Borderland: Ukrainian History

16 members attended the meeting of the club last night at the Kensington Row Bookshop to discuss Ukrainian History. A number of books had been suggested, and the discussion was about Ukraine generally rather than about a specific book. However most of the members present had read Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine by Anna Reid. The discussion was enlivened by the fact that one of the members present had visited the country in the 1960s,  and another member in the early 1990s and again recently.

An online video had been identified for the members on the history of Ukraine as well as the associated book available on Kindle. So too, members were informed of this article on Ukrainian history, with the great set of 22 historical maps published with it.

Opening of the Discussion

The history of Ukraine is one of extreme suffering. Polish and Russian overlords dominated ethnic Ukrainian serfs during the 17th and 18th century; moreover there were raids by Cossack bands and periodic warfare. In the 20th century, after the Russian revolution, what is now Ukraine was divided and was wracked by wars among local factions, and between the Soviet and White armies. In the 1920s and 30s, as part of the Soviet Union, Ukrainians suffered famine and purges. It was a major battleground between the Soviet and Axis forces in the Second World War; the Nazi's on being driven out of the region committed massacres and the Communists on regaining possession retaliated against those that they perceived as traitorous. After the break up of the Soviet Union, Ukrainians suffered more than most of the other former republics from economic decline and bad government. Of course today the country is in crisis having lost Crimea, and with the east in turmoil.

We noted that Jews, everywhere an endangered minority in Europe, had migrated in significant numbers to areas that are now parts of Ukraine. They were there a despised group, suffering not only the deprivations of their neighbors but Cossack raids and what was described at a first Holocaust lead by Cossacks led by Bohdan Chmielick. Even today the term Cossack has a connotation of excessive violence (which dates in part to their service to the Romanov Tsars) that is especially vivid in many Jewish memories. The Nazi's killed virtually all the Jews in the Ukraine during the 20th century Holocaust.

Source of map: Talking Points Memo

Creating a Ukrainian Country

We spent some time reviewing the process by which Ukraine came to be a sovereign state. The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was first created after World War I, out of parts of what had been the Russian empire, notably what had been called Little Russia and South Russia. It was a founding and integral part of the USSR. Many of the functions of a national government were carried out from Moscow rather than from Kiev; many people who were born in or lived for a long time in Ukraine played an important role in the government of the USSR (notably Khrushchev, Andropov, and Brezhnev).

Western lands were added by conquest to the Ukraine SSR in World War II. Crimea was transferred from the Russian SSR to the Ukraine SSR in 1954.

At the time of the creation of the United Nations (and its decentralized agencies) Ukraine was made a member state of the UN. This took place in spite of the fact that the foreign affairs of the Ukraine SSR were both formally and actually managed by the government of the USSR from Moscow (as the foreign affairs of U.S. states are managed by the federal government in Washington).

Thus when the USSR broke up in 1991, and Ukraine became an independent country, there was no Ukrainian experience of managing many aspects of the governance of an independent state. Moreover, the country was assembled in the 20th century from regions with very different histories,  economies and cultures.

Why Was Ukrainia So Badly Governed?

The question was asked by one of our members.

For the decade after independence, the Ukrainian economy suffered a huge decline -- more severe even than the Russian economy. There was massive corruption in government, and a oligarchy formed of people who had taken advantage to accumulate extreme wealth. Massive popular demonstrations (the Orange Revolution and Euromaidan) resulted in changes in the administration.

It was suggested that the answer lay in a history in which the land had been governed for centuries by the extremely autocratic Russian Tsars and then by the extremely autocratic Communist governments of the USSR. While Ukrainian society formally tried to draw from western political models of democracy and western economic models of free market capitalism, it had not historically developed the institutions to make those models work well.  Indeed, it tended to fall back on autocratic government and extraction of benefits from favoritism by the autocrats that had characterized the USSR and the Tsarist Russian empire.

About the Ukrainian National Identity

One of our members mentioned that he had not been able to find a reference to a Ukrainian people before the Napoleonic wars and the early 1800s. We tossed around the idea that the creation of an ethnic "Ukrainian" identity was part of the rise of nationalism in the 19th century. We suggested that that identity was built around a number of elements:

• The Ukrainian language, which is one of the Slavic languages (quite similar to Russian). Its first grammar was published in 1818 and its first dictionary in 1823. Taras Shevchenko became famous writing poetry in the language. Still many people in Ukraine speak Russian as their "first language" and many more speak Russian as well as Ukrainian. An anecdote was shared of a meeting with Ukrainian officials that broke up because the officials had to attend their class in the Ukrainian language.
• Geography: Ukrainians are people who live in Ukraine (or near it; there are apparently millions of "ethnic" Ukrainians in Poland). During the existence of the USSR, many people who would have considered themselves Ukrainian moved (or were moved) to other parts of the USSR.
• History: a history of Little Russia, was published in the 19th century, the first of the formal histories that Ukrainians could conceive of as their own. But ethnic identity is formed around the stories people tell themselves of the past of their kind. In the case of ethnic Ukrainians that story included the Kievan Rus who ruled the largest area in Europe a thousand years ago, and the Cossack Hetmanate, composed of people who escaped from serfdom and revolted against foreign domination.
• Religion, especially the Orthodox religion. It was pointed out that Orthodox churches tend to be nationalistic supporting the national government. In the case of Galicia, affiliation with the Uniate church was also important in creating a sense of ethnic identity.
• The educational system: beginning with higher education in the 19th century, and much more broadly in the 20th, schools taught the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian history,
• Definition by others: Poles, Russians, and Germans saw the Ukrainian peasants as people to be conquered and/or exploited.
• Ukrainians could define themselves as not Poles, not Russians, not Ottomans, not Germans, not any of the other neighboring ethic groups with whom they had little in common and indeed much to fear.
• Common local bonds: For the villagers in the land that became Ukraine, the only people that they could look to for aid and support were their neighbors and local community. Those were the people that could be looked to for the "ethnic identity" of "people like me". It was suggested that that cultural concept may have persisted.

