Questions and Answers About History

Students of history invariably ponder questions of what if. What if Archduke Francis Ferdinand had not been assassinated? Would World War I still have happened? What if the United States had lacked aircraft carriers at the outset of World War II? Would Japan have won the battle for the Pacific? Historian Jerry H. Bentley, editor of the Journal of World History, ponders these and many other what if questions in a series of historical inquiries ranging from ancient Mesopotamia to the end of the Cold War.

Questions and Answers About History Q: Without the use of aircraft carriers, is it possible that the United States could have defeated the Japanese in the war in the Pacific during World War II? How? A: In the absence of aircraft carriers, the war in the Pacific would inevitably have been a very different affair. Aircraft carriers were prominent in several of the most important battles of World War II (1939-1945) in the Pacific, including the Battle of Coral Sea (May 1942), which stopped the Japanese advance to the south toward Australia, and the Battle of Midway (June 1942), which seriously damaged the Japanese aircraft carrier fleet and turned the tide of the war in the Pacific. Remember that Japanese forces also made use of aircraft carriers. These carriers played a crucial role in Japanese conquests of Pacific islands and also in the attack on Pearl Harbor. If there had not been any aircraft carriers at all, the war in the Pacific would have been largely a naval and amphibious conflict. In this case, presumably neither Japanese nor American forces would have had any significant advantage. On the other hand, if Japanese forces had had aircraft carriers and American forces had not, it would have been exceedingly difficult for American forces to safely steam through Pacific waters or to launch amphibious invasions. In that case, the United States likely would have suffered staggering losses of both ships and men before winning the war in the Pacific. Q: Was the Allies targeting of German civilians in World War I morally and strategically acceptable in warfare? A: There were relatively few direct and intentional attacks on civilian targets during the Great War (also known as World War I), fought from 1914 to 1918. Aircraft of that era were not sophisticated enough to undertake the massive bombing campaigns that devastated civilian populations during later wars. During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), for example, aerial forces caused extensive damage to civilian targets as well as military targets. By the time of World War II (1939-1945), aerial bombardmentincluding attacks on civilian targetshad become a principal tool of warfare. No amount of historical or military analysis can answer the question of whether attacks on civilian targets are morally acceptable. The answer to that question depends on individual and collective views on what is morally proper and what is not. Some might argue that wars (or at least some wars) are conflicts between entire societies, not just combatants, so that the targeting of civilians is either morally justifiable or militarily necessary or both. Until recent times, civilian populations were generally vulnerable to attack by military forces regardless of moral considerations. During the 20th century, however, international law defined civilian populations as inappropriate military targets. By this standard, attacks on civilians are not morally acceptable,

whether they take the form of German bombardments during the Battle of Britain, the Allies firebombing of Dresden, or American deployment of atomic weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Q: How has China managed to maintain its civilization for so long? A: China is in some ways a land of remarkable social and cultural continuity. Distinctive Chinese forms of agriculture appeared as early as 6500 BC. The origins of Chinese writing trace back to the 16th century BC. Elements of Chinese cultural traditions such as Confucianism and Daoism date from the 6th century BC. For most of history since the 3rd century BC, the land that we now call China has been under the rule of a centralized state. Geographical considerations partly explain this Chinese social and cultural continuity. For the past 3,000 years or more, most of the Chinese population has been concentrated in the highly fertile valleys of the Huang He (Yellow River) and the Yangtze. Another consideration is government policy. From the 3rd century BC to the present, Chinese rulers have invested heavily in roads, canals, and railroad lines linking the far-flung regions of China. Let's not forget that China, while maintaining some social and cultural traditions over a long period of time, has also undergone tremendous change. While supporting Confucian and Daoist traditions, for example, China has also received cultural imports from abroad: Buddhism, modern science, and Marxism all traveled to China from other lands. And Chinese workers themselves have a long history of devising technological innovations that have brought considerable change to China: Paper, printing, the magnetic compass, gunpowder, and paper money are just a few Chinese inventions. Q: Why did cities develop, and do we still need them? A: Human beings are social animals. Only a very few have lived outside society as hermits or recluses. Almost all have lived in families, bands, villages, towns, or cities. The earliest humans were hunter-gatherers, who lived by hunting and gathering wild food, and they existed mostly in migratory bands of about 30 to 50 individuals. When humans began to rely on agriculture to produce food, they settled in villages. Some favorably situated villages attracted many settlers and grew into towns where markets were available for the exchange of goods. The first cities appeared about 4000 BC in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq). They differed from villages and towns in that they were political, military, economic, commercial, and cultural centers from which the leaders of society governed the affairs of surrounding regions. These cities came into being largely because Mesopotamian farmers were reaping large harvests that attracted numerous migrants to the region. Increasing population brought social problems, and cities emerged as the sites where specialists worked to organize public life and maintain order. Do we still need cities? It depends on what kind of society we want. A hunting and gathering society does not need cities. A modern industrial society, on the other hand, needs cities, because they provide sites where people can deal conveniently with one another. Even an agricultural society needs cities where buyers and sellers can find markets and government officials can supervise public affairs. It looks as though cities will be with us for the foreseeable future. Q: How and why were Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev able to come to a diplomatic end to the Cold War? A: Personally, I would not say that United States President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev ended the Cold War by diplomatic means. No two individuals started the Cold War, nor could any pair possibly have brought it to an end.

