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Cliopatria

  • Nov 7, 2010

    Kenyan Muslim Socialist Watch

    by Cliopatria

    Chris Bray’s last post notwithstanding, I find it even scarier when the Tea Party gets their history right. For example:
    [Glenn] Beck condemned a"guy in the Republican Party who says his favorite president is Theodore Roosevelt." He then read disapprovingly the Roosevelt quote that “we grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used . . . so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community.”"Is this what the Republican Party stands for?" Bec
  • Nov 7, 2010

    Sows Ate My Zoloft

    by Cliopatria

    In her widely celebrated new book about the contemporary Tea Party movement's relationship to U.S. history, Harvard professor Jill Lepore laments the right-wing embrace of a facile and blindly reverent view of the past.

    "Antihistory," she writes,"has no patience for ambiguity, self-doubt, and introspection...Political affiliates are, by nat
  • Nov 5, 2010

    Africa Past and Present Podcast # 45

    by Cliopatria

    Episode 45 of Africa Past and Present -- the podcast about African history,
    culture, and politics -- is now available at: http://afripod.aodl.org

    In this show, Prof. Terence Ranger (Emeritus, University of Oxford) discusses his
    many contributions to African Studies and African History, how these themes have
    developed, and also his 17th book: Bulawayo Burning/ /(2010). This is the first of
    three podcasts recorde
  • Nov 4, 2010

    Compare

    by Cliopatria

    2010. ("Indeed, progressives are urging him to seize the opportunity to take a more muscular approach with his executive powers...and his prerogatives as commander in chief to make decisive moves that can't be sabotaged by Congressional Republicans. The basic message: So much for the prime minister routine, it's time to act like a president.")

  • Oct 29, 2010

    Wet with Blood: The Investigation of Mary Todd Lincoln's Cloak

    by Cliopatria

    Sometime after President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theater in April 1865, Elizabeth Keckly, the former slave and personal confidante of Mary Todd Lincoln, acquired the opera cloak she was wearing that night. In 1890, Keckly sold it to an antiquities dealer, describing it as"wet with blood stains" on the night of the assassination.

    This cloak is the centerpiece of this website devoted to the forensic drama surrounding the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. More than 100 ima

  • Oct 28, 2010

    Oh, the humanities!

    by Cliopatria

    [Cross-posted at Airminded.]

    Hindenburg, 6 May 1937

    There's been much discussion in various places and in various ways recently about the woeful state of the humanities in various university systems around the English-speaking world, particularly in light of the

  • Oct 28, 2010

    74th Millenum BCE Notes

    by Cliopatria

    Blombos Cave in South Africa may be the coolest archaeological site in the world. As this Science News article reports, the Blombos excavation team has discovered pressure-flake worked tools dating to roughly 75,000 years ago. That pushes the date for the earliest appearance of this crucial technology back over 50,000 years. The previous oldest examples of this techno