Historians in the News
Highlights
- French historians consulted by government over "French identity"
- Victorian historian tells what we can learn from Victorian ideas on thrift
- New ways to write the story of the world
- Niall Ferguson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali: a new power couple
- Activist Historian Howard Zinn's Obit on NPR Causes a Firestorm
- Peter Calvocoressi, codebreaker and historian, dies at 97
- Eric Foner: Zinn's Critical History
- American historians weigh in on the Illinois senate election
- Louis R. Harlan, Historian of Booker T. Washington, Dies at 87
- National Humanities Alliance issues call to March meeting in Washington DC
WEEK OF NOVEMBER 30, 2009
WEEK OF NOVEMBER 23, 2009
Ivan the Terrible film 'slanders Russia' and should be banned, historian says
Historians seeks to capture and preserve 100-year farm heritage
Still much to discover about Lisbon's role in WWII, says UK historian
New online tool for searching early modern and nineteenth century British history
Israeli historian calls Jewish people an invention--and reaps controversy
Joshua Brown: LBJ also promised to get the job done (illustration)
UNH historian pens book on how nation denied liberty to a free black man
Jeffrey Herf defends his analysis of "Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World'
WEEK OF NOVEMBER 16, 2009
Gerald Ensley: Mission won't be the same without historian Hann
Four-decade historian of UAE finally translates lifes work into native language
Indian democracy unique, it thrives in every state: Cambridge historian
Video link: Theodore H. White Lecture on Press and Politics by Taylor Branch
Historian investigates the 'lost village' of Garscadden (Scotland)
Conservatives go after Bruce Cumings new book on the American empire
Alan Philps: Shlomo Sand 'cleared away a lot of 19th century debris'
Kevin Wright hosts talk, "1609--A Country That Was Never Lost,"
2009 National Book Award Finalist, Nonfiction: T. J. Stiles's 'The First Tycoon'
Pamela Crossley's " The Wobbling Pivot, China Since 1800: An Interpretive History"
Interview With Rick Perlstein, author of "Nixonland" [video]
Robert Byrd, longest-serving Congress member, considered historian
Arabs Hostile Approach to Iran is a "Big Mistake." an Arab Historian says
From the archives: Oklahoma woman historian who struggled to rise above prejudices
Drake Bennett: How historians are looking deeper at the fall of the Berlin Wall
WEEK OF NOVEMBER 9, 2009
Hackers Post Private E-mails of Historian and Accused Holocaust Denier
Hackers Post Private E-mails of Historian and Accused Holocaust Denier
Historian John Hope Franklin to Be Honored with Memorial Conference at Brooklyn College
Historian insists that finance minister apologizes for saying "feudal old men" (Bulgaria)
Historian Can Keep His Manuscript on Tobacco Studies, Judge Rules
Ferriero Confirmed by Senate as Archivist of the United States
Historian links fall of Berlin Wall to rise in religious extremism in Pakistan
Conservatives Feel Seminar Organized by Historian Gabriel Piterberg 'demonized' Israel
Author re-examines Truman's controversial decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan
Skowhegan's sacrifice was 'great' in war says local historian (Maine)
Former Poet Laureate accused of plundering historian's work for his new poem
Obituary: Scholar who ignited Batman controversy (Australia)
Pulitzer Prize winning historian to lecture on Mormon diarists (Missouri)
Pulling hair and calling names, historians disagree about Scotland
Scottish historian takes to the water as he recreates river cruises
WEEK OF NOVEMBER 2, 2009
Talking with Historian and Activist Howard Zinn [audio 11 minutes, 35 secconds]
Matthew Kaminski: From Solidarity to Democracy (on Adam Michnik and the end of the Cold War)
Czech Historian Says President Vaclav Klaus Using Decrees To Get out of Isolation
Chinese historian in Cape Cop sheds light on China's 20th Century
U.Va. historian Jennifer Burns examines Ayn Rand's life, philosophy
Florida Gulf Coast University professor discussed the war in Afghanistan
Historians assess Obama's presidency, one year after his election
Historian's plea to resurrect 'disappearing' monument (Australia)
The Future of the Former Rosemont Manor in Weirton is About to be Uncovered (PA)
Tilly Panel Series at 2009 SSHA: Charles Tilly's and Louise Tilly's Work and Legacy
Humanities, Smithsonian, Library of Congress and Park Service budgets hold steady
Interview: Clinton Historian Seeks To Dispel "Cartoon Images"
WEEK OF OCTOBER 26, 2009
Cambridge Historian Writes Definitive History Of Britain's MI5
Cabarrus historians work to keep war history alive (N. Carolina)
Monday, November 30, 2009
Historian seeking student bloopers
Source: Eric H. Cline, Ph.D. Chair, Department of Classical and Semitic Languages and Literatures Associate Professor of Classics and of Anthropology (Ancient History and Archaeology) The George Washington University (11-30-09)
Student bloopers are needed, for a book to be published by Mitch Allen and Left Coast Press. Any and all areas desired: history, archaeology, English, science, etc. Bloopers already collected from student essays, exams, and research papers include gems such as "The Israelites...wondered in the dessert for 40 years." Please send via email to Eric Cline at ehcline@gwu.edu. Please also include a statement giving express permission to include the bloopers in the book. Apologies in advance for cross-listing; please feel free to forward this message.
