CLIOPATRIA: A Group Blog
Entries by Ralph E. Luker
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Friday, June 19, 2009
20th Century Notes
Ian Thomson reviews Bertrand M. Patenaude's Stalin's Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky for London's Sunday Times, 14 June.
Claire Harman, "Virginia Woolf's neat brown paper parcels," TLS, 17 June, reviews Stuart N. Clarke, ed., The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume Five: 1929–1932.
Stefan Beck reviews Susan Jacoby's Alger Hiss and the Battle for History for the Barnes & Noble Review, 18 June.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Modern Western Notes
Iain Sinclair, "Upriver," LRB, 25 June, reviews Peter Ackroyd's Thames: Sacred River.
John Rogister, "Stinking, splendid Versailles," TLS, 17 June, reviews Tony Spawforth's Versailles, William Ritchey Newton's Derrière la Façade: Vivre au château de Versailles au XVIIIe siècle, and Jeanne Louise Henriette Campan's The Private Life of Marie Antoinette.
Elizabeth Redden, "Higher Ed and the Third Reich," IHE, 17 June, interviews Stephen H. Norwood, the author of The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses.
In October, Yale University Press will publish Alan Allport's book on demobilization in Great Britain, Demobbed: Coming Home after World War Two. Beginning today, in conjunction with the book's publication, Allport will post-blog a year of British demobilization, June 1945-June 1946. His post-blogging follows the examples of Brett Holman's series at Airminded on the 1938 Sudeten Crisis and the 1909 Scareship Wave.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Wednesday's Notes
Indian History Carnival #18 is up at varnam. LI, an ancient/medieval edition of the festival, goes up at Gillian Polack's Food History on 20 June. Send your nominations of the best in ancient/medieval history blogging since 18 April to her or use the form.
A continuing conversation:
Patricia Cohen, "Great Caesar's Ghost! Are Traditional History Courses Vanishing?" NYT, 10 June;
Claire Potter, "Let's Run Away from the Girls and Other Strategies to Make History Relevant to a Twenty-First Century Liberal Arts Education," Tenured Radical, 11 June;
Mary Dudziak, "Another Slow News Day at the New York Times," Legal History, 12 June;
Stan Katz, "Traditional History Courses," Brainstorm, 13 June;
Tim Burke, "History As It Was," Easily Distracted, 16 June; &
David Silbey, "Never Mind the Facts ...," Edge of the American West, 17 June.
Pervez Hoodbhoy, "An Indian history of numbers," Nature, 4 June, reviews Kim Plofker's Mathematics In India.
Dwight Garner, "Revisiting Wartime: 66 Miles of Cruelty," NYT, 16 June, reviews Michael and Elizabeth Norman's Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath.
Andrew Roberts, "Inside Kissinger's Brain," Daily Beast, 15 June, reviews Sir Alistair Home's Kissinger 1973: The Crucial Year.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
More Noted Things
The Giant's Shoulders #12, the history of science carnival, is up at Thoughts from Gut Bacteria.
Thomas W. Laqueur reviews Richard Bernstein's The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters for the San Francisco Chronicle, 14 June.
Claire Harman, "A Dissenting Voice," Literary Review, June, reviews William McCarthy's Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment.
Judith Flanders reviews J. F. M. Clark's Bugs and the Victorians for the Telegraph, 7 June.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
The history of science carnival, the Giant's Shoulders #12, will be up later today at Thoughts from Gut Bacteria.
Scott Jaschik, "A College for History Only," IHE, 15 June, looks at an experiment in pre-legal studies.
Patricia Cohen, "Great Caesar's Ghost! Are Traditional History Courses Vanishing?" NYT, 10 June, provoked some significant replies:
Claire Potter, "Let's Run Away from the Girls and Other Strategies to Make History Relevant to a Twenty-First Century Liberal Arts Education," Tenured Radical, 11 June;
Mary Dudziak, "Another Slow News Day at the New York Times," Legal History, 12 June; and
Stan Katz, "Traditional History Courses," Brainstorm, 13 June.
On a related issue, Peter Berkowitz, "Conservatism and the University Curriculum," WSJ, 13 June, argues for the representation of conservatism in the liberal arts curriculum.
Jane Mayer, "The Secret History," New Yorker, 22 June, asks whether, given its history, Leon Panetta can change directions at the CIA.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Sunday's Notes
Eric Ormsby, "Empires in Collision," NYT, 12 June, reviews Andrew Wheatcroft's The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans and the Battle for Europe.
Kathryn Harrison, "Oh, Lord," NYT, 12 June, reviews Edna O'Brien's Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life.
Muriel Dobbin, "Albert 'fell into step behind' Victoria," Washington Times, 10 June, reviews Gillian Gill's Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals.
Beverly Gage, "American Macho," NYT, 12 June, Patricia O'Toole, "Barbarian Virtues," American Scholar, Summer, and Tim Rutten for the LA Times, 12 June, review Jackson Lears's Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920.
Matthew Dallek, "Not Ready for Mt. Rushmore," American Scholar, Summer, assesses Ronald Reagan, the myth and the reality. See also: John Harwood, "Republicans Rethinking the Reagan Mystique," NYT, 13 June.
Leah Hager Cohen, "Feminine Mystique," NYT, 12 June, reviews Kate Walbert's A Short History of Women, a work of fiction.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Holland Cotter, "The Many Voices of Enlightenment," NYT, 11 June, reviews "Light of the Sufis: The Mystical Arts of Islam," an exhibit at New York's Brooklyn Museum.
Tim Burke, "Colonial Africa: A List of Questions," Easily Distracted, 12 June, reorganizes a course around key questions. Can you add to his list?
Michael Kazin, "What So Proudly He Hails," Washington Post, 14 June, reviews Simon Schama's The American Future: A History.
Michael Dirda, "Literary Promise Unfulfilled," Washington Post, 11 June, reviews Steven J. Zipperstein's Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing.
Chris Bray, "The Stuff of Which Movies Are Made," Washington Post, 14 June, reviews Doug Stanton's Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Friday's Notes
Dan Colman, "Intelligent Video: The Top Cultural & Educational Video Sites," Open Culture, 5 June, notes 45 sites you'd want to know about.
Andrew Holgate reviews Roger Crowley's Empires of the Sea: The Final Battle for the Mediterranean, 1521-1580 for London's Sunday Times, 7 June.
Mark, "Weed, Booze, Cocaine and Other Old School ‘Medicine' Ads," Pill Talk, 9 June, features medicinal ads from a less regulated generation. Hat tip.
Sarah Churchwell, "The real Tramp?" TLS, 10 June, reviews Simon Louvish's Chaplin: The tramp's odyssey and Miranda Seymour's Chaplin's Girl: The life and loves of Virginia Cherrill.
Terence Hawkes, "William Empson's influence on the CIA," TLS, 10 June, reviews Michael Holzman's James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligence.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Thursday's Notes
Patricia Cohen, "Great Caesar's Ghost! Are Traditional History Courses Vanishing?" NYT, 10 June, picks up on a discussion at H-Diplo and the recent Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations conference. It was precipitated by a proposal to change the title of Diplomatic History, the field's only journal. Unsurprisingly, the chart accompanying Cohen's article reports that diplomatic, economic, and intellectual history have declined and women's and cultural history have increased in the last 30 years. The surprise -- to me, at least -- is that, in the same period, military history has marginally increased its representation in American history departments.
Paula Fredriksen, "The Nazi of Nazareth," Tablet, 10 June, reviews Susannah Heschel's Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany.
Robert O. Paxton, "Occupied Minds," BookForum, June/August, reviews Frederic Spotts's The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation, Kirrily Freeman's Bronzes to Bullets: Vichy and the Destruction of French Public Statuary, 1941-1944, and Art of the Defeat, France 1940-1944 by Laurence Bertrand Dorleac, Jane Marie Todd, and Serge Guilbaut.
Ron Rosenbaum, "Save the Salinger Archives!" Slate, 5 June, speculates that there may be something important in J. D.'s papers.
Stan Katz, "Jim Leach at NEH," Brainstorm, 10 June, shares my enthusiasm for the former Iowa congressman's nomination to head the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Wednesday's Notes
Pragati: The Indian National Interest Review, June, is a special issue devoted to history. Thanks to Manan Ahmed for the tip.
common-place, the American Antiquarian Society's e-journal of early American history and culture, has begun publishing interim issues, reviewing books, films, and exhibits. See: IX, 3.5.
Louis Bayard, "Love -- The Scientific Way," Washington Post, 7 June, reviews Thomas Maier's Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters And Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
More Noted Things
Ross King, "Intelligent, By Design," Washington Post, 8 June, reviews Enrique Joven's The Book of God and Physics: A Novel of the Voynich Mystery, translated from the Spanish by Dolores M. Koch.
David Nash, "The Gain from Thomas Paine," History Today, June, re-examines Paine's legacy to the modern world.
James Bratt, "Exceptionalism with a Twist," Books & Culture, May/June, reviews George C. Herring's From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776.
John Wilson, "‘A Really Holy Self-Realization'," Books & Culture, May/June, reviews Stefan Aust's Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F..
Monday, June 8, 2009
Things Noted Here and There
Simon Winchester, "Lands of Erotic Fantasy and Their Complex Reality," NYT, 7 June, reviews Richard Bernstein's The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters.
Mike Jay, "The day pain died," Boston Globe, 7 June, perpetuates a Yankee myth about the first use of an anaesthetic in surgery. Boston, tip your hat to Georgia's Crawford Long.
Jody Rosen, "The Oldest Oldie, Revisited," Brow Beat, 4 June, brings us up to date on the findings of audio historians David Giovannoni and Patrick Feaster about the oldest recordings of the human voice. You can hear all of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's phonautograms on Giovannoni's and Feaster's website.
Jonathan Yardley, "Weeding Out the Weak," Washington Post, 7 June, reviews Vincent J. Cannato's American Passage: The History of Ellis Island.
Anne Applebaum, "Now We Know," TNR, 17 June, reviews Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
20th Century Biography
This week, Life published previously unpublished photographs of Adolph Hitler, 1936-1945. See: Hitler's Humble Beginnings, Adolph Hitler Among the Crowds, Adolph Hitler: Up Close, and Adolph Hitler's Private World.
Dagmar Herzog, "Berlin Underground," NYT, 5 June, reviews Anne Nelson's Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler.
Max Boot, "Gang of Four," NYT, 5 June, reviews Andrew Roberts's Master and Commander: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941-1945.
Todd Gitlin, "I. F. Stone, Journalist -- and Spy?" American Prospect, 5 June, reviews D.D. Guttenplan's American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone and Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev.
Paul Berman, "Telling the Tale," NYT, 5 June, reviews Gerald Martin's Gabriel García Márquez: A Life.
John Gray, "The Cosy Philosopher," Literary Review, June, reviews Isaiah Berlin, Enlightening: Letters 1946-1960, edited by Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes with the assistance of Serena Moore.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Barbara Graziosi reviews Robin Waterfield's Why Socrates Died: Dispelling the Myths for the THES, 4 June.
Holland Cotter, "Putting ‘Primitive' to Rest," NYT, 4 June, reviews "African and Oceanic Art From the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva: A Legacy of Collecting," an exhibit at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
At Legal History, Sally Greene is doing a series of posts on newly discovered archival evidence on the case of State v Mann (1829). A major case in American slave law, it starkly held that a master's authority is absolute.
Volume XI of the Journal of Southern Religion is online! It publishes Kelly Baker, Ed Blum, Fitzhugh Brundage, Anthea Butler, Wayne Flynt, Charles Irons, Randall Stephens and many other historians.
Ian Sansom, "Hucksters, mavericks and visionaries," Guardian, 6 June, reviews Helen Carr's The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, HD and the Imagists.
Friday, June 5, 2009
Notes Ancient & Modern
In a series that puts famous philosophical quotations in context, Brandon Watson treats George Santayana's "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Tom Holland, "Modernist minotaurs," TLS, 3 June, reviews Cathy Gere's Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism and Theodore Ziolkowski's Minos and the Moderns: Cretan myth in twentieth-century literature and art.
John Holbo, "Hey kids! Free Plato Book! And you can help me make it better!" Crooked Timber, 1 June, introduces us to his and Belle Waring's e-edition of Reason and Persuasion: Three Dialogues by Plato: Euthyphro, Meno and Republic, Book I.
Nicholas Guyatt, "Orchids and Lilacs: Darwin, Lincoln and Slavery," The Nation, 3 June, reviews Adam Gopnik's Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, Adrian Desmond's and James Moore's Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Nature, and Barry Werth's Banquet at Delmonico's: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America.
Scott Saul, "Off Camera: Civil Rights in the North," The Nation, 3 June, reviews Thomas J. Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Modern History Notes
"History students are most promiscuous," Telegraph, 30 May, at Oxford, at least. Hat tip.
Garry Wills, "Lincoln's Black History," NYRB, 11 June, reviews Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Donald Yacovone, eds., Lincoln on Race and Slavery.
Colm Tóibín, "The Admirable Mrs. James," NYRB, 11 June, reviews Susan E. Gunter's Alice in Jamesland: The Story of Alice Howe Gibbens James and Paul Fisher's House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family.
Jonathan Keates, "Foreigners in Florence," TLS, 3 June, reviews Bernd Roeck's Florence 1900: The quest for Arcadia, translated by Stewart Spencer.
Martin Filler, "The Late Show," NYRB, 11 June, reviews "Picasso: Mosqueteros," an exhibit at the Gagosian Gallery in New York City.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Wednesday's Notes
D. Graham Burnett and Anthony Grafton, "Deception as a Way of Knowing: A Conversation with Anthony Grafton," Cabinet, Spring, is an interview with Grafton about his work on deception and forgery. Errol Morris continues his series on the subject, "Bamboozling Ourselves," Zoom, this week.
Pat Rogers, "Cheerfulness breaks in," New Criterion, June, reviews Peter Martin's Samuel Johnson: A Biography and Jeffrey Meyers's Samuel Johnson: The Struggle.
David W. Blight, "The Civil War Sesquicentennial," CHE, 5 June, argues that the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War might be what the 100th anniversary failed to be.
Dwight Garner, "Some Like It Hot, Some Like It Literary: A Playwright's Life, With Marilyn," NYT, 2 June, reviews Christopher Bigsby's Arthur Miller, 1915-1962.
Finally, farewell to Harvard's Ernest R. May, a distinguished historian of diplomacy. Thanks to Jeff Vanke for the tip.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
More Noted Things
Allen C. Guelzo, "Culprit-in-Chief," Books & Culture, 29 May, reviews William Marvel's Mr. Lincoln Goes to War and Lincoln's Darkest Year: The War in 1862.
Joseph Epstein, "Eminent Victorian," Weekly Standard, 8 June, reviews Gertrude Himmelfarb's The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot.
Christopher Benfey, "The Way of Distortion," TNR, 3 June, reviews Brad Gooch's Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor.
Michiko Kakutani, "Playing Basketball, Playing Politics: Lessons From the Top Game Changer," NYT, 1 June, reviews Richard Wolffe's new book on Barack Obama, Renegade: The Making of a President.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
Peter Behrens, "The Appeal of the Spud," Washington Post, 31 May, reviews John Reader's Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent.
Jonathan Yardley, "Celebrating Quiet Heroism," Washington Post, 31 May, reviews Edmund S. Morgan's American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America.
Caroline Weber, "Lightning Rods and Sideshows," NYT, 29 May, reviews Jill Jonnes's Eiffel's Tower: And the World's Fair Where Buffalo Bill Beguiled Paris, the Artists Quarreled, and Thomas Edison Became a Count and James H. S. McGregor's Paris from the Ground Up.
Whether you participated in The Long Civil Rights Movement Conference: Histories, Politics, Memories at UNC, Chapel Hill, on 2-4 April or not, you may want to view videos of its panels.
David Greenberg, "The Cold War Duel That Never Dies," Washington Post, 31 May, reviews Susan Jacoby's Alger Hiss and the Battle for History.
Francis Wheen, "Life on Mars," Literary Review, May, reviews Andy Beckett's When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Ian Pindar reviews John Guy's A Daughter's Love, his new dual biography of Sir Thomas More and his daughter, Margaret, for the Guardian, 30 May.
After picking up a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family has won the $50,000 George Washington Book Prize for "the most important new book about America's founding era."
Joseph Tartakovsky, "Spirits Rising," WSJ, 14 May, reviews Linda Himelstein's The King of Vodka: The Story of Pyotr Smirnov and the Upheaval of an Empire.
Giles Foden, "Fair stood the wind for France," Guardian, 30 May, reviews Anthony Beevor's D-Day: The Battle for Normandy.
Finally, farewell to Patricia Crawford, a historian of women's lives in the 17th century, to Rupert Hall, historian of science and editor of the Isaac Newton papers, to Franklin H. Littell, a scholar of the Holocaust, to Ivan van Sertima, a controversial advocate of Afro-centrism, and to Ronald T. Takaki, a pioneer in American ethnic studies.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Friday's Notes
Errol Morris, "Bamboozling Ourselves," Zoom, 27 May- , is a seven-part series that will continue through next week. Part I, Part II.
Giulia F. Miller reviews Yirmiyahu Yovel's The Other Within: The Marranos: Split Identity and Emerging Modernity for the THES, 28 May.
Ari Kelman, "Lincoln's legacy," TLS, 27 May, reviews Philip B. Kunhardt III, Peter W. Kunhardt and Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., Looking for Lincoln: The making of an American icon, James Oakes's The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the triumph of anti-slavery politics, Eric Foner, ed., Our Lincoln: New perspectives on Lincoln and his world, and Barry Schwartz's Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and memory in late twentieth-century America.
A. W. Purdue, "Politics filtered by the past," THES, 21 May, reviews Reba Sofer's History, Historians, and Conservatism in Britain and America: From the Great War to Thatcher and Reagan.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Biographical Notes
Maggie Scarf, "Vows," NYT, 22 May, reviews Wendy Moore's Wedlock: The True Story of the Disastrous Marriage and Remarkable Divorce of Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore.
Brian Hayes, "An Epistolary Episode," American Scientist, May/June, reviews Keith Devlin's The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-Century Letter That Made the World Modern.
Mark Bostridge, "The darker side of George Eliot," Guardian, 24 May, reviews Brenda Maddox's George Eliot: Novelist, Lover, Wife.
Michael O'Donnell, "Radical Streak," Washington Monthly, May/June, reviews Barry Seldes's Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician.
Janet Maslin, "Unraveling the Labyrinthine Life of a Magical Realist," NYT, 27 May, reviews Gerald Martin's Gabriel García Márquez: A Life.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Wednesday's Notes
John Carey reviews Merry Wiesner-Hanks's The Marvellous Hairy Girls: The Gonzales Sisters and Their Worlds for the Sunday Times, 24 May.
Stephen Amidon reviews Elaine Showalter's A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx for the Sunday Times, 24 May.
Jonathan Ross, "The secret life of Superman," London Times, 23 May, reviews Craig Yoe's Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-creator Joe Shuster.
Allan Mallinson reviews Antony Beevor's D-Day: The Battle for Normandy for the London Times, 23 May.
John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, "Their Man in Havana?" NRO, 26 May, summarizes their findings about Ernest Hemingway's contacts with the KGB.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
More Noted Things
Three Quarks Daily announces the launch of the Quarks, annual prizes for the best blog entries in Science, Arts & Literature, Politics, and Philosophy. See the announcement for all of the details.
Carlos A. Driscoll, Juliet Clutton-Brock, Andrew C. Kitchener and Stephen J. O'Brien, "The Evolution of House Cats," Scientific American, June, says that recent research finds cats were domesticated earlier and elsewhere than we'd previously thought.
Spiegel Staff, "Hitler's European Holocaust Helpers," Der Spiegel, 20 May, looks at the active complicity of non-German Europeans in the Holocaust.
Finally, a belated farewell to Perez Zagorin, a distinguished American historian of 16th and 17th century Europe.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
#50, an early modern edition of the festival, is up at Nick's Mercurius Politicus.
Alice Schroeder, "The Man Who Owned America," Washington Post, 24 May, reviews T. J. Stiles's The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Michael Dirda, "The Importance of Reading in Earnest," Washington Post, 21 May, reviews Thomas Wright's Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde.
