CLIOPATRIA: A Group Blog
Entries by Ralph E. Luker
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Midweek Notes
Congratulations to Natalie Zemon Davis of Princeton and Toronto who has won Norway's 4.5 million kroner ($785,000) Holberg International Memorial Prize for distinguished work in history.
Rebecca Kaplan, "Students protest tenure denial of professor," Daily Pennsylvanian, 16 March, reports student reaction to the tenure denial of Ronald J. Granieri by Penn's history department. If you look at all he brings to the table, it looks like a bad decision.
Adam Kirsch, "Political Legacy," The Tablet, 16 March, reviews Eric Nelson's The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought.
Timothy R. Smith reviews Mark Lee Gardner's To Hell on a Fast Horse: Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and the Epic Chase to Justice in the Old West for the Washington Post, 14 March.
Istvan Rev, "An Absurdist Film That Touches on Wartime Reality," NYT, 15 March, reviews the WWII era film, "Inglorious Basterds," and finds more truthfulness in it than other reviewers have believed. Thanks to Manan Ahmed for the tip.
Dwight Garner, "Renewing an Old Idea: Common Good," NYT, 16 March, reviews Tony Judt's Ill Fares the Land.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
More Noted Things
Both Meg at xoom and Another Damned Medievalist are challenging the practice of Medievalists.net and Medieval News of picking up stories (sometimes verbatim) from other sites, deleting author's names, and, of course, not linking to the original source of the story. ADM has carried the objection to Facebook, where the spokesperson for Medievalists.net refuses to acknowledge the unattributed theft and, elsewhere, claims to be "livid" about the charges. But these folk have been caught red-handed and flat-footed. They need to correct their practice before extending their territory to History of the Ancient World and Early Modern England.
Patricia Cohen, "Fending Off Digital Decay, Bit by Bit," NYT, 15 March, looks at the special problems of archiving electronic manuscripts.
Michael Kazin,"God and Woman at Wasilla," Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Spring, reviews Sarah Palin's Going Rogue: An American Life and Matthew Continetti'sThe Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down A Rising Star.
"Has Education Reform Gone Too Far?" TNR, 15 March, is a symposium, featuring Diane Ravitch, Richard Rothstein, and Ben Wildavsky.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Things Noted Here & There
The National Book Critics Circle Awards for 2009 were announced on Thursday night. Unsurprisingly, they included: Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall for Fiction, Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science for General Nonfiction, and Blake Bailey's Cheever: A Life for Biography.
Eric Ormsby, "Butchers and Saints," NYT, 12 March, reviews Jonathan Phillips's Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades.
Jacqueline Jones, "Black Like Whom?" Slate, 14 March, reviews Ira Berlin's The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations.
Sarah Wheeler, "The Frozen Unknown," NYT, 11 March, reviews Anthony Brandt's The Man Who Ate His Boots: The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage.
Joan Waugh, "Ulysses S. Grant earned his $50 bill," LA Times, 8 March, and Sean Wilentz, "Who's Buried in the History Books?" NYT, 13 March, argue against replacing U. S. Grant with Ronald Reagan on the $50 bill.
Gary Indiana, "Making Our Mark," bookforum, February/March, and Scott Martelle, "Mark Twain's vendetta volume," LA Times, 14 March, review Laura Skandera Trombley's Mark Twain's Other Woman: The Hidden Story of His Final Years.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Weak Endnotes
Richard Dorment, "Art and Traffic," NYRBlog, 12 March, reviews "Masterpieces of European Painting from Dulwich Picture Gallery," an exhibit at Manhattan's Frick Gallery.
James McConnachie reviews Alex Butterworth's The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents for London's Sunday Times, 14 March.
Wendell Steavenson reviews Oliver Bullough's Let Our Fame be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus for London's Sunday Times, 14 March.
Steven Hahn, "Race to the Plate," The Book, 12 March, and Wil Haygood for the Washington Post, 13 March, review Timothy M. Gay's Satch, Dizzy, and Rapid Robert: The Wild Saga of Interracial Baseball Before Jackie Robinson.
Finally, farewell to UC, Berkeley's professor emeritus of legal history, Thomas G. Barnes, and to Georgetown University's Russian historian, Richard T. Stites.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Friday's Notes
Timothy Garton Ash, "Bearing witness is a sacred trust," Guardian, 10 March, reflects on Artur Domoslawsk's revelations in Kapuscinski Non-Fiction.
Scott Saul, "A Body on the Gears: On Mario Savio," Nation, 11 March, Robert Cohen's Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s.
Sara Mosle, "Facing Up to Our Ignorance," Slate, 11 March, reviews Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System.
For Women's History Month, Tenured Radical recommends a few good women's history blogs by female historians. Cliopatria's History Blogroll lists more than two dozen Women's History Blogs by female historians.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
20th Century Notes
Florida's Matthew Gallman and UC, Irvine's Jon Wiener exchange comments about Wiener's "Big Tobacco and the Historians," The Nation, 25 February.
Lesley Chamberlain, "Powerless Lenin," TLS, 10 March, reviews Helen Rappaport's Conspirator: Lenin in exile.
Edmund Morris, "Why Is Obama Reading My Book?" Daily Beast, 9 March, considers what the 44th has to learn from the 26th.
Peter Kemp reviews Kenneth Slawenski's JD Salinger: A Life Raised High for London's Sunday Times, 28 February.
Peter Carlson reviews Francis Wheen's Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia for the Washington Post, 7 March.
Harold Seymour (1910-1992) earned a doctorate in history from Cornell and taught at South Carolina's Presbyterian College and Cleveland's Fenn College. Later, he was in administration at SUNY, Buffalo. But Seymour earned his professional reputation with the publication of a prize-winning three volume history of baseball (1960-1990) and, before the third volume was published, Alzheimer's Disease severely limited his intellectual capacity. For 30 years, he'd refused to acknowledge his wife's co-authorship of his books and now the Society for American Baseball Research seeks to correct the record. You have to wonder how many other wives and lovers of male historians of his generation ought to have been acknowledged as co-author.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Mid-Week Notes
Rob MacDougall, "Playful Historical Thinking," Old is the New New, 8 March, MacDougall, "Survival of the Funnest," Old is the New New, 9 March, and MacDougall, "A Demonstration," Old is the New New, 10 March, summon us to come out and play.
Paul Lay previews "Paul Sandby RA: Picturing Britain, A Bicentenary Exhibition," an exhibit in the Sackler Wing of London's Royal Academy of Arts, for History Today, 9 March. See also: Mary Beard, 10 March.
Adam Kirsch, "Orthodox Liberal," Tablet, 9 March, reviews Abigail Green's Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero.
Joanna Bourke reviews Bernhard Schlink's Guilt about the Past for the London Times, 27 February.
Finally, farewell to a distinguished classicist, Sir Kenneth Dover.
Here, Bob Dylan casts a skeptical eye at Sir Kenneth.* There is no known evidence, however, that Dover was chuckling at the memory of Trevor Aston's suicide. Hat tip.
*Am I wrong or does this picture look like a still from the new "Alice in Wonderland" flick?
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
More Noted Things
Benedetta Craveri, "Fly High & Fall," NYRB, 25 March, reviews Veronica Buckley's The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon.
Ben Wallace-Wells, "Heart of Darkness," The Book, 10 March, reviews Bertrand Taithe's The Killer Trail: A Colonial Scandal in the Heart of Africa.
Eric Arneson reviews John Milton Cooper, Jr.'s Woodrow Wilson: A Biography for the Chicago Tribune, 4 March. Hat tip.
Robert Lacy, "Model Failure," Literary Review, March, reviews Greg Grandin's Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City.
On May 20, Yale's Jonathan Spence will give the 2010 Jefferson Lecture at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C. His subject is "When Minds Met: China and the West in the Seventeenth Century." Since its establishment in 1972, Spence is the 15th historian to give the Jefferson Lecture. His predecessors include: Bernard Bailyn, Caroline Walker Bynum, Robert Conquest, John Hope Franklin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Donald Kagan, Bernard Knox, Bernard Lewis, Forrest McDonald, James McPherson, Jaroslav Pelikan, Barbara Tuchman, Emily Vermeule, and C. Vann Woodward.
Monday, March 8, 2010
Things Noted Here & There
Curt Suplee reviews Timothy Ferris's The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature for the Washington Post, 7 March.
Alan Ryan, "Heroes of Enterprise," Literary Review, March, reviews Joyce Appleby's The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism.
Kenan Malik, "Pigs Won't Fly," Literary Review, March, and Michael Ruse, "Philosophers Rip Darwin," CHE, 7 March, feature the renewed debate about Darwin.
John J. Tierney, Jr., "From the Top: The Question of Command in Counter-Insurgency," Books & Culture, March/April, reviews Mark Moyar's A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq.
Alex Goodall, "'Individualists of The World, Unite!'" Literary Review, March, reviews Jennifer Burns's Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
A Carnival & Modern History Notes
Biblical Studies Carnival LI is up at Annuma.
Amos N. Jones reviews Lea VanderVelde's Mrs. Dred Scott: The woman behind the scenes of the famous case for Books & Culture, March.
Joseph O'Neill, "Turks, Kurds, Armenians: View From a Small Town," NYT, 3 March, reviews Christopher de Bellaigue's Rebel Land: Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town.
Mick Sussman, "The Bootleg Diaries," NYT, 5 March, reviews Max Watman's Chasing the White Dog: An Amateur Outlaw's Adventures in Moonshine.
Martin Cohen reviews Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy for the THE, 18 February.
Elaine Showalter, "China Girl," Literary Review, March, reviews Hilary Spurling's Burying Bones: Pearl Buck's Life in China.
Art History Notes
Richard Dorment for the Telegraph, 15 February, Charles Darwent for the Independent, 21 February, and James Hall, "Michelangelo and the mastery of drawing," Guardian, 6 March, review "Michelangelo's Dream," an exhibit at London's Courtauld Gallery.
Maya Jasanoff reviews Holger Hoock's Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War and the Arts in the British World, 1750-1850 for the Guardian, 6 March.
Sarah Boxer, "The Dark Art of Cut and Paste," Slate, 3 March, has slides from and notes on "Playing with Pictures: The Victorian Art of Photocollage," an exhibit at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Rachel Wolff, "Did Monet Invent Abstract Art?" Daily Beast, 4 March, reviews "Monet and Abstraction," an exhibit at two venues in Madrid, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Fundación Caja Madrid.
Friday, March 5, 2010
Friday's Notes
Michael Silk, "W. B. Yeats and King Oedipus," TLS, 3 March, reviews Jared Curtis, ed., Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus: Manuscript materials by W. B. Yeats.
Seth Lerer, "What Lewis Carroll Taught Us," Slate, 4 March, reviews Jenny Woolf's The Mystery of Lewis Carroll.
Janet Maslin, "Stand by Your Singer and Her Art," NYT, 3 March, reviews Jimmy McDonough's Tammy Wynette: Tragic Country Queen.
Meanwhile, over here on the So What Are You Doin' About It? Corner:
Thursday, March 4, 2010
More Noted Things
Jed Perl, "Venice in Texas," TNR, 2 March, reviews "Paolo Veronese: The Petrobelli Altarpiece," an exhibit at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin.
John Rogister, "The Sun King (and his wife)," TLS, 3 March, reviews Nicolas Milovanovic and Alexandre Maral, eds., Louis XIV: L'homme et le roi and Madame de Maintenon's Lettres, 1, 1650–1689, ed. by Hans Bots and Eugénie Bots-Estourgie.
Max Byrd reviews Michael O'Brien's Mrs. Adams in Winter: A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon for the Barnes & Noble Review, 2 March.
Dwight Garner, "A Look at the Snarled Past of Armenians and Turks," NYT, 2 March, reviews Christopher de Bellaigue's Rebel Land: Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town.
Kapuscinski Non-fiction, Artur Domoslawski's new biography of post-World War II Poland's most important foreign correspondent, accuses Kapuscinski of both lying and spying. The accusations draw critical reaction from Neal Ascherson in the Guardian and Morgan Meis at The Smart Set.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
"70 Million" by Hold Your Horses!
This musical video production of "70 Million" by the Franco-American band, Hold Your Horses!, nods at Art History by recreating two dozen of the most important paintings in western art. You get two points for every painting and each artist you can name. One point extra credit for each painting you can date:
70 Million by Hold Your Horses ! from L'Ogre on Vimeo.
Hat tipTuesday, March 2, 2010
20th Century Notes
There's been considerable interest in both Jon Wiener's "Big Tobacco and the Historians," The Nation, 25 February, and the list of historians who have testified in American courts on behalf of tobacco corporations. In his forthcoming book, Golden Holocaust, Robert Proctor will cite more instances of those historians' testimony and the names of additional historians testifying for Big Tobacco.
Elyssa East, "Murder by the Drop," NYT, 25 February, reviews Deborah Blum's The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett reviews Frances Stonor Saunders's The Woman Who Shot Mussolini for the Guardian, 27 February.
Richard Brooks, "The battle of Hastings and Beevor," London's Sunday Times, 28 February, announces new British blockbuster histories of WWII. Henry Holt and Co., the publisher of Charles Pellegrino's The Road from Hiroshima, has announced it is withdrawing the book because of continuing questions about its integrity.
Lawrence D. Freedman, "Frostbitten," Foreign Affairs, March/April, reviews Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Things Noted Here & There
History Carnival LXXXV, a Winter Olympics Edition, is up at Disability Studies.
Anthony Grafton, "Humanities and Inhumanities," TNR, 17 February, reviews Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in The American University.
Ann Gibbons, "The Human Family's Earliest Ancestors," Smithsonian, March, and Andrew Curry, "Gobekli Tepe: The World's First Temple?" Smithsonian, November 2008, underscore the remarkable dynamism of archaeological and pre-historical studies. Hat tip.
Antony Lerman reviews Anthony Julius's Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England for the Guardian, 27 February.
Edward Rothstein, "It Took Tools to Build a Revolution," NYT, 26 February, reviews "Compass & Rule: Architecture as Mathematical Practice in England, 1500-1750," an exhibit at Yale's Center for British Art in New Haven, CT.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Testifying for Tobacco
Jon Wiener, "Big Tobacco and the Historians," The Nation, 25 February, is essential reading, I think, for historians. I've often disagreed with Jon, but I'm grateful for his inquiry into the willingness of 40 American historians to sell their reputations to American tobacco interests. I'm also disappointed to learn from his article that some of those historians are in positions of substantial professional influence.
From Robert N. Proctor, "‘Everyone knew but no one had proof': tobacco industry use of medical history expertise in US courts, 1990–2002," Tobacco Control, 2006, Table 2 "Historians (36 in total) who have testified as expert witnesses for the American tobacco industry, 1986–2005 (excludes consulting witnesses). Compiled with Louis M Kyriakoudes":
Friday, February 26, 2010
Modern History Notes
Dominic Sandbrook for the Telegraph, 23 February, and Scott McLemee, "Darkness after noon," The National, 25 February, review Michael Scammell's Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual.
Larissa MacFarquhar, "The Deflationist," New Yorker, 1 March:
... Krugman went to Yale, in 1970, intending to study history, but he felt that history was too much about what and not enough about why, so he ended up in economics. Economics, he found, examined the same infinitely complicated social reality that history did but, instead of elucidating its complexity, looked for patterns and rules that made the complexity seem simple. Why did some societies have serfs or slaves and others not? You could talk about culture and national character and climate and changing mores and heroes and revolts and the history of agriculture and the Romans and the Christians and the Middle Ages and all the rest of it; or, like Krugman's economics teacher Evsey Domar, you could argue that if peasants are barely surviving there's no point in enslaving them, because they have nothing to give you, but if good new land becomes available it makes sense to enslave them, because you can skim off the difference between their output and what it takes to keep them alive. Suddenly, a simple story made sense of a huge and baffling swath of reality, and Krugman found that enormously satisfying.
Historiann and her readers think about Krugman, the erstwhile historian.
Congratulations to Robert A. Caro, Annette Gordon-Reed, David Levering Lewis and William H. McNeill, who received National Humanities Medals last night from President Obama.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Thursday's Notes
Shadi Bartsch, "The Archaeologist as Minotaur," The Book, 24 February, reviews Cathy Gere's Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism.
Ammon Shea, "Violent but Charming," Humanities, January/February, reviews the Dictionary of Old English.
Patrick O'Connor, "The clown who knew Byron," TLS, 24 February, reviews Andrew McConnell Scott's The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi: Laughter, madness and the story of Britain's greatest comedian.
Richard Rayner for the LA Times, 14 February, Bob Blaisdel for the San Francisco Chronicle, 21 February, Dwight Garner, "Tolstoy & Co. as Objects of Obsession," NYT, 16 February, and Adam Kirsch, "A Comedian in the Academy," Slate, 24 February, review Elif Batuman's The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them.
Sean Wilentz, "Obama, Fire Your Staff!" Daily Beast, 24 February, calls for changes in the White House staff.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Additionally Noted Things
G. W. Bernard's new biography, Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions, finds her guilty, as charged, of adultery.
Philip Ball for London's Sunday Times, 21 February, and Ned Block and Philip Kitcher, "Misunderstanding Darwin," Boston Review, March/April, review Jerry Fodor's and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's What Darwin Got Wrong. Thomas Rogers interviews Fodor about the book and its argument in "Taking Down the Father of Evolution," Salon, 22 February.
Dominique Browning, "Of Gold and Bondage," NYT, 16 February, reviews Christopher Corbett's The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West.
Max Hastings reviews Olivier Philipponnat's and Patrick Lienhardt's The Life of Irène Némirovsky for London's Sunday Times, 21 February; and Adam Kirsch, "Epistolary Bromance," Tablet, 23 February, reviews "Dearest Georg": Love, Literature, and Power in Dark Times: The Letters of Elias, Veza, and Georges Canetti, 1933-1948, ed. by Karen Lauer and Kristian Wachinger.
Charles Pellegrino has agreed to remove the false testimony of Joseph Fuoco from future editions of Pellegrino's The Last Train from Hiroshima. But has Henry Holt or any other publisher committed to a new edition of the book?
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
More Noted Things
Finalists for the LA Times Book Prize for 2009 in History are:
Jeffrey R. Young, "Yo, Ho, Ho, and a Digital Scrum," CHE, 21 February, features Adrian Johns's work in Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars From Gutenberg to Gates.
Sanford Levinson, "So Many Origins," The Book, 23 February, reviews Seth Lipsky's The Citizen's Constitution and Jack Rakove'sThe Annotated U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Things Noted Here & There
If Tiger Woods only had tenure at Harvard, he wouldn't have to go through all this public sturm und drang. Richard Kay and Geoffrey Levy, "Naughty Niall Ferguson: The dashing TV historian and the string of affairs that could cost him millions," Daily Mail, 20 February, finds the Harvard historian invited his wife to cross the Atlantic to attend the £30,000 40th birthday party he gave his latest mistress.
Robin McKie, "How a hobbit is rewriting the history of the human race," The Guardian, 21 February, claims the dispersion out of Africa began before homo sapiens.
Carnivalesque LIX, an ancient/medieval edition of the festival, is up at Burgundians in the Mist.
The finalists for the George Washington Book Prize for 2010 are: Richard Beeman's Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution, R.B. Bernstein's The Founding Fathers Reconsidered, and Edith B Gelles' Abigail & John: Portrait of A Marriage. "The $50,000 award—co-sponsored by Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and George Washington's Mount Vernon—is the largest prize nationwide for a book on early American history, and one of the largest literary prizes of any kind."
Myron Magnet, "The Education of John Jay," City Journal, Winter, looks at the career of the early American republic's diplomat.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Notes in Recent American History
Ben Ratliff, "Takin' It to the Streets," NYT, 16 February, reviews Tony Fletcher's All Hopped Up and Ready to Go: Music From the Streets of New York 1927-77. Dwight Garner, "Under a Strange, Soulful Spell," NYT, 18 February, reviews Nadine Cohodas's Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone.
John Rodden and Ethan Goffman, "Politics and the Intellectual: The Legacy of Irving Howe," The Common Review, Winter, re-examines Howe's legacy to the American left; and Tony Judt, "Revolutionaries, NYRBlog, 10 February, is the most recent in his series of memoir for the NYRB.
Chris Lehmann, "The Cut Man," The Nation, 18 February, reviews Taylor Branch's The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History With the President. Richard L. Burke, "The President and the Prosecutor," NYT, 16 February, and David Greenberg for the Washington Post, 21 February, review Ken Gormley's The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr.
Russell Jacoby, "Why Intellectuals Are All Bad," CHE, 14 February, reviews Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals and Society; and Ross Posnock, "A Great Memoir! At Last!" The Book, 19 February, reviews Terry Castle's The Professor and Other Writings.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Exhibitions: 20th Century Abstractions
Holland Cotter, "History Lesson in Abstraction, Cutting Across the Americas," NYT, 18 February, reviews "Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s-50s," an exhibit at New Jersey's Newark Museum.
Eric Banks, "Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit at Phillips goes beyond flowers to abstract art," Washington Post, 20 February, reviews "Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction," an exhibit at Washington's Phillips Gallery.
Carol Vogel, "The Torrent That Flowed in Picasso's Final Years," NYT, 18 February, reviews "Pablo Picasso: The Mediterranean Years (1945-1961)," an exhibit at London's Gagosian Gallery.
History Blogging in Continental Languages
I remember the excitement only a few years ago when we first found someone doing history blogging in a language other than English. Now, I've just added to Cliopatria's History Blogroll a dozen continental language blogs that we hadn't listed earlier and sub-divided all of them by language group. The history blogroll now lists 75 history blogs in 10 continental languages: Bulgarian, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. Spanish, German, and French are, by far, the largest language groups and each of them has a blog aggregator. Blogosphera de historia, Wissenschafts Café, and ClioWeb probably direct more traffic within their language groups than Cliopatria's History Blogroll does. Together, I hope, we help to create a sense of community, of common interest and purpose, among history bloggers.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
20th Century Notes
Kevin Schultz and Paul Harvey, "Everywhere and Nowhere," IHE, 18 February, comments on the uneven coverage of religion in post-bellum America.
Jenna Weissman Joselit, "‘Here's to You, Mrs. Feitlebaum'," The Book, 17 February, reviews Ari Kelman, ed., Is Diss A System? The Milt Gross Comic Reader.
Piers Brendon, "What Winston Really Wanted," Literary Review, February, reviews Richard Toye's Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made.
Adam Kirsch, "Axis of Evil," Tablet, 16 February, reviews Jeffrey Herf's Nazi Propaganda in the Arab World.
Mark Walhout, "Il Caso Silone," Books & Culture, January/ February, reviews Stanislao G. Pugliese's Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone. John Gray, "Life of a Giant," Literary Review, February, reviews Michael Scammell's Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
More Noted Things
Liza Mundy, "Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Childbirth …," Slate, 15 February, reviews Randi Hutter Epstein's Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank. Mundy's "When presidents and slaves mingled at the White House," Washington Post, 15 February, recalls a time when Washington authorities and slaves were intimates.
Rosemarie Zagarri reviews Woody Holton's Abigail Adams for the Washington Post, 14 February.
Michiko Kakutani, "It's a Plot! No, It's Not: A Debunking," NYT, 15 February, reviews David Aaronovitch'd Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History.
Roya Nikkhah, "Queen Victoria's passion for nudity goes on display in new art exhibition," Telegraph, 13 February, previews "Victoria & Albert: Art & Love," an exhibition opening at The Queen's Gallery in Buckingham Palace on March 19.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Summing It Up
John Castelluchi, "The Night They Burned Ranum's Papers," CHE, 14 February, recalls what happened to Orest Ranum's research at Columbia in 1968.
"A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything" is a "2100 page-long flipbook by art student Jamie Bell": Hat tip.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Things Noted Here & There
Catherine Rampell, "Jews and the Burden of Money," NYT, 12 February, reviews Jerry Z. Muller's Capitalism and the Jews.
