Walking through the Old City....of New York

I have a real appreciation for the subjects of my dissertation. As a historian this can be a good or a bad thing. E. P. Thompson, one of the greats, said his task in writing about the "making of the English working class" was to "rescue them from the enormous condensation of posterity." I'm not so sure that is what I'm trying to do with the young Americans who worked for the Commission for Relief in Belgium during World War I, but they do have a story to tell in the sources they've left behind.

The men who left from New York City between 1914 and early 1917 were about my age and my education level. They had a basic knowledge of the French language. Mine is really basic, but I plan on working on it just as they did. I probably have a better knowledge of Belgium as a country than they did, but it's such a unique nation-state that I'm certainly no expert. They left for a term of at least 6 months. I'm going for 8. They weren't saints. They were men of their times with particular views about women, race, work, "the other," and things like that, but the left on an adventure that colored their futures. I see this trip as doing the same for me, even though it is difficult and pulls me out of my easy life in the US with friends, family, and the like.

I don't mean to be mawkish or "a Hamlet," even though I'm prone to that. I hope it's seen as a more contemplative mood. For example, I wanted around the Financial District of New York City yesterday. I went in to do some errands and visit Carly for lunch near her office. After lunch, instead of going back to Brooklyn, I stayed in the City and wandered around the "old" part of New York (if New York could have an old section). The Financial District is unlike the rest of New York. With the Customs House, Trinity Church, St. Paul's Chapel, Federal Hall, it's old. There are brass plaques all over noting historical events or places. A Citi Bank branch is located in the Second Class Passenger entrance of the old Cunard Cunard Steamship Company building near Battery Park. There is no grid system, for example. The streets are narrow and intersect at odd angles. They are named, not numbered. I got turned around trying to find a deli I need to find before Carly got out of work. I had to look at a map a few times to figure out how to get some where. It stuck me, I'm a stranger in my own City. In fact, I wasn't hearing much English. Many tourists linger in the area and the employees of the shops speak Spanish mostly or Russian. The Wall Street types are too busy to talk. It got me thinking about "big cities."

Brussels is a big city. It's the capital of Belgium. It's the "capital of Europe." (The EU is based there.) Roughly the size of Staten Island it has a little over 1 million people. It's a multi-lingual place because of Belgian necessity (Dutch and French (and German )are the official languages) and because of the EU. It has new buildings, but lots of history, too. Its roads are named, not numbered. they are narrow in places and broad in others. (At least according to the maps I've looked at.)

This got me thinking about my fears of going to live there for 8 months. Yes, it's a foreign city. It's different, but it's also a big city, like New York and like Rome. I can manage in NYC. I survived in Rome when I was there on vacation. Now, of course, Brussels is its own place. Has its own history and I expect to fall in love with it on its own terms, but in preparing to go it's useful to think about the connections between there and here, just as I try to show my students the connections between the then and now. Yes, difference is the keystone of history, but we study it to make connections with why we are the way we are today. So, maybe, there is more to connect me and calm me about this move and change by not making where I'm going into some sort of "other," but into a place that offers a connection to where I am right now -- New York City, or at least a specific part of New York City.