Some Noted Things ...

Google Map: You may have seen Google Map. Using the view from the sky feature, I could focus in so closely on our house here in Atlanta that I could see the light burning in my study.

Bellow: Scott McLemee's"Bellow's Gift" at Inside Higher Ed is required reading.

Round-Ups: Thanks to Sharon Howard, we have a round-up of her posts on Women's History Month and notice of the first Biblical Studies Carnival. And, thanks to Jonathan Dresner, Cliopatria makes the Science Carnival, the Tangled Bank, this tangle around.

Life and Death: The Terri Schiavo case continues to reverberate on the net. Tim Burke's"God Doesn't Do Feeding Tubes" at Easily Distracted irritates me in ways that Burke usually doesn't. I suspect its because we evangelical Christians look like intellectual bottom-feeders on his map and I suspect that we do because we let intellectual bottom-feeders appear to speak for us. In"Distinctions" at Siris, Brandon Watson draws some, well, some distinctions between the abortion debate and the euthanasia debate.

Reportage: This is an embarrassment to both Columbia University and the New York Times. The Times admits and Columbia confirms that the University gave the newspaper a privileged one day advance release of its report on its Middle Eastern studies program in return for a commitment by the Times reporter not to ask critics of the program for their reaction. Great Institutions may expect one hand washing the other treatment from Great Institutions, but they do so to their mutual embarrassment.

Perspectives: The April issue of the AHA's Perspectives is now online. Jim Banner's"A New Era for the Discipline of History" is perhaps of greatest interest. It reviews the report of the AHA's Committee on Graduate Education, The Education of Historians for the Twenty-first Century, which was prepared under the direction of NYU's Thomas Bender, Princeton's Colin Palmer, and the AHA's Philip Katz. Banner summarizes their recommendations, which seem reasonable enough, but he warns that unless senior historians in major programs, to whom graduate students are drawn, are willing to retool themselves for the challenge, reports like this seem likely to mean little.

Pot ‘n Kettle Watch: My friend, Jim Lindgren, was at the University of Wisconsin yesterday to talk about his experience in exposing the flaws in Michael Bellesiles's Arming America. Ann Althaus and Gordon Smith have reports on the talk. One sidelight that Lindgren noted was that Ana Marie Cox interviewed him about Arming America for the Chronicle of Higher Education and seemed to be convinced by him that there were serious problems with the book. But, about that time, she was fired from the Chronicle's reporting staff and Lindgren believes there may have been a link between those things. That is, the Chronicles's reportage was remarkably supportive of Bellesiles until rather late in the game. But thus was born the career of Wonkette. I told you that the Lord works in mysterious ways her wonders to perform.*
*Update: A journalist friend, who would have some reason to know, tells me that any suggestion that Ana Marie Cox's being fired from the CHE had anything to do with her believing that Lindgren was essentially correct about Arming America is, well, nothing short of poppycock and probably a good bit beyond it. [In fact, I'd love to quote my journalist friend's colorful language to that effect, but I don't have his permission.] Jim Lindgren, in turn, reports his version of things at The Volokh Conspiracy. Scott McLemee, for one, seems skeptical of Lindgren's account of things. Ahh, the Bellesiles story. Diverse, impassioned reports? You're kidding me. The ways of the Lord are mysterious, indeed.

But, anyway, underlying these reports is a Left v. Right or a Lawyers v. Historians one-upmanship that I'm just noting. The lawyers seem to think that student-run and fact-checked law journals would never have made the blunder that the JAH did in 1996 when it published Bellesiles's original article. Maybe so. But I don't know of history journals that do special issues subsidized by a major foundationwith the proviso that only one side of a controversial issuewill be represented in them. I certainly don't have any objection to the Federalist Society sponsoring Jim Lindgren's talk at the University of Wisconsin, but I'd like to know if the Federalist Society is still sponsoring public lectures by John Lott and why he's still at the American Enterprise Institute. Tim Lambert? Anybody? Thanks to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit for the tip.