Source.

It’s a space race Cold War holiday season!  In Russian and English.

Russian cards from here.  Anyone for some Space Food Sticks and Tang?

Via RealClearBooks, we learned recently that he’s got a new book called The Origins of Political Order, and unsurprisingly, he is completely wrong again.  But you have to admit that it’s pretty cute that he has more in common with Karl Marx and with the first generation of Soviet historians than his modern peers because of his unshaken, dumba$$ theory of history’s inevitable destination.  Reviewer John Gray asks,

[H]ow could laws of history underpin human progress when views about what constitutes progress are so ephemeral and so divergent? Some human values are universal and enduring, but ideas of progress come and go like fashions in hats. Theories of convergence reflect disparate and incompatible ideals of human betterment. What all such theories have in common is that they have come to nothing. None of the regimes that was believed to be the near-inevitable end point of modern development has emerged anywhere in the world. 

Fukuyama shows no sign of being discouraged by this record of failure. The faith that the world is set to converge on a single type of government is central to his view of things, pervading this bulky and tiresome book of nearly six hundred pages, the first of two projected volumes. The same faith animated the celebrated essay that he published in The National Interest in the summer of 1989, called “The End of History?,” in which he proclaimed that “the universalization of Western liberal democracy” is “the final form of human government.” To any detached observer at the time, it was perfectly clear that history had not stopped but resumed: like the past, the future would be shaped by ethnic and religious conflicts and resource wars, while more complex types of ideological conflict would replace the cold war stand-off.  Yet three years later, when Fukuyama published a book-length version of his claim, called The End of History and the Last Man, the question mark attached to the essay had disappeared. Like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whose monumental eulogy to Stalin’s Russia, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (1935), appeared in later editions with the question mark removed, Fukuyama was completely confident that a new era in the history of humanity had arrived.

Like, no doy!  How do books like this get published and taken seriously?  (Personally, I think it’s an occupational hazard of doing extremely old-fashioned political and diplomatic history, but YMMV.  No one with any familiarity with archives or with the experience of creating new knowledge can escape being amazed by the role of chance and contingency in history.)  Read Gray’s whole review–it’s pretty windy on the first page, but the next two are actually about Fukuyama’s book and so are much more effective. 

Personally, I say that Fall Break (next week for us) and an enormous cocktail (tonight!) are the end of history.  At least they sound more believable to me than the notion that liberal democracy is truly where the world is spinning.

[C]ontrary to what defenders of the apostrophe imagine, its status has long been moot.Before the seventeenth century the apostrophe was rare. The Parisian printer Geoffroy Tory promoted it in the 1520s, and it first appeared in an English text in 1559.

Initially the apostrophe was used to signify the omission of a sound. Gradually it came to signify possession. This possessive use was at first confined to the singular. However, writers were inconsistent in their placing of the punctuation mark, and in the eighteenth century, as print culture burgeoned, everything went haywire. Although it seemed natural to use an apostrophe in the possessive plural, authorities, such as the grammarian Robert Lowth, argued against this. In a volume entitled “Grammatical Institutes” (1760), John Ash went so far as to say that the possessive apostrophe “seems to have been introduced by mistake.”

By the time Ash was writing, the apostrophe was being used to form plurals.Among those who did this was the typographer Michael Mattaire. In a grammar he brought out in 1712 he suggested that the correct plural of species was species’s. Some rival grammarians could barely contain their rage in the face of such recommendations. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the experts (all self-appointed) urgently debated the mark’s correct application.

.       .       .       .       .       .

[H]ere’s the rub: say any of these names aloud and you’ll be struck by the fact that the apostrophe works on the eye rather than the ear. Simply put, we don’t hear apostrophes, and this is a significant factor accounting for the inconsistency with which they are used.  Apostrophes can present important distinctions. For instance, compare the innocuousness of the statement “My sister’s boyfriend’s coming” and the social awkwardness implicit in “My sisters’ boyfriend’s coming.” Yet pragmatists would argue that such a distinction, rather than being marked with a single little squiggle, needs amplifying.

Up on my high horse again!

The aural nature of useful punctuation is an interesting point–but I’d argue that we don’t clearly hear most punctuation in spoken English.  Aside from inflecting our voices upward when asking a question, or adding urgency and volume to a sentence punctuated by an exclamation point, I think most of us would be hard-pressed to hear the difference that punctuation makes.  (What’s the aural difference between a semi-colon and a period?  Did you just hear that em-dash?  Or that one?)  It seems to me that punctuation was intended to help us translate the inflections of spoken English to the page, rather than the other way around, but that’s just my guess.  (Readers, please correct me if you know otherwise.) 

