Have a Good NEWS

As a young man, I briefly toyed with the notion that I might get myself a nice Ph.D. in history. I was a fairly unaggressive student as an undergraduate, but the one category of classes I really did enjoy, in which I actually even tended to do the reading, was history. My first class on the French Revolution opened my eyes and set my mind ablaze, and I will always remember fondly my professor, Dennis O'Brien. An extremely witty man, gay though not exactly open about it (though also not exactly closeted either), quite self-consciously campy, he would half-jokingly profess himself a great admirer of the monarchy and a believer in enlightened despotism as the highest form of rule. I called him "Citoyen de Brienne" once in class, and he took very histrionic umbrage.

He loved a line he attributed to Frederick the Great. The emperor was touring the prisons and pointed at a prisoner. He asked what that man was in for. The guard replied nervously that it was for having sex with horses. "Well," bellowed Frederick. "Get that man out of this prison and put him in the infantry!"

I remember on the first day of class he asked for a show of hands on the question, "How many of you think people are basically good and usually do the right thing?" About half raised their hands (I didn't). In mock sadness he smiled ruefully and said, perhaps thinking of what he would later tell us about Saint-Just and other notables, "Well, I'm afraid you might have kind of a tough time with this class."

I never got that Ph.D., but I have read me some history, as I suspect all of you have, and so today we visit the subject of great works of history. There are of course so many to choose from. In fact there are so many that today's quiz has 12 questions. Eight concern Americans and four Brits. Thinking caps on? Let's do it.

1. Perhaps the first great work of history in the Enlightenment was Edward Gibbon, and in six volumes is described:
a. The Greco-Roman wars
b. The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire
c. The "Mohametan" conquest of Iberia

2. Whose history of the French Revolution recounts Robespierre's death thus: "The Gendarmes point their swords at him, to show the people which is he. A woman springs on the Tumbril; clutching the side of it with one hand, waving the other Sibyl-like; and exclaims: "The death of thee gladdens my very heart, m'enivre de joi"; Robespierre opened his eyes; "Scélérat, go down to Hell, with the curses of all wives and mothers!" -- At the foot of the scaffold, they stretched him on the ground till his turn came. Lifted aloft, his eyes again opened; caught the bloody axe. Samson wrenched the coat off him; wrenched the dirty linen from his jaw: the jaw fell powerless, there burst from him a cry; -- hideous to hear and see. Samson, thou canst not be too quick!"
a. J.M. Thompson
b. Thomas Carlyle
c. Georges Lefebvre

3. Charles Beard turned historiography of the American Constitution on its head in 1913 with a work that offered what novel examination of the Constitution:
A. Economic Interpretation
B. An analysis from the perspective of the peasants
c. A slaveholder's understanding

4. This British historian who explored the rise and decline of world cultures and societies was so celebrated as to make the cover of Time magazine in 1947, in between volumes six and seven of his A Study of History:
a. Hugh Trevor-Roper
b. Oswald Spengler
C. Arnold Toynbee

5. This is the most well-known historian of the American frontier developed the thesis that the westward expansion and the constant Taming the wilderness to prepare the American character wholly separate from any other national identity:
a. William Dean Howells
b. Frederick Jackson Turner
c. Richard Hofstadter

6. A 29-year-old Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. won a Pulitzer Prize for his still-admired 1945 history of what early American president?
a. Andrew Jackson
b. John Quincy Adams
c. Thomas Jefferson

7. This American historian brought a literary style to his critique of war, especially in his The Great War in Modern Memory, which Joseph Heller called "the best book I know of" about World War I.
a. John Keegan
B. Taylor
C. Paul Fussell

8. Who wrote of his masterful working-class history that he was "seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand-loom weaver, the 'Utopian' artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity"?
a. Victor Kiernan
b. Ralph Miliband
c. E.P. Thompson

9. Martin Luther King called the book that the historian "historic Bible" civil rights movement:
a. C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow
B. John Hope Franklin 's From Slavery to Freedom
c. James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom

10. Though not a trained historian, her seminal 1970 work The Dialectic of Sex brought together and critiqued the works of Freud, Marx, de Beauvoir and others to offer a radical feminist interpretation of history and politics:
a. Shulamith Firestone
b. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
c. Ellen Willis

11. This American historian who wrote a landmark history of slavery Roll, Jordan, Roll, was a rather strict Marxist, a young man, and (it 'u still alive), and the harsh neo-conservatives, as older 1.
a. Russell Jacoby
b. Eugene Genovese
c. Sidney Hook

12. David Levering Lewis is the first author to win back-to-back Pulitzer Prizes for his two-volume biography (1994 and 2001) on what important figure in African American history?
A. Marcus Garvey
b. Frederick Douglass
c. W.E.B. Du Bois

Let's go below the fold.

Answers: 1-b, 2-b, 3-and 4-c, 5-b, 6-a, 7, 8-c, 9-a, 10 a, 11-b 12-c.

I'm guessing this was maybe a little tougher than usual. My fake answers tend to be plausible on this one, so in many cases you just had to know the right answer. I did this intentionally just to see how things would turn out today. Even with that said, I expect strong results from you lot.

Notes:
1. If you do not t 'get this one you have to stop here and now.
2. Fun fact: Carlyle had finished about half of the book (I think, about 200 thousand words) and loaned it to his friend John Stuart Mill. Mill House 'burned, and the manuscript Carlisle' with him. He rewrote it all and, apparently, Mill bore no ill will.
3. Seminal book for people on the left in particular, and arguably way ahead of its time.
4. Especially easy to Britons, but I do not think the teeth nor the Yankees.
5. Reverse of above.
6. One of those you had to know.
7. What a stunning book, one whose reading was a really memorable experience.
8. Tough fake answers, as they were all, so to speak, comrades. Kiernan, incidentally, once wrote a sort of Marxist history of Tobacco that I thought was wonderful.
9. Maybe the toughest of the bunch because the fakes are so plausible.
10. Really great book of its time that has led many women in the study of history.
11. The old moving-left-to-right-without-really-changing-ones-temperament story.
12. Another one you had to know. Two Pulitzers, fairly impressive eh?

Now, as usual, tell us not only how you did, but share with the rest of us some historians and histories you love.

Have a Good NEWS