More Noted Things

by Cliopatria

Awards: Nominations for The Cliopatria Awards close on 30 November. Only two days left to place your nominations. Voting in the Islamsphere's Brass Crescent Awards is open until 4 December. Voting for The 2006 Weblog Awards begins in the first week of December.

Bloggery: A happy day for me is when a major historian launches her blog. Cliopatria welcomes Mary L. Dudziak's Legal History Blog to the history blogosphere! Thanks to Eric Muller's Is That Legal? for the tip.

Carnivals: David Tiley hosts History Carnival XLIV at Barista on 1 December. Send your nominations of the best of history blogging since 15 November to tiley*at*internode*.*on*.*net or use the form.

Counterfactuals: Tim Burke,"The Years of Rice and Salt," Easily Distracted, 27 November, takes up a problem with counterfactuals.

History Games: At Investigations of a Dog, Gavin Robinson tries out Making History: The Calm and the Storm. It's a game, he says, not a simulation.

Niraq: Niall Ferguson,"Some Civil Wars Never End," LA Times, 27 November, sees no role the United States can play in Iraq that will keep it from continuing chaos. Yet, he doesn't recommend a withdrawal of American troops.

Soviet History: Sixteen years ago, as Germany celebrated its re-unification, the Soviet Union crumbled. Christian Neff,"The Kremlin Minutes: Diary of a Collapsing Superpower," Spiegel Online, 22 November, reconstructs events in the Kremlin from a mass of documents recently released in Moscow. Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily for the tip.

Spatial History: Nathanael Robinson's"City and Country: Modern Spatial History," Rhine River, 24 November, invites you to help him think through the syllabus and required readings for an advanced undergraduate or graduate student course that"integrates various aspects of, what I would call, spatial history: urban history, social history, rural history, environmental history, etc.""City and Country," 28 November, is his revised version. Have a look at it and let him know if you have additional suggestions.

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Ralph E. Luker - 11/30/2006

Rebecca, I'm not sure that any of the answers to KC took discussion of the University of Michigan history department's decisions off the table. Clearly, Michigan's department responded to shifts in the profession and created areas of strength where there had been little or nothing before and those shifts of resources left the department weak in some traditional areas of strength. I'm not altogether satisfied by Tim's argument that the new social historians are doing political history, with a broader definition of what is political than KC is at ease with. I'm more encouraged by the kind of work that Sean Wilentz and Eric Rauchway have been doing, because ultimately it acknowledges that -- once we've tipped our hat to national ways of configuring history -- the political narrative, with an expanded definition of what is political, is the most likely central thread.

Oscar Chamberlain - 11/30/2006

Sadly, I think Ferguson's ambiguousness concerning proper American action reflects the reality. It is at least possible that we are now the difference between bad and worse. Or we may be standing in the way of a victory--probably by Shi'a forces--that would bring a measure of peace, but almost certainly at great cost for many in Iraq and perhaps for many outside of it, too.

I do not know which is true, or even if either is true.

Rebecca Anne Goetz - 11/29/2006

Just read the article. I'm amazed that the old UMICH canard is still around (didn't I read that Michigan just hired a diplomatic historian?)

I'm also wondering how the academy is supposed to promote political diversity. If I've said it once, I'll say it again: I know scads of graduate students who will happily register as Republicans if that action will get them jobs.

Of course, political positions and ideologies are changeable as well (in ways that race and most of the time, sex, are not). Would the person hired to be a department's die-hard leftist who then became a conservative have to be fired?

The suggestions of those who, like Horowitz and now, it seems, Young, who seem to want quotas or something like it in the academy ignore the fluidity of ideas: it is possible for people to change their minds in ways they cannot change their bodies. How do we account for that?

I suspect if the naysayers now wait for a bit, the pendulum will swing the other way. The political complexion of the academy now, I suspect, is the last gasp of the Vietnam generation. People who are graduate students now are far more conservative in many ways than their mentors. (Yes, yes, that's a generalization, but based on my own experiences and observations.)

Ralph E. Luker - 11/29/2006

I agree with you that including Ward Churchill in the academy did not make his work any more important, interesting, rational, or stimulating.

Jonathan Dresner - 11/29/2006

In Alan's defense, the main thrust of the article does seem to be that having a political position represented in academia produces more sophisticated and civil expressions of same, and that the "Coulter problem" is a result of the exclusion of people who think like her from the academy.

I find both the premise and conclusion tenuous, but with grade inflation I'd still have to give it a B....

Ralph E. Luker - 11/29/2006

Very funny, Alan. You've been reading student paraphrases of primary sources too long.

Alan Baumler - 11/29/2006

Reason has an article by Cathy Young reccomending finding an academic position for Ann Coulter, or somthing like that. It is mostly based on a talk by Cliopatria's own K.C. Johnson.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/116921.html