… and they speak a different language there. From a Pacific Historical Review article of 1946 on war damage to France:
Military engineers restored the railroads and roads needed as supply lines for the advancing Allied armies, but responsibility for the repair of shattered bridges and railroads which were not needed for military purposes was delegated to the French. It might just as well have been delegated to the Zulus.
George Kyte, “War Damage and Problems of Reconstruction in France, 1940-1945,” Pacific Historical Review 15, no. 4 (December 1946): 417-26, on 421.
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36 comments
January 29, 2010 at 12:34 pm
ben
Joke’s on Kyte—WWII damage to French infrastructure isn’t a matter of neither Pacific nor pacific history. What a maroon.
January 29, 2010 at 12:34 pm
ben
Er, joke’s on me. Is a matter of neither etc.
January 29, 2010 at 12:36 pm
ben
Is the joke definitively on me, or can I claim exculpatory ignorance?
January 29, 2010 at 1:26 pm
andrew
I would say that you’ve confused the PHR with the WHQ, but that’s unlikely.
January 29, 2010 at 1:42 pm
Daniel
That’s harsh.
January 29, 2010 at 4:21 pm
snarkout
Ben, you Nimrod.
January 29, 2010 at 6:24 pm
Western Dave
So when did PHR stop being devoted to history produced on or near the West Coast and become more focused on Western US and trans-Pacific history?
January 29, 2010 at 8:44 pm
AYY
You lost me. What’s the point of the headline, or of dragging up an obscure article from 64 years ago? Some commenters seem to think the point is that it appeared in the wrong magazine. That point may be well taken, but if the editors and subscribers didn’t mind it at the time, why bring it up now? And what’s a “maroon” ? Sorry but I’m very confused about this whole thing.
January 29, 2010 at 9:42 pm
ari
The “headline” is a rather famous phrase. Though I regret that I’m not sure who first said it, you can google it just as easily as I can. As for dragging up obscure articles, that’s pretty much what we do as historians. We call it secondary research. And finally, the overall point, the relationship between the post title and the post itself, is that no historian today would ever put into print anything like the block quote you read above. Providing such a quote to readers of EotAW, then, is a way of measuring how much things have changed with regard to our discipline’s rhetorical standards.
Happy to help.
January 29, 2010 at 10:14 pm
andrew
My understanding was that the PHR was originally a place for historians working on the west coast in any geographical field to get their work published in a reputable journal while the profession was still more regionally-based. This article was back when the Journal of American History was still the Missouri Valley Historical Review.
But I’m just speculating, and I assume that the PHR has probably always had more of a western/pacific focus – but it’s run by the Pacific Coast Branch of the AHA, not the OAH.
January 29, 2010 at 10:47 pm
andrew
Uh, instead of Missouri, that should be Mississippi. I’m not sure how I failed to correct that, as I looked it up before posting the comment.
January 29, 2010 at 10:52 pm
eric
I say the title comes from LP Hartley, The Go-between. I did not google this, so it may be incorrect.
January 29, 2010 at 11:03 pm
andrew
Google says it is correct. Unless it’s a phrase that was already in use at that time.
January 29, 2010 at 11:34 pm
ben
Joke really is on me. My first comment was facetious. I do not believe that the Pacific Historical Review is dedicated to peacetime history or to the history of the Pacific, anymore than I think analogous things about the Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. I am sorry for any confusion I may have caused.
January 30, 2010 at 1:20 am
dave
Well, at least nobody ever accused the Zulus of being cheese-eating surrender-monkeys…
January 30, 2010 at 8:10 am
mrearl
This good post is yet another proof of Faulkner. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
January 30, 2010 at 9:54 am
TF Smith
I’m kind of interested in why Prof. K was looking at Dr. Kyte’s work; some interesting possibilties suggest themselves.
George K. was at Lehigh and then Northern Arizona before he retired in 1987; He appears to be an American history specialist. He was on the roll of the AHA as a 50-year-member as late as 2000, apparently. Anyone here study at Flagstaff? Anyone have any courses with him?
His father, George C., was an education professor and advisor at Cal; his grandfather was an Oakland city cop…another uncle and a cousin were both PE teachers, one in the Oakland schools and the other at Cal…
Amazing thing, the Google.
