HISTORICAL CONVERSATIONS ...

I am reporting to you from the American Historical Association convention in Washington, D. C., but reporting to you only subjunctively because nature finally intervened, making it inconceivable that I would get through the crowded airports and endure the stuffy convention halls without collapsing. Take my word for it, you'd rather not know the details causing me to cancel plans to be in DC at the last minute. On the other hand, I've often thought that a subjunctive presence at the AHA convention was the only way to go ... as if those papers were really interesting, as if you were going to get that job offer, as if David Brion Davis really did want to meet you there, etc.

My agents in DC nonetheless tell me that Senator and former Klansman Robert Byrd of West Virginia is now officially the recipient of the inaugural Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Award for Civil Service (scroll down to 13 December). He is reported to have given the historians only 15 minutes of stentorian rhetoric in return for the honor. Thank goodness. That is only 1/57th of the time he devoted to filibustering against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Reports have it that the AHA executive committee is under such pressure to balance this year's award with one to a Republican next year that it is considering giving the second Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Award for Civil Service to David Duke.

Rather than attending to AHA blather, historians and other serious folk will follow the discussions on Cliopatria. If you've not read Tim Burke's essay on historical analogies, do yourself a favor and do so. The discussion begun there is continued by Burke and Invisible Adjunct over on her blog. Writing in The New Yorker, Daniel Mendelsohn takes up Thucydides's The Peloponnesian Wars and the modern analogies, widely assumed during the Cold War, and suggested more recently by Donald Kagan and Victor Davis Hanson.
Update: See also, Edward Cohn's discussion at"Mildly Malevolent."