Nominations are open for the Cliopatria Awards, 20ll. Until 30 November, you can nominate candidates for Best Group Blog, Best Individual Blog, Best New Blog, Best Post, Best Series of Posts, and Best Writer. This year, for the first time, there will be Awards for Best Twitter Feed and Best Podcast Episode.

Brenda Wineapple, "John Brown's Folly: The mythology of a madman," American Scholar, Autumn, reviews Tony Horwitz's Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War. Beverly Gage, "Lessons for Occupy Wall Street," Slate, 2 November, draws on her book, The Day Wall Street Exploded, to urge the relevance of the great railroad strike of 1877.

István Deák, "The Hater," The Book, 3 November, reviews Robert Gerwarth's Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich.

Alan Jenkins, "‘How I dislike that play now . . .'," TLS, 2 November, reviews George Craig, Martha Dow Fesenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, eds., The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. II, 1941-1956; and Craig, Writing Beckett's Letters. Theodore Dalrymple, "Knowledge Without Knowledge," New English Review, November, reassesses the work of Isaac Deutscher: "the scholar who knew a lot and understood little (including, or especially, himself). A man may smile and smile and be a villain. A man may read and read, and experience and experience, and understand nothing."

William Benton, "Elizabeth Bishop: Exchanging Hats – in pictures," Guardian, 3 November, is a slide show of the poet's paintings. Evan Hughes, "The Cordial Enmity Of Joan Didion And Pauline Kael," The Awl, 31 October, "resurrects the highbrow gossip of yore."

Walter Laquer, "Night Thoughts on Europe," National Interest, Nov/Dec, offers a foretaste of his new book, After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent.

Samuel Helfont, "The Uncomfortable Questions," The Book, 31 October, reviews Katerina Dalacoura's Islamist Terrorism and Democracy in the Middle East.

Stephen M. Walt, "The End of the American Era," National Interest, Nov/Dec, calls for a re-assessment of the role of the United States in international affairs.

Thomas Schulz, "Has America Become an Oligarchy?" Der Spiegel, 28 October, explores whether the United States has entered "a second gilded age."

Jelanie Cobb, "Of lynchings, high tech and others," CainWatch, 31 October, finds Herman Cain doing violence to history.

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

The twenty-ninth edition of the Military History Carnival will take place here on December 1.  Please submit the best recent military history (broadly conceived) on the web for consideration for posting.  Deadline is November 28.

Nominations can be submitted here.

Pankaj Mishra, "Watch This Man," LRB, 3 November, reviews Niall Ferguson's Civilisation: The West and the Rest.

Theodore K. Rabb, "Love letter to a painting," TLS, 26 October, reviews Carola Hicks's Girl in a Green Gown: The history and mystery of the Arnolfini portrait.

John Markoff, "How Revolutionary Tools Cracked a 1700s Code," NYT, 24 October: "a team of Swedish and American linguists has applied statistics-based translation techniques to crack one of the most stubborn of codes: the Copiale Cipher, a hand-lettered 105-page manuscript that appears to date from the late 18th century."

Alan Wolfe, "One Right," The Book, 27 October, reviews Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.

Jay Merrick, "Russia's aesthetic revolution: How Soviet building still influences today's architects," Independent, 21 October, reviews "Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-35," an exhibit at London's Royal Academy of Arts.

The NYT's "Room for Debate" asks: "Do Good Debaters Make Good Presidents?" There are answers from H. W. Brands, Robert Dallek, David Gergen, Alonzo Hamby, Joan Hoff, Kathleen Hall Jameson, Jon Meacham, and Richard Reeves.

Roger Atwood, "The real lessons of Easter Island," TLS, 19 October, reviews Terry L. Hunt's and Carl Lipo's The Statues That Walked: Unraveling the mystery of Easter Island.

David S. Reynolds, "An Angry Prophet," WSJ, 22 October, reviews Tony Horwitz's Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War.

Michiko Kakutani, "Two-Sided Man Gets Two New Biographies," NYT, 24 October, reviews Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist and Claire Tomlin's Charles Dickens.

Fred Siegel, "Lyrical Leftist, Dogged Idealist," WSJ, 24 October, reviews Vivian Gornick's Emma Goldman.

