[Jason Jewell]

Hi, Ben, and welcome to Liberty Classroom! There are no absolutely required or essential readings for the Western Civilization courses. The bibliography that accompanies each lecture is for those who wish to dig deeper into that particular lecture’s topic.

If you are looking for a general Western Civ survey textbook that will flesh out the lecture material, I find Jackson Spielvogel’s the least objectionable of the mainstream texts out there: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0495913243/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0495913243&linkCode=as2&tag=thewesttrad-20

Yes, it is pricey (not excessively so, as college textbooks go), but I’m sure you can find used copies for a more palatable price.

And I hope you find the blog enjoyable!

[Jason Jewell]

Juan, I am actually not that familiar with the universe of documentaries on WWII. I suspect that documentaries focusing more on specific battles or campaigns will be better than a series that tries to encompass the whole war.

As for “regular” films, off the top of my head, “Das Boot” is quite good, and the first thirty minutes or so of “Enemy at the Gates” gives a taste of the brutality of Stalingrad.

[Jason Jewell]

It has been a while since I listened to this lecture, and I don’t recall saying that Trotsky went to Russia straight from Switzerland. If I did, that was a misstatement. Trotsky was in Switzerland earlier in the war, then in France and Spain before going to New York. He went back to Europe in the spring of 1917.

[Jason Jewell]

Hi, Brian. I’m glad you’re enjoying the lectures.

The discipline of history, because of its reliance on written testimony, isn’t really equipped to answer your questions. They fall more under the purview of archeology.

There are multiple theories as to how, when, and why people first came to the Americas. The one that seems to be most in favor right now is that they crossed a land bridge from Russia to Alaska in pursuit of big game during an Ice Age some 12,000 years ago. But any explanation involves a decent dose of speculation.

[Jason Jewell]

David, this is a question that deserves more than a response of one or two paragraphs. We are talking about the possibility of developing a course on the history of conservatism and libertarianism that would flesh this out in much more detail, but that is months down the road.

As you note, these words originally referred to supporters (left) and opponents (right) of the French Revolution and its legacy. They retained those meanings in Europe to a great extent throughout the 19th century and the early 20th century. Now that the French Revolution enjoys nearly universal approbation in Europe, “left” is usually employed to refer to social and economic egalitarianism, and “right” is used to refer to anyone who objects to those things.

In his essay “Left and Right,” Murray Rothbard argued that a better way to view the spectrum is that “left” is anti-State, and “right” is pro-State. This was his attempt to woo New Left opponents of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, but the argument never really caught on in broader public discourse. Today in the U.S. the terms mean pretty much what they mean in Europe.

Most libertarians today will argue that “left” and “right,” or at least “right,” aren’t really that useful in describing one’s political program. “Left” might mean something definite, but “right” is employed to refer to everyone from libertarians and classical liberals to Buchananite populists to divine-right monarchists to neo-Nazis. It obscures more than it illuminates.

[Jason Jewell]

Hi, Dan. I’ve explained my usage of the term “Palestine” in another thread on this message board. It is a generic geographical term that Western historians have used since well before the modern state of Israel was established in 1948. It is not intended to advance any political position. Please do not interpret it as such.

[Jason Jewell]

Have you looked at the sources I mention on the page for the lecture on the Industrial Revolution in Britain? I don’t really like Hobsbawm, but I bet you could mine his bibliographies for some sources on the transition you want to write about.

[Jason Jewell]

According to Jean Gimpel (1976), medieval people introduced more machinery into their society than any other people ever had to that point in history. The whole concept of the mill (for grain, leather, paper, etc.) was a huge breakthrough that saved countless labor-hours for men and animals.

If the assignment is asking more for an “a-ha!” kind of technological gimmick, there’s also the stirrup, the magnetic compass, paper-making, and the full-rigged ship. Several of these inventions had origins outside of Europe, but Europeans made far greater use of them than anyone else did during the Middle Ages.

[Jason Jewell]

Dan, can you clarify the assignment a little? Are you looking for a technology that was invented/adopted between 600 and 1500, or a technology that had a big impact on the period, or both?

The technologies you’ve mentioned are all significant. If military technologies are fair game, you might consider the crossbow or gunpowder.

[Jason Jewell]

As you hint at above, everything in this debate hinges on definition. Certainly it’s possible to define “liberal” in such a way as to exclude people like Smith, but I don’t really see the usefulness of doing so. Also, if you read works like Milton’s “Areopagitica,” you see arguments for things like freedom of the press that do not seem to appeal to community interests.

Also, your point about utilitarians is a good one.

[Jason Jewell]

Following up on this, I just ran across an announcement of a new book anthologizing resistance sermons preached during the Third Reich. The book isn’t scheduled for release until October, but you might be interested in taking a look. I don’t know if any Roman Catholics are represented in it:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0802869025/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0802869025&linkCode=as2&tag=thewesttrad-20

[Jason Jewell]

Shirer was a journalist who saw a lot of Nazi Germany up close. You get a lot of good anecdotes and things of that sort there. Its political and economic theoretical framework isn’t all that great, but you’ll have fun with it. I’m not familiar with Tooze’s book.

[Jason Jewell]

Hi, John. If you are looking for primary sources, the most famous is Froissart’s “Chronicles,” a 14th-century work which provides a lot of information about the first half of the Hundred Years War.

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/froissart-full.asp

Desmond Seward writes engaging works on medieval history. His book on the Hundred Years War is focused on the military and political stuff in a chronological format: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140283617/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0140283617&linkCode=as2&tag=thewesttrad-20

If you want a book that is more topically organized, the volume on the war in the Cambridge Medieval Textbook series has dedicated sections to things like taxation: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521319234/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0521319234&linkCode=as2&tag=thewesttrad-20

Rothbard discusses the politics of the 14th century very briefly in his History of Economic Thought as well.

[Jason Jewell]

Usually with a revolution, I end up asking what the revolutionaries’ goals are. Sometimes the goal is to escape from an oppressive state (secession); this seems to fit what happened in East Germany, as well as what happened in the USSR a couple of years later. Those revolutions look pretty good to me.

On the other hand, when the goal of the revolutionaries is to seize control of a state, things are much trickier. More often than not, even the revolutionaries talk a good game on freedom and the like, they do more damage than they heal because they wind up using violence against anyone who resists their seizure of power (not just the established government, but also regular people). And of course if the revolutionaries’ express goal is to create a political order that affords less liberty than the previous one, there’s nothing good about that.

I don’t have strong feelings one way or the other about the July Revolution. The Revolutions of 1848, in general, were harmful. They alienated many elites with liberal inclinations. They also fueled socialist movements down the road. And of course they failed in their objectives.

I hope this is helpful.

[Jason Jewell]

Hitler was baptized as an infant into the Roman Catholic Church, which was the official church in Austria-Hungary, where he grew up. But I don’t know of any evidence that he ever showed any commitment to Christian doctrine as an adult; his membership in the Catholic Church was purely nominal, and he did not participate in the sacraments.

The “Christianity” that Hitler occasionally affirmed in public was one that most Christians would not recognize because it was “Nazified.”

The Wikipedia article on this topic has many citations to give you an idea of the conflicting interpretations of Hitler’s religious views: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Adolf_Hitler

As to the role of religion in the Nazi state, Hitler tried with some success to turn the churches into instruments of Nazi policy. He succeeded to the extent that the leadership of the churches echoed nationalist propaganda when the war started. However, there was always resistance within the churches, too.

I don’t know as much about Goebbels, unfortunately, but I hope this helps.

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