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Cliopatria

  • Nov 15, 2007

    ClerkWeb Timeline

    by Cliopatria

    A remarkable new website from the House Clerk's office provides a model of how federal government agencies can use the internet to bring congressional history to the public.

    The House History timeline provides an interactive, narrative summary of the history of the House. In addition to covering all of the key dates

  • Nov 15, 2007

    Lapham's Quarterly

    by Cliopatria

    On Monday, Harper's editor emeritus and national correspondent, Lewis Lapham, launched his new venture, Lapham's Quarterly, in NYC. It intends to set"the story of the past in the frame of the present."
    Four times a year the editors seize upon the most urgent question then current in the headlines - foreign war, financial panic, separation of church and state - and find answers to that question from authors whose writings
  • Nov 13, 2007

    Nov. 12, 2007

    by Cliopatria

  • Wall Street Journal Headline

    Minutes in World War II took a toll comparable to that of months in Iraq.
  • Bob Greene

    It was reported [after Paul Tibbets died] that he claimed never to have lost a night’s sleep after the mission, and some saw this as a show of indifference. It was
  • Nov 12, 2007

    Shifting Baselines

    by Cliopatria

    So apparently the war in Iraq is over, and that country is at peace. Violence has dropped off sharply...in the last three months. American commanders say the drop-off means that Iraqis are renouncing violence and realizing that they've"had enough."

    No. This is not hard. Start with the AP story I linked to above:"Associated Press figures show a sharp drop in the number of U.S. and Iraqi deaths across the country in
  • Nov 11, 2007

    When did Americans become deodorant-crazy?

    by Cliopatria

    ... People’s fear of sweating is usually far greater than how much they actually perspire, said Dr. David Bank, a dermatologist in Mount Kisco, N.Y. “Fewer than 5 percent of people really suffer from debilitating sweating,” he said. “That’s called hyperhidrosis. But I’ve found 50 percent of individuals think they sweat excessively.”

    People who suffer from extreme malodor are even rarer, said George Preti, an analytical organic chemist who studies body odor at the Monell Chemical Sen
  • Nov 11, 2007

    A Norman Mailer Prelude to a Betty Smith Party

    by Cliopatria

    Sorry, Norman. We met, but I don't remember much about it. My loss, I suppose you'd think.

    There are photographs of me with some notables – Richard Nixon, most notoriously. The picture always refreshes my memory of a time in 1957, when we were both Vice Presidents. Him of the United States; me of Louisville, Kentucky's Young Republican Club. Yes, I was. But I have no photographs with most of the notables

  • Nov 8, 2007

    Kirk Bane: Review of Robert Greenfield's Exile on Main St.: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones (Da Capo Press, 2006)

    by Cliopatria

    In the summer of 1971, the Rolling Stones recorded their double-disc masterpiece, Exile on Main St. For the band, settled in the south of France to escape British tax laws, it was a time of chaos and creativity. In his fast-paced, gossipy, lurid, and unsparing account, Exile on Main St.: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones (Da Capo Press, 2006), veteran rock writer Robert Greenfield maintains that the album was “recorded under the influence of heroin... [and] mixed by people snorting high
  • Nov 8, 2007

    The Further Adventures of Ben Franklin's Ghost

    by Cliopatria

    The other day, I posted about Ben Franklin’s posthumous popularity as the go to ghost for American spiritualists. Probably Franklin’s most frequent and energetic earthly correspondent was an abolitionist minister turned spiritualist named John Murray Spear. In 1851 or 1852, Spear and his daughter Sophronia began seeking messages from the spirit world. In 1853, they announced that Spear had become the mouthpiece fo
  • Nov 8, 2007

    Around the World in the 1890s: Photographs from the World’s Transportation Commission, 1894-1896


    by Cliopatria

    A hand-colored photograph from 1895 shows a soldier riding a reindeer near the Eastern Siberian Railway. Another photograph from the same year shows a busy day on Collins Street in Melbourne, including buildings, individuals, and multiple forms of transportation. Both images are part of a larger collection of 900 photographs covering a wide variety of subjects.

    Between 1894 and 1896, American photographer William Henry Jackson traveled throughout the world for the World’s Transporta
  • Nov 8, 2007

    Week of Nov. 5, 2007

    by Cliopatria

  • New York American Revolution Round Table Newsletter

    In one of his less glorious moments, on September 24, 2007, Mayor Bloomberg compared the Iraq War to the American Revolution,"but this time we’re the British." He was not comparing motives, he said. Only the way Iraq insurgents were apparently flummoxing our trained regular army. Mr. Bloomberg doesn’t seem to realize that the Americans of 1776 had a regular army too, and Washington insisted the war c