Here's a list of over two dozen tenured associate and full professors of history who are blogging. If you know others, please mention them in comments.**

Jonathan Bean, Southern Illinois University, Liberty & Power
David Beito, University of Alabama, Liberty & Power
Timothy Burke, Swarthmore, Easily Distracted
Juan Cole, University of Michigan, Informed Comment
Stephen Davies, Manchester Metropolitan University, Liberty & Power Sherman Dorn, University of South Florida, Sherman Dorn

Mark Grimsley, Ohio State, Blog Them Out of the Stone Age
Alonzo Hamby, Ohio University, POTUS
Joan Hoff, Montana State University, POTUS
KC Johnson, Brooklyn College, Cliopatria
Jeffrey Kimball, Miami University, POTUS
Stanley Kutler*, University of Wisconsin, POTUS

Mark LeVine, University of California, Irvine, Mark A. LeVine
Allan Lichtman, American University, POTUS
Dale B. Light*, Pennsylvania State University, Light Seeking Light
Deborah E. Lipstadt, Emory University, History on Trial
William Marina, Florida Atlantic University, Liberty & Power

Timothy Naftali, University of Virginia, POTUS
James Oakes, CUNY, The Graduate Center, Left2Right
Paula Petrik, George Mason University, History Talk
Thomas C. Reeves*, University of Wisconsin, Parkside, Thomas C. Reeves
Greg Robinson, University of Quebec, Montreal, Cliopatria
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.*, NYU, Huffington Post
Hugo Schwyzer, Pasadena Community College, Hugo Schwyzer
Melvin Small, Wayne State University, POTUS

Gil Troy, McGill University, POTUS
Ted Widmer, Washington College, POTUS
Jon Wiener, University of California, Irvine, Jon Wiener
Lawrence S. Wittner, SUNY, Albany, POTUS
Julian E. Zelizer, Boston University, POTUS

*emeritus
**At least one of my colleagues at Cliopatria may have been recently tenured and promoted to associate professor. I don't mean to ignore you. Just let me know and I'll add your name to the list.

In addition to these, there are history bloggers who may be tenured as associate or full professors, but who choose to blog pseudonymously.

The Bradford case, in its most basic form, really isn’t about tenure. At its heart is an academic mystery: this past spring, why did 5 of the 15 members of the IU Law’s personnel committee have voted against Bradford’s reappointment—in effect demanding his immediate dismissal? Bradford’s record of scholarly publication is extraordinarily good. His teaching has been prize-winning. And, as Slater reaffirmed, IU-Indianapolis Law doesn’t use collegiality as a criterion. So, what criteria did the Bradford Five employ? Several months into the controversy, the university still hasn’t offered anything approaching a plausible explanation.

The identities of two members of the anti-Bradford coalition are publicly known. Bradford has contended that his relations with Professor Florence Roisman deteriorated when he refused to sign a statement prepared by Roisman defending Ward Churchill, and has claimed that Roisman retaliated by opposing his reappointment. Roisman has termed the allegation"deeply offensive and outrageous," since she is “devoted to the principle of academic freedom." Indeed, she publicly informed Bradford, “My conviction that you are not deserving of or likely to earn tenure here is not based on any political views you may hold, and I have made that clear in every statement I have made on the subject.” As she has refused to discuss her reasons for opposing Bradford, however, these denials ring hollow. Nor can Roisman hide behind the wall of confidentiality of the personnel process, since she has publicly admitted that she voted against Bradford's reappontment. (This admission alone would seem to me to violate the university's personnel policies.) Apparently Roisman wants to invoke confidentiality only when she lacks an explanation that will be publicly defensible.

Moreover, it has recently come to light that Roisman supported the tenure bid of a candidate who differed with Bradford not in scholarly credentials but in gender and ideology. Could it be, then, that Roisman’s definition of “the principle of academic freedom” is flexible enough to allow her to base votes on gender or ideology rather than a candidate’s credentials? To quote from one of her students (who described her as a fine teacher), “Prof. Roisman is not always a model for diversity. It is true that adhering to a principled position is acceptable and encouraged. But Roisman arguably takes it to another level by advocating her extreme positions at the expense of dissent.”

