Sungai Batu, Kedah archaelogy

This ancient archaeological site of the Bujang Valley has been known by the British settlers since 18 century. In the year 2007, Centre for Global Archaeological Research (CGAR) discovered several sites in Sungai Batu. It reveals a huge complex of settlement at the height of the Bujang Valley Civilization. The excavations also revealed fallen brick structures and uncovered artefacts such as beads, iron objects, iron slags, iron knives, tuyere and burnt areas. The Sungai Batu monument (see picture 1 and 2) is an interesting find which has rough resemblance of some of the known temples and monument in Cambodia, India, Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia.

Location: Sungai Batu, Sungai Petani, Kedah, Malaysia.

Use of Sources : Primary sources and written sources

In scholarly writing, the objective of classifying sources is to determine the independence and reliability of sources Though the terms primary source and secondary source originated in historiography as a way to trace the history of historical ideas, they have been applied to many other fields.

For example, these ideas may be used to trace the history of scientific theories, literary elements, and other information that is passed from one author to another.

Science In scientific literature, a primary source is the original publication of a scientist's new data, results, and theories.

Political History: In political history, primary sources are documents such as official reports, speeches, pamphlets, posters, or letters by participants, official election returns, and eyewitness accounts.

Intellectual History: In the history of ideas or intellectual history, the main primary sources are books, essays and letters written by intellectuals.

Cultural History: A study of cultural history could include fictional sources such as novels or plays.

Broader sense: In a broader sense primary sources also include physical objects like photographs, newsreels, coins, paintings or buildings created at the time. Historians may also take archaeological artifacts and oral reports and interviews into consideration.

Written sources:

Written sources may be divided into three main types.

1) Narrative sources or literary sources: They tell a story or message. They are not limited to fictional sources (which can be sources of information for contemporary attitudes), but include diaries, films, biographies, leading philosophical works, scientific works, and so on.

2) Diplomatic sources : They include charters and other legal documents which usually follow a set format.

3) Social documents : These are records created by organizations, such as registers of births, tax records, and so on.

In the study of historiography, when the study of history is itself subject to historical scrutiny, a secondary source becomes a primary source.

For a biography of a historian, that historian's publications would be primary sources. Documentary films can be considered a secondary source or primary source, depending on how much the filmmaker modifies the original sources.[

The Lafayette College Library, for example, provides the following synopsis of primary sources in several basic areas of study:


"The definition of a primary source varies depending upon the academic discipline and the context in which it is used.

In the humanities, a primary source could be defined as something that was created either during the time period being studied or afterward by individuals reflecting on their involvement in the events of that time.

In the social sciences, the definition of a primary source would be expanded to include numerical data that has been gathered to analyze relationships between people, events, and their environment.

In the natural sciences, a primary source could be defined as a report of original findings or ideas. These sources often appear in the form of research articles with sections on methods and results."

The Oral History

Oral history is the collection and study of historical information about individuals, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. These interviews are conducted with people who participated in or observed past events and whose memories and perceptions of these are to be preserved as an aural record for future generations. Oral history strives to obtain information from different perspectives, and most of these cannot be found in written sources. Oral history also refers to information gathered in this manner and to a written work (published or unpublished) based on such data, often preserved in archives and large libraries.

The term is sometimes used in a more general sense to refer to any information about past events that people who experienced them tell anybody else but professional historians usually consider this to be oral tradition. However, as the Columbia Encyclopedia[1] explains:


Primitive societies have long relied on oral tradition to preserve a record of the past in the absence of written histories. In Western society, the use of oral material goes back to the early Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides (even earlier if you want to count traditional societies in Asia and Africa), both of whom made extensive use of oral reports from witnesses. The modern concept of oral history was developed in the 1940s by Allan Nevins and his associates at Columbia University.


Oral history in modern times

Oral history has become an international movement in historical research. Oral historians in different countries have approached the collection, analysis, and dissemination of oral history in different ways. However, it should also be noted that there are many ways of creating oral histories and carrying out the study of oral history even within individual national contexts.

