Things Noted Here and There

Some time ago, I recommended"The Empire That Was Russia," an online exhibit of the color photographs by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, the official photographer to Czar Nicholas II. It's an extraordinary exhibit of the architecture, landscapes, and peoples of late Czarist Russia. Manan Ahmed calls my attention to"Colour WWI Photographs," another remarkable collection, probably by the French photographer, Jean-Baptiste Tournassoud. (You can date the photographs, in part, by the color of the French soldiers' pants. They began the war in red; red pants disappeared in 1915.) There's a much larger on-line exhibit,"World War I Color Photos." Use the drop down menus. It's very rich."The Heritage of the Great War" is another huge source. Its collection,"The Great War in Color," includes most, if not all the"Colour WWI Photographs" and may be more reliably available, but its"Bloody Picnic: Forbidden War Pictures" may be more graphic than you care to recommend to students. Wikipedia's brief history of color photography is also helpful.

The Boston Globe and the Harvard Crimson report that Andrei Shleifer, the University's Whipple V. N. Jones Professor of Economics, has apparently been stripped of his endowed chair for his role in defrauding the United States government while advising the Russian government. The University paid $26.5 million and Shleifer paid $2 million to settle the government's case against him and the University. Henceforth, Shleifer will be simply a Professor of Economics, with tenure. There's much that's still murky about the story (is there a salary reduction? if not, will the University still draw on the chair's endowment to pay his salary?) and it's still nice work if you can get it. Thanks to Margaret Soltan at University Diaries for the tip.

CBS's"60 Minutes" will feature a segment on the case against three Duke lacrosse players this evening. Here's a preliminary interview with CBS's Ed Bradley about the segment. Like other recent major features on the story – David Brooks in the New York Times and Stuart Taylor in the National Journal – the background to it relies heavily on the investigative journalism of our colleague, KC Johnson. It appears on his blog, Durham-in Wonderland. At least one New York lawyer says that KC deserves a Pulitzer Prize for it. He was in Raleigh this weekend to speak at the John William Pope Center for Education Policy on intellectual diversity and will be in Durham in two weeks to speak at the invitation of the ACLU@Duke.