Sunday Notes
Patricia Cohen,"Stop the Presses Boys, Women Claim Space on Op-Ed Pages," NY Times, 15 March, offers good advice for those of us -- male or female -- who attempt the occasional op-ed. And all for less than the $5,000 Catherine Orenstein charges for her practicum. For historians who want to publish op-eds, I recommend History News Service. Its directors, Joyce Appleby and Jim Banner, offer tough editorial advice and the service circulates op-eds it accepts to some 300 newspapers and chains across North America. Be sure to check HNS's op-ed style and submission guidelines.
David Lague,"Chinese Village Struggles to Save Dying Language," NY Times, 18 March, takes us to remote Sanjiazi in northeast China, where a handful of people still speak Manchu, the official language of the Qing dynasty and an archive of 60 tons of documents in the provincial archive at Harbin.
Jim Endersby,"Evolution Myths," TLS, 14 March, reviews Morse Peckham, ed., Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (variorum text), and Frederick Burkhardt and Duncan Porter, eds., The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (Volume 14: 1866). Hat tip.
Bryan Burrough,"Blowing Smoke: How Big Tobacco Convinced Generations of Americans to Light Up," Washington Post, 17 March, reviews Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America. Yet another commodity or micro-history. The reviewer isn't fond of the genre:"By their very nature, these books can come off as bloodless digests of minutiae. Given a choice between Kitty Kelley's latest and A Brief History of the Booger, I'd hold my nose and pick the Kelley."
Gracchi at Westminster Wisdom and Matthew Sinclair at Sinclair's Musings discuss the University of Leeds' cancellation of a talk and workshop by Matthias Kuntzel. While Gracchi believes there are serious problems with Kuntzel's work, he agrees with Sinclair that Leeds was mistaken to cancel the event.
Terry McDermott,"Blogs Can Top the Presses," LA Times, 17 March, is another tribute from the mainstream press to Josh Marshall's TPM Media.