Michael Kazin, "Socialist Studies," bookforum, June/August, reviews D. D. Guttenplan's American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone.
Glenn Altschuler, "Looking to America's past to find a path for the future," Boston Globe, 24 May, and David Brooks, "Mirror on America," NYT, 22 May, review Simon Schama's The American Future: A History.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Weed Endnotes
Weeds presents a brief history of cannabis from 2727 B.C. to the present. New episodes on Showtime beginning Monday June 8th at 10PM ET/PT.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Friday's Notes
#50, an early modern edition of the festival, goes up at Nick's Mercurius Politicus on Sunday 24 May. Send nominations of the best of early modern history blogging since 22 March to mercuriuspoliticus*at*googlemail*dot*com or use the form.
The shortlist for Great Britain's Samuel Johnson Prize in nonfiction is: Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, David Grann's The Lost City of Z, Philip Hoare's Leviathan, Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, and Manjit Kumar's Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality.
Richard Vinen, "The great British crisis, 1918–1939," TLS, 20 May, reviews Richard Overy's The Morbid Age: Britain between the wars.
David Runciman, "Like Boiling a Frog," LRB, 28 May, reviews Andrew Lih's The Wikipedia Revolution.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Thursday's Notes
Tim Burke, "What's Distinctive About Africanist Historiography?" Easily Distracted, 20 May, finds four ways in which the historiography of Africa differs from other historiographies.
Adam Nicolson's Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History has won the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje prize for a book that most successfully evokes "the spirit of a place." Nicolson's book features his family's ancestral home from a medieval manor, to the creation by his grandparents, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, of a world-famous garden, and Nicolson's own attempts to restore the estate to its glory days.
Alison Flood, "Scholar denies oral roots of fairy tales," Guardian, 19 May, reviews Ruth B. Bottigheimer's Fairy Tales: A New History.
David Denby, "The Real Rhett Butler," New Yorker, 25 May, reviews Michael Sragrow's Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master and Molly Haskell's Frankly, My Dear: ‘Gone with the Wind' Revisited.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Wednesday's Notes
Christopher Ricks, "Keats's Afterlife," NYRB, 11 June, reviews Stanley Plumley's Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography. See also: Ricks's podcast interview with Giles Harvey about the book.
A. O. Scott, "Holy Mystery! Mayhem at the Vatican," NYT, 15 May, and Ross Douthat, "Dan Brown's America," NYT, 18 May, take on Brown's Angels and Demons.
Michael Wood, "The Myth of Gabriel García Márquez," Slate, 18 May, reviews Gerald Martin's Gabriel García Márquez: A Life.
Dwight Gardner, "Piecing Together That Voice on the Barroom Floor," NYT, 19 May, reviews Barney Hoskyns's Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits.
The text of "Obama's Commencement Address at Notre Dame," 17 May. E. J. Dionne, Russell Arben Fox, and Hugo Schwyzer comment on it.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
More Noted Things
Alec Ryrie reviews Eamon Duffy's The Canon: The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580, for the THES, 7 May.
Sarah Churchwell, "A room of their own, at last," Guardian, 16 May, reviews Elaine Showalter's A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx.
Bruce Kuklick, "America's First Legal Coup," Washington Post, 17 May, reviews David O. Stewart's Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy.
Jonathan Rauch, "Capitalism's Fault Lines," NYT, 14 May, reviews Richard A. Posner's A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent Into Depression. During May, Posner is guest blogging at Andrew Sullivan about the subject of his book.
Finally, farewell to David Herbert Donald (1920-2009), a distinguished American historian.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
Scott Jaschik, "'Becoming Historians'," IHE, 18 May, interviews the editors of a new volume of essays by senior historians about the path to becoming one.
G. W. Bowersock, "The Scholar of Scholars," NYRB, 14 May, reviews Anthony Grafton's Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West. The review is fully available only to subscribers, but it is a worthy tribute to one of the most widely admired contemporary historians.
Jennifer Howard, "From 'Once Upon a Time' to 'Happily Ever After'," CHE, 22 May, reviews Ruth B. Bottigheimer's Fairy Tales: A New History.
Simon Schama, "America's phobia of banks," Financial Times, 15 May, tracks the targeting of monied interests in American political rhetoric. Hat tip.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Sunday's Notes
Jonathan Edwards guest-blogs at "Trips on Grading," zunguzungu, 15 May.
Walter Reich, "‘We Are All Guilty'," NYT, 13 May, reviews Richard J. Evans's The Third Reich at War.
Joseph O'Neill, "Touched by Evil," The Atlantic, June, reviews Brad Gooch's Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor.
Bruce Barcott, "Special Forces," NYT, 14 May, reviews Doug Stanton's Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan.
Leslie Berlin, "A Web That Speaks Your Language," NYT, 16 May, features ways in which barriers of language are being overcome on the web. Berlin is project historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford. Thanks to Manan Ahmed for the tip.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Indian History Carnival #17 is up at varnam. The Giant's Shoulders #11, the history of science carnival, is up at Curving Normality.
Carl Pyrdum, "Arianna Huffington is Good at History," Got Medieval, 11 May, shows Huff hasn't quite got the invention of the printing press, just yet.
Jonathan Yardley, "Love, Power and Art," Washington Post, 17 May, reviews Gerald Martin's Gabriel García Márquez: A Life.
Alexandra Alter, "The Next Age of Discovery," WSJ, 8 May, identifies some of the ways in which digital history transforms how we do history.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Thursday's Notes
Mary Beard, "Spinning Caesar's murder," TLS, 13 May, reviews T. P. Wiseman's Remembering the Roman People: Essays on Late-Republican politics and literature.
Carol Vogel, "By the Hand of a Very Young Master?" NYT, 12 May, reports on Fort Worth's Kimbell Art Museum's purchase of what may be the earliest known work by Michelangelo.
At Airminded, our colleague, Brett Holman, has launched a series of posts about mysterious aerial visitors in the nights skies over Great Britain in 1909.
Colm Tóibín, "Follow-the-Leader," LRB, 14 May, reviews Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton, eds., Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.
Dwight Gardner, "An American Writer, Coming of Age in Oxford," NYT, 12 May, and Michael Dirda, "Friends and Other Characters," Washington Post, 14 May, review Reynolds Price's memoir of his early years at Oxford, Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back.
Erik Eckholm, "Secret Memoir Offers Look Inside China's Politics," NYT, 14 May, and John Pomfret, "Secret Memoir Reveals Dissent by Chinese Leader," Washington Post, 14 May, announce the publication next week of Zhao Ziyang's Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang.
Richard Posner, "Is the Conservative Movement Losing Steam?" The Becker-Posner Blog, 10 May, argues that the late 20th century's intellectual movement is over.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Wednesday's Notes
Andrew Roberts, "The Green-Ink Brigade," Literary Review, May, reviews David Aaronovitch's Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History.
Elspeth Barker, "Getting on with it," Literary Review, May, reviews Elaine Showalter's A Jury of her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx.
hilzoy, "About That Georgia Nullification Resolution ...," Obsidian Wings, 8 May, points out that Georgia's resolutions of state sovereignty is a lightly edited version of Thomas Jefferson's "Resolutions Related To The Alien And Sedition Acts," which were adopted by the Kentucky legislature in 1798.
Alan Ryan, "A Capital Fellow," Literary Review, May, reviews Tristram Hunt's The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels.
Charles Matthews, "The Great and Powerful 'Oz'," Washington Post, 12 May, reviews Evan I. Schwartz's Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story.
Istvan Deak, "Honor's Gasp," TNR, 20 May, reviews Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager's Valkyrie: The Story Of The Plot To Kill Hitler, By Its Last Member, trans. by Steven Rendall.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Modern History Notes
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, "The Mythology of Blogs: A Top Ten List for the Uninitiated Historian," Perspectives on History, May, identifies some that are news to me.
Michael Kazin, "Ruthless in Manhattan," NYT, 7 May, reviews T. J. Stiles's The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Robert McCrum, "The masterpiece that killed George Orwell," Guardian, 10 May, describes the conditions under which Orwell wrote 1984.
Stephen Cox, "Finding Atlas," American Conservative, 4 May, argues that, before Ayn Rand, there was Isabel Patterson.
Jordan Davis, "Into the Wardrobe: C.S. Lewis's Narnia," Nation, 6 May, reviews Laura Miller's The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia.
Laura Shapiro, "Helen Gurley Brown's Sexy Mistake," Slate, 11 May, reviews Jennifer Scanlon's new biography of Brown, Bad Girls Go Everywhere.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
Elisabetta Povoledo, "Leonardo Unbound: Splitting the Master's Tome to Save His Words," NYT, 8 May, looks at the curatorial problems with Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Atlanticus at Milan's Ambrosiana Library.
Richard Holmes, "The Great de Staël," NYRB, 28 May, reviews Francine du Plessix Gray's Madame de Staël: The First Modern Woman, J. Christopher Herold's Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Staël, Renee Winegarten's Germaine de Staël & Benjamin Constant: A Dual Biography, Angelica Goodden's Madame de Staël: The Dangerous Exile, and Madame de Staël's Corinne, or Italy, trans. by Sylvia Raphael.
Richard Dorment for the Telegraph, 21 April, and Stan Katz for the CHE, 10 May, review "Cezanne and Beyond," an exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Sunday's Notes
Ruth Rosen, "Soap to Ploughshares," Slate, 8 May, looks at returning Mother's Day to something closer to what Anna Jarvis and Julia Ward Howe had in mind.
Richard C. Lewontin, "Why Darwin?" NYRB, 28 May, reviews Janet Browne's Darwin's Origin of Species: A Biography, The Annotated Origin: A Facsimile of the First Edition of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, annotated by James T. Costa, Jerry A. Coyne's Why Evolution Is True, and Greg Gibson's It Takes a Genome: How a Clash Between Our Genes and Modern Life Is Making Us Sick.
Benjamin Carter Hett, "Brutally Violent and Destined for Defeat," Washington Post, 10 May, reviews Richard J. Evans's The Third Reich at War.
Dorothy Gallagher, "A Clash of Symbols," NYT, 7 May, reviews Susan Jacoby's Alger Hiss and the Battle for History.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Lori Gottlieb, "Mother, Brace Yourself," NYT, 7 May, and "Worst mothers in literature," BookFinders.com Journal, 4 May, are antidotes to mothersday miasma. Hat tip.
Samuel D. Kassow, "A Tale Of Two Cities," TNR, 6 May, reviews Gordon J. Horwitz's Ghettostadt: Lodz and the Making of a Nazi City.
Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, Alexander Vassiliev, "I.F. Stone, Soviet Agent—Case Closed," Commentary, May, v. D.D. Guttenplan, "Red Harvest: The KGB in America," Nation, 6 May.
John Gross, "Gentility Takes a Holiday," WSJ, 7 May, reviews David Castronovo's Blokes: The Bad Boys of British Literature. Hat tip.
Hendrik Hertzberg, "Bonkers in Georgia," New Yorker, 7 May, tracks state sovereignty sentiment among Southern Republicans.
Friday, May 8, 2009
Friday's Notes
After only eight months on the job, William H. Worger, a historian of southern Africa, who previously taught at UCLA, Stanford, Michigan, and Dalhousie, has been ousted as dean of the graduate school at Louisiana State. More disturbing news from LSU for historians is the report that reduced state funding could jeopardize the existence of the University Press.
Michael Dirda, "A Journey That's Hard to Take," Washington Post, 7 May, reviews Robin Lane Fox's Traveling Heroes: In the Epic Age of Homer.
Jonathan Keates, "The life of a dynamic Doge," TLS, 29 April, reviews Dennis Romano's The Likeness of Venice: A Life of Doge Francesco Foscari, 1373–1457.
Martin Jacques, "Marx's keeper," Guardian, 2 May, reviews Tristram Hunt's The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels.
Waterboarding in 1902, Life, 22 May 1902. "Chorus in Background: Those pious Yanks can't throw stones at us any more." Hat tip.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Thursday's Notes
Biblical Studies Carnival #41 is up at Exploring Our Matrix. The Carnival of Genealogy #71, with a Local History theme, is up at What's Past is Prologue. The anthropology/archaeology carnival, Four Stone Hearth #66, is up at Aardvarchaeology.
Alexandra Mullen reviews Patricia T. O'Conner's and Stewart Kellerman's Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language for the Barnes & Noble Review, 5 May.
John Lichfield, "Was truth the biggest casualty in the case of Vincent and his severed ear?" Independent, 5 May, reports the argument of Hamburg University's Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans, in Van Goghs Ohr, Paul Gauguin und der Pakt des Schweigens [Van Gogh's Ear, Paul Gauguin and the Pact of Silence], that Gauguin was responsible for Van Gogh's loss of an ear.
Christopher Hitchens, "Ruthless yet Humane," Slate, 4 May, finds reasons Obama cited Churchill on torture.
Finally, we grieve with our colleagues, who teach at the University of Georgia and Wesleyan University, for the tragic deaths by murder that their communities have recently experienced.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
More Noted Things
John Wilson discusses Eugene Genovese's new book, Miss Betsey: A Memoir of Marriage at Books & Culture Podcast, 1 May. The memoir of his life with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese bears endorsements from Natalie Zemon Davis, Jean Bethge Elshtain, Paul Gottfried, and Wilfred McClay. I hope Gene will do a second memoir, focusing primarily on his own career.
Hugh Eakin, "Who Should Own the World's Antiquities?" NYRB, 14 May, reviews James Cuno's Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage and Cuno, ed., Whose Culture? The Promise of Museums and the Debate Over Antiquities.
Michiko Kakutani, "A Towering Playwright's Tiny Library," NYT, 4 May, reviews Jonathan Bate's Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
Jonathan Yardley, "A Queen for the Ages," Washington Post, 3 May, reviews Diana Preston's Cleopatra and Antony: Power, Love, and Politics in the Ancient World.
Louis Bayard, "The Bard's Beautiful Mind," Washington Post, 28 April, reviews Jonathan Bate's Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare.
Noel Malcolm, "The Odd Couple," Standpoint, May, reviews Robert Zaretsky's and John T. Scott's The Philosophers' Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding.
Scott Jaschik, "Going After a Scholar's Critic," IHE, 4 May, reports Guenther Lewy's lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center for defamation.
Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, Alexander Vassiliev, "I.F. Stone, Soviet Agent—Case Closed," Commentary, May, argues that the case that Izzy was a Soviet agent in the United States in the 1930s is conclusive.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Dwight Gardner, "No Smiley Faces the Day the Lady Left the Louvre," NYT, 30 April, reviews R. A. Scotti's Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa.
Patricia Cohen, "Roosevelt and the Jews: A Debate Rekindled," NYT, 30 April, anticipates the publication of Richard Breitman, Barbara McDonald Stewart and Severin Hochberg, eds., Refugees and Rescue: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1935-1945. This is the second of three volumes of McDonald's papers.
Evan R. Goldstein, "Running out of Solutions," Foreign Policy, April, looks at the evolving position of Bennie Morris and the Israeli left.
Late this afternoon at my house, we will lift our cups of Mint Julep for the Annual Official Weep. It happens when the choir sings "My Old Kentucky Home" before the running of the Kentucky Derby. Many versions of Stephen Foster's song really are bad enough to make you weep, but I rather like Johnny Cash's revision of it. Foster's lyrics were sanitized by the state legislature two decades ago, but the revision obscured the origins of a song written in the antislavery spirit of Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel. It was originally entitled "Poor Uncle Tom, Good Night."
Friday, May 1, 2009
Friday's Notes
History Carnival LXXVI is up at Penny Richards's Disability Studies.
Bob Blaisdell reviews Barry Schwartz's Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth-Century America for the THES, 30 April. This second volume follows Schwartz's first, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (2000).
Michael Dirda, "Giving Us the Pieces, but Not the Prose," Washington Post, 30 April, reviews Mark Twain's Who Is Mark Twain?
Tony Mann reviews Loren Graham's and Jean-Michel Kantor's Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity for the THES, 30 April.
Fred Inglis, "Values of Homo unacademicus," THES, 30 April, reviews Michele Lamont's How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
More Noted Things
A Conversation:
Tristram Hunt, "Feminist friend or foe?" Guardian, 29 April, draws on Hunt's The Frock-coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels.
Dwight Gardner, "The Mogul Who Built Corporate America," NYT, 28 April, reviews T. J. Stiles's The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Michelle Orange, "Not Easy Being Greene: Graham Greene's Letters," Nation, 15 April, reviews Richard Greene, ed., Graham Greene: A Life in Letters.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
Penny Richards hosts History Carnival LXXVI at Disability Studies on Friday 1 May. Send nominations of April's best in history blogging to her at disstud*at*temple*dot*edu or use the form.
Ingrid D. Rowland, "A Silly, Very Cultured Club," NYRB, 14 May, reviews Bruce Redford's Dilettanti: The Antic and the Antique in Eighteenth-Century England.
Jonathan Zasloff, "What if torture is necessary but illegal? Learning from Lincoln," The Reality-Based Community, 27 April, asks "What did Lincoln do?"
A Pandemic Reader:
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
More Modern Notes
Scott Jaschik, "Larry Kramer Questions Gay Studies," IHE, 28 April, discusses Kramer's "Yale's Conspiracy of Silence," Daily Beast, 24 April, with scholars in the field.
Robert Service reviews Tristram Hunt's The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels for the Sunday Times, 26 April.
George Scialabba, "Only Words: Liberalism, Past and Future," The Nation, 11 May, reviews Jedediah Purdy's A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom and Alan Wolfe's The Future of Liberalism.
Daniel Mallory, "Who Stole the Mona Lisa?" Washington Post, 26 April, reviews R.A. Scotti's Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa and Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler's The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection.
Sam Kean, "Where's Our Scapegoat?" Slate, 27 April, reviews Frank Partnoy's The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, The Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Modern History Notes
Larry Kramer, "Yale's Conspiracy of Silence," Daily Beast, 24 April, lays out the activist's grievances with the University's handling of gay & lesbian studies.
Kevin Murphy, "U. S. History for Dummies," Ghost in the Machine, 22 April, offers a primer for tea parties.
Barron H. Lerner, "Gather 'Round the Cadaver," Slate, 24 April, Elizabeth Redden, "Photographic History of Human Dissection," IHE, 29 April, and Abigail Zuger, "Snapshots From the Days of Bare-Hands Anatomy," NYT, 27 April, review John Harley Warner's and James M. Edmonson's Dissection, a book of photographs of 19th and 20th century medical students and their cadavers.
Louis Begley, "Before the Law," TNR, 6 May, reviews Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg, and Benno Wagner, eds., Franz Kafka: The Office Writings.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Sunday's Notes
Pankaj Mishra, "Another Incarnation," NYT, 24 April, reviews Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History.
Roger Cohen, "America Unmasked," NYT, 24 April, reviews Godfrey Hodgson's The Myth of American Exceptionalism.
Louise Richardson, "Malicious Intent," NYT, 24 April, reviews Michael Burleigh's Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism.
Laura Tyson Li, "The Final Triumph of Chiang Kai-shek," Washington Post, 26 April, reviews Jay Taylor's The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-Shek and the Struggle for Modern China.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Matthew Reisz, "'The book everyone wishes they'd written'," THES, 23 April, launches the periodical's series in which scholars name a work in their field that they most admire.
Alan Baumler, "Grading exams in Late Imperial China," Frog in a Well/China, 24 April, finds us doing it in another time and another place.
Tim Blanning, "Joseph Haydn and the German Nation," History Today, May, discusses the composer's cultural nationalism.
Paul Collins, "Online gaming the Victorian way," New Scientist, 17 April, shows how chess at a distance led to the telegraph, answering a need felt since England's Henry I played France's Louis VI in 1119. Hat tip.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Notes Ancient & Modern
Angela Charlton, "Humanity's earliest written works go online," AP, 21 April, introduces World Digital Library. Thanks to Les Baitzer for the tip.
Stacy Schiff, "Who's Buried in Cleopatra's Tomb?" NYT, 21 April, considers the questions and answers that may be suggested by the discovery of Cleopatra's tomb.
