CLIOPATRIA: A Group Blog
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Sullivan's Fun with "Historical" Maps
I have long admired Andrew Sullivan’s writing. He was way ahead of his time in both supporting gay marriage and discerning the significance of the Bush administration’s embrace of torture. During the 2008 primaries, he often articulated Barack Obama’s case more effectively than did Obama. And he saw through the fraud that was Sarah Palin before virtually any other prominent political commentator.
Eating People
"In the America where things are made, the recession has been a depression. According to a new Northeastern University study, one in every six blue-collar industrial jobs have disappeared since 2007, matching the drop in overall employment in the Great Depression. Last year, about 1.3 million factory jobs vanished."
USA Today, March 2
"Indeed, last year's wealth wasteland has become a billionaire bonanza. Most of the richest people on the planet have seen their fortunes soar in the past year. This year the World's Billionaires have an average net worth of $3.5 billion, up $500 million in 12 months. The world has 1,011 10-figure titans, up from 793 a year ago but still shy of the record 1,125 in 2008. Of those billionaires on last year's list, only 12% saw their fortunes decline."
Forbes, March 10
A question: What possible futures do these two paragraphs suggest to historians?
Weak Endnotes
Richard Dorment, "Art and Traffic," NYRBlog, 12 March, reviews "Masterpieces of European Painting from Dulwich Picture Gallery," an exhibit at Manhattan's Frick Gallery.
James McConnachie reviews Alex Butterworth's The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents for London's Sunday Times, 14 March.
Wendell Steavenson reviews Oliver Bullough's Let Our Fame be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus for London's Sunday Times, 14 March.
Steven Hahn, "Race to the Plate," The Book, 12 March, and Wil Haygood for the Washington Post, 13 March, review Timothy M. Gay's Satch, Dizzy, and Rapid Robert: The Wild Saga of Interracial Baseball Before Jackie Robinson.
Finally, farewell to UC, Berkeley's professor emeritus of legal history, Thomas G. Barnes, and to Georgetown University's Russian historian, Richard T. Stites.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Friday's Notes
Timothy Garton Ash, "Bearing witness is a sacred trust," Guardian, 10 March, reflects on Artur Domoslawsk's revelations in Kapuscinski Non-Fiction.
Scott Saul, "A Body on the Gears: On Mario Savio," Nation, 11 March, Robert Cohen's Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s.
Sara Mosle, "Facing Up to Our Ignorance," Slate, 11 March, reviews Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System.
For Women's History Month, Tenured Radical recommends a few good women's history blogs by female historians. Cliopatria's History Blogroll lists more than two dozen Women's History Blogs by female historians.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
20th Century Notes
Florida's Matthew Gallman and UC, Irvine's Jon Weiner exchange comments about Weiner's "Big Tobacco and the Historians," The Nation, 25 February.
Lesley Chamberlain, "Powerless Lenin," TLS, 10 March, reviews Helen Rappaport's Conspirator: Lenin in exile.
Edmund Morris, "Why Is Obama Reading My Book?" Daily Beast, 9 March, considers what the 44th has to learn from the 26th.
Peter Kemp reviews Kenneth Slawenski's JD Salinger: A Life Raised High for London's Sunday Times, 28 February.
Peter Carlson reviews Francis Wheen's Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia for the Washington Post, 7 March.
Harold Seymour (1910-1992) earned a doctorate in history from Cornell and taught at South Carolina's Presbyterian College and Cleveland's Fenn College. Later, he was in administration at SUNY, Buffalo. But Seymour earned his professional reputation with the publication of a prize-winning three volume history of baseball (1960-1990) and, before the third volume was published, Alzheimer's Disease severely limited his intellectual capacity. For 30 years, he'd refused to acknowledge his wife's co-authorship of his books and now the Society for American Baseball Research seeks to correct the record. You have to wonder how many other wives and lovers of male historians of his generation ought to have been acknowledged as co-author.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Mid-Week Notes
Rob MacDougall, "Playful Historical Thinking," Old is the New New, 8 March, MacDougall, "Survival of the Funnest," Old is the New New, 9 March, and MacDougall, "A Demonstration," Old is the New New, 10 March, summon us to come out and play.