Still, there was some discussion as to how strong the ethnic identity could be in a nation state so recently become independent, with so complex a history and so diverse a geography. The example of Ireland was brought up, as a country that uses one language (English) for government and day to day living, but in which the people value a language few speak well (Irish) as part of their ethnic history and identity. So too, it was questioned whether the members present did not feel that they were America, even though most could trace their ancestry back to relatively recent immigrants.

Accession to the European Union and NATO

In 2012, the EU signed deals on free trade and political association with Ukraine. but with conditions that members thought could not be met. Plans were formalized for Ukraine to join NATO in 2008, but were shelved in 2010 when Viktor Yanukovych was elected Ukrainian president.

It was noted that the highest wages in Ukraine tend to be in the eastern region, where coal mines and heavy industry are concentrated. Of course, many in this region also see that Russian wages and pensions are higher than those in Ukraine, and may hope for economic gain from linking to Russia. However, were Ukraine to become part of the European common market, many of the less efficient mines and factories in Ukraine would face stiff competition, and many Ukrainians might well eventually lose their jobs. This might have helped divide the country, especially if many people in the west feel they have much to gain by closer ties with the west, while many people in the east feel that they have much to lose.

While these overtures to tie Ukraine to western Europe may not have been realistic, club members suggested that they would have been objectionable to many Russians. It seem to us that Russia would prefer to have Ukraine as a buffer state rather than as a part of the EU and NATO. Russia's current actions may be seen as, in part, responses to the western overtures to Ukraine.

One member noted that Poland might well prefer a Ukraine integrated into western Europe rather than as a country heavily influenced by Russia. However, we agreed that we knew almost nothing about Ukrainian-Polish political relations.

Ukraine and the Russian Federation

We discussed oil and gas briefly, noting that Ukraine was dependent on Russian energy exports, and that Russia had recently increased the price of its energy exports to Ukraine. While Ukraine has some leverage in that a significant portion of Russian exports to western Europe pass through its pipeline, there is also a pipeline through Belarus that allows Ukraine to be bypassed.

We noted that different western European nations have quite different dependencies on oil and gas imported from Russia. The implication is that, given the difficulty of building the infrastructure needed to obtain supplies fro other sources, the more dependent countries may be less willing to confront Russia over Ukraine.

We noted that Russia had nationalized oil reserves claimed by Ukraine in the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. We also wondered whether Russia could find alternative markets for its energy exports in Asia, either by building a pipeline through Russian territory or by accessing pipelines in Central Asian States. We commented negatively on the appointment of Vice President Biden's son, Hunter, to the board of directors of Ukraine's largest gas producer.

Russia had intervened militarily to separate Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia, to separate Transnistria from Moldova, and now to separate Crimea from Ukraine. It was questioned whether the end game now is for Russia to try to separate some part of eastern Ukraine from the rest of the country, creating a "neutral" region with close economic and cultural ties to the Russian Federation.

We noted that the Russian-Ukrainian situation should be understood in a wider context. Russia is a major global player involved in negotiations with regard to Syria, nuclear weapons, and chemical weapons. It has been a valuable U.S. ally with respect to the war in Afghanistan, allowing bases in countries allied to Russia and transshipment of materials through its territory.

Overall Opinion of Borderland 

We considered Borderland by Anna Reid to be primarily a cultural history, although it also dealt with political history in some detail. On member noted that she would have liked to have had more about economics, given the importance that that subject appears to hold for understanding current events. Still the opinion of the book was very positive. An easy read, well written and interesting.

Source

What kinds of books do you want to read

Some time ago I started an email discussion on the categories we have been using. You can refresh your memory on those categories here:

https://sites.google.com/site/bnhistorybookclub/possible-future-books

Based on your feedback, I suggest hat we reduce the number of categories, so that we will read more books in our favorite categories. I suggest the following categories

Books of topical interest

Tonight's discussion on Ukraine and discussions related to the commemoration of the War of 1812, the Civil War and World War I are examples.

American History

We can include books focusing on events that occurred locally in this category.

European History (anything since the middle ages)

History in Other Regions (modern in Asia, Latin America, or Africa)

Ancient History 

We can read biography, economic history, history of science and technology as they fit into any of these other categories if the book itself is interesting.

Please share your comments,

Possible Books for Club Reading on the U.S. Civil War

The members of our history book club expressed interest in reading books related to the anniversary celebrations we are experiencing simultaneously this year:

• The final year of the War of 1812
• The fourth year of the Civil War
• The first year of World War I.

We have chosen to read The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies by Alan Taylor.

The following is revised, based on helpful comments from members of the Civil War Book Club that meets at Barnes and Noble at the Montrose Crossing Shopping Center.

Note that we read 1861: The Civil War Awakening by Adam Goodheart in May, 2012. We have also read a couple of books on slavery and Jim Crow, including American Slavery: 1619-1877 by Peter Kolchin in November 2011.

In thinking about a book on the Civil War, we can benefit from several articles giving their author's ideas on the best Civil War histories. Here are three:

• "The top 12 Civil War books ever written" by Glenn W. Lantasie, Salon, December 26, 2010
• "The Best Civil War Books" by Malcolm Jones, The Daily Beast, April 15, 2011
• "Civil War Book List" by The New York Times. This is undated, but the most recent books were published in 2010.

