ngojoseph – Historical Thinking

My Historically Related Event

November 8, 2016ngojoseph

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Hopefully, I wasn’t the only one who had trouble finding out what to do for this assignment. I was initially thinking about going to a museum but personally, I’m too lazy to go. So I naturally procrastinated, still keeping in mind that I had to do this assignment eventually.

For the past few weeks, I had been watching a Korean drama with my girlfriend. It goes by the name of “Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo” which tells a riveting tale of a girl who inadvertently travels back in time to Goryeo, an Korean dynasty that existed between the 900s to the late 1300s. I usually don’t watch historically themed Korean dramas but like most fans, I watched for the actors (and actresses).

When my girlfriend and I finished watching the finale, we let out our frustrations about how “bad” the ending was and how the main actress was so stale and yadda yadda. But then, it just hit me. I had been participating in a historical event “kinda, sorta” for about a month! Oh man, did I feel a sense of relief as I did not have to drive to a museum and walk around and read the plaques (although that doesn’t mean I don’t like doing it).

Ignoring the sappiness, romance, and beauty shots, this drama did not take too much of a creative liberty when it came to portraying ancient Korea. This was the first time I researched the background of a setting for a Korean drama. It helped tremendously in understanding the context for royal politics which included marriage, incest, and political purges. Although looking up the history of the era kind of spoiled the ending (a part of the drama’s plot hung on finding out who became the next king), I learned a great deal about how the first established monarchy of a united Korea developed itself through the interactions between the princes of the dynasty and the time-travelling intruder.

In all, this “event” taught me that history can be portrayed through mainstream media and that it can be used to trigger interest into specific parts of that history. Honestly, I wouldn’t have watched this drama if it weren’t for the actors (and actresses) but I’m glad my girlfriend recommended that I watched it with her; without watching it, I wouldn’t have come to this conclusion.

The Dust Bowl: Good Insight on How to Compare Arguments

November 6, 2016ngojoseph

Clayton Koppes’ “Dusty Volumes: Environmental Disaster and Economic Collapse in the 1930’s” is a review on two books with two competing theories about the study of the Dust Bowl. With that being said, it’s interesting that both of these theories cover the topic of what the disaster of the Dust Bowl really meant. My colleague jessica42 summarizes these two theories very well: “[Bonnifield] argues that the Dust Bowl has been scholarly researched to a minimum because it is primarily defined as a natural disaster that only resulted in economic downfalls” and “Worster’s theory of nature as a source of capitalism led to the severe destruction of the environment.”

This review offers great insight on how to approach historiography as well. Personally, I’m doing research on the Dust Bowl to use for my final paper so this segment gives me some ideas on how to write it up. By comparing two sources of arguments, Koppes sheds light on a particular aspect of the Dust Bowl that he wants to focus on, in this case how the disaster is seen and how the disaster is interpreted. I agree with his statement “scholarly attention to the Dust Bowl has been slight” because most scholars view this event as an isolated disaster with one lesson to be learned about why we shouldn’t over-farm land. But I disagree, and that’s what I will be writing about in my paper.

All in all, Koppes’ review is itself a good source of comparing two arguments. And through that comparison does he formulate a thesis about the study of the Dust Bowl; it’s small and needs to be rethought about.

Creative Destruction: Disaster’s Role as a Reset Button

October 25, 2016ngojoseph

There’s a game I used to play called SimCity 4. It’s a city building simulation game where you can plan where people live, zone areas for offices and skyscrapers, build schools and hospitals, set taxes, virtually control every aspect of building and maintaining a city. Now, I wasn’t very good at this game. Despite my efforts on making sure the streets were lined up nicely and schools and city municipals had decent city coverage, my city would always either go into massive debt, protesters would shut down city functions due to pay cuts, or fires would destroy entire city sections because fire trucks couldn’t wade through the traffic. And every time I got to that point, I just started a new game.

“What Comes Down Must Come Up” by Keven Rozario explains the phenomenon on post disaster rebuilding of cities. People since the colonization of New England have demonstrated a need to rebuild after a major catastrophe and not just simply leave the ruins as is. Rozario brings forth a point that businesses and city officials had always wanted to keep infrastructure updated for the sake of making the city profitable thus disasters such as the San Francisco earthquake and Chicago fire were seen as ample opportunities to pave ways for more modern cities. In all, it does benefit the city in general; beautification makes the city more open to tourists, modern sewage systems keep the city clean, and wider streets keep the city from becoming too suffocating. Alas, sometimes disaster doesn’t hit fast enough for a city to be able to modernize to these standards but when it does, history has shown that the planners don’t hold back, such as Haussmann’s development of Paris before Napoleon’s reign.

This aggressive “creative destruction” comes at a price; a price that the low working class peoples have to pay. As explained through the rebuilding of San Francisco, the buildings that were rebuilt were formerly those of the working class, those who worked in the manufacturing plants in the city. But those buildings were rebuilt to now house the middle, upper class as the city transitioned from manufacturing to financial institutes. This pushed the former lower class out of the city and most of them homeless. So although the city had gained much more capital after its destruction, it had to put the burden on someone. ploopy1 makes an excellent point, “I agree that society can be given a second chance, but it is up to the people that will determine how society is rebuilt from the ashes.”

