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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.

Saturday, June 30, 2007

Ted Widmer: Calls on the US to surrender island of Navassa (Navassa?)

Source: Ted Widmer in an Op Ed in the NYT (6-30-07)

[Ted Widmer, the director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, is the author of the forthcoming “Ark of the Liberties: America and the World.”]

IF you sail due south from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, you will eventually come to a tiny tear-shaped island with no beaches, no water and no human beings. Navassa, its enormous limestone cliffs rising straight out of the sea, is the oldest continuous overseas possession of the United States, older than Guantánamo, the Virgin Islands, Hawaii, and Alaska. Older than all of them, Navassa contains American history in microcosm.

Although it came into American possession only 150 years ago, Navassa was first sighted, according to legend, during the second voyage of Columbus in 1493. Thirty miles west of Hispaniola, it was close enough to be noticed but far enough away that its existence was always a bit in doubt. From the beginning it appeared indistinct on maps, a tiny smudge not much bigger than a ladybug on a windshield, in the windward passage between Haiti and Jamaica....

The United States Congress quickly placed the island under American jurisdiction based on the Guano Islands Act of 1856. The act, one of history’s more accurately named pieces of legislation, gave permission to the United States, from the United States, to claim any island in the world rich in bird droppings. Consequently, Navassa became an American “appurtenance” — not quite a territory but still indisputably American.

Except the declaration was disputed by the island’s nearest neighbor, Haiti, which has claimed Navassa since its independence in 1804. Haiti bases its rights on Columbus and on early treaties between France and Spain. But few paid attention, in part because Haiti itself was not recognized by the United States at the time since it was governed by people of African descent....

All that Navassa holds for us is the right — or more specifically, the power — of its possession. Perhaps we should celebrate the sesquicentennial by just giving it back — to Haiti, or an international trust or the state of nature itself. It would be a sublime gesture on behalf of freedom in its simplest state.

Would it not confound our critics to witness an American act of pure altruism? Would it not confound them even more if our oldest possession, the birthplace of American imperialism, became the birthplace of a better way of thinking about the way nations interact?...

Posted on Saturday, June 30, 2007 at 8:59 PM | Comments (1) | Top

James MacGregor Burns & Susan Dunn: Criticize the Supreme Court's School Decision

Source: Letter to the editor of the NYT (6-30-07)

To the Editor:

The Supreme Court’s decision to block the use of race for school integration tragically sets the clock as well as the quest for equality back in time.

If the next president is a Democrat, he or she will try to undo the damage created by the Bush administration, but will be confronted with a reactionary Supreme Court, just as Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the 1930s.

But while a majority of the members of the high court in the ’30s were close to retirement age, the conservative members of the present court will doubtless remain on the bench for 20 to 30 more years.

Roosevelt’s attempt to circumvent the high court with his court-packing plan failed. Perhaps the next president will find a better solution to the problem of an obstructionist Supreme Court.

James MacGregor Burns

Susan Dunn

Williamstown, Mass., June 29, 2007

The writers teach at Williams College and are co-authors of “The Three Roosevelts: Patrician Leaders Who Transformed America.”

Posted on Saturday, June 30, 2007 at 8:57 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, June 29, 2007

Howard Zinn: His publisher rides to his defense

Source: Letter to the editor of the NYT Book Review by Dan Simon. (6-24-07)

[Simon is the publisher of Seven Stories Press. ]

In his review of Howard Zinn's "Young People's History of the United States" (June 17), Walter Kirn misses the point. It isn't just that behind our socalled great leaders are often corporate business interests and other such uninspiring truths of history, but also that there is another unheralded force at work, one that indeed is very inspiring — the history of popular movements and of everyday people doing extraordinary things — and that is largely left out of other history books. Had Kirn chosen to wrestle with that part of Zinn's philosophy, I think it would have been a lot harder for him to paint the author's approach as overwhelmingly negative.

As Zinn writes in his introduction: "We all need heroes, people to admire, to see as examples of how human beings should live. But I prefer to see Bartolomé de Las Casas as a hero, for exposing Columbus's violent behavior against the Indians he encountered in the Bahamas. I prefer to see the Cherokee Indians as heroes, for resisting their removal from the lands on which they lived. … I consider Helen Keller a hero because she protested against President Woodrow Wilson's decision to send young Americans into the slaughterhouse of the First World War. My point of view, which is critical of war, racism and economic injustice, carries over to the situation we face in the United States today. "

Posted on Friday, June 29, 2007 at 8:53 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Ralph Luker: Reveals that Yale law students were behind the petition signed by historians in the school race cases

Source: Ralph Luker at Cliopatria (HNN Blog) (6-29-07)

Our colleague, Chris Bray, passes along a recommendation that you have a look at: Bruce Schneier, "Strong Laws, Smart Tech Can Stop Abusive ‘Data Reuse'," Wired, 28 June. It's a thoughtful piece that grounds its argument in historical experience and warns about the growing problem of a "data shadow, which always follows me around but I can never see." Read the whole thing, as they say.

Mary Dudziak's "Brown as a Cold War Case," Journal of American History, 91 (2004), was cited in Justice Breyer's opinion for the dissenting justices in the school integration decision yesterday. At Legal History Blog, she argues that "Roberts Misreads Brown and its History in Today's School Case." See also: Dahlia Lithwick's "A Supreme Court Conversation," Slate, 28 June.

The 60 of us who signed the historians' amicus brief in Parents Involved in Community Schools v Seattle School District #1, et al. and Crystal D. Meredith, Custodial Parent ... v Jefferson County Board of Education, et al. got an e-mail from Yale Law School student Brian Deese yesterday. I've copied it below the fold. But, first, a word of explanation:

Brian contacted me in late September about filing a brief in the two school integration cases. He and a team of Yale law students were planning such a brief and wanted historical advice and contacts. Quickly, he brought me up to speed on how such things are done. I can say now that John Hope Franklin, Louis Harlan, Dan Carter, Glenda Gilmore, Jim McPherson, Vernon Burton and I did not sit around a table planning the brief. The Yale law students coordinated conversation among 60 historians and other scholars. Then, they drafted and revised versions of the brief. When, however, I wrote about the brief for History News Network last October, Brian and the other Yale law students wanted no mention of their role in creating it. They thought that it carried more weight as the expression of citizen-scholars intent on doing their civic duty. And, after all, it is that. But they also feared that a law clerk at the Court might slip a brief to the bottom of a stack of briefs if he or she suspected that it was the work of Yale law students.

I had my own reservations about the pretense that this was simply the work of "citizen-scholars intent on doing their civic duty." There'd been times in my career when I resented having to do "ghost-writing" for other people. Here, however, I was signing someone else's creation as if it were my own. Finally, I swallowed my qualms. If, after all, I were making an appearance in court, an attorney would be shaping my case. And, here, it was important that legal minds frame the argument for legal minds. What they needed from us was, first, our expertise and, secondly, our reputations as scholars. They had the skill to shape historical knowledge into a legal argument.

With that background, here is Brian Deese's reading of yesterday's Court opinion:

Posted on Friday, June 29, 2007 at 7:09 PM | Comments (0) | Top

David Robarge: CIA chief historian says the release of Family Jewels should clear up myths

Source: NYT (6-27-07)

For more than 30 years, the Family Jewels have clouded the C.I.A.’s reputation, even though most of their contents have long been known from official reports and ad hoc disclosures. William Colby — who oversaw the compilation of the Jewels while serving as the agency’s operations chief and director-designate — is the source of some durable misconceptions about them. In his memoir, Honorable Men (p. 340), Colby says that the Jewels consist of “693 pages of possible violations of, or at least questionable activities in regard to, the C.I.A.’s legislative charter”; that among the contents are “bizarre and tragic cases wherein the Agency experimented with mind-control drugs”; and that accompanying them was “a separate and even more secret annex” that “summarized a 1967 survey of C.I.A.’s involvement in assassination attempts or plans against Castro, Lumumba and Trujillo.”

These misstatements were repeated at least in part in several widely read works, including Thomas Powers’s The Man Who Kept the Secrets, John Ranelagh’s The Agency, G.J.A. O’Toole’s Encyclopedia of American Intelligence and Espionage, and Norman Polmar and Thomas Allen’s Spy Book. Less informed observers also have suggested that the Jewels include details about political and paramilitary covert actions and definitive proof that the C.I.A.’s controversial counterintelligence chief, James Angleton, was the mastermind behind the domestic spying program called MHCHAOS.

Posted on Friday, June 29, 2007 at 5:29 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Robert Dallek: How he ended up making an appearance at a furniture store

Source: HNN Editor Rick Shenkman (6-29-07)

A few weeks ago newspaper-page-flipping New York Times readers (such as HNN's editor's mother) may have seen this double-take advertisement:

Dallek at Dallek's?

A publicity man's dream headline. What's behind it?

Turns out Robert Dallek's uncles own the well-known Dallek's furniture store, he told us in an email. When the book came out they asked him to make an appearance and sign copies of his new book on Nixon and Kissinger (the June HNN Book of the Month). And he agreed.

It was just like a bookstore appearance, Dallek told us.

Don't we all wish we had uncles like Bob's?

Hat Tip: Mother Shenkman

Posted on Friday, June 29, 2007 at 3:24 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Eugen Weber: Charting the story of modern France (obituary)

Source: Guardian (6-29-07)

Eugen Weber, who has died aged 82, was one of the most distinguished historians of modern France. He wrote on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from French sport to Romanian fascism, and was the author of a seminal study of the transformation of the French countryside in the last three decades of the 19th century.

Born to a Romanian family in Bucharest, Weber spent his entire academic career in the west. His origins were important, however, to his later development. As he wrote: "Few 20th-century historians of 19th-century Europe had the good fortune to be born in the 19th century: that was where Romania still lived between the wars." Sent by his parents to be educated in Britain, he was here when war broke out.

He served in the British army from 1943 to 1947, and after demob read history at Cambridge, with a year at the École des Sciences Politiques in Paris. He then began his doctorate in Cambridge on the nationalist right in France in the decades before 1914.

Weber's career suffered a slight hiccup when his thesis was failed, but he had the last laugh since the book that resulted from it has rarely been out of print since its publication as The Nationalist Revival in France (1959). In 1956 he was appointed to the history faculty at UCLA, California, where he spent his entire career, culminating in a professorial chair now named after him. He was a lively teacher and excellent communicator, hosting a 52-part, historical television documentary series, The Western Tradition....

Posted on Thursday, June 28, 2007 at 10:11 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr: Remembered at British memorial

Source: Simon Jenkins in the Guardian (6-29-07)

A memorial service in London's Reform Club on Monday celebrated the late Arthur Schlesinger, finest of American postwar historians. Lauren Bacall, Edna O'Brien and admiring academics, diplomats and friends sang his praises. In the library from where Phileas Fogg set off round the world in 80 days, Schlesinger's memory rounded it in 90 years.

Schlesinger was the best sort of historian, an arguing one. It was impossible to meet him, even in old age, without some exquisite dispute. He championed the New Deal and the Kennedy era. He espoused the British liberal tradition as the founding glue of the American adventure. Multiculturalists might not like it, he wrote in The Disuniting of America, but "to deny the essentially European origins of American culture is to falsify history". Above all, he believed in history as the "great explainer" of human affairs.

The finest eulogy came from William vanden Heuvel, quoting from Schlesinger himself in a talk last December that was aimed straight between the eyes of the Bush administration. "History is a moral necessity for a nation which is the world's dominant military power," said Schlesinger. "It is the best antidote to delusions of omnipotence and omniscience." History forever reminded us "of the limits of our passing perspectives . . . of our profound and chastening frailty as human beings". ...

Posted on Thursday, June 28, 2007 at 10:06 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Timothy R. Furnish: Charges liberal bias on campus affects employment decisions (his own)

Source: Investor's Business Daily (6-28-07)

[Furnish is an associate professor of history at Georgia Perimeter College in Dunwoody, Ga., and the author of "Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, Their Jihads, and Osama bin Laden" (2005). He writes occasionally for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.]

I was cautiously optimistic that my quest to move from a community college to a four-year school might succeed this time. The gatekeepers at the annual conference of the American Historical Association, where thousands are interviewed but few are chosen, had seen fit to let me pass, and I was now on the campus of a large state university for round two.

Everything had gone well: my 75-minute PowerPoint lecture to a class studying early Islamic history, subsequent interviews with the department chair and dean — I was on a roll.

Then I was outed. During a meeting with the search committee, a professor produced irrefutable evidence that I "appeared to be more conservative than others in my field."

Worse, the evidence gave him the weapon he needed to deliver the coup de grace: "You sounded like Daniel Pipes!"

Posted on Thursday, June 28, 2007 at 10:00 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Gordon Brown: Historian becomes British Prime Minister

Source: John Sutherland in the Guardian (6-27-07)

... Much has been made (notably by himself, in his recent acceptance speech) of Brown's being a son of the manse. It's true that he inherits his church's missionary zeal (something that distinguishes it from its languid Anglican counterpart). But more significant is the fact that he was associated with the history department at Edinburgh for 15 years - from matriculation in 1967, through the award of his honours degree, to the completion of his PhD in 1982.

Although, democratic intellectual that he is, Brown disdains the title (along with black tie and other ceremonial flummery), he is the first British prime minister to have earned a doctorate.

Young Gordon came to Edinburgh a precociously brilliant, but highly impressionable, adolescent. Its history and politics departments, in the 60s and early 70s, were the most impressive in the country. Unsurprisingly, the university left a deep and complex stamp on the youthful Brown.

The most charismatic figure was John P Mackintosh. A dandyish figure, flamboyant in flares and floral ties, Mackintosh hosted wild parties at his north Edinburgh home. Who knows, I may have jostled the future prime minister at one of them, to get at what was left of the white plonk.

Mackintosh died prematurely in 1978, aged just 57. The least ivory-towered of historians, Mackintosh believed in the academic-political nexus. He was Labour MP for Berwick and East Lothian from 1966 until his death.

Ideologically, I would guess there were three other personal influences on the impressionable young Mr Brown. Victor Kiernan, along with Eric Hobsbawm the most distinguished Marxist historian of the postwar period, published, in Brown's second year, his scathing satire on British imperialism, The Lords of Human Kind. Kiernan loathed the "English" arrogance of the colonizing classes. In Brown's enduring interest in Africa one discerns an odd mixture of Livingstonian zeal and Kiernanian rage.

The second influence on the young Brown was, I would hazard, Geoffrey Best - the most principled academic I have ever known. Fascinated by the interplay of ethics and history, Best was interested in the Victorian philanthropist, the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury was author of the factory acts that got children and women out of the mines and factory slavery. High-minded, old-fashioned philanthropy of the Shaftesburian variety runs like a vein through Brown's political character.

A third influence was, I would guess, Paul Addison. Addison joined the history department in Brown's first year. A junior lecturer, he was my lodger for three years.

Addison was, at the time, engaged on research that would eventually be published as The Road to 1945, a classic analysis of the formation of the ideology behind the nationalisations of the postwar period - in particular, how that socialist ideology translated itself into practical reform.

When the judgments of posterity finally come in, Gordon Brown will - I suspect - be compared not to his showman predecessor but to Attlee: the quietest, but most momentously effective prime minister Britain had in the 20th century.

It's hard to think of a more effective apprenticeship for a future PM than a decade and a half in Edinburgh's history department at that glorious period....

Posted on Thursday, June 28, 2007 at 9:42 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Bsrry Rubin: Blasts Middle East experts who lack expertise

Source: FrontpageMag.com (6-28-07)

[Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, Interdisciplinary university and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs |(MERIA) Journal. His new book, The Truth About Syria, is being published by Palgrave-Macmillan in May. ]

Dear Career Counselor:

I am in bad shape. I cannot get a job or support myself. I want to be rich and famous and powerful but I have no idea what to do. Can you suggest a powerful, prestigious, high-paying field where I need do no study or training?

Destitute and Dumb.

Dear D&D:

I’m so glad you wrote me as I have the perfect solution: become an expert on the Middle East and Islam. It’s easy, painless (for you, though many others will pay for it with their lives), and profitable. Just look at these examples:

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Sure they were tenured professors but they hadn’t produced anything of note in years. Then they had an idea: write a paper attacking the power of the Jewish lobby. Years of study? Intensive research? Nah. A few hours by a grad student on the internet. Result: Fame, a huge book contract, invitations to speak, largely respectful media coverage! Within months.

