Last August, I ordered a used book from a bookseller in the United Kingdom:  John H. Gleason’s 1950 study, The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain.  I knew I would need the book for my chapter on the Crimean War and the idea of “Western Civilization,” but I wasn’t ready to turn to it yet. Now, instead of turning to this topic, the topic is turning to me, to all of us, thanks to current events. “Current events,” it just now occurs to me, is a sort of exasperated rhetorical handwaving gesture historians make about the right-now, the one-damn-thing-after-another in Read more