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.
Theodore Ziolkowski, "Gilgamesh: An Epic Obsession," berfrois, 1 November, draws on the author's book, Gilgamesh Among Us: Modern Encounters With the Ancient Epic. Christopher Carroll, "The Vanished City," The Book, 2 November, reviews Richard Miles's Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization. Simon Schama, "Robert Hughes Reimagines a Glorious Rome in New Book," Daily Beast, 30 October, reviews Hughes's Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History. Schama avoids the controversy.
Ross Posnock, "American Idol: On Nietzsche in America," Nation, 1 November, reviews Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas. Fred Siegel, "Lyrical Leftist, Dogged Idealist," WSJ, 24 October, reviews Vivian Gornick's Emma Goldman. Rob Verger, "The Vets Who Conquered Everest," Daily Beast, 3 November, interviews Wade Davis, the author of Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest. Andrew Litchenstein, "Landscapes of American History," Facing Change: Documenting America, 2011, is a slide-show of Litchenstein's extraordinary photographs.
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.
Kent State's Julio Pino is at it again.
Colin Dickey, "Quack Prophet," Lapham's Quarterly, 30 October, re-assesses the long career of Nostradamus in western history.
Tim Black, "Why Malthus is back in fashion," spiked review of books, October, looks again at Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population.
Richard Beeman, "James Madison, ‘the Father of Politics'," NYT, 28 October, reviews Richard Brookhiser's James Madison.
Kevin Boyle, "On the Road to Harpers Ferry," NYT, 28 October, reviews Tony Horwitz's Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War.
Eric Banks, "Wars They Have Seen," CHE, reviews Barbara Will's Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma and Antoine Compagnon's Le Cas Bernard Faÿ: Du Collège de France à l'indignité nationale. Benjamin Ivry, "Samuel Beckett's Letters Reveal Roots of Resistance," Jewish Daily Forward, 27 October, draws on The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1956, 2 volumes, and Samuel Beckett's German Diaries, 1936–1937.
Frank Rich, "Roaring at the Screen With Pauline Kael," NYT, 27 October, reviews Brian Kellow's Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark and Sanford Schwartz, ed., The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael.
Marshall Poe, "Meme Weaver," Atlantic, October, tells how his proposal for a "big idea" book was born – and died.
[Cross-posted at Airminded.]
I have a favour to ask of you. Would you mind please having a look at this and telling me what's wrong with it? Thank you.
To be somewhat less cryptic, it's an article for peer-review which I am having no luck getting accepted anywhere, and I don't really know why. I've had some bad luck. I wrote the first version about a year before I finished my PhD, in the hope that it would be on my CV by the time I entered the job market; in the event the journal I submitted it to took well over a year to reject it. But I've made some bad choices too. In its original form it was too ambitious and far too long; after three rejections I decided to cut it in two and rewrite each piece as a standalone article. As it (or at least the first part) was now shorter and sharper, I was again hopeful that I could find a home for it. But I've now received a second rejection for this version. This last rejection was helpful in that the reviewer provided detailed criticism, but while much of it is well taken, some of it is not suggests that the point of my article did not get across. That's my fault as a writer; it might also be that I've been sending it to the wrong journals. But as I say, I'm not really why it's so difficult to place; it doesn't seem to me to be any worse than my first or even my second peer-reviwed articles.
So I'm taking a leaf out of Katrina Gulliver's book (though not her actual book!) by putting the most-recently-rejected version of the article up on Google Docs and requesting feedback from anyone who has the patience to wade through it. You can comment on the article itself, either anonymously (if you don't want to be mentioned in the acknowledgements) or using your Google account; or you can send me an email. (No comments here though, please, unless they're about the crowdsourcing itself.) I'll take it down after a week or so.
How can I improve the article? What am I doing wrong? Where should I send it? Or should I just accept that this one is a dud and forget about it? It's up to you! Well, it's still up to me, but I'll be grateful for any and all suggestions.
Holland Cotter, "A Cosmopolitan Trove of Exotic Beauty," NYT, 27 October, previews the opening of the Metropolitan Museum's redesigned Islamic exhibition space.
