Philobiblon

So what is the Carnival of Bad History? That is a question I’ve spent a lot of time answering in the past couple of weeks, to thoughts along the lines of “but aren’t carnivals about good things?” So perhaps we should call it “the carnival of good posts about bad history”, but then that’s a bit of a mouthful, so I guess we’re stuck with the current title.

So what are my qualifications for hosting? Well by profession I’m a journalist – which means I belong to the group very often responsible for some of the worst excesses of bad history. I was thinking back to all of the history stories I’ve written over the years; I suspect the worst would have been 250 words on a 100-year-old stuffed armadillo. One of those last-minute things – here was a picture. Write about it. Wouldn’t be that hard now, but this was in the pre-internet age… so I fear what I did was repeat every cliche I’d ever heard about the Victorians. Luckily, however, this WAS the pre-internet age, so the evidence is hidden in yellowing newsprint in the archives.

That doesn’t make me sound like much of the host, so I guess I’d better also tell my “good” bad history story. I made a small mark with people of a kind who (sadly) no longer matter a jot at The Times (London) when I pointed out the problem with some famous columnist’s rhetorical use of Ozymandias, who the writer had building pyramids. But, I said, Ozymandias – or at least the statue that inspired Shelley – was Ramses the Great, who would not even have thought of constructing such – pyramids being about a millennia out of fashion. Yes – it might be an arcane point, but it is the sort of thing that still gets retired professors writing to The Times, or bloggers warming up their fingers.

So, without further ado… the carnival. And since just as the last refuge for a journalist out of ideas is alliteration, the last refuge of a historian out of ideas is chronology, this is roughly arranged by date – but complaints of bad chronology will not be entertained…

So I’ll start with a bit of very early prehistory – otherwise known as paleontology – as thought about in 1807 by Charlotte Smith. She was working her way from very bad history – fossils as freaks of nature, towards a more scientific explanation.

Staying, to be technical, prehistoric – Stonehenge. On Jennie’s Rambles, she reminds readers, and her students, that it “is NOT some giant sundial! “ (But it is a rather funny cartoon… Sorry!)

For Glaukopidos, ancient imperialism is being, it seems repeated. Describing other gods as “equivalents” to certain Greek and Roman gods is seriously inaccurate, she suggests.

I’m not sure that I’d agree with everything in this post, but on The Unknown Islam, Abu Sahajj has some interesting thoughts in The Unknown Islam in America – the bad history lying in the fact the refusal to acknowledge some of it.

On Walking the Berkshires, GreenmanTim tries to tease the good history from the bad in the story of Sarah Bishop, the Hermit of West Mountain, a woman who chose to live for 30 years alone in a small cave in the wilderness in the late 18th and early 19th century.

I’ve rejected several nominations that seemed to me to refer only to contemporary American politics, without historical focus at all, but I had no problems including a submission for Orac’s post on Respectful Insolence about the comparisons between the Iraq War and the American Civil War. Whatever you think about the former, it is clear that the account of the latter is being twisted for political purposes.

Now I’m not sure this post really deserves to be here – it seems rather fun history to me, but it was nominated, so check out on Mark A Rayner’s The Skwib, the The Lost PowerPoint Slides (Henri Bergson Edition). And yes for the literal-minded, I have noticed there was no Powerpoint back then – lucky them!

Bad history about the Jews is not hard to find in history, but Brett D. Hirsch on Sound and Theory has found in a 1938 anti-Semitic children’s book just how antisemites are either “lazy, or just plain unoriginal?”

Some of the controversies here are just going to run and run, and that’s certainly true of the debate about the aims and actions of Arthur “Bomber” Harris in Dresden and other places. Brett Holman on Airminded takes issue with “Orac’s post critiquing Richard Dawkins’ comments”. (Yes I did cut and paste that to make sure I got it right.)

And then there’s that other Bad History Carnival regular – the Hitler comparison. Joerg W has collected a stack of them on Atlantic Review.

Then finally – a post so broad in chronology that I couldn’t place it in the run above: On Westminster Wisdow, Gracchi finds an Anglican Anachronism – a modern-day bishop projecting back his own views on democracy to the past.

I hope you found that a good display of bad history. Now just as when you write a column about grammar you’re bound to get picked up on some such error within, I’m sure I’ll have made an error in here somewhere. Please consider it a further display of bad history, and correct it immediately…

When I’m handling a 350,000-year-old hand-axe at the British Museum, which was made by one of the ancestors of the Neanderthals, a Homo heidelbergensis (or if you prefer an early Neanderthal – not all the experts use that terminology), two questions (possibly inter-related) come up: did we kill them off? did we interbreed with them?

Having just read John Hawks excellent Neanderthal genome FAQ I’m going to have to amend my answer to the second question. (Which was: “the current evidence says we didn’t”. It will now be “there’s some limited, early evidence that we might have done.”)

I was using the mitochondrial DNA evidence outlined here, but seems that isn’t now thought to be enough – because mitochondrial DNA is only a small part of the story.

That second link also has a simpler outline of the debate, if you’re finding John Hawks hard going…

The History Carnival No 43 is now up at Axis of Evel Knievel. My eye was particularly caught by some alternative history – what would have happened had the Gunpowder Plot succeeded, and a spectacularly entertaining and probably time-wasting online source, Kirby’s Wonderful and Scientific Museum: or Magazine of Remarkable Characters; Including all the Curiosities of Nature and Art from the Remotest Period to the Present Time, Drawn from Every Authentic Source.

But it is a huge carnival, so you are bound to pick out other favourites…

And while I’m pointing to resources, BBC Radio Four’s In Our Time, on the Peasants’ Revolt (the English 14th-century one) is rather good. You should be able to listen to that for at least a week. Or you can download it.