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino • World War I (?) • Vietnam Comparison: World War II as the “good war”
- 8. Literary Digest, No. 17, November 26, 1898 The Spanish- American- Cuban- -Filipino War
- 9. Childe Hassam, Allies Day, May 1917 World War I: The U.S.’s unknown difficult war
- 10. Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941)
- 11. Japan Times (May 11, 2015) What is known in Vietnam as “the American War”
- 12. KEY CHARACTERISTICS DIFFICULT HISTORIES • 1. Difficult histories are central to a nation’s history (whether or not they are so recognized by political elites). • Periods or events that are parochial or only loosely connected to the national past may also be important, but they do not need to be integrated into the national storyline. • 2. Difficult histories tend to refute broadly accepted versions of the past or stated national values. • They are often dissonant with the narrative template that characterizes the overall memory of a national past (Wertsch, 2002), or they contradict such national values as tolerance or equality. • 3. Difficult histories may connect with questions or problems facing us in the present. • That is, they are relevant to the world around us. • 4. Difficult histories often involve violence, usually collective or state sanctioned. • This is where war and conflict are central. Even when it is not state sanctioned, this type of violence may be committed by citizens of good social standing. Violence approved by the state or enacted by groups of supposedly upstanding citizens cannot be easily dismissed as aberrations or exceptions. • 5. Partly as the result of the other four conditions, difficult histories create disequilibria that challenge existing historical understandings. • To integrate these periods or events into an existing historical understanding may require people to change their assumptions or beliefs. Such a process comes at a cost, either individually, in adjusting our relationship to the nation and state, or collectively, in the national story we tell. Adapted slightly from Gross and Terra, “What Makes Difficult History Difficult?” (2018)
- 13. THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR DIFFICULT HISTORIES AND THE USES OF HISTORY, HUMANITIES • Some takeaways on the uses of history in conversations overall and about the experience of war, clarity of thought, and decision making: • How policy-makers use history and how better approaches for them can help us in talking about difficult history and difficult wars by thinking in “time-streams” (George Marshall) • “Enlightening questions are the point of every method we propose, questions that shed light almost regardless of answers.” • “We tend to overuse analogies, especially in argument, and underuse all else” – histories of issues, individuals, institutions • Three assumptions: • “In employment of government power, particulars matter.” • “Marginal improvement in performance is worth seeking.” • “A little thought can help.” • Ricahard Neustadt and Ernest May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision
- 14. THE TRANSCENDENCE OF TRAGEDY • “We find genuine tragedy … only in that destruction which does not prematurely cut short development an success, but which, instead, grows out of success itself. • Breakdown and failure reveal the true nature of things. In failure, life’s reality is not lost; on the contrary, here it makes itself wholly and decisively felt. There is no tragedy without transcendence. • This transformation may go the way of deliverance, where man rises to supreme reality through conquest of the tragic. Otherwise the transformation may go the way of decline into irresponsible aestheticism of the spectator: man distracted, drifting, falling off into nothingness.” –Karl Jaspers, Tragedy is Not Enough