Carlin Romano, "An Author's Favorite Wittgenstein," CHE, 24 August, reviews Alexander Waugh's The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War.
Michiko Kakutani, "Brand Che: Revolutionary as Marketer's Dream," NYT, 20 April, reviews Michael Casey's Che's Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image.
Scott Shane and Mark Mazetti, "In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Their Past Use," NYT, 21 April, tells a stunning tale of indifference to history. Or is it that policy-makers cannot now admit that they did know the history?
Finally, "turned into a newt," Texas in Africa, 17 April, looks back again at Newt Gingrich's dissertation in history at Tulane. See also: Dave Noon, "Gingrich the Historian," Lawyers, Guns, and Money, 20 April. We could do a whole series of these. Ralph Reed, anyone? Others? Thanks to Manan Ahmed for the tip.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
More Noted Things
Johann Hari, "Why the Wicked Witch Isn't Dead," Slate, 20 April, reviews John Demos's The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-hunting in the Western World and Thomas Robisheaux's The Last Witch of Langenburg: Murder in a German Village.
Jill Lepore, "The Humbug," New Yorker, 27 April, reviews In the Shadow of the Master: Classic Tales by Edgar Allen Poe and Essays by ..., Mary Higgins Clark, et al., On a Raven's Wing: New Tales in Honor of Edgar Allen Poe, and Peter Ackroyd's Poe: A Life Cut Short. For a bonus, Lepore challenges you to "Solve Edgar Allen Poe's Cryptogram," Graham's Magazine (August 1841).
Congratulations to the winners of Pulitzer Prizes for 2009:
and to: Mary Elizabeth Berry of UC, Berkeley, Robert A. Caro, William Chester Jordan and James M. McPherson of Princeton, Rashid Khalidi of Columbia, T. J. Jackson Lears of Rutgers, Matthew S. Santirocco of NYU, Jonathan Sarna of Brandeis, Steven Shapin of Harvard, Sanjay Subramanyam of UCLA, Donald E. Worster of the University of Kansas, Itamar Ravinovich of Tel Aviv, and Romila Thapar of Jawaharlal Nehru University, who are newly elected members of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Things Noted Here and There
Mary Beard, "Scrolling Down the Ages," NYT, 16 April, looks at book-making and -marketing in ancient Greece and Rome.
Alan Jacobs, "Gardening and Governing," Books & Culture, 3 April, reviews Tim Richardson's The Arcadian Friends: Inventing the English Landscape Garden.
Benjamin L. Carp, "Nice Party, But Not So Revolutionary," Washington Post, 19 April, compares the tax protests of 1773 and 2009.
Valerie Strauss, "What Was the Civil War Really About?" Washington Post, 20 April, talks with Richmond's Ed Ayres, St. Joseph's Randall Miller, Princeton's James McPherson, and others about how the election of Barack Obama may affect interpretations of the American Civil War.
Jon Garvie, "Is it fresh?" TLS, 15 April, reviews Susanne Friedberg's Fresh: A perishable history.
Ross Douthat, "God and Politics," NYT, 16 April, reviews Steven P. Miller's Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South.
Finally, farewell to Harvard's Samuel H. Beer.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Conditions Currently Rendering Me Mute
From my evangelical childhood:
Yield not to temptation,
for yielding is sin ....
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Notes Ancient & Modern
XLIX, an ancient/medieval edition of the festival, is up at Muhlberger's Early History.
Judith Weingarten reviews Pat Southern's Empress Zenobia: Palmyra's Rebel Queen for the THES, 16 April.
Stephen Halliday reviews Patrick H. Armstrong's Darwin's Luck: Chance and Fortune in the Life and Work of Charles Darwin for the THES, 16 April.
Roberta Smith, "Going All Out, Right to the End," NYT, 16 April, reviews "Picasso: Mosqueteros," an exhibit at the Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan.
Roger Lewis reviews Evi Kurz's The Kissinger Saga: Walter and Henry Kissinger, Two Brothers from Fürth, Germany for the Telegraph, 16 April.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Friday's Notes
Hilary Mantel, "What did her neighbours say when Gabriel had gone?" LRB, 9 April, reviews Miri Rubin's Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary.
Graham Robb, "Rimbaud in the Pléiade," TLS, 15 April, reviews Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud's Oeuvres Complètes, edited by André Guyaux with Aurélia Cervoni.
Michael Dirda, "What Lies Beneath Old-Erotica Covers," Washington Post, 16 April, reviews Donna Dennis's Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York.
Ross Posnock, "Black is Brilliant," TNR, 15 April, reviews Leonard Harris's and Charles Molesworth's Alain Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher.
"Abuse of Power: The Bush Administration's Secret Legal Memos," ACLU, 16 April, has the four Bush administration memos justifying torture of prisoners and the Obama administration statement that accompanied their release yesterday.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Thursday's Notes
Indian History Carnival #16 is up at varnam. The Giant's Shoulders #10, the history of science carnival, is up at Stochastic Scribbles.
Scott McLemee's interview with John H. Summers, "Every Fury on Earth," IHE, 15 April, is not to be missed.
John Steele Gordon, "Inventing a New World," WSJ, 11 April, reviews Gavin Weightman's The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World, 1776-1914.
Mark Bostridge, "Austenmania," Literary Review, April, reviews Claire Harman's Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World.
John Pipkin, "Woods Burner," Boston Globe, 12 April, argues that Thoreau may have taken up residence at Walden Pond because of a forest fire that he'd sparked a year earlier.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Cliopatria Welcomes William Jelani Cobb
Cliopatria is pleased to welcome William Jelani Cobb to our circle. A native of New York City, Professor Cobb did his undergraduate work at Howard University and his doctorate at Rutgers, with David Levering Lewis. He is now an Associate Professor of History at Spelman College in Atlanta.
Dr. Cobb is the author of To The Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic and editor of The Essential Harold Cruse: A Reader and The Devil & Dave Chappelle and Other Essays. Currently, he is at work on two book manuscripts, In Our Lifetimes: Barack Obama and the New Black America and a monograph, Antidote to Revolution: African American Anticommunism and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 1931-1957.
Dr. Cobb's articles and essays have appeared in the Washington Post, Essence, The Progressive, Ebony, at TheRoot.com and elsewhere. An occasional commentator on NPR, CNN, Al-Jazeera, CBS News, and other national broadcast outlets, he blogs at Creative Ink and American Exception. It's a pleasure to welcome him to Cliopatria.
Monday, April 13, 2009
Things Noted Here and There
Hilary Mantel, "The War Against Women," NYRB, 30 April, reviews Marilyn French's From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, 4 volumes, with forewards by Margaret Atwood.
Ronald Dworkin, "Looking for Cass Sunstein," NYRB, 30 April, reviews Cass Sunstein's A Constitution of Many Minds: Why the Founding Document Doesn't Mean What It Meant Before. Hat tip.
Michael Korda, "Patton Like You've Never Seen Him Before," Daily Beast, 12 April, pans the History Channel's new series on General George S. Patton.
Jean Edward Smith, "How to End a War, Eisenhower's Way," 100 Days, 11 April, looks at Eisenhower's decision to end the war in Korea.
Daniel Mendelsohn, "The Collector," TNR, 15 April, reviews Susan Sontag's Reborn: Journals & Notebooks 1947-1963, David Reiff, ed.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Sunday's Notes
Jan Freeman, "Clever Horses," Boston Globe, 12 April, and Geoffrey K. Pullum, "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice," CHE, 17 April, note that on Thursday we'll celebrate a half century of Strunk's and White's bad advice.
Paul Richard, "Tiny Treasure Offers Secret That Inspires," Washington Post, 11 April, closely examines Giulio Clovio's "The Lamentation" which is in "Heaven on Earth: Manuscript Illuminations from the National Gallery of Art," an exhibit at the National Gallery in Washington.
Miranda Seymour, "This Blessed Plot," NYT, 10 April, reviews Andrea Wulf's The Brother Gardners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession.
Walter Isaacson, "A Delicate Balance," NYT, 10 April, reviews Richard Beeman's Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution.
Michael O'Donnell, "They Fought the Law," Nation, 8 April, Fred Strebeigh's Equal: Women Reshape American Law.
U. S. History Notes below the fold ...
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Edward Rothstein, "Jefferson's Blind Spots and Ideals, in Brick and Mortar," NYT, 9 April, reviews Jefferson's Monticello at Charlottesville and Poplar Forest near Lynchburg, Virginia.
David McCullough, "Paving Over History," NYT, 10 April, is a video op-ed, in which McCullough appeals for saving the view of the Brooklyn Bridge, partly for a reason that may not have occurred to you.
Simon Baatz, "Robbers of Romance," Washington Post, 12 April, reviews Jeff Guinn's Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie And Clyde and Paul Schneider's Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend.
Michiko Kakutani, "Dysfunctional in Old Vienna: Never Good Enough for Big Daddy," NYT, 9 April, reviews Alexander Waugh's The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War.
James Rosen, "Tales from the Cult," Washington Post, 12 April, reviews Mark Rudd's Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen.
Marc Fisher, "At Least They Weren't Nazis," Washington Post, 12 April, reviews Stefan Aust's Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F., Anthea Bell, trans.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Friday's Notes
Richard J. Evans reviews Frank McDonough's Sophie Scholl: The Real Story of the Woman who Defied Hitler for the THES, 9 April.
Congratulations to historians who have won Guggenheim Fellowships for 2009:
That would be three Guggenheims to Rutgers historians.Robert Beachy, Goucher College Jeffrey Bortz, Appalachian State University Kate Brown, University of Maryland, Baltimore County Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University Pierre Force, Columbia University
Peter Galison, Harvard University Risa L. Goluboff, University of Virginia Law School Annette Gordon-Reed, New York Law School/ Rutgers University Amy Greenberg, Pennsylvania State University Karen Halttunen, University of Southern California Benjamin Carter Hett, Hunter College/Graduate Center, CUNY Noel Lenski, University of Colorado Theodore J. Lewis, Johns Hopkins University
Charles Marsh, University of Virginia Roderick A. McDonald, Rider University Mae M. Ngai, Columbia University Tara Nummedal, Brown University Leslie Peirce, New York University Carla Gardina Pestana, Miami University Jacob Soll, Rutgers University Deborah Gray White, Rutgers University
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Thursday's Notes
Allison Flood, "Free-access World Digital Library set to launch," Guardian, 8 April, announces the launch of the WDL on 21 April.
Biancamaria Fontana, "Witness to Three Revolutions," TLS, 8 April, reviews Caroline Moorehead's Dancing to the Precipice: Lucie de la Tour du Pin and the French Revolution.
Maureen Freely reviews Christopher de Bellaigue's Rebel Land: Among Turkey's Forgotten Peoples and Daniel Metcalfe's Out of Steppe: The Lost Peoples of Central Asia for the London Times, 4 April.
Two years after Emory University's announcement that it would put $2,000,000 into translations of Deborah Lipstadt's website Holocaust Denial on Trial, it is now readily accessible in Arabic, Farsi, Russian, and Turkish.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
20th Century Notes
Blake Gopnik, "Face Value," Washington Post, 7 April, reviews "Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture," an exhibit at Washington's National Portrait Gallery.
Michael Kenney, "A Holocaust narrative in the words of refugee Jews," Boston Globe, 7 April, reviews Debórah Dwork's and Robert Jan Van Pelt's Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933-1946.
Nicholas Lemann, "Paper Tigers," New Yorker, 13 April, reviews Kenneth Whyte's The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst, Richard J. Tofel's Restless Genius: Barney Kilgore, The Wall Street Journal, and the Invention of Modern Journalism, and Michael Wolff's The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
More Noted Things
David Neiwart, "Fox ambush crew pursues history prof with bogus claims – and is proud of it," Crooks and Liars, 5 April, has the footage of Fox News going all gotcha on Columbia's Alan Brinkley. Thanks to Manan Ahmed for the tip.
Paul Freedman, "A Spanish Epic Retold," WSJ, 4 April, reviews Burton Raffel's new translation of The Song of the Cid.
The new Common-Place is up! It's a special issue, offering many replies to Sydney Smith's question in the Edinburgh Review (January 1820): "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?"
Denis Donoghue, "The unspeakable stress of pitch," New Criterion, April, reviews Paul Mariani's Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life.
I spoke with an editor at Life.com yesterday about its photographs at the Lorraine Motel after Martin Luther King's assassination. As a result, they've corrected the identification of the man shown embracing Ralph Abernathy and standing alone and pensive outside King's motel room. If you don't know who Will D. Campbell is, introduce yourself to his book, Brother to a Dragonfly.
Finally, farewell to Sidney Fine, who taught over 26,000 students in 53 years at the University of Michigan.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Things Noted Here and There
Lauren Koenig, "Senior Class Day speaker stirs up controversy," inside VANDY, 2 April, notes Vanderbilt student objections to honoring historian/plagiarist Doris Kearns Goodwin. Hat tip.
"Across the Continent, Big Milestones Mean Big Parties," Washington Post, 5 April, tracks this year's multiple anniversaries across Europe.
Linford Fisher, "Comparative Ethnohistory," Religion in American History, 3 April, looks at early American religious and ethnohistory. Fisher will join the history department at Brown in the fall.
Adam Kirsch, "Primary Source," NextBook, 30 March, reviews Grigoris Balakian's Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918.
Eric Arnesen reviews David Kushner's Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America's Legendary Suburb for the Chicago Tribune, 28 March.
Historians' Opinions below the fold ...
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Sunday's Notes
History Carnival is in need of hosts for May and through the summer months. If you'd like to do it, contact Sharon Howard at sharon*at*earlymodernweb*dot*org*dot*uk.
Tom Holland, "The Revolt That Ravaged An Empire," Washington Post, 5 April, reviews Barry Strauss's The Spartacus War.
Adam Kirsch, "Sealed with a Kiss," NYT, 3 April, reviews Susan Gubar's Judas: A Biography.
Claire Tomalin, "A Woman for All Seasons," NYT, 2 April, reviews John Guy's A Daughter's Love: Thomas More and His Dearest Meg.
Ben Hoyle, "Handel 'was binge eater and problem drinker'," London Times, 2 April, previews "Handel Reveal'd," an exhibit that opens this week at London's Handel House Museum.
Martha A. Sandweiss, "Invisible Woman," Washington Post, 5 April, reviews Lea VanderVelde's Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery's Frontier.
Susan Dominus, "The Past as Peep Show," NYT, 2 April, reviews Kat Long's The Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex and Sin in New York City and Donna Dennis's Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York.
Adam Kirsch, "Life On Venus: Europe's Last Man," World Affairs, Spring, features the speculation of late 19th century intellectuals that bourgeois culture would destroy the human spirit.
20th Century Notes below the fold ...
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Weak Endnotes
From Karen Winkler's Q & A with Michèle Lamont, the author of How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment, CHE, 3 April:
In history there is a high degree of consensus among scholars about what is good. But it is not based so much on a common theory, or method, or whether people think the discipline is part of the humanities or social sciences. It's a shared sense of craftsmanship. People care about whether the work is careful. They believe they can identify careful work. And that they can convince others about it. The degree of consensus has varied over the years. In the 1960s, for example, the discipline was polarized politically. But it has found consensus in the practice of scholarship.
Historians believe that contrasts sharply with English literature. As one told me, "The disciplinary center holds." That sense of consensus makes history proposals and applicants very successful in multidisciplinary competitions like the national fellowship and grant programs.
Ron Rosenbaum, "Should We Care What Shakespeare Did in Bed?" Slate, 2 April, sees the controversy about the new "Shakespeare portrait" as a discussion of his sexuality.
Marina Warner, "Ventriloquism," LRB, 9 April, reviews Daniel Karlin, ed., Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám by Edward FitzGerald.
Holland Cotter, "From the Deep, a Diva With Many Faces," NYT, 2 April, reviews "Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas," an exhibit at Washington's National Museum of African Art.
American History Notes below the fold --
Friday, April 3, 2009
Friday's Notes
Alison Flood, "Is this YouTube for books?" Guardian, 31 March, introduces Scribd.com.
Tunku Varadarajan, "A People and Their Karma," WSJ, 1 April, reviews Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History.
Sarah Bendall reviews James R. Akerman, ed., The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire for the THES, 2 April.
Christopher Clark, "Vases, Tea Sets, Cigars, His Own Watercolours," LRB, 9 April, reviews Fabrice d'Almeida's High Society in the Third Reich.
Trevor Herbert reviews Krin Gabbard's Hotter than That: The Trumpet, Jazz, and American Culture for the THES, 2 April.
Finally, on the eve of the 41st anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination, Life magazine releases heretofore unpublished photographs taken shortly thereafter by its photographer at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Thanks to Les Baitzer for the tip.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Thursday's Notes
History Carnival LXXV is up at Frog in a Well: Korea. It's a quiz!
Meredith Hindley, "The Voracious Pen of Thomas Carlyle," Humanities, March/April, features the crucial role of The French Revolution: A History in Carlyle's career.
Adam Zamoyski, "How I Rewrote Polish History," Standpoint, March, reflects on revising his The Polish Way: A Thousand-Year History of the Poles and their Culture after a decisive turning point in Poland's history.
Michael Dirda, "No More Waiting for Beckett's Letters," Washington Post, 2 April, reviews Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, eds., The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Volume I. 1929-1940.
Janet Maslin, "A Daughter's Life With Daddy Issues," NYT, 2 April, reviews Allegra Huston's Love Child. Until a teenager, Allegra thought that she was the daughter of Hollywood producer, John Huston, but her biological father is the British historian, John Julius Norwich, her half-sister is his daughter, the historian Artemis Cooper, and her half-brother-in-law, the historian Anthony Beevor.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Wednesday's Notes
History Carnival LXXV will be up later today at Frog in a Well: Korea.
If Virgil were on Facebook ...
Anthony Gottlieb, "A Nervous Splendor," New Yorker, 6 April, reviews Alexander Waugh's The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War.
Spencer A. Leonard, "Going It Alone: Christopher Hitchens and the Death of the Left," The Platypus Affiliated Society, 15 March, reviews Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman, eds., Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left.
Claire Potter, "What Side Are You On: The Politics of History (Meetings)," Tenured Radical, 31 March, replies to my claim yesterday that the OAH convention's panel on the state of studies of modern American conservatism might have been improved had it included – you know – a conservative historian working on the subject.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
3 Series, 2 Personal Appearances, & a Quibble
At Notorious Ph.D., Judith Bennett responds to the March roundtable discussion of her book, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism.
Errol Morris, "Whose Father Was He?" Zoom, 29 March, is a five-part series this week, in which Morris interrogates an American Civil War era photograph of three children.
At TPM Café this week, Peniel Joseph of Brandeis, Columbia's Todd Gitlin, Penn's Thomas Sugrue, and Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation join Clay Risen, the author of A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination, to discuss his book.
You can hear our former colleague, Manan Ahmed, discuss "Obama Lays out New Policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan," on Chicago Public Radio's Worldview.
Finally, on a less serious note, Historiann points out that the OAH convention may go down in history as "the one where Tenured Radical hurled into a trash can in the Seattle Convention Center." More seriously, Rick Shenkman has done yeoman service in presenting videos of major sessions of the convention on HNN's mainpage. Still, I wonder about the composition of panels at our conventions. How could a panel on the state of the study of recent American conservatism not include a conservative historian? Donald Critchlow, for example, should have been there to respond to Rick Perlstein's criticism. I've seen this happen again and again at our conventions: major panels dealing with major issues and there's not a dime's worth of difference in what or the ways the panelists think about them.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Things Noted Here and There
Jonathan Dresner will host History Carnival LXXV on Wednesday 1 April at Frog in a Well: Korea. Send nominations of March's best in history blogging to jonathan*at*froginawell*dot*net or use the form.
Neely Tucker, "What's the Meaning of Life? Turn to the Last Page," Washington Post, 29 March, reviews Simon Critchley's The Book of Dead Philosophers.
Jamie Merrill, "The Ten Best History Books," Independent, 27 January, lists Merrill's selections, which strike me as an interesting, but given the title, odd list.
