Saturday Notes
Dinah Birch,"The Ghosts of Arthur Conan Doyle," TLS, 7 November, reviews Andrew Lycett's Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes and Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower and Charles Foley, eds., Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters.
David Brooks,"History and Calumny," NYT, 9 November, attempts to rescue Ronald Reagan's reputation from insinuations about his campaigning at Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980. The story is more complicated than is commonly reported. And, yet, he did advocate"states rights" at Philadelphia, his administration had no significant accomplishment in civil rights and he never distanced himself from Senate Dixiecrats, like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond.
Steadily, the history blogosphere increases its influence in our professional practice. In 2005, I published"Were There Blog Enough and Time," in the AHA's Perspectives; and Caleb McDaniel followed with his"Blogging in the Early Republic" in Common-place. The next year, Manan Ahmed, David Beito, Juan Cole, Sharon Howard, Rick Shenkman, and I shared a panel at the AHA convention that introduced blogging at our major national gathering.
In 2008, Hartford's Warren J. Goldstein will give a paper,"Adventures in the Blogosphere: A Pilgrim's Progress" and five of our blogging colleagues, Manan Ahmed, Alan Baumler, Jon Dresner, Rebecca Goetz, and Nathanael Robinson, will present a panel,"Contested Pasts and Constructed Presents: Memory in the Local" at January's AHA convention in Washington, DC. Mark Grimsley and Kevin Levin will discuss the Civil War and military history blogging next Fall at the Southern Historical Association convention in New Orleans. Now, Tim Lacy, Paul Murphy, and others at U.S. Intellectual History step it up a notch, to launch a Conference on U. S. Intellectual History. They've posted a call for papers for the Conference, which is scheduled for 17-18 October 2008 in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Here's good advice on conference presentations from: Linda Kerber, Claire Potter, and Mary Dudziak.