Canterbury Tales

Greetings faithful Rebunk reader. I am writing this form an internet cafe on a lovely day in Canterbury, home of Chaucer's tales. This is a wonderful city, abuzz with hustle and bustle, home to many students, and with an abundant pub life. (According to a woman I met yesterday Canterbury has the most pubs per capita of any city in England. That is not a modest achievement.) At the heart of the city is Canterbury cathedral, an imposing old structure and the domanant feature on Canterbury's spectacular 'skyline' (no skyscrapers here.) The best view of the city comes from the University of Kent campus, which sits high on a hill above the city. The walk to town is a couple of miles or so (there are buses and taxis, but the walk is worth doing) and for part of it one gets a spectacular view of Canturbury that is surely the capstone of any faculty or student recruiting effort at Kent.

My main purpose for visiting Canterbury is not its windy, narrow alleyways or its vibrant nightlife, however. I am here for a conference, which concluded yesterday, on Brown v. Board or Education. This being the fiftieth anniversary of that momentous case, there have bveen dozens of these kinds of conferences, and the major meetings have all had panels and roundtables and plenary sessions devoted to the case(s -- keep in mind that Brown is in fact several cases brought together under one name). I was here to chair a panel, which meant basically that I got to parasitically attach myself to the work of some scholars I have long admired, particularly the University of Sussex's Clive Webb, a young historian who has already had a remarkably productive career and who gave a marvelous paper on a radical right wing 'outside agitator' named John Kaspar yesterday in my panel. The conference was quite good, though it was overwhelmingly populated with Yanks. I actually assumed that the Tony Badger mafia would be in full effect. Cambridge's firt-rate historian Tony Badger has been producing a generation of British scholars of the US South that is easily the equal of any other group producing work in US history anywhere. It is largely because of his influence that England has produced some of the finest young scholars of American history in the last decade or so.

In any case, the conference, while Yank-centric, was worthwhile. There were some great discussions, some really interesting arguments, and the intellectual vibrancy spilled over into the pubs last night. I am here in Canterbury for one extra night before heading to Oxford. I am going to wander these streets, finding bookstores and probably making my way to the cathedral, or perhaps making my own adventures, much like Chaucer's intrepid travelers of a few centuries ago.