Posted on Thursday, June 28, 2007 at 8:32 PM | Comments (0) | Top

JAH Experiment: Journal publishes accounts of historic events by the photographers who captured them on film

Source: Roundtable in the Journal of American History: American Faces: Twentieth-Century Photographs (6-1-07)

Several of the essays speak with a personal voice. This departure from traditional JAH tone and style is deliberate, as one of our purposes is to juxtapose different voices on related topics and themes in the history of American photography, to provoke further questions about the images, and to tease out the connections and tensions be-tween them. For example, Claude Cookman and Ted Engelmann contemplate the painful (and, for the victims of the My Lai massacre, fatal) consequences of taking photographs of people without learning their names or intervening on their behalf.
Anthony Fernandez III and David Allen help us see how differently the photographer and the subject of the photograph may experience the moment captured in a picture (a point raised as well, and even more urgently, by Cookman). Similarly, the pairing of Colleen McDannell and Barbara Orbach Natanson allows McDannell to confirm Natanson's claim that the Library of Congress collections are extraordinarily accessible through the Internet, as is much of the information historians need to understand the photos in those collections, offering us new opportunities for our work. Some pairings force us into complex conversations. Fernandez writes of expressions of the "American spirit" in the aftermath of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in 1995 and of how a similar spirit motivated his service in the U.S. Marines.1 Cookman, on the other hand, asks us to recognize our nation's potential for evil. By reading those two essays together, one is forced to retain both ideas in an uneasy relationship.

Posted on Thursday, June 28, 2007 at 7:26 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Gordon Wood: Historians' obession with slavery is a form of presentism

Source: Mary L. Dudziak at her blog, Legal History (Click on SOURCE for embedded links.) (6-19-07)

"Reading the Founders’ Minds" is the title of a review by Gordon S. Wood in the June 28 issue of the New York Review of Books. The review takes up important questions of historical method, and also a critical question about the vision at the nation’s founding. Because of the importance of this review, and also because of the sharpness of the criticism of the reviewed books, I’ve invited the authors of the reviewed books to provide commentary on the Legal History Blog, and I have invited a couple of other legal historians of this period to join in. Their posts will follow, later today and later this week.

The books at hand are Dark Bargain: Slavery, Profits, and the Struggle for the Constitution by Lawrence Goldstone (Walker) and American Taxation, American Slavery by Robin L. Einhorn (University of Chicago Press), but Wood uses the review to take aim at a broader literature that places slavery front and center at the nation’s founding. Other works on his list are Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power (2000); Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic (2001); Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders (2001); Garry Wills, "Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power (2003); Alfred W. Blumrosen and Ruth G. Blumrosen, Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution (2005); and Gary Nash, Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (2006). These books, Wood suggests, "help satisfy the seemingly insatiable desire of many historians today to place slavery at the heart of America's origins."

This treatment of slavery, he argues, is an improper form of presentism. He agrees with Bernard Bailyn, who "is keenly aware of the present's need to relate to the past and the power of that need in stimulating historical inquiry and writing. ‘There is always,’ [Bailyn] writes, ‘a need to extract from the past some kind of bearing on contemporary problems, some message, commentary, or instruction to the writer's age, and to see reflected in the past familiar aspects of the present.’ But without ‘critical control,’ this need, says Bailyn, ‘generates an obvious kind of presentism, which at its worst becomes indoctrination by historical example.’"

Posted on Thursday, June 28, 2007 at 3:52 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Simon Schama: TV historian to pay tribute to anti-slavery pioneer

Source: http://www.24dash.com (6-27-07)

Author and TV historian Simon Schama will deliver a tribute to slavery abolition pioneer Granville Sharp in a memorial service at All Saints Church on July 8.

It will mark the completion of conservation work on Sharp’s tomb in All Saints churchyard.

The service, on the nearest Sunday to the anniversary of Sharp’s death on 6 July 1813, is the culmination of a campaign to repair the tomb of the man known as the ‘father of the abolition movement’.

The conservation project was launched to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade this year, which has seen events taking place locally and across the country as well as TV documentaries by Professor Schama and others.

In only six months the Granville Sharp Working Group has persuaded the government to give the tomb a grade II listing and has raised £15,000 to repair it.

The work, which involves the replacement of some stone, started this week and is due to be completed on June 29.

Posted on Wednesday, June 27, 2007 at 10:25 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez: Interviewed about their conclusion that the Soviets were behind the 6 Day War

Source: Jamie Glazov at frontpagemag.com (6-27-07)

Frontpage Interview’s guests today are Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez.

Isabella Ginor is a Research Fellow of the Hebrew University's Truman Institute. She came to Israel from her native Ukraine shortly before the Six-Day War. She was a specialist on the former USSR at the leading Israeli newspaper Haaretz and is a frequent commentator for other national and foreign media.

Gideon Remez is a sabra and historian by training. He fought in the Six-Day war as an Israeli paratrooper. He won several prestigious awards for his daily rogram International Hour, which he edited and presented for more than half his 36-year career at the country's premier national radio network.

Both are the co-authors of the new book, Foxbats Over Dimona: The Soviets' Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War, just published by Yale University Press.

Posted on Wednesday, June 27, 2007 at 10:17 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Patrice Higonnet: Blasted again for Bush-bashing, this time by fellow historian

Source: Gil Troy writing at the website of http://www.newsobserver.com (6-17-07)

Poor Patrice Higonnet. The Parisian-born historian has a great life. He loves being Robert Walton Goelet Professor of French History at Harvard University. He is charmed by his Harvard students, as he admits in "Graduation Day," the lovely, elegiac preface to "Attendant Cruelties: Nation and Nationalism in American History."

But he cannot reconcile the colorful all-American palette of fresh-faced idealists he encounters in Harvard Yard with the dark hues of George Bush's America he sees on TV. At Harvard's commencement, he observes blacks and whites, rich kids and poor kids, Jewish students and Palestinian students, fulfilling the American dream. Yet day after day, he reads about the American imperial nightmare haunting his adopted country -- and the world.
Being a historian, Higonnet chronicles this paradox, tracing it back to conflicting ideological legacies. An elegant writer and insightful observer, he offers a stimulating, compact overview of American history, a particularly impressive achievement for someone whose usual turf is the French Revolution and Vichy France. Alas, his admittedly "presentist" agenda is so jaundiced, so superficial, so cliche, it derails the book. Rather than offering the profound analysis good history can yield, Higonnet produces another shrill, one-dimensional Bush-bashing, neo-conservative-fearing, Israel-obsessed polemic.

Posted on Wednesday, June 27, 2007 at 8:53 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Shaul Bakhash: In NYT op ed he hopes Iran will realize holding his wife hostage is unproductive

Source: NYT (6-27-07)

[Mr. Bakhash is a professor of history at George Mason University.]

IRAN’S judiciary says it expects to announce a decision this week or next in the case of my wife, Haleh Esfandiari, and two other Iranian-Americans, Kian Tajbakhsh and Ali Shakeri, who have been held in solitary confinement at Tehran’s Evin prison since early May. The fate of these detainees could be resolved by Iran’s government in a number of ways. Only one would be in the best interests of the Islamic Republic: the detainees should be freed and all charges dropped.

The three detainees are not connected to one another. Haleh is the director of the Middle East program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington; Mr. Tajbakhsh is a social scientist and urban planner with the Open Society Institute in New York City; and Mr. Shakeri is a founder of the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding at the University of California, Irvine. But so far, their cases have followed an ominously familiar pattern.

First, there is an arrest. Then, to justify the unjustifiable, the authorities come up with outlandish charges and accusations; in the case of my wife and the two men, they are accused of spying and endangering Iran’s national security, allegations vague enough to criminalize the most common scholarly activities.

Next — and we seem to have entered this stage now — some in the Iranian leadership recognize what the imprisonment and false charges are doing to Iran’s international standing, and attempt damage control. In the last two weeks, smear campaigns against Haleh in newspapers close to the regime have stopped. A judiciary official has claimed that she is in good health — a claim difficult to credit when for the past 50 days she has been interrogated and intimidated and denied family visits, legal representation and the medication and medical attention she needs.

Meanwhile, the security services seem compelled to prove the arrests enabled them to uncover “networks” and expose “subversives.” They demand yet more time to complete their “investigations,” heedless of the damage they do to the mental and physical health of the detainees and the anguish they cause their families.

Over the years, many Iranian intellectuals, writers and academics have been put on trial for “espionage” or “endangering national security,” sentenced to sometimes long prison terms and mistreated in the process. In a particularly horrific case in 2003, an Iranian-Canadian photographer, Zahra Kazemi, died under interrogation at Evin prison....

In the case of my wife and the others, the Iranian authorities can repeat the discreditable mistakes of the past or they can emulate the good sense they eventually displayed with the British. They can free the detainees and bring a quick end to what has become an embarrassing episode for Iran and a cruel experience for those they have so unfairly imprisoned.

Posted on Wednesday, June 27, 2007 at 1:27 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Mark Noll: Evangelical scholar discusses move to Notre Dame

Source: http://www.southbendtribune.com (6-21-07)

Mark A. Noll, a man many Americans may never have heard of, reclines in his office chair dressed in jeans and a polo shirt. A soft-spoken man and now a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, he was named one of the top 25 most influential evangelicals in America by Time magazine in 2005.

Unlike the late Jerry Falwell, known for his booming personality and media savvy, Noll has achieved recognition within the evangelical community and beyond through his powerful scholarship and many well-received books.

Noll accepted the position of Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History, an endowed chair, at Notre Dame in July 2006 after leaving Wheaton College, a private evangelical Protestant liberal arts college near Chicago where he spent 27 years as a teacher and scholar.

The evolving relationship between Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants, Noll says during a recent conversation, is what led a Catholic university such as Notre Dame to invite him to join its faculty.

Fifty years ago, evangelicals and Catholics had almost nothing to do with each other, Noll says.

"Today, there are all sorts of conversations, discussions and partial agreements."

On its side, the university is glad to have Noll, says John McGreevy, chairman of Notre Dame's history department, adding, "Mark brings to us strength in American and religious and intellectual history, which has long been an area of focus within the department."

Posted on Tuesday, June 26, 2007 at 10:37 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Baruch Kimmerling: Controversial critic of Israel's origins and its role in the Middle East

Source: Guardian (6-26-07)

Baruch Kimmerling, who has died aged 67, was probably the first Israeli academic to analyse Zionism in settler- immigrant, colonialist terms. He described his homeland as being "built on the ruins of another society". A devoted atheist, he lamented Jews' and Arabs' failure to "separate religion from nationality".
Though associated with the "new historians" who question the official narrative of Israel's creation, Kimmerling was a sociologist by training. In his book, The Interrupted System: Israeli Civilians in War and Routine Times (1985), he began anatomising what he saw as the deleterious, if disguised, militarisation of Israeli civil society. Challenging the notion of Israel as a beneficent "melting pot", he called on fellow citizens to embrace their multiple origins - Arab and Jewish, oriental and western, religious and secular.

In 1993, he co-wrote (with Joel Migdal) what Library Journal in the US called "the best descriptive treatment of the Palestinians to appear in decades". The book, Palestinians: The Making of a People, noted how Israel's victory in the six-day war of 1967 paradoxically reunited and politically revived Palestinians, and returned the Middle East conflict to its pre-1948 inter-communal cockpit.
The book's publication coincided with the apparently successful Oslo peace accords. Ten years later, with the peace process in ruins, Kimmerling released his controversial Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War against the Palestinians. What began as a biography became an analysis of "a gradual but systematic attempt to cause Palestinians' annihilation as an independent social, political and economic entity".

To his adversaries Kimmerling was a tendentious polemicist who let ideological bias overrule academic sobriety and gave succour to Israel's foes. Yet he called himself a patriot, and while decrying the "monstrous practices of Zionism" he valued Israel's "islands of marvellous humanism and creativity". He feared that a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestine dilemma would just cause further Balkanisation and bloodshed in the Middle East, and he opposed boycotts of Israeli universities....

Posted on Tuesday, June 26, 2007 at 10:24 PM | Comments (0) | Top

James M. McPherson: Awarded Lincoln medal

Source: PRNewswire (6-24-07)

Congressman John Lewis and Dr. James M. McPherson have been named the 2007 recipients of Ford's Theatre Lincoln Medals. Ford's Theatre Lincoln Medals were bestowed on Congressman Lewis and Dr. McPherson by Nicholas D. Chabraja, Vice Chair of the Ford's Theatre Society Board of Trustees and one of the 2005 winners, at the Ford's Theatre annual benefit gala held on Sunday, June 24, 2007.

Given by Ford's Theatre, the site of one of the most significant events in American history, the Ford's Theatre Lincoln Medal is an annual award given to individuals who through their body of work, accomplishments or personal attributes exemplify the lasting legacy and mettle of character embodied by the most beloved president in our nation's history, President Abraham Lincoln.

"This year, Ford's Theatre Lincoln Medals go to two men who have brought Lincoln's legacy and character alive through the power of courageous action and the written word," says Ford's Theatre Chairman of the Board of Trustees Wayne R. Reynolds. "Ford's Theatre is honored to award Congressman Lewis, an architect of the civil rights movement, and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Dr. James M. McPherson, whose works on the Civil War continue to enlighten us and illuminate the era that shaped the future of our great nation under our greatest president."...

Posted on Tuesday, June 26, 2007 at 10:03 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Hank Nelson: Australian historian sheds light on forgotten sex slaves

Source: Kyodo News (6-25-07)

When it comes to the debate about World War II "comfort women," Australia has "chosen to ignore" evidence of Japanese military brothels that housed up to 3,000 Japanese and Korean women in the town of Rabaul on the island of New Guinea, an Australian historian claims.

Instead of highlighting the abuses suffered by women in Rabaul, located in what was then mandated Australian territory, Australia's politicians and its media have focused on Jan Ruff O'Hearne, a Dutch woman who moved to Australian after she was forced to become a comfort woman in the Japanese-occupied Java during the war, according to Hank Nelson, a professor emeritus at Australian National University.

"Either by accident or design, Australians have chosen not to remember the brothels in an Australian territory and not to use evidence from Rabaul to contribute to debates about the comfort women," Nelson said in a paper submitted for publication in the Journal of Pacific History.

Ruff-O'Hearne, who became the first European woman to speak out in 1992 about the atrocities committed against her, has become the one of the world's leading campaigners for the rights of former comfort women, testifying in the U.S. Congress and personifying the debate back home in Australia.

But the example of Rabaul could also be used to provide evidence in the recurring debate about whether the comfort women were actually coerced into sexual slavery with military involvement or whether, as some Japanese politicians continue to assert, evidence supports nothing more than opportunistic private contractors meeting the demands of soldiers in military camps, Nelson says.

In his paper, Nelson details memoirs from Japanese doctors, the testimony of a Korean woman who worked as a sex slave in Rabaul and statements from Australians who were prisoners of the Japanese as well as from captured Japanese.

Posted on Tuesday, June 26, 2007 at 10:00 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Geoffrey Blainey: Controversial Australian conservative to sit on history panel

Source: The Age (6-26-07)

HISTORIAN Geoffrey Blainey will sit on a panel of commentators who will work out the best way to teach Australian history to year 9 and 10 students.

Professor Blainey — the conservative heavyweight who in 1993 coined the phrase "black armband view of history" to describe the portrayal of European colonisation as shameful — will be joined by Sydney Institute director Gerard Henderson, NSW Board of Studies inspector Jennifer Lawless and Australian National University senior fellow Nicholas Brown.

As the Government moves towards demanding a uniform national curriculum, Education Minister Julie Bishop said the group's advice and recommendations would form the basis of the model curriculum for year 9 and 10 students.

The panel will continue the work of Monash University's Professor Tony Taylor, who was commissioned by the Government to develop a model history curriculum framework for the years 3 to 10, following the Australian history summit in Canberra last year. An associate professor of history at La Trobe University, Richard Broome, said time would tell if the reference group was too conservative.

But he said it was important to make the teaching of Australian history "contested and contestable".

University of Melbourne historian Stuart McIntyre said that although half of the panel members were conservative, the composition appeared balanced.

"I think what the minister has done is to attempt some balance," he said. "It means that it is not a stacked committee."

Posted on Tuesday, June 26, 2007 at 9:58 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Eino Jutikkala: Historian Leaves $29.4-Million to Finnish Academy

Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (6-29-07)

The Finnish Academy of Science and Letters expects its humanities division to be transformed by an unexpected gift from a historian who lived through quite a bit of history himself.

When Eino Jutikkala, a longtime member of the academy, died last year, at the age of 99, he bequeathed the academy about $29.4-million, the result of some very patient investing. The gift is believed to be the largest an individual has ever given to the humanities in Finland, said Matti Saarnisto, the academy's secretary general, in an e-mail message.

When a lawyer from Mr. Jutikkala's bank called to tell him that the historian had left most of his fortune to the academy, Mr. Saarnisto said, he thought the bequest would be considerably less.

When he heard the actual amount, "it was a good thing I was sitting down," he said....

