ShaneHaven.com

Today I wanted to start a new feature for my blog. As my loyal readers will know – all three of you – I have tried to do things like this in the past. I used to have a person of the week feature, and I had to revive it from the dead a multiple times. I was trying to do a “PotW” each week, hence the name. I constantly found myself either not doing them, or scrambling to find something worthy to post. Instead of that I found the Historical Person of the Month may work better. For one, it is right down my alley; I study the subject constantly. Secondly, I only have to remember to update the topic twelve times per year. I can study individuals and find time to give them such a post. It won’t be too demanding on my behalf, and it could be interesting for you. One final disclaimer must be stated. I can not always post based on what I am researching in school. If I have to write a paper on any particular person or subject I must refrain from writing about them until all work had been submitted and returned. It is possible to plagiarize yourself, and I do not want to run into any academic trouble at my university.

ShaneHaven’s Historical Person of the Month for March 2010 goes to Suetonius who was a classical writer and pseudo-historian. We must call him a pseudo-historian because he was not a real historian. While many of the ancient writers did use classic documents, most have been lost or destroyed and they are no longer available to us. First, we can not account for their accuracy, and secondly there was no such thing has a historian back in the classic times. People were trained differently to write based off of the standards of rhetoric trying to evoke particular emotions based on the standards of the time. While Suetonius’ work, The Tweleve Caesars, may be horribly biased, it is a fascinating read. He often talks of the scandalous nature of the Roman Emperors and their thirst for bloodshed. In fact, he actually made Nero sound like Stewie Griffin because both tried to kill their mother so many times. By and by his work is the easiest primary source I have ever read, and it flows wonderfully. Of course I am reading a translated version because I do not know Latin, but my statement still stands. I have enjoyed thoroughly reading his book and that is why he is the Historical Person of the Month (HPM).

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I despise social historians. They just don’t get it. They have their use, but when it comes to the items which define humanity they are clueless. As a minor historian I can not say that I identify with there ideology. In fact, I don’t really identify with any particular field in full, but I come close to the military historian ideology. The reason which I am writing this is primarily based off of a course which I am undertaking. Last night, November 2, 2009, I came to realize the severity in which their philosophies present. The class is an American history course which focuses on the time period of 1920 – 1960. Currently, we are focusing on the 1940s and more specifically World War II. This is one of my favorite periods of history, and I know quite a bit about it. I sometimes like to question my professors on topics which I have extensively researched before, to see what their knowledge on the issue is. Now to be fair, my professor is not a specialist in WWII but rather Jazz and social history around the 1920s. However I asked him about General Mark W. Clark and his haste to take Rome, this was a topic of a research paper that I wrote last semester. To be short, since my paper was a twenty page paper, Clark got a lot of Americans killed for a symbolic reason at best. Mr. Professor said that the symbolic reason was on par with taking of North Africa, and the fighting in the streets of Berlin by the Russians. I mean that has no basis, especially since by the time Clark and the American troops got to Rome, the Germans had already left. He was clearly wrong, but he is pretty full of himself. Later on, Mr. Professor even said that the dropping of the A-Bombs on Japan was wrong. Now that is debatable, but he said that the class wasn’t allowed to contest him, and he wouldn’t have any discussion. I thought social historians were supposed to be the most open minded? I fully understand scholastic law, where the student loses their rights to things like free-speech while on campus, but this is plainly wrong. Mr. Professor also stated that invading mainland Japan wouldn’t have cost even one single American life.  I think most of the military would disagree with that, if they were still around to have their voice heard. Now this is just what the professor stated.

After the lecture period, we had a discussion on Studs Terkel’s work The Good War where students were able to discuss the book. What did I learn from my fellow scholars? That it was wrong for the United States to fight a war on the European front to try and stop the oppression of Nazi Germany on minorities. However America was wrong to institute camps for Japanese and Italian Americans. The icing on the cake had ot be calling my dead grandmother racist because she simply lived in the 1940s. I didn’t even mention her in discussion but one airhead of a student decided to label my family member as a racist because “everyone” was racist in the 40s. Does one not see the irony here? First war is bad because its messy and atrocities happen. Furthermore America is in the boat as Nazi Germany when it comes to camps but American isn’t allowed to get away with it when Germany executed six-million Jews alone, and countless other minorities. It just doesn’t make sense!

