I’ve decided to go All Alex Rose, All The Time. That means that I’m pausing The History Man blog and switching over to . . . 

http://alexrose.wordpress.com

Remember, you heard it here first.

A nice surprise on Sunday morning: The Arkansas Democrat Gazette gave a lengthy (and perceptive) review of American Rifle: A Biography. I’ve pasted in the text below. 

Book details relationship of rifles to U.S. military

Review by Bryan Hendricks, Arkansas Democrat Gazette, June 7, 2009

For a definitive history of the American military rifle, American Rifle, A Biography, is the best I’ve ever read. 

Written by Alexander Rose, author of Washington’s Spies, American Rifle chronicles the parallel development of the rifle with that of the United States military. They are so closely entwined that they are inseparable, such that the rifle was and is the primary influence on U.S. military doctrine. If that claim sounds grandiose and preposterous, Rose makes his case in a way that quashes all doubt. 

The book begins with a prologue about George Washington’s prized, custom-made Jost rifle, for which he paid 6 pounds and 10 shillings. That price today, Rose speculated, would equal something close to $1,400. Washington insisted that the rifle appear in a famous portrait by Charles Willson Peale. Including the rifle had both sentimental appeal and political calculation. 

“By identifying himself simultaneously with the American frontiersman and with the professional soldier,” Rose wrote, “Washington succeeded in squaring an obstinately round circle. One day … this feat would lead to his unanimously approved elevation to commander in chief of the American forces for a war of independence.” 

Beginning with the French and Indian Wars, the rifle was an extremely controversial weapon. It was designed for long-range sharpshooting, allowing its shooter to engage and kill an individual target. That sharply violated European military doctrine, which placed a premium on massed troops using muskets to rain massed fire on a massed foe. European troops did not aim at a specific target. They fired their guns with the expectation that massed firepower would overwhelm and rout an enemy. To actually pick out a target and kill that one person specifically was seen as murder, especially since American riflemen had a tendency to shoot British officers. 

According to European military theorists, this subverted all social order on the battlefield and gave too much power to individual soldiers. The British considered fighting with rifles a war crime, and riflemen captured in battle were summarily executed. Hence, there was vigorous debate within the Continental Army as to whether the use of rifles was legal, and whether American soldiers should fight according to European customs. 

Of all this book’s tangents and subplots, the most compelling revolves around the relentless struggle for dominance between massed fire advocates and those who emphasize single-shot accuracy. It is a debate that endures to this day, in both military and sporting circles. 

Rose explains how, early on, the Department of the Army’s Ordnance Department embraced single-shot rifles, muzzleloading rifles. The Ordnance Department maintained this bias into the Civil War, even when it was apparent that breechloading rifles and even repeating rifles provided a distinct advantage over the comparatively primitive arms that Confederate troops used. To the dismay of U.S. Army hierarchy, some Union generals gave their troops a boost by purchasing repeating rifles and ammunition with their personal funds. 

The objection to repeaters and breechloaders was that they promoted undisciplined fire and profligated waste of ammunition. 

Through generations, Rose noted, the army was dominated by a “cult of accuracy” that practically deified the notion of long-range marksmanship. However, that grand ideal constantly clashed with the realities of the actual battlefield, where combat usually occurred furiously at fairly close ranges. 

One of the transcendent moments of that debate, Rose added with great detail, was at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where a combined American Indian army slaughtered George Custer’s cavalry. Custer and his men were armed with single-shot Springfield rifles. They simply could not load and fire fast enough to outshoot the American Indians, many of whom used repeaters to augment their swarming tactics. 

It came to a head again in World War I, when the U.S. Army went to Europe with its famed 1903 Springfield repeating rifle. U.S. General John Pershing emphasized individual marksmanship, but found sniping to be of limited use in trench warfare. 

Finally, massed fire advocates seemed to gain the upper hand in World War II with the M-1 Garand, a semiautomatic rifle chambered in .30-06. It was also no secret that U.S. Marines in the Pacific Theater preferred the .45-cal. Thompson submachine gun over standard issue weapons. 

The emergence of the Kalashnikov AK-47 permanently altered the perception of the combat rifle. Though cheaply made, its main attributes were high-capacity, rapid-fire capability and near indestructibility. A few years later, the U.S. military adopted the M16, which featured the same attributes, except with cartridges featuring tiny .22-caliber bullets. 

A thorough review of this book could go twice as long. The bottom line is it’s a wellwritten, comprehensive history of a tough subject.”

Posted by Alexander Rose, www.alexrose.com

A couple of things.

First, Invention & Technology magazine has kindly posted my “Kentucky Rifle” piece online. Unfortunately, it lacks the stunning photos of the paper version, but I expect that’s owing to copyright issues. You can download a PDF of the original article — with photos — from my website. (Scroll about halfway down the page.) 

Second, I attended the American Revolution Round Table’s dinner a few nights ago, where Gordon Wood was speaking (about the clash between Hamiltonian “monarchism” and Jeffersonian republicanism in 1780s/1790s America — I think he has a book coming out). At the dinner, Thomas Fleming, the historian, verbally reviewed John Ross’s new War on the Run, a biography of Robert Rogers and his times. It was, as they say, a double-thumbs-up rave. I happened to review the book on Amazon (my first-ever review), a copy of which I’ve posted below. The book’s well worth a look. 

My Amazon review:

“In my own book — and I apologize for the self-serving plug, but it’s pertinent – Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring, I devoted part of a chapter to Robert Rogers, one of the most remarkable killing gentlemen of Colonial (and Revolutionary) America. I always, however, wanted to know more about this bewitching, wild creature, and so I’m glad that John Ross has undertaken the burden of excavating his life and times from the murk of the past. 

Good, narrative-driven history-writing is tricky to pull off, but, having blazed through the book, I think Ross has done a sterling job introducing Rogers to a modern audience. Ross is particularly skilled at evoking the frightening nature of the wilderness and the unique exigencies of frontier fighting. The vast, unexplored backcountry was densely thicketed by forests, rumpled by towering mountain ranges, and watered by unbridgeable rivers — and Rogers was master of it all. Small wonder his enemies (and friends) were terrified of him; small wonder that they (in Ross’s words) “could not get their imagination around the man, this master of nature and humans who could lead unimpressionable New Englanders to the edge of death over and over.” 

Now, while I had once foolishly assumed that Rogers was merely a rough-hewn, if cunning, ranger with an eye for the main chance, I’m happy to admit that War on the Run set me straight. Rogers, in truth, was an immensely complex individual, being both the most famed (or notorious) frontiersman in the world — a kind of Davy Crockett/Daniel Boone twofer — as well as a literate and entertaining American who, through his books and a play, illuminated to his fellow colonists the amazing potential of what would become their own country come 1783. 

