Course Outline and Reading Materials for Wellesley-Weston Lifetime Learning

 The Butterfly Effect:  Tipping Points in World History
Part I

First Session:  Its  A Wonderful Life Second Session:  5th Century Athens - an Inflection Point in Western Civilization Third Session:  The Battle of Teutoburg Forest 9CE Fourth Session: 1066 - The Norman Conquest Fifth Session:  The Crisis of the Fourteenth Century Sixth Session:  Sheng He’s Fleet & Explorations, 1405 - 1433 Seventh Session: The Death of Frederick III 1888 Eighth Session:  Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, 1914 Ninth Session:  The Kornilov Affair:  The Bolshevik Revolution Fails?

First Session:  Its  A Wonderful Life

Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist and eminent Harvard evolutionary biologist has become well known for his proposition in  Wonderful Life that if  we play the tape of history over again we will get a different result.  The following suggested readings and video will help jump start our discussion of the role contingency has played throughout history.

Contingency
Taken from

What it Means to Think Historically

Contingency may, in fact, be the most difficult of the C's. To argue that history is contingent is to claim that every historical outcome depends upon a number of prior conditions; that each of these prior conditions depends, in turn, upon still other conditions; and so on. The core insight of contingency is that the world is a magnificently interconnected place. Change a single prior condition, and any historical outcome could have turned out differently. Lee could have won at Gettysburg, Gore might have won in Florida, China might have inaugurated the world's first industrial revolution. 
Contingency can be an unsettling idea—so much so that people in the past have often tried to mask it with myths of national and racial destiny. The Pilgrim William Bradford, for instance, interpreted the decimation of New England's native peoples not as a consequence of smallpox, but as a literal godsend.5 Two centuries later, American ideologues chose to rationalize their unlikely fortunes—from the purchase of Louisiana to the discovery of gold in California—as their nation's "Manifest Destiny." Historians, unlike Bradford and the apologists of westward expansion, look at the same outcomes differently. They see not divine fate, but a series of contingent results possessing other possibilities.
Contingency demands that students think deeply about past, present, and future. It offers a powerful corrective to teleology, the fallacy that events pursue a straight-arrow course to a pre-determined outcome, since people in the past had no way of anticipating our present world. Contingency also reminds us that individuals shape the course of human events. What if Karl Marx had decided to elude Prussian censors by emigrating to the United States instead of France, where he met Frederick Engels? To assert that the past is contingent is to impress upon students the notion that the future is up for grabs, and that they bear some responsibility for shaping the course of future history.
Contingency can be a difficult concept to present abstractly, but it suffuses the stories historians tend to tell about individual lives. Futurology, however, might offer an even stronger tool for imparting contingency than biography. Mechanistic views of history as the inevitable march toward the present tend to collapse once students see how different their world is from any predicted in the past.

Excerpt from Gould, Stephen Jay, Wonderful Life, Norton & Co., New York, p. 283-85.

Historical explanations take the form of narrative: E, the phenomenon to be explained, arose because D came before, preceded by C, B, and A. If any of these earlier stages had not occurred, or had transpired in a different way, then E would not exist (or would be present in a substantially altered form, E', requiring a different explanation). Thus, E makes sense and can be explained rigorously as the outcome of A through D. But no law of nature enjoined E; any variant E' arising from an altered set of anteced- ents, would have been equally explicable, though massively different in form and effect.
I am not speaking of randomness (for E had to arise, as a consequence of A through D), but of the central principle of all history-contingency. A historical explanation does not rest on direct deductions from laws of na- ture, but on an unpredictable sequence of antecedent states, where any major change in any step of the sequence would have altered the final result. This final result is therefore dependent, or contingent, upon every- thing that came before-the unerasable and determining signature of history.”

Many scientists and interested laypeople, caught by the stereotype of the "scientific method," find such contingent explanations less interesting or less "scientific," even when their appropriateness and essential correctness must be acknowledged. The South lost the Civil War with a kind of relentless inevitability once hundreds of particular events happened as they did-Pickett's charge failed, Lincoln won the election of 1864, etc., etc., etc. But wind the tape of American history back to the Louisiana Purchase, the Dred Scott decision, or even only to Fort Sumter, let it run again with just a few small and judicious changes (plus their cascade of consequences), and a different outcome, including the opposite resolution, might have occurred with equal relentlessness past a certain point. (I used to believe that Northern superiority in population and industry had virtually guaran- teed the result from the start. But I have been persuaded by recent scholar- ship that wars for recognition rather than conquest can be won by purpose- ful minorities. The South was not trying to overrun the North, but merely to secure its own declared borders and win acknowledgment as an independent state. Majorities, even in the midst of occupation, can be rendered sufficiently war-weary and prone to withdraw by insurgencies, particularly in guerilla form, that will not relent.)