Ideology seems to be a secondary explanation for the vote of Professor Mary Harter Mitchell, whose credentials recall the adage that second-class departments make third-class hires. Indeed, departments risk future personnel difficulties when they bring on board even one mediocre member, lest the mediocre work feverishly to ensure that their colleagues are even weaker than they are. Since Mitchell ceased functioning as an active scholar two decades ago, it’s not hard to see why she viewed Bradford as a threat. Even before she stopped publishing, her production was so meager as to raise questions about the criteria the law school used to hire her in the first place. Amazingly, however, even though her last legal article came in 1987 and she has produced only one book (under 200 pages, published by a press called ”The Foundation”), Mitchell was recently awarded an endowed chair financed by Finish Line founder Alan H. Cohen.

The university’s response to the matter has intensified the crisis. For much of the summer, IU Law officials relied on procedural arguments, essentially hoping to obscure the issue. They alleged first that Bradford wasn’t eligible for tenure, then that he had failed to apply for tenure, and finally that he had improperly applied for tenure. The university chancellor recently conceded, however, that each of these procedural elements was wrong: that Bradford was eligible to apply for tenure and that he had properly filed his application.

Currently, the University has moved in a different direction. Roisman and Mitchell have filed an “ethics” allegation against Bradford, and the University’s vice chancellor has convened a special committee to investigate. Bradford, quite properly, has refused to cooperate with what is little more than a kangaroo court.

I've heard that both Fox News and the Chronicle are going to be covering this case, so I doubt we've heard the last of it.

I was very sorry to read this article in the morning's LA Times: Turkish Court Cancels Meeting to Discuss Armenian Massacre.

A court Thursday ordered the cancellation of a conference where Turkish academics were expected to challenge the official version of the events surrounding the mass deaths among this nation's Armenians during and after World War I.

For almost a century, the Turkish government has denied that more than a million Armenians were victims of a systematic genocide between 1915-1922. But the wall of denial has shown recent signs of cracking. Famed Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk is quoted by the Times as recently saying "1 million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in these lands but no one but me dares say so." For his candor, Pamuk was arrested and charged with "insulting Turkey's national dignity."

Turkish ultra-nationalists are unwilling to allow discussion of the Armenian Genocide, even when silencing that discussion seems very likely to threaten Turkey's case for admission to the European Union.  It's a bit difficult, after all, to imagine admitting a country that jails authors for "insulting national dignity" into the same union that includes the great liberal and tolerant democracies of Western Europe.  But even though a growing number of Turks seem eager to confront the past and openly discuss what was done to more than a million of their neighbors, powerful elements in the country are willing to jeopardize EU membership in order to maintain the fiction of national innocence.

I have a particular concern for this issue because I teach at Pasadena City College, where perhaps 20% of the student body is of Armenian descent.  The larger Glendale-Pasadena area of Los Angeles has the largest concentration of Armenians in the Western Hemisphere, and they play a vital role in local politics and public life.   Years ago, when I first began teaching my Modern Europe courses at PCC, I never mentioned the Armenian Genocide during my lectures on the First World War.  One after another, semester after semester, Armenian-American students asked me to begin to cover it.  At first I resisted, with the excuse that the tragedy didn't technically take place in Europe.  But I began to read more and more material in response to their requests, and became convinced that for both moral and historical reasons, the narrative of what happened in 1915 had to be included. 

True confession: what really pushed me "over the top" was something less laudatory: in early 1997, I briefly dated a young Armenian-American woman who asked if I ever taught the subject of the genocide in my classes.  When I said "no", she lectured me over sushi for half an hour.  Her charm and her passion helped push me along considerably!  (This was before the moment, mind you, when she told me that our "relationship" wouldn't go anywhere because she could only be "serious" about an Armenian fellow.)

In the years since I began regularly including a segment on the Armenian Genocide (just as I include a segment on the Holocaust), I've had dozens of students come up to me and thank me, often with tears in their eyes, for giving legitimacy to a story they've heard over and over again from their parents and grandparents.  I hear the same refrain each time:  "We've never heard this from someone who wasn't Armenian.  Thank you for noticing, thank you for recognizing that this is important enough to teach."  I'll admit that the gratitude of these students is a considerable encouragement to continue to lecture on the subject, and it has spurred me to expand the amount of time I devote to it.

