Things Noted Here and There ...
Scott McLemee's"Gone Fishing," Inside Higher Ed, 21 July, helps us to understand (and dismiss) Stanley Fish,"Intentional Neglect," New York Times, 19 July.
The Smithsonian's display of previously unknown photographs of the Dayton, Tennessee, Scopes"Monkey Trial" discovered by Marcel LaFollette is worth a close look and Alex Johnson,"Lessons Learned from Monkeying with History," MSNBC, 18 July, certainly is worth reading. Thanks to Dale Light and Glenn Reynolds for the tips. The fact that both Light and Reynolds thought of Ed Larson's A Summer for the Gods in reference to these two pieces should embarrass Johnson for not having mentioned the book as a matter of courtesy. On the other hand, it also raises an interesting question about the point at which a monograph is so broadly known among those who know about a subject that it is no longer merely the best work on it, but has so re-defined our understanding of it that the monograph becomes the body of common knowledge and therefore requires no citation.
Carnivalesque will hold its inaugural ancient/medieval festival on Friday 5 August at Cranky Professor. The Cranky One is casting a wide net for contributions from archaeologists, historians of all sorts, as well as specialists in literature and philosophy. Please send your nominations of exemplary posts that have appeared in the last three months on the period prior to 1450 CE to professor*at*crankyprofessor*dot*com.
Congratulations to Caleb McDaniel because his"Blogging in the Early Republic," Common-Place, 5 (July 2005), has been featured in both the Chronicle of Higher Education and in the Utne Reader's Utne Web Watch; and because today is the first anniversary of Mode for Caleb. His"A Blog Was Born" reflects on what he hopes it to be.