On Describing Today's Historical Ecosphere

We historians conventionally distinguish scholarly historical writing from popular historical writing.  The former is what those of us who write for this blog do professionally; the latter is what tends to appear on bestseller lists.  The very existence of popular historical writing distinguishes our field from many others in the humanities. These days, at least, there's precious little popular literary criticism for example (though popular cultural criticism certainly exists). And though bookstores are brimming with popular philosophy books, they bear virtually no resemblance to the work of academic philosophers.  In contrast, not only are there innumerable works of popular history, most academic historians (or, at least, the Americanists among us) like to think that our work is potentially of interest to a broader, non-academic audience.  Occasionally a handful of scholarly works, usually in the areas of military or political history, find a large (or at least largish) audience outside the Ivory Tower.  I'm thinking, for example, of Jim McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom or Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm. Pulitzer Prizes in History often go to such works.

But more often, works of history that find their way to the best seller list are considerably less scholarly.  Take, for example, Hardball host Chris Matthews' Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, currently #33 on the New York Times Hardcover Non-Fiction Best Sellers List and the subject of a take-down by the historian David Greenberg in TNR [h/t Erik Loomis at LGM].  Vanity projects by pundits about presidents past seem to have emerged as a genre unto themselves.  At least as described by Greenberg, Matthews book seems little more than a projection of his own two-dimensional political personality onto JFK.*  

But what I found most interesting about Matthews' book was the list of people who have blurbed it.

As Greenberg notes, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero is marketed with praise from Douglas Brinkley, Walter Isaacson, Brian Williams, Peggy Noonan, and Doris Kearns Goodwin.  This is an interesting mix of people.  Noonan and Williams are fellow media personalities, who don't have any particular historical credentials. But the other three figures inhabit an intermediate zone between scholarly and popular approaches to history: semi-serious historians whose reputations have been built as mainstream public intellectuals.  The only academic among the three is Brinkley, though I think his reputation as a scholar is even more slight than Isaacson's or Goodwin's (despite the accusations of plagiarism against the latter).  Along with the once ubiquitous Michael Beschloss, Brinkley and Goodwin for years formed a kind of triumvirate of semi-official historical opinion on relatively serious network newscasts.  Each is also more closely tied to the political and financial elite than your average historian (popular or scholarly):  Goodwin was an assistant to LBJ and married Richard Goodwin, a more senior assistant to both JFK and LBJ.  Brinkley is a member of the Century Club and the Council on Foreign Relations.  Beschloss is married to a former treasurer and chief investment officer of the World Bank who runs a Washington, DC-based hedge fund.  Isaacson emerged out of the media, starting his career as a journalist, rising to be CEO of CNN in 2001 and President and CEO of the Aspen Institute in 2003.

What I find fascinating about these figures is the very complicated role they play in today's historical ecosphere. If you had to place their work on one side or the other of the popular / scholarly divide, they'd certainly be considered popular.  Yet their books--especially Goodwin's and Isaacson's--are taken seriously by serious people. They are certainly not in the same category of "historians" as, say, Glenn Beck or Chris Matthews. But they are often called upon to validate the seriousness and even the expertise of people like Matthews (if not Beck).  Indeed, Goodwin's blurb for Matthew's JFK book seems to leave David Greenberg somewhat flummoxed; he notes that she "surely cannot regard this as a meritorious book."

What all of this suggests to me is that the old scholarly / popular divide is too crude to describe the ways in which history is produced and consumed in the U.S. today.  I'm not going to attempt a more precise taxonomy in this blogpost. But I think establishing one would help us make better sense of things like the Tea Party's use of history, which have been recurring themes on this blog.

___________________________

* I needed to add somewhere the cover of Glenn Beck's book on George Washington, since it so nicely captures the actual focus of many of these sorts of projects:

Black Public Intellectuals

Are there particular pressures on black academics to be public intellectuals? How does one respond to those pressures while maintaining an active academic career? Are black academics more at risk if they do become public intellectuals? The New York Times hosts a discussion by John McWhorter and Glenn Loury.

McWhorter calls for a balance. "The academic realm can be highly unsatisfying" because people don't read the work we shed blood, sweat, and tears to finish. But at the same time, people like Cornel West or Henry Louis Gates haven't been rigorous academics since they were young men.

At the same time, graduate students should not have any different expectations of black scholars than they do of white. McWhorter heard an obituary of Manning Marable, who held a joint appointment in History and African American studies at Columbia, on NPR in which a student raved about all the "files and folders" that Marable had, as if to prove he was truly a serious academic.

Black Public Intellectuals

Are there particular pressures on black academics to be public intellectuals? How does one respond to those pressures while maintaining an active academic career? Are black academics more at risk if they do become public intellectuals? The New York Times hosts a discussion by John McWhorter and Glenn Loury.

McWhorter calls for a balance. "The academic realm can be highly unsatisfying" because people don't read the work we shed blood, sweat, and tears to finish. But at the same time, people like Cornel West or Henry Louis Gates haven't been rigorous academics since they were young men.

At the same time, graduate students should not have any different expectations of black scholars than they do of white. McWhorter heard an obituary of Manning Marable, who held a joint appointment in History and African American studies at Columbia, on NPR in which a student raved about all the "files and folders" that Marable had, as if to prove he was truly a serious academic.

Is Academic Blogging A Zero-Sum Game?

In February of this year I offered some reflections on blogging as a professional historian. In that piece I hoped to add to David Sehat's earlier series, as well as make an argument for what I called the "blog-as-lab approach."

In today's post I offer some reflections on the hazards and usefulness of blogging through another post by Edward J. Blum at Religion in American History. Blum's post, overall, looks at blogging through a somewhat jaded lens and offers six "reservations and lessons" for others---especially junior scholars---looking to make their mark through blogging.

I agree with several of Blum's points. But I also agree with a commenter who nudges us to consider some positives.

Problems arise in relation to the respectability of blogging when one views it as a zero-sum game in relation to other publishing endeavors. The fact is that blogging and paper publishing are synergistic. Blogging can quicken one's paper publishing efforts---whether it be by my blog-as-lab theory, or simply by helping you break writer's block. And publishing helps your blogging because it brings respect and awareness to your overall work, whether it be presented in scholarly formats, or in snippets. Academic publishing brings attention to one's (valuable?) non-peer-reviewed work.