Were you composing a symposium of articles on the early American republic, you might include Russell Shorto's "How Christian Were the Founders?" NYT, 11 February, and Gary Rosen's "Freedom's Laboratory," NYT, 12 February, a review of Timothy Ferris's The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature. Kurt Anderson's "Is Democracy Killing Democracy?" NYMagazine, 5 February, otoh, has as much bad history per paragraph as you're likely to find anywhere.
Jonathan Yardley reviews Kathryn Allamong Jacob's King of the Lobby: The Life and Times of Sam Ward, Man-About-Washington in the Gilded Age for the Washington Post, 7 February. Andrew Young's tell-all book about his experience with John and Elizabeth Edwards, The Politician, reminds Jacob Heilbrunn of money, politics, and sex in Gilded Age Washington.
Michael Idov, "Gulag Humor," The Book, 12 February, reviews Karen L. Ryan's Stalin in Russian Satire, 1917-1991.
Godfrey Cheshire, "North Carolina as It Was, Split and Seething," NYT, 12 February, reviews the new film version of Timothy Tyson's Blood Done Sign My Name. Here's the trailer for the film. Hat tip.
Below the fold, updating the Niall Ferguson story:
Friday, February 12, 2010
Notes on Knitting Fiction
Thomas H. Benton, "The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind'," CHE, 8 February, is prompting much discussion.
Jane Jakeman, "The tangled history of knitting," TLS, 10 February, reviews Giorgio Riello's and Prasannan Parthasarathi's The Spinning World: A global history of cotton textiles, 1200–1850 and Joanne Turney's The Culture of Knitting.
William Deresiewicz, "The Renunciation Artist: On Leo Tolstoy," The Nation, 11 February, reviews Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, trans.
Janet Maslin, "Mark Twain: A Public Image as Tailored as His Snow-White Suits," NYT, 10 February, reviews Michael Shelden's Mark Twain: Man in White, The Grand Adventure of His Final Years.
Owen Jaurus, "The Real Story of Nazi Egyptology," Heritage-Key, 09/01, features Thomas Schneider's study of German Egyptology during the Nazi era.
Patricia Cohen, "Faulkner Link to Plantation Diary Discovered," NYT, 10 February, features a major development in Faulkner studies. Emory's Sally Wolff-King is interviewed on NPR's "All Things Considered." I am surprised that UNC's Joel Williamson did not discover this 20 years ago, but he apparently did not have access to Edgar Wiggin Francisco, III.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Thursday's Notes
Adam Kirsch, "The Pilgrim," Tablet, 9 February, reviews Hillel Halkin's new biography of Yehuda Halevi, medieval Judaism's great poet.
Lauro Martines, "Science, religion and plague," TLS, 10 February, reviews Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., Culture of Plague: Medical thinking at the end of the Renaissance.
Robert K. Landers, "Redcoats Coming, Nobody Home," WSJ, 29 January, reviews Michael Kranish's Flight from Monticello: Thomas Jefferson at War.
Dan Cohen calls attention to the National Park Service's developing interactive project, Virtual Fredericksburg.
Claire Harman, "The Belle of Amherst?" Literary Review, February, reviews Lyndall Gordon's Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
20th Century Notes
Michael Scammell, "Saint and Sinner," The Book, 8 February, reviews Stanislao Pugliese's Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone.
Toril Moi, "The Adulteress Wife," LRB, 11 February, reviews Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, trans. by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier.
Linda Christmas reviews Chris Welles Feder's In My Father's Shadow: a Daughter Remembers Orson Welles for the Telegraph, 1 February.
George Perkovich reviews Garry Wills's Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State for the Washington Post, 7 February.
Dwight Garner, "A Nice Guy in a Perfect Baseball World," NYT, 9 February, and Chris Haft, "Mays' life and legend transcend statistics," MLB.com, 9 February, review James S. Hirsch's Willie Mays: The Life the Legend. The MLB site features a video of Bob Costas's interview with Mays.
Finally, think outside the box for Valentine's Day.* Consider recent books by three friends of Cliopatria:
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Ferguson's Current Affair Goes Public
In case you don't have the news,
Katie Nicholl, Miles Goslett, and Caroline Graham, "The history man and fatwa girl: How will David Cameron take news that think-tank guru Niall Ferguson has deserted wife Sue Douglas for Somali feminist?" Daily Mail, 7 February
Lawrence Auster, "Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds Admit Impediments," View from the Right, 7 February
Beth Hale, "The historian, his wife and a mistress living under a fatwa," Daily Mail, 8 February
Cahal Milmo and Luke Blackall, "'It's tricky to find men when you're living under a fatwa'," Independent, 8 February
"Fabulously Snobby Divorce Scandal of the Week: Niall Ferguson's Fatwa Mistress Two-Step," The Gawker, 8 February
Courtney Comstock, "Niall Ferguson Is Leaving His Wife For A Young Hot Feminist And Political War Refugee," Business Insider, 8 February
Jessica Pressler, "Niall Ferguson Leaves Wife for Somali Intellectual," New York Magazine, 8 February
Margaret Soltan, "‘In all the years I have known Ayaan, she's never had a boyfriend. She's gorgeous, but with a fatwa, it's tricky to find guys.'," University Diaries, 8 February, and
Doug Camilli, "The Descent of Family," Montreal Gazette, 9 February.
The story broke on Sunday in the Daily Mail, where Ms. Douglas was Ferguson's editor, when they first met in 1987. The DM quotes "another historian" to the effect that NF "has the kind of face you want to punch." He had eight affairs in the last five years?
Monday, February 8, 2010
Things Noted Here & There
Anthony Grafton, "Scholar and Blogger," The Book, 8 February, reviews Mary Beard's A Don's Life.
Helen Castor reviews Thomas Asbridge's The Crusades: The War for the Holy Land for the Guardian, 6 February.
Peter Ackroyd reviews Felipe Fernández-Armesto's 1492: The Year Our World Began for the London Times, 6 February.
Claudia Goldin, "Tales Out of School," NYT, 5 February, reviews Jonathan Cole's The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected.
Richard Brooks, "British Library to offer free ebook downloads," London's Sunday Times, 7 February, announces the BL's plan to release 65,000 19th century works of fiction.
John Carey reviews Michael Scammell's Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual for London's Sunday Times, 7 February.
For All The Saints ...
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Weak Endnotes
Robert Darnton, "Google and the New Digital Future," NYRB, 17 December; Paul N. Currant, Anthony Lewis, Theodore Koditschek, et al., "Google & the Future of Books: An Exchange," NYRB, 14 January; and Roy Blount Jr., Judy Blume, Scott Turow, et al., "The Google Books Settlement: An Exchange with the Authors Guild," NYRB, 25 February, is an important discussion.
Edward Rothstein, "Unrolled, Unbridled and Unabashed," NYT, 4 February, reviews "Rubbers: The Life, History & Struggle of the Condom," an exhibit at Manhattan's Museum of Sex.
Susan Rubin Suleiman, "French Contentions," NYT, 5 February, reviews Frederick Brown's For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus.
Matthew Kaminski, "Creating a Postwar World," WSJ, 3 February, reviews S. M. Plokhy's Yalta: The Price of Peace.
Charles Peterson, "In the World of Facebook," NYRB, 25 February, reviews Julia Angwin's Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America and Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal.
Friday, February 5, 2010
Friday's Notes
Jeffrey Herf, "It Will Not Go Away," The Book, 4 February, reviews Robert S. Wistrich's A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad.
Thomas Rogers, "When smart people believe dumb things," Salon, 3 February, interviews David Aaronovitch, the author of Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History.
Adam Mars-Jones reviews Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, eds., A New Literary History of America for the Guardian, 31 January.
Ed Caesar reviews Greg Grandin's Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City for London's Sunday Times, 31 January.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Thursday's Notes
Peter Leeson, "Justice, Medieval Style,"Boston Globe, 31 January. Julie Hofmann: "Anybody want to count the ways in which this is just wrong?" Where are Got Medieval and In the Middle when you need them?
Michael Dirda reviews Michael Scott's Boyle: Between God and Science for the Washington Post, 4 February.
Mark Mazower, "History's Isle," The Book, 3 February, reviews Richard J. Evans's Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent.
Liam Julian, "Art as Manifesto," Policy Review, February/March, reviews Nicholas Fox Weber's The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism.
The coincidental deaths of J. D. Salinger and Howard Zinn continues to attract commentary. See:
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Modern History Notes
Serena Golden, "Piracy," IHE, 3 February, interviews the University of Chicago's Adrian Johns about his new book, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates.
Katherine Bouton, "Tale of an Unsung Fossil Finder, in Fact and Fiction," NYT, 1 February, reviews Shelly Emling's The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World and Tracy Chevalier's Remarkable Creatures.
Nicholas Shrimpton, "Tennyson now," TLS, 27 January, reviews Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry, eds., Tennyson Among the Poets.
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, "In And Out Of History," The Book, 2 February, reviews Jean-Marie Apostolides's The Metamorphosis of Tintin or Tintin for Adults and Pierre Assouline's Herge: The Man Who Created Tintin.
Anthony Daniels, "Ayn Rand: engineer of souls," New Criterion, February, reviews Ann C. Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made.
Dwight Garner, "A Woman's Undying Gift to Science," NYT, 2 February, reviews Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks; and Denise Grady, "A Lasting Gift to Medicine That Wasn't Really a Gift," NYT, 1 February, takes another look at Lacks's contribution to biological engineering.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
More Noted Things
Rob Lyons, "A foodie's guide to the history of humanity," Spiked Review of Books, 31 January, reviews Tom Standage's An Edible History of Humanity.
Howell Raines, "The Counter Revolution," NYT, 31 January, pays his due to the 50th anniversary of the Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-ins. Marian Wright Edelman, "SNCC, Fifty Years Later," Huffington Post, 31 January, remembers. The scene of the sit-in has re-opened as a civil rights museum. See: Edward Rothstein, "Four Men, a Counter and Soon, Revolution," NYT, 31 January.
Bruce J. Shulman, "House should pass Senate bill," Politico, 31 January, looks at the legislative history of social security to argue for a resolution of the health care impass.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Things Noted Here & There
Steven Levingston reviews Paul Strathern's The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior: The Intersecting Lives of da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Borgia and the World They Shaped for the Washington Post, 31 January.
Caleb Crain, "Beer Buddies," BookForum, February/March, reviews Richard Stott's Jolly Fellows: Male Milieus in Nineteenth-Century America.
Douglas Whynott, "A legacy of life," Boston Globe, 31 January, and Eric Roston for the Washington Post, 31 January, review Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. This appears to be an extra-ordinary story and a major book. Popular Science's headline, "Five Reasons Henrietta Lacks is the Most Important Woman in Medical History", probably exaggerates, but you get the point.
William H. Chafe, "A protest that changed history," AJC, 29 January, celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-ins.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Sunday's Notes
Michael Bérubé, "The Way We Learn," NYT, 29 January, reviews Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas.
William Dalrymple reviews James Mather's Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World for the Guardian, 31 January.
Vanessa Thorpe, "Uncovered: the man behind Coleridge's Ancient Mariner," Guardian, 31 January, reviews Robert Fowke's The Real Ancient Mariner.
Caroline Weber, "Après le Déluge," NYT, 29 January, reviews Jeffrey H. Jackson's Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910.
Tom Carson, "The Night Belongs to Us," NYT, 29 January, reviews Patti Smith's Just Kids. In "Patti Smith's New York stories," Guardian, 31 January, Gaby Wood interviews Smith.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Weak Endnotes
Charlotte Higgins, "The Iliad and what it can still tell us about war," Guardian, 30 January, is a essay on ancient lessons about the costs of war.
Andrew Wheatcroft, "Cast Away," NYT, 29 January, reviews Matthew Carr's Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain.
In Anna Blundy's interview with Robert Goodwin, "Rewriting America," The Browser, 2009, he recommends five books that are central to his project rewriting Spanish American history.
Philip Pullman offers "An introduction to the poetry of William Blake," Guardian, 29 January.
Annabelle Wynn, "Mollie Panter-Downes, a wartime voice to treaure," Books Blog, 21 January, calls for the rediscovery of the mid-20th century journalist and novelist.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Modern History Notes
Richard Posner, "The Race Against Race," The Book, 29 January, reviews Peggy Pascoe's What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America and Paul A. Lombardo's Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell.
Michael Williams reviews Adam Zamoyski's Chopin: Prince of the Romantics for the Telegraph, 26 January.
Andy Beckett reviews Perry Anderson's The New Old World for the Guardian, 23 January.
Our colleague, K. C. Johnson, has published an essay on "Obama and American Foreign Policy," SHAFR, 26 January.
"Obama at One," the Nation's symposium on the highs and lows of Barack Obama's first year as POTUS includes responses by Andrew Bacevich, Robert Caro, Adolph Reed, Jr., Howard Zinn and many others.
Farewell to Howard Zinn, activist and author of A People's History of the United States. Michael Kazin's "Howard Zinn's History Lessons," Dissent, Spring 2004, remains the most powerful critique of Zinn's most popular work. Yet had I been at Spelman College from 1956 to 1963 or at Boston University from 1964 to 1988, Zinn and I would have been allies.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Premodern History Notes
Caleb Crain, "Terms of Infringement," The National, 21 January, reviews Adrian Johns's Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates.
Peter Schjeldahl, "Then and Now," New Yorker, 1 February, reviews "The Drawings of Bronzino," an exhibit at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art. See also: Schjeldahl's "Man of Mannerism," a narrated slide show.
John Ferling, "Myths of the American Revolution," Smithsonian, January, takes on some common acceptances about the American Revolution.
Aaron Belz, "The Jerk," Books & Culture, January/February, reviews Robert Crawford's The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography.
Sophia Lear, "Reader, I Made Him Up," The Book, 28 January, reviews Sheila Kohler's Becoming Jane Eyre.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Midweek Notes
You may recall that Simon Schama, "What objects say about our times," Financial Times, 22 January, previews among other things "A History of the World in 100 Objects," Neil MacGregor's new series on the history of material culture that runs throughout 2010 on BBC. Manan Ahmed reminds me that you can listen to the series on BBC's site.
Carnivalesque LVIII, an early modern edition of the festival is up at The Gentleman Administrator. It takes the form of "A Book of Blogge Cookrye" and calls for
1 pitcher of sex 2 pinches of violence 2 slabs of domestic debate 1 qrt. of the exotic 2 litres of Samuel Pepys & 1/2 pint of Shakespeare
Adam Kirsch, "Vanishing Act," Tablet, 26 January, reviews Yehuda Bauer's The Death of the Shtetl.
Samuel Brittan, "The Many Faces of Liberalism," Financial Times, 22 January, reviews Raymond Plant's The Neo-Liberal State, Simon Griffiths and Kevin Hickson, eds., British Party Politics and Ideology after New Labour, and Timothy Ferris's The Science of Liberty.
Dwight Garner, "North Korea Keeps Hiding, and Fascinating," NYT, 26 January, reviews Barbara Demick's Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, Ralph Hassig's and Kongdan Oh's The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom, and B. R. Myers's The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves — and Why It Matters.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
20th Century Notes
The University of Chicago Library's online exhibits feature historical subjects, including Darwin, Lincoln, and book, Jewish, and women's history. "Integrating the Life of the Mind: African Americans at the University of Chicago, 1870-1940" is a fascinating one.
Jonathan Yardley reviews Christopher Browning's Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp for the Washington Post, 24 January.
Janet Maslin, "Exclusive!!! Gossip Has a History!" NYT, 24 January, reviews Henry E. Scott's Shocking True Story: The Rise and Fall of Confidential, ‘America's Most Scandalous Scandal Magazine'.
You've probably seen the "HNN special: Liberals Respond to Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism". A conservative, Michael Ledeen, responds to the book here; and the convener of the liberals' criticism, David Neiwert, prompts more extensive discussion at Neiwert, "Historians vs. Jonah Goldberg," Huffington Post, 25 January.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Louis R. Harlan, 1922-2010
Louis R. Harlan died on Friday in Lexington, Virginia. His service in World War II was the subject of a memoir, All At Sea. Harlan did his undergraduate work at Emory, earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins, and taught for most of his career at the University of Maryland. A distinguished historian of the modern South, he won the Bancroft Prize twice, the Pulitzer Prize once, and the Albert J. Beveridge Award once for Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901 and Booker T. Washington: the Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915. He also edited the multi-volume Washington Papers. Harlan was one of the few historians to have served as president of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Southern Historical Association. The fine baggage under his eyes and handlebar mustaches put my own to shame. I miss him already. Thanks to Ted DeLaney for the notice. See also: AHA Today, 25 January.
More Noted Things
Hilary Mantel, "Anne Boleyn, Queen for a Day," NYT, 22 January, reviews Alison Wier's The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn. You can read and hear Weir, "Arguing the Case for Anne Boleyn," NPR's All Things Considered, 24 January.
Stephen Mihm, "Capitalist Chameleon," NYT, 22 January, reviews Joyce Appleby's The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism.
Sidney Mintz, "Whitewashing Haiti's History," Boston Review, 22 January, looks at misreadings of Haiti's history.
Walter Isaacson, "Who Declares War?" NYT, 21 January, reviews John Yoo's Crisis and Command: The History of Executive Power From George Washington to George W. Bush and Garry Wills's Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State. Andrew Sullivan notes that Isaacson and Review editor Sam Tanenhaus acquiesce in the Times refusal to call waterboarding torture.
Sean Wilentz, "The Return of Ulysses," The Book, 25 January, reviews Joan Waugh's U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth.
Anne Applebaum, "Yesterday's Man?" NYRB, 11 February, reviews Michael Scammell's Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic. Damon Linker, "The Illiberal Imagination," The Book, 22 January, reviews Michael Kimmage's The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Things Noted Here & There
Carnivalesque LVIII, an early modern edition of the festival, is delayed. Carnival of Genealogy LXXXVIII is up at Creative Gene. Both History Carnival and Carnivalesque are in need of hosts. If you're interested, contact sharon*at*earlymodernweb*dot*org*dot*uk.
Amidst the death and destruction in Port-au-Prince, damage to Haiti's galleries and religious institutions appears to be massive, but damage to its cultural institutions seems more limited. Despite some structural damage, both the National Library and the National Archives buildings remain standing. Major collections in the National Museum, which was built underground across from the National Palace, appear to have survived.
Simon Schama, "What objects say about our times," Financial Times, 22 January, previews "A History of the World in 100 Objects," Neil MacGregor's new series on the history of material culture that runs throughout 2010 on BBC, "Seven Ages Of Britain," David Dimbleby's art history series for BBC One, Holger Hoock's Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750-1850, which "reads British imperial history through its self-imaging," and Celina Fox's The Arts of Industry in the Age of Enlightenment which "restores the connection between drawing and technology originally embedded in the very word ‘art' .... "
Past its ninth hour, our colleague, Scott McLemee chaired a meeting of the National Book Critics Circle yesterday to choose finalists for NBCC's 2009 awards.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Weak Endnotes
Our former colleague, Tom Palaima, reviews Page duBois's Out of Athens: The New Ancient Greeks for the THE, 21 January.
Holland Cotter, "A Line Both Spirited and Firm," NYT, 21 January, reviews "The Drawings of Bronzino," an exhibit at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Given the State Department's reversal of its ban on Tariq Ramadan's travel to and in the United States, Paul Berman re-affirms his claim that Ramadan makes no significant contribution to debate. Berman first argued that at length in "Who's Afraid of Tariq Ramadan?" TNR, 4 June 2007. Both it and his current book project attack Ramadan and his intellectual supporters, Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash.
Charles Simic, "Witness to Horror," NYRB, 11 February, reviews Mark Danner's Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War. Danner's "To Heal Haiti, Look to History, Not Nature," NYT, 21 January, turns his attention to the Caribbean republic.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Friday's Notes
In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Three-Toed Sloth, 19 January, Cosma Shalizi contemplates why prints didn't "displace paintings the same way that printed books displaced manuscript codices?"
Edward Rothstein, "A Big Map That Shrank the World," NYT, 19 January, reviews an exhibition of the Matteo Ricci World Map at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
Jeremy Harding, "Pavements Like Jelly," LRB, 28 January, reviews Jeffrey Jackson's Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 and "Paris Inondé 1910," an exhibit at the Galerie des Bibliothèques in Paris.
Michael Dirda reviews Michael Scammell's Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic for the Washington Post, 21 January.
Perry Anderson, "Sinomania," LRB, 28 January, reviews Martin Jacques's When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World, Yasheng Huang's Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State, Ching Kwan Lee's Against the Law: Labour Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Thursday's Notes
James Sharpe, "Satan Rules," TLS, 20 January, reviews P. G. Maxwell-Stuart's Satan: A Biography.
Tristram Hunt reviews Jonathan Clark, ed., A World by Itself: A History of the British Isles for the Guardian, 17 January.
Norma Clarke, "Loving cousins in the English bourgeoisie," TLS, 20 January, reviews Adam Kuper's Incest and Influence: The private life of bourgeois England.
David Kaufmann, "A Skeptic's Skeptic," The Tablet, 20 January, reviews David Mikics's Who Was Jacques Derrida? An Intellectual Biography.
Finally, thanks to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who has renewed Tariq Ramadan's freedom to travel to and in the United States.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
More Noted Things
Lauren Winner, "‘The Christianity of This Land'," Books & Culture, 14 January, reviews Emily Clark's Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727-1834, Ed Blum's Reforging The White Republic: Race, Religion, And American Nationalism, 1865-1898, and James B. Bennett's Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans.
Edward Glaeser, "Why Cities Matter," The Book, 19 January, reviews Dominic A. Pacyga's Chicago: A Biography.
Dwight Garner, "After Atom Bombs' Shock, the Real Horrors Began Unfolding," NYT, 19 January, reviews Charles Pellegrino's The Last Train from Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back.
Tony Judt, "Food," NYRBlog, 25 November, Judt, "Night," NYRB, 14 January; and Judt, "Kibbutz," NYRBlog, 18 January are the first three in a series of memoirs by the European historian.
Aaron Bady, "This, periodically, needs to be said: Go to hell, David Brooks," zunguzungu, 15 January, and Matt Taibbi, "Translating David Brooks," taibblog, 18 January, take on DB's "The Underlying Tragedy," NYT, 14 January.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Mostly Modern Notes
Daniel Mendelsohn, "But Enough About Me," New Yorker, 18 January, reviews Ben Yagoda's Memoir: A History.
In C. S. Manegold, "New England's scarlet ‘S' for slavery," Boston Globe, 18 January, the author of Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North recalls New England's history of slavery.
Sam Roberts, "Of Mutual Influence: The City and the 16th President," NYT, 15 January, reviews "Lincoln and New York," an exhibit at the New York Historical Society, and Harold Holzer, ed., Lincoln and New York.
Christopher Benfey, "The Hunger Artists," TNR, 18 January, reviews Gavin Jones's American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty In U.S. Literature, 1840-1945, Morris Dickstein's Dancing In the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, and Linda Gordon's Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits.
Blake Morrison reviews Antonia Frasier's Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter for the Guardian, 16 January.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Things Noted Here & There
Michael S. Roth for the LA Times, 10 January, and Gideon Lewis-Kraus, "The Opening of the Academic Mind," Slate, 17 January, review Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University. Hat tip.
Rafael Behr, "Shlomo Sand: an enemy of the Jewish people?" Guardian, 17 January, interviews the author of The Invention of the Jewish People.
Michael Kenney, "These American lives in occupied Paris," Boston Globe, 13 January, reviews Charles Glass's Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation.
Kevin O'Kelly, "García Márquez life misses the man," Boston Globe, 15 January, reviews Ilan Stavans's Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Modern History Notes
David Silbey renews the Military History Carnival at The Edge of the American West, 17 January.
Edmund White, "Only Reflect," NYT, 14 January, reviews Frank Kermode's Concerning E. M. Forster.
Matthew Dallek reviews David E. Hoffman's The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of The Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy for the Washington Post, 17 January.
