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Lapham's Quarterly: States of War
Our first issue, and forever topical, in which we catalog 4,000 years of armed conflict.
Among the contributors: Thucydides, Sun Tzu, George Orwell, Homer, Joseph Goebbels, Wilfred Owen, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Edward Gibbon, Siegfried Sassoon, George W. Bush, Julia Ward Howe, W.H. Auden, George Patton.
Among the contributors: Thucydides, Sun Tzu, George Orwell, Homer, Joseph Goebbels, Wilfred Owen, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Edward Gibbon, Siegfried Sassoon, George W. Bush, Julia Ward Howe, W.H. Auden, George Patton.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
2 people are currently reading
29 people want to read
About the author
Lewis H. Lapham
181 books134 followersLewis Henry Lapham was the editor of Harper's Magazine from 1976 until 1981, and again from 1983 until 2006. He is the founder and current editor of Lapham's Quarterly, featuring a wide range of famous authors devoted to a single topic in each issue. Lapham has also written numerous books on politics and current affairs.
Lapham's Quarterly
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/
Lapham's Quarterly
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 1, 2013
This is not going to be a speed-read issue, though it may well be engrossing. Page 1 is the first flimsy sheet after the cover and usually contains a single quote. The other side, Page 2, contains all the publisher data before the Contents start on Page 3. I spent more than a half-hour researching the Page 1 quote's author. Lapham's Quarterly has a way of doing that, piquing one's interest to explore further.
The quote: "Perpetual peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful dream, and war is an integral part of God's ordering of the universe... Without war, the world would become swamped in materialism." -- General Helmuth von Moltke
A fuller variation of the quote is "Perpetual peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful dream. War is an element in the order of the world ordained by God. In it the noblest virtues of mankind are developed; courage - the abnegation of self; faithfulness to duty, the spirit of sacrifice: the soldier gives his life. Without war the world would stagnate, lose itself in materialism." (Ref.)
Aside from the altruistic self-sacrifice expressed, what really jumped at me was the world 'swamped or lost in materialism'. Horrors, that we should create and possess things. Who is this Moltke? It happens this quote is from Moltke the Elder and not Moltke the Younger. The Elder was quite the Prussian war strategist in the 19th century. The Wiki link alone (first previous) will give you pause. That is just Page 1!
This Winter:2008 issue is the very first issue of Lapham's Quarterly. 'Volume 1, Number 1'. The format appears very similar to subsequent issues and therefore well-thought in advance. (I didn't start reading Lapham's until Fall 2011: The Future, due to a well-read friend's suggestion.) Lenin, bin Laden, St. Augustine, Goebbels, Queen Elizabeth I, Bush, Krishna. Only the names change. There are no innocents.
221 pages of reading and art reproduction to the Sources section at the end. Check.
Table of Contents including this issue's Voices in Time sections of Calls to Arms, Rules of Engagement, Field Reports, and Postmortems. (4 sections instead of the usual 3.) Check.
Those contents list authors and the year and place of their essay/extract. To name a few just from the first section: Homer, General George Patton, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., V.I. Lenin, Saint Augustine, Osama Bin Laden, Joseph Goebbels, Krishna, Queen Elizabeth I, George W. Bush, and William Shakespeare. Wow. What's not to like?
The 'Among the Contributors' section (paragraph summaries of some authors) (p. 8) include Winston Churchill, Herodotus (the Father of History and a frequent Quarterly contributor), and Private First Class Jessica Lynch, 'injured in an ambush during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003'.
The World Map, always in the Introductory section and depicting theme elements on a global scale, is NOT present in the first issue. (I lied. I found it at the end on pp. 220-221. Apparently it has since been expanded in content and moved to the front.)
Editor/publisher Lewis H. Lapham's Preamble is titled The Gulf of Time. The former editor of Harper's Magazine is, as always, eloquent, insightful, thoughtful, and thought-provoking. In this first LQ issue and Preamble he lays the foundation for reflecting on history and Voices in Time. A few fragments:
"“He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth.”
—Goethe
During my years as editor of Harper’s Magazine, I could rely on the post office to mark the degree to which I was living in what Goethe surely would have regarded as straitened circumstances." ...
"The afternoon mail added to the weight of evidence making the case for what I didn’t know and wasn’t likely ever to know, and, over a period of years, I came up with a risk-assessment model wired to the sound of the human voice. If, on first looking through a dispatch from the Yale University library or the White House Situation Room, I couldn’t hear the voice of its author, I let it go the way of the Carolina Parakeet." ...
