The infrequency with which I post at Cliopatria has a lot to do with my not really understanding what I have to say that might be of interest to its largely-silent audience, but I had at least hoped to keep that audience updated on the developments in the defunding of the humanities in UK universities. Unfortunately, since I last did that, there have been no changes worth reporting. The widespread student protesting, the Oxford vote of no confidence and similar actions elsewhere, the subsequent meetings of vice-chancellors with the UK Prime Minister David Cameron,1 all made no difference at all to the state of the government's policy, which remains to cut all support for teaching in the humanities and to hang much of what research is funded on its social impact. Admittedly, the terms in which `impact' has finally been defined could be liberally interpreted merely as, "having readers not at university", which we might all hope for, especially the bloggers, but the general odour of marketisation makes us view it with justifiable fear and suspicion anyway.
Instead, the academic community appears largely to have disappeared into navel-gazing (not least at Oxford, which has the signal problem of having taught much of the current government, so that their views of how much the humanities could be worth in their personal development must partly originate here) about our failure to combine and make a decent statement of the point of a university. There was a spirited conference in London in December, including a contribution by Keith Thomas that went into the London Review of Books and the Oxford Magazine, but it can justly be argued, and has been, that defences in terms of tradition and its values are never going to impress those who have already stepped away from those values as they were taught them.2 If times are held to be a-changing, arguments that nothing need change probably cut little ice.
All the same, it is rather embarrassing that our assembled philosophers, economists, lawyers and, yea, historians, can't get our heads together and come up with a working model for a practical and self-evidently worthwhile modern humanities education that doesn't date back to the circumstances of the 1850s.3 It's all the more embarrassing because the opposition to it is so illogical and incoherent. Vast schemes have been constructed by David Willets and his cronies to relieve the burden on the UK taxpayer of paying for all this damn education, and yet what has resulted from it is a scheme that will apparently cost the government more up front, and has even less chance of being eventually paid back than did the original Conservative student loans scheme, adjusted many times since its inception in 1991. This one, on the other hand, was being adjusted even before it was made law. We have all kinds of instructions about improving access, and yet the sector is being starved of money and penalised for charging fees at the same time as being required to. What is supposed to lead to a diversification of `the student experience' is in fact a force for its homogenisation as a market-led degree system competes in a system where increasingly, the only metric of success is salary-added, something that the situation of the wider economy hobbles before we can get started. If this is what we're up against, it's pretty shoddy that we can't offer something obviously better.4
More deeply than this, however, I have for some time been worrying about what on earth the government think they're doing. These are, by the metrics I'm pre-disposed to use at least—as in, the place where I teach at degree-level gave many of them degrees—not stupid men. (Though they are mostly men, plus ça change.) The flaws in their plans are obvious to anyone who does the maths or knows the history, and they should be able to see this, or have people handy who can; how can these things be missed? Can they really be this incompetent?
The trouble is, of course, the alternative, which is that there is a purpose. In my darker moments, when reflecting on the awful passivity of the British voter and the way in which probable criminals who ignore public expressions of opinion can be returned to office simply because there's no-one better, I have wondered if that state of quiescence isn't actually what the current ruling class in the UK want, the lack of protest that will allow them to feather their personal nests quickly enough to get out of office safely before the shell they've hollowed out in the public sphere collapses in their wake. I thought this was unduly cynical, however, until I came across this excellent piece by Alun Salt, entitled "The UK government's attack on the humanities is an attack on democratic accountability". Do read it, not just for the satire—Alun writes much better than I do—but for this, towards the end:
"Education has been reduced to a purely economic commodity, and so the mantra is that it must be economically justified. There is no recognition that an educated electorate is necessary for a functioning democracy. I benefit from large numbers of people being educated and able to spot when a policy is a fantasy, because it has consequences at the ballot box. This is a function of education that isn’t an economic asset because democracy isn’t inherently an economic asset. If it were inherently an asset then we wouldn’t be spending billions supporting dictators around the world, and overseas tycoons wouldn’t be spending large amounts of money on electoral campaigns to block equal access to the electorate. David Cameron is firmly establishing that education is not something he admires in an electorate, and that’s why it's necessary to tax it."
The alarming thing is that Alun originally wrote this in 2010, before all the pieces of the puzzle were in place. I increasingly begin to think that this is really the heart of it, though. The things we preach the humanities as providing, critical thinking, independence of mind, the ability to evaluate sources against each other, spotting precedent, not "believing rubbish": why on earth have we ever thought that these are things a government in power wants more of in its electorate? How could it possibly advantage them and make it easier for them to stay in power or profit from power? As for history, the benefits of a historical perspective in public policy are so bluntly obvious that the Onion has taken the chance to point them out to the US public:
"... one thing we can do, before making a choice that has permanent consequences for our entire civilization, is check real quick first to see if human beings have ever done anything like it previously, and see if it turned out to be a good idea or not."
