no loss for words

Changes

noreply@blogger.com (Danny) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:06:00 +0000

Lovely Fiancée (once Lovely Girlfriend) is now Lovely Wife.

This guy doesn't know the half of it

noreply@blogger.com (Danny) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 01:51:00 +0000

A complaint about medical jargon that rails against words like "toxic" and "vegetables"... written by someone who obviously doesn't spend much time around doctors. Spend five minutes with Lovely Fiancée (soon to be Lovely Wife!) and her med school classmates and you'll hear far worse... epistaxis, neoplasm, pneumothorax... that's some jargon for you.

Why aren't there more cricket statistics? Part 5: An attempt at revising batting average

noreply@blogger.com (Danny) — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 14:05:00 +0000

As you might remember, over a year and a half ago I started a series of posts on cricket statistics (here, here, here, and here. Before the series fell dormant, I discussed the problem with batting average. It's question is pretty straightforward, really. What to do with not-outs? I don't know if anyone's ever done the statistical legwork, but I'd be willing to hazard a guess that ending up not-out is largely a function of position in the batting order. So some sort of adjustment needs to be made to accurately capture what's going on with the not-out innings. I suggested a number of possibilities, including adjusting batting average based on a batsman's typical batting position.

Ananth Narayanan of the new Cricinfo It Figures blog has recently offered up another solution. Narayanan's idea is to extend all not-out innings to their expected conclusion. He calculates this based on a batsman's recent form. So if I a batsman has averaged 30 in his last ten innings, assume that he'll add 30 runs to his not-out score and consider that to be his completed innings score.

This is an intriguing solution, since it focuses on the not-out innings, which is where the problem with batting average arises. But there are a number of problems with it. First, is it really safe to assume, as Narayanan does, that since "Kumar Sangakkara ... has scored 984 runs in his last 10 innings at an innings average of 98.4," a 32 not-out in his next innings can be extended by 98 runs to 130? Not all innings are created equal. It might turn out to be the case that, once Sangakkara reaches the 30s, he normally goes on to score 150. The toughest runs to score, of course, are the first ones. Analyzing a player's typical score after reaching a set number of runs seems a far better approach and would incorporate the fact that well-set players can be practically impossible to dislodge.

Another problem arises with the assumption that recent form is the best predictor of future performance. This is the sort of empirical question that baseball sabermetricians excel at answering. Sadly, I completely lack the statistical chops to even take a stab at it. But plenty of research into the "hot hand" in basketball has shown that recent rates of success do no better at predicting future performance than overall rates of past success. In other words, there's no such thing as the hot hand (a recent paper argued that "feeding the hot hand" is still a good idea, since a player who has made several consecutive shots is probably a good player to begin with).

There's no guarantee that batting innings follow the same pattern, of course. But budding cricket statisticians should take note. This is a key question that, as far as I know, hasn't been answered. Does recent performance accurately predict future performance? Or is "underlying talent" (represented by overall past performance) a better predictor?

So while Narayanan is on the right track, he makes a few assumptions that need further examination. The question remains unsolved: what to do with not-outs?

A brief update

noreply@blogger.com (Danny) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 03:24:00 +0000

It turns out that, unlike the last time around, graduate school and blogging are not compatible. At least they haven't been this semester. Some of that has been the commute, but it's also that I've just been overwhelmed by reading and writing. In an entirely good way.

I probably won't blog at all in the next month since there's still plenty of work to be done. But I should have more free time in the spring, since I should only be down in Providence two days a week. So I'll be giving blogging on a regular basis yet another try.

Fighting with the Frogs, Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Danny) — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 20:08:00 +0000

The British Expeditionary Force’s arrival in northern France on 14 August 1914 marked a striking development in the history of Anglo-French relations. While military co-operation between Britain and France was not wholly unprecedented, never before had the two countries fought side-by-side in a conflict of this scale. For most of their respective histories, Britain and France had viewed their neighbour across the English Channel as rivals at best and outright enemies at worst. Just sixteen years before the outbreak of the First World War the two countries had been on the verge of warfare over an obscure African outpost. Anti-French sentiment had pervaded British society for centuries. Though the Entente Cordiale of 1904 had improved Anglo-French relations, the military alliance that developed as a result of the war represented a noteworthy departure from the historical relationship between Britain and France.

For most of the second millennium, Britain and France had seen each other as enemies. The Hundred Years’ War had been a vital stage in the development of English identity. Its battles continued to be remembered in the early years of the twentieth century. In the numerous conflicts between Britain and France in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, France served as an 'Other' against which the British defined a new sense of nationhood. The Crimean War found the two old enemies fighting alongside each other, but even then, at least apocryphally, ‘the British had to be reminded […] not to refer to the French as the enemy’. According to Robert Vansittart, born in 1881, ‘the Victorian England in which I was brought up was almost entirely anti-French’. As historian P.M.H. Bell has written, ‘The antagonism between the two countries had been long and bitter’ and ‘The roots of dislike and distrust of France ran deep, nourished by centuries of warfare and an insular suspicion of foreigners, of whom the French were the nearest’.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the British of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries consistently portrayed the French in negative terms. In his study of how Victorian political thinkers perceived France, historian Georgios Varouxakis compiled a damning list of characteristics. The French were:

warlike; volatile; easily excitable; easily susceptible to being seduced by leaders promising them glory abroad; vindictive and envious vis-à-vis the English; unfair and impervious to considerations of justice; not respectful of international treaties, law and conventions; overambitious; inordinately vain, touchy and other such unpleasant things.

The French penchant for revolution frightened Victorian commentators, both Whig and Tory, who looked to stable government, not popular uprising, as the means to achieve progress.

In addition to this general distaste for the French, there were widespread British fears of war with France. Numerous novelists played to these fears. William Laird Clowe’s The Great Naval War of 1887 (1887), Louis Tracy’s The Final War (1893), William Le Queux’s England’s Peril (1899), and Max Pemberton’s Pro Patria (1901) all depicted war between Britain and France. These fictional accounts of war were not without factual basis. Numerous crises found Britain and France near war. A French move against Siam, a virtual British protectorate, in 1893 caused some in Britain to expect war. In 1898, a dispute over Fashoda, a small, mud-brick fort on the Upper Nile, led the two nations to the brink of war. Just a year later, French pro-Boer sentiment and the possibility of Franco-Russo-German intervention on behalf of the Boers further strained Anglo-French relations. In short, the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries found Britain and France mutually hostile. In hindsight, the various crises that disrupted Anglo-French relations seem minor and insignificant. Yet the fact that they were met with such grave concern and incited such negative feelings suggests that the British were predisposed to think poorly of the French; diplomatic conflicts merely triggered the expression of latent anti-French feeling.

