History – Page 2 – Ammon Shepherd

German Sonderweg

This is an essay I wrote for a Directed Readings course in Fall 2009, with Marion Deshmukh.

The Sonderweg of German History

Before 1940s there was a positive Sonderweg thesis that promoted favorably the differences of Germany from other Western nations.[1] This is similar to what every nation does, showing their best side, why they are better or, in a good sense, different than other nations. These are typical self-promotion tactics that help one feel good with ones’ self, and to help others see the virtues they would like them to see. This thesis is more appropriately termed the “German divergence from the West” in English. Sonderweg was mainly a derogatory term used by its critics.

After 1940, the positive Sonderweg was no longer developed or used. A critical Sonderweg took the place of the positive reflection of German history, with the new one attempting to answer one prominent question; How did Germany produce a society and political atmosphere where National Socialism could come to power? Proponents of this Sonderweg thesis have been Ernst Fraenkel, Hans Rosenberg, George Mosse, Fritz Stern, Karl-Dietrich Bracher, Gerhard A. Ritter, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Heinrich August Winkler, Helmut Plessner, Leonard Krieger, Kurt Sontheimer, John Maynard Keynes, Fritz Fischer, Wolfgang Mommsen.[2]

Those who argued for a critical Sonderweg put forth the following points for seeing Germany’s special path to National Socialism.

Sonderweg proponents were cautious about asserting a “necessary relationship between long-term developments in German History and the triumph of National Socialism,” but in the end were specifically looking for peculiarities in German politics that hindered a liberal democracy from developing.[3]
Germany had a relatively late attempt at creating a nation state. France and the United States of America formed, or attempted to form, a nation in the late eighteenth century. It was nearly one hundred years, finally in 1871, that Germany was able to form a federal government.
Sonderweg proponents hearken back to the Kaiserreich government’s oppressive practices that limited parliament and caused what parties that did form to be rigid and fragmented.
German defeat in World War I is seen as an important part of the German Sonderweg. The devastating defeat in the First World War left German confidence in tatters. Coupled with the limiting and demeaning restrictions of the Versailles Treaty, Germany seemed anxious to prove to themselves and Europeans that they were a nation of worth. The defeat also led Germany into a new phase of government different, full parliamentary constitution with no monarchy or empire.
Germany’s political culture tended to be conservative. This made it difficult for liberal parties to be effective.
The “Junkers-the large agrarian landowners east of the Elbe River” (similar to the English gentry) retained much of their power. Whereas other nations had developed a parliament with representative leaders, much of Germany’s power still lay with landed aristocrats.
Bismarck’s forming the nation-state with “Blut und Eisen”–“blood and iron” which put emphasis on the military, and left them unchecked by parliament. This gave a militaristic approach to German government that lasted through the Weimar Republic and into National Socialism.
The unbourgeois-ness of the bourgeoisie. They never really revolted against the aristocratic society and political culture. There was no middle class of people to rise up in rebellion as there were in other Western states. As a result Germany was left without a tradition of successful revolutions and a history of top-down reforms. Combined with pressure from the peasants, the middle classes were politically weak.
Germany experienced a strange mixture of social and economic modernization and industrialization and capitalism on one hand, but maintained the old power relations, pre-industrial institutions, and cultures. It was an odd combination of old powers, cultures and organizations in charge of new social and economic conditions and ways of production.
All of these “long-term patterns” came to a head with the “short-term factors” of 1920s and 1930s, and help to explain the collapse of the Weimar Republic and rise of National Socialism.[4]

“In a nutshell, the critical Sonderweg thesis claimed to indentify long-term structures and processes that, under the influence of numerous other factors (from the consequences of defeat in World War I through the class conflicts of the 1920s to the peculiarities of Adolf Hitler’s personality), contributed to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the triumph of National Socialism”.[5]

Historians opposed or critical of the Sonderweg have based their critiques partly on methodology. Opponents to the Sonderweg thesis have been Thomas Nipperdey, David Blackbourn, Geoff Eley, Ernst Nolte, Jürgen Kocka, François Furet,Friedrich Meinecke.