But our policy-makers don't need or want to think about how things will turn out in the long-term. Even if they did want to be rewarded for doing good, they would need that benefit inside a five-year cycle, before re-election. (Perhaps it's no wonder they have made academia jump the same repetitive rope, they have been raised to think it natural and game it.) Education is a much more slow-burning gain than that, and if it is to be reflected in greater inventiveness, creativity, wealth, health and, not least folks, not least, HAPPINESS—that will all come round in two, maybe three, governments' time, or even more, when this lot will be well out of it, or at least I assume that they presume they will be. So they would see little gain from their good efforts.
But I don't even credit them with that much good intent; I see what is effectively, as Alun says, a sabotaging of democracy leading to a continuation of the political disengagement of the electorate and the persistent ignoring of popular calls to change that, even when those calls were met with manifesto pledges now long abandoned. And this is being done by intelligent, educated people. Can they all be incompetent? Oblivious? Unconcernedly amoral? Or is this actually a successful policy? I don't like any of the...
Nigel Cliff, "The Reign of Venice," NYT, 27 January, reviews Roger Crowley's City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas. Matthew Price reviews Norman Davies's Vanished Kingdoms: The Lives and Afterlives of Europe's Lost Realms for The National, 28 January.
John B. Hattendorf, "The War Without a Loser," WSJ, 28 January, reviews George C. Daughan's 1812: The Navy's War and Brian Arthur's How Britain Won the War of 1812.
Pablo Eisenberg, "The Foundation Business," Nation, 25 January, reviews Olivier Zunz's Philanthropy in America: A History.
Sam Roberts, "How the Jews Handled Prohibition," NYT, 27 January, reviews Marni Davis's Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition.
Brad Gooch, "How Gossip Became History," Daily Beast, 29 January, reviews Christopher Bram's Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America. Susie Linfield, "The Pains of the Pioneers," The Book, 30 January, reviews Susan Hertog's Dangerous Ambition: Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson, New Women in Search of Love and Power.
Gabriel Thompson, "Looking Back at the UFW, a Union With Two Souls," Nation, 25 January, interviews Frank Bardacke, the author of Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers.
Samuel G. Freedman, "The Influence of the Inquisition," NYT, 27 January, reviews Cullen Murphy's God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World. Murphy, "Inside the heresy files," New Humanist, Jan/Feb, is a foretaste of the book.
Helen Castor, "The heart of Englishness?" TLS, 25 January, reviews Adam Nicholson's The Gentry: Stories of the English. John Barrell, "The English pleasures of Vauxhall," TLS, 25 January, reviews David Coke's and Alan Borg's Vauxhall Gardens: A History.
Edward Rothstein, "Life, Liberty and the Fact of Slavery," NYT, 26 January, reviews "Slavery at Jefferson's Monticello: Paradox of Liberty," an exhibit at Washington, DC's National Museum of American History, and a permanent companion, "Landscape of Slavery: Mulberry Row at Monticello," at the sites of labor on Jefferson's plantation near Charlottesville, VA. See also: "Slave images unearthed from the ‘Slavery at Jefferson's Monticello' exhibit at the Smithsonian," a slide show at The Root.
Richard Overy, "Sympathy with the devil," New Statesman, 23 January, reviews Piers Paul Read's The Dreyfus Affair.
Timothy Garton Ash, "In France, genocide has become a political brickbat," Guardian, 18 January, and Ash, "Speech Crimes and France," LA Times, 19 January, warn against attempt to outlaw denial of Armenian genocide.
Stefany Anne Golberg, "Greetings from Here," Smart Set, 18 January, and Tess Lewis, "Dispatches From a Lost Empire," WSJ, 21 January, review Michael Hofmann, ed. & trans., Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters. Hofmann, "Joseph Roth: Going Over the Edge," NYRB, 22 December, is a revised version of the volume's introduction; and the New Yorker, 9 January, has an excerpt from the book.
Alec Ash interviews "Timothy Snyder on Dissent," The Browser, 25 January, for his recommendation of five essential books on the subject. The focus is on Snyder's modern eastern European field.
Adam Gopnik, "The Caging of America," New Yorker, 30 January, reviews William J. Stuntz's The Collapse of American Criminal Justice and Franklin E. Zimring's The City that Became Safe: New York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control. Why is it that the land of the free imprisons more people in 2012 than it enslaved in 1860 and than Joseph Stalin imprisoned in 1950?
