More Noted Things

Andy Carvin,"The Life of the Blog," NPR, 24 December, sees Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars as a precursor to contemporary history blogs. But the timeline shows how late most historians were to the form. Kevin Murphy's The Ghost in the Machine, in 1999, was probably the first of us. I count nearly a thousand history blogs, now – a tiny fraction of the 112 million blogs that technorati says it monitors.

"Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity" is an exhibit at Harvard's Sackler Museum through January. It previously appeared in Munich, Rome, and Istanbul, and will leave Harvard for the Getty Museum in Los Angeles."Top Ten Color Classical Reproductions," ListUniverse, 24 December, shows ten of the classical artifacts beside the replicas done in color. They are astonishingly gaudy. Gilded Athena from Nashville, Tennesee's Parthenon is a more speculative coloration. Mary Beard is skeptical.

Old UK Photos.com is a huge trove of ca 1890s and early 1900s photographs of Ireland and Great Britain. BLDGBLOG has a lovely selection from them.

Ed Hammond,"First Person: Taner Akçam," Financial Times, 8 December, interviews the Turkish historian of the Armenian genocide, who teaches history at the University of Minnesota. Hat tip.

George Weigel,"Refighting the Wars of Religion," Commentary, November, is a thoughtful review of Mark Lilla's The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West.

Michael Isikoff,"Challenging Cheney," Newsweek, 24 December, interviews J. William Leonard,"the gold standard of information specialists in the federal government," according to Allen Weinstein, the national archivist. Leonard is retiring after challenging the claim that the Vice President is a legislative, rather than an executive, official and, thus, exempt from federal regulations governing classified information. Hat tip to Steve Beinen at Political Animal and Jonathan Adler at The Volokh Conspiracy.