Yesterday we had a theme day for Ancient History, spending the entire day (well, 8:45-17:30) at uni. Each workgroup had to discuss one Roman emperor from the second century and was split up into smaller groups which had to give presentations on the subject. Finally each workgroup picked one of these presentations to represent them to the entire year. It was good fun, although we had Antoninus Pius who is not only one of the five ‘Good Emperors’, he is also easily the dullest emperor ever. Apart from building the Antonine Wall, the only thing he did meriting mention is allegedly dying of an overdose of bad cheese. And while that is a very entertaining anecdote, it’s not enough to fill up a ten minute presentation.
Another group had Commodus. He dressed as Hercules and killed ‘volunteers’ in the Colosseum in amusing ways. We were jealous.
Also, on Thursday we had Historical Practice, which is usually a dull class but it was actually entertaining for a change. Joost Roosendaal, who was already familiar to me as the author of a book on the Batavian Revolt (1987) held a talk about sources and their reliability, but illustrated this with his own research into 1944 Nijmegen as an example. We were shown bits of A Bridge Too Far, a famous war movie, to illustrate simple inaccuracies that can creep into sources, and how some things perceived as accurate at the time (the inadvertent failure to blow up the Waalbridge) now turn out to be false. German high command ordered not to blow up the bridge, so they could more easily recapture the area later on; the resistance fighter credited with cutting the lines and thus preventing the explosion (and who was killed a day or two later) did not, in fact, do so, as the lines had already been cut by the Germans themselves. It turns out a number of people gave erroneous testimony to create a martyr for the resistance, a heroic image. Not to say that the resistance fighters weren’t heroic, but the bridge would’ve survived regardless of their acts.
The centre of Nijmegen in September 1944,
after the bombardment (February ‘44) by the allies and the battle for the city
If you want to know more, the Radboud university has a detailed site (in Dutch) on the research.
And to get back to the point I was trying to make, this was clearly the way to go with Historical Practice: speak from experience and illustrate it with your own specialist subject rather than just giving loads of abstract information.
