Anyone reading blogs over the last few years know how obsessive the wingnut element can get over faked, altered and “faked” photographs. Sometimes there’s a case to answer; sometimes there’s a picture that contradicts their narrative and they’re shrilly convinced that “it isn’t trooo!” We saw instances of both in the recent Lebanon war. Now the great-granddaddy of such controversies “looks set for reinvestigation”:http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/news/Robert_Capa_photo_investigators_defend_war_picture_news_252312.html : did Robert Capa stage his most famous picture, the “Falling Soldier” from the Spanish Civil War? The International Center of Photography in New York has acquired a suitcase discovered in Mexico last year containing Capa negatives abandoned when he fled from Paris in 1939.
Via “Dan Nexon”:http://duckofminerva.blogspot.com/2008/04/charles-tilly-wins-albert-o-hirschman.html, Charles Tilly “has won”:http://www.ssrc.org/hirschman/recipients.php the SSRC’s 2008 Albert O. Hirschman prize. I’ve blogged occasionally before about his wonderful little essay _Warmaking and Statemaking as Organized Crime_; now I find that it’s finally available on the WWW in a “decent scan”:http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/51028?mode=full&submit_simple=Show+full+item+record (as a working paper, but I think it is pretty well identical to the final version apart from page numbers etc). It’s a piece I can’t recommend highly enough – short, brutal and brilliant (and quite accessible to curious non-academics, I would think).
Also of interest from the SSRC is this “roundtable”:http://www.ssrc.org/raceinamerica/ on MLK, Obama and William Kristol.