And just like that, classes are over and there are two essays and an exam separating me from my ultimate destiny….the dissertation. The final weeks of class were probably the most fun I’ve had all year, since I finally got it into my head that I knew what I was talking about and had something to say that might be worth hearing. A lot of the reading from these last classes are forming the basis of my essays: from my Dominions class, I am trying to decide between looking at fears about 'reverse colonialism' in late 19th-century British literature (how the conquered or primitive people are always coming to conquer Britain), how the British Empire is described to ‘untouched natives’ in 19th century adventure novels and Arthur Conan Doyle’s construction of history in his History of the Boer War (which was published while the war was being fought and went into 17 editions before it ended, with each edition containing a bit more of the story); for my Australia War and Society class, I am comparing the language of trauma and identity in Australian memoirs from the First World War and Vietnam, stemming from a theory that the two wars were not very different for the men who experienced them, but that in 1914, the language to describe such horrors and disillusionment didn’t exist as it did in the late 1960’s. If you can’t tell, all of these topics are a shameless ploy to read a lot of swashbuckling tales in the sunshine and to enjoy even the rainy days with some reading at the British library. History is everywhere and you might as well have fun studying it, after all.
(On the wall in the Stoke Newington Library. He was from Boston, too!!)
We had a fascinating discussion during our final class of ‘Concepts and Debates’ about the nature of history itself and what precisely we were all doing as historians (apparently to be followed up with the meaning of life, the secret to eternal happiness and the formula for cold fusion). I held that human beings are unique because of their self-awareness, and because of that trait, every human being has some desire to leave his or her mark; to declare its own existence. The earliest cave drawings are witness to this. And consequently, every human somehow constructs his or her own history, that then becomes part of a larger story, perhaps tribal, perhaps national, and that it is the job of a historian to take all this noise and to make a kind of symphony that can make all these stories into some kind of comprehensible whole. Not an easy task, but I can’t imagine one I’d rather be doing.
(Newport Castle, Bridgend, Wales)My academic and existential crisis aside, the world continues to spin beneath my feet. I was fortunate enough to be in Cardiff with my father for the weekend and thus avoided the protests and riots surrounding the G20 meetings. My bus took me by the Bank of England on Thursday morning and I got a good look at the graffiti that was scribbled on the walls. I couldn’t help but think of my advisor from my undergraduate days. He taught a class on the riots in Paris in 1968, and used as his major text a list of the slogans and sayings he noted that were painted across the city. Is this how we will be remembered? Are these the words that will be heard in forty years when someone comes around to tell our tale? Regardless, it’s not every day that you are made so acutely aware of your historic moment as I was reading the headlines over the past few days. I hope all this optimism leads to something good. I hope we end up as more than some clever words in chalk on a crumbling wall…