Finally, congratulations to our former colleague, Manan Ahmed, who has accepted a position at Columbia University in the history of Islam and South Asia.
Mary Beth Norton, "Margaret Fuller: Woman of the World," NYT, 20 January, and Melanie Kirkpatrick, "Let Them Be Sea Captains!" WSJ, 21 January, review John Matteson's The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography. Dwight Garner, "All-American Religion or Reason to Worry?" NYT, 24 January, reviews Matthew Bowman's The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith. Bowman blogs at The Juvenile Instructor.
In the week that Kodak filed for bankruptcy, "A Look at Photos From Kodak's Glory Days (Photos)," Daily Beast, n d, and "Eastman Kodak: 130 years of history – in pictures," Guardian, 19 January.
Sam Leith, "Age of Ideas," Spectator, 21 January, reviews Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century. Steve Donoghue reviews Peter Englund's The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War for The National, 20 January.
Ron Rosenbaum, "Revisiting The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," Smithsonian, February, is adapted from Rosenbaum's introduction to a new edition of William L. Shirer's classic. Jonathan Yardley reviews Peter Longerich's Heinrich Himmler: A Life for the Washington Post, 20 January. Peter Clarke, "The Rivals," The Book, 25 January, reviews Peter Caddick-Adams's Monty and Rommel: Parallel Lives.
Thaddeus Russell, "Controlling Guns, Controlling People," Reason, January, reviews Adam Winkler's Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America.
Simon Schama, "No Downers in ‘Downton'," Daily Beast, 16 January, gives "Downton Abby" a thumbs down. "... history's meant to be a bummer, not a stroll down memory lane. Done right, it delivers the tonic of tragedy, not the bromide of romance." "Uptown Downstairs Abbey" spoofs the genre:
Carnivalesque LXXXI, "Sexy Coins and why Giggs should have listened to the Greeks," an ancient/medieval edition of the festival, is up at Tom Sykes's In Pursuit of History.
Peter Monaghan, "Monumental Egyptologists," CHE, 15 January, reviews Ivor Noël Hume's Belzoni: The Giant Archaeologists Love to Hate and Jeffrey Abt's American Egyptologist: The Life of James Henry Breasted and the Creation of His Oriental Institute. Michael Dirda reviews Michael Murray's Jacques Barzun: Portrait of a Mind for the Washington Post, 18 January.
Graham E. Seel, "Good King John," History Today, February, paints a positive portrait.
Ken Johnson, "Getting Personal," NYT, 22 December, and Jed Perl, "Why Curators Matter," TNR, 18 January, review "The Renaissance Portrait: From Donatello to Bellini," an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. Charles Hope, "The Wrong Leonardo?" NYRB, 9 February, reviews "Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan," an exhibit at London's National Gallery of Art. Hope gives particular attention to its inclusion of two versions of The Virgin of the Rocks attributed to Leonardo.
Charles Isherwood, "Ben Jonson: In and Out of Shakespeare's Shadow," NYT, 19 January, reviews Ian Donaldson's Ben Jonson: A Life.
Faramerz Dabhoiwala, "The first sexual revolution: lust and liberty in the 18th century," Guardian, 20 January, is an excerpt from his The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution.
The Giants' Shoulders #43, the history of science carnival, is up at The Dispersal of Darwin.
Steven Pearlstein reviews Niall Ferguson's Civilization: The West and the Rest for the Washington Post, 13 January. It's a book in search of an editor, he says; even, in search of an author.
Patricia Cohen, "A Grim Aspect of Modernity (and a Breezy Tour)," NYT, 18 January, reviews Cullen Murphy's God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World. Elizabeth Lowry, "Visions of the Arabian Nights," TLS, 18 January, reviews Robert Irwin's Visions of the Jinn: Illustrators of the Arabian Nights.
Jennifer Schuessler, "Online Fracas for a Critic of the Right," NYT, 18 January, features hostile early press reaction to Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind and the internet pushback at Cliopatria, Crooked Timber, and U. S. Intellectual History.
Marc Wortman, "Red Tails Overlooks the Story of America's First Black Pilots," Daily Beast, 16 January, tells the story of African American pilots before World War II's Tuskegee Airmen.
Richard Davenport-Hines, "Survivors of the Ritzkrieg," TLS, 16 January, reviews Matthew Sweet's The West End Front: The wartime secrets of London's grand hotels.
David Greenberg, "It's A Man's World," The Book, 19 January, reviews Chris Matthews's Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero. Why is best-selling American political biography so vapid?
