CLIOPATRIA: A Group Blog
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Pat McCullough hosts Biblical Studies Carnival XLIII at kata ta biblia.
Edward Rothstein, "Manhattan: An Island Always Diverse," NYT, 3 July, reviews "Mannahatta/Manhattan: A Natural History of New York City," an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York.
John G. McCurdy, "We the Bachelors," NYT, 3 July, looks at the status of unmarried men in 18th century America.
Marie Arana, "First in War, First in Peace, First in Hogging the Credit," Washington Post, 5 July, reviews John Ferling's The Ascent of George Washington: The Hidden Political Genius of an American Icon.
Susan Jacoby, "The Flag of Our Fathers," Washington Post, 4 July, reviews Woden Teachout's Capture the Flag: A Political History of American Patriotism.
Friday, July 3, 2009
American Notes
Christina Hoff Sommers, "Persistent Myths in Feminist Scholarship," CHE, 29 June, gets a reply in Claire Potter's "'And Your Little Dog Too!!!' Christina Hoff Sommers Still Wants the Ruby Slippers," Tenured Radical, 1 July.
The new Common-place is up, with a forum on Thomas Paine and some other good things.
Kathleen Duval, "Life, Liberty and Benign Monarchy?" NYT, 2 July, looks at alternative forms of governance in late 18th century North America.
Michael Dirda, "Liebling, At the Top of His Game," Washington Post, 2 July, reviews A. J. Liebling's The Sweet Science and other Writings.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
For a Mystic Chimera, It Sure Gets Around
In the first volume of his biography of Andrew Jackson, Robert Remini neatly captures the strangeness of state sovereignty. It happens in a single quiet paragraph that describes the ceremony on the morning of July 17, 1821, in which Spain relinquished its claim to the Floridas. Jackson handed the Spanish governor "the instruments of his authority to take possession of the territory," and Governor José Callava responded by giving Jackson control of his keys and his archives. Then, finally, having surrendered the symbols of power, Callava "released the inhabitants of West Florida from their allegiance to Spain." The paragraph ends with members of the Spanish crowd -- suddenly finding themselves members of an American crowd -- bursting into tears.
(The next paragraph opens with a letter from Rachel Jackson to a friend, reporting that she is watching the entire city of Pensacola "sit solitary and mourn.")
I was brought back to that paragraph last week by one of those Christopher Hitchens columns that gets stuck in the lower intestine and won't go away. It's the one in which he dismisses the idea of treading carefully to avoid giving Iranians the idea that the United States is intervening in their own business. "There is nothing at all that any Western country can do," he assures us, "to avoid the charge of intervening in Iran's internal affairs." But better yet, Hitchens adds, Iranians can't really complain about our intervention in their business, since they already do it to us:
Thursday's Notes
Scott Jaschik, "Empty Chair No More," IHE, 2 July, features the filling of Wisconsin's chair in military history and the relative health of the field.
Masolino D'Amico, "Rebuilt Rome," TLS, 1 July, reviews David Watkin's The Roman Forum.
Andrew Butterfield, "Venice: The Masters in Boston," NYRB, 16 July, reviews "Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice," an exhibit at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, March 15–August 16, 2009, and the Louvre, Paris, September 14, 2009–January 4, 2010.
Sean Carroll, "Newton, P.I.," Cosmic Variance, 1 July, reviews Thomas Levenson's Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
The best things in life were free
[Cross-posted at Airminded.]
The Royal Historical Society has for some years maintained an online bibliography of British and Irish history, updated three times a year. It currently has over 460,000 records. It's a fantastic resource for scholars interested in any aspect of the history of the British Isles, not least because it's free. But from 1 January 2010 it won't be: it will be rebranded as the Bibliography of British and Irish History which will be sold by Brepols, with subscriptions available for institutions and individuals.
This is a shame, of course. A resource which was freely available to anyone with an internet connection will now only be open to those who can afford to pay. Presumably that includes big universities and libraries (although even librarians at Yale, of all places, are complaining that digital resources are getting to expensive, according to this H-Albion post), but what about smaller universities, local libraries, schools, independent researchers? There is the individual subscription, but there's no information about pricing yet and it seems unlikely to be cheap.
