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Cliopatria

  • Dec 20, 2005

    Jonathan Rosenberg: Review of John Lewis Gaddis's The Cold War: A New History

    by Cliopatria

    ... As US leaders strain to manage America's current overseas dilemmas, The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis transports us to an earlier era. In luminous detail, Gaddis, the Robert A. Lovett professor of history at Yale, traces the history of the conflict that dominated world politics from the end of World War II to the early 1990s. How long ago it all seems.

    Gaddis, America's most distinguished cold war historian, has been writing about the subject for more than 30 year
  • Dec 20, 2005

    NCH WASHINGTON UPDATE (Vol. 11, #49; 20 DECEMBER 2005)

    by Cliopatria

    The following is an abstracted report of the Executive Director detailing the work of the National Coalition for History in 2005. The full (slightly modified) report will be available online on the NCH website after the annual meeting of the NCH Policy Board on 6 January 2006 in Philadelphia.

    I. ADVOCACY AND POLICY Appropriations: In spite of massive cuts in most domestic programs caused largely by the ongoing war in Iraq, in 2005 history and archives programs overall faired well i

  • Dec 20, 2005

    NCH WASHINGTON UPDATE (Vol. 11, #48; 16 DECEMBER 2005)

    by Cliopatria

    by Bruce Craig (editor) with Nathaniel Kulyk (contributor)

    1. HISTORY COALITION GETS NARA GRANT TO MONITOR AND HELP RECOVER, MISSING, STOLEN, OR ALIENATED DOCUMENTS
    2. HOUSE NARROWLY PASSES EDUCATION BILL
    3. SENATORS BYRD AND FRIST SPAR OVER SENATE HISTORY AND TRADITION
    4. "NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND" IS TOPIC OF NATIONAL HISTORY CENTER CONGRESSIONAL SEMINAR EVENT
    5. WHITE HOUSE ISSUES NEW FOIA EXECUTIVE ORDER
    6. NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE CELEBRATES 20TH ANNIV

  • Dec 20, 2005

    More Noted Things

    by Cliopatria

    Jonathan Alter,"Bush's Snoopgate," Newsweek, 20 December, reveals that the President summoned the New York Times publisher and editor to the Oval Office on 6 December to insist that they kill the story on NSA eavesdropping.

    George F. Will,"Why Didn't He Ask Congress?" Washington Post, 20 December, argues that the

  • Dec 20, 2005

    Cory Maye We Kill You?

    by Cliopatria

    I outlined my understanding of the case of Cory Maye in"An Open Letter to Governor Haley Barbour." [See also: here.] Alas, my op-ed fell into the great op-ed abyss. I'll have to write a better one. I've written to 25 well known friends, asking them to do what they can to bring Cory Maye's plight to public attention. I tried and failed to prompt three major journalists with a social conscienc
  • Dec 19, 2005

    Grading Thoughts....

    by Cliopatria

    • Have your deadlines for submitting grades gotten shorter or longer lately? When we went to direct on-line submission of grades, we gained about 36 hours the first semester, then lost them again. We have not quite four days between the last scheduled final exam and the submission deadline.

    • Does the short window for grading affect the kind of tests/assignments you give? Or does it just affect the subtlety with which you grade?

    • Has anyone else noticed Da Vinci Co

  • Dec 19, 2005

    Bruce Cumings: Review of 2 Books on North Korea and the United States

    by Cliopatria

    If you are looking for the review of Jerome Karabel's The Chosen click here.

    Bruce Cumings teaches in the History Department and the Committee on International Relations at the University of Chicago and is the author of North Korea: Another Country (The New Press, 2003).

    Jasper Becker, Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 300 pp.

    B

  • Dec 18, 2005

    Leon Wieseltier: Review of Spielberg's Munich

    by Cliopatria

    A few days before I read in Time that Steven Spielberg's new movie is so significant that there had been no advance screenings of it, I went to an advance screening of it. The fakery is everywhere, isn't it, though in this instance it nicely captures the self-importance of this pseudo-controversial film. The makers of Munich seem to think that it is itself an intervention in the historical conflict that it portrays. For this reason, perhaps, they have devised a movie that wishes to be shocking a
  • Dec 18, 2005

    A Letter From an Immigrant

    by Cliopatria

    Here is the translation of the pertinent part of a letter I wrote yesterday to the Quebec-based newsmagazine L'ACTUALITÉ, which recently featured a special issue on "101 Words to Understand Quebec." In explaining why I thought that the word "immigration" or "immigrants" should be one, I touched on my own experience as an immigrant to Quebec.
    This brings up two related questions that I consder to be of interest:
    First, is there a significant transhisto
  • Dec 17, 2005

    Naomi Klein: 'Never Before!' Our Amnesiac Torture Debate

    by Cliopatria

    It was the "Mission Accomplished" of George W. Bush's second term, and an announcement of that magnitude called for a suitably dramatic location. But what was the right backdrop for the infamous "We do not torture" declaration? With characteristic audacity, the Bush team settled on downtown Panama City.

    It was certainly bold. An hour and a half's drive from where Bush stood, the US military ran the notorious School of the Americas from 1946 to 1984, a sinister e
  • Dec 17, 2005

    Christian Tyler: Review of Simon Schama's Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution

    by Cliopatria

    Simon Schama's book on the beginnings of the anti-slavery movement is based on a glorious, and for today's Americans shocking, paradox. When the colonists declared independence from the tyranny of British rule, brandishing the rights of man, many of their slaves ran off to join the King's army. One of those refugees was Henry Washington, whose owner was George Washington; another was a comrade of Henry's who rechristened himself "British Freedom". Like the thousands who joined them, th
  • Dec 17, 2005

    Isaac Wolf : Review of Joshua London's Victory in Tripoli

    by Cliopatria

    All the way to America's founding, when North African pirates plundered U.S. merchant ships under the banner of Islam, according to a new book, "Victory In Tripoli."

    Written by Joshua E. London and published in August, the book details the buildup to the war, which ran from 1801 to 1805, showing how North African leaders encouraged piracy of American merchant ships. "Victory" focuses on post-Revolution American politics, recounting how the mounting pirate attack
  • Dec 16, 2005

    Collegiality 101

    by Cliopatria

    A distressing article in this morning's IHE. Donald Hall, chairman of West Virginia's Department of English and a specialist in British studies, queer theory, and cultural studies, has called for setting new priorities in graduate school education. Specifically, Hall wants"more training in service and other forms of collegial interaction," since in grad-scho
  • Dec 16, 2005

    More Proxmire

    by Cliopatria

    As a follow-up on my post yesterday, William Proxmire, who died yesterday, was almost a one-term senator: deep divisions within the Wisconsin Democratic Party swept the party's ticket under in 1964, making John Reynolds the only Dem governor to lose that November and holding Proxmire to 53 percent of the vote.

    An early sign of the problems came in this call from March 1964 between LBJ and Cliff Carter, his point man at the Democratic Natio