Noted Here and There ...
Another Damned Medievalist is planning a gathering of history bloggers at Seattle's American Historical Association convention in January. Will those who blog pseudonymously come in disguise? Gotta get my Cliopatria robes out of storage ‘n have ‘em cleaned. Don't wanna be smellin' of mothballs. Polish up the ol' miter ‘n scepter. Gin up the liturgical pomp.
My daughter taught me that there is a crucial difference between"a bomb" and"the bomb." Ann Althouse thinks Oliver Stone's"Alexander" will be the former and some Greeks are apparently already talking of suing. Hat tip to Instapundit.
Noting discussions by KC Johnson and me about the importance of intellectual diversity in American college classrooms, a reader of Cliopatria reminded us that there are those who disagree. He pointed to the closing remarks of Professor Grover Furr of Montclair State University's English Department on H-HOAC, a private listserv." ... colleges and universities do not need a single additional ‘conservative.' And they have plenty of ‘liberals,' said Professor Furr.
What they do need, and would much benefit from, is more Marxists, radicals, leftists – all terms conventionally applied to those who fight against exploitation, racism, sexism, and capitalism. We can never have too many of these, just as we can never have too few ‘conservatives.'Any questions? This guy is a real gem. Why is he teaching courses in World Literature, Chaucer, and Viet Nam & American Culture this semester? Can retirement come soon enough?
So far, I'm not terribly impressed by Google Scholar, but Patrick Belton at Oxblog has found us a new on-line library resource: Wikisource, brought to us by the folks at Wikipedia. Wikisource offers on-line texts. So far, it's spotty. But, among other things, Belton found the Iliad, the Odyssey, some Upanishads, the Qur'an, Shakespeare's corpus, Leaves of Grass, and many of the United States presidential inaugural and state of the union addresses there.