This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

War of 1812

Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen

From knowing your history to looting the White House, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.

Does It Help to Know History?

Adam Gopnik
New Yorker

About a year ago, I wrote about some attempts to explain why anyone would, or ought to, study English in college. The point, I thought, was not that studying English gives anyone some practical advantage on non-English majors, but that it enables us to enter, as equals, into a long existing, ongoing conversation. It isn’t productive in a tangible sense; it’s productive in a human sense. The action, whether rewarded or not, really is its own reward. The activity is the answer.

It might be worth asking similar questions about the value of studying, or at least, reading, history these days, since it is a subject that comes to mind many mornings on the op-ed page. Every writer, of every political flavor, has some neat historical analogy, or mini-lesson, with which to preface an argument for why we ought to bomb these guys or side with those guys against the guys we were bombing before. But the best argument for reading history is not that it will show us the right thing to do in one case or the other, but rather that it will show us why even doing the right thing rarely works out. The advantage of having a historical sense is not that it will lead you to some quarry of instructions, the way that Superman can regularly return to the Fortress of Solitude to get instructions from his dad, but that it will teach you that no such crystal cave exists. What history generally “teaches” is how hard it is for anyone to control it, including the people who think they’re making it. [continue reading]

The Odd Objects Looted From Washington DC in 1814

BBC News

It’s been 200 years since the British burned Washington, but objects looted in 1814 will probably never be returned, writes Tammy Thueringer. Other than an off-colour tweet and subsequent apology by the British Embassy, the bicentennial of the punitive mission of 1814 that left the US capital in flames has received little attention this week.

The burning was one of the final events of the often-forgotten War of 1812, a conflict which saw the US try and fail to grab bits of Canada and Britain try and fail to blockade the US. British troops torched the White House, Treasury and parts of the Capitol Building in a punitive mission near the end of the war. They also looted what they could, effectively collecting “souvenirs”. After the attack, the Royal Navy sailed to Bermuda with their spoils, included four paintings of King George III and Queen Charlotte, a grandfather clock and President James Madison’s personal government receipt book. Today, the artworks hang in two Bermuda government buildings and the clock is in private hands. [continue reading]

3,000 Photos of Middle East From 1867-1914 Now Online

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