Lili Loofbourow, "The Golden Age Of Dirty Talk," The Awl, 25 October, argues an earlier age had more imaginative language.
Adam Kirsch, "Red Rosa," Jewish Review of Books, Fall, reviews Georg Adler, Peter Hudis, and Annalies Laschitza, eds., The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg.
Jed Perl, "The Relevance of Irrelevance," TNR, 26 October, reviews "Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism," an exhibit at New York's Acquavella Galleries.
Denis Donoghue, "Samuel Beckett's Midgame," NYT, 28 October, reviews George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, eds., The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol II, 1941-1956.
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.
Good News: after five months, The Edge of the American West, winner of 2008's Cliopatria Award for Best Group Blog, has dehiatusized itself. Welcome back, Ari and Eric. Hat tip.
Alec Ash interviews "Norman Davies on Europe's Vanished States," The Browser, 27 October for his recommendation of five essential books on the subject.
Vladislav Davidzon, "Odessa Story," The Book, 27 October, reviews Charles King's Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams.
Alexander Rose, "Bounteous Misperceptions," WSJ, 25 October, reviews Anne Salmond's Bligh: William Bligh in the South Seas.
James Longenbach, "This Is Just to Say: On William Carlos Williams," Nation, 25 October, reviews Herbert Leibowitz's "Something Urgent I Have to Say to You" The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams.
Andrew J. Bacevich, "Solving for X: On George F. Kennan," Nation, 25 October, reviews John Lewis Gaddis's George F. Kennan: An American Life.
Janet Maslin, "The ‘70s, as Dramatic as a Movie," NYT, 26 October, reviews Brian Kellow's Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark and James Wolcott's Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York. Frank Rich, "Roaring at the Screen with Pauline Kael," NYT, 27 October, reviews Kellow's Pauline Kael and Sanford Schwartz, ed., The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael.
Miriam Elder, "Tsar quality: Bolshoi theatre reopens after six-year overhaul," Guardian, 27 October, previews the reopening of Moscow's Bolshoi.
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.
Rory Stewart, "Cool Under Fire," intelligent life, Sept/Oct, revisits Afghanistan's National Kabul Museum and its treasures.
Isaac Chotiner, "What Did It Look Like?" The Book, 25 October, reviews Ashley Jackson's and David Tomkins's Illustrating Empire: A Visual History of British Imperialism.
Jack Rakove, "The Inventor of Our Politics," The Book, 26 October, reviews Richard Brookhiser's James Madison.
Jo Guldi, "what is being occupied?" inscape, 19 October, and Matthew Battles, "Tactical Utopia," HiloBrow, 19 October, reflect on historical precedent for the Occupy movement.
James K. Gailbreath, "Dumbing Down Darwin," Washington Monthly, Nov/Dec, reviews Robert H. Frank's The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good.
Vivian Gornick, "Love and Anarchy," CHE, 23 October, is adapted from Gornick's new book, Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life.
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.
Carnivalesque LXXIX, an ancient/medieval edition of the festival, is up at She-Wolf.
TLS editor Sir Peter Stothard first published a very critical assessment of Robert Hughes's Rome on 19 June. Ten days later, Mary Beard's review for the Guardian found so many "howlers" in the book that she told readers to skip its first 200 pages. Stothard returned to the attack in September's Australian Book Review: "In his lengthy account of the history of Rome, Robert Hughes is doubly, gloriously, and disgracefully careless." The full-throated attack is reprinted here, where Stothard seems to demand that Hughes reply.
Charles C. Mann, "How the Potato Changed the World," Smithsonian, November, is adapted from Mann's 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. M. J., "The benefits of early money-laundering," Economist, 21 October, reviews "Money and Beauty: Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities," an exhibit at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. David Wooten, "Revolution in the heavens," TLS, 19 October, reviews Steven Shapin's and Simon Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life (new edition); and Robert S. Westman's The Copernican Question: Prognostication, skepticism, and celestial order.