The Entente Cordiale of 1904 represented a pivotal change in the nature of Anglo-French relations. Just six years after the two nations had been on the edge of war over Fashoda, Britain and France signed an agreement that laid the foundation for their future alliance during the First World War and a century of co-operation between the two. Historians should be wary, however, of investing the Entente with an undue significance. Though the recent centenary commemorations of the agreement suggest that the Entente Cordiale solidified a friendship between the British and the French that would last a century, the realities of the agreement itself cast doubt on the agreement’s role in developing an amicable relationship between the long-time rivals. Bell has described the Entente as ‘a mixed bag of bargains over territory in Africa and Asia and regulations about fishing for bait off Newfoundland’, hardly the stuff of an agreement between valued friends. Reactions to the Entente Cordiale further reveal that the agreement was not the manifestation of any great love between Britain and France. Paul Cambon, the French ambassador to Britain, wrote to French foreign minister Théophile Delcassé that ‘Your task is done and you may pride yourself on having carried to a successful conclusion an enterprise considered impossible’, impossible, no doubt, due to the continuing distaste that characterized cultural relations between Britain and France. The Manchester Guardian made this aversion explicit. ‘The growing friendship between England and France is the most hopeful sign that has appeared in international politics for many a long year, but we deceive ourselves if we pretend that it has its roots in popular sentiment in either country’. Fifty years after the signing of the Entente, Harold Nicolson noted the unlikely circumstances in which it developed. The ‘Entente, in its early stages, was a frail and delicate plant, not rooted in the soil of public sympathy either in France or England, but nursed in a cold greenhouse by M. Cambon, Lord Lansdowne, and his successor, Sir Edward Grey’. As was widely recognized at the time of its signing, the Entente Cordiale was a diplomatic agreement devoted to resolving outstanding colonial disputes, nothing more. The significance later attributed to the treaty by the British was a phenomenon distinct from the treaty itself. Only Britain’s entry into the war in 1914 following Germany’s invasion of Belgium ensured that the diplomatic agreement of 1904 would develop into a military alliance.

It was with this history of antagonism, hardly grounds for optimism or admiration, that Britain and France joined forces in August 1914. Still, evidence from July 1914 reveals that some in Britain had accepted and embraced the Entente Cordiale, with two banquets devoted to singing its praises in a span of two weeks. A willingness to deride France remained, however, with the British press taking considerable delight in pointing out French failings and faults observed in the Caillaux trial. Just before the war the British public had ambivalent views of France: praise in light of the Entente Cordiale and criticism whenever the opportunity presented itself. Beneath the veneer of pro-French sentiment there remained a current of Francophobia.

Once the war began, negative portrayals of France practically vanished and the British press eagerly embraced their new ally. These positive depictions of France developed without obvious pressure from the government and reflect a genuine change in British attitudes towards France. Along with later changes in British perceptions of France, the terms in which the French were described and understood, however, suggest that the improved wartime image of France was more a result of the circumstances of war than any deep-seated admiration for the French people.

On second thought...

noreply@blogger.com (Danny) — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 16:48:00 +0000

It looks as if I might not have as much free time for blogging as I had hoped. I'll probably be commuting down to Providence four days a week. There are obviously worse commutes than Boston-Providence, but for the time being it feels like a big chunk of time.

I will, on the other hand, be reading at least 3 books a week, so I imagine I'll have lots to write about. Hopefully I'll also have the time to do so...

Fighting with the Frogs, Part 0

noreply@blogger.com (Danny) — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 00:50:00 +0000

As promised months ago, I'm finally going to start blogging the interesting bits from my MPhil dissertation. I start my PhD at Brown next week, so, while I'll be busy with reading, I should also have the flexibility to devote 45 minutes to blogging a few times a week.

For now, some background.

Back in 2004-2005 I did an MPhil in modern European history at the University of Cambridge. My dissertation was, rather clumsily, entitled "British attitudes towards France during the early months of the First World War, July-December 1914." I had wanted to call it "Fighting with the Frogs," but the degree committee must have found it a bit flip as they silently amended it.

My initial attraction to representations of France in wartime came, no doubt, from the torrents of Francophobia in America that accompanied the beginning of the war in Iraq. Freedom fries and all that. I was curious to see if the same phenomenon had happened (in reverse) when Britain and France joined forces in the summer of 1914.

My broader interest in how people make use of the past also drew me to the topic. There's a long history of conflict between Britain and France, of course, and I wanted to see exactly what the British did with that past once their old enemies became their new friends.

As you'll see, I discovered plenty of newspaper articles and editorials that helped me answer those questions, and more.

Barry Bonds and baseball's drug policy

noreply@blogger.com (Danny) — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 19:24:00 +0000

At a reader's request (hi, Eric!), my thoughts on Barry Bonds and Major League Baseball's drug policy...

First, Barry Bonds. Let's get the obvious out of the way. Bonds almost certainly used steroids between 2000 and 2004. This page documents the change in his appearance throughout his career. You don't go from looking like this (1998) to this (2003) without chemical assistance, especially when you're in your late 30s. It's certainly possible that Bonds muscled up as much as he did through weightlifting and legal supplements. But given everything that's come out in the last few years (including Bonds's leaked grand jury testimony in which he admitted using the clear and the cream, there's little doubt that he used steroids.

That said, Bonds was already one of the best players in baseball history before he started using steroids. Throw out his seasons from 2000 to 2004 and these are his career stats (through August 15, 2007):

2,200 hits, 501 home runs, 1,443 RBIs, 468 stolen bases, 1,674 walks, .287 batting average, .415 on-base percentage, .560 slugging percentage, and .975 on-base-plus-slugging.

