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CLIOPATRIA: A Group Blog

Aaron Bady (∞); Chris Bray (∞); James C. Cobb (∞); Mark Grimsley (∞); Brett Holman (∞); Jonathan Jarrett (∞); Robert KC Johnson (∞); Rachel Leow (∞); Ralph E. Luker (∞); Bruce Mazlish (∞); Scott McLemee (∞); Claire B. Potter (∞); Jonathan T. Reynolds (∞); Sage Ross (∞)

Nominations for the best history blogging will be open through November. Final selections will made by panels of history bloggers and announced at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in early January. The complete list of past winners is here

Cliopatria's History Blogroll Part I / Part II.

Monday, November 30, 2009

Ralph E. Luker

20th Century Notes

Nominations for the Cliopatria Awards, 2009 close on Monday 30 November at midnight est. Additional nominations are welcome in all categories, but we especially need nominations for Best Post. To refresh your memory, have a look at the monthly history carnivals and/or Cliopatria's History Blogroll.

David L. Ulin reviews Eva Hoffman's Time for the LA Times, 22 November.

Erez Manela, "First in Peace," Boston Globe, 29 November, reviews John Milton Cooper's Woodrow Wilson: A Biography.

Jon Meacham, "How Heroic Was Churchill?" Slate, 29 November, reviews Paul Johnson's Churchill.

Posted on Monday, November 30, 2009 at 12:32 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Ralph E. Luker

Things Noted Here & There

Stacy Schiff, "Please Mr. Postman," NYT, 27 November, reviews Thomas Mallon's Yours Ever: People and Their Letters.

Jay Winik, "A New Nation," NYT, 27 November, reviews Gordon S. Wood's Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815.

Andrew Motion reviews Vincent van Gogh's The Letters: The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition for the Guardian, 21 November.

Ange Mlinko, "Angels to Radios: On Rainer Maria Rilke," Nation, 24 November, reviews Edward Snow, ed. and trans., The Poetry of Rilke: Bilingual Edition.

Posted on Sunday, November 29, 2009 at 12:29 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, November 27, 2009

Ralph E. Luker

Weak Endnotes

Dominic Sandbrook, "History Books of the Year," Telegraph, 26 November, takes a crack at naming the best of a year's books in history. See also: "100 Notable Books of 2009: Non-fiction," NYT, 6 December; and Benjamin Schwarz, "Books of the Year," Atlantic, December.

Randall Stephens, "Rebunking the Pilgrims?" Religion in American History, 24 November, reviews Jeremy Bangs's Strangers and Pilgrims, Travellers and Sojourners.

Alexander Nazaryan, "How to Digest a Historic Feast," Washington Post, 25 November, reviews James Baker's Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday.

Laila Lalami, "The New Inquisition," The Nation, 24 November, reviews Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West.

Finally, farewell to H. C. Robbins Landon, a music historian, who made major contributions to our appreciation of Handel, Haydn, and Mozart.

Posted on Friday, November 27, 2009 at 12:52 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Ralph E. Luker

Additionally Noted

Nominations for the Cliopatria Awards, 2009, will close at midnight est on Monday 30 November. Additional nominations in all categories are welcome, but we particularly need nominations for Best Post. To refresh your memory, have a look at the monthly history carnivals and/or Cliopatria's History Blogroll.

Robert Darnton, "Google and the New Digital Future," NYRB, 17 December, looks at the future of digitized books.

Judith Shulevitz, "My True Story," NYT, 20 November, and Jonathan Yardley, "Shelve It Under Naval Gazing," Washington Post, 29 November, review Ben Yagoda's Memoir: A History.

Jill Lepore, "Boundless promise and grave peril," Washington Post, 29 November, reviews Gordon Wood's Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815.

Michael Dirda, "The unheroic genius behind the adventures of Tintin," Washington Post, 26 November, reviews Pierre Assouline's Hergé: The Man Who Created Tintin and Jean-Marie Apostolidès's The Metamorphoses of Tintin; or, Tintin for Adults.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 1:19 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Ralph E. Luker

20th Century Notes

Adam Kirsch, "The Firebrand," Tablet, 24 November, reviews Robert Service's Trotsky: A Biography.

A Debate: Jeffrey Herf, "Hate Radio," CHE, 22 November; and Richard Wolin, "Herf's Misuses of History," CHE, 22 November. The debate continues on-line at "'Islamo-Fascism': an Exchange," CHE, 22 November.

Dwight Garner, "Power and Style, in the Ring and the World," NYT, 24 November, reviews Wil Haygood's Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson.

Emily Bazelon, "The Alienator," Slate, 24 November, reviews Joan Biskupic's American Original: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Posted on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 1:36 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Ralph E. Luker

More Noted Things

Patricia Cohen reviews Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People for the NYT, 23 November.

Daniel Vitkus, "Celebrating English Proto-Imperialism," Common-place, November, reviews Alison Games's The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660.

Jeffrey Herf, "Hate Radio," CHE, 22 November, is an essay based on Herf's research for Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, which is published this month by Yale University Press.

