Oct 28, 2006

Saturday Notes

by Cliopatria

Are course distribution requirements merely ways of herding student cattle? Tim Burke takes a skeptical look at Williams' new"diversity" requirement.

At Blog Them Out of the Stone Age, Mark Grimsley presents Jeremy Black on"Could the British have won the American War of Independence?"

At South Dakota Politics, Jason Heppler takes up Oscar Chamberlain's question about the perfect presidential campaign.

Garry Wills,"A Country Ruled by Faith," NYRB, 16 November, is about the best reading of the Bush administration and the religious right that I've seen.

I don't know much about prosecutorial procedure, but Durham's prosecutor now admits that, many months after charging the Duke lacrosse players with rape, he still has not interviewed the accuser about what happened that night. That seems outrageous, but KC Johnson is on his case.

On Wednesday 1 November, Sergey Romanov will host History Carnival XLII at Holocaust Controversies. Send your nominations of the best in history blogging since 15 October to him at sergeyhc*at*gmail*dot*com or use the form.

Nominations for the Cliopatria Awards also open on 1 November and remain open through the month. You will be invited to submit nominations for the Best Individual Blog, Best Group Blog, Best New Blog, Best Post, Best Series of Posts, and Best Writer. Here are last year's winners. Some folks are already prepped. The time-frame for this year's Awards is 1 December 2005 through 30 November 2006. Both Cliopatria's History Blogroll and the various history carnivals (Asian History Carnival, Carnival of Bad History, Carnivalesque and History Carnival) are excellent sources of reference for nominations. Be sure to include both a title and a live link for nominations. The judges are already overworked and judging takes place in the runup to the holiday season.

More Comments:

Jonathan Dresner - 10/28/2006

Kuo, thanks.

Absolutely, but part of Kuo's critique was the failure of the movement to achieve significant support for real goals; Will's critique is all about the significant support for real goals. They do differ, as I understand it, on what "real goals" are, but it seems to me that the constituencies most likely to be put off by Kuo's experiences are the same ones likely to be heartened by Wills' list. I'd be surprised (pleased, I think) to learn that there was a larger group with more of Kuo's perspective who were paying attention.

Ralph E. Luker - 10/28/2006

For what it's worth, I think that's a smart observation, Jon. At least a part of the difference between Wills and David Kuo is that Kuo argues from within the premises of what he understands the religious right to be -- he is within that community -- whereas Wills is not and does not.

Jonathan Dresner - 10/28/2006

The Will's article was well done. Very little there that I hadn't already encountered, being a regular liberal blog reader, but it lays out the whole array quite devastatingly.

Oddly, though, I found myself thinking that it could serve as a sort of counterweight to the recent "Administration is more political than religious" critiques coming from the likes of [name of former administration religious office staffer who wrote a highly critical book that got published a few weeks back].