Jonathan Yardley reviews Paul Ingrassia's Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry's Road from Glory to Disaster for the Washington Post, 17 January.
Tom Bissell, "The Bunny Revolution," The Book, 14 January, and Tara McKelvey, "Nonfiction Chronicle," NYT, 14 January, review Elizabeth Fraterrigo's Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Weak Endnotes
"What We're Reading: 124th Annual Meeting Edition," AHA Today, 13 January, is a massive roundup of coverage of the AHA convention in San Diego.
Michael Dirda reviews Umberto Eco's The Infinity of Lists for the Washington Post, 14 January.
Scott McLemee, "History is the Devil's Scripture," Crooked Timber, 15 January, launches from Pat Robertson to C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution.
The new Common-Place, X, 2 (January, 2010), is up! It's an ante-bellum American feast.
Miles Corwin, "The Hack," CJR, January/February, sketches the early career of Gabriel García Márquez in journalism.
Isaac Chotiner, "Venerations," The Book, 15 January, reviews Paul Johnson's Churchill.
Friday, January 15, 2010
More Noted Things
The Giant's Shoulders #19, the history of science carnival, is up at The Renaissance Mathematicus. Indian History Carnival #25 is up at varnam.
Caleb Crain, "Semantic Time Travel," NYT, 8 January, is an essay on the new Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Amanda Vickery, "Love and marriage, English-style," TLS, 13 January, reviews Maureen Waller's The English Marriage: Tales of love, money and adultery.
James Stevens Curl reviews Joscelyn Godwin's Athanasius Kircher's Theatre of the World for THE, 7 January.
Eve Ottenberg, "A History of Slander," In These Times, 11 January, reviews Robert Darnton's The Devil in the Holy Water, or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon.
Josh Nathan-Kazis, "A Death in the Family," Tablet, 13 January, tells the story of a murder/scandal that destroyed New York's Sephardic elite.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Early Modern Notes
Daniel Golden, "For-Profit Colleges Target the Military," Business Week, 30 December, argues that for-profit institutions are exploiting Americans in uniform and American tax payers.
David Reiff, "The End of Hunger?" TNR, 2 January, reviews Cormac Ó Gráda's Famine: A Short History.
David A. Bell, "Visions," TNR, 11 January, reviews Larissa Juliet Taylor's The Virgin Warrior: The Life and Death of Joan of Arc.
Adam Kirsch, "The Other Secret Jews," Tablet, 12 January, reviews Marc David Baer's The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks.
Brett Zongker, "1602 Map Unveiled, Shows China At Center Of World," AP, 12 January, announces the Library of Congress's public display of Matteo Ricci's map of the world. See also: Mark Iype, "Rare Chinese-language map goes on display in Washington," Canada.com, 12 January.
Alan Jacobs, "Man of Sorrows," Books & Culture, January/February, is a fresh reading of Samuel Johnson.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Chart Wars: Data Visualization
Monday, January 11, 2010
Things Noted Here & There
Kenneth J. Cooper, "The Lost Script," Boston Globe, 10 January, is about Ajami, a script whose recovery may be a key to understanding much of Africa's pre-modern history. Our colleague, Jonathan Reynolds, finds the article "a bit hyperbolic in the lack of use of or attention to Ajami. I studied Hausa in Ajami at BU in the early 1990's... using contemporary Hausa books and newspapers that were printed in the script."
Megan Marshall, "Return of the King," NYT, 8 January, reviews Jenny Uglow's A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game.
Hillel Halkin, "Indecent Proposal," TNR, 9 January, reviews Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People, trans. by Yael Lotan.
"Intellectuals and Their America," Dissent, Winter, is a symposium, featuring contributions by E. J. Dionne, Jr., Alice Kessler-Harris, Jackson Lears, Martha Nussbaum, Katha Pollitt, Michael Tomasky, Katrina vanden Heuvel, and Leon Wieseltier.
Adam Liptak, "More Perfect," NYT, 8 January, reviews Seth Lipsky's The Citizen's Constitution: An Annotated Guide and Jack N. Rakove, ed., The Annotated U. S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Cliopatria Awards, 2009
In conjunction with the AHA annual meeting in San Diego, here are the fifth 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, Miriam Burstein, Paul Harvey, Chris Jones, Rob MacDougall, David Silbey, Randall Stephens, and Jeremy Young. They have done a fine job. It's the year of the female history blogger, with women having won at least 4½ of the 6 awards. It's also the first year in which one blog won two awards. Here are the winners and brief explanations of the judges' rationale for their decisions:
Best Group Blog: Curious Expeditions
If you're not jealous of their travels, you need your head examined: Dylan Thuras and Michelle Enemark scour the world in search of history in its raw essentials--with a special taste for the wondrous, macabre, or obscure. Their analysis is smart, their enthusiasm is infectious, and their (plentiful) images are beautiful and haunting. "I found myself waiting breathlessly for the next twist and turn in several different museums, just as if I were there," one judge reported, "and their non-museum-related posts are equally spectacular."
Best Individual Blog: Georgian London
It's a really nice blog that balances popular history and some decent research. The posts are uniformly good, and the blogger, Lucy Inglis, uses images that enhance and frame the posts.
Best New Blog: Georgian London
From London's 18th century rookeries, to being a dwarf in 18th century England, to Jeremy Bentham and the birth of a surveillance society, to what it was like to have gout, to bizarre birth stories from Gentleman's Magazine, Georgian London informs, instructs, and entertains us on ordinary life in 18th century London, emphasizing especially the artisan and immigrant populations of the city. This is fascinating social history presented in blog form, and is a terrific younger entrant into the burgeoning history blog scene.
Best Post: Rachel Leow's "Curating the Oceans: The Future of Singapore's Past," A Historian's Craft, 14 July 2009.
"Curating the Oceans" is just a great post. It demonstrates what a really good history blog post can do. Rachel uses images well, and presents a coherent essay on a historical topic we might not otherwise hear much about. It's also a very nice example of good history aimed at a popular audience.
Best Series of Posts: Heather Cox Richardson's "Richardson's Rules of Order," The Historical Society Blog, 20 March 2009 - .
"Please remember that your professors are human and it's hard work to stand in front of a hundred pairs of eyes and talk for an hour," Heather Cox Richardson of U. Mass Amherst writes in a series of 9 (and counting) posts that collectively provide an instructive, gentle, and eminently useful guide for college students in history classes. In an age of changing rules and often a challenging lack of civility, Richardson provides both useful information and a practical etiquette manual which could help improve the classroom environment everywhere. This series of posts will soon be finding its way onto syllabi in history courses across the country.
Best Writer: The Headsman, at Executed Today.
Given its format--the story behind a different historical execution, every day -- Executed Today could by rights be monotonous and depressing. It is testament to "The Headsman's" skills as a writer and storyteller that his blog is nothing of the sort. An engaging and astonishingly prolific blogger, The Headsman writes witty and accessible prose, jumps from continent to continent and century to century with ease, and despite two years of daily blogging he is still finding new things to do with his premise.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Friday's Notes
You are most likely to find reports on San Diego's American Historical Association convention at: AHA Today, CHE, The Edge of the American West, Historiann, History News Network, IHE, Notes from the Field, Nothing Recedes Like Success, Religion and American History and THS Blog.
Evan R. Goldstein, "The Trials of Tony Judt," CHE, 6 January, is a rich interview with the European historian afflicted with Lou Gehrig's Disease.
Christopher McDougall reviews Thor Gotaas's Running: A Global History for the Guardian, 3 January.
James McConnachie reviews Thomas Asbridge's The Crusades: The War for the Holy Land for the Sunday Times, 3 January.
Martti Pärssinen, Denise Schaan and Alceu Ranzi, "Pre-Columbian geometric earthworks in the upper Purús: a complex society in western Amazonia," Antiquity, December, and David Grann, "Under the Jungle," New Yorker, 7 January, discuss an extra-ordinary archaeological find in the Amazon valley.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
More Noted Things
At the AHA convention in San Diego, a group of twittering historians ("twitterstorians"!) will gather at Dussini on Friday at 7:00 p.m. pdt. There, Katrina Gulliver will announce the winners of the Cliopatria Awards, 2009. They'll be announced online here at Cliopatria shortly thereafter.
The argument in Rob Townsend's "A Grim Year on the Academic Job Market for Historians," Perspectives, January, that the labor crisis in academic history is caused by an oversupply of newly minted doctors is challenged in Marc Bousquet, "At the AHA: Huh?" Brainstorm, 6 January.
Adam Kirsch, "Enlightenment, Yes!" Tablet, 5 January, reviews Zeev Sternhell's The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition.
Wendy Doniger, "India's Sacred Extremes," TLS, 6 January, reviews William Dalrymple's Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Things Noted Here & There
History's Louella Parsons, C. Vann Winchell, is predicting a "San Diego Tsunami" for the AHA convention later this week. That may be why none of my colleagues at Cliopatria will be there. I've asked Katrina Gulliver to announce the winners of the Cliopatria Awards at the San Diego gathering of twittering historians on Friday evening. The list of winners will appear simultaneously online here at Cliopatria.
Randall J. Stephens, "Teaching the Writing of History Roundtable in January Issue of Historically Speaking," THS Blog, 4 January, offers a foretaste of a roundtable on "How to Teach the Writing of History," Historically Speaking, January 2009. It features contributions by Stephen Pyne, Michael Kammen, Jill Lepore, and John Demos.
Namit Arora, "Early Islam," 3 Quarks Daily, 14 September - 4 January:
Part 1: The Rise of Islam / Part 2: The Golden Age of Islam
Part 3: The Path of Reason / Part 4: The Mystic Tide
Part 5: Epilogue
At "Free Thinkers," Tablet, 4 January, Sara Ivry interviews Michael Goldfarb, the author of Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance.
Errol Morris, winner of the Cliopatria Award for Best Series of Posts in 2007, has a new two-part series on photography and war, "It Was All Started by a Mouse," Part 1 and Part 2, Opinionator, 3-4 January.
Monday, January 4, 2010
Modern History Notes
History Carnival LXXXIII is up at Westminster Wisdom. Ebenezer Scrooge is your host.
Robert B. Townsend, "Troubling News on Job Market for History PhDs," AHA Today, 4 January, and Scott Jaschik, "No Entry," IHE, 4 January, feature the deteriorating academic job market in history.
Joan Anderman, "Finding out about Founders," Boston Globe, 2 January, is an interview with Joel Richard Paul, the author of Unlikely Allies: How a Merchant, a Playwright, and a Spy Saved the American Revolution.
John Ferling, "Myths of the American Revolution," Smithsonian, January, considers seven popular myths.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Sunday's Notes
Frank Kermode, "In the Beginning," NYT, 31 December, reviews David Rosenberg's A Literary Bible: An Original Translation.
Arthur C. Danto, "Pleasure, Light, Glory," NYT, 31 December, reviews Roberto Calasso's Tiepolo Pink, trans. by Alastair McEwen.
Michael A. Fletcher reviews D'Army Bailey's The Education of a Black Radical: A Southern Civil Rights Activist's Journey, 1959-1964 for the Washington Post, 3 January.
Gaby Wood, "A walk on the wild side in 70s New York," Guardian, 3 January, reviews Edmund White's City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s.
Jeffrey Rosen, "A Man of Influence," NYT, 31 December, reviews Joan Biskupic's American Original: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Weak Endnotes
C. Vann Winchell, "Baltimore Shocker! ‘Strangely, Awfully Interesting.' Johns Hopkins Embarrasses Early Modernists in Mass Mailing Gaffe," Nothing Recedes Like Success, 1 January.
Simon Schama, "The Joy of Excess," Financial Times, 23 December, reviews Umberto Eco's The Infinity of Lists: From Homer to James Joyce.
Leo Robson reviews Greil Marcus's and Werner Sollors's A New Literary History of America for the New Statesman, 30 December.
Susie Linfield reviews Daniel J. Goldhagen's Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, And the Ongoing Assault on Humanity and Mark Danner's Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War for the Washington Post, 3 January.
James Mann reviews Paul Johnson's Churchill for the Washington Post, 3 January.
Richard Greenwald, "Our Coffee, Ourselves," In These Times, 29 December, reviews Bryant Simon's Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
More Noted Things
Charlie Savage, "Obama Curbs Secrecy of Classified Documents," NYT, 30 December, features President Obama's executive order opening federal archives to research. All historians must appreciate his declaration that "no information may remain classified indefinitely."
"Religion and the historical profession," The Immanent Frame, 30 December, is a symposium of responses to news of religion's resurgence as a field of historical study. Contributors include: Jon Butler, David Hollinger, John Schmalzbauer, Jonathan Sheehan, and Grant Wacker. Hat tip.
Sarah Kaufman, "Rumors abound that new Leonardo da Vinci painting has been found in Boston," Washington Post, 31 December, reports that those who know won't say and those who say don't know.
Esther Shore, "L.L. Zamenhof and the Shadow People," TNR, 30 December, looks at the origins of Esperanto.
James Dao, "Army History Finds Early Missteps in Afghanistan," NYT, 30 December, looks at the unpublished work of a team of seven historians covering the first four years of the United States' experience in Afghanistan.
Finally, Yale's Economics Department announces that UCLA's Naomi Lamoreaux will move to New Haven in the fall of 2010 to take appointments in Yale's economics and history departments.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
History Carnivals in 2010
So, there's remarkable vitality in history blog carnivals at the end of 2009. Biblical Studies Carnival has become so robust that its sponsors are having to rethink how it can best cover all the work it represents. Some of the history carnivals – Art History, Bad History, and Asian History – have become inert, but so had Military History. Fallow for a year, it springs to life again in collaboration with H-War. So, too, Bad History might work out a cooperative relationship with History and Policy. Art History and Asian History need only look around for likely allies and additional energy on the net.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Modern History Notes
Tony Judt, "Night," NYRB, 14 January, is the first in a series of meditations composed as the European historian copes with ALS ("Lou Gehrig's disease"). He is now paralyzed from the neck down.
Patrick Healy, "Falling, Falling, Falling for the Footlight Parade," NYT, 28 December, reviews Ben Hodges, ed., The Play That Changed My Life: America's Foremost Playwrights on the Plays That Influenced Them.
Anthony Lane, "Hollywood Royalty," New Yorker, 4 January, reviews "Gli Anni di Grace Kelly, Principessa di Monaco," an exhibit at Rome's Fondazione Memmo, and Donald Spoto's High Society: The Life of Grace Kelly.
George Brock, "A reporter reflects," TLS, 22 December, reviews Timothy Garton Ash's Facts Are Subversive: Political writing from a decade without a name.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
Laura Italiano, "Embezzler-busting NYU whiz kid," NY Post, 26 December, has the story of an NYU history major, Michael Peaden. He blew the whistle on the chemistry department's manager for embezzling over $400,000 from the University. Peaden's had no word of thanks yet from NYU officials. Someone -- Thomas Bender, Hasia Diner, Michael Gomez, Linda Gordon, David Levering Lewis, Daniel Walkowitz, Barbara Weinstein, Marilyn Young, Jonathan Zimmerman – someone ought to take the young man out to lunch or something. He's one of ours and he ought to know that we're proud of him.
Yale University attorneys argue that a suit demanding the return of a Vincent Van Gogh painting it has held for 50 years could undo American museums' ownership claims to art and artifacts worth billions of dollars.
You can tour the ruins of ancient Pompeii on Google Maps. There's no better guide through them than Mary Beard's Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town.
Tim Martin, "For want of a better word," The National, 19 December, reviews The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Sunday's Notes
Leigh van der Stoep, "Witi's publisher in fresh plagiarism dispute," Wellington, New Zealand's Sunday Star Times, 27 December, headlines charges that New Zealand historian Danny Keenan's recent book on the Moari land wars plagiarized material from an earlier book by New Zealand historian Nigel Prickett. Hat tip.
S. Frederick Starr, "Rediscovering Central Asia," Wilson Quarterly, Summer, takes us back to a time when central Asia was the heart of civilization.
Danny Hakim, "His Specialty? Old New York, in Vivid Dutch," NYT, 26 December, features the work of Charles Gehring in translating New York's Dutch colonial records.
Kevin Levin's "Best of 2009," Civil War Memory, 25 December, hands out his blog and book awards for the year. CWM's choice of "best history blog" of the year? Jim Cullen's American History Now.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Tracy Lee Simmons reviews Donald Kagan's Thucydides: The Reinvention of History for the Washington Post, 23 December.
Matthew Price, "The making of the modern state," The National, 24 December, reviews Steve Pincus's 1688: The First Modern Revolution.
Ronan McDonald reviews Frank Kermode's Concerning E. M. Forster and his Bury Place Papers for the Guardian, 20 December.
Stefan Kanfer, "All That Jazz," City Journal, 22 December, reviews Terry Teachout's Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong.
Carlos Lozada reviews Jennifer Burns's The Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and Anne C. Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made for the Washington Post, 23 December.
Friday, December 25, 2009
Photograph of Jesus
This brief film was a winning entry in a competition to use images from Getty's Hulton Archive to illustrate the range of its offerings. Even such a rich archive gets many requests that it's unlikely to be able to fill:
Hat tip.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Modern History Notes
Greg Lukianoff, "College Students Can't Say 'Sissies' Anymore? Yale Goes for Old-Timey Censorship Against F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote," HuffPo, 21 December, protests censorship at Yale.
Mark Noll, "Jefferson's America," Books & Culture, January, reviews Gordon Wood's Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815.
Ron Charles reviews Sheila Kohler's Becoming Jane Eyre for the Washington Post, 23 December.
Stephen Shapin, "The Darwin Show," LRB, 7 January, is an essay looking back on the conference, exhibition, and literary production occasioned by the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of the Species.
David Yaffe, "Misterioso," Nation, 22 December, reviews Robin D. G. Kelley's Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
More Noted Things
A. C. Grayling reviews Paul Murdin's Secrets of the Universe: How We Discovered the Cosmos for the Barnes & Noble Review, 17 December.
Steven Levingston reviews Geoffrey Chaucer's ‘The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling' by Peter Ackroyd for the Washington Post, 20 December.
Brooke Allen, "Not only connected," New Criterion, December, reviews Frank Kermode's Concerning E. M. Forster. Hat tip.
Simon Winchester, "A Photo of a Smell and Other Scoops," NYT, 21 December, reviews Harold Evans's My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
Stuart Taylor, Jr., "The Rot At Duke -- And Beyond," National Journal, 19 December, claims that Duke's faculty learned nothing from the scandal of 2006 and 2007.
Robert B. Townsend, "A New Found Religion? The Field Surges among AHA Members," Perspectives, December, and Scott Jaschik, "Religious Revival," IHE, 21 December, examine the surge of academic interest in the history of religion.
In Tony Perrottet's "Gentlemen, Charge Your Indecent Props," Slate, 18 December, the author of Napoleon's Privates: 2,500 Years of History Unzipped, visits some uncommon relics at the Museum of the University of St. Andrews.
Justin Moyer reviews Thomas Fleming's The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers for the Washington Post, 20 December.
Claude R. Marx, "The man behind the Roosevelts," Boston Globe, 19 December, reviews Julie M. Fenster's FDR's Shadow: Louis Howe, the Force that Shaped Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Hat tip.
Johann Hari, "The Casanova of Causes," Slate, 20 December, reviews Michael Scammell's Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Sunday's Notes
Ambrose Hofstadter Bierce, III, the Broad-Gauge Gossip, sends seasonal "Greetings, Friends!"
Andrea Wulf, "Bed, Bath and Beyond," NYT, 16 December, reviews Amanda Vickery's Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England.
Adam Thirwell, "The Animator," TNR, 19 December, reviews Michael Slater's Charles Dickens.
Alex von Tunzelman, "After the War, Before the War," NYT, 16 December, reviews Richard Overy's The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars.
Jeanette Winterson, "Patricia Highsmith, Hiding in Plain Sight," NYT, 16 December, reviews Joan Schenkar's The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Carnivalesque LVII, an ancient/medieval edition of the festival, is up at Judith Weingarten's Zenobia: Empress of the East. Weingarten's "Just the potion to needle a republic," THE, 17 December, reviews Adrienne Mayor's The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy.
David Farley, "The Family Jewels," Smart Set, 19 December, identifies the top ten unlikely Christian relics, up to and including Mary's breast milk and Jesus's foreskin.
Michael Dirda, "Mystic Terror Revisited," WSJ, 19 December, reviews Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time.
Philip Hensher reviews Frank Kermode's Concerning E. M. Forster for the Telegraph, 12 December.
Carolyn See reviews Ted Gioia's The Birth and Death of the Cool for the Washington Post, 18 December; and Louis Bayard reviews Terry Teachout's Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong for the Washington Post, 20 December.
Friday, December 18, 2009
British Notes & Randy Thoughts
Peter Linehan, "800 years on the Cam," TLS, 16 December, reviews Mary Beard's It's a Don's Life, G. R. Evans's The University of Cambridge: A new history, Alan Macfarlane's Reflections on Cambridge, and Peter Pagnamenta, ed., The University of Cambridge: An 800th anniversary portrait.
Janet Maslin, "Once More, Revisiting Anne Boleyn Yet Again," NYT, 16 December, reviews Alison Weir's The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn.
Stella Tillyard, "Georgian London," TLS, 9 December, reviews Dan Cruickshank's The Secret History of Georgian London, Rachel Stewart's The Townhouse in Georgian London, and Amanda Vickery's Behind Closed Doors: At home in Georgian England. Tillyard really ought to have tipped her reviewer's cap to Lucy Inglis's splendid blog, Georgian London.
Henry Power, "Samuel Johnson restored to his proper size and place," TLS, 16 December, reviews Sir John Hawkins's The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D., edited by O. M. Brack, Jr., and David Nokes's Samuel Johnson: A Life.
Ruth Guilding, "John Piper and Myfanwy Piper: art in an organic Utopia," TLS, 16 December, reviews Frances Spalding's John Piper and Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art.
Scott McLemee, "And the Rand played on," The National, 17 December, reviews Jennifer Burns's Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and Anne C. Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Thursday's Notes
The Giant's Shoulders #18, the history of science carnival, is up at Jost A Mon.
Jamie James reviews Christopher Betts's translation of Charles Perrault's The Complete Fairy Tales (first published in French in 1697) for the LA Times, 13 December.
Louis Menand, "Road Warrior," New Yorker, 21 December, reviews Michael Scammell's Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic. I heard Koestler lecture at Duke in the early 1960s. He was there to visit J. B. Rhine's laboratory in extra-sensory perception and denounced his audience for knowing nothing about it. He seemed to have no interest in the civil rights movement, about which some of us could have told him a great deal.
Jackson Lears, "Hard Times Revisited," TAP, 10 December, reviews Morris Dickstein's Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression and Linda Gordon's Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Midweek Notes
Indian History Carnival #24 is up at varnam. The Giant's Shoulders #18, the history of science carnival, should be up later today at Jost A Mon.
Jamillah Knowles, "Time machines," BBC Radio 5 Live's Pods and Blogs, 15 December, links to its podcast about history blogging and bloggers. It includes my interview about Cliopatria and the Cliopatria Awards. Knowles also interviews Mike Duncan of The History of Rome, Rob Baker of Another Nickel in the Machine on 20th century London, and Trish Lewis of St. Vincent Memories on an old town in Minnesota's far northwest. Ms. Lewis also blogs at, ... ah ... , Victorian Sex Machines.
Adam Kirsch, "Dark Humor," Tablet, 15 December, reviews Adam Biro's Is It Good for the Jews?.
Justin Elliott, "The John Hope Franklin File: FBI Looked At Esteemed Historian For Communist Ties," TPM, 15 December, reports findings from Dr. Franklin's FBI file. Elliott posts selected documents from it here.
Dwight Garner, "Chinua Achebe's Encounters With Many Hearts of Darkness," NYT, 15 December, reviews Achebe's The Education of a British-Protected Child.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Modern History Notes
By consulting different lists, Jennifer Howard, "A Few University-Press Books Hit Mainstream 'Best Of' Lists," CHE, 14 December, gets slightly different results than Mary Dudziak's. Add Gordon S. Woods's Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 and Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Lois More Overbeck, Dan Gunn, and George Craig, eds., The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. 1, 1929-1940 to the short list of books that made it to more than one list of the Best.