Jonathan Benthall, "Islam and the West," TLS, 18 January, reviews seven recent books on the subject.
Thomas E. Hachey and Robert K. O'Neill, "College has fought to deny access to interview materials," Irish Times, 19 January, prompts charges of "Obvious and Dangerous Lies from Boston College," Chris Bray, 19 January.
Jonathan Turley, "10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free," Washington Post, 13 January, ought to be read, pondered, and motivating.
Bethany Nowviskie, "It Starts on Day One," ProfHacker, 12 January, prompts contrasting responses from two Cliopatria alum: Tim Burke, "I endorse these messages," Easily Distracted, 13 January; and Caleb McDaniel, "Methods in U.S. Cultural History," Offprints, 13 January.
John Ray, "A tomb of one's own," TLS, 11 January, reviews the expansion of Oxford's Asmolean Museum's collections of Ancient Egyptian and Nubian artifacts.
Louise Foxcroft, "Eating it up: diet fads of the ages," CultureLab, 5 January, surveys dieting practices since the ancient Greeks. Foxcroft is the author of Calories & Corsets: A history of dieting over 2,000 years.
Edward Peters reviews Cullen Murphy's God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World for the Washington Post, 13 January.
Majorie Kehe for the CS Monitor, 6 January, and Jonathan Yardley for the Washington Post, 13 January review Elizabeth Dowling Taylor's A Slave in the White House.
Laura Shapiro, "What It Means to Be Middle Aged," NYT, 13 January, and Kay Hymowitz, "Old Enough to Know Better," WSJ, 14 January, review Patricia Cohen's In Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age.
Brooke Allen reviews Rosamund Bartlett's Tolstroy: A Russian Life for the Barnes and Noble Review, 11 January. Alexander Star, "What Friedrich Nietzsche Did to America," NYT, 13 January, reviews Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas.
Ian Thompson reviews Roberto Olla's Il Duce and His Women: Mussolini's Rise to Power for the Guardian, 13 January.
Chris Bray, "Boston College saga shows how the state has failed," Irish Times, 10 January, continues Bray's devastating critique of the state's and Boston College's misconduct.
Avner Shapira previews Eli Friedlander's Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait for Haaretz, 30 December. This year marks the 120th anniversary of Benjamin's birth. Michael O'Donnell, "The Last Days of Hugh Trevor-Roper," Washington Monthly, Jan/Feb, reviews Adam Sisman's An Honourable Englishman: The Life of Hugh Trevor-Roper.
Jeff Stier, "Modern-Day Prohibition, Reason, January, reviews Christopher Snowdon's The Art of Suppression: Pleasure, Panic and Prohibition Since 1800.
Tristram Hunt reviews Bill Cash's John Bright: Statesman, Orator, Agitator for the Guardian, 6 January.
Evelyne Payen-Variéras, "Disorder in Modernity: A New Revisionist History of Railroads in the U.S.," Books & Ideas, 12 August, reviews Richard White's Railroaded. The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America.
Sarah Fay, "Sex and Prophecy," The Book, 10 January, reviews David Lodge's biographical novel of H. G. Wells, A Man of Parts.
Corey Robin, "The Conservative Reaction," CHE, 8 January, is adapted from his book, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. Robin won the Cliopatria Award, 2011 for Best Writer. Bernard Porter reviews Cita Stelzer's Dinner with Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table for History Today, 19 December. Michael Kimmage, "A Consequential Man," The Book, 9 January, reviews Carl T. Bogus's Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism.
James M. Murphy, "The man who started the sexual revolution," TLS, 4 January, reviews Christopher Turner's Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the invention of sex.
John Schmalzbauer, "The Marginalization of Evangelical Scholarship (Among Evangelicals)," C^rdus/Comment, 14 December, and Molly Worthen, "The Evangelical Brain Trust," NYT, 6 January, review Randall Stephens and Karl Giberson's The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age.
David Runciman, "Will we be all right in the end?" LRB, 5 January, argues that, faced with its current crisis, Europe is likely to drift. William Drozdiak reviews Walter Laqueur's The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent for the Washington Post, 6 January.
Finally, to recognize the most "angry, funny and trenchant" in book reviewing, The Omnivore has established its hatchet job of the year award. On this year's shortlist: Mary Beard for her review of Robert Hughes's Rome in the Guardian, 2 July, and Leo Robson for his review of Richard Bradford's Martin Amis: The Biography in the New Statesman, 14 November.