The reason for this move is the end of government funding for the bibliography. That's understandable; the money has to come from somewhere. The fact that it has been funded by British taxpayers does raise the question of why a commercial entity should be allowed to profit from that expenditure. But as I'm not a British taxpayer it could equally well be asked why I should benefit from that expenditure. So I don't really have a basis for moral outrage here. It's just ... a shame.
But it seems to me that must be some other way to do this -- crowdsourcing, scraping, some combination of both? There are some sites which show the potential of crowdsourcing by way of people uploading and updating their own bibliographies, such as Librarything, or in a more academic context, CiteULike and Mendeley. Given a critical mass of users, a crowdsourced bibliography would be close to up to date. Scraping could be used to automatically feed in journal articles via RSS (books would be harder -- though maybe not). There are many difficulties inherent in such an approach, but I'd rather see something like this be the future than an ever-increasing array of paywalls.
More Noted Things
Brett Schulte hosts History Carnival LXXVIII today at TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog.
H. W. Brands, "A Revisionist's Burden," National Interest, 30 June, reviews Margaret MacMillan's Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History.
Ryan Patrico, "You Say You Want a Revolution," Books & Culture, 29 June, reviews Mike Rapport's 1848: Year of Revolution.
Sean Wilentz, "Who Lincoln Was," TNR, 15 July, reviews Michael Burlingame's Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Donald Yacovone, eds., Lincoln on Race & Slavery, Harold Holzer's Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860-1861 and Holzer, ed., The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now, Fred Kaplan's Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, John Stauffer's Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, and Ronald White's A. Lincoln: A Biography.
Finally, if, like me, you admire the pseudonymous blog, Curious Expeditions, and miss The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society, check out the new joint venture of their founders, Atlas Obscura, A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities and Esoterica.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
20th Century American History Notes
Christina Hoff Sommers, "Persistent Myths in Feminist Scholarship," CHE, 29 June, argues that much feminist scholarship is unreliable.
Lynne Curry, "Intellectual Seduction: The Promise and Perils of Eugenics," H-Law, June, reviews Victoria F. Nourse's In Reckless Hands: Skinner v. Oklahoma and the Near-Triumph of American Eugenics and Paul A. Lombardo's Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell. Hat tip.
Adam Kirsch, "All Quiet," TNR, 24 June, reviews Hasia Diner's We Remember With Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962. Mark Oppenheimer, "The Denial Twist," Tablet, 23-26 June, is a four-part series on the Holocaust Denial movement in the United States: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Ex Post WHA
I just returned from a first-rate meeting of the World History Association. Despite the hard economic times (and small travel budgets), some 450 scholars and teachers of World History managed to find their way to Salem, Mass.
Beyond the normal assortment of really smart papers, there were a host of special events, including a Keynote presentation by Salem State's own Dane Morrison ("Citizens of the World? Salem's Early Expatriate Communities") and a public lecture by William McNeil ("Leaving Western Civ Behind"). Also of note was a roundtable entitled "World History: Past, Present, and Future" featuring Jerry Bentley, Alfred Crosby, Kennth Curtis, Candice Gaucher, and William McNeill.
Finally, a big shout-out to Salem State College, who really rolled out the red carpet for the WHA. This is a school which has distinguished itself both in its dedication to World History and its outstanding engagement with local history. I'm sure I wasn't the only conference attendee who came away impressed by the host institution.
Things Noted Here & There
Oliver Marre, "They're too cool for school: meet the new history boys and girls," Guardian, 28 June, identifies a half-dozen young historians who are leading the renewal of popular history in Great Britain with "a mix of strong narratives, exciting personalities and quirky facts." Thanks to Manan Ahmed for the tip.
Sam Tanenhaus, "Sound of Silence: The Culture Wars Take a Break," NYT, 27 June, and Stan Katz, "NEH in Obamaland," Brainstorm, 28 June, disagree about the significance of Jim Leach's nomination to lead the National Endowment for the Humanities.
David Schiff, "Mahler's Body," The Nation, 24 June, reviews Henry-Louis de La Grange's Gustav Mahler: A New Life Cut Short (1907-1911).
Manjit Kumar, "The meeting of minds," Telegraph, 22 June, is an excerpt from his Quantum, which was shortlisted for the BBC's Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. In it, Kumar explores a clash between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein, one of the great controversies in the history of physics.
