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medievalguy's profile
Michael Livingston
Michael Livingston
Michael Livingston
@medievalguy

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Michael Livingston

@medievalguy

Medievalist | Conflict Analyst | Novelist | TV Guy-ist | Opinions my own | Rep’d by @pstevens1824

Charleston, SC
michaellivingston.com
Joined April 2014

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    Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

    On 16 June, 75 years ago, the gestapo dragged twenty-six members of the French Resistance into a darkened field between villages. As they were organized into small groups for the firing squad, a 16 year old boy wept, asking if it would hurt. This man was beside him. 1/xpic.twitter.com/fD3XCyIhZz

    5:54 AM - 17 Jun 2019
    • 6,424 Retweets
    • 12,998 Likes
    • Sophie Hammond aging stupid belligerent turtles Marcia S Newman My Cronqvist leah Bob of the cats 😼🌳🌲🪵😺 Dr Lena Liapi The girl with the Zelda tattoo Joe Fonseca
    327 replies 6,424 retweets 12,998 likes
      1. New conversation
      2. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        He was a small, unassuming man in his late fifties, and his name was Marc Bloch. He assured the boy that the bullets would not hurt, then cried out “Vive la France!” as the guns fired. 2/x

        13 replies 265 retweets 1,856 likes
        Show this thread
      3. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        Bloch had been one of the most esteemed professors in Europe, yet he made the decision to give his life fighting the great evil of his time. Today, as the world threatens to slip into a far too similar darkness, Bloch’s spirit can and should serve as an inspiration. 3/x

        5 replies 334 retweets 2,608 likes
        Show this thread
      4. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        History isn’t passive, and historians can’t be, either. 4/x

        6 replies 428 retweets 2,626 likes
        Show this thread
      5. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        The belief that historians have an important role to play in shaping the world, not just reporting on it, is one of the hallmarks of the Annales School of historiography founded by Bloch and his in 1928. 5/x

        7 replies 225 retweets 2,162 likes
        Show this thread
      6. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        Bloch believed that historians are inevitably caught up in the events they describe. Bloch’s aim with Annales was to build something inherently interdisciplinary and communal. 6/x

        1 reply 151 retweets 1,710 likes
        Show this thread
      7. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        “Isolated,” he once wrote, “each [historian] will understand only by halves, even within his own field of study, for the only true history, which can advance only through mutual aid, is universal history.” 7/x

        3 replies 200 retweets 1,711 likes
        Show this thread
      8. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        Bloch’s focus on history as the collective experience of society was heavily influenced by battle. He’d volunteered to fight for France in August 1914, and in action on the Western Front he saw how class distinctions faded away. 8/x

        4 replies 130 retweets 1,442 likes
        Show this thread
      9. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        The bullets at the Marne, the Somme, and the Argonne didn’t care who men were or where they came from. 9/x

        2 replies 106 retweets 1,228 likes
        Show this thread
      10. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        After the First World War, Bloch — who’d been wounded twice — found his career path in academia. And he was good at it. 10/x

        1 reply 93 retweets 1,166 likes
        Show this thread
      11. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        Whether because of his unique approach to history, his left-wing politics, or his identity as a Jew in a time of rising global anti-Semitism, Bloch had a number of career setbacks in the early 1930s, but he finally managed to achieve a prestigious position at the Sorbonne. 11/x

        2 replies 106 retweets 1,274 likes
        Show this thread
      12. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        That same year, Adolf Hitler broke the post-war Treaty of Versailles. Two years later, the Third Reich annexed Austria. 12/x

        2 replies 94 retweets 1,037 likes
        Show this thread
      13. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        At the age of 53, twenty-five years after he’d volunteered to serve in First World War, he was mobilized again to serve as a fuel supply officer for the French Army in what would become the Second World War. 13/x

        2 replies 105 retweets 1,128 likes
        Show this thread
      14. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        He spent the next months organizing logistics against the Nazis, ultimately standing on the beaches of Dunkirk in June 1940, where he gave the order to burn the last reserves of fuel in order to prevent them falling into the hands of the enemy. 14/x

