More Noted Things
At Siris, Brandon Watson takes A. C. Grayling's"The Persistence of the Faithful," Guardian, 23 January, apart. Historical evidence and historical reasoning aren't Grayling's strength.
At 74, the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski died last week. Here, he reflects on his childhood memories of 1945:
... in some fundamental sense, the war did not end for me in 1945, or at any time soon afterwards. In many ways, something of it endures in me still. For those who lived through it, war is never over, not in an absolute way. It is a truism that an individual dies only when the last person who knew and remembered him dies; that a human being finally ceases to exist when all the bearers of his memory depart this world. Something like this also happens with war.
Ryszard Kapuscinski,"When There is Talk of War ...," The Guardian, 27 January. Thanks to Dan Todman at Trench Fever for the tip.
The debate about Middlebury College history department's ban on citation of articles from Wikipedia continues at Inside Higher Ed, AHA Today, and Mills Kelly's edwired. Here's the syllabus for the Western Civ course in which Kelly is using Wikipedia as the textbook. Of course, that's in addition to the six monographs he's assigned.
Matthew Sinclair and Gracchi reflect on the current British debate about the public uses of history.
Finally, the Bush Library:"It's like a think tank, except without the doubt." Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the tip.