I've berated the AHA for giving its inaugural Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Award for Civil Service to Senator and former Klansman Robert Byrd. Tim Burke asks an interesting question about whether the award was actually created in order to do honor to der Porkmeister. It does rather astonish me that my generation in the profession's leadership does such a thing. Is all the idealism finally swallowed up in groveling? On the other hand, Klansman Byrd's remarks did set Juan Cole to analogizing about the United States and the Roman Republic.

Have you noticed the different kind of attention the net gives to an AHA convention and an MLA convention? Even in the best of places, the approach to and retreat from (also here) the MLA invites the most bemused commentary. Is the history collective simply less interesting? Less hip? Less obsessed? Our paper and panel titles are surely less playful, though sometimes equally obscure. Erin O'Connor is serializing a satiric reading of an English Department and the MLA (here, here, and here). It has drawn a lot of criticism (here [no permalink] and here). I don't know quite what to make of it, but Sackville might have been a historian. There was my chairman who ran off with an undergraduate advisee and one of my more enlightened colleagues who objected to an older female job candidate because he suspected that her breasts were no longer perky.

Just before New Year's, I noted predictions that scholars will increasingly take to blogging as a means of communication and discussion. Economists and legal scholars seem well advanced on that road. Brian Leiter raises the question of blogging as scholarship here and here. At Crooked Timber, Brian Weatherson continues the discussion. There, too, Ophelia Benson, Tim Burke, and Matt Yglesias enter into it. My own more gossipy posts excepted, of course, I cannot help but think that at the more serious academic blogs we are at least privy to notes toward scholarship and invited to engage it at formative levels.