Their opposition consists of the following points:

There are several historical continuities to be seen in German history. For example the Kaiserreich is also a prehistory of the Federal Republic of Germany. This line of reasoning suggests that as National Socialism fades farther into the past, it becomes less of a clear case that the collapse of the Weimar Republic led to National Socialism. Supporting a Sonderweg assumes there is a “normal path” that Germany could have taken. To define what a “normal” path is, is much to subjective a “value judgment,” and the belief in the superiority of “the West”.[6]
A research in Bielefeld has shown that the aristocratic influence (or dominance) over the middle class was no greater in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany than in other western European nations. International comparisons have shown, contrary to Sonderweg hypothesis, that the educated German middle class was “strong and clearly contoured”.[7] It was a widespread European trait for the bourgeois to turn from liberalism in nineteenth century.
The Kaiserreich did show signs of modernism. It was “full of modern dynamism, for example in the areas of science and scholarship, art and culture”.[8]
Intensive recent research seems to point to National Socialism as a modern phenomenon, rather than the results of past traditions.

Some core aspects of the Sonderweg have been supported, though, through recent research in three ways:

1. Three of the basic developmental problems of modern societies showed themselves at the same time only in Germany. 1) Formation of the nation-state, 2) decision to have a constitution (parliament) or no, 3) issues with society brought by industrialization. Other countries dealt with these individually, that is, with generations, or at least decades, of time in between to iron out difficulties.[9]

2. While issues with the middle class, the bourgeoisie, cannot be discounted, they did have less of an effect on Germany society than in other European countries.[10]

3. Germany had a “bureaucratic tradition” of a strong authoritarian state. Such power in the hands of the state blocked parliament from functioning, provided effective services to the people, and weakened middle class liberalism. When a democratic government finally did have power, after World War I in the form of the Weimar Republic, the inability of the leaders to provide a stable economy and society meant Germans were eager, or at least willing, to go back to a strong authoritarian state. Important to realize, though, is that the rise of National Socialism should be seen separate from the fall of the Weimar Republic. National Socialism was too new to have broken apart the Weimar Republic; it merely picked up the pieces.

With the Federal Republic the Sonderweg ended for West Germany. It became a “normal” western nation. East Germany, continued the Sonderweg, much altered of course, until its collapse in 1989-90.[11]

Sonderweg Bibliography

Proponents

Bracher, Karl Dietrich, ed. Deutscher Sonderweg, Mythos Oder Realität? München: R. Oldenbourg, 1982.

Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. 1st ed. New York: HarperPerennial, 1998.

Fischer, Fritz. Griff Nach Der Weltmacht: Die Kriegszielpolitik Des Kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914-18. 2nd ed. Düsseldorf: Droste, 1962.

Fritzsche, Peter. Germans into Nazis. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 1996.

Kocka, Jurgen. “Asymmetrical Historical Comparison: The Case of the German Sonderweg.” History and Theory 38, no. 1 (February 1999): 40-50.

Krieger, Leonard. The German Idea of Freedom; History of a Political Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Pr, 1972.

Mommsen, Hans. Alternative Zu Hitler: Studien Zur Geschichte Des Deutschen Widerstandes. München: Beck, 2000.

Mommsen, Hans, ed. The Third Reich Between Vision and Reality: New Perspectives on German History, 1918-1945. German historical perspectives v.12. Oxford: Berg, 2001.

Mosse, George L. The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich. New York: Schocken Books, 1981.

Plessner, Helmuth. Die Verspätete Nation; Über Die Politische Verführbarkeit Bürgerlichen Geistes. 2nd ed. Stuttgart]: W. Kohlhammer, 1959.

Rosenberg, Hans. Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience, 1660-1815. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968.

Sontheimer, Kurt. Antidemokratisches Denken in Der Weimarer Republik; Die Politischen Ideen Des Deutschen Nationalismus Zwischen 1918 Und 1933. München: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1962.

Stern, Fritz Richard. The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology. California library reprint series. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.

Wehler, Hans Ulrich. The German Empire, 1871-1918. Providence, RI: Berg Publishers, 1993.

Winkler, Heinrich August. Germany: The Long Road West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Opponents

Blackbourn, David, and Geoff Eley. The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Furet, François. Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews. 1st ed. New York: Schocken Books, 1989.

Kocka, Jurgen. “Asymmetrical Historical Comparison: The Case of the German Sonderweg.” History and Theory 38, no. 1 (February 1999): 40-50.

Meinecke, Friedrich. The German Catastrophe: Reflections and Recollections. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963.

Nolte, Ernst. Die Weimarer Republik: Demokratie Zwischen Lenin Und Hitler. München: Herbig, 2006.

[1] Jurgen Kocka, “Asymmetrical Historical Comparison: The Case of the German Sonderweg,” History and Theory 38, no. 1 (February 1999): 41.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 42.