All thoughtful writing is valuable. And the web, when other writers do their homework, actually helps prevent intellectual theft. When you get your thoughts "out there" in a coherent fashion, others will find your work.

There seems to be a deep-seated tendency in human nature to get at sources and roots---a tendency which profits historians immensely. People seem want to know who thought of something first and give honor. But maybe my observations are too one-sided, too optimistic? If so, let me offer a pessimistically worded conclusion:

Academic blogging will die as a useful endeavor when the zero-sum-game folks win. - TL

Is Academic Blogging A Zero-Sum Game?

In February of this year I offered some reflections on blogging as a professional historian. In that piece I hoped to add to David Sehat's earlier series, as well as make an argument for what I called the "blog-as-lab approach."

In today's post I offer some reflections on the hazards and usefulness of blogging through another post by Edward J. Blum at Religion in American History. Blum's post, overall, looks at blogging through a somewhat jaded lens and offers six "reservations and lessons" for others---especially junior scholars---looking to make their mark through blogging.

I agree with several of Blum's points. But I also agree with a commenter who nudges us to consider some positives.

Problems arise in relation to the respectability of blogging when one views it as a zero-sum game in relation to other publishing endeavors. The fact is that blogging and paper publishing are synergistic. Blogging can quicken one's paper publishing efforts---whether it be by my blog-as-lab theory, or simply by helping you break writer's block. And publishing helps your blogging because it brings respect and awareness to your overall work, whether it be presented in scholarly formats, or in snippets. Academic publishing brings attention to one's (valuable?) non-peer-reviewed work.

All thoughtful writing is valuable. And the web, when other writers do their homework, actually helps prevent intellectual theft. When you get your thoughts "out there" in a coherent fashion, others will find your work.

There seems to be a deep-seated tendency in human nature to get at sources and roots---a tendency which profits historians immensely. People seem want to know who thought of something first and give honor. But maybe my observations are too one-sided, too optimistic? If so, let me offer a pessimistically worded conclusion:

Academic blogging will die as a useful endeavor when the zero-sum-game folks win. - TL

Speaking Truth to Power (or Whither the White House Intellectual?, Part III)

On the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration in January, 2009, I wrote a post about the White House intellectual-in-residence, a figure who was a part of the presidencies of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford, but then more or less disappeared from the scene. Later presidents, of course, consulted intellectuals in other ways.

A few months later, Tim Lacy blogged about an early appearance of intellectuals in this White House: the private dinner that Obama had held with a series of historians on June 30, 2009. U.S. News reported that guests included "Michael Beschloss, H. W. Brands, Douglas Brinkley, Robert Dallek, and Doris Kearns Goodwin." Unlike U.S. News, Tim wasn't particularly impressed with this line-up. Nor was I. As I wrote in a comment on Tim's post:

[T]hese historians of the presidency are precisely the people whose input Beltway insiders already listen to obsessively. If all he wants to do is survey the opinions of Michael Beschloss, H. W. Brands, Douglas Brinkley, Robert Dallek, and Doris Kearns Goodwin, Obama could have saved the taxpayers money and watched PBS's NewsHour for a month.

What I find most distressing is that the President apparently believes that speaking to these people represents breaking out of the DC "bubble." With the exception of Brands, all of these scholars spend much of their lives within the bubble. Indeed, it's hard to imagine Doris Kearns Goodwins's, Michael Beschloss's, and Doug Brinkley's careers without it. A policy elite that only talks to itself is distressing enough. A policy elite that only talks to itself and believes that its reaching to the outside is even more depressing.

Well it turns out that I may have overestimated the capacity of the D.C. "bubble."

One of the other guests that evening turns out to have been Garry Wills, who was a potentially more interesting interlocutor than those mentioned by US News. A few days ago, Wills put up a post on the New York Review of Books blog (who knew that the NYRB had a blog?) that casts more light on last year's White House historians dinner:

It is time for me to break a silence I have observed for over a year, against my better judgment. On June 30, 2009, I and eight other historians were invited to a dinner with President Obama and three of his staffers, to discuss what history could teach him about conducting the presidency. I was asked shortly after by several news media what went on there, and I replied that it was off the record. I have argued elsewhere that the imposition of secrecy to insure that the president gets “candid advice” is a cover for something else—making sure that what is said about the people’s business does not reach the people. But I went along this time, since the president said that he wanted this dinner to be a continuing thing, and I thought that revealing its first contents would jeopardize the continuation of a project that might be a source of information for him.

But there has been no follow up on the first dinner, and certainly no sign that he learned anything from it. The only thing achieved has been the silencing of the main point the dinner guests tried to make—that pursuit of war in Afghanistan would be for him what Vietnam was to Lyndon Johnson. At least four or five of the nine stressed this. Nothing else rose to this level of seriousness or repeated concern.

There's more, of course. As the kids say, read the whole thing.

The main thrust of Wills's post is the point that Afghanistan is likely to become Obama's (and his successors') Vietnam...if it hasn't already. I largely agree with this assessment.

But there's also a lot here that pertains to our discussions of this White House and the role of intellectuals in it, from its deep devotion to secrecy (despite early noises about transparency) to its apparent lack of follow-through (this turned out not to be the first of many such dinners).

I was also struck by the willingness of these very establishment-oriented presidential historians (other than Wills, who is a lifelong gadfly) to speak truth to power (though, to be fair, Wills says that four or five of nine guests emphasized Afghanistan....so it's possible that he's talking about himself plus three as-yet-unrevealed attendees).

The Afghanistan War seems to me to be a classic quagmire, a conflict that will suck untold blood and money and accomplish little or nothing, while encouraging the U.S. state to violate civil liberties at home and commit war crimes abroad. The least bad option remains, as it has been for years, withdrawing ASAP. This view--though common enough on the internets--is still seen in "serious" policy circles as fantastically woolly-headed and radical. "Serious" debate about Afghanistan consists of arguing COIN vs. Antiterrorism, or debating how much more we should spend or how many more troops we should commit.

At any rate, it seems as if the historical profession acquitted itself better than I had feared that night, while Obama did (and has since done) depressingly worse.

Speaking Truth to Power (or Whither the White House Intellectual?, Part III)

On the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration in January, 2009, I wrote a post about the White House intellectual-in-residence, a figure who was a part of the presidencies of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford, but then more or less disappeared from the scene. Later presidents, of course, consulted intellectuals in other ways.