Michael Dirda, "Vladimir Nabokov, reduced to notes," Washington Post, 19 November, reviews Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura, edited by Dmitri Nabokov.

Michiko Kakutani, "The Voice That Helped Remake Culture," NYT, 23 November, reviews Terry Teachout's POPS: A Life of Louis Armstrong.

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 1:57 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Rachel Leow

Yuri Dojc's Last Folio: An Exhibition

Books are beautiful, even in death and deathly times. So says a new photo exhibition of dying books, immortalized in print and on display in Cambridge University's Gonville & Caius Library.

Entitled Last Folio, the exhibition presents Yuri Dojc's photographs from an old Jewish school in eastern Slovakia, a building frozen in time since one fateful day in 1943 in which every teacher and child in the school was spirited away to the concentration camps. Their abrupt departure left the halls and classrooms desolate; the books, their pages fluttering to stillness, decayed wordlessly until their discovery half a century later.

Posted on Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 11:47 AM | Comments (1) | Top

Ralph E. Luker

Things Noted Here & There

Carnivalesque LVI, an early modern edition of the festival, is up at Investigations of a Dog.

Judith Shulevitz, "My True Story," NYT, 20 November, reviews Ben Yagoda's Memoir: A History.

Emily Colette Wilkinson reviews Veronica Buckley's The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Franoise D'Aubigne, Madame de Maintenon for the Washington Times, 15 November.

Alexandra Mullen, "Discovering the Keys to a Musical Past," WSJ, 21 November, reviews Madeline Goold's Mr. Langshaw's Square Piano: The Story of the First Pianos and How They Caused a Cultural Revolution.

Sean Wilentz, "Into the West," NYT, 20 November, reviews Robert W. Merry's A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War, and the Conquest of the American Continent.

Jonathan Yardley, "Forgotten Warrior," Washington Post, 22 November, reviews Joan Waugh's U. S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth.

Posted on Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 12:13 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Ralph E. Luker

Because I Love Good Country Music, ...

I could listen to the Carolina Chocolate Drops all day. Here, they do "Corn Bread and Butterbeans": That's Justin Robinson singing and on the fiddle, Rhiannon Giddens joins in song and plays the banjo, and Dom Flemons works the jug and bones. They carry on a tradition of African American string band music that Mebane, North Carolina's Joe Thompson taught them.

The Wiyos is a well-regarded white, urban group, with roots in New York and New Orleans. When they do their own, quite different, version of "Corn Bread and Butterbeans," the harmonica, guitar, bass and washboard, with bell and horn, replace the fiddle, banjo, jug and bones.

Posted on Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 12:54 AM | Comments (2) | Top

Friday, November 20, 2009

Ralph E. Luker

Friday's Notes

Michael O'Sullivan, "An army for the afterlife," Washington Post, 20 November, reviews "Terra Cotta Warriors: Guardians of China's First Emperor," an exhibit at the National Geographic Museum in Washington, DC.

Edward Rothstein, "Flights of Mind, Brought to Life," NYT, 19 November, reviews "Leonardo da Vinci's Workshop," an exhibit at Discovery Times Square Exposition in Manhattan.

Harvey J. Kaye, "Palin's Unlikely Hero," Daily Beast, 17 November, argues that Sarah Palin and much of the American Right misunderstand Thomas Paine.

Matthew Cobb, "How the Americans bought the French Resistance," TLS, 18 November, reviews Robert Belot's and Gilbert Karpman's L'affaire Suisse: La Résistance a-t-elle trahi de Gaulle?

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 12:57 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Chris Bray

Self-Satirizing Institutions

UC Berkeley needs to cut $150 million from their budget...so they hired a consultant for $3 million to tell them what to cut. Now they have to cut $153 million, but never mind -- the funny part is that the chancellor told the New York Times that he had to hire consultants to figure out his budget, because he has no expertise in organizational matters. He doesn't know anything about running an institution, understand -- he just, you know, runs an institution. I never understand how people like this manage to not feel embarrassed by themselves.

Posted on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 5:40 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Ralph E. Luker

Notes Ancient & Modern

Congratulations to T. J. Stiles, whose The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt has won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and to Philip Hoose, whose Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice has won the Award for Young People's Literature.

Adam Kirsch, "A Prophet's Pen," Tablet, 17 November, reviews David Rosenberg's A Literary Bible: An Original Translation.

Bonnie S. Benwick, "A tasting menu of savory dishes," Washington Post, 18 November, reviews Andrew Dalby's Cheese: A Global History, Sarah Moss's and Alexander Badenoch's Chocolate: A Global History, and Colleen Taylor Sen's Curry: A Global History.

Diana Athill, "Lore of the Land," Literary Review, November, reviews Madelaine Bunting's The Plot: A Biography of an English Acre.

Posted on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 12:08 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Ralph E. Luker

Midweek Notes

"The Giant's Shoulders #17 - Darwin Sesquicentennial Edition," the history of science carnival, is up at The Primate Diaries.