Suppose, then, that we have a set of historical explanations, as well documented as anything in conventional science. These results do not arise as deducible consequences from any law of nature; they are not even pre- dictable from any general or abstract property of the larger system (as superiority in population or industry). How can we deny such explanations a role every bit as interesting and important as a more conventional scien- tific conclusion? I hold that we must grant equal status for three basic reasons.

1. A question of reliability. The documentation of evidence, and proba- bility of truth by disproof of alternatives, may be every bit as conclusive as for any explanation in traditional science.
   
   
2. A matter of importance. The equal impact of historically contingent explanations can scarcely be denied. The Civil War is the focus and turn- ing point of American history. Such central matters as race, regionalism, and economic power owe their present shape to this great event that need not have occurred. If the current taxonomic order and relative diversity of life are more a consequence of "just history" than a potential deduction from general principles of evolution, then contingency sets the basic pat- tern of nature.
   
   
3. A psychological point. I have been too apologetic so far. I have even slipped into the rhetoric of inferiority-by starting from the premise that historical explanations may be less interesting and then pugnaciously fighting for equality. No such apologies need be made. Historical explana- tions are endlessly fascinating in themselves, in many ways more intriguing to the human psyche than the inexorable consequences of nature's laws. We are especially moved by events that did not have to be, but that occurred for identifiable reasons subject to endless mulling and stewing. By contrast, both ends of the usual dichotomy-the inevitable and the truly random-usually make less impact on our emotions because they cannot be controlled by history's agents and objects, and are therefore either chan- neled or buffeted, without much hope for pushing back. But, with contin- gency, we are drawn in; we become involved; we share the pain of triumph or tragedy. When we realize that the actual outcome did not have to be, that any alteration in any step along the way would have unleashed a cascade down a different channel, we grasp the causal power of individual events. We can argue, lament, or exult over each detail-because each holds the power of transformation. Contingency is the affirmation of con- trol by immediate events over destiny, the kingdom lost for want of a horseshoe nail. The Civil War is an especially poignant tragedy because a replay of the tape might have saved a half million lives for a thousand different reasons-and we would not find a statue of a soldier, with names of the dead engraved on the pedestal below, on every village green and before every county courthouse in old America. Our own evolution is a joy and a wonder because such a curious chain of events would probably never happen again, but having occurred, makes eminent sense. Contingency is a license to participate in history, and our psyche responds.”

Second Session:  5th Century Athens - an Inflection Point in Western Civilization

 Battle of Salamis: Themistocles defeat of the Persians, 480 BCE

In 483 BCE a rich vein of silver was discovered in one of the state owned mines in the village of Laurion, southeast of Athens.  The discovery yielded over 100 Talents, the equivalent of approximately 100 million dollars in today’s currency.  A considerable sum now, even more so in 5th century Greece.  What to do with this windfall?  Two points of view dominated the politics of the Ekklesia, the Athenian assembly.  The popular view was to divide the wealth equally among all the citizens of the polis.  Themistocles proposed instead, that they devote the sum to the construction of a fleet of 200 triremes. 
Seven years out from the defeat of the Persians at Marathon, the Greek world was well aware that Xerxes was preparing a second assault to finish what his father, Darius, had been unable to accomplish.  Despite the Athenian’s traditional preference for infantry in the form of the hoplite phalanx, Themistocles argued that sea power would provide the best defense from the advancing Persians and their fleet of 1200 ships.  He carried the day and a period of rapid building and training commenced.  The results of the convergence of these two events, newly acquired wealth and a decision to forego narrow self interest in favor of a future larger good would have major consequences, not just for the 5th century Greek world, but for western civilization as a whole.