The Cold War, after all, was a complex affair. It arose from doubts and insecurities on the side of both Americans and the Soviets. Leaders from both sides fueled the Cold War and prolonged it, sometimes for their own domestic political reasons. By the 1980s it was clear that the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc were incapable of matching the United States and other capitalist societies in prosperity and economic productivity. When Gorbachev became Soviet leader in 1985, he appreciated the difficulties that the Soviet Union faced, and he instituted several daring initiatives to invigorate the USSR. They did not work, and by 1991 Gorbachev was out of power. Although political and economic structures helped set the stage for the end of the Cold War, it is also important to remember that without the actions of individual human beings seeking to change their societies, the Cold War could not have come to an end. Perhaps more important than Reagan and Gorbachev were the thousands of individuals like the Polish workers who founded the labor union Solidarnosc in the face of opposition from the Communist authorities, or the good burghers and university students of Leipzig who in the fall of 1989 held a series of nonviolent demonstrations in the face of East Germany's Stasi police force. Without actions like these, which called for tremendous courage, the Berlin Wall would still be standing, regardless of everything Reagan and Gorbachev did. Q: Does Egypt belong to Africa or the Middle East? It's on the African continent, but you always hear about it involved with Middle Eastern politics. A: It might seem that nothing could be more stable than geographical categories. Barring earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and other natural catastrophes, Earth's lands change very gradually. But geographical categories do not always coincide neatly with human affairs. Take the notion of continents. We call a landform a continent when there is a very long stretch of unbroken dry land. But people inhabiting a single given continent might well organize their societies and their relations with others without regard to their status as inhabitants of that continent. This is the case with Africa. The African continent is an unbroken stretch of dry land that runs from Cairo to the Cape of Good Hope. But it has always been quite difficult to travel by land between the northern and southern parts of Africa because of the Saharaone of the most forbidding and inhospitable regions of the world. From ancient times, people traveled between Egypt and lands to the south and people from these regions communicated with one another; these contacts powerfully influenced ancient Egyptian society. Yet inhabitants of North Africa, including Egyptians, also had frequent and intense dealings with their neighbors in the Mediterranean and Southwest Asia (also called the Middle East). Since the expansion of Islam and the Arab conquest of north Africa in the 7th century, Egypt has had even closer relations with Southwest Asiato the point that the principal language spoken in Egypt today is Arabic, not Coptic, the language of ancient Egypt. So Egypt is definitely in Africa, and Egyptian society has always reflected the influence of neighbors to the south. But Egypt has also had close relations with neighbors to the north and east, and since the 7th century, these relations have been more influential on Egyptian development than those from the south. For an excellent book on the trickiness of relating geographical categories to human historical experiences, see Martin W. Lewis and Karen E. Wigens work The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Q: Why did Europeans, as opposed to Asians or Africans, take the lead in colonizing the world in the 16th through 19th centuries?