"On the assumption that the blessed states of amnesia cannot support either the hope of individual liberty or the practice of democratic self-government, Lapham’s Quarterly grounds its editorial premise on the risk-assessment model that allowed me to edit Harper’s Magazine. If the words on the page translate into the sound of a human voice, I don’t much care whether the author sets up the mise-en-scène in 1740s Paris or Harlem in the 1920s."
"We have nothing else with which to build the future except the lumber of the past—history exploited as natural resource and applied technology, telling us that the story painted on the old walls and printed in the old books is also our own."
"An acquaintance with history doesn’t pay the rent or predict the outcome of next year’s election, but, as the season or occasion requires, it makes possible the revolt against what G. K. Chesterton once called, “the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about”;"
"To bring at least some of the voices of the past up to the microphone of the present, Lapham’s Quarterly chooses a topic prominent in the news and, within the perimeter of that topic, assembles a set of relevant texts—literary narrative and philosophical commentary, diaries, speeches, letters, and proclamations, as well as essays and reviews by contemporary historians."
"To accept as a consequence the price being paid to the piper in Iraq is to acknowledge the truth of the old Arab proverb that says we have less reason to fear what might happen tomorrow than to beware of what happened yesterday. I know of no better reason to read history. Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past."
LQ is generous with free access to much of its content. The full Preamble and many items from the rest of the issue can be read HERE.
The first section, Calls to Arms, is indeed that. 'Follow me into battle, I'm right behind you all the way!' Gen. George Patton is George C. Scott is George Patton. If you have ever seen the movie Patton, the opening soliloquy is Patton's gritty fire and brimstone speech to his troops prior to D-Day in WWII. (Available free.) Throughout history the Calls seem similar. 'It is right to fight. We must do this.'
The rest of the section follows suit. Kuwait 2003, Iraq 1917, Clermont 1095, and Troy c. 1250 BC. Popes, saints, queens, tsars, presidents. Bin Laden, Goebbels, Tecumseh, Krishna, even 19th-century lecturer John Ruskin.
‘Onward Christian Soldiers, marching as to war.’ (Hymn I remember from childhood.)
Sidebar quotes:
“It takes fifteen thousand casualties to train a major-general.” -Ferdinand Foch. (p. 35.)
“There never was a good war or a bad peace.” -Benjamin Franklin, 1773. (p. 51.)
Section 2, Rules of Engagement, awaits.
Oh.
This IS nasty business.
If you thought INTOXICATION (Winter 2013 issue) was an unpleasant topic “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet”.
Winter 2008: States Of War is Lewis Lapham’s first issue and he pulls no punches. No tiptoeing into the public arena for this literary journal. Wasn’t I lulled and lullabyed in my preliminary review. His Preamble politely set the stage and the Calls to Arms section is all ‘Rah Rah’ and ‘The Glories of Battle’. Onward soldiers indeed.
As noted previously Patton is a hoot, but there is a certain sameness in Calls to Arms. All honor and glory. No blood has been spilled… yet.
That changes abruptly with section 2, Rules of Engagement. Rules? We don’t need no stinkin’ rules.
2005, Haditha Iraq. Families slaughtered by U.S. Marines in the fog of war.
1600, German mercenaries. Pillage, loot, burn.
1994, Rwanda. Pure (?) slaughter.
WWII, the American Civil (?) War, Sun Tzu and the Art of War.
Field Reports, section 3, steps it up yet another notch.
Vietnam, of course. (Someone told me there is a museum in the U.S. with 58,000 sets of dog tags representing the 58,000 Americans killed in that war. Don’t get me started.)
The good old Light Brigade. Nice poem, not reprinted in LQ, but a rather factual account that it wasn’t pretty.
Yet another sacking of Rome, by Spaniards in the 16th century. Not pretty.
Relentless slaughter. Pilgrims in America, Jerusalem 70 A.D., Spaniards in the New World in 1542.
It’s all well written, and not pornographically gory, but it is gory. There seems to be no beginning or end to it. Then… now… always?
My Lai, gas chambers, Nagasaki.
The final section is Postmortems. Merriam-Webster Online defines it:
1. : done, occurring, or collected after death
2 : following the event
After death indeed.