Edward Rothstein, "Casting a Sliver of Light on the Heart of Darkness," NYT, 29 March, reviews "Brazza in Congo: A Life and Legacy," an exhibit at New York University's Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, and "Brazza: A Symbol for Humanity," an exhibit at Manhattan's National Arts Club.
"Lorca and the Gay World," New Yorker, 24 March, is a booknote on Ian Gibson's Lorca y el mundo Gay.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Sunday's Notes
Peter Applebome, "John Hope Franklin, Scholar and Witness," NYT, 28 March, recalls the historian's life and work.
At Legal History, Christopher Capozzola blogs the OAH convention in Seattle: Day One, Day Two & Day Three.
Fernando Gouvêa, "Things that Teach," American Scientist, March/April, reviews Peggy Aldrich Kidwell, Amy Ackerberg-Hastings and David Lindsay Roberts, Tools of American Mathematics Teaching, 1800–2000.
Caleb Crain, "Brother, Can You Spare a Room?" NYT, 26 March, is an essay occasioned by new editions of Thomas Butler Gunn’s The Physiology of New York Boardinghouses (1856).
David Oshinsky, "They Dug It," NYT, 27 March, reviews Julie Greene's The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal.
Peter Galison, "Sons of Atom," NYT, 26 March, reviews Louisa Gilder's The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Brad Leithauser, "Family Feuds," NYT, 27 March, reviews Anne Carson, trans., An Oresteia.
Philip Kennicott, "To Dream in Bard's Day? At Folger, That's the Question," Washington Post, 12 March, and Edward Rothstein, "Catching Some Z's in Days of Yore," NYT, 27 March, review "To Sleep, Perchance to Dream," an exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC.
Dennis Overbye, "A Telescope to the Past as Galileo Visits U.S.," NYT, 27 March, reviews "Galileo, the Medici and the Age of Astronomy," an exhibit opening on 4 April at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute.
Michael Downes, "The Janácek affair," TLS, 25 March, reviews John Tyrrell's Janácek: Years of a Life. Volume Two (1914–1928): Tsar of the Forests.
Bob Thompson, "An Author Peers at Reagan, and the Brink," Washington Post, 26 March, reviews James Mann's The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Friday's Notes
Walter Dellinger, "The Historian Who Lived What He Taught," Washington Post, 26 March, and Stan Katz, "John Hope Franklin, RIP," Brainstorm, 25 March, are tributes by two of the legion who knew him as mentor, colleague and friend.
Historiann and Tenured Radical report from the OAH convention in Seattle.
Michael Dirda, "Darker Judas, or A Forgiving Light?" Washington Post, 26 March, reviews Susan Gubar's Judas: A Biography.
Edward Rothstein, "There Are No Small Parts in This American History Lesson," NYT, 11 March, reviews "Big!" an exhibit at the National Archives in Washington, DC.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Thursday's Notes
Ari Kelman's "A Method to Our Madness," Edge of the American West, 23 March, on books for a course on historical methods, generates a good discussion.
Richard Dunn narrates a slide show, "Taking the long view of the telescope's history," Guardian, 19 March.
Rachel Polonsky, "Pushkin's library lyrics," TLS, 25 March, reviews Alexander Pushkin, Eugen Onegin, trans. by Stanley Mitchell, and Andrew Kahn's Pushkin's Lyric Intelligence.
David A. Bell, "Becoming France," TNR, 1 April, reviews Robert Gildea's Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799-1914.
Jamie James, "A Traveler's Way With Words," WSJ, 20 March, reviews Christopher Benfey, ed., Lafcadio Hearn: American Writings.
Niall Ferguson, "This financial crisis does have a Conservative solution," Telegraph, 24 March, sees three options for conservatives.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Farewell to John Hope Franklin
At 94, John Hope Franklin died today in Durham, North Carolina, of congestive heart failure. He was a pioneer in African American history, a distinguished historian, and a gentleman. His death occurs on the eve of the Organization of American Historians' convention in Seattle.
More Noted Things
John Wilson, "Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in the First Century BC," Books & Culture, 23 March, reviews Barry Strauss's The Spartacus War.
Ingrid D. Rowland, "The Flowering Genius of Maria Sibylla Merian," NYRB, 9 April, reviews Kim Todd's Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis and "Maria Sibylla Merian & Daughters: Women of Art and Science," an exhibit at Amsterdam's Rembrandt House Museum, February 23–May 18, 2008, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, June 10– August 31, 2008.
Lorna Scott Fox, "There Will Always Be Blood: True Crime Writing," The Nation, 18 March, reviews Harold Schechter, ed., True Crime: An American Anthology.
Drew Gilpin Faust, "The Progress of Our Arms," TNR, 18 March, reviews James McPherson's Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief.
Thomas Mallon, "Theirs Truly: The Lowell-Bishop Letters," Atlantic, April, reviews Thomas Travisano, with Saskia Hamilton, ed., Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Things Noted Here and There
Lucas Mearian, "Internet Archive Upgrades Wayback Machine," PC World, 22 March, announces a massive upgrade to the Net's memory.
The Roundtable on Judith Bennett's History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism continues at:
Part I, Notorious PhD
Part II, Historiann
Part III, Tenured Radical
Part IV, Blogenspiel
Part V, Notorious PhD, next Monday, Bennett responds to the whole discussion.
Suzannah Lipscomb, "Who Was Henry VIII?" History Today, April, attempts to penetrate current illusions about him.
Jean Strouse, "When the Economy Really Did ‘Fall Off a Cliff'," NYT, 22 March, looks at the American banking crisis of 1907. Strouse is the author of Morgan: American Financier and director of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Mostly Modern Things Noted
At Chapati Mystery, Wendy Doniger responds to discussion of her new book, The Hindus: An Alternative History. The discussion was prompted by Michael Dirda's review of it.
Aisha Labi, "At Cambridge, Darwin's Natural Selection Was Comfort, Ledgers Show," CHE, 23 March, reports on newly found evidence about Charles Darwin's student years at Cambridge.
Blake Gopnik, "All Eyes Turn To T.J. Clark, Who Turns His To Picasso," "Shades of Meaning at First Blush," and "T.J. Clark Tells the 'Truth' About Picasso," Washington Post, 22 March, feature UC, Berkeley's distinguished art historian. He began his Mellon lecture series on "Picasso and Truth" yesterday at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Darius Rejali, "Icewater and Sweatboxes," Slate, 17 March, traces the history of the CIA's use of torture. Rejali, a political scientist at Reed, is the author of Torture and Democracy (Princeton UP, 2007).
Rob Farley hosted a live discussion with Juan Cole about his new book, Engaging the Muslim World, at firedoglake, 22 March. After 9:00 a.m. edt this morning, you can hear Cole interviewed about his book on PBS's "Morning Edition".
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Sunday's Notes
Carnivalesque XLVIII, an early modern edition of the festival, is up at Sarah Werner's Wynken de Worde.
Nelson Hernandez, "Buried Treasure," Washington Post, 22 March, reviews Jo Marchant's Decoding the Heavens: A 2000-Year-Old Computer -- and the Century-Long Search to Discover Its Secrets.
Danuta Schanzer reviews Valerie Allen's On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages for Reviews in History, #733. Consider yourself forewarned ....
Alida Becker, "Twisted Sister," NYT, 19 March, reviews Flora Fraser's Pauline Bonaparte: Venus of Empire.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Weak Endnotes
The winners of this year's Bancroft Prize are: Thomas G. Andrews's Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War, Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, and Pekka Hämäläinen's The Comanche Empire.
Meet Celia Chazelle, a medievalist who chairs the College of New Jersey's History Department. Her professional credentials are excellent -- could hardly be better -- but she's far from a remote ivy-tower academic. Take a look at her blog, Inside/ Outside, where she writes about her teaching experience in a state prison at Bordentown. It is featured in Michele Alperin's "Prison Instruction: A Respite from Isolation," US 1, 28 December.
The Historical Society's Randall Stephens announces the launch of its new blog, ths blog. He calls it a group blog, which probably means that it welcomes potential posts from other historians. Heather Cox Richardson of UMass, Amherst, is first up, with "Richardson's Rules of Order, Part I: Why Study History?" If ths blog can match the high quality of Historically Speaking, which Stephens also edits, you'll want to keep a close eye on it.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Friday's Notes
Michael Dirda, "Passages from India," Washington Post, 19 March, reviews Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History. See also: Sepoy's "An Alternate History," Chapati Mystery, 19 March.
Holland Cotter, "Treasures at a Korean Crossroad," NYT, 19 March, reviews "Art of the Korean Renaissance, 1400-1600," an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan.
Over 40 years after its original publication, the Post's Jonathan Yardley takes another look at Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914.
Until 30 April, you can browse and view Alexander Street's American History in Video, its collection of History Channel programs, newsreels from the early twentieth century, and other visual sources without charge.
Peter Campbell, "At the National Gallery," LRB, 26 March, reviews "Picasso: Challenging the Past," an exhibit at London's National Gallery.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
European History Notes
Laleh Khalili reviews Emily Toth's Ms. Mentor's New and Ever More Impeccable Advice for Women and Men in Academia for the THES, 12 March.
Anthony Kenny, "Maurice Bowra, the great Oxford gossip," TLS, 18 March, reviews Leslie Mitchell's Maurice Bowra: A Life.
Michelle Harvey reviews Jeffrey Lockwood's Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War for the THES, 19 March.
Robert Applebaum reviews a new edition of The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi (1570): The Art and Craft of a Master Cook for the THES, 19 March.
James Fenton, "Pure Palladio," TLS, 18 March, reviews "Andrea Palladio: His Life and Legacy," an exhibit at London's Royal Academy of Arts, and Guido Beltramini and Howard Burns, Palladio.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Modern History Notes
Indian History Carnival #15 is up at varnam.
Christopher Hitchens, "The Revenge of Karl Marx," The Atlantic, April, re-evaluates Marx, in light of the current economic crisis.
Dwight Garner, "In Chicago, Real Estate and Race as a Volatile Mix," NYT, 17 March, reviews Beryl Satter's Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America.
Benjamin Ivry, "The Private Barthes," CHE, 20 March, reviews Roland Barthe's journals, Système de la mode (The Fashion System), L'Empire des signes (Empire of Signs), Fragments d'un discours amoureux (A Lover's Discourse: Fragments), Journal de deuil (Bereavement Diary) and Carnets du voyage en Chine (China Travel Notebook), translated by Richard Howard.
Anne Applebaum, "A ‘Beacon Light' Into Black Sites," Slate, 16 March, calls for application of the rule of law in the torture inquiry.
Last night, I attended Emory's celebration of the publication of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume I, 1929-1940. The volume is reviewed here. Salman Rushdie, Edward Albee, and others read excerpts from the letters. This letters project has been twenty years in the creation, with three more volumes to go. If what I heard is any sign of things to come, it is well worth the wait.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Things Noted Here and There
The Military History Carnival for March is up at Jennie's American Presidents Blog. The Giant's Shoulders #9, the history of science carnival, is up at The Evilutionary Biologist. Wynken de Worde's Sarah Werner will host an early modern edition of on 21 March. Use the form to nominate the best in early modern history blogging since 25 January.
Danielle Allen, "A More Perfect Monument," TNR, 18 March, reviews Josiah Ober's Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens.
Steve Coates, "Under the Volcano," NYT, 12 March, reviews Mary Beard's The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found.
John F. Burns, "Is This a Shakespeare Which I See Before Me?" NYT, 9 March, and Adam Gopnik, "Look Here, Upon This Picture," New Yorker, 12 March, cast skeptical eyes on the portrait thought to be of William Shakespeare.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Mr H's Giornale Nuovo to Cliopatria's Hall of Fame
When they are no longer active, Cliopatria honors especially distinguished history blogs by naming them to its Hall of Fame. Heretofore, only Invisible Adjunct (February 2003 - August 2004), Caleb McDaniel's Mode for Caleb (July 2004 - August 2006), and William Turkel's Digital History Hacks (December 2005 - December 2008) have been so honored. At Sharon Howard's suggestion, we're adding Mr H's Giornale Nuovo to the Hall of Fame. BibliOdyssey's pk or peacay is our guest to tell you why.
Giornale Nuovo (October 2002 - October 2007)
Mr H's Giornale Nuovo, the self-described "accumulation of inconsequential notices in the shape of a web-log", provides an excellent model for how an amateur enthusiast can publish a website of distinction within a niche subject. For the ever modest Mr H, that venture involved collecting, scanning and linking to an eclectic array of beautiful, curious and sometimes bizarre art works, dominated by unusual engravings and etchings from the Renaissance and Early Modern periods. At a basic level, one would classify Giornale Nuovo as an Art History blog, justifying its appearance among the esteemed company in this memorial, but Mr H also shared his passion for books and literature as extensions from and sources for the visual delights that appeared on the blog.
A side venture involved the ocr-scanning and hosting of Isaac D'Israeli's 'Curiosities of Literature', and when his collecting habits overtook the available shelf space at home, Mr H generously held periodic book [and CD] giveaways for site visitors.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Sunday's Notes
James Traub, "The Academic Freedom Agenda," NYT, 10 March, and Mike Allen, "Battle brews over Bush library," Politico, 14 March, review the tortured history of George Bush the Younger's effort to build his presidential library, museum, and policy institute at Southern Methodist University. SMU's long had a relatively weak central administration. It is now even weaker.
Amon Shea, "Unwed Language," NYT, 12 March, reviews John McWhorter's Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English.
Holland Cotter, "Passion of the Moment: A Triptych of Masters," NYT, 12 March, and Sebastian Smee, "The art of a rivalry," Boston Globe, 13 March, review "Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese Rivals in Renaissance Venice," at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.
Gary J. Bass, "The Prague (Berlin, Paris, Milan) Spring," NYT, reviews Mike Rapport's 1848: Year of Revolution.
Brenda Wineapple, "Sallow, Queer, Sagacious: Lincoln Through the Ages," The Nation, 11 March, reviews Harold Holzer, ed., The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy From 1860 to Now and Barry Schwartz's Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth-Century America.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
American History Notes
Julia Wallace, "The Alcotts, Père and Fille," Harvard Magazine, March/April, reviews John Matteson's Eden's Outcasts.
David Garrow, "How American Ghettos Were Made," Washington Post, 15 March, reviews Beryl Satter's Family Properties: Race, Real Estate and the Black Migration to Chicago.
Nathan Heller, "The Hidden Heart of Cheever Country," Slate, 11 March, Geoffrey Wolff, "Suburban Suffering," NYT, 12 March, and Jonathan Yardley, "Good Writer, Bad Man," Washington Post, 15 March, review Blake Bailey's Cheever: A Life.
Robert Dallek, "How Not to End Another President's War (L.B.J. Edition)," 100 Days, 12 March, revisits Lyndon Johnson's experience with the war in Vietnam.
Finally, Jon Stewart's confrontation with Jim Cramer is literally all over the web.
Tim Burke offers a commentary on it.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Things Noted Here and There
James Stevens Curl reviews Obelisk: A History by Brian A. Curran, Anthony Grafton, Pamela O. Long and Benjamin Weiss for the THES, 12 March.
Jane Ridley, "In the shadow of the Iron Duke," TLS, 11 March, reviews Jane Wellesley's Wellington: A journey through my family.
Paul Anderson, "An Invertebrate Left," LRB, 12 March, is an essay about whatever happened to the Italian Left.
Paul Gifford, "The ultimate French intellectual?" TLS, 11 March, reviews Michel Jarrety's Paul Valéry.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Modernity Reviewed
Cass R. Sunstein, "The Enlarged Republic – Then and Now," NYRB, 26 March, is an essay on The Federalist Papers.
Joan Acocella, "In the Blood," New Yorker, 16 March, reviews Bram Stoker's The New Annotated Dracula, with notations and an introduction by Leslie S. Klinger, Janet Byrne, and Neil Gaiman, and Stephanie Meyer's Twilight.
Adam Kirsch, "Intellectuals at the Gates," City Journal, 6 March, reviews Charles Kurzman's Democracy Denied, 1905–1915: Intellectuals and the Fate of Democracy.
Brooke Allen reviews D. J. Taylor's Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London's Jazz Age for the Barnes & Noble Review, 19 February.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Two Conversations
As noted earlier, Judith Bennett's History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism is the subject of a March Monday Roundtable. The schedule is as follows:
2 March – Notorious PhD
9 March – Historiann, wherein Lawrence Stone, of blessed memory, is called "a tool"
16 March – Cliopatria and Tenured Radical
23 March – Blogenspiel
30 March – an as yet undisclosed apocalypse.
In the meantime, I am over at Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo Café this week, where the University of Tennessee's Robert Norrell, Liberty & Power's and the Pope Center's Jane Shaw, the University of Oregon's Joseph Lowndes, attorney Bruce Kleinschmidt, and I are discussing Norrell's controversial new biography, Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington. And I'm trying to be nice about it.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Cliopatria Revised & Dissented
Three years ago, Cliopatria helped to launch a new blog at History News Network, Revise and Dissent. It featured some of the younger stars in the history blogosphere and has been a fascinating read, because its group members were on the cutting edge of diverse approaches to history. In recent months, however, R & D's audience declined and a decision made to close it. R & D's remaining active members have agreed to join our group at Cliopatria. That decision is altogether our gain, because each of them is already a well known figure in the history blogosphere.
It is a pleasure to welcome Sterling Fluharty, Brett Holman, and Sage Ross to our circle at Cliopatria.
Monday, March 9, 2009
20th Century Notes
Mondli Makhanya, "He's not some mascot to be bickered over and wheeled out at party bashes," Johannesburg, South Africa Times, 7 March, compares the bad behavior of the children of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.
Tobias Grey, "The Man Who Threw The First Terrorist Bomb," Washington Post, 8 March, reviews John Merriman's The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age.
Marie Arana, "Lost in the Jungle," Washington Post, 8 March, reviews David Grann's The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon.
Drake Bennett, "Troublesome Element," NYT, 5 March, reviews Tom Zoellner's Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World.
Roya Nikkhah, "George Orwell's love letters to go on sale," Telegraph, 7 March, announces the auction of Eric Arthur Blair's letters to Eleanor Jaques.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Sunday's Notes
Richard Eden, "Andrew Marr's history book is pulped amid great mystery," Telegraph, 8 March, treats the sudden and mysterious withdrawal and pulping of Marr's A History of Modern Britain. Thanks to Manan Ahmed for the tip.
Jonathan Yardley, "The Wife Who Got Away," Washington Post, 8 March, reviews Wendy Moore's Wedlock: The True Story of the Disastrous Marriage and Remarkable Divorce of Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore.
Katie Roiphe, "Writing Women," NYT, 5 March, reviews Elaine Showalter's A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx.
Baz Dreisinger, "A Transracial Man," NYT, 5 March, reviews Martha A. Sandweiss's Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line.
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Weak Endnotes
John Elogon, "Identity-Theft Arrest in Dispute Over Dead Sea Scrolls," NYT, 5 March, reports charges against the son of the University of Chicago's Norman Golb, who may have sought to discredit criticism by NYU's Lawrence H. Schiffman of his father's work.
John Adamson, "Eyewitness to an Era," Literary Review, March, reviews Caroline Moorhead's Dancing to the Precipice: Lucie de La Tour du Pin and the French Revolution.
Karen Rosenberg, "Maverick, You Cast a Giant Shadow," NYT, 5 March, reviews "Cézanne and Beyond," an exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The collapse of the city archive at Cologne seems little short of catastrophic. Because of unstable rubble, efforts to rescue two or three people who may have been lost in the collapse or to assay damage to the archive's holdings – including city council minutes going back to 1376 and manuscript collections of Heinrich Böll, Karl Marx, Jacques Offenbach, and others – have been slow. See: Klaus Graf's Archivalia and Nathanael Robinson's Europe Endless. Meanwhile, the library at UCLA has acquired the papers of Aldous Huxley.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Friday's Notes
The melting economy hits Harvard, Yale, and historical societies from New Jersey to Oregon. What the tanking stock market hasn't done to higher education endowments, fraud has. Beyond NYU and Yeshiva, Carnegie Mellon and Pittsburgh appear to have been bilked of nearly $115 million. Anthony Grafton, "Graduate school in a New Ice Age," Daily Princetonian, 2 March, puts the grim implications for graduate education in historical perspective. Hat tip.
