Blogs > Cliopatria > Wednesday Notes

Sep 12, 2007

Wednesday Notes


by Cliopatria


Barbara Weinstein,"The Case of the Incredible Shrinking Historians?" Perspectives, September, is the AHA president's reply to Sam Tanenhaus's"History, Written in the Present Tense," NYT, 4 March. Cliopatria held a symposium about it last March. Weinstein's column might have been improved by reading the symposium. It, at least, had a reply by Tanenhaus to his critics.

Scott McLemee's excellent"Wide-Stance Sociology," IHE, 12 September, is a timely look at the work of Laud Humphreys and the Tearoom Trade.

Andrew Sullivan's"Quote of the Day," 11 September, picked up Chris Bray's find in General David Petraeus's 1984 Princeton dissertation, The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A study of military influence and the use of force in the post-Vietnam era. Chris says that there are many other passages in the General's dissertation that other bloggers ought to explore.

Kanya Balkrishna,"Dems object to choice of Sept. 11 memorial speaker," Yale Daily News, 11 September, reports divisions in the Yale community over the choice of history professor Donald Kagan as the featured speaker for its 9/11 memorial service.


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samuel rotenstreich - 9/13/2007

Reading a 305 page dissertation is not required. The general should be judged by his recent deeds. He trained the Iraqi military; this was obviously a miserable failure. He heads a surge and not reconciliation effort; the surge has, at best, doused down 10 out of a million fires.

Unless you are influenced by uniforms with trillion medals, Patreas is a pathetic figure Quixoting in the Iraqi dessert instead of the Spanish landscape.