Production-wise, the photos have been chosen with great care, and his footnotes (or rather, endnotes) are rock solid. A useful list of “Dramatis Personae” — to help us keep track of the dozens of colorful characters stalking the early frontier — and no fewer than 14 maps make War on the Run a worthwhile purchase. This is a very fine biography of one of America’s early Greats, and it’s certainly one of the most interesting books I’ve read all year. 

Recommended for anyone interested in early America and military history (especially insurgency, Special Forces, and the evolution of tactics).”

Alexander Rose, www.alexrose.com

I was just sent this — it’s from the forthcoming April issue of Shooting Illustrated. Apparently, there will be a longer online version coming out.

The editors at National Review were kind enough to allow me to take up most of a page with a letter clarifying a few misconceptions about what I say about the place of riflemen during the War of Independence in American Rifle: A Biography. Thanks, gents, much appreciated. 

Here’s the PDF: Letter to National Review

Posted by Alexander Rose, www.alexrose.com

Hey, cool, the book just got pinged by Instapundit. It’s quite an honor. 

Posted by Alexander Rose (www.alexrose.com)

A busy day for posting here at the History Man. Here’s a PDF of an article I wrote about a year ago for the military magazine, Armchair General, but which has only appeared now (in the March 2009) issue. It has nothing to do with rifles, but concerns instead the subject of my last book, Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring (Bantam Dell, 2006).

Click here to download: The Culper Ring – Alexander Rose – Armchair General (March 2009)

Posted by Alexander Rose (www.alexrose.com)

Hello all,

Well, it’s been a while since I updated this blog, my only excuse being that I’ve been away hard-selling the book. Anyway, I’m around again with some news. The American Rifleman, the NRA’s premier magazine, just reviewed the book. I have a JPEG here, but I’m trying to get a better copy (probably in PDF) to upload. This’ll have to hold you until I can get that done. 

Incidentally, my new Facebook page is “Alexander Rose-Historian.” Feel free to contact me or “Friend” me. 

OK, here’s the last one, from Publishers Weekly.

“In this solid history, Rose explores the development of the rifle, such as how it evolved in American history to become an iconic symbol of freedom and how it developed as an effective military instrument as well as a private citizen’s firearm. Drawing on numerous primary sources, from letters and journals of ordinary soldiers to the writings of inventors such as Samuel Colt, Rose traces the rise of the rifle from its original use as a hunting tool and a means of defense and protection to its eventual use as an offensive weapon in wars of conquest. Loaded with facts, the book reveals that firearms didn’t come into their own in the colonies until 1609, when Samuel de Champlain led his men on a raid of the Mohawks. In their increasing contact with European adventurers and traders, Native Americans recognized the power of firearms and cannily traded for such weapons. By the early 18th century, gunsmiths of German extraction invented a rifle that had greater accuracy and distance than muskets. The Kentucky rifle, so named because it’s rumored that Daniel Boone carried one of these early rifles in his travels around the frontier, was easier to load and could drop a bear, or a British soldier, in fewer shots and at a more distant range than a musket. In his entertaining history, Rose engagingly chronicles Americans’ peculiar quest to build a more refined and effective firearm.”

Here’s the next one, a Starred Review from Kirkus Reviews, which was mighty nice of them. Now, I know that I shouldn’t be looking gift horses in the mouth, but I just wanted to mention that there’s a niggling factual error in this one; namely, that I end with the Vietnam era and the advent of the M16, “which remains today’s infantry rifle.” Not quite so! American Rifle actually concludes with a chapter analyzing the current Iraq War and the controversy over the M4 (including the XM8, the HK416, and the SCAR). For those riveted by the story of the M4, see my earlier post on the topic here.

Anyway, on to the review . . . 

“A nuts-and-bolts description of American firearms development that provides surprising insight into the country’s history. Historian Rose (Washington’s Spies, 2006) reminds readers that the rifle remained a civilian weapon until the Civil War. Centuries earlier, gunsmiths learned that engraving a sprial inside the smooth-barreled musket (“rifling”) made the bullet spin, increasing range and accuracy. The downside: Rifle-boring was a skilled, labor-intensive process, and the bullet had to grip the barrel tightly to pick up spin. Musketeers dropped a ball down the barrel; riflemen required a powerful ramrod. Expense and slow operation mattered little to hunters, who preferred rifles as early as the 17th century. During the 18th, American gunsmiths lengthened and narrowed the barrel to produce the Kentucky rifle, more accurate and also cheaper because of the smaller bullet. Massed armies with muskets fought major battles from the Revolution to the Mexican Wr, but riflemen gave a good account of themselves as snipers and guerrillas. They even won some battles: At King’s Mountain in 1780, for example, dense forests gave the advantage to slow-firing but accurate rifles. Technical progress made rifles the preferred Civil War weapon, although muskets remained common. The author ably demonstrates the struggles of inventors who developed reliable breech loaders, all-in-one bullets and repeating rifles before the war, only to have the Union army’s hidebound ordnance chief turn up his nose at them. During the post war decades, all were adopted despite fierce opposition by experts convinced that marksmanship, not rapid fire, wins battles. That controversy continues to rage, and Rose’s account never flags as he proceeds through the nasty engineering and political and media battles that produced the Springfield 1903 (World War I), Garand M1 (WWII) and M14, ending with the Vietnam era’s superb, but not perfect, M16, which remains today’s infantry rifle with no end in sight. Ingenious and satisfying.” 

Posted by Alexander Rose, www.alexrose.com

Ta-da, I’m back after a break. Today there was some good news: a bumper crop of not-bad trade reviews (Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews) of American Rifle: A Biography. These might be the last ones I ever get, so I’m posting them with pride. 

First up, Booklist . . . 

“This fascinating book shows how the history of the U.S. is mirrored in the history of one of its technological achievements, the rifle. The rifle arrived in America in 1492; it was then called a “hand cannon,” 30 pounds of iron that was, to be fair, not terribly accurate. It wasn’t until the early 1600s that rifles—or muskets, to be more precise—became widespread and effective as lethal weapons, and it wasn’t until later in the century, when German immigrants arrived with a new kind of firearm that was shorter and lighter and more accurate, that the rifle began its slow evolution into the familiar form it takes today. This book is loaded with detail, full of lively characters and an abundant spirit of invention. The history of the rifle is also the history of mass production, of American politics, of the legal system, and of war itself. It is impossible not to get caught up in this rich, surprising, and engrossing story.”

Posted by Alexander Rose, www.alexrose.com

Many years ago, my boss at the newspaper, a man long experienced in the ways of the world, gave me some sound advice: When you’re angry and bashing out one of those long, aggrieved, abusive, sarcastic missives to some fool who’s annoyed you, before you hit Send take a walk outside for ten minutes. Then, upon your return, delete what you’ve typed and write in its place a cool, calm, and collected letter. (An alternative is to just not send the original, angry letter, but then you end up like this guy. The Onion, as always, gets it right.)

