It's official: the Peter Campbell deathwatch has begun.

After four seasons of watching him go from a spoiled, entitled, philandering brat to an at least somewhat sympathetic husband and employee, it's been rather shocking to see him revert back to his old habits with a vengeance. In the first episode alone, he viciously outmaneuvered Roger at the client game (going out of his way to humiliate the older man in front of colleagues) and strong-armed his way into a new office. In "Signal 30," his behavior is so outrageous that he gets a lesson in marital fidelity from Don freakin' Draper and his ass kicked in an office brawl by the mild-mannered English accountant Lane Pryce.

At least he's finally learning to drive -- the show title, "Signal 30", is taken from a rather graphic highway safety film from the '60s (I took driver's ed. in the new millennium, but my instructor still screened "Signal 30" for us, since, in his words, some things can't be improved upon. "Signal 30" the instructional film certainly has a sort of gory perfection.)

Pete and his wife Trudy host a dinner party for Don, fellow accounts man Ken Cosgrove (who had his own wonderful moments this episode -- but more on that later), and their wives at the new Campbell "country" estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, which establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that Trudy Campbell is a loving wife and mother. The very next day, he joins Don and Roger for a client meeting with a vice president at Jaguar Cars, which turns into a drunken visit to a brothel. Amazingly, Don stays celibate for the evening, despite the ample attention of the employees ("Jesus, Don," Roger tells him, "even in this place you're doing better than us") but Pete ends up bedding a look-alike for his teenage driver's ed. classmate in one of the most transactional sexual encounters on a show no stranger to the cathouse. His sense of entitlement is so overwhelming that he only gets turned on after being throatily assured, "You're my king." He lashes out at Don afterward for his disapproving glances: "You of all people ... I can't believe I have to explain I was doing my job to a man who just pulled his pants up on the world."

It gets worse. The next morning, Lane -- who set up the meeting with Jaguar after failing to close the deal on his own -- furiously informs the other partners that Jaguar got caught with his pants down -- "He was caught with chewing gum on his pubics!", which draws guffaws from all except old-fashioned Burt Cooper (who appears to have become the token political signpost on the show -- before the angry Englishman bursts in, he's rubbing Roger's back and assuring him "Nixon's lying in wait"). After enduring more taunts from Pete, Lane goes ballistic and challenges him to fisticuffs ("You're a grimy little pimp," he says, perhaps the victim of selective memory regarding his own infidelities -- remember, this is a show where almost every character is a terrible person). In a scene that many fans have been waiting five years for, Lane proceeds to kick the crap out of him ("I know cooler heads should prevail," says Roger, "but am I the only who wants to see this?" -- a double irony, since John Slattery directed the episode). He goes home in a sulk, his face badly bruised.

All of this, along with a receding hairline and a bit extra paunch, paints the portrait of a deeply, deeply unhappy man sliding into middle age.

I remain a skeptic that the season will end in Pete's suicide -- that seemed to be the path Don was going down last season when he descended into full-blown alcoholism, but instead he ended up married to his secretary -- though it wouldn't come out of left field. Just as the Richard Speck murders provided the necessary moribundity for last week's episode, Charles Whitman's tower rampage at the University of Texas sets the tone for this one. Unlike the sexually depraved Speck, Whitman seemed to be an ordinary man who just snapped after domestic problems -- first he murdered his wife and mother, then he went to the university armed to the teeth and killed another thirteen people before the police took him down. Who knows? Maybe Pete is being set up for a rampage of some sort.

University of Texas Main Building, where most of Whitman's rampage occurred.

But again, I'm not convinced. Decline has been a dramatic necessity on this show throughout its entire run. "I'm living like there's no tomorrow," Don said back in the very first episode, "because there isn't one." The glimmers of New York we see outside the rarified world of big business have gotten steadily less glamorous, too, as the seasons have gone on -- the greasy spoons have gotten greasier (the best episode of Season 4, "The Suitcase," saw Don and Peggy fleeing a Greek restaurant because a roach found its way into a painting of the Parthenon), the streets have gotten dirtier (watch any street shot this season -- the odds are, the garbage cans will be overflowing). If we're going to use pop culture as a roadmap (and Mad Men is nothing if unaware that it exists in the realm of popular memory), then the romantic, if bittersweet, New York of The Apartment is rapidly fading in the distance -- and the grittier New York of Midnight Cowboy is arriving. "Time feels like it's speeding up," Pete's would-be belle amour from his driver's ed. class sighs.