These stats would still put him at 23rd in career home runs, 9th in career walks, 25th in career on-base percentage, and 16th in career OPS. In other words, even if we throw out five of his seasons (some of the greatest offensive seasons in history), Bonds still comes out as one of the top 15-20 hitters ever. And that's if you ignore those years completely. Credit Bonds with even mediocre seasons (say, the typical performance of an aging left fielder) and he's easily back up among the top 10 hitters ever. Steroids did not make Barry Bonds great; he was already one of the best players ever.

What to do, then, about the steroids? Some have called for commissioner Bud Selig to append an asterisk to Bonds's career home run total. This would be both unnecessary and unfair. Unnecessary because no one will ever be able to think about Barry Bonds and his records without acknowledging (explicitly or implicitly) that those totals were enhanced by steroids. "Bonds" and "steroids" are so closely linked that literally adding an asterisk to his career statistics would be entirely superfluous.

Second, Bonds broke none of baseball's rules in taking steroids (breaking laws is another matter). Baseball did not prohibit the use of steroids until 2005, at which point Bonds likely stopped using them. Asterisking Bond's home run total would be punishing him for breaking a rule that didn't exist when he broke it. That doesn't fly in a court of law it shouldn't fly in baseball either.

Bonds's place in baseball history is clear. One of the greatest players ever, he will also be remembered forever as the sport's most famous steroid user. He is what he is, and no amount of hand-wringing by sportswriters or asterisking by Bud Selig will change his reputation.

Things would be very different, of course, if Major Leauge Baseball had a sensible steroid policy in place when Bonds started using steroids. It should have been clear in the mid-90s that steroid abuse was taking place in baseball. Both Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, the sluggers who helped revitalize baseball's popularity in the summer of 1998, are now strongly suspected of using steroids. Back in 1998, McGwire admitted using andro which the NFL and IOC had already banned. People should have been far more suspicious about how muscular players were getting. It's not as if steroid use was a new thing, or that it was difficult to test for steroids. That it took baseball so long to institute a ban on steroids is a disgrace to both Major League Baseball and the players union.

Even as it currently stands, baseball's drug policy lags far behind those of other sports. Professional cycling has had greater problems with doping than any other sport. Nearly every major cyclist of the past 20 years has been implicated in or accused of doping: Jan Ullrich, Bjarne Riis, Marco Pantani, Lance Armstrong, Richard Virenque, David Millar, Tyler Hamilton, Ivan Basso, Roberto Heras, Erik Zabel (some, like Riis, Millar, and Zabel, have admitted their drug use). Thanks to the widespread nature of doping in cycling, evidence of cheating almost always brings heavy punishment.

- In 2004, Tyler Hamilton, who had recently won the Olympic gold in the time trial, tested positive for the presence of a "foreign blood population." The U.S. Anti-Doping Agnecy suspended him for 2 years.
- In 2005, Roberto Heras, four-time winner of the Vuelta a España, was found to have used EPO. He was suspended for 2 years.
- After police found used syringes in his home, former world time trial champion David Millar admitted to using EPO in 2001 and 2003. British Cycling suspended him for 2 years.
- This spring, 2006 Giro d'Italia winner Ivan Basso admitted "attempted doping" (he had doping products, but maintained that he had not actually doped). The Italian Olympic Committee suspended him for 2 years.
- At this year's Tour de France, the Rabobank team fired its leader and likely race winner Michael Rasmussen when it became apparent that he had lied about his whereabouts earlier this year and missed several doping controls. The Danish cycling team also suspended him from riding in Danish colors.

Professional cyclists are punished when they cheat. All these cases were first offenses. The lesson is clear: dope and you'll be out of the sport for two years. The fact that riders continue to test positive for banned substances shows how ingrained doping is within professional cycling. The resolve of cycling's authorities is admirable: they want a clean sport, and they're entirely willing to kick out the biggest names in the sport to ensure that it stays clean.

The situation in baseball couldn't be more different. Neifi Perez, one of the worst everyday players of the last ten years, has tested positive for stimulants three times this year, and he'll still get to play baseball next season. The penalty for a first positive test is counseling. For his second failed test, he was suspended for 25 games. And for his third positive test, the third time that he had been found to be cheating, he was suspended for just 80 games.

To be fair, the penalties for steroid use are stiffer. One positive steroid test carries a suspension of 50 games. A second positive test will get you suspended for 100 games. Only on testing positive for steroids a third time will you receive a lifetime ban.

These are not the punishments meted out by an organization committed to stamping out drug abuse. A 50-game suspension isn't trivial, but it's not much more than a slap on the wrist. Losing a third of your annual salary doesn't threaten your livelihood when the average player's salary is over $2 million. The punishment is especially lenient given that there seem to be genuine incentives for taking steroids: if you hit more home runs, you'll get a bigger contract (one shudders to think just how bad Neifi Perez could be if he weren't taking drugs).

If Bud Selig Selig really wanted steroids out of baseball, he would have pushed for much more string penalties: at least a season for a first offense, with the possibility of a lifetime ban for a second failed test. Cycling has it right. Fans know that doping is rife in the sport, but they can also derive a small amount of satisfaction with the knowledge that dopers who get caught are severely punished.

All this brings us back to Bonds. One of the big stories accompanying his chase of Hank Aaron's career home run record was whether Bud Selig would choose to be present for Bonds's record-breaking home run. If Bonds did not have the "steroid-abuser" tag hanging around his neck, there's not question that Selig would have been there. But Bonds used steroids, so Selig struggled with the decision to explicitly validate Bonds's steroid-laden achievement.

Selig deserves no sympathy here. If he had pushed for steroid testing 10 years ago, or implemented a steroid policy with bite back in 2005, he might have some credibility when it comes to steroids. But in waiting so long to do anything and then doing so little, Selig ceded whatever moral high ground he might have held.

You can blame Barry Bonds for many things, but breaking the rules isn't one of them. If baseball had gotten its act together 10 years ago, we wouldn't be hearing about this now. Barry Bonds would either have gotten caught (and been punished) or chosen not to use steroids and continue his exemplary career drug-free. Instead, we're left with an all-time great whose true greatness we'll never really know. Bonds is mostly to blame for that, of course, but Major League Baseball gets a major assist.

Cultivating British identity

noreply@blogger.com (Danny) — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:57:00 +0000

(I seem to take 2 months to actually blog about stories I save for blogging, so you'll have to excuse my lack of timeliness.)

