More Noted Things
In dismissing David Gelernter's new book, Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion, our colleague, Daniel Larison, writes, in part:
the title is a little baffling (why the fourth?), until you realise that he must mean to include Islam as the third great ‘Western' religion, at which point we can already take it as a given that words mean nothing to the author.
Unless I misunderstand him, it seems to me that Larison is simply incorrect. The origins and history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are inter-related in ways that none of them are related to the great ‘Eastern' religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. Moreover, at the heart of all three Western religions is a monotheistic claim that is alien to all the Eastern religions. The assumption of Gelernter's title -- that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are the Western family of religions – seems inescapable to me; and his claim – that Americanism is a rival that may directly challenge each of them or, as Will Herberg had it, enter into any of them and claim to be its essence -- has a bibliographical history of fifty years now.
You can read Mark Grimsley's"Why Military History Matters," Military History, May, at Blog Them Out of the Stone Age, 13 July.
Princeton's James McPherson has won the first Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for lifetime achievement in military writing. There's a $100,000 honorarium that goes with it.
Ever since Tim Burke's"One of These Things is Just Like the Other," Cliopatria, 7 January 2004, I've known his thinking about historical analogies to be essential reading. So: Burke,"Philippines, Malaysia, South Africa: A Full-Disclosure Approach to Historical Analogy," Easily Distracted, 16 July 2007. Michael O'Hanlon and Jason Campbell,"Measuring Progress in Iraq," OpinionJournal, 13 July, and our colleague, Daniel Larison,"Who Now Remembers the Filipino Insurgency?" The American Scene, 13 July, are also thinking about Malaysia and the Philippines.
Finally, Thomas Bartlett,"Archive Fever," CHE, 20 July, [the link is free to both subscribers and non-subscribers] is as full an accounting as we're likely to get of the struggle between the University of California, Irvine, and Jacques Derrida's estate over the disposition of his papers. It's a fascinating story. Except for the sexual stuff (and a friend at UCI assures me that there's much more to that than Bartlett indicates), it reminded me of the struggle between Boston University and the King Estate over the disposition of Martin Luther King's Papers.