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Cliopatria

  • Jan 27, 2008

    Modern Confrontational Notes

    by Cliopatria

    Geoffrey C. Ward,"Death's Army," NYT, 27 January, reviews Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.

    Jonathan Yardley reviews Stephen Budiansky's The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox for the Washington Post, 27 January.

    Michael Sims,"

  • Jan 26, 2008

    Joseph M. Levine (1933-2008)

    by Cliopatria

    Joseph M. Levine, the distinguished early modern European intellectual historian at Syracuse University, died early this morning. His son, Peter Levine, a noted professor of philosophy and public policy at the University of Maryland, remembers his father. Thanks to Tony Grafton for the tip.
  • Jan 25, 2008

    Chafe, Hillary, and LBJ

    by Cliopatria

    William Chafe is widely considered one of the nation’s leading historians of civil rights. The former president of the AHA has, among other works, authored an influential book on the Greensboro sit-ins.

    In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve come to a very different view of Chafe because of my involvement in the lacrosse case. In March 2006—based on less than one week of press reports—Chafe

  • Jan 25, 2008

    Week of Jan. 21, 2008

    by Cliopatria

  • Fred Inglis

    The great Italian historian, Arnoldo Momigliano, could, his admirers said, make history"out of two used bus tickets" . Patrick Wright can not only do the same; he proves that the litter, the ruins, the rusty old vehicles of the past are our most trustworthy records of the heap of hope, deathliness and menda
  • Jan 25, 2008

    Japanese Old Photographs in Bakumatsu-Meiji Period


    by Cliopatria

    During the second half of the 19th century, Japan changed dramatically, marked in large part by the overthrow of the feudal Tokugawa regime and rapid formation into a modern nation-state. At the same time, photographic technology emerged and became increasingly portable. When Westerners visited Japan, viewing the country and people through the lens of Western expectations, they began recording what they saw with photographs. Travelers who brought cameras produced many landscape photographs as we
  • Jan 25, 2008

    What Does New Hampshire Tell Us?

    by Cliopatria

    HNN welcomes your comments.

    You do not have to register to participate in this poll for the first two weeks; after that, registration is required. We do ask all readers to abide by our civility guidelines whether they register or not.

    To participate in our poll simply drop down to the bottom of this page and click on the word"Comments."

    Two small, homogenous, mostly rural states have now

  • Jan 24, 2008

    Till the Cows Come Home

    by Cliopatria

    One of this year's cleverest advertising campaigns, in the GOP primary to replace Speaker Dennis Hastert. The target is dairy farmer Jim Oberweis (who has also run, unsuccessfully, for Senate and governor).
  • Jan 23, 2008

    Freedom House Ratings

    by Cliopatria

    The 2007 ratings are now available, and the overall trend is discouraging:"According to the survey’s findings, the year 2007 was marked by a notable setback for global freedom. The decline was most pronounced in South Asia, but also reached significant levels in the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa. It affected
  • Jan 21, 2008

    "One of the Worst Negative Ads . . ."

    by Cliopatria

    It remains open to debate whether Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire remark about Martin Luther King, LBJ, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an attempt to play to race. I suspect probably not, but given a variety of other initiatives of the Clintons’ campaign that do seem to have been racially polarizing, it’s hard to give Clinton the benefit of the doubt. At the very least, the remark suggested how Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama approach politics differently, a theme recently explored in a lo
  • Jan 21, 2008

    What are historians doing when they explain things?

    by Cliopatria

    This was originally posted on my history blog at A Historian's Craft

    I've been thinking more about explanation & causation in history recently. It seems to me that there are structural elements in both film and narrative that are quite similar to the Humean model of causation: that is to say, images or phrases are placed one after the other, and the viewer or reader has a"habit-driven" inclination to

  • Jan 21, 2008

    Things Noted Here and There

    by Cliopatria

    Jonathan Beck,"Junior Staff Lecturers want equal rights," Jerusalem Post, 21 January. After senior lecturers at Israeli universities returned to classes from a three months' strike yesterday, adjunct junior lecturers complain that they've been left out of agreements and have very disadvantageous working conditions. Thanks to Brian Ulrich for the tip.

    Eliot Weinberger,"