My father, a Viennese-born war refugee, has received several thousand dollars in compensation over the years from the Austrian government.  Austria and Germany have each accepted responsibility for the destruction of so many millions of Jews.  Compensation, however inadequate, has been paid; the truth has been acknowledged; profound remorse has been expressed.  I know how important this is.  That sense of remorse on the part of the government is one of the things that allows my family to have such generally warm feelings about Austria and Austrians, despite what happened in the 1930s and 40s.  But my Armenian friends have received nothing from Turkey.  No compensation, no remorse, no acknowledgment that what was done to their ancestors was real and inexcusable.  I had hoped, especially after Pamuk's brave declaration, that Turkey might be ready to face the truth.  I had hoped that if nothing else, the carrot of European integration might be sufficient cause to rethink the policy of denial that has characterized the Turkish response for generations.  Yesterday's court decision suggests that I -- and others -- have been too optimistic.

Ken Heineman, whose book, God is a Conservative: Religion, Politics, and Morality in Contemporary America (New York University Press), appears in a new paperback edition this fall;
KC Johnson, whose book, Congress and the Cold War (Cambridge University Press), will be published this fall; and
Jonathan Reynolds, whose book with Erik Gilbert, Trading Tastes: Commodity and Cultural Exchange To 1750 (Prentice Hall) has just been published.

Historians Proliferate! Congratulations to:

Russell Arben and Melissa Fox. Russell recently moved to Western Illinois University and Mrs. Fox is on schedule to give birth to a fourth little Fox in about six months. He'll keep us posted on all that at In Medias Res.
Richard and Leanne Bailey who are expecting a little Bailey in about six months. Richard is teaching at Indiana University, Southeast, while he finishes his dissertation at the University of Kentucky. He keeps us posted about that at Etcetera Whatever, but if you want to keep up on the little one, try Baby Bailey's Blog: A Nine Month Odyssey.

Sex: Louis Menand,"Stand By Your Man: The Strange Liaison of Sartre and Beauvoir," New Yorker, 19 September, examines the complicated sexual lives of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. This is fairly sordid stuff, exploitation parading itself as liberation. There's no question but that Sartre and Beauvoir exploited many other people. The question, says Menand, is whether Sartre exploited Beauvoir or the reverse. In any case, their exploitations became the essence of their own relationship. Scott McLemee's"Things Done in Secret," Inside Higher Ed, 22 September, reviews a new book about Harvard's star chamber proceedings against gay students in the 1920s.

What's in a Name? Stonewall Jackson & the Death of God: Almost forty years ago, Thomas Jonathan Jackson Altizer's"death of God" theology was headline news around the country. He didn't intend it that way, but briefly, in a moment that seemed near apocalyptic for lots of other reasons, as well, the"death of God" stood as shorthand for the death of many things: illusions about domestic reform and international ventures, hope for newly established third world countries, belief in the essential innocense of American influence in the world. All of those memories came flooding back when I read Brad Johnson's"A Theological Memoir" at The Weblog. The Weblog also scored a post by Altizer, himself.

But Johnson's post took me to T. J. J. Altizer's"Living the Death of God: A Theological Memoir." As often as I'd seen his name, it had never occurred to me that Altizer was named for Stonewall Jackson. The Southern family, an alcoholic father, a domineering mother, a seminary diagnosis of mental illness – it rang lots of bells. But he's named for Stonewall Jackson. I've often wondered about people and their namesakes. Would we still think about Martin Luther King in quite the same way if he had retained his original name, Michael King? Or does being Martin Luther King lend the presumption of"here I stand" in our heads? Or, take another example: Huey P. Newton. It never occurred to me that Newton was a namesake until I learned that he was born in Louisiana and, after making the connection with Huey P. Long, I've never thought about Newton in quite the same way: another Southern demagogue, but now dressed in black and translated to the West Coast. It's an odd permutation.

I suspect that Altizer wouldn't put much stock in being a namesake. For most of his career, he used only the initials and undiscerning people like me saw nothing in them. I really need Mark Grimsley's help here, but I've read enough memoirs of the period to know that, for many Southerners, the death of Stonewall Jackson was the death of Confederate hope. And the tragic realization was that his own men had killed him."God is dead," said Nietzsche."God remains dead. And we have killed him."

The"masterpiece" at issue is: Beito, Johnson, and Luker,"Consulting All Sides on ‘Speech Codes'," OAH Newsletter, 33 (May 2005): 11. The article appealed to our fellow historians to recognize that there are threats to freedom of speech and inquiry that come from both the right and the left and argued for an alliance across the ideological spectrum against all of those threats. It began and concluded with the threat to Ward Churchill's freedom of speech at the University of Colorado. In between, it cited three instances of threats to freedom of speech by the left against academic conservatives. [ ... ]

According to Ingersoll,"bad history" occurs when the historian challenges threats to conservative speech. Nowhere does Ingersoll challenge Beito, Johnson, and Luker on the facts of the three cases nor does he mention our defense of Ward Churchill's free speech rights. We have published"bad history," says Ingersoll, because we have construed politically correct speech codes as a threat to the free speech rights of conservatives. Speech on campus must be less free than it is"on the street corner," he argues, because offensive speech cannot be tolerated in the academy.