Paul Lay previews "Paul Sandby RA: Picturing Britain, A Bicentenary Exhibition," an exhibit in the Sackler Wing of London's Royal Academy of Arts, for History Today, 9 March. See also: Mary Beard, 10 March.
Adam Kirsch, "Orthodox Liberal," Tablet, 9 March, reviews Abigail Green's Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero.
Joanna Bourke reviews Bernhard Schlink's Guilt about the Past for the London Times, 27 February.
Finally, farewell to a distinguished classicist, Sir Kenneth Dover.
Here, Bob Dylan casts a skeptical eye at Sir Kenneth.* There is no known evidence, however, that Dover was chuckling at the memory of Trevor Aston's suicide. Hat tip.
*Am I wrong or does this picture look like a still from the new "Alice in Wonderland" flick?
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
More Noted Things
Benedetta Craveri, "Fly High & Fall," NYRB, 25 March, reviews Veronica Buckley's The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon.
Ben Wallace-Wells, "Heart of Darkness," The Book, 10 March, reviews Bertrand Taithe's The Killer Trail: A Colonial Scandal in the Heart of Africa.
Eric Arneson reviews John Milton Cooper, Jr.'s Woodrow Wilson: A Biography for the Chicago Tribune, 4 March. Hat tip.
Robert Lacy, "Model Failure," Literary Review, March, reviews Greg Grandin's Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City.
On May 20, Yale's Jonathan Spence will give the 2010 Jefferson Lecture at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C. His subject is "When Minds Met: China and the West in the Seventeenth Century." Since its establishment in 1972, Spence is the 15th historian to give the Jefferson Lecture. His predecessors include: Bernard Bailyn, Caroline Walker Bynum, Robert Conquest, John Hope Franklin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Donald Kagan, Bernard Knox, Bernard Lewis, Forrest McDonald, James McPherson, Jaroslav Pelikan, Barbara Tuchman, Emily Vermeule, and C. Vann Woodward.
Monday, March 8, 2010
Things Noted Here & There
Curt Suplee reviews Timothy Ferris's The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature for the Washington Post, 7 March.
Alan Ryan, "Heroes of Enterprise," Literary Review, March, reviews Joyce Appleby's The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism.
Kenan Malik, "Pigs Won't Fly," Literary Review, March, and Michael Ruse, "Philosophers Rip Darwin," CHE, 7 March, feature the renewed debate about Darwin.
John J. Tierney, Jr., "From the Top: The Question of Command in Counter-Insurgency," Books & Culture, March/April, reviews Mark Moyar's A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq.
Alex Goodall, "'Individualists of The World, Unite!'" Literary Review, March, reviews Jennifer Burns's Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
A Carnival & Modern History Notes
Biblical Studies Carnival LI is up at Annuma.
Amos N. Jones reviews Lea VanderVelde's Mrs. Dred Scott: The woman behind the scenes of the famous case for Books & Culture, March.
Joseph O'Neill, "Turks, Kurds, Armenians: View From a Small Town," NYT, 3 March, reviews Christopher de Bellaigue's Rebel Land: Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town.
Mick Sussman, "The Bootleg Diaries," NYT, 5 March, reviews Max Watman's Chasing the White Dog: An Amateur Outlaw's Adventures in Moonshine.
Martin Cohen reviews Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy for the THE, 18 February.
Elaine Showalter, "China Girl," Literary Review, March, reviews Hilary Spurling's Burying Bones: Pearl Buck's Life in China.
Art History Notes
Richard Dorment for the Telegraph, 15 February, Charles Darwent for the Independent, 21 February, and James Hall, "Michelangelo and the mastery of drawing," Guardian, 6 March, review "Michelangelo's Dream," an exhibit at London's Courtauld Gallery.
Maya Jasanoff reviews Holger Hoock's Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War and the Arts in the British World, 1750-1850 for the Guardian, 6 March.
Sarah Boxer, "The Dark Art of Cut and Paste," Slate, 3 March, has slides from and notes on "Playing with Pictures: The Victorian Art of Photocollage," an exhibit at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Rachel Wolff, "Did Monet Invent Abstract Art?" Daily Beast, 4 March, reviews "Monet and Abstraction," an exhibit at two venues in Madrid, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Fundación Caja Madrid.