Posted on Tuesday, June 26, 2007 at 9:53 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Cited as a scholar on China the public should heed

Source: Tom Plate in the Seattle Times (6-14-07)

LOS ANGELES — America needs more people like Prof. Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a heretofore humble academic here on the West Coast. Let me explain.

Understanding China is going to remain irritatingly difficult. It's an obviously important but intensely problematic place, with a possibly fabulous or possibly tragic future. We maybe have a better shot figuring out the future of India, or even Mars.

If we leave the job of thinking about China to our general mass news media, we will wind up with mainly superficial portraits of that part of China that's most visible to the eye and to the camera, while losing all sight and sense of that part of China that is clandestine or at least well beneath the surface....

Exhibit A would be to have more observers like Wasserstrom, history professor from the University of California, Irvine. His publisher (Indiana University Press) is offering us his new book, titled "China's Brave New World And Other Tales For Global Times." It penetrates with a lightly knowing eye and ear into the interior mind, heart and soul of giant China and the innumerable Chinese.

The good professor's main approach to getting us deeper into China's DNA is to not act like the typical professor — that is, forget the fudging footnotes and the dodgy theories. Instead, dip into the easy writing and clear expression, the common touch of forcing you to come with him into the coffee shop to chat with students or stick with him as your guide as he takes you down China's event-filled memory lanes.

In his collections of essays, Wasserstrom helps us understand more about China in a way that inoffensively suggests how little we know and by implication how little the professor knows, despite in fact knowing so much — relatively speaking.

"I ask," he writes, "Does it mean the same thing when a Starbucks or a bowling alley opens in Beijing as opposed to Boise, the Canton of China as opposed to the Canton in Ohio?" His emphatic answer, you quickly find out, is that it dramatically does not and you find out exactly why.

Although he admits to exceptions (as do I), hard-core Western academic "experts" declaiming on China generally leave him cold. And although he agrees that there are some excellent American foreign correspondents working on the mainland (as do I), he has little love for their editors back in the U.S. and or in Europe, who resist originality and force their copy into preconceived pigeonholes with the size of the pigeons getting smaller with every corporate tightening of the news hole.

"China's Brave New World" is full of insights over a broad China canvas. "Too often," the professor writes, "Americans curious about China feel they have only two options: accept the overly simplistic answers to big questions provided by a sound-bite-driven mass media, or look for alternatives in stuffy academic works that can be off-putting due to the style in which they are written. I want to offer a third option: a playful look at serious issues."...

Posted on Tuesday, June 26, 2007 at 9:40 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Niall Palmer: British Historian says taking a look at Harding is worth it

Source: http://www.marionstar.com (6-26-07)

MARION - When it comes to President Warren G. Harding's achievements compared to other presidents, a British scholar is asking other historians to cut the Marion native some slack.

Niall Palmer, who wrote "The New Hampshire Primary and the American Electoral Process" and "The Twenties in America: Politics and History" said he finds Harding interesting because of how more attention has been paid to his personal life rather than his politics.

"The more I read the less I was convinced he was a failure," said Palmer. "I found he was not a (political) party man, was not bullied by Congress. He performed very credibly in office."

Palmer, a lecturer in U.S. politics at London's Brunel University, will be speaking on Harding Tuesday evening at Ohio State University at Marion. The lecture, "The Evolving Legacy of President Warren G. Harding," will be held at 7 p.m. in the Student Center's Guthery Room and is free and open to the public.
The scholar said he believes part of the problem with accounts of Harding is that the presidential papers were not released until 1963, 40 years after his death in 1923. He said that left historians with less information to go on than they may have had on other presidents.

Palmer also said the fact that the nation's 29th president died in office 23 months into his term, almost halfway through a full four-year term, means historians are looking at less of a time line compared to most other presidents.

Posted on Tuesday, June 26, 2007 at 9:31 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Saul Friedlander: Challenges the view that the Holocaust was simply the result of bureaucrats doing what they were told

Source: Richard Evans in the NYT Book Review (6-24-07)

In 1997, Saul Friedlander published “The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939,” the first of his projected two-volume history of “Nazi Germany and the Jews.” In the introduction to that volume, he announced his intention of “establishing a historical account of the Holocaust in which the policies of the perpetrators, the attitudes of surrounding society and the world of the victims could be addressed within an integrated framework.” Such a framework has indeed been missing from most historical accounts of this most difficult and challenging of subjects. They have focused either on the processes of decision-making and their implementation or on the world of suffering and death experienced by the victims. Friedländer’s first volume stood out from most other work in this field because it successfully combined both of these aspects. And his second volume does so as well. It now establishes itself as the standard historical work on Nazi Germany’s mass murder of Europe’s Jews.

And yet “The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945” is no ordinary academic book. True, Friedlander seems to have read virtually every printed source and secondary work on his vast subject in English, German and French. His judgments are scrupulous and levelheaded. And he treats the historical controversies that have raged around so many of the topics he covers with untiring fair-mindedness. He writes without a trace of polemic or of facile retrospective moralizing. The book meticulously satisfies every requirement of professional historical writing.

What raises “The Years of Extermination” to the level of literature, however, is the skilled interweaving of individual testimony with the broader depiction of events. Friedlander never lets the reader forget the human and personal meanings of the historical processes he is describing. By and large, he avoids the sometimes unreliable testimony of memoirs for the greater immediacy of contemporary diaries and letters, though he also makes good use of witness statements at postwar trials. The result is an account of unparalleled vividness and power that reads like a novel....

Posted on Tuesday, June 26, 2007 at 9:23 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Hiram Bingham III: The historian who made the world aware of Machu Picchu

Source: NYT Mag (6-24-07)

The stones at Machu Picchu seem almost alive. They may be alive, if you credit the religious beliefs of the ruler Pachacuti Yupanqui, whose subjects in the early 15th century constructed the granite Inca complex, high above a curling river and nestled among jagged green peaks. To honor the spirits that take form as mountains, the Inca stoneworkers carved rock outcrops to replicate their shapes. Doorways and windows of sublimely precise masonry frame exquisite views. But this extraordinary marriage of setting and architecture only partly explains the fame of Machu Picchu today. Just as important is the romantic history, both of the people who built it in this remote place and of the explorer who brought it to the attention of the world. The Inca succumbed to Spanish conquest in the 16th century; and the explorer Hiram Bingham III, whose long life lasted almost as many years as the Inca empire, died in 1956. Like the stones of Machu Picchu, however, the voices of the Inca ruler and the American explorer continue to resonate.

Imposingly tall and strong-minded, Bingham was the grandson of a famous missionary who took Christianity to the Hawaiian islanders. In his efforts to locate lost places of legend, the younger Bingham proved to be as resourceful. Bolstered by the fortune of his wife, who was a Tiffany heiress, and a faculty position at Yale University, where he taught South American history, Bingham traveled to Peru in 1911 in hopes of finding Vilcabamba, the redoubt in the Andean highlands where the last Inca resistance forces retreated from the Spanish conquerors. Instead he stumbled upon Machu Picchu. With the joint support of Yale and the National Geographic Society, Bingham returned twice to conduct archeological digs in Peru. In 1912, he and his team excavated Machu Picchu and shipped nearly 5,000 artifacts back to Yale. Two years later, he staged a final expedition to explore sites near Machu Picchu in the Sacred Valley....

Posted on Tuesday, June 26, 2007 at 9:21 PM | Comments (0) | Top

David Halberstam: Driver in His Death to Be Charged With Manslaughter

Source: Mercury News (6-21-07)

The 26-year-old UC Berkeley graduate student who was driving the car involved in a crash that killed award-winning journalist David Halberstam last April faces misdemeanor criminal charges in the accident, the San Mateo County District Attorney's Office announced today.

San Mateo County Chief Deputy District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe said Kevin Jones will be charged with vehicular manslaughter without gross negligence. He faces up to a year in the county jail and a fine of up to $1,000 if convicted.

Posted on Tuesday, June 26, 2007 at 7:42 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Robert Dallek: Attacked for writing about dead presidents

Source: HNN Staff (6-26-07)

In his NYT review of My Way, the new biography of Hillary Clinton by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr., historian Robert Dallek concluded that the book offers an unsatisfying portrait of the former first lady and would-be president.

Now the authors have taken their revenge. Van Natta told an interviewer that Dallek "is a biographer of dead presidents. We did an investigative biography of someone running for president."

Dallek is the author of books on JFK, LBJ and Nixon. For the record, his book on Nixon also concerns Henry Kissinger, who is very much alive.

Posted on Tuesday, June 26, 2007 at 6:09 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Karen Armstrong: "Terrorists have lost the religious plot"

Source: Straits Times (6-20-07)

RELIGIOUS extremists who preach terror and violence are pushing a distorted version of their religion, said renowned historian Karen Armstrong.

'There is a lot of bad religion about,' she said, noting that Buddhists used the term 'unskilled religion'.

'Terrorism, in my view, is not inspired by religion. It's a form of religiously articulated nationalism,' she said.

She was delivering this year's Islamic Religious Council of Singapore (Muis) lecture to some 800 religious leaders, diplomats and others at the Ritz-Carlton Millenia on Monday night.

Introducing her, Minister-in-charge of Muslim Affairs Yaacob Ibrahim said hers was 'an independent view', and hoped her lecture would contribute to Singapore being an inter-faith hub.

Ms Armstrong argued that radical actions were a response to unjust foreign policies pursued by Western governments, such as in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Also, various fundamentalist movements are driven by the fear that their religion is under attack, she noted.

Muslims, feeling their faith was under attack from the West, took Quranic verses on self-defence out of context to justify aggression, she said.

But she added: 'Once a religiosity turns in any way to violence, it has lost the plot. Every single one of the major world traditions began as a recoil from violence.'

Ms Armstrong, whose writings on world religions are widely read and translated, argued that extremists are not true to their faith.

In her 45-minute speech titled The Role Of Religion In The New Millennium, she called for an emphasis on 'the golden rule' - to treat others as one would like to be treated, an ethic first promoted by Confucius.

This ethic should become a force in politics and in religion, she said, as it does not leave people feeling marginalised and helpless - often the sources of a turn to violence.

She also had a lively 45-minute dialogue with the audience, spanning topics including secularism and Islam and whether there were limits to compassion.

After the session, civil servant Julia Chan, 27, told The Straits Times: 'I don't see any conflict in being true to your own religion and showing equal compassion for everyone.'

Speaking to reporters later, Ms Armstrong said it is difficult to be optimistic about bridging the gap between the West and the Muslim world, a chasm which observers say has widened since the Sept 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

'You feel you're making some headway explaining that jihad does not mean holy war, but when something like the cartoon crisis happens, it's like snakes and ladders, it goes right down again,' she said.

She was referring to protests throughout the Muslim world last year when several European newspapers published offensive cartoons of Prophet Muhammad.

'I do not think this conflict is religiously motivated - it's about politics,' she said, adding that the US was not an honest broker in the Middle East.

However, she noted that the high levels of violence in the world today could compel peace, just as throughout history, excessive violence drove people to religion and peace.

Posted on Wednesday, June 20, 2007 at 1:37 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Mark A. LeVine: Urges academics to boycott

Source: Chronicle for Higher Ed (6-18-07)

Add to the list of academics criticizing DePaul University’s decision to deny tenure to Norman Finkelstein Mark A. LeVine, who posts his blog on the History News Network.

“I am especially offended at this immoral and utterly politically motivated action, which goes against the principles of intellectual honesty, courage, and integrity that I was taught were the foundations of a proper Catholic education,” LeVine says. “It is certainly a shameful stain, and a mark of cowardice, particularly compared with the brave stand of the administration of Notre Dame in its invitation to Tariq Ramadan to fill a prestigious professorship despite the similarly risible attacks on his scholarship and character by many of the same academic hacks who’ve gone after Finkelstein.”

As a result, he says, he will no longer advise any graduate student to apply to a Ph.D. program or any young faculty member to apply for a job at DePaul, nor will he attend any academic conference put on at the university.

Posted on Tuesday, June 19, 2007 at 12:50 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Saturday, June 16, 2007

David McCullough: The famed biographer speaks to a crowd of hundreds and later discusses the library

Source: Kansas City Star (6-16-07)

David McCullough spoke Wednesday in Independence to help observe the Truman Library’s 50th anniversary.

McCullough’s biographies of Harry Truman and John Adams have won Pulitzer Prizes. His years introducing “American Experience” on public television, as well as his narration of the landmark Ken Burns “The Civil War” documentary, have made him perhaps the county’s most recognizable historian.

About 400 people attended his speech Wednesday, which he delivered on the library’s front steps. Before that speech, he answered a few questions.

Q. Would Harry Truman be pleased with the Truman Library today?

A. He would be immensely pleased. … He wanted this to be a classroom for democracy, and I think he would be particularly pleased with the library’s program (The White House Decision Center) of bringing students and teachers here, which is one of the best of all the presidential libraries.

Q. Your biography of Truman appeared in 1992, and it was a great success. It soon was made into an HBO movie, starring Gary Sinise in the title role. It was about the same time the Truman Library Institute began raising funds for the library’s $22 million upgrade, completed a few years ago. Do you feel your book played a role in the success of that campaign?

A. I hope it played a good part. It certainly brought the story of Harry Truman to the country. I feel my own participation in trying to raise that money helped. The Truman Library is a national treasure, but it is also an important civic and cultural amenity for Kansas City and the surrounding area.

Q. Is it wise to continue to build presidential libraries across the country?

A. I just had someone in New York say to me the other day, ‘Hasn’t this presidential library craze gotten out of hand? Do we need all these presidential libraries all over the country?’

Well, we do. I don’t believe that everything ought to be in Washington. But I also know that it is valuable for anyone trying to understand the life of a particular president to come to the place that produced that human being, where his memory is part of the story of that place. This is where (longtime Truman Library research room staff member) Liz Safly introduced me to many people in the community who were invaluable to my understanding of Harry Truman, because they knew him or worked with him or watched him as we walked down the street.

None of that would have been possible had I been in Washington working in another big government building.

Posted on Saturday, June 16, 2007 at 10:51 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Christopher Alan Bayly: Investigative historian knighted

Source: BBC News (6-16-07)

Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at Cambridge, Prof Christopher Alan Bayly, researches and writes extensively about the Far East.

He revealed in a recent book that at the end of World War II more than 80,000 Japanese were kept in captivity.

The historian claimed they were used as cheap labour on projects across Asia and were not repatriated until 1948.

The professor, who also writes about the British Empire and the growth of Europe, was honoured for his contribution to historical scholarship.

Posted on Saturday, June 16, 2007 at 10:35 PM | Comments (0) | Top

David Starkey: TV historian gets Queen's honour

Source: BBC News (6-16-07)

Kendal-born broadcaster and historian Dr David Starkey is among Cumbrians named in the Queen's birthday honours.
Dr Starkey - once Britain's highest paid TV presenter - becomes a CBE for services to history.

Also honoured are Westmoreland Cardiac Support Society co-founder Gillian Impey, who becomes an MBE.

Sellafield managing director Barry Snelson and Cumbria Police deputy chief constable Christine Twigg are also among those recognised.

Mr Snelson, from Cockermouth, becomes an MBE for services to the UK nuclear industry.

Ms Twigg, who was the Cumbria force's acting chief constable for a time, gets the Queen's Police Medal.

Also recognised is Anthony Wright, a teacher at Trinity School in Carlisle, who becomes a CBE for services to education.

Posted on Saturday, June 16, 2007 at 10:02 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Saul Friedlaender: Jewish historian gets top German prize

Source: Expatica (6-14-07)

French-Israeli historian Saul Friedlaender has been awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, officials announced in Frankfurt Thursday.

The prize, with a value of 25,000 euros (33,000 dollars), is Germany's most prestigious literary award. It is to be presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair on October 14.

The jury said Friedlaender was an "epic storyteller of the history of the Shoah, the persecution and extermination of Jews in the time of Nazi dominance in Europe."

Friedlaender had provided people burnt to ashes with a voice and a memorial, it said.

Friedlaender was born in Prague in 1932, surviving the Holocaust in France. He has taught at the universities of Geneva and Tel Aviv, and is currently a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles.

His two-volume work, Nazi Germany and the Jews, is perhaps his best known.

Posted on Thursday, June 14, 2007 at 9:33 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Heinrichs Strods: Has been denied Russian visa

Source: Latvian Abroad (6-12-07)

Latvian historian Heinrihs Strods has been denied Russian visa. He intended to visit Moscow to explore documents in Russian archives and to give a talk at a conference. Strods applied for visa several times, with support letters from the Latvian embassador to Russia and from a history institute of Russian Academy of Sciences and was repeatedly denied visa. This is a second instance when a well-known Latvian historian has been denied Russian visa. The first was Aivars Stranga in 2005.