In "Blog to Book: An Elegant Execution," New Yorker, 24 June, Caleb Crain discusses the publication of The Wreck of the Henry Clay: Posts & Essays, 2003-2009, his anthology of work from his blog, Steamboats are ruining everything. In 2007, Crain won the Cliopatria Award for Best Writer.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Slap the Jap and make the Hun pay
[Cross-posted at Airminded.]
Or, Australia strides onto the world stage.
Today is the 90th anniversary of the signing of the Versailles Treaty and thus of the Covenant of the League of Nations (which formed the first thirty articles of the Treaty). This was a fateful moment, with heavy consequences for those who lived through the next quarter-century. But as all of that is well-known (and still debated), I want to draw attention to something that isn't: Australia's role in the Paris Peace Conference, which formulated both the Treaty and the Covenant. While Australia had existed as an independent nation since 1901, most Australians would consider the ANZAC participation in the Dardanelles campaign in 1915 to be its true coming of age. Australian forces went on to serve with great distinction on the Western Front, Palestine and elsewhere, a shedding of blood which earned Australia a place among the peacemakers in Paris. But what use did Australia make of its first opportunity to influence the future of the world?
Sunday's Notes
On Wednesday 1 July, Brett Schulte will host History Carnival LXXVIII at TOCWOC -- A Civil War Blog. You can nominate the best in June's history blogging for inclusion in the festival by using the TOCWOC contact or the History Carnival's nomination forms.
Paul Bloom, "No Smiting," NYT, 24 June, and Dan Cryer, "Survival of the nicest," Boston Globe, 28 June, review Robert Wright's The Evolution of God. Take no comfort in't.
Christopher Hitchens, "The Lovely Stones," Vanity Fair, July, visits Athens' Acropolis Museum.
Tunku Varadaradanjan, "Seeking Pleasure Far From Home," WSJ, 9 June, reviews Richard Bernstein's The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters.
Stephen Mihm, "The Modernizers," NYT, 25 June, reviews Gavin Weightman's The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World, 1776-1914.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Roberta Smith, "Precious Works From a Perilous Land," NYT, 25 June, reviews "Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures From the National Museum, Kabul," an exhibit now showing at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Alexander F. Remington, "A Silent Killer," Washington Post, 28 June, reviews Stephan Talty's The Illustrious Dead: The Terrifying Story of How Typhus Killed Napoleon's Greatest Army.
Maira Kalman, "Time Wastes Too Fast," NYT, 25 June, on her visit to Monticello, is from her current series for the Times, "And the Pursuit of Happiness." Penguin published her first series, "The Principles of Uncertainty."
Charles Postel, "Bursting into the Modern Age," Washington Post, 28 June, reviews Jackson Lears's Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920.
Jonathan Yardley, "A Hero for Hard Times," Washington Post, 28 June, reviews Elliott Gorn's Dillinger's Wild Ride: The Year That Made America's Public Enemy Number One.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Friday's Notes
Zenobia Jacobs and Richard G. Roberts, "Human History Written in Stone and Blood," American Scientist, July/August, argues that "two bursts of human innovation in southern Africa during the Middle Stone Age may be linked to population growth and early migration off the continent."
Harvey Mansfield, "Consequential Ideas," WS, 22 June, reviews Paul Rahe's Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville and the Modern Prospect.
Peter Parker, "Is Toad of Toad Hall bipolar?" TLS, 24 June, reviews two new annotated editions of Kenneth Graham's The Wind in the Willows.
Richard Overy, "Ice-Cold in Coyoacan," Literary Review, June, reviews Bertrand M. Patenaude's Stalin's Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Thursday's Notes
Algis Valiunas, "Highborn Fools," Claremont Review, Spring, reviews Duc de Saint-Simon, Memoirs of Duc de Saint-Simon, 1691-1709: Presented to the King, Memoirs of Duc de Saint-Simon, 1710-1715: The Bastards Triumphant, and Memoirs of Duc de Saint-Simon, 1715-1723: Fatal Weakness. Translated by Lucy Norton.
Ian Pindar, "Men and Marian," Guardian, 20 June, reviews Brenda Maddox's George Eliot: Novelist, Lover, Wife.
Ben Zimmer, "Hunting the Elusive First ‘Ms.'," Visual Thesaurus, 23 June, finds the earliest use of "Ms." in Massachusetts' Springfield Republican, 10 November 1901.
Elliott J. Gorn, "The Meanings of Depression-Era Culture," CHE, 26 June, reviews David Welky's Everything Was Better in America: Print Culture in the Great Depression.
