THE SUBJUNCTIVE CIVIL WAR ... 10-24-03

After six dozen posts about the Mobile Museum controversy and the Civil War on H-South and several hundred others on HNN, James Miller, a historian at Carleton University in Canada, writes:

For every southern historian, fourteen years or older, not once but whenever he or she wants it, there is the instant when no posting on civil war causation, no matter how long the thread, has yet used the word feudalism. The thesaurus of reaction is in position behind the Shift and F7 keys, . . . the manichean premises of past/bad, future/good are laid and ready in the American mind and ahistorical assumptions regarding the meaning of progress are already loosened to break out . . . and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even been used yet, it not only hasn't been used yet but there is still time for it not to be used. Yet it's going to be used, we all know that, we have been here too often and with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a southern historian to think, This time. Maybe this time . . . and maybe I'll see you at the Cubs-Red Sox World Series next year.

Posted by Ralph 2:30 p.m. EDT

AN E-MAIL FROM NIGERIA ... 10-24-03

Kieran Healy is being irreverent about the successor to John Paul II.

Posted by Ralph 12:15 a.m. EDT

DURANTY AND THE PULITZER ... 10-24-03

Columbia University historian Mark von Hagen has recommended that the Pulitzer Prize given to Walter Duranty for his reporting from the Soviet Union in the 1930s be revoked. For his report, see: here. Arthur Sulzberger and Bill Keller at the New York Times worry about such a revocation being like a Stalinist"airbrushing