On the eve of the opening of Steven Spielberg's new film, The Adventures of Tintin, Simon Kuper's "Tintin and the war," FT Magazine, 21 October, re-examines charges against the Belgian cartoonist/collaborationist, Georges Remi, whose pen name was Hergé.

Fang Lizhi, "The Real Deng," NYRB, 10 November, reviews Ezra F. Vogel's Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China.

Jonathan Lopez, "A Stranger to Himself," WSJ, 15 October, Roberta Silman for the Boston Globe, 17 October, and Michiko Kakutani, "The Persona and the Palette," NYT, 20 October, review Steven Naifeh's and Gregory White Smith's Van Gogh: The Life. Ariella Budick, "Portrait of Decline," Slate, 25 September, and Barry Schwabsky, "Vacant, Limpid, Angelic: On Willem de Kooning," Nation, 18 October, review "de Kooning: A Retrospective," an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

Alonzo Hamby, "When Ike Took Charge," WSJ, 20 October, reviews Jim Newton's Eisenhower: The White House Years. Eric A. Posner, "Casual with the Court," The Book, 24 October, reviews Kevin J. McMahon's Nixon's Court: His Challenge to Judicial Liberalism and Its Political Consequences.

David Barboza, "The Man Who Took Modernity to China," NYT, 21 October, reviews Ezra F. Vogel's Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China.

Jacob Silverman, "Free Radical," Tablet, 19 October, reviews the new documentary film, Paul Goodman Changed My Life. Matt Labash, "Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride," WSJ, 15 October, reviews Jann Wenner, ed., Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson.

Dwight Garner, "Peering Beyond a Monologist's Stage Presence Into His Uncensored Mind," NYT, 17 October, reviews Nell Casey, ed., The Journals of Spalding Gray. Raymond Beauchemin reviews Robert J Wiersema's Walk Like a Man: Coming of Age with the Music of Bruce Springsteen for The National, 21 October. Janet Maslin, "Making the iBio for Apple's Genius," NYT, 21 October, and WSJ Staff for the WSJ's Speakeasy, 23 October, review Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs.

"Winged words," Economist, 15 October, reviews The Iliad of Homer, trans. by Richmond Lattimore, The Iliad, trans. by Anthony Verity, The Iliad, trans. by Stephen Mitchell, and Alice Oswald's Memorial. Alec Ash interviews "Norman Stone on Turkish History," The Browser, 20 October, for his recommendation of five essential books about it.

Alex Knapp, "Yes, Shakespeare Really Did Write Shakespeare," Forbes, 19 October, attempts to settle the issue.

Frank Viviano, "The Eunuch Admiral," California, Fall, about Zheng He, a 15th-century Chinese admiral; and Sterling Lord, "When Kerouac Met Kesey," American Scholar, Autumn, by their literary agent, are The Browser's leading candidates for favorite article of the month. You can vote among the top 10 here.

The new Common-Place is up, with new work in ante-bellum American history by Jennifer Brady, Kevin Butterfield, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, and others. Every generation seems to discover Herman Melville's Moby Dick anew for itself. For this one, see, for example: Matt Kish's One Drawing for Every Page of Moby Dick, Jamie L. Jones, "Blogging Moby Dick," Common-Place, October, Todd Gitlin, "The Grand Programme," The Book, 19 October, a review of Nathaniel Philbrick's Why Read Moby-Dick?, and Philbrick, "The Road to Melville," Vanity Fair, November, an adaptation from the book.

Michael Bernhard, "The Leadership Secrets of Bismarck: Imperial Germany and Competative Authoritarianism," Foreign Affairs, 16 October, reviews Jonathan Steinberg's Bismarck: A Life.

Michael Ratner and Michael Steven Smith, "Who Killed Che?" Guernica, October, draws on documents published in Ratner's and Smith's Who Killed Che? How the CIA Got Away with Murder to illuminate the question.

"Liberalism and Occupy Wall Street," TNR, 17 October, is an on-going TNR symposium, featuring Paul Berman, Todd Gitlin, David Greenberg, Michael Kazin, and others.

