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This page includes, in addition to news about historians, news about political scientists, economists, law professors, and others who write about history.

Monday, August 30, 2010

Obit: Historian John Russell-Wood

Source: JHU Gazette (8-30-10)

Anthony John R. Russell-Wood, the Herbert Baxter Adams Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University and a widely published expert in the history and culture of pre-Columbian and colonial Latin America, died Aug. 13 at his Lutherville home after a brief illness.

A faculty member at Johns Hopkins since 1971, Russell-Wood, 70, was a prolific author and one of the world’s foremost historians of Brazil and the Portuguese seaborne empire.

Friday, August 27, 2010

Pressure mounts for 'Sheriff' Elizabeth Warren, says Zelizer

Source: CNN.com (8-26-10)

Pressure continues to mount on President Obama to select Elizabeth Warren as the nation's first consumer financial protection regulator.

Warren, 61, has become something of a cause célèbre as the administration's top pick to run the new agency charged with protecting consumers from abusive mortgage and credit card practices....

"The administration is hesitating because they're faced with the traditional problem that Obama has faced," said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University.

If the White House passes Warren over, Zelizer says, they disappoint liberals whose support has been key throughout the administration. If Warren gets the nod, the White House must deal with "political difficulties on Capitol Hill where centrists have quite a lot of power and Republicans are becoming quite obstinate," Zelizer said.

Warren teaches contract and bankruptcy law as a Harvard University professor and she's also written a number of personal finance books. More publicly, she chairs a congressional oversight panel that has garnered attention for its critical reviews of government spending to bail out Wall Street banks under the Troubled Asset Relief Program....

Posted on Friday, August 27, 2010 at 1:28 PM | Comments (0) | Top

David Weber, Southwest Expert, Dies at 69

Source: NYT (8-27-10)

David J. Weber, whose groundbreaking works on the American Southwest under Spain and Mexico opened new territory for historians, died on Aug. 20 in Gallup, N.M. He was 69 and lived in Dallas and Ramah, N.M.

The cause was complications from multiple myeloma, said his wife, Carol.

When Mr. Weber began writing about the history of the borderlands between present-day Mexico and the United States, the subject was regarded as a backwater.

“United States historians saw the field as part of Latin American history and ignored it,” he wrote in a 2005 essay. “Latin American historians regarded it as belonging to the history of the United States, and likewise gave it short shrift.”

In “The Spanish Frontier in North America” (1992), his most important book, Mr. Weber presented a complex picture of cultural, political and military interaction among the Spanish, the indigenous Indian populations and Anglo settlers, and explored the roots of a Hispanic legacy that defines the American Southwest today. In the process he dismantled the so-called Black Legend, the entrenched myth of Spain as a uniquely rapacious power, bent solely on conquest and plunder....

Posted on Friday, August 27, 2010 at 11:37 AM | Comments (1) | Top

Franz Schurmann, Cold War Expert on China, Dies at 84

Source: NYT (8-26-10)

Franz Schurmann, an expert on China during the cold war and a globe-trotting professor who helped found the Pacific News Service, a provider of news and commentary about Asia, died on Aug. 20 at his home in San Francisco. He was 84. The cause was complications of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, his wife, Sandy Close, said.

Mr. Schurmann, who was fluent in as many as 12 languages and read a variety of foreign papers daily, taught history and sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, for nearly four decades. But his life was far more adventurous than that sounds, and he referred to himself not as an academic but as an explorer-journalist.

The son of working-class immigrants, he developed early on the charisma and intellectual heft to attract famous and powerful company. He spent graduate school summers with the family of the German expatriate playwright Bertolt Brecht, whose son Stefan he had met in the Army. At Brecht’s Southern California dinner table he encountered Thomas Mann and other German intellectuals in exile.

An opponent of the Vietnam War and a founder of the Berkeley Faculty Peace Committee in 1964, he toured Hanoi with the writer Mary McCarthy in 1968. An inveterate traveler, especially in Asia but also in Russia and other parts of Europe, he became used to drawing conclusions more from firsthand observations than from secondhand accounts by scholars and journalists....

