Before and After

It was the strange and awful history of the Soviet Union that first got me seriously interested in history -- back in 1981, when I walked into a Cambridge, MA bookstore. I had an expense-paid trip for an interview for some computer programming job. It's hard to remember what I used to read before that, but I came across Stephen F. Cohen's Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, maybe in my opinion the best single book on the subject.

After that came about 15 years of reading a good couple of shelves of books on the subject while working as a computer systems analyst. At some point, feeling satisfied that I had some sense of how the USSR had the trajectory it had, and having branched out to examinations of other tragic/horrendous states like Nazi Germany, and the evolution of modern China, I took an interest in how reasonably sane, free, and democratic states and/or civic culture came to exist in some places.

In the mid to late 80s I was doing way too much driving which got me started with Books on Tape. The selection was not so broad and was certainly more "West" centric (as in U.S. and Western Europe), and one of the first instances of turning in this direction was "reading" a book on tape about the period of the English Civil War and the Cromwell regime. Another important thing I read was Barbara Tuchman's Stilwell and the American Experience in China, which kind of bridges the gap between China and in general the dynamics that helped drive some of the more backward nations into Communist regimes -- and U.S. history (and military history at that). One could also say that Cromwell and the English Civil war bridged the gap between an interest in huge historical discontinuities that seemed to center around a charismatic leader/dictator (Lenin and Stalin, Hitler, Mao) and the path leading to (relative) civility and western democracy.

Around the same time I started wondering whether my growing understanding, such as it was, might be worth sharing in some way, and ultimately I was lead to a much more intense study than I had ever done before, of America's path to our Civil War. The very popular Civil war miniseries around that time got me thinking that this subject could possibly be used to entice Americans to look at history, and maybe better understand the paths that peoples and nations take through history.

That lead to around 10 years during which I managed to become to some degree a "real" historian, able to elicit some respect from much of the large community of historians studying the period of U.S. history sometimes called the "Early (American) Republic". There is a society called SHEAR (Society of Historians of the Early American Republic), with a discussion list and yearly meetings around the country, and a quarterly Journal of the Early Republic or JER, which I soon joined, and then became the society's web editor for a time, AND began publishing a mass of stuff on the web and through email, which is still up on www.EarlyRepublic.org aka JMISC.net. The most successful thing I did was an email newsletter called Jacksonian Miscellanies which consisted of typically chapter length excerpts scanned from books from the period (early 1800s) with some commentary. I tried to put it out weekly, then biweekly, then occasionally, then sporadically -- still in all, I produced over 100 issues which were subscribed to by many of the best historians of the "Early Republic".

These days I'm drawn back to taking another look at the USSR, but from the outside, and looking just as closely at the US and the sequence of actions and perceptions we call the Cold War, and its aftermath. Ultimately, I hope to build up "What Was the Cold War?" into a very wide ranging set of essays, timelines, bibliographies, biographical dictionary with strong use of hypertext links -- much like Tales of the Early Republic.

Stephen F. Cohen has recently (2009) written a book: Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War, stressing the contingent nature of history. For some reason, people seem (often very stubbornly) drawn to the idea that things had to work out more or less the way they did -- from the Marxists' historical inevitability to the unfolding of the "last days" as believed in by Christian fundamentalists -- and many points of view in between. From studying the history of ideas, I've come to believe it is very difficult to make sense of an idea and why it takes hold without understanding the idea(s) to which it was largely a reaction. Early Protestant belief in predestination appears to me to be a sort of big club to wield against the economy of the Roman Catholic Church as it was at that time -- largely encouraging people to buy their way into heaven and to trust that the priesthood could help you get their if you treated them with proper reverence and humility. Similarly, historical inevitability served as a big club to wield against the "Great Man" theory of history, which tended to put "common people" in their places.

So predestination can be strangely liberating under certain circumstances. It seems mainly useful for breaking the spell of the powers that be. Later, however, in the religious domain at least, liberation seemed to take the less paradoxical form of saying, as the Methodists did "Yes I can get myself into heaven" (though not with the help of priests).

[to be continued]