        3 replies 104 retweets 1,239 likes
        Show this thread
      15. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        All the while — in spare time, in such notebooks as he could find, apologizing for errors that might result from having little research materials beyond the library of his mind — he was writing a new book that would set out his definition of what it meant to be a historian. 15/x

        2 replies 107 retweets 1,278 likes
        Show this thread
      16. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        The book was still unfinished five years later, when he stood in a darkened field as a member of the French Resistance and reassured a boy that the bullets would not hurt. 16/x

        3 replies 100 retweets 1,212 likes
        Show this thread
      17. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        Such was the esteem in which Bloch was held that these drafts were published posthumously in 1949 under the title Apologie pour l'Histoire, ou Métier d'Historien; it was translated into English, the first of his works to be so treated, as The Historian’s Craft in 1953. 17/x

        4 replies 138 retweets 1,404 likes
        Show this thread
      18. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        In its first lines, Bloch explains that The Historian’s Craft was begun in response to a question from his son: “Tell me, Daddy. What is the use of history?” It was a question Bloch knew to be on the minds of many in the dark days of the 1940s. 18/x

        2 replies 149 retweets 1,335 likes
        Show this thread
      19. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        Bloch’s response was two-fold. First, he understood that the past was the key to the present. 19/x

        1 reply 121 retweets 1,261 likes
        Show this thread
      20. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        As @prof_gabriele recently wrote, “Living in the darkness of Nazism, Bloch understood that he first needed to seek the roots of the tree casting that shadow before it could be uprooted and toppled.” 20/x

        2 replies 220 retweets 1,499 likes
        Show this thread
      21. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        Second, Bloch recognized that “The past is, by definition, a datum which nothing in the future will change. But the knowledge of the past is something progressive which is constantly transforming and perfecting itself.” 21/x

        4 replies 212 retweets 1,550 likes
        Show this thread
      22. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        The historian’s work, in other words, was in the journey of the question, not in the destination of the answer. 22/x

        2 replies 146 retweets 1,357 likes
        Show this thread
      23. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        Something of this truth may lie behind the fact that, while the book was left in pieces at his untimely death, all three of his surviving drafts had the very same ending: “In a word, in history, as elsewhere, the causes cannot be assumed. They are to be looked for…” 23/x

        1 reply 137 retweets 1,364 likes
        Show this thread
      24. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        So many of Bloch’s fellow academics chose the safer road when the Nazis came — to stay quiet, to get by. But Bloch did no such thing. 24/x

        1 reply 99 retweets 1,065 likes
        Show this thread
      25. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        By March 1943 his search for meaning in the face of unfathomable horrors had led to him becoming a member of the French Resistance. 25/x

        1 reply 87 retweets 1,031 likes
        Show this thread
      26. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        He provided his experience as a logistician, as well as leveraging his formidable intellect to the tasks of coded and public communications. He even used his need to visit archives for historical research as a means to travel in the service of the Resistance. 26/x

        1 reply 77 retweets 1,017 likes
        Show this thread
      27. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        The gestapo arrested him in Lyon in March 1944. They found a radio and resistance papers in his rented rooms. 27/x

        2 replies 85 retweets 919 likes
        Show this thread
      28. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        He was tortured repeatedly over the next months, but it’s said that he gave the Nazis nothing. When he was conscious and well enough to talk, Marc Bloch taught his beloved history to fellow prisoners. 28/x

        2 replies 100 retweets 1,140 likes
        Show this thread
      29. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        Bloch joined the Resistance for many reasons. He was a Jew disgusted by anti-Semetic laws. He was a patriot angered at the violence done to his country and its people. 29/x

        2 replies 98 retweets 1,075 likes
        Show this thread
      30. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        But he was also a historian. And as he recognized that the past was ever-present, he must have recognized, too, that he would have to live, in whatever present he had left, with the choices of his past. 30/x

        2 replies 116 retweets 1,261 likes
        Show this thread
      31. Michael Livingston‏ @medievalguy 17 Jun 2019

        Martyrdom does strange things to memory. Bloch was a great historian in his time. His books and his thoughts continue to have enormous influence on the humanities. 31/x

        30 replies 124 retweets 1,573 likes
        Show this thread
      32. Show replies

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