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Cliopatria

  • Jul 15, 2005

    Our New Battle Cry

    by Cliopatria

    Here’s another, ho hum, report on our nation’s systematic use of torture. The article also contains more evidence of our nation’s systematic effort to lie to itself about our use of torture by mangling the language. In this case, and it is clever, the Bush Administration has created a continuum of interrogation techniques and limited the world “torture” to the point where the bones are broken and t
  • Jul 14, 2005

    O Chronology, I Love You ...

    by Cliopatria

    Most of you have probably heard of the recent tiff between Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum and Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy over Santorum's charge that the liberal culture of the People's Republic of Massachusetts was the soil in which priestly abuse of children would take place. Specifically, Santorum said that

    Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every el
  • Jul 14, 2005

    Rehnquist's Excuse

    by Cliopatria

    Chief Justice Rehnquist's schoolboy reply to reporters the other day that it is for him to know whether he plans to resign and them to find out is symptomatic of his failure to handle this episode in his career with aplomb.

    He holds as chief justice a great deal of power. It is not unreasonable for reporters to wonder if he plans to continue holding onto this power in light of his physical ailments. To treat their question with contempt, as he did, is beneath his office--and an ins
  • Jul 14, 2005

    Chertoff

    by Cliopatria

    By and large, I think Michael Chertoff has done a good job as Homeland Security Secretary. (Of course, following Tom Ridge, it would have been hard to have done worse.) But today he made some astonishing comments about the federal response to the War on Terror.

    According to the AP, Chertoff argued that while the federal government would handle airline security, improving security against terrorism on the nati

  • Jul 14, 2005

    Some Recommended Things ...

    by Cliopatria

    Michael Berube,"48 Hours," 11 July, responds to the decision of Pennsylvania's state House of Representatives to establish a committee to inquire into matters of intellectual diversity at colleges and universities supported by the Commonwealth.

    Congratulations to our colleague, Caleb McDaniel, whose"Blogging in the Early Republic" gets

  • Jul 14, 2005

    More Things ...

    by Cliopatria

    Academic Politics! Scott McLemee's"A Classic Revisited," Inside Higher Ed, 14 July, takes another look at F. M. Cornford's Microcosmographia Academica.

    Carnival! Caleb McDaniel will host the History Carnival on Friday 15 July at Mode for Caleb. Send your nominations of the best in history blogg

  • Jul 12, 2005

    Some Things I Hadn't Yet Noted ...

    by Cliopatria

    Women's Review: The Women's Review of Books was founded in 1983, won considerable respect and a peak circulation of 12,000. Circulation declined to 5,500 by December 2004, however, when rising debt forced it to cease publication. The Boston Globe reports that Wellesley College has reached an agreement with Old City Publishing that will allow the WRB to renew publication. Th
  • Jul 12, 2005

    Rebunk's Summer Vacation

    by Cliopatria

    Rebunk will more than likely be sporadic at best in posting for the next week or so. Marc is on vacation with his wife, surely thinking about anything but blogging. Knowing how excited Steve was about his research trip, he probably is spending his days knee deep in archive boxes and his nights curled up with the photocopies and a bottle of wine. Rich is still celebrating his last great victory in the Vermont courts, is hard on the job search, and is nursing a torn up ankle from his softball leag
  • Jul 12, 2005

    Sacre Bleu!

    by Cliopatria

    The Thunderstick reports from the US: “They just said on Sportscenter that France will not pursue the 2016 summer Olympics--I'm sure there's a 'French surrender' joke in there somewhere.”

  • Jul 12, 2005

    Pursuit of the Middle Class Terrorist

    by Cliopatria

    Tony Blair’s government has released via backchannels a report on Islamic radicals recruiting disaffected middle class Muslim students. However, one hopes that the report uses statistics better than this paragraph from the press report linked above suggests:
    It paints a chilling picture of the scale of the task in tackling terrorism. Drawing on information from MI5, it concludes: “Intelligence indicates that the number of British Mu
  • Jul 12, 2005

    Check This Kid Out

    by Cliopatria

    Today’s Boston Globe has a story about a remarkable twelve-year-old who blogs about sports. Alex’s Sports Blog is well written, smart, and in the tradition of any good blog, is chock full of ardent but well-defended opinions.
  • Jul 11, 2005

    How Green Is Your Lawn?

    by Cliopatria

    William Weir, in the Hartford Courant (7-10-05):

    Greg Burritt of Durham spends two hours a day, seven days a week on his lawn, and he's still not happy with it.

    It's mainly some brown patches that are eating at him, which he blames on Foxy, his German Shepherd mix. See that? he says, pointing to a spot of dead grass. That's what dog urine will do.

    ``If you could invent something that would take care of that, you could quit your job forever,'' he says.

    Actually, Bu

  • Jul 11, 2005

    More Noted Things ...

    by Cliopatria

    Iraq: Last night, I dropped Chris Bray off at the Atlanta airport for his return to Fort Benning after a very enjoyable day and a half of good companionship. Knowing that he is committed for a tour of duty in Iraq is re-assuring on one level, but it makes all the more poignant the points raised in Eliot A. Cohen's"A Hawk Questions Himself as His Son Goes to War," Washington Post, 1
  • Jul 11, 2005

    Making Lists

    by Cliopatria

    Anne Zook is one of my favorite bloggers, so it pains me to have to cite her as the example of a trope which bugs me. She's not alone, though. I've noticed a fair number of people, when talking about the recent London attacks, citing it as the end of a string of attacks:"9/11, 3/11, 7/7" o

  • Jul 10, 2005

    The Massachusetts Game

    by Cliopatria

    Today's Boston Globe has a wonderful article by John Thorn. A member of the Society for American Baseball Research and the author of Total Baseball: The Ultimate Besball Encyclopedia, Thorn had a brief moment in the sun last year when he discovered that baseball, or something closely resembling it, had been played in Pittsfield in Western Massachusetts, in 1791, long be
  • Jul 10, 2005

    And Still Undefeated . . .

    by Cliopatria

    Rebunk is pleased to announce that one of our own, Richard Holmes, just received word that he won his most recent (and with a career change in the works, probably final) case before the Vermont Supreme Court.

    In a unanimous decision the justices sided with his client, and Richard gets to go out on top. Holmes goes out with a 3-0 record before the Green Mountain State’s highest court. Or as he put it: