Historian Francois Furstenberg compares the Bush presidency to the French Revolutionary period in The New York Times (“Bush’s Dangerous Liaisons”). Regardless of the political implications I think it is noteworthy the way that the French Revolution continues to be a lens through which contemporary politics and political clashes are understood.

Much as George W. Bush’s presidency was ineluctably shaped by Sept. 11, 2001, so the outbreak of the French Revolution was symbolized by the events of one fateful day, July 14, 1789. And though 18th-century France may seem impossibly distant to contemporary Americans, future historians examining Mr. Bush’s presidency within the longer sweep of political and intellectual history may find the French Revolution useful in understanding his curious brand of 21st- century conservatism.

Among the many carry-overs of the French Revolution that Furstenberg mentions is the original usage of the word “terrorist.”

A terroriste was, in its original meaning, a Jacobin leader who ruled France during la Terreur.

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).

Two new biographies of Alexis de Tocqueville are reviewed in The New York Times. The sense of the review is that each of them complicates the standard notion of Tocqueville: he was “an unlikely student of democracy and an even less likely voyager to the American wilderness.”

Hopefully I’ll have a chance to read these sometime soon. I’ve always had only a fairly general familiarity with Tocqueville and would like to know more about him.

Americans generally quote Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” as a way of patting themselves on the back. Tocqueville’s first volume, published at the end of 1834 after a nine-month tour of the New World, was the first great study of American institutions and political culture. It declared the American Revolution the triumph of “a mature and considered taste for liberty, not a vague and indefinite instinct for independence.”

But there is another way to read Tocqueville. If Volume 1 laid out what Americans had made of democracy, Volume 2, published six years later, laid out what democracy had made of Americans. This was a bleaker subject. Self-rule had its paradoxes, Tocqueville showed. Equality could come at the price of intellectual independence. And if one man was just as worthy of a political voice as the next, why should any individual involve himself in politics at all? Hugh Brogan, a historian at the University of Essex in England, shares the preoccupations of this second Tocqueville, without sharing his conclusions. In an erudite and combative new biography, he presents many of Tocqueville’s misgivings about democracy as specious and reactionary.

The complete review by Christopher Caldwell in The New York Times: “Even God Quotes Tocqueville”

Japan is facing a growing crisis about its collective memory of the Second World War. According to The Guardian there is a conflict between those on the political right who are attempting to remove from the historical record acknowledgements of certain atrocities committed by the Japanese government and/or its military.

I am just as skeptical of attempts to sanitize history as I am of claims that there is an absolute truth in the past to be discovered. However, it is troubling to think of the government modifying history textbooks to suit a certain political ideology or to serve a politically charged purpose. Hopefully the Japanese government will decide to leave textbooks and education in the hands of scholars and authors.

This year the education ministry ordered publishers of seven high-school textbooks to be introduced next April to remove references to the forced suicides. The ministry said “it was not clear there were military orders [to commit suicide]” and that “recent studies suggest there were no such orders”.

The demand is part of a growing movement to sanitise - or simply ignore - the darkest episodes in modern Japanese history, which have gathered pace under one of the most conservative governments of recent decades, led by the hawkish prime minister, Shinzo Abe.

A long simmering row over the 1937 massacre of tens of thousands of Chinese civilians in Nanking by Japanese forces has been reignited by renewed efforts to play down the carnage. Last month about 130 Japanese MPs denounced the massacre as a Chinese fabrication and claimed the death toll was nearer 20,000. Several films marking the 70th anniversary are due for release this year, including one by the rightwing director Satoru Mizushima which describes the episode as a myth.

Other attempts by the Japanese right to rectify Japan’s “masochistic” view of its own history have set it on a diplomatic collision course with its closest ally, the United States.

The complete article from The Guardian: “Told to commit suicide, survivors now face elimination from history “

Researchers at North Carolina State University report (“Mayday 23: World Population Becomes More Urban Than Rural”) that May 23, 2007 is the date when the population of the world will be more urban than rural.

Working with United Nations estimates that predict the world will be 51.3 percent urban by 2010, the researchers projected the May 23, 2007, transition day based on the average daily rural and urban population increases from 2005 to 2010. On that day, a predicted global urban population of 3,303,992,253 will exceed that of 3,303,866,404 rural people.

Interestingly they compare the population statistics for the world to the United States urban-rural divide and not to Britain, which achieved a majority urban population first among Western industrialized nations.

In the United States, the tipping point from a majority rural to a majority urban population came early in the late 1910s, the researchers say. Today, 21 percent of our country is rural although some states — Maine, Mississippi, Vermont, and West Virginia — are still majority rural. In North Carolina, a rural majority held until the late 1980s.