In recent months, both Gordon Brown and David Cameron have called for the British state to take greater interest in cultivating British identity, with particular focus on the "United" bit of the "United Kingdom." Brown's take is more compelling, not least because Cameron's use of the United States as a model is rather blunted by his ignorance about what actually resonates with Americans (hint: Americans have neither emotional attachment nor reverence to Mt. Rushmore). But both Brown and Cameron believe that the
government can take positive steps towards increasing a sense of British unity: making British history a central part of the national curriculum, highlighting nationwide holidays like Remembrance Day, and ensuring that immigrants learn English.

These are just the sort of things that the government can do to increase national identity, but I'm skeptical that they would actually work. Identity is complex and multi-faceted, and it strikes me as naive to think that simply injecting more British history into the schools, flying the Union Jack more frequently, and encouraging the use of English will magically make everyone feel more British (to be fair, Cameron points to English as a means of facilitating communication and cooperation between previously disconnected communities within the UK). Too much of life takes place outside of the purview of the state for it to be as easy as that. Family life, television, and local community all have as strong an impact on the development of identity as what is taught in school.

I'll leave it to others (for now) to debate the desirability of a stronger British identity. But it won't be as easy to create as Brown and Cameron seem to think.

More on sports history

noreply@blogger.com (Danny) — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 00:36:00 +0000

A few more quick thoughts on the history of sports:

---
I've been thinking about it, and I realized that I presented a rather narrow-minded perspective in Monday's post. I suggested that writing history about sports ran the risk of slipping fannish accounting of the outcome of games rather than placing sports in their larger social and cultural context. Of course, people do more than watch sports. They play them, too. To ignore the games that have no national (or even regional) audience is to miss out on a huge portion of the sporting experience. Tracing the story of, say, cricket on the village green or local non-professional football leagues can reveal more about British society and culture than responses to national sports events like the Bodyline tour or England's 1966 World Cup victory.

---
That said, there's plenty to be gleaned from looking at popular responses to key moments in national sporting life. Patrick McDevitt's May the Best Man Win appears to be a sterling example of history that teases out the implications of international sports (I haven't read McDevitt's book, but Michael Paris's review in the June 2007 issue of the Journal of Modern History provides a good summary). McDevitt locates the masculinization of organized sports in the early 19th century and goes on to show the tensions that arose when England was no longer dominant in such quintessentially English sports as rugby and cricket. If success in sports signified true masculinity, what did it mean for the English race if its men were no longer the best athletes in the world?

I haven't read McDevitt's book yet, but it looks to be well worth checking out.

The challenge of incorporating sports into history

noreply@blogger.com (Danny) — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 03:38:00 +0000

Way back in May Sharon Howard pointed readers to a Frank Keating piece in the Guardian bemoaning the lack of sports* in social history. He attributes it to snobbish-ness on the part of academic historians, but ends by listing two recent social histories that do incorporate sports. So his point that historians neglect sports is dulled a bit.

Including sports in history can be a difficult task. It can be all too easy to get caught up in the internal details of the game and, as a result, miss the role that sports play within society. In a paper I wrote a few years ago on Philadelphians' memories of Veterans Stadium, I spent over a page describing in rather intricate detail the last two outs of the Phillies 1980 World Series victory. In retrospect, it's clear that my own interest in the outcome of the game itself sidetracked me from the thesis of the paper as a whole; that page could easily have been condensed into a few lines without weakening the argument.

The problem, then (at least for me), is abandoning the fan's perspective. While history cannot be bias-free, it can be over-indulgent. Readers who don't care about the Lord's Test during the West Indies' 1963 tour of England (to cite an example from Keating's article) can be excused for skipping ahead to the non-sports material. The larger significance of that Test, if Keating is to be believed, is that, during the summer of 1963, the whole of England was focused on the outcome of a game of cricket, that sports unified the country, if only for a moment (for what it's worth, a similar sort of thing occurred two years ago as England wrested the Ashes from Australia).

As a lifelong sports fan, I certainly appreciate Frank Keating's call for sports to be incorporated into social history. But I also recognize that the very passions that sports stir up make it difficult to write good history that incorporates sports without slipping into fandom. There's nothing wrong with being a fan, of course, but writing a story of what happened on the field (which is always a temptation) is barely more than antiquarianism -- interesting for fellow aficionados, but often missing the bigger point.

*I'm sticking with American usage. For the time being at least. I do find myself saying things like, "Chelsea are...", though, so it's probably a losing battle.

Newsweek's high school rankings (yet again)

noreply@blogger.com (Danny) — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 15:38:00 +0000

Newsweek and Jay Mathews are at it again. Yet again they've published a list of "the 1,300 top U.S. schools". And yet again they've used Mathews's simplistic and stupid Challenge Index to come up with their rankings.

Since they haven't added anything, I don't have to either. Everything I've written in the past on this remains relevant. See these two posts from two years ago and this one from last year.

Of course, I can't resist adding a bit more. Towards the end of his piece Mathews admits, as he did last year, that his work is journalism, not scholarship, likening his Challenge Index to slugging percentage, i.e. just one factor to be considered. The difference, of course, is that slugging percentage actually correlates really well with scoring runs in baseball. Mathews doesn't tell us anything about what the Challenge Index correlates to, nor does he justify why his admittedly personal criterion should be the sole basis for "America's Top Schools."

Will the madness never end?

The failings of narrative history

noreply@blogger.com (Danny) — Fri, 25 May 2007 00:31:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, while reading responses to the teaching of the Holocaust in British schools, I came across the Conservative History Journal. CHJ's "Tory Historian" expressed an intriguing belief that "History teaching should start at the beginning and go forward in a chronological fashion." Back on May 13, Ralph Luker directed readers to a Kevin Drum post musing that "that history could be made more interesting to high school students if it were taught backwards." These musings are the opposite sides of the same coin and, as a result, share a number of shortcomings. Both Tory Historian and Kevin Drum envision history as The Story of the Past, with extra emphasis on the first the. History is a mess of many stories. It's a mistake to reduce it to a single narrative, either forward- or backward-looking.

