Things Noted Here and There

The Broadside is a regularly updated collection of history bloggging (and some other online history news) that has been popular among the historians who are followed by @historycarnival on Twitter.
It's intended as a supplement to the monthly Carnivals - the content is largely automated and will be much less selective and individual. (For more information, read here.)

Aminatta Forna reviews V. S. Naipaul's The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief for the Guardian, 29 August.

John Smolens reviews Alex Butterworth's The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents for the Washington Post, 29 August.

Fresh from the slammer, Conrad Black publishes"Decline, but Not Inevitable Decline," NRO, 26 August, which surveys American history since 1940. Except for Viet Nam, it's onward and upward to 1989. Then it's declension under four failed administrations.