David W. Blight, "America's Armageddon Revisited," Slate, 14 December, reviews John Keegan's The American Civil War: A Military History. Blight suggests a different perspective on Ari Kelman's observation that "the normally genial James McPherson" had "savaged" Keegan's book. "Some [of Keegan's] chapters cite no sources at all," says Blight, "and many rely heavily on James McPherson's modern narrative history, Battle Cry of Freedom."
Josh Lambert, "Who owns Holocaust history?" Tablet, 14 December, comes up with some surprising answers.
Ronald Hutton, "The saintly Dennis Wheatley," TLS, 9 December, reviews Phil Baker's The Devil is a Gentleman: The life and times of Dennis Wheatley.
Finally, congratulations to Cliopatria's friend, Michael Bérubé, who has been elected president of the Modern Language Association.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
Mary L. Dudziak, "2009 Best Book Lists (and a worst book list)," Legal History, 13 December, rounds up lists of the Best and the Worst. Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, and Mary Karr's LIT: A Memoir appear to be the only books on more than one list of the Best.
Luke Slattery, "Doing battle for Troy over Homer's ghosts," The Australian, 2 December, reviews Caroline Alexander's The War that Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Illiad and the Trojan War. Hat tip.
Drake Bennett, "The mystery of Zomia," Boston Globe, 6 December, reviews James C. Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia.
Ben Terris, "Scholars Nostalgic for the Old South Study the Virtues of Secession, Quietly," CHE, 6 December, looks at the Abbeville Institute's contemporary academic secessionists.
Farewell to Paul Samuelson, author of Economics: An Introductory Analysis and the first American Nobel laureate in economics.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Sunday's Notes
Andreas Hess reviews Robert Darnton's The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future for THE, 10 December.
Alex Danchev reviews David Cast's The Delight of Art: Giorgio Vasari and the Traditions of Humanist Discourse for THE, 10 December.
Virginia DeJohn Anderson, "Abigail Adams, Founding Mother," NYT, 10 December, reviews Woody Holton's Abigail Adams.
James Lovegrove, "I see a darkness," Financial Times, 11 December, reviews Peter Straub, ed., American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny, 2 vols., Patrick O'Leary's The Black Heart, and Stephen King's Just After Sunset. See also: Ed Park's "'Another conversation bleeds into yours'," LA Times, 29 November. Hat tip.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Since the demise of the Carnival of Bad History, the historians at History & Policy have taken up the challenge as a regular feature. See: Matthew Reisz, "Past Mistakes," THES, 15 October.
Paul Laity, "Jenny Uglow," Guardian, 12 December, is an interview with the recent biographer of Charles II.
Carolyn See, "Oddball twists of the Revolution," Washington Post, 11 December, reviews Joel Richard Paul's Unlikely Allies: How a Merchant, a Playwright, and a Spy Saved the American Revolution.
Ron Hanson, "Short stories, shorter life," Washington Post, 13 December, reviews Carol Sklenicka's Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life and William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll, eds., Carver: Collected Stories.
Farewell to Yosef H. Yerushalmi, a distinguished scholar of Jewish history, who taught at Rutgers, Harvard, and Columbia. See: Marissa Brostoff, "History and Memory," Tablet, 10 December.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Charles Babbage's "Difference Engine"
Laura Sydell, "A 19th-Century Mathematician Finally Proves Himself," NPR's "Morning Edition," 10 December, reviews the story of Charles Babbage's 'Difference Engine.' It was conceived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and built in the late 20th century.
The Difference Engine was an automatic, mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial functions. Both logarithmic and trigonometric functions can be approximated by polynomials, so a difference engine can compute many useful sets of numbers.
Here, its modern builder explains how the Difference Engine works.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Modern History Notes
Dwight Garner, "Communism's Path: A Once-Vigorous Idea That Has Lost Its Muscle," NYT, 8 December, reviews David Priestland's The Red Flag: A History of Communism.
Adam Kirsch, "Partisan Poet," Tablet, 8 December, reviews Dina Porat's The Fall of a Sparrow: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner.
David Runciman, "I Could Fix That," LRB, 17 December, reviews Taylor Branch's The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History in the White House.
Kevin Mattson, "In Dubious Battle," bookforum, December/ January, reviews Michael Bérubé's The Left at War.
Finally, farewell to Shearer Davis Bowman. The author of Masters and Lords : Mid-19th-Century U.S. Planters and Prussian Junkers and At the Precipice: Americans North and South during the Secession Crisis, Professor Bowman taught at Hampden-Sydney, the University of Texas, the University of Kentucky, and Berea College.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Maybe It's Just Me ...
Yesterday, members of the Organization of American Historians received an e-mail from its president, Elaine Tyler May, announcing the choice of a new executive director for the OAH.
After an extensive process that resulted in 54 applications, Katherine (Kathy) Finley has been selected by the OAH Executive Board ...
Kathy holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in history, and has served history museums and associations. In addition to her passion for history, she is also a trained and seasoned nonprofit executive whose experience and talents will help us achieve the ambitious goals of the recently adopted Strategic Plan ...
Kathy will be coming to us from her current position of Executive Director of the Real Estate Investment Securities Association and the TICA Foundation in Indianapolis. Previous experiences have been as Director of the American College of Sports Medicine Foundation and senior executive team leader for Advancement, Education and Meetings for the American College of Sports Medicine; Executive Director of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA) and Associate Faculty in Philanthropic Studies at IUPUI; and Executive Director of Roller Skating Association International and the Roller Skating Foundation.
Maybe it's just me, but one of my colleagues at Cliopatria thought this announcement sufficiently odd to call it to my attention.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
The Nonfiction list in "The 10 Best Books of 2009," NYT, 13 December, includes Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, David Finkel's The Good Soldiers, Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, Mary Karr's LIT: A Memoir, and Carol Sklenicka's Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life.
Caroline Weber, "Paris," NYT, 3 December, reviews Georges Duby and Guy Lobrichon, eds., History of Paris in Painting.
Megan Marshall, "Hey, Mr. Postman," Slate, 7 December, reviews Thomas Mallon's Yours Ever: People and Their Letters.
Crystal Downing and Reid Perkins-Buzo, "Silent Divas," Books & Culture, November/December, reviews Angela Dalle Vacche's Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema.
Kathryn Harrison, "The Symbologist," NYT, 3 December, reviews Carl G. Jung's The Red Book: Liber Novus.
David Lodge, "Shored Against His Ruins," Literary Review, December/January, reviews Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments.
Barry Gewen, "That Old Black Magic," NYT, 3 December, reviews Robert Kimball, Barry Day, Miles Kreuger and Eric Davis, eds., The Complete Lyrics of Johnny Mercer.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Happy Anniversary!
Like an absent-minded professor, Cliopatria forgot to mention her 6th anniversary last Thursday. To over 950,000 readers from about 180 countries, thanks for coming by to read and discuss. To over 1500 other history blogs and bloggers, thanks for creating the history blogosphere's increasingly rich diversity. To my colleagues at Cliopatria, both past and present, thanks for your many contributions. Here's to many more!
P. S. If, like me, you've been missing his juiciness, Ambrose Hofstadter Bierce, III, at The Broad-Gauge Gossip, be sure to check out the new pretender to the history gossip throne: C. Vann Winchell at Nothing Recedes Like Success. In his (or her?) initial venture, CVW nominates likely high profile refugees from the UC-system's financial debacle.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Sunday's Notes
Tim Rutten reviews Mark Lamster's Master of Shadows: The Secret Diplomatic Career of the Painter Peter Paul Rubens for the LA Times, 2 December.
John Barnard, "Who killed John Keats?" TLS, 2 December, poses a new theory about the poet's death.
Mary Tompkins Lewis, "His Art, His Words," WSJ, 3 December, reviews Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker, eds., Vincent van Gogh—The Letters, 6 volumes; the online edition, Vincent van Gogh, The Letters; and "Van Gogh's Letters," an exhibit at Amsterdam's van Gogh Museum.
Jay Parini reviews The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy, trans. by Cathy Porter, for the Guardian, 5 December.
Peter Scoblic, "Missile Man," New Republic, 5 December, reviews Neil Sheehan's A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon.
Nicholas Lemann, "The Power and the Glory," New Yorker, 7 December, reviews Harold Evans's My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Weak Endnotes
From the blogs:
From the news and reviews:
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Additionally Noted
Michael Dirda, "His reign: Far from plain," Washington Post, 3 December, reviews Jenny Uglow's A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game.
Jill Lepore, "Preëxisting Condition," New Yorker, 7 December, looks at 20th century American health care reform. Here, she responds to readers' questions about it.
Jody Rosen, "Vanishing Act," Slate, 1 December, rediscovers Eva Tanguay, America's first "rock star" and the model for Sunset Boulevard's Nora Desmond. Here she sings her theme song, "I Don't Care".
Ian Buruma, "Occupied Paris: The Sweet and the Cruel," NYRB, 17 December, reviews Claude Arnaud's Jean Cocteau, Jean Baronnet's Les Parisiens sous l'Occupation: Photographies en couleurs d'André Zucca, David Bellos, trans., The Journal of Hélène Berr, Patrick Buisson's 1940–1945 Années érotiques: De la Grande Prostituée à la revanche des mâles, Olivier Corpet's and Claire Paulhan's Collaboration and Resistance: French Literary Life Under the Nazi Occupation, Agnès Humbert's Résistance: Memoirs of Occupied France, trans. by Barbara Mellor, and Philippe Jullian's Occupied Paris: The Sweet and the Cruel.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
MidWeek Notes
History Carnival LXXXII is up at The Lay Scientist.
David W. Blight, "‘He Knew How to Die': John Brown on the Gallows, December 2, 1859," HNN, 30 November, Tony Horwitz, "The 9/11 of 1859," NYT, 1 December, and David S. Reynolds, "Freedom's Martyr," NYT, 1 December, mark the 150th anniversary of the hanging of John Brown. Here and elsewhere, Reynolds argues for pardoning the old man.
In "Decline of the West," IHE, 2 December, our colleague, Scott McLemee, takes a hard look at the intellectual decay of Princeton's Cornel West.
In "Making Sense of Senseless Violence at Berkeley," CHE, 1 December, our colleague, Aaron Bady, writes of students who make him proud to occupy a classroom.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
More Noted Things
John Noble Wilford, "A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity," NYT, 30 November, reviews "The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley, 5000-3500 BC," an exhibit at NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in Manhattan.
Toby Lester, "Armchair Travelers," American Scholar, Autumn, is an essay about Petrarch and Boccaccio from Lester's book, The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America its Name.
Ned Crabb, "Risky Business," WSJ, 26 November, reviews Jenny Uglow's A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game.
Edward Rothstein, "For Poe, This Has Been the Year to Die For," NYT, 30 November, reviews The Poe Museum and "Poe: Man, Myth, or Monster," an exhibit at the Library of Virginia in Richmond.
Tim Burke, "Anatomy of a Search," Easily Distracted, 30 November, is a fascinating search for the family connection to Cretan nationalism and the Greco-Turkish War of 1897.
Monday, November 30, 2009
20th Century Notes
Nominations for the Cliopatria Awards, 2009 close on Monday 30 November at midnight est. Additional nominations are welcome in all categories, but we especially need nominations for Best Post. To refresh your memory, have a look at the monthly history carnivals and/or Cliopatria's History Blogroll.
David L. Ulin reviews Eva Hoffman's Time for the LA Times, 22 November.
Erez Manela, "First in Peace," Boston Globe, 29 November, reviews John Milton Cooper's Woodrow Wilson: A Biography.
Jon Meacham, "How Heroic Was Churchill?" Slate, 29 November, reviews Paul Johnson's Churchill.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
Stacy Schiff, "Please Mr. Postman," NYT, 27 November, reviews Thomas Mallon's Yours Ever: People and Their Letters.
Jay Winik, "A New Nation," NYT, 27 November, reviews Gordon S. Wood's Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815.
Andrew Motion reviews Vincent van Gogh's The Letters: The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition for the Guardian, 21 November.
Ange Mlinko, "Angels to Radios: On Rainer Maria Rilke," Nation, 24 November, reviews Edward Snow, ed. and trans., The Poetry of Rilke: Bilingual Edition.
Friday, November 27, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Dominic Sandbrook, "History Books of the Year," Telegraph, 26 November, takes a crack at naming the best of a year's books in history. See also: "100 Notable Books of 2009: Non-fiction," NYT, 6 December; and Benjamin Schwarz, "Books of the Year," Atlantic, December.
Randall Stephens, "Rebunking the Pilgrims?" Religion in American History, 24 November, reviews Jeremy Bangs's Strangers and Pilgrims, Travellers and Sojourners.
Alexander Nazaryan, "How to Digest a Historic Feast," Washington Post, 25 November, reviews James Baker's Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday.
Laila Lalami, "The New Inquisition," The Nation, 24 November, reviews Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West.
Finally, farewell to H. C. Robbins Landon, a music historian, who made major contributions to our appreciation of Handel, Haydn, and Mozart.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Additionally Noted
Nominations for the Cliopatria Awards, 2009, will close at midnight est on Monday 30 November. Additional nominations in all categories are welcome, but we particularly need nominations for Best Post. To refresh your memory, have a look at the monthly history carnivals and/or Cliopatria's History Blogroll.
Robert Darnton, "Google and the New Digital Future," NYRB, 17 December, looks at the future of digitized books.
Judith Shulevitz, "My True Story," NYT, 20 November, and Jonathan Yardley, "Shelve It Under Naval Gazing," Washington Post, 29 November, review Ben Yagoda's Memoir: A History.
Jill Lepore, "Boundless promise and grave peril," Washington Post, 29 November, reviews Gordon Wood's Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815.
Michael Dirda, "The unheroic genius behind the adventures of Tintin," Washington Post, 26 November, reviews Pierre Assouline's Hergé: The Man Who Created Tintin and Jean-Marie Apostolidès's The Metamorphoses of Tintin; or, Tintin for Adults.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
20th Century Notes
Adam Kirsch, "The Firebrand," Tablet, 24 November, reviews Robert Service's Trotsky: A Biography.
A Debate: Jeffrey Herf, "Hate Radio," CHE, 22 November; and Richard Wolin, "Herf's Misuses of History," CHE, 22 November. The debate continues on-line at "'Islamo-Fascism': an Exchange," CHE, 22 November.
Dwight Garner, "Power and Style, in the Ring and the World," NYT, 24 November, reviews Wil Haygood's Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson.
Emily Bazelon, "The Alienator," Slate, 24 November, reviews Joan Biskupic's American Original: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
More Noted Things
Patricia Cohen reviews Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People for the NYT, 23 November.
Daniel Vitkus, "Celebrating English Proto-Imperialism," Common-place, November, reviews Alison Games's The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660.
Jeffrey Herf, "Hate Radio," CHE, 22 November, is an essay based on Herf's research for Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, which is published this month by Yale University Press.
Michael Dirda, "Vladimir Nabokov, reduced to notes," Washington Post, 19 November, reviews Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura, edited by Dmitri Nabokov.
Michiko Kakutani, "The Voice That Helped Remake Culture," NYT, 23 November, reviews Terry Teachout's POPS: A Life of Louis Armstrong.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
Carnivalesque LVI, an early modern edition of the festival, is up at Investigations of a Dog.
Judith Shulevitz, "My True Story," NYT, 20 November, reviews Ben Yagoda's Memoir: A History.
Emily Colette Wilkinson reviews Veronica Buckley's The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Franoise D'Aubigne, Madame de Maintenon for the Washington Times, 15 November.
Alexandra Mullen, "Discovering the Keys to a Musical Past," WSJ, 21 November, reviews Madeline Goold's Mr. Langshaw's Square Piano: The Story of the First Pianos and How They Caused a Cultural Revolution.
Sean Wilentz, "Into the West," NYT, 20 November, reviews Robert W. Merry's A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War, and the Conquest of the American Continent.
Jonathan Yardley, "Forgotten Warrior," Washington Post, 22 November, reviews Joan Waugh's U. S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Because I Love Good Country Music, ...
I could listen to the Carolina Chocolate Drops all day. Here, they do "Corn Bread and Butterbeans": That's Justin Robinson singing and on the fiddle, Rhiannon Giddens joins in song and plays the banjo, and Dom Flemons works the jug and bones. They carry on a tradition of African American string band music that Mebane, North Carolina's Joe Thompson taught them.
The Wiyos is a well-regarded white, urban group, with roots in New York and New Orleans. When they do their own, quite different, version of "Corn Bread and Butterbeans," the harmonica, guitar, bass and washboard, with bell and horn, replace the fiddle, banjo, jug and bones.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Friday's Notes
Michael O'Sullivan, "An army for the afterlife," Washington Post, 20 November, reviews "Terra Cotta Warriors: Guardians of China's First Emperor," an exhibit at the National Geographic Museum in Washington, DC.
Edward Rothstein, "Flights of Mind, Brought to Life," NYT, 19 November, reviews "Leonardo da Vinci's Workshop," an exhibit at Discovery Times Square Exposition in Manhattan.
Harvey J. Kaye, "Palin's Unlikely Hero," Daily Beast, 17 November, argues that Sarah Palin and much of the American Right misunderstand Thomas Paine.
Matthew Cobb, "How the Americans bought the French Resistance," TLS, 18 November, reviews Robert Belot's and Gilbert Karpman's L'affaire Suisse: La Résistance a-t-elle trahi de Gaulle?
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Notes Ancient & Modern
Congratulations to T. J. Stiles, whose The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt has won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and to Philip Hoose, whose Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice has won the Award for Young People's Literature.
Adam Kirsch, "A Prophet's Pen," Tablet, 17 November, reviews David Rosenberg's A Literary Bible: An Original Translation.
Bonnie S. Benwick, "A tasting menu of savory dishes," Washington Post, 18 November, reviews Andrew Dalby's Cheese: A Global History, Sarah Moss's and Alexander Badenoch's Chocolate: A Global History, and Colleen Taylor Sen's Curry: A Global History.
Diana Athill, "Lore of the Land," Literary Review, November, reviews Madelaine Bunting's The Plot: A Biography of an English Acre.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Midweek Notes
"The Giant's Shoulders #17 - Darwin Sesquicentennial Edition," the history of science carnival, is up at The Primate Diaries.
Elspeth Barker, "Words, Glorious Words," Literary Review, November, reviews Christian Kay, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels and Irené Wotherspoon, eds., Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Laura Claridge, "Best Books About Etiquette," WSJ, 14 November, recommends five: Erasmus, On the Civility of Children's Conduct, 1530; George Washington, Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior, 1748; Emily Post, Etiquette, 1927; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Learning How to Behave [sic], 1946; and Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, 1969.
Finally, this graphic tracks the expansion and decline of four major European maritime empires between 1800 and 2000: Hat tip.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Additionally Noted
Rosemary Hill, "The re-enchantment of the present," TLS, 11 November, reviews Megan Aldrich and Robert J. Wallis, eds., Antiquaries and Archaists: The past in the past, the past in the present.
Robert Irwin, "Onward Christian Soldiers," Literary Review, November, reviews Jonathan Phillips's Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades.
Tim Blanning, "High Notes," Literary Review, November, reviews Daniel Snowman's The Gilded Stage: A Social History of Opera.
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, "The Arctic heart of darkness," TLS, 11 November, reviews Andrew Lambert's Franklin: Tragic hero of polar exploration and Glyn Williams's Arctic Labyrinth: The quest for the Northwest Passage.
Caryl Phillips, "The Explorer," TNR, 16 November, reviews Lafcadio Hearn's American Writings.
Monday, November 16, 2009
More Noted Things
Judith Shulevitz, "Was Paul a Jew?" Tablet, 11 November, looks at recent revisionist studies of Paul of Tarsus by Pamela Eisenbaum, John G. Gager, Sarah Ruden, and Garry Wills.
Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn, "Scandal and Success," New Yorker, 13 November, reviews "Candide at 250: Scandal and Success," an exhibit at the New York Public Library.
Steve Fraser, "The Misunderstood Robber Baron: On Cornelius Vanderbilt," The Nation, 11 November, reviews T. J. Stiles's The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Martin Amis, "The problem with Nabokov," The Guardian, 14 November, is an essay occasioned by the publication of Nabokov's The Original of Laura. Hat tip.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
The Carnival of Genealogy LXXXIII is up at Janet the Researcher; Biblical Studies Carnival XLVII is up at Paul of Tarsus in Historical Perspective; and Indian History Carnival #23 is up at varnam.
Edward Rothstein, "Information Highway: Camel Speed but Exotic Links," NYT, 12 November, reviews "Traveling the Silk Road," an exhibit at Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History.
Holland Cotter, "Compassionate Masters of the Universe," NYT, 12 November, reviews "Victorious Ones: Jain Images of Perfection, " an exhibit at Manhattan's Rubin Museum of Art, and "Peaceful Conquerors: Jain Manuscript Painting," an exhibit at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Harold Bloom, "Road Trip," NYT, 11 November, reviews Peter Ackroyd's The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling.
Michael Dirda, "Jung at Heart," Washington Post, 12 November, reviews Carl G. Jung's The Red Book: Liber Novus.
Friday, November 13, 2009
20th Century Notes
Terry Eagleton, "Waking the Dead," New Statesman, 12 November, is an essay occasioned by the republication of Eagleton's Walter Benjamin: or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism.
Bernard Porter, "Other People's Mail," LRB, 19 November, reviews Christopher Andrew's The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5.
Walter Isaacson, "How Einstein Divided America's Jews," Atlantic, December, explores the reaction of prominent American Jews to Einstein's Zionism.
Adam Mars-Jones reviews Blake Bailey's Cheever: A Life for the Guardian, 8 November.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Mid-Week Notes
Peter Stothard, "The School of Athens," WSJ, 10 November, reviews Donald Kagan's Thucydides: The Reinvention of History.
Jan Swafford, "Nature's Rejects: The music of the castrati," Slate, 9 November, revisits an outcast dimension of 16th to 19th century European music.
Philip Kennicott, "Far out of Africa," Washington Post, 11 November, reviews "The African Presence in México: From Yanga to the Present," an exhibit at Washington, DC's Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum.
Paul Harvey, "Inventing a Tradition," Books & Culture, 9 November, takes apart Jonathan Bean's claim in Race and Liberty in America: The Essential Reader to have identified a classical liberating tradition in American race relations.
Julian Barnes, "On we sail," LRB, is an essay about Guy de Maupassant, occasioned by new English translations of two of his novels.
Adam Kirsch, "The November Pogrom," Tablet, 10 November, reviews Alan Steinweis's Kristallnacht 1938.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
Over the weekend, The Root and Howard University's student newspaper, The Hilltop, reported a crisis at the University's Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. Its staffing had declined from 50 to 12 positions and, by the end of the semester, there would be no employees. Yesterday, Howard's administration said that there are no plans to close the MSRC, but there's every indication that one of the most important centers for research in African American history is in serious difficulty.
Evan R. Goldstein, "Isaiah Berlin, Beyond the Wit," CHE, 8 November, reviews Isaiah Berlin's Enlightening: Letters, 1946-1960.
Christine Stansell, "The Journey of the American Woman," Daily Beast, 10 November, reviews Gail Collins's When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present.
Terry Gross interviews Ken Auletta, the author of 'Googled': Biography Of A Company, And An Age, NPR, 2 November.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Modern Memory
Jonathan Yardley, "Memories carved in stone," Washington Post, 8 November, reviews Kirk Savage's Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, And the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape.
Alan Pell Crawford, "Grave Matters," WSJ, 27 October, and Fergus M. Bordewich, "Our honored dead, our flawed history," Washington Post, 8 November, review Robert M. Poole's On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery.