The apostrophe, when employed correctly, offers helpful clarification on the page about the relationship between some nouns and other nouns, as well as a useful abbreviation for interpreting spoken language (she’s versus she is, for example.)  And for those reasons, as well as my natural inclination to pedantry, I’ll continue to saddle up and ride to battle for the apostrophe.  After all, how would you know I’m a cowgirl if I didn’t tell you by occasionally droppin’ some gees and replacin’ ’em with apostrophes?  Yippee-kai-yai-yay!

My understanding was that the increase in paper costs nearly 20 years ago led most academic publishers to switch from footnotes (at the bottom of each page) to endnotes (at the back of the book.)  Somehow, I was informed, this saves paper.  I can remember the last time I read a book with footnotes–ironically, it was Anthony Grafton’s The Footnote:  A Curious History (1997), which I re-read with my graduate seminar a few weeks ago, and which for obvious reasons offers footnotes rather than endnotes.  (Horowitz’s exploration on the life and death of the footnote uses and cites Grafton generously, too.)  But I think when it was published 14 years ago, it was already exotic for having resisted a publisher’s insistence on endnotes.

My foremost concern about e-books–or perhaps more specifically with the Kindle, although I hope those of you in the know will inform me if this is true of other e-readers–is that it makes citations by students unnecessarily annoying.  My students who read their course books on Kindles don’t see page numers, so that when they cite their Kindle editions they give me a bull$hitte “location” that is meaningless and moreover useless to me, a non-Kindle (in fact, anti-Kindle) owner/reader, should I need to check the citation.

What are the rest of you historians and humanities types doing about student citations of e-books?  Would it kill the Kindle to offer the option of reading the book with page numbers included?  Does anyone remember the non-existant “trend” of citing journal articles online by paragraph number, rather than just pulling up a PDF and checking the page number from the print edition?  Who actually enjoys reading articles in HTML?  (I read and cite the PDF, and that’s what how vastly vast majority of books and articles I read now are citing journal articles, although I’m sure their authors are like me and mostly accessing them online.)  Can we hope this Kindle crappiness will fade away from disuse, or is that a bridge too far?  What do all of you think about these questions, both as writers and readers of scholarly notes?

Dear Historiann–

I work out at a gym off campus.  I have often seen some of my colleagues and one of my graduate students in various states of undress, including nudity.  Likewise, they have seen me the same way.  While I am generally very comfortable being naked in front of others, I have found that these encounters make me slightly uncomfortable.  They also make me laugh.  What is the etiquette for seeing your colleagues and your students naked in the gym locker room?  I sure could use some advice.

Heh.  I’ve never been so grateful for my 33 mile commute as I am today!

Dear readers, let me throw this one out to you.  While I’ve lived in college towns for the past 14 years, they weren’t the towns where my university was located, so while I appreciate that this is a problem for many uni faculty and students, I’m not the best person to answer this question.  (Come to think of it, I’ve never regularly showered anywhere but home.  I’m a runner–I don’t need a gym.)  What do you think?  What is locker-room etiquette anyway, besides “don’t stare” and/or “acknowledge your colleague/student but only above the collar bone?”

Related but not immediately relevant confession:  I’m just not into all of the body care in public facilities that’s become nearly de rigeur over the past decade.  What’s with all the spas and waxing everywhere, all of the time?  It’s like middle-class women are all ancient Romans, getting oiled up and wiped down by strigil-wielding  attendants.  Thanks, but no thanks!

Unless politicians agree a package by 2 August the US may be unable to pay its bills, triggering an economic crisis.

On Tuesday the dollar fell against the euro whilst US shares opened down.

But Ms Lagarde warned against drastic cuts in spending, saying these could create a “jobless recovery”.

Our reality:  u haz it rite!  Maybe she should have said it would mean even more job-lessness in our so-called “recovery?”  In which case we must ask:  what part of this reality is the “recovery,” and can we stage an intervention in Congress and in the White House already?