The discipline came into its own in the 1960s and early 70s when inexpensive tape recorders were available to document such rising social movements as civil rights, feminism, and anti–Vietnam War protest. Authors such as Studs Terkel, Alex Haley, and Oscar Lewis have employed oral history in their books, many of which are largely based on interviews. In another important example of the genre, a massive archive covering the oral history of American music has been compiled at the Yale School of Music. By the end of the 20th cent. oral history had become a respected discipline in many colleges and universities. At that time the Italian historian Alessandro Portelli and his associates began to study the role that memory itself, whether accurate or faulty, plays in the themes and structures of oral history. Their published work has since become standard material in the field, and many oral historians now include in their research the study of the subjective memory of the persons they interview


Oral history in Britain and Northern Ireland

Since the 1990s, oral history in Britain has grown from being a method in folklore studies (see for example the work of the School of Scottish Studies in the 1950s) to becoming a key component in community histories. Oral history continues to be an important means by which non-academics can actively participate in the compilation and study of history. However, practitioners across a wide range of academic disciplines have also developed the method into a way of recording, understanding, and archiving narrated memories. Influences have included women's history and labour history.

In Britain the Oral History Society has played a key role in facilitating and developing the use of oral history.

A more complete account of the history of oral history in Britain and Northern Ireland can be found at Making Oral History on the Institute of Historical Research's website.

In one of the largest memory projects anywhere, the BBC invited its audiences from 2003 to 2006 to send in recollections of the home front in the Second World War. The BBC made 47,000 of the recollections and 15,000 photographs available on its website

Modern oral history in the United States

Contemporary oral history involves recording or transcribing eyewitness accounts of historical events. Some anthropologists started collecting recordings (at first especially of Native American folklore) on phonograph cylinders in the late 19th century. In the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) sent out interviewers to collect accounts from various groups, including surviving witnesses of the American Civil War, slavery, and other major historical events. The Library of Congress also began recording traditional American music and folklore onto acetate discs. With the development of audio tape recordings after World War II, the task of oral historians became easier.

In 1942, the New Yorker published a profile of Joe Gould, who claimed to be collecting “An Oral History of Our Time”. Although Gould never produced this work, the magazine story about him popularized the term oral history.

In 1946, David Boder, a professor of psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, traveled to Europe to record long interviews with "displaced persons"—most of them Holocaust survivors. Using the first device capable of capturing hours of audio—the wire recorder—Boder came back with the first recorded Holocaust testimonials and in all likelihood the first recorded oral histories of significant length.[8]

In 1948, Alan Nevins, a Columbia University historian, established the Columbia Oral History Research Office, with a mission of recording, transcribing, and preserving oral history interviews. In 1967, American oral historians founded the Oral History Association, and British oral historians founded the Oral History Society in 1969. There are now numerous national organizations and an International Oral History Association, which hold workshops and conferences and publish newsletters and journals devoted to oral history theory and practices.

Historians, folklorists, anthropologists, sociologists, journalists, linguists, and many others employ some form of interviewing in their research. Although multi-disciplinary, oral historians have promoted common ethics and standards of practice, most importantly the attaining of the “informed consent” of those being interviewed. Usually this is achieved through a deed of gift, which also establishes copyright ownership that is critical for publication and archival preservation.

Oral historians generally prefer to ask open-ended questions and avoid leading questions that encourage people to say what they think the interviewer wants them to say. Some interviews are “life reviews”, conducted with people at the end of their careers. Other interviews focus on a specific period or a specific event in people's lives, such as in the case of war veterans or survivors of a hurricane.

The first oral history archives focused on interviews with prominent politicians, diplomats, military officers, and business leaders. By the 1960s and '70s, interviewing began to be employed more often when historians investigated history from below. Whatever the field or focus of a project, oral historians attempt to record the memories of many different people when researching a given event. Interviewing a single person provides a single perspective. Individuals may misremember events or distort their account for personal reasons. By interviewing widely, oral historians seek points of agreement among many different sources, and also record the complexity of the issues. The nature of memory – both individual and community – is as much a part of the practice of oral history as are the stories collected.

Legal interpretation

In 1997 the Supreme Court of Canada, in the Delgamuukw v. British Columbia trial, ruled that oral histories were just as important as written testimony. Of oral histories, it said "that they are tangential to the ultimate purpose of the fact-finding process at trial – the determination of the historical truth."

Wikipedia

The Long March: China's founding myth Oct 21, 2011

The Long March: China's founding myth

Anthony Paul, For The Straits Times, Oct 21, 2011

SEVENTY-FIVE years ago today, China's Red Army, the predecessor of the People's Liberation Army, ended its Long March, a storied, 24-month retreat from the Nationalist Army's often, near-successful attempts under Chiang Kai-shek to crush the communist revolution. On Oct 22, 1936, the Red Army's three main units - the First Front Army, Second Front and Fourth Front - came together at Huining in Shaanxi province.