Giles Coren, a restaurant critic who writes for the Sunday Times in Britain, could have done with such sage advice. Copyeditors (called subs, or sub-editors, over there) had the temerity to change a single word in his column and Coren went absolutely berserk. His furious, rabid email to the hapless subs was, of course, leaked, and resulted in their replying to him in — yes — a cool, calm, and collected manner. It all adds up to one of the more entertaining exchanges of recent years, a genuine comic classic of the journalistic trade. (I still refuse to count hackery as a “profession.”)

I can see both sides’ point of view on this one, having been both a writer and an editor. Certainly, writers have to fight to keep certain favored phrases and words from the editorial chopping-block; generally, if I write something then that’s what I intended to say, so please don’t start fiddling with it. In one of my books, I referred to a particular eighteenth-century comedy as a “frothy farce.” I’ve never understood why, but my editor hated the phrase. Hated it, hated it, hated it. He deleted it and told me so. On the next pass, I added it back in. He took it out, again telling me what he had done and not listening to my entreaties. So I put it back. He took it out. So I let him think that he had won by not telling him that I had quietly reinserted it into the final draft for the printer. It’s still in there.

On the other hand, everyone’s writing can use a touch of editing. Judging by his email, Coren’s certainly could. When I was editing copy for a newspaper and later a magazine, I would be amazed by how incompetent and sloppy some (very well-known) writers were. Others were simply thoughtless: There was one, a fellow of a Washington, D.C. think-tank who would always send his copy in some weird text-format — despite repeated requests not to. It would then take us a tedious half an hour to reformat it, and that was before we could even begin subbing it. Did we ever receive a “thank you” for all this hard work, from any of these guys we had labored to make sound smart and stylish? No. 

Occasionally, I’d get writers who really knew the business. These were pleasures to work with because they took care with their copy and didn’t leave it to the copyeditors to tidy it up for them. One, for instance, would submit 2,000 words on pension reform or something, I’d read it through, and find a single instance where a word-change might be in order. He’d take a look and say OK and we were done. 

As for me, I don’t know what I would do without the oft-unsung skills of the newspaper’s and publisher’s subs and proofers. They catch grammatical errors, typos, punctuation problems, and the like with amazing proficiency. Stuff you don’t even know about they catch. They even clear up inconsistencies and stylistic infelicities.

In Coren’s case, the copyeditors were wrong to have excised the word, but what I find incredible is that only now is he asking for proofs of the edited copy so that he can approve their corrections and alterations before publication. This implies that what he was doing before was submitting his piece and trusting the subs to not make a hash of it. This is a remarkably foolish thing to do, for journalists and historians alike. If they’re your words, you have a responsibility to make sure they stay yours, even if it means rereading the entire text four or five times line-by-line, word-by-word. (Much to my editor’s annoyance, for instance, I insist on seeing the second passthrough of manuscript drafts so that I can quadruple-check photo captions and other little bits-’n'-pieces.)

Still, this Coren thing is pretty funny. 

Posted by Alexander Rose, www.alexrose.com

When it first came out, back in the 1960s, the rifle known as the M16 was dismissed by some soldiers as being “made by Mattel,” which, more famously, manufactured Barbie dolls. For a time, there was even a rumor that the gun had been made by Mattel. While its plastic grips and stock were actually highly advanced polymers that considerably lightened the weapon, they felt cheap and flimsy to men accustomed to handling the M1 Garand and the M14 — both sturdy guns constructed from wood and metal. 

Strangely enough, then, the New Scientist and Wired are reporting — by the same guy, David Hambling — that a toy company really is attempting to manufacture a military rifle. Thus (in the words of the New Scientist):

“A gun that fires variable speed bullets and which can be set to kill, wound or just inflict a bruise is being built by a US toy manufacturer. The weapon is based on technology used to propel toy rockets. Lund and Company Invention, a toy design studio based near Chicago, makes toy rockets that are powered by burning hydrogen obtained by electrolysing water. Now the company is being funded by the US army to adapt the technology to fire bullets instead.The US Army are interested in arming soldiers with weapons that can be switched between lethal and non-lethal modes. They asked Company Invention to make a rifle that can fire bullets at various speeds. The new weapon, called the Variable Velocity Weapon System or VWS, lets the soldier to use the same rifle for crowd control and combat, by altering the muzzle velocity. It could be loaded with “rubber bullets” designed only to deliver blunt impacts on a person, full-speed lethal rounds or projectiles somewhere between the two. Bruce Lund, the company’s CEO, says the gun works by mixing a liquid or gaseous fuel with air in a combustion chamber behind the bullet. This determines the explosive capability of the propellant and consequently the velocity of the bullet as it leaves the gun. “Projectile velocity varies from non-lethal at 10 metres, to lethal at 100 metres or more, as desired,” says Lund. The company says that the weapon produces less heat and light than traditional guns. It can also be made lighter and could have a high power setting for long-range sniping.”

I don’t know whether this technology is ever going to work. Achieving accuracy, for instance, is going to be tricky if soldiers have to learn to compensate for variable velocities at various ranges with different types of ammunition. So, a shooter may very well end up killing someone with a non-lethal round by aiming at, say, his torso but hitting his head by accident. Likewise, soldiers could mistakenly use non-lethal rounds during, shall we say, urban-combat situations requiring lethal force. If this rifle ever comes out of the initial planning stage, users are going to have undergo lengthy training.

Those are tactical questions, however. On a broader level, ever since 1945, armies have been looking for ways to integrate the close-quarters, high-volume firepower of the submachine gun with the long-range, high-accuracy ability of the semiautomatic rifle — to no avail. Some machines, in other words, are better suited to single-use capability (or doing one thing well) rather then weakened by making them serve in multiple roles (or doing many things not-very-well).

Variable-velocity weapons are the latest attempt to bridge the gap, only with non-lethal and lethal bullets rather than syncing firepower with marksmanship. In this case, it is posited that the same gun will be used for both crowd control and combat. These are widely different tasks, and I wonder whether it might not be simpler to just keep using separate tools for each job. 

Of course, it’s possible that, owing to onboard computers being able to calculate range, speed, and a host of other factors, a variable-velocity, non-lethal/lethal rifle is likely in our future. Maybe soldiers, like the Federation crew in Star Trek, will soon be able to ”set phasers to stun.” But, nevertheless, the problem with such advanced technology is that when existing technology — e.g., the lowly gunpowder-and-metal cartridge — is so efficient, cheap, and widely available it’s very difficult to effect such a wholesale replacement as rapidly and as easily as the new technology’s proponents like to imagine. Change instead comes very, very slowly, often sputters or diverges in unexpected directions, or just halts and maybe even reverses. There are political, financial, social, and military considerations at every stage, and all it takes is a single decision by a middle-ranking administrator of some kind and the entire project can be terminated or postponed indefinitely.

