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Cliopatria

  • Aug 21, 2005

    The One-Sided World of "Global Studies"

    by Cliopatria

    This week’s New Republic contains a sharp critique of a book called Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization. Author Michael Goldman is a University of Minnesota sociologist and an affiliate at the U of M’s Institute for Global Studies. Reviewer Joshua Brook (a former aide to the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan) terms the volume a “jeremiad
  • Aug 21, 2005

    Early Modern Carnivalesque!

    by Cliopatria

    Carnivalesque Button

    On Monday September 5, I will be hosting the next Early Modern edition of Carnivalesque over at my other home, (a)musings of a grad student.

    September 5 might seem like a long ways away, but with the chaos of the beginning of the semester, I fig
  • Aug 21, 2005

    Filling the Void

    by Cliopatria

    In 1936, as the German army moved across the Rhine, no British soldiers were in Cologne to confront them. No Belgian troops were in Aachen to prevent them from reaching the border. No French troops were in Trier to control the crowds. And no American troops were in sight to protect the rights of minorities and foreigners. They had already left.

    The remilitarization of the Rhineland is a contentious memory, a point at which Hitler might have been confronted. With the withdrawal
  • Aug 21, 2005

    Some Religious and Political Bloviations

    by Cliopatria

    Simon Worrell's essay,"The Fanatics Who Founded America," London Times, 20 August, first draws a parallel between early America's Pilgrims and the Muslim extremists said to live in contemporary England and, secondly, argues that those Pilgrims poisoned the wellspring of American culture with their own religious extremism, manifest in the contemporary Religious Right. This doesn't bode well for Worrell's forthcomin
  • Aug 20, 2005

    Striking Parallels

    by Cliopatria

    • I was listening to NPR this morning, and a commentator noted that one of the potentially problematic side effects of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza was that the extremist groups would consider it to be a result of their suicide bombing and other terror tactics, and that would legitimize those methods. I was struck, at that moment, by the similarity to the sixty year argument we've been having about the atomic bombs. There are two primary arguments in favor of the bombings: the moral
  • Aug 20, 2005

    Howard Meyer: Edwin Meese's Influence

    by Cliopatria

    The disclosure of the influence of Edwin Meese III on the life and thinking of Judge Roberts is a valued contribution to the current debate about the fitness of Judge Roberts to be confirmed as a justice.

    It throws light on an extremely important issue that the participants -- including leading senators --have failed thus far adequately to explain or emphasize.

    The Meese movement's use of the word "originalism" arose from its dissatisfaction with the judges
  • Aug 20, 2005

    Enraged Moderates Taking Stands

    by Cliopatria

    I was walking around town one evening, early in my first semester of college, getting the lay of the land, experiencing the city, and getting away from the sheltered chaos of the dorm. I came across a poster on a telephone pole: Black background, a triangle dominating the top (too washed out to have any color), and at the bottom an equation:"SILENCE=DEATH" I'd never seen the like before, never heard of ACT-UP or gay liberation or had an openly homosexual

  • Aug 19, 2005

    Paging Dr. Frist

    by Cliopatria

    My favorite line from the 1992 presidential campaign came when Paul Tsongas labeled Bill Clinton the "pander bear." But Clinton is a paragon of ideological consistency compared to Bill Frist. After diagnosing Terry Schiavo from his Senate office, Frist now has endorsed the teaching of intelligent design (and done so in a classic late-Friday news dump, hoping
  • Aug 18, 2005

    What's Not Happening? Hawaiian Sovereignty

    by Cliopatria

    One of the great challenges in history, I think, is the"why not?" question. Once something happens, proximate causes and long-term roots are usually pretty easy to tease out. But explaining the failure of a cause, an idea, a proposal, is more challenging. Particularly when it seems like a reasonable idea to most, a minor adjustment fixing a festering problem.

    At the end of the last Senate session, Hawaii senators Akaka and Inouye clashed with the leadership, the result of which was a c

  • Aug 18, 2005

    Why Did Mercenary Armies Largely Cease to Exist?

    by Cliopatria

    [P]rivate soldiers have been on the battlefield for thousands of years. As P.W. Singer, a scholar of privatized warfare at the Brookings Institution, recounts in his book ''Corporate Warriors,'' mercenaries served in the army of the King of Ur two millennia before Christ; the ancient Greeks supplemented their forces by contracting out for cavalry and for specialists in the slingshot; and private bands of Swiss pikemen, infantry with 18-foot-long weapons, proved themselves superior to cavalry in
  • Aug 18, 2005

    more sheehan, more theater

    by Cliopatria

    Edmund Morris writes that Cindy Sheehan" cannot expect a president to emote on demand."

    But, dollars to donuts, this is not really what Ms. Sheehan wants. At any rate it is not what she is doing. She is staging an impasse, defining the terms of her protest in stark, photo-friendly
  • Aug 17, 2005

    Thanks, and something to read....

    by Cliopatria

    Thanks, Ralph, for the fabulous introduction. I'm quite delighted to be a Cliopatriarch! (Or, Cliomatriarch? I recently discovered that"historianess" is a correct, if archaic, descriptor for a woman historian. So why not Cliomatriarch?)

    Since the readers of this blog have an interest in academic freedom issues, you might be interested in this article in today's Boston
  • Aug 17, 2005

    Still More on Happiness

    by Cliopatria

    Just below, the esteemed Ralph E. Luker links to The Little Professor's insightful discussion of how various religious groups tend to view others as unhappy. The same can also be said for national/political and even economic groups.

    In particular I am reminded of one of the greater incidents of epiphany in my life. During my fieldwork in
  • Aug 17, 2005

    More Noted Things

    by Cliopatria

    Our Cliopatrician in uniform, Chris Bray, e-mailed an update to me yesterday. After a four day leave to visit his wife and family in California, he is back at Camp Shelby outside Hattiesburg, Mississippi. There, two months after his re-induction, time-consuming training has begun in earnest.

    Scott McLemee,"Reading Left to Right, Inside Higher Ed, 16 August, interviews