Things Noted Here and There

American Loyalists: Maya Jasanoff,"Loyal to a Fault," NYTM, 1 July, looks at the American opposition to the American Revolution and the legacy of the Loyalists' subsequent roles elsewhere in the British empire. Jasanoff is an associate professor of British history at Harvard and the author of Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850. Her relatively conservative interpretation of the American Revolution, however, understates its dislocations, which were in some respects even greater than those of the French Revolution.

Stalin Papers: Bryon MacWilliams,"Yale U. Press Strikes Deal with Russian Archive to Open Stalin's Papers to Scholars," CHE, 2 July, announces an agreement between Yale UP and the Russian State Archives to make Stalin's papers available to researchers.

You're No Winston Churchill, George: Lynne Olson,"Why Winston Wouldn't Stand for W," Washington Post, 1 July, argues that Bush is more like Neville Chamberlain than Winston Churchill. Olson is the author of Troublesome Young Men, the young Conservatives who eventually forced Chamberlain's resignation and brought Churchill to power.

But, You're a Clement Attlee, Gordon Brown: John Sutherland,"The Democratic Intellectual," Guardian, 27 June, weighs the import of the new PM's influences as a historian and the first Prime Minister to have an earned doctorate.

Geek Corner: Danah Boyd,"Viewing American Class Divisions through Facebook and Myspace," Apophenia, 24 June, even got a notice from the CHE, but Valleywag and Andrew P. Keating, a grad student in modern history at UC, Berkeley, think it's the kind of bad pop-sociology that Tom Tomorrow mocked in David Brooks.