Elspeth Barker, "Words, Glorious Words," Literary Review, November, reviews Christian Kay, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels and Irené Wotherspoon, eds., Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Laura Claridge, "Best Books About Etiquette," WSJ, 14 November, recommends five: Erasmus, On the Civility of Children's Conduct, 1530; George Washington, Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior, 1748; Emily Post, Etiquette, 1927; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Learning How to Behave [sic], 1946; and Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, 1969.

Finally, this graphic tracks the expansion and decline of four major European maritime empires between 1800 and 2000: Hat tip.

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 12:45 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Robert KC Johnson

Cory Maye Reversal

In an injustice that my colleague Ralph Luker several years ago highlighted, the Mississippi Supreme Court has overturned Cory Maye's conviction for murder and remanded the case for a new trial.

The grounds for the decision were exceedingly narrow--a finding that the trial court judge erred in his response to Maye's second request for a change of venue--suggesting perhaps that even this very conservative Supreme Court was troubled by the circumstances of the conviction.

Posted on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 7:00 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Ralph E. Luker

Additionally Noted

Rosemary Hill, "The re-enchantment of the present," TLS, 11 November, reviews Megan Aldrich and Robert J. Wallis, eds., Antiquaries and Archaists: The past in the past, the past in the present.

Robert Irwin, "Onward Christian Soldiers," Literary Review, November, reviews Jonathan Phillips's Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades.

Tim Blanning, "High Notes," Literary Review, November, reviews Daniel Snowman's The Gilded Stage: A Social History of Opera.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, "The Arctic heart of darkness," TLS, 11 November, reviews Andrew Lambert's Franklin: Tragic hero of polar exploration and Glyn Williams's Arctic Labyrinth: The quest for the Northwest Passage.

Caryl Phillips, "The Explorer," TNR, 16 November, reviews Lafcadio Hearn's American Writings.

Posted on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 5:20 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, November 16, 2009

Robert KC Johnson

Celebrating Ernest Gruening

A rare shout-out to my favorite former Alaska senator, in Chris Hitchens' dissection of a fawning Palin book.

That the McCain team never seems to have understood just how much Alaska politics differed from that of the Lower 48 is one of many failures in the vetting process that netted Palin.

Posted on Monday, November 16, 2009 at 6:41 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Chris Bray

Baked

Improper focus on Internet-based procrastination caused me to miss news of another bake-off at the American Antiquarian Society. In this episode, three very old recipes produce apple pies with flavors that range from "perfumy and off-putting" to "vile...gross...disgusting."

One day, I will teach a class on the history of ordinary life in the early United States. And we will bake. Is there a better way to make the past tangible?

Posted on Monday, November 16, 2009 at 1:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Ralph E. Luker

More Noted Things

Judith Shulevitz, "Was Paul a Jew?" Tablet, 11 November, looks at recent revisionist studies of Paul of Tarsus by Pamela Eisenbaum, John G. Gager, Sarah Ruden, and Garry Wills.

Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn, "Scandal and Success," New Yorker, 13 November, reviews "Candide at 250: Scandal and Success," an exhibit at the New York Public Library.

Steve Fraser, "The Misunderstood Robber Baron: On Cornelius Vanderbilt," The Nation, 11 November, reviews T. J. Stiles's The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Martin Amis, "The problem with Nabokov," The Guardian, 14 November, is an essay occasioned by the publication of Nabokov's The Original of Laura. Hat tip.

Posted on Monday, November 16, 2009 at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Ralph E. Luker

Things Noted Here & There

The Carnival of Genealogy LXXXIII is up at Janet the Researcher; Biblical Studies Carnival XLVII is up at Paul of Tarsus in Historical Perspective; and Indian History Carnival #23 is up at varnam.

Edward Rothstein, "Information Highway: Camel Speed but Exotic Links," NYT, 12 November, reviews "Traveling the Silk Road," an exhibit at Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History.

Holland Cotter, "Compassionate Masters of the Universe," NYT, 12 November, reviews "Victorious Ones: Jain Images of Perfection, " an exhibit at Manhattan's Rubin Museum of Art, and "Peaceful Conquerors: Jain Manuscript Painting," an exhibit at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Harold Bloom, "Road Trip," NYT, 11 November, reviews Peter Ackroyd's The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling.

Michael Dirda, "Jung at Heart," Washington Post, 12 November, reviews Carl G. Jung's The Red Book: Liber Novus.

Posted on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 12:17 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, November 13, 2009

Ralph E. Luker

20th Century Notes

Terry Eagleton, "Waking the Dead," New Statesman, 12 November, is an essay occasioned by the republication of Eagleton's Walter Benjamin: or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism.

Bernard Porter, "Other People's Mail," LRB, 19 November, reviews Christopher Andrew's The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5.

Walter Isaacson, "How Einstein Divided America's Jews," Atlantic, December, explores the reaction of prominent American Jews to Einstein's Zionism.

Adam Mars-Jones reviews Blake Bailey's Cheever: A Life for the Guardian, 8 November.

Posted on Friday, November 13, 2009 at 12:47 AM | Comments (0) | Top

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