Revising History

[Kaiddin]

Being a history buff, I spend quite a bit of time looking for books and programs discussing most things historical. I the last 3 weeks various programs have said that everything I have ever learned is incorrect. Some examples:

1) The Battle of Britain
The RAF and Britain did not win the battle. The Luftwaffe simply decided not to continue the battle. You can't win a battle if one side no longer wants to fight.

2) The Charge of the Light Brigade
Where to start? Simply was a 20 - 30 minute run not that dangerous and few casualties. The real heroes of the battle were the Turks.

3) Agincourt
This wasn't an English victory. It was simply crowd mechanics and bad mud. Henry V may or may not have been a barbarian for executing the prisoners. The Longbow really had nothing to do with the battle. The arrows could not pierce French armour on man or horse. The archers did more damage with their long knives.

4) Nefertiti
No only was she Akhenaten's queen but ruled as Smenkhare. I really enjoyed the science behind this one. If the results were ambiguous, then that must support the theory.

5) Waterloo
Once again, it is not a British or Allied victory. At best it was a draw that Napoleon decided that he did not want to continue. The program gave the impression that the only reason that the French did not continue the battle was that Field Marshal Ney was insane. Well, and possibly, that the mud made the French cannon balls ineffective might have been another reason.

This is just a quick list. If I had time I could probably find more. Maybe Trek fans should be a little easier on Berman and Braga for their tampering with the Trek timeline. Since everyone else is doing it, why would it be wrong for them to do it?

[Lt.Khrys Antos]

Revisionism is bad, but so is complete myopia of most historians when it comes to Eastern European battles.

Take Agincourt, fought in 1415, I've read numbers between 10k to 40k of troops on either side.

Now take the Battle of Grunwald (Stebark or Tannenberg, in some texts) was fought between the Polish Kingdom and her allies against the Teutonic Knights and their allies. That battle was significantly more important, on a grander scale and fought with the use of massed men strategy. The Polish Armies had somewhere between 40k to 60k of troops including 18,000 Knights. Anywhere between 30k and 40k of troops on the Teuton side, of which, 21,000 heavily armored knights. Each side has cannons, 100 for the Teutons and 16 for the Poles.

When the battle ended, most of the Teuton leadership lay dead, including their Grand Master, thus ending their supremacy in the East and cementing the domination of the Poles in the region. 1400 Teutons survived the battle. Over 20,000 Polish and allied troops died at the battle.

The body of their greatest hero von Lichtenstein was there, Schwarzenberger's, von Wallenrode's, and from the foreign knights was Jaromir of Prague, Gabor of Buda, leader of Hungarians, Richard of York, and a few others.

Agincourt by comparison was a jolly stroll through the mud.

As for Trek...the problem here is we got the whole series on tape! We just rewind and point out indiscrepancies. History is alot more murky when political institutions begin to rewrite or create heroes and heroic battles in order to promote X feeling in people.

Lets thank our lucky stars that say, Erich Von Daniken isn't producing/directing Trek.

[tanksoldier]

Originally posted by Kaiddin
Being a history buff, I spend quite a bit of time looking for books and programs discussing most things historical. I the last 3 weeks various programs have said that everything I have ever learned is incorrect. Some examples:

1) The Battle of Britain
The RAF and Britain did not win the battle. The Luftwaffe simply decided not to continue the battle. You can't win a battle if one side no longer wants to fight.

This one is perhaps technically true, but that is the nature of air warfare. If the other side stops flying, that's pretty much a forfeit. The German goal was to invade Britain, or at least force a truce that would take the UK out of the war. That didn't happen.

2) The Charge of the Light Brigade
Where to start? Simply was a 20 - 30 minute run not that dangerous and few casualties. The real heroes of the battle were the Turks.

My understanding is that the charge of the Light Brigade was a pointless gesture by that point of the battle, but that there were high casualties.

[Phantom]

As to the BoB and Agincourt, what does it matter? The situation was in the favour of the right people.

The charge of the Light Brigade...It's a problem of allowing poetry to influence history. It was the papers that made the Charge what it is today. Also, the Cavalry has always been the Queen of the Services, so whatever they did was important. TPBI has always gotten the short end of the stick, particularly the Turks in the Crimean, they ended up as nothing more then pack animals.

