Princeton's Linda Colley, Britain's Adloyada, and Crooked Timber's Chris Bertram debate how the United States fits the model of Empire. Does Great Britain, France, Russia, or China fix the mold?

Kenneth Gregg and Scott McLemee call attention to this LA Times article about the discovery of a letter that reveals Upton Sinclair's awareness that the case for Nichola Sacco's and Bartolomeo Vanzetti's innocense was a fraud. My recollection is that thirty-five years ago, in a talk at UNC, Chapel Hill, Oscar Handlin claimed that some of his peers among historians had knowingly participated in suppressing evidence that, however hysterical and procedurally flawed was the case against them, Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty as charged.
Update: eb at No Great Matter suggests that there is no news in the LA Times story, except the intellectual laziness of the reporter and the ignorance of the Sinclair scholars that it quotes.

In case you missed it, Lois Romano,"Literacy of College Students Is on Decline," Washington Post, 25 December. Why do I suspect that you already knew that?

No great surprise here: Ward Churchill wins Andrew Sullivan's Michael Moore Award for the year.