Patricia Cohen, "An Ethical Question: Does a Nazi Deserve a Place Among Philosophers?" NYT, 8 November, reviews the debate launched even before the publication in the United States of Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy.
____________, "Long-Delayed Opening for History of, and by, Joseph Papp," NYT, 6 November, has the back-story on Kenneth Turan's Free for All: Joe Papp, The Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told.
Arts & Letters Daily has a superb roundup of reflections on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall.
Stefany Anne Goldberg, "In Las Vegas, history has a price, not a past," Washington Post, 8 November, argues that pawned items lose their history for a price.
Finally, thanks to Chris Bray, the Best. Job. Listing. Ever.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Harold Bloom, "The Critic's Critic," NYT, 5 November, reviews David Nokes's Samuel Johnson: A Life.
Gregory Cowles, "Stray Questions for: Woody Holton," Paper Cuts, 6 November, interviews the University of Richmond historian, whose new book on Abigail Adams appeared this week.
Edward Rothstein, "At the Morgan, the Jane Austen Her Family Knew," NYT, 6 November, reviews "A Woman's Wit: Jane Austen's Life and Legacy," an exhibit at the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan.
Philip Kennicott, "FDR's stimulus package for artists: No cause for nostalgia," Washington Post, 8 November, reviews "1934: A New Deal for Artists," an exhibit at Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Aaron Burr Raps on Alexander Hamilton
"Writer and star of the Broadway musical, In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda performs "The Hamilton Mixtape" at the White House Evening of Poetry, Music, and the Spoken Word on May 12, 2009. Accompanied by Alex Lacamoire."
Hat tip.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Friday's Notes
Louis Menand, "The Ph. D. Problem," Harvard Magazine, November/December, argues for a change in the professionalization of academic people.
Jenna Weissman Joselit, "Founding Father," Tablet, 5 November, reviews Bruce Feiler's America's Prophet: Moses and the American Story.
Michael Dirda, "Beneath a host of characters lay a writer akin to Shakespeare," Washington Post, 5 November, reviews Michael Slater's Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing.
Melanie Kirkpatrick, "China's Mystery Lady," WSJ, 3 November, reviews Hannah Pakula's The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China.
Manan Ahmed, "Start a war," National, 5 November, argues that, in Pakistan, "the dysfunctional state remains its own worst enemy."
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Thursday's Notes
The Historical Society's Historically Speaking has become the most vital historical newsletter in the United States. Currently, its series of symposia on the state of traditional fields of history considers Intellectual History and Military History. September's issue on Intellectual History featured essays by Daniel Wickberg, David Hollinger, Sarah Igo, and Wilfred McClay. November's issue on Military History has essays by Brian Linn, Dennis Showalter, Robert Citino, Victor Davis Hanson, and Roger Spiller. There's a foretaste of the Military History forum at The Historical Society's ths blog.
Peter Campbell, "At the British Museum," LRB, 5 November, reviews "Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler," an exhibit at the London's BM.
Julian Bell, "For Those Who Don't Know," LRB, 5 November, reviews Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker, eds., Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, trans. by Michael Hoyle et al.
Paul Reitter, "The precious Hugo von Hofmannsthal," TLS, 4 November, reviews J. D. McClatchey, ed., The Whole Difference: Selected writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal.
Tariq Ali, "The life and death of Trotsky," Guardian, 31 October, reviews Bertrand M. Patenaude's Stalin's Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky and Robert Service's Trotsky: A Biography.
Evgeny Morozov, "Edit This Page," Boston Review reviews Andrew Lih's The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Mid-Week Notes
Cato Unbound, November, features a symposium on "How the World Got Modern." Stephen Davies's "How the World Got Modern" is its lead essay. Jack Goldstone, Anthony Pagden, and Jason Kuznicki will each publish a reply to Davies this week.
Dwight Garner, "Wartime China's Elegant Enigma," NYT, 3 November, reviews Hannah Pakula's The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China.
A year after his election, historians assess President Obama: Walter Isaacson, Michael Kazin, Rick Perlstein, Ted Widmer, and Garry Wills, Daily Beast, 2 November; and Doris Kearns Goodwin, Huffington Post, 3 November.
Finally, farewell to Claude Lévi-Strauss, a cultural anthropologist and leading French intellectual, and to Judson C. Ward, an American historian who was for many years an administrator at Emory University.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
More Noted Things
Jill Lepore, "Rap Sheet," New Yorker, 2 November, reviews Randolph Roth's American Homicide and Pieter Spierenburg's A History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present. See also: Lepore, "Foul Play," ibid.
Peter Brooks, "Napoleon's Eye," NYRB, 19 November, is an essay drawing on Peter Rosenberg, ed., Dominique-Vivant Denon: L'oeil de Napoléon, an exhibition at the Louvre, Paris, October 20, 1999–January 17, 2000, Vivant Denon's No Tomorrow, and Andrew McClellan's Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris.
Jonathan Raban, "American Pastoral," NYRB, 19 November, reviews Linda Gordon's Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits and Anne Whiston Spirn's Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field.
Johann Hari, "How Ayn Rand Became an American Icon," Slate, Jennifer Burns's Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and Anne Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made.
Charlotte Higgins, "Benjamin Britten's diaries reveal boys, bitching and brilliance," Guardian, 31 October, reviews John Evans, ed., Journeying Boy: The Diaries of the Young Benjamin Britten, 1928-1938.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
Karen Houppert, "A room of her own," Washington Post, 1 November, tells the story of Marcia Carlisle, Houppert's history professor at Bennington, her disability, and a modest, mysterious bequest.
Johannah Cornblatt, "The Evolution of Birth Control," Newsweek, 29 October, is a slideshow of its history.
Christopher Benfey's "Renaissance Men," NYT, 29 October, reviews Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.
Caleb Crain, "Keats Speaks," NYT, 29 October, considers whether John Keats spoke like the character who plays him in Jane Campion's film, "Bright Star." See also: Crain, "Cockney Keats?" Steamboats are ruining everything, 31 October.
Daniel Stashower, "The United States of spooks and spirits," Washington Post, 25 October, reviews William J. Birnes's and Joel Martin's The Haunting of America: From the Salem Witch Trials to Harry Houdini and Mitch Horowitz's Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation.
James M. McPherson, "Brutal Terrain," NYT, 29 October, reviews John Keegan's The American Civil War: A Military History.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
The History Blogosphere's Weekend
Michael Sims, "Mind over monsters: Peering into the dark corners of the psyche," Washington Post, 27 October, reviews Stephen T. Asma's On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. See also: Asma's "Monsters and the Moral Imagination," CHE, 25 October.
Adam Kirsch, "Ayn Rand's Revenge," NYT, 29 October, and T. J. Stiles for the San Francisco Chronicle, 1 November, review Anne C. Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made.
Ronald Grigor Suny, "Empire Falls: The Revolutions of 1989," Nation, 28 October, reviews Stephen Kotkin's Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, Constantine Pleshakov's There Is No Freedom Without Bread! 1989 and the Civil War That Brought Down Communism, and Victor Sebestyen's Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire.
Friday, October 30, 2009
20th Century Notes
John Herrman, "Giz Explains: Why Every Country Has a Different F#$%ing Plug," Gizmodo, 29 October, includes a helpful map of where a dozen different male plugs and female sockets are used around the world. Thanks to Manan Ahmed for the tip.
Jacob Silverman, "‘I Have Decided Not to Die'," VQR, Fall, reviews Grigoris Balakian's Armenian Golgotha and Peter Balakian's Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir.
Today marks the 71st anniversary of the Orson Welles's 1938 live radio production of H. G. Wells's story of a Martian invasion, "The War of the Worlds." Its realism apparently caused widespread panic in its radio audience. WaroftheWorldsTribute.com will live stream the original radio production tonight, beginning at 8:00 p.m. EST.
Nick Gillespie, "Ready for Her Close-Up," Wilson Quarterly, Autumn, reviews Jennifer Burns's Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and Anne C. Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made.
Michael Tomasky, "In The Tank," TNR, 28 October, reviews Taylor Branch's The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Thursday's Notes
Isobel Grundy reviews Dena Goodman's Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters for the THES, 29 October.
Alexis de Tocqueville, "Letters from America," Hudson Review, Autumn, publishes a selection from the letters he sent home when he visited the United States in 1831/32. See also: Paula Deitz, "Alexis de Tocqueville: Letters From America, Huffington Post, 28 October.
James Buzard reviews Paul Young's Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order for the THES, 29 October.
Willy Maley reviews Tristram Hunt's The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels for the THES, 29 October.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Midweek Notes
Cristina Odone reviews Diarmaid MacCulloch's A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years for the Guardian, 25 October.
Edward Rothstein, "One Man's Crusade Against Slavery, Seen From Two Angles," NYT, 27 October, reviews "John Brown: The Abolitionist and His Legacy," an exhibit at the New York Historical Society in Manhattan, and "The Portent: John Brown's Raid in American Memory," an exhibit at the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond.
Adam Kirsch, "Deliberate Evil," Tablet, 27 October, and David Reiff, "The Willing Misinterpreter," National Interest, 27 October, review Daniel Goldhagen's Worse than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity.
Bruce Kuklick, "A Cold War Story," Books & Culture, November/ December, reviews Neil Sheehan's A Fiery Peace in a Cold War.
Finally, farewell to Bowling Green's Ray Browne, who pioneered in studies of American popular culture.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
More Noted Things
John Gray, "The democratic wish," The National, 15 October, reviews John Keane's The Life and Death of Democracy.
Janet Maslin, "For Starters, a Satanic Svengali," NYT, 25 October, reviews Piers Dudgeon's Neverland: J. M. Barrie, the Du Mauriers and the Dark Side of "Peter Pan".
Steven Hahn, "The Race Man," TNR, 26 October, reviews Robert J. Norrell's Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington.
Philip D. Zelikow, "The Suicide of the East," Foreign Policy, November/December, reviews Frederic Bozo's Mitterrand, the End of the Cold War, and German Unification, Archie Brown's The Rise and Fall of Communism, Jeffrey A. Engel, ed., The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989, Stephen Kotkin's Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, Michael Meyer's The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Constantine Pleshakov's There Is No Freedom Without Bread! 1989 and the Civil War That Brought Down Communism, David Priestland's The Red Flag: A History of Communism, Mary Louise Sarotte's 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe, and Victor Sebestyen's Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire.
Elizabeth Kolbert, "The Things People Say," New Yorker, 2 November, reviews Cass Sunstein's On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
On Sunday 1 November, we'll open nominations for the Cliopatria Awards, 2009. Throughout November you can offer nominations for the six awards. Teams of judges will select the winning nominees in December and they will be announced in conjunction with the meeting of the American Historical Association in early January.
An ancient/medieval edition of Carnivalesque, with an All Hallows Eve theme, will be held on Saturday 31 October at Bavardess. Send nominations of the best or most frightening of September's and October's ancient/medieval history blogging to bavardess*at*gmail*dot*com or use the form. On Sunday 1 November, Natalie Bennett will host History Carnival LXXXI at Philobiblon. Send nominations of the best in October's history blogging to natalie*at*nataliebennett*dot*co*dot*uk, use the form, or "tweet @natalieben with quick links using the hashtag #historycarnival."
Tunku Varadarajan, "Metropolitan Glory," WSJ, 24 October, reviews John Julius Norwich, ed., The Great Cities in History.
Matthew Guerrieri, "Beethoven's early believers," Boston Globe, 25 October, argues that New England Transcendentalists adopted Beethoven as the embodiment of their artistic ideal in the 1830s and 1840s. Fixing him in the American musical canon may be their most persistent cultural contribution, Guerrieri argues.
Errol Morris's seven-part series, "The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock," is now complete at Zoom.
Finally, the Nation's 9 November issue has a forum on Afghanistan. It features essays by Stephen Walt, John Mueller, Selig Harrison, Priya Satia, our former colleague, Manan Ahmed, Mosharraf Zaidi, and Robert Dreyfuss.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Sunday's Notes
Dinah Birch reviews Mary Beard's It's a Don's Life for the Guardian, 25 October. The book is a edition of Beard's work on her blog, It's a Don's Life, and the debates that have ensued there.
James Glanz, "Henry V's Greatest Victory Is Besieged by Academia," NYT, 24 October, reviews the debate about Agincourt. Silbey pursues the subject in "Agincourt & Iraq," Edge of the American West, 24 October.
Matthew Shaer, "Tackling Knut Hamsun," LA Times, 25 October, reviews Ingar Sletten Kolloen's Knut Hamsun: Dreamer and Dissenter and Monika {Zcaron}agar's Knut Hamsun: The Dark Side of Literary Brilliance.
David Oshinsky, "Picturing the Depression," NYT, 22 October, reviews Linda Gordon's Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Joy Connolly, "A City Unbottled," Nation, 21 October, reviews Mary Beard's The Fires of Vesuvius.
Roberta Smith, "Wise Warriors, Artfully Attired," NYT, 22 October, reviews "Art of the Samurai: Japanese Arms and Armor, 1156-1868," an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan.
John Matson, "Galileo's Contradiction: The Astronomer Who Riled the Inquisition Fathered 2 Nuns," Scientific American, 21 October, transcribes a conversation with Dava Sobel, the author of Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Friday's Notes
Elizabeth Lowry, "Full Disclosure," TLS, 21 October, reviews Laura Cumming's A Face to the World: On Self Portraits.
Carlin Romano, "Heil Heidegger!" CHE, 18 October, previews Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy.
Sam Anderson, "Mrs. Logic," New York Magazine, 18 October, reviews Anne Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made.
Kevin Morris and Glenn Altschuler, "Catty on a Hot Tin Roof," Huffington Post, 22 October, reviews Edmund White's City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960's and 70's.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Thursday's Notes
Adam Kirsch, "Heavenly Bodies," Tablet, 21 October, reviews Benjamin D. Sommer's The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel.
Natasha Tripney reviews Sheila Rowbotham's Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love for the Guardian, 18 October.
Sherrilyn A. Ifill, "Woman of Valor," Women's Review of Books, September/October, reviews Mia Bay's To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells and Paula Giddings's Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching.
Donald Rayfield, "Trotsky at Last," TLS, 21 October, reviews Bertrand M. Patenaude's Stalin's Nemesis: The exile and murder of Leon Trotsky and Robert Service's Trotsky: A Biography.
Janet Maslin, "Twin Biographies of a Singular Woman, Ayn Rand," NYT, 21 October, reviews Anne C. Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made and Jennifer Burns's Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
More Noted Things
You can read, hear, and see the story at Sylvia Poggoli's "Greece Unveils Museum Meant For 'Stolen' Sculptures," NPR, 20 October.
Brett Foster, "Hurlyburly," Books & Culture, 19 October, reviews Arthur L. Schwartz's Vivat Rex! An Exhibition Commemorating the 500th Anniversary of the Accession of Henry VIII.
William J. Quirk, "Living on $500,000 a Year," American Scholar, Autumn, reports on what we know from F. Scott Fitzgerald's financial records.
Michael Korda, "Escape from Hungary," Daily Beast, 20 October, and Jonathan Yardley, "Behind the Iron Curtain," Washington Post, 18 October, review an immigrant's memoir of her family's experience, Kati Marton's Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Cliopatria Welcomes Bruce Mazlish
Cliopatria is pleased to welcome Bruce Mazlish to its circle. Professor Mazlish hardly needs an introduction. He earned his academic degrees at Columbia, studying with Shepherd Clough and Jacques Barzun, joined the history department at MIT, and taught there for nearly a half century. His first book, with Jacob Brunowski, was The Western Intellectual Tradition: From Leonardo to Hegel (1960); and his second, The Riddle of History: The Great Speculators from Vico to Freud (1966), pursued his interest in European intellectual history. Subsequently, he published pioneering works in psycho-history, revolutionary leadership, and comparative and global history. Professor Mazlish was a founding editor of History & Theory and helped to establish the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. He published in such places as the American Historical Review, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Daedalus, History of European Ideas, the Journal of Contemporary History, the Nation, the New York Times Book Review, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, and many others. He has lectured widely in the United States and abroad; and served on governing and advisory boards for the Toynbee Prize Foundation, the Library of Congress's Kluge Prize, and the Rockefeller Archives Center. It is a privilege to welcome him to our group at Cliopatria.
Things Noted Here & There
Anthony Grafton, "Did Thucydides Really Tell the Truth?" Slate, 19 October, reviews Donald Kagan's Thucydides: The Reinvention of History.
Richard White, "Changing the Metaphor," Nation, 14 October, reviews Jackson Lears's Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America,1877-1920.
Thaddeus Russell, "Why Liberals Kill," Daily Beast, 17 October, argues that if Obama escalates America's commitment to the war in Afghanistan, he merely follows the examples of the American left's presidential heroes.
In "The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock," Part 1 and Part 2, Zoom, 18 October, Errol Morris, the winner of the Cliopatria Award in 2007 for Best Series of Posts, launches a new, seven part series.
Jennifer Balderama, "Style and Alchemy," NYT, 14 October, reviews Mark Garvey's Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style".
Timothy Garton Ash, "1989!" NYRB, 5 November, draws on nine recent works of history in English, French, and German to argue that 1989 was a crucial year for Europe's role in world history.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
20th Century Notes
Piers Brendon reviews Andrew Marr's The Making of Modern Britain for the Guardian, 17 October.
Alan Allport, "no peace on the home front," London's Times, 17 October, says there's a history of troubled return of British troops from the battlefield. Alan, our former colleague at Cliopatria, would know about that. Yale University Press publishes his Demobbed: Coming Home After the Second World War this month and he blogs about it here.
D. G. Myers, "The Never-Ending Journey," Commentary, October, reviews Edward Alexander's Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe: And Other Stories of Literary Friendship and Michael Kimmage's The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism.
August Kleinzahler, "Monk's Moods," NYT, 15 October, reviews Robin D. G. Kelley's Theolonius Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original.
Hans-Ulrich Stoldt and Klaus Wiegrefe, "East German Jokes Collected by West German Spies," Der Spiegel, 14 October, asks "What would happen if the desert became communist?" "Nothing for a while," comes the reply, "and then there would be a sand shortage."
Friday, October 16, 2009
Friday's Notes
The Biblical Studies Carnival XLVI is up at Hebrew and Greek Reader; Giant's Shoulders #16, the history of science carnival, is up at Quiche Moraine; the Indian History Carnival #22 is up at varnam; and the History is Ephemeral Carnival, 6th edition, is up at Kitsch Slapped.
The National Book Award nominees were announced yesterday. In Nonfiction, they include: Adrienne Mayor's The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy, T. J. Stiles's The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Greg Grandin's Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City.
John Bowen, "Day-to-day Dickens," TLS, 14 October, reviews Michael Slater's Charles Dickens.
Dwight Garner, "America's War, British View," NYT, 15 October, reviews John Keegan's The American Civil War: A Military History.
Luke Harding, "Russian historian arrested in clampdown on Stalin era," Guardian, 15 October, reports the arrest of Mikhail Suprun, who is doing research on German prisoners in the Arctic gulags.
Robert Draper, "Barack Obama's Work in Progress," GQ, November, argues that the President is, first, a writer.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Thursday's Notes
Toby Lester, "A world redrawn," Boston Globe, 11 October, is an essay based on Lester's forthcoming book, The Fourth Part of the World, on the consequences of publication of the Waldseemüller map in 1507 CE. Click here for an interactive version of the map.
Mark Lamster, "The Art of Diplomacy," WSJ, 10 October, is an essay adapted from Lamster's Master of Shadows: The Secret Diplomatic Career of the Painter Peter Paul Rubens.
The new Common-place is up, with pirates, explorers, slave-traders and much more. Now with a feature that allows comments and discussion.
Andrea Wulf, "Let My People Grow," Literary Review, October, reviews Tim Richardson's Great Gardens of America.
Christopher Hitchens, "The Pity of War," Atlantic, November, reviews Peter Hart's The Somme: The Darkest Hour on the Western Front.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
More Noted Things
Stephen Adams, "Leonardo da Vinci picture 'worth millions' revealed by a fingerprint," Telegraph, 12 October, reports the claimed new find of a da Vinci.
Joan Acocella, "Tudor Tales," New Yorker, 19 October, Martin Rubin, "A Man for All Tasks and Times," WSJ, 10 October, and Wendy Smith, "Henry VIII Got the Wives, but Cromwell Got the Power," Washington Post, [13] October, review Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.
Geoffrey Kurtz, "From Liberalism to Social Democracy," Dissent, 26 August, reviews Andreas Kalyvas's and Ira Katznelson's Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns. Hat tip.
Nicholas Bakalar, "In 1918 Pandemic, Another Possible Killer: Aspirin," NYT, 12 October, asks whether the cure accounted for a portion of the deaths.
Joseph Loconte, "‘A New Era of Friendship and Prosperity'," Books & Culture, 12 October, reviews David Faber's Munich, 1938: Appeasement and World War II.
Evan R. Goldstein, "Inventing Israel," Tablet, 13 October, reviews Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People. See also: Anita Shapira, "The Jewish-people Deniers," The Journal of Israeli History, March.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Some Things Are Like This and/or Not Like That
Scott Eric Kaufman, "The increasingly forgettable work of Malcolm Gladwell," Edge of the American West, 12 October, tackles the analogy offered in Malcolm Gladwell, "Offensive Play," New Yorker, 19 October, between dog fighting and football. If Gladwell's analogy is forgettable, are these other current offerings memorable and/or persuasive?
Monday, October 12, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
Clay Risen, "They need a hero," The National, 9 October, recalls the story of Hermann, an ancient chief who rallied German tribesmen to defeat the Roman army. This founding national myth was cherished until it was banished in the post-World War II era. What role might it play in Europe's post-national era?
Stephen Greenblatt, "How It Must Have Been," NYRB, 5 November, reviews Hilary Mantel's Man Booker Prize-winning novel, Wolf Hall.
Joel Achenbach, "Washington: First in War, Peace -- and Accounting," Washington Post, 12 October, looks at current interest in digitizing the voluminous George Washington financial records.
Simon Callow reviews Michael Slater's Charles Dickens for the Guardian, 10 October.
Joshua Hammer, "The Girl in the Attic," NYT, 8 October, reviews Francine Prose's Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Edward Carr, "The Last Days of the Polymath," Intelligent Life, Autumn, reviews Carl Djerassi's Four Jews on Parnassus -- A Conversation. It is an imagined series of discussions among Theodor Adorno, Arnold Schönberg, Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem about art, music, philosophy and Jewish identity.
Edward Rothstein, "When Honest Abe Met This Querulous Metropolis," NYT, 8 October, reviews "Lincoln and New York," an exhibit at the New York Historical Society in Manhattan.
Colman McCarthy, "The Script Doesn't Change," Washington Post, 11 October, reviews Susan A. Brewer's Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda From the Philippines to Iraq. Professor Brewer was one of my students.
Jeremy Treglown, "Somerset Maugham's bondage," TLS, 7 October, reviews Selina Hastings's The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham.
Jonathan Yardley, "Beyond Omaha Beach," Washington Post, 11 October, reviews Anthony Beevor's D-Day: The Battle for Normandy.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Mostly Early Modern Notes
Simon Ings reviews Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human for the Telegraph, 4 October.
As you probably know, the richest collection of Judaica ever gathered by a single collector, the Valmadonna Trust Library, is now on display and for sale at Sotheby's in New York City. This slideshow offers a remarkable sense of the collection's holdings.
Jessie Childs, "Murder Most Royal," Literary Review, October, reviews Alison Wier's The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn.
David Wootton, "The Credulous Chemist," Literary Review, October, reviews Michael Hunter's Boyle: Between God and Science.
Norma Clark, "The Harlot's Progress," Literary Review, October, reviews Dan Cruickshank's The Secret History of Georgian London: How the Wages of Sin Shaped the Capital.
Robert Pinsky, "In Nomine Patris et Felis," Slate, 6 October, introduces us to Christopher Smart's poem about his cat, Jerome.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
More Modern Notes
David A. Bell, "The Colbert Report," TNR, 7 October, reviews Jacob Soll's The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State Intelligence System.
