Weak Endnotes

by Cliopatria

"Women's History Carnival 2011, International Women's Day Edition" is up at Sharon Howard's Early Modern Notes!

The winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced on Thursday evening. They include: in nonfiction, Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth Of Other Suns; in autobiography, Darin Strauss's Half a Life; and, in biography, Sarah Bakewell's How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer.

Anthony Gottlieb,"Montaigne's Moment," NYT, 10 March, is an appreciation of"history's first blogger."

Martin Filler,"At Home with the Rembrandts," NYRB, 2 March, reviews"Rembrandt and His School: Masterworks from the Frick and Lugt Collections," an exhibit at the Frick Collection in Manhattan.

Edward Rothstein,"Emancipating History," NYT, 11 March, looks at the representation of slavery in the museums of Charleston, South Carolina.

In Richard J. Evans,"The Wonderfulness of Us," LRB, 17 March, the author of In Defense of History takes on Michael Gove and Simon Schama.

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Jonathan Jarrett - 3/14/2011

That Evans essay is a tonic, because I suffer dyspeptically from the presence of the various problems he describes. But I can't help noticing that what he is largely advocating is no change (and his idea that history students all finish A-Level with an idea how to do source criticism is, in my experience, woefully unjustified, even if that will be diminished still further by the government proposals). On the other hand, Gove and Ferguson (who is not mentioned, something that must irk him immensely) and, further down the road, Schama, appear to be proposing an essentially teleological narrative that explains how the UK got to where it is and from where, which is surely a Whig view of history. So Evans is the Conservative and the Tories are the Whigs? No, wait, I'm confused...

I also have to confess to my own Fergusonian moment where Evans says:

"Not one professional historian employed by a British university has spoken out either in favour of these ideas or against them."

Well, dammit, Jim, I am such a historian, and I wrote this (the second of the two sections is the relevant one). I don't where he's looking but it probably didn't extend to a Google search.