StephenKMackSD's Blog

Over on his blog the BBC’s chief political correspondent Nick Robinson posts a revealing PS about Blair’s second appearance before the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war.

What is emerging before our eyes is a clash of cultures between a politician who believes governing is, in the end, about one man’s judgement and the Whitehall classes who believe it should be about official papers, formal consideration of the evidence and collective decision making. Continue reading →

Kate Briggs’s wonderful translation finally makes available in English a most unusual book by one of the most significant literary figures of the twentieth century. The Preparation of the Novel comprises the notes of the third and last lecture course Roland Barthes delivered at the Collège de France, cut short in 1980 by his untimely death. Although the three lecture series were posthumously published in French in the order they were given, Columbia University Press have brought out the final course before the first one (How To Live Together, their translation of the second appeared in 2005) – an indication of just how intriguing a book this is. Continue reading →

“Don is very conscious of the existence of this “old black book,” as he calls it. He’s sure it’s full of criticism of him. I tell him, well, when I die, all he has to do is burn it.”

Don Bachardy was both wrong and right about that “old black book”, his partner Christopher Isherwood’s journal. It is not a catalogue of carpings. It is not vengeful or – looked at overall – bitter. But it has its bitter moments, since it describes a difficult ménage. One is tempted, coming upon it for the first time, to be critical of Bachardy: why must he be so sensitive? Why is he always flying off the handle? Why should he, a young artist at the start of his career, have the nerve to suggest to the older, celebrated novelist that he should move out of their shared home for a while, in order to give Bachardy some space? Didn’t he know, when he took up with Isherwood, what he was letting himself in for? Continue reading →

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the American Civil War, the commemoration of which provides an opportunity to look back on that great tragedy and retrace the conflict. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times have convened online panels to do just that, and there are countless other rich resources available for examining the conduct of the war. The Sesquicentennial, though, is also an opportunity for considering the role that the Civil War has played in American culture through these one hundred and fifty years.

About ten years ago we published David W. Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which was recently recognized as one of the dozen best books ever written about the war. The book is about how the Civil War functioned for America in the fifty years after its end, through the immediate efforts to put the country back together, through the failure of Reconstruction and the rise of the Jim Crow system in the South. Blight shows how Americans in both the North and the South, led by the Federal Government, focused on healing the nation at the expense of pursuing justice for the countless Americans impacted by the war, chief among them the four million former slaves.

Later this year we’ll publish a new book from Professor Blight, on four writers who were both shaping and reflecting American memory of the Civil War during the Civil Rights era – James Baldwin, Bruce Catton, Robert Penn Warren, and Edmund Wilson. Working on this new project, which examines the role of the Civil War at its Centennial, led him inevitably to consider its impact today, at the Sesquicentennial, a time when the constitutional questions raised by the Civil War churn as tumultuously as ever.

We caught up with Professor Blight at the American Historical Association meeting in Boston earlier this month, where he was kind enough to join us for a conversation on the Civil War’s importance in America’s past and present. In three parts posted below, Professor Blight addresses the defining role of the Civil War in American culture, the conflicting aims of healing and justice in the years after the conflict, and the role of the historian in contemporary debate.

 

 

January 21, 2011 |

 

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To the casual political observer, Reince Priebus, the newly elected chairman of the Republican National Committee, seemed to come out of nowhere. But to Wisconsin progressives, Priebus is known as the state Republican Party operative who allegedly tried to suppress the votes of minorities and students in both the recent midterm congressional elections and the 2008 presidential election — in apparent coordination with David Koch’s Americans For Prosperity. Continue reading →