Charles Esdaile, "The Bear Against The Cockrel," Literary Review, October, reviews Dominic Lieven's Russia Against Napoleon: The Battle for Europe, 1807 to 1814.
Rachel L. Swarns and Jodi Kantor, "In First Lady's Roots, a Complex Path From Slavery," NYT, 7 October, outlines the genealogical findings of Megan Smolenyak and others into Michelle Obama's family background. Ira Berlin, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Annette Gordon-Reed, and others discuss it.
John Gray, "Behind the Myth," Literary Review, October, reviews Robert Service's Trotsky: A Biography.
Taylor Branch, author of The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President, will be fielding questions at noon today for the Washington Post. Cranky Professor, take note.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
More Noted Things
Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall has won the Man Booker Prize for 2009. The novel is a "densely-plotted tale of Thomas Cromwell's rise to power in the court of Henry VIII." Among the winners of the American Book Awards for 2009 are Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science and Houston A. Baker, Jr.'s Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Right Era.
Donald Morrison, "Vive la différence," Financial Times, 2 October, reviews John Dummer's Serge Bastarde Ate My Baguette, Debra Ollivier's What French Women Know: About Love, Sex and Other Affairs of the Heart, Michael Simkins's Détour de France: An Englishman in Search of a Continental Education, and Lucy Wadham's The Secret Life of France.
Allison Hoffman, "Something Old, Something New," Tablet, 6 October, reviews Elisa New's Jacob's Cane: A Jewish Family's Journey from the Four Lands of Lithuania to the Ports of London and Baltimore; A Memoir in Five Generations.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Things Ancient & Modern
G. W. Bowersock, "Unquiet Flows the Don," TNR, 5 October, reviews Leslie Mitchell's Maurice Bowra: A Life.
John Tierney, "A High-Tech Hunt for Lost Art," NYT, 5 October, reports on efforts to locate Leonardo da Vinci's largest painting.
Jill Lepore, "Not So Fast," New Yorker, 12 October, reviews Matthew Stewart's The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong.
Adam Kirsch, "The Great Disconcerting Wipeout," TNR, 5 October, reviews Christopher Bigsby's Arthur Miller.
W. A. Pannapacker, "Confessions of a Middlebrow Professor," CHE, 5 October, reflects on a theme in recent books: Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books (2008), Joan Shelley Rubin's The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992), and Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988).
Monday, October 5, 2009
European History Notes
History Carnival LXXX is up at Katrina Gulliver's Notes from the Field.
Howard Halle, New York: Timeout, 17 September, and Alexandra Peers, "Vermeer's Naughty Milkmaid," Daily Beast, 2 October, review "Vermeer's Masterpiece: The Milkmaid," an exhibit at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Christopher Benfey, "Watteau the Wanderer," Slate, 4 October, is a slide-show essay about the 18th century French artist, Jean-Antoine Watteau.
Anne Frank House, 23 September, posts the only known footage of young Anne Frank on film. It is 22 July 1941 and the woman next door is getting married.
Hat tip.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Sunday's Notes
In John McWhorter, "What African-American Studies Could Be," Minding the Campus, 30 September, and McWhorter, "What Should African-American Studies Students Learn?" TNR, 1 October, a conservative looks at what African-American Studies is and what it might be.
Richard Fortey, "All Things Considered," Literary Review, September, reviews Frances Larson's An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World.
Michael Beschloss, "Missile Defense," NYT, 1 October, reviews Neil Sheehan's A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon.
Kevin Boyle, "Too Young to Bear This Burden," Washington Post, 4 October, reviews A Mighty Long Way: My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School by Carlotta Walls LaNier, with Lisa Frazier Page.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Mary Beard, "Roman art thieves," TLS, 30 September, reviews Margaret M. Miles's Art as Plunder: The ancient origins of debate about cultural property and Carole Paul's The Borghese Collections and the Display of Art in the Age of the Grand Tour.
Philip Pullman reviews Joscelyn Godwin's Athanasius Kircher's Theatre of the World for the Guardian, 3 October.
Frances Wilson reviews Jenny Uglow's A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration and Dan Cruikshank's The Secret History of Georgian London for London's Sunday Times, 27 September and 4 October.
Katheryn Hughes reviews David Nokes's Samuel Johnson: A Life for the Guardian, 3 October.
John Carey reviews Michael Slater's Charles Dickens for London's Sunday Times, 27 September.
Friday, October 2, 2009
Friday's Notes
Science devotes its special issue of 2 October to a 4.4 million year old hominid species, ardipithecus ramidus, and its environment. Many scientists think it may be that last common ancestor we share with chimpanzees.
Frederic Raphael, "‘The One Wanted Most'," Literary Review, September, reviews Susan Gubar's Judas: A Biography.
Corey Robin, "The First Counter-revolutionary," The Nation, 30 September, reviews Quentin Skinner's Hobbes and Republican Liberty.
Freya Johnston, "Toilet Humours," Literary Review, September, reviews David Nokes's Samuel Johnson: A Life.
Jackson Lears, "The Usefulness of Cranks: Nature as a standpoint for social criticism," TNR, 29 September, reviews James William Gibson's A Reenchanted World: The Quest for A New Kinship With Nature, Edward Humes's Eco Barons: The Dreamers, Schemers, and Millionaires Who Are Saving Our Planet, Bill McKibben, ed., American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, Steve Nicholls's Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery, Jonathan Peter Spiro's Defending The Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, And The Legacy Of Madison Grant, and Donald Worster's A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
"History Hurts My Brain"
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Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Memory & Oral History
Our former colleague, Michael Tinkler, The Cranky Professor, is critical of Cliopatria for having cited published reviews of Taylor Branch's new book, based on his interviews with former President Clinton. Michael seems to think that I ought to have criticized the fact that Branch conducted the interviews with Clinton privately and that, for the time being, at least, access to them is denied all other historians.
The criticism seems strange to me because, in "Murder and Biblical Memory: The Legend of Vernon Johns,"* I published a fuller critique of Branch's work as a historian than any other historian.** One of its major points focused on his uncritical use of oral history. The scandal of Branch's new book on Clinton isn't that Branch accepted a National Humanities Medal from Clinton even as the interviews were being conducted. The scandal isn't even, as Tinkler seems to think, that the interviews were conducted privately or that other historians are denied access to them. Frustrating as it may be, that is very commonly the case in contemporary history. The scandal of Branch's new book is that even he had no access to the tapes that he and Bill Clinton had created. All Branch had were his notes and recorded memories of the interviews that he created after leaving the interviews with Clinton.
*Joyce Appleby, ed., The Best American History Essays, 2006 (NY: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2006): 201-229.
**My colleague on the Martin Luther King Papers Project, Clayborne Carson, will publish a tepid critique of Branch's civil rights trilogy in the coming issue of the American Historical Review.
Modern American Notes
Barry Yeoman, "Tenure Tracker," Duke Magazine, September/ October, follows the job search of Kelly Kennington, a young Duke Ph.D. in history, during a difficult year.
Adam Kirsch, "A Zionist Supreme," Tablet, 29 September, reviews Melvin I. Urofsky's Louis D. Brandeis: A Life.
Elisabeth Malkin, "Kahlo Trove: Fact or Fakery?" NYT, 28 September, considers the claims of authenticity for a collection attributed to Frida Kahlo.
Dwight Garner, "In the '70s, All New York Seemed Young and Gay," NYT, 29 September, reviews Edmund White's City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s. White recalls that the sociologist, Richard Sennett, might slip, midmeal at dinner parties, into "a chic little black dress." Surely, this won't be news to Sennett's wife, Saskia Sassen.
Richard Dorment, "What Is an Andy Warhol?" NYRB, 22 October, reviews Arthur C. Danto's Andy Warhol, Tony Scherman's and David Dalton's Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol, and Richard Polsky's I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon).
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
María Rosa Menocal, "The Culture of Translation," Words Without Borders, September, is "a translation and adaptation of ‘La culture des traductions: l'arabisation invisible de l'Europe et l'invention du moderne,' one in a series of six lectures given during May and June 2003 at the Institut du monde arabe in Paris." Hat tip.
Dana Stevens, "There's Something About Keats," Slate, 25 September, reviews "Bright Star," Jane Campion's new film about the love affair between John Keats and his neighbor Fanny Brawne.
Jackson Lears, "The Waxing and Waning of America's Political Right," NYT, 28 September, reviews Sam Tanenhaus's The Death of Conservatism.
Timothy Tyson, "Esther: For Just Such a Time as This," Facebook, 28 September, is the sermon that Tyson preached in the Duke University chapel on Sunday.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Carnivals
Carnivalesque LIV, an excellent early modern edition of the festival, is up at Early Modern Notes. Katrina Gulliver at Notes from the Field will host History Carnival LXXX on 4/5 October. Bavardess will host Carnivalesque LV, an ancient/medieval edition of the festival, in the latter half of October. The next early modern edition of Carnivalesque will be in November and needs a host. If you are interested, contact sharon*at*earlymodernweb*dot*org*dot*uk.
Sharon Howard's "Whither Carnivals? Or, Carnivals wither?" Early Modern Notes, 26 September, asks about the future of History Carnival in particular and history carnivals in general. The various history carnivals have been excellent means of a) highlighting superior blogging on historical topics; and b) drawing attention to new voices in the history blogosphere. In the last two years, however, the art history carnival, the Asian history carnival, the military history carnival, and the carnival of bad history have collapsed. Carnivalesque, History Carnival, the history of science's The Giant's Shoulders, and Indian History Carnival survive because of energetic coordination. The coordinators need volunteer hosts. If you expect them to promote your work, do them the favor of noticing the carnival's appearance and link to it.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
20th Century American History
P. J. O'Rourke, "Sex, Drugs, Music, Mud," WS, 31 August, reviews Michael Lang's The Road to Woodstock, Brad Littleproud's and Joanne Hague's Woodstock: Peace, Music & Memories and Susan Reynolds's Woodstock Revisited: 50 Far Out, Groovy, Peace-Loving, Flashback-Inducing Stories From Those Who Were There.
Michael Dobbs, "The Brain That Won Us the Cold War," Washington Post, 27 September, reviews Neil Sheehan's A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon.
Henry Adams, "Decoding Jackson Pollock," Smithsonian, October, sees Pollock's paintings in a new way.
Joe Klein, "Bill Session," NYT, 25 September, reviews Taylor Branch's The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History With the President.
Finally, farewell to the remarkably prolific Milton Meltzer and to the University of Virginia's distinguished Jefferson scholar, Merrill D. Peterson.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Modern History Notes
Emily Bazelon, "Supreme Courtship," NYT, 25 September, reviews Barry Friedman's The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution.
Stephen Budiansky, "Rising Up Against a Rich Man's War," Washington Post, 27 September, reviews Sally Jenkins's and John Stauffer's The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded From the Confederacy.
Alan M. Dershowitz, "The Practice," NYT, 25 September, reviews Melvin I. Urofsky's Louis D. Brandeis: A Life.
Adam Begley, "Side By Side," NYT, 25 September, reviews Morris Dickstein's Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression.
Jonathan Yardley, "Tracking Nazi Loot," Washington Post, 27 September, reviews The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel with Bret Witter.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Friday's Notes
Matthew Reisz, "The seven deadly sins of the academy," THES, 17 September, names the familiar.
Tim Burke, "The Microhistorical Unknown," Easily Distracted, 24 September, reflects on what we make of the unknown.
Aaron Bady, "Walkout," zunguzungu, 24 September, has excellent photographs of the strike at UC, Berkeley.
Mike Pitts, "Anglo-Saxon gold hoard is the biggest - and could get bigger," Guardian, 24 September, and "Huge Anglo-Saxon gold hoard found," BBC, 24 September, are early reports of the discovery in Staffordshire of 1500 gold and silver artifacts. For photographs, see "The Staffordshire Hoard."
Richard Posner, "How I Became a Keynesian," TNR, 23 September, tells how he gave Keynes a second look. See also: Paul Krugman reviews Robert Skidelsky's Keynes: The Return of the Master for the Guardian, 30 August.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Thursday's Notes
Farhad Manjoo, "Is Wikipedia a Victim of Its Own Success?" Time, 28 September, seeks to understand why the expansion of Wikipedia has slowed dramatically in the last two years. Is it the first collapse in the internet's ecosystem? [Cliopatria's resident expert on such things, Sage Ross, is otherwise preoccupied with the birth of Brighton.]
Michael Bérubé, "What's the Matter With Cultural Studies?" CHE, 14 September, provokes replies in Ira Livingston's "What's the Matter with Michael?" Bully Bloggers, 23 September, and The Cultural Studies Graduate Group, UC Davis, "A Note from the Unicorns: A Cultural Studies PhD Program responds to Michael Berube," Bully Bloggers, 23 September. He replies in "Things I Did Not Know," Michael Bérubé, 23 September.
Laura Miller, "America, the beautiful (America, the ugly)," Salon, 23 September, reviews Greil Marcus and Werner Sollers, eds., A New Literary History of America.
Joshua Kendall, "Samuel Johnson, anti-American," Boston Globe, 20 September, argues that America's love of Johnson was unrequited.
Bernard Porter, "The Anglo-world of settlers, not dominators," TLS, 23 September, reviews James Belich's Replenishing the Earth: The settler revolution and the rise of the Anglo-world.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
More Noted Things
Patricia Cohen, "The Essence of America in 1,095 Pages," NYT, 22 September, reviews Greil Marcus and Werner Sollers, eds., A New Literary History of America.
Meghan O'Rourke, "The Man Who Made Oz," Slate, 21 September, reviews Evan I. Schwartz's Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story and Rebecca Loncraine's The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum.
Harvey A. Silverglate, "Setting a noble precedent," Boston Globe, 20 September, reviews Melvin I. Urofsky's Louis D. Brandeis: A Life. Hat tip.
Jonathan Brent, "Postmodern Stalinism, CHE, 21 September, argues that revisionism among Russian historians is renewing Joseph Stalin's historical reputation.
Dwight Garner, "Behind the Scenes of the Dark Cold War, Where an Even Darker Side Lurked," NYT, 22 September, reviews David E. Hoffman's The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy.
Evan R. Goldstein, "Intellectual Cold Warriors," CHE, 21 September, reviews David C. Engerman's Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts, Stephen F. Cohen's Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War, and Yevgeny Primokov's Russia and the Arabs: Behind the Scenes in the Middle East From the Cold War to the Present.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
Anthony Grafton, "Google Books and the Judge," New Yorker, 18 September, is Grafton's most recent take on Google Books.
Chicago Boyz is in the midst of a roundtable on Xenophon. See: Introduction, Xenophon was a Professional, Alexander and Cyrus: Two Different Routes to Babylon, Xenophon's Ascent, The Shadow of Herodotus, Tips for Reading The Anabasis, Clearchus Delinda Est, and The Art of Leadership.
Eric Ormsby, "Fateful Schism," WSJ, 11 September, reviews Lesley Hazleton's After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam.
Adam Gopnik, "Trial of the Century," New Yorker, 28 September, reviews Louis Begley's Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters and George R. Whyte's The Dreyfus Affair: A Chronological History.
Monday, September 21, 2009
On Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Modern History Notes
The Organization of American Historians has released a draft of its "2009 Strategic Plan." Larry Cebula's "More Cowbell: My Plan to Revive the OAH," Northwest History, 16 September, argues that more radical change is in order.
Ira Berlin, "The Not-So-Solid South," NYT, 17 September, reviews Lacy K. Ford's Deliver Us From Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South.
Michael Bailey, "Brunel, Locke and Stephenson: the engineering giants who shaped our world," Telegraph, 15 September, pays tribute to three 19th century British railroad engineers -- titans of the Industrial Revolution.
Steve Heller, "The Revolution Will Be Illustrated," NYT, 17 September, reviews David King, ed., Red Star Over Russia: A Visual History of the Soviet Union From the Revolution to the Death of Stalin, Agnes Husslein-Arco, Jean Louis Gaillemin, Michel Hilaire and Christiane Lange, eds., Alphonse Mucha, designed by Peter Baldinger, Daniel Zimmer's and David J. Hornung's Reynold Brown: A Life in Pictures, Earl Kemp and Luis Ortiz, eds., Cult Magazines, A to Z: A Compendium of Culturally Obsessive and Curiously Expressive Publications, Craig Yoe's Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-Creator Joe Shuster, and Edward Sorel's The Mural at the Waverly Inn: A Portrait of Greenwich Village Bohemians.
Mary Speck, "Fidel and Friends," Washington Post, 20 September, reviews Simon Reid-Henry's Fidel and Che: A Revolutionary Friendship and Angel Esteban's and Stephanie Panichelli's Fidel and Gabo: A Portrait of the Legendary Friendship Between Fidel Castro and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Christopher Howse reviews David Nokes's Samuel Johnson: A Life for the Telegraph, 18 September. In addition to it, Andrew O'Hagan, "The Powers of Dr. Johnson," NYRB, 8 October, reviews Peter Martin's Samuel Johnson: A Biography, Martin's Samuel Johnson: Selected Writings, and Jeffrey Meyers's Samuel Johnson: The Struggle.
Adam Kirsch, "Awakenings," Tablet, 15 September, reviews Kenneth B. Moss's Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution.
Roberta Smith, "The Angel in the Architecture," NYT, 17 September, previews "Kandinsky," an exhibit opening Sunday at Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum.
Dwight Garner, "The Old Economist, Relevant Amid the Rubble," NYT, 17 September, reviews Robert Skidelsky's Keynes: The Return of the Master.
On the eve of the release of Taylor Branch's new book, The Clinton Tapes, Wil S. Hylton, "The Bill Clinton Tapes," Men.Style.com/, 16 September, is an interview with Branch about the taped interviews he did with Clinton.
Finally, have a look at Cliopatria's recently revised History Blogroll. Newly added institutional blogs include The Cloisters' The Medieval Garden Enclosed, the National Museum of Health and Medicine's A Repository for Bottled Monsters, and the Women's Review of Books blog.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Thursday's Notes
Claire Potter's "Learning To Say No, Hollywood Style: A Helpful Response To Screenwriter Josh Olson," Tenured Radical, 16 September, is a bracing rejoinder to Josh Olson, "I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script," Village Voice, 9 September.
Hilary Mantel, "The Crow Is White," LRB, 24 September, reviews Eamon Duffy's Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor.
Robert Vilain, "Rilke the clay pot," TLS, 16 September, reviews Rainer Maria Rilke's The Book of Hours, George C. Schoolfield's Young Rilke and His Time, and Edward Snow and Michael Winkler, trans., Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé: The Correspondence.
Alexander Zaitchik, "Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck's life," Salon, 16 September, introduces the late Cleon Skousen, the Mormon "historian" Beck and Mitt Romney praise. See also: Steve Benson, "From Commie Basher To Rock 'n Roll Trasher: The Legacy Of The Late, Latter-Day Looney Cleon Skousen," The Mormon Curtain, 21 January 2006.
Kim Phillips-Fein, "Right On," The Nation, 9 September, draws on a dozen major books to assess the state of American conservatism.
Finally, GQ ranks "America's 25 Douchiest Colleges." This Duke alum is one proud puppy.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Wednesday's Notes
Josh Olson, "I Will Not Read Your Fucking [Manu]Script," Village Voice, 9 September, is a candid reply to your request.
James Fallows, "Village Dreamers," Atlantic, October, explores the effort of an American family to preserve a traditional Chinese culture from tourist kitsch.
Alison Bashford, "Australian art takes evolutionary turn," Sydney Morning Herald, 1 September, reviews Richard Dawkins's The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, Jeanette Hoorn's Reframing Darwin: Evolution and Art in Australia, and Richard Milner's Darwin's Universe: Evolution from A to Z. Hat tip.
Dwight Garner, "When Grave Years Fueled Grand Art," NYT, 15 September, reviews Morris Dickstein's Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
More Noted Things
Indian History Carnival #21 is up at varnam; and the history of science carnival, The Giant's Shoulders #15, is up at Entertaining Research.
"A conversation with Jill Lepore," Humanities, September/ October, is a charming interview about her work as a historian.
Caleb Crain, "It Happened One Decade," New Yorker, 21 September, reviews Morris Dickstein's Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression. See also: Crain's related posts at Steamboats are ruining everything.
Jonathan Chait, "Wealthcare," TNR, 14 September, reviews Jennifer Burns's Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and Anne C. Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
Allison Hoffman, "Treasure Trove," Tablet, 9 September, takes another look at Jack Lunzer's Valmadonna, the finest collection of Hebraica ever gathered by a single individual. It's for sale, you know.
Claude R. Marx, "Slavery's influence on the Constitution," Boston Globe, 11 September, reviews David Waldstreicher's Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification.
"Creation," the first major film about the life of Charles Darwin, was recently previewed in the NYT and will open the Toronto Film Festival and premier in England on Saturday. Yet, it does not have a distributor in the United States. "Too controversial," say its producers.
Tim Page, "A Masterful Composer, a Melodic Life," Washington Post, 13 September, reviews Roland John Wiley's Tchaikovsky.
Roberta Smith, "Serenade in Blue," NYT, 10 September, reviews "Monet's Water Lilies," an exhibit that opens Sunday at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Friday's Notes
Bettina Bildhauer, "Monsters and mentalities of the Renaissance," TLS, 9 September, reviews Merry Wiesner-Hanks's The Marvelous Hairy Girls: The Gonzales sisters and their worlds and Jennifer Spinks's Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth Century Germany.
Carol Vogel, "An Old Master Emerges From Grime," NYT, 9 September, reports that a cleaning helps confirm Metropolitan Museum experts' opinion that its painting is by Velazquez.
Alex Beam, "Making history. Or not.," Boston Globe, 8 September, reviews Greil Marcus and Werner Sollers, eds., A New Literary History of America.
Richard Davenport-Hines, "Les rosbifs abroad," TLS, 9 September, reviews Richard Mullen's and James Munson's The Smell of the Continent: The British discover Europe.
Richard Fortey, "All Things Considered," Literary Review, September, reviews Frances Larson's An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World.
Benjamin Schwartz, "Life In (and After) Our Great Recession," Atlantic, October, draws on studies of the Great Depression to suggest implications for our own futures.
Sanford Schwartz, "Mysteries of Ensor," NYRB, 24 September, reviews Catherine de Zegher, ed., Between Street and Mirror: The Drawings of James Ensor and "James Ensor," an exhibit at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, New York, 28 June – 21 September 2009 and at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, 20 October 2009 – 4 February 2010.
Michael Binyon, "Thatcher told Gorbachev Britain did not want German reunification," London Times, 11 September, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Excerpts from the Soviet Union's transcripts of the conversations.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
A Century of Visual Effects
This collection of footage from notable visual effects films of the last 100 years was originally created to accompany a lecture. Its music track is "Rods and Cones" from Blue Man Group's album, "Audio". The list of films from which the montage draws is under the fold. Hat tip.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
More Noted Things
Philip Jenkins, "Where Did They Go?" Books & Culture, September/October, reviews Zvi Ben-Dor Benite's The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History.
Bret Stephens, "The Afghan Stakes," WSJ, 7 September, compares the effect of American withdrawal from Afghanistan to that of the battle of Adrianople in 378 A.D. on the Roman Empire. "... ludicrous and hysterical ... even by the Journal's standards," says Daniel Larison's "Hawkish Alarmism Saps Support For Legitimate Wars," Eunomia, 8 September.
Olivia Judson, "The Creation of Charles Darwin," The Wild Side, 8 September, reviews "Creation," the first major film about the scientist's life.
John Tierney, "A Clash of Polar Frauds and Those Who Believe," NYT, 7 September, reviews what is claimed and what we know about explorers' reach to the North Pole in 1909.
Brooks Barnes, "Blowing the Pixie Dust Off Disney's Archives," NYT, 8 September, previews "Treasures of the Walt Disney Archives," an exhibit that appears this weekend at Southern California's Anaheim Convention Center.