This is quite outrageous. Apparently, in Putin's Russia, foreign historians are not allowed to do archive research unless Putin's government is sure that they'll interpret archive documents in desired way!

Posted on Tuesday, June 12, 2007 at 11:51 PM | Comments (0) | Top

David McCullough: Warns of grave implications for the nation

Source: The Advocate (6-12-07)

Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough warned that failing to properly educate youth about history could have grave implications for the nation.

During a speech Saturday at the Historical Society of the Town of Greenwich's 75th anniversary, held on the lawn of the historic Tomes-Higgins House, McCullough spoke about his crusade to educate the nation's youth about the importance of history and the vital role historical societies play in preserving the past.

"We're not doing a very good job of educating our children in the story of our country," he said.

"It's easy to interest children in history, particularly young children. They want to learn. They love stories, and that's what history is."Ê

McCullough, best known for his books "John Adams," "Truman" and "1776," was invited to speak not only because of his distinguished career, but also for his commitment to preserving local history, said Debra Mecky, executive director of the historical society.

"I feel I have been very fortunate in my subjects," he said. "I've enjoyed them, and the real reward of the work is the work and how much one learns. I have never undertaken a subject I knew a lot about . . . this way it's a journey, an experience."

He has traveled all over the country for the past 10 years supporting historical societies and their missions to educate youths.

"It's a crusade," he said. "I believe in it."...

Posted on Tuesday, June 12, 2007 at 3:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Norman Finkelstein: DePaul University denies tenure to outspoken Holocaust academic

Source: The Guardian (6-12-07)

One of the most rancorous disputes in American academia has ended with a prominent political scientist with controversial views on Israel and anti-semitism being denied tenure at one of the country's top 10 private universities.

Norman Finkelstein, author of The Holocaust Industry, now has less than a year remaining on his contract with the political sciences department of DePaul University in Chicago. He lost his bid for a lifelong post after a four to three vote of the promotions and tenure board.

The decision came at the end of several months of wrangling, both within the Catholic university and within the wider academic and Jewish communities in the US. Mr Finkelstein has argued in his books that claims of anti-semitism are used to dampen down criticism of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians and that the Holocaust is exploited by some Jewish institutions for their own gain.

His position as a Jewish intellectual critical of Israel and of some elites within the Jewish community has prompted passionate debate on both sides.

Intellectuals such as the prolific writer Noam Chomsky and the Oxford historian Avi Shlaim have spoken out in Mr Finkelstein's favour, but others have decried him in equal measure as giving succour to anti-semitism. His most bitter opponent is Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor, who campaigned heavily to prevent tenure being granted. Soon after Mr Finkelstein applied for it, Mr Dershowitz sent DePaul faculty members a dossier of what he categorised as the "most egregious academic sins, outright lies, misquotations, and distortions" of the political scientist...

Posted on Tuesday, June 12, 2007 at 2:20 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, June 10, 2007

Drew Gilpin Faust: Maybe not the "Safe" Replacement everyone thought

Source: The Boston Globe (6-10-07)

Eighteen years ago, at an academic conference at the University of California, San Diego, Drew Gilpin Faust, then a widely respected professor of Southern history at the University of Pennsylvania, caused an uproar that some of her peers still talk about.

Among historians of the South and the Civil War, there is no larger question than why the Confederacy lost its bid for independence. Explanations range from battlefield tactics to the North's industrial superiority, from slave insubordination to the gradual disillusionment of the South's poor, white, non-slaveholding majority.

In San Diego that day, Faust, who takes over the presidency of Harvard on July 1, offered her own explanation, and it managed to rub nearly everyone the wrong way. The South lost, she argued, largely because of the part played by rich, white women, the very figures that had been held up as Dixie's staunchest supporters. Their disappointment with the cause, and their subsequent entreaties to their husbands, sons, brothers, and fathers to give up the fight, did as much as anything else to bring on collapse and defeat.

"It may well have been because of its women that the South lost the Civil War," her paper concluded.

Faust's revisionist salvo brought a fierce response from her audience. Stephanie McCurry, a historian now at Penn who was moderating Faust's panel, remembers the reaction as immediate. The audience at the talk, she says, "went nuts." To military specialists, to historians of slavery, to economic historians, even to some feminist historians, Faust's argument seemed at once radical and wrong-headed, and at the conference and afterward many people let her know that. Faust was verbally attacked. "I'd never seen anything like it," McCurry recalls.

As bombshells go, it can't compete with the one Larry Summers, who stepped down as president of Harvard a year ago, famously dropped in 2005, when he questioned women's aptitude for science. Indeed, Faust's tenure as dean of Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study has earned her a image in Cambridge as a kind of anti-Summers: In contrast to his damn-the-torpedoes style, she is a discreet conciliator, and her impeccable feminist bona fides stand in sharp contrast to his controversial musings on gender.

Nevertheless, Faust's distinguished career as a historian suggests a temperament quite different from that of her reputation as a consensus builder. Although as an administrator she has by all accounts been a smooth inside operator, as a thinker and writer Faust has displayed a taste for shaking things up.

Posted on Sunday, June 10, 2007 at 11:49 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, June 8, 2007

Barry Rubin: Interviewed about 6-Day War

Source: PBS NewsHour (6-7-07)

RAY SUAREZ: For more on the Middle East then and now, we get two perspectives. Barry Rubin is director of the Global International Affairs Center at the Interdisciplinary University at Herzliya, Israel, and author of the new book, "The Truth About Syria."
Hisham Melhem is Washington bureau chief for the Arab satellite network al-Arabiya and Washington correspondent for the Lebanese newspaper An-Nahar.

And, Barry Rubin, did anyone on the Israeli side have the prescience, the forward look to understand that today's situation was a possible outcome of that war 40 years ago?

BARRY RUBIN, Director, Global International Affairs Center: Oh, absolutely. The debate following the war was between two camps. One camp said that they believed that the territories captured in 1967 were bargaining chips which would be used to attain peace with the Arab side when that became possible. The other side said that it did not believe that the Arab side or Arab parties would make peace for a very long time.

Now, where those two positions came together in a consensus was they need to hold territories until there could be a negotiated agreement. So, in a sense, a lot of people -- certainly half the population -- wouldn't be shocked. The shock, of course, came because, in the 1990s, there was a process with the PLO which was hoped that it would result in peace. And then, of course, when it came to the crunch in 2000, and Yasser Arafat was offered an independent Palestinian state and $22 billion in aid as the first offer, he turned it down, so it took a downturn.

So from the point of view of 1967, it's less of a shock than, let's say, from the point of view of 1997, when there were great hopes that there was going to be some kind of diplomatic resolution.

RAY SUAREZ: So you're saying, if I understand you, that there were people who understood that Israel might be in those territories for decades to come?

BARRY RUBIN: Well, I think everyone foresaw the possibility of it taking decades. But, again -- well, just very briefly to explain this...

RAY SUAREZ: Very briefly.

BARRY RUBIN: So the two views were, hold the territories until peace is going to happen. Some people thought it would happen sooner, some people later. In the 1990s, most people went over to the view that peace was possible, but what happened in 2000 confounded both sides.

As a result, what we have today is the analysis goes like this: On the one hand, the great majority of Israelis say they're ready to have an independent Palestinian state and they're ready to leave the remaining territories, but at the same time they say they're very skeptical about the ability of the other side to get it together.

Posted on Friday, June 8, 2007 at 8:38 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Patrice Higonnet: Conservative newspaper blasts Harvard scholar for writing a Bush-bashing book

Source: New York Sun (6-6-07)

When a man as distinguished as Patrice Higonnet — professor of history at Harvard, a leading scholar of France and the French Revolution — writes a book as bad as "Attendant Cruelties" (Other Press, 378 pages, $25.95), it is more than a shame, it is a symptom. What drove Mr. Higonnet to range so far from his professional pasture as to write this brief history of America? It was not any great expertise in the subject; the bulk of the book is a sketchy and conventional chronicle, assembled from secondary sources, and containing no facts or interpretations that will surprise any reader who paid attention in his or her 11th-grade U.S. History class. It was not any deep historical insight; for Mr. Higonnet's method is not to explain our history so much as to assign grades to its leading actors, depending on how well they suit his present-minded criteria of "inclusion" and "exclusion," enlightened "patriotism" and iniquitous "nationalism."

No, the reason why "Attendant Cruelties" got written is much simpler: It is Mr. Higonnet's overpowering hatred of President Bush. How, Mr. Higonnet keeps asking, did the country in which he has lived for decades — the country that he admires as "open-minded, welcoming, at the forefront of nearly everything, and, in so many ways, the freest country in the world" — twice elect as president a man whom he regards as evil incarnate? This is not an exaggeration. In the course of his book, Mr. Higonnet compares the president not just to Hitler — "We can understand him better if we understand what came before him. ... Hitler was a madman, but even he did not become chancellor of the German Reich just because he was a madman" — but also to Stalin: "What Stalinism was to utopian communism, Bushism is to the American creed."

With the illogicality of malice, Mr. Higonnet characterizes Mr. Bush as simultaneously incompetent and omnipotent, feckless and relentless, the bully of his advisers and the dupe of his advisers. Reckoning the sum of these contradictions tells us nothing about Mr. Bush or about America, but it tells us a great deal about the passionate, self-delighting, deeply irresponsible hatred that now prevails even among the most prestigious and best educated precincts of the Left. It is a book that Mr. Higonnet's sympathizers will read with vigorous nods, and everyone else will read with despairing shakes of the head....

Posted on Friday, June 8, 2007 at 8:30 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Trevor Plante: Archivist Discovers Long-lost Lincoln Letter

Source: AHA Blog (Click on SOURCE for embedded links.) (6-8-07)

“Wow!” That was archivist Trevor Plante’s initial reaction when it dawned on him that the faded, yellow letter in his hand had been written by the 16th President of the United States. Plante, a Civil War specialist at the National Archives and Records Administration, happened upon the note three weeks ago while sifting through a box of war-related documents. It was penned by Lincoln on July 7, 1863, and addressed to his general-in-chief, Henry Wager Halleck. “We have certain information that Vicksburg surrendered to Gen. Grant on the 4th of July,” the president informed Halleck. “Now if Gen. Meade can complete his work so gloriously prosecuted thus far, by the literal or substantial destruction of Lee’s army, the rebellion will be over.” Lincoln could sense that an end to the war was close. Vicksburg, the Confederacy’s “Gibraltar of the West”, had fallen, splitting the South in two and giving the U.S. government source-to-mouth control of the Mississippi River. Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania had been repulsed in three days of sanguinary slaughter at an obscure hamlet called Gettysburg. The president wanted General George Meade, the hero of Gettysburg, to deliver a death blow to the Army of Northern Virginia before it could retreat to the safety of its home state. Unfortunately, Meade became unnerved at the prospect of attacking the South’s most famous general and the war dragged on for another two years. The letter captures Lincoln’s excitement at the possibility of bagging Lee and ending the internecine conflict. It had been lost to history for over 140 years until it was discovered last month. Wow, indeed.

Posted on Friday, June 8, 2007 at 8:19 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Rebecca Stott: English professor pens novel about history and Newton

Source: USA Today (6-7-07)

In 1667, a young Isaac Newton was awarded a fellowship at Trinity College in Cambridge. Was it luck, influence, brains or murder that won him his coveted position?
Historians know little about the reclusive Newton, and British history professor and debut novelist Rebecca Stott uses his enigmatic life to construct a modern-day murder mystery set against the backdrop of a 17th-century ghost story.

When Elizabeth Vogelsang, a contemporary Cambridge historian, is found drowned, her son Cameron asks his ex-lover, writer Lydia Brooke, to complete his mother's book about Newton.

But strange things begin to happen when Lydia moves into Elizabeth's house.

Files begin to disappear, blood stains appear on a pillow case, and Lydia is attacked and beaten.

Then there's the spectral vision of a man — is it Newton? — whose presence casts itself upon a mirror or into the middle of a crowd of people on a Cambridge bridge.

Is there a connection between murders that happened in 17th-century Cambridge and the death of Elizabeth and a scientist with whom Cameron works? Did Newton kill all of them?...

Posted on Friday, June 8, 2007 at 7:45 PM | Comments (0) | Top

2,000+ Young Scholars Compete For The Nation's Top History Awards

Source: PRNewswire (6-7-07)

Leading historians, curators and educators face the challenge of judging more than 2,000 finalists as they compete for top awards and scholarship money as part of National History Day (NHD), a yearlong education program for 6th through 12th-grade students. The History Channel(R), a leading sponsor of National History Day, provides $20,000 in cash prizes to four winning senior student projects as well as the Outstanding History Educator Award presented to a teacher who has made exceptional contributions to history education. The competition culminates this year on June 10 -14 at the University of Maryland.

The national winners emerge from a field of more than 700,000 middle and high school students who competed at the district and state levels leading up to the finals. The rigorous, multi-tiered selection process evaluates each project for its historical quality, clarity of presentation and how effectively it addresses this year's theme: "Triumph and Tragedy in History." The annual theme is broad enough to encourage investigation on an individual, idea or event of local, national or international historical importance, from ancient times to the present day. Students present their findings in the form of museum-like exhibits, multimedia documentaries, dramatic performances, or research papers....

Related Links

AHA Blog: National History Day Contest Commences at the Univ. of Maryland this Weekend

Posted on Friday, June 8, 2007 at 7:38 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Cheryl Spector: Gay History Destroyed In Arlington Apartment Fire

Source: http://www.nbc4.com (DC) (6-6-07)

A historian lost much of her collection of gay history photos and artifacts in an apartment fire Wednesday. Fire officials said that how that collection was being stored could have hampered their firefighting efforts.

"This is the nightmare of nightmares that there's a fire," said historian Cheryl Spector.

Spector said that while she was at work Wednesday, her life's passion was going up in smoke.

"I'm a historian and archivist and there was archival material that will never be able to be replaced and it's very sad," she said.
Spector said that after coming out as a lesbian in 1983, she has been using still cameras and video equipment to document the local history of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community in the D.C. region.

"The gay prides, victories, Supreme Court rulings and protests and marches, funerals, a lot of funerals of people who are prominent who died of HIV and AIDS over the years," said Spector.

However, fire officials said the four-foot high stacks of materials she had organized all throughout her apartment made it difficult to fight smoke and flames that alert neighbors spotted.
"Obviously it's a fire hazard. It prevents you from aggressively attacking the fire. As well, it poses a threat to tenants, especially in a multi-family dwelling like an apartment building. With the fire load it has, this could have been much worse," said Deputy Fire Chief Dan Barksdale of the Arlington County Fire Department.

Posted on Friday, June 8, 2007 at 7:34 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Hawaii History Teacher of the Year

Source: http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com (6-6-07)

A sixth-grade teacher at Kahuku Elementary School has been named Hawai'i History Teacher of the Year by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and Preserve America.
Paul Waite, a Hau'ula resident, will receive a $1,000 honorarium and will be in the running for the National History Teacher of the Year award to be selected this fall. Kahuku Elementary School's library will receive a core archive of history books and materials from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History announced the list of winners today.

The award honors one exceptional K-12 teacher of American history from each state and U.S. territory. This year, only K-6 teachers were eligible for nomination.

Posted on Friday, June 8, 2007 at 7:32 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Louisiana History Teacher of the Year

Source: http://blog.nola.com/times-picayune (6-6-07)

Ann Majeste, a fourth-grade teacher at Anastasia C. Alexander Elementary School in Kenner, has been named Louisiana History Teacher of the Year by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and Preserve America.

In a statement, the institute said:

Majeste will be recognized at an award ceremony on Monday, July 9 at 10:00 a.m. at The Old State Capitol in Baton Rouge. The award will be presented by Louisiana Secretary of State Jay Dardenne in the Old House Chambers at 10:30 a.m. A reception will be held immediately following the award ceremony in the Old Senate Chambers.

Inaugurated in 2004, the History Teacher of the Year Award is designed to promote and celebrate the teaching of American history in classrooms across the United States. It honors one exceptional K-12 teacher of American history from each state and U.S. territory. This year, only K-6 teachers were eligible for nomination. The selection of the state winner is based upon several criteria, including: at least three years of classroom experience in teaching American history in elementary school; a deep career commitment to teaching American history, which includes local and state history; evidence of creativity and imagination in the classroom that address literacy and content beyond state standards; close attention to primary documents, artifacts, historic sites, and other primary materials of history, including oral history; and evidence of thoughtful assessment of student achievement.

Posted on Friday, June 8, 2007 at 7:23 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Lee Shepard: The greatest finds in his career as an archivist

Source: http://www.inrich.com (6-6-07)

During his 33-year career as an archivist, Lee Shepard has laid his hands on some remarkable documents and artifacts.

