The Appeal of Studying the LBH

[bighornbuff]

What, to you, is the appeal of studying the LBH battle?
For me it is being a part of an event that was so dramatic in all its aspects.
Even though we are not actually part of it, as it is already over, we are part of it in a way, just by virtue of studying it and discussing it.
Why this battle and not some other one? What other battle provokes such controversy and interest? No one talks the way we do about the Spanish-American War, or even WWI. And the Indian Wars in general, there is not that much talk about it even on this board.
But the Little Big Horn has a magical quality to it, somehow.

[Melani]

It's undoubtedly the mystery. Nobody really knows exactly what happened after Custer rode off along the bluffs, and what accounts there are are contradictory and open to all kinds of conflicting interpretation. And the battle attracted attention at the time because Custer's defeat was so total, and so totally unexpected.

[Diane Merkel]

. . . and the news arrived around the centennial celebration of the birth of the country. Quite a damper for the 4th of July.

The mystery of it is certainly the draw. What other battle offers thousands of Armchair Generals the opportunity to be the only one with the REAL answer to what happened?

[crzhrs]

If Custer fought another "Western" style army with the same results it would not be the same. Indians were the tipping factor in the importance of the fight. Wild Men in all their "savage" glory against the most famous Indian fighter and his shocking defeat at the hands of North America's last truely free people.

[bighornbuff]

And there were certainly many hundreds more there than he had thought.
crzhrs, I remember you from when I was a member before, when I foolishly let it lapse in May of 2005. Nice "meeting" you again

[Dark Cloud]

The battle isn't important at all absent its handy ability to serve as metaphor in people's lives, most prominently men who may or may not have been in combat. It's why people hate or love the participants beyond all justification, because it's taken as a remark about the individual's personal (but unknown to others) experience, for which the 7th are just puppets.

There are many variations of this, of course, but in the main true enough and rarely remarked upon. Few people interested in the LBH are particularly interested in history at all. That's just one of the many reasons that many of our dramatically announced 'Living Historians' annoy: they have a clothing fetish, are not historians or very literate, and often only find life pretending to someone else's.

[bighornbuff]

That is interesting and yet quite a stretch, most respectfully, DC. Whenever psychological aspects of anything are injected into an area, it is suspect. Your second paragraph justifies the first paragraph without further ado. The sentence about Few People are interested in history, is also suspect and may or may not be true.
Statements put forth, are never, in and of themselves, self-proving. An allegation that LBH represents for this or that group, this or that, absent proof, is no more than opinion. However, I defend anyone's right to offer opinions, as long as they realize that they are only opinions, valuable or not valuable, correct or incorrect.
Conclusions stated as such, are never self-proving.
Generalized statements and opinions do not necessarily equate to facts. They are opinions, no more, no less. I do state that you are a very intelligent member/poster but you are given to flights of fancy that are more philosophical in nature than anything based in fact. But this is not to criticize. Suppose I made a subjective statement such as, oh I don't know, let me try one here------The world as a whole is concerned with replicating history at it understands it, doomed to repeat the mistakes of prior peoples, quite against their wills-----those kinds of "constructed" statements amount, at most, to opinions, and to obscure ones, at that.
Unproved allegations are more or less suspect. This is not to say anything perjorative about you, DC, as a person. But mere statements never, ever, necessarily contain truth, no matter how much the statement desires such status. Statements ultimately end up being just another form of opinion, but because they are couched in confident sounding language, they seem to represent Truth itself, but the fact remains that every person's viewpoint, absent hard evidence, constitute opinions, but never more than that.
An unproven statement always remains just that.

[Melani]

Dec 4, 2009 15:01:00 GMT -6 Dark Cloud said:

That's just one of the many reasons that many of our dramatically announced 'Living Historians' annoy: they have a clothing fetish...

Aw, you're just jealous of my wardrobe!

I have studied history, mostly U.S. and Britain, since I could read. I focused on LBH and the Civil War at about age 10, when the CW Centennial began. Got into the Tudors in the '70's, when I began performing at Renaissance faires. Basically, the history interest prompted the faire participation. I now spend my days working in a National Historical Park, feeding Pacific maritime history to the tourists.