The following list is drawn from these sources, eliminating the longer books and those not available in paperback (criteria for our group).

The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery by Eric Foner (2011, 436 pages of text, 4+ stars) Listed in two of the three lists. Eddie Patrick wrote that the Civil War Book Club liked this book.

The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans by Charles Royster  (1993, 418 pages of text, 4+ stars)  Listed in all three lists.

Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David W. Blight (2002, 398 pages of text, 4 stars) Listed in all three lists. John Crowe would like to read this, noting that it is about the aftermath rather than the Civil War itself.

Additions to the list:

Grant and Sherman: The Friendship That Won the Civil War by Charles Bracelen Flood (2006, 402 pages of text, 4+ stars) This book it also on the first of the lists shown above, and Eddie Patrick read and liked it; it was not a selection of the Civil War Book Club.

For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War by James M. McPherson (1996, 256 pages, 4+ stars) Jacque Pickett said this is great.

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War by Tony Horwitz. (2011 ,294 pages of text, 4+ stars) Eddie Patrick found it riveting and said the club liked it.

Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War by Gilpin Faust. (2004, 326 pages, 4 stars) Jacque Pickett recommended this book.

Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters by Elizabeth Brown Pryor ( 474 pages of text, 3+ stars) Sam Steppel recommended  this book.

Widely admired books by Bruce Catton, Shelby Foote, James McPherson and Doris Kearns Goodwin are quite long, exceeding the length mandate set by club members. Such a book might be considered for a two month period.

Other possibilities:

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust (2009, 346 pages, 4+ stars) Listed in all three lists. John Crowe said the book is good but a "very depressing read". Jacque Pickett said this book is great. Sam Steppel said he could not recommend the book as too depressing.

Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam by Stephen W. Sears (2003, 372 pages including an Epilogue and three Appendices, 5 stars) Listed in two of the three lists. Eddie Patrick notes that this is about a single battle, and our group might prefer a broader view of the war. John Crowe mentions that it was originally published in 1973

Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz (1999, 432 pages, 4+ stars) Listed in two of the three lists. Eddie Patrick says probably not right for this purpose as it is not about the Civil War per se, but rather about the author's travels through the modern South and current views there looking back at the Civil War.

John Harrison and the Development of the Marine Chronometer.

Scilly Isles disaster of 1707 from 18th century print

On Wednesday, April 11th, a dozen of us met at the Kensington Row Bookshop to discuss Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel. The book was chosen to honor Cliff Lanham, a long-time member of the club who died last year. He was a world expert on technology transfer, and had often encouraged the club to choose books on the history of technology.

Background

The book is basically the story of John Harrison and his son William who in the 18th century advanced the craft of watch and clock making, eventually producing a marine chronometer that was judged by Parliament as worthy of a major financial reward for the development of a means of measuring longitude at sea.

It was possible at the time to determine latitude by siting of the north star or the sun. Determination of latitude, which required determination of the difference in time between one's location and that of a known place, was not possible as it was beyond the clock makers ability,  Two alternatives standard time -- observation of astronomical events that would be seen at the same moment over half the earth, or development of clocks capable of keeping accurate time over an entire voyage.

Sobel begins her book with an account of a British flotilla that misjudged its longitude in 1707 and crashed into the Scilly Isles, leading to the death of some 2000 men. This was but the worst of many disasters at sea due to mistakes in the estimated longitude of ships. Many of the European countries, as long distance voyages became more common, sought to encourage the development of accurate means of keeping time at sea. In 1714, the British Parliament established a prize for the first to establish a practical means of measuring longitude at sea -- 20,000 pounds if the longitude could be determined accurately to within a half degree. The Longitude Commission, staffed by a distinguished group of scientists and naval officers, was charged with implementation of the law.

John Harrison, who had successfully built some wooden clocks for his local customers, In 1730 he designed the first in a series of clocks that he believed would be sufficiently accurate to win the prize. He was referred by Edmond Halley to England's most prestigious clock maker, George Graham, who was impressed by Harrison's ideas and who provided him with support to develop the clock. It took five years to build the clock, and in 1736 it was given a sea trial on a round trip to Lisbon, the first clock to have a trial approved by the Committee. The clock appeared successful on that voyage, and a trial on a longer voyage was authorized.

Harrison, however, chose to build a second clock rather than go ahead with the proposed longer trial. He abandoned that design when it proved not to retain the necessary accuracy when subjected to the pitching action of a ship at sea. Harrison then spent 17 years working on a third clock. He came to believe that a smaller device would be required to achieve the accuracy and reliability, and to be practical for manufacture to meet the demand.

Harrison's Sea Watch #1
5.2 inches in diameter

He moved to London in 1758, and began work on H4, his sea watch which took six years to develop and construct, was tested on land by the navy, and then sent on a test voyage to and from Jamaica. It kept time with sufficient accuracy to meet the criterion set forth for the prize on that voyage. The Commission, however, was still concerned that the watch could be replicated in sufficient numbers and wished for replication of the success in at least another voyage.

A second voyage was made, and the watch again met the criterion. In that voyage it was compared with an astronomical measurement proposed by Nevil Maskelyne. The Maskelyne approach in the head-to-head comparison was less accurate and appeared to require long and difficult calculations. However, before the prize was awarded, Maskelyne was appointed Astronomer Royal, and thus ex officio, chair of the Longitude Committee. The prize was not awarded.

