CLIOPATRIA: A Group Blog
Nominations for The Cliopatria Awards for the best history blogging are open through November. Final selections will be made by panels of history bloggers and announced at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in early January. Previous winners can be found here, and Cliopatria's History Blogroll can be found here.
Categories: Best Group Blog, Best Individual Blog, Best New Blog, Best Post, Best Series of Posts, Best Writer
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Your Type & The Cliopatria Awards
This site claims to be able to analyze a blog's "type". Here's what it says about Cliopatria:
The Thinkers The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.
They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.
AHA Today and The Edge of the American West are of the same type. Other history sites, like HNN's mainpage and Errol Morris's Zoom, are read as:
The Mechanics The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generelly prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.
The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.
Whether they're a "Thinker," a "Mechanic," or some other type, take a moment this weekend to nominate your favorite history blogger for a Cliopatria Award. Thanks to AHA Today, Airminded, American Creation, Archaeoastronomy, Blogenspiel, Civil War Memory, Early Modern Notes, History Carnivals Aggregator, History News Network, In the Middle, Inside Higher Ed, Legal History, Mercurius Politicus, Progressive Historians, Public Historian, Rogue Classicism, Spinning Clio, and Walking the Berkshires for helping to get the word out about the nominations.
Friday, November 21, 2008
Friday's Notes
Scott Jaschik, "History Employment – Public and Private," IHE, 21 November, summarizes the findings in an AHA report by Rob Townsend.
At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall puts on his historian's cap to suggest that:
... historically, the rising incidence of piracy has frequently, if not always, been a sign of the receding reach of whatever great power has taken on responsibility for policing the sea lanes. The decline of the Hellenistic monarchies in the Mediterranean before the rise of Rome. Caribbean piracy during Spain's long slide into decrepitude and before England decided she lost more than she gained from it. There are many examples. I note too that the Russians just announced that they're sending a few more warships to try to get things under control off the coast of East Africa.
The Guardian has a slide show of excerpts from Charles Darwin's letters and diaries, contemporary cartoons and photographs, taken from David Quammen's new illustrated edition of Darwin's On The Origin of the Species.
The American Social History Project and CUNY's Center for New Media and Learning presents Picturing U. S. History, "an interactive source for teaching with visual evidence."
Six years after being sent to the plagiarism corner, there to sit in exile with Stephen Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin is back on top of her game. Obama cabinet-making has put her study of Lincoln's cabinet, Team of Rivals, back among best-sellers; she is a News Analyst for NBC and reportedly commands up to $40,000 for a lecture. Yet, her "team of rivals" argument is being challenged by her peers. James Oakes, "What's So Special About a Team of Rivals?" NYT, 19 November, argues that Lincoln's inviting competitors into his cabinet was neither innovative nor smart; and Matthew Pinsker's "Lincoln and the myth of 'Team of Rivals'," LA Times, 18 November, argues that Lincoln's cabinet was far more dysfunctional than Goodwin allows. Hat tip.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Rutgers' McCormick
Ted Sherman and Josh Margolin, "Report says Rutgers failed to properly oversee athletics department," Newark Star-Ledger, 20 November, says a newly released report lays the blame for the out-of-control and still foundering athletic program at the feet of the University's president, historian Richard L. McCormick, and the school's board of governors. McCormick responds to the report here. Arguing that McCormick should resign, Margaret Soltan calls his response to the report "preening" and "cretinous."
Thursday's Notes
Edward Wong, "The Dead Tell a Tale China Doesn't Care to Listen To," NYT, 18 November, reports on an exhibit of ancient mummies in China's Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region and their story that Beijing doesn't want told.
Mary Beard has tried her hand with Google Earth's and the University of Virginia's virtual recreation of ancient Rome. It might have been more satisfactory if she had more experience at a pinball machine.
Jacqueline Trescott, "America's Attic Is Ready for Its Public," Washington Post, 20 November, previews the re-opening of DC's National Museum of American History.
Samuel P. Jacobs, "A talk with Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore," Boston Globe, 16 November, explores the two historians' decision to write a work of historical fiction. Thanks to Manan Ahmed for the tip.
Annette Gordon-Reid's The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family has won the National Book Award for Non-Fiction, 2008. The other nominees included: Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, Jane Mayer's The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, Jim Sheeler's Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives, and Joan Wickersham's The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
What Students Need to Know About the U.S. Civil War
Back in July the Foreign Policy Research Institute organized a workshop that brought together about thirty primary and secondary school teachers and several several military historians, including myself. The general subject was "What Students Need to Know About America's Wars." I was asked to address this question as it pertained to the Civil War. Here's what I came up with:
The most important thing to understand about the Civil War is the sheer fact that it happened.