To be fair to Drum, he doesn't say that teaching history backwards is necessarily the best way, just that it could be more interesting to students. This might be true. But I think it's just as likely that students find history as taught in school uninteresting because it's often taught in an uninteresting way. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen's The Presence of the Past shows that Americans find school history boring because curricula focus on memorization and musty narratives that have little personal significance.

One way of combating the dryness of history-teaching in schools is to highlight history's contemporary relevance, which is exactly what Drum's proposal would do. But in seeking to tell the story of how we got to be where we are now, teachers who adopt a reverse chronological approach to history risk falling into several traps.

Chief among these is a complete loss of the contingency of history. Some of Drum's commenters hit upon just this point. One points out that teaching Cold War history backwards would make the fall of communism inevitable, ignoring Mikhail Gorbachev's decisions and their wildly unpredictable consequences. When I took Tim Burke's course on West Africa in the Era of the Slave Trade, Tim made a point of asking at various key junctures, "Were there alternative outcomes here? Could the key players made a different decision here?" In some cases, the class agreed that the circumstances were rather restrictive and that it's hard to imagine events following a different path: small-scale trading of slaves was an established practice in west Africa at the beginning of this period, so it would be unreasonable to expect west African societies to abandon that trade with respect to Europeans. At other moments, it's clear that decision-makers had real options and chose those that, wittingly or unwittingly, inflicted tremendous damage. Telling the story of slavery in reverse chronological order would eliminate these moments of contingency. Discovering and thinking hard about these crucial inflection points are some of the most challenging and rewarding aspects of doing history. If the outcome is clear all along, as it must be in reverse chronologies, it becomes nearly impossible to imagine alternative outcomes.

Second, Drum's proposal would lead to to historical narratives that completely ignore the events that don't have a clear relevance to the present. Tracing the history of, say, Protestantism from its current circumstances to its origins would likely say nothing of the Münster Rebellion of 1534-1535. The Münster Anabaptists have no clear descendants these days; 21st century Mennonites have little in common with the theocratic, polygamous rebels of the 16th century. Yet the Münster Rebellion clearly was a significant moment in the Reformation, representing as it did the successful (if temporary) institution of a radical Protestant theocratic polity less than 20 years after Luther's 95 Theses. To leave out events like this because they have no contemporary significance is to miss out on the richness of the past and to, once again, make the present the only possible outcome of the past.

The historical curriculum favored by Tory Historian doesn't have these problems. If you start at the beginning and move forward from there, you have plenty of opportunities to highlight the contingencies of history, the paths not taken. But in arguing that history must be taught from the very beginning and move forward sequentially, Tory Historian mistakenly assumes that all events can only be understood by understanding everything that has come before them.

To some extent this is true. Discussing the origins of World War II without at least a rudimentary understanding of the Treaty of Versailles is clearly a mistake. But it is far less clear why it is necessary to have studied the rise of civilization in Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium BCE. To be sure, all history classes have to start somewhere. Pieter Judson hinted at how difficult this can be when he opened the first day of a class on modern European history by saying something along the lines of, "This is the day where I cover all the history up to the French Revolution." But it is simply not necessary to study the whole of human history prior to event A in order to study event A.

In describing the holist fallacy, David Hackett Fisher brings up the UNESCO project of writing a complete history of the world. He bitingly concludes that "a project designed to explain everything ends, predictably, by explaining nearly nothing."

The mistake that Kevin Drum and Tory Historian share is the assumption that a clear narrative History exists to be taught. For Drum, History is everything that has brought us to where we are today. For Tory Historian, History is the grand sweep of human existence. For both, history is static and uncontroversial, simply a story to be told. This is wrong-headed for at least two reasons. First, history is controversial (as Tory Historian admits), subject to frequent revision as professional historians make new discoveries and syntheses. Second, no historical narrative can possibly encompass everything, even in a class with a tight geographical and chronological focus (you try condensing the vast literature on World War I into a single class). History, in its rawest form, is a messy jumble of events, trends, and developments. Historians tell stories from this jumble, but there's not just one story to tell.

All historical narratives are vulnerable to these failings. It's not easy to tell a clear story while constantly exploring other possibilities and emphasizing that there's more to it than just this story. But history can be taught in a way that is both responsible and interesting. There's no need to teach history backwards to arouse student interest. Show that history is more than a collection of facts and that the past is full of myriad possibilities and you'll avert student boredom. Nor is it necessary to follow a strict chronological approach to teach history well; it's all right to focus on particular moments in the past, as long as plenty of context is provided.

History takes many forms. Reducing it to a single narrative (even one that moves backward in time) restricts it to just one, and one that many students do not find compelling. Good history presents a compelling story, all the while recognizing that it's not the only story out there.

More history blogging to come

noreply@blogger.com (Danny) — Tue, 15 May 2007 03:17:00 +0000

I've long been aware that much of the history blogging I've done here isn't quite history blogging, but rather blogging about history. I haven't been through my archives, but I can't recall too many instances where I've actually written about the past. To remedy this shortcoming (and the continuing infrequency of posts here), I'm planning to blog about the most interesting bits of my master's dissertation (on British attitudes towards France during WWI, for those of you who somehow forgot the topic of a paper I wrote two years ago and have hardly mentioned since). I don't have a particular timeline in mind, but I'm hoping to have a few posts up in the next few weeks.

For those of you who do prefer my more metahistorical musings, never fear. I'm sure that they will continue to dominate.

I fully anticipate having much more to write about (and having the time to write it) once this autumn rolls around. I'll be beginning a PhD in history at Brown. I got in off the waitlist a few weeks ago. I'm very much looking forward to returning to academia.

Art and ice cream in Rome

noreply@blogger.com (Danny) — Sun, 06 May 2007 18:26:00 +0000

A recent New York Times story highlights one of my favorite about Rome: the abundance of free art in Rome. The center of the city is full of churches, almost all of them worth checking out, for ambiance if nothing else. Throw in the Pantheon and the Forum, and you can easily fill a week with nothing but free art, architecture, and archaeology.

The Times article mentions the site of my favorite painting in the whole world: Caravaggio's Calling of St. Matthew in San Luigi dei Francesi. In addition to the churches mentioned in the article, I also recommend Il Gesù, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (a masterful little church by Borromini), Sant'Ignazio (site of Andrea Pozzo's soaring frescoes and a nifty trompe-l'œil dome), Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza (more Borromini), and Santa Maria della Vittoria (site of Bernini's masterwork Ecstacy of St. Theresa).