A: When seeking to understand the prominence of Europe in the modern world, we must remember why Europeans first ventured into the larger world. From the time of Marco Polo (1254-1324), European merchants sought access to African markets, where they could obtain gold, and to Asian markets, where they could obtain silk, spices, and porcelain. Europeans wanted to get to Africa and Asia; Africans and Asians were not so interested in getting to Europe. In exploring sea routes to Africa and Asia, Europeans found their way to the Americas as well. European peoples were no more economically productive than African and Asian peoples, so how did they become so powerful? Here are two important considerations. The first has to do with military strength. By the 16th century, Europeans had the best gunpowder weapons and armed ships in the world, so they had military advantages over many other peoples. The second consideration involves industrialization. In the 19th century, industrial production made it possible for Europeans to manufacture powerful weapons and inexpensive trade goods of high quality. Thus, industrialization strengthened Europeans both economically and militarily, enabling them to dominate much of the world. Q: How have the Freemasons influenced European and American history? A: Freemasons have profoundly influenced European and American history but more as individuals than as an organization. Let's start at the beginning. What is Freemasonry, anyway? The first Freemasons were actually masons: stonecutters and construction workers who helped build the massive cathedrals and public buildings of medieval Europe. By the 17th century, as the construction of stone buildings declined, the guilds of masons admitted members who were merchants, lawyers, physicians, and professionals. Gradually, these groups functioned less as traditional craft guilds than as fraternal orders or social clubs. They provided opportunities to socialize with friends, and they often provided charitable relief for needy members and their families. In some lands Freemasons fell under suspicion because they had secret rituals with much unfamiliar symbolism. Roman Catholic Church authorities have often considered Freemasonry dangerous because many individual members have been critics of organized religion. In some lands the political authorities have launched campaigns against Freemasons out of fear that their secret organization could undermine the state. People love to imagine the existence of conspiracies! Individual Freemasons have made notable contributions to society in many different ways. Among the most prominent Freemasons have been Ludwig van Beethoven, Voltaire, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Benjamin Franklin, Paul Revere, George Washington, Mark Twain, Davy Crockett, Oscar Wilde, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Duke Ellington, and John Glenn. As an organization, Freemasonry has contributed more to society through its charitable activities than through its ideology. Q: How has greed influenced the development of human civilization? A: What counts as greed? If greed means any acquisition or consumption beyond the bare minimum necessary for survival, then human history is little more than one big monument to greed. All prosperity, all comfort, all unnecessary pleasure would then be the fruit of greed. Perhaps we should adopt a looser definition and view greed as the desire for excessive acquisition or consumption. Then we would create a new problem of determining what is appropriate and what is too much, but we might be able to bring some moral and historical issues into clearer focus.

Excessive acquisition or consumption on the part of some can result in poverty and suffering for many others, so individual greed can have serious social costs. Selfish greed of individuals seeking their own comfort and pleasure without regard to social consequences is clearly an unhealthy and destructive influence. But what if affluent individuals use their wealth to support hospitals, libraries, museums, foundations, educational institutions, and charitable organizations? In that case, the excessive acquisition of some may benefit many others. Or what if the desire for affluence motivates individuals to develop products or provide services that improve the lives of others? Then greed might even appear to be a positive and creative influence. Greed is a very slippery term. Assessing its influence in human history requires careful consideration of individual motives, the uses that affluent individuals make of their wealth, and the larger social effects that follow from human acquisitiveness. Q: What kind of role did Latinos have in World War II, and how were they treated? Were they segregated? How many Latinos served, and what was their main reason for joining the armed forces? A: About 500,000 Mexican Americans served in the U.S. armed forces during World War II. They mostly served in integrated units. But there were at least two units drawn exclusively from Mexican Americans, largely because the military was interested in their ability to speak fluent Spanish. Mexican Americans in the 200th and 515th Coast Artillery units of the New Mexico National Guard served in the Philippine Islands, where their Spanish fluency facilitated communications with some of the local inhabitants. Most members of these units were killed or captured during the Battle of Bataan in 1942. Apart from those who served in the armed forces, many Mexican Americans worked in the United States, contributing to the domestic economy during World War II. The federal government brought in teams of workers known as braceros (from the Spanish word brazos, meaning 'arms') to work on railroads and farms. From 1942 to 1945, about 240,000 braceros worked as contract laborers in the United States. These braceros have been in the news quite recently because apparently some of them were not properly compensated for their labor. Q: Were the witch hunts that occurred in Europe during the Middle Ages a manifestation of a backlash by men against the growing economic and social importance of certain groups of women (e.g. herbalists and midwives)? Or were they due to a pervasive and powerful fear of the supernatural, brought on by works such as The Malleus Maleficarum? Or might casting accusations of witchcraft merely have been a convenient way to rid oneself of a troublesome rival? A: The witch hunts of late-medieval and early-modern Europe are some of the most difficult historical events to understand and explain. To make sense of them, we must begin by recognizing the widespread conviction that supernatural agents intervened regularly in human affairs. Most people believed firmly that God ruled the world, but they also believed that Satan worked constantly to undermine God's rule by inducing individuals to advance his nefarious designs. Only in light of these convictions was it possible for frenzied witch hunting to take place. It is likely that some individuals cynically used fears of witchcraft to destroy personal enemies or economic rivals. It is also likely that many individuals persuaded themselves that maleficent witches caused their personal misfortunes. However, these kinds of personal grievances alone were unlikely to fuel frenzied witch hunts, which depended on mass hysteria, large-scale participation, and public support throughout the affected communities.

