More Noted ...

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan and Eugene Volokh, I found two interesting graphics on the net. Robert Fradkin at the University of Maryland has a cool "History of the Alphabet": Cunieform, Phoenician, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic, and Latin. The better to communicate with each other over time and space, but has it all come down to this? Orgnet.com creates a fascinating sociogram from Amazon.com reports of who bought what related best-sellers. It suggests that the book buying public is clustered into those who buy red books and those who buy blue books – that the public buys books which will re-enforce what they are already disposed to believe – and that there is precious little crossover. Wouldn't want to read something that challenges our most cherished predispositions, now would we?

It's Black History Month and I intended to do a review of websites comparable to one I did earlier on the Civil Rights Movement. Thanks to H-Slavery, I can recommend this webpage, which is a directory to an enormous range of resources available on the net about slavery. The webpage is maintained by Sue Peabody at Washington State University, Vancouver. The only major additions I would make to it are: Amherst College's ambitious African-American Religion: A Documentary History Project; IUPUI's Frederick Douglass Papers Project; Pace University's Harriet Jacobs Papers Project; and UNC, Greensboro's Race & Slavery Petitions Project. Child, just sit down at your computer. An abundance of sources for your honors thesis is right there at your fingertips.

The New York Times offers three noteworthy pieces for Black History Month. Felicia Lee's "Nat Turner in History's Multiple Mirrors" anticipates a PBS production which will be broadcast on Tuesday night. While it focuses on the multiplicity of memory about distant Southern trauma, Andrew Jacobs' "Histories Vanish Along With Southern Cemeteries" directs our attention to the palpable loss of memory and evidence, as cemeteries disappear from both neglect and development. Barnard's Jonathan Reider reviews three important recent books on Martin Luther King.