Like the Battles of Marathon and Thermopylae, Salamis has gained something of a 'legendary' status …, perhaps because of the desperate circumstances and the unlikely odds. A significant number of historians have stated that Salamis is one of the most significant battles in human history…. In a more extreme form of this argument, some historians argue that if the Greeks had lost at Salamis, the ensuing conquest of Greece by the Persians would have effectively stifled the growth of Western Civilization as we know it.  This view is based on the premise that much of modern Western society, such as philosophy, science, personal freedom and democracy are rooted in the legacy of Ancient Greece.  Thus, this school of thought argues that, given the domination of much of modern history by Western Civilization, Persian domination of Greece might have changed the whole trajectory of human history.  It is also worth mentioning that the celebrated blossoming of hugely influential Athenian culture occurred only after the Persian wars were won. 
From Wikipedia:  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Salamis

This point was not lost on contemporary Athenians who celebrated their victory as one of  demokratia over barbarous tyranny.  In 472, eight years after the victory, Aeschylus’  in The Persians  put it thusly:

Sources

An excellent, readable overview of how democracy functioned in Athens.  Athenian Democracy, Mark Cartwright, October, 2014.
http://www.ancient.eu/Athenian_Democracy/

A readable synopsis of the Battle of Salamis 
https://www.historyextra.com/period/ancient-greece/battle-salamis-480-bc-facts-what-happened-who-won/

An excellent 25 min. overview of the battle and its significance.  Excellent footage of triremes in battle.
History's Turning Points: 480 BC The Battle of Salamis 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2fmBIrGxA

Trireme OLYMPIAS  A short  2 minute film made by the Hellenic Navy of the Olympias, an authentic reconstruction of a fifth century Greek trireme, under sail.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INGl8LB9Zxo

For close to 400 years Rome, more formally the Senātus Populusque Rōmānus  -SPQR- had extended its frontiers from the banks of Rome’s Tiber River to Hadrian’s wall on the border of present day Scotland.  A casual inspection of the map above piques our interest.  There are some noticeably empty spaces, all of Germania lies outside the Empire. Why stop at the Rhine River?  It was not for lack of trying.  Julius Caesa r had established the first bridgehead across the Rhine in 58 BCE.  Caesar Augustus followed up by sending his stepson, Drusus, in 11 BCE to consolidate Roman control and extend it  as far as the Wesser River in central Germany.  But as is often the case, getting and keeping can be two very different things as Publius Quinctilius Varus would find out in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE.  

And that is our story for this week.

The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.  This is an all visual, no narrative and musically dramatic overview of the events of the battle.  Useful for those who want a sense of the look and feel of the period.  10 minutes, good quality video.

The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (9 C.E.), Historia Civilis,
An 8 minute power point presentation, excellent narrative.  This is a good source if you are interested in a detailed reconstruction of the tactical details of the encounter.

Books

If your really fascinated by this topic, this is the book to read.
Peter S. Wells,  The Battle That Stopped Rome: Emperor Augustus, Arminius, and the Slaughter of the Legions in the Teutoburg Forest,  2003,  W.W. Norton & Co., NYNY.  272 pages
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Battle-That-Stopped-Rome-Slaughter/dp/0393326438/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8  Paper back and Kindle
Available in iBooks, $11.99

This ten minute excerpt from Robert McNeil’s acclaimed PBS series, The Story of English, focuses on the changes which the English language underwent as a result of the Conquest.  You will want to fast forward to 35:26 for this excerpt.
The Story of English, Program 2, The Mother Tongue Complete.  10 minute excerpt.  https://youtu.be/p3q95Mg2i7c?t=212

Produced by English Heritage: The Battle of Hastings.  11 min.  Uses scenes from the Bayeux tapestry and imagined narrative by participants.  Dialect sometimes makes it hard to follow.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZNM2zg6Gfg

If you are reading this, then you are the lucky descendant of an ancestor who survived the 14th century.  As a result of famine, plague, civil unrest and war the European population declined by nearly 50 percent during this century.  The effects on the development of European civilization were far reaching.  In many ways the catastrophic effect of these events jump started the end of feudalism, the rise of the middle class and the beginnings of the Reformation.

"Around 1300, centuries of prosperity and growth in Europe came to a halt. A series of famines and plagues, such as the Great Famine of 1315–1317 and the Black Death, reduced the population to around half of what it was before the calamities.[1] Along with depopulation came social unrest and endemic warfare. France and England experienced serious peasant uprisings: the Jacquerie, the Peasants' Revolt, as well as over a century of intermittent conflict in the Hundred Years' War. To add to the many problems of the period, the unity of the Catholic Church was shattered by the Western Schism. Collectively these events are sometimes called the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages."
(https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/2099634-late-middle-ages)

Readings On Line

A clear, succinct overview of the major events of the High Middle Ages.
http://www.lineagejourney.com/reformation/locations/europe-late-middle-ages-1300-1500/

This is the “Full Monty.”  Everything you need to know about this topic.  28 page pdf file from a standard college text, The History of Western Society, McKay et. al.
http://thewatsonian.weebly.com/uploads/9/0/3/8/9038807/mckay_chapter_12_-_crisis_of_the_later_middle_ages.pdf