Garry Wills, "Daredevil," Atlantic, July/August, profiles his friend, William Buckley.
Scott McLemee, "Fifty Years After Stonewall," IHE, 24 June, asks what GLBT studies will look like in 2019.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
More Noted Things
Rachel Leow, "On Newspapers as Sources," a historian's craft, 16 June, has suggestions for newspaper research.
Michael Kimmelman, "Elgin Marble Argument in a New Light," NYT, 23 June, finds a $200 million revisionist argument in Athens.
James Gibbons, "Clout of Africa," BookForum, June/August, sees in recent publications "an African literary boom."
Timothy Snyder, "Holocaust: The Ignored Reality," NYRB, 16 July, recenters the Holocaust in today's Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Modern American Notes
Jill Lepore, "Baby Talk: The Fuss about Parenthood," New Yorker, 29 June, reviews Michael Lewis's Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood and Ayelet Waldman's Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace.
Adam Kirsch, "Mixed Record," Tablet, 16 June, and David Oshinsky, "Saint Izzy," Slate, 23 June, review D. D. Gutterplan's American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone.
Philip Davis, "Charm and Death," Literary Review, July, and Adam Kirsch, "The Binding of Isaac," New Republic, 1 July, review Steven J. Zipperstein's Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing.
Michiko Kakutani, "The Rumsfeldian Persona and Its Role in the Iraq War," NYT, 22 June, reviews Bradley Graham's By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Unstated
In a post last week at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, Robert Farley discussed events in Iran in the context of state violence and resistance to the state. "The modern nation state is an extremely efficient killing machine," he wrote. "We know this from our Tilly; the nation-state replaced its competitors, such as empires and city-states, because it could develop and support institutions of internal and external domination."
But the events of the last week suggest to me nearly the opposite of what Charles Tilly tells us. Reporting as an eyewitness, Roger Cohen recently wrote in the New York Times that at least some state actors are declining or resisting orders to direct violence against their fellow Iranians. Elsewhere, former Special Forces officer and DIA official Pat Lang wondered, two days ago, where regular Iranian army troops would come down in a conflict between the Iranian people and the Iranian state. It's not at all clear that the officers of the Iranian state have been able to direct all of the relevant state institutions to simply inflict violence on people in the streets. Some state institutions are apparently pulling away from the state.
It is, in other words, not at all clear that the government is an extremely efficient killing machine, possessing a clear monopoly on violence. In a magnificent turn of events, the efficient killing machine has even been forced to run away from crowds of citizens.
Absent this efficient monopoly on violence, the Iranian state has turned to a set of violent actors who don't draw government paychecks.
Things Noted Here & There
Margherita Laera, "Peter Greenaway's multimedia vision of Christ," Wired.co.uk, 11 June, and Roberta Smith, "In Venice, Peter Greenaway Takes Veronese's Figures Out to Play," NYT, 21 June, review "The Wedding at Cana: A Vision by Peter Greenaway."
Larry Kramer reviews Charles Upchurch's Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain's Age of Reform for the Huffington Post, 16 June. Kramer is so full of it.
"The Evolution of Underwear," Daily Beast, 17 June, reviews "Undercover: The Evolution of Underwear," an exhibit at London's Fashion and Textile Museum. See also: the Beast's slide show.
Jonathan Mirsky, "China's Dictators at Work: The Secret Story," NYRB, 2 July, reviews Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang, translated and edited by Bao Pu, Renee Chiang, and Adi Ignatius, with a foreword by Roderick MacFarquhar.
Bernard Avishai, "A World Apart? The White House and the Middle East," The Nation, 17 June, explores the failure of the White House to persuade Israel to accept a plan for regional peace.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Sunday's Notes
Christopher Shea, "Working Toward a Good Life," Washington Post, 21 June, and Kelefa Sanneh, "Out of the Office," New Yorker, 22 June, review Matthew B. Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work.
Michael Dirda, "A Breakup With Tradition," Washington Post, 18 June, reviews James Davidson's The Greeks and Greek Love: A Bold New Exploration of the Ancient World.
Megan Marshall, "Married With Children," NYT, 19 June, reviews Gillian Gill's We Two, Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals.
Alexander F. Remington, "A King's Tale," Washington Post, 21 June, reviews Daniel Meyerson's In The Valley of the Kings: Howard Carter and the Mystery of King Tutankhamun's Tomb.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Ancient/Medieval Notes
LI, an ancient/medieval edition of the festival, is up at Gillian Polack's Food History.
