Category Archives: history

neh summer seminar

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This summer institute from the National Endowment for the Humanities looks interesting:

THE HANDWRITTEN WORLDS OF EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
Dates: June 20-July 29, 2005 (6 weeks)
Steven W. May, Georgetown College, KY
Faculty: Julia Boffey, Victoria Burke, S. P. Cerasano, A.S.G. Edwards, Mary C. Erler, Margaret J.M. Ezell, Adam Fox, Laura Gowing, Harold Love, Alan Stewart, Paul Werstine, H. R. Woudhuysen

Information: Kathleen Lynch
Folger Shakespeare Library
201 East Capitol St., SE
Washington, DC 20003-1094
202-675-0333
i n s t i t u t e AT f o l g e r DOT e d u

Maybe I’ll apply. I’ll write for more information. What is an NEH Summer Institute?

Institutes provide intensive collaborative study of texts, topics, and ideas central to undergraduate teaching in the humanities under the guidance of faculties distinguished in their fields of scholarship. Institutes aim to prepare participants to return to their classrooms with a deeper knowledge of current scholarship in key fields of the humanities.

Keep this in mind the next time proposals come around (and they will be coming around) to gut the funding for the NEH.

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america: the prequel

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“The Day the Enlightenment Went Out,” by Gary Wills (NY Times):

This [election] might be called Bryan’s revenge for the Scopes trial of 1925, in which William Jennings Bryan’s fundamentalist assault on the concept of evolution was discredited. Disillusionment with that decision led many evangelicals to withdraw from direct engagement in politics. But they came roaring back into the arena out of anger at other court decisions – on prayer in school, abortion, protection of the flag and, now, gay marriage.

“The Values-Vote Myth,” by David Brooks (NY Times):

The fact is that if you think we are safer now, you probably voted for Bush. If you think we are less safe, you probably voted for Kerry. That’s policy, not fundamentalism. The upsurge in voters was an upsurge of people with conservative policy views, whether they are religious or not.

An interesting discussion is taking place on C18-L. Note that the second thread below leads to a blog: Timothy Burke’s Easily Distracted. Check out these threads:

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eighteenth-century letter days

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I have been searching my notes in vain for reference to a practice I remember reading about.

I can remember learning that in the eighteenth century Anglo-American world, members of a religious community would gather to listen to letters from abroad (concerning spiritual matters) being read out loud.

Am I imagining this, or is this a well-known practice that somehow slipped below the radar of my note-taking habits?

Cross posted at C18-L

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18th-C British Religious Periodicals

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Making my work public, dear reader, I provide for your reading pleasure a couple of questions I’ve just posted to c18-L, the email discussion group for eighteenth-century studies:

Continue reading →

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an apple…or something

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I’ll blog more about SHARP 2004 when I’m back in KC. Right now there are too many fun things to do over here. Suffice it to say that the conference was great. I’m back in London, now, where the weather is mercifully cooler.

As I was leaving the British Library yesterday, I passed three Americans looking at the enormous statue of Isaac Newton in the library’s courtyard.

Man with strong southern (American) accent: Issac Newton. Now what was he famous for?
Young Woman, looking at the compass Newton is using: Drawing a circle?
Other Young Woman: The laws of gravity.
Me: He invented calculus.*
Man: Yeah, or an apple fell on his head or somethin’.
Me: [blank stare]

*This is not entirely correct, it turns out. According to the Wikipedia entry “Newton … shares credit with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for the development of differential calculus.”

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