Many historians believe that generalized fears of witchcraft degenerated into serious witch hunting when social, economic, or cultural tensions placed communities under unusual stress. The height of European witch hunting was the period from the mid-16th to the mid-17th centuriesan era of intermittent warfare and constant turmoil with Roman Catholic and various Protestant churches competing for European souls. When community anxieties ran high, political or religious leaders sometimes sought to shore up their influence by organizing drives to identify and punish suspected witches. About 110,000 individuals underwent trials for witchcraft during the 16th and 17th centuries, and about 60,000 were executed as convicted witches. Needless to add, witch hunting was a massively destructive affair for any society. Q: Did anyone in the United States government expect Japan to attack Pearl Harbor in December 1941? A: There is no evidence or persuasive argument that anyone outside the highest circles of the Japanese military knew in advance about the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Almost as soon as the smoke cleared, journalists and historians began to ask if President Franklin D. Roosevelt or someone else in the U.S. government had advance knowledge about the attack. These suspicions arose because it was common knowledge that Roosevelt opposed Japanese expansion in Asia and sought ways to aid China, which had been at war with Japan since 1937. What few knew at the time was that U.S. and British intelligence agents were regularly intercepting official Japanese radio communications and that they were beginning to break the Japanese naval and diplomatic codes. By December 1941, however, the U.S. and British intelligence agents had cracked less than 8 percent of the Japanese code, and much of that was code for numbers. Only in 1945 were agents able to understand some messages, which they had intercepted much earlier but could not decode, that might have alerted them to Japanese intentions. In 1941, as the Japanese strike force approached Hawaii, it maintained strict radio silence, so there were no signals for intelligence agents to detect. Japanese military officials developed their plans in such secrecy that not even the highest-level Japanese diplomats knew about the attack. Q: Why is the word philistine sometimes used to refer to a person who is ignorant or uncultured? A: Interesting question! Sometimes there are peculiar explanations for the meanings that words acquire, and this is one of those cases. First, let's talk about the Philistines. They were an ancient people who came from the Mediterranean area, probably from the island of Crete. They first appeared in historical records after about 1200 BC, when they established a series of settlements in the coastal region of Palestine, roughly the area now known as the Gaza Strip. The Philistines were principal rivals of the Hebrews, who had migrated to Palestine shortly before them. The Hebrews and Philistines fought bitterly in the 11th century BC, as each group sought to establish its own state in Palestine. The Philistines were a sophisticated people. They produced olive oil and textiles, and they traded widely throughout the eastern Mediterranean region. They worshiped gods similar to those of many other peoples in the region. In contrast, the Hebrews worshiped only one deity, whom they called Yahweh, and regarded the deities of others as false gods. Hebrew writings portrayed the Philistines as a crude people who were unable to appreciate the power of Yahweh. The Philistines left few written records and no historical accounts of their experiences. As a result the Hebrew characterizations of the Philistines went largely unchallenged in the historical record, and later writers used the term philistine to refer to materialistic and uncultivated individuals, especially those incapable of appreciating artistic and literary creations.

