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One of our colleagues sent me a link to this. I trust you've seen it. It's the sort of thing one's glad about having nothing to do. I hadn't known that Dierdre McCloskey has an appointment in history at UIC. She's one of those economists who've thought economic history too important to be left to the historians.

For our purposes, it underscores a point that Eric Rauchway made some time ago: that economic history is alive and well, but it's being done by economists. If so, and I think Eric's essentially correct, there seems to be a sort of disconnect in attempted conversations between those of us trained as historians and those economists who are now doing the economic history. Two cases in point: Cliopatria's symposium on Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms and the conversation that ranges between Brad deLong's "Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic World of the Twentieth Century, Pre-World War I China," 13 August, and Alan Baumler's "Was China Stagnant for 700 Years?" Frog in a Well/China, 14 August.

My friend, Eric Scott Kaufman, would like to have a link to or, at least, an acknowledgment of his post at Acephalous. It renews a demand by the minions of Michael Bérubé in the midst of a blog war that ranged over four blogs two years ago. I want to be very clear with Kaufman: you have every right to criticize KC Johnson's work as much as you please. Hold it up to parody and scorn, even, if you will. None of us is immune to criticism. But beware of that fact. Your own modest contributions to scholarship are nothing, yet, by comparison with KC's (scroll down). And your presumptuous demand about who should and who should not be a member of Cliopatria only gives credence to the claims of those who see a totalitarian instinct in the academic left. O.K.?

Andrew Sullivan, "Victor Davis Hanson, Fabulist," Daily Dish, 22 August. I hesitate to harsh on Hanson because he untangled a Vernon Johns knot of mixed and mangled classical references that I would never have untangled on my own. But, really, Victor, you're such a fine classicist ....

Niall Ferguson, "Dollar Diplomacy," New Yorker, 27 August, reviews Greg Behrman's The Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Time When America Helped Save Europe.

Scott McLemee's "Oh, Canada," IHE, 22 August, on "American" and "Canadian" identity, draws a lively discussion.

Posted on Thursday, August 23, 2007 at 12:54 AM | Comments (15) | Return

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