In addition to Rome's wonderful art, it also has the best gelato I've ever had. My two favorites:

San Crispino - In terms of flavor, the best gelato in the world. No cones offered here; the proprietors don't want to take away from the taste of the ice cream alone. I once had a cup of apple and honey here; it was Rosh Hashanna in gelato. Check out the flavors, and be sure to try one that you can't believe can be made into ice cream. Just east of the Trevi fountain.

Della Palma - The widest array of flavors. On one visit I discovered that they had three different kinds of pistachio gelato. I had to have a cone wit all three. They also have a large selection of candy, but stick to the gelato. And go back frequently to try new flavors. Just north of the Pantheon.

Improving the Cricket World Cup schedule

noreply@blogger.com (Danny) — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 21:56:00 +0000

The cricket World Cup, which ended on Saturday with a resounding victory by Australia over Sri Lanka, has been rife with problems: low attendance caused by exorbitant ticket prices, the farcical end to the final as the umpires forced the players to continue in near-darkness, the horrifying decision to continue play without interruption following the murder of Bob Woolmer. In all these cases, the situation could have been handled better: ticket prices should have been lowered, the umpires should have known the rules, the ICC should have suspended play out of respect for Woolmer and to give players a chance to grieve.

But the biggest problem with the World Cup was entirely predictable. It went on for too long, with far too many meaningless game. Here's a rundown of the schedule: 48 matches over a month and a half, followed by two semi-finals and a final. 46 matches! That's only 15 fewer than the FIFA World Cup last year, which had twice as many teams participating. There was a month of games that involved almost no excitement or elimination; the structure of the Super Eights stage allowed teams like England, which was truly awful throughout the tournament, to maintain hope of advancing until the very end.

The length of the tournament was bad enough. It was made worse by the lack of balance between the Super Eights stage and the real show: the semifinals and finals. After spending a month playing 24 games to determine the top 4 teams in the tournament, even when it was clear from early on that Australia, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, and South Africa were the class of the tournament. Instead of quickly eliminating the obvious chaff, we had to sit through an eight-team round robin whose result was known weeks ago.

And after all that work, viewers were left with just three games that really mattered, three games between the top four teams in the competition. On a given day, any top team can beat any other team. The amount of luck involved in the final was only increased by the rain-shortened nature of the final between Australia and Sri Lanka. If you decrease the length of the game, you increase the possibility of crazy stuff happening (like Australia losing, even if they were clearly the best team).

So after taking a month to make absolutely sure that the top four teams made it to the semifinals, the ICC decided to make the semi-finals and the finals a crapshoot. A relative crapshoot, but a crapshoot nonetheless.

The tournament would have been far more engaging if the semi-finals and final were extended to best-of-three (or even best-of-five) series. Doing so would increase the likelihood of the best team winning and, more importantly, produce more games between the top teams in the competition. I'd much rather watch three games of Australia-Sri Lanka then two extra match-ups between mediocre sides.

So there you have it, ICC. Next time around, just get on with already. Shorten the preliminary stages and lengthen the elimination phase. You'll end up with better cricket and less boredom.

Teaching the Holocaust in UK schools

noreply@blogger.com (Danny) — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 02:18:00 +0000

You may have heard that the UK has stopped teaching the Holocaust in its schools to avoid alienating Muslim students. There's an e-mail to that effect that's been going around, and it's been getting a bit of space in the blogosphere.

Headlines in the British press on the story included "No lessons on the Holocaust" (Telegraph) and "Schools drop Holocaust lessons to avoid offence" (Times). The version of the e-mail that I got claimed that "UK removed The Holocaust from its school curriculum because it 'offended' the Moslem population which claims it never occurred."

This all seemed to be a bit unlikely, so I decided to look into the report that started the whole story: Teaching Emotive and Controversial History (pdf) by the Historical Association. The newspaper reports suggest that the problem of not teaching the Holocaust in schools was widespread throughout the country. The report itself says nothing of the sort.

"For example, a history department in a northern city recently avoided selecting the Holocaust as a topic for GCSE coursework for fear of confronting anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils."

That's it. The investigators found a single school that chose not to teach the Holocaust to its students. Its possible, of course, that lots of schools that weren't studied made a similar decision. But in the absence of evidence showing that they did, it's tremendously irresponsible of the press to report a widespread problem that simply doesn't exist.

For more details on the situation and the real state of Holocaust education in the UK, you can check out Snopes and the Holocaust Education Trust.

There are a couple of things to be said about cases like this. Most obvious are boilerplate mutterings about how the media do an awful job reporting stories accurately and should be more responsible. This is a pretty standard complaint, with good reason: the press often dramatically overstates the conclusions of reports like these.

Potentially just as harmful, this story shows how powerful narratives can be and how people will eagerly grab onto any anecdote that confirms their view of the world. We're all guilty of this misstep. We see a story that confirms our biases and accept it without hesitation. We come across a story that challenges our viewpoint and we examine it more closely, looking for holes in the story that weakens its reliability. Within history, cultural historians are particularly vulnerable to this phenomenon as much of their work is qualitative and impressionistic; it is all to easy to brush aside those texts that don't fit cleanly into whatever narrative we've come up with.

In the case of UK schools teaching the Holocaust, the narrative that bought the story to prominence is pretty clear. It goes something like this: the rising tide of Islamofascism, backed up by terrorist acts like the September 11th attacks, is threatening the cultural fabric of the West. If it's not stopped, we'll end up under the yoke of mullahs, subject to Sharia, our women forced to wear burkhas.

Some rightwingers' response to Nancy Pelosi's recent trip to Syria provide another example of how this sort of thing happens. Faced with a picture of Pelosi wearing a headscarf in a mosque, the denizens of Little Green Footballs proclaimed things like "a lot more American women are going to be wearing headscarves if these knuckleheaded dhimmis re-take the White House in '08." Never mind that Laura Bush and Condoleezza Rice have worn similar scarves when visiting mosques. If a Democrat appears in Muslim garb, there's only one possible conclusion: the downfall of western civilization.