As I pointed out in a previous posting (on the future of the M4), the army has been searching for a quantum technological leap forward for its next generation of rifles. Variable-velocity may very well be the Next Big Thing, but don’t bet your mortgage on it.

Posted by Alexander Rose, www.alexrose.com

Historically Speaking is the bimonthly bulletin of The Historical Society. The Society’s intent is to:

“revitalize the study and teaching of history by reorienting the historical profession toward an accessible, integrated history free from fragmentation and over-specialization. The Society promotes frank debate in an atmosphere of civility, mutual respect, and common courtesy. All we require is that participants lay down plausible premises, reason logically, appeal to evidence, and prepare for exchanges with those who hold different points of view. The Historical Society conducts activities that are intellectually profitable, providing a forum where economic, political, intellectual, social, and other historians can exchange ideas and contribute to each other’s work. Our goal is also to promote a scholarly history that is accessible to the public.”

I joined the Society fairly recently and have been pleasantly surprised by how interesting and fizzy is Historically Speaking (the Society’s more mainline Journal of the Historical Society also runs a fine selection of articles). One of the bulletin’s enduring concerns is the interaction between academic historians and the writing of popular (or public) history. 

In the March/April 2008 issue, it printed a forum — Historically Speaking is really big on fora — discussing whether writers “need a license to practice history.” Quite an esteemed bunch of historians (Joyce Lee Malcom, H.W. Brands, Joseph J. Ellis, Jay Winik et al) weighed in on Adam Hochschild’s foundation piece. You’ll have to subscribe to read all their responses. Hochschild, however, you can read in full. Do so, it’s an important article. 

The question of whether popular history written by academic historians has vanished or is flourishing is a fascinating one, and has been tackled previously in Historically Speaking (not least by Eric Arneson in the November/December 2007 issue). 

But that’s not really what this post is about. For the moment, I’d rather focus on the specific act, the trade secrets, the craftsmanship, of writing for a popular audience. I’ll keep coming back to this question in the future, but for the moment, two articles from Historically Speaking illuminate some home truths.

The first was published last year (“The Perils and Pleasures of Going ‘Popular’; Or My Life as a Loser,” by Maureen Ogle) and is an entertaining account of her decision to leave a comfy academic post and join the ranks of independent historians. 

“I faced a mountain-sized learning curve. As an academic, I had mastered a particular set of rules . . . but in my new career, none of that applied. The public doesn’t care about ‘the literature.’ The public doesn’t care what’s au courant in the ivy tower and which trends have gone the way of the dodo. The public is interested in only two things: that the history they read contain a lively narrative—a story—and that the person telling the story be honest. [snip]

So up the mountain I trekked, learning to write a new kind of history. I hunted for the story buried amid the facts. I struggled to craft sentences that—gasp!—contained active verbs and narratives based on real human beings, many of them—bigger gasp!—dead white males. But I refused to abandon my primary mission: to bring well-researched, well-documented, well-reasoned history to non-academic readers. To that end, I plowed through reams of primary documents, spent months sitting in front of microfilm readers, shelled out money traveling to archives and libraries. I wanted my books to land on the front table at Barnes & Noble, but I wanted them to contain the same scholarly research as a monograph read by six. 

Not that I expected anyone to notice. Seven or so years into this new venture, I know that the average reader doesn’t grasp the difference between a primary document and a secondary source, and is unaware of the difference between a local public library and the one found at a university, or for that matter between a library and Google.” 

As someone who has trod a vaguely similar path, I’d agree with Ogle about much of this. To this day, I write my books with a full complement of footnotes (converted into endnotes at the insistence of my publisher) and a vast, tedious, and comprehensive bibliography. I also try to include various views of what’s “au courant“. But as I’m discovering, not many people really care that much. No university scholar has ever written to me saying, “Alex, you did a remarkable job with those endnotes.” Indeed, I’ve recently been informed that for American Rifle (sorry for yet another of these infernal plugs) there is to be no bibliography. Instead, it’s going to be sent to me as a PDF and interested readers can download it from my website. I’m not overly happy about this, but I suspect it’s the wave of the future for many trade historians and, to tell you truth, in some ways the decision makes sense.

Bibliographies are important, but nowhere near as important as foot/endnotes (so long as they contain complete citations) and nobody’s talking about putting those only online. (Did I just jinx myself?) Economically, too, the cost of paper has recently skyrocketed, so if the publisher can save 30 or 40 pages per copy then that’s all to the good. As it is, American Rifle is priced at $30. That ain’t cheap, especially as we head into a recession. And lastly, it turns out that the great majority of readers don’t look at the bibliography. What they want is a good, strong story with vivid characterization and not a whole lot of scholarly nuance, otherwise known as hemming-and-hawing. 

Does that mean we’re doomed to dumbing down popular history? Not at all, so long as we remember that what’s critical in popular-history writing is to achieve that potent narrative and prose style by basing it on sound, empirical, comprehensive research. Lots of people can write well, but “research” can’t or shouldn’t be done by just anyone: It requires a bedrock of training, often acquired in an academic institution but also through practice. It’s getting the writing and the researching (the “two Rs,” I guess you could say) to sync with one another that’s the trick. 

These days, though we hear much about the “democratization of learning” thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I believe that good research threatens to become still rarer and even more difficult. Put it this way, unless you have access to a university library or a really fine public one (like the New York Public Library), now-crucial electronic resources like JSTOR, Project Muse, and ProQuest (let alone the specialist databases of, say, eighteenth-century newspapers) are out of your grasp. Ten years ago, I photocopied all the scholarly articles I needed; today, I download hundreds of PDFs from scores of institutional-subscriber-only databases and stick ‘em all in Sente. (I’ll talk about bibliography apps in some other post.) 

An author who relies only on books and magazine articles commonly available at a local library is therefore going to be at a disadvantage. The fabulous innovation of Google Books does even the odds for some nineteenth-century materials, and Amazon allows customers to acquire some otherwise unobtainable stuff (at no little cost), but the research work of many budding historians unable to breach the university gatekeep is necessarily going to suffer in terms of comprehensiveness and depth. Their writing style may well be spectacular, but the originality of what they’re saying is likely to be limited.