Howard W. French, "Kagame's Hidden War in the Congo," NYRB, 24 September, reviews René Lemarchand's The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa, Gérard Prunier's Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe, and Thomas Turner's The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth and Reality.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
Carnivalesque LIII, an ancient/medieval edition of the festival, is up at Carin Ruff's Ruff Notes.
Louisa Thomas, "Their Love is Alive," Newsweek, 4 September, looks again at Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley's authorship of Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus.
James M. McPherson, "Lincoln Off His Pedestal," NYRB, 24 September, reviews Michael Burlingame's Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Catherine Clinton's Mrs. Lincoln: A Life, Fred Kaplan's Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, and Ronald C. White, Jr.'s A. Lincoln: A Biography.
Nicholas Shakespeare reviews Selina Hastings' The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham for the Telegraph 5 September.
Judith Thurman, "Missing Woman," New Yorker, 14 September, reviews Ric Gillespie's Finding Amelia: The True Story of the Earhart Disappearance.
Garry Wills, "Conservatives: The Tanenhaus Taxonomy," NYRB, 24 September, reviews Sam Tanenhaus's The Death of Conservatism.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Modern History Notes
Thomas Lipscomb, "A Declaration of Inconclusiveness," WSJ, 28 August, reviews William G. Hyland Jr.'s In Defense of Thomas Jefferson. Hat tip.
Wesley Yang, "The End of the Affair," Tablet, 4 September, reviews Louis Begley's Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters.
William Deresiewicz, "Aracataca and Sucre," Nation, 2 September, reviews Gerald Martin's Gabriel García Márquez: A Life.
Ross Douthat, "Another One for the Gipper," NYT, 1 September, reviews Steven F. Hayward's The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution, 1980-1989.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Caroline Alexander, "Two of a Kind," NYT, 1 September, reviews Janet Soskice's The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels.
Matthew Shaer, "Getting Attached to the Past," Washington Post, 6 September, reviews Marina Belozerskaya's To Wake the Dead: A Renaissance Merchant and the Birth of Archaeology.
Caroline Weber, "Undercover Queen," NYT, 1 September, reviews Veronica Buckley's The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon.
Sam Roberts, "New York's Coldest Case: A Murder 400 Years Old," NYT, 4 September, looks at what we know of NYC's first murder.
Friday, September 4, 2009
Friday's Notes
This afternoon, authorities of Antioch University will hand ownership of Antioch College at Yellow Springs, Ohio, over to an independent continuing corporation of College alumni. It expects to re-open Antioch College in September 2010.
Jill Ross reviews The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture by Jerrilynn D. Dodds, Maria Rosa Menocal and Abigail Krasner Balbale for the THES, 3 September.
Deborah D. Rogers reviews Audrey A. Fisch's Frankenstein: Icon of Modern Culture for the THES, 3 September.
Philip Smallwood reviews Fred Inglis's History Man: The Life of R. G. Collingwood for the THES, 3 September.
Edward Glaeser, "What A City Needs," TNR, 4 September, reviews Anthony Flint's Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Modern History Notes
Georgina Ferry, "The odd couple: Carl Jung, Wolfgang Pauli and mystic numbers," TLS, 2 September, reviews Arthur I. Miller's Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The strange friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung.
Scott McLemee lectures on CLR James and African American Liberation at mid-June's Socialism '09 conference in Chicago.
Lawrence Glickman, "Whole Foods Boycott: The Long View," Short Stack, 2 September, puts the boycott in historical perspective. Glickman is the author of Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America.
I'm impressed with the reviews I've read of Tracy Kidder's Strength in What Remains, but I keep wondering about its title. Could it be a misapprehension of "strengthen what remains" (Revelations 3:2)?
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
More Noted Things
Geoffrey Nunberg, "Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars," CHE, 31 August, documents Google's mishandling of its metadata.
David A. Bell, "The Puritanical French," Slate, 31 August, reviews Veronica Buckley's The Secret Wife of Louis XIV.
"Seeing Red," Foreign Policy, 24 August, reproduces rare photographs of the early Soviet Union from David King's Red Star Over Russia: A Visual History of the Soviet Union from the Revolution to the Death of Stalin.
Adam Kirsch, "Atrocious Normalcy," Tablet, 1 September, reviews Barbara Engelking's and Jacek Leociak's The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, translated by Emma Harris.
Todd Gitlin, "Mindless Violence," Tablet, 1 September, reviews Uri Edel's new film, "The Baader-Meinhof Complex".
George F. Will, "Time to Get Out of Afghanistan," Washington Post, 1 September, makes a case for American withdrawal.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Edward Luttwak, Grand Strategy and the Facts
Edward Luttwak, "The Best and the Fastest," TNR, 31 August, reviews Christopher Kelly's The End of Empire: Attila the Hun and the Fall of Rome and Christopher I. Beckwith's Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age To the Present. Luttwak has no fear of being wrong on the facts.* In this review, he reports academic disinterest in military history, even though, when compared with history's other traditional forms, it flourishes in the academy.
Yet, Luttwak's outsider's perspective occasionally raises questions that academic insiders may have missed. His
The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire from the First Century AD to the Third is controversial among professional historians. Luttwak is seen as an outsider and non-specialist in the field. However, his book has raised questions about the Roman army and its defense of the Roman frontier. Luttwak asked "How did the Romans defend the frontier?", a question that he argued had been lost in the professional discourse that focused on demographics, economics and sociology. Although many professional historians reject his views on Roman strategy, his 1976 book has increased interest in the study of the Roman frontiers....
Since the 1980s, Luttwak has published articles on Byzantium. His new book, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire, will be published by Harvard UP.
*Many of us were offended by Luttwak's claim in the NYT last year that Barack Obama would be regarded as an apostate in the Muslim world and was likely to be assassinated by its terrorists. After consulting well-informed scholars, the Times' public editor agreed with us that Luttwak was wrong on the facts and given to extreme language. More recently, Luttwak's "Why U.S. Diplomacy Will Fail With Iran," WSJ, 12 August, includes a bizarre misreading of the overthrow of Mohammed Mosaddeq as Iran's Prime Minister in 1953. He must, surely, know better.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
Sally Jenkins, "Waiting for William," Washington Post, 30 August, revisits the controversy over whether the recently discovered Cobbe portrait is of William Shakespeare.
Caleb Crain, "Bootylicious," New Yorker, 7 September, reviews Peter T. Leeson's The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates. Crain's "Notebook: The Golden Age of Piracy," Steamboats are ruining everything, 30 August, is a valuable bibliographical essay.
Winston Groom, "The Torching of Atlanta," WSJ, 28 August, reviews Marc Wortman's The Bonfire and Russell S. Bonds's War Like the Thunderbolt.
Sam Tanenhaus, "In Kennedy, the Last Roar of the New Deal Liberal," NYT, 28 August, argues that Edward Kennedy's death marks the end of an American political tradition.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Modern History Notes
Mark Lewis, "Treacherous Ground," NYT, 27 August, reviews Richard Slotkin's No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, 1864. See also: Kevin Levin, "‘The Question of Atrocity' for Richard Slotkin," Civil War Memory, 12 August.
Miranda Seymour, "Couples," NYT, 27 August, reviews Kate Cambor's Gilded Youth: Three Lives in France's Belle Époque.
Leon Hoffman, "Freud's Adirondack Vacation," NYT, 29 August, notes the centennial of Freud's only visit to the United States.
Stanley Kaufman, "Odd Surprises," TNR, 29 August, reviews Dani Levy and Stefan Arndt's "My Fuhrer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler".
Jody Rosen, "A Century Later, She's Still Red Hot," NYT, 28 August, announces the re-release of the best of Sophie Tucker.
Anthony Lane, "Dropping Out," New Yorker, 31 August, reviews Ang Lee's "Taking Woodstock" and Udi Edel's "The Baader Meinhof Complex".
Jay Mathews, "I Pledge Allegiance to Core Knowledge," Washington Post, 30 August, reviews E. D. Hirsch's The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Steve Donoghue, "Alexander the Grating," Open Letters Monthly, August, reviews The History of Alexander by Quintus Curtius Rufus. John Yardley, trans.
Jonathan Yardley, "Such a Sad, Sad Story," Washington Post, 30 August, reviews J. Randy Taraborrelli's The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe.
In David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, "T.R.M. Howard, an unlikely civil rights hero," LA Times, 28 August, Howard's biographers identify his ties to the movement.
Sheri Fink, "Strained by Katrina, a Hospital Faced Deadly Choices," NYT, 25 August, takes a close look at decisions made at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans.
Ron Suskind, "Against the Odds," NYT, 27 August, reviews Tracy Kidder's Strength In What Remains.
Claire Potter, "On Sin, Forgiveness and Redemption: A Few Thoughts On The Loss Of My Friend, Senator Kennedy," Tenured Radical, 28 August, remembers Edward Kennedy.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Friday's Notes
BBC History Magazine has relaunched. Its editor, David Musgrove, explains.
H. J. Jackson, "Samuel Johnson at 300," TLS, 26 August, reviews Greg Clingham and Philip Smallwood, eds., Samuel Johnson After 300 Years, Thomas M. Curley's Samuel Johnson, the ‘Ossian' Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland, and Peter Martin's Samuel Johnson, A Biography.
Wesley Stace, "Through life with Bob Dylan," TLS, 21 August, reviews Barry Feinstein's and Bob Dylan's Hollywood Foto-rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript, Feinstein's Real Moments, and Clinton Heylin's Revolution in the Air: The songs of Bob Dylan 1957–1973.
Ian Jack, "Downhill from Here," LRB, 27 August, reviews Andy Beckett's When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Additionally Noted
Errol Morris, "Seven Lies About Lying (Part 1)," Zoom, 5 August, and Morris, "Seven Lies About Lying (Part 2)," Zoom, 6 August, is followed by Morris, "More Lying," Zoom, 25 August, in which he responds to readers' questions.
Karen Schoemer, "See the U.S.A.," New York Magazine, 23 August, reviews "Looking In: Robert Frank's ‘The Americans'," an exhibit at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
James Piereson, "Is Conservatism Dead?" New Criterion, September, reviews Sam Tanenhaus's The Death of Conservatism.
Sean Wilentz, "Triumph and Tragedy," TNR, 26 August, is his assessment of Senator Edward Kennedy's career. Adam Clymer, Kennedy's biographer, takes questions at: "Q. and A. About Senator Kennedy," The Caucus, 26 August.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Wednesday's Notes
Timothy Mowl, "Blood and Mistletoe," THES, 20 August, reviews Ronald Hutton's Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain.
Rebecca Leach reviews Elizabeth Outka's Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic for the THES, 20 August.
Janet Maslin, "Scarecrow, Lion, Tin Man and Freud, Too," NYT, 23 August, reviews Rebecca Loncraine's The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum.
At History Today, Martin Evans's "After the Cold War" launches a series of essays that look at changing attitudes to history in once Communist nations. Catherine Merridale's "Haunted by Stalin" looks at competing versions of Russia's past as functions of current political alternatives.
Matthew Reisz, "Free Radical," THES, 20 August, interviews George Scialabba, the author of What Are Intellectuals Good For?
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
20th Century Notes
Timothy L. Wood, "The Accidental Celebrity," IHE, 24 August, describes his recent experience of identity theft. The essay attributed to Wood had also been falsely attributed to our former colleague at Cliopatria, David Kaiser.
Matthew Price, "The End was Nigh," The National, 20 August, reviews Richard Overy's The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars.
Robert Gellately, "Remembering the Nazi-Soviet Pact After Seventy Years," Huffington Post, 24 August, draws on the author's Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe.
Johann Hari, "Genocide From the Inside," Slate, 24 August, reviews Tracy Kidder's Strength In What Remains, a story of flight from the Rwanda/Burundi holocaust.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
Carnival Notes:
Carnivalesque #53, an ancient/medieval edition of the festival, will be up later today at Carin Ruff's Ruff Notes. History is Ephemeral Carnival #2 is up at Kitsch Slapped. The blog describes itself as "Slapping You With Kitsch — As Often As Possible. Specializing In Bad Taste From A (Feminist) Chick's Perspective. Pop Culture Right In Your Kisser."
Matthew Lynn, "Professor Paul Krugman at war with Niall Ferguson over inflation," London's Sunday Times, 23 August, tracks the careers and recent exchanges of blows.
Diana Preston, "Rome Wasn't Destroyed in a Day Either," Washington Post, 23 August, reviews Adrian Goldsworthy's How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower.
Dennis Drabelle, "Mutiny on the Hudson," Washington Post, 23 August, reviews Peter C. Mancall's Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson -- A Tale of Mutiny and Murder in the Arctic.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
20th Century Lives
Helen Vendler, "The Plain Sense of Things," NYT, 21 August, reviews Wallace Stevens's Selected Poems, edited by John N. Serio.
Evelyn Toynton, "Unhappy Together: The Wittgenstein Family Feud," Harper's, 21 August, reviews Alexander Waugh's The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, "Bread, Wine, Politics," NYT, 21 August, reviews Stanislao G. Pugliese's Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone.
A. C. Grayling reviews Graham Farmelo's The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom for the Barnes & Noble Review, 24 August.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
"Kind of Blue"
On 17 August 1959, Columbia Records released Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue". It featured his ensemble sextet, including pianists Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly, drummer Jimmy Cobb, bassist Paul Chambers, and saxophonists John Coltrane and Julian "Cannonball" Adderley. "Kind of Blue" became the best-selling jazz album of all time; many critics regard it as the finest jazz album ever produced.
Friday, August 21, 2009
Friday's Notes
Aram Bakshian, Jr., "Cherry Tree? Let's Negotiate," WSJ, 20 August, reviews John Ferling's The Ascent of George Washington: The Hidden Political Genius of an American Icon.
David Grylls, "John Sutherland and 900 novelists," TLS, 19 August, reviews Sutherland's The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, 2nd edition.
Dwight Garner, "Delighted by the Joy of Bad Things," NYT, 20 August, reviews Rebecca Solnit's The Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster.
Karan Thapar, "Nehru, Jinnah responsible for Partition: Jaswant," IBN Politics.com, 17 August, interviews Jaswant Singh, the author of a new biography of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of modern Pakistan. Hat tip.
Tim Rutten reviews Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe for the LA Times, 19 August. Hat tip.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
20th Century Notes
John McWhorter, "Thus Spake Zora," City Journal, Summer, looks again at Zora Neal Hurston, who was rediscovered and admired, because of and despite her conservatism.
Adam Kirsch, "Frankfurt on the Hudson," Tablet, 18 August, reviews Thomas Wheatland's The Frankfurt School in Exile.
Gossip:
William Golding and other creeps who wrote well Recent litigation over history's greatest wine hoax
Finally, farewell to Richard Poirier, a founder of the Library of America, an editor of Partisan Review and founder of Raritan: A Quarterly Review.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Wednesday's Notes
Michael Dirda reviews Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book (translated by Meredith McKinney) for the Barnes & Noble Review, 17 August.
"Oliver Stone revealing 'Secret History of America'," the live feed, 18 August. You'll be glad to know all the secrets!
At Legal History, Duke's Laura Edwards is guest-blogging about her most recent book, The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South.
Michael Elliott, "In the Church of Lincoln," Religion Dispatches, 17 August, argues that, while we've fashioned Abraham Lincoln a secular saint, no current politician is his match as a bare-knuckled brawler.
Peter Schjeldahl, "High and Low Relief," New Yorker, 24 August, reviews "Augustus Saint-Gaudens in The Metropolitan Museum of Art," an exhibit at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Scott McLemee, "Prophets of Deceit," IHE, 19 August, finds current relevance in Leo Lowenthal's and Norbert Guterman's Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (1949).
Niall Ferguson, "A runaway deficit may soon test Obama's luck," Financial Times, 10 August, compares Barack Obama to Felix the Cat. Ferguson, "Why My Comparing Obama to Felix the Cat Is Not Racist," Huffington Post, 12 August, jumps at his shadow. Jim Fallows, Paul Krugman, Matt Yglesias and Conor Clarke call him on it.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
More Noted Things
The Tower of Babel:
Hat tip72 Medieval Images 72 Early Modern Images 72 Modern Images
"A very special business angel," Economist, 13 August, and Dwight Garner, "Fox Hunter, Party Animal, Leftist Warrior," NYT, 18 August, review Tristram Hunt's Marx's General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels.
Patricia Cohen, "A Pivotal Year and a Springboard to the '60s," NYT, 17 August, reviews Fred Kaplan's 1959: The Year Everything Changed.
Janet Maslin, "On American Shores, a Wave of Immigrants Smuggled in From China," NYT, 16 August, reviews Patrick Radden Keefe's The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream.
Orlando Patterson, "Race and Diversity in the Age of Obama," NYT, 14 August, finds African Americans as segregated as ever in American private life.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
Andrew Collins, "The key to Dan Brown's success," London Times, 15 August, anticipates the publication of Brown's The Lost Symbol.
Rachel L. Swarns, "Madison and the White House, Through the Memoir of a Slave," NYT, 15 August, tells the story of James Madison's slave, who published a memoir of his life in the White House.
David S. Reynolds, "Rebel Rebel," NYT, 14 August, reviews Sally Jenkins's and John Stauffer's The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded From the Confederacy. Stauffer doesn't even bother to defend a book he signed off on as co-author and Reynolds merely repeats criticism of it offered by bloggers at Civil War Memory and Renegade South.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Carnival Notes
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Weak Endnotes
John Berry & Norman Oder, "Is a New Librarian of Congress in the Works?" Library Journal.com, 3 August, reports rumors of the impending retirement of 80-year-old James Billington as Librarian of Congress. Billington, a noted specialist in Russian history, has been head of the Library of Congress for 22 years. The rumor mill reports that Carla Hayden, director of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, may be in line to succeed him.
Dave Goldberg, "Time-Traveling for Dummies," Slate, 13 August, proposes four ground rules for time travel.
Jonathan Yardley, "Meet the Real Godfather," Washington Post, 16 August, reviews Mike Dash's The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder, and the Birth of the American Mafia.
Mark Adams, "The Lady with the Alligator Clutch," Washington Post, 16 August, reviews Jeff Leen's The Queen of the Ring: Sex, Muscles, Diamonds, and The Making of An American Legend.
Philip Womack reviews Paula Byrne's Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead for the Telegraph, 14 August.
Friday, August 14, 2009
More 20th Century Notes
Dan Kaufman, "La Despedida: A Lost Memoir of the Spanish Civil War," Nation, 12 August, reviews James Neugass, Peter N. Carroll and Peter Glazer, eds., War Is Beautiful: An American Ambulance Driver in the Spanish Civil War.
Ken Johnson, "A Chronicle of New York's Darks and Lights, Captured by Savvy Street Photographers," NYT, 13 August, reviews "New York Photographs," exhibits by thirteen New York City galleries.
Benjamin Wallace-Wells, "Worst and Dimmest," TNR, 12 August, argues that we learned the wrong lessons from David Halberstam.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Modern European Notes
Jim Endersby, "Linnaeus at the service of England," TLS, 12 August, reviews Neil Chambers, ed., The Scientific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1765-1820, 6 vols.; and The Indian and Pacific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, Vol. I.
Donald Rayfield, "Stalin in charge," TLS, 12 August, reviews Oleg V. Khlevniuk's Master of the House: Stalin and his inner circle (Nora Seligman Favorov, trans.) and Paul R. Gregory's Terror By Quota: State security from Lenin to Stalin (An archival study).
Keith Lowe for the Telegraph, 6 August, and Robert Service for the Guardian, 9 August, review Andrew Roberts's The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War.
Alastair Harper, "Where are the good books on modern British politics?" Books Blog, finds a few to recommend.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
20th Century Biographical Notes
Jon Hendley, "I spy Arthur Ransome," Guardian, 13 August, reviews Roland Chambers's The Last Englishman: the Double Life of Arthur Ransome.
Michael Henderson reviews Robin Daniels's Cardus, Celebrant of Beauty: a Memoir for the Telegraph, 10 August.
Adam Kirsch, "Chic Radical," Tablet, 11 August, reviews Barry Seldes's Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician. See also: Alex Ross, "The Bernstein Files," New Yorker, 10 August: Part One, Bernstein and the F.B.I.; Part Two, Bernstein and Nixon's Plumbers; Part Three, Bernstein in the Nixon Tapes.
Dwight Garner, "Writer's Myth Looms as Large as the Many Novels She Wrote," NYT, 11 August, reviews Benjamin Moser's Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector.
Caitlin Flanagan, "Sex and the Married Man," Atlantic, September, reviews Jennifer Scanlon's Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
More Noted Things
Adam Kirsch, "A Nation of Commentators," Tablet, 21 July, reviews Elie Wiesel's Rashi, 11th century France's Rabbi Shlomo ben Yitzhak.
Carol Kaesuk Yoon, "Reviving the Lost Art of Naming the World," NYT, 10 August, is adapted from her book, Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science.
Carlin Romano, "The Shame of Academe and Fascism, Then and Now," CHE, 10 August, reviews Stephen H. Norwood's The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses.
Howard Husock, "Jane Jacobs's Legacy," City Journal, Summer, reviews Anthony Flint's Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City and Glenna Lang and Marjorie Wunsch's Genius of Common Sense: Jane Jacobs and the Story of The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Michiko Kakutani, "Presidential Horse Race, the 2008 Version," NYT, 10 August, reviews Dan Balz's and Haynes Johnson's The Battle for America, 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
Adam Kotsko and Tim Burke discuss posting syllabi on-line.
"The road to insurrection," The Economist, 6 August, reviews David Horspool's The English Rebel: One Thousand Years of Trouble-Making from the Normans to the Nineties.
"Learned and ingenious ladies," The Economist, 6 August, reviews Jane Robinson's Bluestockings: The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education. Hat tip.
Mark Bauerlein, "Demanding Rights, Courting Controversy," WSJ, 6 August, reviews David and Linda Royster Beito's Black Maverick: T. R. M. Howard's Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power.
Jonathan Yardley, "Cabaret Queen," Washington Post, 9 August, reviews James Gavin's Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne.
Adam Kirsch, "Disengagement," Tablet, 4 August, reviews Rich Cohen's Israel is Real.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Our colleague, Claire Potter, the Tenured Radical, and the American Historical Association's Rob Townsend debate the future of the conference job interview.
Michael Shae, "Wilde's Library," NYT, 6 August, reviews Thomas Wright's Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde.
Gail Collins, "Three Days in August," NYT, 6 August, reviews Pete Fornatale's Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock and Michael Lang with Holly George-Warren, The Road to Woodstock.
Paul Krugman, "School for Scoundrels," NYT, 6 August, reviews Justin Fox's The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street and Charles R. Morris's The Sages: Warren Buffett, George Soros, Paul Volcker, and the Maelstrom of Markets.
Saturday, August 8, 2009
Modern American Political Notes
Jonathan Rosen, "Natural Man," NYT, 6 August, reviews Douglas Brinkley's The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America.
Lynn Olson, "Band of Bickering Brothers," Washington Post, 9 August, reviews Andrew Roberts's Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941-1945.
Andrea Fuller, "Senate Historian Reflects on 34 Years of Queries," NYT, 7 August, looks back on Richard Baker's 34 years as historian of the United States Senate.
Christopher Caldwell, "The Rise and Fall of Donald Rumsfeld," NYT, 5 August, reviews Bradley Graham's By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld.
Paul M. Barrett, "While Regulators Slept," NYT, 6 August, reviews David Wessel's In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Friday's Notes
Errol Morris, "Seven Lies About Lying (Part 1)," Zoom, 5 August, and "Seven Lies About Lying (Part 2)," Zoom, 6 August, are a two-part series by the winner of the Cliopatria Award for Best Series of Posts, 2007.
"Is there a margin muse in your library book?" Books Blog, 28 July, offers up readers' marginalia on Gustav Krist, Pauline Moffitt Watts and Eugen Weber.
Dwight Garner, "Rowing to Democracy," NYT, 6 August, reviews John R. Hale's Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy.
