CLIOPATRIA: A Group Blog
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Ferguson's Current Affair Goes Public
In case you don't have the news,
Katie Nicholl, Miles Goslett, and Caroline Graham, "The history man and fatwa girl: How will David Cameron take news that think-tank guru Niall Ferguson has deserted wife Sue Douglas for Somali feminist?" Daily Mail, 7 February
Lawrence Auster, "Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds Admit Impediments," View from the Right, 7 February
Beth Hale, "The historian, his wife and a mistress living under a fatwa," Daily Mail, 8 February
Cahal Milmo and Luke Blackall, "'It's tricky to find men when you're living under a fatwa'," Independent, 8 February
"Fabulously Snobby Divorce Scandal of the Week: Niall Ferguson's Fatwa Mistress Two-Step," The Gawker, 8 February
Courtney Comstock, "Niall Ferguson Is Leaving His Wife For A Young Hot Feminist And Political War Refugee," Business Insider, 8 February
Jessica Pressler, "Niall Ferguson Leaves Wife for Somali Intellectual," New York Magazine, 8 February
Margaret Soltan, "‘In all the years I have known Ayaan, she's never had a boyfriend. She's gorgeous, but with a fatwa, it's tricky to find guys.'," University Diaries, 8 February, and
Doug Camilli, "The Descent of Family," Montreal Gazette, 9 February.
The story broke on Sunday in the Daily Mail, where Ms. Douglas was Ferguson's editor, when they first met in 1987. The DM quotes "another historian" to the effect that NF "has the kind of face you want to punch." He had eight affairs in the last five years?
Monday, February 8, 2010
The Most Worstest Thing in Forever
Actual quote:
"Washington insiders say they can't ever recall a period in American public life as full of anger and polarization as now."
Uh, yeah. When has America ever been polarized before?
And so here we go again. Blogging at the Most Reliable Source of Internet Comedy™, Jeremy Rifkin warns that American public life has suddenly and without precedent turned uncivil. Why, there are even people on the radio who have "fanned the flames of hatred with occasional outrageous personal attacks on public figures and advocates of policy agendas with which they disagree."
Nothing like this has ever happened before, of course, and so the president has been forced to issue "an unprecedented plea for civility in public discourse."
I'm taking up a collection -- send me a check, c/o the UCLA History Department, so we can send our nation's capital a book.
How hard would you have to work to believe this stuff? And is it uncivil of me to want to scream out loud at the people who write it?
Things Noted Here & There
Anthony Grafton, "Scholar and Blogger," The Book, 8 February, reviews Mary Beard's A Don's Life.
Helen Castor reviews Thomas Asbridge's The Crusades: The War for the Holy Land for the Guardian, 6 February.
Peter Ackroyd reviews Felipe Fernández-Armesto's 1492: The Year Our World Began for the London Times, 6 February.
Claudia Goldin, "Tales Out of School," NYT, 5 February, reviews Jonathan Cole's The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected.
Richard Brooks, "British Library to offer free ebook downloads," London's Sunday Times, 7 February, announces the BL's plan to release 65,000 19th century works of fiction.
John Carey reviews Michael Scammell's Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual for London's Sunday Times, 7 February.
For All The Saints ...
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Weak Endnotes
Robert Darnton, "Google and the New Digital Future," NYRB, 17 December; Paul N. Currant, Anthony Lewis, Theodore Koditschek, et al., "Google & the Future of Books: An Exchange," NYRB, 14 January; and Roy Blount Jr., Judy Blume, Scott Turow, et al., "The Google Books Settlement: An Exchange with the Authors Guild," NYRB, 25 February, is an important discussion.
Edward Rothstein, "Unrolled, Unbridled and Unabashed," NYT, 4 February, reviews "Rubbers: The Life, History & Struggle of the Condom," an exhibit at Manhattan's Museum of Sex.
Susan Rubin Suleiman, "French Contentions," NYT, 5 February, reviews Frederick Brown's For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus.
Matthew Kaminski, "Creating a Postwar World," WSJ, 3 February, reviews S. M. Plokhy's Yalta: The Price of Peace.
Charles Peterson, "In the World of Facebook," NYRB, 25 February, reviews Julia Angwin's Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America and Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal.
