Here are a few interesting articles and pieces we found around the web this week. If you come across something that other intellectual historians might enjoy, please let us know in the comments section.
Emily:
Charlie Tyson, The Loneliness of the Gay Aesthete: Alan Hollinghurst and Queer Theory (LARB)
Laurie Stras, Sisters doing it for themselves: radical motets from a 16th-century nunnery (Guardian)
Susan Chira, When Japan Had a Third Gender (NY Times)
Jonathan Freedland on Netflix’s The Crown: A Great Family Business (NYRB), to be paired with the following explanation of how the country I study is completely bonkers:
Sam Knight, Operation London Bridge: the secret plan for the days after the Queen’s death (Guardian)
Chris Hilliard, Words That Disturb the State: Hate Speech and the Lessons of Fascism in Britain, 1930s–1960s (Journal of Modern History)
Gavin Jacobson, There is no more Vendée: The Terror (LRB)
Margaret Atwood, What ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Means in the Age of Trump (NY Times)
Philip Dodd in conversation with Paul Gilroy on Free Thinking (BBC Radio 3)
Stephen Vider et al., Family Viewing: Historians Watch When We Rise (OutHistory)
Linda Greenhouse, How Smart Women Got the Chance, review of Nancy Malkiel’s new history of coeducation in the Ivy League (NYRB)
Sarah:
Ahmed Al-Dawoody, “Islam and international humanitarian law: An overview” (Humanitarian Law & Policy)
James Kirchick, “Hungary’s Ugly State-Sponsored Holocaust Revisionism” (Tablet)
Ann Rees, “Persia Campbell, Our Woman at the United Nations” (VIDA)
Fernando Reimers, “Can Universities Save the Enlightenment from Populism?” (Huffington Post)
Joshua Zeitz, “Lessons From the Fake News Pandemic of 1942” (Politico)
Erin:
Last week the Antiquarian Book Fair came to New York, and I’m still perusing the catalogues I picked up there. Here are some of the best available online.
Amanda Hall, Teffont 38. Excerpted from her introduction to the catalogue: This is the first of several catalogues to include books from the library of Claude Lebédel. A voracious collector of Diderot and his circle, he had an eye for the exceptional and the esoteric, eagerly pursuing little known works, interesting provenances and unusual bindings alongside the masterpieces of the philosophes. This catalogue presents a selection of these books, the often outlandish and eccentric publications that formed the backdrop to the great philosophical upheaval of the Age of Enlightenment.
Deborah Coltham specializes in books on the history of medicine and science. Here’s the list of 40 books she brought with her from the UK, each with vivid descriptions.
Nina Musinsky had a stunning booth as usual, and here is her excellent catalog of European printed books, manuscripts, and prints.
Lorne Bair, specializing in the history, art, and literature of American social movements, didn’t publish a Fair list on his website, but you can take a look at his most recent catalog here.
The Biblioctopus catalogue is a great read. They offer “first editions of the classics of fiction” thus: Books and manuscripts, allied with a multiplicity of related items, 165 to 2014, connected by subject, form, appearance, manufacturing mode, or creative process, all described with a presumption of familiarity, and in our unruly, bawdy, and quixotic style, many with rants and assaults from the scrolls of book collecting (Book Code), and some others enhanced by, or if you prefer, diminished by those hopefully tolerated detours and digressions, captured under the banner we fly as, The Tao of the Octopus. The seventh catalog in an unfinished series of undetermined length, reinforcing the bookseller’s avant–garde, and heralding the winds of change, through our once concealed, but now revealed aim to craft book catalogs as folk art, without abandoning the self–actualizing forms, protocols, disciplines, and traditions we embrace as the internally guiding, and externally comforting, virtues of the past.
If you missed the Fair and want my take on it, LitHub published a little piece I wrote about the ways that the book trade is making room for a new generation of booksellers and collectors.
Eric:
L.D. Burnett, “Back to the Well: The Backchannel” (USIH)
Jason Heller, “A Purplish Haze” (Noisey)
Chad Wellmon, “Whatever Happened to General Education?” (The Hedgehog Review)
Rich Yeselson, “When Labor Fought for Civil Rights” (Dissent)
Disha:
Hal Foster, “Père Ubu is President!” (E-Flux Conversations)
Colin Koopman, “The Power Thinker” (Aeon)
Nancy Macdonald, “How Indigenous People Are Rebranding Canada 150” (Maclean’s)
Jeet Heer, “Horrible Histories” (New Republic)
Alison Meier, “The Dynamic Brain Drawings of the Father of Modern Neuroscience” (Hyperallergic)
Yitzchak:
Adam Kirsch, “Camille Paglia on Jews and Feminism” (Tablet)
David Cole, “Why Free Speech is Not Enough” (NYRB)
Naomi Fry, “Memoirs of Addiction and Ambition by Cat Marnell and Julia Phillips” (New Yorker)
Haider Javed Warraich, “What Our Cells Teach Us About a ‘Natural’ Death” (New York Times)
Spence:
Bee Wilson, “Il Duce and the Red Alfa” (London Review of Books)
Jenny Uglow, “When Art Meets Power” (New York Review of Books)
Kate Robertson, “Why Female Cannibals Frighten and Fascinate” (The Atlantic)