After watching a frustratingly clueless, “barbarians at the gate” NewHour segment on campaign smears (which apparently never existed before the Internet and were never spread by the old media) hosted by Gwen Ifill, who also hosts a conventional wisdom synchronization and self-congratulation session known as Washington Week (which I long ago gave up watching), I [...]
In a review entitled The Blog of War, Anne Applebaum first parodies then purees Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (via A&L Daily).
Baker never answers the questions that he asks. That is, he has not undertaken the historian’s task of hearing multiple arguments, listening to myriad explanations, [...]
I recently discovered that the right venerable Polynesian Society in New Zealand has been slowly digitizing the back issues of its long-lived Journal of the Polynesian Society and mounting them on its website, working together with the University of Auckland Library. At this point, one can browse volumes 1 (1892) through 40 (1931). A perusal [...]
Atlanta-based blogger Photodude takes Andrew Sullivan to task by debunking Mathew Brady’s role as the photographer of the American Civil War. I’ve seen many, many Mathew Brady photographs, but never heard this angle. Did the Ken Burns documentary series on the Civil War mention this? (UPDATE: I’ve corrected the spelling of Brady’s first name except [...]
OVER THE COURSE of the next century and more [after 1811–1812], the New Madrid earthquakes gradually receded from public awareness, as the New Madrid fault system produced just two shocks greater than magnitude 6.0 in the 180 years following the 1811–12 sequence—a 6.5 in 1843 and a 6.8 in 1895. An occasional magazine article would [...]
A recent post on Language Hat about the official name of Iwojima changing back to its prewar form, Iōtō, sparked a bit of discussion about the reason for the change to Iwojima in the first place. That prompted me to take another look at Japanese military communications, the changing role of katakana in Japanese writing, [...]
At least for Korea’s middle-class intellectuals, the early 1920s marked a time of hope and renewed cultural and political activity…. Renaissance is an apt description of the outpouring of essays, commentary, literature, and political analyses that fueled the reemergence of a Korea press after 1920….
The magnitude of the 1920s publishing boom was enormous in relative [...]
Caleb Crain, who blogs at Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, remembers the role offprints used to play in scholarly publishing–and stamp collecting.
Offprints are unbound printed pages of an article, which a scholarly journal provides to the article’s author so that he may share them with colleagues. The protocol is — or rather, was — that when [...]
I don’t feel the need to join all the sharks circulating around the self-inflicted wounds of Reuters and other propaganda facilitators (on whichever side) covering the latest outbreak of hideous warfare in the Middle East, but I would like to take this opportunity to sneer in the general direction of the legacy media and their [...]
Inside Higher Ed reports that the Thai government is banning internal access to Yale University Press’s website.
Thailand takes lèse-majesté seriously — as Yale University Press is finding out.
The Thai government has blocked access in the country to the Yale University Press Web site because it includes information about a forthcoming, critical biography of Thailand’s king. [...]
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