The 1932 letters between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud are outstanding. Somehow they are not even listed in the online archive content. Google ‘Einstein Freud Why War letters’ for various references.
Voltaire, Twain, Tolstoy, Vonnegut, Eisenhower, Lincoln. They all speak well.
The small author info box on the final extract, a poem, put me onto yet another side research tangent about Blenheim and the Duke of Marlborough. I think any single issue of Lapham’s Quarterly could be used for a college history course. ”Read the 2 page poem on page 190-191 and give me a 2,500 word report on John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marborough. Include your thoughts on his effectiveness as a military strategist and his contributions or detractions to England as a world power.”
L.Q. would be great for book study groups too.
The final four longer essays, separately titled Further Remarks, were excellent. (All but one in my opinion.)
One was The Persian Way of War, in Herodotus’ time (500-400 B.C.) That moved me into side research on Behistun and Darius.
Another spoke about Germany’s Wilhelm II and the pathetic circumstances of WWI.
I took exception with Storm Warning. Wayyyy to Politically (environmentally, etc.) Correct, with a stretched comparison between the Fall of Rome and modern-day America.
Despite the very distasteful subject matter (all the more reason to read and inquire?) I very highly recommend this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. If we turn our back on the past are we doing the same for our future?
I attended a WWII plaque commemoration in Etten-Leur, Belgium last May and a Belgian presenter said, in what I first thought might be broken English, “We study history so we can know what we have done”. On second thought I think he was totally accurate. We seem to wade into and through war never really sure of what we are doing. We must study the past to know what we’ve done.
Don’t ignore the unpleasant subjects.
The quote: "Perpetual peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful dream, and war is an integral part of God's ordering of the universe... Without war, the world would become swamped in materialism." -- General Helmuth von Moltke
A fuller variation of the quote is "Perpetual peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful dream. War is an element in the order of the world ordained by God. In it the noblest virtues of mankind are developed; courage - the abnegation of self; faithfulness to duty, the spirit of sacrifice: the soldier gives his life. Without war the world would stagnate, lose itself in materialism." (Ref.)
Aside from the altruistic self-sacrifice expressed, what really jumped at me was the world 'swamped or lost in materialism'. Horrors, that we should create and possess things. Who is this Moltke? It happens this quote is from Moltke the Elder and not Moltke the Younger. The Elder was quite the Prussian war strategist in the 19th century. The Wiki link alone (first previous) will give you pause. That is just Page 1!
This Winter:2008 issue is the very first issue of Lapham's Quarterly. 'Volume 1, Number 1'. The format appears very similar to subsequent issues and therefore well-thought in advance. (I didn't start reading Lapham's until Fall 2011: The Future, due to a well-read friend's suggestion.) Lenin, bin Laden, St. Augustine, Goebbels, Queen Elizabeth I, Bush, Krishna. Only the names change. There are no innocents.
221 pages of reading and art reproduction to the Sources section at the end. Check.
Table of Contents including this issue's Voices in Time sections of Calls to Arms, Rules of Engagement, Field Reports, and Postmortems. (4 sections instead of the usual 3.) Check.
Those contents list authors and the year and place of their essay/extract. To name a few just from the first section: Homer, General George Patton, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., V.I. Lenin, Saint Augustine, Osama Bin Laden, Joseph Goebbels, Krishna, Queen Elizabeth I, George W. Bush, and William Shakespeare. Wow. What's not to like?
The 'Among the Contributors' section (paragraph summaries of some authors) (p. 8) include Winston Churchill, Herodotus (the Father of History and a frequent Quarterly contributor), and Private First Class Jessica Lynch, 'injured in an ambush during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003'.
The World Map, always in the Introductory section and depicting theme elements on a global scale, is NOT present in the first issue. (I lied. I found it at the end on pp. 220-221. Apparently it has since been expanded in content and moved to the front.)
Editor/publisher Lewis H. Lapham's Preamble is titled The Gulf of Time. The former editor of Harper's Magazine is, as always, eloquent, insightful, thoughtful, and thought-provoking. In this first LQ issue and Preamble he lays the foundation for reflecting on history and Voices in Time. A few fragments:
"“He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth.”
—Goethe
During my years as editor of Harper’s Magazine, I could rely on the post office to mark the degree to which I was living in what Goethe surely would have regarded as straitened circumstances." ...
