Congratulations: To Harvard's political scientist, Harvey Mansfield, who has been chosen by NEH to give the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities for 2007. Hattip.

Introductions: Jeremy Boggs,"History Blogosphere: An Introduction," JAMC: Journal of the Association for History and Computing, February, acquaints the uninitiated with what we do and cites a dozen of the usual suspects.

Language: Rachel at a historian's craft has a list of"supremely splendid words" from world languages. I'm particularly fond of the Persian word, nakhur, which is"a camel that won't give milk until her nostrils are tickled." No comment!

Replication: Lubavitchers are one of the largest groups of ultra-orthodox Jews. In 1940, they purchased a collegiate gothic building at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, NY, for the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbi, Yoseph Yitzchak Schneerson, a refugee from Nazi persecution. His energetic nurturing and renewal of the community around the world made the building a kind of holy ground. Now, it is replicated in buildings in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, Los Angeles, New Brunswick (NJ), Montreal, São Paulo, Melbourne, Buenos Aires, Milan, and elsewhere. Hat tip.

Reviews: Props to Dan Todman and Brett Holman for their thoughtful review of Jörg Friedrich's The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945. Composed by a British and an Australian historian, the dialogue explores a reviewing form that blogging makes possible. And, by featuring it on four different history blogs, Airminded, Cliopatria, Revise & Dissent, and Trench Fever, they gave it maximum exposure. Columbia University Press certainly benefitted from the review, which should encourage other academic presses to entrust their new books to bloggers for review.