More Noted Things

by Cliopatria

American Democracy: Sean Wilentz's important new book, The Rise of American Democracy: From Jefferson to Lincoln, is already drawing major reviews. See, for example: Eric Foner,"The American Political Tradition," The Nation, 12 October; and Jill Lepore,"People Power," New Yorker, 17 October. On a note that recurs in discussions here at Cliopatria, both Foner and Lepore point out that Wilentz made his reputation as a practitioner of the new social history, but he both builds on and departs from it to publish a new political synthesis.

Freedom Rides: Oxford University Press has just announced that it will publish Ray Arsenault's Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice in January. Given the massive bibliography on the civil rights movement and the freedom rides' iconic place in its history, it's remarkable that this first major study appears over 40 years after the events. Arsenault is a fine historian and I suspect that the Freedom Rides have found their match in him. In the meantime, Jon Dresner reminds me that the Freedom Rides continue to be a form of direct social action by gay people in Virginia and disability advocates in Illinois.

Lists: Nearly everyone linking to them comments on the vanity of lists. Yet, they retain their fascination for us. Herewith, the most recent lists:
Foreign Policy and Prospect's list of the 100 most important public intellectuals and results of the balloting among them; and
Time's 100 best novels in English since 1923.

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Jonathan Dresner - 10/19/2005

How about this: the top 885 albums of all time. What did they leave out? You know, I went through the top 1000 books but I'll be damned if I'm doing that for music. No historians, after all....

Jonathan Dresner - 10/19/2005

The Times list reads like a curriculum designed by book reviewers who know that they need to throw in a few bones to actual readers....

Scalzi's list is a bit contentious, too, but there's no denying that there's some great stuff on it.

Rebecca Anne Goetz - 10/19/2005

John Scalzi has a list of must-see sci-fi flicks...
http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/003785.html

Enjoy!

(I hated the TIME list BTW)

Manan Ahmed - 10/19/2005

Also, there is the list of the top 40 magazine covers of all time by ASME. I like the National Lampoon meself.

Rob MacDougall - 10/19/2005

Also just out (a little less intellectual but still vaguely historical) Variety's 100 show business "icons" of the last 100 years.

1: The Beatles
2-9: (in alphabetical order) Louis Armstrong, Lucille Ball, Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando, Charlie Chaplin, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Mickey Mouse, Elvis Presley

Jonathan Dresner - 10/19/2005

The top 20 list is here and the full voting results are here. Unless I'm missing someone (and there's a lot of names on here I honestly don't know, which says something about the "public" aspect, anyway) the top historian is Hobsbawm at #18, though Eco (#2) is described as a "medievalist":

1 Noam Chomsky
2 Umberto Eco
3 Richard Dawkins
4 Václav Havel
5 Christopher Hitchens
6 Paul Krugman
7 Jürgen Habermas
8 Amartya Sen
9 Jared Diamond
10 Salman Rushdie
11 Naomi Klein
12 Shirin Ebadi
13 Hernando de Soto
14 Bjørn Lomborg
15 Abdolkarim Soroush
16 Thomas Friedman
17 Pope Benedict XVI
18 Eric Hobsbawm
19 Paul Wolfowitz
20 Camille Paglia

For the record, my write-in vote was for Tim Burke. Other historians who did make the list included Samuel Huntington (#28), Bernard Lewis (#34), Niall Ferguson (tied for #44), Robert Kagan and Paul Kennedy (#62 and #63, respectively)

"four of the bottom five on the list were thinkers from Japan and China" and I don't think anyone from East Asia scored above the bottom quintile, so my field has a way to go. Of course, I thought their nominations were really weak in this area.