Feb 17, 2008

Sunday Notes

by Cliopatria

Asian History Carnival #19 is up at Frog in a Well, Korea. Carnivalesque XXXVI, an early modern edition of the festival, is up at Mercurius Politicus. Indian History Carnival #2 is up at Varnum.

Holland Cotter,"Classical Visions, Romantic Eye," NYT, 15 February, reviews"Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions," an exhibit at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Modris Eksteins,"Drowned in Eau de Vie," LRB, 21 February, reviews Peter Gay's Modernism: The Lure of Heresy from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond.

Sean Wilentz and Julian Zelizer,"A Rotten Way to Pick a President," WaPo, 17 February, calls for reforming the system by"abolishing caucuses, regularizing a rigorous system of national debates, closing open primaries, [and] grabbing power back from the media."

Finally, Cliopatria's History Blogroll continues to grow. Here are some of its newest additions:

William Jelani Cobb's Creative Ink joins Edward Carson's The Proletarian and elle's elle, phd among the blogs by African American historians.

Women in Science is the most recent addition to our Women's History list. It might, as reasonably, be listed in Digital History, Science and Technology and, of course, there are female history bloggers in every other category on the History Blogroll.

Margaret's The Earthly Paradise is a Canadian graduate student's reflections on the Pre-Raphaelites' Arts and Crafts Movement.

Philly History is one of many local history blogs that we list in United States History.

Jeff Pasley's Publick Occurrences is his new venture at Common-Place. Old hands at History News Network may remember Jeff's Notes of a Left-Wing Cub Scout.

Aaron's excellent zunguzungu is the common-place book of an African Studies graduate student in California."In Tanzania," he writes,"you learn that you're an mzungu when children shout ‘zunguzungu!' and follow you around, and in California you learn to forget because they aren't there to remind you."

More Comments:

Ralph E. Luker - 2/18/2008

Thanks for the comment, Claire. I have much the same first and, then, second reactions to Sean's and Julian's op-ed that you do. Removed from the heat of a campaign, we really do need to take a hard look at the jerry-built "system" for choosing presidential candidates that we've got. Given the dispersion of authority (party structures and state legislatures), I'm not sure we're going to come up with something better than we have. We might even tinker with it and only make it worse -- though that's hard to imagine. I do think that there's a legitimate question to be raised about caucuses and that's whether they compromise the secrecy or privacy of the ballot too much. I realize that the secret ballot was, itself, a reform that we haven't always had, but I wonder why it isn't a controlling one now.

Claire B. Potter - 2/17/2008

Just quickly: I'm glad you brought this to our attention. My first response was, "Oh yeah, now that Obama is doing well, having an outsider benefit from the system demonstrates the flaws of the system." But I think the authors make a good point about how people with fixed shifts can't go to caucuses and are thus disenfranchised. I have two thoughts. One is that our idea of what democracy is, and what creates a democratic atmosphere for voting, may be changing over time. The other is, if election days were state holidays, this wouldn't be an issue, so maybe we could keep the caucuses and make it possible for everyone to attend them....