Edinburgh Companion to the History of Democracy

This reference book, in which I  have an article on "Ancient India," should  be out today.  I won't be  expecting you to be bringing me your copies for autographs -- it's priced at L125/$2...

Halloween thought

It's tough this year to be teaching about the Apocalypse -- in connection with the Crusades, and Muslim and Christian doctrines of the Last Judgment -- when you know that at the moment the word "apocalypse" is practically inseparable from the word "zombie."This too shall pa...

Don't blame the Arab Spring

From that radical organization, RAND:The current unrest in Syria, and elsewhere in the Middle East, is mistakenly being blamed on the Arab Spring. Even before the recent violence, many observers were quick to declare that spring had rapidly turned to winter in the Arab world. Here at home, and just before the presidential debate on foreign policy tonight, a Pew Research Center...

Pessimism day, 2: the USA

If you want real hardcore pessimism, try the League of Ordinary Gentlemen:The Towering Legacy of George W. Bushby Jason Kuznicki on October 23, 2012Conventional wisdom errs when it says that George W. Bush was incompetent. He was a president of overwhelming influence, the most effective chief executive since FDR. We live in the world that W. created, for good or — mostly — for...

Pessimism day, 1: The Arab Middle East

At Arabist.net, a link to and an evaluation  of  a melodramatic piece on  the outcome of the "Arab Spring:" ✚ This Is Not a Revolution by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley | The New York Review of BooksAnother almost melodramatically lucid-pessimistic view of the Arab uprisings and their consequences by Hussein...

Intervention in Syria? Read this

http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/?p=15...

A book on runes

Boydell and Brewer sent me a notice about this recent book on the Scandinavian runes. Here is what the author, Michael P. Barnes, has to say about it.  For those of you too busy to click through, Prof. Barnes basically says that there's almost nothing in print about runes except...

Virtuous knights

"Knights were meant to be virtuous..." So said said one of my students in the fourth-year chivalry seminar. He was commenting on a question I asked the class to answer. How did crusading affect the way warriors were viewed?So far we have not really been talking about what most people...

Three types of comments I put on undergraduate essays

One way that I grade undergraduate essays is to read through them and mark them up with comments,, question marks, and grammatical corrections (and circles around misspelled words). Then I go through the papers again and read my comments.  One level of comment is the...

Some interesting medieval scholarship on the web, Crusaders take note

The always interesting  Jonathan Jarrett reminded me of some interesting material that has been posted to the web which might be of interest to people who like the Franks and the Frankish nobility or who are fascinated  by the motivations of the people who went on the First Crusade.I was particularly interested in the second post, which is the next best thing to a scholarly...

Land of milk and butter

Some years ago a student slipped up on a final exam and attributed Henry IV's famous quip on religion and politics to Elizabeth I, making the queen say "England is worth a Mass." (Henry said "Paris.")Today a student paper documented another slip:  "The land of milk and butter."...

Voting matters?

An excerpt from a Salon article by Jonathan Bernstein posted here as a note to myself.   You can read it too.Your vote doesn't matter....Because if you’re really doing coalition work – if you’re really doing politics – you’re not thinking in terms of “who should I vote for?” Instead, you’re asking who we are voting for, and by election time you’ve already negotiating...