George Washington's earliest surviving land survey (1749) and items from the estate of Paul Mellon jump to the top of his list. But the competition has heated up since the discovery of two wooden trunks containing letters, legal papers, journals and financial records collected by Mary Custis Lee, the eldest daughter of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

One of the most powerful is Lee's 1863 handwritten note to the headquarters of the Army of Northern Virginia announcing Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's death. "The daring, skill and energy of this great and good soldier, by the decree of an all-wise Providence, are now lost to us," Lee wrote.

"It was a pretty stunning discovery," said Shepard, the director of manuscripts/senior archivist at the Virginia Historical Society. "The opportunity to work with these items is just incredible."

The trunks were found at Burke & Herbert Bank & Trust Co. in Alexandria in 2002. Robert E.L. deButts Jr., a Lee descendant and corporate attorney in New York, had learned that Mary Custis had an account there at one time. When bank personnel began to research her account, they found the trunks in the basement.

"I guess it was one of those 'out of sight, out of mind' things," Shepard said.

Heirs to the Custis estate turned the trunks over to the Virginia Historical Society in late 2002. Shepard and his staff have spent years cataloging and preserving the papers....

Posted on Friday, June 8, 2007 at 7:05 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Drew Gilpin Faust: WSJ criticizes her for not attending ROTC ceremony

Source: WSJ (6-8-07)

Not long after the faculty coup d'etat that removed Lawrence Summers from the Harvard presidency, he made a point of speaking at the school's commissioning ceremony for the Reserve Officers Training Corps, as he had for every year of his tenure. "I believe that our country is best served when great universities like this one stand with those who defend freedom," he said.

One measure of the new Harvard leadership after Mr. Summers is ROTC, and on Tuesday neither acting president Derek Bok nor president-elect Drew Gilpin Faust saw fit to attend the ceremonies for the class of 2007. The university was instead represented by Stephen Rosen, a professor of government.

Harvard's ROTC, founded in 1916, was banned from campus in 1969; and aside from the brief interregnum of Mr. Summers, who was a vigorous advocate for its return, it has since been mostly spurned by the school's administration. Cadets must commute across town to MIT for its program, and receive no course credit -- or really, credit -- for their efforts.

In this Harvard echoes most of America's elite institutions of higher learning, particularly in the Ivy League. Faculties now say they object to the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays, but the anti-ROTC hostility seems more owing to the sentiments of the "antiwar" movement and other ideological academic causes. Chastened by Mr. Summers's toppling, Ms. Faust is no doubt wary of upsetting this constituency, if she is not a part of it herself.

Posted on Friday, June 8, 2007 at 6:26 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, June 7, 2007

Fritz Stern: Comes in for harsh commentary in London Review of Books

Source: Thomas Laqueur in the London Review of Books (6-7-07)

... By casting his memoir as a series of reports by a peripatetic academic, Stern can also skate over the question that haunts this book: what does it mean for him to be Jewish, and what historical lessons, if any, might one draw from an answer? The thought that the Nazis could erase the commitment to Christianity made by his ancestors was intolerable, although their anti-semitism was what gave him for the first time an unmistakeable feeling of Jewish kinship. Late in his life, well into a second marriage and in the shadow of Israel’s failure to fulfil the ideals of its founders, he has not ‘a scintilla of a doubt’ that he is ‘an American and a Jew’. He writes of himself after his lecture to the Bundestag in 1987 as a ‘61-year-old Jew’, ‘taken aback by the distortions’ of his critics. (And well he might be. Stern had argued, reasonably and correctly, that the workers’ rebellion in East Berlin on 17 June 1953 had not been a call for unification, as politicians on the right wished to believe. West Germany had made 17 June a national holiday, so these questions of historical interpretation mattered a great deal.) How did this self-recognition come about? Eight pages are given over to summarising the lecture; a few words to the question of being a Jew. Other comments are scattered here and there: painful moments of listening in silence to clichéd anti-semitic remarks in a semi-private audience with the pope, or to Germans wondering what happened to the glories of prewar academia. The baptised son of a baptised son of a baptised father is welcomed back to Germany as a German Jew and, at the same time, attacked as an American Jewish professor.

This raises one of the most fascinating questions posed by this book: the nature of this welcome. Stern is by far the most honoured German-speaking refugee historian in Germany – perhaps in academia more generally. Last September, the president of Germany bestowed on him the highest level of Bundesverdienstkreuz, the Federal Cross of Merit. At issue is not whether he deserves the recognition but rather what function this symbiotic relationship – between a scholar who craves honours and a culture that needs to bestow them – serves. Stern is a very good historian but he is one of a generation of very good émigré historians. Two research-based books – his PhD thesis on three illiberal writers of the 19th century and a beautifully written account of the mutually beneficial alliance between Bismarck and his Jewish banker Gerson Bleichröder – and some elegant essays do not, in themselves, explain the laurels.

The answer is not that he is unique in forgiving his native Germany. Others were willing to make moral discriminations among Germans after the war. Eric Hobsbawm writes, for example, that neither he nor his fellow ‘largely Jewish “re-educators”’ felt ‘the sort of visceral anti-German reaction’ that knowledge of the camps might have been expected to provoke: ‘Both conviction and realism saved us from turning the Nazis’ own racist anti-semitism inside out into an equivalent anti-Teutonism.’ That said, there has been no figure among the refugee community more eager, if not to forgive – Stern is repeatedly critical of the mendacity of individuals – then to make a place for himself in the new Germany.

When he went back to Germany Stern made every effort to establish contact with important people. He wanted, for example, to meet an old family friend from Breslau, Hermann Lüdemann, who was speaking at a tenth anniversary commemoration of the attempted coup against Hitler. It turned out that he needed an invitation to get in; supplicating at the gate was of no avail. Stern rushed to a stationery store to buy paper and an envelope, and, when a policeman was slow to agree to deliver his message to the former minister-president of postwar Schleswig-Holstein, Stern offered to take it himself. (Lüdemann, Stern tells us in a footnote, asked a third party whether Stern told jokes as well in English as in German.) Important people were drawn to him; this was not a one-way street. Helmut Schmidt, for instance, wanted someone to write about him; Stern was looking for a new project. ‘Ten days in Schmidt’s archives were wondrous’; Helmut and Mrs Schmidt were ‘wonderfully hospitable’.

In part, Stern’s success is a matter of individual psychology, age, the times and individual passions: man, moment, milieu. The older generation of historians of Germany who emigrated to the United States – major scholars like Hans Rosenberg, Hajo Holborn or Dietrich Gerhard, all students of the great Friedrich Meinecke in Berlin – were certainly interested in re-establishing scholarly relations with the land of their birth. Some went back to teach, others to retire, others not at all. But they were too distinguished, too secure in their learning, too attached to their students and to their new lives to need honours from Germany or have much interest in hobnobbing with political figures.

More to the point, there was almost no one else in Stern’s generation who had a deep interest in making it in Germany. His exact contemporary, Peter Gay (born Peter Fröhlich), did not return until 1961, when it proved almost unbearable. This too may be a matter of fathers; Peter’s was a lamp wholesaler who had to forge documents to escape and never succeeded in building a new life in Colorado. The son did end up writing about Weimar culture, but built his career by studying the Enlightenment, sexuality and psychoanalysis. No cathexis on Germany. Walter Laqueur, roughly Stern’s age and like him from Breslau, says that he felt remarkably at home when he returned after the war. But, he writes in his autobiography, ‘I did not find German postwar politics and culture particularly fascinating; in any case, the lack of passionate interest has been mutual.’ So he was not a candidate for the Stern role....

Posted on Thursday, June 7, 2007 at 8:53 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Alfred McCoy: Tried to warn School Board that Laotian was linked to war crimes

Source: http://www.madison.com (6-5-07)

As the Madison School Board was meeting Monday night to confirm its decision to name a new elementary school for Gen. Vang Pao, reports were coming in that the Hmong general had been indicted and arrested by federal authorities as the alleged mastermind of a plot to violently overthrow the government of Laos.

The irony was not lost on Alfred McCoy, the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. McCoy had been fiercely criticized by supporters of the school-naming proposal, including members of the School Board, for loudly challenging the notion that Vang Pao should be honored.
"When I spoke to the Madison School Board in May, I warned that there were more and more revelations coming out with regard to Vang Pao," McCoy said today.

The professor's historical research on Southeast Asia had been highly critical of the general who worked with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency during the Vietnam War era.

"I stood before the people of this city to warn that an embarrassment such as this would occur if Madison went ahead with its plans to name a school after a man who, according sustained coverage in responsible regional and national newspapers, was guilty of summary executions of enemy captives, fraudulent collection of funds from Hmong-Americans to support his resistance' to the Lao government, forced conscription of child soldiers and drug trafficking," McCoy said.
McCoy's words do, indeed, seem prophetic now that Vang Pao has been linked to what Bob Twiss, an assistant U.S. attorney in California, refers to as a "conspiracy to murder thousands and thousands of people at one time."...

Posted on Thursday, June 7, 2007 at 3:03 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Michael Oren: Interviewed about the Middle East

Source: Atlantic (6-12-02)

HNN Editor: This interview is from 2002. We decided to post a link to it at HNN in light of the 6-Day War anniversary.]

Michael B. Oren, the author of Six Days of War, talks about how a short but momentous conflict forged the modern Middle East....

You have said, "I'm a Zionist; I've devoted my life to Israel. Still, I set out to write a thoroughly honest and dispassionate book." Could you talk about how you went about trying to achieve that balance? How did your strong feelings about Israel play into the writing of the book?

No one writes an objective book. In the postmodern period, there's a tendency to indulge one's prejudices in history. The assumption is that you can't be objective and that to claim objectivity is to be disingenuous. But I believe that balance is something you strive for in the way a mathematician will strive for absolute zero, knowing in advance that he can't ever achieve it, but that he can get closer to it. Since my objective was to understand the Six-Day War and to understand how such a profound event unfolded—an event that is so profoundly impacting our current world—for me to indulge my prejudices would have been counterproductive. And I really viewed those prejudices as obstacles to overcome when I sat down to write history. Every time I came to a document that could be interpreted one way or another, I had to ask myself, Am I interpreting this document in the most balanced way possible, or am I reading it as an Israeli? From the first to the very last page of this book it was a challenge. But some of the most gratifying feedback I've received on the book has been from Arab scholars. I've spoken at Harvard, at Oxford, and most recently at the Council on Foreign Affairs and the National Press Club, and there have been Arab scholars at all of these talks and the feedback has been very encouraging. Recently I was invited to interview on Al Jazeera. It was the highest compliment I could get. I finally made it. I made Al Jazeera!

It seems from what you say in the book that in the years following 1967 the war was an incredibly painful, off-limits topic for the Arabs, so Arab scholars must have waited a while before they started studying it.

Even now it's very painful. This was the Arab world's first major postcolonial crisis, and they didn't fare well in it. They had to come to grips with why the promise of national liberation failed, and that is a painful endeavor. By the way, I think it's a necessary endeavor. It is an essential step in both the political maturation of the region and toward some resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict....

Posted on Thursday, June 7, 2007 at 11:52 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Tom Pocock: Journalist and naval historian whose work focused on the life, times and contemporaries of Nelson (obit.)

Source: Independent (UK) (6-6-07)

The status of naval and maritime history in Britain has greatly advanced in recent years, with several specialist university centres and new professorial chairs. One reason is that, as academia has democratised, it has seen its own advantages in catching up with a long-standing and less fashion-prone popular interest in the field. In this, one strand has been an enduring market for naval fiction, especially but not solely of the Nelsonic era, from C.S. Forester to Patrick O'Brian et al. Another has been a matching tradition of saleable general naval history, purveyed in the mid-to-late-20th century by such names as Christopher Lloyd, Oliver Warner, Dudley Pope, David Howarth and Richard Hough - most led into it by wartime naval service. Tom Pocock, a great friend of Hough, was the last of this Second World War-tempered group and among them held a special place on a number of counts.

Pocock was undoubtedly one of the best writers - fluent, evocative and with great narrative pace - qualities fostered if not born in his original and long-parallel career as a journalist. He was also extraordinarily productive, writing, editing or contributing to 23 books over a period of 38 years up to 2006. Most distinctive, in terms of his reputation, were the high proportion (10) that focused on the life, times and contemporaries of Nelson, with whom Pocock's bond was as much their shared Norfolk background as personal admiration. As he said in the preface to his full biography, Horatio Nelson - a Whitbread Prize runner-up in 1987, and still in print - since a boy he had "walked the [Norfolk] paths that Nelson walked, seen the views he saw, visited most of the houses he had and enjoyed much talk about him in the . . . inn at Burnham Thorpe which he knew"....

Pocock's devotion to Nelson and his contemporaries are likely to be his main legacy. Apart from the 1987 Nelson biography, he published three other notable naval lives; of Captain Sir William Hoste ( Remember Nelson, 1977); of the arch-maverick Admiral Sir Sidney Smith ( A Thirst for Glory, 1996) and in 2000,afreshandoverduere-examination of Captain Marryat - founding father of the Nelsonic sea novel.

His books also showed his fascination and tenacity for "finding things out", often at personal cost and difficulty. Young Nelson in the Americas (1980), for instance, involved a journey to the Nicaraguan jungle fortress where his hero nearly died in 1780, and was also an early example of his capacity to identify an overlooked aspect of a familiar subject, or anticipate and exploit a rising public interest. Later cases included The Terror before Trafalgar: Nelson, Napoleon and the secret war (2002) and his last book, Breaking the Chains (2006), which treated the Navy's war on white slavery in time for this year's Abolition bicentenary.
...

Posted on Wednesday, June 6, 2007 at 7:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

John Ferling: Interviewed about the Am Rev

Source: Oxford University Press website (6-6-07)

[John Ferling is the author of Almost A Miracle (Oxford U. Press).]

OUP: Compared to the Civil War and America’s twentieth century wars, the War of Independence appears to have been pretty tame. Do you agree?

John Ferling: All wars are different. Each war has its own cast of characters, but most importantly the technology of war continues to change, leading to ever more destructive weaponry. Soldiers in the Revolutionary War were for the most part equipped with muskets that had an effective range of 50 yards. Civil War soldiers carried rifles with an effective range that was six times greater. Soldiers in World War II not only carried rifles that they could fire more rapidly, they took machine guns and terrifying other weapons into battle.

Yet despite the relatively primitive technology of the eighteenth century, there was an astonishing death toll in the Revolutionary War. One American male in sixteen of military age died during the Revolutionary War. One in ten of military age died in the Civil War and one in seventy-five in World War II. Of those who served in the Continental army, one in four died. In the Civil War, one regular in five perished. In World War II, one in forty U.S. servicemen died. The death rate was similar for those fighting for Great Britain in the Revolutionary War. One-fourth of the British soldiers, German mercenaries, and American Loyalists who fought with the redcoats in North America perished. More than 80,000 British and American soldiers and sailors died in the Revolutionary War. Given the populations of the two countries in 1776, those losses would be the equivalent today to the loss of roughly 2,000,000 Americans.

OUP: What was the turning point in the Revolutionary War?

Ferling: In his wonderful book on the Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson wrote that long wars tend to have several turning points. That was true of the War of Independence as well, which in my judgment had 5 turning points. The Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775 not only convinced Americans that they could stand up to regulars, it had a deleterious psychological impact on General William Howe, soon to be the British army’s overall commander in North America. General Washington’s brilliant campaign in New Jersey in the last days of 1776, which included the two engagements at Trenton and the subsequent battle at Princeton, boosted sagging morale, enabled a new army to be recruited, and impressed the French leadership. General John Burgoyne’s disastrous invasion of New York in 1777, culminating in his surrender at Saratoga that October, brought France into the war as an American ally and led Britain to adopt a new strategy, the Southern Strategy. By mid-1780 the war had stalemated, with possibly ominous implications for the United States. As a result, I see the partisan war that erupted that summer in South Carolina’s backcountry, and the stunningly adroit campaign waged the following winter in the Carolinas by General Nathanael Greene, as an important turning point. It ultimately led Britain’s Southern commander, Earl Cornwallis, to take his army into Virginia. Four months later he suffered defeat at Yorktown, the long-awaited decisive victory that broke the stalemate....

Posted on Wednesday, June 6, 2007 at 1:22 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Michael Oren: In interview says Arabs indeed threatened war in '67

Source: http://www.jpost.com (6-5-07)

Those who call the Six Day War a disaster or a Pyrrhic victory are grossly mistaken, because they overlook the fact that Israel wasn't destroyed, historian Michael Oren told The Jerusalem Post on Monday.

In an interview on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the outbreak of war on June 5, 1967, Oren said his research of documents in Arab countries had revealed clearly that the Arabs had planned to destroy Israel.