Alan V. Murray reviews Abdul Rahman Azzam's Saladin for the THES, 5 March.
Dane T. Daniel reviews Charles Webster's Paracelsus: Medicine, Magic and Mission at the End of Time for the THES, 5 March.
Jonathan Bate, "The Power of Milton," TLS, 4 March, reviews Gordon Campbell's and Thomas N. Corns's John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Thursday's Notes
John Lukacs, "Putting Man Before Descartes," American Scholar, March, stakes history's claim as the comprehensive discipline.
David Wooton, "Happiness and the Historian," TLS, 25 February, reviews Keith Thomas's Ends of Life: Roads to fulfilment in early modern England.
Edward Rothstein, "Darwin's Wake Splashed Artists, Too," NYT, 2 March, reviews "Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts," an exhibit at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven.
Adam Kirsch, "American as Apple Pie," nextbook, 2 March, reviews Lila Corwin Berman's Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity.
Stefan Beck, "Cheever v. Cheever," New Criterion, March, and John Updike, "Basically Decent," New Yorker, 9 March, reviews Blake Bailey's Cheever: A Life.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Archival Notes
Lisa Spiro, "Digital Humanities in 2008," Part I and Part II, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 7 and 24 February, round up recent developments in the field. Digital History – Methodology for the Infinite Archive is the new wikihome of our former colleague, William Turkel. Hat tip.
Eric Jager, "Lost in the Archives," CHE, 6 March, recalls his research about a duel in 14th century Normandy to point out that most documents are not available on the internet. Some of them in the archives can't even be found.
The city archive building in Cologne, Germany, collapsed yesterday. The archive includes manuscripts by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, as well as Heinrich Böll. Injuries to people were limited, but there are no reports yet on damage to the manuscript holdings. The collapse may have been related to construction of an underground transit tunnel. For current reports, see: Klaus Graf's Archivalia.
"The First World War Poetry Digital Archive and The Great War Archive," a British venture featuring World War I era documents in private hands is now online. Esther MacCallum-Stewart reviews it and Stuart Lee responds in Reviews in History, January. Hat tip.
Frederick J. Graboske, "Nixon Tapes Archivist, explains why he concluded Stanley Kutler's alterations were deliberate," HNN, 28 February, offers an archivist's account of his judgment about the Nixon Tapes controversy.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
More Noted Things
During March, four of our colleagues are conducting roundtable discussions of Judith Bennett's History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism. The first round is up at The Adventures of Notorious Ph.D., Girl Scholar. Subsequent discussions will be at: Historiann on 9 March; Tenured Radical on 16 March; Blogenspiel on 23 March; and somewhere, with an unnamed special guest, on 30 March.
Blake Gopnik, "At Freer, Aesthetic Is Simply Smashing," Washington Post, 3 March, reviews "Golden Seams: The Japanese Art of Mending Ceramics," an exhibit at the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery in Washington. When has a repair enhanced the aesthetic appeal of an artifact? When the Japanese did it.
John Summers, "Gettysburg Regress," TNR, 18 March, wonders whether the National Park Service's efforts to restore the Gettysburg battlefield to conditions in 1863 are helpful. They've cut down trees that weren't there then. Will they strew dead bodies across the fields? Hat tip.
Charles McGrath, "The First Suburbanite," NYT, 27 February, wonders whether a biography and new editions of his work will secure John Cheever's place among important 20th century American authors.
Evan R. Goldstein, "Rashid Khalidi's Balancing Act," CHE, 6 March, explores the controversial professor's struggle to balance scholarship and advocacy. Thanks to CHE for the free link for non-subscribers.
Monday, March 2, 2009
Things Noted Here and There
If you can get past the lovely painting by Louis Jean Francois, "Mars and Venus an Allegory of Peace," History Carnival LXXIV is up at Eliza Knight's History Undressed.
Matthew Polly, "From Russia With Blood, Beauty, and Beasts: How St. Petersburg Came To Be So Gorgeous," Slate, 23 February, finds its only explanation in the city's history.
Theresa Tedesco, "The daily life of Conrad," National Post, 27 February, tells how historian Conrad Black spends his days in the slammer.
D. T. Max, "The Unfinished," New Yorker, 9 March, tells of the recovery, after his suicide, of David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel. Wallace, "Wiggle Room," ibid., is an excerpt from the novel.
Isaac Arnsdorf and Victor Zapana, "Yale will fire up to 300 staff," Yale Daily News, 27 February, notes that hard times have come, even to Old Eli.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Sunday's Notes
"Afghan treasures give peek into history," Houston Chronicle, 28 February, reviews "Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul," an exhibit on world tour that opens today at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas.
Joseph Caputo, "Solving a 17th Century Crime," Smithsonian, March, looks at the murder of an indentured servant in colonial Maryland. It's one of a number of cases featured in "Written in Bone: Forensic Files of the 17th Century Chesapeake," an exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington.
Jamie James reviews Frances Wilson's The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Life for the LA Times, 1 March.
Rich Cohen, "On the Road to El Dorado," NYT, 26 February, reviews David Grann's The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon.
Joshua Prager, "The Wallenberg Curse," WSJ, 28 February, tells the agonizing story of Raoul Wallenberg's family's relentless quest for information about his fate.
Jim Holt, "Suicide Squad," NYT, 26 February, reviews Alexander Waugh's The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Garry Wills, "Closer Than Ever to Vergil," NYRB, 12 March, reviews Vergil's The Aeneid, translated by Sarah Ruden.
Caleb Crain, "Random facts of kindness," The National, 27 February, reviews On Kindness by the historian Barbara Taylor and the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips.
Laura Miller, "Why can't a woman write the Great American Novel?" Salon, 27 February, reviews Elaine Showalter's A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx.
Joy Williams, "Stranger Than Paradise," NYT, 26 February, reviews Brad Gooch's Flannery, the new biography of Flannery O'Connor.
John Derbyshire, "How Radio Wrecks the Right," American Conservative, 23 February, attacks the "comfort food" Limbaugh and Co. feed their right-wing audience.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Revisionisms
If you have any interest in African American history, the history of American race relations, or the civil rights movement, I recommend that you read Robert J. Norrell's "Reshaping the Image of Booker T. Washington," CHE, 27 February.* It is an apologia for his new biography, Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington, which seeks to frame the story of BTW's leadership in positive terms. In doing so, Norrell must necessarily challenge the image of Washington that we've received from W. E. B. Du Bois, C. Vann Woodward, and Louis R. Harlan. And, in doing so, he can't resist the temptation to depict the Wizard of Tuskegee as the early twentieth century's Barack Obama.
As I've said earlier, count me among the skeptics. Norrell will certainly find sympathetic readers among conservative and libertarian historians, but they didn't need Norrell to tell them that in Washington there was much to admire. More critical to the reception of his book, I suspect, are the historians of "the long civil rights movement," Jacquelyn Hall, Thomas Sugrue, Glenda Gilmore, Mary Dudziak, and many more. Will they embrace a revised and positive portrait of BTW as a major chapter in the long struggle? Despite the timeliness of his book, Norrell doesn't appear on their April conference program. Maybe BTW as Barack Obama just didn't have the right ring to the program's organizers.
But, then, I've my own reservations about "the long civil rights movement" frufraw anyway. At its baldest, tlcrm claims that the movement didn't spring virgin from the minds of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks in 1955. Well, of course. No well-informed historian ever claimed that it did and self-evident truths hardly make cutting-edge historiography. The struggle had a history extending back into the early twentieth century and a national and international scope well beyond the South. Some of us, including Du Bois, Woodward, Harlan, John Hope Franklin, August Meier, and others, wrote about the long civil rights struggle before tlcrm sprang virgin from the minds of younger historians. A major part of the problem is that no one – including the lcrm historians -- has done a history of the organization central to the struggle, the NAACP. And an important question in the larger and longer history is the place of Booker T. Washington in it. Robert Norrell has forcefully raised it.
*Thanks to David Glenn at the Chronicle for the link that is free to non-subscribers for the next five days.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Thursday's Notes
"15 Must-See Endangered Cultural Treasures," Smithsonian, March, features remarkable endangered sites in Australia, Canada, China, Cyprus, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kosovo, Mauritania, Peru, Turkey, the United States, and Venezuela.
W. A. Pannapacker, "How to Procrastinate like Leonardo da Vinci," CHE, 20 February, recommends a more creative procrastination than my own.
Matthew Gurewitsch, "Jan Lievens: Out of Rembrandt's Shadow," Smithsonian, March, reviews "Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered," an exhibit on tour in the United States and currently at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Andrew Koppelman, "Naked Strong Evaluation," Dissent, Winter, reviews Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.
David Grann, "Finding the Lost City," Boston Globe, 22 February, is excerpted from Grann's The Lost City of Z. It features the quest of British explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett for the remains of ancient civilization in the Amazon basin. Fawcett may have been less delusional than we once thought.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Still More Notes
History Carnival LXXIV goes up at Eliza Knight's History Undressed on Sunday 1 March. Send nominations of the best in February's history blogging to her at writer*at*elizaknight*dot*com or use the form.
Francis Phillips reviews Simon Sebag Montefiore's Heroes: History's Greatest Men and Women for Mercator.net, 20 February.
Dwight Garner, "A Brother's Keeper: The Other Wordsworth," NYT, 24 February, reviews Frances Wilson's The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Life.
Joseph P. Shivers, "15 Questions with Jill Lepore," Harvard Crimson, 18 February, interviews Lepore about her new novel, with Jane Kamensky, Blindspot.
David Glenn, "A Fresh Look at the Lives of Civil War Soldiers Reveals the High Price of Diversity," CHE, 27 February, reviews Dora L. Costa's and Matthew E. Kahn's Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War. It's a sophisticated statistical study by two UCLA economists.
Amos N. Jones, "The Leader of the Race," Books & Culture, 23 February, reviews Robert J. Norrell's Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington. Withywindle will appreciate Norrell's argument. Me? Not so much.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
More Noted Things
So, the editor at Prestigious Journal has returned your article with a request to "revise and resubmit." Eric Rauchway offers some advice.
Kaila Adia Story reviews Clifton Crais's and Pamela Scully's Sara Baartman and The Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography for the THES, 19 February.
A. N. Wilson, "What the Victorian artists did for us," Guardian, 22 February, reviews Jeremy Paxman's The Victorians: Britain Through the Paintings of the Age.
As Broadway prepares to re-open Frank Loesser's musical, "Guys and Dolls," Adam Gopnik revisits Damon Runyon's guys and gals.
Philip Swanson, "The myths of Gabriel García Márquez," TLS, 11 February, reviews Gerald Martin's Gabriel García Márquez: A Life.
Perry Anderson, "An Entire Order Converted into What It Was Intended to End," LRB, 26 February, reviews Sergio Rizzo's and Gian Antonio Stella's La Casta: Cosi i Politici Italiani sono Diventati Intoccabili and Rizzo's and Stella's La Deriva: Perche l'Italia Rischia il Naufragio.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Things Noted Here and There
Adam Kirsch, "Money Made Him Do It," Slate, 22 February, reviews Peter Martin's Samuel Johnson: A Biography and Jeffrey Meyers's Samuel Johnson: The Struggle.
John Bowen, "Dickens's Refuge for Fallen Women," TLS, 18 February, reviews Jenny Hartley's Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women.
Eric Hobsbawm, "Era of Wonders," LRB, 26 February, reviews Simon Winchester's Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China.
Louise Steinman reviews Samuel D. Kassow's Who Will Write Our History? Rediscovering a Hidden Archive From the Warsaw Ghetto for the LA Times, 22 February.
Steve Weinberg, "Echoes of Vietnam war crimes," Philadelphia Inquirer, 22 February, reviews Deborah Nelson's The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth About U.S. War Crimes. Hat tip.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Herodotus and Modernity
Tobin Harshaw, "Antique Road Show," NYT, 19 February, reviews Justin Marozzi's The Way of Herodotus: Travels With the Man Who Invented History.
Carnivalesque LXVII, "When the Ancient/Medieval and the Modern Collide, and How to Survive the Aftermath. Starring Indiana Jones, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama!" is up at The Adventures of Notorious Ph.D., Girl Scholar.
Jedediah Purdy, "The Coast of Utopia," NYT, 19 February, reviews William H. Goetzmann's Beyond the Revolution: A History of American Thought From Paine to Pragmatism. See also: Blake Wilson, "Stray Questions for Jedediah Purdy," Paper Cuts, 20 February.
Robert Bateman reviews Benson Bobrick's Master of War: The Life of General George H. Thomas for the Washington Post, 22 February.
Annette Gordon-Reed, "Color Blind," Washington Post, 22 February, reviews Martha A. Sandweiss's Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love And Deception Across the Color Line.
Jason Goodwin, "Mongolia and the Madman," NYT, 20 February, reviews James Palmer's The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Weak Endnotes
The finalists for the 2009 George Washington Book Prize for the best work on the American Revolution and the early republic were announced yesterday. They are: Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, Kevin J. Hayes's The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson, and Jane Kamensky's The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America's First Banking Collapse. The judges, Joyce Appleby, Ira Berlin, and Jay Winik, chose the finalists from 78 nominees.
Scott McLemee reviews Jeff B. Perry's Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 for the Barnes & Noble Review, 20 February.
Julian Barnes, "Such, Such Was Eric Blair," NYRB, 12 March, reviews George Orwell's All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays, Orwell's Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays, and Orwell's Why I Write.
Robert Colville reviews Stan Lauryssens's Dalí and I: Exposing the Dark Circus of the International Art Market for the Telegraph, 17 February.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Western Civ Notes
Mary Beard, "What made the Greeks laugh?" TLS, 18 February, reviews Stephen Halliwell's Greek Laughter: A study of cultural psychology from Homer to early Christianity. In "Byzantium and Prince Charles," A Don's Life, 20 February, Beard chats about attending the opening of "Byzantium, 340-1452" at London's Royal Academy of Art.
Eric Ormsby, "The Islamic Enlightenment," WSJ, 14 February, reviews Jonathan Lyons's The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization and John Freely's Aladdin's Lamp: How Greek Science Came to Europe through the Islamic World.
Brian Vick, "Backstage at the Revolution," THES, 19 February, reviews Victoria Johnson's Backstage at the Revolution: How the Royal Paris Opera Survived the End of the Old Regime.
Alex Ross, "The Youngest Master," New Yorker, 23 February, looks at celebrations of the Felix Mendelson bicentennial. Move over Darwin and Lincoln.
Harold Shukman reviews William I. Hitchcock's Liberation: The Bitter Road to Freedom, Europe 1945-1950 for the THES, 19 February.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Notes Ancient and Modern
Scott McLemee, "War in the Heavens and Here Below," IHE, 18 February, reviews Michel Tardieu's Manichaeism.
Eric Rauchway, "Recession Watch: Work for the greater good," Nature, 19 February, looks at the New Deal's contributions in science and technology.
Dwight Gardner, "Lives Defined by Hurricanes, but Devoted to New Orleans," NYT, 17 February, reviews Dan Baum's Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans.
Ann Douglas of Columbia, Robin D. G. Kelley of USC, Peter Rachleff of Macalester, and Adolph Reed of Penn are among the historians who have endorsed the U. S. Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel. Hat tip.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Modern History Notes
Alan Riding, "From a Vault in Paris, Sounds of Opera 1907," NYT, 16 February, announces the recovery of early recordings at the Paris Opera. At the link, you can hear Francesco Tamagno's 1904 rendition of "Nium mi tema" from Verdi's Otello, Nellie Melba's 1907 recording of "Caro nome" from Verdi's Rigoletto, and Enrico Caruso's 1908 version of "Celeste Aida" from Verdi's Aida. The recordings of works by over a dozen different composers will be released this spring on three CDs.
On the 100th anniversary of Geronimo's death, his great-grandson gives notice of intent to file a lawsuit for the recovery of the Apache chief's remains.
CNN and the Washington Post cover the tour by Martin Luther King, III, marking the 50th anniversary of his father's and mother's tour of India. From that tour, King, Jr., learned to speak much more authoritatively of Mahatma Gandhi's understanding of non-violence.
K. Anthony Appiah, "Seven Habits of Truly Liberal People," Slate, 16 February, reviews Alan Wolfe's The Future of Liberalism.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Things Noted Here and There
Christopher F. Chabris, "Last-Minute Changes," WSJ, 12 February, and Noah Millman, "Happy Belated Birthday," The American Scene, 13 February, review Gregory Cochran's and Henry Harpending's The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. Michael Blowhard, "A Week with Gregory Cochran," 2blowhards, 25-30 January, interviews a co-author.
XLVII, an ancient/medieval edition of the festival, goes up at Notorious Ph.D. on 21 February. Send nominations of the best in ancient/medieval history blogging since 23 November to notoriousphd*at*mac*dot*com or use the form.Peter Wilby, "The Trouble with Oxford," New Statesman, 12 February, reviews Leslie Mitchell's Maurice Bowra: a Life.
Finally, Dr. Wicked's Write or Die "puts the prod in productivity." Which reminds me that I do have commitments to three book manuscripts. Hat tip.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Digital History Hacks to Cliopatria's Hall of Fame
When they are no longer active, Cliopatria honors especially distinguished history blogs by naming them to its Hall of Fame. Heretofore, only Invisible Adjunct (February 2003 - August 2004) and Caleb McDaniel's Mode for Caleb (July 2004 - August 2006) have been so honored. With Rob MacDougall's tribute, we are adding William Turkel's Digital History Hacks (December 2005 - December 2008) to that distinguished company:
It seems like just yesterday I was toasting Bill Turkel's Digital History Hacks for winning Cliopatria's Best New Blog Award. Now Bill is moving on from the blog to other things, and I have the sad task of bidding DHH adieu. Let's see what I said back then:
William J. Turkel's Digital History Hacks goes beyond new media platitudes and internet hype to demonstrate in word and deed what history in the twenty-first century will be all about. From the nuts and bolts of spidering and scraping to the loftiest questions about what historians do and why, Digital History Hacks points the way to a brave new world with infectious enthusiasm and blazing imagination.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Modern History Notes
The Virginia Quarterly Review has opened its electronic archive from the period of Staige Blackford's editing, 1975-2003. Without charge, you can read online: Ralph E. Luker, "Garry Wills and the New Debate Over the Declaration of Independence," VQR, Spring 1980, 244-261. Ronald Reagan was not yet elected President, but the new conservative intellectuals dominated critical response to Wills' Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, the most important book on the subject since Carl Becker's The Declaration of Independence. And the diversity of their criticism illustrated divisions within the new conservatism. Or, you can read Irving Louis Horowitz's "Printed Words, Computers, and Democratic Societies," VQR, (Autumn 1983): 620-636, which anticipated the development of wikipedia, e-book readers, and blogs. He does it with the literary skill peculiar to sociologists, but it's a smart article, nonetheless.
Shelby Steele, "Pride and Compromise," NYT, 13 February, reviews Robert J. Norrell's Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington.
Joe Nocera, "Flying Blind," NYT, 13 February, and Frank Ahrens, "Who Caused the Great Depression?" Washington Post, 15 February, review Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World.
Matthew Dallek, "Starting Out Strong," Washington Post, 15 February, reviews Adam Cohen's Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America and Burt Solomon's FDR v. The Constitution: The Court-Packing Fight and the Triumph of Democracy.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Weak Endnotes
During March, Another Damned Medievalist, Historiann, Notorious PhD, Tenured Radical and an unnamed invited guest will hold a book event on Judith Bennett's History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism. ADM has the schedule.
Thomas Hayden, "Darwin the Liberator," Washington Post, 15 February, reviews Adrian Desmond's and James Moore's Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution and Jerry A. Coyne's Why Evolution is True.
