Mid-Week Notes

Cato Unbound, November, features a symposium on"How the World Got Modern." Stephen Davies's"How the World Got Modern" is its lead essay. Jack Goldstone, Anthony Pagden, and Jason Kuznicki will each publish a reply to Davies this week.

Dwight Garner,"Wartime China's Elegant Enigma," NYT, 3 November, reviews Hannah Pakula's The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China.

A year after his election, historians assess President Obama: Walter Isaacson, Michael Kazin, Rick Perlstein, Ted Widmer, and Garry Wills, Daily Beast, 2 November; and Doris Kearns Goodwin, Huffington Post, 3 November.

Finally, farewell to Claude Lévi-Strauss, a cultural anthropologist and leading French intellectual, and to Judson C. Ward, an American historian who was for many years an administrator at Emory University.