A few months later, Tim Lacy blogged about an early appearance of intellectuals in this White House: the private dinner that Obama had held with a series of historians on June 30, 2009. U.S. News reported that guests included "Michael Beschloss, H. W. Brands, Douglas Brinkley, Robert Dallek, and Doris Kearns Goodwin." Unlike U.S. News, Tim wasn't particularly impressed with this line-up. Nor was I. As I wrote in a comment on Tim's post:

[T]hese historians of the presidency are precisely the people whose input Beltway insiders already listen to obsessively. If all he wants to do is survey the opinions of Michael Beschloss, H. W. Brands, Douglas Brinkley, Robert Dallek, and Doris Kearns Goodwin, Obama could have saved the taxpayers money and watched PBS's NewsHour for a month.

What I find most distressing is that the President apparently believes that speaking to these people represents breaking out of the DC "bubble." With the exception of Brands, all of these scholars spend much of their lives within the bubble. Indeed, it's hard to imagine Doris Kearns Goodwins's, Michael Beschloss's, and Doug Brinkley's careers without it. A policy elite that only talks to itself is distressing enough. A policy elite that only talks to itself and believes that its reaching to the outside is even more depressing.

Well it turns out that I may have overestimated the capacity of the D.C. "bubble."

One of the other guests that evening turns out to have been Garry Wills, who was a potentially more interesting interlocutor than those mentioned by US News. A few days ago, Wills put up a post on the New York Review of Books blog (who knew that the NYRB had a blog?) that casts more light on last year's White House historians dinner:

It is time for me to break a silence I have observed for over a year, against my better judgment. On June 30, 2009, I and eight other historians were invited to a dinner with President Obama and three of his staffers, to discuss what history could teach him about conducting the presidency. I was asked shortly after by several news media what went on there, and I replied that it was off the record. I have argued elsewhere that the imposition of secrecy to insure that the president gets “candid advice” is a cover for something else—making sure that what is said about the people’s business does not reach the people. But I went along this time, since the president said that he wanted this dinner to be a continuing thing, and I thought that revealing its first contents would jeopardize the continuation of a project that might be a source of information for him.

But there has been no follow up on the first dinner, and certainly no sign that he learned anything from it. The only thing achieved has been the silencing of the main point the dinner guests tried to make—that pursuit of war in Afghanistan would be for him what Vietnam was to Lyndon Johnson. At least four or five of the nine stressed this. Nothing else rose to this level of seriousness or repeated concern.

There's more, of course. As the kids say, read the whole thing.

The main thrust of Wills's post is the point that Afghanistan is likely to become Obama's (and his successors') Vietnam...if it hasn't already. I largely agree with this assessment.

But there's also a lot here that pertains to our discussions of this White House and the role of intellectuals in it, from its deep devotion to secrecy (despite early noises about transparency) to its apparent lack of follow-through (this turned out not to be the first of many such dinners).

I was also struck by the willingness of these very establishment-oriented presidential historians (other than Wills, who is a lifelong gadfly) to speak truth to power (though, to be fair, Wills says that four or five of nine guests emphasized Afghanistan....so it's possible that he's talking about himself plus three as-yet-unrevealed attendees).

The Afghanistan War seems to me to be a classic quagmire, a conflict that will suck untold blood and money and accomplish little or nothing, while encouraging the U.S. state to violate civil liberties at home and commit war crimes abroad. The least bad option remains, as it has been for years, withdrawing ASAP. This view--though common enough on the internets--is still seen in "serious" policy circles as fantastically woolly-headed and radical. "Serious" debate about Afghanistan consists of arguing COIN vs. Antiterrorism, or debating how much more we should spend or how many more troops we should commit.

At any rate, it seems as if the historical profession acquitted itself better than I had feared that night, while Obama did (and has since done) depressingly worse.

Chomsky's [43-year-old] Challenge To Public Intellectuals

As with my last post, I offer another inspirational prompt on the topic of public intellectuals in relation to this fall's USIH conference.

Wisconsin Public Radio's regular program, To The Best of Our Knowledge, hosted Noam Chomsky on June 20, 2010 to discuss his 1967 essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals."

Published on February 23 of that year, as a special supplement to the New York Review of Books, Chomsky used the context of the escalating Vietnam War as an opportunity to lambaste the "the cult of the experts" and challenge intellectuals "to speak the truth and to expose lies." In addition, he added, "If it is the responsibility of the intellectual to insist upon the truth, it is also his duty to see events in their historical perspective."

For perceived breaches in the public's trust, Chomsky directed his wrath first at the actions of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Walt Rostow, and the "New Frontiersmen" in general. But he also touched on misguided or irresponsible statements made in the public sphere by Irving Kristol, McGeorge Bundy, David N. Rowe, Daniel Bell, and others.

Here's a link to the NPR program. The Chomsky interview occurs during segment one---the 0:00-17:00 minute portion of the show.

Is Chomsky's essay still relevant? Or does the context of Vietnam War negate its effectiveness---rendering it meaningless to today's reader? Does the public today think of intellectuals in terms of truth and lies? Or are public intellectuals just another form of 'infotainment' to today's reading public? Do we only expect irony and/or skepticism from our public intellectuals? - TL

Chomsky's [43-year-old] Challenge To Public Intellectuals

As with my last post, I offer another inspirational prompt on the topic of public intellectuals in relation to this fall's USIH conference.

Wisconsin Public Radio's regular program, To The Best of Our Knowledge, hosted Noam Chomsky on June 20, 2010 to discuss his 1967 essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals."

Published on February 23 of that year, as a special supplement to the New York Review of Books, Chomsky used the context of the escalating Vietnam War as an opportunity to lambaste the "the cult of the experts" and challenge intellectuals "to speak the truth and to expose lies." In addition, he added, "If it is the responsibility of the intellectual to insist upon the truth, it is also his duty to see events in their historical perspective."

For perceived breaches in the public's trust, Chomsky directed his wrath first at the actions of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Walt Rostow, and the "New Frontiersmen" in general. But he also touched on misguided or irresponsible statements made in the public sphere by Irving Kristol, McGeorge Bundy, David N. Rowe, Daniel Bell, and others.