The Biblical Studies Carnival for 1 January 2012 is up at Dr. Jim's Thinking Shop. The Carnival of Genealogy, 113th edition, is up at Creative Gene.
American Historical Association convention reports: AHA Today, Chicago Tribune, CHE, HistoriansTV, HNN, IHE, Legal History, NYT, Points, U.S. Intellectual History, WGN Radio 720, Digital History Project, ThatCamp, Baltimoreandme, GeneologyDr, Nick Cox, Monty Dobson, John Fea, Jason Heppler, Clair Potter, Jonathan Rees, Rick Shenkman, Kate Theimer, and Jonathan Yeager.
Filip Šenk reviews Hans Belting's Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science (trans. by Deborah Lucas Schneider) for the Prague Post, 30 November. John Lichfield, "The 600-year struggle for the soul of Joan of Arc," Independent, 5 January, is historiography in a broad, public sense. Sam Kean, "Copernicus's Last Act," NYT, 6 January, reviews Dava Sobel's A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos.
Jennifer Howard, "All They That Labored," CHE, 30 December, reviews "Manifold Greatness: The Making of the King James Bible," an exhibit co-sponsored by Oxford's Bodleian Library and Washington, DC's Folger Shakespeare Library, and Helen Moore and Julian Reid, eds., Manifold Greatness: The Making of the King James Bible. The exhibit has its own blog, Manifold Greatness. Currently at the Folger, the exhibit will travel to the Ransom Center at the University of Texas.
Rosemary Hill, "As God Intended," LRB, 5 January, reviews Jane Brown's The Omnipotent Magician: Lancelot ‘Capability' Brown, 1716-83.
Howard Jacobson, "Charles Dickens has been ruined by the BBC," Guardian, 6 January, argues that popularizations of Dickens have done him ill. Christopher Hitchens, "Charles Dickens's Inner Child," Vanity Fair, February, (Hitchens's last published essay) pays tribute to Dickens's "respect for childhood" and "willingness to atone for his mistakes."
In conjunction with the AHA annual meeting in Chicago, here are the seventh annual Cliopatria Awards for History Blogging, including our inaugural awards for Best Twitter Feed and Best Podcast Episode. Thanks to the judges this year: Manan Ahmed, Kelly Baker, Jonathan Dresner, Mary Dudziak, Katrina Gulliver, Andrew Hartman, Brett Holman, Sharon Howard, Shane Landrum, Randall Stephens, Karen Tani, and David Weinfeld. They have done a fine job, making difficult decisions to choose the best work from strong fields. Here are the winners and brief explanations of the judges' rationale for their decisions:
Best Individual Blog:
The Chirurgeon's Apprentice The Chirurgeon's Apprentice is "dedicated to the horrors of pre-anaesthetic surgery," but this creative and impeccably crafted blog accomplishes much more. Medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris brings the corporeal body into history. Drawing on a range of sources, from seventeenth-century medical treatises to Shakespeare, she illuminates the physical dimensions of the history of sickness, death and dying. The blog brings medical history to a broader audience, with intriguing posts that, for example, set modern practices like blood transfusions and organ transplantation in the context of a history of belief in the body as an instrument of healing, which included cannibalistic practices. Fitzharris' posts are illustrated with striking photographs of historic medical specimens, such as the preserved left ventricle of a woman's heart from 1765, showing the damage caused by myocardial infarction, posted, appropriately enough, on Valentine's Day.
http://thechirurgeonsapprentice.com/
Best Group Blog:
Wonders and Marvels This blog is impressive for the large number of contributors and the level of research that clearly goes into each post. It manages to be both generally accessible and academically relevant. It features excellent illustrations and is a great looking blog.
http://www.wondersandmarvels.com/
Best New Blog:
Demography and the Imperial Public Sphere Before Victoria
Melodee Beals generously shares her work in progress using this research-focused blog. Her experimentation with different techniques (often digital) gives readers a welcome perspective on the challenges of historical study. This is an engaging example of an individual historian making the most of social media (Ms Beals also has a blog related to her teaching). http://mhbeals.blogspot.com/
Best Post:
Karen Abbott's "If There's a Man Among Ye: The Tale of Pirate Queens Anne Bonny and Mary Read," Past Imperfect, 9 August 2011.
Journalist, writer, and blogger Karen Abbott at Past Imperfect has crafted a beautifully written historical blog post about Anne Bonny and Mary Read, female pirates who plundered and pillaged, dressed as men, and may have been lovers. Bonny supposedly "silenced a shipmate by stabbing him in the heart" and Read "swore, well, like a drunken sailor." Abbott makes the early 18th century come alive with tales of swashbuckling women, busting myths along the way. She queers pirate history, illuminating the social construction of gender and sexual identity, and takes the history of women at arms from the front lines to the pirate ship. Abbott avoids academic jargon and swearing like a sailor, writing in lucid, elegant prose.