A series of “slides” that will walk you through the basic history of the century and its crises. 
http://studylib.net/doc/5225359/the-crisis-of-the-late-middle-ages--1300

Short, succinct readable outline of the basic crises arising in the 14th century.  
http://machaut.weebly.com/the-calamitous-fourteenth-century.html

For those of you who are interested in the the effects of the plague on the human genome.  http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/02/black-death-left-mark-human-genome

A succinct overview of the entire period..14th Century Disaster
https://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/WestTech/x14thc.htm

If you are interested in the economic ramifications of these catastrophes this is for you.  The Great Depression of the 14th Century, Murray N. Rothbard focus on the rise of the state over the church and the imposition of taxes which depressed the economy.
https://mises.org/library/great-depression-14th-century

Bringing it up to date, an article on preparations for the next pandemic, Washington Post, October 24, 2017.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/10/24/world-leaders-rehearse-for-a-pandemic-that-will-come-sooner-than-we-expect/?utm_campaign=860954993f-&utm_term=.4c76539a4526

On Line Video

This is my favorite.  British historian Michael Wood uses the English village of Kibworth to illustrate the effects of the catastrophic 14th century. “Kibworth goes through the worst famine in European history, and then, as revealed in the astonishing village archive in Merton College Oxford, two thirds of the people die in the Black Death.
Helped by today's villagers, field walking and reading the historical texts, and by the local schoolchildren digging archaeological test pits, Wood follows stories of individual lives through these times, out of which the English idea of community and the English character begin to emerge.”
Michael Wood’s Story of England 3 of 6.  The Great Famine and the Black Death. One hour.

https://youtu.be/cJSK8_atMJY?si=7fsKyslTORHRz93M

Our story begins in 1405 when hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of sailors began their first expedition to India’s southwest coast.  Sixty of these ships were the largest wooden ships  to ever sail, 400 feet long, sixty feet wide, with nine masts.  Six more voyages would follow reaching the east coast of Africa and the Arabian Gulf.  There might well have been an eighth voyage in 1477, but internal politics between rival factions in the imperial court led to the end of all further voyages.  More than than that, an attempt was made to destroy all records associated with the voyages as well as the technology needed to build the ships.  By the end of the century only ships with two masts could be built.  In 1525  an imperial edict ordered the destruction of all ocean going ships.  A vast armada of over 3500 ships ceased to exist.  This signaled a turning inward and the adoption of a policy of isolation on China’s part.  

If the trade policies had continued and their voyages with them the history of East Africa, the Middle East and Europe might well have been quite different.

Readings On Line

Excellent short summary by PBS Nova. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/ancient-chinese-explorers.html

A short synopsis for teachers from Columbia Edu.  http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/china_1000ce_mingvoyages.htm#decision  Excellent synopsis.

A 1994 New York Times Notable Book of the Year--an intriguing account of China's rise and fall as a naval power, one hundred years before Columbus discovered the New World
Levathes, Louise. 1994. When China Ruled the Seas. New York: Oxford University Press.  256 pages.  Available on Amazon, print & Kindle and iBooks

Video On Line

Zheng He | from the PBS series: The Story of China. 6 minute clip. Michael Wood brings his usual enthusiasm to this PBS excerpt.  
https://mass.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/zheng-he-story-of-china/zheng-he-story-of-china/?student=true&focus=true

Readings On Line

One of the better of the many “medical” source analyses of the events surrounding Frederick’s death.
How Cancer Caused World War I, Lawrence I. Bonchek, M.D., F.A.C.S., F.A.C.C., Journal Of Lancaster General Hospital, Fall 2008 • Vol. 3 – No. 3
http://www.jlgh.org/JLGH/media/Journal-LGH-Media-Library/Past%20Issues/Volume%203%20-%20Issue%203/JLGH_V3n3_p108-111.pdf

A second and also well written “medical analyses” with historical context.  The Case of Emperor Frederick III:  A Medical-Political Tragedy, Carl E. Silver MD, Journal of the Emeritus College ASU, No. 6.
 https://emerituscollege.asu.edu/sites/default/files/ecdw/EVoice6/frederick.html

While thin on historical background, there are  some interesting conjectures on how history might have been quite different if Frederick had survived.
Bruce Anderson, The West Has Lost Control of the World and Disaster Awaits.  The Telegraph, UK, December 28, 2013.
Download PDF file here.

