Things Not Yet Noted
Allan Mallinson,"A Century of Slaughter," Times Online, 27 May, reviews Niall Ferguson's The War of the World. Ethnic conflict, economic volatility, and decaying empires were the context for the most violent of centuries, says Fergusson. His book anticipates a six part series on British television.
Ronald Steel,"All You Need is Love," New York Review of Books, 22 June, reviews Michael Kazin's A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan."... what makes [Bryan] seem a figure of our very own times," says Steel,"is his ostentatious public piety and his relentless infusion of religion into politics." (subscriber only)
"Blogs and Free Speech," WorldPress.org, 6 June, is an overview of blogging as a world-wide phenomenon: 20 million blogs tracked by services like Technorati, 37 million known to exist, a new one created each second, but that can't even include China's estimated 37 million.
Traditional 'predators of press freedom' — Belarus, Burma, Cuba, Iran, Libya, the Maldives, Nepal, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam — all censor the Internet now. In 2003, only China, Vietnam and the Maldives had imprisoned cyber-dissidents. Now more countries do.
Cliopatria has readers in all of those countries, except North Korea and Turkmenistan. Via Alfredo Perez at Political Theory Daily Review.
Finally,"The History Boys," which ran from May 2004 to April 2005 at London's National Theater and is currently in NYC, appears set to be a big winner at tonight's Tony Awards, which will be handed out in a three hour extravaganza broadcast on CBS.