Noted Here and There ...
Sharon Howard is suffering from Archive Fever this summer, but she's reporting on what she's finding below the dust at Early Modern Notes.
Richard Lourie,"Wishing the War Away," 3 June, reviews Constantine Pleshakov's Stalin's Folly: The Tragic First Ten Days of WWII on the Eastern Front for The Moscow Times's"Context." Pleshakov argues that Stalin vastly underestimated Hitler's preparedness to invade the Soviet Union. Thanks to Arts and Letters Daily for the tip.
Our colleague, Jeff Vanke, has an op-ed,"Look, Europe Already Has a Working Constitution," over on the HNN mainpage. It puts the recent rejection of amendments to the EU constitution in historical perspective. In this case, it makes a lot of difference.
The Rocky Mountain News is doing a series of special reports on Ward Churchill this week. You can access the series here. Thanks to Inside Higher Ed for the tip.
Alan Mendelsohn,"Academic Flame Wars," Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 June, (subscriber only) tells a tale in which flames and blog wars suggest that immediate communications do not foster community.
Speaking of flame wars, Kevin Drum at Political Animal has yet another list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Century. He rightly thought my initial list of ten a miserable failure, though the revised list better suited him, so he builds on it, but explicitly excludes Nazi and Communist books as assumed. Basically, I agree with Drum's list. It includes a book by a certain really bad"lady novelist -- I don't think she'd be missed ...." Initially, he said,"I agree that it's eminently mockable, but let's face it: has this book really had that much influence on anyone who doesn't still use Clearasil pads? I don't think so." On second thought, he admits that Clearasil pads are now used in high places like the Federal Reserve Board. I think Kevin ranks Spencer's Social Statics too high on the list of Ten and disagree with his placement of Whitaker Chambers, Witness, on it, because we now know that Chambers was, essentially, correct. I do not think that his placing Witness on his list is an"obscene" act, that he is a"moron" for having done so, or that I should launch or sustain a flame war against him until he cringes into abject political correction.
Finally, eb at No Great Matter has two fascinating links. A week ago, Ed Ayres' piece in the New York Times about lessons we might learn from Reconstruction in the South to inform reconstruction in Iraq struck me as worth quoting at great length at Cliopatria. Eb found an earlier piece by Mackubin Thomas Owens of the Naval War College in National Review that covers the same territory to make the same application. Owens thought Reconstruction in the South a failure because of a failure of will, whereas Ayres thought it a failure because of failures of both will and moral authority. Another finding by eb that I had missed is Charles Lane's"The Paradoxes of a Death Penalty Stance," Washington Post, 4 June. Why, it asks, when 77% of the public still supported the death penalty, did Germany abolish it in 1949? Drawing on the research of Vanderbilt's Thomas Schwartz, Lane gives a surprising answer. Fifty-five years later, Germany's abolition of the death penalty now enjoys wide-spread popular support.