Saturday Notes

David O'Brien,"History chairman ousted -- Removed from KSU post over professor's trip xxx xx," Recordpub.com, 30 November. Kent State's history department chair, John Jameson, authorized a six weeks release from classes for associate professor Julio Cèsar Pino (aka Julio Assad Pino, Julio Assad Jibril Pino, al-Asad ibn Pino) to study Arabic in the UAE, without the administration's approval. When the administration learned of it, Pino was ordered home to the University immediately and Jameson was removed as department chair. Associate Professor Mary Ann Heiss has been named interim chair of the history department. Hat tip to Margaret Soltan.

BookForum has round-ups of reviews of recent books on African and American history in the popular press.

Jonathan Yardley,"A History That Stands The Test of Time," Washington Post, 28 November, takes another look at Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday on America in the 1920s. Still selling well 75 years after it was first published, Only Yesterday is about as good as journalistic history gets. Scholarship like Roland G. Fryer, Jr.'s and Steven D. Levitt's"Hatred and Profits: Getting under the Hood of the Ku Klux Klan," National Bureau of Economic Research, 1 September, gives empirical refinement to Allen's impressionistic judgments. The Klan in the 1920s, they argue, was a huge pyramid scheme."Today's terrorist organizations seem to be more about generating terror and social change," Levitt says,"as opposed to the Klan, which looked like a giant Elks club that made people rich."

Benjamin Schwarz,"Toiling in the Dream Factory," Atlantic, November, reviews Jeanine Basinger's The Star Machine, Marc Norman's What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting, and Ed Sikov's Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis. Hat tip to A&L Daily.

Finally, farewell to Peter Lipton, the Hans Rausing Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science, and head of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Our colleague, Rachel Leow, remembers a teacher whose remarkable skills gave currency to a verb,"to Lipton." Such teachers cannot be replaced.