Colin Jones and Emily Richardson, "Madame de Pompadour: The Other Cheek," History Today, November, explore obscene cartoons of Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV's favourite mistress. Paula Young Lee, "Vivent Les Animaux," Slate, 21 October, compares "the animal panic of 18th-century Paris with Zanesville, Ohio."
James Fenton, "Everywhere Man," Atlantic, November, reviews Laird M. Easton, ed. and trans., Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880-1918. Mike Dash, "The Battle of Broken Hill," Past Imperfect, 20 October, recounts an attack, early in World War I, by Afghan workmen who rallied under the flag of Turkey on a train of vacationing Australian picnickers.
James J. Sheehan, "Hitler's Last Gasp," NYT, 21 October, reviews Ian Kershaw's The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-45.
Finally, farewell to Emory's Rudolph Byrd, an expert in African American literature, and to Howard's Aziz Batran, a historian of Africa.
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.
History of the typewriter recited by Michael Winslow from SansGil—Gil Cocker on Vimeo.
"For nearly 21 minutes, the camera moves gently around Winslow in a recording studio as he impersonates the noises of 32 typewriters. Inter-titles announce the dates of the respective machines' manufacture, their brand and model number. It is an absorbing feat of mimicry. From the frantic clucking and strenuous creaking of his ‘1895 Barlock Mod. 4', through to the ping-pong sounds of the ‘1954 Hermes Mod. Baby', and concluding with the ‘1983 Olympia Monika Deluxe', Winslow produces a percussive tour de force that could take its place alongside the Dada sound poetry of Raoul Hausmann or Kurt Schwitters and the cartoon exuberance of voice actor Mel Blanc. Although not apparent in the film itself, Uriarte filmed The History of the Typewriter … in the Berlin studio of the industrial noise band Einstürzende Neubauten, who pioneered the use of customized instruments and machinery in the early 1980s.
"Winslow performs with precision and concentration, as if executing a particularly torturous piece of chamber music punctuated by moments of impish irreverence. His performance conjures images of a secretary trotting out a dictated letter on 1932's cutting-edge technology (the inappropriately named Remington Noiseless Portable), or a hack bashing out copy on his newsroom Triumph. (In fact, Uriarte recorded Winslow's imitations of vintage machines from collections in Germany and Switzerland as they were being used to type out the title of the film.) The techniques Winslow uses to achieve the ‘lost' noises are fascinating to observe: by grasping the two microphones like twin pan pipes, gnawing them like corncobs, or grappling, swiping and variously pushing them against his teeth and lips, he produces a glorious vocabulary of fricative letter-hammering, space-bar thuds, platen-knob twisting and carriage-return shunts that seems to encompass chicken-pecking, machete-slashing, strangulation, tap-dancing and QWERTY beat-boxing." Max Andrews, "Ignacio Uriarte," frieze, April 2010. Hat tip.
"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.
This clip comes from a recently-released 1 March 1973 meeting between Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, and Simcha Dinitz about Middle Eastern affairs. In this section, the President functions as an amateur diplomatic historian, offering his perspective on the tension between realism and idealism in US foreign policy, and how that pattern applied to Woodrow Wilson and the Versailles Treaty.
(A note: the overall quality of the recording sometimes isn’t that great.)
President Nixon: Well, we work toward the ideal, but we have to work for it pragmatically. That’s really what it comes down to.
[Break.]
President Nixon: Woodrow Wilson, you know . . . He was probably the most religious, idealistic man ever to ever sit in this office. But before it all, when it finally came down to it—he had great impact. He brought us into the war, the Fourteen Points—again, when he goes over to the Versailles Conference, the pragmatists of Europe gobbled him up in about two bites.
Prime Minister Golda Meir: Yes.
President Nixon: And the world was very unsafe as a result, correct?
As a matter of fact, I think if the Versailles Treaty had come out differently, that you’d never [have] had a Hitler. You know? You really look what produced that fella—it had to start with Versailles. It had to start with Versailles. You can’t take a . . .