[5] Ibid., 43.

[6] Ibid., 44.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid., 45.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., 46.

[11] Ibid., 47.

There are also some good lecture notes here: http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/133c/133cPrevYears/133c06/133c06l04SpecialPath.htm

British History and the Industrial Revolution

In preparation for my Oral Exam on October 28, 2010, I have written down some questions and possible replies about the Industrial Revolution in modern British History.

Bibliography

Some of the important works I’ll draw from are:

Berlanstein, Lenard R, ed. The Industrial Revolution and Work in Nineteenth-Century Europe. London, [England]: Routledge, 1992.
Hobsbawm, E. J. The Age of Revolution [Europe] 1789-1848. New York: New American Library, 1962.
Thompson, Dorothy. The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Pantheon Books, 1964.
Thompson, F. M. L. The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830-1900. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Wiener, Martin J. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980. 1st ed. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Questions

How did the Industrial Revolution affect British society and politics?

Steam Engine. From the Almanach comique, pittoresque, drolatique, critique et charivarique pour l’année 1887, published in Paris.

Changes in Lower Classes

As E.P. Thompson’s book title suggests, the Industrial Revolution created a new socially aware and politically active group, or class of people. And it created more than one. E.P. focuses on the worker class that was established as people became workers in factories. The Industrial Revolution also created a new middle class of merchants and businessmen.

Industrial Revolution also changed trades. The weavers were the hardest hit. Once a respectable and well paid trade, after industry replaced people with machines, weaver trade was poorly paid and dishonorable. Positions opened up for women and children to work in factories. People moved to more urban areas. F.M.L. Thompson argues though, that these modes of urbanization were already in place and were not affected by industrialization.

This bespeaks a fear seen in all levels of society: the fear of change, the fear of technology, the dominance of machine over man.

Organizations Lead to Political Activism

This working class eventually formed unions to deal with issues in the factories, and such organization and collaboration in factory politics spilled out into the politics of government as they eventually sought redresses with Parliament. Dorothy Thompson writes about such a movement known as Chartism, that happened in the 1830s and 1840s. Chartism was a movement of varying and differing causes, with the intent of a better society, fueled by the long unhappy workingmen throughout the country.

Middle Class Changes in Society

The middle classes created their own sphere in English society. Wanting to emulate the aristocracy, they embraced the idea of the gentleman and created a culture of private and public spheres for women and men, codes of conduct and beliefs. Industry began a continual decent in the late nineteenth century as the middle class (the owners of industrial factories, the merchants and businessmen) abandon capitalist notions and seek the leisurely life of the gentleman. One argument is that the decline in British industrialism was a direct result of the middle class emulating the aristocracy instead of overcoming them (socially and politically) (Wiener).

Rain, Steam, Spead - The Great Western Railway, 1844. Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) — Rain, Steam, Spead – The Great Western Railway, 1844. Joseph Mallord William Turner.

Historians and the Industrial Revolution

How historians view the Industrial Revolution shows how history telling is affected by modern economic, political and social atmospheres. Four phases of interpretation show that the Industrial Revolution was viewed as a negative consequence of human behavior; a cyclical process of nature tied to war and economic challenges; a process for economic growth; and most recently as nothing more than anticipated economic and technological evolution.

Why does E.P. Thompson hate the standard of living debate?

Thompson looks at the standard of living between 1790-1840. The biggest issue is that historians sympathetic to capitalist entrepreneurship used the data to match their conclusions, rather than to discover what was there. (Like looking for red cars and noticing how many there are, to the exclusion of noticing all the other colors.) This issue leads to three other issues with historical the look at the standard of living.

1. Historians did not take into consideration that quantity can increase and quality can decrease at the same time. Economic historians take the rise in wages and goods and deduce that quality of live increases too. Social historians look at the writings about poor quality of life and deduce that material wealth declined as well. Thompson argues that the Industrial Revolution brought increase in material goods (wages, products, etc) but the “well-being” of workers decreased (decreased leisure time, less independence, longer working hours, etc) (211).

2. Taking an average dilutes the actual findings. Adding the stats for all counties and then dividing by the number of counties to find an “average” ignores the discrepancies within the counties. One county may be very rich, another very poor, but combining their info and dividing by their numbers does not provide an accurate description of how those counties actually were (213-214).