Posted on Friday, August 27, 2010 at 11:36 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Bath historian finds diaries of woman who nursed Nelson

Source: BBC News (8-24-10)

A Bath historian is hoping to give an admiral's wife - who tended to a wounded Lord Nelson - "her rightful place in history".

Dr Elaine Chalus has won a major research grant of more than £100,000 to investigate diaries kept by Elizabeth Wynne....

Dr Chalus will use her funding from the British Academy to bring to light more than 40 volumes of Elizabeth's diaries, most of which have never been published....

Posted on Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 3:08 PM | Comments (0) | Top

John B. Judis: Defending ‘The Unnecessary Fall of Barack Obama’

Source: John B. Judis in The New Republic (8-25-10)

[John B. Judis is a senior editor of The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.]

In the week since my story on “the unnecessary fall of Barack Obama” came out, I have been accused of being “hysterical” and “ahistorical,” of glorifying Ronald Reagan, of “moving away from” my “previously clear-eyed stance on the primary source of Obama's troubles,” and of relying on the same “white-working-class Theory of Everything” I have been “peddling … ever since summer 2008.” And that’s just in public. Privately, the criticism has been far more withering and has included words far too incendiary to print in a family magazine. But I’ve spent a lot of time considering some of the (quite thought-provoking and reasonable) counter-arguments to my piece, and I’d like to take the opportunity to respond to them here.

1. You shouldn’t be encouraging populism. Or you are wrong to make populism the answer or the main answer to Obama’s political difficulties.

I don’t consider myself a “populist.” I am much more of a Herbert Croly-progressive with a touch of elitism. I wasn’t arguing for populism as a political ideal, but as the means by which Obama could have more plausibly achieved objectives that he, and I, and many Americans share: a return to a buoyant prosperity, a narrowing of inequality, and the reinforcement of the social safety net. To achieve these during the present severe downturn requires strong political majorities. And to get those, Obama—or any president—has to frame his appeal in populist terms.

I am not making the ridiculous assertion that populism is “hardwired” into the American brain. But in the course of American history, certain conceptions—or worldviews—have been passed from generation to generation, and insofar as they have not been repeatedly contradicted by events, have endured. One of these, for instance, is what historian Ernest Tuveson called the idea of America as the “redeemer nation.” When Americans have had to make hard foreign policy choices, the politicians have invariably appealed to America’s role as world savior. Another is Thomas Paine’s idea of government as a “necessary evil,” which invariably pops up as an explanation for our economic ills. Populism—as a defense of the embattled middle class—is a similarly enduring worldview. Populist arguments don’t always carry the day, but during domestic crises, they will be heard, and politicians ignore them at their peril.

Mike Kazin, who wrote the definitive book on populist rhetoric, suggests that I am exaggerating the role of populism in Franklin Roosevelt’s success in his first two years. I disagree with Mike on this point. One can compare what Roosevelt said and did in his first months with what Obama said and did....

Forever Young: Staughton Lynd at 80

Source: Center for Labor Renewal (8-25-10)

Suddenly Staughton Lynd is all the rage. Again. In the last 18 months, Lynd has published two new books, a third that's a reprint of an earlier work, plus a memoir co-authored with his wife Alice. In addition, a portrait of his life as an activist through 1970 by Carl Mirra of Adelphi University has been published, with another book about his work after 1970 by Mark Weber of Kent State University due soon.

In an epoch of imperial hubris and corporate class warfare on steroids, the release of these books could hardly have come at a better time. Soldier, coal miner, Sixties veteran, recent graduate – there's much to be gained by one and all from a study of Lynd's life and work. In so doing, it's remarkable to discover how frequently he was in the right place at the right time and, more importantly, on the right side.

Forty-six years ago, during the tumultuous summer of 1964, Lynd was invited to coordinate the Freedom Schools established in Mississippi by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The schools were an integral part of the Herculean effort to end apartheid in the United States and became models for alternative schools everywhere....

