Things Noted Here and There

Great Britain's Channel 4 has recently broadcast a four-part, bodice-ripping series,"The Devil's Whore," on the English Revolution of the 1640s. It had tough reviews from John Adamson of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and Edward Vallance of Liverpool.

Dwight Garner,"The Wild, Wild Doctoring in the Wild, Wild West," NYT, 16 December, reviews David Dary's Frontier Medicine: From the Atlantic to the Pacific, 1492-1941.

Libraries of Early America gathers online the book collections of early American bibliophiles, from John Adams to Lady Jean Miller Skipwith. Hat tip.

An out-of-court settlement between the Ulysses S. Grant Association and Southern Illinois University will move all of the USGA's collections for publication of the Grant Papers from SIU to Mississippi State University, where John Marszalek will succeed the late John Y. Simon as executive editor of the series.

Kathryn Loftin,"W.E.B. Du Bois and Religion," Books & Culture, November/December, reviews Ed Blum's W.E.B. Du Bois, American Prophet.

Finally, Eric Rauchway's"Does Humor Belong in History?" Edge of the American West, 12 December, prompted a lively discussion. At Papercuts, Blake Wilson suggests that in Flushed With Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper (1969) and Bust-Up: The Uplifting Tale of Otto Titzling and the Development of the Bra (1971), Wallace Reyburn measured the distance between the historian and the humorist.