Roberta Smith, "So Typecast You Could Scream," NYT, 12 February, reviews "Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety and Myth," an exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Alexander Provan, "An Alienation Artist: Kafka and His Critics," The Nation, 11 February, reviews Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg and Benno Wagner, eds., Franz Kafka: The Office Writings and Louis Begley's The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka, A Biographical Essay.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Blogging Darwin and Lincoln
Celebration of the 200th birthdays of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln yesterday reminded me that there are fascinating blogs devoted to both subjects. There's general interest in Darwin on Cliopatria's History Blogroll at both Digital History, Science, and Technology and at Modern History. But, for particular interest, check out: The Beagle Project, Blogging the Origin, Darwiniana, and The Dispersal of Darwin. Similarly, there is general interest in Lincoln at both Military History, where over two dozen blogs focus on the American Civil War, and United States History. There, A. Lincoln Blog, Abraham Lincoln Blog, Lincoln Studies, and What Would Lincoln Do? feature Father Abraham 365 days a year.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
More Noted Things
Tom Palaima reviews Margaret Malamud's Ancient Rome and Modern America for the THES, 12 February.
Michael Kulikowski, "Bed-Hopping and Coup-Plotting," LRB, 12 February, reviews Christopher Kelly's Attila the Hun: Barbarian Terror and the Fall of the Roman Empire.
Sotheby's currently has on display the Valmadonna Library Trust's 11,000 Hebrew books and manuscripts, the largest collection of Judaica in private hands. Its value is estimated at $40,000,000. Its purchase would catapult the purchasing institution into the forefront of the study of the history of Judaism.
Geoff Pevere, "Lincoln and Darwin: Separated at birth?" The Star, 1 February, reviews Adam Gopnik's Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life. Gopnik is interviewed about his book at "The Evolution of Darwin and Lincoln," The Daily Beast, 3 February. Hat tip.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Things Noted Here and There
Carlin Romano, "For Philosophers, Dead Is the New 90," CHE, 13 February, reviews Simon Critchley's The Book of Dead Philosophers.
UCLA's Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts is an extraordinary resource for all students of medieval history. Hat tip.
Brooke Allen, "First Man of Letters," Wilson Quarterly, Winter, reviews Peter Martin's Samuel Johnson: A Biography and Jeffrey Meyers's Samuel Johnson: The Struggle. Hat tip.
Philip Kennicott, "Hitler's Terrible Weapon: Publicity," Washington Post, 11 February, reviews "State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda," an exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
More Modern American Notes
So, the administration at your small university threatens to shut down your history department's doctoral program if it doesn't re-invent itself. Jonathan Rose, "Rethinking Graduate Education in History," Perspectives, February, tells us what his department decided was important.
Adam Kirsch, "Lessons From the Gilded Age," Slate, 9 February, reviews Barry Werth's Banquet at Delmonico's: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America.
Matthew Price, "Stacking Paper," The National, 6 February, reviews Kenneth Whyte's The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst.
Eric Rauchway's The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction is the focus of discussion this week at Josh Marshall's TPMCafé.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Modern American Notes
Janet Maslin, "Harsh Year in Lincoln's Fight for the Union," NYT, 8 February, reviews Charles B. Flood's 1864: Lincoln at the Gates of History.
Wendy Lesser, "Southern Discomfort," bookforum, February/ March, reviews Brad Gooch's Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor.
Michael Kazin, "A Liberal Revival of Americanism," Washington Post, 8 February, sees American progressives re-asserting their patriotic claims.
The recession is having a substantial effect at the Atlanta University Center, the largest concentration of institutions of African-American higher education in the United States. On Saturday, I pointed to Gayle White's "Clark Atlanta University cuts 100 jobs," AJC, 6 February, which announced that, a month after the semester began, 70 full-time faculty members -- nearly a third of its faculty -- and 30 other full-time employees have been summarily dismissed. Classes are canceled until Tuesday, while undergraduates' schedules are re-organized. Ben Smith's "Morehouse cuts part-time teaching staff," AJC, 8 February, adds more details. Morehouse non-renewed the contracts of a third of its adjuncts at the beginning of this semester and CAU has canceled all physical education classes. Scott Jaschik, "Turmoil Over 70 Faculty Layoffs at Clark Atlanta," IHE, 9 February, indicates that some tenured faculty were dismissed, even though CAU pointedly denies that it faces financial exigency. Can the AAUP be far behind?
Although it continues to admit students, a third institution adjacent to the Center, Morris Brown College, is nearly $30,000,000 in debt and lost membership in the Center, federal funding, support from the United Negro College Fund, and its accreditation six years ago.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
400 Years of Milton; 200 of Lincoln
Frank Kermode, "Heroic Milton: Happy Birthday," NYRB, 26 February, reviews Gordon Campbell's and Thomas N. Corns's John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought, Anna Beer's Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot, and Nigel Smith's Is Milton Better Than Shakespeare?.
Fred Kaplan, "The Lincoln Canon," Washington Post, 8 February, William Safire, "Lincoln Monuments," NYT, 6 February, and Allen Barra, "Yet more books to mark Lincoln's big day," San Francisco Chronicle, 8 February, make recommendations from among the outpouring of work about A. Lincoln. David W. Blight, "Abe the Intellectual," Washington Post, 8 February, reviews Ronald C. White Jr.'s A. Lincoln: A Biography; and Elaine Showalter, "On Her Own," Washington Post, 8 February, reviews Catherine Clinton's Mrs. Lincoln: A Life.
Otherwise, Jane Stancill, "UNC warns of class and job cuts," Raleigh News & Observer, 7 February, says that an anticipated 7% reduction in state support of the University of North Carolina system would mean the loss of 660 faculty positions, 232 of them at UNC, Chapel Hill, alone.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Notes Ancient & Modern
Gayle White, "Clark Atlanta University cuts 100 jobs," AJC, 6 February, announces that, a month after the semester began, 70 full-time faculty members and 30 other full-time employees have been summarily dismissed. Classes are canceled until Tuesday, while class schedules are re-organized.
Benjamin Schwarz, "Geography Is Destiny," Atlantic, December, reviews Barry Cunliffe's Europe Between the Oceans, 9000 BC-AD 1000.
Christopher Kelly, "Lighting Up the Dark Ages," Literary Review, February, reviews Chris Wickham's The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000.
"Greatest Achievements of American Socialism," Salon, 6 February, is a slide show of some of the New Deal's finest works. Hat tip.
Rick Shenkman, "The Watergate Transcript Controversy: The Story Behind the Story," HNN, 5 February, is a very helpful background to the Klingman/Kutler controversy about the transcription of the Nixon tapes. Patricia Cohen, "Journal Rejects Essay About Nixon Tapes," NYT, 6 February, notes that the AHR declines to publish Klingman's article.
Eric Kaufmann, "The Meaning of Huntington," Prospect, February, suggests a not-altogether-obvious reason Samuel Huntington became "a pariah" among intellectuals.
Friday, February 6, 2009
Friday's Notes
Tom Palaima reviews Chris Wickham's The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 for the THES, 5 February.
Jeffrey Meyers reviews Barbara Furlotti's and Guido Rebecchini's The Art and Architecture of Mantua: Eight Centuries of Patronage and Collecting (trans. by A. Lawrence Jenkins) for the THES, 5 February.
Lynn Hunt reviews Michael Sonenscher's Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution for the THES, 5 February.
Michael E. Ross, "The End of Black History Month," The Root, 3 February, argues that its rationale no longer holds. Brokey McPoverty's series, "Know Your History," PostBourgie, February, finds humor in it. Hat tip.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Thursday's Notes
David Morgan, "The Permanence of Persia," TLS, 4 February, reviews Michael Axworthy's Empire of the Mind: A History of Iran.
Steven Gunn, "What should we think of Henry VIII?" TLS, 4 February, reviews David Starkey's Henry: Virtuous Prince and Lucy Wooding's Henry VIII.
Jan Swafford, "Great Composers, Lousy Reviews," Slate, 3 February, revisits madly negative reviews of classical composers. Hat tip.
Andrew Steele, "Boom, bust and Harper," Globe and Mail, 2 February, tracks the history of party systems in the United States and Canada. Hat tip.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, "Where next??" TLS, 4 February, reviews Raymond John Howgego's Encyclopedia of Exploration, 1850 to 1940.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
More Noted Things
Ken Johnson, "At the Height of Power for the Netherlands, the City in Glorious Detail," NYT, 29 January, and Blake Gopnik, "The 'Golden' Compass," Washington Post, 3 February, review "Pride of Place: Dutch Cityscapes of the Golden Age," an exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. The Post's slide show.
Stephen Taylor reviews Siân Rees's Sweet Water and Bitter: The Ships that Stopped the Slave Trade for the Times of London, 30 January.
John Wilson, "Ah, Wilderness!" NYT, 30 January, reviews Donald Worster's A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir and Bonny J. Gisel's Nature's Beloved Son: Rediscovering John Muir's Botanical Legacy.
Martin Pugh, "Edward Carpenter, father of the twenty-first century," TLS, 28 January, reviews Sheila Rowbotham's Edward Carpenter: A life of liberty and love.
Claudia Roth Pierpont, "Another Country," New Yorker, 9 February, reviews Magdalena J. Zaborowska's James Baldwin's Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile.
Sam Tanenhaus, "Conservatism Is Dead," TNR, 18 February, is "an intellectual autopsy of the movement" in the United States.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Cliopatria welcomes Aaron Bady
Cliopatria is pleased to welcome Aaron Bady to its circle. A native of southeastern Ohio, Mr. Bady earned a B. A. in English at the Ohio State University and an M. A. in literature from American University in Washington, D. C. He is currently an advanced doctoral student in English at the University of California at Berkeley. Along the way, Bady studied African literature and did two tours of duty as a primary school teacher near Arusha, Tanzania. Nearing the end of his second tour, he began to blog at zunguzungu.
Bady's blog tracks the transition of his interests, from a curiosity about African literature to an interest in the ways in which "America's Africa" and "Africa's America" have been, in his words, "mutually constitutive narratives of identity, the ways that dialogs and travels between have made both identities 'thinkable' in a shared global context." The fascination of his developing ideas has won widespread attention in the academic blogosphere. He is now a member of the literary group blog, The Valve, and has guest-posted at The Edge of the American West. More recently, he won a Cliopatria Award as the history blogosphere's Best Writer. It is a pleasure to welcome him as a member of Cliopatria.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Things Noted Here and There
History Carnival LXXIII is up at Whitney Trettien's diapsalmata.
Judith H. Dobrzynski, "Brandeis on the Brink," The Daily Beast, 28 January, explains the extremity of the University's financial situation that drove its decision to close the Rose Art Museum. The New York Times calls on Brandeis to "share the pain across the university's budget."
Sage Ross, "Libraries and copyfraud," Revise and Dissent, 30 January, is a case study in the right to use a photographic image.
Nathan Nunn and Leonard Wantchekon, "The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa," December. From the Abstract:
We investigate the historical origins of mistrust within Africa. Combining contemporary household survey data with historic data on slave shipments by ethnic group, we show that individuals whose ancestors were heavily threatened by the slave trade today exhibit less trust in neighbors, family co-ethnics, and their local government.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Modern History Notes
Leah Price, "Lives of Johnson," NYT, 30 January, reviews Peter Martin's Samuel Johnson: A Biography and Jeffrey Meyers's Samuel Johnson: The Struggle.
Marilyn Stasio, "Life, Liberty, and Pursuit," NYT, 29 January, reviews Jane Kamensky's and Jill Lepore's Blindspot, By a Gentleman in Exile and a Lady in Disguise.
Christopher Benfey, "Charles Darwin, Abolitionist," NYT, 29 January, reviews Adrian Desmond's and James Moore's Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution and Adam Gopnik's Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life.
Jon Meacham reviews Harold Holzer's The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now, Sean Wilentz's The Best American History Essays on Lincoln, Ron White's A. Lincoln: A Biography, John Stauffer's Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, and James McPherson's Abraham Lincoln: A Presidential Life for the LA Times, 1 February. Meacham quotes Edmund Wilson to the effect that "the cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg." The first multi-volume biography since Sandburg's, Michael Burlingame's Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 2 volumes, ought to be getting more attention.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Weak Endnotes
David Glenn, "Scholars Hope Obama Will Bring Change to the NEH," CHE, 30 January, looks at expectations for the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Dinitia Smith, "Dying and Death: When You Sort It Out, What's It All About, Diogenes?" NYT, 29 January, reviews Simon Critchley's The Book of Dead Philosophers.
Debby Applegate, "Intellectual Selection," NYT, 29 January, reviews Barry Werth's Banquet at Delmonico's: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America.
Caroline Preston, "Still Life, with Scissors and Glue," Washington Post, 1 February, reviews Jessica Helfand's Scrapbooks: An American History; Jonathan Yardley reviews Bryan Burrough's The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes and Michael Dirda reviews Kitty Burns Florey's Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting for the Washington Post, 1 February.
Finally, farewell to John Patrick Diggins, a maverick historian of American thought.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Charles I, 1600-1649
At Mercurius Politicus, Nick has a mini-blog carnival in honor of the 360th anniversary of "The Execution of Charles I". Monty Python's commemoration of the bloody end:
Modern History Notes
Richard Byrne, "Policed Academy," bookforum, February/March, reviews John H. Summers's Every Fury on Earth. Hat tip.
Holland Cotter, "Gaze East and Dream," NYT, 29 January, reviews "The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989," an exhibit at Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum.
P. D. Smith, "Woolworth's shrine to commerce," TLS, 28 January, reviews Gail Fenske's The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the making of modern New York, Robert H. Kargon's and Arthur P. Molella's Invented Edens: Techno-cities of the twentieth century, and Dell Upton's Another City: Urban life and urban spaces in the new American republic.
Helen Brown reviews Graham Farmelo's The Strangest Man: the Hidden Life of Paul Dirac for the Telegraph, 23 January.
Sergei Larenkov at Fima_Psuchopadt matches World War II-era Russian photographs with shots of the same sites today. Hat tip.
Dan Nguyen and Christopher Weaver, "The Missing Memos," Pro Publica, 28 January, compiles and continues to update a list of crucial internal Bush administration memoranda designed to enhance executive authority to detain and/or torture anyone.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Thursday's Notes
Michael Sims, "Going the Distance," Washington Post, 29 January, reviews Justin Marozzi's The Way of Herodotus: Travels With the Man Who Invented History.
Anne Hogan reviews Margaret M. McGowan's Dance in the Renaissance: European Fashion, French Obsession for the THES, 29 January.
Gerard Carruthers reviews Robert Crawford's The Bard: Robert Burns, a Biography for the THES, 29 January.
Colm Tóibín, "Urning," LRB, 29 January, reviews Sheila Rowbotham's Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Wednesday's Notes
Attribution: Despite attribution in authoritative sources, Abraham Lincoln's "of the People, by the People, and for the People" is apparently not from the prologue to John Wycliffe's 1384 English translation of the Bible; and, despite what Barry Goldwater said, "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" is Harry Jaffa's line, not from Cicero's orations against Cataline.
Photography:
Symposia:
Farewell: belatedly, to Germany's distinguished medievalist, Karl-Ferdinand Werner, to Ahmad Hassan Dani, Pakistan's distinguished archaeologist and historian, and to the American novelist and essayist, John Updike.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
More Noted Things
From Tenured Radical comes news that Ned Blackhawk is leaving the University of Wisconsin for a professorship in Yale's history department. His first book, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West, won awards from the OAH, the ASA, the Western History Association, and the American Society for Ethnohistory.
Ziauddin Sardar reviews Jonathan Lyons's The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization for the London Times, 22 January.
Robert Cushman, "Pop goes The Bard," National Post, 23 January, reviews Marjorie Garber's Shakespeare and Modern Culture.
Keith Thomas, "To Buy or Not to Buy: The Origins of Good Taste," History Today, February, finds in 17th century England's consumer culture the origins of desire for "markers of wealth, status, and good taste." Hat tip.
DD Guttenplan for the Guardian, 17 January, Max Hastings for the London Times, 25 January, and Alan Marshall for the Telegraph, 16 January, review David Reynolds's America, Empire of Liberty: A New History. "Reynolds is just cloth-eared," says Guttenplan, "when it comes to American culture." Thanks to Mary Dudziak for the tip.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Things Noted Here and There
#46, an early modern edition of the festival, is up at Chronologi Cogitationes.The National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists for its 2008 awards on Saturday.
The Andrew Jackson Papers Project at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, finds that a letter of 4 July 1835 from Junius Brutus Booth, the father of John Wilkes Booth, to "You damn'd old Scoundrel," President Andrew Jackson, is authentic. In it, the father of Abraham Lincoln's assassin threatens to "cut your throat whilst you are sleeping."
Philip Ball, "On the Evolution of Darwin," Guardian, 25 January, reviews Adrian Desmond's and James Moore's Darwin's Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins.
Anthony Julius, "Judaism's Redefiner," NYT, 23 January, reviews Adam Kirsch's Benjamin Disraeli.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Signs of the Times
Sunday's Notes
Edward Rothstein, "When the News Was New," NYT, 23 January, reviews "Breaking News: Renaissance Journalism and the Birth of the Newspaper," an exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC.
Russell Shorto, "Breath of Thought," NYT, 23 January, reviews Steven Johnson's The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America.
Carolyn See, "A Step in the Same Direction," Washington Post, 23 January, reviews Adam Gopnik's Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life. See also: Gopnik, "How Lincoln and Darwin Shaped the Modern World," Smithsonian, February.
Helmut Merker, "Marx: the quest, the path, the destination," signandsight, 19 January, reviews Alexander Kluge's 9 1/2 hour film, "News from Ideological Antiquity. Marx – Eisenstein – Das Kapital," and finds it not a moment too long.
Michael Kazin, "Does the Man Matter?" Washington Post, 25 January, reviews Waller R. Newell's The Soul of a Leader: Character, Conviction, and Ten Lessons in Political Greatness and Mark K. Updegrove's Baptism by Fire: Eight Presidents Who Took Office in Times of Crisis.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Robert Darnton, "Google & the Future of Books," NYRB, 12 February, assays the place of Google Books in the Enlightenment enterprise.
Holland Cotter, "Where Lines Become a Kind of Language," NYT, 22 January, reviews "Raphael to Renoir: Drawings From the Collection of Jean Bonna," an exhibit at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Dwight Gardner, "The Mahvelous and the Damned," NYT, 21 January, reviews D. J. Taylor's Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London's Jazz Age.
Daniel Kennefick, "Einstein's Worldview and Its Effects," American Scientist, 11 January, reviews Peter L. Galison, Gerald Holton and Silvan S. Schweber, Einstein for the 21st Century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture.
Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Jon A. Nagl, an Oxford Ph.D., "Let's Win the Wars We're In," vs. Colonel Gian P. Gentile, of the United States Military Academy at West Point, "Let's Build an Army to Win All Wars," Joint Force Quarterly, 1st Quarter, ground their debate about the future of American armed forces in their understandings of military history. Thanks to Chris Bray and Kings of War for the tip.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Cliopatria Welcomes Jonathan Jarrett
Cliopatria is pleased to welcome Jonathan Jarrett to its circle. His bachelor's degree is from Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he also took an M. Phil. in medieval history. In 2006, he received his doctorate from the School of History, Classics & Archaeology at Birkbeck College, London. Dr Jarrett has held research and teaching positions in the universities of London and Cambridge, and is currently a Research Assistant in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and a College Research Associate at Clare College, Cambridge.
Dr. Jarrett's expertise is in tenth- and eleventh-century Western European history, especially that of Catalonia. He has presented papers at numerous conferences, including the International Medieval Congress at Leeds and the Haskins Society Conference at Georgetown. His articles and reviews have appeared in journals such as Early Medieval Europe and several more are forthcoming. His dissertation, Pathways of Power in late-Carolingian Catalonia: charters and connections on a medieval frontier, is in revision for publication. Dr. Jarrett blogs at A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe. It is a pleasure to welcome him to Cliopatria.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Thursday's Notes
"President Obama Revokes Bush Presidential Records Executive Order," National Coalition for History, 21 January, notes that, on his first full day in office, Barack Obama revoked George Bush's Executive Order 13233, which severely restricted public access to presidential records. Here is Obama's new executive order. Hat tip.
Geert Jan van Gelder, "Grand Arabian Nights," TLS, 21 January, reviews Malcolm C. Lyons, with Ursula Lyons, trans., with an introduction and notes by Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 nights.
Brian Dillon reviews Lennard J. Davis's Obsession: a History for the Telegraph, 12 January.
