Cliopatria

• Oct 31, 2005
  

  Clio's Nightmares

  by Cliopatria

  I wish I had a good Halloween post for all of you today. A rollicking spooky-creepy alternate history. What I really wish I could do in honor of All Hallow’s Eve is just link directly to Ken Hite’s Suppressed Transmission and introduce the gentle readers of Cliopatria to Clio’s Nightmares.
  
  Ken Hite is well-known by a tiny community of tabletop role-playin
  

• Oct 31, 2005
  

  Gallipoli

  by Cliopatria

  This extraordinary documentary was completed in time to screen at the 90th Anniversary celebrations in Turkey, Australia and New Zealand of the iconic and famously bungled campaign to take the peninsula that guarded the approaches to Istanbul.
  
  It is, of course, far from an untold story. Dozens of documentaries of varying scope and quality have explored the events of the winter of 1915 which loom large in the national mythmaking of Australia and New Zealand.
  
  What disting
  

• Oct 31, 2005
  

  OSU EXHIBIT; CURATOR REDISCOVERS ANTARCTIC DRAWINGS TIED TO BYRD

  by Cliopatria

  They've been in the deep freeze for a long time, and now they're sitting under hot gallery lights.
  
  But David Abbey Paige's pastel drawings of the Antarctic aren't in danger of melting.
  
  The crown jewels at Ohio State University's Hopkins Hall Gallery in an exhibition focusing on polar exploration, the drawings were recently unearthed from the OSU Archives.
  
  "It wasn't a matter of ignoring their presence," exhibit curator Prudence Gill said. "I
  

• Oct 31, 2005
  

  The world: Film spotlights Paris night of blood: Jason Burke reports on a nation racked by memories of war in Algeria and the killing of protesters by police

  by Cliopatria

  IN THE film, there are demonstrations on a bridge in Paris. Last week there were protests on the Pont St Michel over the Seine. In the film, there are angry accusations of racism and counter-accusations of betrayal and treason.
  This weekend the harsh words, insults and racial slurs were as virulent as ever.
  
  Today Nuit Noire (Black Night) will be released at a select number of French cinemas. The controversial film, made by one of France's most respected directors, reconstruc
  

• Oct 31, 2005
  

  Victorian Terrors!

  by Cliopatria

  Some spine-tingling Victorian examples of all things gruesome, gory, and ghostly:

  • In search of a little blood-sucking? If you have ample leisure, you can always try reading the endless saga of Varney the Vampire (1845; volume ed. 1847).  The first online edition, with illustrations, is here.  J. S. Le Fanu's novella

  • Oct 31, 2005
    

    Caleb Crain: Reviews of Two New Lincoln Biographies

    by Cliopatria

    At the age of seven, Abraham Lincoln poked his rifle through a crack in the family’s log cabin and shot a turkey. It was the high point of his career as a hunter, and also the end of it. By his own account, he never afterward “pulled a trigger on any larger game.” He was later seen returning baby birds to their nests and defending turtles from boys with hot coals. When he was twenty-three, he captained a militia to fight Indians in Illinois but never saw action. “I had a good many bloody struggl
    

  • Oct 31, 2005
    

    Samuel Alito and the Supreme Court

    by Cliopatria

    So President Bush has chosen Samuel Alito to replace Sandra Day O’Connor.

    On first glance, he looks like a good choice for Bush. Alito is top sirloin from the conservative perspective, as opposed to the spam-like mystery they perceived in Harriet Miers. Also, while very conservative, he tends to be cool in presentation. It sounds like he can give a pretty good “Here, I stand” presentation

    

  • Oct 30, 2005
    

    East Starts Here

    by Cliopatria

    Orhan Pamuk, the great Turkish novelist, has seen both his share of critical acclaim and nationalist persecution. His troubles started after a remark about the Armenian genocide. A over-zealous prosecutor and a jumpy state has made his case a cause-celebré [you know you have arrived when either Bono or Rushdie takes up your case].
    

  • Oct 30, 2005
    

    Fareed Zakaria: Review of George Packer's The Assassins' Gate

    by Cliopatria

    IN "The Assassins' Gate," his chronicle of the Iraq war, George Packer tells the tale of Drew Erdmann, a young American official in Baghdad. Erdmann, a recent Harvard Ph.D. in history, finds himself rereading Marc Bloch's classic firsthand account of the fall of France in 1940, "Strange Defeat." He was particularly drawn to a few lines. "The ABC of our profession," Bloch wrote, "is to avoid . . . large abstract terms in order to try to discover behind them the
    