There was some early debate about when the Long March ended. The First Front Army, Mao Zedong's central force, was able to stop marching and fighting a year earlier in Wuxi, about 120km away. But Mao settled the matter: Huining was, he declared, 'Peace Town'. It was the place where 'the Red Army's union heralds peace for China'.

As it happened, real peace was a long time coming. First, it took until 1945 before a Japanese invader could be expelled. In Beijing, in October 1949, Mao announced the formation of the People's Republic. Two months later, Chiang, who was then in Chongqing, fled to Taiwan to rejoin his remnant forces. Apart from sporadic aerial and naval encounters and skirmishes between special forces, the last time that communist and nationalist units fought was in 1950. The civil war has never officially ended, though tourists from both the mainland and Taiwan are now a common sight all over China.

The fledgling People's Republic, anxious to build a new, party-centred nationalism for China, soon set about glorifying the Long March. They had a lot of propaganda material to use and went about making the most of it. At the core of the effort was a famous book of the late 1930s - Red Star Over China by Edgar Snow (Random House, 1938).

Snow was just 30 when he produced this classic. Born in Kansas in the United States, he had spent seven years in China, five of them as a correspondent for a then prestigious US magazine, the Saturday Evening Post. He and his wife lived for much of the time in Beijing - near Yenching University, then a leading Christian missionary college that was eventually closed by the communists and merged with Peking University.

The Snows were not communists but they spent time with student activists and were aware of the Chinese Communist Party's policies and motivations. But like most of the world, including China itself at that time, they had little knowledge of Mao, the Red Army or Mao's determination to mobilise the rural masses.

Helped by contacts with a warlord's army in Xi'an, Snow was able to cross communist lines and meet Mao, at a time when the party's reclusive chairman had decided to put himself on record.

Snow's reports created something of a sensation. In Britain, the book sold more than 100,000 copies in the first few weeks of its launch. Many young Chinese radicals, including Jiang Qing, a Shanghai actress who would become Mao's wife, joined the communists in Shaanxi after reading it.

Said Harvard University professor John Fairbank in an introduction to one of the many later editions of the book: 'The remarkable thing about Red Star Over China was that it not only gave the first connected history of Mao and his colleagues and where they had come from, but it also gave a prospect of the future of this little-known movement which was to prove disastrously prophetic.' (Prof Fairbank wrote this in 1968, when US-China relations were at a very low ebb.)

Mao remained grateful to Snow for the portrait shown in the book. Was it altogether accurate? In a word, no.

One example among many available: Snow described the Red Army's seizure of a chain bridge over the Dadu River in western Sichuan province as 'the most critical single incident of the Long March'. In a chapter he titled The Heroes Of Dadu, he breathlessly recounts the reaction of the Sichuanese defenders of the bridge as just 22 Red soldiers raced across it to press an attack against a regiment: 'Were (the Reds) human beings or madmen or gods''

Unfortunately for him, we now have paramount leader Deng Xiaoping's own frank footnote to the history of the operation. During a visit to China in the 1980s, former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski told Deng that he went to the Dadu bridge and had been impressed by 'the great feat of arms'. Deng smiled and said: 'Well, that's the way it's presented in our propaganda. We needed that to express the fighting spirit of our forces. In fact, it was a very easy military operation. There wasn't really much to it. (On) the other side were just some troops of a warlord who were armed with old muskets, and it really wasn't that much of a feat, but we felt we had to dramatise it.'

Over the years since, countless documentaries, plays and movie scripts have turned the action into a centrepiece of modern Chinese history. Across The Dadu River is a popular song from the Chinese musical, The East Is Red.

Mao's gratitude is on the record. A friend of his is reported to have heard him say that Snow's book 'had a merit no less than that of the Great Yu, the mythical emperor who was supposed to have brought China's floods under control and saved the people'.

That Snow saved the people may be debatable. That the founding myth of the Long March helped to create a 'New China' would be easier to argue.

This curious retreat into victory ended just 75 years - only three generations - ago today. Pondering the latest growth statistics, we sometimes forget just how quickly a changed China has reversed its fortunes.

anthonypaul@asiahand.com

ST Forum - Don't make short work of Long March Published on Oct 27, 2011

MR ANTHONY Paul's article ('The Long March: China's founding myth'; last Saturday) tried to make short work of the Long March.

In describing the Luding Bridge crossing over the Dadu River, he made it seem as if 22 Red Army men were to face off against an enemy regiment. This is wrong.

Several days before, about 160km downstream of the famous Bridge of Iron Chains, a full division of the Red Army - the vanguard - had crossed the Dadu River using a captured enemy's boat to ferry the troops.