The continuing sense of decline isn't helped by Lane's seemingly insurmountable Englishness, despite his best attempts to kick it. The whole reason SDCP had a shot at Jaguar in the first place is because Lane was at an English pub with him watching the '66 World Cup final -- (West) Germany vs. England (England won -- it's the British equivalent of "the shot heard 'round the world,") Watching that scene made me think back to all of the other Anglocentric moments on Mad Men, and how those types of English people simply do not exist anymore. Yes, there are still well-heeled, posh members of the aristocracy in Britain (David Cameron springs to mind), but there are no longer Englishmen (and women) who were born to empire and expected to rule the world, even during the decade of diminished imperial expectations that were the 1960s (by '66, a handful of British protectorates are all that remain of the once mighty British Empire, and they'll be independent within a decade). In my mind, there's never really been a good reason to justify the presence of so much Englishness (the narrative reason why Lane Pryce is there at all is because Sterling Cooper was purchased by a British firm in 1962) except to draw declinist parallels between imperial Britain, the world of privileged white New Yorkers in the '60s, and, yes, America today -- three worlds that have all been challenged by the deep currents of history.

Interestingly, Geoff Hurst's winning goal in the '66 World Cup probably didn't actually make it into the net:

I'll end with this -- could Ken Cosgrove, now revealed as a prodigious sci-fi writer, published in the Hugo Award-winning Galaxy, end up writing an episode of Star Trek? The sci-fi cult classic premiered in September 1966, and some of its best episodes were written by the leading sci-fi writers of the decade.

I just finished reading this fascinating Room for Debate in the New York Times on whether to preserve or demolish Brutalist architecture. It raises some excellent questions about historical preservation. (Update: And here's the original article on the Orange County Government Building in Goshen, NY -- HT @opheliacat.)

Now, a disclaimer -- I hate Brutalism. I hate it almost as much as this guy, and he calls Brutalist architects fascists (I personally wouldn't go that far, but there is an undeniable similarity between the Buffalo City Court Building and, say, Vienna's WWII flak towers). I've hated Brutalist buildings since I was a kid, well before I realized that it was a major architectural school that some people actually took seriously. Most Brutalist buildings lack anything approaching warmth or humanity -- they almost uniformly dank, dismal, bunker-like objects that contemptuously destroy the existing aesthetic of neighborhoods and cities.

Worse, they're found everywhere. In my junior year of college, I escaped the confines of the University of Minnesota's arts and humanities campus, home to buildings like the one below, to Trinity College Dublin for a semester abroad, which is one of the most picturesque campuses in the world.

Rarig Center, University of Minnesota

Trinity College Dublin

But I discovered, to my horror, that TCD's primary undergraduate research library is this building:

Berkeley Library, Trinity College Dublin

This is the interior -- it's usually much more dimly-lit (rather problematic for a library):

So yes, I HATE Brutalist architecture, which is why I can't be trusted to think rationally about the question of whether some examples should be preserved. If it were up to me, I'd raze every Brutalist building to the ground, salt the earth where they once stood and condemn them damnatio memoriae. (Did I mention I hate Brutalism?) But, as a number of contributors in the NYT noted, people -- or at least architects -- hated Art Deco after a time, just as they had Victorian, neo-classical, and Beaux-Arts. After all, as many commenters in the Times pointed out, the destruction of New York's Penn Station in 1964 is now rightly considered a crime. The difference between the razing of Penn Station and the proposed destruction of Brutalist buildings is that Penn Station was widely beloved at the time and its destruction was heavily protested. The biggest debate over Brutalist buildings is whether or not Prince Charles is overstepping his bounds in his zeal to demolish them, not whether they ought to be demolished. The only real aesthetic purpose of the archly inhuman designs is to provide the appropriate backdrop for the violent, alienating cinema of the 1970s.