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/2011/08/if-theres-a-man-among-ye-the-tale-of-pirate-queens-anne-bonny-and-mary-read/
Best Series of Posts:
Erik Loomis, "This Day in Labor History," Lawyers, Guns & Money. In "This Day in Labor History" Erik Loomis of Lawyers, Guns & Money documents significant moments in labor and working class history, moving back through time to slavery and drawing attention to anti-union campaigns in the 20th century. This excellent series highlights labor organizing, strikes, and anti-labor violence with state sponsored union-busting foregrounded. By showcasing the messiness of past labor disputes, Loomis provides case studies to show the rich historical variance of these events and how these "days" shaped later attitudes and policies about American labor. The series is both well-written and provocative.
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/author/erik.loomis/
Best Writer:
Corey Robin
Corey Robin's new blog, CoreyRobin.com, has rapidly become a *tour de force*. Robin joins battle with contemporary issues by way of a deep engagement with the history of political thought. Although he is a passionate partisan of the left, he takes conservative thinkers seriously. Several of them have returned the favor, including Andrew Sullivan, who regularly uses Robin's provocative posts as a launching pad for his own blogging, and Bruce Bartlett, who recently debated Robin at CoreyRobin.com. All that, and Robin's words sparkle with a crafty combination of intelligence and wit. He is the quintessential public intellectual for the digital age.
http://coreyrobin.com/
Best Twitter Feed:
The winner of the inaugural Cliopatria Award for Best Twitter Feed is @KatrinaGulliver. Scholarly blogging is a very public expression of the most fundamental values of academic professionalism, as well as great fun: Twitter's microblogging platform allows for a particularly dynamic and open discussion. In addition to participating actively and productively in professional conversations, Katrina Gulliver created and has continued to curate the #Twitterstorians hashtag, which enables historical and pedagogical discussions across the platform, and has helped immensely in creating a strong community of historical interest within Twitter.
http://twitter.com/#!/katrinagulliver
Best Podcast Episode:
The winner of the inaugural Cliopatria Award for Best Podcast Episode is Marshall Poe's New Books In History episode from 14 January 2011: "Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People, W.W. Norton & Company, 2010."
Podcasting leverages new technology and capabilities to bring historians' work to wider publics. Marshall Poe's weekly NBH podcasts provide in-depth discussions with historians, highlighting some of the best recent work and giving authors a chance to describe writing process, research, historiographical and contemporary issues around their publications. The interview with Nell Irvin Painter is friendly, well-informed, substantive, intriguing, entertaining and, most importantly, a fantastic introduction to her work.
http://newbooksinhistory.com/2011/01/14/nell-irvin-painter-the-history-of-white-people-norton-2010/
Daisy Banks interviews "Emma Rothschild on Economic History," The Browser, for her recommendation of five essential books on the subject.
Elaine Sciolino, "Leonardo Painting's Restoration Bitterly Divides Art Experts," NYT, 3 January, features the controversy among art historians over the restoration of Leonardo da Vinci's "Virgin and Child With Saint Anne."
Michael Kimmelman, "The Grid at 200: Lines That Shaped Manhattan," NYT, 2 January, reviews "The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011," an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York.
James Rosen reviews Carl T. Bogus's Buckley: William F. Buckley, Jr., and the Rise of American Conservatism for the Washington Post, 30 December. Kelefa Sanneh, "Bottle Rocket," New Yorker, 9 January, is perhaps the best piece of journalism on Newt Gingrich's candidacy for President.
Scott Jaschik, "Reprieve for Oral History," IHE, 3 January, reports the most recent developments in the case of Boston College and the Irish Republican Army oral history interviews. See also: "Circuit Breaker," Chris Bray, 30 December.
Gary Rosen, "How to Think About How to Live," WSJ, 27 December, reviews Luc Ferry's A Brief History of Thought.
Michael Patrick Brady for the Boston Globe, 7 November, and Christopher Tyerman, "The Crusaders' Favorite Muslim," WSJ, 31 December, review Anne-Marie Eddé's Saladin.
Richard Eder, "A Romantic Journey Through a Vanished Land," NYT, 28 December, reviews Max Egremont's Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia.
Nicholas Wade, "Genome Study Points to Adaptation in Early African-Americans," NYT, 2 January, features the research of Shanghai's Chinese Academy of Sciences. It identifies genetic mutations in the new world's African Americans.
