lecture 1.1

introduction to the class and the 20th century

Transcript

Hi, and welcome to the class. In the course catalog this class is called 20th century world history. And the description says that this class is, and I'm reading from it "a critical analysis of global historical changes in the 20th century, and how they shaped the world we live in today. Students explore popular revolutions, world wars, and the Cold War, social and cultural change, capitalism, imperialism, and decolonization, environmental crises, technological innovation, and other contemporary global developments". Wow, that is quite a mouthful. My name is Juliette Levy and I will be walking you through that. Actually, I'm not. I am going to be telling you stories during this quarter, it you'll be hearing them from my voice. But I can't promise that we're going to follow that very convoluted description for this class, you're going to hear this voice in this podcast, and many others, which are in fact, the lectures for this class. It's a gorgeous day where I am, and I hope it is a gorgeous day, wherever you are. And whenever you listen to this lecture, this is the first lecture in the class. And it's the first podcast in your sequence, it's followed by lecture 1.2. Today, I really want to spend a little time telling you what history is, and why history might matter to maths, engineering, biochem, and computer science students. History is not just a discipline, different from yours, history is memory. History is context. History is what we remember, and what is remembered. And as such, it's flexible, it's malleable, it's an ever changing thing. Well, think about your first day on campus, depending how long ago that was, it will have a very different feel a very different hue. If you'd written a diary entry on about that first day, on your first day, it would probably read really differently than if I asked you to write about that first day today. It's not that the diary entry would be wrong, or that you're lying about it today. So your perspective over that experience, your memory of it has changed over time, you have changed as well. So as you change in the presence, your perspective of the past, also changes. And this is one of the ways in which the present and the past are in constant conversation with one another. A static version of history assumes strict paths for the present for the past and for the future. Your lived experience should already have exposed you to the fact that this is just not so we're constantly reassessing our past, we're constantly reinterpreting our present. And thereby we're also constantly impacting our future. So just as the past and the present, are in constant conversation, the future the past are intimately and intricately connected. You may think that you don't like history, or that a class like this, can't possibly have any bearing on your future as a physicist or as a computer programmer, or as a lawyer or as a business person. I hope to convince you otherwise, I don't mean to transform you into historians. But I just hope that by the end of class, you'll understand what I mean when I say that history is memory. And you'll know how important your understanding of where we've been, how important that is to understand where we're going and where we are. Let me start with a little example about technology and innovations. There's really sort of seductive notion that great inventors just appear they make breakthroughs. They're geniuses, like almost in a vacuum, right? Elon Musk is you know, they're poof out of nowhere, SpaceX and Tesla. But all these inventions have backstories. All these people have backstories. And those backstories are not always clear. Tesla, the company in the name of the company itself, harks back to Nikola Tesla, who was alive 100 years ago and made himself made great innovations that inspired Elon Musk. And the biography of Elon Musk himself, right? If we're thinking about people will be written over and over again. And every time it will recast him in a different light. And sometimes that light is going to be really, really sort of flattering, and sometimes not so much. The fact is no machine, no innovation, no innovator just appeared out of the blue. Each innovation is in fact the product of innovations that came before it. It is the product of inventors that had lives and values, all of which matter to what they produced. I mean, the fact that today we still associate technological innovation with masculine traits, because for years, women inventors were sidelined and ignored. That is a product of values. And it has impacted our world in multiple ways. It's got nothing to do with technology and everything to do with humans. So yes, Technology is a construct. And it has a history. And that history impacts how you think about tech, what you may want to innovate on. There's an issue here that is one of the examples of the present and the future being impacted by the past. There's a great quote by William Gibson, a great sci-fi cyberpunk author. And it goes like this: "when the past is always with you, it may as well be present. And if it is present, it will be future as well". Well, that doesn't solve our question, which is 'what is the past'? All right, well, this class is called the Long 20th century. So what does that mean? The century starts on January 1, 1900. So the first in the series should be zero. But this first lecture is lecture 1.1. So which is it is the first year of the century 1900 or 1901? Let me tell, you in terms of historical events, they really don't care what year it