Kagan on Herodotus: Atlantic gains another subscriber

Eoin Purcell

Atlantic Monthly, Borders & Ancient History
Atlantic Monthly is a magazine to which I generally become addicted when I buy a copy. Living in Ireland as I do this has not been very frequently. One product of the arrival of Borders in Ireland however has been their penchant for importing US magazines. I spent an hour and a half in their new Blanchardstown store (the aerial view) on Valentine’s Night (A very understanding and generous girlfriend) and bought the new Atlantic. This morning I decided to pony up the cash and get a yearly subscription. The magazine will now arrive monthly by post and for that I am very grateful.

This all relates to the blog because a truly excellent artilce in the magazine this month by Robert D. Kaplan on Herodotus and his relevance to current times, A Historian For Our Time. It is a wonderful piece and well worth the entire price of the magazine this month. I thought people might be interested to know that you can download a copy of Herodotus’ Histories (with copious notes apparently) or you can look over the list of freely readable titles and find something more to your taste. If course you can download the e-text from Gutenberg too!

Interestingly you can also grab a copy of Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War. And of course e-text here.

Enjoying a little more time!
Eoin

A little more info: Russell

Russell
It seems statesmen are drawn to the history of the French Revolution. Last post mentioned that Thiers was almost certainly the same man that led France at a troubled time in its history and now it would appear that Russell or Lord John Russell was the Prime Minister of England. You can check his Wikipedia page here and also his biography on the Liberal Democrat history Group site.

It has been a tough mission to retrieve data on this title if only because the title is so generic and used so widely. I therefore confined myself to leafing though its fine pages and dealing with the book as a book. I highly recommend doing this. The process is very enjoyable and if you spend a little time reading this book in particular you will see what it was a good choice.

One of the most interesting passages I have found is here in chapter one where the author tackles the definition of “Revolution” and very effectively describes the differences between previous uprisings and revolts and the French Revolution. His reluctance to ascribe the word revolution to the American Revolution may be controversial but his logic is at least consistent leaving the title out of his description of the events usually referred to as the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Can we lay our hands on a copy?
You can but it is fierce expensive! See Abebooks here for more..

Wrap Up
Google responded quickly to my concerns about accessing public domain books and reminded me that I can print the books if I like, which I did for part but I do enjoy reading the whole. In any case for now we seem to be stuck reading on the Google web pages and not downloading a text from the site as say Gutenberg allows. This seems to be taking me longer than expected but at least I finally got another post up.

From a surprisingly still sunny Dublin.
Eoin

A little more info: Thiers

Thiers
So we have some fine nugget of information turning up. As I suspected but had not confirmed on writing the previous post one of the authors cited, Adolphe Thiers, was head of state of France for some time prior to and following the collapse of the Second Empire and the Franco-Prussian war, Thiers was instrumental in crushing the Paris Commune and stabilising the nation. There is more on his here on Wikipedia.

Can we lay our hands on a copy?
Project Gutenberg has more than excelled itself by providing the entire text of The History of the French Revolution online for free. Sadly it is in French and so is useless to someone as poorly schooled (that is to say my teachers were in fact rather good but cursed by lazy students) in the language as I. other may however use this resource to the hilt.

The Google Book Search copy is also available and for anyone not used to the run of events in the period it has an extensive time line in the front matter here. Reading it reminds me how the actual radicalisation might not have been as inevitable as I suggested yesterday. The opportunities and chances for a more benign resolution almost jump from the page. It is well worth looking over.

Finally for today I thought I’d mention the introduction (here) which is a solid twelve pages long but worth the read. It also sets the book into a nice context and offers insights that are beyond my ability.

Wrap up
So for now I will leave Thiers and his work and do some digging on the others. Just one point that I know will crop up again and again with this project. Why can I not buy the right to print some extracts or even select text from the online version? It is in the public domain, it is scanned. I would happily pay up to twenty dollars to access Google’s version of it and it would certainly make this task easier and more enlightening to be able to quote portions. The sooner Google offers the facility to use the text the better is all I can say.

From a wonderfully sunny Dublin
Eoin
July 16th 2006