But rather than continue to expound on the myriad reasons why Brutalist architecture, for want of a better word, sucks (I am, however, rather found of many modernist designs, which have the benefit of looking sleek and space-age as opposed to bunker-like), I'll throw it open for discussion. Should we preserve Brutalist buildings, and, if so, which ones?

Due to popular demand, I'm going to continue to blog this season of Mad Men. And now, Episode 3! For my post on the two-parter season premier, go here.

When you get right down to it, it's the lucky among us who get old. At the risk of being morbid, I've always believed it's better to die at a hundred, with a lifetime of memories and experiences, than it is to die at twenty-five. That doesn't mean aging is easy, though, and for the first time since the show began, last night's Mad Men episode made the characters seem so ... old. From Betty Francis's cancer scare, to Roger Sterling finally realizing he's obsolete, to Don's awkward attempts to psychoanalyze the youth market backstage at a Rolling Stones concert, aging and its discontents are now front and center on the series.

Even Mohawk, the newly-signed airline that sparked so much excitement at SCDP (and highlighted the rivalry between Roger and Pete Campbell) is living on borrowed time. By 1972 Mohawk Airlines would be defunct, acquired by the company that eventually became US Airways. Almost none of the early regional airlines in America operate independently today (but, hey, even Pan Am eventually went out of business, ironically enough at almost the exact same moment as the final collapse of the Soviet Union -- December 1991).

It was certainly startling to be reintroduced to Betty. After two years of marriage to New York mayor John Lindsay's advisor Henry Francis (He got the best line of the night -- "Tell Jim His Honor isn't going to Michigan. [Pause.] Because Romney's a clown, and I don't want him standing next to us."), she's put on a bit of weight, which would in and of itself be unremarkable, but this is the woman who went on at length for years about how important it is to be pretty and thin. Her doctor finds a lump on her thyroid during a check-up for diet pills, and she spends the rest of the episode under the potential cloud of cancer (*SPOILER ALERT*: she doesn't have it). It's worth reflecting on cancer's once-immense social taboo -- people once suffered and died in silence. Remember, the episode is set eight years before Betty Ford went public with her battle with breast cancer. Interestingly, only Don can bring himself to speak the actual word (well, his "other" ex-wife did died of bone marrow cancer) -- every one else, even Betty's cancer-stricken friend Joyce, with whom Betty has lunch after a doctor's appointment, refers to it as a sickness or illness. Joyce's description of the experience of cancer is heart-wrenching, especially her seemingly shrugged-off line in response to Betty's horror: "No one's ever asked."

On to somewhat lighter fare. Part of the original fun of Mad Men was guessing how its very flawed characters would react to the changes of the '60s. Well, we now have a pretty good idea. Roger Sterling remains utterly, almost willfully clueless -- last week, he was completely oblivious to the fact that black people read newspapers and might want office jobs, too; this week, he told Peggy to hire the Woody Allen-esque Michael Ginsberg because having a Jew "makes the agency more modern." He thought the same thing in the first season, six years earlier. (He also assumed it would be a problem for the client to have a Jewish copywriter and was astonished that they didn't care.) Don and the now-hip (and incredibly irritating) Harry Crane, meanwhile, strike up a conversation (and a joint) with a pair of underage groupies at the Stones concert while waiting to recruit the band for a TV commercial for Heinz Baked Beans. In the past, Don would have played the seducer in this situation, but here he seemed genuinely befuddled and concerned. "What do you feel when hear [the Rolling Stones]?" he asks one of them. The girl shrugs. "Brian Jones ... he's a troubadour." (Too bad he'll be dead in three years.) She'll do "whatever he wants," though it's pretty clear she has no idea what that might be. When Don presses her, she dismisses him. "None of you want any of us to have a good time just because you never did," she tells Don (I can't think of a less true statement). "No," he responds, "we're worried about you."

And therein lies the generation gap in a nutshell. It's a lesson that's appreciate much more today than it was in 1966: even square people can do drugs and have sex.