Here's a link to the NPR program. The Chomsky interview occurs during segment one---the 0:00-17:00 minute portion of the show.

Is Chomsky's essay still relevant? Or does the context of Vietnam War negate its effectiveness---rendering it meaningless to today's reader? Does the public today think of intellectuals in terms of truth and lies? Or are public intellectuals just another form of 'infotainment' to today's reading public? Do we only expect irony and/or skepticism from our public intellectuals? - TL

"There was no United States": Bender On Historians And Their Publics

In honor of our USIH 3.0 conference program release, I offer this related essay by Thomas Bender on the role of historians as public intellectuals. Titled "Historians in Public," Bender uses the article to think about the audiences of historians in relation to both historians' particular kinds of expertise and their means of communication. I found this reminder from Bender, appearing early in the essay, to be most worthy (underlining mine):

As Émile Zola declaimed, the intellectual is by definition a public actor; moreover, all professions, including the academic ones, claim a public aspect by definition to justify their privileges of incorporation and self-regulation.

If we follow Zola's prompt, the distinction between an 'intellectual' and a 'scholar' is the starting point for thinking about audiences for intellectuals (their 'publics') in the twentieth century. Words to ponder as we begin thinking through our manuscripts for the fall program.

And here's another passage---with no small implications for USIH as a subfield and its conference (this fall and beyond, underlining mine):

At the time the AHA was founded the overriding cultural and political project was restoring the union. The price of reconciliation was accepting a regime of white terror imposed on black Americans in the former Confederate states. One of the great accomplishments of recent scholarship has been to make this clear.[13] In fact the scholarship of the past two or three decades has focused on a variety of exclusions—many people who were previously excluded from the American narrative—and by implication—the American public. Now race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation have been written into history and public life. This was obviously a good thing, and it had a large impact in schools, the media, and the law, among other dimensions of our lives.

Yet something was lost—the nation and the state. The recovered persons were incorporated into society, not into a narrative of the nation or the state, into identity politics, not citizenship. In the 1980s and 1990s instead of talk about and inquiry into “the public,” there was talk of publics, alternative publics, counter-publics, a black public sphere, and more. The list got pretty long, but the public dissolved in this otherwise invaluable historiography of the 1980s and 1990s. There was no United States. History was all parts, no whole.

Wow. But Bender's essay contains much more. Indeed, we could mine this piece for days. I won't reproduce the rest here, but would be happy to converse about his other points---large and small---in the comments below. - TL

"There was no United States": Bender On Historians And Their Publics

In honor of our USIH 3.0 conference program release, I offer this related essay by Thomas Bender on the role of historians as public intellectuals. Titled "Historians in Public," Bender uses the article to think about the audiences of historians in relation to both historians' particular kinds of expertise and their means of communication. I found this reminder from Bender, appearing early in the essay, to be most worthy (underlining mine):

As Émile Zola declaimed, the intellectual is by definition a public actor; moreover, all professions, including the academic ones, claim a public aspect by definition to justify their privileges of incorporation and self-regulation.

If we follow Zola's prompt, the distinction between an 'intellectual' and a 'scholar' is the starting point for thinking about audiences for intellectuals (their 'publics') in the twentieth century. Words to ponder as we begin thinking through our manuscripts for the fall program.

And here's another passage---with no small implications for USIH as a subfield and its conference (this fall and beyond, underlining mine):

At the time the AHA was founded the overriding cultural and political project was restoring the union. The price of reconciliation was accepting a regime of white terror imposed on black Americans in the former Confederate states. One of the great accomplishments of recent scholarship has been to make this clear.[13] In fact the scholarship of the past two or three decades has focused on a variety of exclusions—many people who were previously excluded from the American narrative—and by implication—the American public. Now race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation have been written into history and public life. This was obviously a good thing, and it had a large impact in schools, the media, and the law, among other dimensions of our lives.

Yet something was lost—the nation and the state. The recovered persons were incorporated into society, not into a narrative of the nation or the state, into identity politics, not citizenship. In the 1980s and 1990s instead of talk about and inquiry into “the public,” there was talk of publics, alternative publics, counter-publics, a black public sphere, and more. The list got pretty long, but the public dissolved in this otherwise invaluable historiography of the 1980s and 1990s. There was no United States. History was all parts, no whole.

Wow. But Bender's essay contains much more. Indeed, we could mine this piece for days. I won't reproduce the rest here, but would be happy to converse about his other points---large and small---in the comments below. - TL

The Revenge of the Eustonians; or Benda It Like Berman

This Sunday, the New York Times Book Review featured a glowing assessment by Anthony Julius of Paul Berman's new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, which angrily accuses Western left-wing intellectuals of embracing the Oxford University Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan while failing to come to the defense of the Somali-Dutch refugee and American Enterprise Institute Resident Fellow Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ramadan, according to Berman, is a slippery character whose opposition to Islamic radicalism is more ambivalent than is often said; while Hirsi Ali is a brave secularist who has devoted her career to truly opposing Islamic extremism in the name of Enlightenment values. But Berman and Julius seem more interested in their opponents on the Western intellectual left, who, they argue, have betrayed their vocation and their intellectual heritage through (in Julius's words):

the false identification of liberal values with an oppressive West, and of political Islamism with an oppressed third world; an unreflective, unqualified opposition to every exercise of American power; a certain blindness regarding, or even tenderness toward, contemporary expressions of anti-Semitism.

For Julius, Berman's book is an impressive entry in a genre that includes Richard Wolin's Seduction of Unreason: the Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism and the many books devoted to Martin Heidegger's Nazism, works which call intellectuals to account for monstrous political failings. As Julius notes, the urtext of this genre is Julien Benda's La Trahison des Clerc (The Betrayal of the Intellectuals) (1927), which attacked intellectuals who abandoned dispassionate reason in favor of nationalism, racism, and militarism.

"Berman," writes Julius, "has a fair claim to being regarded as the Benda of our time. In The Flight of the Intellectuals he continues his work of redeeming the good name of intellectuals by exposing the corrupt among them."

Berman's book has also been lavishly praised by Ron Rosenbaum in Slate, who had personally encouraged Berman to expand an already extensive 2007 New Republic piece attacking Tariq Ramadan.

What links Berman, Julius, and Rosenbaum, is that each is strongly connected to the self-described Decent Left that emerged following 9/11. And the elephant in the room of their discussion of left intellectuals and Tariq Ramadan is the Decent Left's signal project, the War on Iraq.