"The afternoon mail added to the weight of evidence making the case for what I didn’t know and wasn’t likely ever to know, and, over a period of years, I came up with a risk-assessment model wired to the sound of the human voice. If, on first looking through a dispatch from the Yale University library or the White House Situation Room, I couldn’t hear the voice of its author, I let it go the way of the Carolina Parakeet." ...
"On the assumption that the blessed states of amnesia cannot support either the hope of individual liberty or the practice of democratic self-government, Lapham’s Quarterly grounds its editorial premise on the risk-assessment model that allowed me to edit Harper’s Magazine. If the words on the page translate into the sound of a human voice, I don’t much care whether the author sets up the mise-en-scène in 1740s Paris or Harlem in the 1920s."
"We have nothing else with which to build the future except the lumber of the past—history exploited as natural resource and applied technology, telling us that the story painted on the old walls and printed in the old books is also our own."
"An acquaintance with history doesn’t pay the rent or predict the outcome of next year’s election, but, as the season or occasion requires, it makes possible the revolt against what G. K. Chesterton once called, “the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about”;"
"To bring at least some of the voices of the past up to the microphone of the present, Lapham’s Quarterly chooses a topic prominent in the news and, within the perimeter of that topic, assembles a set of relevant texts—literary narrative and philosophical commentary, diaries, speeches, letters, and proclamations, as well as essays and reviews by contemporary historians."
"To accept as a consequence the price being paid to the piper in Iraq is to acknowledge the truth of the old Arab proverb that says we have less reason to fear what might happen tomorrow than to beware of what happened yesterday. I know of no better reason to read history. Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past."
LQ is generous with free access to much of its content. The full Preamble and many items from the rest of the issue can be read HERE.
The first section, Calls to Arms, is indeed that. 'Follow me into battle, I'm right behind you all the way!' Gen. George Patton is George C. Scott is George Patton. If you have ever seen the movie Patton, the opening soliloquy is Patton's gritty fire and brimstone speech to his troops prior to D-Day in WWII. (Available free.) Throughout history the Calls seem similar. 'It is right to fight. We must do this.'
The rest of the section follows suit. Kuwait 2003, Iraq 1917, Clermont 1095, and Troy c. 1250 BC. Popes, saints, queens, tsars, presidents. Bin Laden, Goebbels, Tecumseh, Krishna, even 19th-century lecturer John Ruskin.
‘Onward Christian Soldiers, marching as to war.’ (Hymn I remember from childhood.)
Sidebar quotes:
“It takes fifteen thousand casualties to train a major-general.” -Ferdinand Foch. (p. 35.)
“There never was a good war or a bad peace.” -Benjamin Franklin, 1773. (p. 51.)
Section 2, Rules of Engagement, awaits.
Oh.
This IS nasty business.
If you thought INTOXICATION (Winter 2013 issue) was an unpleasant topic “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet”.
Winter 2008: States Of War is Lewis Lapham’s first issue and he pulls no punches. No tiptoeing into the public arena for this literary journal. Wasn’t I lulled and lullabyed in my preliminary review. His Preamble politely set the stage and the Calls to Arms section is all ‘Rah Rah’ and ‘The Glories of Battle’. Onward soldiers indeed.
As noted previously Patton is a hoot, but there is a certain sameness in Calls to Arms. All honor and glory. No blood has been spilled… yet.
That changes abruptly with section 2, Rules of Engagement. Rules? We don’t need no stinkin’ rules.
2005, Haditha Iraq. Families slaughtered by U.S. Marines in the fog of war.
1600, German mercenaries. Pillage, loot, burn.
1994, Rwanda. Pure (?) slaughter.
WWII, the American Civil (?) War, Sun Tzu and the Art of War.
Field Reports, section 3, steps it up yet another notch.
Vietnam, of course. (Someone told me there is a museum in the U.S. with 58,000 sets of dog tags representing the 58,000 Americans killed in that war. Don’t get me started.)
The good old Light Brigade. Nice poem, not reprinted in LQ, but a rather factual account that it wasn’t pretty.
Yet another sacking of Rome, by Spaniards in the 16th century. Not pretty.
Relentless slaughter. Pilgrims in America, Jerusalem 70 A.D., Spaniards in the New World in 1542.
It’s all well written, and not pornographically gory, but it is gory. There seems to be no beginning or end to it. Then… now… always?
My Lai, gas chambers, Nagasaki.
