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Cliopatria

  • Nov 7, 2007

    The End of the History of Science?

    by Cliopatria

    I went to a handful of interesting talks at the History of Science Society (HSS) meeting this year.

    If you want to see what an HSS meeting looks like, see my Flickr set: History of Science Society 2007.

    If you want to read my accounts of a few talks and my thoughts on the meeting (and my usual digressions into meta-history), read on...

    The first good talk I went to was the ta

  • Nov 7, 2007

    Putting the "Act" in the Military Commissions

    by Cliopatria

    Morris Davis, an Air Force colonel and the longtime chief prosecutor at Guantanamo, has resigned. He nows says that political appointees in the Bush administration called him on several different occasions and asked that he file charges against detainees at politically useful moments:

    "According to Davis, for more than a year Pentagon officials have sought to influence his decisions about 'who we will charge, what we will charge, what evidence we will try to introduce, and how we wil
  • Nov 7, 2007

    Elections

    by Cliopatria

    Kentucky governor Ernie Fletcher was crushed yesterday in his re-election bid, garnering only 41 percent of the vote. He went down in a classless fashion: with the state GOP authorizing gay-bashingcalls against Democratic nominee Steve Beshear and the governor himself ostentatiously ordering the
  • Nov 5, 2007

    Monday's Notes

    by Cliopatria

    Rebecca Goetz, Mark Grimsley, Kevin Levin, and I closed a bar last Thursday night at the Southern Historical Association's convention in Richmond. You'll find reasonably sober reports on the convention at Andrew Duppstadt's Civil War Navy, Chris Graham's Whig Hill, and Kevin's Civil War Memory. Kevin learns that, in a mo
  • Nov 3, 2007

    In Which I Pick Some Nits

    by Cliopatria

    [cross-posted at Easily Distracted]

    If there's two things I've come to dislike equally, it's bad fantasies with dragon characters (cough Eragon) and bad speculative fiction that recreates Horatio Hornblower or other Napoleonic-era stories (cough David Weber). So I really thought there was no way I could possibly enjoy Naomi Novik'
  • Nov 2, 2007

    Week of Oct. 29, 2007

    by Cliopatria

  • Barack Obama

    I think that if you can tell people, ‘We have a president in the White House who still has a grandmother living in a hut on the shores of Lake Victoria and has a sister who’s half-Indonesian, married to a Chinese-Canadian,’ then they’re going to think that he may have a better sense of what’s going on in our lives and in our country. And they’d be right.
  • Nov 2, 2007

    The Uncomplicated Past and the Troubled Present

    by Cliopatria

    Last week, the pseudonymous blogger at Who Is IOZ?posted -- let's say gleefully posted -- an excerpt from a liberal blogger's founder-referencing cri de coeur:"The Founders of this nation of ours knew that tyrants and greedy SOBs were always going to exist, but they counted on us -- the American public -- to stand with one voice and say 'enough!' when the tipping point had occurred and the wrongs became so excessive
  • Nov 2, 2007

    Can't Tell Your Vanderbilts Without a Number

    by Cliopatria

    The New York Sun appears to think that Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt (who died in 1877) and his wife Sophia (who died in 1868) visited Europe in 1890, and there bought some Turner paintings. It was, of course, the grandson: Cornelius Vanderbilt II, and his wife Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt. As previously noted, a similar confusion appears in Anne Sebba's new book American Jennie. The writer for the Sun also comments that the Vanderbilt descendants are "close-knit." Really? Not that I've no
  • Nov 2, 2007

    More PSC Speech

    by Cliopatria

    At Inside Higher Ed, Scott Jaschik profiles what plaintiff Susan O’Malley herself described as a “very, very silly” cause of action against CUNY gadfly Sharad Karkhanis. O’Malley refused comment to Jaschik, allowing her attorney to speak for her, an approach she should have followed before her damning statement to the Sun.

    The most striking statement in Jaschik’s article comes from PSC spokesperson Dor

  • Nov 1, 2007

    Victory for FIRE

    by Cliopatria

    Two days ago, FIRE publicized a stunning program at the University of Delaware, whose residential life apparatus has been organized to ensure that"students will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society," or that “students will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression." In mandatory meetings with their resident advisors, students learned<
  • Nov 1, 2007

    Larry DeWitt: Review of Lew Daly's God and the Welfare State (MIT Press, 2006)

    by Cliopatria

    [Larry DeWitt is a doctoral student in public policy history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the principal editor of Social Security: A Documentary History (Congressional Quarterly Press, 2008).]

    The reformers of the Progressive Era and New Deal were motivated and guided in part by the reformist impulses of those Christians identified with the Social Gospel tradition. A good example of this was Frances Perkins, Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor, and a pr
  • Oct 31, 2007

    My Friend, Joe Herzenberg (1941-2007)

    by Cliopatria

    Almost all of us who've been to graduate school know someone who came, found it comfortable, and never left. My friend, Joe Herzenberg, was one of those people. We met in the fall of 1971, when I was President of UNC's Graduate History Society, and Joe was entering his doctoral program in history there. I liked him immediately. He was smart, well-educated, grumpy, gregarious, and secretive. I didn't then know all that we'd learn abo
  • Oct 31, 2007

    The Cliopatria Awards

    by Cliopatria

    Nominations for The Cliopatria Awards, 2007, in history blogging will open tomorrow, Thursday 1 November. They will remain open through the month. You'll be invited to submit nominations for the Best Individual Blog, Best Group Blog, Best New Blog, Best Post, Best Series of Posts, and Best Writer. Here are the winners for 2005 and
  • Oct 30, 2007

    Free Speech, PSC-Style

    by Cliopatria

    Most CUNY professors are familiar with The Patriot Returns. Published by professor emeritus Sharad Karkhanis, TPR is an on-line newsletter that has directed barbs at the extremist leadership of the CUNY union (the Professional Staff Congress) and the largely ineffectual leadership of the CUNY University Faculty Senate. TPR played a key role in last year’s union election, where a new slate headed by Kingsborough professor Rina Yarnisch almost upset incumbent Barbara Bowen, fa