Pre-existing narratives can have a powerful hold on how we filter and respond to the news. The solution lies not in abandoning narratives (an impossible task), but in adopting a greater degree of skepticism, both towards outrageous claims (the UK is no longer teaching the Holocaust!) and towards stories that fall too neatly into our preconceived notions of the world. Critically evaluating our own narratives brings us closer to the truth and helps develop a sense of intellectual humility, noble outcomes both.

Brian Lara

noreply@blogger.com (Danny) — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 13:32:00 +0000

Brian Lara, one of the giants of modern cricket, announced his retirement from international cricket after the West Indies' victory yesterday against Bangladesh. A batting genius, he holds the records for most Test runs (11,953), the most runs in a Test innings (400 not out), and the most runs in a first-class innings (501 not out).

My interest in cricket came too late to see him in his pomp, so I've been restricted to reading about his greatest innings and watching compilations on YouTube. For my money, it doesn't get any better than his 153 not out as he led the tail home as the West Indies successfully chased 308 to defeat Australia. Nerves of steel.

Wedding invitations

noreply@blogger.com (Danny) — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 02:18:00 +0000

One of the most common topics discussed on The Knot's discussion boards is invitations. Questions abound: who to list as the hosts, how to write out the date, whether response cards are necessary. People get really worked up over these things. At least twice a week there'll be a posting along the lines of, "Help! My printer needs the wording in an hour! Can someone write my invitation?" A lot of this stress is really unnecessary. People freak out over minor points of etiquette and could do well to just chill out.

Did you know that so-and-so "requests the honour of your presence" is only for church weddings? Did you know that you're supposed to spell it honour, even though it's pure affectation? I didn't. Now maybe I'm just a philistine that knows nothing about etiquette, but the very fact that so many people don't know about this sort of things means that the people receiving the invitation won't know about it either. Brides-to-be flatter themselves by thinking that guests will notice this sort of thing. And even if they do, chances are they won't care.

Did you know that you're never supposed to put information about attire on a wedding invitation? Requesting "Black tie," is, apparently, rude and presumptuous. Etiquette mavens insist that people will be able to gauge the appropriate attire for an event based on the location, time, and style of the invitation. But clearly people put things like "Black tie invited" on an invitation because guests don't know these things.

If people on wedding discussion boards aren't acquainted with the finer points of invitation etiquette, their guests won't be either. It's fine if you want to have traditional invitations, but it's really not worth stressing over whether your guests think less of you for requesting the pleasure of their company for a church wedding. They won't notice and they won't care. So don't sweat it.

More on Tanenhaus's views of history

noreply@blogger.com (Danny) — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 17:24:00 +0000

After reading Sam Tanenhaus's response to the Cliopatra symposium his essay on Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., I disagree with him on a couple of key points. In emphasizing the need for "great men" and master narratives, Tanenhaus displays a distorted understanding of what constitutes good history.

First, Tanenhaus has a rather eccentric view of how historians should portray individual figures within their work. In spite of insisting that "'great men' need not be great ... so much as representative," he later calls on historians to meet the critique of Saul Bellow and show how "the ordinary person could achieve a kind of greatness through his struggles with the culture that surrounded him." Far from being representative, then, Tanenhaus's ideal historical figures are the ones who transcend their societies' boundaries and attain distinction and eminence.

As Frederic Smoler noted in his response to Tanenhaus, academic history is largely anti-heroic these days. With good reason, if you ask me. While there are clearly a number of figures from the past who have shaped the course of history, to write about them hagiographically is to miss out on the larger fabric of the past. People do not rises to greatness without being influenced by the society and culture around them. Studying context explains a great deal and often serves to demystify, and in the process humanize, the supposed heroes. To be sure, Tanenhaus warns that historians "must be careful not to underestimate ... the larger impersonal forces in and against which individual lives unfold." But to set out to write a history of individuals striving for greatness virtually ensures that the narrative will ignore the importance of context and, as a result, fail to capture the whole picture.

My second problem with Tanenhaus's ideal of historical practice is related to the first. As Scott McLemee pointed out, it is not as easy as it once was to write coherent narratives of the past. In 1945, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. could write The Age of Jackson without so much as mentioning the Trail of Tears. To do so now would be seen as a willful whitewashing of the past. In 1945, it was good enough for a Pulitzer.

I don't mean to bash Schlesinger. Rather, my point is that the more we learn about the past, the harder it becomes to create coherent narratives out of it. This is not a bad thing. In general, I think we'd all be better served if we were much more humble in our pronouncements on history and its contemporary significance. The past is messy and there are no easy lessons in it.

Tanenhaus, though, sees the breakdown of narratives as a bad thing: "every nation is defined to an important extent by its unifying myths (stories), however unstable, and that we sacrifice something if we don't seek to give those stories some credence even as we examine and revise them." Let's be very clear about this: Tanenhaus believes that we shold be granting credence to myths. While few historians would disagree with his assessment that mythmaking is a key component of creating national unity, even fewer would see it as their responsibility to help prop up those myths. Historians' first responsibility is to the past, not to the nation. To switch those priorities is to risk distorting the past for present concerns.

In short, Tanenhaus's views on the way that historians should work are profoundly ahistorical and, if implemented, would result in presentist history that fails to accurately portray the past. While there's no such thing as the Historical Truth that can be written, following Tanenhaus's advice would miss the mark by a long ways.

Lessons from Rome?

noreply@blogger.com (Danny) — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 22:23:00 +0000

I saw The Emperor's Club a few years ago and found it frustrating as all hell. But I couldn't quite place the source of my annoyance. After stumbling across a reference to it somewhere on the internet last week, I thought about it some more and figured out my problem with it.

William Hundert teaches Roman history at an elite boys private school. He wants to instill virtue and character in his pupils by teaching them about Rome. "When the boys read Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Julius Caesar even, they're put in direct contact with men, who in their own age, exemplified the highest standards of statesmanship, of civic virtue, character, conviction." A lofty and noble goal. Perhaps a bit misguided, but the character's believable.

What strains credulity is the movie's climax: a rather silly Roman history trivia contest that most closely resembles a spelling bee. After bloviating for the whole movie on the need to look to the figures of Caesar and Cicero for moral inspiration, Hundert oversees a contest where students wear togas, answer purely factual questions ("Who was Hamilcar Barca?"), and fight it out to become Mr. Julius Caesar.