If, for example, the attitude toward the Germans after World War I had been the attitude that we took after World War II, there might have been a different situation.
Henry Kissinger: But I think Versailles was either too soft or too tough. [Unclear cross-talk.]
President Nixon: I thought it was too tough, actually.
Kissinger: But it was . . . It . . . It created the possibility of humiliating the Germans, while not [unclear] them enough.
President Nixon: You can’t do that. If you’re going to humiliate somebody, you must destroy him. Otherwise, he’s going to be able to destroy you. You never strike the king unless you kill him.
Kissinger: That’s true. [Unclear] France, which had been demoralized by the war, because Russia couldn’t come to . . . So Versailles was a disaster.
President Nixon: That’s right.
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.
Mary Carole McCauley, "Walters researchers decode the secrets of the Archimedes Palimpsest," Baltimore Sun, 14 October, and Edward Rothstein, "Finding Archimedes in the Shadows," NYT, 16 October, feature the Archimedes Palimpsest, on exhibit now in "Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes" at Baltimore's Walters Art Museum.
Scott McLemee, "Mad – or Just Angry?" IHE, 19 October, reviews Aloys Winterling's Caligula: A Biography.
Charles Nickoll for the Guardian, 14 October, and "Masques of beauty and blackness," Spectator, 15 October, review Ian Donaldson's Ben Jonson: A Life.
Jill Lepore, "Forget 9-9-9. Here's a Simple Plan: 1," NYT, 15 October, recalls Henry George, the original man with a plan.
Richard Pipes, "Trotsky the Jew," Tablet, 17 October, reviews Joshua Rubenstein's Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary's Life.
Philip Hensher reviews Max Hastings's All Hell Let Loose: The World at War, 1939-1945 for the Guardian, 13 October. John Gooch, "Mussolini's diaries and the ‘treasure of Dongo'," TLS, 17 October, reviews Mimmo Franzinelli's Autopsia di un Falso: I diari di Mussolini e la manipolazione della storia, I Diari di Mussolini, 1939, Veri o presunti, and Claretta Petacci's Verso il Disastro: Mussolini in guerra, diari, 1939-1940, Mimmo Franzinelli, ed.
Nathan Heller, "What She Said," New Yorker, 24 October, reviews Brian Kellow's Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark and Sanford Schwartz, ed., The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael.
When Matt Yglesias thought he found a Straussian in David Brooks, Ben Alpers was skeptical and Andrew Sullivan took notice. "I know Straussians," Sullivan wrote. "Straussians are friends of mine. David Brooks is not a Straussian."
Karl W. Giberson and Randall J. Stephens, "The Evangelical Rejection of Reason," NYT, 17 October, challenges the anti-intellectual positions of fellow evangelicals. The argument draws on work in their new book, The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age.
Finally, congratulations to Stephanie McCurry, who has won the Gilder Lehrman Center's Frederick Douglass Prize for her book, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South.
The Giant's Shoulders #40, the history of science carnival, is up at Gurdur's Stranger In An Even Stranger Land.
Dan Ephron, "Blood in the Holy City," Daily Beast, 17 October, reviews Simon Sebag Montefiori's Jerusalem: The Biography.
Michael Maiello, "The Optimistic Science," Daily Beast, 14 October, reviews Sylvia Nasar's Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius.
Steven Sherwood, "Science controversies past and present," Physics Today, October, argues that controversy over global warming follows a course similar to those of other "inconvenient truths" from physics.
Adam Kirsch, "Seeing Double," Tablet, 11 October, reviews Samantha Baskind's and Larry Silver's Jewish Art: A Modern History.
Jordan Smith, "The Philosopher of the Post-9/11 Era," Slate, 17 October, reviews John Patrick Diggins's Why Niebuhr Now?
Haleh Esfandiari, "The End of Illusion," The Book, 17 October, reviews Arash Hejazi's The Gaze of the Gazelle: The Story of a Generation, the story of the Iranian regime's failure to convince a new generation of its people.
Finally, over on Tumblr, you may have missed "Presidential Pickup Lines".
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