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Cliopatria

  • Oct 30, 2007

    Why they called it the Manhattan Project

    by Cliopatria

    By nature, code names and cover stories are meant to give no indication of the secrets concealed. "Magic" was the name for intelligence gleaned from Japanese ciphers in World War II, and "Overlord" stood for the Allied plan to invade Europe.

    Many people assume that the same holds true for the Manhattan Project, in which thousands of experts gathered in the mountains of New Mexico to make the world's first atom bomb.

    Robert Norris, a historian of the
  • Oct 30, 2007

    Kentucky

    by Cliopatria

    This year's gubernatorial elections are likely to be a wash: Republicans captured Louisiana, but the Democrats are almost certain to win Kentucky, thanks in large part to Governor Ernie Fletcher's appalling ethics record.

    Fletcher took office following the ethically challenged administration of Democratic governor Paul Patton, and called himself an ethics"reformer." In what's certainly the year's most biting political ad, a Kentucky good-government group contrasts the rhetoric with
  • Oct 29, 2007

    Revising Giuliani's Record

    by Cliopatria

    Below, Ralph references David Greenberg's Post op-ed on Rudy Giuliani. Writes Greenberg,"As any New Yorker can tell you, the last word anyone in the 1990s would have attached to the brash, furniture- breaking mayor was 'liberal' -- and the second-to-last was 'moderate.'"

    That's more than a bit of an overstatement: take, for instance, Conservative Party chairman Mike Long, who repeatedly withheld the party's line from Giuliani because of the former mayor's positions on abortio
  • Oct 28, 2007

    Sunday Notes

    by Cliopatria

    Leonardo Da Vinci's"The Last Supper" went online yesterday at 16 billion pixels –"1,600 times stronger than the images taken with the typical 10 million pixel digital camera." You should be able to see it as if you were standing only inches away. NYT report.

    Louis Bayard,"

  • Oct 25, 2007

    Week of Oct. 22, 2007

    by Cliopatria

  • Daniel Henninger

    In the"60s, the left introduced the"non-negotiable demand" into our politics. It's still with us. It's political infantilism. In real life, the non-negotiable"demand" usually ends about age six.
  • John Mulaa, Nairobi writer

    History has a rude way of cocking a snook at temerariou
  • Oct 24, 2007

    On Photographs: Conclusion

    by Cliopatria

    By thinking about the Fenton photographs we are essentially thinking about some of the most vexing issues in photography – about posing, about the intentions of the photographer, about the nature of photographic evidence – about the relationship between photographs and reality.

    The third, and final, part of Errol Morris's remarkable essay on Robert Fenton's two photographs is now out.

    Like I said before, it is essent
  • Oct 22, 2007

    What are historians good for? Part II

    by Cliopatria

    In my first post to Revise and Dissent, I lamented that historians don't have good answers to the question:"Why does your work matter to anyone who is not an historian?" I heard two very engaging talks over the last 8 days, from two historians of science and medicine with very different takes on the issue: Alice Dreger and William Newman.

    Last week, Alice Dreger gave proba