The United States of America has now endured over two centuries under the same form of government. That is a great success story — one that Americans take largely for granted. The country has grown and changed in many ways and has endured many challenges, nearly all of them addressed within the limits of constitutional government. How many other countries can make such a statement? The massive exception to this rule is the Civil War, a war that began when seven states refused to abide by the result of a constitutionally mandated, fairly conducted presidential election with an unambiguous winner. Instead they left the Union to form their own separate republic. In the weeks that followed, four more states joined the Confederacy, and those eleven states fought a four-year war against the other twenty-two. Six hundred twenty thousand Americans perished during that conflict. That was about 2 percent of the U.S. population in 1860, the equivalent of 6.1 million today.
What accounts for this singular failure of democracy? Over the years, historians have offered different explanations. In the first half of the twentieth century, it was common to blame a “blundering generation” of politicians for losing control of a crisis that was largely of their own making. After World War II, it became common to view the conflict as unavoidable: the product of a fundamental contradiction in a society that preached freedom and equality yet attempted to reconcile those values with the institution of chattel slavery.
But perhaps a better answer is that the war reflected a failure of American citizens themselves.
Modern History Notes
At Google Life, you can search "millions" of photographs, many of them not published before, from Life magazine's photo archive. Thanks to Manan Ahmed for the tip.
Christopher Benfey, "The American Loneliness," TNR, 3 December, reviews Robin G. Wilder and Jackson R. Bryer, eds., The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder.
Adam Liptak and Jonathan D. Glater, "Papers Offer Close-Up of Rehnquist and the Court," NYT, 17 November, looks at the stories slowly unfolding from the William Rehnquist papers at Stanford's Hoover Institution. At Legal History, Mary Dudziak offers some tips for research at the Hoover Archives.
David Berreby, "Only in America?" Slate, 17 November, questions the exultation about the election of Barack Obama as an outburst of American exceptionalism. What about England's Benjamin Disraeli, France's Napoleon Bonaparte, Germany's Cem Ozdemir, Peru's Alberto Fujimori, India's Sonia Gandhi, or Kenya's Daniel arap Moi? Or the Roman Empire's North African, Syrian, and Balkan emperors? Outsiders, all.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
More Noted Things
Frances Wilson, "Exccentrick Patrick Brontë," TLS, 13 November, reviews Dudley Green's Patrick Brontë: Father of Genius.
Michael Wood, "Double Thought," LRB, 20 November, reviews Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg and Benno Wagner, eds., Franz Kafka: The Office Writings, trans. by Eric Patton and Ruth Hein.
Two weeks after the United States' presidential election, we're still busy graphing and mapping it: "From Cotton Pickin' to Pickin' Presidents," Strange Maps, 15 November, overlays a map of bales of cotton picked in 1860 on a map of Southern counties carried by Barack Obama in 2008; and Andrew Gelman's "Race, Region and Obama," red state blue state/rich state poor state, 17 November, compares voting along racial lines by section of the country. See also: Eric Rauchway's variations on those charts at The Edge of the American West. The "cotton belt" appears to persist into the 21st century, but now without sufficient voting strength to win South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, or Arkansas. Deep South voters seem more likely to vote along racial lines than voters in other sections of the country. Yet, see Nate Silver's "For Obama, Will Familiarity Erode Contempt?" FiveThirtyEight, 17 November: "The driving factor in determining how Obama performed vis-à-vis John Kerry, however, appears as though it might not be race, but rather how much Obama camaigned in a given state." The power of the "sun belt" seems diminished when Democrats and Republicans divide the electoral votes of Florida and Texas.
Congratulations to Gabor Boritt, Richard Brookhiser, and Harold Holzer who were awarded the National Humanities Medal yesterday at the White House; and to Clement Price, Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor of History and director of the Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers University, Newark, who will co-chair the NEH transition team for the Obama administration.
Monday, November 17, 2008
"All Agree That we Must Keep a Peace Establishment"
Adding to my recent post on the topic, here's a glorious example of the degree to which, in the early republic, rhetorical opposition to the idea of a standing army didn't actually add up to opposition to the thing itself.
Speaking on Friday, February 2, 1816, in the House of Representatives, Richard Johnson of Kentucky warned that a standing army "would be, in time of peace, inconsistent with the Constitution and our free institutions." Looking to history and to contemporary Europe, Johnson offered examples of standing armies that had destroyed the freedom of their countrymen. "A standing army is dangerous to liberty," he argued; it had been so in ancient Rome, and the standing army "has been the most powerful instrument in the hands of power and usurpation" in the present day. "All the governments of Europe and all the tyrants of the day are supported by this means," he concluded.