The second article of interest in Historically Speaking was written by Nicholas Guyatt, a lecturer at the University of York in England. “The End of History; Or My Summer with Apocalyptic Christians” appeared in the latest issue (May/June) and tells of his experiences writing a trade book about contemporary evangelicalism in the United States. There’s some very funny parts and it will certainly ring true for anyone who’s pubbed with one of the major houses or dealt with literary agents. Now over to him:

“I found myself an agent in London, and he came up with simple suggestions about how to proceed. Write a proposal. Play up your historical knowledge, but don’t become a prisoner to it. Look for a big thesis, and hammer it home when you map out your chapters. Boast that you’re going to interview the colossi of the Religious Right, even if you have no idea how to contact them. I followed all these steps, and let the agent do the rest. He quickly sold the book to Random House in the UK, and Harper Collins in the U.S. Then, to my enormous surprise, he was fired from the agency. One of the things I’ve found out during my brief exposure to commercial publishing is that every author has a story to tell about their editor/publicist/mentor/marketing person/jacket designer being fired at the crucial moment, just when the book was poised for enormous success.” 

There are three morals to this post. The first is provided by Guyatt: “I was quickly made aware of one of the realities of commercial publishing: your book needs to fit within quite rigid guidelines of what sells and what doesn’t.” The second is that you should purchase membership to The Historical Society. And the third is that writing for a wide audience while retaining a scholarly backbone is neither as simple nor as easy as it looks, or some haughtily believe. I still haven’t quite got the hang of it after three books, but I flatter myself to think that I’m making some progress. We’ll see what readers think.

Posted by Alexander Rose, www.alexrose.com

As part of my ongoing quest to illuminate the highways and by-ways of historical obscurity, please let me introduce a new addition to the slowly expanding Rose universe: namely, the blog run by Todd Seavey (who knows everything there is to know about the history of comic books — my own intellectual limit was reached a long time ago with Luke Cage), sensibly called www.ToddSeavey.com. It may be described as “conservatism for punks,” but don’t let that put you off.

Posted by Alexander Rose, www.alexrose.com

IO9, an excellent science-fiction site has publicized the exploits of the world’s greatest astroforensicist, astroforensician, expert on astroforensics, Professor Donald Olson of Southwest Texas State University. 

Olson and his colleagues specialize in exactly “timing” momentous events or famous episodes in history by combining astronomical data with topographic maps, aerial photographs, weather records, journals, and letters. 

According to Time magazine and The New York Times, his sleuthing feats include:

• Explaining why that Greek fellow, Pheidippides, who raced 26 miles from Marathon to Athens in 490 BC collapsed and died after bringing news of the Persian defeat. To those lazy souls, who, like me, assumed it was because he had run, Gatorade-less, 26 miles, Olson demonstrated that the run occurred on August 12 (rather than mid-September, as usually posited), when the average temperature ranges from 88 to 91 degrees, soaring as high as 102 near Athens. A month later, it falls to a more temperate 83 degrees. Olson’s source was Herodotus, who precisely describes the phases of the Moon at this time, and he also knew that the Athenians had pleaded for Spartan help. No problem, said they, but only after the next full Moon — six days away. Where previous historians had erred in dating the marathon (not Marathon, I guess) was in using the Athenian calendar to deduce the time of the Spartans’ Moon-based religious festival and then to have worked back from there (hence September). But the Spartans, sensibly enough, used a Spartan calendar — which runs a month behind that of their Peloponnesian frenemies. So it was August they were talking about. 
• Discovering that on the moonlit night Paul Revere rowed undetected under the nose of a British vessel on his way to Ride into history, the moon was in fact exceptionally low on the southern horizon. 
• Tracking down the identity of the mysterious “bright star” cited in the opening scene of Hamlet. It was a supernova exploding in the Cassiopeia constellation in 1572. (I’m not so convinced about this one; surely Shakespeare could have just been being metaphorical?)
• Arguing that the red sky behind the figure in Munch’s The Scream was caused by the Krakatoa volcano’s dust. (Ditto as above for me on this one.)
• Pointing out that at Tarawa in 1943, the Marines’ landing craft were caught on the edge of a reef and were forced to wade 600 yards under fire before they got to the beach. According to Olson, the Moon was almost at its farthest point from the Earth, and its weak gravitational pull rendered the Tarawan tides almost non-existent.

His latest exploit (see here and here) is pinpointing the exact date of Julius Caesar’s amphibious landing in Britain. In 55 B.C. (or BCE, whichever you prefer), he arrived with two legions (about 10,000 men) somewhere on the southern coast.

The exact date has long been disputed, with opinion wavering between August 26 and 27. Even his landing place was uncertain; most historians, remarking that the terrain matched Caesar’s description, asserted it was northeast of Dover, between Walmer and Deal. Scientists argued that a northeastern location was impossible. The tides, the hydrographers and astronomers said, would have pulled the Romans southwest along the coast. There seemed no way of reconciling the twin demands of Science and History (notice the portentous capitalization). 

Rather fortunately, the equinox and lunar cycle of August 2007 exactly matched those pertaining in the summer of 55 BC — a very rare occurrence. Olson and his team travelled to Britain to see if their on-site experiments could solve the mystery. They found that the historians were right in one respect: the landing was indeed to the northeast, at Deal. But the scientists, too, were right: On August 26-27, there was no way Caesar’s legions would have been able to beach their boats at Deal. 

But, if one revised the date to August 22-23 (thanks to the historian R.G. Collingwood, who in 1937 discovered a probable transcription error in the ancient records), then suddenly the conflict solved itself. On those dates, the tides would have been perfect for a Deal landing. 

Is any of this stuff really all that important? There’s but a week’s difference between the dates. Perhaps it isn’t world-shakingly important, but the application of the rigorous, logical scientific method to solve enduring historical mysteries, and the use of historians’ intuitive skills to temper scientific certitude, is interesting. 

Posted by Alexander Rose, www.alexrose.com

A new article by Anita Elberse in the Harvard Business Review tackles the influential theory, advanced by Chris Anderson (the editor of Wired magazine), of the Long Tail. Said tail refers to the idea that these days, owing to the ease and cheapness of circulating obscure or niche-interest media (music and movies, primarily) on the Web, companies ought to rely less on a few big sellers to make their money. Consumers will be moved to purchase many products that mirror their tastes and interests rather than buy a few homogenized hits pushed by the big powerhouses.

Thus, the once-massive “market” is splintering into tiny shards, and if you, the producer of obscure music and movies, put out enough shards and if sufficient numbers of people are interested in those tiny shards, you can achieve significant profits — even if you never have a hit.

The Harvard Business Review, however, takes issue with Anderson, pointing out that in fact the so-called “blockbuster strategy” still holds. One terrifying statistic cited by Elberse notes that of the 3.9 million songs sold online in 2007 (most through Apple iTunes for 99 cents), 3.6 million of them were downloaded fewer than 100 times. A large number of these were purchased just once (presumably by either the artist or his mother).  The dominance of the blockbuster, she argues, is growing only stronger. 

I’m not going to go into too many details here (make sure to buy Anderson’s book — coming out soon in paperback — or visit his blog), but it would be interesting to apply these concepts specifically to the History-Bookwriting Field.