That -- not our ‘bad history' -- is the nub of the matter in Ingersoll's letter. His history is"bad" because he leaves out facts inconvenient to his argument. He ignores our defense of Ward Churchill's free speech rights. Ingersoll is wrong, not just because his history is blindered by ideology, but because, if we are to be free, we must be prepared to be offended occasionally by other people's speech. Do I believe that hurtful words like"nigger,""bitch," and"faggot," must be tolerated in campus speech? Yes, I do. I believe that decent people will not use offensive language and that self-respecting people may choose to shun those who use them, but I do not believe that speech on campus should be any less free than it is elsewhere in the world.

I believe that, despite the fact that I've been offended against by other people's speech many times and to serious material consequence. Despite having been shot at, fire-bombed, and jailed in the civil rights movement, I've been called a"racist" in the midst of a tenure review. In the midst of tenure reviews, I've been called both a"homophobe" and"a homosexual." For good or ill, I'm not nearly such a complex, conflicted, and interesting character."Classist,""sexist,""elitist" – all those words of politically correct abuse have been thrown at me to damage my career. To this day, I'd defend the right of my critics to speak their minds and my own right to defend myself against the worst of their charges. I'd defend Professor Ingersoll's right to publish accusations that I have published"bad history." As with others of my critics, one reason for defending his speech and publication rights is that he publishes evidence that refutes his own argument. He publishes his own"bad history."

"Race, class, and gender" is the mantra of the academic class, says Scott McLemee, but class is definitely the junior partner. Critical reflection on our own social status as an academic class is even more rare. But, in"Class Dismissed," Inside Higher Ed, 20 September, McLemee offers up a well annotated bibliography.

David Shribman,"How Will History Rate the President?" Toledo Blade, 18 September, is a thoughtful and mildly surprising comparison of the results of Jim Lindgren's recent survey of the opinions of 130 scholars with the findings of Arthur Schlesinger in 1948.

In"Soft-Peddling the Internment" at Orcinus, David Neiwart shows the damage done on the Right by Michelle Malkin's apologia for Japanese internment during World War II. But Eric Muller,"Michelle Malkin's Ever-Shrinking Defense of Racial Internment," Is That Legal? 19 September, shows that Malkin's response to Greg Robinson's discovery of the McCloy Memo is evidence that she has less and less room for maneuver. Give it up, Michelle!

In"Let Them Eat Wireless," Rob MacDougall tells a grim tale. In mid-July, he and Mrs. Mac moved to London, Ontario, where he's teaching at the University of Western Ontario. So, it's two months later and despite" competition," the MacDougalls are still awaiting a land-line telephone installation. The lackluster telephonicians must not know who they're messing with. He's publishing the history of their ass. [ ... ]

Prompted by a reading of Barbara Ehrenreich's Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passion of War, Natalie Bennett reflects on the causes of war at Philobiblion. Thanks to Jon Dresner for the tip.

Joyce Jun'r posted about it six months ago, but I thought you'd want to know that the cremated remains of Nicolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are kept in the Rare Book Room of the Boston Public Library. Somewhere on the net, surely, someone is maintaining lists of the odd things early agreements oblige special collections to maintain.

Michelle Malkin responds to Greg Robinson's discovery of the McCloy memo on Japanese internment during World War II.

Arthur Schlesinger,"Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr," New York Times, 18 September, argues that both the contemporary secular left and the contemporary religious right have much to learn from Reinhold Niebuhr, 20th century America's greatest social ethicist. My former student, Michael Baxter, offers an interesting companion piece in a critical evaluation of the legacy of Niebuhr's Catholic contemporary, John Courtney Murray.

Paul Kennedy,"America Agonistes," Washington Post, 18 September, reviews James T. Patterson's Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore, the latest volume in"The Oxford History of the United States" series.

Niall Ferguson,"Peace is Spreading: The Troubling Thing is, We Don't Really Know Why," The Telegraph, 18 September, argues that the world is more peaceful in 2005 than it was a generation ago and that we don't really know why, but maybe it's because local people are fed up with the violence. Thanks to Richard Jensen's Conservativenet for the tip.