Friday, March 5, 2010
Friday's Notes
Michael Silk, "W. B. Yeats and King Oedipus," TLS, 3 March, reviews Jared Curtis, ed., Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus: Manuscript materials by W. B. Yeats.
Seth Lerer, "What Lewis Carroll Taught Us," Slate, 4 March, reviews Jenny Woolf's The Mystery of Lewis Carroll.
Janet Maslin, "Stand by Your Singer and Her Art," NYT, 3 March, reviews Jimmy McDonough's Tammy Wynette: Tragic Country Queen.
Meanwhile, over here on the So What Are You Doin' About It? Corner:
Thursday, March 4, 2010
More Noted Things
Jed Perl, "Venice in Texas," TNR, 2 March, reviews "Paolo Veronese: The Petrobelli Altarpiece," an exhibit at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin.
John Rogister, "The Sun King (and his wife)," TLS, 3 March, reviews Nicolas Milovanovic and Alexandre Maral, eds., Louis XIV: L'homme et le roi and Madame de Maintenon's Lettres, 1, 1650–1689, ed. by Hans Bots and Eugénie Bots-Estourgie.
Max Byrd reviews Michael O'Brien's Mrs. Adams in Winter: A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon for the Barnes & Noble Review, 2 March.
Dwight Garner, "A Look at the Snarled Past of Armenians and Turks," NYT, 2 March, reviews Christopher de Bellaigue's Rebel Land: Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town.
Kapuscinski Non-fiction, Artur Domoslawski's new biography of post-World War II Poland's most important foreign correspondent, accuses Kapuscinski of both lying and spying. The accusations draw critical reaction from Neal Ascherson in the Guardian and Morgan Meis at The Smart Set.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
"70 Million" by Hold Your Horses!
This musical video production of "70 Million" by the Franco-American band, Hold Your Horses!, nods at Art History by recreating two dozen of the most important paintings in western art. You get two points for every painting and each artist you can name. One point extra credit for each painting you can date:
70 Million by Hold Your Horses ! from L'Ogre on Vimeo.
Hat tipTuesday, March 2, 2010
20th Century Notes
There's been considerable interest in both Jon Wiener's "Big Tobacco and the Historians," The Nation, 25 February, and the list of historians who have testified in American courts on behalf of tobacco corporations. In his forthcoming book, Golden Holocaust, Robert Proctor will cite more instances of those historians' testimony and the names of additional historians testifying for Big Tobacco.
Elyssa East, "Murder by the Drop," NYT, 25 February, reviews Deborah Blum's The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett reviews Frances Stonor Saunders's The Woman Who Shot Mussolini for the Guardian, 27 February.
Richard Brooks, "The battle of Hastings and Beevor," London's Sunday Times, 28 February, announces new British blockbuster histories of WWII. Henry Holt and Co., the publisher of Charles Pellegrino's The Road from Hiroshima, has announced it is withdrawing the book because of continuing questions about its integrity.
Lawrence D. Freedman, "Frostbitten," Foreign Affairs, March/April, reviews Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Things Noted Here & There
History Carnival LXXXV, a Winter Olympics Edition, is up at Disability Studies.
Anthony Grafton, "Humanities and Inhumanities," TNR, 17 February, reviews Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in The American University.
Ann Gibbons, "The Human Family's Earliest Ancestors," Smithsonian, March, and Andrew Curry, "Gobekli Tepe: The World's First Temple?" Smithsonian, November 2008, underscore the remarkable dynamism of archaeological and pre-historical studies. Hat tip.
Antony Lerman reviews Anthony Julius's Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England for the Guardian, 27 February.
Edward Rothstein, "It Took Tools to Build a Revolution," NYT, 26 February, reviews "Compass & Rule: Architecture as Mathematical Practice in England, 1500-1750," an exhibit at Yale's Center for British Art in New Haven, CT.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Testifying for Tobacco
Jon Wiener, "Big Tobacco and the Historians," The Nation, 25 February, is essential reading, I think, for historians. I've often disagreed with Jon, but I'm grateful for his inquiry into the willingness of 40 American historians to sell their reputations to American tobacco interests. I'm also disappointed to learn from his article that some of those historians are in positions of substantial professional influence.