  • Oct 30, 2005
    

    More Noted Things

    by Cliopatria

    In Iraq: Andrew F. Krepenavich, Jr.,"How to Win in Iraq," Foreign Affairs, September/October 2005. Krepenavich argues that"winning will require a new approach to counterinsurgency ... that focuses on providing security to Iraqis rather than hunting down insurgents [a]nd it will take at least a decade." It strikes me that he may be exactly right, but that the advice comes
    

  • Oct 30, 2005
    

    Scott McLemee: Review of Gombrich's A Little History of the World

    by Cliopatria

    “Whoever cannot give to himself an adequate account of the past three thousand years,” said Goethe, “remains in darkness, without history, living from day to day.” That is an expression of a bedrock principle of liberal humanism, European-style. It takes the existence of the educated individual as its basic unit of reference — its gold standard. But it also judges the quality of that existence by how much the individual has spent in acquiring a sense of the past. That expenditure also meaans, in
    

  • Oct 29, 2005
    

    Things Noted Here and There

    by Cliopatria

    Cliopatria Front: Rumors have reached Atlanta that a small gaggle of Cliopatricians gathered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Thursday. Manan Ahmed, Rebecca Goetz, KC Johnson, and allied dignitaries are also said to have had entirely too much fun. Any doctrinal recommendations made at that conclave are, of course, subject to review by higher – er, I mean more sober -- authorities. And, btw, don't forget to send

  • Oct 28, 2005
    

    So Quilts Were Used as Secret Markers of the Underground Railroad?

    by Cliopatria

    There's been an interesting exchange at H-AmStdy and H-Slavery. A Communications professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, inquired for a Master's degree student about surviving evidence of the use of quilts as markers on the underground railroad in ante-bellum America. It's a notion that was given popular circulation in a book by Jacqueline L. Tobin and Raymond Dobard, Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad (Doubleday, 1999). Subsequently, the notion
    

  • Oct 28, 2005
    

    Gordon S. Wood: Review of Bruce Ackerman's The Failure of the Founding Fathers: Jefferson, Marshall, and the Rise of Presidential Democracy (Belknap Press/Harvard)

    by Cliopatria

    Academic historians are not much interested in constitutional history these days. Historians who write on America's constitutional past are a vanishing breed. For much of the academy, constitutional history, with its concentration on the actions of dead white males, is much too old-fashioned, and not to be compared in importance with cultural and social history, especially of the sort focusing on issues of race and gender. And so the teaching and the writing of constitutional history in American
    

  • Oct 28, 2005
    

    Revealing Ourselves

    by Cliopatria

    Today's Tomorrow's Professor mailing was Lee Shulman's Carnegie Perspectives essay on accountability and feedback in medical education and practice. He highlights the"Morbidity and Mortality" debriefings and a particularly vigorous response by JHU to a consistently flawed protocol: clear guidelines, clear supervision, and responsible parties were giv

    

  • Oct 28, 2005
    

    East Asian Tryptich

    by Cliopatria

    China is braindraining the US to fuel its growing universities.

    In only a generation, China has sharply increased the proportion of its college-age population in higher education, to roughly 20 percent now from 1.4 percent in 1978. In engineering alone, China is producing 442,000 new undergraduates a year, along with 48,000 graduates with masters' degrees and 8,000 Ph.D's.

    As

    

  • Oct 28, 2005
    

    Worlds at Hand

    by Cliopatria

    Scott McLemee's"A Child's Garden of Culture and Atrocity," Inside Higher Ed, 27 October, reviews E. H. Gombrich's A Little History of the World (Yale, 2005) with Scott's usual thoughtfulness. This looks like a great holiday gift for a 10 year old – one that mom and d
    

  • Oct 27, 2005
    

    Miers Withdraws

    by Cliopatria

    Harriet Miers has withdrawn her name from nomination. The fig leaf is concern over the Senate wanting papers related to her job with Bush.

    A few thoughts:

    1. Charles Krauthammer was either influential or had an inside source. He suggested this approach to withdrawal on the 21st.

    2.

    

  • Oct 27, 2005
    

    Additionally Noted

    by Cliopatria

    History Carnival #19 goes up on Tuesday 1 November at (a)musings of a grad student. Send your nominations of exemplary posts that have appeared since 15 October to our colleague, Rebecca Goetz: rgoetz[at]fas[dot]harvard[dot]edu.

    Tristram Hunt,"Quo Vadis America?" The Observer, 23 October, previews a

    

  • Oct 26, 2005
    

    Malcolm X documentary

    by Cliopatria

    Forty years have passed since Malcolm X was shot down while speaking on stage at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City.
    
    To mark that anniversary, "Brother Minister," which was released in theaters in 1995, is available for the first time on DVD.
    
    Directed by Jack Baxter, this makes good use of archival footage of Malcolm X interviews and rallies, as well as numerous written documents after they were declassified by the federal government.
    
    Along wit
    

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