The New York Times travel section includes a narrative about journeying to the American First World War cemeteries in France, particularly the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery.

It’s strange that a military graveyard should be so lovely, but lovely is the only way to describe the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery, 26 miles northwest of Verdun. As exquisite as any French park or chateau grounds, the cemetery is a formal garden of perfectly clipped trees, immaculate lawns, fountains and roses and long white rows of grave markers. Given its beauty, it’s also strange how empty the place is — and stranger still since this is the largest American military cemetery in Europe, the burial site of 14,246 United States service members who died in the war to end all wars.

The complete article in the New York Times: “On Hallowed Ground, a Place of Painful Beauty”

Today’s Cal football game versus Oregon was nervewracking to watch. It was very back-and-forth (the Bears would score and then the Ducks, etc) but Cal pulled it out in the end.

This is an image of one of the last plays of the game when it appeared as though Oregon might score and tie the game. Oregon fumbled the ball into the endzone resulting in a touchback and the Bears getting the ball with about 20 seconds remaining.

The British government is preparing to claim a large chunck of the ocean in the South Atlantic which The Guardian headine wonders is a “new British empire.” The plan is noteworthy because it shows another example of how concepts of empire and imperialism remain relevant in the realm of economic resource exploitation.

Britain is preparing territorial claims on tens of thousands of square miles of the Atlantic Ocean floor around the Falklands, Ascension Island and Rockall in the hope of annexing potentially lucrative gas, mineral and oil fields, the Guardian has learned.

The UK claims, to be lodged at the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, exploit a novel legal approach that is transforming the international politics of underwater prospecting.

Britain is accelerating its process of submitting applications to the UN - which is fraught with diplomatic sensitivities, not least with Argentina - before an international deadline for registering interests.

The complete article from The Guardian: “The new British empire? UK plans to annex south Atlantic”

The current issue of the Journal of British Studies focuses on religion in Britain, “from the medieval to the modern periods.” The topic seems very timely and relevant to contemporary political and social issues. Unfotunately the editor notes that they did not receive submissions on Islam or Muslims in time for inclusion in this issue, but several articles on Islam are promised for a future issue.

In the editor’s introduction, Anna Clark mentions Callum Brown’s Death of Christian Britain. When I read this book a few years ago I was impressed by the way that Brown tried to pinpoint by several different measures when Christianity peaked and began to decline in Britain. Brown gave quite a bit of quantitative evidence in the form of Sunday School attendance and other measures of religiosity in order to precisely answer the question. Although any attempt to measure something that is ultimately a matter of personal sentiment and conscience (Sunday School attendance, for instance, just because people were attending more, does that mean they were there because they were religious or for other reasons) is going to be somewhat difficult, I appreciated the way that Brown assembled statistics.

Clark mentions Brown’s overall argument that religion remained relatively strong in Britain until the 1960s and only then began its decline (which challenges the more conventional belief in a longer, and less precipitous, decline commensing in the 19th century). She describes the way that Brown’s work, although controversial and open to criticism, sparked a new debate about religion in Britain. The current JBS issue contributes to that conversation.

Three major themes emerge in this special issue on religion. First, British religion should be put in the context of developments on the continent. Second, the relationship of religion to the state remains an important theme. How much power and motivation did state authorities have to control religious ideas? How did religion define national identity? How did denominations outside the Church of England react to and interact with state power? Third, religious discourses can be studied as material texts, as scholars examine how they are produced, modified, censored, read, and shared.

The complete article by Anna Clark, “Editor’s Introduction”

Timothy Ash writes in the Los Angeles Times that Europe is “a front line in the war on terror,” a point which others have made in the context of discussions about the new multicultural nature of the continent with its increasing population of foreign-born residents as well as increasing numbers of Muslims.

How large of an impact immigration and the changing religious makeup of Europe will have in the long term is a subject of much debate. What I find most interesting about the discussion is the way that boundaries and lines of demarcation are so much about creating a sense of Europe and a European identity. Everything from the present day debate about Turkey’s entry into the European Union to the Federal Republic of Germany’s Chancellor Adenauer’s famous comment that “Asia begins at the Elbe” to the history of the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna to the turning back of the Moors at the Pyrannes has been about the boundaries of Europe.

I wonder if part of what makes the present day immigration patterns seem distinct from influxes into Europe in the past is that because of jet and train travel possibilities the flows of immigrants and immigrant communities are not geographically continguous.

