Cliopatria

• Oct 16, 2011
  

  More Modern Notes

  by Cliopatria

  Robert Kagan, "Nation-Building, Our National Pastime," NYT, 14 October, reviews Jeremi Suri's Liberty's Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building From the Founders to Obama.

  

• Oct 14, 2011
  

  Stop the planes

  by Cliopatria

  [Cross-posted at Airminded.]

  

  On 29 March 1939, Croydon airport was the site of an extraordinary scene, as the Daily Express reported:

  

• Oct 14, 2011
  

  Modern History Notes

  by Cliopatria

  "Great Obituaries," The Browser, 2011, is a roundup of gems in the year's Anglo-American press.

  Aram Bakshian, Jr., "Hard-Headed Idealist," WSJ, 13 October, reviews Richard Brookheiser's James Madison.

  Libby Copeland, "Are Americans Secretly Homesick?" Slate, 12 October, reviews Susan J. Matt's Homesickness: An American History.

  Jackson Lears, "American Oracle," Commonweal, 21 October, reviews John Patrick Diggins's Why Niebuhr Now?

  

• Oct 13, 2011
  

  Boston College (Cont.): New Political Efforts

  by Cliopatria

  Here are two reports about recent efforts to seek political intervention against the BC subpoenas.

  

• Oct 13, 2011
  

  Hey OHA Members: A Request

  by Cliopatria

  The Oral History Association is meeting in Denver this week. I assume there will be discussions about the Boston College subpoenas, and I invite anyone attending the meeting to send me reports about those discussions to be posted here. I can be reached at cbray (at) ucla (dot) edu. Or just post a comment here.

  

• Oct 13, 2011
  

  Women's and Other History Notes

  by Cliopatria

  Sharon Howard has an excellent roundup of "Ada Lovelace Day: Women in the history of science, medicine and technology," Early Modern Notes, 8 October.

  Peter Thonemann, "Children in the Roman Empire," TLS, 12 October, reviews Christian Laes's Children in the Roman Empire: Outsiders Within and Véronique Dasen and Thomas Späth, eds., Children, Memory, and Family Identity in Roman Culture.

  

• Oct 11, 2011
  

  Improbable arguments in ninth-century Girona

  by Cliopatria

  While I was working up a recent conference paper I had to spend some quality time with the documents of Carolingian-era Girona for the first time. I've avoided Girona for two reasons: firstly, and most importantly, when I began my Ph. D.

  

• Oct 11, 2011
  

  More Noted Things

  by Cliopatria

  Jean Bethke Elshtain, "Remembrance of Things Blessed," American Conservative, 5 October, reviews Garry Wills's Augustine's Confessions: A Biography.

  Michael Barone, "Life May Differ In Your Region," WSJ, 10 October, reviews Colin Woodard's American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America.

  Troy Patterson, "Prohibition," Slate, 30 September, and Michael Kazin, "What the Temperance Movement and the Anti-Abortion Movement Have in Common," TNR, 3 October, review Ken Burns's and Lynn Novick's documentary, Prohibition.

  

• Oct 10, 2011
  

  MetaMaus by Art Spiegelman

  by Cliopatria

  "In MetaMaus, Spiegelman employs prose, drawings, documents, and photographs to trace the intersecting paths of history, family, and comics that led to the creation, twenty-five years ago, of Maus, his Pulitzer Prize winning comic book about the Holocaust."
  Pantheon Books published MetaMaus on October 4th. There is additional material from the book and bonus DVD on Art Spiegelman's Facebook page: Facebook.com/ArtSpiegelman.
  

• Oct 10, 2011
  

  Things Noted Here & There

  by Cliopatria

  Caleb Crain, "On Not Letting Go," Paris Review Daily, 6 October: "Writing tries to fix the past—to hold it in place and sometimes in imagination to improve it."

  Jerome Groopman, "The Body and Human Progress," NYRB, 27 October, reviews Robert Floud's, Robert W. Fogel's, Bernard Harris's, and Sok Chul Hong's The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World Since 1700.

  Michiko Kakutani, "Gun Control and Gun Rights Stay Fighting Words," NYT, 9 October, reviews Adam Winkler's Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America.

  

• Oct 9, 2011
  

  Sunday's Notes

  by Cliopatria

  Sheri Berman, "The Conservative as Elitist," NYT, 7 October, reviews Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. Robin replies to Berman's negative review at his blog.