Andrew O'Hehir, "Sacrificial virgins of the Mississippi, Salon, 6 August, and Dennis Drabelle, "Down by the Riverside," Washington Post, 9 August, review Timothy Pauketat's Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Things Ancient & Modern
Vincent Crapanzano, "How to fake science, history and religion," TLS, 5 August, reviews Ronald H. Fritze's Invented Knowledge: False history, fake science and pseudo-religions.
David Arnold, "Beheading Hindus," TLS, 29 July, reviews Wendy Doniger's The Hindus.
A. E. Harvey, "The real Mary Magdalene," TLS, 5 August, reviews Robin Griffith-Jones's Mary Magdelene: The woman whom Jesus loved.
Peter Berkowitz, "Conserving," Policy Review, August/ September, reviews Patrick Allitt's The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History.
Ronald Fraser, "Doing business with Franco," TLS, 29 July, reviews Hugh Thomas's Eduardo Barreiros and the Recovery of Spain.
Richard Vinen, "How Orwellian was Orwell?" TLS, 5 August, reviews Paul Anderson, ed., Orwell in "Tribune," "As I Please" and other writings, 1943–7 and Philip Bounds's Orwell and Marxism: The political and cultural thinking of George Orwell.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
More Noted Things
This week, Cliopatria's friends at Crooked Timber are holding a "book event" on George Scialabba's What Are Intellectuals Good For?. Thus far, there are contributions by:
Henry Farrell Michael Bérubé Russell Jacoby Rich Yeselson John Holbo Scott McLemee George Scialabba
David Zax, "Galileo's Vision," Smithsonian, July, recalls how and what Galileo taught us to see.
Alan Jacobs, "The English Montaigne," Books & Culture, July/August, reviews Duncan Wu's William Hazlitt: the First Modern Man.
Isaac Chotiner, "Could Malcolm Gladwell Be More Wrong About 'To Kill A Mockingbird'?" TNR, 5 August, develops at greater length Jeremy Young's argument at Cliopatria.
Dwight Garner, "When David Fought Goliath in Washington Square Park," NYT, 4 August, reviews Anthony Flint's Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
Michael Massing, "The News about the Internet," NYRB, 13 August, reviews Eric Boehlert's Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press, Bill Wasik's And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture, and two dozen major political blogs.
Andrew Clark, "Seeking Haydn," Financial Times, 25 July, reviews David Wyn Jones's The Life of Haydn, David Vickers's Haydn, Christopher Hogwood's Haydn's Visits to England, David Wyn Jones, ed., Oxford Composer Companions: Haydn, and Richard Wigmore's The Faber Pocket Guide to Haydn.
Willis G. Regier, "The Essence of War: Clausewitz as Educator," CHE, 3 August, reviews what Clausewitz taught us.
Judith Thurman, "Wilder Women," New Yorker, 10 August, revisits William Holtz's The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane.
Malcolm Gladwell, "The Courthouse Ring: Atticus Finch and the limits of Southern liberalism," New Yorker, 10 August, argues that Alabama's Big Jim Folsom is a key to understanding To Kill a Mockingbird.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Brenda Wineapple, "French Connections," NYT, 29 July, reviews Caroline Moorehead's Dancing to the Precipice: The Life of Lucie de la Tour du Pin, Eyewitness to an Era.
Dennis Drabelle, "Literature," Washington Post, 2 August, reviews Denise D. Knight and Jennifer S. Tuttle, eds., The Selected Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Mark Harris, "Dream and Delirium," NYT, 29 July, reviews Werner Herzog's Conquest of the Useless: Reflections From the Making of "Fitzcarraldo". Translated by Krishna Winston.
Douglas Foster, "The Promise of South Africa," Washington Post, 2 August, reviews Alec Russell's Bring Me My Machine Gun: The Battle for the Soul of South Africa From Mandela to Zuma.
Fouad Ajami, "Strangers in the Land," NYT, 29 July, reviews Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Notes on Western Civilization
History Carnival LXXIX is up at History Today News!
Kathryn Hughes reviews Hermione Lee's Biography: A Very Short Introduction for the Guardian, 1 August.
Tim Whitmarsh, "A Nabokov of the ancient world," TLS, 24 July, reviews George Economou's Ananios: Ananios of Kleitor.
Jed Perl, "Anonymous No More," TNR, 28 July, reviews Melanie Holcomb's Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages and "Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages," an exhibit at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Tim Black, "‘We want to determine the world, not be determined by it'," Spiked Review of Books, July, and John Cottingham, "From Job to the Enlightenment," Standpoint, July/August, review Susan Neiman's Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists. Hat tip.
Friday, July 31, 2009
A Statement About the State of Jones Dispute
Guest-posted by Kevin Levin from Civil War Memory.
The ongoing dispute between Victoria Bynum, the author of the well-regarded study, The Free State of Jones (UNC Press, 2001) and Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer, the authors of the brand new book, The State of Jones (Doubleday, 2009), shows no sign of letting up. Now that the story has been picked up by the New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Ed, I've decided to explain how I came to be involved in this little squabble. I've received a number of emails from interested readers inquiring as to how I got involved, including a few that have taken liberties in assuming some kind of loyalty to one side. I want to clear the air and offer my own assessment of this unfortunate incident.
In late spring I was contacted by a representative from Doubleday who asked if I might be interested in an advanced copy for review. I receive these types of emails on a daily basis and, while I reject most of these offers, I decided to accept this one given the topic as well as the involvement of John Stauffer, whose work I know and respect. Shortly thereafter, I received an email from Sally Jenkins who also asked if I was interested in reviewing the book. I promised to give the book a thorough read, though I could not be certain when I might get around to posting a review on the blog given the demands of my own research projects.
While reading through the book I came across a thorough critique by Victoria Bynum at her blog, Renegade South, and decided to link to it. [Her review was eventually published in three parts: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.] In the interest of full disclosure let me point out that I've never met personally with Prof. Bynum. We are, however, linked on the social networking site, Facebook. Admittedly, I am a big fan of her own study of Jones County and I am familiar with other shorter scholarly pieces in edited collections and scholarly journals. I consider her to be a very talented historian. As I read through the Jenkins-Stauffer book I accumulated a growing list of questions and problems with their interpretation having to do with, among other things, their characterization of Jones County as well as Newton Knight. Many of my concerns were reinforced after reading Prof. Bynum's critique. The decision to link to Prof. Bynum's review was done to make available to my readers the thoughts of an acknowledged expert in this particular subject area. Her review is hard-nosed and thorough; however, at no time does Prof. Bynum engage in personal insult or call into question the authors' motivation for taking on the topic of Jones County. I had no desire to write off the Jenkins-Stauffer book, though I did suggest that there are legitimate questions about its interpretation.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Modern History Notes
Jenny Diski, "All Eat All," LRB, 6 August, reviews Catalin Avramescu's An Intellectual History of Cannibalism, translated by Alistair Ian Blyth.
Michael Dirda, "Meeting of the Minds," Washington Post, 30 July, reviews Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.
Hillary Mantel, "He Roared," LRB, 6 August, reviews David Lawday's Danton: The Gentle Giant of Terror.
Michael Cieply, "Civil War Fires Up Literary Shootout," NYT, 29 July, looks at the continuing feud between Victoria Bynum, the author of The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Longest Civil War, and John Stauffer and Sally Jenkins, the authors of The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded From the Confederacy. Most of the battles have been at Bynum's blog, Renegade South: histories of unconventional southerners, with occasional skirmishes at Kevin Levin's Civil War Memory.
Eric Hobsbawm, "C (for Crisis)," LRB, 6 August, reviews Richard Overy's The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
History Carnival, A Lincoln Disputation & the Philippines Analogy
Kathryn Hadley will host the next edition of History Carnival on Saturday 1 August at History Today News. Send your nominations of the best in history blogging since 1 July to k*dot*hadley*at*historytoday*dot*com or use the nomination form.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
More Noted Things
Mary Beard, "Knossos: Fakes, Facts, and Mystery," NYRB, 13 August, reviews Cathy Gere's Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism.
Joan Acocella, "Betrayal," New Yorker, 3 August, reviews Susan Gubar's Judas: A Biography and Herbert Krosney's The Lost Gospel: The Quest for the Gospel of Judas Iscariot.
John Warne Monroe, "Isn't It Romantic?" Commonweal, 17 July, reviews Tim Blanning's The Triumph of Music: The Rise of Composers, Musicians, and Their Art. Hat tip.
Roger Cohen, "Iran: The Tragedy & the Future," NYRB, 13 August, looks at the prospects for Iran.
Adam Hochschild, "The Rape of the Congo," NYRB, 13 August, takes a look at prospects for Africa's heartland.
Finally, congratulations to Cliopatria's friend, Stephen D. Marlowe, who has been re-instated on the faculty of Ohio's Edison Community College.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
For lack of volunteer hosts, the carnivals of Asian history, bad history, and military history are currently on hiatus. Without volunteer hosts, History Carnival and both ancient/medieval and early modern editions of Carnivalesque could face the same fate. Please contact sharon*at*earlymodernweb*dot*org*dot *uk or carnivalesque*at*earlymodernweb*dot*org*dot*uk if you are interested in serving as a host.
Michael Dirda, "Finding the 'I' In Life," Washington Post, 23 July, reviews Keith Thomas's The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England.
John Gray reviews Timothy Garton Ash's Facts Are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name for the New Statesman, 16 July.
Finally, farewell to NYU's classicist, Lionel Casson.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Horrible Histories
Over at Crooked Timber, Harry Brighouse says that "Horrible Histories" may be the best thing BBC is doing these days. YouTube offers many samples, but "The 4 Georges: 'Born 2 Rule'" gives you a sense of what the series does:
Saturday, July 25, 2009
More Modern History Notes
Stephen M. Walt recently read Piers Brendon's The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997 and drew "10 lessons on empire."
Adam Liptak, "Judicial Roulette," NYT, 24 July, reviews James MacGregor Burns's Packing the Court: The Rise of Judicial Power and the Coming Crisis of the Supreme Court.
Liza Mundy, "Minding the Children, Watching the Parents," Washington Post, 25 July, reviews Miriam Forman-Brunell's Babysitter: An American History and Tasha Blaine's Just Like A Family: Inside the Lives of Nannies, the Parents They Work for, and the Children They Love.
Tony Horwitz, "A Land and A People," NYT, 23 July, reviews Rich Cohen's Israel is Real: An Obsessive Quest to Understand the Jewish Nation and Its History; and Jonathan Tepperman, "Zionist in the White House," NYT, 23 July, reviews Allis Radosh and Ronald Radosh, A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Friday's Notes
Rachel Cusk, "The Art of Self-Portraiture," The Guardian, 19 July, reviews Laura Cumming's A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits.
Peter Marshall, "Not a real queen?" TLS, 22 July, reviews Eamon Duffy's Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor, Linda Porter's Mary Tudor: The First Queen, Judith M. Richards's Mary Tudor, and Anna Whitelock's Mary Tudor.
Janet Maslin, "Mother Nature's Son, With a Big Stick (and Rifle)," NYT, 22 July, reviews Douglas Brinkley's The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America.
Joseph Lennon, "The hunger artist," TLS, 22 July, marks the centennial of suffragette Marion Wallace-Dunlop's first modern hunger strike.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Some Modern History Notes
Jeffrey R. Young, "When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom," CHE, 20 July, v. Eric Rauchway, "Bullet points don't bore people, people do," Edge of the American West, 21 July.
John Summers reviews Jackson Lears's Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 for bookforum, 17 July.
Mark Mazower, "The Evil That Men Do," TNR, 1 July, reviews Grigoris Balakian's Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918, translated by Peter Balakian with Aris Sevag, Ryan Gingeras's Sorrowful Shores: Violence, Ethnicity, and the End of the Ottoman Empire, 1912-1923, and Fethiye Cetin's My Grandmother: A Memoir.
Christopher Hitchens, "A Sense of Historical Irony: Leszek Kolakowski, 1927-2009," Slate, 20 July, recalls Poland's philosopher of democratic socialism.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
More Noted Things
Stephen J. Pyne, "History Is Scholarship; It's Also Literature," CHE, 17 July, argues that too many history graduate students and professors haven't yet learned how to write. The Arizona State historian discusses how he teaches writing for historians.
Adam Kirsch, "What's Romantic About Science?" Slate, 20 July, reviews Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.
George Scialabba reviews Stanislao Pugliese's Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone for the Barnes & Noble Review, 21 July.
"State Dept Offers New Caveat on Nixon Tapes," Secrecy News, 20 July, takes notice of deviant transcriptions in the Foreign Relations of the United States series. Transcripts are "interpretations"; it's the tapes that are "documents".
On the Thursday afternoon arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr, the police report, and the statement of Gates's attorney, Charles Ogletree.
Update: Cambridge, Massachusetts police announced this afternoon that charges against Gates will be dropped.
Monday, July 20, 2009
United States History Notes
Jeffrey R. Young, "Drive-Time History, With a Dry Sense of Humor," CHE, 13 July, features three Virginia historians who've taken history to radio.
Michael Grunwald, "Power to (Some of) the People," Washington Post, 19 July, reviews Lynn Hudson Parsons's The Birth of Modern Politics: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams and the Election of 1828.
Ben Macintyre, "Dearborn-on-Amazon," NYT, 16 July, and Aaron Leitko, "Welcome to the Jungle," Washington Post, 19 July, review Greg Grandin's Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City.
Martha A. Sandweiss, "The Family That Rejected Jim Crow," Washington Post, 19 July, reviews W. Ralph Eubanks's The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of An Interracial Family in the American South.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Early Modern Notes
David M. Kennedy, "What Is History Good For?" NYT, 16 July, reviews Margaret MacMillan's Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History.
Carnivalesque LII, an early modern edition of the festival, is up at Gilbert Mabbott.
Michael Sims, "White Man's Fantasy," Washington Post, 19 July, reviews Richard Bernstein's The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters.
Jonathan Yardley, "Shakespeare's Storm," Washington Post, 19 July, reviews Hobson Woodward's A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare's The Tempest.
Robert J. Bliwise, "A Witch's Brew," Duke Magazine, July/August, previews Thomas Robisheaux's The Last Witch of Langenburg: Murder in a German Village.
Justin Moyer, "A New Newton," Washington Post, 19 July, reviews Thomas Levenson's Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist.
Christopher Benfey, "Science and the Sublime," NYT, 16 July, reviews Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Weak Endnotes
Stephen Baker, "A Brief History of Blogs," Business Week, 16 July, reviews Scott Rosenberg's Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters.
Mary Beard, "Was He Quite Ordinary?" LRB, 23 July, reviews Frank McLynn's Marcus Aurelius: Warrior, Philosopher, Emperor.
John Stubbs, "Bill & Bess," Literary Review, July, reviews Helen Hackett's Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths.
William Doyle, "Blood Brother," Literary Review, July, reviews David Lawday's Danton.
Maria Margaronis, "Mixing History and Desire: The Poetry of C.P. Cavafy," The Nation, 15 July, reviews C. P. Cavafy's Collected Poems and The Unfinished Poems. Translated and edited by Daniel Mendelsohn.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Thursday's Notes
The Giant's Shoulders #13, the history of science carnival, is up at Skulls in the Stars.
Cathy Gere, "Restoring Faith: The ancient Minoan civilisation," History Today, July, argues that, when traditional religions were under attack, Arthur Evans offered Minos as a source of mythological reference. Gere is recently the author of Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism.
Michael Dirda, "A Woman of Masterful Persuasion," Washington Post, 16 July, reviews John Lukacs, ed., American Austen: The Forgotten Writing of Agnes Repplier.
Michael Kimmelman, "High-Born Prussians Who Defied Their Origin," NYT, 15 July, profiles Countess Elisabeth von der Schulenburg, whose Nazi family was at the heart of the plot against Hitler.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
More Noted Things
Indian History Carnival #19 is up at varnam.
The Contributors, "Fired from the Canon," The Second Pass, 9 July, names 10 novels in the canon that really aren't must reads.
Stephanie Simon's "The Culture Wars' New Front: U.S. History Classes in Texas," WSJ, 14 July, prompted considerable discussion at Paul Harvey's "The Eyes of David Barton Are Upon You," Religion in American History, 14 July, and Eric Rauchway's "A rat done bit my sister Nell," Edge of the American West, 14 July.
A colleague points out that the joint effort of two full professors, Christopher Newfield and Stanton Glantz, "Ending the California dream," San Francisco Chronicle, 14 July, says 25% cuts in state funding for the UC system means that "students will learn 25 percent less." That's 25% of the $3 billion that the state general fund sends to the UC system, out of the UC system's $19 billion budget. These two geniuses are both "former chairs of the UC Systemwide Committee on Planning and Budget."
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Early Modern Notes
Patrick Ludolph will host an early modern edition of 
at Gilbert Mabbott on 19 July. Send nominations of the best in early modern history blogging since 25 May to him at pludolph*at*umail*dot*ucsb*dot*edu or use the form. If you are interested in hosting History Carnival in September or thereafter, contact sharon*at*earlymodernweb *dot*org*dot*uk.
Peter Forbes for the Independent, 26 September, Robin McKie for the Guardian, 2 November, Janet Maslin for the NYT, 8 July, and Dava Sobel for the Barnes & Noble Review, 17 July, review Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. James Mustich interviews Holmes about his book in Barnes & Noble Review, 6 July.
Nicholas Shakespeare for the Telegraph, 15 January, Jane Shilling for the London Times, 16 January, Sarah Burton for the Independent, 23 January, Kathryn Harrison, "Oh, Lord," NYT, 12 June, and Katha Pollitt, "Lord Byron's Great Insight," Slate, 13 July, review Edna O'Brien's Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
Jane Black, "Cooking Up a Pot of Civilization," Washington Post, 12 July, reviews Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human and Tom Standage's An Edible History of Humanity.
Gordon Wood, "Revolutionary Manners," TNR, 1 July, reviews Eric Slauter's The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution.
Mickey Edwards, "A wide-ranging and clear-eyed examination of the history of American conservatism," Boston Globe, 12 July, reviews Patrick Allitt's The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History.
Farewell to Kenneth M. Stampp, 1912-2009.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Recent American History Notes
Michael Meyer, "Still ‘Ugly' After All These Years," NYT, 10 July, looks back on William J. Lederer's and Eugene Burdick's novel The Ugly American.
Tom Perriello, "Faith in the Electorate," Washington Post, 12 July, reviews Shaun A. Casey's The Making of a Catholic President: Kennedy vs. Nixon 1960.
John Lancaster, "Misguided Missiles," Washington Post, 12 July, reviews James Scott's The Attack on the Liberty: The Untold Story of Israel's Deadly 1967 Assault on a U.S. Spy Ship.
Thomas Mallon, "Giant Step, Full Stop," NYT, 8 July, reviews Craig Nelson's Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon and Andrew Chaikin with Victoria Kohl, Voices from the Moon: Apollo Astronauts Describe Their Lunar Experiences.
Alexander Waugh, "Dreams From His Father," American Conservative, 1 August, reviews Christopher Buckley's Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Weak Endnotes
seeks hosts for both its ancient/medieval and its early modern editions of the festival. If you are interested, contact Julie Hofman and Sharon Howard at carnivalesque *at*earlymodernweb*dot*org*dot*uk.
Laura Miller, "History is bunk after all," Salon, 9 July, and Jonathan Yardley, "Getting History Right," Washington Post, 12 July, review Margaret MacMillan's Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History.
Holland Cotter, "Mysterious Moods, Elusive in Marble," NYT, 9 July, reviews "An Antiquity of Imagination: Tullio Lombardo and Venetian High Renaissance Sculpture," an exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
250 years later, at Christopher Moore's Canadian History, he's live-blogging the siege of Quebec. It begins on 3 July and continues with daily entries.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Modern History Notes
Janet Maslin, "When Poets Were Scientists and Nature Their Mysterious Muse," NYT, 8 July, reviews Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.
Peter D. Smith reviews Philip Hoare's Leviathan or, The Whale for the TLS, 10 July. Hoare's book won this year's BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction.
David Miller, "Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness," Telegraph, 7July, recalls the novel's extraordinary hold on its readers and Achebe's troubling criticism of it.
Suzy Hansen, "Importance of elsewhere," The National, 3 July, reviews Magdalena J. Zaborowska's James Baldwin's Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Bela Kiraly, 1912-2009
Bela Kiraly, military leader of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and subsequently a professor of history at Brooklyn College, died on Saturday in Budapest. After the failure of the Hungarian revolt, he came to the United States, earned a doctorate at Columbia, and taught in Brooklyn's history department from 1964 to 1982. Kiraly's books included Hungary in the Late Eighteenth Century: The Decline of Enlightened Despotism (1969) and Basic History of Modern Hungary (2001).
Wednesday's Notes
Will the recession put an end to conference job interviews? Claire Potter, "More Annals of the Great Depression: Whither The Conference Interview?" Tenured Radical, 7 July.
Michael Kimmelman, "Stolen Beauty: A Greek Urn's Underworld," NYT, 7 July, reviews Vernon Silver's The Lost Chalice: The Epic Hunt for a Priceless Masterpiece.
Johann Hari, "The Birth, and Death, of the Asian Babe," Slate, 29 June, reviews Richard Bernstein's The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters.
Peter Gwyn reviews Kevin Sharpe's Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England for the THES, 2 July.
Scott McLemee interviews Immanuel Ness of Brooklyn College, who edited the new 7 volume International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, 1500 to the Present.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
More Noted Things
David Moltz, "So Sue Me," IHE, 6 July, tells the story of a ruthless administration at Ohio's Edison Community College. As farangi at Chapati Mystery, its victim, Stephen D. Marlowe, is a longtime friend of Cliopatria. He also edits the College union's blog, The Illuminator. The faculty has voted no confidence in President Yowell and the Board of Trustees will do justice and save money if it retires him.
The Codex Sinaiticus is now online. Digitization of the oldest Greek text of the Christian Bible is a cooperative venture of the British Library, the Leipzig University Library, the National Library of Russia, and St. Catherine's Monastery. On 6-7 July, the British Library is hosting an international conference about the text. Until September, it hosts an exhibit, "From Parchment to Pixel: the virtual reunification of Codex Sinaiticus."
Jeffrey Rosen, "Black Robe Politics," Washington Post, 5 July, Emily Bazelon, "The Supreme Court on Trial," Slate, 6 July, and Michiko Kakutani, "Appointees Who Really Govern America," NYT, 6 July, review James MacGregor Burns's Packing the Court: The Rise of Judicial Power and the Coming Crisis of the Supreme Court.
Terry Eagleton, "Urbane sprawl," Guardian, 27 June, reviews Isaiah Berlin's Enlightening: Letters, 1946-1960.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Things Noted Here & There
Laura, "The Blogosphere 2.0," 11D, 2 July, her observations about how blogging has changed in the last six years, is getting widespread commentary. For the most part, I agree with her, especially about the growth of niche blogging. Six years ago, it was a pleasant surprise to find another history blog out there. Now, we know of at least 1500 of them and they thrive with specialization. Recently, we've created separate categories for Digital History and History of Science and Technology.
Scott Jaschik, "Empty Chair No More," IHE, 2 July, notes the hiring of John W. Hall as the first Ambrose-Hesseltine Professor in U.S. Military History. The topics of both Hall's first and second books are military dimensions of the Indian wars. Jaschik might have noted that Wisconsin's Native American historian, Ned Blackhawk, recently decamped for Yale.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Modern History Notes
Greg Grandin, "Off Dead Center: William Appleman Williams," The Nation, 1 July, reviews a new edition of Williams's The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, with a foreword by Lloyd C. Gardner and an afterword by Andrew J. Bacevich.
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.
David Andelman, "Over There," NYT, 3 July, reviews Norman Stone's World War One.
Dominique Browning, "Goddess of Mischief," NYT, 30 June, reviews Frances Osborn's The Bolter, a biography of Idina Sackville.
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, "