Harrison then began to work on a second sea watch, his fifth device. When it was completed, however, he had the help of King George III in testing its accuracy. The King also provided help in bypassing the Longitude Committee and going directly to the Parliament which awarded Harrison £8,750 in 1773; John Harrison was then 80 years old. The prize was never awarded. However, in total Harrison received £23,065 for his work on chronometers, and was a wealthy man in his old age. Over his lifetime he made a number of inventions improving the accuracy of clocks and watches.

Our Discussion

Why Did Harrison Have Such A Hard Time? We began by wondering whether Harrison's outsider position might have caused some of his problems with the acceptance of his innovative ideas. Such seems to happen often.

We noted too that negative information from "outsiders" is sometimes ignored; indeed, in the Scilly Isles tragedy mentioned above, a sailor had warned the admiral in charge that according to his, the sailor's reckoning they were about to go aground. The sailor was hanged, as it was a capital crime for a seaman to keep track of a ships position.

We also noted that the class distinctions in England are hard for an American to fully appreciate, and that they would have been much greater in the 18th century than today. A small town carpenter would have been of a much lower class than the scientists of sufficient prestige to be named to the Longitude Committee, or indeed than the senior officers of the navy on the Committee. The class prejudice might have acted in such a way that the Committee failed to properly appreciate Harrison's ideas.

We also thought that the scientists were much more likely to consider the  astronomical approaches, which were cutting edge science of the day, to be effective, rather than an approach based on clockwork. It was noted that the naval officers seemed much more positive about Harrison's clocks, especially those who had seen them in use on voyages. James Cook used a copy of Harrison's first sea watch on two of his voyages and was very positive about its utility.

We noted that a captain of one of the ships used on a test voyage asked to be placed on the list for one of the first Harrison chronometers on sale; indeed once marine chronometers became commercially available in the 19th century, many sea captains purchased their own. On a tangent, we noted that long after Harrison died, sea captains regularly brought their own marine chronometers on board their ships, and that ships at sea had several of the expensive devices, not willing to take the chance of a single chronometer stopping, leaving them without a means of knowing the exact time.

The astronomers were also partly right. Measurement of time by astronomical observation was used in surveying on land. It was effective in establishing the longitude of ports, for example. Indeed, astronomical determination of longitude was used by Zebulon Pike (of Pike's Peak fame) in his survey of the American west in the early 19th century.

However, we contemplated also the idea that Maskelyne might have wanted the prize money for himself, and was not a fair judge. Indeed, a member suggested that it is hard to avoid conflict of interest in committees that make technological judgments, where members of the committee may well know some of the applicants for money (or where their institutions may benefit from grants).

Was the Committee Right? A member noted that one would want more than one test. The clock could be right at the end of the voyage by chance. Or the voyage might itself have been unusual, say unusually calm, leading to a good result that would not be repeated on a rough voyage. Or a clock that often would fail over a long voyage, might not fail on a single test voyage. The facts that Harrison chose not to subject his first clock to a longer test voyage, and that his second clock proved vulnerable to the pitch of the ship, suggests that multiple voyages might indeed be needed to test the practicality of a watch (no matter what the Parliament said in its law).

The Committee also asked that Harrison disassemble his clock while members observed the process. Their interest seems to have been whether the clock could be replicated commercially at an affordable cost. We thought that it might not have met that test. Harrison apparently hand tuned the parts of the device carefully to obtain the required accuracy. When the Harrison clocks were cleaned and put back into operation in the 20th century, one had to be taken apart and reassembled a thousand times before it worked accurately. Indeed, there were elements of the early clocks that represented remnants of experiments that had been tried and failed -- but portions not disturbing other functions simply left in the device.

It was noted in passing that Sobel perhaps failed to do justice in the book to Edmond Halley, who was for part of period covered the Astronomer Royal and chair of the Longitude Committee. As Neil deGrasse Tyson describes in the third episode of the TV series Cosmos, Halley was a very great scientists indeed. Among his many accomplishments was that of convincing Newton to write Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica documenting the theory of gravity and the invention of calculus; when the Royal Academy failed to publish Principia, Halley did so with his own money.

John Harrison

Why the Concern: Loss of a warship and crew was of course important to the navy; loss of a flotilla was even more catastrophic. We noted that at the time ships tended to sail to the desired latitude and then sail at that latitude to the desired port. If they mistook their longitude and sailed east when the port was indeed to the west, the results would be not only an extended time of the voyage, but might also result in deaths on board from scurvy; food or water resources could run out sailing in the wrong direction on a long voyage.

We noted that by the 18th century, long voyages had become much more common. Marine trade routes had developed from western Europe to Asia and the Americas. (Not to mention down the coast of Africa, and from America to Asia as we read in 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles Mann. The increase in long distance sea voyaging increased the magnitude of the problems related to failing to measure longitude accurately.

We also noted that sailing south to a given latitude and then sailing east or west to the desired port involved (in theory) traveling two legs of a right triangle, while the voyage via the hypotenuse would be shorter, perhaps much shorter. Long distance voyages by sailing ship took a long time, and were dangerous. If the distance could be shortened and the time cut, money would be saved. It was suggested that the economic benefits of a good way of measuring longitude in the age of sail might have been as important or more important than the military benefits.

And of course, a nation that gained a monopoly on the technology to measure longitude would gain trade and military advantages that would lead to economic and political power. That is why various governments were not only offering rewards for the development of such technology, but doing so on condition that the means would be closely held within the nation,

Developing Technology Capacity: Sobel tells a great story of a lone inventor working for decades alone, unappreciated, to create a new kind of machine that both met an important need and that could be manufactured. According to one member, that is not the way we understand technology to develop.

