As a colleague of mine has recently written, a term that was slanderous a mere decade ago—empire—has now become a cliché in discussing the United States. Indeed,

They fight death and all its elements
While smiling

O how I suffer from the long nights
Witnessing those motherless divers
Every time a month passes by, another follows
Until the eyes grow old.

Oh, how lucky are the rich
Who no longer cross the ocean as me.

And again:
If I was rich and a merchant
I would never have endeavored
But I'm weak and all I have
Is my cane.

In late October 1999 I visited the third annual Syrian National Documentation Festival in the Damascus fairgrounds. Syrian ministry employees and Ba'th Party officials have organized the ten-day long annual Documentation Festival since the mid-1990s. Its stated purpose is to preserve and celebrate the heritage of the nation. In 1999 the exhibition was separated into four large halls devoted to different documents and art. The most prominent hall was devoted to heroic paintings, photos, and videotaped speeches of then Syrian President Hafiz al-Asad. Other halls were devoted to popular art, family, local, and municipal histories and documents, and selections from the archives of various departments and ministries. The final hall contained the ministry of education, ministry of antiquities, including the national archives, the ministry of the interior including the departments of awqâf (sing, waqf), Damascus municipal police, and the ministry of agriculture.

Many American scholars work in Cairo these days. For this reason, we pay more attention to Egyptian history-writing, to the situation of the archives as well as to newly discovered textual sources. I have compiled here a few notes along these lines.

Published in late 2004, Mashayna khatti-sirah dhatiyah [Going My Way], (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 336 pp.), is an unusual work by the well-known Egyptian historian Raouf Abbas, which sold several thousand copies in days and elicited a number of reviews. The wide interest in this autobiographical work doubtless lies in the controversial subjects it raises and the names it names.

The 2005 Western Consortium Multi-Language Conference was hosted by the University of Arizona Center for Middle Eastern Studies. The theme and focus of this year conference proceedings was titled, hat Works in the Language Classroom. The conference thus aimed to bring together teachers and scholars of Middle Eastern languages in order to elucidate relevant pedagogical trends and techniques in the field of language instruction. Moreover, the conference served as a valuable venue for the exchange of pedagogically grounded scholarly material that provided for demonstrated classroom application. Conference participants and session presenters represented a diversity of institutions from around the country. The following provides a brief summary of the featured conference presentations and participant reactions.