So I have another Beirut story to tell. It has to do with a question I often get: "what got you into history?" The answer I give lately is "I'm Armenian, I didn't get a choice." As a descendant of genocide survivors, history haunts me. I just made it into a career.
I can't remember *not* having historical awareness-- I suspect this is a diaspora thing and a genocide survivor thing, broadly stated. It was just always there. I knew that my people used to live somewhere that they were driven from. I knew we had our own language and food.
I knew there were places we had and that we lost, but I didn't quite know why.
And I remember the elders talking in vague terms about "the year of exile" or "the Great Crime," in particular.
But I remember the day that that all resolved into gut-churning clarity, early after we moved to Beirut.
I must've been in second grade. Even then, I loved being in libraries, and reading books too big for me.
The library at school was in a ground floor. It was dark, with high, small windows, bars over them, lots of concrete-- it was also one of the bomb shelters during the civil war. So it was easy to get lost in dimly lit stacks among old, dusty books.
And I remember being eye level with one of the lower shelves in the Armenian history section, and seeing a big, heavy book whose title I can't remember, but which included one of the words for "genocide."
It had what I recognize in hindsight as some of the famous photos from the Genocide of 1915, the ones shot by German Second Lieutenant Armin T. Wegner: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armin_Weg…
I didn't read much of it-- I just leafed through it. And I remember, even at that age, having this moment of gut-churning realization of what this meant. What this was. Why this mattered. How fucked up it was that the perpetrators were never held to account.
I was already interested in history-- World War II warbirds were an interest, for instance, since even before that. But that encounter with that book crystallized the stories I'd heard, showed me how I was a part of history, and grabbed me so hard, I couldn't help but care.
I'm not a historian of Armenia. That's not where my passion is, nor where my professional credentials now lie-- I am, ultimately, a historian of Japanese and US military history.
But it was that visceral moment of seeing how I was inseparable from history, how frighteningly close it was,, how it was there and weighed on everything whether I cared or not, that got me to care about interprpeting the past.
All I did was make it into a career.
And all of that happened in Beirut, when I was knee high to a grasshopper.
I hope, as I sit here decades later, I've done right by little second-grade Nyri.
Thanks for reading, friend.
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It thus became one of the early vessels of the modern Shogunate Navy. To learn more about the Shogunate Navy and other American influence on its development, take a listen to my episode of the @USNAMuseum Preble Hall podcast here: naval-history-lyceum.simplecast.com/episodes/the-s…
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Depending on which: it'd run the gamut from nerdy to insufferable.
Man, I was up late last night.
But yes, I stand by this. and because they're all lesbians, it'd overlap with sapphic Twitter.
Leigh's Twitter would be work and travel photography, thirst traps, with some memes interspersed.
Chloë's Twitter feed would have a lot of drone photography, for reasons the book may make obvious. Also I think she'd be a loyal follower of @CivilWarHumor, drawn in by that avatar that looks eerlly like her old division commander.
Just saw something that if true, suggests that the capital of Artsakh is increasingly surrounded and in-range of Azeri forces. If that's the case, I expect our people will fight to their last breath-- but I fear it will not stop there.
Those of you who follow me on here, in some measure, do care and I know that. But the powers that be, that could do something about this, don't care and won't do anything.
And if cease fires mean nothing, even if all of us on the ground fought to the last, what the hell is going to stop the Azeri and Turkish forces from destroying Armenia, after Artsakh falls?
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For the first time, a Friday Night History topic has to be in two parts. I know, right? A topic that's long enough that I feel like I want to split it up. Wild!