Thursday Notes
Souren Melikian,"Giuseppe Arcimboldo's Hallucinations: Fantasy or Insanity?" IHT, 5 October, and Michael Kimmelman,"Arcimboldo's Feast for the Eyes," NYT, 10 October, review the Giuseppe Arcimboldo exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg.
Scott Carlson,"The Story Trees Tell," CHE, 12 October, introduces Northeastern University's Harvey Green, who has just published Wood: Craft, Culture, History. CHE also has an audio/slide show that features Green's appreciation, both as a historian and a craftsman, of wood as a material.
Under attack at Durham-in-Wonderland from an anonymous commenter who argued that our colleague, KC Johnson, lacked academic credibility, KC revealed that his book, Congress and the Cold War, has just won the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum's D.B. Hardeman Prize for the best book of the year on the Congress. Official announcement of the award will be released later this month.
Tim Burke,"Third Way," Easily Distracted, 9 October, is a thoughtful piece about intellectual dispositions:
The more I reflect on these habits of mind, the more aware I am of how much they influence what I do as a historian and cultural critic, and even the way I approach political questions. I don't like binaries, ever. I'm not going to make grand theoretical claims about that. It's just my cast of mind. Someone throws a stark right/wrong dichotomy at me, I'm going to look for a third way to see it, I'm going to try and shift the question or reframe it.
The piece reminded me again (!) of the poverty of my own intellectual life, as compared with Tim's. I'm no longer likely to audit an art course, as he is, or, even, speculate about why I abandoned math after high school, as he does. But in my seniority, I am more deeply concerned about where my intellectual blinders are. In their very different ways, the cases of Michael Bellesiles's Arming America and the Duke lacrosse/rape charges shook me deeply. In both cases, I was disposed to defend what ultimately proved to be indefensible. It's a failure of reserved intellectual skepticism.
I don't know whether Mills Kelly's speculation that blogs may replace H-Net's listservs as our preferred means of communication is likely to happen, but some very field-specific blogs (Mary Dudziak's Legal History Blog or Paul Harvey's Religion in American History, for example) seem to have become essential reading. Tim Lacey's U.S. Intellectual History has that potential. He's put out a call for more contributors.