Thursday Notes
John Gordon Steele,"Europe's Rise to Power? Thank Better Roads, Revolutions of All Sorts and Turnips," NYT, 4 July, reviews Tim Blanning's The Pursuit of Glory: Europe, 1648-1815. Blanning's text may set the new gold standard for early modern European history.
Michael Rose,"How a Revolution Saved an Empire," NYT, 5 July. The retired British army general argues that, by abandoning its lower 13 colonies in British North America, Great Britain prepared itself for a larger imperial task ahead."Today ... the United States finds itself in much the same position as Britain in 1781," says General Rose.
Distracted and diminished by an irrelevant, costly and probably unwinnable war in Iraq, America could ultimately find itself challenged by countries like China and India. Unless it can find a leader with the moral courage of Pitt, there is a strong probability that it will be forced to relinquish its position as the global superpower — possibly to a regime that does not have the same commitment to justice and liberty that the United States and Britain have worked so hard to extend across the world over the past two centuries.
Niko Koppel,"A Country's Past is Unearthed and Comes into Focus," NYT, 4 July, and Philip Kennicott,"Plain as Dirt: History without Gimmicky," Washington Post, 4 July, look at the excavation of the site of the house where Presidents George Washington and John Adams lived in Philadelphia.
"Washington, Lincoln Most Popular Presidents; Nixon, Bush Least Popular," Rasmussen Reports, 4 July. In this poll of presidential popularity, familiarity apparently breeds contempt. The nation's first four presidents were rated favorably by at least 70% of those polled. At least 40% of them rated five of the most recent presidents unfavorably.
Keith Windschuttle,"Postmodernism and the Fabrication of Aboriginal History," Sydney Line, 30 May, and Theodore Dalrymple,"Why Intellectuals Like Genocide," New English Review, July, are the most recent blows in Windschuttle's challenge to the intellectual honesty of many Australian historians. Hat tip.
Finally, Cameron Abadi,"New Museum Pays Respect to Europe's Emigrants," Spiegel Online, 4 July, draws attention to the opening of Ballinstadt, Hamburg's new museum that focuses on the experience of five million European emigrants to the western hemisphere between 1850 and 1939. Thanks to Dale Light for the tip.