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Cliopatria

  • May 2, 2008

    Howard Meyer: Pastor Wright Controversy

    by Cliopatria

    To the Editor,

    If the cameras had stopped rolling and the sound track cut off, following the presentation by Bill Moyers on PBS of who Rev. Wright was and placing his peculiarly provocative remarks in context, there would have been a more informative debate on the substance of what his sermons had said..

    Unfortunately that was not the case and the journals in print and electronics, as is common when news is made in a competing, medium, looked the other way, while Moyers, reco

  • May 2, 2008

    Charles Tilly, May 20, 1929 – April 29, 2008

    by Cliopatria

    As Ralph Luker noted yesterday, historian and sociologist Charles Tilly died on April 29, 2008, of lymphoma. He was 78 years old and will be greatly missed by the many students and colleagues he touched over the years.

    Chuck was one of the great intellects of our time: as importantly, he was endlessly excited about ideas, a scholar who was an indefatigable teacher, a man who not only taught you how to do history, but encouraged you to find your own new ways to do it. While I wouldn'
  • May 1, 2008

    Happy 75th Birthday to the Catholic Worker

    by Cliopatria

    On this day in 1933, the first issue of The Catholic Worker appeared, promising to take seriously the church's program to"reconstruct the social order" according to the teachings of a certain revolutionary, anti-imperialist, and egalitarian organization from the Palestine, long ago.

    Introducing the paper, founding editor Dorothy Day wrote:


    This first number of The Catholic Worker was planned, written and edited in the kitchen of a teneme
  • Apr 30, 2008

    "By Durn Boys, Looks Like We Might 'a Won After All!"

    by Cliopatria

    (crossposted at http://cobbloviate.com)

    Just when I thought I was making a little headway in convincing white folks down this way that we lost the war and it’s time to move on, here comes a Newsweek piece by Michael Hirsh that’s likely to undo all my good work:

    In the summer of 1863, Robert E. Lee led an ill-advised incursion into Pennsylvania. His army was defeated at Gettysburg, and thence afterward Lee
  • Apr 30, 2008

    'Hansard online'

    by Cliopatria

    [Cross-posted at Airminded.]

    I stumbled across this by accident: a pilot digitisation of Hansard, funded and operated by Parliament. What an excellent thing! It's functional, but based only on a subset of 20th-century Hansard material:

    What's on this site? This site is generated from
  • Apr 28, 2008

    Reforming the Rules

    by Cliopatria

    After virtually every presidential contest since 1968, the Democrats have considered—or gone ahead with—rewriting the rules for the party's nomination. And just as consistently, these rules changes have had unintended, and often negative, consequences. Two of the problems with this year's race (the superdelegates and the anti-majoritarian tendencies of the current proportional allocation structure) date from previous rules changes, after the 1980 and 1988 contests, respectively. So while Democra
  • Apr 28, 2008

    Women and Other Historical Beings

    by Cliopatria

    Felix at Bay Radical will host History Carnival LXIV on Thursday 1 May. Send him nominations of April's best in history blogging at bayradical*at*gmail*dot*com or use the form. History Carnival needs hosts for subsequent months. If you'd like to host one of the monthly carnivals at your blog this summer or fall, please contact sharon*at*earlymoder
  • Apr 27, 2008

    Thomas Sugrue: Review of 4 Books on Racism

    by Cliopatria

    [Thomas J. Sugrue, the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis and, most recently, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Unfinished Struggle for Racial Equality in the North (forthcoming this fall from Random House).]

    *Race Relations: A Critique *
    by Stephen Steinberg

    *Come on People: On the Path From Victims to Victors *
    by Bill Cosby and Alvin F. Poussaint
  • Apr 26, 2008

    Race and Indiana

    by Cliopatria

    Since the Pennsylvania primary, there's been quite a bit of discussion of the role of race in propping up the Clintons' campaign. Few, however, have been quite as blunt as a supporter of the Clintons polled in the just-released Indianapolis Starpoll. (Obama leads by three, with a large number of undecided voters--and, remarkably, beats McCain in a hypothetical Indiana general election matchup.)
  • Apr 25, 2008

    Week of April 21, 2008

    by Cliopatria

  • Daniel Henninger

    Sam Nunn and David Boren by political temperament should be in [Hillary's] camp. Instead, they threw in with Obama, who calls his campaign"post-partisan," a ludicrous phrase. The blowback at ABC's debate makes clear that Obama is the left's man. So what did Messrs. Nunn and Boren see?

    The biggest event was the Clinton Abandonment. In a campaign of surprises, none has been more breatht

  • Apr 25, 2008

    Historical Argument From Soup to Nuts

    by Cliopatria

    I tell my students that all good research projects and analytical writing have to provide an answer to the question, “So what?”, a justification for the project or the essay. One student asked me if history as a discipline had any stock or standard answers to that question.

    I started to list a few that I could think of, and then a few more. I thought I’d try out the results here, to see if readers could knock a few down or add some more.


    Many hist