Carl Rollyson, "A Jewish Revolutionary," WSJ, 31 December, reviews Joshua Rubenstein's Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary's Life.
In Anthony Summers, "The secret life of J. Edgar Hoover," Guardian, 31 December, a Hoover biographer probes J. Edgar's dark depths.
Books to look forward to in 2012:
Faramerz Dabhoiwala's The Origin of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution. Its Oxford historian/author claims it's both a good read and will improve your sex life. I'll take a money-back guarantee on that.
Robert A. Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power. Volume 4 of Caro's massive biography takes LBJ to the vice presidency, through the Kennedy assassination, and to the presidency.
D. J. Taylor, "Mean Streets," The Book, 2 January, reviews John Marriott's Beyond the Tower: A History of East London.
James Kindall, "At Times, the History Is in the Margins," NYT, reviews "John Adams Unbound," an exhibit at the Sachem Public Library in Holbrooke, New York. Zoltan Haraszti's John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (1952) was the first major study of Adams's marginalia.
Christopher Benfey, "The Far-Apart Artists," NYRB, 12 January, reviews Sarah Greenough, ed., My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Volume I, 1915–1933; "Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O'Keeffe," an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan; Barbara Haskell, ed., Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction; and Katherine Hoffman, Alfred Stieglitz: A Legacy of Light.
Finally, farewell to Emmett L. Bennett, Jr., a distinguished classicist who played a major role in the decipherment of Linear B.
Adam Hochschild, "Haiti's Tragic History," NYT, 29 December, reviews Laurent Dubois' Haiti: The Aftershocks of History.
Joyce E. Chaplin, "Roger Williams: The Great Separationist," NYT, 30 December, reviews John M. Barry's Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty. See also: Barry, "God, Government and Roger Williams' Big Idea," Smithsonian, January.
MelodiousMsM, "The Rule of Thumb: Vagina Types and Variability of Female Orgasm," MoSex:Blog, 18 November, identifies "A. E. Narjani," the author of an important 1924 paper on female orgasm as "Princess Marie Bonapart, great-grandniece of Emperor Napoleon I of France and daughter of Prince Roland Bonaparte." After marrying Prince George of Greece and Denmark in 1907, her official title became Her Royal Highness, Princess George of Greece and Denmark. Experiencing orgasm only through masterbation, HRH exhausted a husband and four male lovers before her study of the distance between the clitoris and the vagina in 243 women as determinative of the possibility of orgasm from penetrative sex.
Gary J. Bass, "How They Learned to Hate the Bomb," NYT, 30 December, reviews Philip Taubman's The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb. Lionel Barber for the Financial Times, 18 December, and Jacob Heilbrunn, "Remembering Richard Holbrooke," NYT, 30 December, review Derek Chollet and Samantha Power, eds., The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrooke in the World.
Finally, congratulations to the winners of Christianity Today's 2012 awards for the best books in history and biography: Paul C. Gutjahr for Charles Hodge: Guardian of American Orthodoxy and Thomas Albert Howard for God and the Atlantic: America, Europe, and the Religious Divide. Gary Scott Smith won an Award of Merit for Heaven in the American Imagination.
Mary Beard, Mike Dash, Helen Castor, John Morrill, and Timothy Garton Ash recommend the "Best of FiveBooks on History," The Browser, 29 December.
Colin Burrow reviews Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began for the Guardian, 23 December.
Suzanne Gamboa, "Scholars want help identifying slaves' origins," Guardian, 29 December, examines the project of Emory's David Eltis, York's James Walvin, and others.
Bernard Porter reviews Haia Shpayer-Makov's The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England for the Guardian, 23 December.
A. N. Wilson, "P. G. Wodehouse, the writing-machine with a tragic twist," TLS, 29 December, reviews Sophie Ratcliffe, ed., P. G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters.
Michael Dirda, "Arguably Hitchens," TLS, 21 December, reviews Christopher Hitchens's Arguably.
Jackson Lears, "A History of Disappointment," LRB, 5 January, reviews Sally Jacobs's The Other Barack: The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama's Father and Janny Scott's A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother.
Colin Thubron, "Apocalypse City," NYRB, 12 January, reviews Simon Sebag Montefiori's Jerusalem: The Biography.
"How Luther went viral: Five centuries before Facebook and the Arab spring, social media helped bring about the Reformation," Economist, 17 December, sees precedent for social change.
Mark Lilla, "Republicans for Revolution," NYRB, 12 January, reviews Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.