The 22 men braved the crossing as, otherwise, the rest of the army would face defeat by the pursuing enemy forces.

Seventeen brave young men perished in the assault.

The vanguard caught up with and joined its comrades after the crossing - and the rest is history.

The river crossing was significant because the Luding Bridge was a famous, irreplaceable landmark and a main link with Tibet.

So, take a respectful stance and let the 'Chairman' - Mao Zedong - have his say: 'The Long March is a manifesto. It has proclaimed to the world that the Red Army is an army of heroes... Has history ever known a long march equal to ours? No, never.'

It is bridge over waters now. March on?

Chen Sen Lenn

Ship from failed Mongol invasion found off Japan

BBC - 28 Oct 2011

Ship from failed Mongol invasion found off Japan Kublai Khan, the Mongol ruler, who subdued China but failed in two attempts to conquer Japan

The wreck of a ship thought to have taken part in a failed Mongol invasion of Japan has been found off the Japanese coast.

A team of researchers uncovered a 12-metre (36ft) section of keel buried in deep sand off Nagasaki prefecture.

They said it was the first time such a large piece of hull had been recovered from the Mongol invasion fleets.

The 13th Century attacks on Japan were a rare setback for the Mongols at the height of their powers.

Experts expressed surprise that the wreck was so well preserved after so many centuries on the seabed.

The researchers from the Okinawa-based University of the Ryukyus used ultrasonic equipment to detect the remains of the ship.

The wood on the hull was painted whitish grey and held together by nails. Bricks, weapons and other instruments were found on board.

The discovery is expected to shed light on the shipbuilding skills of the time and give clues about the nature of the Mongol defeat.

'Divine wind'

The Japanese have always attributed their victory to storms that wrecked the Mongol fleets during both attempted invasions in 1274 and 1281.


They concluded that Japan was protected from invasion by a divine wind, or Kamikaze, which was invoked in the Second World War to inspire pilots to launch suicide attacks on allied ships.

As Central Asian nomads, the Mongols had little experience of the sea and used subjugated Chinese and Koreans to build their fleets.

The structure of the ship is said to resemble Chinese ships of the era.

The Mongols that did manage to land are reputed to have had some success against the Japanese, who struggled to match their skilled use of mounted archers.

But on both occasions, the Mongols and the Chinese and Korean troops under their command, headed back out to sea to try to ride out approaching typhoons - and that proved to be their downfall.

Otto Von Habsburg put to rest

Habsburg funeral sparks nostalgia and admirationBy Bethany Bell

BBC News, Pannonhalma, Hungary

Otto von Habsburg returned to Austria in death to claim something of his dual heritage Continue reading the main story
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A silver urn stood by the altar in the Benedictine Abbey of Pannonhalma in Hungary.

It was surrounded by a wreath of flowers and leaves in red, white and green - the colours of the Hungarian flag.

It contained the heart of Otto von Habsburg, Archduke of Austria, Crown Prince of Austro-Hungary, Royal Prince of Hungary and Bohemia, of Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia, Lodomeria and Illyria - to give him just a few of his pre-World War I titles.

The Habsburg family once ruled over a mighty empire, which dominated central Europe for hundreds of years. But Otto, who was endowed with brains and charm, was born just a few years before the monarchy collapsed at the end of WWI.

He and his family were expelled and Otto spent much of his life in exile. But he returned in death to claim something of his dual heritage.

On Saturday, his body was buried with his ancestors in the imperial crypt in the Austrian capital Vienna.

That was a favour that was not granted to his own father, Karl, the last Emperor, who abdicated in 1919. When he died four years later, it was out of the question for the newly formed Republic of Austria to allow his body to be returned to Vienna. Karl was buried in exile in Madeira - where his tomb remains to this day.

Otto himself was only allowed back into Austria in the 1960s after a protracted and bitter legal battle.

But the pomp and ceremony at his funeral this week suggest that many Austrians have managed to overcome their reservations about their former crown prince.

Continue reading the main story
“
Start Quote
[Otto von Habsburg] wanted to be buried in a country which still loves him”
End Quote
Father Albin

While few want to see the return of the monarchy, there is nonetheless nostalgia for the days of Austria's bygone greatness, as well as admiration for Otto von Habsburg's efforts to reunify Europe during and after the Cold War.

On Saturday, the Austro-Hungarian Empire seemed to come back to life as moustachioed men in richly brocaded Habsburg-era uniforms marched behind his coffin in solemn procession through Vienna.

