War Minus the Shooting

July/August 2004 · Historically Speaking33 There Is No Perfect Design (2003). When I interviewed him, he stressed that histories of smaU things—be theypaper cups, paperbags, waterpitchers, or chairs—reveal the extraordinary that exists in the ordinary. Perhaps contemporary historians have a special responsibility to write histories of things, especially smaU and invisible things. Indeed, ifwe are to write of human power, we mustwrite notjust ofgreat and grandiose matters but ofvital and deadly microscopic things. Increasingly, as I argued in Dust, human fate turns on the atom, molecule, ceU, gene, and microscopic engineering. As a genre, the history ofthings (or the histories ofeverything) can be seen as a gatheringofsundryhistoriographical tribes. On one level, it appears to be an overflow from social history, particularly with its concern for domestic and everydayUfe. Italso can be conceptualized as a superabundance of cultural history, with its focus on the material things that determine human belief, behavior, and socialization. But I would argue this genre has another ofits sources in the recent expansion ofenvironmental and ecological history. Concentrating on the relationship between the natural and the historical, it directs our attention to the determining roles ofplants, animals, crops, land use, agricultural practices and technologies, along with the causative and elemental power of climate, soils, water, rivers, and fire on human landscape . Reconfirming the materiaUty ofhistory , environmental historians often propose an underlying and governing energy equation between all human and natural things and the importance of technology in transforming environments. Collectively, historians writing in this genre are revitaUzinghistorybyforgingnew, ifnotstunning, marriages offacts, anecdotes, ideas, concepts, and ideas. Their works proceed on fresh perspectives and unexpected connections. Theyhave atleast the potential to remove obtuse explanations and impenetrable historiographical debates from their narratives, aUowingvivid details, tellinganecdotes , precise connections, and keen wits to trump theory and ideology. Althoughnot always pure in practice and admittedlymore appropriate for certain subjects than others, the historyofthings moves us into everyday Ufe. Not forgetful of Cinderella among the ashes or the truism that not everyshoe fits everyfoot, historianswriting the history ofthings must utiUze a flexible causality. Tracing connections between crafts and classes and across landscapes and environments, this genre welcomes everything under the sun into its consideration. The history of things, to guess at its future, will not consoUdate itself into a formal school or an estabUshed curriculum. Its sources and motives are too diverse; its subjects and methodologies are too numerous, if not eccentric. Its embrace of novelty, no doubt, invites those who cherish cleverness and book sales over scholarship. Nevertheless , atthe same time, itwiU provide fresh topics and approaches. It will give a deserved place to the history ofscience, technology, engineering, design, and the landscape, which is fitting in this era ofmoral and social subjects . It wiU also leaven economic, business, family, local, and regional history. Negating abstract ideologies and uniform and governing explanations, it wiU stimulate our imaginations , enhance the flexibüityofour causalities , and meetJacques Barzun's prescription for good history by joining "Narrative, Chronology, Concreteness, and Memorability ."2 Finally, with its accent on details, precise connections, and contextual accuracy, the history ofthings will leave us, as any good narrative should, tremblingbefore the power ofthe common and ordinary, the smaU and invisible, to write human destinies. JosephA. Amato has recently retiredfrom Southwest State University where he was director ofthe CenterforRuraland Regional Studies andprofessor ofhistory. His Dust: A History ofthe Small and Invisible (University ofCalifornia Press, 2000) wasselected as afirst choice non-fiction book by the Los Angeles Times. He iscompleting On Foot: A Cultural History ofWalking (New York University Press,forthcoming in 2004). 1 Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History, trans. Katharine H.Jewett (Routledge, 2001). 2 Barzun's prescription is cited in Hugh Ragsdale, "Comparative Historiography ofthe Social HistoryofRevolutions : English, French, and Russian," TheJournalofthe HistoricalSociety 3 (2003): 357. War Minus the Shooting Nigel Spivey Late in 1945 the EngUsh writer George Orwell turned his journalistic attention to the phenomenon of international soccer. The Second World War had ended with formal peace agreements in the summer of that year. As part of a return to normaUty, the Soviet Union had sent one of its leading football clubs, the Moscow Dynamos, on a round of "friendly" fixtures with teams in Britain. The...