For the uninitiated, the Doubleday myth is part American folklore, part sports history. The story goes like this — Civil War hero Arthur Doubleday founded modern baseball on a field in Cooperstown, NY. This version of history is appealing for a variety of reasons, but most historians now agree that it quite simply isn’t true.

In this article at the History News Network, Kirsch writes that debunking this myth is about as popular and difficult as “telling the truth about the tooth fairy or Santa Claus.” Case in point, the Commissioner of Baseball Bud Selig, recently stated, “From all of the historians which I have spoken with, I really believe that Abner Doubleday is the `Father of Baseball.’ I know there are some historians who would dispute this, though.”

So, why does this myth endure and continue to garner support from people who, frankly, should know better? Kirsch chalks it up to two reasons:

• “baseball’s continuing association with American nationalism.” It is no mistake that Kirsch starts his article clashing with a tour guide at the Gettysburg battlefield.
• and, “the enduring power [of] a very appealing story” that favors the “field of dreams” in Cooperstown over the urban setting of the inner city of NYC.

Click over to read Kirsch’s complete article.

Found at The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Hot Type blog:

Assume that university presses make it through whatever you want to call the current era of publishing: crisis, transformation, great digital shift. Not everybody makes that assumption. I do. The real question, for me, is how numerous the survivors will be, what they will look like, what kinds of materials they’ll publish, and how they’ll operate in five, 10, 20 years.

The Association of Research Libraries recently came up with scenarios for the year 2030, designed to help libraries avoid future shock as they make strategic plans. I’ve wondered when someone would make similar prognostications for university presses. The new issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing, out Monday, does just that. Among the contributors’ more startling suggestions is the idea that we could have more university presses, not fewer, in the future.

Collectively the essayists push forward with other ideas that have been gaining ground in the past couple of years: that presses need to find ways to ally themselves more closely with their host institutions; that presses have to learn to publish many kinds of things digitally and well, not limit themselves to monographs and journals; that consortial arrangements will likely be the ticket to survival; and that publishers need to bring scholars more into the process if they don’t want to lose those authors to alternative publishing systems and outlets.

Read the Chronicle’s complete article here.

One of the two contributors who actually work at a scholarly press, Princeton University Press director Peter Dougherty contributes “Reimagining the University Press: A Checklist for Scholarly Publishers” to the JEP issue as well.

“Intro to Poetry Writing is always like this: a long labor, a breech birth, or, obversely, mining in the dark. You take healthy young Americans used to sunshine (aided sometimes by Xanax and Adderall), you blindfold them and lead them by the hand into a labyrinth made from bones. Then you tell them their assignment: ‘Find the Grail. You have a New York minute to get it.’”

– The Poetry Lesson

If you’re in the Princeton area, swing by Labyrinth Books today to meet Andrei Codrescu and get your copy of The Poetry Lesson signed! The event will begin at 3 PM. Details are below.

FACT: In 1921 a traveling religious man appeared in eastern British Bengal. Soon residents began to identify this half-naked and ash-smeared sannyasi as none other than the Second Kumar of Bhawal–a man believed to have died twelve years earlier, at the age of twenty-six. So began one of the most extraordinary legal cases in Indian history.

The case would rivet popular attention for several decades as it unwound in courts from Dhaka and Calcutta to London.

A Princely Impostor? tells an incredible story replete with courtroom drama, sexual debauchery, family intrigue, and squandered wealth. With a novelist’s eye for interesting detail, Partha Chatterjee sifts through evidence found in official archives, popular songs, and backstreet Bangladeshi bookshops. He evaluates the case of the man claiming, with the support of legions of tenants and relatives, to be the long-lost Kumar. And he considers the position of the sannyasi’s detractors, including the colonial government and the Kumar’s young widow, who resolutely refused to meet the man she denounced as an impostor.

Along the way, Chatterjee introduces us to a fascinating range of human character, gleans insights into the nature of human identity, and examines the relation between scientific evidence, legal truth, and cultural practice. The story he tells unfolds alongside decades of Indian history. Its plot is shaped by changing gender and class relations and punctuated by critical historical events, including the onset of World War II, the Bengal famine of 1943, and the Great Calcutta Killings. And by identifying the earliest erosion of colonialism and the growth of nationalist thinking within the organs of colonial power, Chatterjee also gives us a secret history of Indian nationalism.