David Greenberg, "The Riddle of Herbert Hoover," Slate, 19 January, reviews William E. Leuchtenburg's Herbert Hoover.
Russell Baker, "A Revolutionary President," NYRB, 12 February, reviews Anthony J. Badger's FDR: The First Hundred Days, Jonathan Alter's The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, Adam Cohen's Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America, and H. W. Brand's Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Alter, Badger, Cohen, Alonzo Hamby, Allen Lichtman, Julian Zelizer, and others discuss Badger's FDR at Josh Marshall's TPMCafé Book Club, 19- January. John Steele Gordon, "Getting America Back on Its Feet, the 1933 Version," NYT, 21 January, reviews Cohen's Nothing to Fear.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Carnivals!
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
More Noted Things
In Michael A. Elliott, "Rick Warren Gives Pre-Inauguration Sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church," Religion Dispatches, 19 January, Emory's Elliott recounts our misadventures yesterday at the Martin Luther King birthday celebration at Ebenezer. There were gay protesters both outside and inside the four hour service and Elliott earns title as "old iron butt" for sitting through all of it. I had to take a bathroom and fresh air break after the first two hours.
Jill Lepore, "Back Issues," New Yorker, 26 January, looks at the early years of American newspapers; and Lepore, "The Speech," New Yorker, 12 January, reviews the history of presidential inaugural addresses.
David Garrow, "An Unfinished Dream," Newsweek, 21 January, warns against seeing Barack Obama's inauguration as the achievement of King's "Dream."
Books that have influenced Barack Obama; and books that he should be reading. The President need not bother with Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, Debra Dickerson's recommendation. Dickerson and anyone still burdening students with it should read: Michael Kazin, "Howard Zinn's History Lessons," Dissent, Spring 2004. Hat tip.
Monday, January 19, 2009
Things Noted Here and There
Steven Hoch, the Russian historian and former provost at Washington State University, has been assigned to teach at the University's branch campus at Richland. There, he will teach a seminar on the Russian Revolution at an annual salary of $245,000. The department might have hired three full professors, five or six assistant professors, or a small army of adjuncts for that money. Hat tip.
Thomas Hegghammer, "Until the end of time," The National, 16 January, reviews Jean-Pierre Filiu's L'Apocalypse dans l'Islam, a study of the apocalypse in Sunni and Shia Islam since the 7th century.
"Inaugural Words: 1789 to the Present," NYT, 17 January, has a word cloud for every inaugural address since George Washington's first.
Michael Kammen, "Chagall, chronicler of a century's triumphs, terrors," Boston Globe, 18 January, reviews Jackie Wullschlager's Chagall: A Biography.
Matt Taibbi, "Flat N All That," New York Press, 14 January, takes aim at Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded. Especially recommended for connoisseurs of venom well delivered.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
My Inaugural Weekend
If you don't have HBO on cable, your local NPR station may be carrying the concert on the National Mall. It's a terrific bill. If your NPR local station isn't carrying it, NPR is streaming it live until 5:00 p.m. est. HBO Online is rebroadcasting the concert, even for non-subscribers, at 10:30 p.m. est and pst.
Tomorrow, I'm meeting Emory's Michael Elliott to attend the annual Martin Luther King birthday celebration at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church. I expect to spend Tuesday in front of my television at home, watching the inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States. It was a distant vision when Michael Kazin, Joyce Appleby and I organized "Historians for Obama" in late November 2007. Thank you, America.
Sunday's Notes
Michael Dirda reviews Paul Maliszewski's Fakers: Hoaxers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters, and Other Great Pretenders for the Washington Post, 18 January.
JFrater, "Top 10 Incredible Early Firsts In Photography," The List Universe, 13 January (scroll down), reproduces important landmarks in photography. [Ed: JFrater should have supplied dates for each photograph. Also, "early firsts," as opposed to "late firsts"?].
Jonathan Yardley reviews Robert J. Norrell's Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington for the Washington Post, 18 January.
David Greenberg, "Fearless Leader," NYT, 16 January, reviews Adam Cohen's Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America and Burt Solomon's FDR v. The Constitution: The Court-Packing Fight and the Triumph of Democracy.
Sam Roberts, "Rosenberg May Have Enlisted Two Spies," NYT, 17 January, looks at new revelations about Soviet era spying in the United States in Spies: The Rise and Fall of the K.G.B. in America by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Peter Gwyn reviews David Starkey's Henry: Virtuous Prince for THE, 15 January, and finds it puffed from little evidence.
Joe Phelen, "The defence for Robert Burns," TLS, 14 January, reviews Robert Crawford's The Bard: Robert Burns, a biography.
Edward Rothstein, "Fragments Tell a Story of Pain and Pride," NYT, 14 January, reviews "America I Am: The African American Imprint," an exhibit that opened Thursday at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
Joanna Lewis reviews Richard Price's Making Empire: Colonial Encounters and the Creation of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century Africa for THE, 15 January.
Philip Kennicott, "The Age of Abe," Washington Post, 16 January, reviews "Abraham Lincoln: An Extraordinary Life," an exhibit at the National Museum of American History in Washington.
Friday, January 16, 2009
Current Issues
Freedom of Speech: A South Carolina state senator proposes to make the use of vulgar language in public a felony. Meanwhile, presidents at 266 public colleges and universities in the United States have been put on notice that they may be personally liable for unconstitutional speech codes on their campuses.
A Ministry of Culture: Look for more discussion of the direction of cultural affairs in the Obama administration in the coming weeks. UNC, Chapel Hill's William Ferris, NEH Chairman in the Clinton administration, argues for an overarching cabinet level position. Goodness knows, the Smithsonian was in need of supervisory authority that was paying attention in recent years. Princeton's Stan Katz thinks a ministry of culture is a non-starter.
AHA & the Market: The best roundups of reports and commentary on the AHA convention are at AHA Today and HNN. Historians TV now has some non-commercial content: interviews with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Felice Lifshitz, with more promised to come. Elsewhere, Sterling Fluharty and Claire Potter discuss the history job market.
South Asia: Manan Ahmed, "Strangers in the Night," Chapati Mystery, 15 January, is his contribution about Pakistan's recent history at Chicago's panel, "Terror in Mumbai: Reflections on the Aftermath," on Wednesday.
Weblog Awards: Finally, the winners of The 2008 Weblog Awards have been announced. Next year, there should be a category for Best History Blog. With 1200 potential nominees, there's more than enough to choose among.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Thursday's Notes
Neil Genzlinger, "Following That Fast Cash," NYT, 12 January, reviews the PBS documentary, based on Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money, which will premier on Tuesday evening.
The new Common-place is up, with all things early American.
Bill Kauffman, "Darwin in the New World," WSJ, 9 January, reviews Barry Werth's Banquet at Delmonico's: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Darwinism in America.
Caleb Crain, "Children of the Left, Unite!" NYT, 9 January, reviews Julia L. Mickenberg and Philip Nel, eds., Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children's Literature.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
American History Notes
Whatever happened to Historians TV? The AHA agreed to an association with a British production company, WebsEdge, which promised to produce daily half-hour in-house programs at the AHA convention and subsequent video clips from the convention to a broader audience. Ten days after the convention closed, however, the only offerings on Historians TV are seven commercials. They were bought by the Smithsonian's yet-to-be-created National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Naval History and Heritage Command, Michigan's Department of History, Arts and Libraries, and history departments at James Madison University, UMass, Boston, Murray State University and Princeton University. At this point, Historians TV offers commercials only. No programming.
David Courtwright, "Why Soldiers Fight – or Flee," WSJ, 12 January, reviews Dora L. Costa's and Matthew E. Kahn's Heroes & Cowards: The Social Face of War. Costa and Kahn are UCLA economists who make use of Robert Fogel's database to do an econometric study of desertion from the Union army during the American Civil War. Here is Princeton University Press's webpage for the book. The authors are guest-posting about their book at The Volokh Conspiracy this week.
The bulk of the Martin Luther King Papers at the Atlanta University Center's Woodruff Library are digitized and went online yesterday. You can browse and search the digital finding aids here, but access to "digital surrogates" is restricted to on site use and researchers will not have direct access to original or photocopied documents. "No downloads, photocopies or photographs of King collection materials are permitted." Access to the archive's dedicated terminals is by 30 minute intervals, up to a maximum of 90 minutes. The archive's hours are very limited. It is a nightmare for researchers from out of town.
Gary J. Bass, "Unvarnished Conclusions After Covering, and Uncovering, the White House," NYT, 12 January, reviews David E. Sanger's The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
More Noted Things
A comment on the new meaning of religious diversity: In all the controversy about the choice of clergy to offer prayers at the Obama inauguration, has anyone noticed that all of them are Protestants? In the rush to represent gay and straight, male and female, Religious Right and not-so-Right, there are no Roman Catholic, Jewish, Eastern Orthodox or Muslim clergy among the select.
Sino-Japanese Studies was published in hard copy from 1988-2003. It is now digitized, its publication is renewed as an e-journal and it invites submissions.
Paul Lay, editor of History Today, launches his blog with assessments of two new books on the English Civil War, John Adamson, ed., The English Civil War and Blair Worden's The English Civil Wars, 1640-1660.
Edmund White, "Teenage Dirtbag," Guardian, 10 January, is excerpted from White's Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Things Noted Here and There
Anthony Grafton, "Gospel Secrets: The Biblical Controversies of Morton Smith," The Nation, 7 January, is a remarkable essay on the persisting controversy about the scholarship of Columbia's ancient historian, Morton Smith. Hat tip.
Justine Ferrari and Samantha Maiden, "Keith Windschuttle caught in Quadrant hoax," The Australian, 7 January, on the sokaling of Australia's leading right-wing historian. Plotted at Diary of a Hoax; first exposed by its host, Crikey. Hat tip.
The The Impotence of Proofreading: Hat tip.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Holland Cotter, "In the Gloom, Seeing Rembrandt With New Eyes," NYT, 8 January, looks at the Dutch painter's work when the bottom dropped out of his market.
Michael Dirda reviews Duncan Wu's William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man for the Washington Post, 11 January.
Louis Boyard, "Sociable Darwinists," Washington Post, 11 January, reviews Barry Werth's Banquet at Delmonico's: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America.
Jack Rosenthal, "The Mogul at Play," NYT, 9 January, reviews Kenneth Whyte's The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst.
David Garrow, "True North," Wilson Quarterly, Winter, reviews Thomas Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Wherein I Confess To Being A Nit-Picking Crank
I was reading a post at a well-known history blog yesterday. Its author is a historian employed by an American college or university to teach. At his first use of "alot," I was surprised. At his second, I was appalled. He does not know that "a lot" is two words. Don't tell me that language is malleable. As I type this, my computer keeps automatically correcting my attempt to type "alot". Its use is an error common among gum-snapping undergraduates. Can it be that a liberal arts education, doctoral study, a dissertation, and experience teaching history at an American college or university has not taught this historian that "a lot" is two words? I will no longer bother to read anything he posts. Please tell me where he teaches so I won't waste money on tuition there.
Friday, January 9, 2009
Friday's Notes
Christine Purdon reviews Lennard J. Davis's Obsession: A History for the THES, 8 January.
Robert Mills reviews Derek G. Neal's The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England for the THES, 8 January.
John Guy, "Shakespeare and deep England," TLS, 7 January, reviews Jonathan Bate's Soul of the Age: The life, mind and world of William Shakespeare .
Laurence Rees reviews Philipp von Boeselager's Valkyrie, Hans Mommsen's Germans Against Hitler and Ian Kershaw's Luck of the Devil for the London Times, 4 January.
Tony Badger, "FDR: A Model for Obama?" The Nation, 7 January, reminds us of how unprepared Roosevelt was for the crisis that faced him.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Modern History Notes
"Archie Summons Up Some AHA Detox," Rate Your Students, 5 January, is a colorful wrap up on the convention -- including comments on your job interview and your dissertation.
Scott Jaschik's "Seeking Purpose in Graduate Course Work," IHE, 6 January, begins with Ann Fabian's line, "We were more or less raised and professionalized by wolves." The discussion continues at Ann Little's "Modern graduate studies and the value of historiography," Historiann, 6 January, and at Paul Harvey's "The Graduate," Religion in American History, 7 January.
Frances Wilson reviews Franny Moyle's Desperate Romantics: The Private Lives of the Pre-Raphaelites for the London Times, 4 January. Hat tip.
Eric Arnesen, "Free Speech vs. fear," Boston Globe, 4 January, reviews Ernest Freeberg's Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent and Christopher Capozzola's Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen. Hat tip.
Adam Kirsch and Slavoj Zizek trade blows in: Kirsch, "The Deadly Jester," TNR, 3 December, a review of Zizek's In Defense of Lost Causes and Violence; Zizek, "Who Are You Calling Anti-Semitic?" TNR, 7 January; and Kirsch, "Still The Most Dangerous Philosopher In The West," TNR, 7 January.
Finally, you can vote in the Weblog Awards, 2008. You can vote once every 24 hours in each category, so vote early and vote often.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
More Noted Things
Scott Jaschik, "The Depressed History Job Market," IHE, 5 January, and Stan Katz, "The State of History and the History of State," Brainstorm, 6 January, report on the AHA's history job market. Katz also updates developments on the Foreign Relations of the United States.
Medieval Thought:
Shaul Magrid, "The Great Islamic Rabbi," Washington Post, 4 January, reviews Joel L. Kramer's Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds.
Military History:
Derek Leebaert, "Do Unto Others," Washington Post, 4 January, reviews Edwin G. Burrows's Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War, Norman Bussel's My Private War: Liberated Body, Captive Mind: A World War II POW's Journey, and Kevin Dockery's Operation Thunderhead: The True Story of Vietnam's Final POW Rescue Mission -- and the Last Navy SEAL Killed in Country.
Robert Asahina, "The Other Suicide Bombers," Washington Post, 4 January, reviews Maxwell Taylor Kennedy's Danger's Hour: The Story of the USS Bunker Hill and the Kamikaze Pilot Who Crippled Her.
Interviews:
You can hear H. W. Brands and Louis R. Harlan on NPR's Morning Edition, "White House to Break Another Color Barrier in Jan.," 26 December, about Theodore Roosevelt's invitation to Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House.
You can hear Eric Rauchway on NPR's Planet Money, "If FDR Had Done Nothing," 5 January.
Mortuary: Farewell to Christopher Hibbert.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Notes Medieval and Modern
Namit Arora, "Marco Polo's India," 3 Quarks Daily, 5 January, looks at what we learn from Marco Polo about 13th century India and what we learn about him.
Nicholas Bakalar, "In Reality, Oliver's Diet Wasn't Truly Dickensian," NYT, 29 December, reports a finding in The British Medical Journal that Charles Dickens took dramatic license in his account of Oliver Twist's diet in the 19th century workhouse.
Eugene Volokh finds explanatory power in the fact that, on 18 June 1912, Congress passed a law entitled, "An Act to provide for the support and maintenance of bastards in the District of Columbia."
Sarah Wildman, "Paper Love: Inside the Holocaust Archives," Slate, 5 January, looks at the newly opened archive at Bad Arolsen, Germany.
Adam Kirsch, "Beware of Pity," New Yorker, 12 January, re-assesses Hannah Arendt and her Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess.
Monday, January 5, 2009
Things Noted Here and There
AHA Convention Roundup: AHA Today, Chapati Mystery, CHE, Harper Academic, Historiann, History-ing, Inside Higher Ed, Notorious Ph.D., Rate Your Students*, Tenured Radical, and The Way of Improvement Leads Home.
*Clue to super-senior scholar who shows up at his three-paper panel without having submitted a paper to the commentator in advance, asks how much time he is allotted, and has his microphone ripped from his hands by the panel's moderator after talking for 40 minutes: it's time to retire.
David Hahn, "Origin of the specious," Guardian, 3 January, reviews Chris Lavers's The Natural History of Unicorns.
David C. Flatto, "The Great Eagle," Commentary, January, reviews Joel L. Kramer's Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds.
Barry Gewen, "The Man Who Discovered Oxygen (Maybe) and Gave the World Soda Water," NYT, 2 January, reviews Stephen Johnson's The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America.
Gary Anderson reviews Piers Brendon's The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997 for the Washington Times, 4 January.
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Sunday's Notes
Carnivals: History Carnival LXXII is up at Melissa Bellanta's The Vapour Trail. Gavin Robinson is unable to continue coordinating the Military History Carnival. If you are interested in doing so, please contact him at Investigations of a Dog.
Blogging the AHA Convention: AHA Today*, Chapati Mystery, Hotshot Harry** and Ann Little at Historiann, Kelly in Kansas, Knitting Clio, Legal History, Making History Podcast, Archie** at Rate Your Students, and Tenured Radical.***
*Officialese, but be nice.
**Bottom's up, as it were.
***All of this, despite reports of The Hilton's free wireless failures and $30 for a breakfast of yogurt and a muffin. Nothing, however, quite so exciting as Indyanna's recollection of Nat Hentoff's being driven from the platform of an AHA plenium in the early 1970s by a female New York intellectual who repeatedly referred to him as a "c*cks*ck*r".
New to History Blogging: The election year drew many historians into blogging at major venues, like Arianna Huffington's The Huffington Post and Tina Brown's more recent venture, The Daily Beast. I've only now added them to Cliopatria's History Blogroll, mostly in Contemporary Commentary, because it was difficult filtering historians out of the long lists of peddle pushers and fancy dancers who blog at those venues. Here, for your edification, are the ones I found:
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Simon Schama at the Ashmolean
Some years ago, I walked over to my office one evening, only to hear some of my students having a great deal of fun in a classroom. I leaned close enough to hear what was going on. It turned out that one of them was doing a mocking imitation of me. I couldn't help but open the door to tell them I thought he was doing a good job of it. Anyway, here's an undergraduate's unkind rendition of Simon Schama:
Hat tip.
Friday, January 2, 2009
Modern History Notes
If you are unable to attend the AHA convention, you can follow it, in part, at AHA Today and Historianstv.com.
Sanford Schwartz, "American Parable," NYRB, 15 January, reviews "Thomas Chambers: American Marine and Landscape Painter, 1808–1869," an exhibit currently on tour in Philadelphia, New York, and Bloomington.
Esther Schor, "Emily Dickinson and other hummingbirds," TLS, 31 December, reviews Brenda Wineapple's White Heat: The friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Christopher Benfey's A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, art, and scandal in the intersecting worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade.
Jeffrey Herf, "Unpleasant Truths," TNR, 30 December, reviews the German feature film, Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
The Cliopatria Awards, 2008
In conjunction with the AHA annual meeting in New York, here are the fourth annual Cliopatria Awards for History Blogging. Thanks to the judges this year, who made the difficult decisions necessary to pick the best work from strong fields: Manan Ahmed, Another Damned Medievalist, Rebecca Goetz, William Turkel, Jeremy Boggs, Lisa Spiro, Jonathan Dresner, Elle, Ph.D., Jeremy Young. They have done a fine job. Thanks also to Jonathan Dresner for creating the 2008 logos. Here, then, are the winners and brief explanations of the judges' rationale for their decisions:
Best Group Blog: The Edge of the American West
Witty and insightful, the Edge of the American West puts the group in group blog, with frequent contributions from an irreverent band that includes several historians, a grad student in philosophy, a grad student in literature, and a software developer. Always entertaining, often enlightening, the blog features snazzy visuals—graphs, photos, videos—and zippy writing on everything from meditations on Obama, to a reflection on the 1967 Detroit riots, to tips for preparing for an academic job interview.Best Individual Blog: Northwest HistoryAri Kelman and Eric Rauchway of the history department at UC, Davis, founded The Edge and are now joined in it by others.
In addition to a strong focus on the historical materials and historiography of the American Northwest, Prof. Cebula introduces and explains digital resources and techniques with great range and depth. The writing is engaging and incisive and the result both entertaining and very useful.Best New Blog: Wynken de WordeLarry Cebula is a Public Historian at Eastern Washington University and Assistant Digital Archivist at the Washington State Digital Archives.