Posted on Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 1:49 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Historian uses ancient maps to block ramblers

Source: Telegraph (UK) (8-24-10)

Bryan McNerney, who presented several successful history series on ITV, has been accused of blocking a footpath through the grounds of his country home.

But the 57-year-old insists that a mistake by a map maker half a century ago wrongly showed the right of way through the property - ironically called "Garden of Eden".

Mr McNerney and his wife Cate, a nurse, bought the property set in wooded grounds in the village of Banham, near Attlebrough, Norfolk, three years ago.

He said:"I am not being a Nimby but if the council had originally said there was a public footpath through our garden I would have accepted it.

"But the plotted path is incorrect because it shows the route running through a 300-year-old hedgerow and a steep escarpment.

"We have pored over ancient maps and talked to many locals and it is clear that the public right of way never ran through our garden."...

Posted on Tuesday, August 24, 2010 at 7:26 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Historian and China expert Franz Schurmann dies

Source: SF Chronicle (8-23-10)

Franz Schurmann, a sociologist and historian who was an influential scholar of modern China and a co-founder of Pacific News Service in 1970, died Friday at his San Francisco home of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, his family said. He was 84.

Mr. Schurmann taught at UC Berkeley for 38 years and headed its Center for Chinese Studies. He spoke a dozen languages and wrote more than a half dozen books on China and U.S. foreign policy. His writings early in the Cold War accurately predicted the political rift between China and the Soviet Union....

Posted on Tuesday, August 24, 2010 at 5:52 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Income inequality may contribute to financial crises, says Harvard economic historian

Source: NYT (8-21-10)

David A. Moss, an economic and policy historian at the Harvard Business School, has spent years studying income inequality. While he has long believed that the growing disparity between the rich and poor was harmful to the people on the bottom, he says he hadn’t seen the risks to the world of finance, where many of the richest earn their great fortunes.

Now, as he studies the financial crisis of 2008, Mr. Moss says that even Wall Street may have something serious to fear from inequality — namely, another crisis.

The possible connection between economic inequality and financial crises came to Mr. Moss about a year ago, when he was at his research center in Cambridge, Mass. A colleague suggested that he overlay two different graphs — one plotting financial regulation and bank failures, and the other charting trends in income inequality.

Mr. Moss says he was surprised by what he saw. The timelines danced in sync with each other. Income disparities between rich and poor widened as government regulations eased and bank failures rose.

“I could hardly believe how tight the fit was — it was a stunning correlation,” he said. “And it began to raise the question of whether there are causal links between financial deregulation, economic inequality and instability in the financial sector. Are all of these things connected?”

Professor Moss is among a small group of economists, sociologists and legal scholars who are now trying to discover if income inequality contributes to financial crises. They have a new data point, of course, in the recent banking crisis, but there is only one parallel in the United States — the 1929 market crash....

Posted on Tuesday, August 24, 2010 at 4:47 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Red Menace: David Gentilcore Talks the Tasty History of the Tomato

Source: Boston Globe (8-15-10)

August in New England is the height of tomato season, when fat red beefsteaks, purple and green heirlooms, and tiny, sweet Sungolds beckon at the farmers market. They’re wonderful in crisp salads, as refreshing gazpachos, and all on their own. Perhaps most of all, tomatoes are synonymous with Italian cuisine.

Without the tomato, pizza would be bread and cheese, spaghetti would seem naked. The North End without red sauce? Impossible. But the tomato’s role in Italian food is fairly recent, according to David Gentilcore, a professor of early modern history at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom.

In his new book, “Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato in Italy,” Gentilcore traces the tomato from its origins in the New World, where it was domesticated by the Maya, then cultivated by the Aztecs. It likely entered Europe via Spain, after conquistador Hernan Cortes’s conquest of Mexico. When it arrived on the scene in Italy, it was strictly a curiosity for those who studied plants — not something anyone faint of heart would consider eating. In 1628, Paduan physician Giovanni Domenico Sala called tomatoes “strange and horrible things” in a discussion that included the consumption of locusts, crickets, and worms. When people ate tomatoes, it was as a novelty. “People were curious about new foods, the way gourmets are today with new combinations and new uses of high technology in preparation,” Gentilcore said. Yesterday’s tomato is today’s molecular gastronomy....

