Also, now that my summer class, my final paper, summer vacation, language test and comprehensive exams are out of the way, I can get back to the important things in life, like blogging.

I’ll post some vacation pictures from Mesa Verde and the Grand Canyon tomorrow, and we’ll jump back into politics with some stuff on Russia and Georgia. Speaking of Russia, if any of you are looking to hire a historian / Russian linguist, let me know. College loans come due in six months!

1. A discussion about “Eurocentrism,” and Modernity.

In class we were discussing how the concept of a modernity and the Modern were Eurocentric, because they presupposed European standards of progress and they spoke of a “Modern Era” which was in fact confined mostly to Europe. The general idea was that all of those Moderns were imperialistic bigots for thinking that way.

The funny thing is, these same students blithely talk about POSTmodernity, the postmodern, etc. completely without irony. Like it isn’t primarily confined to the Industrialized World and doesn’t have its own Eurocentric value systems?

2. A discussion about the Italian Renaissance and its historiography

We were discussing the way in which 19th century historians distorted Renaissance studies by mining it for socially useful narratives supporting the Enlightenment and liberal republicanism. This was right after reading a seminal feminist article on the Renaissance.

The blindness of these people amazed me. While their methodologies are more sophisticated than Jacob Burckhardt, their impulses are identitical. His project was the Enlightenment, and he found what he was looking for. Their project is post-Marxist (or Marxist) leftism, and they find what they want in the Renaissance. Does it distort history any less to view EVERYTHING through the prism of Race/Class/Gender than through republican goggles?

UPDATE: And yes, I am amused by the phrase “seminal feminist.”

“When the great westward migration began everything was modified. . . Beyond the mountains . . . a new nation sprang up. . . . Our continental life is a radically different thing from our life in the old settlements. . . . The formative period of American history . . . did not end in colonial times or on the Atlantic coast . . . nor will it end until we cease to have frontier communities and a young political life just accommodating itself to fixed institutions. . . . Almost all the critical issues of our politics have been made up beyond the mountains.” Woodrow Wilson, “Mr. Goldwin Smith’s ‘Views’ on our Political History,” in Forum, xvI, 495 (December, 1893); but though aware of the new revelation, Wilson failed to name the prophet [i.e., Turner].

So, not only was Woodrow Wilson the most racist of the post-Reconstruction presidents (a man who systematically re-segregated Washington and demoted African American government employees), but he might have been a plagiarist as well.

(Volokh Conspiracy, Was Woodrow Wilson a plagiarist?)

I note in passing that “plagiarism” was a common 19th-C charge, and a commoner crime; but Wilson was working late enough, and definitely was of a piece with American academia enough, to have known better. He may be held to this standard, I think.

May I humbly ask that we realize that “Wilsonian” as applied to Presidents of both parties is not a compliment?

Here’s a link to Madison’s day-by-day notes on the Convention of 1787.

Also, check out Journals of the Continental Congress 1774-1789. They’ve only completed it through 1776, but it still has some fun primary sources. Well, fun if you’re a big geek, anyway.