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Cliopatria



  • On Tribble, The Final Episode...

    by Cliopatria

    ...although I'll be back with the sequel as soon as I've finished sifting through the more than thirty emails I've received from grad student and non-grad student bloggers.

    For those of you who don't know about this effort, here's the short version: I'm interested in finding out if grad student bloggers really are at a disadvantage on the job market, as Tribble suggested. More than thirty responses is a lot, but I want more!!

    Here's the

  • Library Thing

    by Cliopatria

    Library Thing is proving to be a wonderful distraction from freshman comp essays and administrative paperwork. The site, active since late August, uses a simple interface: type in some identifying details about your book--e.g., an ISBN, author's name, or part of the title--and a tag, and lo! the LOC or Amazon catalogs fill in the rest. Click on the appropriate link, and you now have an entry in your very own library catalog. If necessary, you can ente

  • Katrina ... Greatest Natural Disaster in Our History?

    by Cliopatria

    By HNN Staff

    ... The reality is that America has faced and successfully overcome a disaster that was greater than the New Orleans flood in almost every dimension. It was one that took more lives, left as many people homeless, and destroyed more wealth than Hurricane Katrina. And it involved all the same “unprecedented” incidents of civil violence, failures of first responders, government incompetence, and racial undertones.

    It was the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, almost exactly a century ago. It’s proof that everything that’s old will one day be new again.

    When the earthquake struck San Francisco at dawn on April 18, 1906, the city held about 400,000 people — not so different from the 485,000 in New Orleans a century later. The quake, and the fire that followed, left from 225,000 to 300,000 homeless, which likely exceeds the number that will turn out to have been left homeless in New Orleans by Katrina.


  • The Tipping Point

    by Cliopatria

    Generally, I am unsympathetic to doomsday scenarios but this article in The Independent, Global Warming 'past the point of no return' has me in jitters. Steve Connor writes:
    They believe global warming is melting Arctic ice so rapidly that the region is beginning to absorb more heat from the sun, causing the ice to melt still further and so reinforcing a vicious cycle of melting and hea

  • History Carnival #16

    by Cliopatria

    is up at Orac's place.

    History Carnival Button

    Orac, one of the finest carnival hosts in the blogosphere, has turned a mere two weeks of historical blogging into a TV lineup that should make the History Channel hang their heads in shame.

    I sh


  • Embrace the Race

    by Cliopatria

    "I want Arabs to get sexed up like nothing else," wrote Jill Bandes a"19 [yr old] blond-haired, blue-eyed, Caucasian Jew" in the Daily Tar Heel."I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport." Hmm. Forget the racial profiling for security. There is more going on in this column."When asked if she had a boyfriend, Ann Coulter once said that any time she had

  • Tribble Fall Out Part II

    by Cliopatria

    I've gotten many responses to my appeal for blogging information from grad student and faculty bloggers in the humanities and social sciences. You've whet my appetite for more! Please go to the survey and email me your response as soon as possible: rgoetz AT fas DOT harvard DOT edu.

    If you've already taken the

  • The AHA Program

    by Cliopatria

    The current issue of Perspectives includes a call for comments on the mix of modes of presentation at the meeting. I'm glad to see the AHA soliciting advice. I was on the Program Committee a few years back and I wasted everyone's time at a busy meeting by yapping about this topic a bit. It's nice to think about it in advance so that a future Program Committee might be able to work it into the call for proposals.

    Here's what I've suggested (same thing I suggested at the Prog

  • Primary Day

    by Cliopatria

    New York polls are open from 6am till 9pm Tuesday. As a supporter from the start of the mayoral bid of Congressman Anthony Weiner, the only candidate who would have a chance of beating Mike Bloomberg in November and a figure who's been head-and-shoulders above his competitors intellectually, I've been delighted by his recent surge in the polls--he's now a solid second, although there

  • Rating the President(s)

    by Cliopatria

    "Presidential Leadership: The Rankings," OpinionJournal, 12 September, gives and James Tarantino,"How's He Doing," interprets the results from a survey of 130 prominent professors of economics, history, law, and political science, which asked them to rate American presidents on a scale of 1-5. Sponsored by the Federalist Society and the Wall Street Journal, t

  • Breaking news on the Japanese American Internment

    by Cliopatria

    The military removal and confinement of some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the Pacific Coast during 1942, popularly (if imprecisely) known as the Japanese American internment, remains a powerful event in our national consciousness. The legacy and lessons of the events have been well established, or so one might think. After all, in 1988 the United States government granted an official apology for and a $20,000 redress payment to those affected. Manzanar itself has become a National Hi