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Entries by Michael C Tinkler


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Cliopatria's History Blogroll Part I/Part II.
Thanks for the kind welcome...
Thanks for the kind welcome, Dr. Luker! I indeed used to walk from my apartment to school past the Luker Estate, unbeknownst to me - not that my Europeanist social set would have pointed it out.


I'm happy to have been invited to join the Cliopatria group.
Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - 20:36
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The Standing of the Profession
Economists are smarting about ranking below astrologers -- but economists rank higher than historians.


Europeans rank the 'scientific" content of these fields --


1. Physics

2. Medicine

3. Biology

4. Astronomy

5. Psychology

6. Astrology

7. Economics

8. History


Here's a link to the pdf version -- the sad, sad chart is on page 27. I wonder what a comparable ranking in America would reveal?
Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - 23:50
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Quagmire Update
I check the New York Times and Washington Post daily but have yet to see a reported ACT of antisemitism, including taunts or shouts, resulting from The Passion of the Christ.

The worst the Anti-Defamation League has posted is Extremists Latch on to"The Passion of the Christ", which makes it clear that the folks quoted were rabid antisemites before they saw Mad Max, let alone The Passion.

It's been out for a week. Am I missing something, or is the punditocracy due the usual respect for its ability to predict the future?

By the way, if you think I'm an antisemite for thinking that the film (which I still haven't seen) won't produce a pogrom, I'm not talking about Mel or Christian theology -- I'm talking about America, the movie critics, and the professoriate. I think we public intellectuals are pretty bad at providing value for money when we offer paid predictions. Remember the mass mosque burnings in the last quarter of 2001? I live a county away from the Sikh Temple that got firebombed, so I don't underestimate the things that did occur. On the other hand, I also keep up with French synagogue burnings.

Let me offer a prediction -- The Passion of the Christ will not cause any large, medium, or small-scale outburst of antisemitism in America. I predict there will be tiny, isolated, quickly condemned, and thoroughly prosecuted incidents of antisemitism. If I'm wrong, I'll be happy to stand corrected.

FURTHER: Here's a New York Post story about the current level of antisemitic incidents in NYC as a baseline, by the way, though comments from those interviewed are contradictory.
Friday, March 5, 2004 - 20:08
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Fashion Plate
This post won't do you any good in an hour, but if you go to the Washington Post main page and hit reload over and over again you can watch a fasion show of the world's best-dressed authoritarian, Moammar Gaddafi. Stylin'!
Saturday, March 6, 2004 - 12:21
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History of History Teaching
So the so-called"greatest generation" didn't do well on standardized history tests? Hmmm. I was thinking about my own history career before college. I went to a really good high school in Chattanooga, TN and had:

*7th grade - American History - junior school football coach
*9th grade -"government" - not bad, though the teacher was reputedly a charity hire; he was certainly odd, without being crazy enough to be vivid or fun
*10th grade - European history - the chainsmoking registrar, the only class he taught. Misery. I read the textbook to pass the time, and when I finished that started snaffling books off his shelf. Guess that's why I did well on the AP.
*11th grade - American history from a man who was a historian. Bob Bailey, r.i.p, was a fine teacher and a fine historian. If he did anything outside the classroom for the school (and it was the kind of place where every teacher did something) I don't remember it. We were his priority. Little as I have grown up to enjoy the kind of historian who wears costumes which reflect his favorite period this man could make us think that history was interesting and that writing the history term paper was a mild imposition.

I have no problem believing that most people learned little from their history teachers, given how little I, who seemed to be destined for the subject, learned from 3 out of 4 in high school.

Was your experience different?
Tuesday, March 9, 2004 - 22:44
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Keith Hopkins, r.i.p.
The New York Times reports the death of Keith Hopkins, an important historian of antiquity. I know that most of the authors of this blog will miss Daniel Boorstin more (or are more likely to have read a book by him), but Hopkins represents the kind of history practiced today in the field of antiquity. The Times perhaps overstresses his"unusual approach" considering the broad acceptance of his work -- maybe they were impressed by his trajectory -- classics degrees, sociology lectureships, back to classics. It's a lot less uncommon than they think; the study of antiquity is interdisciplinary by necessity.

Hopkins' A World Full of Gods: the strange triumph of Christianity would be a great place to start.
Monday, March 15, 2004 - 11:48
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A Sad Day in the Blogosphere...
The Invisible Adjunct is leaving us. Best wishes to someone who would have made a more interesting tenured or tenure-track colleague than many we've known.
Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - 20:58
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Zombie Errors and Interesting Periodization
One of THOSE errors we can't seem to kill.

You know,"everyone in 1492 thought the world was flat until Columbus proved them wrong." That kind of thing.

There are two stories about ancient and medieval art in today's New York Times -- the first about a splendid show of later Byzantine art at the Met, the second about a show of art from A.D. 300-600 at a private gallery. One article is worth reading, the other is for sighing over.

First for sighs. The author offers us some background:"In 324 Constantine, now sole emperor, made Christianity the state religion, which had a profound impact on Christian art and the decorative arts." We have done a very bad job teaching people about that one. In 324, Constantine legalized Christianity in the entire empire. Using the term"state religion" for Christianity has to wait until Theodosius I in 380. Those 56 years are full of interesting developments, including a full-scale attempt to return the Empire to practicing still legal paganism. The LT-ANTIQ listserve has been commiserating about this zombie error today.

The better article talks about the show of later Byzantine art; the organizer made a very interesting decision: the show doesn't stop in 1453 with the fall of Constantinople to Mehmet the Conqueror. Instead,"Ms. Evans has contrived a terminus for the show, 1557. That is when a German scholar, Hieronymus Wolf, came up with the word Byzantium, derived from the name of an ancient Greek town, Byzantion, near which Constantinople was founded, to describe what had then become a phenomenon of history, a lost empire of Hellenic origins based on the Bosphorus, the past of Yeats's future dreams."

It's good to have a vivid reminder like this that cultures and art traditions don't always start and stop at neat dates with battles and rulers. It should be a very interesting show.

Feel free to leave your favorite 'zombie error' in the comments. I always call them 'zombie errors,' by the way, because if you put a stake in the heart of a 'vampire error' it stays dead.
Saturday, March 27, 2004 - 16:28
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Teaching with a Blog
I'm looking at using a blog interface next year for Art 101. My goal is to get students to discuss local architecture and the historical background for some of the great 19th century graveyards in town. They usually write papers about this material, but neither the individual papers nor the group work I've designed in the past is really satisfying me, lately. Maybe the blog interface with statement followed by comments (in a format other than ours here) will be better.

I've set up a Typepad blog (30 days free trial, though those first 2 days lasted about an hour apiece) to experiment.
Take a look.
http://michaeltinkler.typepad.com/
Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - 15:13
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Trebuchets on the Quad
I've blogged a bunch of photos of a Trebuchet event over at an experimental class site -- Michael Tinkler's Art 101.

I was thinking that it's a mild pity that my medieval class this term is"Women and Medieval Art" - not an obvious connection to, say, siege instruments. But then there are all the"Assaults on the Castle of Love" images we've been looking at. Definitely a bonus-points-if-you-attend opportunity!
Friday, April 16, 2004 - 19:38
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