3. Quality is subject to interpretation and dependent upon the group you’re looking at (gentlemen, poor, workers, laborers, etc)

The Past in Color

This weeks installment of history found on the web includes links to a few sites with something special. Color photographs from the early days of color photography. Color somehow brings a photograph to more life, adds more detail, and helps get a better understanding of the time period. Sure you can see the style of clothes, for example, in a black and white, but did you know it was bright green!

The first site comes from the Boston Globe. These pictures are from Russia over 100 years ago! Absolutely amazing detail.

Second we have a bunch of color moving pictures from World War II from a blog at salon.com. Color and moving pictures just makes it all the more real.

Department of Energy Historical Atomic Test Films — Historic Test Films

The third site is an archive of films from nuclear testing by the U.S. Department of Energy. Crazy the amount of destruction those armaments produced.

Fourth is a link to NASA’s Flickr account. Here is Flickr working with a number of the U.S. Government departments to archive some of their images and provide a more publicly accessible way for these public images to be… accessible. Kind of neat.

Finally, the best for last. This site is all in Russian, so not too sure what he’s saying, but Sergey Larenkov has some neat images. They show a juxtaposition of World War II photos with current photos of the same place. It’s a really neat way to see how the damage would look if it were to happen today.

Many Mechanical Machines

Back again with another roundup of websites promoting some history. This weeks focus is on the computers and other machines.

Technologizer has come through in the past year or so with some really fun looks at technology of the past. Here are three:

designmistakes1 — 15 Classic PC Design Mistakes

videophone-splash1 — 132 Years of the videophone

It’s amazing how ugly and non-functional computers were in the early stages. They don’t seem to be anything like cars. Old cars, some of them anyways, become classics. They were made to look good. Somehow, I guess, computer manufacturers didn’t think computers would need any style. Sure they were made for businesses, but beige…. for everything? One of Apple’s biggest successes has been to transform the look of personal computers. No matter what you think about Apple as a company and Steve Jobs as a person, at least their stuff has some style (which has it’s own interesting history in that many styles come from old Braun products by Dieter Rams).

oldcomputer01 — Small Gallery of Old Computers

Speaking of old computers… The Obsolete Technology Website has a plethora of information, a veritable archive, of old technology. It’s good to see someone is keeping the history of our tech junk. Newscientist also steps in with a small gallery of ancient (read older than 30 years) technology.

mac-startup-chimes-osx-startupsound-preference-pane — Macintosh Startup Chimes

Finally, a trip down memory lane with all of the old Macintosh start up sounds at Geekology.

History's equation

I had moment of early morning, jump out of bed and write it down, inspiration the other day.

It was the equation of history.

The Present = (Past Realities) + (Hopes for the Future)

The present, in very simple terms, is a combination of things that have already happened and what is hoped to happen in the future.

History is the study of this equation as it relates to individuals, corporations, governments, nations, etc.

Think about how you think about yourself, for example. You might be like me and when you think about yourself you have this knowledge of things you’ve done, seen, and heard. Then you compare that with how you think you should be.

A historical study does the same thing. It tries to figure out what the present is for any given time period, event, or issue by putting together the past events and the ideals that people left behind.

Anyhow, that’s a quick, not well thought out explanation of a very early morning inspiring thought. As those types of thoughts go, they often don’t pan out when brought under the light of a conscious brain.

Graduate Research Paper

Not that I really have time to blog as I do it, but… I feel like I need to do something historical here… So why not.

Markirch-A9-Scan-080303-0001 — Tunnel at Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines (German: Markirch), in Alsace, France

So this is my last class before embarking on my dissertation. The Graduate Research Seminar should hopefully tie up any loose knots in our historical writing abilities. It’s a course on honing our skills. The syllabus looks great, and I’m excited for the class. One initial question I had was, why are we learning how to write like historians until the very end? Why don’t we learn how to write at the beginning or even in the middle? Well, there is a course or two on that, but nothing like this one proposes to be. We’re apparently going to learn all the behind-the-scene techniques and tricks to the trade. I’m actually really excited for it. Our Professor is great.

So for this class we’re supposed to write a 25-30 page paper that will hopefully become a chapter (or at least a bulk of one) of the dissertation. If nothing else, it can be a publishable paper. On the very low end, it will at least teach us something we don’t want to do for a dissertation.