Finally, farewell to John Morton Blum, a distinguished American political historian. See also: Allan M. Winkler, "A Tribute to John Morton Blum," HNN, 18 October.

Jill Lepore in the New York Times, wrong as always:

"Lately, Mr. Cain has risen in the polls, buoyed by Tea Party populism, which is curious because when the word 'populism' was coined, in 1890, it meant opposition to a monopoly on wealth held by businessmen and bankers."

No, no, no, no, no, and wrong on both ends. A Harvard historian and the editors of the New York Times op-ed pages don't know any history between them? The Populists weren't simply opposed to wealth, or to a monopoly on wealth, or to businessmen, or to bankers. You can read the Omaha Platform yourself. You have to read all the way to the second sentence of the preamble for this: "Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench." Weird that people who just hated rich people used their first formal political statement to talk about political corruption, yeah? It's almost like they were angry at the government, which, you know, hold on a minute, I'm sensing the presence of a theme that I've heard somewhere else.

The Populists didn't simply hate wealth; they hated their (accurate) sense that the fix was in, that private wealth was derived from, and served by, public corruption. They hated crony capitalism. Agrarian populism wasn't proletarian -- it was substantially a movement of the rural petit bourgeoisie, smallholders who wanted to thrive as profit-seeking property owners. Here's the last sentence of the first paragraph of the preamble: "From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires."

The Populists were concerned with "governmental injustice" and the wealth it produced, not with wealth itself. Keep going through the Omaha Platform (emphasis added):

"The national power to create money is appropriated to enrich bondholders; a vast public debt payable in legal tender currency has been funded into gold-bearing bonds, thereby adding millions to the burdens of the people....the supply of currency is purposely abridged to fatten usurers, bankrupt enterprise, and enslave industry....We have witnessed for more than a quarter of a century the struggles of the two great political parties for power and plunder, while grievous wrongs have been inflicted upon the suffering people. We charge that the controlling influences dominating both these parties have permitted the existing dreadful conditions to develop without serious effort to prevent or restrain them. Neither do they now promise us any substantial reform. They have agreed together to ignore, in the coming campaign, every issue but one. They propose to drown the outcries of a plundered people with the uproar of a sham battle over the tariff, so that capitalists, corporations, national banks, rings, trusts, watered stock, the demonetization of silver and the oppressions of the usurers may all be lost sight of. They propose to sacrifice our homes, lives, and children on the altar of mammon; to destroy the multitude in order to secure corruption funds from the millionaires."

And so on. The Populists liked industry and enterprise -- see the statement above about the enslavement of those positive things. They hated dishonest enterprise, industry that made money as clients of state power. They hated the way that a "vast public debt" served the interests of private wealth. This should all be sounding familiar, and please do notice what organization's logo appears on the website where you log in to manage your foodstamp benefits. All your base are belong to us -- more poverty makes more wealth for Wall Street.

Going back to the Omaha Platform, move past the preamble and look at the platform: "Second.—Wealth belongs to him who creates it, and every dollar taken from industry without an equivalent is robbery. “If any will not work, neither shall he eat.” The interests of rural and civic labor are the same; their enemies are identical."

So here we have people who thought that "wealth belongs to him who creates it," and who were horrified by the enslavement of industry and enterprise. And Jill Lepore tells you that "populism" meant "opposition to a monopoly on wealth held by businessmen." No it didn't, and in many ways, the Tea Party expresses the populist sentiment of the actual Populists.

This is most certainly not to say that the Tea Party are the Populists reborn. Again, from the preamble to the Omaha Platform: "We believe that the power of government—in other words, of the people—should be expanded (as in the case of the postal service) as rapidly and as far as the good sense of an intelligent people and the teachings of experience shall justify, to the end that oppression, injustice, and poverty shall eventually cease in the land."

That's not Tea party politics. But the Tea Party's sense that the fix is in, that dirty government serves private wealth, is entirely comparable to Populist views of the relationship between corrupt political parties and private wealth. It's not even slightly "curious" to use the term "populist" to describe people who oppose government bailouts of private corporations.

The reductive coding of political movements as "left" or "right" overdetermines our conclusions about them. Try to notice what people are saying, then analyze it on its own terms, without the weight of a facile label.