Studs Terkel: Democracy Now! Tribute [video 59 minutes]
Source: Democracy Now (11-27-09)
The legendary radio broadcaster, writer, oral historian, raconteur and chronicler of our times, Studs Terkel, died last month at the age of ninety-six in his hometown of Chicago. Today, a Democracy Now! special tribute: We spend the hour on Studs Terkel. Over the years, Terkel has been a regular guest on Democracy Now! We play a wide-ranging interview we did with him in 2005. We also feature a rare recording of Terkel interviewing the Rev. Martin Luther King at the bedside of the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. “My curiosity is what saw me through,” Terkel said in 2005. "What would the world be like, or will there be a world? And so, that’s my epitaph. I have it all set. Curiosity did not kill this cat. And it’s curiosity, I think, that has saved me thus far.” [includes rush transcript]
Historian unearthes Civil War war criminal
Source: The Leaf Chronicle (11-29-09)
Her breath quickened as she caught sight of a name engraved in stone. Could it possibly be him?
As Carolyn Stier Ferrell stepped closer, she could see that, yes, she had found her man! At the Odd Fellows Home Cemetery atop Boot Hill in New Providence, Ferrell found the final resting place of Thomas Pratt Turner.
"My heart started racing," Ferrell said.
Ferrell, a local historian who wrote "In Search of Nannie Tyler," was seeking information about the military history of another former Clarksville resident when she found mention that Turner was buried in Clarksville.
"It's like a treasure chest," she said. "You find something you didn't expect."
Ferrell went to Clarksville's Odd Fellows Cemetery and, in the very back, under a huge old oak tree, was a tombstone that reads:
Dr. T.P. Turner
Died December 26, 1900
Admitted from Memphis Lodge #6
Aug. 26, 1900.
"It's a historical bombshell," Ferrell said about the find, which will be documented in her next book, likely released next fall.
But what's the big deal about the finding the grave of Turner, a Memphis dentist who died more than 100 years ago, with no family to mourn him?
Ferrell said it is Turner's secret identity that makes this a major discovery. Long before he was a kindly old dentist, Turner was a ferocious young Confederate soldier who became one of the most notorious war criminals of the Civil War. Thomas Pratt Turner was the commandant — although he quibbled about that title — of Libby Prison in Richmond, Va., a place where Union soldiers who had been captured during war were tortured and murdered.
"Dr. Turner's funeral was the first to be held at the home. Did anyone know the complete story behind this elderly man when he came to live his last days at the home?" says the manuscript of Ferrell's forthcoming book. "Could anyone suspect what deeds he had committed while on this earth and looking to the next world? Or was Dr. Turner able to conceal his true identity till the day he drew his last breath?"...
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Ivan the Terrible film 'slanders Russia' and should be banned, historian says
Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-28-09)
Vyacheslav Manyagin has asked Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to outlaw the film, which he claims is an insult to Russian statehood.
The blockbuster, released earlier this month, has triggered an ill-tempered debate in religious and historical circles at a time when the Kremlin is encouraging Russians to take patriotic pride in their often brutal history...
... "Imagine that they made a film in America about George Washington in which the first US president was portrayed as a bloodthirsty maniac," Mr Manyagin said. "This film slanders the Russian people and state."
The "unjust" depiction of Russia's first tsar as a monster would fuel Western stereotypes about modern Russia, he added...
Historian discovers Niebuhr quote was correct
Source: NYT (11-27-09)
A Yale librarian who cast doubt last year on the origins of the Serenity Prayer, adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous and reprinted on countless knickknacks, says new evidence has persuaded him to retain the famed Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr as the author in the next edition of The Yale Book of Quotations.
The provenance of the prayer, which begins, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” became a subject of controversy last year with the publication of an article by the librarian, Fred R. Shapiro, who is also the editor of the book of quotations. Mr. Shapiro had found archival materials that led him to express doubt that Niebuhr was the author.
But now another researcher trawling the Internet has discovered evidence that attributes the prayer to Niebuhr. The researcher, Stephen Goranson, works in the circulation department at the Duke University library, has a doctorate from Duke in the history of religion and, as a sideline, searches for the origins of words and sayings and publishes his findings in etymology journals. This month he found a Christian student newsletter written in 1937 that cites Niebuhr as the prayer’s author.