Harry, meanwhile, mistakes the one-hit wonder the Trade Winds for the Stones. "They sounded just like them," he said, despite the Trade Winds sounding a lot more like the Beach Boys. But, of course, all pop acts sound the same, right? (Truthfully, I can't tell the difference between Ke$ha and Lady GaGa, either, but at least the Stones have staying power.)

The Stones, incidentally, actually did a Rice Krispies commercial in the UK in 1964, but it fell to the Who to actually record a Heinz Baked Beans.

In 1967, most pop bands were desperately trying to keep up with the Beatles and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band -- Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys nearly had a nervous breakdown after hearing the album. The Rolling Stones recorded the very mixed Their Satanic Majesties Request (one critic of the Internet Age called it "the worst of the major bands' takes on Sgt. Pepper ... full of self-conscious attempts to be weird"); The Who cut The Who Sell Out, which, judging by its packaging alone, could very well become Don Draper's favorite album of 1967.

The whole album is structured like a pirate radio broadcast, complete with ad spots recorded specifically for the album (supposedly the band actually tried to sell ad space on the album but couldn't get any companies interested, so they just a few gra is). Among the products to get plugged: Odorono (a popular English deodorant, the first marketed specifically to women), Charles Atlas's bodybuilding course, and, yes, Heinz Baked Beans.

And, as evidence that not everyone in the advertising world was brain-dead on race (and the fact that there were profits to be made from -- *gasp* -- actually selling things to African Americans!), I submit for your consideration this jingle for Coca-Cola, my personal favorite from a huge number of spots from the '60s featuring well-known acts, sung by Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin.

On the home page this week is a wonderful article that was sent over to me by Mark Selden at JapanFocus: New York, Nuke York: Nuclear Holocaust in the American Imagination from Hiroshima to 9/11 by Mike Broderick and Robert Jacobs. It's exactly what it says on the tin. I personally love this subject -- I remember writing a paper I was particularly proud of about the 1945 Life Magazine spread that Broderick and Jacobs briefly talk about.

It is however, essentially an academic article, and HNN does not, as a rule, publish or reprint academic articles. There are a variety of reasons for this: we don't do peer review; we value brevity and clarity; our research shows that the majority of readers click out of an article after around 2,000 words (except for interviews, which tend to be less dense); and academic articles often go into extreme and, for our purposes, unnecessary detail and can often fall into the habit of repeating a single point endlessly, on and on and on, completely oblivious to the fact that the readers got the point the first time, and they don't need to have an idea pounded into their heads over and over and over...

Uh, anyway...

So why did we publish in full Nuke York, New York, an article with 49 footnotes and 7,000 words (the equivalent of nearly 35 pages of 12-pont, double-spaced font), not the most subtle of analysis, and certainly guilty of the sin of repetitiveness?

Two reasons: 1) it's on a modern pop culture topic, which tends to attract more readers than, say, an socio-historical analysis of the proverbial underwater basket weaving; and more importantly 2) It has great pictures. If you don't want to slog your way through 7,000 words, just look at the pictures in sequence -- they provide, in sum, a wonderful photographic history of the atomic age. That alone makes it exactly the kind of academic paper that has the potential for broad appeal.

I'm going to make a bold statement: pretty much everyone is familiar with Saint Patrick. Probably not in any real historical or religious detail, but you don't lend your name to the biggest drinking day in the United States -- and quite possibly the Western world -- without people at least remembering your name.

But, to paraphrase something an Irish professor once said to me when I spent a term at Trinity College, Dublin,* pretty much every thing you know about Saint Patrick is wrong. For one thing, he didn't introduce Christianity to Ireland -- the Catholic Church recognizes Palladius, a missionary and ascetic from Gaul, as the first bishop of the believing Irish, and even that implies that he was sent to Ireland to tend to existing Christian communities. Indeed, there's some ambiguity as to whether Palladius and Patrick where the same person (at least one scholar believes they were), and even if they weren't, it's possible that many of the (non-legendary) acts attributed to Patrick were in fact Palladius's. Regardless, Patrick's own testament makes his life sound interesting enough: he was the son of a deacon in fifth-century Roman Britain who was captured by pirates when he was sixteen, sold into slavery in Ireland, escaped back to Britain after six years, but then returned to Ireland as a missionary and representative of the Christian Church.

