Jim is in Boston, on his school's annual 10th grade swing through New England: the Mashantucket Pequot Museum in Connecticut, memorial sites in Salem and the battlefield at Concord Massachusetts, as well as the Hub (with a detour to Charlestown to see the Bunker Hill Memorial). His big news, however, is editorial: his ongoing project on actors as historians -- early draft segments of which have been appearing on this blog -- has been accepted for publication by Oxford University Press. (It's had a working title of "Sensing the Past: Hollywood Actors as Historians," but discussions are underway to come up with a zippier title; right now "The Arc of American History: What Movie Stars Tell Us About Ourselves" is in contention.) The hope is to have the book out by the end of 2012, in time to coincide with the release of the forthcoming Steven Spielberg/Abe Lincoln movie Team of Rivals, based on the Doris Kearns Goodwin book and starring Daniel Day-Lewis (one of the subjects of the work-in-progress). More on this as the date approaches.

Stay tuned for further developments. In the meantime, draft segments on the final case study, Meryl Streep, will be running in the coming weeks.