Very good on the personalities and intrigues among the royals leading up to the war. 
Simon Edge, Royal  Misfit Who Caused The Great War, The Express, UK, February 1, 2014.
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world-war-1/457365/Royal-misfit-who-caused-The-Great-War

An excellent recent comparison of the temperaments of Wilhelm II and our current president, Donald Trump.
What Happens When a Bad-Tempered, Distractible Doofus Runs an Empire? Miranda Carter, The New Yorker, June 6, 2018.
what_happens_when_a_bad-tempered_distractible_doofus_runs_an_empire__|_the_new_yorker.pdf

King George V and Kaiser Wilhelm II attending the funeral of King Edward VII, 1910
Four short years before the "...lamps [would go] out all over Europe"  Sir Edward Grey

Eighth Session:  Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, 1914
One right turn too many.

Sophie and Franz one hour before they would be shot and killed by Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip.

A botched assassination attempt, an impulsive decision, a wrong turn, a confused chauffeur stoping his vehicle.  Hardly the ingredients that should result in four years of warfare and 18 million deaths.  Yet it did.  


The assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on the 28 of June 1914 was the triggering event that in 35 days would catapult Europe into war.  Of course it can reasonably argued that one event or another would eventually have produced the same result.  Europe had been poised on the edge of the precipice for years. But war looks unavoidable only in hindsight. Europe had successfully surmounted a series of provocative crises, Moroccan-1905, Bosnian-1908, Agadir-1911, Balkan War-1912, Balkin War-1913  any one of which could have proved disastrous.  But a tipping point had been reached, an  almost unstoppable progression of decisions were about to be made following the assassination that would lead to disaster.  England’s Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey,  captured the futility of August 1914 in his notebook:

Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary from 1905 to 1916.

A great European war under modern conditions would be a catastrophe for which previous wars afforded no precedent. … I thought this must be obvious to everyone else, as it seemed obvious to me. And that if once it became apparent that we were on the edge, all the Great Powers would call a halt and recoil from the abyss. 

There is a lesson here concerns how unexamined assumptions and imagined knowledge often produce avoidable tragedies.

If you watch one more video, this is the one.  Easy to listen to, not dry or academic, Margaret MacMillan, Professor of International History at the University of Oxford, presents a fascinating and comprehensive lecture examining the intellectual, diplomatic and cultural trends foreshowing the coming conflict.
2015 Ross Horning Lecture, Creighton University Department of History, Apr 16, 2015, ”Was World War One Inevitable?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv0aYYZacR0

A straight forward narrative of events the day of the assassination. A Shot that Changed the World - The Assassination of Franz Ferdinand I Prelude to WW I - Part 3/3, 8 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmHxq28440c

The unfolding of events during the eight months from the February Revolution of 1917 to the success of the Bolshevik Revolution of October 25 represented  a fluid canvas upon which constantly evolving political factions responded to the exigencies of political, social and military developments.  Competing revolutionary visions included the hardline Bolsheviks, the more moderate Mensheviks, as well as the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs).  It was by no means certain in February what the outcome would be.  

The Provisional Government reflected this factionalism preventing it from developing into an effective governmental force controlling the levers of power.  Their ineffectiveness was compounded by the existence of competing governmental structures, especially the Petrograd Soviet composed of workers and soldiers.  There were conservative forces at work as well throughout this period who desired restoration of a constitutional monarch. 

Russian soldiers running from advancing German troops, July, 1917.

Thus far it would seem that the hopes of the Bolsheviks had dimmed considerably.  But  now we reach our tipping point:  a series of decisions made by Kerensky in reaction to the commander-in-chief of the Russian Army Lavr Kornilov’s decision to send troops to restore order in Petrograd in late August.  This would provide the Bolsheviks with the means to overthrow the government in October.  Kerensky, fearful of a possible military coup, released the imprisoned Bolshevik leaders, armed the Red Guard which then, under the leadership of Leon Trotsky, mounted the successful defense of Petrograd.  

But what if Kornilov had successfully garrisoned Petrograd?  What if Lenin had remained in Finland?  We will never know.

Lavr Kornilov, 1917

Documents

In this lecture, Ian Thatcher provides an in-depth analysis of the underlying political and social context that led to the failure of the Provisional Government in the fall of 1917. I found it informative and easy to listen too. The Russian Provisional Government, 1917 pt1 & 2, Prof. Ian Thatcher, Ulster University. The Faculties: The History Faculty - University lectures for secondary schools. 30 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KKa0hXuNK0