Publishers, who are very big on the blockbuster strategy as a rule, devote the vast majority of their marketing muscle and advertising dollars to a very small number of the tens, dozens, or scores of books they crank out each year. The others, mostly, sink without much trace. Now, some of the lucky few flop big-time while others more than earn out their large advances and publicity budgets. It’s very difficult to predict which books are going to hit and which miss. Indeed, sometimes a no-name, no-advance book unexpectedly takes off and turns into an immensely profitable phenomenon. This once happened to a book about some boy wizard who flies about on broomsticks, but I can’t remember his name. Beatrix Potter? Harry Lime? Something like that. 

Anyway, in the Harvard article, the author points out that “in 2006 just 20% of Grand Central’s [a publisher] titles accounted for roughly 80% of its sales and an even larger share of its profits.” The following year Grand Central published 61 hardcover titles, each of which turned in an average of just under $100,000 in profits. But two of those were “make” books (i.e., the titles pushed to the limits), one of which cost $7 million to market, produce, and acquire but achieved net sales of $12 million, making for a $5 million gross profit, or fifty times the average. 

Personally, I’d be very surprised to find any trade publisher, let alone an academic one, turning an average $100,000 profit on a history list, so I’m not sure this example truly applies to our particular field. Which begs the question, can historians make money from the Long Tail?

The answer is Yes, But Not Very Much, And With Conditions Attached. The Long Tail only comes in useful, as in profitable in terms of money, once you’ve already had a blockbuster, or at least seen relatively significant sales. At that point, the value of your back-properties jump as readers try to find anything else you’ve written. The key thing is to have those back-properties readily available, which is where the Web comes in. In the old days, a publisher would have to reprint, at no little expense, copies of your previous books and ship them to retailers. Nowadays, Amazon keeps large stocks of used and new copies of pretty much anything, so people can get a hold of whatever they want within a day or so. Your collected works no longer disappear forever, which is all to the good — though keep in mind that if readers are buying used books, you don’t see any royalties. Also, this scenario hinges on you having a backlist of previous books. The Web, nevertheless, offers other opportunities to hop aboard the Long Tail.

Most authors have at least several bits-and-pieces of articles scattered on their hard drives. Now, if you’re an A-Lister, you can eventually clean them up, collate them, add an introduction, and flog them off as “Collected Essays,” but for beginners and midlisters, these dessicated pieces remain skeletons that will never get fleshed out or finished.

Well, that used to be the case. It turns out you can resurrect the dead, for Amazon now runs a program called Shorts that allows historians to package their work and sell it. My contribution, so far, to Amazon Shorts was once a 5,000-word sample chapter for a proposed book on the fate of Benedict Arnold after he scarpered to the British side during the War of Independence. I never quite finished the chapter, and never followed up on the book, so Benedict_Arnold.doc lay forlorn for years in a folder buried deep in Alex/Documents/Book Ideas/War of Independence/Traitors/American/. 

About a year after Washington’s Spies came out I thought, hmm, well, maybe a few people would be interested in finding out about Benedict Arnold, so I rejigged the piece, added some new material, rewrote the beginning, and sent it off to the Shorts people. The only cost, to me, has been several hours of my time making sure the copy read OK. Remember, all the real work was done years before, so it’s long been discounted. Amazon hosts the article on its website and makes sure to link my books to it. The Short itself sells for 49 cents, of which I receive about 20 cents. It’s a pretty good deal, but let’s face it, I’m never going to get rich from it. 

On the other hand, if I had 250 of these Shorts up on Amazon, all of which were based on work I’d previously done and had abandoned, I think we’d be talking about a nice income stream here. Let’s say each Short was downloaded an average of five times a month (some, following the blockbuster strategy, would be much higher, some none at all), then that would net me $250. 

That’s better, as they say, than a kick in the head, but then again, how likely is it that I would have 250 potential Shorts lying around in the first place? I would have to start devoting days and weeks to writing new ones, which would suck up time from that spent writing actual books — which bring with them potentially significant advances. I think the problem with the Long Tail, therefore, is that in the history-writing field it’s difficult to make any kind of living from it unless you have either a gigantic built-in backlist or enjoy a blockbuster hit and readers download any and all Shorts you’ve written.

Should, then, historians stay away from the Long Tail and dismiss it as not being worth the candle? Yes, but only if you think of writing in terms of dollars (as most Long Tail analyses seem to do). Historians, however, often trade in a currency worth more than cash: reputation. A more business-y term would be “brand management.”

Much as one historian will regard another as “sound” and of good judgment if he’s read one particularly sensible scholarly article on JSTOR, readers tend to recognize beloved writers’ names and stay loyal to them — even if their new tome is on a subject initially not of much interest to them. Take David McCullough, one of the finest narrative historians around. Now, that guy knows how to write a book (as did Barbara Tuchman). Specialists may disagree with their approaches and conclusions — Tuchman’s Guns of August, let alone her history of the fourteenth century, A Distant Mirror, are way, way out of date — but McCullough could publish a volume consisting entirely of his macaroni pictures and stick figures and it would still go straight to Number One. With a bullet. So long as it had his name on it in BIG LETTERS. (I mean the book, not the bullet.) 

Historians can run a monetary loss on the Long Tail while reaping greater, intangible benefits by getting their names out in the wide world, creating interest in their work, and stimulating sales of their books by letting readers first sample their work in cheap, or even free, snippets. So, when you’re writing your book, always keep an eye open for material you can use for the Long Tail. 

Posted by Alexander Rose, www.alexrose.com

Bit busy today with the whole blogroll thing.

Alex Seifert’s Wild-West oriented History Rhymes blog has an excellent series of postings on the “real” American cowboys. 

For ancient-and-medieval fans, have a look at The History Blog.

Posted by Alexander Rose, www.alexrose.com

The late Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer is in the news again, for June 25 was the anniversary of 1876’s Last Stand. We know what his soldiers were carrying (apart from a variety of pistols, .45-caliber, single-shot Springfield rifles), but what is less certain is the Indians’ armament.

At the time it was suspected that the Indians were all carrying modern repeater rifles (like Winchesters) and that Custer’s men had been simply overwhemed by firepower. They were hampered, too, by their allegedly inferior Springfields. Politically, this was potent stuff, and was certainly exploited by armsmakers (Winchester wanted an army contract to replace the Springfields with their own products), some annoyed officers (who accused Washington of appeasing Indian hostiles by giving them brand-new weaponry while their boys in blue made do with older rifles), and Democrats (keen to attack, in an election year, President Grant as a “Custer-killer” and peace-policy fanatic). 