Irish 5-shilling stamp depicting St. Patrick, 1937

To complicate things even further, Saint Patrick is only one of three patron saints of Ireland. Saint Brigid of Kildare was active at the same time as Patrick in the latter half of the fifth century, and Saint Columba of Donegal preached to the Picts of Scotland in the 500s. Brigid's hagiography, incidentally, makes for some pretty interesting reading, particularly her miracles (from Cogitosus's Life of St. Brigid):

[The] venerable Brigid was asked by some lepers for beer, but had none. She noticed water that had been prepared for baths. She blessed it, in the goodness of her abiding faith, and transformed into the best beer, which she drew copiously for the thirsty. It was indeed He Who turned water into win in Cana of Galilee Who turned water into beer here....

That's right -- the Galileans have their wine, but the Irish have their beer (suddenly, the modern Saint Patrick's Day celebration doesn't quite seem so off-key).

But my personal favorite, possibly the most astounding miracle I've ever read of in any saint's life (though admittedly I have only a cursory knowledge of Irish and Russian hagiographies -- emphasis on cursory) is this stunner:

With a strength of faith most powerful and ineffable, she (Brigid) blessed a woman who, after a vow of virginity, had lapsed through weakness into youthful concupisence, as a result of which her womb began to swell with pregnancy. In consequence, what had been conceived in the womb disappeared, and she restored her to health and to penitence without childbirth or pain.

There's a reason why Choice Ireland (where abortion is illegal) proclaims Brigid of Kildare as Ireland's first abortionist.

But for those who are neither interested in the arcane details of Irish saints or drinking themselves into a stupor, there is an alternative holiday that celebrates Irish literature, Irish language, and Irish culture. My advice to to the cultural set is to avoid the pubs tomorrow and instead start making plans for Bloomsday on June 16 -- the date on which James Joyce's epic novel Ulysses is set in 1904 (I admit to having had a rather disappointing gorgonzola cheese sandwich and glass of burgundy at Davy Byrne's Pub -- a word to the wise: don't order wine at Irish pubs, whether in Ireland or not). In the U.S., Bloomsday typically means book readings (and probably some drinking); in Dublin, it means a brigade of men and women in Edwardian garb retracing the steps of Joyce's protagonist, Leopold Bloom.

Bloomsday revelers outside Davy Byrne's Pub, 2003

*That can be a surprisingly sore point whenever I mention it to Irish people I encounter the U.S., as it's considered to be a posh and rather snobby college by its detractors, but then again, it was the resident university of the Protestant Ascendancy for decades, and it maintained a largely Protestant character well into Irish independence; though the university lifted a ban on Catholic students in 1793, the Irish Catholic Church only lifted its reciprocal ban in 1972.

You'd think that John F. Kennedy's 1960 speech in Houston to a group of Protestant ministers which effectively defused Kennedy's Catholicism as a campaign issue would be referenced favorably by this year's GOP crop. Of the four remaining candidates, two are Catholics, one is Mormon, and there's only a single Protestant left in the race (Ron Paul is a Baptist).

But Rick Santorum -- himself a Catholic -- said in a speech early on in the current campaign cycle that Kennedy's speech "made me want to throw up." When George Stephanopoulos asked him about his remarks yesterday, Santorum offered this defense:

The first substantive line in the speech was "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute." I don't believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country. This is the First Amendment.  The First Amendment says the free exercise of religion.  That means bringing everybody, people of faith and no faith, into the public square.  Kennedy for the first time articulated the vision saying, no, ‘faith is not allowed in the public square.  I will keep it separate.’  Go on and read the speech ‘I will have nothing to do with faith.  I won’t consult with people of faith.’  It was an absolutist doctrine that was foreign at the time of 1960....

To say that people of faith have no role in the public square?  You bet that makes you throw up.  What kind of country do we live that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case?