Then, in nearly the same breath, Johnson gave it all back without appearing to notice:
Things Noted Here and There
Andrew Higgins, "Professor Hired for Outreach to Muslims Delivers a Jolt," WSJ, 15 November, reports the story of Muhammad Sven Kalisch. He was hired to teach Islamic Studies at Münster University and his doubts about the existence of the historical Muhammad are causing a stir in Germany. Hat tip.
Roger Atwood, "Fool's Gold," Washington Post, 16 November, reviews Sharon Waxman's Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World and Nina Burleigh's Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed, and Forgery in the Holy Land.
Art Winslow reviews John Demos's The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-hunting in the Western World for the Chicago Tribune, 15 November.
David Brown, "16th-Century Mapmaker's Intriguing Knowledge," Washington Post, 17 November, explores what Martin Waldseemueller knew about the contours of the trans-Atlantic world.
Karl E. Meyer, "The Gift of Governance," Washington Post, 16 November, reviews Piers Brendon's The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997.
Andrew Cayton, "The Presidency That Roared," NYT, 14 November, reviews Jon Meacham's American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Modern History Notes
The Giant's Shoulders #5, the history of science carnival, is up at PodBlack Cat.
Steven Poole, "The Mischievous Oracle," Guardian, 15 November, reviews Manjit Kumar's Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality.
James Campbell, "Heavy Reading," NYT, 14 November, and Wendy Smith for the Chicago Tribune, 15 November, review Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books.
David Orr, "Love, Your Ted," NYT, 14 November, reviews Christopher Reid, ed., Letters of Ted Hughes. Hat tip.
Toby Lichtig, "Paul Theroux in Asia," TLS, 12 November, reviews Theroux's Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, published 35 years after his The Great Railway Bazaar.
Niall Ferguson, "Wall Street Lays Another Egg," Vanity Fair, December, looks through the looking glass, at Planet Finance.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Weak Endnotes
Congratulations to Cliopatria's friend, Randall Stephens, who's just become editor of Historically Speaking, the very lively bulletin of The Historical Society. Randall also edits the online Journal of Southern Religion and blogs at Religion in American History.
Richard Eyre, "The Seven Ages of Shakespeare," Guardian, 15 November, reviews Jonathan Bate's Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare.
Louis P. Masur, "Downsizing Andrew Jackson," Slate, 10 November, reviews Jon Meacham's American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House and David Reynolds's Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson.
Barry Gewen, "The Overlooked Economic Crisis, Influential Still," NYT, 13 November, reviews Robert J. Samuelson's The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence.
Sam Tanenhaus, "The Imperial Vice Presidency," TNR, 19 November, reviews Barton Gellman's Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.
Joseph Levine, "History Matters," Boston Review, September/ October, insists that Israel and its supporters must take the claims of Palestinians seriously.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
"Not so Large as to be Dangerous"
Last year, I suggested here that anti-standing army ideology had remarkably little real effect on the development of American military institutions. A year later, I'm far more confident that I was right.
In the decades following the Revolution, the statement of opposition to standing armies was frequently followed in the next breath by proposals to enlarge the standing army; the rhetorical purpose of such statements was to cloak the growth of state power in the garments of humble republican restraint: No man among us has ever loathed and despised a standing army as much as do I, gentlemen -- and so it gives me no pleasure, no pleasure indeed, to stand before this House and propose that we enlarge the peacetime establishment by 2,000 men.
The statesmen of the period recognized that anti-standing army rhetoric was just rhetoric. In January of 1816, debating the size of the postwar army, Henry Clay belittled opponents in the House of Representatives who expressed displeasure with the proposed peacetime force of 10,000 troops.
History and Rove's Analysis
Karl Rove has an op-ed in today’s WSJ pointing to history to suggest that 2010 will be a good year for Republicans. Writes Rove, “In a sign Mr. Obama's victory may have been more personal than partisan or philosophical, Democrats picked up just 10 state senate seats (out of 1,971) and 94 state house seats (out of 5,411). By comparison, when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980, Republicans picked up 112 state senate seats (out of 1,981) and 190 state house seats (out of 5,501).” The Dems also gained fewer House and Senate seats than did the Republicans in 1980.
Thursday's Notes
Dr. Denny, "The Gray Lady turns pasty white: Is the financial demise of The Times at hand?" Scholars & Rogues, 11 November, looks at the NYT's balance sheet. The picture looks grim. Hat tip.
