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Cliopatria

  • Mar 25, 2005

    Good Friday and Terry Schiavo* ...

    by Cliopatria

    For all of us in the Christian tradition, today is Good Friday, the day in the liturgical year when we recall the crucifixion of our Lord, Jesus Christ. It comes, this year, near the end of a long and, sometimes, near obscene struggle over the life and death of one of my fellow Christians, Terri Schiavo. That struggle seems, on this Good Friday, to be near its end.

    It disturbs me that our common Christianity doesn't yield a common understanding of how to think about Terri Schiavo's l

  • Mar 25, 2005

    Contributions for the next History Carnival

    by Cliopatria

    The next History Carnival will be at Clioweb on 1 April. As ever, please send your suggestions for inclusion (your own writing or that of others) to the host: Jeremy Boggs, email jboggs AT gmu DOT edu (and put 'History Carnival' or something similar in the title). If you're not sure of the criteria for inclusion, visit the carnival homepage.
  • Mar 25, 2005

    Churchill Report ...

    by Cliopatria

    The University of Colorado has released its preliminary findings in the internal review of Ward Churchill. Here is a summary of its findings."Bottom line: Ward Churchill will not be fired for his 9/11 comments, but will be investigated for issues concerning his research. He will not be investigated on issues concerning his teaching. He will be investigated for issues concerning his Indian ethnicity, becaus
  • Mar 25, 2005

    I Pledge Allegiance

    by Cliopatria

    Care of HNN, I learned of this Washington Post article on people protesting saying the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish in public schools.

    When I first read the HNN summary, I thought, “Huh? ” I remembered my sixth grade class reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish. We did it to show off our minimal exposure to foreign language instruction. Of course we had maybe one k
  • Mar 24, 2005

    Highway Memorials in Mississippi

    by Cliopatria

    Mississippi is renaming two stretched of highway after individuals killed during the Civil Rights era. This is one of those situations where we can lament something that is long overdue or celebrate that even with too much time passed, this is still a remarkable example of change over time. A stretch of U.S. Highway 19 South will be named after James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, the three Civil Rights workers murdered in 1964 on that highway. U.S. Highway 49 East in Tallahachie
  • Mar 24, 2005

    Cultural Revolution as Farce?

    by Cliopatria

    My father says"any number is a good first approximation for any other number" and, by extension, any historical event or process can be compared to current events if enough context is excluded. I believe that the integrity of historical comparisons matters because historical analogy is mostly a shorthand language that is more often used to wound and rally -- nearly useless in finding common ground -- than to explain or convince.

  • Mar 23, 2005

    When Black Immigrants Outnumbered White Immigrants

    by Cliopatria

    In the March 2005 issue of American Heritage Yale historian David Brion Davis writes about slavery as"The Central Fact of American History."

    In the course of his article he notes:

    "By 1820 nearly 8.7 million slaves had departed for the New World from Africa." How many whites had emigrated by that time from Europe? 2.6 million.

    (The article is not on the Internet.)

  • Mar 23, 2005

    My Reading Shame

    by Cliopatria

    OK, Rebunkers – it’s time to get it back in full swing. Sort of. I want to try an interactive post, so this will require your participation. All of us are readers. Were we not, we would not be part of this little sub-community. I feel as if I spend most of my waking hours reading. I am always in the middle of ten books, I have more magazines than I know what to do with, and every nook and cranny is filled with newspapers, journal articles, and various printouts from websites. Yet I am sure I am
  • Mar 23, 2005

    Your Front Page News ...

    by Cliopatria

    If you go over to David Horowitz's Front Page Rag, you'll find it features Steven Plaut's cleverly titled article,"Old Juan Cole, A Very Sad Soul." It is the usual attack on a major academic voice. The list of academic voices subject to such attacks grows longer and longer. By now, it includes at least five of us at Cliopatria: Tim Burke, Oscar Chamberlain, Jon Dre
  • Mar 23, 2005

    Our Four Stories ...

    by Cliopatria

    Robert Reich's"The Lost Art of Democratic Narrative: Story Time," TNR, 28 March (subscribers only) has other purposes, but his typology of the four American narratives is interesting in its own right.

    There are four essential American stories. The first two are about hope; the second two are about fear.

    The Triumphant Individual. This is the familiar tale of the little guy who works hard,

  • Mar 22, 2005

    Bush: Pro-Life?

    by Cliopatria

    A week or so ago on The Daily Show Jon Stewart, noting yet another example of American hypocrisy, observed that the Bush administration is making the world safe for irony.

    The line came to mind this morning when the NYT reported that President Bush, speaking about the necessity of signing the law designed to save Terri Schiavo's life, said: "It Is Wisest to Always Err on the Side of Life."

    Please.

    This from the same politician who:

    *a
  • Mar 22, 2005

    Fair Share

    by Cliopatria

    I'm happy to report that the Pasadena City College chapter of the California Teachers Association has, at long last, made the brave move to impose the "fair share service fee" on all of our full-time faculty.  Our union engages in collective bargaining with the district, and is the sole representative of faculty interests during that process.  For years and years, membership in our local CTA chapter has been optional.  About half
  • Mar 22, 2005

    A view from up North

    by Cliopatria

    I have been ruminating much lately on the myriad forms of obliviousness that mark American reactions to Canada. On the one hand, Americans, whether the media, government or individuals, pay little attention to news here, and do not seem to look to Canada as an alternate laboratory of social policy. On the other hand, Americans look benignly on Canada as being somehow their own, and not a foreign country at all.

    An example of the first tendency I note in the fact that the current stu
  • Mar 22, 2005

    The other Roosevelt legacy

    by Cliopatria

    The article in HNN’s “Breaking News” on Roosevelt descendants reminds us that this past week marks the 100th anniversary of a most crucial alliance in 20th Century American History: The signing of the marriage contract between Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt on March 17, 1905. The happy event was not itself without its curious White House connections: in the absence of her father, the orphaned bride was given away by her Uncle Theodore, the President of the United States, who had arrived for the
  • Mar 21, 2005

    Teaching Texts

    by Cliopatria

    In a thought-provoking recent post, the Little Professor writes that"literary scholars ... study how texts work." Historians, on the other hand,"study how texts exist." These two scholarly endeavors, of course, overlap and complement each other. But as the post goes on to say,"it's very difficult to make the historian cohabit peacefully with the literary critic."

    It is es
  • Mar 20, 2005

    Signing Things, Like Petitions and Oaths ...

    by Cliopatria

    A professional colleague from Colorado asks that I post this letter about Ward Churchill and the Board of Regents at the University of Colorado. Subsequent developments have dated some of its information, but it is one national effort to influence CU's Board of Regents. Specifically, the University's Regents will convene an emergency meeting next week, during Spring Vacation at CU,"in which they will assess whether Women's Studies and Ethnic Studies have