Clocks had been around for a very long time. Galileo had proposed the pendulum clock early in the 17th century, which was the basis for Harrison's early, accurate wooden clocks. (Incidentally, Galileo also proposed using astronomical observations as a standard for "celestial time".) Watches, albeit of very limited accuracy, had been available in the 17th century, and the watch makers art had advanced. Moreover, there were advances being made in metallurgy, metal working machinery, and the measurement of mechanical devices. One must assume that Harrison benefited from the science of the Age of Enlightenment and the technology of the new Industrial Revolution.

We know that Harrison had financial help from George Graham, and that he discussed his original design with Graham. (He also had contact with Thomas Mudge, Graham's successor.) In 1753, John Jefferys made a pocket watch for Harrison (apparently to keep time as an observer moved from the chronometer kept in a ships cabin to the deck where astronomical observations would be made). An apprentice of Jefferys, Larcum Kendall, made the copy of the Harrison chronometer that Captain Cook took on his voyage. According to Wikipedia, "the marine timekeeper was reinvented yet again by John Arnold who while basing his design on Harrison's most important principles, at the same time simplified it enough for him to produce equally accurate but far less costly marine chronometers in quantity from around 1783.  Nonetheless, for many years even towards the end of the 18th century, chronometers were expensive rarities, as their adoption and use proceeded slowly due to the precision manufacturing necessary and hence high expense."

Thus perhaps John Harrison, while contributing many innovations to the marine chronometer, is likely to have built on the work of others, to have benefited from the collaboration with expert watchmakers, and to have had his work actually become commercial due to John Arnold.

The Measurement of Time and Calendars: We left the subject of Sobel's book per se, to talk about time and calendars. For example, a member explained the use of a simple device with two aligned pinholes located at either end of a tube with a crystal at the back pinhole. When the tube is oriented north-south, the sun at midday can pass through the two pinholes and fall on the crystal, making it shine brightly. This device was used before there were accurate clocks to identify noon exactly on shipboard. Indeed, a ten minute warning bell or blast used to be used in ports to alert arriving ships that the measurement could soon be made.

A member also explained the analemma, the figure 8 that is found in the Pacific Ocean on many globes. From earth, the sun appears to move against the celestial sphere over the course of the year, due to the nature of the earth's orbit around the sun. The analemma describes this apparent path. It is also related to the equation of time, which which describes the discrepancy between apparent solar time (measured by tracking the sun) and mean solar time (with noons 24 hours apart).

We also talked about various calendars. The Gregorian calendar, used by most of us today, was promulgated so that Easter Sunday in the Catholic Church's calendar could remain in its original relationship with the Spring equinox. The earlier Julian calendar had defined a year to be slightly longer than the time it takes the earth to orbit the sun. By 1582 when the Gregorian calendar was proclaimed, the Spring equinox had shifted 10 days, so 10 days were simply skipped that year. However, the Gregorian calendar also does not have leap years on years that are divisible by 400. The Jewish and Islamic calendars are lunar rather than solar; the Jewish calendar periodically has a special month to realign the lunar with the solar calenday, the Islamic calendar does not, and the location of its months shift with respect to the seasons over time.

A member also explained the difference between solar time and sidereal time.

The Writing of History: As an aside in the discussion of the book we came again to the question of why so many historians seem to write poorly. There are of course authors, some whom we have read, who write well and know their history, but many seem to have come to a style that is stultifying, Two members present mentioned that they had in graduate school done projects focusing on why historians can't (or at least too often don't) write well. In neither case was the project well received by faculty.

The Bottom Line: This short book was received by the group as a pleasure to read. It read like a feel good novel, with a heroic protagonist overcoming great diversity to triumph in the end. Attracting a wide readership, it acquainted its reader with an important problem of the 18th century age of sail, and how that problem was solved. Its author is not a professional historian, but rather a former New York Times science writer. However, we found that the book failed to put Harrison;s contributions in the context of the science and technology of his time, thereby suggesting a simplistic model of technology development. It perhaps failed to adequately recognize the economic motivation behind the search for a means to measure longitude, the cultural divide underlying Harrison's problems with the Longitude Committee, and the quality of that Committee and its work.

What kinds of books do you want to read and discuss?

For about a year we have been choosing books from a set of categories that were chosen without much thought. I have gone back and looked at the books we have read and discussed since the beginning of 2009, some 73 in total. The count is shown in the table below.

57 of the books are general histories, focusing especially on American and European history. Few deal with native Americans (Indians), Religion, Ancient history, Historiography and the uses of history, Economic history or Science and Technology. If we continue with the new practice, we will change the nature of the club.

Should we revise categories from which we select books, or indeed, change the process more fundamentally? Your comments are welcome.

Category	Most Recent	Since 8/2011	2009-7/2011	Total
Local Interest	February 2013	1		1
American History	December 2013	8	10	18
Native American History	July 2012	1	2	3
History of Religion	January 2014	1	1	2
European History	May 2014	8	9	17
History in Other Regions	November 2013	4	9	13
Ancient History	February 2014	3	1	4
About History	March 2014	1	1	2
Economic History	April 2013	1	1	2
History of Science and Tech.	April 2014	2		2
(More than one region)	November 2012	3	6	9
		33	40	73

The Practice and Uses of History

Eleven intrepid members of our History Book Club braved the wind and rain for an evening discussion of the practice of history and the uses of history. The Kensington Row Bookshop again offered its hospitality to our group.