The problem with Nefertiti is the fact that Egyptian Queens were rolled into the reign of the next male Pharoh. So, it really is hard to tell in these situations...Nefertiti could well have been Smenkare-it is really impossible to tell.

History is fluid, not linear. As more information comes out on a subject it will change. This is the way it should be.

[Tas II]

[B]3) Agincourt
This wasn't an English victory. It was simply crowd mechanics and bad mud. Henry V may or may not have been a barbarian for executing the prisoners. The Longbow really had nothing to do with the battle. The arrows could not pierce French armour on man or horse. The archers did more damage with their long knives.[B]

A: This WAS an English victory. How the result was reached was immaterial. The french sued for peace after a battle in which they lost the cream of their knights to an inferior force. That sounds like a victory to me.
B:As for the Longbow having had nothing to do with the battle......bull! The Longbow was not able to pierce the armour of the knights regularly, but was able to pierce the joints etc. (The weak points of any suit of medieval armour).
Granted that such occurences are difficult to produce with one archer facing one knight. But, when there are 5000 or so archers shooting 10+ arrows per minute such occurences happen quite a bit.
What one has to remember is that the mud and crowd dynamics forced the french knights to advance slowly, and with constricted movement. Once the first few horses started to fall, as their riders were injured (as indeed the horses were), chaos ensued. Then, and only then, were the English troops able to engage the knights at close quarters. King Henry and his generals chose the best ground to use the troops at his disposal in the best possible way. The french managed to beat themselves to a certain degree, owing to how they managed their troops. The weather of the days approaching the battle, and during the battle did not help them either. The English bowmen managed to keep their bowstrings dry, and in so doing so had a tremendous advantage over the crossbowmen facing them, who's strings were soaked, and thus alot harder to cock the crossbows (an already slow process).

(Apologies for the length of this post, but the Longbow, and it's history is one of my pet subjects!)

Cheers

Tas

[Kaiddin]

The German goal was to invade Britain, or at least force a truce that would take the UK out of the war.

Another program in the last little while disputed this as well. The so-called Battlefield Detectives claim that there is no real evidence of a German mustering of sea craft capable of crossing the channel. They claim anecdotal evidence of barges, which were more suited to crossing rivers, being massed more for psychological effect than any real desire to send an army. Supposedly, there were no craft capable of transporting tanks and an invasion without tanks would be contrary to the blitzkrieg mind set.

If the other side stops flying, that's pretty much a forfeit.

Since fighting to the last man seems to be a historically rare event, how else do you decide who won?

Agincourt by comparison was a jolly stroll through the mud.

Granted there are many eastern battles with larger armies. What most people credit Agincourt with is it is one of the battles that signaled the end knightly domination of the battlefield. The fact that the English were greatly outnumbered by the French simply emphasizes this fact.

As to the BoB and Agincourt, what does it matter? History is fluid, not linear. As more information comes out on a subject it will change. This is the way it should be.

What does it matter? Having talked to people who fought in the Battle of Britain, it would matter a great deal to them. I just hate to see their service and sacrifice diminished by a specious re-interpretation of the events.

As to Agincourt, I'm not old enough to have talked to any veterans so I don't know how this reinvention of history would play with them.

I agree that information coming to light can change to commonly held historic opinions. I do believe that the new evidence needs to be held to a higher standard than it currently is. Their new evidence always sounds impressive but usually turns out to be an interpretation of their evidence to fit the change they want to make. After all hearing that a satelite deep scan of the battlefield sounds impressive but does it really prove that Field Marshal Ney must have gone insane? It may show where the redoubts were at Balaclava, assuming that changes from World War 2 can be identified and removed from the picture. But does it really prove that the Turks faced 3 hours of artillery bombardment? The investigators only found 5 canister sub munitions. So maybe this new evidence, the number of balls found, can be spun to say that the Turks didn't sustain a bombardment of this duration and it must have been by many fewer guns than the official record stated. But then I'm not an expert at creative re-interpretation.

Enough ranting for now....

[Ezri's Toy]

Originally posted by Lt.Khrys Antos
Lets thank our lucky stars that say, Erich Von Daniken isn't producing/directing Trek.