Friday, February 5, 2010
Friday's Notes
Jeffrey Herf, "It Will Not Go Away," The Book, 4 February, reviews Robert S. Wistrich's A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad.
Thomas Rogers, "When smart people believe dumb things," Salon, 3 February, interviews David Aaronovitch, the author of Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History.
Adam Mars-Jones reviews Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, eds., A New Literary History of America for the Guardian, 31 January.
Ed Caesar reviews Greg Grandin's Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City for London's Sunday Times, 31 January.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Thursday's Notes
Peter Leeson, "Justice, Medieval Style,"Boston Globe, 31 January. Julie Hofmann: "Anybody want to count the ways in which this is just wrong?" Where are Got Medieval and In the Middle when you need them?
Michael Dirda reviews Michael Scott's Boyle: Between God and Science for the Washington Post, 4 February.
Mark Mazower, "History's Isle," The Book, 3 February, reviews Richard J. Evans's Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent.
Liam Julian, "Art as Manifesto," Policy Review, February/March, reviews Nicholas Fox Weber's The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism.
The coincidental deaths of J. D. Salinger and Howard Zinn continues to attract commentary. See:
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Modern History Notes
Serena Golden, "Piracy," IHE, 3 February, interviews the University of Chicago's Adrian Johns about his new book, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates.
Katherine Bouton, "Tale of an Unsung Fossil Finder, in Fact and Fiction," NYT, 1 February, reviews Shelly Emling's The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World and Tracy Chevalier's Remarkable Creatures.
Nicholas Shrimpton, "Tennyson now," TLS, 27 January, reviews Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry, eds., Tennyson Among the Poets.
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, "In And Out Of History," The Book, 2 February, reviews Jean-Marie Apostolides's The Metamorphosis of Tintin or Tintin for Adults and Pierre Assouline's Herge: The Man Who Created Tintin.
Anthony Daniels, "Ayn Rand: engineer of souls," New Criterion, February, reviews Ann C. Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made.
Dwight Garner, "A Woman's Undying Gift to Science," NYT, 2 February, reviews Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks; and Denise Grady, "A Lasting Gift to Medicine That Wasn't Really a Gift," NYT, 1 February, takes another look at Lacks's contribution to biological engineering.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
More Noted Things
Rob Lyons, "A foodie's guide to the history of humanity," Spiked Review of Books, 31 January, reviews Tom Standage's An Edible History of Humanity.
Howell Raines, "The Counter Revolution," NYT, 31 January, pays his due to the 50th anniversary of the Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-ins. Marian Wright Edelman, "SNCC, Fifty Years Later," Huffington Post, 31 January, remembers. The scene of the sit-in has re-opened as a civil rights museum. See: Edward Rothstein, "Four Men, a Counter and Soon, Revolution," NYT, 31 January.
Bruce J. Shulman, "House should pass Senate bill," Politico, 31 January, looks at the legislative history of social security to argue for a resolution of the health care impass.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Things Noted Here & There
Steven Levingston reviews Paul Strathern's The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior: The Intersecting Lives of da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Borgia and the World They Shaped for the Washington Post, 31 January.
Caleb Crain, "Beer Buddies," BookForum, February/March, reviews Richard Stott's Jolly Fellows: Male Milieus in Nineteenth-Century America.
Douglas Whynott, "A legacy of life," Boston Globe, 31 January, and Eric Roston for the Washington Post, 31 January, review Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. This appears to be an extra-ordinary story and a major book. Popular Science's headline, "Five Reasons Henrietta Lacks is the Most Important Woman in Medical History", probably exaggerates, but you get the point.
William H. Chafe, "A protest that changed history," AJC, 29 January, celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-ins.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
The trumpet calls
[Cross-posted at Airminded.]
Airminded is hosting the next edition of the Military History Carnival on 15 February. Please send me suggestions for the best military history blogging since 17 January, either by email (bholman at airminded dot org), by web (here or here) or by twitter (@Airminded or tagged #mhc21). Thanks!
Image source: Wikipedia.
Sunday's Notes
Michael Bérubé, "The Way We Learn," NYT, 29 January, reviews Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas.
