The twenty-ninth edition of the Military History Carnival will take place here on December 1.  Please submit the best recent military history (broadly conceived) on the web for consideration for posting.  Deadline is November 28.

Nominations can be submitted here.

Good News: after five months, The Edge of the American West, winner of 2008's Cliopatria Award for Best Group Blog, has dehiatusized itself. Welcome back, Ari and Eric. Hat tip.

Alec Ash interviews "Norman Davies on Europe's Vanished States," The Browser, 27 October for his recommendation of five essential books on the subject.

Vladislav Davidzon, "Odessa Story," The Book, 27 October, reviews Charles King's Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams.

Pankaj Mishra, "Watch This Man," LRB, 3 November, reviews Niall Ferguson's Civilisation: The West and the Rest.

Theodore K. Rabb, "Love letter to a painting," TLS, 26 October, reviews Carola Hicks's Girl in a Green Gown: The history and mystery of the Arnolfini portrait.

Rory Stewart, "Cool Under Fire," intelligent life, Sept/Oct, revisits Afghanistan's National Kabul Museum and its treasures.

Isaac Chotiner, "What Did It Look Like?" The Book, 25 October, reviews Ashley Jackson's and David Tomkins's Illustrating Empire: A Visual History of British Imperialism.

Jack Rakove, "The Inventor of Our Politics," The Book, 26 October, reviews Richard Brookhiser's James Madison.

Roger Atwood, "The real lessons of Easter Island," TLS, 19 October, reviews Terry L. Hunt's and Carl Lipo's The Statues That Walked: Unraveling the mystery of Easter Island.

David S. Reynolds, "An Angry Prophet," WSJ, 22 October, reviews Tony Horwitz's Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War.

Michiko Kakutani, "Two-Sided Man Gets Two New Biographies," NYT, 24 October, reviews Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist and Claire Tomlin's Charles Dickens.

Carnivalesque LXXIX, an ancient/medieval edition of the festival, is up at She-Wolf.

Jonathan Lopez, "A Stranger to Himself," WSJ, 15 October, Roberta Silman for the Boston Globe, 17 October, and Michiko Kakutani, "The Persona and the Palette," NYT, 20 October, review Steven Naifeh's and Gregory White Smith's Van Gogh: The Life.

History of the typewriter recited by Michael Winslow from SansGil—Gil Cocker on Vimeo.

"Winged words," Economist, 15 October, reviews The Iliad of Homer, trans. by Richmond Lattimore, The Iliad, trans. by Anthony Verity, The Iliad, trans. by Stephen Mitchell, and Alice Oswald's Memorial. Alec Ash interviews "Norman Stone on Turkish History," The Browser, 20 October, for his recommendation of five essential books about it.

Alex Knapp, "Yes, Shakespeare Really Did Write Shakespeare," Forbes, 19 October, attempts to settle the issue.

This clip comes from a recently-released 1 March 1973 meeting between Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, and Simcha Dinitz about Middle Eastern affairs. In this section, the President functions as an amateur diplomatic historian, offering his perspective on the tension between realism and idealism in US foreign policy, and how that pattern applied to Woodrow Wilson and the Versailles Treaty.

(A note: the overall quality of the recording sometimes isn’t that great.)

President Nixon: Well, we work toward the ideal, but we have to work for it pragmatically. That’s really what it comes down to.

[Break.]

President Nixon: Woodrow Wilson, you know . . . He was probably the most religious, idealistic man ever to ever sit in this office. But before it all, when it finally came down to it—he had great impact. He brought us into the war, the Fourteen Points—again, when he goes over to the Versailles Conference, the pragmatists of Europe gobbled him up in about two bites.

Prime Minister Golda Meir: Yes.

President Nixon: And the world was very unsafe as a result, correct?

Jill Lepore in the New York Times, wrong as always:

"Lately, Mr. Cain has risen in the polls, buoyed by Tea Party populism, which is curious because when the word 'populism' was coined, in 1890, it meant opposition to a monopoly on wealth held by businessmen and bankers."

No, no, no, no, no, and wrong on both ends. A Harvard historian and the editors of the New York Times op-ed pages don't know any history between them? The Populists weren't simply opposed to wealth, or to a monopoly on wealth, or to businessmen, or to bankers. You can read the Omaha Platform yourself. You have to read all the way to the second sentence of the preamble for this: "Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench." Weird that people who just hated rich people used their first formal political statement to talk about political corruption, yeah? It's almost like they were angry at the government, which, you know, hold on a minute, I'm sensing the presence of a theme that I've heard somewhere else.

Mary Carole McCauley, "Walters researchers decode the secrets of the Archimedes Palimpsest," Baltimore Sun, 14 October, and Edward Rothstein, "Finding Archimedes in the Shadows," NYT, 16 October, feature the Archimedes Palimpsest, on exhibit now in "Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes" at Baltimore's Walters Art Museum.

Scott McLemee, "Mad – or Just Angry?" IHE, 19 October, reviews Aloys Winterling's Caligula: A Biography.

The Giant's Shoulders #40, the history of science carnival, is up at Gurdur's Stranger In An Even Stranger Land.

Dan Ephron, "Blood in the Holy City," Daily Beast, 17 October, reviews Simon Sebag Montefiori's Jerusalem: The Biography.

Michael Maiello, "The Optimistic Science," Daily Beast, 14 October, reviews Sylvia Nasar's Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius.

Steven Sherwood, "Science controversies past and present," Physics Today, October, argues that controversy over global warming follows a course similar to those of other "inconvenient truths" from physics.

Thirty-five years ago, Robert Gross published a remarkable social history of Concord, Massachusetts in the Revolutionary era. Minutely examining local records, Gross built a rich and precise social picture of the town, showing how local relationships worked and how people understood their world. On a foundation of a great deal of carefully examined evidence, Gross described a group of people who intended only one kind of revolution, and didn't mean to make corresponding social, economic, or cultural changes, hoping and expecting to go on living the way their parents had lived. Here's his conclusion about the nature of the violent revolution that the people of Concord helped to make:

In the November issue of Vanity Fair -- the magazine that was the Huffington Post before the Huffington Post was the Huffington Post -- James Kwak and Simon Johnson ("K+J") build a case against the Tea Party as anti-Hamiltonian, and therefore as an enemy of order and progress. William Hogeland does a nice job with the mess of K+J's narrative, so I won't spend much time discussing the foolishness of their premise and the lazy dishonesty of their technique. What interests me is the why.

Johnson and Kwak make a case for government debt as the foundation of stability, order, and progress; when governments borrow and spend, nations grow. Government borrowing and spending is progressive; opposition to government borrowing and spending is regressive. End of story.