Paul Berman, in particular, has been an unusually committed and dogged proponent of that war, seeing it as the first necessary step in a long war against "Muslim totalitarianism."* Along with Berman, Anthony Julius was an early signatory to the Euston Manifesto, a 2006 British document that excoriated the anti-war left and has been the chief institutional manifestation of the pro-war left in the UK.

Ron Rosenbaum, for his part, was ambivalent about the upcoming Iraq War in October 2002, but he knew what he didn't like--the anti-war movement. How dare leftist academics attack George W. Bush and John Ashcroft, Rosenbaum wrote, when they had yet to atone for the crimes of Josef Stalin and Pol Pot:

Goodbye to the brilliant thinkers of the Left who believe it’s the very height of wit to make fun of George W. Bush’s intelligence—thereby establishing, of course, how very, very smart they are. Mr. Bush may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer (I think he’s more ill-informed and lazy than dumb). But they are guilty of a historical stupidity on a far greater scale, in their blind spot about Marxist genocides. It’s a failure of self-knowledge and intellectual responsibility that far outweighs Bush’s, because they’re supposed to be so very smart.

"I guess today," Rosenbaum concluded dramatically, "Left means never having to say you're sorry."

Say what you will about the Eustonian "leftists," they certainly seem to have adopted Rosenbaum's accusatory credo as their own when it comes to the Iraq War.

There have been many more appalling crimes in the last bloody century of the world's history, but in this young millennium, the War on Iraq stands as one of the greatest wastes of human life and national treasure. It helped destabilize a region. It ushered in new threats to civil liberties in two of the world's great democracies. It placed the United States in the company of the world's open torturers. And unlike Stalin's and Pol Pot's genocides, this one is our responsibility as Americans and Brits. And special responsibility lies with the war's unrepentant cheerleaders.

So while I don't have a studied opinion about Tariq Ramadan, I do know that Paul Berman, Anthony Julius, and Ron Rosenbaum are pretty much the last people who ought to be lecturing us about the trahison des clercs.**
________________________________________
* Berman's view of the war is on fine display in the Slate forum entitled "Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War" (in Berman's case, not very much).

** For an alternate view on Tariq Ramadan, see this recent Andrew March piece from The American Prospect.

The Revenge of the Eustonians; or Benda It Like Berman

This Sunday, the New York Times Book Review featured a glowing assessment by Anthony Julius of Paul Berman's new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, which angrily accuses Western left-wing intellectuals of embracing the Oxford University Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan while failing to come to the defense of the Somali-Dutch refugee and American Enterprise Institute Resident Fellow Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ramadan, according to Berman, is a slippery character whose opposition to Islamic radicalism is more ambivalent than is often said; while Hirsi Ali is a brave secularist who has devoted her career to truly opposing Islamic extremism in the name of Enlightenment values. But Berman and Julius seem more interested in their opponents on the Western intellectual left, who, they argue, have betrayed their vocation and their intellectual heritage through (in Julius's words):

the false identification of liberal values with an oppressive West, and of political Islamism with an oppressed third world; an unreflective, unqualified opposition to every exercise of American power; a certain blindness regarding, or even tenderness toward, contemporary expressions of anti-Semitism.

For Julius, Berman's book is an impressive entry in a genre that includes Richard Wolin's Seduction of Unreason: the Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism and the many books devoted to Martin Heidegger's Nazism, works which call intellectuals to account for monstrous political failings. As Julius notes, the urtext of this genre is Julien Benda's La Trahison des Clerc (The Betrayal of the Intellectuals) (1927), which attacked intellectuals who abandoned dispassionate reason in favor of nationalism, racism, and militarism.

"Berman," writes Julius, "has a fair claim to being regarded as the Benda of our time. In The Flight of the Intellectuals he continues his work of redeeming the good name of intellectuals by exposing the corrupt among them."

Berman's book has also been lavishly praised by Ron Rosenbaum in Slate, who had personally encouraged Berman to expand an already extensive 2007 New Republic piece attacking Tariq Ramadan.

What links Berman, Julius, and Rosenbaum, is that each is strongly connected to the self-described Decent Left that emerged following 9/11. And the elephant in the room of their discussion of left intellectuals and Tariq Ramadan is the Decent Left's signal project, the War on Iraq.

Paul Berman, in particular, has been an unusually committed and dogged proponent of that war, seeing it as the first necessary step in a long war against "Muslim totalitarianism."* Along with Berman, Anthony Julius was an early signatory to the Euston Manifesto, a 2006 British document that excoriated the anti-war left and has been the chief institutional manifestation of the pro-war left in the UK.

Ron Rosenbaum, for his part, was ambivalent about the upcoming Iraq War in October 2002, but he knew what he didn't like--the anti-war movement. How dare leftist academics attack George W. Bush and John Ashcroft, Rosenbaum wrote, when they had yet to atone for the crimes of Josef Stalin and Pol Pot:

Goodbye to the brilliant thinkers of the Left who believe it’s the very height of wit to make fun of George W. Bush’s intelligence—thereby establishing, of course, how very, very smart they are. Mr. Bush may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer (I think he’s more ill-informed and lazy than dumb). But they are guilty of a historical stupidity on a far greater scale, in their blind spot about Marxist genocides. It’s a failure of self-knowledge and intellectual responsibility that far outweighs Bush’s, because they’re supposed to be so very smart.

"I guess today," Rosenbaum concluded dramatically, "Left means never having to say you're sorry."

Say what you will about the Eustonian "leftists," they certainly seem to have adopted Rosenbaum's accusatory credo as their own when it comes to the Iraq War.

There have been many more appalling crimes in the last bloody century of the world's history, but in this young millennium, the War on Iraq stands as one of the greatest wastes of human life and national treasure. It helped destabilize a region. It ushered in new threats to civil liberties in two of the world's great democracies. It placed the United States in the company of the world's open torturers. And unlike Stalin's and Pol Pot's genocides, this one is our responsibility as Americans and Brits. And special responsibility lies with the war's unrepentant cheerleaders.

So while I don't have a studied opinion about Tariq Ramadan, I do know that Paul Berman, Anthony Julius, and Ron Rosenbaum are pretty much the last people who ought to be lecturing us about the trahison des clercs.**
________________________________________
* Berman's view of the war is on fine display in the Slate forum entitled "Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War" (in Berman's case, not very much).