is. And to the passing of time, the fact that as of January 1 1900, humans would now refer to it as the first year of the 20th century, that makes no difference. With humans, they need structure, which is why they've tried to mark the movement of the planets around the sun, and through its orbit by organizing it into seasons in years and months, and weeks and days. And we have to organize those structures in a way that to most people, and that may include some of you, the discipline of history is simply the study of the past, or the recollection of events or people in the past. Your survey answers are wonderfully explicit on that front, and I'm really grateful to you for your honest answers. I'm quoting, "excruciatingly boring", is what some of you said about history. "What's the point of it so tedious", "Who cares about dates and kings?" You know, honestly, I blame your history teachers in high school for those opinions. Because if I had to memorize dates of battles and names of kings, I would hate history too. But there are other ways of thinking about history. And I'll tell you about those in a second. But I just want you to know that I will never ask you to remember a date, you might need to know what comes before or after something. So get the sequence, right. But there's no memorization in this class. All right. So when I was in college, I had to read a really short book called "What is History" by a British scholar named Edward Hallett Carr. It's a great little book, and to those of you who are interested by what I'm going to talk about next, pick it up. It's just easy reading. Carr wrote a book called What is history in 1961, a time of some major shifts in the global balance as you'll learn in this class. The book is based on a series of lectures he gave about historiography. Now what is historiography?Historiography means the writing of history. So that's essentially the act of making history. Was Carr was saying, was that history?[cough] Excuse me. See, I tell you, I'm gonna keep those coughs in there. I am real, and I don't produce hyper produced podcasts.

So Carr posits that History is an unending dialogue between the present and the past. Carr's argument was that any historical analysis could only ever be an interpretation, biased, inevitably, by the author's perspective, right? By their point of view, by their own place of history. So what he was saying is that historians are biased because they're human, the same way that humans cough, they are biased, and that they have a perspective that is determined by their point of view. So today, we'd call that positionality. Carr was effectively saying that there is no objective truth to be found in  History, that positionality really determines truth, and therefore there can be no truth. What he was saying was that what makes a historical fact historically relevant is a matter of opinion. He would say that the decision to teach history by focusing on kings and the battles is a reflection of a particular worldview, that coconsiders that, perhaps it's more important to focus on the kings and their battles than the people who earned to pay taxes so that the Kings could fund their wars. So this isn't to say that Carr was saying that there is no truth in history. That truth is positional, that there are different ways of understanding historical facts, and that we should not ever assume that one perspective is the only perspective. There are other ways of thinking about this. Here, I'm going to invoke Hilary Mantel, a British novelist who  recently passed away. She is perhaps best known for three novels of historical fiction about Thomas Cromwell, she wrote them and you might have heard about Thomas Cromwell,  he played a significant role in some of the marriages of King Henry the Eighth, the one who beheaded a few of his wives. And he also ended up beheading Cromwell himself and 1540. So we're talking this is a while ago, Cromwell is often portrayed as a conniving man. As a plotter, but in the novels of Hillary Mantella rewrites his story, she reimagines it from the perspective of him as a human being as the son of a British commoner. And she essentially redraws his role in British history, not necessarily as the sort of the architect of the British reformation, but as a human being with some serious issues that he tried to impact. So essentially, she changed the lens and presented Cromwell differently. In her first lecture, she gave a series of brief lectures for the BBC, in 2017, Hilary Mantel has to say this about history. And I'm going to quote, it's a long quote, relatively long, "it is possible for competent historians to come to radically different conclusions on the basis of the same evidence. Because of course, 99% of the evidence above all, unrecorded speech is not available to us. Fact, evidence is always partial facts are not truth. Though they are part of it. Information is not knowledge. And history is not the past, it is the method we have evolved of organizing our ignorance of the past. It's the record of what's left on the record. It's the plan of the positions taken when we stopped the dance to note them down. It's what's left in the sieve, when the centuries have run through it. A few stones, scraps of writing scraps of cloth, it's no more the past, and a birth certificate is a birth, or script as a performance or map is a journey. It's the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with the incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who perform them. It's no more than the best we can do. And often it falls short of that." 