Oh, and we'll be doing Christmas 1901 on Dec. 12--come see us if you're in the Bay Area!
hydestreetlivinghistory.org/events.html

hydestreetlivinghistory.org/gallery/christmas1.jpg

I agree that LBH was not an important battle in the overall scheme of the history of the world or even the U.S., but it certainly had a major effect in the Indian War period. Probably the main reason most people have heard of Custer today is Libbie, the one-woman PR firm. lbhbuff described Beecher Island as "obscure" in another thread, and I would have to say that it is, compared to LBH and in regard to the general population, as opposed to people who study the Indian Wars Period, whether you describe them as historians or not. Ask any random person on the street what he knows about Custer, and you will probably get some kind of answer involving "killed by Indians," even if the specifics aren't known, but if you ask the same random selection what they know about Beecher Island or Forsyth, 99.9% will have never heard of either one. (That is just my personal guess; I haven't actually done the survey.)

By the way, what do people think makes one a "historian" as opposed to just somebody who studies histroy? Is publishing required, or what?

[sherppa]

Publishing prove nothing. Other than as the old saying goes" you have to be 50 miles from home to be an expert on anything".

[bighornbuff]

Melani, your last sentence reminded me of the time I was at the Old North Bridge Visitor Center at Minute Man National Historical Park in Concord, and a woman and her daughter were looking at various books, wondering what some good ones were, and I overheard and said well, Rebels and Redcoasts is a good one, eyewitness accounts of the battles, or some of them, plus the very intriguing book by Joseph Plumb Martin, Pvt Yankee Doodle, and the woman asked me "are you an HISTORIAN?", and I said "yes and no". An amateur one, one who just reads about it and finds it interesting, but she meant do I do that for a living, as if one would not be familiar with a book unless one were a full-fledged writing, teaching historian. It was interesting. That a "historian" would be, to her, someone who was "officially" in that field in some capacity or other. Not many think of historians as being those who like and read about history.

[Dark Cloud]

A history buff is not a historian. Further, a history buff fixated on single events and only those events can bring a great deal of nonsense and misunderstanding to the objects of his interest by his limited knowledge of the times. One relevant example is how ignorant - the right word - many Custer buffs are of the literary templates that existed in that time and after, and how those templates configured how those people contemporary to the battle and after 'remembered' the event. Or often were actually said to have remembered the event.

The woman you describe, at least by the evidence you provide, could very well have been asking if you'd been schooled in the methods and the academic discipline of history. Apparently you are not. Neither am I, but the memorization of trading card info doesn't make us athletes, nor does relentless fetish management of trivia and/or detail make us historians. Perhaps that was her concern.

Or, maybe she just knew the author of a book she felt you were dissing, and felt the need to defend it. Happens here.

[bighornbuff]

The memory of trading cards is not equivalent to a knowledge of history. One can be a historian, albeit amateur, simply by reading and thinking about historical events. One who studies history, without having published anything, without having taught classes.
When I recommended the book to her, she was astonished that I had read it,(as if only a college professor would even know about this particular book!) and therefore figured it was my chosen profession to teach history or engage in research of it. She was not looking at any books in particular, she asked aloud, where do we start, to her daughter, and I said Rebels and Redcoats at least provides eyewitnesse accounts.
Everyone who is interested in history and reads about it and discusses it, is just as much an historian as someone who teaches it and researches it. Nor is this merely an exercise in semantics. Perhaps our culture has dictated that historians are only those who engage in the study of history as a professional endeavor, but I am not concerned with societal norms when it comes to defining "historian". Common usage of a word does not, for me, mean that that is the final word on a subject. I use "historian" to mean anyone who delves into historical matters, amateur and professional.

