The unicorns are back to wish you a happy Pi(e) day and Ides of March! This means that if you didn’t have proper pie yesterday, you could still rectify things today, and commemorate Caesar properly.
We didn’t do a typical Blessing of Unicorns last week—instead, in honor of International Women’s Day, I wrote a little exhortation for you to read (more) women and included a roundup of great recent books, so it was a blessing of unicorns of a particular sort, at least. But because of the missed week of this feature, this week’s Blessing of Unicorns includes reads from the past couple of weeks, including essays on historic bathrooms, singleness, Barbie, personality sorting, Front Porch Republic turns 15, Marilynne Robinson’s latest, a lot of war, and what looks like a very promising job opening in Antarctica. You could be neighbors with some really adorable penguins!!!
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First up, the stuff of nightmares, but successfully resolved: “A university academic who was trapped in the bathroom of a medieval tower for seven hours escaped using an eyeliner and a cotton bud.”
Noted. Also, this reminded me of Andrea Turpin’s historic (even if less dramatic) bathroom adventure last summer.
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Dani Treweek is always worth reading, and I appreciated her latest in Mere Orthodoxy: “The Heavenly Significance of Singleness (And Marriage)”.
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Speaking of singleness etc., Abigail Wilkinson Miller offers a superb “Catholic Defense of Barbie and Greta Gerwig’s Feminism” in America Magazine.
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Monica Klem has a lovely piece about her recent book in Public Discourse (review of her book in Current is coming next month), “What ‘Abortion Hurts Women’ Meant to the Early Feminists.”
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Karen Swallow Prior, a human who loves humans well and has made no secret of her love for dogs, has a really beautiful reminder at TGC this week: “Pets Aren’t People.”
Her essay also reminded me of this lovely piece from Agnes Howard here at Current a while back.
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What’s with all the personality type sorting that everyone is (seemingly) obsessed with? Christopher Yates’ essay in The Hedgehog Review is the best I’ve read on the topic in quite a while.
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Front Porch Republic, one of my favorite places to read regularly, is turning fifteen! Celebration essays earlier this week, plus the usual great content otherwise.
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I really enjoyed historian Chris Gehrz’s reflections this week on “The Dual Value of the History Major.” Chris is working on a book to help Christian parents think about making college decisions for/with their children, and Dan and I are really looking forward to it!
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We are planning a two-day forum on Marilynne Robinson’s newest book, Reading Genesis, to take place in late summer. In the meanwhile, I highly recommend Philip Bunn’s lovely review in Plough. By the way, Philip announced some big news this week, so join me in heartily congratulating him: come fall, he will be a colleague of Current Managing Editor Jay Green at Covenant College!
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Lauren Benton has an insightful blog post on her recent book on imperial violence. A taste:
Historians are supposed to feel lucky when our new books align closely with topics prominently in the news. I would welcome a little less relevance for They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence. As I was writing the book, Russia invaded Ukraine. Then the war in Gaza exploded, just a few months before the book’s publication. Sharp accounts of suffering and loss in both conflicts carry disturbing echoes of the imperial past.
I did not set out to make these connections when I began the project. My motivations were more personal, and more scholarly. In a career writing about the legal history of empires, I had paid more attention to imperial rule than to violence, and I set out to correct that imbalance. I also wanted to enlarge the field of international law. Most studies about law and war spotlight the late-nineteenth century, when the laws of war were codified, or start in the mid-twentieth century, when international institutions outlawed major wars. I wanted to shift the focus further back, to the half-millennium of global empire building before the dawn of the twentieth century.
Instead of confining my attention to the writings of theologians and jurists on war, as many historians of international law do, I set out uncover the legal practices of war. I dove into accounts of “small” violence in and on the edges of empires. I read about raids, sieges, and campaigns of conquest. I examined participants’ accounts of massacres alongside treatises on peace. I pored over letters from European commanders and analyzed Indigenous complaints about Europeans’ conduct in war. I surveyed the context in which anti-imperial warriors were labeled as rebels or enemies.
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Last but not least, on another war-related note, Bret Devereaux’s latest for Foreign Policy argues that the shrinking of the historical profession—the disappearance of experts that everyone used to take for granted—has dire repercussions for national security as well. A taste:
The United States is rapidly shedding historians—and the national security implications are dire. Even as it grapples with challenges and conflicts rooted in complicated regional histories, the United States continues a decade-and-a-half-long path of defunding history departments and deprioritizing history education. This threatens to produce a generation of policymakers and advisors whose view of the world is increasingly, and dangerously, shallow.
History is in an unprecedented crisis. Battered by budget cuts and a refusal to replace retiring historians, university history departments are now rapidly shrinking; a 2022 study of Midwestern history departments found that the number of permanent departmental faculty had declined by nearly a third since 2010. That decline continues to accelerate as university hiring of historians remains stuck at levels well below what is necessary to replace retirements…
This policy-created collapse of the history discipline has direct impacts on national security. The Department of Defense is one of the largest employers of academic historians in the United States, in positions ranging from office training as part of the service academies or Professional Military Education to unit-level command historians responsible for chronicling and analyzing the operations of their units and fielding requests for historical data…
But the national security implications of the decline of history extend beyond direct federal hiring. Democracies such as the United States rely on the public to set broad strategic priorities through elections and on civilian leaders to translate those priorities into executable policies. Fostering historical knowledge in the public at large is also an important aspect of U.S. competitiveness.
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Okay, if you are really sick and tired of everything else around (a logical feeling on the week after time change, where no amount of coffee is going to cut it), here’s an ad for a really promising job opening in Antarctica. It’s temporary, but filled with adventure: “Charity seeks hard-working, self-motivated individuals for temporary positions. Must be willing to relocate—and stomach the smell of penguin poop.”