  Justin Fox, "How the Dismal Science Stopped Being Dismal," NYT, 7 October, reviews Sylvia Nasar's Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius.

  Howard Brick reviews Michael Kazin's American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation for the Washington Post, 7 October.

  

• Oct 8, 2011
  

  Weak Endnotes

  by Cliopatria

  Mary Beard, "Alexander: How Great?" NYRB, 27 October, reviews Pierre Briant's Alexander the Great and His Empire: A Short Introduction, trans. by Amélie Kuhrt, Philip Freeman's Alexander the Great, James Romm's Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great and the War for Crown and Empire, Romm, ed., The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander, trans. by Pamela Mensch, and Ian Worthington's Philip II of Macedonia.

  

• Oct 7, 2011
  

  Friday's History Notes

  by Cliopatria

  Kaustuv Basu, "Big History on Campus," IHE, 7 October, is an update on the curricular development of "Big History".

  Thomas Meany, "Getting to Denmark: On Francis Fukuyama," Nation, 5 October, reviews Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.

  David Reiff, "The Wrong Moral Revolution: On Michael Barnett," Nation, 5 October, reviews Michael Barnett's Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism.

  

• Oct 6, 2011
  

  Still More Noted

  by Cliopatria

  The Carnival of Geneology CX is up at Creative Gene. Four Stone Hearth CXIX, the anthropology carnival, is up at Krystal D'Costa's Anthropology in Practice.

  From the "you thought things were bad at your place department":

  

• Oct 5, 2011
  

  Boston College (Cont.): Paging the Hookah-Smoking Caterpillar

  by Cliopatria

  A few quick updates regarding the federal subpoenas of oral history materials at Boston College:

  1.) Irish-American organizations are seeking meetings with members of Congress to raise questions about the DOJ's handling of the request for subpoenas under the terms of the US-UK MLAT. See this story for details. These meetings finally offer a political response to a transparently political investigation, and they represent a hugely positive development. This course of action is exactly the one I had hoped to see the AHA, AAUP, and other academic organizations pursue several months ago. But at least someone is willing to make a stand for the integrity and independence of academic research, while academics are apparently not interested. I'm still confused by that last part.

  

• Oct 5, 2011
  

  Fred Shuttlesworth, 1922-2011

  by Cliopatria

  Well done, thou good and faithful servant.
  

• Oct 5, 2011
  

  More Noted Things

  by Cliopatria

  Randall Stephens at THS Blog has launched a series in which he interviews well-known historians about "Why I Became a Historian": Jack Rakove, David D. Hall, ...

  Helen Castor, "A Stormin' Norman," Literary Review, October, reviews Tracy Borman's Matilda: Queen of the Conqueror.

  John Sutherland, "A Tale of Two Dickens," Literary Review, October, reviews Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist and Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life.

  

• Oct 4, 2011
  

  Modern History Notes

  by Cliopatria

  In light of the job market, Anthony T. Grafton and Jim Grossman, "No More Plan B," Perspectives, October, calls for a revision of graduate programs in history. There's further discussion at Scott Jaschik's "‘No More Plan B'," IHE, 3 October, including comments by the President of the MLA and Vice President of the ACLS.

  Robert M. Solow, "Working in the Dark," TNR, 28 September, reviews Sylvia Nasar's Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius.

  

• Oct 3, 2011
  

  Things Noted Here & There

  by Cliopatria

  History Carnival CIII is up at Tiffany Stozicki's The History Reporter.

  Peter Manseau, "The Big Bang," bookforum, Sept/Nov, and Alan Wolfe, "The Origins of Religion, Beginning With the Big Bang," NYT, 30 September, review Robert N. Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age.

  Miri Rubin, "Sources of Illumination," THE, 29 September, finds lessons for contemporary universities in their medieval ancestors.

  

• Oct 2, 2011
  

  Historical Memory Suggests Some Predictable Outcomes

  by Cliopatria

  Four years ago, I predicted a wave of deficiency judgments against homeowners who lost their homes in foreclosure proceedings but still found themselves owing money to their mortgage lender. That prediction was based on past occurrences of the same thing.

  So here's an Oct. 1 story from the Wall Street Journal on the rising wave of deficiency judgments in precisely those circumstances.