history | Michael A. Innes

An area, call it what you will, of safety

08.06.2018 by Michael A. Innes

Colleagues at Arab Digest have just published an interesting commentary on “Boundaries in the Arab world and their remarkable durability.” It’s not publicly available, but I do hope they’ll release it as a sample for general readers. The piece, authored by Chatham House’s Greg Shapland, ex of the Foreign Office, alludes to one of those issue-areas that bridges the grounded, practical, concrete world of international law, and the often fuzzy realm of historical understanding, collective identity and memory, and perception […]

Categories: International Boundary Disputes • Tags: Gulf War, history, Iraq, politics, safe havens, sanctuary, terminology

Left in folders next to the trivial and the mundane

08.10.2017 by Michael A. Innes

Trawl industry news or employment classifieds (pick your preferred sector) using keywords like “research” and “information”, and you might find yourself thinking that the sum total of reality is digital, too big for mere human minds to process, and that making sense of it is best left to machines and software. It’s a world in which understanding is less contingent on a cognitive capacity for critical engagement and creative insight than it is on the accessibility of information. Access is […]

Categories: Noteworthy • Tags: archival investigations, archive, forensic history, forensic research, historical research, history

A brief foray into distraction’s history

03.01.2017 by Michael A. Innes

This looks interesting: A Crisis of Short Attention Spans, 250 Years Ago By Natalie M. Phillips | January 01, 2017 When most people think of distraction, they think of flooded inboxes, cellphone beeps, Twitter feeds. An ever-present and unavoidable consequence of our fast-paced contemporary world, distraction is cast as a — if not the — mental state of modernity. Whatever came before — childhood, our parents’ generation, the Enlightenment — must have been, it seems, a more attentive age. Yet […]

Categories: Noteworthy • Tags: books, cognition, history, information, literature, reading

Maps: Telling a Story of Imagined Omniscience

06.11.2016 by Michael A. Innes

In lieu of something original from me, I offer you something insightful by someone else – Michael Caines, in the Times Literary Supplement, reviewing a new British Library exhibition entitled Maps and the Twentieth Century: Drawing the line. It tells “a story of imagined omniscience,” Caines writes, “of the world seen in a series of bird’s-eye overviews, albeit on widely varying scales and for competing purposes.” The subject is entirely apropos as Britain debates and decides its identity and its […]

Categories: Noteworthy • Tags: British Library, cartography, history, maps

Missiles of Outrage and Anger

26.09.2016 by Michael A. Innes

In the early pages of his memoir Known and Unknown, Donald Rumsfeld described boyhood memories of an America struggling to come to grips with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. One of those recollections was of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s reassuring voice, its “formal, almost aristocratic tone” cutting across the airwaves. “Outlining the indictment against the Japanese Empire, he spoke slowly and deliberately,” Rumsfeld wrote. “Every syllable was carefully enunciated, as if the words themselves were missiles of outrage and anger. […]

Categories: Sources and Methods • Tags: digital history, Donald Rumsfeld, framing, history, Known and Unknown, memoirs, politics, primary sources, rhetorical coercion, The Rumsfeld Papers

Michael A. Innes

/ Notes /

Tag: history

An area, call it what you will, of safety

Left in folders next to the trivial and the mundane

A brief foray into distraction’s history

Maps: Telling a Story of Imagined Omniscience

Missiles of Outrage and Anger