I love that image of history as what stays stuck in the sieve, that there are a whole lot of things we'll never know will never capture. And that therefore we have to be so very careful when we interpret what is leftover. We have to be explicit about that fact that there is always a bit of new history to be found and another sieve, a new lens with which to approach it. Now there are plenty of people who would say this is completely ludicrous to believe that there is a history with a capital H. And that we can somehow write that history, and discover how something was and be certain that it was so. This class is not that place. I've already told you that history is three different things. It's memory. It's what's left over, like the scraps that Hilary Mantel mentions. And it's positionality is depends on who where you are and who you are. This class is not going to tell you that there is a straight path to figuring out what happened. Because historical evidence- what historians call primary sources,- is itself produced by humans, and it's produced by humans in a context that we need to understand in order to properly analyze the evidence. When historians interpret that source, they bring their own lived experience their scholarly methods and their biases into the analyses. So you, as budding scholars of mathematics or physics, and in this class -history, be aware of what is left in the sieve and be aware of what might lead to historians to come to radically different conclusions about the same scraps of history. Be aware of what you bring to your reading of the evidence. This is why when we try to assess if the 20th century was long or not as the subtitle of the name of this class suggests, we have to consider what evidence has been used to determine that length. For example, Brad DeLong, an economic historian observes that the long 20 century usually refers to the period between 1870 and 2010. And it's largely defined by economic metrics. And those economic metrics are largely European and North American. 1870 marks a period when 150 years of industrial Asia's industrialization, some parts of Europe and the US coalesced with transportation and organizational innovations. The modern corporation was born, Industrial Research Lab flourished and globalization's as we refer to it today became the norm. In 1870, approximately 70% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty. In 2010, that number was less than 9%. The innovations in medicine, food production labor organization of the period meant that in aggregate, people live longer, eat more and work less than in the previous century. I hope it's dawning on you where this perspective may start to falter. We have enormous amounts of data about European economies that were the first to industrialize, and American states that became the birthplace of American industry and the magnet of so much immigration from Europe. So if we're looking for data on economic activity and see the world in terms of that, we will develop a perspective that prioritizes economic growth as the historical driver. What if we turn the prospective upside down and focus on African nations? Their timeline will be defined by a completely different set of values. Or what if we take Hobbsbawm's perspective on the short 20th century, which is defined by the rise and fall of communism in Europe? And let's apply that to Asia? How does the story change? Or maybe geography is not the metric - when you define the 20th century by when women became enfranchised, when they became empowered members of whatever country they lived in? And that century may not have even begun yet for some? I asked you ultimately, what does it matter how long a century is, if we're not all free to discuss it, as the men and women in Iran and Ukraine and Russia and Saudi Arabia and Nicaragua and Mexico and Singapore, ask them how long a century is? All this to say, it is challenging enough to figure out when the century starts, it's even more challenging to try to define whose history, whose century we're discussing. In this class, we will take a really generous view of this definition. And I will try to give you a general perspective on historical processes and events. In a chronological sense, I will try to convince that there are many perspectives on how this chronology unfolds, you have a sense of why the Mexican and Russian Revolution were important, and how computing transformed the world into 20th century. But why a man called Gandhi and his ideals were just as transformational. I also hope you know that revolutions and industrial leaders and even political leaders are remembered because historians continue to write about them. And that you can add to those stories and write new ones by continuing to explore the historical record and discover new ways of approaching the past. So before we end this lecture, how about a few date details about this first ticket of the 20th century?