That's because his concepts are already being used over on Stargate SG-1

[Scottomir]

Another program in the last little while disputed this as well. The so-called Battlefield Detectives claim that there is no real evidence of a German mustering of sea craft capable of crossing the channel. They claim anecdotal evidence of barges, which were more suited to crossing rivers, being massed more for psychological effect than any real desire to send an army.

The most compelling account for this that I've encountered is that the supposed Germany invasion of Britain was part of a disinformation campaign to convince Stalin that Germany would be incapable of invading in 1941. The Blitz was an honest attempt to convince Britain to surrender, but "Sea Lion" (I believe the operation was called) was disinformation to make the Soviets believe that German manpower would be directed to invading England. The professor making this case also suggested that the German 1941 build-up in the Balkans was a further ruse to move divisions east without arousing Stalin's suspicion. A shrewder Soviet general staff might have seen through these bluffs...but, of course, Stalin had purged something like 200 staff officers by 1939 and replaced them with far too junior men.

When it comes to Agincourt, can I assume most of us have read Keegan's Face of Battle? I think it is the most persuasive account of the fight since Delbruck's revisionist thesis in the 1920's.

[Phantom]

Originally posted by Kaiddin



What does it matter? Having talked to people who fought in the Battle of Britain, it would matter a great deal to them. I just hate to see their service and sacrifice diminished by a specious re-interpretation of the events.

I wasn't diminishing their efforts or sacrifice...nor do I doubt any future information will do either. My point was that if provable new information does come up on a subject it should not be dimissed.

As to the cannon info at Balaclava, I believe it was stated that it was gathered by estimate. They took the average speed the gunners could actually load their guns to the speed at which the Light Brigade went through their areas of fire, as all 3 batteries could not have fired on the Brigade at one time I think it was a reasonable statment. Another show on the subject also stated that most of the causalities didn't happen on thier run in, they happend when the LB could not be re enforced and had to retreat back the way they came.

As to the pasting the turks took. No, sat scans don't really prove it, but the first hand accounts they used in their research might.

[Lancer]

Originally posted by Phantom
History is fluid, not linear. As more information comes out on a subject it will change. This is the way it should be.

Personaly I consider this a rather cynical attitude.
History is not fluid. History is a fact. What may be uncertain about it is the way we interpret it or what we know about it, but your statement may well be construed to mean that you think it is okay to reinterpret history and that I simply can not support, nor condone.
Too many people are already trying to reconstruct history that I think we can not stand idly by while this happens. Just look at how many self-proclaimed "experts" try to tell the world that the genocides of the Nazi regime did never happen!

I am more than willing to believe that this is not what you were talking about, but simply proclaiming that more information about history may be a good thing in itself is IMO a most dangerous attitude, at least unless you make a point about the so called "information" being verifyable. (OTOH that may well go for anything we now consider "information", but that's a different can of worms I probably shouldn't be opening).

That being said, let me give you an example: I was born in (Western-) Germany and lived there my whole life. I have seen the "facts" of the German reunification (as reported in the news available to me) and for years I have witnessed the rewriting of history. Statues of Marx and Lenin have been torn down, streets have been re-named, history has been re-writen and erradicated, all in the name of unification and democracy; as people in charge suddenly thought it prudent to forget about the last 40 or 50 years of our history. (I know I may be exagerating quite a bit, but it helps to make my point, does it not?)

In a two or three hundred years from now, when historians excavate the ruins of Berlin or Leipzig or Magdeburg, will they find evidence that part of Germany was once a Russian client state? No, probably not, because someone somewhere has decided it was best to try and eradicate that part of our history from museums and street-names and what have you! And that is only what is going on right now! Who knows what revisions will be made to history in the next couple of decades.

So yeah, history may be fluid, but by gawd you can be sure that the facts don't speak for themselves. History can be remade every time someone who proclaims himself an "expert" decides to do so and can manage to convince others to see things as he wants them to.

My point?
Don't trust what others tell you, be it about the past, the present or the future. Did the English longbowmen win the battle of Agincourt? Heck, who cares?
If this is of the utmost importance to you, look to the present, not the past and if you can't do that, at least make darn sure you have all the facts you can get, before you decide for yourself what really happened.