Although this seems obvious to Israel sympathizers who hold to the traditional story of the Arabs' responsibility for the outbreak of war, the intervening decades have seen the promulgation of a myth that Israel was not really in danger.

Q & A with Michael Oren
"The biggest myth going is that somehow there was not a real and immediate Arab threat, that somehow Israel could have negotiated itself outside the crisis of 1967, and that it wasn't facing an existential threat, or facing any threat at all," said Oren, who is a senior fellow at the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at Jerusalem's Shalem Center and author of Six Days of War: June 1967. He noted that this was the premise of Tom Segev's book, 1967: Israel, the War and the Year That Transformed the Middle East. "What's remarkable is that all the people alleging this - not one of them is working from Arabic sources. It's quite extraordinary when you think about it. It's almost as if Israel were living in a universe by itself. It's a deeply solipsistic approach to Middle East history."...

Posted on Wednesday, June 6, 2007 at 1:39 AM | Comments (0) | Top

AHA Council Supports Statement Against Detention of Scholars in Iran

Source: AHA Blog (6-5-07)

At its biennial meeting on Sunday June 3, 2007, the AHA Council released the following statement (see the press room page on the AHA web site) in support of the recent letter from the Middle East Studies Association on the detention of scholars in Iran:

"We, the members of the Council of the American Historical Association, write to express our support for the recent statements issued by the Middle East Studies Association protesting the arrests and detention of Dr. Haleh Esfandiari and Dr. Kian Tajbakhsh. As Council members of an organization dedicated to academic freedom and free scholarly exchange, we are deeply disturbed by the Iranian government’s actions in this matter and join our colleagues in MESA in calling for the immediate release of Dr. Esfandiari and Dr. Tajbakhsh."

...

Posted on Wednesday, June 6, 2007 at 1:19 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Robert Dallek: Dares to criticize book on Hillary by ex-NYT reporters in the NYT

Source: Robert Dallek in a book review in the NYT (6-5-07)

... In “Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton,” Jeff Gerth, a former reporter for The New York Times, and Don Van Natta Jr., an investigative reporter at the paper, have written what will become mandatory reading for Mrs. Clinton’s opponents.

Mr. Gerth and Mr. Van Natta see themselves as relating the unvarnished truth about Senator Clinton. “Never before has such a high-profile candidate occupied the spotlight for so long without the public’s learning the facts about so much that is crucial to finally understanding her,” they write. Mrs. Clinton; her husband, Bill; and their supporters have told a flattering story about the couple. “Now it is time for another,” less laudatory version....

The book is almost uniformly negative and overly focused on what they consider the Clintons’ scandalous past and the darker aspects of Mrs. Clinton’s personality. Her ambition, for example, is seen as an unattractive compulsion that, at times, has led her into untoward behavior. They assert that the Clintons had a longstanding deal to win the presidency, first for Bill and then for Hillary, a secret pact of ambition.

The evidence of such a pact — interviews that have already been challenged in the press — is less than convincing. Moreover, that the Clintons are ambitious and hunger for the public spotlight is obvious. But does this make them different from anyone else in politics, including two of our most notable presidents, Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt?

The book’s greatest flaw is its flogging of all the Clinton scandals, not simply because they are so familiar and ultimately came to so little, but also because they give us insufficient clues to what sort of president Mrs. Clinton might be. It would have been more instructive to learn something new about why her health reform initiative failed or to explain in some detail why she was overwhelmingly re-elected by New York voters and has been, as even some Republican senators acknowledge, an effective senator.

The third of the book devoted to Mrs. Clinton’s Senate career is no endorsement of her presidential aspirations. They describe her as someone who has operated outside Senate rules and as having been careless in voting for the Iraq war without reading “the complete intelligence reports.”

Should Hillary Clinton’s personal limitations — her inclination to shade the truth in the service of her ambition, what former Senator Bill Bradley called her “arrogance,” “disdain,” and “hypocrisy” — disqualify her for the presidency?

It is surely preferable to have our most upright citizens sitting in the White House, but history repeatedly shows that presidents with character flaws have not necessarily been less competent leaders, especially in times of crisis, than those with a stronger moral compass: John F. Kennedy’s womanizing hardly precluded his effective management of the Cuban missile crisis, and Richard M. Nixon’s affinity for cutting political and legal corners did not prevent him from some exceptional foreign policy achievements, most notably the transformation of relations with China....

Posted on Wednesday, June 6, 2007 at 1:15 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, June 5, 2007

Ian Kershaw: Past master

Source: John Crace in the Guardian (6-5-07)

Almost anything can look inevitable in hindsight. The rise of Hitler, the Iraq war, even this interview. As one event follows another, the public and the private appear to interconnect in a seamless arc of mechanistic determinism, such that the only thing left for a historian to do is attribute the correct degrees of causality. It's an attractive way of making sense of the past, but what seems predictable now rarely looked that way when it happened.

This is the starting point for Fateful Choices, the new book by Ian Kershaw, the UK's, if not the world's, premier historian of the Nazi era. He looks at 10 critical decisions between May 1940 (when Britain decided to fight on, rather than surrender, at Dunkirk) and late 1941 (when Hitler declared war on the US and set in place the extermination of the Jews) that shaped the outcome not just of the second world war but of the rest of the 20th century.

"We get used to thinking of events in a certain way," he says, "and I wanted to re-examine key moments to show they weren't as straightforward as we imagine. The book is not an exercise in counter-factualism ... but you can't avoid a certain amount of short-term 'what-if-ism', simply because the decisions were so pivotal.

"Churchill had not yet become the bombastic war leader in May 1941. Becoming prime minister had been far from an inevitability. So the decision to fight on, when it was not even certain that Britain would still have an army, was on a knife edge for some days. And it's not hard to imagine it having gone the other way. Any academic who says he never has an alternative history in mind isn't being entirely honest."...

Posted on Tuesday, June 5, 2007 at 6:17 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Fred Notehelfer: Honored for Leadership in Japanese Studies

Source: http://www.international.ucla.edu (6-4-07)

Fred G. Notehelfer directed the UCLA Center for Japanese Studies for 16 years and co-directed an East Asian Studies consortium in Southern California for 20 years. He will continue teaching at UCLA for another year before retiring.

***

As a graduate student in history, Gordon Berger came across a publication in the Yale library that he says was "kept under lock and key." It was called the Harvard East Asian Research Center Papers on Japan. After receiving permission, he read in it "a remarkably erudite paper" written by Fred G. Notehelfer, a scholar of his own generation.

"The paper was already addressing one of the leitmotifs of his career-long interest in examining how the universal values of western civilization have been encountered and integrated, or not, into the Japanese experience," Berger said at a May 19, 2007, symposium honoring Notehelfer's 16-year tenure as director of the Paul I. and Hisako Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies, which hosted the event at UCLA. "It is an issue that reverberates through virtually all of Fred's scholarship."

Berger and his USC colleague Jonathan Reynolds; UCLA's William Bodiford, Seiji Lippit, and Donald McCallum; and Eiichiro Azuma and Cameron Hurst, both of the University of Pennslyvania, discussed topics ranging from Japanese history, religion, art, and literature in honor of Notehelfer.

McCallum, acting director of the Terasaki Center for the past two quarters, said the symposium should be considered a celebration of Notehelfer's achievements, not a farewell.

"It is not a retirement. You don't retire from directorships," he said. "Fred in fact will continue to teach at UCLA next year, so in essence it is a celebration."

Posted on Tuesday, June 5, 2007 at 6:15 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Daniel Pipes: Establishes a legal defense fund for experts sued by Islamists

Source: Middle East Forum website (6-5-07)

The Middle East Forum has established a Legal Project to protect researchers and analysts who work on the topics of terrorism, terrorist funding, and radical Islam.

Researchers and analysts have been repeatedly targeted in legal actions ...

Such lawsuits are often predatory, filed without a serious expectation of winning, but undertaken as a means to bankrupt, distract, intimidate, and demoralize defendants. Plaintiffs seek less to prevail in the courtroom than to wear down researchers and analysts. Even when the latter win cases, they pay heavily in time, money, and spirit. As counterterrorism specialist Steven Emerson comments, "Legal action has become a mainstay of radical Islamist organizations seeking to intimidate and silence their critics." Islamists clearly hope, Douglas Farah notes, that researchers will "get tired of the cost and the hassle [of lawsuits] and simply shut up."

Posted on Tuesday, June 5, 2007 at 3:19 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Horace Mann teacher shouldn't have been fired says historian, but ...

Source: Jonathan Zimmerman in the New York Daily News (6-5-07)

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of “Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century” (Harvard University Press).]

In 1936, historian Howard Beale published a book entitled, “Are American Teachers Free?” In 855 not-so-succinct pages, Beale gave a simple answer: no. Across the United States, schools placed strict limits upon teachers’ speech, manners, and conduct. Some schools barred teachers from dancing, smoking, or playing cards; others fired instructors who joined “radical” political groups, including the Ku Klux Klan.

OK, so the ban on card-playing seems a bit draconian in this day and age. But a teacher who goes home, dons a hood, and carries a flaming cross to a KKK rally? I’m perfectly fine with firing him. And that, I suppose, marks me as an enemy of “academic freedom.”

Witness the dust-up at the Horace Mann School in New York, one of the city’s most prestigious prep schools. The school recently dismissed Andrew Trees, who published a saucy satire last year of New York’s high-society, private-school set. Then it barred the student newspaper from publishing two letters and opinion piece in support of Dr. Trees.

“Doctor” Trees, you see, holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia. If he taught at a college or university, like I do, he would certainly be free to write or say anything he wished. Instead, he teaches at a high school. Should that make a difference?

Not according to one of the censored letters, signed by dozens of prominent American historians. “We believe that academic freedom should be the cornerstone of an academic institution,” declares the letter, which was obtained by the New York Times after the Horace Mann newspaper was prevented from publishing it. “In our own work and in our classrooms, we strive to create an environment where students and faculty are free to think critically.”

Well, sure. Every teacher should try to do that, no matter what their subject of instruction or the age of their students. But if the historians think that elementary and high school teachers should have the same type of academic freedom that university professors have . . .well, they’re simply wrong.

Let me get a few things on the table right away. First of all, full disclosure: I don’t know Andrew Trees. But I do know several of his professors at UVA, who signed the letter in his support.

Second, I share their outrage about Trees’ dismissal. If Horace Mann fired Trees for publishing a send-up of the school, it should be deeply ashamed of itself. And the school compounded its foolishness by censoring letters to the student newspaper, where the editor-in-chief is none other than Elyssa Spitzer, daughter of Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

But I’m troubled by the implication that high school teachers should have exactly the same rights and freedoms as university professors. Suppose a teacher wrote a book denying the Holocaust, or maintaining that the world was created in six 24-hour days. If the teacher was fired, would the East Coast’s academic all-stars rally to his defense?

I think not. And that’s because all of us understand—whether we admit it or not—that elementary- and secondary-level teachers need to stay within some kind of community consensus. They teach kids, not adults. So it’s reasonable for the community to insist that teachers’ public behavior—and sometimes, even, their public expression—respects a few broadly shared norms.

That’s why federal courts upheld the 2000 dismissal of Bronx High School of Science teacher Peter Melzer, a leader of the North American Man-Boy Love Association. As a citizen, Melzer has every right to join an organization advocating the legalization of underage sex. But he has no right to teach in a school, where his presence would generate too much fear, confusion, and controversy for young people to handle.

Could the students at Horace Mann handle a satire of their upscale private school? Of course they could. No one who attends Horace Mann would be in the least bit shocked, surprised, or scared by the behaviors that Andrew Trees described in his book, "Academy X": drug abuse, grade inflation, or plagiarism.

So if school officials fired Trees because of his book, they certainly weren’t acting to protect the kids. Instead, they were acting to protect their market share: they wanted to appease angry parents and trustees, who thought the book would hurt the reputation of the school.

And that’s truly despicable. Like any school—indeed, like any adult—Horace Mann can and should shield children from attitudes, opinions, and behaviors which are simply too horrible for young minds to contemplate. But it shouldn’t censor faculty or students simply for making the school look bad. That makes Horace Mann look even worse.

Posted on Tuesday, June 5, 2007 at 1:43 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, June 4, 2007

Tom Segev: Offers fresh look at 6-Day War

Source: Gil Troy in the course of a review of Segev's 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East (6-2-07)

As Israelis celebrate the 40th anniversary of their speedy triumph over hostile neighbours, both internal and external critics are questioning the Six Day War's justification, let alone its results. The pivotal moral question regards Israel's decision to launch its pre-emptive air raid, which destroyed Egypt's air force on June 5, 1967. Did Israel act rashly? Did the attack reflect a delusional anxiety rather than a realistic threat assessment?

In 2002, historian Michael Oren's majestic Six Days of War emphasized the miscalculations that triggered this unwanted war. Nevertheless, after examining Syrian, Jordanian, Egyptian, American and Soviet sources, along with Israeli archives, Oren concluded that Israel's leaders had no choice but to attack.

Those who condemn Israel's decision generally minimize Arab leaders' genocidal threats, the skirmishes with Syria and Egypt's decision to blockade Israel's southernmost port after dismissing the United Nations buffer force on its border with Israel.

And indeed, in his sweeping, gripping and contrarian book examining 1967, Israeli journalist and historian Tom Segev censures Israel by focusing too narrowly on Israel. Rooting the conflict in the country's economic, social and psychic crisis of confidence in 1966, Segev paints a devastating portrait of a small, insecure society, exorcising inner demons by overreacting to external demons. "Obviously," he concludes, "Israel was too weak to avoid war."

Posted on Monday, June 4, 2007 at 9:13 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Paul David: It took decades for the economic impact of electricity to become clear. The same will prove true of information technology.

Source: Tim Harford in the Financial Times (London) (6-2-07)

... Paul David, an economic historian at Stanford, presented a brief, prescient research paper to the American Economic Association back in 1990, titled "The Dynamo and the Computer". Professor David's aim was to persuade economists that the history of the electric dynamo would tell them something about the ongoing information revolution.

Electric light bulbs were available by 1879, and there were generating stations in New York and London by 1881. Yet a thoughtful observer in 1900 would have found little evidence that the "electricity revolution" was making business more efficient.

Steam-powered manufacturing had linked an entire production line to a single huge steam engine. As a result, factories were stacked on many floors around the central engine, with drive belts all running at the same speed. The flow of work around the factory was governed by the need to put certain machines close to the steam engine, rather than the logic of moving the product from one machine to the next. When electric dynamos were first introduced, the steam engine would be ripped out and the dynamo would replace it. Productivity barely improved.

Eventually, businesses figured out that factories could be completely redesigned on a single floor; production lines were arranged to enable the smooth flow of materials around the factory. Most importantly, each worker could have his or her own little electric motor, starting it or stopping it at will. The improvements weren't just architectural but social: once the technology allowed workers to make more decisions, they needed more training and different contracts to encourage them to take responsibility.

David showed that the first world war, which led to immigration controls and choked off the supply of cheap but untrained immigrant workers, was one of the spurs to make these changes. US productivity growth eventually leapt in the 1920s, four decades after the commercialisation of electricity. Productivity growth rates in US manufacturing in the 1920s were more than five per cent per year, a rate that makes the "new economy" look laughable, at least for now.

But David's research also suggests patience. New technology takes time to have a big economic impact. More importantly, businesses and society itself have to adapt before that will happen. Such change is always difficult and, perhaps mercifully, slower than the march of technology....

Posted on Monday, June 4, 2007 at 9:08 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Michael Beschloss: WaPo pans his book on presidential courage

Source: Alan Wolfe in the WaPo (6-3-07)

[Alan Wolfe is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College and is writing a book about why liberalism matters.]

It has become a cliché to point out that while academic historians write dense, imponderable tomes to get tenure, popular historians satisfy the public hunger with powerfully written and engaging narratives. This cliché could be disproved in two ways: Academics could write terrific histories, and popular historians could write dreadful ones.

Michael Beschloss picks the second option. Presidential Courage is boring, repetitive and badly written. It tells us nothing we did not know before. And it substitutes melodrama for the actualities of history.

The thesis of Beschloss's book is that presidents sometimes act courageously. Like one of his heroes, John F. Kennedy, Beschloss defines courage as the willingness to do the right thing rather than the popular thing. The rest of the book is devoted to offering examples of this not very stunning insight. Included are George Washington's support of the unpopular Jay Treaty, John Adams's willingness to break with extreme Federalists, Andrew Jackson's successful struggle with Nicholas Biddle and the Second National Bank, Lincoln's issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, Teddy Roosevelt's trust busting, FDR's leadership during America's entry into World War II, Harry Truman's support for a Jewish state, John F. Kennedy's fight for civil rights, and Ronald Reagan's decision to ignore the hard-line anti-communists in his party to find common ground with Mikhail Gorbachev.