This video seems newly timely given the massive wiretapping scandal blowing up News Corporation.  Now that Rupert Murdoch and his empire look pretty weak, the long knives are out for him.  Roger Simon reports that nearly 30 years ago–perhaps to the soundtrack of an Adam Ant video–Murdoch said something racist at a dinner with Chicago Sun-Times reporters after he bought their newspaper:

The Pregnant Widow is unfortunately a disappointment.  Amis pulls back on the self-loathing, and he shies away from the horrors of the flesh.  Perhaps this was inevitable, given the setting for the book (1970), the fact that the main characters are all in their 20s, and that the male protagonist Keith Nearing is once again only a lightly disguised version of the now 60-ish Martin Amis, and the middle-aged and elderly tend to romanticize youth. 

There are some good lines about aging and the prospect of death, however, that are vintage Amis:

When you become old. . . When you become old, you find yourself auditioning for the role of a lifetime; then, after interminable rehersals, you’re finally starring in a horror film–a talentless, irresponsible, and above all low-budget horror film, in which (as is the way with horror films) they’re saving the worst for last. (5)

That’s good, no?  I also liked this description of middle age:

This is the way it goes.  In your mid-forties you have your first crisis of mortality (death will not ignore me); and ten years later you have your first crisis of age (my body whispers that death is already intrigued by me).  But something very interesting happens to you in between.

As the fiftieth birthday approaches, you get the sense that your life is thinning out, and will continue to thin out, until it thins out into nothing.  And you sometimes say to yourself:  That went by a bit quick.  That went a bit quick.  In certain moods, you may want to put it rather more forcefully.  As in:  OY!! THAT went a BIT F*CKING QUICK!!!. . . Then fifty comes and goes, and fifty-one, and fifty-two.  And life thickens out again.  Because there is now an enormous and unsuspected presence within your being, like an undiscovered continent.  This is the past. (5)

I like those last two sentences especically.  Amis is a novelist who has been increasingly drawn to writing about the past in historical novels, so this interest in the past is nothing new on his part.  (He also unfortunately has become something of a neoconservative in the past decade, along with his old chum Christopher Hitchens, and has written a number of essays that blather on about “Islamofascism,” but the adults in this household ignore those in favor of the more timeless insights found in his fiction.)

This tracks with something Rad Readr, an old friend, warned me about a few years ago as I was staring down the barrel of 40:  “No one gets out of the 40s without a major crisis.”  So far, I’d have to say that he’s right.  Here are the crises that my friends have faced in their 40s:  breast cancer, marital trouble, divorce, professional disappointment, prolonged unemployment.  This is just a random sample, but you get the picture.

As far as a novel about the sexual revolution, it’s clear that Amis published that book in 1973 in media res.  If you want to read an Amis novel about the early 1970s, read his first novel The Rachel Papers, and skip The Pregnant Widow.

While I’m working away at my day job, go read this post by Echidne, in which she discusses the ways in which the media discuss the “fertility crisis” in some European countries without noting the extreme pressure on women who are mothers in said countries to leave the workforce. (Or in one case she cites, pregnant women and mothers are just proactively pink-slipped.) She notes that even with generous maternity leave policies, most mothers do not return to work after the birth of just one child in both Germany and Italy. This sidles up to a point that I’ve made here before (and even in my day job writing recently) about the global and apparently transhistorical resistance to see women as rational economic actors who make decisions about their lives that respond directly to their political, cultural, and economic environments.

This is directly related to the conversation we had last week about that odd and offensive discussion of breastfeeding rates in Africa by Nicholas Kristof, who suggested (like many other Anglophone male commenters in the past 300 years or so) that breastfeeding is a “natural” and “free” resource that needs no external environmental, cultural, or political support beyond a woman’s free choice (or refusal) to nurse. Commenter Digger, an archaeologist with some evident anthropological chops as well, summed it all up nicely: “Women: selfish magical factories of goodness! Seriously, this works in several analyses, not just this one.”

Indeed. The presumption that women’s bodies should operate in the service of the state is foundational to the liberal state itself, so I guess that’s why so few people globally and transhistorically look to understand women’s life choices as rational or reasonable given the structural limits around them. Instead, they just assume instead that it’s pure bloody-mindedness on the part of women that they’re not having enough children, or they’re not having them under the approved conditions (heterosexual matrimony, for example), and/or that they’re not breastfeeding said children at all/long enough/long enough to satisfy the demands of the state. To borrow a turn of phrase from Digger, they’re just selfishly withholding the magical goodness their bodies can produce naturally, and for free!

Finally, you know I couldn’t resist this one:

Don’t miss the interview with Holly George-Warren, author of Public Cowboy no. 1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry” on Fresh Air yesterday!