Map-B-Group-Scan-080303-0001 — Map of tunnel locations

My dissertation, as it stands now, is on Nazi Tunnels. The Nazis, towards the middle of the war, decided that they needed to move much of their war manufacturing underground. So they designed and built huge underground bunkers and tunnel systems for factories and depots. Go ahead, google it. There’s not much out there. Add the keywords, ‘melk ebensee’ and you’ll get a few more responses. The only scholarly works that I know of on this topic are two German books. One is an excellent work by Hans Walter Wichert, Decknamenverzeichnis deutscher unterirdischer Bauten(at Amazon, already have one), which lists practically all of the underground building sites during Nazi Germany. The second work is a dissertation by Bertrand Perz, Projekt Quarz: Steyr-Daimler-Puch Und Das Konzentrationslager Melk, Industrie, Zwangsarbeit und Konzentrationslager in O?sterreich (at Amazon if anyone wants to buy it for me), which is an in-depth look at one of these underground projects in Melk, Australia.

Anyhow, there are totally no sources available, to my knowledge, that I can use for the current project. That’s part of my dissertation work, is to dig up all of those sources. It should be fun. It’s also not manageable in a semester’s time. So for this semester’s project I had several ideas.

ProjektQuarzScan-080303-0001 — Projekt Quarz

First, I thought about doing a micro-study on just one of the tunnels. Unfortunately, in the two or three hours of looking for sources, I couldn’t find any. I haven’t checked with the library, yet, but I’m not hopeful. So my second idea is to look at a more broad topic that touches the issue of the tunnels. One obvious one is, why did they build them in the first place (the answer is to protect them from Allied bombings). But a deeper question begs, why did they think they could do that in the first place. It was a huge undertaking to move so many factories underground. They must have though they could do it. So a deeper question would be, why did the Nazi’s think they could undertake such a big job. Now let’s step back a bit, say, 30-50 years, and apply this question to Germany as a whole in the form of, what did German’s think of their technical and scientific abilities? So that will be my basis of inquiry for this semester’s project. I will look at what German citizens, German scientists, and German politicians thought about German science and technology from 1900 until the end of World War II. I post more on this as I think it through and find sources.

So, basically, I’m hoping to keep up the blog as I write the paper and take the class. I’ll post the methodology that I learn, and the troubles and trials, the triumphs and tackles about writing a historical paper.

First off, I feel completely unprepared because I have no sources. That’s the first thing to tackle.

Poster Session at the History of Ed

At the beginning of the year I was asked to participate in a poster session for the History of Education Society’s Annual Meeting. I have done a few things with maps, so I was asked to share resources and ideas for using maps with teaching history.

Not too many people came by, so I only spoke with two people. I had this list of resources for working with and teaching with maps:

History and Maps

Selected Websites

http://chnm.gmu.edu/worldhistorysources/unpacking/mapsmain.html (CHNM’s site on using maps in the classroom)
http://echo.gmu.edu/search/node/map (A list of map resources on the web, collected by GMU’s Echo project)
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/ (Library of Congress Map Collections)
http://www.besthistorysites.net/Maps.shtml (A long list of map related websites for teaching history)
http://explorethemed.com/Default.asp (Historical Atlas of the Mediterranean)
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/ (Tons of maps sponsored by University of Texas at Austin)
http://www.flu.gov/whereyoulive/healthmap/ (US Gov. Flu Map)
http://www.unc.edu/awmc/index.html (Ancient World Mapping Center)
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/ (Hundreds of posts about strange maps. Very good discussion starters.)

Selected Bibliography

Brown, Lloyd Arnold. The Story of Maps. New York: Dover Publications, 1979.
Bruckner, Martin. The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity. Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
Field Museum of Natural History, and Newberry Library. Maps: Finding Our Place in the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Knowles, Anne Kelly, and Amy Hillier. Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship. Pap/Cdr. ESRI Press, 2008.
Pickles, John. A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geo-Coded World. London: Routledge, 2004.
Turnbull, David, and Deakin University. Maps Are Territories: Science Is an Atlas: A Portfolio of Exhibits. University of Chicago Press ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Virga, Vincent, and Library of Congress. Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations. Little, Brown and Company, 2007.

And this Keynote playing on my laptop:

40th anniversary of the moon landing

What space junky, almost historian, geek would I be without posting a little bit about some of the best type of history in existence. I refer, of course, to the history of man’s endeavors to explore space. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to step on a celestial body other than Earth. Michael Collins waited in the Command capsule as the two American astronauts made human history.

So here are a number of resources and articles describing some cool things about space flight.

