Unfortunately, the Fairmont Hotel in New Orleans is unable to host the Fall 2006 convention of the Southern Historical Association. I'd been hoping for the SHA's early return to the Big Easy. The Fall convention has been moved to the Sheraton Birmingham Hotel in Birmingham, Alabama. The new dates for the convention are Wednesday 15 November through Saturday 18 November 2006. It looks like the SHA will not get back to New Orleans until 2008.

At Historiblogography, Michael Benson and Linus Kafka ponder the relationship between one's politics and one's scholarship; and, at POTUS, Alonzo Hamby asks"Is History Politics by Other Means?"

Rick Perlstein and David Horowitz mix it up here. Rick answers my question here with the suggestion that conservatives have not recently produced a level of scholarship worthy of appointment at UCLA; I have the same observation about whether Jesse Lemisch's scholarship was worthy of the University of Chicago.

On the plagiarism front, Hiram Hover says that he's getting spammed with press releases from online paper writing services. The latest is from EssayFraud.org. It claims to be a non-profit site where students can file their grievances against overseas sites that hire English as Second Language (ESL) writers to do their work! That assumes, of course, the legitimacy of paper writing services in the first place. When I used to correct students' written grammar, at least, I could be fairly sure that the errors were no further removed from my students than a fraternity or sorority filing cabinet.

After the publication of Jacques Pluss's bizarre"Now It Can Be Told: Why I Pretended to be a Neo-Nazi" at HNN, the Newark Star-Ledger published a column whose title found Professor Pluss"between a Reich and a hard place" and reported that he was"a few stukas short of a squadron." But public relations for UCLA alum Andrew Jones is increasingly challenging. Andrew Israel Ross reports that MSNBC's Keith Olbermann names Brother Jones"the second worst person in the world today."