Let’s first take the issue of the Springfields — a very fine firearm, let it be said. One of the deadliest charges against them was that during the furious fighting of the Last Stand, unburned gunpowder residue had badly fouled their breeches and that, consequently, empty casings had been jammed inside. The only way of extracting them was to insert a hunting knife and force them out. Indian prisoners testified that they had seen Custer’s doomed soldiers desperately trying to clear their Springfields, and military investigators recorded broken knife-blades scattered around the battlefield.

Not so, ordnance experts countered, blaming poor maintenance and dirty cartridges instead for the jamming. The gun itself, they stoutly declared, was not to blame. In truth, neither side was completely right. Later ballistic and archaeological research has found that five percent of Custer’s Springfields suffered from extraction failure. It was a high rate — more than double that recorded during the gun’s experimental trials (held under ideal conditions) — but faulty loading on the part of terrified, panicked soldiers doubtlessly contributed to the figure.

Moving on to the argument that the Indians outgunned Custer’s force, Medal of Honor recipient Sergeant Charles Windolph of Captain Benteen’s Troop H remembered that at least half the enemy brought bows, arrows, and lances (as well as clubs, axes, and knives), and about a quarter used “odds and ends of old muzzle-loaders and single-shot rifles of various vintages.”  Thus, “not more than 25 or 30 per cent of the warriors carried modern repeating rifles.” 

Assuming 1,500 Indian warriors fought, then there were between 375 and 495 repeating rifles at the battle, the lower number being the most probable (according to statistical projections based on artifacts found at the battlefield). Whatever the exact number, Custer’s 220 men, armed with their single-shot Springfields, were outmatched by just the repeater-armed Indians, let alone those carrying old muskets and single-shots. But both these numbers are on an absolute basis; there were simply far more Indians present than soldiers, so they had more firearms.

I would love to know what the percentage of U.S. fatalities were for repeaters and muzzle-loaders/single-shots. Repeater ammunition at the time was pretty hard to get in any reasonable quantity, so it’s possible that those Indians carrying repeaters may only have had four or five cartridges whereas their comrades using powder and lead or standard .45s could have brought along hundreds. In that instance, repeaters would have been a hindrance rather than a help. 

The most striking aspect of Windolph’s recollection, nonetheless, is not how relatively few Indians carried repeaters, but how many were still using old technology (bows, clubs, etc.) in the modern era.

During the Fetterman Massacre in 1866, for instance, just under 80 soldiers were ambushed and annihilated by a force of between 1,500 and 2,000 Lakota Sioux, Northern Arapaho, and Northern Cheyenne. 

The local commander, Colonel Carrington, summarized the grisly scene for his superiors in Washington: “Eyes torn out and laid on the rocks; noses cut off; ears cut off; chins hewn off; teeth chopped out; joints of fingers; brains taken out and placed on rocks with other members of the body; entrails taken out and exposed; hands cut off; feet cut off; arms taken out of sockets; private parts severed and indecently placed on the persons; eyes, ears, mouth, and arms penetrated with spearheads, sticks, and arrows; ribs slashed to separation with knives; skulls severed in every form, from chin to crown; muscles of calves, thighs, stomach, breast, back, arms, and cheek taken out.”

Terrible stuff, but note the focus in the colonel’s description on the damage wrought by spearheads, sticks, arrows, and knives. Skulls are severed, not exploded by metal projectiles; ribs are slashed, not broken by the force of a bullet’s impact; hands and feet are cut off, not holed by lead. Though some of the wealthier or more accomplished warriors were armed with both bladed and ballistic weapons, very few of the Indians at the Fetterman fight bore firearms and the vast majority of those who did carried ancient muzzleloaders. (A flintlock musket engraved, “London, 1777″ was later found at the site.) The fort’s assistant surgeon, who examined the corpses, believed just six men had died exclusively of  bullet wounds.  

Both Fetterman and Custer were done in not by firepower or high-tech weaponry but by the enemy’s huge numbers. 

Posted by Alexander Rose, www.alexrose.com

Another addition to the Blogroll of Fame, The Edge of the American West, a history-minded blog written by Eric Rauchway, Ari Kelman (who both “teach history at a fine public university at the western edge of the American West”), and Scott Eric Kaufman (”a doctoral candidate in English at a closely related fine public university in a similar location.) Interesting perspectives — and entertaining, too. 

Deploying my Holmesian (I refer to Mycroft, of course, not the greatly inferior Sherlock) detective skills to the utmost, I have discovered, using a newfangled electro-mechanical device called a Google, that Rauchway and Kelman are employed at University of California, Davis, and that Kaufman studies English and Comparative Literature at U.C. Irvine. 

Posted by Alexander Rose, www.alexrose.com

Goodness, I just noticed that I was linked to from wigwags.wordpress.com. This is pretty exciting. She rather liked that post I put up about “How to Write a History Book, Part 1.” 

Guess I’ll have to get to work on Part 2. Expectations have now been raised . . . 

On May 11, 1861, some two months before the First Battle of Bull Run, Scientific American published a fascinating time-capsule of an article on “Rifles and Shooting.” At the time, target practice in the army had languished for decades, with a concordant diminution on the part of many troops to hit anything.

Before the mid-1850s, target practice often consisted of a soldier who had finished his watch firing a round at a crude bulls-eye painted on a guardhouse. (And even that was only because live weapons had to be deactivated after guard duty—by laboriously using a screw-like instrument to “pull” the ball out—so that soldiers saved time by pulling the trigger instead.) Wrote a private in the Second Dragoons, so few officers believed the men required any practice with their weapons that, in his five months of wearing “Uncle Sam’s livery,” he had been taken out for proper target shooting just twice.

So, not unusual was the experience of Captain George W. Wingate — after the war, a founder of the National Rifle Association (NRA) — who discovered that most of his New York company couldn’t hit a barrel lid at 100 yards. He was forced to use an imported British manual on riflemanship to teach his men the rudiments of shooting, which he thought might come in useful during a battle.

To help rectify the situation, Scientific American declared that “a soldier should . . . know what his rifle can do, and what he can do with it, at certain distances,” before proceeding to lay out some basic principles (e.g., what a bullet trajectory is) for its readers. The most striking aspect of the piece is its emphasis on long-range shooting: The magazine took it for granted that troops should be “capable of destroying the enemy” with their rifles at 1,200 yards — an incredible figure by any definition. It was for this reason, among others, that Scientific American dismissed breech-loaders in favor of the older muzzle-loaders. The former “are not so accurate as those which load at the muzzle.” 

Warfare, in short, was expected to be conducted at long range, whereas in fact the average distance (according to Paddy Griffiths) between Confederate and Unionist during Civil War firefights—including battles, skirmishes, and low-level actions—was a mere 127 yards.

The article is also remarkable for its foreshadowing of a controversy that would erupt some years after the War between what I call “progressives” and “diehards.” I don’t mean this in a political sense (militarily progressive officers were quite often red-blooded conservatives when it came to voting), but strictly in terms of what kind of rifle they wanted as a service weapon.

