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Cliopatria

  • Dec 10, 2005

    Post 9/11 America: The Best of Times

    by Cliopatria

    The September 11 attacks and the Global War on Terror they triggered are, on the greater scale of things, no big deal.

    That's the conclusion of a survey of 354 American history professors undertaken by the Siena College Research Institute (SRI). Asked to rank eight"trying times" in American history-- The Revolutionary War, Civil War, World War I, Great Depression, World War II, Cold War, Vietnam/Cultural Revolution, and the current War on Terror, the War on Terror came in dead last
  • Dec 10, 2005

    More Noted Things

    by Cliopatria

    Richard Byrne,"Reading the Plot Forward," CHE, 9 December, (subscriber only) reports on a Folger Institute seminar on the 400th anniversary of the"Gunpowder Plot." It raises questions about whether and how the"Gunpowder Plot" has a place in a history of terrorism. Hiram Hover is skeptical.

    At

  • Dec 9, 2005

    Barry Oakley: Review opf Christopher Hitchens's Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays

    by Cliopatria

    THE Oxford-educated and Washington-based Christopher Hitchens combines two-fisted American punchiness with an English sense of style. Both are richly on offer in this collection of his journalism. You don't just read him, you watch him; he's a performer, contrary and pugnacious, a pit bull impatient with the proprieties of print.

    The only people he'll let pat him are writers. ...

    But once he breaks out of the literary parkland, Hitchens is at his teeth-baring best. He's
  • Dec 9, 2005

    Tulane and NYU

    by Cliopatria

    It's a truism--but one that we sometimes forget nonetheless--that the purpose of universities is to educate students, and that without the tuition payments that students or their families supply, professors would need to find other employment.

    Yesterday, at Tulane, the decline in student enrollment following Hurricane Katrina had its first dramatic impact: the university is e

  • Dec 9, 2005

    Bradford

    by Cliopatria

    Reader Jacob Paul Segal (in the comments section at the post below) posted an article from a recent edition of the Indy Star that I had missed: IU Law professor William Bradford, who received five highly suspicious votes against his reappointment, has resigned, after admitting lying about his military record.

    Before I went public in my tenure case, I was told frankly that every

  • Dec 9, 2005

    Congress News

    by Cliopatria

    As I recently discovered from Ralph Luker, the Washington Post has made available the full services of the Thomas website, which basically has every Congress-related document since 1991 on-line. A similar site, the Century of Lawmaking, similarly has every Congress-related document between 1789 and 1873 on-line. Alas, we continue to wait for Congress to approrpiat
  • Dec 8, 2005

    NCH WASHINGTON UPDATE (Vol. 11, #47; 8 DECEMBER 2005)

    by Cliopatria

    By Bruce Craig (editor) with Nathaniel Kulyk (contributor) NATIONAL COALITION FOR HISTORY (NCH) Website at http://www.h_net.org/~nch/

    1. HISTORY IS SLIPPING AWAY SAYS REPORT
    2. NEW MEMBERS GIVE ADDED CLOUT TO HISTORY COALITION
    3. "TEACHING AMERICAN HISTORY" GRANT ANNOUNCEMENT
    4. AN EISENHOWER MEMORIAL -- A STEP CLOSER TO REALITY
    5. FRANCE REQUIRES TEXTBOOKS TO PUT POSITIVE "SPIN" ON NATION'S COLONIAL PAST
    6. BITS AND BYTES: NCH Fund

  • Dec 8, 2005

    New History Blog from Quebec

    by Cliopatria

    I am pleased to announce the recent opening of a French-language blog on the United States, AUX FRONTIÈRES DE L'ONCLE SAM (On the Borders of Uncle Sam) at http://onclesam.blogspot.com Although the blogger, Seb, does not identify himself other than to say he is a Montreal man, he promises reports on American History and culture. It looks promising--I will be interested to see how it progresses.
  • Dec 7, 2005

    Fun with Adverbs

    by Cliopatria

    While reading the latest statistics on the job market in the December 2005 Perspectives, I had to wonder whether the last line of this paragraph was intentionally, or accidentally, wry.
    As we noted in our last job market report, a sharp drop in the number of new history PhDs in the 2002–03 academic year was followed b
  • Dec 7, 2005

    CFP (Posts, that is): Asian History Carnival #2 coming soon

    by Cliopatria

    Konrad Lawson will be hosting the second edition of the Asian History Carnival at Muninn on Monday, December 12th. You can send your nominations for posts on Asian history (all of Asia! all of history!) to konrad[at]lawson[dot]net through Sunday. If you're thinking of writing something about Memoirs of a Geisha or Chang/Halliday's Mao, this is the weekend for it!

    Got stuff that isn'

  • Dec 7, 2005

    The will to Believe

    by Cliopatria

    I have often had cause in the last years to ponder the odd ways in which history becomes not just a tool for people but an article of faith or identity. I discovered this in particular when I first began doing research on Franklin Roosevelt and Japanese Americans for the project that became By Order of the President. I found that a number of Japanese Americans, on hearing that I was studying Franklin Roosevelt, would ask me whether Roosevelt had foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor and had let Japan at
  • Dec 6, 2005

    Military-Academic Complex Questions

    by Cliopatria

    A group of activists has occupied the offices of University of Hawai'i System Interim President John McLain for several days now, demanding that the UH system back out of an agreement to establish a military research program and undertake substantial research projects. As much of a throwback as this is, we live in a new age, where protests have websites and live video feeds and, of course,

  • Dec 6, 2005

    Betrayal and plagiarism: on falling in love with students

    by Cliopatria

    Through Inside Higher Ed, I found this post: Loving the Liars, by Ryan Claycomb, a professor at West Virginia University.  He and I and countless other profs are dealing with the influx of finals and term papers this time of year, and we're also dealing with the ancient bugbear of plagiarism.

    Ryan writes of one of his early experiences with confronting a young fellow who had