So in the end, completely resetting a virtual city in a video game might not hurt anybody, but the same cannot be said about rebuilding a city after a disaster especially taking into consideration what the city officials want to take into priority.

Earthquakes in California: Yet People Still Choose to Live Here

October 23, 2016ngojoseph

One point that Ted Steinburg really hammers in his essay, “Smoke and Mirrors: The San Francisco Earthquake and Seismic Denial”, is that city businessmen and investors were keen on calling the destruction of San Francisco in 1906 a result of the fire that erupted after the magnitude 7.7 earthquake and not the earthquake itself. Steinburg’s point of “seismic denial” really paints a new way of seeing what it means to live in an earthquake prone part of the world. Now the businessmen and investors were quick to realize that negative attention to San Francisco as an earthquake central would quell any sort of quick rebuilding and future investments. Earthquakes ultimately cannot be avoided and are unpredictable; people knew that back then and still do today so those “deniers” made sure to spin the disaster as a fire, a disaster than can theoretically be more controlled. They aren’t wrong for wanting to protect their assets but it’s dangerous to deny that an area isn’t more prone to disasters if the history of that area says so otherwise. @armando35 brings up an excellent point that this denial of earthquakes will “[affect] the way people would view earthquakes in the future.”

Which brings me to my point; if we now know that California is more prone to earthquakes, large ones too like the Big One that is predicted to occur in the near future, is it not foolish that we choose to live here? California is a big state with a massive population that sits on one of the most active faults in the world. Hardships and inconveniences aside, if staying alive is just choice between here and the next state over, I would be inclined to think that the next state over is safer. Are we all victims of earthquake denial? And this doesn’t just speak to California but to all parts of the world that experiences regular disasters. Perhaps there is something more than just denying the dangers of earthquakes…

Marx’s Communism: A Product of the Time

October 18, 2016ngojoseph

I remember learning about communism back in high school and being in awe about it. A society where everyone was economically equal? “How fascinating!” I thought to myself, disregarding the fact that my grandfather fought against communism during the war and my dad being a refugee himself. It’s easy to say that communism is perfect for creating an equal and fair society, a utopia. As @erodriguez317 says “Marx’s ideas were not meant to become evil but more of a harmonious way of living“. It’s also easy to forget that Marx’s communism (or Marxism) was primarily an economic system not a political ideology that had been twisted by the likes of Mao Tse-tung and Stalin. To be fair, they probably did apply communism in the beginning but in the end, they really focused more on a central power taking over the entirety of not just the economy, but the entire country itself (looking at you China, Vietnam, and North Korea).

If we were to really analyze Marx’s claims further, I believe we can come to the conclusion that communism was an answer to the problem of his time. If conditions never worsened during the Industrial Revolution for the working classes, Marx would never have had to come to the result of communism being the ultimate answer for ending class struggle. And if Marx never developed this ideology, important communist nations would not have had a platform to revolutionize upon such as the Soviet Union and China. I know I’m talking about hypothetical “what-ifs” but I think it’s important to note that if the conditions of the working class were not bad, Marx would not have had an incentive to revolutionize. Maybe perhaps that’s why today, communism wouldn’t really work. Is it because of the much better working conditions? Or has communism just doesn’t work? I can agree with both.

Storm Recovery: An Optimistic Outcome

October 4, 2016ngojoseph

Reading Patricia Bellis Bixel’s “‘It Must Be Made Safe’: Galveston, Texas and the 1900 Story” was definitely a refreshing way to end the section on the hurricane that decimated Galveston. It had a more optimistic and less grim tone compared to Isaac’s Storm and I definitely appreciated that. However. Bixel has a different agenda with her essay compared to Larson’s so I guess that the difference in tone was default.

Bixel’s essay is about how the island city rebuilt itself and it is important to distinguish the two ways that the city did so. First the city had to change politically, a sentiment that the city populace including the elite acknowledged. There was a growing sense of Progressivism in the area and the hurricane was a way to demonstrate that the city was capable of adapting to changes. Secondly, the city had to change physically, with the raising (not razing) of the city itself and the construction of a seawall along the bay side. The raising and the seawall were widely deemed as accomplishments to modern technology at that time but it was important to note that these technological feats would not have been possible without the support of the public and the legislation, a point that is driven home much throughout Bixel’s essay.

So how did the hurricane shape American ideas about disaster preparedness? Bixel’s essay gave a clear answer. Radical changes to an area cannot occur without changes to the foundation of it; the foundation being the legislative party or parties that oversee the area. And to get change to the foundation, the people must change their mindset. The people of Galveston believed that their city was immune to the destruction of the sea but after the devastating hurricane of 1900, their beliefs quickly changed and so did their mindset. @armando35 says it true, “This notion can be amplified to include different levels of government which must work together in times of disaster to help people. If there is no cooperation people will suffer…”.