I really do think if WWII had to be fought today, and these people were in power, the Nazi regime would win. I could go further and say that if the U.S. had an A-Bomb dropped on them by say Nazi Germany and their fabled “New York Bomber” that they would simply say “thank you, but war is a brutal business that isn’t just in any occasion. Please take a third of the eastern seaboard for your own!” I am glad I am not cut from the same cloth. I just feat that these people are going to be teaching MY family if I choose to ever have one.

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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is at it again. The fanatical Iranian leader is further pushing the envelope on being one of the most hardcore contemporary Holocaust deniers. Of course you are unfamiliar with the likes of a ‘holocaust denier’ they contain the belief that no one ever attempted genocide on the Jewish population in Europe or the Middle East. According to the Associtated Press via Yahoo News, Ahmadinejad made a speech on Friday where he questioned whether or not the Holocaust actually happened. Nasser Karimi and Lee Keath of the AP writes:

During a speech Friday, he questioned whether the Holocaust was ‘a real event’ and called it a pretext used by Jews to trick the West into backing the creation of Israel. He said the Jewish state was created out of ‘a lie and a mythical claim.’¹

To an extent, I wish I could meet the Iranian leader. I wouldn’t want to talk to him. I hold a passionate contempt for the man. I see him as one who has the potential for being a modern day Adolf Hitler. What I would do at this meeting would be to hand him a copy of Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman’s Denying History: Who says the holocaust never happened and why do they say it? I would implore him to read it. If he did, I would love to hear his refutation. I do not understand how anyone can still be alive and hold such ideals. We all know that I have commented on Ahmadinejad previously. I don’t want to rehash too much of the old posts. However, I think it is hard for anyone to truly attempt to deny how Ahmadinejad feels. He continuously speaks of how the holocaust apparently never happened, and how they deserve to be destroyed.

For the previous posts on Iran, click here.

– END NOTES –

1. Nasser Karimi and Lee Keath, “Iran’s Ahmadinejad proud of Holocaust denial.” Associated Press, September 21, 2009, http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090921/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iran (accessed September 22, 2009).

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Today is a day that will forever be etched into my memory. Eight years ago, at about this very time that this post was published, the horrible events that would change the course of United States policy and history. I urge my readers to take some time today to ponder what has happened since then, and remember that no matter how secure we as United Statesians feel, there are still those who want to obliterate the country. Take some time to at least think about those who fell in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. Most importantly, never forget 9/11.

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I often ponder the actions of humanity and its place in the world. It is the nautre of a history major to contemplate such phenomena. Unfortunatley, I often see the dark side of the subject as it is what society seems to focus on. For a moment yesterday that did not happen. I quickly visited the CNN.com homepage to scan the headlines to see what was happening in the world when my eyes came accross the headline which read: “what is man’s greatest achievement?” This quick moment made me change the subject of my thinking for a good amount of time. I began to ponder the good that humanity has done throughout history instead of the wretched. I ended up clicking on the headline to read the short article – which turned out to be nothing but a report on a poll. The article never answered it’s own question so I figured that I could make a case for a particular accomplishment in the attempt to answer the question.

So what do I see as man’s greatest accomplishment? I am going to take the safe answer – the conquering of math, algebra, and geometry. It is hard to give credit to a particular group of humanity because it seems that each civilization developed their math off of other works from previous civilizations such as the Egyptions or the ancient Greeks. I feel that math is so important to the accomplishments of humanity because without it, many of the accomplishments would not have been possible. Whether it was the building of the pyramids in Egypt, the invention of flight by the Wright brothers, landing on the moon, or the invention of any product. Math works hand in hand with the sciences to develop things like the refridgerator, or the steam engine. The development of math throughout the years have brought on many of the fancy things that man has achieved. It is easy to name many of the fancy inventions of man but it is easy to forget the building blocks that allowed humanity’s accomplishments.

With that said it is important to mention the signifcance of today. On this day, forty years ago, man walked on the moon. This is a big accomplishment of man and if you look at the history of flight it is quite amazing that only 66 years after the invention of human flight that man was able to fly to the moon. Today is a day to cherish being human.

* As a tribute to the moon landing this post was posted at 7:56pm which is the approximate time that Neil Armstrong said his famous quote and stepped down onto the moon’s surface. *

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