That makes me throw up and it should make every American who is seen from the president, someone who is now trying to tell people of faith that you will do what the government says, we are going to impose our values on you, not that you can’t come to the public square and argue against it, but now we’re going to turn around and say we’re going to impose our values from the government on people of faith, which of course is the next logical step when people of faith, at least according to John Kennedy, have no role in the public square.

Joan Walsh has a pretty effective takedown of Santorum's remarks over at Salon. If you'll bear with me, I'll quote Walsh (no relation, I assure you) quoting Kennedy (the full speech by JFK, incidentally, can be read here):

Of course, there’s no place in Kennedy’s speech where he said “people of faith are not allowed in the public square,” or anything close to that, and Santorum’s saying it three times doesn’t make it true. Here’s one key passage:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew— or a Quaker or a Unitarian or a Baptist. It was Virginia’s harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson’s statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you — until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.

It is absolutely clear that Kennedy accepts “people of faith in the public square” – his goal is to make a place for people of every faith in our public life. Kennedy doesn’t even go as far as Christian right hero Reagan, who actually said the separation of church and state protects the right of non-believers, too.

Now, Walsh concludes by calling Santorum a liar for mischaracterizing Kennedy's remarks. I wouldn't go that far. Santorum clearly believes his analysis of Kennedy's speech, though, as Joan (I'm switching over to her first name, otherwise I feel like I'm writing about myself in the third person) demonstrates, Kennedy was not saying religion does not belong in the public square.

Santorum's big problem is with context. I echo his call to actually read dthe full text of Kennedy's speech because it does provide rich context. Kennedy starts out by jabbing at the Eisenhower administration for losing Cuba and falling behind in the space race. He speaks admiringly of other countries with Catholic presidents but officially pluralist or secular states: De Valera's Ireland (to be fair, Kennedy could have used a history lesson himself one this one), De Gaulle's France, and Adenaur's Germany -- incidentally, when was the last time in this election cycle that a candidate spoke admiringly of a foreign leader?

Perhaps most importantly, Santorum seemed to be completely oblivious to the fact that Kennedy gave his speech explicitly to rebut criticism that he would use his office to give preferential treatment to his church and that in 1960 Protestantism had a particularly important political role in the public square (the SPLC, anyone?). He's not thinking critically about history.

Came across this passage in economist Daniel Kahneman's new book Thinking, Fast and Slow:

The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained. As Nassim Taleb pointed out in The Black Swan, our tendency to construct and believe coherent narratives of the past makes it difficult for us to accept the limits of our forecasting ability. Everything makes sense in hindsight, a fact that financial pundits exploit every evening as they offer convincing accounts of the day’s events. And we cannot suppress the powerful intuition that what makes sense in hindsight today was predictable yesterday. The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.

The often-used image of the “march of history” implies order and direction. Marches, unlike strolls or walks, are not random. We think that we should be able to explain the past by focusing on either large social movements and cultural and technological developments or the intentions and abilities of a few great men. The idea that large historical events are determined by luck is profoundly shocking, although it is demonstrably true. It is hard to think of the history of the twentieth century, including its large social movements, without bringing in the role of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Zedong. But there was a moment in time, just before an egg was fertilized, when there was a fifty-fifty chance that the embryo that became Hitler could have been a female. Compounding the three events, there was a probability of one-eighth of a twentieth century without any of the three great villains and it is impossible to argue that history would have been roughly the same in their absence. The fertilization of these three eggs had momentous consequences, and it makes a joke of the idea that long-term developments are predictable. [Emphasis mine.]

So, Kahneman, perhaps unintentionally, brushes aside one of the core claims historians supposedly make about history: that we can understand it.

But do historians actually make this claim? I seem to remember being taught in school about the inherent limitations in understanding the past, both in terms of records (much of what we know about Rome comes from records that were preserved by Middle Age monks, for instance -- and they made choices about what to preserve and transcribe), and that anyway the past, as L.P. Hartley so wonderfully put it, "is a foreign country; they do things differently there." Modern historians, so the thinking goes, should always be aware of their own historicity.

Thoughts?