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Today’s example of brainless, fact-free so-called “Founding Fathers” worship
And it would have worked too, if it weren’t for you meddling Anti-Federalists! Today’s example comes from Katherine Kersten, a fellow at something called the Center for the American Experiment in...
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Education theater, old school style. (Really old school!)
C’est ca, mes amis! From Alice Kaplan’s Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), pp. 41-42, a...
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Notes on X
Here’s something amazing I learned from Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis, by Alice Kaplan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,...
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Cake! Because Christmas.
Susan’s orange-scented fruitcakeCan you believe it? Susan actually sent me a cake! It’s her orange-scented fruitcake, and we are having a hard time keeping it whole until tomorrow. Merry Christmas to...
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A conversation with Chauncey DeVega about guns, masculinity, and the white...
Chauncey DeVega called me up a few weeks ago to talk about the Newtown murders, and in particular about the deep historical connection between white masculinity and firearms ownership. We also talked...
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2012: the Year of the Asshole?
Some of you have probably heard of Geoffrey Nunberg’s Ascent of the A-word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years (2012) because of his platform as the resident linguist for NPR’s Fresh Air. A few weeks...
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Intimate body care: never a highly paid occupation
NPR featured a story tonight about how poorly compensated home health care work is. Currently, they are not entitled either to the minimum wage nor to overtime pay. Most make between $8-10/hr., while...
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Life, death, and early America
Richard III’s skeleton, showing a massive skull fracture and evidence of corpse desecration. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I find the story about the discovery and identification of Richard...
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Game Change
I finally had an opportunity to see Game Change, HBO’s fictionalized account of the John McCain campaign for president in in 2008 and his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate. It was really...
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Lose weight now the William Howard Taft way!
Do you still have a stubborn few pounds to drop after the holidays? Why not try the William Howard Taft diet? He lost nearly seventy pounds on it. Behold (via New York Magazine): Taft is an...
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Are you there, God? It’s Margaret.
A savage handbagging! It’s a big day for women’s history today as we note the death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Here’s a roundup up some of the things I’ve seen on the non-peer...
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Wednesday round-up: What I saw at the OAH
Attending a big conference like the Organization of American Historians is fun, especially when it’s in an pleasant place like San Francisco in the spring in mid-April. What I do is so marginal to the...
View ArticleNominations are now open for Best Title Ever
First Sealord of the Admiralty probably gets my vote, but Supreme Allied Commander is pretty boss, too. (What does it say about me that I gravitate towards these European-oriented military offices and...
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Monday round-up: endless semester edition
You’ve heard of The Endless Summer? It sure seems to me like this is the Endless Semester. Maybe it’s all of the snow and slush in April, but more than any other spring semester in recent memory,...
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John Winthrop: still controversial after all these years.
For a comment on a paper that I’m giving this afternoon, I needed to check a quotation from The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649 (1996), edited by Richard Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle,...
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We’re gonna blog it like it’s 1399! Or, what academic blogging can and can’t...
Anachronistic image of Chaucer from the 17th century Go read Dr. Cleveland on the uses of academic blogging, and how in many respects it is like Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetry (only with more profanity,...
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Hard Times, indeed.
“Clearly you need to restrict the dimensions to things that more or less have a right answer or several right answers.” So says Daphne Koller on the challenges of adapting MOOC technology to teach...
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Bleg update: Introduction to Historical Practice
Onward! Thanks to your many fantastic suggestions way back at the beginning of the summer, I’ve finally made some decisions (and perhaps more importantly, submitted my book orders) for my fall 2013...
View ArticleAn almost unbloglich level of Franzenfreude
Check it out: Amanda Hess’s analysis of Jonathan Franzen’s recent essay in which he screams at the children to get off his lawn, and to take their Twitter-machines with them: Franzen blames the...
View ArticleDead feminist Nobelist novelist’s work described as “seminal.” Srsly?
Doris Lessing died yesterday, as you may have heard. As I was making sandwiches for lunches this morning, I heard the NPR top-of-the-hour news announcement about her death, and it actually described...
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