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Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought: the Transformation of America, 1815-1848 has won 2008's Pulitzer Prize in History. The other finalists in History were: Robert Dallek's Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power and David Halberstam's The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War.
Saul Friedlander's The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 has won the Prize in General Nonfiction. The other finalists were: Allan Brandt's The Cigarette Century and Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. And, otherwise,
John Matteson's Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father has won the Prize in Biography. The other finalists were: Martin Duberman's The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein and Zachary Leader's The Life of Kingsley Amis.
The new Common-place is up. John Wilkes (his sister, actually), Dred Scott, and much more!
Steve Kettmann reviews Anthony Read's The World on Fire: 1919 and the Battle With Bolshevism for the SF Chronicle, 6 April. Thanks to Mary Dudziak for the tip.
Taylor Branch,"The Last Wish of Martin Luther King," NYT, 6 April, Branch's speech at the National Cathedral, recalls King's sermon there, just weeks before his death in Memphis.
Four Bush biographers have read the script for Oliver Stone's"W" and give it mixed reviews.
Finally, I'm all for respecting a blogger's anonymity or pseudonymity, but – uno, jus' sayin' – American historians may want to know about Rustbelt Intellectual. Hat tip to Ari Kelman, who doesn't know either. That is all.
Sorry it's taken me so long to respond -- I was grading papers and getting sick, among other things.
I agree, generally, with what you say in this comment. I would add that, in my view, some forms of political history have a special claim to the academy by virtue of their special claim on the public's interest -- most notably, eighteenth-century U.S. political history, nineteenth-century U.S. military history, and twentieth-century African American political history. But you're correct that it's unreasonable to expect that every history department will address these areas in a way that might appeal to the public; we may only ask that they do address them in some fashion, which UCLA is clearly doing.
Ralph E. Luker -
4/9/2008
Can an African-Americanist do the department's political history? Can a historian of women in America do the department's political history? *Must* it be someone who writes and teaches primarily, even only, on the presidency and the Congress or on state or local politics? If you're going to say that it must, political history becomes one of many competing claims on limited departmental slots and those many competing claims include a number of others that may think they've been getting too little attention: constitutional history, diplomatic history, economic history, legal history, military history, etc. Given the fact that a narrow definition of what political history is must necessarily exclude huge swaths of the American public from its purview, it then becomes increasingly difficult to claim for political history that it is the backbone to all narrative of American history and, therefore, *essential* that its narrow offerings *must* be represented in the graduate curriculum.
Jeremy Young -
4/9/2008
Friedlander is a Europeanist and doesn't fall under KC's criticisms -- in what I've read, he never says the entire history department contains no political historians, only that the American subfield contains none. While I haven't read Howe's book and can't say for certain, from what little I can glean around the Web I would consider it a work of social history.
But I take it you disagree.
Ralph E. Luker -
4/9/2008
You don't think that *either* Howe's book *or* Friedlander's book are political history?
Jeremy Young -
4/9/2008
Hmm. Well, now I'm far from anything I can speak on with any authority but my own opinion. I would say that I don't see what good it does to the field of history to break it up into specialized pieces and sell it off to other academic specialties. I don't happen to support the turnover of economic history to economics departments, nor do I favor the specialization of history of science in its own departments. All these things, along with the more standard social and cultural history, are part of a coherent picture, a snapshot of the world in the past, if you will -- and I'm against declaring anything beyond the purview of the historian.
Having said this, while I think you for your detailed explanation, I'm still confused as to what this broader argument has to do with UCLA winning two Pulitzers. Surely KC was not attacking the department for universal intellectual imbecility. Yet the twin Pulitzers -- while admittedly impressive -- only speak to the brilliance of two relatively elderly scholars. How does that answer KC's critiques about political history?
Ralph E. Luker -
4/9/2008
Well, yes, you are. This is something that we've discussed many times at Cliopatria. KC tends to work with a rather traditional and, even, narrow definition of what political history is. Others have argued a) that KC works with too narrow a definition of political history; and b) assuming that definition, he needs to make a case for why it is essential to any graduate department's offerings. That is, we are probably long past a time when you can *assume* that a electoral/political narrative can be understood as the essential core of the historical narrative. We are past that, in part, because making it such simply excludes too many people from its purview for too much of the time. If it isn't the essential core, then it becomes one of many competing specialties, each of which then makes its claims and not all of which can readily be satisfied. Without a great deal of complaint, for example, we've largely shuffled economic history off to the economists to do. Why, then, for instance, wouldn't we accept political history as a proper purview of a government or political science department?
Jeremy Young -
4/9/2008
You're correct that I should have looked up KC's writings before I commented. Now that I have, I find Chris's comment even more incomprehensible. KC's criticisms of UCLA seem to be pretty narrowly focused on the makeup of its Americanist faculty; he's upset that the department has hired no (or few) political historians and teaches few courses in political history. While the twin Pulitzers are impressive, I don't see how they disprove that argument. Friedlander is a Europeanist, so he falls outside the purview of KC's criticisms; Howe is, in fact, a social historian. I don't read KC's critiques as attacks on the scholarship of these faculty members, but on their relative lack of representativeness as measured in specializations and subjects taught. You can give a professor ten Pulitzers and it won't make him any more of a political historian than he was when he was hired.
Am I missing something?
Ralph E. Luker -
4/9/2008
I think you're too quick on the trigger here, Jeremy. In the first place, you might try to figure out if there is *any* precedent for a single department to have won two Pulitzer Prizes in a single year. I doubt that there is. In the second place, between them Howe and Friedlander would have many years of teaching behind them at UCLA, one on the American and one on the European side of the department. As such, they'd have been helping to set a level of tone and expectation for younger colleagues for many years. Knowing Joyce Appleby a bit, as I do, I would want to underestimate the influence of an emeritus professor on the current quality of the UCLA department. And, finally, you didn't bother to look up what KC has written about the UCLA department. Simple Google search, my friend.
Jeremy Young -
4/9/2008
You know, I take your point, but one of the two UCLA profs is emeritus, and the other is the 75-year-old Saul Friedlander. Trying to save a department's reputation through the works of two of its septuagenarians is as silly as, I don't know, saying Princeton is a bastion of Civil War history because James MacPherson used to teach there.
I haven't read the KC Johnson comment you reference, and I have no opinion on the UCLA Department of History -- I'm just saying that whatever claims he made, this probably isn't an effective counter to them.
Chris Bray -
4/8/2008
UCLA's history department cannot possibly have brought home two Pulitzers, because UCLA's history department only diddles around in the narrow backwaters of identity group history and facile New Left social theory. Did the Pulitzer committee not get KC Johnson's memo?
Jeremy Young -
4/8/2008
Heh.
Ralph E. Luker -
4/8/2008
I s'pose if I were guessing, that would be my guess, as well.