Ash’s article does not reflect too much on the meaning of boundaries, rather, his point is that Europe is on the front line of dealing with radical Islam and that the continent does not seem to be aware of its position.

To return from the United States to Europe is to travel from a country that thinks it is on the front line of the struggle against jihadist terrorism but is not, to a continent that is on the front line but still has not fully awoken to the fact.

Only a fool would rule out the possibility of another terrorist assault on what is now styled the American homeland, but the fact is that in the six years since 9/11, there have been several major attacks (Madrid, London) and foiled plots in Europe. In the United States, there have been no major attacks and, as far as we know, just a few averted conspiracies. All the evidence suggests that American Muslims are better integrated than those in Western Europe. Last week’s arrest of a group apparently planning a 9/11 anniversary attack in Germany suggests that the threat to the heimat is greater than that to the U.S. homeland.

An invisible front line runs through the quiet streets of many a European city or town where there is a significant Muslim population. Whether you live in London or Oxford, Berlin or Neu-Ulm, Madrid or Rotterdam, you are on that front line — much more than you ever were during the Cold War. This struggle is partly about intelligence and police work to prevent those who have already become fanatical, violent jihadists from blowing us up at St. Pancras or the Gare du Nord. Ordinary non-Muslim Europeans can only do a little to help this work, as well as worrying about the curtailment of civil liberties. Ordinary, peaceful, law-abiding Muslim Europeans can do a little more.

The complete article from the Los Angeles Times “Battleground Europe”

Several months ago Professor Laqueur wrote a book review of Fritz Stern’s Five Germanys I Have Known in the London Review of Books. I hadn’t read the book and I have only the most cursory knowledge of intellectual debates among twentieth century German scholars. I enjoyed the review primarily because I love the way that Laqueur writes. Although the review was somewhat critical, it seemed balanced to me.

The September 20, 2007 issues of the London Review of Books includes a letter from the scholar Tony Judt who attacks Laqueur’s review as well as him personally. Judt takes issue with the observations Laqueur made about the importance of fame and recognition to Stern and his contemporaries. He writes:

This ad hominem assault would be distasteful from any quarter. But it is pretty ripe coming from an academic whose own website (http://history.berkeley.edu/faculty/Laqueur/) lists every bauble he has received, every important lecture he has ever given, and even takes the trouble to inform visitors that Thomas Laqueur was once a ‘Guest of the Rektor, Wissenschafts Kolleg zu Berlin’. In matters of aspiration, apparently, the professor knows whereof he writes.

As the guy who manages the Berkeley History Department’s website I know for a fact that there are quite a few things wrong with Judt’s use of this example to criticize Professor Laqueur. For one thing, Judt’s framing of that address (http://history.berkeley.edu/faculty/Laqueur/) as Laqueur’s “own” is a little misleading. It is not, after all, something like thomaslaqueur.com. Instead it is something more analagous to a directory listing. Professor Laqueur does not update that web page himself, nor do any of the faculty in the department update their own directly. If they have more information to add they tell tell me or another staff person. Many of them simply email me a copy of their CV whenever they make changes to it and I format the updated version for posting on the web. All of the faculty pages are simply pages on the History Department’s site, not their own entities.

Moreover, the content of Laqueur’s web page is fairly extensive because of an administrative request that faculty pages be up-to-date and as extensive as possible. One of the many criteria that the National Research Council uses to evaluate graduate programs is information found on department websites, including faculty profiles. As part of the NRC evaluation process the university encouraged departments to make pages as thorough as possible. I can attest to the fact that not every faculty member in the History Department sent me a complete CV to post, but the vast majority of the department who did (like Laqueur) were acting in the interest of and at the request of their university.

Apart from that there is the issue of prospective graduate students and how they get information about the department’s faculty. I know from talking with my peers in their first few years of graduate school that most of them before they came to Berkeley looked at the web pages of faculty whose work interested them. Tony Judt probably would argue there is no need for a prospective student to know every honor that a professor received, but it seems to me that there is a benefit to posting a complete or nearly-complete CV.

The larger point is that a web site or web page is not about self-aggrandizement. Certainly not when it follows a standard department format and sits on a university server. But, even in a general sense, web pages have become so commonplace that they are often the first place we turn for information about someone. Even Tony Judt in fashioning his critique must have done a Google search for “Thomas Laqueur” (if, instead, he went to the Department’s main page and found Laqueur through navigating our site that would prove the point about the institutional nature of Laqueur’s web page).