Q: Could the Phoenicians have sailed to the New World? A: The Phoenicians were quite capable of sailing to the Americas, as were several other peoples before Christopher Columbus made his famous voyage of 1492. The Phoenicians established a series of trading cities in Phoenicia (present-day coastal Lebanon) in about 2500 BC. Since their narrow strip of land had limited agricultural potential, the Phoenicians turned to the sea and built a flourishing trading economy. They produced glassware, metal goods, and high-quality textiles, which they traded throughout the Mediterranean basin. From 1200 to 800 BC they dominated Mediterranean trade and established numerous trading colonies throughout the region. Their most famous and powerful colony was Carthage, in what is now Tunisia. The Phoenicians sailed beyond the Mediterranean into the Atlantic Ocean. They traded at coastal sites in Portugal, France, the British Isles, and the Canary Islands. From the Canary Islands, they could easily have ridden the trade winds west across the Atlantic to the Americas, although after getting there they may well have had trouble finding a convenient route back. Indeed, the trade winds blow so reliably from east to west that some peoples of coastal West Africa also could have crossed the Atlantic before Columbus. However, there is no evidence that either Phoenicians or Africans sailed to the Americas. What is certain is that Viking explorers crossed the North Atlantic and established the colony of Vinland (in present-day Newfoundland) in about AD 1000. Q: Why did so many people from Romania immigrate to America from the 1880s to 1910s? A: For almost a centuryfrom about 1850 to 1914Europeans migrated to other world regions on a scale never before witnessed in world history. So it was not just Romanians migrating to the United States. Rather, it was a case of individuals migrating from European lands in massive numbers. This series of migrations is one of the really important large-scale processes of modern times. Between 1800 and 1914, approximately 50 million Europeans migrated to other parts of the world. About 32 million went to the United States; most of the rest went to other lands in temperate regions, such as Argentina, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. The vast majority of the migrants came from southern and eastern Europe, where many ethnic and religious minorities were unhappy with the heavy-handed policies of the Austrian empire (called the Austro-Hungarian empire after 1867). After the French Revolution, authorities harshly suppressed the nationalist efforts of minority peoples within the multicultural Austrian and Austro-Hungarian empires. After imperial authorities squelched the revolution of 1848, many individuals decided to leave Europe altogether to seek opportunities in other lands. The United States seemed attractive to many because it underwent a process of rapid industrialization after the Civil War in the 1860s; thus, many jobs were available in the industrial cities of the Northeast. Many migrants also went to other lands where they hoped to find opportunities in agriculture, crafts, or trade. Q: Is the United States the most powerful nation in the history of the world? A: There can be no serious question that, in absolute terms, the United States is the most powerful nation in the history of the world. The United States is capable of mustering more military power than any nation or empire in earlier times. It is the wealthiest nation in world history. It enjoys the most extensive educational system and the most effective medical technologies ever devised. The United States also benefits from open communications and a remarkable pool of intellectual and cultural talent. So far we have been talking in absolute terms. What if we speak in relative terms? It might well be that during the 19th century the British Empire was more powerful with respect to the rest of

the world than the United States is today, or that during the 16th century the Spanish Empire was more powerful. It might even be that during the 6th century BC the empire of Persia was more powerful in relation to the rest of the world than the United States is today, even though Persian influence obviously did not extend as far as U.S. power today. Of course, tremendous power does not necessarily enable a nation to do whatever it wants in the rest of the world. Even powerful nations must cooperate and negotiate with others, or else they will fritter their resources away in needless and avoidable conflicts. Remember also that power brings responsibilities. Powerful nations have special obligations to consider the interests of others and resist temptations to use their power unfairly to their own advantage. Q: Would World War I have happened if Archduke Francis Ferdinand had not been assassinated? A: Europe was such a tinderbox in 1914 that it is tempting to regard some kind of military conflict at that time as almost inevitable. All the major European powers were armed camps. They had ambitions that conflicted with their neighbors plans, and they nourished grievances from previous conflicts. They had entered into secret treaties and alliances that called on them to support others in the event of war. Perhaps most dangerously, they eagerly looked forward to war, thinking that their own arms and allies would enable them to crush their prospective opponents with relative ease. Yet many historians, myself included, would argue that developments like World War I are not inevitable. As it happened, the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the heir to the thrones of Austria-Hungary, triggered a series of events that culminated in a massive and destructive global war. But it was by no means inevitable that such a ruinous conflict would ensue. Political and military leaders throughout Europe chose, for a variety of reasons, to take the assassination and the events that followed as pretexts for war, but they could have chosen differently. Even if they went to war, they could have chosen to pursue a limited conflict rather than the total war that marred the early years of the 20th century. Alas, World War I in all of its horror was a matter of choice, not fate.
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