Bruce Cole, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, announced yesterday that he will leave in January to become President and CEO of a new museum and research facility, the American Revolution Center, at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Hat tip.
Joan Nathan, "A Short History of the Bagel," Slate, 12 November, reviews Maria Balinska's The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread.
Janet Maslin, "Elites and Rivals, Beware: He's Tough as Old Hickory," NYT, 9 November, reviews John Meacham's American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
More Noted Things
Remember Steven Hoch, the Russian historian who left the University of Kentucky to become the Provost at Washington State University, had a fight with WSU's vice president for business and finance, and agreed to step down as Provost to a teaching position at $245,000? Now, he has been re-assigned to teach at WSU's branch campus at Richland, Washington. Would you say he's being encouraged to move on? Anyone want to offer him $245 grand a year to teach? Hat tip.
Our colleague, Rachel Loew's "bookporn #36: asian civilizations museum, singapore," a historian's craft, 8 November, features an extraordinary 15th century Ottoman Turkish scroll. In tiny, hair script, within its large script prayer, is the entire Qu'ran.
Zakintosh's "Zore hua kis par?" Windmills of My Mind, 11 November, sees a misreading by emphasis in most recounts of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
Joe Stephens, "The FBI's 15-Year Campaign To Ferret Out Norman Mailer," Washington Post, 11 November, looks at the Bureau's file on Norman Mailer. We paid agents to collect these banalities!
Rob MacDougall's remarkable "American for a Day," Old is the New New, 5 November, was widely acknowledged on the net, from Crooked Timber and Daily Kos to HNN and Metafilter. Rob's "I Have Until January 20," Old is the New New, 10 November, has a symposium of comparable responses to the election, including those by Manan Ahmed and Rachel Leow. Contrarily, Marc Comtois's "Obama Already Among the Best," Spinning Clio, 9 November, thinks that Historians for Obama have locked themselves in as court historians. That's only if Obama retains or appoints any Republicans to his cabinet or doesn't insist that Joe Lieberman be barred from the Senate Democratic caucus, of course.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Modern History Notes
Our colleague, Dan Todman's "How we remember them: the 1914-18 war today," Open Democracy, 7 November, considers World War I's place in British history.
The Guardian, 10 November, anthologizes some of World War I's most remarkable pieces of writing: Richard Aldington's "Bombardment"; Robert Graves, "The Useless Officer"; Graves, "It's a Queer Time"; Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front"; Siegfried Sasson, "'This wild strangeness somehow excited me'"; and Sasson, "Suicide in the Trenches".
Ryan Lizza, "Battle Plans: How Obama Won," New Yorker, 17 November, reports from within the Obama campaign. Lizza may have had to give up plans for a campaign book when he left TNR for the New Yorker. Newsweek's Richard Wolffe apparently has a reporter's book on the campaign in the works; and the Washington Post's David Marannis may also be doing one. You can look forward to an Obama biography by David Garrow.
P. J. O'Rourke, "We Blew It" Weekly Standard, 17 November, laments 28 years of conservative failure in the United States. "Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye," he begins.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Lieberman
There’s a lot of discussion about whether Joe Lieberman should retain his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. In resolving the question, Senate Democrats might swallow their institutional pride and follow the precedent of the House, placing the matter before the entire caucus for a vote.
Miriam Makeba, 1932-2008
Things Noted Here and There
In "What it meant," Boston Globe, 9 November, John Dittmer, Eric Foner, Jacqueline Jones, Steve Lawson, and Thomas Sugrue reflect on where Obama's election fits in the American narrative. Thanks to Manan Ahmed for the tip.
Miranda Seymour, "Troubled Water," NYT, 9 November, reviews Peter Ackroyd's Thames: The Biography.
Tony Horwitz, "The Ideal Colonist," Washington Post, 9 November, reviews David Hackett Fisher's Champlain's Dream.
Stephen Prothero, "Those Wacky Puritans," Washington Post, 9 November, reviews Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates.
Max Byrd, "The Bullet Machine," NYT, 7 November, reviews Julia Keller's Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel: The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
"Good Crazy"
Ta-Nehisi Coates, "The Man of Tomorrow," Washington Post, 9 November, calls attention to this clip. On 4 March 2007, when Barack Obama was to speak at historic Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in Selma, Alabama, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Dr. Joseph Lowery preceded him in the pulpit. This was at a time in the Democratic primaries when many of Lowery's peers in the civil rights movement, including John Lewis and Andrew Young, believed that Obama's campaign was "just crazy." Lowery saw a distinction that makes a difference:
Twenty months later, "good crazy" seized the land. Now, it's time to get serious and get busy.
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