Weak Endnotes

The FBI has released its 423 page file on the late Howard Zinn (1949-1974). David Knowles at AOL News finds three highlights in the file: a) Although several informants identified Zinn as a member of the CP, he repeatedly denied it. b) Although he disavowed violence, Zinn recalled his service in defense of the United States in World War II and said that he would defend it in any war with the Soviet Union. c) Zinn was critical of the role of Robert Kennedy and the FBI in the civil rights crises of the early and mid-1960s. Megan Carpentier, a reporter for TPMMuckraker, finds that, in 1970, only six years after Zinn was hired to teach at Boston University and a year before John Silber became its president, a senior Boston administrator who was an FBI informant, maneuvered to have Zinn fired. See also: Clark Merrefield, Daily Beast, 30 July.

Isabelle Mandraud,"Mauritania's hidden manuscripts," Guardian, 27 July, is an update on threatened rare manuscripts in northwest Africa.

Trevor Butterworth,"A Revolution Of the Mind," WSJ, 30 July, reviews Joel Mokyr's The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850.

Thomas Mallon,"Saratoga Gothic," NYT, 30 July, and Carolyn See for the Washington Post, 30 July, review Geoffrey O'Brien's The Fall of the House of Walworth: A Tale of Madness and Murder in Gilded Age America.

Evan R. Goldstein,"Will Israel's New Archive Policy Set Back a Generation of Scholarship?" CHE, 30 July, interviews Benny Morris about the classification extension by twenty years on select Israeli archives.