To tell his tale, Beschloss writes chapters that rarely exceed 10 pages. He is fond of paragraphs that contain only one sentence. With the possible exception of John Adams, none of the presidents he chooses is controversial or surprising. And what he says about each has been said many times before: Andrew Jackson was a man to whom honor was important, Teddy Roosevelt overcame his poor physical health, and Ronald Reagan liked to talk about his movie roles. It is as if Beschloss never wants to tax the minds of his readers. He taxes their attention span instead, for it is easier to read longer narratives filled with fascinating twists and turns than to work one's way through Beschloss's choppy, disconnected stories.

Once one of these stories has been told, moreover, one gets the point of them all. Where does courage come from? Let's try God. So despite the fact that America's presidents vary greatly in their faith commitments, Beschloss's presidents invariably turn to religion for reassurance. Jackson "drew strength from his religious belief and Bible reading." Lincoln was able to face possible political defeat because he "drew in part on his religious faith." Harry Truman "tried to be a serious Christian." Ronald Reagan "was in fact a determined Christian." Life rarely follows a script. Beschloss's lives of the presidents always do....

Posted on Monday, June 4, 2007 at 9:03 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Samuel Huntington: Academic claims the clash of civilizations is a dangerous myth

Source: Eboo Patel in the WaPo (6-4-07)

[ Eboo Patel is the Founder and Executive Director of the Interfaith Youth Core and the author of Acts of Faith.]

The first assignment I give the graduate students in my class at Chicago Theological Seminary is Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations. I figure it is only fair for them to do a thorough reading of perhaps the most prevalent theory of our times.

And then I spend the rest of the semester trying to dig out of that hole.

It’s not that my students – most of them bright, progressive, hopeful people of faith – want to believe that there is a clash of civilizations. It is that Huntington has created a framework that facts seem to fit in. And as our media continues to provide a microphone and a stage for religious totalitarians, the Huntington thesis that civilizations are inherently at odds with each other acquires the force of inevitability, which makes it the single most dangerous idea of our time.

So I am continually looking for resources that are as wide-ranging as Huntington’s book - that pull together history, politics, religious scholarship and personal narrative into a coherent framework which can counter the force of inevitability with the power of possibility.

I have found one such resource in Akbar Ahmed’s important new book, Journey Into Islam.

Professor Ahmed’s personal range is remarkable. He is a devoted Muslim who was trained as an anthropologist at the University of London, served as Pakistan’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, lived for extended periods of time on three continents, and seems comfortable in situations that range from tribal rituals to state dinners. He brings every inch of his access, erudition and aplomb to this book.

He also brings a deep and nuanced understanding of Islam, something shockingly absent from most of the current books on Muslims in the modern world. For Ahmed, Islam is not just a handful of sacred verses or a particular political movement, but a broad tradition inspired by a religious ethos that includes poetry, philosophy, prayer, politics and every other aspect of human life. This breadth of understanding is distilled into a fascinating three-part typology of Muslim leadership – the mystical, the modernist and the fundamentalist. Each of these archetypes is rooted within the tradition and has had various incarnations throughout Muslim history....

Posted on Monday, June 4, 2007 at 8:59 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Andrew Roberts: In praise of the 'Anglosphere'

Source: Robert Sibley, The Ottawa Citizen (6-3-07)

Toward the end of the 19th century, Prussian leader Otto von Bismarck remarked that the most important thing to know about the 20th century was that Americans spoke English.

His point was obvious: an alliance between the British Empire and the United States, the world's largest English-speaking states, would create the most powerful political entity on the planet.

Bismarck's remarks proved prescient, for which we can be thankful. If not for the willingness of the English-speaking nations -- Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand -- to sacrifice their blood and treasure, much of the world would be ruled by dictators.

Such is the conclusion you reach after reading historian Andrew Roberts' latest book, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900. Moreover, it dawns on you that the source of much of the world's disorder in the last century has been, and still is, non-English-speaking countries.

"It is emphatically not that the English-speaking peoples are inherently better or superior that accounts for their success, therefore, but that they have perfected better systems of government," Roberts writes in suggesting that a key reason for the success of the English-speaking people is widely shared cultural mindset.

Thanks to traditions of law, a common language, a shared cultural background and an abiding sense of individual freedom, the English-speaking peoples have been less susceptible than others to the lures of fanaticism. And this, he says, allowed them "to achieve their full potential, while some other peoples on the planet have remained mired in authoritarianism, totalitarianism and institutionalised larceny."

Despite Roberts' caveats, some reviewers had damned him with cries of cultural chauvinism and charges of "racism." For example, Johann Hari, a columnist for the left-wing Independent newspaper, dismisses Roberts' book as "an ahistorical catalogue of apologies and justifications for mass murder ... " But rather than offer sufficient evidence to rebut Roberts' thesis, Hari, writing in a recent edition of The New Republic, sneers at Roberts for having a father who "owned a string of Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises."

Such elitist rhetoric is standard fare for those who seek to silence anyone who dares challenge the propaganda of multicultural equanimity. But while you can quarrel with Roberts' interpretation of events, he marshals too much empirical evidence to be dismissed with a sneer.

As a more insightful reviewer observes, Roberts places the accomplishments of the English-speaking people over the last century in proper perspective. "Instead of emulating other historians who have portrayed the 20th century as a cesspit of almost uninterrupted warfare, slaughter, and misery, Roberts snubs reproach and defeatism," historian Keith Windshuttle said in the February edition of The New Criterion. "His tale is of the triumph of light over the forces of darkness."...

Posted on Monday, June 4, 2007 at 8:55 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Labor union teaching labor history to teachers

Source: http://www.nysut.org (6-4-07)

Kate Mullany is more than a 19th-century labor pioneer for Celine Casey's students. She's a neighbor. "I teach at School 14 in Troy and my kids could walk to the Kate Mullany historic site," said Casey, a K-1 remediation teacher and Troy Teachers Association member. "I'd love to incorporate information about her into my curriculum."

Casey attended the Teaching Labor History Symposium at NYSUT headquarters in May. The day-long forum helped teachers better incorporate labor lessons into their curriculum.

"There's a lot of misunderstanding about what labor unions do," said Paul Cole, director of the American Labor Studies Center, which organized the event. Cole is a retired secretary-treasurer for the New York State AFL-CIO and a former NYSUT director.

Posted on Monday, June 4, 2007 at 8:44 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tom Segev: The Six-Day War, 40 Years Later

Source: Jon Wiener in the Nation (6-4-07)

Israel went to war 40 years ago this week more because of "psychological weakness" than because of a genuine strategic threat--that's the conclusion of Tom Segev, one of Israel's leading historians, and author of the new book 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East. June 5 is the 40th anniversary of the beginning of Israel's Six-Day war, when the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza began. I spoke with Tom Segev on the phone in Jerusalem on Monday.

The prevailing view of the war, in both the US and Israel, was expressed by historian Michael Oren, who wrote in the LA Times on Sunday that the war "saved Israel from destruction." Segev commented, "We don't really know that. We don't really know what the Arabs intended to do." But we do know what Israelis thought: "They thought Egypt was out to destroy them. It's really a psychological matter more than a clear-cut strategic one. Psychologically Israelis were very weak on the eve of the Six-Day War; they believed they were facing a second Holocaust."

How much of that psychology was an accurate response to the strategic situation, and how much was caused by other factors? "The crisis of May 1967 caught Israel at a weak point in its history," Segev said, "with economic recession and unemployment, more Israelis leaving Israel than Jews coming to live there, a generation gap with people fearing they were losing their children as Zionists, and a widespread feeling that the Zionist dream was over. And beyond that Israel was feeling the first acts of Palestinian terrorism, and the army had no answer to that, just as it doesn't have an answer to today's terrorism. All this led to a deep pessimism. Then the crisis broke out."

Posted on Monday, June 4, 2007 at 8:02 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Anthony Wells-Cole: Solves riddle of ancient carvings on Scottish castle

Source: BBC (6-4-07)

The origins of intricate carvings which line the walled garden of a Scottish castle have finally been discovered, solving centuries of mystery.
The 400-year-old Edzell Castle near Brechin attracts thousands of visitors.

It was not known where the 14 carvings, depicting the Liberal arts on the south wall and Cardinal Virtues on the west wall, had come from.

But their origins have now been revealed as those of Flemish Renaissance master - Maarten de Vos.

'Eureka moment'

English historian, Anthony Wells-Cole, discovered the link to de Vos while he was carrying out work in Amsterdam.

De Vos apparently provided the inspiration to Edzell sculptor Johannes Salder.

Posted on Monday, June 4, 2007 at 7:40 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Edward Blum: Being young no bar to teaching history

Source: http://media.www.thedailyaztec.com (6-4-07)

When one thinks about history professors, the stereotype of ancient-looking men in tweed jackets who drone on about past events that seem to have little significance today usually comes to mind. San Diego State history professor Edward Blum challenges this perception.

"History is a profession that's being written by youngish folks with energy, new ideas, approaches and insights," Blum said. "They're dedicated to seeing the past connected to the present."

Blum, 29, began teaching at SDSU last semester. Although his primary concentration is on the American Civil War and Reconstruction, he's found ways to make history that is centuries old resonate with his students. He said he uses 19th-century music, pictures, historical simulations - in which students research historic figures and come together to debate - and even contemporary cartoons to give students a feel for those times. In one of his introductory classes, Blum showed part of the "South Park" episode in which the characters re-enact the Civil War.

Since 9/11, some of the familiar music from the Civil War era has taken on new meanings, Blum said.

"'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' is troubling," he said. "One of the lines is 'As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.' So I asked my students what that sounds like, and some of them said 'jihad.'"

The idea of what it means to say that "God is on your side" - as the North and the South did in the Civil War and the United States and terrorist groups have said in the current War on Terror - has become more complicated, Blum said.

Posted on Monday, June 4, 2007 at 7:20 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Eric Alterman: He explains why he was arrested in the Spin Room

Source: Huffington Post (Blog) Click on SOURCE for embedded links. (6-3-07)

Ok, here's what happened.

I came to New Hampshire with the Creative Coalition for a panel tomorrow morning and was supposed to be in the auditorium for the debate but because I am a journalist, they were told I would have to wait in the spin room. When I got to the spin room, which was an empty gymnasium, I noticed that there were chairs located on a balcony above us. So I went up there -- no one asked me for my ID or anything -- and went over to the bar and asked if it was a cash bar, because I had no idea what kind of event it was. I was told it was an open bar so I asked for a glass of wine and a glass of water and went to sit down and wait for the event to begin.

A guy came over and asked me who I was and I told him I was a columnist for The Nation and he told me I had to leave. I thought he was kind of rude, so I asked him his name, thinking it might go into Altercation the next day. He refused to answer me I asked again. He refused again. But I was following him out when he went to get a cop. The cop told me to leave the room and I did. We left the room, past where the people were handing out badges to go into the reception and I figured the entire drama was over. But the cop kept yelling at me to leave. I didn't understand. I thought I had left. I asked him to stop yelling, I had left. He kept telling me to leave. In retrospect, I guess he was kicking me out of the building and I didn't understand, but it was really mystifying and annoying and I told him I wanted to speak to his commanding officer.

We went over to the commanding officer and I, calmly and politely, sought to explain that I didn't know why this cop was continuing to hassle me. The first cop kept interrupting me as I tried to explain myself and finally I turned around and said, "Can I please finish a sentence here?" That's when the first cop decided to arrest me. He handcuffed me behind my back and took me outside.

(A funny aside, Congressman Ed Markey happen to walk by then and came over to say hello to me and stuck out his hand for a shake. I had to say, "Sorry, Ed, I'm being handcuffed." He laughed, and told the officers that he would vouch for my character and walked away.)

Anyway, I never refused to leave and the only time I raised my voice was when the first cop would not let me explain what I had thought was a massive misunderstanding to his commanding officer. Once I was arrested and brought to the Goffstown station, I actually had a pretty nice time with the cops there, who were very friendly and understanding of my situation. When they learned I was a writer and planned to write about this incident, they wanted to make sure that I knew that the cop who had arrested me was not one of theirs, but was from another town and had been working on an "reciprocity" arrangement.

I paid a $30 fine to be released and the whole thing took about 45 minutes. I filed a written report with the police explaining that I thought the arresting officer had treated me unfairly, and I do think this was the case, but I now think it was based on a misunderstanding on just where he wanted me to stay and where he wanted me to leave.

In any case, I spoke to CNN and I believe they will correct some of the misimpressions created by their first story. Just to be clear, I did not refuse to leave seven times and I did not, as far as I know, raise my voice, except for that last time.

For the record, I also don't remember anyone reading me my Miranda rights, though I don't know if that is ultimately going to matter. I have a court date in July but I am hoping to be able to clear it up before I leave tomorrow because it strikes me as mostly, a misunderstanding.

PS: the Goffstown cops went a lot easier on me when I told them I was a Met/Sox fan, and a Yankee hater to the core...

Posted on Monday, June 4, 2007 at 7:00 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Eric Alterman: Released after being arrested in Spin Room

Source: CNN (6-3-07)

[HNN Editor: Click here to read Eric Alterman's account of what happened.]

MANCHESTER, New Hampshire (CNN ) – Columnist and author Eric Alterman has been released after being arrested Sunday night inside the debate spin room. He was charged with criminal trespass after police say he refused repeated orders to leave.

Goffstown, N.H. police said Alterman was in the spin room as a guest of the Creative Coalition and went to an area reserved for a private reception for WMUR-TV. Police said he was asked by an executive at the party if he was invited to the private area and was asked to leave. A police officer was called after a verbal altercation ensued. According to police, Alterman was asked seven times to leave and became increasingly loud as he refused. After ignoring a final request, police said he was handcuffed and taken from the building.

Alterman spoke with CNN after being released. He called the arrest a “misunderstanding” and claimed he did not refuse orders to leave.

He told CNN he was waiting in the spin room for the debate to end but there was no place to sit. He claimed he saw an area upstairs and was not stopped when he walked up there. He said he saw a bar area and asked if it was an open bar. Told that it was, he ordered a wine and a water. He then said he was approached by a man and asked if he was invited to the party. Alterman said he asked for the man’s name because he had been treated “brusquely”. He said the man declined to give his name and called for an officer.

Alterman said he “never raised his voice once” and identified himself as a journalist. When he asked for the police officer’s name, the office threatened to arrest him. Alterman said he asked for a supervising officer to come over and tried to explain the situation. He claims he was cut off and acknowledged he may have been argumentative when he said, “could I please finish a sentence here?”

He was booked and released after paying $30. Alterman said he will fight to get the charges dropped.

Alterman writes a column for “The Nation” and writes the “Altercation” blog for Media Matters. He also has authored several books, including WhyWhen Presidents Lie.

Posted on Monday, June 4, 2007 at 6:53 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Richard Wolin: Says there's been a shift in intellectuals' priorities

Source: Chronicle of Higher Education summary of article in The Hedgehog Review (6-4-07)

There has been a "basic transformation of the nature and function of intellectuals," writes Richard Wolin, a professor of history, comparative literature, and political science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. "The visionary and utopian intellectuals of the old stamp," he argues, "have been replaced by a more modest and humble breed."

Mr. Wolin, whose essay is part of a special issue about "intellectuals and public responsibility," says that intellectuals used to work for the greater good without giving any consideration to constraints created by realpolitik. "In the face of the sordid, Machiavellian realities of power politics," he writes, they stood "as the guardians of a higher law." The 19th-century French intellectual Émile Zola, for instance, "realized that, when fundamental questions of justice were at issue, politically motivated compromises ... were unacceptable," Mr. Wolin writes.

That intellectual outlook came to an end in the 1980s, he says, with the deaths of such thinkers as Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre. Their successors, he writes, "are less interested in redeeming mankind than they are in righting particular wrongs and remedying specific injustices." For instance, "human rights violations, famine, ... racial discrimination, prisoners' rights, and so forth."

Posted on Monday, June 4, 2007 at 6:41 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Long list of prominent historians come to defense of H.S. teacher dismissed for writing a novel

Source: NYT (6-1-07)

[Click here for background.]

Dear Editor,

We were shocked and disappointed that the Horace Mann school would dismiss a faculty member for writing a novel, and we applaud the many Horace Mann students who courageously and thoughtfully protested this action and advocated for academic freedom. This shows Horace Mann students at their finest.

Posted on Monday, June 4, 2007 at 1:47 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Michael Oren: 5 best books about the Middle East are ...

Source: WSJ (6-2-07)

1. "An Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania" by Peter Markoe (1787)....

2. "Sufferings in Africa" by James Riley (1817)....

3. "The Valley of Vision" by George Bush (1847).

