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Cliopatria



  • Things Noted Here and There

    by Cliopatria

    Carnival: History Carnival LIV is up at Rebecca Goetz's Historianess!

    American Loyalists: Maya Jasanoff,"Loyal to a Fault," NYTM, 1 July, looks at the American opposition to the American Revolution and the legacy of the Loyalists' subsequent roles elsewhere in the British em


  • Saturday Notes

    by Cliopatria

    Carnival: Rebecca Goetz will host History Carnival LIV at Historianess on Sunday 1 July. Send your nominations of the best in history blogging since 1 June to her at rebecca_goetz*at*hotmail*dot*com or use the form.

    Authors and Publishers:
    Claire Potter,"Ever Wondered How to ...


  • A Piece of the Sky

    by Cliopatria

    The protests of Neo-Nazis at the planned construction of a mosque in Cologne would normally be taken as a sign of resurging German racism. Cologners have registered their disapproval of the construction in large numbers (most preferring a smaller, more modest structure). The extremists are using the uproar to gain legitimacy. Of course, others would still see the controversy through the

  • Week of June 25, 2007

    by Cliopatria

  • Re: Paris Hilton NYT:

    Paris Hilton read aloud her prison writings as if she had spent a lifetime on Robben Island, and that was surely the highlight of this heiress-actress’s first television interview since her release from jail.

  • Re: Bush, Iraq & Turkey Juan Cole:


  • Crossroads To Islam

    by Cliopatria

    A few years ago a book came out called Crossroads to Islam. To call it a revisionist history is to state the case too weakly. It would also tend to give revisionist history a very, very bad name. In the future, I will probably have more extended remarks about this book, but for the moment I will focus mainly on the book's claims about Byzantine religious policy, as that is my main interest in the book.

    Crossroads to Islam has many controversial interpretations of e


  • History At Play

    by Cliopatria

    (Cross-posted to Old is the New New. Comments welcome either place.)

    Bart: Oh boy! Free trading cards!
    Milhouse: Wow! Joseph of Arimathea! Twenty six conversions in A.D. 46!
    Nelson: Whoa, a Methuselah rookie card!
    Ned Flanders: Well, boys, who'd have thought learning about history could be fun?
    Bart: (horrrified) History??
    Milhouse: Learning?!?
    Nelson: Let's get out of here!!!

  • Looking Around

    by Cliopatria

    For the past two weeks I have been engulfed in an intense but satisfying two-week institute with forty-two K-12 teachers. The only news report that I saw was the Colbert Report on Comedy Central. (That’s what living in a dorm will do for you.) I did not even do much web browsing, except for the minimum needed to assure me that the sun still rose in the East and no continents had disappeared.

    Now that it’s all


  • Anthony Dralle: Review of Celluloid Blackboard: Teaching History with Film, ed. Alan S. Marcus

    by Cliopatria


    Much has been made in recent years of many students’ lack of interest in social studies, and of their poor performance in various measures of U.S. history knowledge. Starting with the 1983 publication, A Nation at Risk, and continuing through various studies conducted by Diane Ravitch, Chester Finn, and their peers, advocates of fact-based history study have argued that American students do not know their history as well as they should.

    During the same period of time, rese

  • Clean Hands

    by Cliopatria

    [Crossposted at The Rhine River.]

    What's in a name? NPR reported last week on how the Polish government wants to change the name of Auschwitz in order to emphasize that it was a German camp, not a Polish camp. According to the story, the Polish government feels that the extermination camp is mistakenly associated with Poland, because it lies on Polish soil. Much of the story concerns how UNESCO is

  • Sunday Notes

    by Cliopatria

    Harold Bloom,"The Lost Jewish Culture," NYRB, 28 June, reviews Peter Cole's The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492.

    H. W. Brands,"A Glorious Beginning," Washington Post, 24 June, reviews Michael Barone's Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval that Inspired America's