Noted Here and There ...
Janet Maslin,"Scholarship Trumps the Stake in Pursuit of Dracula," New York Times, 13 June, reviews Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian: A Novel. The historian as Dracula:"I became an historian," he says,"in order to preserve my own history forever."* According to Maslin, the novel only seems to go on forever. On a related matter, Scott Eric Kaufman has some thoughts about novels as alternative history in"Crypto-Communisto Conflagration 100% Guaranteed, or Happenstance and Identity Politics" at The Valve.
Dana Stevens,"There's A Long, Long Trail A-Winding," Slate, 10 June, suggests that you should have better uses for your time than watching Steven Spielberg's summer-long saga, Into the West on TNT.
Ben McConville,"Black America's Musical Links to Scotland," The Scotsman, 4 June, is an interesting account of Willie Ruff's exploration of the interaction of Scots-Irish and African-American music in the South. A long-time collaborator with Dizzy Gillespie and associate of Louis Armstrong and Charlies Mingus, Ruff now teaches music at Yale. In May, he brought together singers from the Back Free Church on the Isle of Lewis, the Indian Bottom Old Regular Baptists, a white group from southeastern Kentucky, and a black congregation from Eutaw, Alabama. Listen to the sample of singing from the Western Isles offered at that link and you will hear singing very much like I heard at the civil rights mass meetings in Albany, Georgia, in the summer of 1962. My friend, Paul Harvey, and I think Ruff ought to read about it in Paul Harvey, Freedom's Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (University of North Carolina, 2005)
Robin Marantz Henig,"Seed Capital," Washington Post, 12 June, reviews Davis Plotz's The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank. Plotz tells a story of Robert Graham's"Repository for Germinal Choice" and the late 20th century's American eugenics movement, whose most visible public face was William Shockley.
Our colleague, Hugo Schwyzer, has an article,"Gay Rights Movement: Going Forward or Backward?" over on HNN's mainpage, but remember that you saw it here first.
Finally, congratulations both to Danny Loss of No Loss for Words, who finished all requirements for his M. Phil. at Cambridge on Friday with a dissertation on English attitudes toward the French in the early months of World War I, and to Linus Kafka of Snoblog, who joins Historiblogography to make it a UCLA gang of four.
*This line recalls one of the classic debates that raged on the comment boards of HNN's mainpage 18 months ago, before Register for Comment. It was over whether"a" or"an" was the appropriate article precedent to"historian." I confess to being promiscuous, or at least ambidextrous, about my usage, but in that debate, Derek Catsam and Jon Dresner defended"our pretentious ans." As I said then, if you are ever in a bar fight, you would want to have Catsam on your side. In this case, however, I thought"Grammarian Again" finally bested him with"Professor Catsam Stars in a Play." Btw, by my count, that string of comments on Catsam's"Bush Officials Are Flunking Anti-Terrorism 101" nearly equals, if it does not beat, what I thought was my record-holding siege with the gun lobby for"Journalists Are Rushing to Judgment About Michael Bellesiles." I lost count, but there are something like 165 comments on each article. You do understand that, for those of us who cut our teeth on the comment boards of HNN's mainpage before Register for Comment, size matters.