Isaac’s Storm: Am I Reading a Historical Fiction?

September 25, 2016ngojoseph

If it were not for the descriptions of the historical backgrounds of weather tracking and hurricanes/tropical storms, I would have been inclined to believe that Isaac’s Storm is a historical fiction about a town’s experience with a terrible hurricane. The pacing, the “characters”, the level of depth that Erik Larson delves into the topic of weather and human interaction with weather/nature, certainly makes me want to finish this book tonight! (Obvious overstatement but it truly is a good read so far.) I share many of the same sentiments as rhuska, definitely “expecting the book to follow more traditional historical writing” but being pleasantly surprised that it is not at all traditional.

I certainly appreciate how Larson sets up the story to be friendly with people who have no knowledge of the meteorologist lingo that he throws around. It seems to be more for the audience that does understand such statistics but for those who are not so interested in meteorology, Larson makes it quite easy to understand from the get-go that there is a big storm coming and nobody is prepared for it.

The book is structured in a way that attempts to cover whatever necessary information is needed to understand the storm despite the fact that it is a narrative that describes the events chronologically. Larson does this by retelling of the experiences Columbus and his crew had with weather, offering explanations of meteorology, shifting from different perspectives of the event (although Isaac Cline is his main focus), and just simply offering more than just numbers about the event. There is a level of social engineering and human decisions that affected the outcomes of the storm and Larson does a really good job at narrating what happened that allowed the storm to be more disastrous than it had to be.

I am looking forward to finishing this book!

The Chicago Fire: Natural, Unnatural, or Both?

September 18, 2016ngojoseph

I think the author of “The Great Conflagration” described the Great Chicago Fire in a way that was simple and easy to understand. It was like she was telling a narrative! (Yes, I know she was.) What I found the most interesting besides how pleasant the narrative was to read was the way Bessie Bradwell Helmer started her narrative by quoting A.T. Andreas, “‘Nature had withheld her accustomed measure of prevention, and man had added to the peril by recklessness.'”

This quote leads the debate on whether or not the fire was caused naturally or unnaturally. But Helmer leaves her audience to figure that out themselves, affirming her position of just simply retelling the events of the fire chronologically. She admits that “the exact particulars of [the fire’s] origin are unknown” but comically adds that “a kick from a cow would have been sufficient” to start a fire. Her first dab at whether this event was natural or unnatural but really just offering a suggestion. That does leave us to ask several questions though such as, if a cow was really the perpetrator, is the fire a natural fire? Who would leave a cow there in the first place? Who could have put fire near a cow? Does the inclusion of humans make the fire not natural? Are humans not part of nature and therefore actions of humans are natural? One concern spirals into a large debate of naturalness or unnaturalness, a debate that still goes on today.

We are inclined to believe that Chicago Fire is unnatural however, but only because of the way people added to the severity of the fire although not intentionally. Harking back at A.T. Andreas’ quote, the people who designed the city never expected fires that catastrophic therefore the “wooden everything” constructed by city planners made the situation immensely worse. So even though the fire was caused naturally (or unnaturally), the severity of the fire was caused by the mishaps of humans therefore, human intervention was detrimental. Quoting erodriguez317, “everything built was human made which makes it unnatural on how the fire spread.” I agree with this sentiment.

Historiography: It’s Complicated and I Think That’s OK

September 6, 2016ngojoseph

One of the first things that Popkin admits in From Herodotus to H-net: The Story of Historiography is that historiography is difficult. The way that “historiographical analyses…move back and forth among several levels of reference” from “the facts of the past” to “the ways in which those facts can be discerned and written about” but also including “the mental processes of historians” can indeed “make them challenging to follow” (Popkin 5), especially for students that are simply interested in history. And so far, I could not agree more!

Even though we have not yet to really delve into dissecting historiography, just reading about it so far gives me a weird taste of history, something I have never experienced before when I think of the word “history”. Coincidentally, Popkin points this out as well saying “[students] often feel as though they are being asked to say goodbye to all the things that attracted them to the subject in the first place” (Popkin 5). Although it is too early to say that I already hate history, it does make me think about why I chose to switch to history in the first place. Interesting that it is always within the most “difficult” parts in life that you learn more about yourself.

This of course does not mean I have no respect for histiography. It is the subject that makes history even remotely possible and it is imperative that history students do have some form of competency in the subject. Its difficulty is a letdown for many aspiring history students; I can sympathize because I am aspiring history student as well. But for some who see historiography as something they can just skip because it’s too hard, then they certainly should not become a history major. Therefore, I do share a sentiment with terry_christi who states “if you are an individual that would rather view history through romanticized lenses, then maybe historiography doesn’t seem engaging enough for you”.

I know that this subject will be difficult. But I still think that is OK. Because at the end of the day, I will truly know if this is the right path for me.

Joseph Ngo

Historical Thinking – Fall 2016

Author: ngojoseph