A Princely Impostor?
The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal
By Partha Chatterjee

For more books in our online sale catalog, please visit:
http://press.princeton.edu/booksale/

In this op-ed from USA Today, PUP author Thomas Kidd writes:

The fact that nearly 20% of Americans say that President Obama is a Muslim has certainly not kept him from talking to Muslims. Just in the past week, the president gave his second major address to the Muslim world, and issued greetings to Muslims for Eid-ul-Adha, the celebration of Abraham’s “willingness to sacrifice his son.” Even in this small act of presidential courtesy, however, Obama had to tread very carefully. Note that the administration did not include the name of Abraham’s son. Muslims believe that Abraham was willing to sacrifice Ishmael, while the Jewish and Christian Scriptures contend that it was Isaac — indeed, this is one of the most fundamental divergences between these religious traditions. The president wants to acknowledge the Muslim holiday, without exacerbating religious tensions.

Using this celebration as a point of entry, Kidd discusses the need for the president to stand up to would-be terrorists while maintaining lines of communication with the Muslim community, all as he continues to battle mis-information about his own religious beliefs. Kidd identifies this as a “nearly impossible balance” to achieve.

Kidd is an expert on the fraught relationship between America and Islam going back to the colonial times. His book with Princeton University Press, American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism, provides an essential history through which we can understand current debates about Islam in America.

Princeton Alumni Weekly spoke with William G. Bowen about why he chose to write his new book Lessons Learned: Reflections of a University President (a book Library Journal called “the essential manual for university presidents” in a recent starred review):

PAW: Why this book, and why now?

For many years, people have urged me to make some kind of a record of what I thought I had learned throughout all these years, in and around ­presidents’ offices. … I kept getting asked for advice on one subject or another. So I finally yielded to these blandishments.

Later in the interview, Bowen addresses concerns that the book’s lessons might not transfer to other schools:

I was concerned that the book would be too ­Princeton-centric, since many of the examples and most of my experiences were at Princeton. But my editor persuaded me otherwise. … But I must also say that people from a wide range of very different institutions said many of these principles and propositions are really universal. They apply at my community college as well as at a big land-grant university, as well as a liberal-arts college.

We invite you to see what’s new and forthcoming in our 2011 Anthropology catalog.

Clifford Geertz, Thomas Barfield, E. Summerson Carr and many more can be found in the catalog. Great books by great authors.

Browse Princeton’s 2011 Anthropology catalog online at:
http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/anth11.pdf

If you’re at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting, visit the Princeton booth (no. 400) and say hello. Browse new books there!

You can also learn about new anthropology books by joining our e-mail list at:
http://press.princeton.edu/subscribe/

Shamus Rahman Khan just sent over these photos of him holding the first copy of his new book Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School. Judging by the title of this post over at scatterplot, I guess it must feel pretty good to finally have it in hand.

You’ve seen the Vanity Fair version on the last page of each issue, the one adapted from Proust and given to celebrities to answer. Now check out Dorothy King’s blog where 2009 National Book Award Finalist and POISON KING author Adrienne Mayor channels her subject and unlocks the key to the Man, the Mith, the Legend.

“The gift of nature that I would like to have is: I am already blessed by Nature, with a magnificent physique and superb athletic prowess!”

Nice timing leading up to the April paperback release but hey, Mithradates? Would a little bit of modesty kill you?

Then again, this royal coinage shows off some luscious locks so maybe Nature really did spend a little more time crafting the king…

Here is the definitive new edition of the hugely popular collection of Einstein quotations that has sold tens of thousands of copies worldwide and been translated into twenty-five languages.

The Ultimate Quotable Einstein features 400 additional quotes, bringing the total to roughly 1,600 in all. This ultimate edition includes new sections–”On and to Children,” “On Race and Prejudice,” and “Einstein’s Verses: A Small Selection”–as well as a chronology of Einstein’s life and accomplishments, Freeman Dyson’s authoritative foreword, and new commentary by Alice Calaprice.

In The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, readers will also find quotes by others about Einstein along with quotes attributed to him. Every quotation in this informative and entertaining collection is fully documented, and Calaprice has carefully selected new photographs and cartoons to introduce each section.

We invite you to take a look at chapter one online:
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9268.pdf