** For an alternate view on Tariq Ramadan, see this recent Andrew March piece from The American Prospect.

Blogging USIH: Only Paradoxes to Offer?

Some time ago one of our own, David Sehat, started a series called "Blogging Academic Knowledge." His series lasted for only a couple of posts, but he covered the general nature of online communities, professional authority, fostering discussion, and the perils of online communication (i.e. mobbing others, comment misinterpretation, anonymity, etc.). Our discussion of David's posts was rather limited---probably a disappointment to him, but also perhaps a consequence of the fact that he echoed our questions and none of us had answers. In any event, I will extend David's discussion in a narrow way to blogging about U.S. intellectual history. In other words, let's talk about what we do here at a meta level---go epistemological on blogging USIH.

After three plus years of posting and observing posts here, when it comes to writing directly about intellectual history I have observed some paradoxes.

All of us---here at least---are generally committed to disseminating knowledge about USIH through paper and electronic media. However, the profession, particularly our subfield, values books most of all. They're the currency of the realm. This works against a professional doing any heavy lifting on either articles (refereed or no) and other shorter pieces. It makes the historian feel guilty for committing too much time and energy to ephemeral(?) media---precisely the kind of media that reaches the most people. That feeling and the book-as-currency issue prevents historians of the intellectual life from disseminating knowledge in reader friendly, affordable formats. This is paradox #1.

I have also come to believe that many intellectual history topics are not conducive to blogging. There are two reasons for this. First, USIH topics often require adequate depth in order to explain nuance. In a blog format this opens one up to the charge of treating complex topics too lightly. No intellectual historian wants to be accused of shallowness. Second, no one wants to read long posts! But USIH topics seem to often require lengthy treatments. So the "topical problem" is paradox #2.

Solutions? I'm not sure I have any for paradox #1. The profession is what it is. No regular USIH blogger will succeed in the profession if blogging is all the historian does. Period. However, an answer to paradox #2 goes some way toward helping with #1.

I believe that more intellectual historians need to see blogs as book and article laboratories. This works in the early stages of drafting because all good writers know that draft #1 never, never, never (yes, I'm partly emphasizing this for myself!) really looks like the final version. Writers who transition straight from drafts to final copies are the exception, not the rule. Because of this no one should fear posting early ideas for an article. And if this blog-as-lab approach applies for articles, it applies to book projects triply. Think of all the things that are cut from chapter drafts. Using the leavings from the cutting room floor for blog posts seems like a fruitful line of thinking.

Over the past year or two I have noticed that many authors are posting early drafts of material in order to solicit comments for revisionary purposes. This is no different than passing around chapter drafts to colleagues. Why not do it on a smaller scale, with chapter sections? And what better audience for revisionary-comment purposes than USIH blog followers?

I also think that blogging involves a commitment to professional service on the part of the historian. We must place a higher value on brief discourses and the simple underscoring of ideas in order to popularize the subfield. Indeed, one can ponder without being ponderous or pedantic. Intellectual historians should be content to post shorter pieces and be happy with longer comment sections---and participating in those comment strings. Indeed, posting shorter pieces prevents one from being ponderous on a topic before the audience gets on board. In fact it's probably best to post only 1/4-1/3 of a longer post one has drafted and leave the rest for comments if your audience feels your momentum.

Although this post applies of course to my USIH colleagues immediately as well as broadly, it also adds to the conversation about ~how~ to blog academic knowledge.

What are your blog strategy ideas, for intellectual historians or speaking broadly? Has this post hit near the mark in identifying the problems with blogging on USIH topics? - TL

PS: My title comes with apologies to Joan Wallach Scott. I can't say, however, that my title has much to do with the main thrust of that book.

Blogging USIH: Only Paradoxes to Offer?

Some time ago one of our own, David Sehat, started a series called "Blogging Academic Knowledge." His series lasted for only a couple of posts, but he covered the general nature of online communities, professional authority, fostering discussion, and the perils of online communication (i.e. mobbing others, comment misinterpretation, anonymity, etc.). Our discussion of David's posts was rather limited---probably a disappointment to him, but also perhaps a consequence of the fact that he echoed our questions and none of us had answers. In any event, I will extend David's discussion in a narrow way to blogging about U.S. intellectual history. In other words, let's talk about what we do here at a meta level---go epistemological on blogging USIH.

After three plus years of posting and observing posts here, when it comes to writing directly about intellectual history I have observed some paradoxes.

All of us---here at least---are generally committed to disseminating knowledge about USIH through paper and electronic media. However, the profession, particularly our subfield, values books most of all. They're the currency of the realm. This works against a professional doing any heavy lifting on either articles (refereed or no) and other shorter pieces. It makes the historian feel guilty for committing too much time and energy to ephemeral(?) media---precisely the kind of media that reaches the most people. That feeling and the book-as-currency issue prevents historians of the intellectual life from disseminating knowledge in reader friendly, affordable formats. This is paradox #1.

I have also come to believe that many intellectual history topics are not conducive to blogging. There are two reasons for this. First, USIH topics often require adequate depth in order to explain nuance. In a blog format this opens one up to the charge of treating complex topics too lightly. No intellectual historian wants to be accused of shallowness. Second, no one wants to read long posts! But USIH topics seem to often require lengthy treatments. So the "topical problem" is paradox #2.

Solutions? I'm not sure I have any for paradox #1. The profession is what it is. No regular USIH blogger will succeed in the profession if blogging is all the historian does. Period. However, an answer to paradox #2 goes some way toward helping with #1.

I believe that more intellectual historians need to see blogs as book and article laboratories. This works in the early stages of drafting because all good writers know that draft #1 never, never, never (yes, I'm partly emphasizing this for myself!) really looks like the final version. Writers who transition straight from drafts to final copies are the exception, not the rule. Because of this no one should fear posting early ideas for an article. And if this blog-as-lab approach applies for articles, it applies to book projects triply. Think of all the things that are cut from chapter drafts. Using the leavings from the cutting room floor for blog posts seems like a fruitful line of thinking.

Over the past year or two I have noticed that many authors are posting early drafts of material in order to solicit comments for revisionary purposes. This is no different than passing around chapter drafts to colleagues. Why not do it on a smaller scale, with chapter sections? And what better audience for revisionary-comment purposes than USIH blog followers?