Look, you can argue that studying the past provides valuable lessons for the present. You can even argue that we should seek to emulate the great men of the past. But you can't argue that and then bestow honor and prestige on those who memorize the most battles. Hundert ends up coming across like a pedantic blowhard who believes that history lies in the facts. As a result, his high-minded moralism comes across as an almost naive hypocrisy when faced with a real moral conflict.

Random encounters with international cricketers

noreply@blogger.com (Danny) — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 21:52:00 +0000

Last summer, I spent a week in Bermuda with my parents and girlfriend. During my time in England I picked up an interest in cricket, so I decided that we should all go to a match. Never mind that my parents and girlfriend had, at best, a rudimentary knowledge of the game (my girlfriend still giggles when announcers say things along the lines of "He's taken a key wicket there"). I would be there to explain things.

We showed up at Lord's Oval a few minutes before the scheduled start. The players were warming up and there wasn't much of a crowd, so we walked over to the shore and watched some crashing waves to kill some time. After a few minutes we wandered back to the stands (nothing more than the porch of the clubhouse) and awaited the start. The players were all there, and so was an umpire. But one person was missing.

The second umpire, it seems, had either forgotten or decided not to show up. The remaining umpire did about the only thing he could: he came over to the spectators and asked for volunteers. He asked my dad first. He laughed nervously and suggested me as an alternative. "You should ask my son. He knows the rules, at least."

After nervously explaining that my actual cricket experience was limited to 20 overs of wicket-keeping in a lowly MCR vs. porters match, I was nonetheless deputised as the second umpire. I did manage to convince the real umpire to let me remain at square leg; LBWs would be far beyond my ken.

The umpiring itself was rather low-key. I had only a few decisions to make, none of them difficult. The one time I gave someone out was a clear run-out. The batsman had failed to make his ground by at least three feet. On the players were just as bewildered by my being there as I was. "When did you get to the island?" "Yesterday afternoon." "And you're already umpiring cricket?!"

As it turned out, Flatts Victoria handily defeated Western Stars by 101 runs.

A nice story, and a good example of the things that can happen when keeping an open mind while traveling. But why is it timely? Well, as I recently discovered, two of the players in the match I umpired were selected for Bermuda's World Cup side. Thanks to Saleem Mukuddem and Dean Minors, I've been on a cricket pitch with players that have been on a cricket pitch with some of the biggest names in the sport: Andrew Flintoff, Kevin Pietersen, Muttiah Muralitharan and more. All thanks to a desire to sit and watch some cricket one Sunday morning.

A milestone

noreply@blogger.com (Danny) — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 01:28:00 +0000

Today, by dumb luck, I came across the first instance of me being cited in print. The first book on my cart was Anges & Démons: Autopsie d'une mystification by Jean-Michel Oullion. As you probably know, my most popular post ever was a rather lengthy list of the innumerable errors in Dan Brown's trainwreck of a thriller.

I flipped through Oullion's book -- no big surprises. Even though I haven't picked up the book in over two years, the factual errors are so egregious (to say nothing of the awful writing) that the whole thing ends up being pretty memorable. But imagine my surprise when I get to the bibliography. The last item:

Sur le blog de Danny Loss, nos lecteurs anglophones trouveront également un mini-forum de discussion sur les erreurs d'Anges et Démons.

If anything, I'm a bit concerned by how closely some of Ouillon's critiques followed my own. But for right now the main feeling is exhilaration.

Historians for the present

noreply@blogger.com (Danny) — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 03:47:00 +0000

Manan Ahmed has called for a symposium: A Historian for the People. This is my contribution.

Sam Tanenhaus, writing in the New York Times, notes the passing of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. as the loss of America's "last great public historian." Tanenhaus points to Schlesinger, along with C. Vann Woodward and Richard Hofstadter, as having written classic works of history that simultaneously addressed contemporary political problems. Tanenhaus calls for more historians like them.

Tanenhaus shoots down the most likely successors to Schlesinger as lacking the broad cultural authority that Schlesinger held for the past half century. Gordon Wood's Radicalism of the American Revolution and James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom fail to influence how we think about current topics. In this respect, Tanenhaus gets things backwards. It might be the case that the Wood's proposed radicalism really has no contemporary significance. Tanenhaus's complaint that the works of Wood, McPherson, and those like them are "mired" in the past misses out on the fact that they must stand on their own merits as studies of a particular period in the past. That they do not offer clear lessons or morals for the present is not a liability.

I suspect, however, that even if Wood and McPherson wrote books in the mold of Schlesinger, they would not gain the audience and attention that Schlesinger commanded. Schlesinger's cultural authority came, in large part, from his life story. The son of Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., he already had a name famous in scholarly circles. Born in the same year as John F. Kennedy, he was a student at Harvard at the same time as the future president. He served in the Office of War Information and OSS during WWII, then returned to Harvard as a professor of history, all before becoming a Special Assistant to President Kennedy. As a result, he had the scholarly credibility, the social connections, and the political experience necessary to emerge as a bona fide public intellectual.

It's not simply a matter, then, of historians emulating Arthur Schlesinger's commitment to addressing contemporary issues. Schlesinger was a special case. He built up a tremendous amount of social capital in ways that aren't readily available to historians today. For better or worse, there are few opportunities for historians (or most other academics) to move directly into public service.

Historians can and should offer their perspectives on the problems and issues of today. But it's not as simple as writing books like Schlesinger. The 21st century needs a new model of the public intellectual. Tanenhaus is right; there won't be another Arthur Schlesinger. He was of another generation and is not an easy model for contemporary historians to follow.

I don't know the best way for historians to engage in public discussions. It's a tough question, made all the more difficult by rapid changes in technology -- witness the rising importance of blogs in the past few years. As significant a public figure as Schlesinger was, his time is past. When it comes to how to best address contemporary issues, contemporary historians should look to the future, not the past.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., 89

noreply@blogger.com (Danny) — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 09:41:00 +0000

Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., died last night at the age of 89. I haven't read any of his work, but he spoke at Swarthmore just over three years ago, when he spoke compellingly about the importance of debate before war and the patriotism of dissent.