Things Noted Here and There

by Cliopatria

Daniel Lazare,"Good Faith," Nation, 17 March, reviews Benjamin Kaplan's Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe.

Charles McGrath's"A Debunker on the Road to World War II," NYT, 4 March, gave advance warning of controversy about Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization; and Baker's"The Charms of Wikipedia," NYRB, 20 March, signaled his own charms as a writer. But, in challenging popular notions of World War II as"the good war," Baker's got a tough uphill battle. Early reviews of Human Smoke are in: Mark Kurlansky gives it a thumbs up in the LA Times, 9 March; and Glenn C. Altschuler gives it a thumbs down in the Boston Globe, 9 March. Hat tip.

Janet Maslin,"The Amazing Adventures of the Midcentury Comic Book Trade," NYT, 10 March, reviews David Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. Hajdu,"The Ten-Cent Plague," BookForum, February/March, is an excerpt from the book.

Finally,"The world's 50 most powerful blogs," Guardian's Observer, 9 March, counts several friends of Cliopatria, including: 7. Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, 33. Crooked Timber, and 40. Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish. Thanks to Scott McLemee at Crooked Timber for the tip.

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Kevin C. Murphy - 3/11/2008

If you're going to count him as a blog (and that list does at #11), then Drudge is still far and away the most powerful blog out there. He's the only one that can single-handedly sway a news cycle (Case in point, Somaligate.)

Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs - 3/11/2008

In his review of Benjamin Kaplan's book, Daniel Lazare concludes that "The solution ... lies in imposing peace by strictly subordinating religion to the needs of modern society." No doubt that's quite enlightened of him, but perhaps the amount of religion intruding on modern society suggests that religion is one of the needs of modern society.
Omitted from his review (and probably from Kaplan's book, although I have not seen that yet), a major international effort to inspire and enforce religious toleration should be mentioned, one that is rarely remembered. In the second half of the century, Swiss Calvinists persecuted Mennonites, whom they drove into exile in the Palatine, where Catholics continued the persecution. Dutch Mennonites organized a letter-writing and diplomatic campaign to end the persecution and relieve the suffering. Besides Mennonites under the guidance of the Mennonite Collegiant Galenus Abrahamsz. de Hann, others who were involved included Dutch Reformed, German Reformed, and Swiss Reformed professors of theology, Jan Amos Comenius, John Durie, Philip von Zesen, William Penn, and Phillipus van Limborch, who was John Locke's host in Amsterdam, where Locke wrote his first Letter on Toleration influenced by van Limborch's writings on the same subject, and, in my view, inspired by this ongoing relief effort. The cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Maastricht became involved, as did the provincial parliaments of Holland and Gelderland. The Dutch States General (national parliament) intervened, and also King William III of England (who was simultaneously Stadhouder of The Netherlands) and the Emperor Leopold. The argument for toleration was not Enlightenment social tranquility, but a theological conclusion based on the idea of the imperfection of man after the Fall. Imperfection meant that no one had a perfect understanding of the truth, and thus no one could be certain that his understanding of the errors he perceived in his opponents' theology was accurate. In consequence, while believing one had a clear grasp of religious truth, there was no basis for persecution, but rather a requirement for toleration of religious difference. I have published ca. 250 documents about this international effort in the interests of religious toleration, with an introductory overview: Letters on Toleration: Dutch Aid to Persecuted Swiss and Palatine Mennonites, 1615-1699 (Picton Press, 2004).

Jonathan Dresner - 3/11/2008

And when a reviewer says it, you know the book advances no arguments not already warmly recieved by some faction or other, allowing the swindle to be swallowed as self-evident truth.

Alan Allport - 3/11/2008

Kurlansky: "His very effective style is to offer the facts and leave readers to draw their own conclusions ... you are left to put things together yourself."

Oh dear. Whenever a historian tells you that he is simply "offering the facts," you know you are being swindled.