I also think that blogging involves a commitment to professional service on the part of the historian. We must place a higher value on brief discourses and the simple underscoring of ideas in order to popularize the subfield. Indeed, one can ponder without being ponderous or pedantic. Intellectual historians should be content to post shorter pieces and be happy with longer comment sections---and participating in those comment strings. Indeed, posting shorter pieces prevents one from being ponderous on a topic before the audience gets on board. In fact it's probably best to post only 1/4-1/3 of a longer post one has drafted and leave the rest for comments if your audience feels your momentum.

Although this post applies of course to my USIH colleagues immediately as well as broadly, it also adds to the conversation about ~how~ to blog academic knowledge.

What are your blog strategy ideas, for intellectual historians or speaking broadly? Has this post hit near the mark in identifying the problems with blogging on USIH topics? - TL

PS: My title comes with apologies to Joan Wallach Scott. I can't say, however, that my title has much to do with the main thrust of that book.

Watching the Detectives

TPMMuckraker, the investigative journalist wing of (Brown History PhD) Josh Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo blog empire, has obtained most of the late John Hope Franklin's FBI file through a FOIA request. The nearly five-hundred pages of material were apparently the result of a series of background checks conducted when Franklin received a number of presidential appointments. Executive summary: colleagues universally praised him; J. Edgar Hoover suspected him of Communist ties for having his book positively reviewed by The Daily Worker, praising a book by Herbert Aptheker, saying nice things about W.E.B. DuBois, and so forth. Excerpts from the file can be found here.

All in all this is interesting news if not a bit surprising. While it's nice to see a (non-academic) blog like TPM putting John Hope Franklin on its frontpage and reminding its readers about the long history of our national surveillance state, TPM draws few conclusions from this story.

While there was once, in the late 1970s, an emerging consensus in Washington that this sort of thing was an affront to democracy, whatever modest progress was made by the Church Committee has been undone in recent years and a much more robust consensus has grown in favor of more internal surveillance. One wonders what our FBI (or DHS) files look like...and whether we or anybody else outside the halls of power will ever get a look at them.

Watching the Detectives

TPMMuckraker, the investigative journalist wing of (Brown History PhD) Josh Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo blog empire, has obtained most of the late John Hope Franklin's FBI file through a FOIA request. The nearly five-hundred pages of material were apparently the result of a series of background checks conducted when Franklin received a number of presidential appointments. Executive summary: colleagues universally praised him; J. Edgar Hoover suspected him of Communist ties for having his book positively reviewed by The Daily Worker, praising a book by Herbert Aptheker, saying nice things about W.E.B. DuBois, and so forth. Excerpts from the file can be found here.

All in all this is interesting news if not a bit surprising. While it's nice to see a (non-academic) blog like TPM putting John Hope Franklin on its frontpage and reminding its readers about the long history of our national surveillance state, TPM draws few conclusions from this story.

While there was once, in the late 1970s, an emerging consensus in Washington that this sort of thing was an affront to democracy, whatever modest progress was made by the Church Committee has been undone in recent years and a much more robust consensus has grown in favor of more internal surveillance. One wonders what our FBI (or DHS) files look like...and whether we or anybody else outside the halls of power will ever get a look at them.

This Be The Verse

Twenty years ago, David Hackett Fischer published Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, which attempts to explain U.S. political culture down to the present through the initial patterns of British immigration to North America. Historiographically, Fischer's project flowed from the twin streams of Annales School histoire totale, which was if anything losing influence at the time of the book's publication, and cultural history, which was very much on the rise. From the Annalistes, Fischer borrowed many of his interests (e.g. the longue durée; regionalism) and the scope of his project (this very hefty book announced itself as the first of a five-volume rewriting of the social and cultural history of the United States). But Fischer's approach stressed the importance of culture and ethnicity, both of which made this in-many-ways old-fashioned project seem more of its moment (though Fischer's conception of culture was itself rather anthropological and pre-"linguistic turn").*

Fischer's book was widely reviewed but got an almost universally mixed reception. Historians celebrated the audacity and ambition of the project, while questioning its details, logic, and conclusions. Charles Joyner, writing in the Journal of American Folklore, called it a "stunning but problematic achievement." Jack P. Greene, writing in the Journal of Social History, compared the book--in its extraordinary scope--to an encyclopedia, but worried that its individual components were not up to the historical standards one expects from encyclopedia entries. Darrett Rutman, reviewing the book for the American Historical Review, concluded that "Albion's Seed has borne at best questionable fruit." Albion's Seed stood as a kind of cautionary tale of the difficulties of writing total history. Though Fischer's career has continued to flourish, it has gone in other directions; the other four volumes of the project that Albion's Seed was supposed to inaugurate have never appeared.

But despite its rocky initial reception among historians, Albion's Seed has worked its way into the public discourse. Sara Robinson, co-author of the influential liberal blog Orcinus, devoted a two-part series to the book in 2007. And 2008 was a very good year for Albion's Seed. In trying to explain voting patterns during last year's protracted Democratic Presidential primary battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, many analysts turned to Albion's Seed and argued that Scots Irish culture in Appalachia made the region especially good for Clinton and bad for Obama (here's one random example of from The Seattle Times; googling "Scots Irish Fischer Obama" yields many others).

More recently, Albion's Seed has become a go-to explanation of what's going on with the Republican Party today. Indeed, at the time of this writing, the top-rated diary on DailyKos, the most influential Democratic blog, is "Yo, Pundits! Here's What's Up With the Republicans," which uses Albion's Seed to argue that each of the two major parties are based on two of Fischer's four ethno-regional groupings.**

(Lest anyone think that David Hackett Fischer has become the property of Democrats and progressives, it's worth noting that he was the 2006 recipient of the American Enterprise Institute's Irving Kristol Award for "notable intellectual or practical contributions to improved public policy and social welfare.")

While Albion's Seed has undoubtedly become something of a classic, I don't think that my fellow twentieth-century historians turn to it much to explain political cultural phenomena in our period. Rereading reviews from nearly two decades ago while putting together this post, I was tempted to agree with Fischer's critics about both its virtues and its flaws. Has it fared any better among historians of earlier periods of U.S. history? Or is this an example of a work of academic history that has become more read--or at least more significant--outside the profession than within it?

