Author: Maria Villotti

Ida and Neighbors

October 14, 2015 / Maria Villotti / 0 Comments

After reading Neighbors and watching Ida, I feel like they generally serve as complimentary pieces. Both works shed light on the fact that Poles were just as guilty in the murder of local Jews as Germans were—perhaps, in some cases, even more guilty.

Ida, in a way, illuminates and confirms a particular anecdote included in Neighbors. Towards the end of the book, Gross includes the story of Aharon Appelfeld’s return to his hometown 50 years after the murder of 62 Jews there. When he tried to find where there were buried, many adults tried to keep from telling him. However, when he asked the children, it was clear that even they, who weren’t alive at the time of the killings, knew about them. Eventually the man who buried the bodies shows him where the grave is. A similar scene is depicted in Ida, when the man who killed and buried Ida’s parents and her aunt’s son is at first reluctant to admit knowledge of the grave (as are many in the town), but eventually takes the pair to where the victims were buried.

Although it seems, in some respects, that many Polish people mentioned in Neighbors are much more forthcoming with information about the murders than characters in Ida were, it should be noted that the characters in Ida had nothing to lose by concealing information from to random women. In contrast, the people interviewed in the trials mentioned in Neighbors probably stood to lose a lot if they lied and the court found out about it.

Both works show an interesting aspect of wartime Poland: the fact that many found hiding Jews unconscionable and unacceptable, but were perfectly willing to murder them to fix the situation. The killer in Ida killed the Jews his father was hiding, and on many occassions mentioned in Neighbors, citizens of a town turned upon those hiding Jews and pressured them to kill those Jews, demonstrating that pressure to kill Jews did not always come from the Nazis. It seems to me that Ida and Neighbors both serve to show both the guilt of the Polish people and their continuing knowledge of what happened during the war, although they may, at times, be reluctant to admit it.

Seeing Like A Historian

October 7, 2015 / Maria Villotti / 0 Comments

Reading Gaddis’ text, in a way, helped get me thinking in different ways about how history and its methods work. For me, the most interesting part of the text was the distinction between types of causes in the sixth chapter, because it helped expand my view of causation.

Where previously I wouldn’t have even considered the impact that the formation of the Japanese islands had on the attack on Pearl Harbor, thanks to Gaddis it know seems obvious to me that the attack couldn’t have happened without the islands forming. Usually, I would only look at the most recent thing or things that preceded an event as possible causes, but know I realize that things that happened long before are also causes—just slightly less relevant ones.

I was also very interested by exceptional and general causes, and the idea of context’s effect on consequences. I guess it isn’t so much that it was news to me, but that it highlighted something I had often glossed over. The same conditions, for example, that cause car accidents exist very often without causing car accidents. But with the addition of one other, new cause, an accident can occur.

I think this recognition of varying levels of causes is important to the way we see history because it can help us choose which causes to highlight. Not only that, but it gives more options of causes to highlight. With all of these different things to focus on, there are any number of ways to interpret history, and with that, more chances to get closer to the truth

Doing History

September 24, 2015 / Maria Villotti / 0 Comments

I’ve never really thought about my strategy for approaching a new history research paper topic, but I think I do have one after all. Whenever I get a topic to write about, I try to think of where (if anywhere) I’ve heard of that topic before. If not, I usually do turn to Google or a library to get me started.

When I think of places I’ve heard of a topic before, I’m looking for other books I’ve previously read, maybe even including textbooks that I’ve kept. I usually will go to those to refresh my memory on basic information about the topic and try to gather important names or words I can later use as search terms to find out more information. If I don’t know anything at all about a topic and haven’t really read anything about it before, I’ll do a quick Google search. Often I don’t trust what I read on the internet, so a lot of times I’ll read five or six different sites on the same events to try and corroborate the facts.

