Manan Ahmed will host History Carnival XXXIV on 1 July. Send nominations of exemplary history posts since 15 June to him at manan*at*uchicago*dot*edu or use the form. You do remember the rule, don't you? If you don't send in a nomination, he is free to feature that wretched thing you posted last Friday night when you were under alien influences. Let the blogger beware.

Adam Gopnik,"Life of the Party: Benjamin Disraeli and the Politics of Performance," New Yorker, 3 July, on why Disraeli didn't fit Lytton Strachey's Victorian mold. Victoria's Conservative Prime Minister, says Gopnik, was"Milton's Satan set loose in Tennyson's rookery, the energy principle that helps keep the landscape around him from being merely pious."

Carlin Romano,"Get Me Revision! Remembering Richard Hofstadter," CHE, 30 June, reviews David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography."Think Gordon Wood and (still) Arthur Schlesinger Jr., with Sean Wilentz one middle-aged prince. As Brown puts it of Hofstadter, 'For nearly 30 years ... he wrote the best books for the best publisher, won the best prizes, and taught in the best city, at the best school, at the best time'."
Bob Thompson,"The History Channeler," Washington Post, 26 June, is an excellent sketch of Simon Schama. For him,"in the end, the lessons of history are not the point. The point is the continuous, interconnected drama of human lives" it concludes."The study of history is ‘a resistance against oblivion, against loss,' he says. ‘It tells you about what it was like to be a human being.'"

Jeffrey A. Jenkins,"A Rich History of the ‘People's House'," Chicago Tribune, 25 June, reviews Robert V. Remini, The House: The History of the House of Representatives; and David Garrow,"A Modest Proposal," Los Angeles Times, 25 June, reviews Jeffrey Rosen's The Most Democratic Branch: How the Courts Serve America.

Chris Bray recommends"A Camp Divided," Wall Street Journal, ca 13 June. The article about conflict in a camp north of Baghdad between a" careerist" American colonel and an American colonel who had"gone native" is subscriber-only, but"Careerism Comes to Camp Taji," Westhawk, 20 June, tells the story.

Finally, Bob Ray Sanders,"Cashing in on Martin Luther King's Legacy," Dallas/Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 28 June; and Maria Saporta,"Emory Left Out of Loop in King Deal," AJ-C, 28 June, track the on-going saga of the King Papers. Andy Peters,"Atlanta Keeps King Papers, But Scholars Fret Over Access," Fulton County GA DailyReport.com, 28 June, covers many things, including the King Estate's claim that any historian who intends to quote from a King document"in whole or in part" must have the Estate's permi$$ion. That claim rejects"fair use" altogether. Threatened by Estate attorneys, Taylor Branch ignored them altogether. In Peters article, the editor of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Clay Carson, is quoted as having said:"Anyone who asks for permission to quote Dr. King's words is stupid to ask for permission."