Weekend Roundup

• AHA Today has an extensive round-up of blog coverage of the American Historical Association meeting. History News Network's coverage is always helpful, but there is much, much more, including a link to Clara Altman's great post.

• "Over the past 10 years, numerous research universities' strategic plans have called for increased interdisciplinary work," writes Myra Strober (Graduate School of Business, Stanford University), "Nonetheless, there is little evidence that it is happening." How do we explain this? And what ought universities do about it? Read Strober's full column here, at the Chronicle of Higher Ed.

• From NPR, a brief history of the House speaker's gavel, in commemoration of its passing from one speaker to the next. ("We have accounts where he's gaveling away furiously and the head flies off and lands one or two rows down the rostrum among the reading clerks" . . . .) (image credit)
  

• Over at In Custodia Legis, the blog of the law librarians of Congress, Senior Foreign Law Specialist Nicole Atwill has written a short post about slavery in the French Colonies and Le Code Noir (the Black Code) of 1685. You can read it here.

• What belongs in Australia's new National Curriculum? Intellectual history, Bruce Buchan (Griffith University) answers, the kind found in recent studies of law and empire.