The final section is Postmortems. Merriam-Webster Online defines it:
1. : done, occurring, or collected after death
2 : following the event
After death indeed.
The 1932 letters between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud are outstanding. Somehow they are not even listed in the online archive content. Google ‘Einstein Freud Why War letters’ for various references.
Voltaire, Twain, Tolstoy, Vonnegut, Eisenhower, Lincoln. They all speak well.
The small author info box on the final extract, a poem, put me onto yet another side research tangent about Blenheim and the Duke of Marlborough. I think any single issue of Lapham’s Quarterly could be used for a college history course. ”Read the 2 page poem on page 190-191 and give me a 2,500 word report on John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marborough. Include your thoughts on his effectiveness as a military strategist and his contributions or detractions to England as a world power.”
L.Q. would be great for book study groups too.
The final four longer essays, separately titled Further Remarks, were excellent. (All but one in my opinion.)
One was The Persian Way of War, in Herodotus’ time (500-400 B.C.) That moved me into side research on Behistun and Darius.
Another spoke about Germany’s Wilhelm II and the pathetic circumstances of WWI.
I took exception with Storm Warning. Wayyyy to Politically (environmentally, etc.) Correct, with a stretched comparison between the Fall of Rome and modern-day America.
Despite the very distasteful subject matter (all the more reason to read and inquire?) I very highly recommend this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. If we turn our back on the past are we doing the same for our future?
I attended a WWII plaque commemoration in Etten-Leur, Belgium last May and a Belgian presenter said, in what I first thought might be broken English, “We study history so we can know what we have done”. On second thought I think he was totally accurate. We seem to wade into and through war never really sure of what we are doing. We must study the past to know what we’ve done.
Don’t ignore the unpleasant subjects.
July 26, 2020
Partway through reading the first issue of Lapham's Quarterly, I looked it up to discover that the editor used to work for Harper's Magazine. That made perfect sense, because the magazine feels a lot like a long-form Harper's Index--readings on a topic, arranged in a way that each resonates with the ones around it, skipping back and forth in ways that aren't always logical, but make intuitive sense. So a meditation on the causes of war from the Crusades might lead right to a discussion of the reasons for war by a 20th century strategist. As a result, both vast differences and striking similarities in the experience of war emerge. The most powerful build was to the end of the second section, about the actual waging of war, where a fictional account of one victim of the Nazi gas chambers is followed by the clinical report of one of the men who dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The reader's view first narrows down to one small, intimate, agonizing death among millions, then widens dizzyingly out to impersonally witness another mass death from high above to close the section. A harrowing and thought-provoking read into the philosophy and practice of war.
August 4, 2017
Just happened to be reading The Histories by Herodotus at the same time. While not typical summer reading, it's been an education in how War has always been with us and continues on, shaping mankind's existence.
November 8, 2015
I am not at all into war. Just as with sports, nothing can get my eyes to glaze over faster than talking about, like, battles or armor or troops or movements or whatever else. I honestly can't even think of the lingo that would bore me -- that's how little I pay attention.
But I really enjoyed reading this -- a lot. It got me thinking about war in a different way, thinking about it in terms of a game -- which is not good, but which is, I think, the way many people think about it. Also, many pieces moved me quite a bit -- some absolutely destroyed me, like that Life and Fate snippet. While reading this, I started compulsively playing online games that centered around war. This issue did not turn me into a warmonger or anything, but it got me interested and curious, and I think that's what it was supposed to do.
But I really enjoyed reading this -- a lot. It got me thinking about war in a different way, thinking about it in terms of a game -- which is not good, but which is, I think, the way many people think about it. Also, many pieces moved me quite a bit -- some absolutely destroyed me, like that Life and Fate snippet. While reading this, I started compulsively playing online games that centered around war. This issue did not turn me into a warmonger or anything, but it got me interested and curious, and I think that's what it was supposed to do.
October 31, 2015
This one took a long time. Not as interested in the subject, I think. More nonfiction than some of the other issues as well, some of it quite dry. The essays at the end were super thought-provoking, especially the one comparing our world of now (or at least in 2008) with Rome in the 5th and 6th centuries (global climate change, mass population migration, and a lack of conviction/direction in society's elites). Loved the excerpt as well from Life and Fate, a 20th century novel I had never heard of which has been called a "Soviet War and Peace" .... definitely going on my "to-read" list.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews