More Noted Things
Timothy George,"Delighted by Doctrine," Christian History & Biography, Summer, pays tribute to Yale's brilliant church historian, Jaroslav Pelikan (1923-2006).
On the Pope and the Muslims, as we've come to expect from him, Jacob Levy has a remarkably thoughtful commentary. On the other hand, if Juan Cole is correct, that Benedict XVI saw violence at the heart of Islam from its inception, then it seems to me that the Pope ought to repent of his words. If you don't take Cole's word for it, try Andrew Sullivan and the London Times.
At Notes of a former native speaker, Jonathan Benda in Taiwan wonders what to do when he realizes that someone has plagiarized his work. In comments, one of his readers cites an extraordinary example from personal experience. Say, for example, you submit an article for publication in a journal and it is rejected. Subsequently, an article appears in a different journal and it includes some of your work. You have reason to believe that the author of the second article was a reader of your manuscript. What do you do? I'll tell you what I'd do. I'd go to the editor of the first journal and raise some very holy hell. Before it blew over, I'd want the editors of both journals, the cretin who plagiarized me, and academic authorities at my copyist's institution to know about it. Thanks to Jonathan Dresner for the tip.
This, however, reminds me of an anecdote. When Ron White and I were in graduate school, at Princeton and UNC, respectively, we independently settled on almost exactly the same dissertation topic. We first met when he visited Chapel Hill on a research trip. We had coffee together in the Pine Room and, glad to have the company of someone interested in the same subject, I remember talking too much about it. Subsequently, I recalled that he hadn't said anything about it that wasn't obvious or already known. Nervous, I wrote him a letter asking him to direct his research away from mine. In return, my advisor, Robert Moats Miller, got a very angry letter from Ron's advisor, Princeton's Arthur Link, who denounced my"dog-in-a-manger" attitude. A former president of the AHA and editor of the papers of Woodrow Wilson, Link was rather revered at Chapel Hill, as one of its most prominent doctorates. There was no way that news of this rebuke from Mount Olympus wasn't going to get around the department.
Subsequently, Ron and I published some articles about the social gospel and fin de siècle racial reform, but both of us took much longer than we should have to get our books out. I might have seen him again in 1984, when I was at a summer seminar at Princeton and he had a temporary appointment on the seminary's faculty, but neither of us cared to see each other after our earlier experience.
When I joined the staff of the Martin Luther King Papers Project, I was still working on the big book and, before I had finished it, White sent a copy of his manuscript, Liberty and Justice for All: Racial Reform and the Social Gospel (1877-1925), to Coretta Scott King's office in Atlanta and asked her to write a blurb for his book. Well, Coretta never actually wrote anything, so her staff sent the manuscript up to her ghostwriter, Steve Klein. Steve's office was right next to mine, so he handed Ron's manuscript over to me. I read through it, anxiously, to see whether Ron had stolen my thunder. My conclusion was that he had not -- that he had a thing or two that I liked – but that, on the whole, my yet-unpublished manuscript, The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885-1912, was much superior to his. Still, Arthur Link's rebuke lingered in my brain and I'd already done a lot of ghostwriting for Coretta to get the work of the King Papers Project done. So I thought of a Coretta-blurb for Ron's book that began:"This piece of shit ...."
Finally, congratulations to Rebecca J. Scott, Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. Her book, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Harvard University Press), has won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for the best book on slavery or abolition. It reviews the two slave societies' path to freedom and their construction of post-emancipation communities.
Sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and awarded by Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, the Prize includes a monetary award of $25,000. The other finalists for the Prize were Steven Deyle's Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (Oxford University Press) and Richard Follett's The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana's Cane World, 1820-1860 (Louisiana State University Press).