Things Noted Here and There
at Siris on Sunday 29 April. Send your nominations of the best in history blogging since 24 February on the period from 1450 and 1850 CE to him at branemrys*at*yahoo*dot*com or carnivalesque*at* earlymodernweb*dot*org*dot*uk or use the form.Manan Ahmed,"1857 and Dalrymple's The Last Moghul," Chapati Mystery, 21 April, explains how William Dalrymple's The Last Moghul: The Fall of a Dynasty, Dehli, 1857 challenges both nationalist and imperial interpretations of the rebellion of 1857. You can hear Dalrymple and Manan in dialogue with him here.
David Garrow and Kenji Yoshino review Kevin Merida's and Michael A. Fletcher's Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas.
David Greenberg,"Our Zero-Tolerance Society," LA Times, 22 April, argues that the rush to judgment often fails to make important distinctions.
I believe that the racist Imus — a third-rate Howard Stern with a middlebrow patina — deserved to go, and that Gonzales and Wolfowitz (and possibly Nifong) ought to follow. But the speed and ferocity of the attacks against them and the harsh tenor of the discourse — in these scandals and others like them — hardly reflect a dispassionate pursuit of justice....Vocal swaths of the public, amplified by the media, have been expressing a primitive, unquenchable desire to inflict stern penalties on supposed wrongdoers — no matter how obscure the offender or how minor the offense.
We've repeatedly failed to distinguish among capital crimes, misdemeanors and innocence....John Kerry...Joe Biden...Howard Dean...Doris Kearns Goodwin...Stephen Ambrose...Joseph Ellis...Lawrence H. Summers...Roberto Alomar...Dan Rather...Eason Jordan...Judith Miller....
That's Kevin Drum's excerpt from Greenberg's op-ed. Do read the whole piece. I'm sympathetic with the thrust of his argument. My first piece for History News Network was a defense of due process in the case of Michael Bellesiles, but Greenberg's too quick to think that the judgments in these cases were unjust. Kerry, Biden, and Dean all retain their positions of power, but how can Greenberg still have any doubt but that Mike Nifong should to be removed from his? Judith Miller's deeply flawed journalism at the New York Times was a big part of journalism's failure in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Why shouldn't there be professional consequences for such malpractice? And what of Greenberg's comments about the historians in his list. Were the consequences for Kearns Goodwin or for Joe Ellis too extreme? I doubt it. And would Harvard be a better place had Lawrence Summers survived his storm? I doubt that, too.
Finally, farewell to David Halberstam. At his best in The Best and the Brightest, he had much to teach us. Judith Miller should have read it more carefully.