Weekend Round-up

• The National Book Critics Circle finalists this year include, in non-fiction: Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea; S.C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History; Jennifer Homans, Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet; Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer; and Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration. Ralph Luker has the rest here.

• Just in time to serve as an object lesson to the students in my New Deal Legal History seminar before we troop over to the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress there appeared this story of a researcher's falsification of the date on a famous pardon by Abraham Lincoln. DRE

• R.I.P. Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell. One of the last of the "New York intellectuals," Bell's publications include Marxian Socialism in the United States (1952), The End of Ideology (1960), and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1978). Obituaries are here, here, and here. (image credit)
  

• Over at the Faculty Lounge, Al Brophy has posted an update on the status of "the second volume of the Morton Horwitz festschrift" (Transformations in American Legal History: Law, Ideology, and Methods -- Essays in Honor of Morton Horwitz). You can read his commentary and see the TOC here.

• Religion in American History (a group blog on American religious history and culture) has posted a two-part interview with David Sehat, author of The Myth of American Religious Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2010). (Part I, Part II)

• From Out of the Jungle, news that a digitization project at the Kennedy Library is not including papers of Robert Kennedy, which are "'stacked in a vault at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum ... , individually sealed and labeled.' They amount to '54 crates of records so closely guarded that even the library director is prohibited from taking a peek.'"  More here.