Still More Noted Things
Occasionally, Cliopatria recognizes extraordinary primary source sites on the net, such as The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London 1674 to 1834, a major resource for crime and punishment in the period. A very different, but equally impressive site, is Corpus Thomisticum, nearly everything you'll need for your dissertation on Thomas Aquinas. Its Brevis Introductio explains, in 9 languages, that it offers a full edition of the complete works. Do you have any idea how much he wrote? My seminar in Aquinas read his Summa contra Gentiles. His Summa Theologiae is much too long to tackle in a semester. There are, in addition, the many other works. The site also has a bibliography of scholarship from the 13th century to the present, an index of the main tools for study, a concordance generator sensitive to inflectional variation and other digital tools, and a digital edition of the main manuscripts.
If, otoh, you need a short introduction to Aquinas, I still recommend G. K. Chesterton's St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox. Word has it that Chesterton was working against a tight publication deadline, locked himself in a room with a strong libation, and produced a complete text. G. K. drunk was a better writer than I am sober.
Scott McLemee,"A Moralist of the Mind," Inside Higher Ed, 19 July, is a worthy companion to: McLemee,"The Moralist," Boston Globe, 16 July. See also: Margaret Soltan,"UD's Foggy Bottom Lunchmate," University Diaries, 18 July.
Allen Guelzo,"Public Indecency," Books and Culture, July/August, reviews Todd Gitlin, The Intellectuals and the Flag.
At H-Teach, Amanda Seligman, of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, says that she is preparing to teach a research methods course. She's thinking of doing a unit on plagiarism and a separate one on research fraud, with Michael Bellesiles's Arming America as a case in point.
The problem I am having is that I am not sure what the students will get out of the lesson, other than shame on the history profession.
*Shame on Bellesiles for such shoddy research.
*Shame on professional historians for letting amateur historians do a much superior job in pointing out the flaws in Arming America.
*Shame on the AHA for using the case as a jumping off point for abandoning its role in adjudicating cases of academic fraud, instead of finding a better way to do so.
Has anyone used the Bellesiles case in teaching? To what end? Am I wrong that the profession as a whole comes off badly in this episode?
Seligman's Hall of Shame is well-stated. I've always felt that shame should be a teaching moment and a learning experience. Unfortunately, the AHA learned and is teaching the wrong lesson. Your own comments, of course, are welcome here and at H-Teach. Thanks to Richard Jensen for the tip.
Finally, congratulations to Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and TPM Café, whose initial column for Time.com appears this week. Josh has a doctorate in colonial American history from Brown and is one of the most widely read history bloggers on the net.