Noted Here and There ...
Brandon Watson's Houyhnhnm Land is hosting the Early Modernists Carnival. It features some of the best of Anglo-Dutch Wars, Beddgelert's Grave, David Brainard's Blog, Early Modern Notes, Giornale Nuovo, John Wesley's Journal, Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks, Philobiblion, Positive Liberty, Rhine River, and Siris.
One other note from the SHA convention: In 1992, when I was teaching at Antioch College, my book, The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885-1912, had just been published. I had reason to be very proud of it. The product of 20 years of work, it won two prizes and was generally very positively reviewed. But there was a very harsh review in Labor History by Elizabeth Leonard at Colby College. At the time, my students were reading the book in a seminar, so I xeroxed copies of one of the very positive reviews and Leonard's review, passed them out to the students and suggested that this was the range of legitimate reaction to the book. Leonard was especially critical of what she thought was my inattention to the role of women in the story. The criticism seemed well off the mark to me, since Ida B. Wells was the heroine of the book's first half, Mary White Ovington was the heroine of its latter half, and there was lots of attention to women throughout the book.
Well, I met Elizabeth Leonard at the SHA convention in Memphis. She now chairs the history department at Colby. She introduced herself and apologized for the review."I was just out of graduate school and thought I was pretty hot stuff. We were taught to be critical," she said. I gave her a hug and said that I had done some of the same kind of reviewing when I was at that stage in my career and hadn't been thoughtful to apologize later. I'll have to remember that the next time I see Jim McPherson. It was a lovely gesture on her part.