Let me do my job as a historian right. First off on December 31 1899, the people of Paris New York, Mexico City website is New Delhi, Manila, and many other places, probably celebrated New Year's Eve, much like we would today. Today, we're December 31. That'd be some partying maybe a late night. Probably too much drinking and a hangover. January 1 1900, was the first day of the new century. Although some would insist that that wouldn't happen. Another 90 No one, right, Math. This is the decade when Einstein made his greatest contributions to science. He wrote most of his work on quantum physics in 1905. And it was by all accounts a miraculous year for modern quantum physics. So anyone studying physics in this class, your subject matter would be so different. If 1905 hadn't happened if Einstein hadn't happened in 1905. A little bit earlier in 1903, Marie Curie had become the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize for her work on radiation, or a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Originally, the prize was going to be announced for Pierre Curie, her husband and Henri Becquerel, their co-author, because since she was a woman, she couldn't possibly have contributed to those innovations, right? So when her husband found this out, he complained bitterly to the Nobel Committee and Marie Curie was rightfully added to the prize. The 20th century is in fact a century when women's rights become a constant political and cultural movement. That movement continues to be incomplete, as we can observe right now in many countries, including this one. But Marie Curie's Nobel Prize can be seen as a bellwether moment, she wouldn't become the first female professor at the University of Paris, even if her membership at the French Academy of Sciences would continue to be declined. In fact, the French Academy of Science did not accept a woman amongst the ranks until 1962. And a cruel twist for anyone wanting to do research on the security using her documents using the primary sources that she worked with the notebooks who wrote him, you'd have to do it using some pretty serious protective clothing. Most of her documents are saved in lead lined boxes because of the high levels of radiation they still emit to this day, 100 years later, more than 100 years later, a consequence of the ionizing radiation that she was working on - the negative effects of that radiation would only be understood well after her death from the effects of that radiation. What else is going on in the 20th century? Well, in the early decades of the 20th century, much of the African continent was under colonial rule of European countries Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain all claimed a piece of the continent. Spain and Portugal and France recently lost their American colonies in the 19th century. And with the other European powers, they joined in extracting labor and wealth from the continent. In fact, on January 4 1900, in Lagos, Nigeria, formal ceremonies were being held to lower the flag of the Royal newspaper company and replace it with the British flag as the United Kingdom took over administration of Nigeria, just like that. The early 1900s also sees the continuation of the Boer War where war refers to the Dutch settlers or settlers of Dutch origin in what is today South Africa, Lesotho and Eswatini - and the Boer War  saw the Boers fighting against the British Empire's power there - so that there was sort of conflict between these Dutch settlers and the United Kingdom. Both sides in this conflict employed non white labor in the confrontations. In fact, many African soldiers were engaged on both sides to fight this completely colonial war. And Gandhi, who is Indian and would be key in the fight for Indian independence in the 1930s and 40s, was in fact attached to one of the ambulance corps on the British side. The success of the wars punched holes into the impression of an all powerful British dominance and inspired many others to question the power of the British Empire elsewhere. And that's going become really important to Gandhi's actions in the future, and continuing on the colonial theme, Queen Victoria died in 1901. And we can imagine that her funeral procession was really quite a lot like Queen Elizabeth's if you watched some of it on TV last year. Over the course of 100 plus years, some things change, some don't. And we can imagine that it was really important for the organizers of the funeral procession of Elizabeth to convey that the royal family would remain, that nothing changed here. Which brings us back to the theme of this class. One of the themes, which is that some things will change a lot over the 20th century. And some things won't change that much. And I look forward to you discovering which do and which don't. Now, before I close, I want to explain how these podcasts are organized.  Each module covers a different decade of the 20th century. The .1 podcast will cover general events of that decade,  events that you should know as a university student. The .2 podcasts also covers that same decade and events that are relevant, but it does so from the perspective of my great grandmother, who was born at the beginning of the 20th century on August 10, 1900. Now some of you might wonder, why am I bringing my personal history into this class? Why is my great grandmother relevant? And let me just take a few more minutes to explain why. As Carr reminded us in 1961, history is personal. Whether you're interested in the history of military aircraft or the history of post colonial India, you are bringing your own perspective to the questions you ask, and the evidence you deem relevant and the books you read. In fact, my personal perspective is part of any interests that I have your personal perspective defines who you are. Most of you in this class are not history majors, but I can guarantee that your personal perspective impacted what you choose to study. If your computer is studying computer science, biology or engineering, you may think that you were being objective when you chose that. But you can only be objective by being explicit about your personal bias. And that does not eliminate that bias. So telling you the history of the 20th century in part through my great grandmother makes that bias explicit. It also allows you to see history as a personal experience. History is not the just the stuff of textbooks, which by the way we don't have in this class. History is not just what was assigned in class history is what your parents, your grandparents, and your great grandparents experience. History is their memory of your birth. History is not foreign to you. It is literally the path that explains how you got to where you are today. One thing I really hope you learn is that history is not a straight unidirectional narrative. Expert historians may be the ones who spend the most time trying to analyze the historical evidence that historians are not the ones who decide what history matters whose history gets told. That is, in many ways, really up to you. I've assigned a reading this week by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. And it's in the first module in which she makes an impassioned plea to her audience not to get wedded to a single story. And I'm asking you to do the same. Do not get wedded to one version of the facts to one single history. We Contain Multitudes. Welcome to the class.