Logographer

I’ve been distracted with other activities this week, which might explain the scant blog posts. Here are a few things from other blogs to wet your whistle.

• Mark Grimsley’s interest in counterfactual history is on display in his post entitled What If France Had Not Fallen in 1940?
• Dean Dad responds to a reader’s question and provides guidance on teaching a class at a community college in contrast to teaching an upper level class at a university. “[N]othing is too good for the proletariat.”
• Toby Lichtig reviews Tod Wodicka’s novel, Jonathan Cape, which sounds like an odd but interesting book.
• Jonathan thinks there might be something to the claim that modern gadgets and distractions leave us with no time to think. I suppose an intellectual is defined by the propensity to think about thinking.
• Carl Pyrdum at Got Medieval participates in the amusing game of Medieval Wikigroaning. (No, it doesn’t have anything to do with Matt Groening or The Simpsons. Groening doesn’t even sound like groaning.) Maybe I’ll play along later, when I feel like exerting myself.
• And even though it’s summertime and school isn’t in session, Dennis at CAMPVS MAWRTIVS is compelled to delve into historiography, making a few comments about Jacob Burckhardt, a name that reminds me of my mentor, which in turn reminds me that summertime is nearly over and I really should be thinking about my thesis more often, if not about historiography per se.

That’s it for now.

• Leave a comment... (0)

The latest ancient-medieval carnivalesque is up, courtesy of Gillian Polack.

• Leave a comment... (0)

Ever since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by stories of the occasional discovery of well-preserved mammoths. Now comes news of a six-month-old female mammoth discovered in Siberia. The animal is thought to have died about 10,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age. It’s surprisingly well-preserved, by the sounds of it, missing only its tail.

Mammoth specimens usually end up “being lost to a lucrative trade in ivory, skin, hair and other body parts,” according to one scientist interviewed for the article. Scientists themselves have Jurassic Park aspirations for the extinct beast.

Some scientists hold out hope that well preserved sperm or other cells containing viable DNA could be used to resurrect the mammoth.

Dr [Larry] Agenbroad remains optimistic about the potential for cloning[.]

“When we got the Jarkov mammoth [found frozen in Taimyr, Siberia, in 1997], the geneticists told me: ‘if you can get us good DNA, we’ll have a baby mammoth for you in 22 months’,” he told BBC News.

The prospect of bringing the mammoth to life intrigues me, but I wonder if it’s really a good idea. I also wonder how many scientists share Agenbroad’s optimism. The article doesn’t quote any skeptics.

• Leave a comment... (0)

The Sphinx, famously, is missing its nose. I have always heard that it was Napoleon’s guys who shot it off, although I have never researched it myself and it’s not in my field of study. Troels says evidence for the destruction points elsewhere, to “Islamic clerics in the 14th century.”

• Leave a comment... (0)

It’s interesting to see the keywords for web search engines that occasionally bring people to this site. Sometimes I take a set of these terms from my web log and plug them into Google myself. I do this for two reasons, the first being to see where my site ends up in the results list. Frequently it’s on the second or third page of the results, which makes it surprising that anyone follows the link at all. The second reason is to see what other interesting things there are on the web for some of the terms.

Recently the search phrase “professor pizarro +medieval” led someone to Logographer, and, more interestingly, turned up a link to the abstract of a paper by Andrew Gillett titled “Ethnogenesis: a Contested Model of Early Medieval Europe,” published in History Compass 4 (2), 241-260.

I was already aware of the paper, having run across it in my thesis research, but I haven’t yet read it. The surprising thing about finding it now on the Blackwell Synergy site is not that it reminded me of a paper I had nearly forgotten, but that, underneath the abstract, the web page contains a link to an MP3 recording of an interview with Andrew Gillett. The interview is about 20 minutes long, and well worth a listen, especially since it is much less formal than a paper. It is interesting to hear Gillett’s extemporaneous comments on the historiography of Late Antiquity, and on the ethnogenesis debate and the relationship it has with modern notions of ethnicity.

• Leave a comment... (0)

Historianess hosts History Carnival 54.

• Leave a comment... (0)

Here are a few things that have caught my attention and entertained me on the web recently.

• The funniest thing I’ve read in the last few days has to be Prof. Richard Nokes’s commentary on a 1200-year-old Viking turd. No, really!
• Continuing the story of the impending closure of Antioch College, which I mentioned a few days ago, two posts caught my attention: One on the lessons for college philanthropy from the Antioch debacle (are there any, really?), and another from Inside Higher Ed, which is itself interesting because of all of the comments attached to it.
• In the cold, icy realm of economics, that dismal science, Prof. George Borjas looks at the flip-side of immigration’s contribution to US GDP and attempts to calculate the impact of immigration on US wages.
• Prof. Mark Grimsley of Ohio State asks whether there’s any support for the claim that military history is a discipline strictly for conservatives.

There you have it. Scatological history, immigration, war, politics, and academic gossip all in one fell swoop.

• Leave a comment... (1)

If Mel Brooks or the Marx Brothers were funny and, perhaps, therapeutic in their send-ups of National Socialist Germany, I suppose it could be healthy to make fun of life under the East German Stasi, which seems to be the point of the Ostel in Berlin. David at Cronaca wonders whether the rooms have hidden cameras and microphones.

Me? I’m not sure I’d want to stay there. Would you?

(Oh, and I hate to think of the keyword searches on the web that will bring people to this post.)

• Leave a comment... (0)

A few days ago I said that I enjoy reading Jeff Sypeck, and his post comparing Tony Soprano to Charlemagne gives me another reminder to check Quid plura regularly. I especially like the film ideas at the end of the post and in the comments section. Very funny!

• Leave a comment... (0)

Here’s a fun place, Sightseeing with Google Satellite Maps, that lists over 11,000 shortcuts to interesting places in Google maps. Sure, you could find these sights yourself, if you know what to look for at Google, but you can save a little time by consulting this list. I enjoyed seeing some spots in Spain, including Madinat al-Zahra near Córdoba, a tenth-century complex built by the Umayyad ruler ‘Abd al-Rahman III and destroyed in the eleventh century in a Berber rebellion.

[via]

• Leave a comment... (0)