Eli Sola-Sole, who runs the Bookshop asked that we share the news of the upcoming

Kensington Day of the Book Festival

Sunday April 27th 2014, 11am-4pm 

Howard Avenue, Old Town Kensington, Md 

We tried a new approach in this meeting with people reading a book of their own choice on the subject  People had read:

• Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan
• The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past by John Lewis Gaddis
• "Lessons" of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy by Ernest R. May
• What Is History? by Edward Hallet Carr

The discussion was lively as usual. We had read Margaret MacMillan's book in 2010, and it describes several ways history is used, such as how historical stories can help people feel comfortable when confronting uncertainty. History can be used well in creating a sense of unity in a nation-state, but also has the danger of fueling conflict among ethnic groups as they make conflicting claims of ownership of land and property; indeed, we suspected that many of the situations in which people resort to violence rather than living peacefully together were based on this kind of misuse of history.

One of our members, who had majored in history in graduate school, made the comment that all the graduate schools now seem to focus on quantitative methods for the study of history, and none allow students to do narrative history using qualitative approaches. A second member, who had majored in political science in graduate school noted that that was true also in his field. Both were concerned that the emphasis on quantitative methods sometimes was instead of good thinking on important issues.

We noted that the questions being asked by historians today are different than those asked in the past. We all were brought up with a "great man" approach to history, while now there is much more interest in women's history, black history, and histories of other actors. A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich was mentioned as a book helping to broaden our understanding of colonial America (especially as Ballard was the subject of a TV program popularizing the knowedge). We noted that the further back in time one goes, the less information that there is available to historians about the common people.

It was noted that sometimes historical papers misuse statistics, which got us into a discussion of the problems of peer review of journal articles. We also noted that statistical packages make it easy to provide analyses that appear knowledgeable but have the difficulty that they may disguise poor understanding by the authors of the study. We thought it might be interesting for some future meeting to choose an article from a professional history journal to discuss, rather than a book.

MacMillan got us talking about "what history is good for" and we recalled the final comment from that discussion -- we read history because we like to.

We then moved to discuss the use of history in foreign policy, drawing on May's book. We noted his thesis that frequently White House leaders surround themselves with like-minded people of similar backgrounds, and tend to draw on historical antecedents from their own experience during times that they were already in high office. (It was noted that these days the executive branch has historians, as does the Congressional Research Service.)

May points out that in a situation such as occurred in the post war planning after World War II, it was important to have historical understanding of the places in which actions would be taken (e.g. Germany, Japan), but also of U.S. public opinion, of the Congress and of the government bureaucracy.

We chatted about the utility of a White House Council of Historical Advisors, perhaps like that of the Council of Economic Advisers or the scientific advisory panels organized by the White House Office of Science and Technology. Such a body might help to identify historians whose expertise was specifically relevant to the issues before the decision makers.

Experts in each relevant field might help identify alternative historical events for consideration by the decision makers -- comparable situations illustrating alternative actions and outcomes. They might help to avoid analyses of those historical events that had been challenged as failing to utilize relevant information or utilizing data which had been shown to be questionable. 

One of our members kicked off the discussion of Gaddis' book saying how much she liked it, noting that another had been so annoyed by the early chapters as to give up reading the book entirely.

Gaddis suggests that many historians seem to have a desire to make history more like the social sciences. We noted the anecdote of William McNeill, describing his approach to writing history -- thinking, then reading and researching, refining his original ideas, and then iterating the process. This was greeted by a physicist who said it was also the process of physics.

Gaddis talks about the relation of historical methods to scientific methods. This relates to the earlier point of the focus on quantitative methods in history departments. Certainly historians have difficulty developing hypothesis tests for historical theories. On the other hand, sciences from cosmology, to ecology, to systematic biology, to evolutionary genetics tend to use methods much like those of traditional historians. 

Gaddis suggests that historians write first to convince themselves of the correctness of a narrative, and then the quality of that narrative is judged by the degree that it convinces other historians. Clearly it is an important function of the profession to subject reports of historical research to professional peer review. It is only people who are thoroughly familiar with previous research on the subject, who have themselves explored relevant original sources, who can fully appreciate novelty, and fully criticize the sources and analysis in a new study.

On the other hand, history buffs like the members of this club are better served by people who write well for the intelligent generalist. Such writers will tend to draw on secondary sources rather than present their own research into original sources. They help us to gain the larger picture.

We frequently complain about the teaching of history in our schools and the history text books used in those school classes. (The school boards that select texts and pass on curricula are sometimes more interested in teaching the preferred historical myths of their members rather than the best estimates of the facts or the more complete view of the past.)

One of our members had read What is History by E. H. Carr. This book, first published in 1961. This was from a series of lectures. (The MacMillan and Gaddis books also seem to read like series of lectures compiled in a book.) It is perhaps the classic in the field, read still by those preparing for a career as historians.

We had been discussing (on the Internet) reading a book related to the current crisis in Ukraine and Crimea. That led us into a discussion of the crisis. One of our members had been to Odessa several years ago and again last year, and stressed how much change he had noted; he felt strongly that a very recent book would be necessary to understand the most relevant situation.

We noted that the Crimea is almost an Island, which only became part of Ukraine in 1954 (to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the union of Russia and Ukraine). Moreover, it has a special status in Ukraine, and is important to Russia as a naval base. Russian tourism and export industries are economically important to Crimea.

Few of us had read any Ukrainian history and there was an interest in a book which briefly sketches the distant roots of the current situation. (Indeed, the crisis involves Russia, Turkey, Poland, the EU and the USA, and we have not read much of the relevant history.) It clearly will not be possible to find a book of manageable length that looks at recent and distant history, both specific to Ukraine and Crimea and general to the countries with interest in the conflict. We decided to try to replicate the experience of this evening, letting every member read a book of his choice, and bring together the different viewpoints in our May 14th meeting.