[bighornbuff]

Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
"Historian"--"a student or writer of history"
Naturally, we are all welcome to our own interpretations of mostly everything. There are those who say that man never landed on the moon, that it was a staged event, filmed in a studio. I cannot help that.
I know there are those who enjoy engaging others in disputes here that deal with and do not deal with LBH, and that is natural although I do not enjoy disputes for the sake of disputes, to see who "wins".
In fact, I am very much against the idea of engaging in, let's not call it debates or even discussion, but let's call it "controversy".
It's not that I have no time for it, because I do have plenty of time for it, but I see it as an aimless kind of activity, purposeless, without a goal of any legitimate kind. I am sure it involves a goal or goals but in my judgement that goal is not well thought out or legitimate. But as stated before, these are only opinions and are by no means the final word on any subject, LBH or anything else.

[Dark Cloud]

If both you and David McCullough were to call yourselves 'historians', the term has no meaning. If you call yourself an amateur historian, that provides a distinction, except it runs up against the atoll of someone like John Gray, also an amateur historian, but you and I are still not to be mentioned in the same breath with him. Too many distinctions threaten the structural integrity of that word if it is to encompass too wide a range.

Conservatives in this country debase the language when they try to sub 'taxpayer' for 'citizen,' especially when so many high end conservatives seem to pay no taxes at all. The liberals do the same when they use 'activist' to describe someone risking their life in a Third World nation just as they do to an idiot in my liberal home town parading for something or other as if they were equally heroic. The left also debases the language when they use 'corporate' as a synonym for 'evil,' which is just stupid.

Elevation of terminology, especially as it is to apply to oneself, would surely be a definition of the decline of civilization. Sanitary Engineer instead of Janitor and "Living Historian" instead of costumed actor who rather likes dressing up. Many Custer buffs, who do indeed without a clue think of themselves as historians, are no different than those who memorize trading card stats. They can tell you Custer's life minute by minute and discuss his clothing and uniform trivia, and list every weapon variation of the time. And that's it.

They couldn't tell you what Canada, Mexico, or our own government was primarily concerned with from 1865 to 1876, nor give a coherent explanation for the Presidential election of 1876, or discuss the books that he and his officer corps would no doubt have read, nor have the slightest interest in any of that. But all that played a major role in the reasons for the battle and how it was presented after.

That's the difference between a fetish for a specific past and a real historian, who is academically trained in method and research and, well, history.

[bighornbuff]

Elevation of terminology can never be a sign of anything, much less the decline of civilization. And a historian remains the same as I cited in the Merriam-Webster dictionary awhile ago. One who is interested in a specific part of the past no more necessarily has a fetish for it than he or she does for being on discussion boards. An interest is not the same as a fetish.
Verbal sparring: it is aimless, pointless, without value, possibly injurious to others, as it has been when it has gotten out of hand, and I have seen it get out of hand here. There is only one possible reason I can think of for verbal sparring for the sake of doing so.
But I am interested in learning about LBH. I don't enter some of the other threads and topics, because I know more about the history of the Chinese dynasties than I do about time lines in the LBH battle. So there are certain topics within LBH that I am either unqualified to talk about or am not interested in.
The thing that interests me the most, for some unknown reason, is the 2 days Benteen and Reno and their men spent on the bluffs. There is something heroic about it, something heroic in just holding out that long. Two days in the normal course of events is not a big deal to us or to anyone else, but those two days must have been something. Surely they did not expect to get off those bluffs alive. And to harken back to a portion of our discussion about Beecher Island, being heroic does not involve a mere self preservation knee jerk reaction to danger. It can in some cases but does not cover all possible situations. Rather, there is true heroism in doing what one has to do to live, credit can be given for that, simply because there is always an alternative---capitulating, mentally or physically....we are not required to be heroic merely by virtue of doing that which causes us to survive. Some fall apart and are beside themselves, and consequently are not heroic at all. I say all this because this is one of my chief interests about the LBH, how they remained on the bluffs and did what they did to survive. The two downhill charges, especially, scream out a giant exclamation point in my mind when I read about it. Then I looked at the list of Medal Of Honor recipients that someone provided here on the boards, I forget who, sorry, and reading just the very first page, in my opinion, Benteen did far more than some of those recipients.