Historic Spacecraft is an archive of space vehicles and other things space related. They have a lot of photos of vehicles, suits, and such. They also have posters and such for sell, if you’re inclined to have something on your wall. They also have stats and dates for all of the rockets and vehicles listed. A great source for photos for all your space history needs. Also really cool is a list of all completed Space Shuttle missions. Space Shuttle Discovery has flown the most missions, 36, so far (June 2009) with a total of 126 missions. The Space Shuttle Enterprise never made it to space, but you can see it at the Udvar-Hazy National Air and Space Museum in Dulles, VA. I’ve been there a couple of times, and it is extremely awesome.

Next up from Flightglobal is an interactive timeline of sorts, with lots of information about the missions, flights, computers, physics and people who made it possible to put man on the moon. Most amazing about the whole flight, is that everything was based on theory. There was no way to test the actual theoretical physics without flying to the moon and back. “Although the theoretical physics of travelling to the Moon had been laid down before the advent of the Apollo missions, this was the first time a series of manned missions had put the theory into practice.”

Speaking of computers, Linux.com has a neat write up about the software used to guide the Apollo 11 spacecraft to the moon and back. It’s incredible to think that they were able to do such an amazing thing with technology comparable to today’s calculators. All of the code used punch cards and took hours to see if it was written properly. Jerry Bostick described the process in the Linux.com article:

“We would give instructions to the programs by punching cards,” Bostick said. “You had to wait at least 12 hours to see if it would work right.” The early programming was done in the real-time computing complex in Houston using IBM 7094 computers with 64K of memory. There were no hard disks. All the data was stored on magnetic tape, with each computer having about eight tape drives. Most programs used for the mission were written in Fortran, Bostick said. “After Apollo 1, we upgraded to the biggest and the best equipment that government money could buy, the IBM 360 with an unheard of 1MB of memory. We went all the way from 64K to 1MB.”

Moving from space computers to space computer games, the Technologizer has a great piece about a well loved space game, Lunar Lander. This game started out as a text-based game written by a high school student. It became popular and was later turned into countless graphical spin offs. I’m playing one on the iPod Touch a bit too much at the moment. You can see I made the top 20 players for a while!

Finally, New Scientist has a number of interesting articles relating to the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. One article addresses with the ethics and issues with the moon being a historic spot. Wherever there is a piece of human debris or footstep, it’s historically valuable. Should all of these sites and artifacts and footprints be protected? What happens when/if tourists are able to visit the moon? Who’s going to be the museum curator and the tourist guides? I’ll take that job!

Another New Scientist article lists several reasons why the moon is still relevant to science, for government, commercial enterprise and the normal guy.

Lastly, New Scientist has a neat interactive map showing the many multi-national places on the moon where humans have left their mark and made exploration.

Nazis in the news

Nazi history is always a good way to sell news, and get people to read.

A few Nazi related items came up in the news lately.

From the Telegraph.co.uk we have some never before seen photographs of Hitler. From the article:

“The colour pictures come from the collection of Hugo Jaeger, Hitler’s personal photographer, who captured him on camera him from 1936 to the final days of his rule in 1945.

They include a glimpse inside Berghof, his mountaintop estate in Bavaria, and his private apartments in Berlin.”

This will shed some more light on Hitler and life of top Nazis. It goes well with a find from a fellow PhD student at GMU who found similar photos at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/ssalbum/). The photos are of Hitler’s apartment at Berghof, Hitler mingling with the people and at parades, and other rooms and belongings of Hitler’s.

Also in the news is a recently uncovered German E-Boat, the S130, which interrupted an allied D-Day training and killed over 700 American servicemen. It is being reconstructed and will be used as a memorial of those who fought in World War II. From the article:

“As owner the world’s largest privately held collection of military vehicles, Wheatcroft said he envisions the restored vessel as being a “living memorial to all sailors who died during World War Two.”

“It’s the only example of its type left in the world,” he said. “I want it to become like something brought back from the past.””

And, finally, another World War II vessel making the news is the Horten 2-29. This was a stealth jet developed by a couple of brothers. It has the uncanny resemblance to our B-2 stealth bomber. Here is a site with a number of cool pictures. National Geographic has a cool documentary about a team of engineers at Northrop Grumman who reconstructed the airplane to test it’s stealth abilities. Most amazing of all, I think, is that the plane was made from wood! That and several layers of paint, aparently, are what make it nearly invisible to radar. I’ll have to do some research into this machine and write up a history of it.