Based on this week’s workbook reading, I should probably do more work with primary sources. It’s very rare that I actually get to use a quality primary source. Before doing the reading, I also realize I can and should be using secondary sources’ sources to find useful primary sources. Above all, I need to be more careful to notice bias—something I’m great at doing when the bias is different than my own, but when it’s the same as mine I think I often let it go unnoticed. This week’s readings have definitely given me some helpful tips for how to research a new history paper topic in the future.

Building a Nation on the Record

September 16, 2015 / Maria Villotti / 0 Comments

Both the Ghosh and Milligan readings this week present interesting images of archives as they relate to the nations whose history they are archiving. Many scholars find a strong tie between archives and the foundation of nations. This is because archives hold the documents and information that reflect essentially what a nation is about and also how the government of that nation has been functioning.

Milligan, in discussing the French Archives nationales, describes a system where the contents and actions of the archives is representative of the ideals of the state. If the Archives remove and destroy a document to protect an individual, they (and by extension, the government) are putting private interests above the public interest. If a government wishes to be perceived as benefitting the nation as a whole, the way documents are handled in the national archives should reflect this. In this way, the behavior of the archives themselves is central to the creation of nations.

In Ghosh’s essay, it becomes apparent through the both the differing content of archives in Britain and India and the reactions of people in the archives in both nations, that archives are key in shaping and maintaining a particular national identity. The documents in the Calcutta archives that represent an unsavory topic for India are poorly sorted and not often referenced, while archivists in Britain were keen to suggest various organized references that could help find information on that same topic. This suggests that what can be found easily in a nation’s archives becomes the nation’s history.

While I don’t believe the archives at Dickinson could not be said to be particularly influential in either of these ways to the creation of a nation (that nation being the United States), I do feel that the archives are central to how, in a smaller sense, the college community was built. The information in these archives relates to the founding and history of the college, and there is no doubt that what is included and what is easily accessible has shaped the image of Dickinson and its surrounding community. The Dickinson archives function similarly to national archives, but on a smaller scale.

Detection and Historical Method

September 9, 2015 / Maria Villotti / 0 Comments

When a person thinks of a detective and a historian, it is likely they see the former as an exciting person who does exciting work, and the latter as a stuffy person with their nose in a book, doing a terribly tedious job. What that person would be failing to realize, however, is that a great many similarities exist between the methods used in these two professions. Josephine Tey presents the parallels and the differences nicely in her novel The Daughter of Time, which explores the way in which Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard turns his detective’s mind towards a matter of history.

Both historians and detectives find their best, most trustworthy evidence from primary sources. For a detective, these can be eyewitness accounts or receipts. For historians, primary sources are produced at the time in question, and are things like letters and ledgers. In The Daughter of Time, Grant and Carradine’s some most useful sources were a letter written by Richard III and records from the time that weren’t intended as historical record.

Detectives most often do their work in the moment. They have a fresh look at events before most people have time to form their own strongly held ideas and convictions, and can look almost anywhere to find relevant information. Historians, however do their work looking back through a window. As time progresses away from the event in question, that window gets smaller and smaller, giving historians fewer options as to what occurred, barring the discovery of new information. Tey highlights this when Grant laments the fact that most accounts of Richard that follow the More account adopt the story without question until it is narrowed down into a simple tale of villainy in the child’s history book.

Despite that difference, which appears to give advantage to the detectives, both detectives and historians have to cross check and wade through dubious “facts.” Detectives can get false testimony from a spiteful witness, and historians can get bad information from a spiteful primary or secondary source. Histories very much reflect the time they were written—the Tudor historians mentioned by Tey vilify Richard III, and the Gospels (whether regarded as reliable histories or not) each tell slightly different stories depending on the people the authors were trying to reach in their respective time periods. Just like detectives have to be aware of “witnesses” who may have ulterior motives, historians have to realize that history may be exaggerated in favor of the author. Both detectives and historians look to similar places for facts and face some similar obstacles with them, but they are very much separated by the allowances of their respective time frames.