History is a matter of perspective. One man's freedom fighter is another's terrorist. Then again, history has been written by those who have killed heroes. However, history often provides an almost ironic sense of justice. Oliver Cromwell, master strategist to some, war criminal to others illustrates this point perfectly. Buried in Westminster, dug up by the Charles II, hung on the Tower of London until blown down in a storm. His head was bandied about for 300 years, until someone condescended to donate Cromwell's head to his Alma Mater.
Then again there are those who are a puzzle. Italy, in thirty years of warfare and the Borgia, created Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and the Renaissance. After kicking out the Habsburgs and having 500 years of peace, what do the Swiss have to show for it, the Cuckoo Clock.
History forum thread of the day,
http://history-forums.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1992
We have lived through some trying and prosperous times over the past couple decades. I seek only to record events, history will give us an idea of where these events will take us. Beyond the last few decades, I also hope to make this a repository of varied primary sources.
WCU and History-forums
Other blogs I read
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3 comments:
OK I'm officially addicted to your blog! Don't forget Caravaggio and Bernini in your list of incredible Italians.
Rest assured, I will not forget. I just want to make sure I don't run out of material like Miss Snark. Have you checked out the History-Forum? I'd be happy to discuss them and more.
EMERGING
How and what a person writes is one way of measuring someone's true personality. "Little by little" writes Gustave de Beaumont in his analysis of the historian and sociologist Alexis de Toqueville(1805-1859), "his true personality began to emerge in his account of his travels."1 I feel the same is true of my poetry and essays: little by little my personality began to emerge throughout the years 1980 to 1992. Then, during the next nine years, 1992 to 2001, I found myself able to use language to open up a multiplication of meanings. I also found that no single perspective was adequate to the immense task facing the Baha'i who would understand the complexity of the issues of these several epochs.
Certain events give writers the sense, the tone, the texture, of the age they live in. Price grew up in the shadow of the bomb, the first stage of the nuclear age(1945-1962). Then, space exploration, beginning in its first decade 1959-1969; the Viet Nam War, the first TV war, civil rights and the assassination of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King--all these events before he was twenty-five--coming in quick succession after two world wars in the previous two epochs, put the stamp of instability on his times, gave him the sense that his was a new age and one with a dark heart.
"The problem that would become central to Toqueville's entire thought was the substitution of a democratic world for the aristocratic world."2 The central problem of the age for Price was the insensible decline of democracy in an anarchous and globalizing age. This decline he could see in his study of history, an endless succession of engagements with a past, and his study of politics, an endless succession of processes in a present, during which the dramatis personae in both fields were never fully able to fathom, control and command events.3 -Ron Price with thanks to Andre Jardin, Toqueville: A Biography, Peter Halban, London, 1988, 1p.71 and 2p.62; and 3 J.W. Swain, Edward Gibbon the Historian, MacMillan, London, 1966, p.70.
I can not record the transactions
of these days for the instruction
of the future; nor can I tell
of the latent causes of decay,
the slow and secret poison
in the long and slow decline
of a civilization that came
into the nineteenth century
when They brought to all
the Bridge which is sharper
than the sword and finer
than a hair.1 And so now
we watch the darkest hours
before the dawn and wonder,
in our puzzled wonder.
1 The Bab, Selections, p.96.
Ron Price
20 July 2001
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