Cliopatria

• Feb 18, 2005
  

  Noted Here and There ...

  by Cliopatria

  Tristram Hunt's"Historians in Cahoots" in the Guardian sees a connection between the politics of the Bush era and the resurgence of admiring biographies of the Founding Fathers. He's not much impressed by either of them. Thanks to Chris Pettit for the tip.

  At Easily Distracted, Ti

  

• Feb 17, 2005
  

  Rebecca Solnit: Review of Adam Hochschild's, Bury the Chains, Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (Houghton Mifflin)

  by Cliopatria

  Rebecca Solnit lives in a dense atmosphere of conspiracies, digressions and marginalia somewhere in San Francisco. Her most recent book, speaking of conspiracy, is Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities.

  Mark Lombardi's art consists of colossal drawings of networks of power, connecting politicians, capitalists, and corporations into intricate maps, like medieval cosmology or kabbalah diagrams, whose huge arcs and circles linking the small handwritten names are as v

  

• Feb 17, 2005
  

  Pipe Dreams

  by Cliopatria

  "Sometimes I wish I did US history.... such great material to work with, and all in English."
  
  I must admit to laughing out loud when I read my colleague Jonathan Dresner's comment. How many, many times I have said this to my US and English history cohorts [specifically those who do the modern period ]. You don't have to waste 4-5 years of Arabic and Persian and Sindhi and Serayki [let's leave French and German aside], I
  

• Feb 17, 2005
  

  Foundation for the Defense of Democracies Antiterrorism Fellowship

  by Cliopatria

  I just got this today:

  The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies has begun accepting applications for its Academic Fellows anti-terrorism training program. This program provides university professors with a detailed understanding of the terror threat that faces our nation and sister democracies. Centered on a 10-day course taught in conjunction with the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, the program takes place entirely in Israel. Participants interact

  

• Feb 17, 2005
  

  Discover The Network ...

  by Cliopatria

  A year ago, Invisible Adjunct, Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber, and I had some fun with David Horowitz's Follow the Network. It was supposed to be a"Guide to the Left," but it included such anomalies as Paul Berman and Garry Wills, the Harvard Alumni Association and the Wall Street Journal. Embarrassed
  

• Feb 17, 2005
  

  Libertarians Breathing Down My Neck ...

  by Cliopatria

  If you think the apples and oranges here at Cliopatria have been a little ripe lately, you should see the rot over at Liberty & Power. My anti-war libertarian friends have broken out in a flame war of their own and my friend, David Beito, is braggin' on it. Seriously, Jason Kuznicki's post about University of Nevada economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe has drawn 138 comments."This is c
  

• Feb 16, 2005
  

  Beating the Daily Show to the Punch

  by Cliopatria

  I am getting ready to head to campus, half listening to CNN, when I hear Don Rumsfeld say at a hearing at the Pentagon,"I am not here to do intelligent work." Many of us think you should be, but we agree that it seems at times that you are not.

  Dr. Freud thinks you might have meant"intelligence work," by the way.

  

• Feb 16, 2005
  

  Deferred Enlightenment

  by Cliopatria

  In the movie The Longest Day, there is a brief scene in which the commander of French forces addresses the men on a warship. I can’t give you the exact quote, but he says something like this: “Today, we must fire on our homeland. Such is the price of freedom.”
  
  When I first saw this movie, it was roughly the 20th anniversary of D-Day. I was in 6th grade and full of Churchillian (Winston) heroism, and these words seemed only logical. Quite honestly, I did not understand at a
  

• Feb 16, 2005
  

  More on Douthat

  by Cliopatria

  Timothy Burke posted last Friday about Ross Douthat's critique of Harvard's curriculum in the Atlantic Monthly, which might have been appropriately and sardonically titled,"The Education of Ross Douthat."
  
  Douthat doesn't go as far as Henry Adams; he doesn't refer to himself in the third person. But he might well have quoted Adams, his fellow Harvard alumnus, who made most of Douthat's points in 1918:

  For generatio

  

• Feb 16, 2005
  

  Conversations from the 2nd History Carnival ...

  by Cliopatria

  My colleague, Sharon Howard, told me that the History Carnivals were worth doing. One of the reasons is that they launch conversations among us. History Carnival #2 concluded with Tim"Burke's Home for Imaginary Friends," a post about why he blogs. I liked it so much that I followed it over to Coffee Grou
  

• Feb 16, 2005
  

  The Joke's On Us ...

  by Cliopatria

  Eighteen months ago at History News Network, my colleague, Jonathan Dresner, asked about history jokes or jokes involving historians, i. e., if anyone knew of any good ones. The results were pretty slim. Jonathan contributed this one about how many historians it takes to change a light bulb. Susan Rosenfeld came up with an archives joke. Theresa Lynch recalled

• Feb 15, 2005
  

  More Notes ...

  by Cliopatria

  This I do not believe. If moral conservatives use C. A. Tripp's recent book about Abraham Lincoln to justify chiseling Abraham Lincoln's face from Mt. Rushmore to replace it with Ronald Reagan's, they'll be giving Tripp more credit than he's due and defacing national memory. Thanks to Moby Lives for the tip.

  Gertrude Himmelfarb has an excellent piece in The Weekly Standard<