IDEAS: When did the tomato become an integral part of Italy’s cuisine?

GENTILCORE: You can’t imagine Italian food without it. And yet most of these dishes, such as pasta al pomodoro, are fairly recent — from the 1870s or ’80s. Italian immigrants arriving in New York City or Boston were the first generation to eat these dishes as daily things. Making a rich meat sauce with maybe the addition of tomato paste, that Sunday gravy style, is something that happens only in the 20th century....

Posted on Tuesday, August 24, 2010 at 4:09 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Daniel J. Flynn: An FBI History of Howard Zinn

Source: City Journal (8-19-10)

[Daniel J. Flynn, author of A Conservative History of the American Left, blogs at www.flynnfiles.com.]

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, as Joseph Stalin entered the final years of his reign of terror in the Soviet Union, twentysomething Howard Zinn served as a foot soldier in the Communist Party of the United States of America—this according to recently declassified FBI files. Zinn, the Marxist historian and progressive hero who died in January, may also have lied to the FBI about his Communist Party membership. Is it at all surprising that someone who got history so wrong stood on the wrong side of history?

Zinn’s partisans will no doubt jeer at much of what the FBI files reveal. Who cares if Zinn marched in a May Day parade or if his wife subscribed to The Daily Worker? Other allegations are more serious but vague. One declassified report notes: “Information received on 6/12/53, indicated that the subject was possibly in contact with persons operating in the Communist Party underground.” What information, derived from whom? Was Zinn “possibly” involved with spies or really involved with spies? What kind of “contact”? Who in “the Communist Party underground”? And for some, the identity of the accusers vindicates the accused. J. Edgar Hoover’s personally ordering an investigation of Zinn on March 30, 1949; FBI associate director Clyde Tolson’s ominously asking, “What do our files show on Zinn?”; and FBI spooks’ surveillance of Zinn’s home—these stand as badges of honor in some circles, most notably the ones in which Zinn operated.

But amid charges innocuous and amorphous are specific allegations by numerous eyewitnesses that Howard Zinn was indeed a Communist Party member. After interviewing Zinn on November 6, 1953 and again on February 9, 1954, FBI agents described him as “courteous” and “friendly,” yet willing to part with information only after a repetition of pointed questions. Zinn admitted membership in numerous Communist fronts, including the Americans Veterans Committee and the American Labor Party, which employed Zinn at its headquarters in Brooklyn at a time when Communists controlled it. But he steadfastly denied membership in the Communist Party itself....

Posted on Tuesday, August 24, 2010 at 3:25 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review

Source: NYT (8-23-10)

For professors, publishing in elite journals is an unavoidable part of university life. The grueling process of subjecting work to the up-or-down judgment of credentialed scholarly peers has been a cornerstone of academic culture since at least the mid-20th century.

Now some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work. Instead of relying on a few experts selected by leading publications, they advocate using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience.

“What we’re experiencing now is the most important transformation in our reading and writing tools since the invention of movable type,” said Katherine Rowe, a Renaissance specialist and media historian at Bryn Mawr College. “The way scholarly exchange is moving is radical, and we need to think about what it means for our fields.”...

Just a few years ago these sorts of developments would have been unthinkable, said Dan Cohen, director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. “Serious scholars are asking whether the institutions of the academy — as they have existed for decades, even centuries — aren’t becoming obsolete,” he said....

Advocates of more open reviewing, like Mr. Cohen at George Mason argue that other important scholarly values besides quality control — for example, generating discussion, improving works in progress and sharing information rapidly — are given short shrift under the current system.