The Puritans viewed themselves as the New Israel and America as the New Promised Land. Accordingly they felt a sense of kinship with the Old Israel--the Jews--and the old Promised Land, then known as Palestine, a part of the Ottoman Empire. Many of the Puritans' descendants regarded it as their Christian and American duty to help restore the Jews to Palestine. "I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation," wrote President John Adams, and Abraham Lincoln acknowledged that "restoring the Jews to their national home in Palestine . . . is a noble dream and one shared by many Americans." But few restorationists were more outspoken than George Bush, a distinguished professor of Hebrew at New York University. His "The Valley of Vision," which became an antebellum best seller, called on the U.S. government to militarily wrench Palestine from the Turks and return it to the Jews. The Jewish state "will blaze in notoriety . . . and flash a splendid demonstration," declared Bush, a direct forebear of two presidents of the same name, revealing the centuries-old roots of American support for Israel.

4. "The Innocents Abroad" by Mark Twain (1869)....

5. "The Arabists" by Robert D. Kaplan (The Free Press, 1993).

From 1813, with the appointment of Mordechai Emanuel Noah as U.S. consul for Tunis in north Africa, until World War I, American Jews served as U.S. diplomats in the region. The State Department believed that these Jews, though most of them German-born, formed a natural bridge between Christian America and the Muslim world. But beginning in the 1920s--as Robert D. Kaplan charts in his riveting "The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite"--Jews were gradually pushed out of the State Department, replaced by a generation of diplomats who encouraged Arab nationalism and who were unabashed in their anti-Zionist, indeed anti-Semitic, worldview. Deeply identifying with Arab autocrats, the Arabists served as the architects of the U.S.-Saudi alliance, represented oil interests in Washington and convinced politicians that the Middle East had far more to fear from America than vice versa. Though their monopoly began to dissolve in the 1970s--when another German-born American Jew, Henry Kissinger, assumed control of policy making in the Middle East--the Arabists continued to exert a disproportionate and generally deleterious influence in Washington. Kaplan's book, published in the aftermath of the first Islamist attack on the World Trade Center, acquired a greater poignancy after the second. Above all, it exposed the danger of the Arabists' illusions of a romantic, congenial Middle East.

Posted on Monday, June 4, 2007 at 12:02 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, June 3, 2007

Michael Oren: On Bush's typical American intentions in the Middle East

Source: http://www.abc.net.au (6-3-07)

ELIZABETH JACKSON: Two hundred and thirty years ago, a hardy American called John Ledyard became the first from his country to travel to the Middle East.

He went with the aim of making a difference. He was the first American to do so, but certainly not the last.

American born academic, Michael Oren, has written a book about the history of US entanglements in the Middle East.

Called Power, Faith and Fantasy it traces the various motives and the many misunderstandings which have underpinned US policy.

Michael Oren lives and works in Jerusalem, where he met with our Middle East Correspondent David Hardaker.

David asked Michael Oren for his assessment of the impact of the Bush administration.

MICHAEL OREN: Put it this way, I think that the Bush administration came into the Middle East with very good intentions and with sort of very typical, classical American intentions.

DAVID HARDAKER: By which you mean?

MICHAEL OREN: By which I mean that Americans have, for more than two centuries, regarded the Middle East as sort of a fractured reflection of themselves. And they look at the Middle East and say basically, "we can fix this, we can make this Middle East resemble us, we can make it into democratic United States of the Middle East".

DAVID HARDAKER: Do the people in the Middle East want democracy or not?

MICHAEL OREN: It depends again on how you define democracy. Um, democracy, it's widely misunderstood in the west. Translated, democracy means casting a ballot every four years.

But the people in the Middle East understand that democracy is not that. That democracy is a package, democracy is a civilisation, and that with democracy comes rights of freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, but even more importantly women's rights, children's rights, which are in many ways an anathema to the traditional societies of this region and they're not going to, don't want that part of the package.

Posted on Sunday, June 3, 2007 at 9:59 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Dominique Clément: Says the boomers bring peace to Canada

Source: Globe and Mail (Canada) (6-1-07)

Canada's baby boomers have been waiting to hear this: Flower-power worked. The hippies' giddy make-love-not-war-movement of four decades ago actually resulted in a more loving country.

University of Victoria historian Dominique Clément says today's plethora of human-rights legislation and institutions can be traced directly back to the demands by young people in the 1960s and 1970s for a Canada that would be more caring and sensitive toward their marginalized fellow citizens: the poor, the disadvantaged, homosexuals and racial minorities.

“Biology alone did not define the baby-boom generation,” he says in a paper presented at this week's Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Saskatchewan.

“The youth of the Sixties were the front-runners of a specific historical movement in which political activism and radical ideas were pronounced. Though the generation was not revolutionary, it had a revolutionary impact.”

Dr. Clément's paper weighs in on a subject that has been hotly debated for years: whether the hippies generation and their dewy-eyed embrace of Bob Dylan's The Times They Are a-Changin' actually made any difference.

He says they did. They changed the times. They didn't just make a lot of noise and then fade into middle age.

Posted on Sunday, June 3, 2007 at 9:55 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Douglas Brinkley: Prolific author moves to Austin for the music and vibe and research sources after taking Rice University teaching job

Source: Austin American-Statesman (6-3-07)

It's not at all hard to explain. Music helps prominent and prolific historian and author Douglas Brinkley write. Austin has lots of music.

So here Brinkley, his wife and three children are, settling into their big new house in Stratford Hills off Red Bud Trail, Brinkley having just left his job at Tulane University in New Orleans — where he was director of the Theodore Roosevelt Center for American Civilization and a history professor — for a new post at Rice University in Houston.

Said Rice Provost Eugene Levy, in a statement announcing Brinkley's move in mid-May: "His work on contemporary American history and politics resonates across a broad spectrum of public interest, and his interpretive commentaries in the broadcast media are informative and widely watched."

This is indeed a coup for Rice, which has made a deal with one of a relative handful of historians who are well-known outside academia, and for Austin, where Brinkley already has many friends. It also makes Brinkley arguably Austin's most prominent Hurricane Katrina refugee.

Brinkley is author of the Katrina book "The Great Deluge," which won the 2007 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for its combination of history, journalism and survivor anger, and "The Boys of Pointe du Hoc," about a D-Day invasion battle that President Reagan invoked in speeches, now optioned as a movie by Warner Bros. Most recently, he is editor of "The Reagan Diaries" (HarperCollins), chosen for the job by Nancy

Reagan shortly after the former president's death in 2004. Regarded as well-connected and something of a media darling, Brinkley was famously spanked by Slate's David Plotz for overexposure in the aftermath of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s death. But there's no questioning his work ethic or his ambition: "I'm grabbing 20th-century America by the scruff of the neck," he said.

Posted on Sunday, June 3, 2007 at 9:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

High Schools Use Civ III Mod to Teach Canadian History

Source: http://blog.wired.com (6-1-07)

Students will be learning history Sid Meier-style when HistoriCanada: The New World, a Civ III mod, is donated to 100,000 Canadian high schools. Produced by Bitcasters and developed by 2k Games, HistoriCanada lets players take control of one of Canada's early European or aboriginal civilizations, making decisions for them about everything from crop development to war.

The history-teaching part comes from playing through scenarios and answering questions about Canada's history as the game progresses. ...

Posted on Sunday, June 3, 2007 at 9:35 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Horace Mann history teacher's novel raises hackles

Source: NYT (6-1-07)

A furor has erupted at a New York City private high school over a history teacher’s satirical novel, his impending departure and, now, accusations that administrators barred the student newspaper from publishing a letter by prominent historians and scholars who had come to the teacher’s defense.

The controversy, which has divided teachers, parents and students at the Horace Mann School, a private school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, erupted this week.

The Record, the student newspaper, published an editors’ note on Wednesday stating that the head of the school, Thomas M. Kelly, had forbidden the editors from publishing two letters and an opinion essay concerning the case of the history teacher, Andrew S. Trees.

Dr. Kelly did not respond to telephone messages left at his office late yesterday, and Dr. Trees did not respond to messages left at his home and with his parents.

Dr. Trees had published a novel last year, “Academy X,” that poked fun at the mores and foibles of affluent children and their overbearing parents at a fictional elite school. His narrator, a teacher named John Spencer, calls the school an “ethical wonderland” and laments the antics of Caitlyn Brie, a pampered student at the school.

(Reviewing the novel in The New York Times last year, Michiko Kakutani wrote, “In the early pages of this novel Mr. Trees demonstrates inklings of a Kingsley Amis-like ability to extract humor from the travails of his hapless hero, but any hopes that the book might become a ‘Lucky Jim’-ish romp are soon squashed by his preposterous plot and John’s tedious class rage at Caitlyn’s parents and their ilk.”)

Dr. Trees’s annual contract to teach at the school was not renewed for the next school year, prompting an outcry from some teachers and students.

In a letter to the student newspaper last week, a fellow history teacher, Peter P. Sheehy, wrote that the novel “has angered some because the themes and issues he explores correspond very closely to issues with which we struggle.” While some believe “the novel reflects poor taste,” he added, “such critiques do not warrant the punishment of an author or artist who says something unpopular or controversial.”

Last week, according to The Record, some 150 students signed a petition in defense of Dr. Trees...

Posted on Sunday, June 3, 2007 at 9:06 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Karen Armstrong: Says the afterlife is a "red herring" and hating religion is a pathology

Source: Steve Paulson at Salon (5-30-07)

Karen Armstrong is a one-woman publishing industry, the author of nearly 20 books on religion. When her breakthrough book "A History of God" appeared in 1993, this British writer quickly became known as one of the world's leading historians of spiritual matters. Her work displays a wide-ranging knowledge of religious traditions -- from the monotheistic religions to Buddhism. What's most remarkable is how she carved out this career for herself after rejecting a life in the church.

At 17, Armstrong became a Catholic nun. She left the convent after seven years of torment. "I had failed to make a gift of myself to God," she wrote in her recent memoir, "The Spiral Staircase." While she despaired over never managing to feel the presence of God, Armstrong also bristled at the restrictive life imposed by the convent, which she described in her first book, "Through the Narrow Gate." When she left in 1969, she had never heard of the Beatles or the Vietnam War, and she'd lost her faith in God.

Armstrong went on to work in British television, where she became a well-known secular commentator on religion. Then something strange happened. After a TV project fell apart, she rediscovered religion while working on two books, "A History of God" and a biography of Mohammed. Her study of sacred texts finally gave her the appreciation of religion she had longed for -- not religion as a system of belief, but as a gateway into a world of mystery and the ineffable. "Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet" also made her one of Europe's most prominent defenders of Islam.

Armstrong now calls herself a "freelance monotheist." It's easy to understand her appeal in today's world of spiritual seekers. As an ex-nun, she resonates with people who've fallen out with organized religion. Armstrong has little patience for literal readings of the Bible, but argues that sacred texts yield profound insights if we read them as myth and poetry. She's especially drawn to the mystical tradition, which -- in her view -- has often been distorted by institutionalized religion. While her books have made her enormously popular, it isn't surprising that she's also managed to raise the ire of both Christian fundamentalists and atheists....

Posted on Sunday, June 3, 2007 at 8:56 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, June 1, 2007

Herbert Norman: More than a victim of McCarthyism

Source: Historian John Price writing at the website of Japan Focus (5-26-07)

Fifty years ago, the Canadian diplomat and noted Japan scholar, Herbert Norman, committed suicide, stepping off the roof of a nine-storey building in downtown Cairo. Canadian ambassador to Egypt at the time, Norman was 47 years old and his death on April 4, 1957 provoked a crisis in Canada-U.S. relations.

Norman’s last act came in the wake of accusations made in the U.S. Senate that he was disloyal, a possible communist spy. This was the third round of such charges. On each occasion, RCMP and foreign affairs officials had grilled and cleared Norman of any wrongdoing. Still, the costs were heavy. The first round had prompted his recall from Tokyo in 1950; the second had led to his effective demotion in 1953.

Norman’s appointment as ambassador to Egypt in 1956 was the beginning of his comeback and coincided with the outbreak of the Suez Crisis. Exhausted by his part in advocating for a U.N. peacekeeping mission (for which Lester Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize), Norman was suddenly faced with renewed U.S. charges. He opted to end his life rather than face continued persecution.[1]

Posted on Friday, June 1, 2007 at 7:11 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Shaul Bakhash: Interviewed on PBS about his wife's ordeal

Source: NewsHour (PBS) (5-28-07)

[Shaul Bakhash is a historian at George Mason University. He is married to Haleh Esfandiari, the American citizen and the director of the Middle Eastern program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington who has been accused by Iran of spying.]

JUDY WOODRUFF: All right, Professor Bakhash, your wife, Haleh Esfandiari, couldn't leave Iran since December, has been in prison since earlier in May. What's the latest on her condition?

SHAUL BAKHASH, George Mason University: Well, as in the previous case, we have no information about her condition in prison. The only thing she's allowed is a very brief telephone call, usually lasting under a minute, to her mother in Tehran, in which she can ask after the health of her grandchildren and say she's OK. But we feel there's a minder standing right next to her.

So we have no idea as to her condition, and they have denied access to the family. They've denied access to the lawyers.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Do you hear anything through third channels?

SHAUL BAKHASH: No, so we do not know how she's being treated in prison. And this is a prison which is notorious for its interrogation methods.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Has she been charged with something?

SHAUL BAKHASH: She hasn't been officially charged with anything, but a statement by the Ministry of Intelligence last Monday implicates the Wilson Center, where she works, in this fantastical plot, so to speak, to advance a velvet or what the Iranians call a "soft revolution" in Iran.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Changing the minds of the Iranian people?

SHAUL BAKHASH: Well, so to speak. But this is -- sorry -- yes, it is criminalizing scholarly activity. This is saying, holding conferences and inviting people to give talks somehow is nefarious activity.

Posted on Friday, June 1, 2007 at 4:08 PM | Comments (0) | Top

W. K. Pritchett: Classicist, dead at 98

Source: Victor Davis Hanson at National Review (5-30-07)

The great American classicist W. K. Pritchett passed away this Tuesday at 98 in Berkeley. WKP, as he was called, reshaped the study of ancient Greek topography, and spent much of his life finding ancient routes, battlefields, and harbors, establishing the nature of the Athenian calendar, defending the authority of the Greek historians from postmodern attacks, and writing a massive five-volume history of the Greek state at war-much of all this in his retirement after a long career of philological research and distinguished teaching.

For many years, he was among the giants in American classics in general, and among a postwar generation of scholars in particular at Berkeley, such as J.K.Anderson, William Anderson, Steven Miller, Ronald Stroud, Leslie Threatte, and several others, whose high standards, teaching, and research made UCB the top center of classics in the world-and sadly that generation was not replaced at Berkeley by a subsequent group of such a caliber. Professor Pritchett is the sort of scholar we will not see again in our generation — if ever.

Posted on Friday, June 1, 2007 at 3:05 PM | Comments (0) | Top

David Dorado Romo: The Nazis learned about Zyklon B from the US treatment of Mexicans

Source: http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk (6-1-07)

A brilliant new book by a Mexican-American historian documents how, in the Twenties and Thirties, the Nazis were inspired by what the United States had been doing to their Mexican neighbours since 1917.

In Ringside at the Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juarez, David Dorado Romo establishes the US Immigration Department's systematic brutality along the Rio Grande border.

Mexican visitors were forced to strip naked and subjected to 'screening' (for homosexuality, low IQ, physical deformities like 'clubbed fingers') and to 'disinfection' with various toxic fumigants, including gasoline, kerosene, sulfuric acid, DDT and, after 1929, Zyklon-B (hydrocyanic acid) - the same gas used in the Holocaust's death camps.

The ostensible reason for the US fumigation was the fear of a typhus epidemic. Yet in 1916, the year before such 'baths' were enforced, only two cases of typhus had occurred in the poorest El Paso slum.

"This is a huge black hole in history," Romo told me. "Unfortunately, I only have oral histories and other anecdotal evidence about the harmful effects of the noxious chemicals used to disinfect and delouse the Mexican border crossers - including deaths, birth defects, cancer, etc. It may well go into the tens of thousands. It's incredible that absolutely no one, after all these years, has ever attempted to document this."...

Posted on Friday, June 1, 2007 at 12:40 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Shaul Bakhash: Md. bank freezes funds of historian over controversy involving his wife

Source: WaPo (5-31-07)

It was a hard enough day for Shaul Bakhash, as he dealt with the ongoing drama surrounding the imprisonment in Iran of his wife, noted American scholar Haleh Esfandiari. Then he found an express letter on the doorstep of his Potomac home yesterday morning announcing that Citibank had frozen his wife's bank accounts on grounds that she is now a "resident" of Iran.

Posted on Friday, June 1, 2007 at 12:40 PM | Comments (0) | Top

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