ostFirst, this week, a quick announcement: over the summer, we’ll be hosting a book club/series of blog posts about “big” history, centered on Jürgen Osterhammel’s recent The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 2014). The festivities will start shortly with an introductory post on Osterhammel, so if you’d like to read along with us, you might want to borrow or order a copy! Over the summer, we’ll be offering a Big History Open Thread at the weekend along with our links, and we very much hope you’ll participate and share your thoughts.
And now, 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!
From all of us: videos from Graftoniana, the conference in honor of Patron and Friend of the Blog Anthony Grafton, are now online.
Emily:
Sorrow Passes and We Remain, an epistolary meditation by Henry James (Letters of Note)
Blogging, Academia, and Aspiration (Clerk of Oxford)
Friends and colleagues Alma Igra and Jordan Katz have created a wonderful historical food/cooking blog! Leftovers: History of the World in 1000 Cookbooks
Susan Price, Reviving the Female Canon, writing women back into the history of philosophy (Atlantic)
Is British history anti-Europe? Think again: Fog in Channel, Historians Isolated (History Today)
Relatedly, Katie Engelhardt, What Would You Do If You Could Censor Your Past? A Visit to the UK’s Secret Archives (Vice)
Nicolas Pelham, Isis and the Shia Revival in Iraq (NYRB)
Anne Barnard and Hwaida Saad, Frantic Message as Palmyra, Syria, Fell: ‘We’re Finished’ (NY Times)
Alastair Macaulay, The Body Beautiful: The Classical Ideal in Ancient Greek Art (NY Times)
John:
Peter Christian Aigner interviews Julian E. Zelizer (New Books in History)
Christophe Litwin (trans. Michael C. Behrent), “Living the Enlightenment” (Books & Ideas)
Timothy Nunan interviews Jan Eckel: “From the Banality of Evil to the Ambivalence of Good” (Toynbee Prize Foundation)
Mario Porro, “Edgar Morin. Insegnare a vivere” (Doppiozero)
Barbara von Reibnitz, »Intellektuelle Neugirde« (Neue Zürcher Zeitung)
Angela Schader interviews Lydia Davis: »Einen Fingerbreit neben dem Gewöhnlichen« (Neue Zürcher Zeitung)
James Schmidt, “Adorno Considers a Career Change” (Persistent Enlightenment)
Gustav Seibt, »Seine Zeit« (Süddeutsche Zeitung)
Jacob Soll, “The Culture of Criticism” (The New Republic)
Michael F. Suarez delivers the 2015 Lyell lectures, “The Reach of Bibliography: Looking Beyond Letterpress in Eighteenth-Century Texts” (The Conveyor)
And finally, along with the conference videos below, the BBC’s 1977 production of Tom Stoppard’s great television play Professional Foul (synopsis here)
Madeline:
Susan Price, “Reviving the Female Canon” (Atlantic)
In response, Special Collections and Archives at Mizzou put up some great pictures of Emilie du Châtelet.
Ingrid D. Rowland, “Bernini: He Had the Touch,” on the latest books and exhibits of the sculptor (NYRB)
Mohamad Ballan, on historiography and identity in 12th-century Iberia (Ballandallus)
Steve Pincus, “1776: The Revolt against Austerity” (NYRBlog)
And finally, in the annals of American hipsterdom (not to be anachronistic at all…), an 1845 music review by Walt Whitman (NYR Gallery).