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An article in The New York Times late last year discussed the reaction in the field of history to Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, 1945-1953, a book written by Arnold Offner, Cornelia F. Hugel Professor of History.
“No recent book has stirred up the world of Truman devotees and cold war scholars quite like Arnold Offner’s ‘Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War: 1945-1953,’ published by Stanford University Press,” notes the Dec. 21 Think Tank column by Christopher Shea. “Professor Offner, of Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, who labored nearly 20 years on the book, is an unapologetic revisionist. For instance, he argues that the Marshall Plan, the hugely ambitious attempt to reconstruct Western Europe, actually caused the Soviet Union to clamp down on Eastern Europe – and that without it, Stalin might have granted those states a degree of autonomyAs a president, Offner argues, Truman was a ‘parochial nationalist,’ who ‘narrowed rather than broadened the options that he presented to the American citizenry.”
As the article notes, “discussions of the book have resurrected timeworn divisions in the field of cold war history.”
Today’s issue of The Morning Call included a review of “The Elegba Principle,” an exhibition in the Grossman Gallery of the Williams Visual Arts Building. “In the center are 18 groups of four swiveling doors, each marked with a charged or fairly neutral phrase. On the perimeter are 44 leaning doors marked with a word or phrase signifying desire or fear. Most of these were chosen by students of Grossman director Jim Toia, who leads Lafayette’s community-based teaching program and, in his spare time, turns tree mushrooms into sculptural books…‘The Elegba Principle’ prompts a pair of profound thoughts. One is that doors are portals to expression. The other is that so many trees have died to hide our sins.”
The Dec. 20 issue of The Morning Call reported on the selection of the Williams Visual Arts Building for the silver medal by the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Institute of Architects — the highest honor given by the group to recognize excellence in design.
The contract extensions for football coach Frank Tavani and his counterpart at Rutgers University were the focus of Ed Laubach’s Sideline Slants column in the newspaper’s Dec. 22 issue. “You can’t argue with Lafayette locking up Frank Tavani through 2007 after the transformation that has taken place on College HillThe Leopards, picked to finish seventh this year in the league’s annual preseason poll, went a surprising 7-5 and finished third in the league, losing only to co-champions Colgate and Fordham.”