[Phantom]

Originally posted by Lancer
Personaly I consider this a rather cynical attitude.
History is not fluid. History is a fact. What may be uncertain about it is the way we interpret it or what we know about it, but your statement may well be construed to mean that you think it is okay to reinterpret history and that I simply can not support, nor condone.
Too many people are already trying to reconstruct history that I think we can not stand idly by while this happens. Just look at how many self-proclaimed "experts" try to tell the world that the genocides of the Nazi regime did never happen!

I

The Holocost happened it has been explictedly proven, I am still haunted by the first images I saw in History class...as I should be. My main point is that so much of our history has changed...For hundreds of years the cities of Pompeii, Herculeaneum, Troy, Ubar, Ankor Wat, Macho Pecho(?) were all considered "lost cities" and as such myth. Then come people like Schliemann, Hiram Bingham and Evens and these (and others) are now real places...history has CHANGED (not just perceptively, but factually.) I am a BA student in Classics, and I have seen evidence of so called world experts hiding or destroying facts that could change the way we view certain aspects of history, just because it doesn't fit their theories...who is commiting the greater crime? The revisionists, who people don't really listen to in my experience?

History, like science, progresses it is not a stagnant linear concept, but a living and growing entity as long as it can be backed up by hard factual and provable evidence. Whcih is why I am so facinated by it.

As to your comment about the erasure of certain parts of the past, you used the eradication of Marxism in Germany...This isn't the first, the ancient Egyptians were wiping out the memory of their leaders a millenia before. Besides, going on standard Archaeological practice, they wont' be interested in Marxism, they'll be trying to figure out why we worshihpped some thing called the "Big Mac" under the "Golden Arches." Why everything has to come back to religion in Archaeology I don't know, this being another danger point in my mind.

[Phantom]

Originally posted by Lt.Khrys Antos
Lets thank our lucky stars that say, Erich Von Daniken isn't producing/directing Trek.

Originally posted by Ezri's Toy
That's because his concepts are already being used over on Stargate SG-1

Perhaps this is one of the reasons that SG-1 is the superior show. At the very least Von Daniken's theories show imagination. A trait B&B wouldn't know if it came up and bit them in the a$$.

[Lt.Khrys Antos]

Originally posted by Phantom
Originally posted by Lt.Khrys Antos
Lets thank our lucky stars that say, Erich Von Daniken isn't producing/directing Trek.




Perhaps this is one of the reasons that SG-1 is the superior show. At the very least Von Daniken's theories show imagination. A trait B&B wouldn't know if it came up and bit them in the a$$.

True, True. At least in SG-1 its done semi-seriously.

[Lancer]

Originally posted by Phantom
Perhaps this is one of the reasons that SG-1 is the superior show. At the very least Von Daniken's theories show imagination. A trait B&B wouldn't know if it came up and bit them in the a$$.

Actually, that's not true, at least not IMO. They certainly do have imagination, just not the kind of imagination some people expect them to have.

In a way B&B are rewriting the history of Star Trek, but that's something Trek writers have been doing for a long while.
With Trek, not just the (completely fictional to begin with) timeline of the universe has been somewhat fluid, but every "fact" itself. Point(s) in case: We have seen a few Andorians before ENT, but just because they behaved in a certain way, does that mean they should all behave the same way? A year may have been established on-screen for the founding of the Federation, but who has said that Archer wouldn't play a crucial part in it? And so on and so on.

Which brings us back to the question that started this whole thread: If history can be redefined by new facts as they come to light, why shouldn't the same go for Star Trek? Each show has established new "facts", when and if the writers felt it was opportune to do so, so why should the "history" of Star Trek suddenly be set in stone?

(And in case you think this is not what this thread is about, go back to the last paragraph of the post that started this thread; it's not about history, it's about Trek, at least as far as I read it.)

[Phantom]

Originally posted by Lancer
Actually, that's not true, at least not IMO. They certainly do have imagination, just not the kind of imagination some people expect them to have.

Really!? They do have imagination? Wow! Please tell me the ep where I can see this flash of inspiration.

BTB, I don't expect much.