Friday's Notes
"Is there a margin muse in your library book?" Books Blog, 28 July, offers up readers' marginalia on Gustav Krist, Pauline Moffitt Watts and Eugen Weber.
Dwight Garner,"Rowing to Democracy," NYT, 6 August, reviews John R. Hale's Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy.
Andrew O'Hehir,"Sacrificial virgins of the Mississippi, Salon, 6 August, and Dennis Drabelle,"Down by the Riverside," Washington Post, 9 August, review Timothy Pauketat's Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi.
Maev Kennedy reviews"Tennyson at Farringford," an exhibit at Farringford House, Isle of Wight, for the Guardian, 6 August.
Two notes on abbreviated language: Jeremy Dibbel,"Was JQA a Tweeter?" The Beehive, 29 May, suggests that John Quincy Adams's diary entries read like twitter tweets [gag!]; and Jennifer Schluessler,"A Brief History of Shorthand," Paper Cuts, 6 August, reports on the rise and decline of shorthand.
Steven Hahn,"On History: A Rebellious Take on African-American History," CHE, 3 August, argues for the centrality of the nationalist tradition in African American history. Hahn claims, of course, that historians have largely ignored that central tradition. I'd argue that its centrality may be minimized because of the fraud at its heart.
Finally, I have a report that Miami University's distinguished emeritus professor of Southern history, Jack Temple Kirby, has died at his home in Florida. I'd be happy to be corrected about that. Jack was in the midst of his term as President of the Southern Historical Association.