Sep 13, 2006

More Things Noted

by Cliopatria

I'll be hosting History Carnival XXXIX on Friday 15 September here at Cliopatria. Send your nominations of the best in history blogging since 1 September to me at ralphluker*at*mindspring*dot*com or use the form.

I don't know how we missed it for so long, but Manan Ahmed recently spotted David Kaiser's blog, History Unfolding. Kaiser is the author of Economic Diplomacy and the Origins of the Second World War (Princeton UP, 1980); Postmortem: New Evidence in the Case of Sacco and Vanzetti, co-authored with William Young (UMassP, 1985); Politics and War: European Conflict from Philip II to Hitler (Harvard UP, 1990); Epic Season: The 1948 American League Pennant Race (UMassP, 1998); and American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Viet Nam War (Harvard UP, 2000). He is a member of the faculty at the Naval War College, but is visiting at Williams this year and will appear on a panel there with Cliopatria's friend, Marc Lynch (a.k.a., Abu Aardvark), on Tuesday.

There is some re-assurance in Charles McGrath's"At $9.95 a Page, You Expected Poetry?" NY Times, 10 September. The term-paper writing services generally produce prose as dreadful as what your students would do on their own. Like all on-line sources, Wikipedia lends itself to plagiarism. Sage Ross has a good summary of historians' listserv discussions of Wikipedia and concludes that Roy Rosenzweig's recent article,"Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past," JAH, June, seems to be turning the tide among historians in its favor.

Jonathan Rauch,"Unwinding Bush," The Atlantic, October, is subscriber only, but you can read the whole thing here. It is a troubling reading of the Bush administration, especially for those who take the war on terrorism seriously. Thanks to Eugene Volokh for the tip.

Finally, Mark Fiore's"A Nation Remembers ..." is both amusing and sad.

More Comments:

Jonathan Dresner - 9/11/2006

I had a very similar reaction, but I hadn't though of climate change as an issue.

I think he's underestimated how damaging Nixon was, too, both in his failure to deal with Vietnam and the implications of Watergate which are still with us.

Andre Mayer - 9/11/2006

Rauch quite possibly underestimates the time it will take to "unwind" negative aspects of Bush II's legacy because he does not include climate change. This missed opportunity seems to me to be a particular threat to Bush's historical reputation, in view of the availability of the counterfactual Gore ("earth in the Balance")presidency.

Ralph E. Luker - 9/11/2006

My strategy was to let no point go unexaggerated.

Scott McLemee - 9/11/2006

Intellectual Affairs, my column at Inside Higher Ed isn't s blog. I'm not sure that distinction matters to anyone else (it may perhaps be an evolutionary leftover from the days of print media, like a residual tail) but it certainly makes a difference in how I go about writing.

Likewise, I insist on the distinction between a review of a book and an article on it. The forms are different, and impose different demands. On occasion, I will review a book for Newsday or the New York Times or someplace, then write either an article or a blog entry on it. The point of departure may be different, but I don't take the same route.

In any case, my ubiquity is much overstated. Remember the paraphrase of Warhol, updated for the present moment: "In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people."