Perhaps Albion's Seed will do more to transform our political culture (or at least the ways that we talk about it) than it did to explain it.

___________________________________

* Albion's Seed was old-fashioned not only in its Annalistes qualities, but in its argument, which harkens back to the pre-Frederick Jackson Turner view of American history as best explained by the political traditions of the Germanic forebears of its founders.

** For those keeping score at home: Democrats = Puritans+Quakers while Republicans = Borderers+Cavaliers. Once again, the Scots Irish "Borderers" are the focus of the dKos diarist's attention.

This Be The Verse

Twenty years ago, David Hackett Fischer published Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, which attempts to explain U.S. political culture down to the present through the initial patterns of British immigration to North America. Historiographically, Fischer's project flowed from the twin streams of Annales School histoire totale, which was if anything losing influence at the time of the book's publication, and cultural history, which was very much on the rise. From the Annalistes, Fischer borrowed many of his interests (e.g. the longue durée; regionalism) and the scope of his project (this very hefty book announced itself as the first of a five-volume rewriting of the social and cultural history of the United States). But Fischer's approach stressed the importance of culture and ethnicity, both of which made this in-many-ways old-fashioned project seem more of its moment (though Fischer's conception of culture was itself rather anthropological and pre-"linguistic turn").*

Fischer's book was widely reviewed but got an almost universally mixed reception. Historians celebrated the audacity and ambition of the project, while questioning its details, logic, and conclusions. Charles Joyner, writing in the Journal of American Folklore, called it a "stunning but problematic achievement." Jack P. Greene, writing in the Journal of Social History, compared the book--in its extraordinary scope--to an encyclopedia, but worried that its individual components were not up to the historical standards one expects from encyclopedia entries. Darrett Rutman, reviewing the book for the American Historical Review, concluded that "Albion's Seed has borne at best questionable fruit." Albion's Seed stood as a kind of cautionary tale of the difficulties of writing total history. Though Fischer's career has continued to flourish, it has gone in other directions; the other four volumes of the project that Albion's Seed was supposed to inaugurate have never appeared.

But despite its rocky initial reception among historians, Albion's Seed has worked its way into the public discourse. Sara Robinson, co-author of the influential liberal blog Orcinus, devoted a two-part series to the book in 2007. And 2008 was a very good year for Albion's Seed. In trying to explain voting patterns during last year's protracted Democratic Presidential primary battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, many analysts turned to Albion's Seed and argued that Scots Irish culture in Appalachia made the region especially good for Clinton and bad for Obama (here's one random example of from The Seattle Times; googling "Scots Irish Fischer Obama" yields many others).

More recently, Albion's Seed has become a go-to explanation of what's going on with the Republican Party today. Indeed, at the time of this writing, the top-rated diary on DailyKos, the most influential Democratic blog, is "Yo, Pundits! Here's What's Up With the Republicans," which uses Albion's Seed to argue that each of the two major parties are based on two of Fischer's four ethno-regional groupings.**

(Lest anyone think that David Hackett Fischer has become the property of Democrats and progressives, it's worth noting that he was the 2006 recipient of the American Enterprise Institute's Irving Kristol Award for "notable intellectual or practical contributions to improved public policy and social welfare.")

While Albion's Seed has undoubtedly become something of a classic, I don't think that my fellow twentieth-century historians turn to it much to explain political cultural phenomena in our period. Rereading reviews from nearly two decades ago while putting together this post, I was tempted to agree with Fischer's critics about both its virtues and its flaws. Has it fared any better among historians of earlier periods of U.S. history? Or is this an example of a work of academic history that has become more read--or at least more significant--outside the profession than within it?

Perhaps Albion's Seed will do more to transform our political culture (or at least the ways that we talk about it) than it did to explain it.

___________________________________

* Albion's Seed was old-fashioned not only in its Annalistes qualities, but in its argument, which harkens back to the pre-Frederick Jackson Turner view of American history as best explained by the political traditions of the Germanic forebears of its founders.

** For those keeping score at home: Democrats = Puritans+Quakers while Republicans = Borderers+Cavaliers. Once again, the Scots Irish "Borderers" are the focus of the dKos diarist's attention.

Tim's Light Reading (7/30/09)

1. This might qualify as a bit dated, but I'm not sure anyone here noted the new autobiographical collection of essays, titled Becoming Historians and published by the University of Chicago Press. Here is an e-mail interview between InsideHigherEd's Scott Jaschik and the book's editors, James M. Banner Jr. and John R. Gillis. The collection includes essays from Rhys Isaac, Joan Wallach Scott, Dwight T. Pitcaithley, Linda Gordon, David A. Hollinger, Maureen Murphy Nutting, Franklin W. Knight, Temma Kaplan, Paul Robinson, and the editors.

2. A few weeks ago I learned of a new print publication, The POINT Magazine. It is a new Chicago-based journal seeking to survey the contemporary scene from an intellectual angle. They might be interested in your idea for an article connecting your scholarly interest to today's news? Here's the TOC for their Spring 09 issue.

3. This NYT article by Carter Dougherty narrates a renewed Catholic interest, particularly in Germany, in a third economic way between capitalism and socialism. Of course the instigation was the early July release of Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical, "Charity in Truth." But the article's title, "Catholicism as Antidote to Turbo-Capitalism," reveals that the third way is really just a more ethical market-based structure.

4. Brill's ongoing "Studies in Intellectual History" book series contains some titles that may be of interest to USIH readers. Perhaps they would be receptive to your book proposal?

5. Elizabethtown College prof David Brown comments at HNN on his new book about Midwestern voices in the history profession. I haven't yet read his intriguing intellectual biography on Hofstadter, so I better get going before I'm another book behind.

6. InsideHigherEd's Scott Jaschik e-mail interviews Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze, professor of the history of mathematics at the University of Agder, in Norway, on his new book, Mathematicians Fleeing from Nazi Germany: Individual Fates and Global Impact (Princeton Press). Being known as a land of opportunity and tolerance, relatively speaking during the 1930s, increased the net mathematics brain power of the United States during tumultuous times.

7. I want to wish Sterling Fluharty well as he begins an exploration of life outside the history profession. His weblog, PhDinHistory, has quantitatively explored the profession for the last few years and forced some qualitative changes in my opinion about the state of the field.