Wynken de Worde is a blog about books: not only their history, but also their cultural significance and myriad uses. It's richly illustrated and always immensely thoughtful. Though the focus is on Renaissance and Elizabethan materials, Sarah Werner brings the history to life, and also addresses the present state of books, reading and intellectual property as well.Best Post: Claire Potter, "What Would Natalie Zemon Davis Do?" Tenured Radical, 19 June 2008.Dr. Sarah Werner is Director of the Undergraduate Program at the Folger Shakespeare Library and a scholar of Shakesperean and Renaissance drama.
In this eloquent, well-argued response to the blogger Rusticus' attack on women's history and women historians, Potter uses a 1988 exchange between Natalie Zemon Davis and Robert Finlay to illustrate how women's history can "illuminate what it meant to be human" while showing "how to argue in a civilized way." She argues that historians succeed because they persuade their colleagues, male and female; this blog post is a good example of one such success.Best Series of Posts: Tim Abbott on Jonathan Trumbull's "The Death of General Montgomery", Walking the Berkshires, Jan. 12, Jan. 13, Jan. 14, Jan. 17, Jan. 18.Claire Potter is a professor of History and American Studies at Connecticut's Wesleyan University.
The examination of Jonathan Trumbull's famous painting, The Death of General Montgomery in Attack on Quebec, December 31 1775, over five posts at Tim Abbott's Walking the Berkshires is good scholarly writing and engaging analysis. Abbott raises intriguing questions about historical memory, as he guides his readers through the examination of historical records.Best Writer: ZunguzunguTim Abbott is a conservation professional.
Whether in his examination of Henry Morton Stanley's encounter with Dr. Livingstone, or tracing the African imaginary in Charlton Heston's Naked Jungle or his expositions of John Ford's American West, Zunguzungu is always thought- provoking and illuminating. His writing consistently demonstrates a gift of narrative and the willingness to eschew easy questions. He draws heavily on visuals to augment his readings, but never at the expense of readability.Zunguzungu is a graduate student in English. His project is broadly concerned with tracking the extent to which "America's Africa" and "Africa's America" have been mutually constitutive -- even, occasionally, dialogic -- narratives of identity.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
JibJab's Year in Review, 2008
Not JibJab's best, I think, but -- except for Obama's election -- 2008 wasn't so great, either.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
More Noted Things
Adam Kirsch, "The Secret of The Canterbury Tales," Slate, 29 December, reviews Burton Raffel's new translation of Chaucer from middle to modern English.
Joseph Tartakovsky, "A Man of Imagination," New Criterion, December, reviews Adam Kirsch's Benjamin Disraeli.
David Schiff, "Ives's Ears," The Nation, 17 December, reviews Gayle Sherwood Magee's Charles Ives Reconsidered. Hat tip.
Bijan C. Bayne reviews James Sullivan's The Hardest Working Man: How James Brown Saved The Soul of America for The Root, 26 December.
Pan Tianshu, "‘Working Sisters': The everyday lives of migrant women in China's world factories," Harvard Magazine, January/February, reviews Leslie T. Chang's Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China.
Cullen Murphy and Todd S. Purdum, "Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House," Vanity Fair, February, includes candid and devastating commentary from within the Bush administration. The AP covers it in Staff, "Ex-aides say Bush never recovered from Katrina," AP, 29 December.
Monday, December 29, 2008
Things Noted Here and There
Mike Knobler, "AJC investigation: Many athletes lag far behind on SAT scores," AJC, 28 December; and Doug Lederman, "The Admissions Gap for Big-Time Athletes," IHE, 29 December, report of the gap in SAT scores between football and basketball players and other students at public universities in the United States. The gap is sometimes stunning, as for example the 433 points separating University of Texas basketball players from the average score of all the University's admits.
John Bemelmans Marciano, "A Deadly Wave, a Lucky Star," NYT, 26 December, tells a personal story of the tsunami of 28 December 1908 at Pellaro, Italy, the largest natural disaster in European history.
Before the book's publication, Gabriel Sherman, "The Greatest Love Story Ever Sold," TNR, 25 December, exposes Herman Rosenblat's Holocaust "memoir," Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived, as a fraud. Oprey Winfrey promoted, film in the works, children's version – the whole nine yards. Book publication canceled; film will go ahead.
A Mt. Rushmore of the Mind
In John F. Harris & Alexander Burns, "Straw Man? Historians say Obama is no Lincoln," Politico, 15 December, and Matt Carey, "Historian sees lessons, Lincoln parallels for Obama," CNN, 23 December, Princeton's Sean Wilentz and Jim McPherson have a gentlemen's disagreement about Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama. Josh Marshall and Eric Rauchway wonder if Obama is trolling Wilentz.
Ronald J. Pestritto, "Theodore Roosevelt Was No Conservative," WSJ, 26 December, argues that TR shouldn't represent the future of the Republican Party; and draws a reply in Max Boot's "TR, Still a Conservative," Contentions, 27 December.
A Rasmussen poll tests public opinion about whether Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan was the best American president of the 20th century.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Sunday's Notes
History Carnival LXXII goes up at Melissa Bellanta's The Vapour Trail on Thursday 1 January. Send your nominations of December's best in history blogging to her at: m.bellanta*at* uq*dot*edu*dot*au.
Michael Hirsch, "Follow the Money," NYT, 25 December, reviews Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World.
Charles Isherwood, "Brush Up Your You-Know-What," NYT, 25 December, reviews Marjorie Gerber's Shakespeare and Modern Culture.
Richard Byrne, "Ranters and Corantos: Renaissance Journalism," The Nation, 22 December, reviews "Breaking News: Renaissance Journalism and the Birth of the Newspaper," an exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. See also: Scott McLemee, "Wondrous Communications," Quick Study, 27 December, on C. L. R. James and the English Revolution.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Weak Endnotes
Christopher Miller, "Historians and Facebook," History and Education, 16 December, compares the numbers of Facebook group memberships achieved by word-of-mouth for the AHA, OAH, and H-Net. He contrasts these with the group memberships achieved by "sustained efforts" for Cliopatria, HNN, and Progressive Historians.* Miller concludes that the AHA and OAH "are missing out by not extending content to this platform." I'm not so sure about that, but that may be because I really don't understand what Facebook is all about. I have an account and have friends on Facebook, but it isn't clear to me how it is particularly useful to historians.
*Other history blogs that have Facebook groups include: Chapati Mystery, Civil War History, Civil War Memory, In the Middle, and TOCWOC -- A Civil War Blog.
David Abulafia reviews Marcy Norton's Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World for THES, 18 December.
Adam Hochschild, "Americans in the gulag," TLS, 23 December, reviews Tim Tzouliadis's The Forsaken: From the Great Depression to the Gulags, Hope and betrayal in Stalin's Russia.
Dwight Gardner, "A Wartime Tale That Had to Be Told," NYT, 25 December, reviews Thomas Keneally's Searching for Schindler, an account of how the story of "Schindler's List" came to be told.
Finally, can a Marxist think of fox hunting as a healthy sport? Apparently so. The late Christopher Hill did.
Friday, December 26, 2008
Modern History Notes
Nathan, "5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year," Flowing Data, 19 December, presents them. Hat tip.
Claire Tomalin, "The house that Charles built," Guardian, 20 December, reviews Jenny Hartley's Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women.
Marshall Berman, "Modernism in the Streets," Dissent, Fall, reviews Peter Gay's Modernism: The Lure of Heresy.
John Steele Gordon, "Getting to Know You, Mr. Hammerstein," NYT, 24 December, reviews Amy Asch, ed., The Complete Lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II.
At the end of the year, The New Republic says Michael Tomasky's "Jackboots and Whole Foods," TNR, 12 March, a review of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, ranks as the "Best of TNR, 2008." Goldberg disagrees, calling Tomasky's review "shameful, dishonest and just plain stupid." His fuller reply is here.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Earliest Sound Recording
The earliest sound recording that has survived was done by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in 1860. It predates Thomas Edison's wax cylinder experiments by nearly three decades. Strangely, his "phonautograph" was designed to record sound, but not to play it back. The voice on the 10 second recording is of a woman singing "Au Clair de la Lune."
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
More Noted Things
Gwenda Blair, "Paying with the Past," Chicago Magazine, December, is a study in Iranian antiquities and the modern war on terror. Hat tip.
John Derbyshire, "When Worlds Collide," Claremont Review, Fall, reviews Hugh Kennedy's The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In and David Levering Lewis's God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215.
Jessica Dawson, "Virgin Rebirth," Washington Post, 23 December, looks at the conservation of Neroccio dei Landi's "Virgin and Child with Saint Anthony Abbott and Saint Sigismund" (c. 1490/1495) at the National Gallery of Art's conservation lab.
Sander Gliboff, "Love, Death and Darwinism," American Scientist, January/February 2009, reviews Robert J. Richards's The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought.
Martin Sieff, "Chaplin lifted weary world's spirits," Washington Times, 21 December, reviews Stephen Weissman's Chaplin: A Life.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Things Noted Here and There
You may have read about it at Knitting Clio, Historiann, or Legal History. A letter, "Feminist historians for a New Deal," drafted by Mimi Abramovitz of Hunter College, Rosalyn Baxandall of SUNY, Old Westbury, Eileen Boris and Alice O'Connor of the UC, Santa Barbara, Linda Gordon of NYU, Alice Kessler-Harris of Columbia, Annelise Orleck of Dartmouth, and Sally Stein of UC, Irvine, reminds President-elect Obama that New Deal programs did not treat women equally and calls on him to attend to gender equity in his new economic stimulus proposals. Over 1000 American historians of women have now signed the letter.
Kathryn Shevelow, "River of Life," Washington Post, 21 December, reviews Peter Ackroyd's Thames: The Biography.
Philip Dray, "The Crucible of Reconstruction," Washington Post, 21 December, reviews Jacqueline Jones's Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War.
Scott Stossel, "Still Crazy After All These Years," NYT, 19 December, reviews Jonathan Engels's American Therapy: The Rise of Psychotherapy in the United States.
The AP's record of the biggest Ponzi-schemes in history misses two of the most spectacular, according to Josh Marshall: Richard Whitney and Ivar Kreuger. They both made Charles Ponzi look like a piker; and Bernie Madoff makes all of them look almost like honest men.
Finally, Edward Jay Epstein's "How Much Has Harvard Really Lost?" Huffington Post, 21 December, argues that the University's loss may be more than the $8 billion it acknowledges from its $36 billion endowment. The real loss may be closer to $18 billion, he says. Hat tip.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Antikythera rebuilt and rebooted
The 2150 year old Antikythera mechanism is a strange clockwork of meshed cogs that was discovered over a century ago in the cargo of an ancient Greek shipwreck near the island of Antikythera. Jo Marchant's Decoding the Heavens: Solving the Mystery of the World's First Computer is the story of the scientists and engineers who fell under its spell in the last century. It is, says one reviewer, "a gripping tale of scientific obsession, rivalry and skulduggery." Now, the mechanism has been reconstructed and its purposes interpreted by Michael Wright, a former curator at London's Science Museum. Here, Wright demonstrates his working model of the original:
James Randerson, "Antikythera: A 2,000-year-old Greek computer comes back to life," Guardian: Science Blog, 11 December; Jo Marchant, "Archimedes and the 2000-year-old computer," New Scientist, 12 December; Charlie Sorrel, "World's First Computer Rebuilt, Rebooted After 2,000 Years," Wired, 16 December; and John Cox, "Reproduction of 2,100-year-old calculator deepens mystery," Network World, 17 December.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Weak Endnotes
Ahoy, mateys! Mills Kelly has taught his course, "Lying about the Past." As required, his students created and set a hoax afloat, with its own website, wikipedia entry, and youtube channel. USA Today and others bought into the hoax; CHE exposed it.
Holland Cotter, "The Glory That Was Greece From a Female Perspective," NYT, 18 December, reviews "Worshiping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens," an exhibit at Manhattan's Onassis Cultural Center.
Roberta Smith, "Seeing History in the Eye of a Needle," NYT, 18 December, reviews "English Embroidery From the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1580-1700: 'Twixt Art and Nature," an exhibit at Manhattan's Bard Graduate Center.
Anthony Gottlieb, "Particle Man," NYT, 19 December, reviews Ingrid D. Rowland's Giordano Bruno: Philosopher Heretic.
Friday, December 19, 2008
A Holiday Greeting from Mexico
Cliopatria's friend, Ambrose Hofstader Bierce III, sends "Greetings, Friends!" from deepest Mexico.
City Life and Civil War
W. V. Harris, "Noisy, smelly, excavated Pompeii," TLS, 17 December, reviews Mary Beard's Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town.
Rosemary Ashton, "Surveying London," TLS, 10 December, reviews Ben Weinreb, Christopher Hibbert, Julia Keay and John Keay, eds., The London Encyclopaedia, revised 3rd edition.
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, "In Congo Square: Colonial New Orleans," The Nation, 10 December, reviews Shannon Lee Dawdy's Building the Devil's Empire: French Colonial New Orleans and Ned Sublette's The World That Made New Orleans From Spanish Silver to Congo Square.
Thomas Laqueur, "Among the Graves," LRB, 18 December, reviews Mark Neely's The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction and Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Immigration to the United States, 1820-2007
Each dot represents 100 people:
Immigration to the US, 1820-2007 v2 from Ian Stevenson on Vimeo. Hat tip.
This striking graphic does, for example, illustrate South American immigration's dramatic growth in recent decades. Three things about the graphic, however, make me skeptical of its usefulness as much more than a gimmick:
1) the use of dark blue dots against a black background to represent the African migration makes it difficult to see them well.
2) the graphic depicts the United States exclusively as migration's destiny. We've known for a long time that, at least so far as the European migration is concerned, there was a substantial rate of return to the homeland and that it varied dramatically over time and from one nation of origin to another.
3) depicting the United States exclusively as migration's destiny also obscures far more complex and interesting patterns of international and regional migrations. You would never know from this graphic, for example, that at least in the early years the African migration to the Caribbean and South America was far larger than the migration to the United States. It doesn't even attempt to suggest the large European migration to South America; or the substantial redistributions of population in Asia.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Things Noted Here and There
Indian History Carnival #12 is up at Varnam.
Great Britain's Channel 4 has recently broadcast a four-part, bodice-ripping series, "The Devil's Whore," on the English Revolution of the 1640s. It had tough reviews from John Adamson of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and Edward Vallance of Liverpool.
Dwight Garner, "The Wild, Wild Doctoring in the Wild, Wild West," NYT, 16 December, reviews David Dary's Frontier Medicine: From the Atlantic to the Pacific, 1492-1941.
Libraries of Early America gathers online the book collections of early American bibliophiles, from John Adams to Lady Jean Miller Skipwith. Hat tip.
An out-of-court settlement between the Ulysses S. Grant Association and Southern Illinois University will move all of the USGA's collections for publication of the Grant Papers from SIU to Mississippi State University, where John Marszalek will succeed the late John Y. Simon as executive editor of the series.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Lincoln and Obama in 2009
In John F. Harris and Alexander Burns, "Straw Man? Historians say Obama is no Lincoln," Politico, 15 December, "historians" primarily means Sean Wilentz. Toss with a quote from Eric Foner and a reference to Doris Kearns Goodwin. That's about it.
Whether "the historians" like it or not, Lincoln and Obama will be inextricably linked by writers in 2009 – writers who will make the bicentennial of his birth the year of Lincoln and the year of his inauguration the year of Obama. James L. Swanson, the historian of Lincoln's assassination, counts at least 60 Abraham Lincoln titles that will appear in 2009. Michael Burlingame's Abraham Lincoln: A Life, the first multi-volume biography of Lincoln since Carl Sandburg's, is surely foremost among them. Burlingame's scholarship has mastered the sources, including Lincoln's early anonymous op-eds, as no one else has ever done.
Michael Calderone mentions four Obama authors: 1) the New Yorker's David Remnick, whose "The Joshua Generation" will form the core of his book on Obama, race and politics in contemporary America; 2) the New Yorker's Washington correspondent, Ryan Lizza, is doing a book about Obama's' first year in office; 3) The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama by PBS's Gwen Ifill, groups Obama with a new generation of African American politicians -- Newark's Cory Booker, Massachusetts' Deval Patrick, and Representative Artur Davis of Alabama -- and will appear on Inauguration Day; and 4) Robert Draper has a contract for a work spanning the 40 years from the death of Martin Luther King to the election of Barack Obama. Unmentioned in Calderone's list are: King biographer David Garrow, who is at work on an Obama biography, and campaign books by Newsweek's Richard Wolffe and the Washington Post's David Marannis.
Monday, December 15, 2008
Mostly Modern Notes
Alexander Clark hosts Military History Carnival XIX at Military History and Warfare. The history of science carnival, The Giant's Shoulders VI, is up at Rigorous Trivialities.
From CD Rom to Internet Website: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database and The Walt Whitman Archive.
Anthony Grafton, "Mein Buch," TNR, 24 December, reviews Timothy W. Ryback's Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life.
Scott Jaschik, "‘Crisis' Seen in Key History Series," IHE, 15 December, explores the troubled production of Foreign Relations of the United States, a series that is the official record of U.S. foreign policy. KC Johnson first brought it to our attention.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Notes Ancient and Modern
Steve Coates, "‘My Poetry Is Filthy — but Not I'," NYT, 12 December, reviews Martial's Epigrams: A Selection, translated and with an introduction by Garry Wills.
Lorraine Adams, "Thinly Veiled," NYT, 12 December, reviews Sherry Jones's The Jewel of Medina, a work of historical fiction.
Blake Gopnik, "Ascending Anew," Washington Post, 14 December, features the Correggio retrospective that is currently exhibited across Parma, Italy.
Blake Bailey, "A Modern Victorian," NYT, 12 December, reviews Paul Mariani's Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life.
Patrick Keeney, "Decline, fall and then some," National Post, 6 December, reviews Theodore Dalrymple's Not with a Bang But with a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline.
James Glanz and T. Christian Miller, "Report Spotlights Iraq Rebuilding Blunders," NYT, 13 December, summarizes a massive report, "Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience," on the $117 billion spent in failed reconstruction projects.
Where is the Frederick Lewis Allen who will write our Only Yesterday? How could you make up Donald Rumsfeld, Sarah Palin, Rod Blagojevich, Marc Dreier, Bernie Madoff?
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Weak Endnotes
Roderick C. Morris, "Venetian spoken here," TLS, 12 December, reviews Ronnie Ferguson's A Linguistic History of Venice.
Simon Jenkins, "Milton the poet was a bore and a prig. But on liberty he was majestic," Guardian, 12 December, argues that John Milton remains an inspiration for freedom of speech.
David Blight, "The Slave Who Found a New World," Washington Post, 14 December, reviews Robert Goodwin's Crossing the Continent, 1527-1540: The Story of the First African-American Explorer of the American South.
Wendy Smith, "A Sect of Celibates," Washington Post, 14 December, reviews Jane Fletcher Geniesse's American Priestess: The Extraordinary Story of Anna Spafford and the American Colony in Jerusalem.
Guy Gugliotta, "Chemistry and Morality," Washington Post, 14 December, reviews Thomas Hager's The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Modern History Notes
Michael Kenney, "Romance and murder in 18th-century Boston," Boston Globe, 9 December, and Carolyn See, "Colonial Farce in Beantown," Washington Post, 12 December, review Jane Kamensky's and Jill Lepore's Blindspot, By a Gentleman in Exile & a Lady in Disguise.
Matthew Price, "Watching the sun set on the great British empire," Boston Globe, 10 December, reviews Piers Brendon's The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997.
Edward Rothstein, "Reconsidering the Man From Illinois," NYT, 11 December, reviews "One Life: The Mask of Lincoln," an exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.
Caleb Crain, "Pixies, Sheilas, Dirtbags and Cougar Bait: Modern Slang," The Nation, 10 December, reviews John Ayto and John Simpson, eds., Stone the Crows: Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang, and Tom Dalzell, ed., The Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang and Unconventional English. See also: Crain, "Attack of the Kittenheads," Steamboats are ruining everything, 11 December.
Michael Kazin, "The Sit-Down Strike Returns! Now What?" TAP, 11 December, reflects on how labor action and political support now differs from it in the 1930s. Hat tip.