At the requiem mass in St Stephen's Cathedral, the Kaiser Hymne, the old imperial anthem by Joseph Haydn, was played.

The current President of Austria, Heinz Fischer, pointedly did not sing along.

Other ancient traditions were observed.

'Still loved'
Mr Habsburg's sons, Karl and Georg, carried the urn down to the crypt
The Habsburgs often have their hearts buried separately from their embalmed bodies. Many of them are kept in copper urns in Vienna's Augustiner Church, a few streets away from the imperial crypt in the Cappuchin Church.

But Otto chose to have his heart buried in Hungary, in the Benedictine abbey where he was sent to learn Hungarian as a boy, when he was still Crown Prince.

Later, monks from the abbey followed him into exile to teach him Hungarian literature.

He returned here in the late 1980s as the first cracks appeared in the Iron Curtain.

Working with the pan-European movement, he had long campaigned against communism and worked for the re-unification of Europe.

At the service in Hungary, which was attended by Protestant and Catholic bishops and a rabbi, the monks promised to look after his heart and pray for his soul.

His two sons, Karl and Georg, carried the urn down to the crypt to be buried under a marble slab.

HEART BURIAL
Burying the heart separately to the body was a custom used by a number of medieval European aristocrats:

Richard I (Richard the Lionheart): The English king's heart was buried at Rouen in Normandy after he died in 1199. His body was buried in Anjou

Robert the Bruce: The king of the Scots, who died in 1329, is buried in Dunfermline Abbey but his heart is buried in Melrose Abbey

The House of Habsburg has practised heart burial for centuries
But the practice was not limited to monarchs.

English writer Thomas Hardy's body is interred in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey but his heart is buried in the grave of his first wife Emma in Dorchester.

And one of the monks, Father Albin, had another reason for why Otto von Habsburg may have chosen Pannonhalma as a final resting place for his heart.

"Hungary never expelled him personally, and he wanted to be buried in a country which still loves him," he said.

Nancy Wake

Australia WWII heroine Nancy 'White Mouse' Wake dies At one point, Nancy Wake was top of the Gestapo's most wanted list Continue reading the main story
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One of the most highly decorated Allied secret agents of World War II, Nancy Wake, has died in London aged 98.

Born in New Zealand but raised in Australia, she is credited with helping hundreds of Allied personnel escape from occupied France.

The German Gestapo named her the "White Mouse" because she was so elusive.

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said Mrs Wake was "a truly remarkable individual whose selfless valour and tenacity will never be forgotten".

"Nancy Wake was a woman of exceptional courage and resourcefulness whose daring exploits saved the lives of hundreds of Allied personnel and helped bring the Nazi occupation of France to an end," Ms Gillard said in a statement.

Saboteur and spy

Working as a journalist in Europe, she interviewed Adolf Hitler in Vienna in 1933 and then vowed to fight against his persecution of Jews.

Continue reading the main story
“
Start Quote
I killed a lot of Germans, and I am only sorry I didn't kill more”
-
Nancy Wake

After the fall of France in 1940, Mrs Wake became a French Resistance courier and later a saboteur and spy - setting up escape routes and sabotaging German installations, saving hundreds of Allied lives.

She worked for British Special Operations and was parachuted into France in April 1944 before D-Day to deliver weapons to French Resistance fighters.

At one point, she was top of the Gestapo's most wanted list.

"Freedom is the only thing worth living for. While I was doing that work, I used to think it didn't matter if I died, because without freedom there was no point in living," Wake once said of her wartime exploits.

It was only after the liberation of France that she learned her husband, French businessman Henri Fiocca, had been tortured and killed by the Gestapo for refusing to give her up.

"I have only one thing to say: I killed a lot of Germans, and I am only sorry I didn't kill more," she once said.

She was Australia's most decorated servicewoman, and one of the most decorated Allied servicewomen of World War II.

France awarded her its highest honour, the Legion D'Honneur; she also received Britain's George Medal, and the US Medal of Freedom. In 2004, she was made Companion of the Order of Australia.

She returned to Australia in 1949, where she failed several times to win a seat in parliament.

In 1957 she went back to England, where she married RAF fighter pilot John Forward.

Wake died in London. She had been a resident at a nursing home for retired forces personnel since 2003.

She is expected to be cremated and her ashes spread in Montlucon in central France, the scene of much of her heroism.

Her story inspired Sebastian Faulks' 1999 novel Charlotte Gray and a 2001 film by the same title, with the lead role played by Australian actress Cate Blanchett.