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Cliopatria

  • Aug 22, 2007

    Misusing History

    by Cliopatria

    President Bush delivered an address today before the VFW, pointing to historical lessons from East Asia to justify his policy in Iraq.

    For a positive legacy, he cited South Korea:"The defense strategy that refused to hand the South Koreans over to a totalitarian neighbor helped raise up an Asian Tiger that is a model for developing countries across the world, including the Middle East."

    That statement might very well be true: it certainly would justify the war to liberate Kuwait. But

  • Aug 20, 2007

    Music, Silence, and Candidates

    by Cliopatria

    At New Music Box, Andrew Waggoner has a wonderful article on music and the loss of silence. Here is one of many statements that have expressed thoughts of mine far better than I ever have:
    In many world societies, however, there are still spaces—if only interior, or metaphorical, or temporal—set aside for contemplation, for noiseless recalibration of the soul, and in conte
  • Aug 20, 2007

    Jim Sleeper: Review of David Gelernter's Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion (Doubleday)

    by Cliopatria

    [Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale University, is at work on a book about the American republic's Hebraic and Calvinist roots]

    "Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain," warns Psalm 127 -- as does David Gelernter, the militantly neoconservative Yale computer scientist and patriotic rhapsodist who cites that verse often in "Americanism." Many Americans do sense that a national-security state full of armed watchmen needs th
  • Aug 20, 2007

    Rethinking That Conference Paper

    by Cliopatria

    If:book alerts the"scholars in the humanities, film and media studies especially" to check out SciVee - which"moves science beyond the printed word and lecture theater". In essence, a researcher can upload both the paper and a video/annotated presentation of the research. The video, they suggest, should be"as if you were presenting in front of a live audience
  • Aug 19, 2007

    "Executive Privilege"

    by Cliopatria

    [Mr. Kaiser is the Stanley Kaplan Professor of History and Leadership Studies at Williams College, and the author of American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (2000).]

    More than thirty years ago, in a brilliant work of legal history, Raoul Berger exploded the idea of executive privilege. Little, it seems, has changed since then.

    Late last month, the White House refused to allow two former officials, including former White House counsel H

  • Aug 17, 2007

    Aug. 13, 2007

    by Cliopatria

  • Re: White House Weddings Alexander Burns :

    I wonder, if the Bushes decide against a White House wedding, whether it might not be in part in order to avoid comparisons with one that took place almost exactly 40 years ago. In 1967 Lynda Bird Johnson wed there, marrying the Marine Corps veteran and Bronze Star recipient Charles Robb. A newsreel about the event is available here. In the midst of an unpopular war, and as