From Robert N. Proctor, "‘Everyone knew but no one had proof': tobacco industry use of medical history expertise in US courts, 1990–2002," Tobacco Control, 2006, Table 2 "Historians (36 in total) who have testified as expert witnesses for the American tobacco industry, 1986–2005 (excludes consulting witnesses). Compiled with Louis M Kyriakoudes":
Friday, February 26, 2010
Modern History Notes
Dominic Sandbrook for the Telegraph, 23 February, and Scott McLemee, "Darkness after noon," The National, 25 February, review Michael Scammell's Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual.
Larissa MacFarquhar, "The Deflationist," New Yorker, 1 March:
... Krugman went to Yale, in 1970, intending to study history, but he felt that history was too much about what and not enough about why, so he ended up in economics. Economics, he found, examined the same infinitely complicated social reality that history did but, instead of elucidating its complexity, looked for patterns and rules that made the complexity seem simple. Why did some societies have serfs or slaves and others not? You could talk about culture and national character and climate and changing mores and heroes and revolts and the history of agriculture and the Romans and the Christians and the Middle Ages and all the rest of it; or, like Krugman's economics teacher Evsey Domar, you could argue that if peasants are barely surviving there's no point in enslaving them, because they have nothing to give you, but if good new land becomes available it makes sense to enslave them, because you can skim off the difference between their output and what it takes to keep them alive. Suddenly, a simple story made sense of a huge and baffling swath of reality, and Krugman found that enormously satisfying.
Historiann and her readers think about Krugman, the erstwhile historian.
Congratulations to Robert A. Caro, Annette Gordon-Reed, David Levering Lewis and William H. McNeill, who received National Humanities Medals last night from President Obama.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Thursday's Notes
Shadi Bartsch, "The Archaeologist as Minotaur," The Book, 24 February, reviews Cathy Gere's Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism.
Ammon Shea, "Violent but Charming," Humanities, January/February, reviews the Dictionary of Old English.
Patrick O'Connor, "The clown who knew Byron," TLS, 24 February, reviews Andrew McConnell Scott's The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi: Laughter, madness and the story of Britain's greatest comedian.
Richard Rayner for the LA Times, 14 February, Bob Blaisdel for the San Francisco Chronicle, 21 February, Dwight Garner, "Tolstoy & Co. as Objects of Obsession," NYT, 16 February, and Adam Kirsch, "A Comedian in the Academy," Slate, 24 February, review Elif Batuman's The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them.
Sean Wilentz, "Obama, Fire Your Staff!" Daily Beast, 24 February, calls for changes in the White House staff.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Additionally Noted Things
G. W. Bernard's new biography, Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions, finds her guilty, as charged, of adultery.
Philip Ball for London's Sunday Times, 21 February, and Ned Block and Philip Kitcher, "Misunderstanding Darwin," Boston Review, March/April, review Jerry Fodor's and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's What Darwin Got Wrong. Thomas Rogers interviews Fodor about the book and its argument in "Taking Down the Father of Evolution," Salon, 22 February.
Dominique Browning, "Of Gold and Bondage," NYT, 16 February, reviews Christopher Corbett's The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West.
Max Hastings reviews Olivier Philipponnat's and Patrick Lienhardt's The Life of Irène Némirovsky for London's Sunday Times, 21 February; and Adam Kirsch, "Epistolary Bromance," Tablet, 23 February, reviews "Dearest Georg": Love, Literature, and Power in Dark Times: The Letters of Elias, Veza, and Georges Canetti, 1933-1948, ed. by Karen Lauer and Kristian Wachinger.
Charles Pellegrino has agreed to remove the false testimony of Joseph Fuoco from future editions of Pellegrino's The Last Train from Hiroshima. But has Henry Holt or any other publisher committed to a new edition of the book?
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
More Noted Things
Finalists for the LA Times Book Prize for 2009 in History are:
Jeffrey R. Young, "Yo, Ho, Ho, and a Digital Scrum," CHE, 21 February, features Adrian Johns's work in Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars From Gutenberg to Gates.
Sanford Levinson, "So Many Origins," The Book, 23 February, reviews Seth Lipsky's The Citizen's Constitution and Jack Rakove'sThe Annotated U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence.
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