"Acropolis Museum to Open in Greece," Washington Post, 18 June, and "The New Acropolis Museum," NYT, 19 June, are slide shows of the new Acropolis Museum that opens this weekend in Athens. See also: Mary Beard, "The new Acropolis Museum -- a glimpse at the opening party (and of the opening speeches)," A Don's Life, 19 June; and Anthee Carassava, "In Athens, Museum Is an Olympian Feat," NYT, 19 June.
Toni Bentley, "Harem Envy," NYT, 19 June, reviews Richard Bernstein's The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters.
Recent Entries
- Weak Endnotes
- American Notes
- For a Mystic Chimera, It Sure Gets Around
- Thursday's Notes
- The best things in life were free
- More Noted Things
- 20th Century American History Notes
- Ex Post WHA
- Things Noted Here & There
- Slap the Jap and make the Hun pay
News
Roundup
HNN Blogs
Contributing Editors
- Timothy Burke (∞)
- Hala Fattah (∞)
- Michael Kazin (∞)
- Wilson J. Moses (∞)
- Thomas G. Palaima (∞)
- Mechal Sobel (∞)
- Sean Wilentz (∞)
- Sam Wineburg (∞)
Cliopatria's Appendices
- Cliopatria Alumni
- Cliopatria Awards
- Cliopatria's Bookshelf
- Hall of Fame
- History Blogroll
- History Carnival
- Symposia
Blogs
- AHA Today
- Airminded
- American Exception
- Andrew Sullivan
- Axis of Evel Knieval
- BibliOdyssey
- Boingboing
- Chapati Mystery
- Civil War Memory
- Civil Warriors
- A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe
- The Corner
- Crooked Timber
- Daily Kos
- A Don's Life
- Early Modern Notes
- Easily Distracted
- Edge of the American West
- Eunomia
- FiveThirtyEight.com
- The Fix
- Frog in a Well
- A Historian's Craft
- In the Middle
- Informed Comment
- Instapundit
- Kevin Drum
- Matthew Yglesias
- Northwest History
- Paper Cuts
- PhDinHistory
- Quick Study
- Ragessos 2.02
- Religion and American History
- Roblog
- Siris
- Steamboats Are Ruining Everything
- Talking Points Memo
- Tenured Radical University Diaries
- The Valve
- Volokh Conspiracy
- Walking the Berkshires
- War Historian
- wood s lot
- Wynken de Worde
- Zoom
- zunguzungu
Other Media
- American Prospect
- Arts and Letters Daily
- Bookforum
- Chronicle of Higher Education
- Common-Place
- The Daily Beast
- Foreign Policy
- Global Voices
- History News Service
- History Now
- Huffington Post
- Inside Higher Ed
- New York Times
- Newsday
- NPR
- Politico
- RealClear Politics
- Romenesko
- Salon
- Slate
- Washington Post
- Weekly Standard
- World Press Review
Shopping
Recent Comments
- Chris Bray on American Notes
- Jonathan Dresner on Ex Post WHA
- Chris Bray on Unstated
- David Silbey on Unstated
- Jonathan Jarrett on The history of the future of journalism?
- Sage Ross on The history of the future of journalism?
- Jonathan Jarrett on The history of the future of journalism?
- Chris Bray on Sudden Whackjob Syndrome
- Jonathan Dresner on Sudden Whackjob Syndrome
- Jonathan Jarrett on Labcoats and tweed jackets
Archives
July 2009June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
March 2009
February 2009
January 2009
December 2008
November 2008
October 2008
September 2008
August 2008
July 2008
June 2008
May 2008
April 2008
March 2008
February 2008
January 2008
December 2007
November 2007
October 2007
September 2007
August 2007
July 2007
June 2007
May 2007
April 2007
March 2007
February 2007
January 2007
December 2006
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006
June 2006
May 2006
April 2006
March 2006
February 2006
January 2006
December 2005
November 2005
October 2005
September 2005
August 2005
July 2005
June 2005
May 2005
April 2005
March 2005
February 2005
January 2005
December 2004
November 2004
October 2004
September 2004
August 2004
July 2004
June 2004
May 2004
April 2004
March 2004
February 2004
January 2004
December 2003
