Apr 5, 2009

Weak Endnotes

by Cliopatria

From Karen Winkler's Q & A with Michèle Lamont, the author of How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment, CHE, 3 April:

In history there is a high degree of consensus among scholars about what is good. But it is not based so much on a common theory, or method, or whether people think the discipline is part of the humanities or social sciences. It's a shared sense of craftsmanship. People care about whether the work is careful. They believe they can identify careful work. And that they can convince others about it. The degree of consensus has varied over the years. In the 1960s, for example, the discipline was polarized politically. But it has found consensus in the practice of scholarship.
Historians believe that contrasts sharply with English literature. As one told me,"The disciplinary center holds." That sense of consensus makes history proposals and applicants very successful in multidisciplinary competitions like the national fellowship and grant programs.

Ron Rosenbaum,"Should We Care What Shakespeare Did in Bed?" Slate, 2 April, sees the controversy about the new"Shakespeare portrait" as a discussion of his sexuality.

Marina Warner,"Ventriloquism," LRB, 9 April, reviews Daniel Karlin, ed., Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám by Edward FitzGerald.

Holland Cotter,"From the Deep, a Diva With Many Faces," NYT, 2 April, reviews"Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas," an exhibit at Washington's National Museum of African Art.

American History Notes below the fold --

Liz Jobey,"Gone west: photographing America's greatest landscapes," Guardian, 2 April, reviews Eva Respini's Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West and"Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West, an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

Dwight Gardner,"‘Voice of the Century' Broke Racial Barriers," NYT, 2 April, reviews Ray Arsenault's The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America.

There is a significant error in annotations of Life's newly released photographs at the Lorraine Motel after Martin Luther King's assassination. The man shown embracing Ralph Abernathy and standing alone and pensive outside King's motel room is known nowhere, ever, as"William Campbell" or"Bill Campbell". That is Will D. Campbell. A white Mississippi Baptist preacher and writer, Will has had a life that is the stuff of civil rights legend.

Finally, farewell to Emory Elliott of UC, Riverside. He is, perhaps, best known as the general editor of The Columbia Literary History of the United States.