Additionally Noted Things
More than twenty-five years ago, one of the southern states adopted a new method of capital punishment. Poison gas supplanted the gallows. In its earliest stages, a microphone was placed inside the sealed death chamber so that scientific observers might hear the words of the dying prisoner to judge how the human reacted in this novel situation.
The first victim was a young Negro. As the pellet dropped into the container, and the gas curled upward, through the microphone came these words:"Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis..."
The line gained further currency in 1994, when Madison Smartt Bell made it the title of his sixth novel. But, in"‘Save Me, Joe Louis!': History or Myth," Journal of Combative Sport, April 2005, Joseph R. Svinth published the results of a painstaking search that shows, near conclusively, that the story is an urban legend. Six months after Svinth published his article, David Margolick's op-ed,"Save Me, Joe Louis!" LA Times, 7 November 2005, told the story that probably underlay the urban legend. It's well worth reading.
"In Praise of ... the Blogosphere," The Guardian, 11 March, and Technorati note that there are now probably 30,000,000 blogs."... blogging is graduating from being a minority sport to a mainstream activity." Academic blogs are a tiny fraction of the big picture; and history blogs a small part of them. Yet, Cliopatria's History Blogroll continues to grow. In the next few days, we'll be adding"K-12," a section of blogs by pre-collegiate teachers of history. Here's a selection of some of the best of them:
A History Teacher
A Shrewdness of Apes
at the moment
Civil War Memory
Classroom Biz
Fred's World
History is Elementary
MadHatter
Outside [The Cave]
Socrates' Classroom
I hope that including pre-collegiate teachers of history will help to erode artificial barriers to their communications with the rest of us.
Finally, at Maroonblog, Andrew Dzwonchyk recommends Pandora. It is a streaming on-line radio. What is neat about it is that it asks you for your choice of artist or song and then searches out and streams music compatible with your musical taste. This could be fun.