January 30, 2010 at 10:12 am
ben
Prof. R., you mean, don’t you?
January 30, 2010 at 10:17 am
TF Smith
Ben – You are correct. Prof. R. makes the possibilties equally interesting…
January 30, 2010 at 11:03 am
Hortense
I think the quote is actually “the past is a foreign country” etc., but in any event, it’s no place for a xenophobic outlook.
January 30, 2010 at 11:40 am
ari
I, too, have heard and read it as “the past is a foreign country” — as here. But google indicates that Eric’s version is at least as accurate.
January 30, 2010 at 1:38 pm
Jackmormon
Oh, I thought that the joke was on Americans today for having such shitty railroads in comparison with the French.
January 30, 2010 at 5:37 pm
snarkout
Googling to look up where the phrase came from (I’ve even seen the Julie Christie movie!) led to this complaint (from “Tory Historian”) that novelists should not judge history, so really, it’s all on topic.
January 30, 2010 at 5:40 pm
kid bitzer
another country, a foreign country, the french, the zulus, who cares.
the point is:
the past is teeming with wogs.
January 30, 2010 at 8:41 pm
Josh
the past is teeming with wogs.
s/b
“The wogs start at 1995.”
January 30, 2010 at 9:23 pm
NM
Somewhere in The Poor Man archives, The Editors surveyed some old warblogging said “the past really is a foreign country. I want to bomb it.” So true.
January 31, 2010 at 10:45 am
Erik Lund
Bombing is how you bring Western Civilisation. So, yeah, in general.
And when are we going to hear more about the reconstruction of the French rail network?
January 31, 2010 at 10:52 am
Ben Alpers
From the New York Times, November 3, 1950 (quoted in David Oshinsky’s A Conspiracy So Immense, p. 192):
Chinese Communist hordes, attacking on horse and on foot to the sound of bugle calls, cut up Americans and South Koreans at Unsan today in an Indian-style massacre.
January 31, 2010 at 4:42 pm
docdave
They start at 1995? Where I was taught sir, they began at Calais.
And where I worked (for a couple of years) they began, it was implied, over in the Anthropology department, our chief competition for brainy ethnohistorians-in-prospect.
February 1, 2010 at 8:27 am
William Berry
L.P. Hartley: “The past is another country; they do things differently there.”
February 1, 2010 at 8:37 am
dave
Why does a part of me want to say “Fly Fishing”…..?
February 1, 2010 at 10:05 am
Michael Holloway
I’m going to read the McCarthy book and maybe the L P Hartley, it sounds nice; and found out about the history of black settlement around the slave trade – so while confusing, all in all, a really productive morning.
BUT. I’m saving this paragraph by ‘AYY’ in a word document for later:
“You lost me. What’s the point of (INSERT ADJECTIVE HERE), or of dragging up an obscure (INSERT NOUN HERE) from (INSERT YEAR HERE) ago? Some commenters seem to think the point is that it appeared in the wrong (PERSON, PLACE OR THING HERE). That point may be well taken, but if the editors and subscribers didn’t mind it at the time, why bring it up now? And what’s a (OBSCURE CULTURAL REFERENCE HERE) ? Sorry but I’m very confused about this whole thing.”
Sincerely,
Michael Holloway
February 1, 2010 at 3:05 pm
Michael Bérubé
You lost me. What’s the point of (INSERT ADJECTIVE HERE), or of dragging up an obscure (INSERT NOUN HERE) from (INSERT YEAR HERE) ago? Some commenters seem to think the point is that it appeared in the wrong (PERSON, PLACE OR THING HERE). That point may be well taken, but if the editors and subscribers didn’t mind it at the time, why bring it up now? And what’s a (OBSCURE CULTURAL REFERENCE HERE) ? Sorry but I’m very confused about this whole thing.
This strikes me as a lovely all-purpose response to your basic incendiary blog post.
February 1, 2010 at 4:25 pm
Jason B.
I hate it when I appear in the wrong person, place, or thing.
February 2, 2010 at 9:17 am
Michael Holloway
The first sentence of this comment is going to make you want to read more.
February 2, 2010 at 12:04 pm
kid bitzer
the post to which michel bé links is a work of art.
(though jim henley also sort of covered that territory in a different way, four years ago.)
http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2006/04/07/4991