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Cliopatria

  • Oct 19, 2005

    Academic Blogging

    by Cliopatria

    JC: [Laughs.] When you're talking about the debates I hold with my readers and the way I put up critiques of my position, what academic life has to offer is open debate and being honest about your sources, about how you come to a conclusion. The whole point of my blog is to attempt to represent the life of the mind in a public forum. I view what I do as different from politics where you want to stay on message, stay on point. You want to put out an image, a position and stick to it.
  • Oct 19, 2005

    The Times They Are . . .Stuck?

    by Cliopatria

    I caught part of Angels in America last night. It is a reminder, a magnificent one, that the dismal times, the ones in which progress seems stuck and mired and all that is ugly is ascendant, can bust open suddenly into something legitimately hopeful and truly beautiful.

    Certainly the times seem dismal right now. Pakistan is still buried in its Earthquake with relief still only just arriving in some a

  • Oct 18, 2005

    Textbook Tours

    by Cliopatria

    Barely related reading: Chris Bray notes some oddities and ironies in the new Iraqi Constitution and The Little Professor is grading student writing.

    Meanwhile, I'm reviewing the textbook (Brummet, et al., Civilization, Pearson/Longman, 11e) for my section on Islamic societies tomorrow, and

  • Oct 18, 2005

    Times and Post

    by Cliopatria

    While the editors at the New York Times have been busy deciding which information could be published to conform to Judy Miller's legal strategy, maybe it's time to look to the Washington Post as the paper of record. Today's paper features a remarkable profile of alleged corruption by Ohio congressman Bob Ney, who ironically was elected to a previously solid Dem district on an anti-
  • Oct 17, 2005

    A Call for Symposium

    by Cliopatria

    Our fourth symposium will focus on Sean Wilentz's"Bush's Ancestors," which appeared this weekend in the NYT Magazine. Cliopatricians participating in the symposium should send their contributions to manan*at*uchicago*dot*edu. I will post them here on Friday 21 October.

    Contributions from other bloggers are genuinely welcomed at their own blogs.
  • Oct 17, 2005

    Jesse Lemisch: Murrow in the Blitz

    by Cliopatria

    To the Editor:

    Early in World War II, Edward R. Murrow was deeply and emotionally committed to American support of the embattled British. This influenced his dramatic CBS rooftop broadcasts from London during the Nazi bombing. As Neal Gabler writes ["Good Night, and the Good Fight," Op-Ed, October 9], Murrow "[held] out his microphone so that listeners could hear the explosions during the London Blitz."

    There is more to this than Gabler reports. In
  • Oct 17, 2005

    Jill Lepore: Review of Sean Wilentz's The Rise of American Democracy (Norton)

    by Cliopatria

    ... Wilentz’s initial foray into the story of democracy’s rise came with his first book, “Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850” (1984), in which he argued that urban workers and radicals constituted the truly democratic element in Jacksonianism. Wilentz was criticized for his depiction of manly artisans fighting the good fight (in my dog-eared copy, I found a note, passed to me by a classmate: “Do Wilentz’s workers have any vices other than the o
  • Oct 17, 2005

    Purity and Popularity, thinking about feminisms

    by Cliopatria

    I'm quite happy with the thoughtful discussion beneath this post at my own blog about why some young women shy away from the label "feminist."  I've been thinking about the various ways I've tried, over the years, to "win" both young men and women over to the feminist cause.

    At times, I confess I've used the ultimately unsatisfactory strategy of broadening the definition of the f

  • Oct 17, 2005

    Goldstein on Academic Freedom

    by Cliopatria

    CUNY’s faculty union, the PSC, has issued some unusual statements on academic freedom over the past year. Although the CUNY contract doesn’t give adjuncts the right to reappointment, the PSC claimed that “academic freedom” mandated the reappointment of adjuncts Mohammed Yousry and Susan Rosenberg, who were accused or convicted of crimes associated with political causes the PSC found appealing. (Such a philosophy puts a whole new spin on the criminal nature of the contemporary adjunct system.)

  • Oct 16, 2005

    Noted in Proxy

    by Cliopatria

    ....that Issue # 18 of the History Carnival is up at Acephalous. Many thanks to Scott Eric Kaufman for a splendid job.

    .....that Timothy Garton Ash spend a few weeks in Iran and wrote about it in the NYRB: Soldiers of the Hidden Imam.

    ....that Anatol Lieven, author of America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, says his piece

  • Oct 16, 2005

    Badly Disposed at Washington State

    by Cliopatria

    The “dispositions” movement is again rearing its ugly head, this time in Washington State University’s Education Department. This vague concept is a favorite of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), which in 2002 changed its accreditation requirements to mandate that dozens of education programs around the nation needed to measure each student’s disposition to promote “social justice.”

    Events at

  • Oct 15, 2005

    Yom Kippur Roundup

    by Cliopatria

    Watch this space: the latest History CarnivalIS HERE, at Scott Eric Kaufman's suddenly very popularAcephalous.

    For those of you who didn't experience the Holiest of Holies, or for those of you who did and need to catch up on your blog-reading, here's a rundown.

  • Oct 15, 2005

    More Tierney

    by Cliopatria

    A while back, I wrote a piece on the educational establishment's response to the surveys of faculty partisan breakdown, arguing that these responses, much more than the partisan numbers themselves, made the case for those concerned about the current lack of intellectual diversity on campus.

    John Tierney appears to have noticed the same thing. Earlier this week, he published an op-ed on the ideological imbalance among faculty at

  • Oct 14, 2005

    Marquette's "Diversity" Initiative

    by Cliopatria

    Inside Higher Ed this morning has a troubling article on a new"diversity" initiative launched at Marquette. Provost Madeline Wake has announced that no new hires will be approved unless one"diverse" candidate is in the final pool.

    “I’m not looking for less qualified candidates, but I want a good faith effort to get people in the pool,” said Wake. But for all practical purposes, the policy will set up a two-track search

  • Oct 13, 2005

    Things Noted Here and There

    by Cliopatria

    Atonement: Today is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Whether you observe it or not, it is a good day to seek forgiveness from those you have may have offended.

    Catastrophe: According to Tariq Ali,"Pakistan Will Not Forget," The Guardian, 12 October, early reports may have vastly understated the earthquake's destruction in Kashmir and neighbo

  • Oct 12, 2005

    Perception is Reality

    by Cliopatria

    In case you missed it, Major Bob Bateman began his post at Eric Alterman's Altercation yesterday with a tribute to Mark Grimsley. Writing from Baghdad, Bateman said:
    Perception is Reality

    In Ohio State historian Mark Grimsley is one of the most balanced and intellectually inquisitive academics I know. His interests and insights across a wide-range of fields d

  • Oct 12, 2005

    Ruth Rosen: Review of Catherine Whitney's What Women Really Want

    by Cliopatria

    EVER since American women won the right to vote in 1920, politicians and pollsters have been trying to predict how women will vote and whether, as a group, they will transform American political culture.

    For most of the 20th century, women voted according to their ethnic, class or racial interests. In 1980, however, the first real gender gap appeared. Men cast 54% of their votes for Reagan, compared with 46% of women, creating an 8-point gender gap. This partisan disparity continue