Burning Scholarship

When I saw this story, about a Columbia University historian who lost a decade's worth of research to student radicals in the 1968 uprisings at that campus I experienced pangs of what can only be called sympathetic pain. For all of the legitimacy of protest in the 1960s, some of the worst and most indulgent excesses of the late years of that decade seriously undermined the legitimate claims.

WaMo Turns 40

Washington Monthly celebrates its 40th birthday this year. As part of the celebration, the magazine has posted some of its greatest hits, which you can access here. Among my favorites: Taylor Branch on Civil Rights in Southwest Georgia, the smugness of baby boomers, the dubiousness of Woodward and Bernstein's cozying up to certain sources, and an assessment of the magazine's "Bullseyes and Blunders" over the last four decades.

Jaime Says: "FAIL!"

Jaime, who is the suave and graceful host of The Cyber Hacienda, was recently asked to write for the blog of Arizona State University's North American Center for Transborder Studies (NACTS). His first post assesses a couple of the papers on panels he participated in at a conference in Albuquerque, both from scholars putting forth historical interpretations stuck in the 1960s, one from the right, one from the left.