Shall We Read About Ukrainian History?

Given the current crisis between the Ukraine and Russia, is there any interest in reading a book about Ukrainian history as our next selection. Here are a few possibilities:

Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation by Serhy Yekelchyk (2007, more than 4 stars, 320 pages)

In 2004 and 2005, striking images from the Ukraine made their way around the world, among them boisterous, orange-clad crowds protesting electoral fraud and the hideously scarred face of a poisoned opposition candidate. Europe's second-largest country but still an immature state only recently independent, Ukraine has become a test case of post-communist democracy, as millions of people in other countries celebrated the protesters' eventual victory.
Any attempt to truly understand current events in this vibrant and unsettled land, however, must begin with the Ukraines dramatic history. Ukraine's strategic location between Russia and the West, the country's pronounced cultural regionalism, and the ugly face of post-communist politics are all anchored in Ukraine's complex past.
The first Western survey of Ukrainian history to include coverage of the Orange Revolution and its aftermath, this book narrates the deliberate construction of a modern Ukrainian nation, incorporating new Ukrainian scholarship and archival revelations of the post-communist period.
Here then is a history of the land where the strategic interests of Russia and the West have long clashed, with reverberations that resonate to this day.

Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine by Anna Reid. (2000. almost 4 star average rating, 272 pages) We have an outside recommendation for this book from a good source.

Borderland tells the story of Ukraine. A thousand years ago it was the center of the first great Slav civilization, Kievan Rus. In 1240, the Mongols invaded from the east, and for the next seven centureies, Ukraine was split between warring neighbors: Lithuanians, Poles, Russians, Austrians, and Tatars. Again and again, borderland turned into battlefield: during the Cossack risings of the seventeenth century, Russia’s wars with Sweden in the eighteenth, the Civil War of 1918–1920, and under Nazi occupation. Ukraine finally won independence in 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Bigger than France and a populous as Britain, it has the potential to become one of the most powerful states in Europe.In this finely written and penetrating book, Anna Reid combines research and her own experiences to chart Ukraine’s tragic past. Talking to peasants and politicians, rabbis and racketeers, dissidents and paramilitaries, survivors of Stalin’s famine and of Nazi labor camps, she reveals the layers of myth and propaganda that wrap this divided land. From the Polish churches of Lviv to the coal mines of the Russian-speaking Donbass, from the Galician shtetlech to the Tatar shantytowns of Crimea, the book explores Ukraine’s struggle to build itself a national identity, and identity that faces up to a bloody past, and embraces all the peoples within its borders.

 Black Sea by Neal Ascherson (1996, 4 stars, 320 pages)

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History
In this study of the fateful encounters between Europe and Asia on the shores of a legendary sea, Neal Ascherson explores the disputed meaning of community, nationhood, history, and culture in a region famous for its dramatic conflicts. What makes the Back Sea cultures distinctive, Ascherson agrues, is the way their comonent parts came together over the millennia to shape unique communities, languages, religions, and trade. As he shows with skill and persuasiveness, Black Sea patterns in the Caucasus, Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Turkey, and Greece have linked the peoples of Europe and Asia together for centuries.

2014 Ukraine and Crimea Crisis: The Crimean Tatars and Their Influence on the Triangle Of Conflict - Russia - Crimea - Ukraine, History of Crimea, Sevastopol, Russian Black Sea Fleet (2008, unrated, 161 pages) (This book is available from Amazon on Kindle for a fee, or to sample for free on the Internet.)

This study of the conflict over the years involving Ukraine, Russia, and the Crimea is particularly interesting and relevant in light of the ongoing crisis in 2014. The dissolution of the Soviet Union brought about multidimensional problems to the former republics of the USSR and their inhabitants. In 1990s Ukraine, Crimea became a center of conflict between Ukraine and Russia over the former Soviet Black Sea Fleet and Crimea itself, perceived as historically their own by both sides of the conflict. Local Crimean authorities took advantage of the specificity of a demographic situation in Crimea were Ukrainians, the titular nation, are in minority and considerably Russified to claim for autonomy. Later, they attempted to secede from Ukraine. At the same time, the Crimean Tatar influx from exile, orchestrated by the Stalin regime in 1944, further exacerbated the 'triangle of conflict' between the dyads Russia-Ukraine and Crimea-Ukraine. The Crimean Tatars, currently 12 percent of the Crimean population, proclaimed Crimea the national territory of the Crimean Tatar people, on which they alone possess the right to self-government and claimed greater rights for themselves as allegedly the most indigenous peoples in Crimea, while the rest are colonizers. The explains the historical developments in Crimea and attempts to draw implications to the Ukrainian government in dealing with Crimean Tatar nationalism which seems to be overcoming the problems within the 'triangle of conflict' that was so sharp in 1990s. 

Please Comment!

• Do you think it is a good idea to read a book on Ukrainian History? 
• Do you have any suggestion in addition to those listed above for us to read on the Ukraine?
• Which if any of these books interest you?
• Do you like the idea of everyone choosing their own reading and having a more general discussion on Ukrainian history?

As a result of a request from a member, I have added a couple of new books to the list of possibles:

The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation by Andrew Wilson (unrated, 416 pages, 2009)

This book is the most acute, informed, and up-to-date account available today of Ukraine and its people. Andrew Wilson brings his classic work up to the present, through the Orange Revolution and its aftermath, including the 2006 election, the ensuing crisis of 2007, the Ukrainian response to the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, the economic crisis in Ukraine, and the 2009 gas dispute between Russia and Ukraine. It looks forward to the key election in 2010, which will revisit many of the issues that were thought settled in 2004.

Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union by Joseph D. Dwyer. (3 stars, 438 pages, 2000)

Focusing on the critical relationship between Ukraine and Russia, renowned scholar Roman Szporluk chronicles the final two decades in the history of the Soviet Union and presents a story that is often lost in the standard interpretations of the collapse of communism.

This is not exactly history, but it might be worth reading:

Return to Ukraine by Anie Savage (4 stars plus, 272 pages, 2000, only available in hardback, but available at paperback prices from other venders)

Nearly fifty years after fleeing Ukraine during World War II, Ania Savage returned with her mother and aunt—their first trip back to their homeland. In this riveting account of the journey, she records both the changes they found in Ukraine in the early days of postSoviet existence and the memories they had gone to seek.
Savage, a journalist traveling to teach at Kyiv State University, records in vivid detail her experiences in her homeland, including the political turmoil that gripped Ukraine as it struggled to establish a democracy. In a moving subtext, Savage also describes the intense emotions she felt traveling with her mother, who at age seventyfour was suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's disease.
Savage skillfully threads these personal themes into narratives of Ukraine's larger history, events that include stumbling upon the excavation of a mass grave from the Stalinist era. She moves through the discoveries of her trip with an honest and passionate voice as she witnesses the rebirth of a nation and as she and her family reconnect with their past. Savage also describes the experience of working in Kyiv and speculates on how her Ukrainian heritage and American youth and education combine to shape her view of the people and places she encounters in Ukraine.
This story will prove fascinating to historians, sociologists, and general readers alike, especially those with an interest in the rise of democracy in Eastern Europe, life in those troubled countries, or personal struggles with memory and its loss. In addition, Ukrainian immigrants and those of Ukrainian heritage will find Return to Ukraine a moving account of their homeland and what it has become.
The cemetery is a desolate, forgotten place. My mother’s face has turned white. She clutches at her purse and is whispering to herself. "This is not the cemetery," my mother says. "We had a beautiful cemetery."
"Of course this is the cemetery," Katia cries. "No one moves cemeteries, not even Communists."
I’m the one who finds the double grave of my grandparents near the center of the cemetery. A rough concrete cross rises above the graves, paid for with money my mother and Katia had sent to the village a few years into Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost. A metal plaque bearing my grandparents’ names hangs from the cross.
We place the gladioli we have brought with us at the foot of the cross and bend our heads in prayer. Our tears mingle with the raindrops falling on the graves.—from the book

Still more books to consider (added 3/10/2014)

Ukraine: The Search for a National Identity edited by Sharon Wolchik and Volodymyr Zviglyanich (unrated, 338 pages, 1999, expensive but available at lower prices used)

This comprehensive book focuses on the challenges facing Ukraine as a newly emerged state after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Like all countries with no recent history of independence, Ukraine had to invent or recreate effective political institutions, reintroduce a market economy, and reorient its foreign policy. These tasks were impossible to accomplish without resolving the question of national identity. In this balanced and clear-eyed assessment, a team of U.S. and Ukrainian specialists explores the external and internal dimensions of national identity and statehood, providing a wealth of information previously unavailable to Western scholars.
Arguing that the search for national identity is a multidimensional process, the authors show that it reflects the realities of the dawning twenty-first century. Paradoxically, this quest must cope with the both the weakening of state boundaries caused by globalization and the strengthening of the national model as new countries emerge from the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.
After providing the historical context of Ukraine’s international debut, the book analyzes the complexities of constructing a national identity. The authors explore questions of ethnic relations and regionalism, the development of political values and attitudes, mass-elite relations, the cultural background of economic strategies, gender issues, and the threat of organized crime to emergent civil society.

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (4 stars plus, 580 pages, 2012)

Americans call the Second World War “The Good War.” But before it even began, America’s wartime ally Josef Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens—and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was finally defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war’s end, both the German and the Soviet killing sites fell behind the iron curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness.
Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single history, in the time and place where they occurred: between Germany and Russia, when Hitler and Stalin both held power. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands will be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history.

Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt (4 stars, 960 pages, 2006)

World War II may have ended in 1945, but according to historian Tony Judt, the conflict's epilogue lasted for nearly the rest of the century. Calling 1945-1989 "an interim age," Judt examines what happened on each side of the Iron Curtain, with the West nervously inching forward while the East endured the "peace of the prison yard" until the fall of Communism in 1989 signaled their chance to progress. Though he proposes no grand, overarching theory of the postwar period, Judt's massive work covers the broad strokes as well as the fine details of the years 1945 to 2005. No one book (even at nearly a thousand pages) could fully encompass this complex period, but Postwar comes close, and is impressive for its scope, synthesis, clarity, and narrative cohesion.
Judt treats the entire continent as a whole, providing equal coverage of social changes, economic forces, and cultural shifts in western and eastern Europe. He offers a county-by-county analysis of how each Eastern nation shed Communism and traces the rise of the European Union, looking at what it represents both economically and ideologically. Along with the dealings between European nations, he also covers Europe's conflicted relationship with the United States, which learned much different lessons from World War II than did Europe. In particular, he studies the success of the Marshall Plan and the way the West both appreciated and resented the help, for acceptance of it reminded them of their diminished place in the world. No impartial observer, Judt offers his judgments and opinions throughout the book in an attempt to instruct as well as inform. If a moral lesson is to come from World War II, Judt writes, "then it will have to be taught afresh with each passing generation. 'European Union' may be an answer to history, but it can never be a substitute." This book would be an excellent place to start that lesson. --Shawn Carkonen