Mar 11, 2008

More Noted Things

by Cliopatria

ArchivesNext has the winners of its Best Archives on the Web Awards. Hat tip.

Charles McGrath,"A Debunker on the Road to World War II," NYT, 4 March. So, you begin research for your book on the origins of World War II by buying"6,000 volumes of bound newspapers from the British Library" and your manuscript begins in 1892.

Yet another recent memoir exposed as fiction. There've been enough of these in the last 15 years or so for them to be recognized as their own special sub-genre. Someone will be teaching a college level course in The Fraudulent Memoir. What are the learning objectives?

Nancy Nall Derringer,"Gone in 60 Seconds: How My Blog Started the Avalanche that Buried Presidential Aide Tim Goeglein," Slate, 3 March, is a first-hand account.

Abigail Thernstrom and Stephen Thernstrom,"Is race out of the race?" LA Times, 2 March, is a conservative reading of what Obama's candidacy has accomplished for American politics.

More Comments:

Kate Theimer - 3/5/2008

Looks like the AHA blog you're hat tipping to had a bad link. The correct one is:

http://www.archivesnext.com/?p=109

There are individual posts about the winners following that announcement throughout the week.

Hope people take a look!

Scott Kaufman - 3/4/2008

I've co-taught the first half of that course three times already: it's called "The Ethics and Evolution of Literary Journalism," and it covers everything from Crane and London's exaggerations to Joseph Mitchell's composites to Truman Capote's novelistic excesses, but stops just short of contemporary fraudulence. I could see the value of such a course for literary journalism majors, since the one temptation they wrestle with is the desire to write a "better" story. (Or we could have them watch the fifth season of The Wire. But I like your idea better.)