To cut a very long story short — the full version will be given in my book American Rifle (to be published this October) — progressives believed that war could be made cleaner and humanized thanks to good, lethal marksmanship on the part of soldiers, who would act on their own initiative more than hitherto had been the case. By targeting, say, a general from afar using an assortment of highly precise aiming mechanisms, a sharpshooter could bring a battle to an end using just a single shot, thereby saving untold lives. Given the Civil War’s vast numbers of dead and wounded, such a desire was surely an understandable one. Indeed, to the progressives, war should be transformed into a rational, modern, scientific, almost antiseptic endeavor. 

Alternatively, diehard officers dismissed such views as fantasy. War was hard, necessarily bloody, and often fought hand-to-hand — as it had been since the days of Achilles and his Myrmidons. “When at war, it was kill them all,” recalled George Whittaker of the 6th Cavalry. Killing was the natural order of things, and man was wolf to man. To those of that mind, progressive ideas were extremely dangerous and the mollycoddling (as they saw it) of the top-ranked shooters undermined discipline in the ranks. They felt sharpshooters were too individual to make good soldiers and that tighter unit cohesion was key to winning battles. 

The anonymous Scientific American writer was of the progressive tendency, judging by his emphasis on long-range shooting and the need for “a man with a clear eye, a steady hand, and a cool head” to do it. Such phrases were common among progressives: “In an Indian fight,” opined one after the war, “the best marksman is the strongest man. Victory is not for the man of muscle, but the result of the quick eye and cool nerve of the fine shot.” Progressives now called this form of prowess the “New Courage” to distinguish it from the inferior, dated martial virtues—men’s instinctive emotions, brute force, and valorous ferocity tightly harnessed by officers and unleashed at the enemy—revered by the diehards.

Basically, progressives wanted more single-shot, large-caliber rifles (like the Springfield) that would force soldiers to husband their rounds and make their shots count while diehards were more open to introducing newfangled, smaller-caliber repeaters (like the Winchester) into the service, the thinking being that close-range firepower was of more utility than accuracy. What bridged the gap, at least temporarily, was the advent of magazines holding five or six rounds that could be used either for a single shot or fired very rapidly. Oh, and smokeless powder, too, but I won’t go into that here. 

It’s interesting (at least to me) that you can see echoes of the progressive/diehard divide in the current debates over the place of technology in modern battle versus brute force. You can have as many “surgical-strike,” $150-million aircraft as you like, but without a lot of big guys armed with rifles (a form of weapon more than 500 years old) on the ground, it’s difficult to win wars against insurgents. Of course, against a conventional army, the first Gulf War was won by squadrons of high-tech aircraft, so this particular controversy isn’t likely to be going away anytime soon . . . 

You can download the PDF by clicking on the link: scientific-american-rifles-and-shooting-may-11-1861

Or you can visit Cornell University Library’s excellent Making of America project and have a browse yourself.

Posted by Alexander Rose, www.alexrose.com

If you’re interested in the espionage and intelligence wars of the American Revolution, then you might want to read my brand-new article examining the strange case of John Honeyman, who is alleged to have helped General George Washington inflict defeats on the British during the dismal winter of 1776-77. I cast doubt on the story, and investigate its origins. What I came up with might surprise you. 

I originally became interested in Honeyman after I was asked, at the end of almost talk I gave about the Culper Ring — Washington’s most successful network during the War of Independence — about what I thought of him. Not knowing anything about it, I tended to hedge a bit. During a quiet spell a few months ago, I reopened the “case” and sent the article off to Studies in Intelligence, the CIA’s scholarly journal. 

It went online earlier today — what with the Hugh Trevor-Roper and the Don Higginbotham posts, it’s been a busy couple of hours — and you can download the PDF here. You can read the entire issue, if you should be so inclined, here. 

Posted by Alexander Rose, www.alexrose.com

It occurs to me that I should have been more specific in my previous post about the two books — so far — that have appeared since Lord Dacre’s death in 2003. Both of these had long “almost been finished,” but the former Regius Professor held off publishing them, possibly for fear of criticism. He never quite recovered from that Hitler Diaries debacle and he had many enemies at Peterhouse, Cambridge — which used to be known as “Hitlerhouse,” not only to remind Trevor-Roper of his humiliation at every opportunity but to reflect its dons’ robustly conservative views.)

The first of his posthumous works was Europe’s Physician: The Various Life of Sir Theodore De Mayerne (Yale University Press), which is by any definition a marvelous exposition, and the second, which appeared a month or so ago in Britain, is The Invention of Scotland: Myth and Tradition. Adam Sisman, who has been appointed Trevor-Roper’s biographer, reviews it here, the Tory journalist Simon Heffer discusses it here, while Ben Macintyre, author of several good popular histories (like this one and this one) is not quite as complimentary here. 

Personally, I think Trevor-Roper somewhat overstates the case about Scottish myths; much of this stuff has been around for years and some of it already appeared in his chapter on the creation of the kilt in the Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger-edited The Invention of Tradition. (Me, I’ve never quite understood whyor how Trevor-Roper hooked up with the likes of Hobsbawm . . . 

I hope this clears things up a bit. 

Posted by Alexander Rose, www.alexrose.com

One of America’s foremost military historians, R. Don Higginbotham, died over the weekend, as reported by Ralph Luker at Cliopatria. I used, and heavily annotated, several of his books — including this one — when researching my own. I’ve taken the following from his bio at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill website:

Professor Higginbotham’s research interests are primarily in American history to 1815, although his work on the American Revolution has led him to do several articles on the subject of comparative revolution — America and Mexico, America and Vietnam, and the American Revolution and the Confederate Revolution. In addition to several books on the American Revolution, he has edited the Papers of James Iredell, a North Carolina and Federalist leader. His most recent publications are “The Martial Spirit in the Antebellum South,” Journal of Southern History, 58 (1992), 1-26, “Formentors of Revolution: Massachusetts and South Carolina,” Journal of the Early Republic, 14 (1994), 1-33, and “The Federalized Militia Debate: A Neglected Aspect of Second Amendment Scholarship,” William and Mary Quarterly, 55 (1998), 39-58. He is currently working on a book on George Washington and his relationship to the American Revolution, an essentially non-military study. He examined his military relationship to the Revolution in George Washington and the American Military Tradition(1985). Higginbotham’s George Washington Reconsidered: Selected Essays appeared in 2001. Washington: Uniting a Nation (2002) is his most recent work.”

One can only hope that his newest Washington book, about “his relationship to the American Revolution,” will appear posthumously (rather like the two left behind by Hugh Trevor-Roper, the late Lord Dacre, both recently published to much acclaim.)

Posted by Alexander Rose, www.alexrose.com