Lyndall Gordon, Eva Hoffman, Calvin Trillin, Jennifer Steil, and William Fiennes recommend the "Best of FiveBooks on Memoirs," The Browser, 26 December. Michael Korda, "Beware Hollywood Memoirs: They're Dull and Overrated," Daily Beast, 27 December, draws on his experience as a publisher to argue that a Hollywood memoir is likely to disappoint.
John Gribbin, "How Physics Got Weird," WSJ, 24 December, reviews Stephen Hawking, ed., The Dreams That Stuff Is Made Of, an anthology of the 20th century's major scientific papers that drove the revolution in quantum physics.
Patricia Cohen, "Bound for Local Glory at Last," NYT, 27 December, reports that Oklahoma is finally welcoming the archives of Woodie Guthrie.
At Chris Bray, our former colleague continues his series of posts about the Boston College/Irish Republican Army oral histories controversy. He outlines a convincing case that responsible authorities at Boston College must resign.
Timothy Snyder, "War No More: Why the World Has Become More Peaceful," Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb 2012, takes up a debate with Steven Pinker.
Tom Shippey, "Arthurian Glories Renewed," WSJ, 24 December, reviews Peter Ackroyd's The Death of King Arthur and Simon Armitage's The Death of King Arthur.
Drew Gilpin Faust, "Much, But Not Everything," The Book, 25 December, reviews David Reynolds's Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America.
Matthew Price, "Charles Dickens: a man and his demons," The National, 23 December, reviews Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life. Martin Rubin reviews Rosamund Bartlett's Tolstoy: A Russian Life for the LA Times, 25 December. Thomas Meany, "Stranger in a Strange Land," WSJ, 24 December, reviews Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's American Nietzsche.
William Anthony Hay, "Ambition in the East," WSJ, 23 December, reviews Sean McMeekins's The Russian Origins Of the First World War .
Andrew Hartman, "Teach for America: The Hidden Curriculum of Liberal Do-Gooders," Jacobin, Winter, takes on our own spoils. See also the discussion at: Hartman, "Teach for America: The Hidden Curriculum of Liberal Do-Gooders," US Intellectual History, and anon., "Response," Gates of Mercy, 24 December.
In "The Book of Books: What Literature Owes the Bible," NYT, 22 December, Marilynne Robinson takes up an issue close to her heart.
Michael Mewshaw reviews Robert Hughes's Rome : A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History for the Washington Post, 23 December. The review is more in the vein of Mary Beard's and Peter Stothard's than of Simon Schama's and others'.
David W. Dunlap, "Types With Plenty of Character," NYT, 23 December, reviews "Printing for Kingdom, Empire & Republic: Treasures From the Archives of the Imprimerie Nationale," an exhibit at the Grolier Club in Manhattan.
Darrin M. McMahon, "The Enlightenment's True Radicals," NYT, 23 December, reviews Jonathan I. Israel's Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750-1790.
Eugenia Zuckerman reviews Stuart Isacoff's A Natural History of the Piano : The Instrument, the Music, the Musicians — from Mozart to Modern Jazz and Everything in Between for the Washington Post, 23 December. Colin Fleming reviews Michael Broyles's Beethoven in America for the Washington Post, 23 December.
Mary Beard responds to the question, "Do the Classics Have a Future?" NYRB, 12 January.
Adam Kirsch, "Mysteries and Masterpieces," Harvard Magazine, Jan/Feb, investigates "the latest stage in the ‘American conquest of the Middle Ages'."
T. J. Clark, "The Chill of Disillusion," LRB, 5 January, reviews "Leonardo Da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan," the extraordinary exhibit at London's National Gallery. Ken Johnson, "Getting Personal," NYT, 22 December, reviews "The Renaissance Portrait From Donatello to Bellini," an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan.
Sam Adams, "Tintin's Father, Nobody's Son," Slate, 22 December, reviews Benoît Peeters' Hergé: Son of Tintin and the comics biography, The Adventures of Hergé.
Jennifer Howard, "Boston College Must Release Oral-History Records, but Court Will Review Them First," CHE, 19 December, and Jack Bouboushian, "Britain May Get Ahold of Secret IRA Interviews," Courthouse News Service, 22 December, report the latest developments in the Boston College/IRA oral history transcripts scandal. Bouboushian's reportage would have been improved had he read Chris Bray's careful study of the court documents here at Cliopatria. Boston College has utterly failed to defend privacy assurances its researchers gave witnesses and will apparently turn over vastly more oral history material than the court has even demanded. Will the American Association of University Professors, the American Historical Association, the American Sociological Association, the Oral History Association, and the Society of American Archivists act to safeguard obvious professional research interests in the case? If not, why not?
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