William Dalrymple reviews James Mather's Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World for the Guardian, 31 January.
Vanessa Thorpe, "Uncovered: the man behind Coleridge's Ancient Mariner," Guardian, 31 January, reviews Robert Fowke's The Real Ancient Mariner.
Caroline Weber, "Après le Déluge," NYT, 29 January, reviews Jeffrey H. Jackson's Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910.
Tom Carson, "The Night Belongs to Us," NYT, 29 January, reviews Patti Smith's Just Kids. In "Patti Smith's New York stories," Guardian, 31 January, Gaby Wood interviews Smith.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Weak Endnotes
Charlotte Higgins, "The Iliad and what it can still tell us about war," Guardian, 30 January, is a essay on ancient lessons about the costs of war.
Andrew Wheatcroft, "Cast Away," NYT, 29 January, reviews Matthew Carr's Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain.
In Anna Blundy's interview with Robert Goodwin, "Rewriting America," The Browser, 2009, he recommends five books that are central to his project rewriting Spanish American history.
Philip Pullman offers "An introduction to the poetry of William Blake," Guardian, 29 January.
Annabelle Wynn, "Mollie Panter-Downes, a wartime voice to treaure," Books Blog, 21 January, calls for the rediscovery of the mid-20th century journalist and novelist.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Modern History Notes
Richard Posner, "The Race Against Race," The Book, 29 January, reviews Peggy Pascoe's What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America and Paul A. Lombardo's Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell.
Michael Williams reviews Adam Zamoyski's Chopin: Prince of the Romantics for the Telegraph, 26 January.
Andy Beckett reviews Perry Anderson's The New Old World for the Guardian, 23 January.
Our colleague, K. C. Johnson, has published an essay on "Obama and American Foreign Policy," SHAFR, 26 January.
"Obama at One," the Nation's symposium on the highs and lows of Barack Obama's first year as POTUS includes responses by Andrew Bacevich, Robert Caro, Adolph Reed, Jr., Howard Zinn and many others.
Farewell to Howard Zinn, activist and author of A People's History of the United States. Michael Kazin's "Howard Zinn's History Lessons," Dissent, Spring 2004, remains the most powerful critique of Zinn's most popular work. Yet had I been at Spelman College from 1956 to 1963 or at Boston University from 1964 to 1988, Zinn and I would have been allies.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Premodern History Notes
Caleb Crain, "Terms of Infringement," The National, 21 January, reviews Adrian Johns's Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates.
Peter Schjeldahl, "Then and Now," New Yorker, 1 February, reviews "The Drawings of Bronzino," an exhibit at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art. See also: Schjeldahl's "Man of Mannerism," a narrated slide show.
John Ferling, "Myths of the American Revolution," Smithsonian, January, takes on some common acceptances about the American Revolution.
Aaron Belz, "The Jerk," Books & Culture, January/February, reviews Robert Crawford's The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography.
Sophia Lear, "Reader, I Made Him Up," The Book, 28 January, reviews Sheila Kohler's Becoming Jane Eyre.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Dissenting Opinion
Glenn Greenwald is a constitutional lawyer by training, so he has a particular view of what the “rule of law” means. That’s fine. On most points, I am in complete agreement with him, especially in recent years where investing the constitution with actual authority puts you at odds with pretty much the entire US state apparatus. But I regard his claim that Citizens United vs. FEC is “good law” with all sorts of reservations. As he puts it:
One of the central lessons of the Bush era should have been that illegal or unconstitutional actions — warrantless eavesdropping, torture, unilateral Presidential programs — can’t be justified because of the allegedly good results they produce (Protecting us from the Terrorists). The “rule of law” means we faithfully apply it in ways that produce outcomes we like and outcomes we don’t like.
