Fencing Bear at Prayer

"The metaphorical terms 'scholarship recognizes,' 'scholarship has demonstrated,' are of indispensable and vital value to us. Alongside our concept of the knowledge of the single individual we must also retain the concept of a dynamic magnitude called the discipline of history, which, despite the fact that it is nowhere and never realized in a human mind, nonetheless remains a coherent entity. "Seen in this light, the amazing production working only in breadth and never in depth takes on a quite different appearance. It makes no difference whether a historical study is understood by ten thousand readers or by nine. It is quite unnecessary for each monograph to justify itself as a 'preliminary study' for a later synthesis. An entity in the cosmos, it has within itself the same right to exist as every blackbird that sings and every cow that eats grass. "The historical discipline is a cultural process, a function of the world, a paternal house wi...

I'm finding it hard not to start this post with yet another apology, but there you go. Yesterday while I was making my breakfast--organic bananas, organic strawberries, all-natural (no corn syrup!) granola, organic milk from pasture-fed cows, organic herbal stress-relieving tea--I was suddenly struck by how white it all was. Unsurprising, you say? I am, after all, exactly the type of White Person Christian Lander's blog -turned- book is aimed at, both descriptively and in marketing terms: college-educated, upper-middle-class, wannabe artist-intellectual, urban dwelling. And, indeed, although I somehow missed the whole blog phenomenon last winter (too busy teaching the History of European Civilization, I suppose), I read the book as soon as I got back from Europe and could order a copy from my local, independently-owned bookstore . I even took the quiz at the back: "How White Are You?" Organic food (check), tea (check), yoga (check), gifted children (check-...