Things Not Yet Noted

At Liberty and Power, Radley Balko reports good news for Cory Maye, the young African American, who we believe is unjustly sentenced to death in Mississippi. His new legal team has filed a brief that seeks a new trial in the case and the new findings of forensic experts. Here's hoping ...

I missed the 200th anniversary of the birth of John Stuart Mill yesterday. But Brandon Watson was on the case, with an excellent round-up of Mill sources on the net. Among the highlights: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (33 volumes; dear Lord, I do love the internet); Roger Scruton,"Thoroughly Modern Mill," Wall Street Journal, 19 May; Anthony Skelton,"Liberty's Godfather," Globe and Mail, 19 May; and"Catallarchy's Mill-fest: The Bicentennial Edition," 19 May.

There's some compensation for the mainstream media's niggling remembrance of Jaroslav Pelikan in the e-tributes of many dozens of former students and people who read his work. See, for example: Menachem Mendel, Pontifications and Titusonline. Nancy Wellins, who was his undergraduate research assistant at Yale some years ago, sent me an e-mail and I was struck by her recollection:

I once witnessed a phone conversation with a colleague that he held while I was sitting in his office waiting to start our study session."Next semester?" he said into the phone."Oh, I don't know yet what I'm going to teach… I think I'll just look around, see what everyone else is doing, and then I'll fill in the blanks."
And he could. His learning was that all-encompassing. After I moved to Israel in the 1980s, he corresponded with me in Hebrew. He knew my tradition (I'm Jewish) better than I did!

When you know to say that of a teacher, you know that you have been blessed by great teaching. I know, because I had such an experience with Will Herberg, a great Jewish scholar. He knew my own traditions better than I did. He wasmy rabbi.

Finally, Cliopatria is unusually well-represented on History News Network's mainpage this week. Two of our contributing editors, Jim Cobb and Sean Wilentz, have articles there: Cobb's"Are Opponents of Gay Marriage Toying with Our Independent Judiciary?" and Wilentz's"Of Course, Historians Can Offer Their Assessment of Bush's Presidency," a reply to Larry DeWitt's criticism of his politically engaged scholarship. Our colleague, Manan Ahmed's"The Polyglot Manifesto" is the more finished form of posts that originally appeared at Chapati Mystery and Cliopatria. It summons us to the historical scholarship of the future. Well done!