In other words, while this decision might have pernicious effects in practice, he gives priority to the decision’s theoretical justification, the fact that it is “good law,” that it follows the constitution’s explicit guidelines. I don’t particularly think that he’s wrong. But I don’t think you can be right on this kind of question, or at least not in the simple way he‘s pretending to be. The “rule of law” is a convenient fairy tale for both simple-minded people and for whip smart lawyers like Greenwald who, for whatever particular reason, find it congenial to act as if they believe there is a clear line dividing legal from illegal or constitutional from unconstitutional. But as Jeffrey Toobin put it during the Sotomayor confirmation hearings (a man who knows a thing or two about Supreme Court history), it is a fiction that “the law” can exist separate from the minds that, in interpreting it, radically re-create and transform it:
Justices have a great deal of discretion—in which cases they take, in the results they reach, in the opinions they write. When it comes to interpreting the Constitution—in deciding, say, whether a university admissions office may consider an applicant’s race—there is, frankly, no such thing as “law.” In such instances, Justices make choices, based largely, though not exclusively, on their political views of the issues involved. In reaching decisions this way, the Justices are not doing anything wrong; there is no other way to interpret the majestic vagueness of the Constitution.
Midweek Notes
You may recall that Simon Schama, "What objects say about our times," Financial Times, 22 January, previews among other things "A History of the World in 100 Objects," Neil MacGregor's new series on the history of material culture that runs throughout 2010 on BBC. Manan Ahmed reminds me that you can listen to the series on BBC's site.
Carnivalesque LVIII, an early modern edition of the festival is up at The Gentleman Administrator. It takes the form of "A Book of Blogge Cookrye" and calls for
1 pitcher of sex 2 pinches of violence 2 slabs of domestic debate 1 qrt. of the exotic 2 litres of Samuel Pepys & 1/2 pint of Shakespeare
Adam Kirsch, "Vanishing Act," Tablet, 26 January, reviews Yehuda Bauer's The Death of the Shtetl.
Samuel Brittan, "The Many Faces of Liberalism," Financial Times, 22 January, reviews Raymond Plant's The Neo-Liberal State, Simon Griffiths and Kevin Hickson, eds., British Party Politics and Ideology after New Labour, and Timothy Ferris's The Science of Liberty.
Dwight Garner, "North Korea Keeps Hiding, and Fascinating," NYT, 26 January, reviews Barbara Demick's Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, Ralph Hassig's and Kongdan Oh's The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom, and B. R. Myers's The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves — and Why It Matters.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
20th Century Notes
The University of Chicago Library's online exhibits feature historical subjects, including Darwin, Lincoln, and book, Jewish, and women's history. "Integrating the Life of the Mind: African Americans at the University of Chicago, 1870-1940" is a fascinating one.
Jonathan Yardley reviews Christopher Browning's Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp for the Washington Post, 24 January.
Janet Maslin, "Exclusive!!! Gossip Has a History!" NYT, 24 January, reviews Henry E. Scott's Shocking True Story: The Rise and Fall of Confidential, ‘America's Most Scandalous Scandal Magazine'.
You've probably seen the "HNN special: Liberals Respond to Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism". A conservative, Michael Ledeen, responds to the book here; and the convener of the liberals' criticism, David Neiwert, prompts more extensive discussion at Neiwert, "Historians vs. Jonah Goldberg," Huffington Post, 25 January.
Monday, January 25, 2010
There's Other Evidence...
...but it's just so totally old
Blaring headlines and silly stories announce a stunning new finding from the Gallup Poll: the first year of Barack Obama's presidency is the most polarizing ever.
In the always magnificently awful Huffington Post, for an almost too-easy example, Sam Stein says the poll shows that Obama has "the most polarized approval ratings ever recorded during a president's first year in office."
Gallup doesn't help, tagging their report on the poll with a subhead explaining that Obama's numbers are worse than for "any prior first-year president."
Louis R. Harlan, 1922-2010
Louis R. Harlan died on Friday in Lexington, Virginia. His service in World War II was the subject of a memoir, All At Sea. Harlan did his undergraduate work at Emory, earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins, and taught for most of his career at the University of Maryland. A distinguished historian of the modern South, he won the Bancroft Prize twice, the Pulitzer Prize once, and the Albert J. Beveridge Award once for Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901 and Booker T. Washington: the Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915. He also edited the multi-volume Washington Papers. Harlan was one of the few historians to have served as president of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Southern Historical Association. The fine baggage under his eyes and handlebar mustaches put my own to shame. I miss him already. Thanks to Ted DeLaney for the notice. See also: AHA Today, 25 January.
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