“There is an ethical imperative to share information,” said Mr. Cohen, who regularly posts his work online, where he said thousands read it. Engaging people in different disciplines and from outside academia has made his scholarship better, he said.

To Mr. Cohen, the most pressing intellectual issue in the next decade is this tension between the insular, specialized world of expert scholarship and the open and free-wheeling exchange of information on the Web. “And academia,” he said, “is caught in the middle.”

Posted on Tuesday, August 24, 2010 at 12:34 PM | Comments (0) | Top

David Weber, Vice-president of the AHA’s Professional Division, Dies at 69

Source: Debbie Ann Doyle at the AHA Blog (8-23-10)

[Debbie Ann Doyle works with the Professional Division and staffs the Task Force on Disability and the LGBTQ Historians Task Force.]

David J. Weber, historian of the Borderlands, the American West, and Latin America and vice-president of the American Historical Association’s Professional Division, died on Friday, August 20, after a long struggle with multiple myeloma.

Weber was Robert and Nancy Dedman professor of history and founding director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He received his BS from the State University of New York at Fredonia and his MA and PhD from the University of New Mexico. In recognition of his work, he received the Real Orden de Isabel la Católica–the Spanish equivalent of a knighthood–from Juan Carlos, the King of Spain, and the Orden Mexicana del Águila Azteca, (the Order of the Aztec Eagle), the highest award the Mexican government bestows on foreign nationals. His book Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (Yale University Press) received the AHA’s John Edwin Fagg prize in 2006. He was the recipient of numerous other recognitions for his scholarship and teaching.

A dedicated volunteer and good citizen of the profession, Weber served as vice-president of the AHA’s Professional Division (beginning in 2008), and represented the division on the Task Force on Disability and the LGBTQ Historians Task Force. He was active in several other associations and had been an ex officio member of the board of the National History Center, president of the Western History Association, a member of the executive board of the Organization of American Historians, and a member of the general committee of the Conference on Latin American History. He served on numerous editorial boards and prize committees.

A session dedicated to the impact of his work has been scheduled for the AHA annual meeting in Boston. Organized by the Conference on Latin American History’s Borderlands and Frontiers Studies Committee, the session is entitled “David J. Weber and the Borderlands: Past, Present, and Future.” A tribute will also be held at the Western Historical Association’s annual meeting in Lake Tahoe in October.

Though it sounds like a cliché, David can only be described as a truly nice man. His depth of knowledge, and dedication to scholarship, teaching, and the future of the profession will be sorely missed. Plans for a memorial are pending; per the family’s request, memorial contributions can be sent to the Clements Center for Southwest Studies or the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation. Obituaries have been posted on H-Texas and H-West.

Posted on Tuesday, August 24, 2010 at 12:33 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, August 23, 2010

The Root Interview: William Jelani Cobb on Obama and Black Leadership

Source: The Root (8-19-10)

Dr. William Jelani Cobb, one of the country's most visible African-American intellectuals, is an associate professor and chair of the history department at Spelman College in Atlanta. His meditation on the hip-hop aesthetic, To the Break of Dawn, is one of the most important texts on this cultural phenomenon.

In his latest book, The Substance of Hope, Cobb turns his attention to the 2008 election, the political climate preceding the election and his own involvement as a delegate for the state of Georgia. (He blogged for The Root from the Democratic National Convention in 2008.) His training as a historian comes to bear as he asks, What does this all mean? And where do we go from here?

The interview was conducted via Google Chat.

The Root: In The Substance of Hope, you play both historian and participant as a delegate in the 2008 election. How did these distinct roles help shape your book?

William Jelani Cobb: Initially they made it more difficult because I'm accustomed to writing about things that are more static. This was an attempt to place the election into a context in terms of history, and in some ways in terms of irony. But this was also a rapidly changing subject. The result was that I wrote about three-quarters of the book and then threw it all out and started again from scratch. It was much more difficult to decide what story I wanted to tell.

Posted on Monday, August 23, 2010 at 9:11 PM | Comments (0) | Top

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