The prayer in the newsletter is slightly different from the contemporary one often printed on mugs and wall plaques. It reads, “Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know the one from the other.”...
Friday, November 27, 2009
Historian's case for Tuhoe independence (New Zealand)
Source: NZ Herald (11-28-09)
Once, not such a long time ago, in colonial New Zealand, Tuhoe were permitted to rule themselves within the boundaries of what was left of their land.
It was the late 1800s and they were the only tribe to gain legal autonomy from the Pakeha Government. For a short while. Then it was taken away.
The desire for autonomy never dulled though, nor was ceded by the Urewera mountain people; and today it is on the table again with John Key's Government, as part of a singular constitutional claim.
In a powerful new book on Tuhoe, eminent New Zealand historian Dame Judith Binney argues for that autonomy to be restored.
The time has long come, Binney told the Weekend Herald. She believes there is nothing to be feared from a separate Tuhoe nation operating within New Zealand and that the tribe has a strong case.
Historians seeks to capture and preserve 100-year farm heritage
Source: Google News (11-27-09)
BILLINGS, Mont. — For 100 years Henry Armstrong's family has farmed the same patch of central Montana land, hanging on through the Depression, low wheat prices and the ever-present risk that the next generation would move on.
Armstrong, 82, lives in the same house near Geraldine that his grandfather built and lived in as a homesteader. It's a little bigger now, but lonelier since his wife, Norma, died about six years ago.
"As long as I live, I've got rights to live here," he said. "The one thing about this that I've been especially proud of is we were able to make it these 100 years on relatively small acreage."
Historians say tales like Armstrong's are becoming increasingly rare...
... But in a bid to capture and preserve a slice of the state's past, the Montana Historical Society has started a drive to identify families that have farmed or ranched the same land for a century or more.
The Centennial Farm and Ranch Program was created under a bill passed by the 2009 Legislature. The intent is to honor Montana's heritage while compiling family histories to be archived and eventually compiled for the society's Web site.
Ellen Baumler, an interpretive historian who is helping lead the effort, said it's unknown how many of the state's farms and ranches fit the bill.
Historian one of 10 human rights award winners (Toronto)
Source: The Toronto Observer (11-26-09)
Most Torontonians are not familiar with the black experience in Canada, but for Adrienne Shadd, African-Canadian history is in her blood.
Shadd is the great-great-grandniece of Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the first black women to publish and edit a newspaper in North America.
She is also a direct descendant of Abraham Shadd, a leader of the American abolitionist movement, one of the key figures of the Underground Railroad and the first black person in Canada to serve in public office.
Wednesday night Shadd was awarded the William P. Hubbard Award for Race Relations at the Access, Equity & Human Rights Awards at City Hall. She was acknowledged for her work in recognizing black history in Toronto.
Still much to discover about Lisbon's role in WWII, says UK historian
Source: The Portugal News Online (11-28-09)
There is still much to tell about Portugal’s role during World War II, says noted British historian Antony Beevor, whose father served London as a spy in Lisbon during the conflict, provoking the ire of Portuguese dictator António Oliveira Salazar.
Antony Beevor, whose latest book, “D Day: The Battle for Normandy”, was released in a Portuguese translation earlier this month, told the Lusa News Agency this week that his curiosity about Portugal’s role - especially the part played by his father - was hobbled by John Beevor’s silence and the fact that few documents remained from his organisation, the Special Operations Executive (SOE).
“Much material was destroyed after the war, many of SOE’s archives, and others were saved”, the historian said in a London interview.
Elisabeth Roudinesco, historian and psychoanalyst, discusses her new book "Back to the 'Jewish Question'" [video]
Source: France 24 (11-26-09)
Historian and psychoanalyst Elisabeth Roudinesco publishes "Retour sur la question juive" (Back to the ‘Jewish Question’), an inquiry into anti-Semitism, anti-Judaism, and Zionism’s supporters and opponents.
< a href="http://www.france24.com/en/20091126-interview-elisabeth-roudinesco-historian-and-psychoanalyst"> Go to video</a>
UK diplomat questions post of Jews on Iraq panel
Source: The Jerusalem Post (via OpEdNews) (11-25-09)
A British diplomat has criticized the appointment of two leading Jewish academics to the UK's Iraq Inquiry panel, stating it may upset the balance of the inquiry.
Sir Oliver Miles, a former British ambassador to Libya, told The Independent newspaper this week that the appointment of Sir Martin Gilbert, the renowned Holocaust historian and Winston Churchill biographer, and Sir Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies and vice-principal of King's College London, would be seen as "ammunition" that could be used to call the inquiry a "whitewash."
Miles said the two academics were Jewish and that Gilbert was an active Zionist. He also said they were both strong supporters of former prime minister Tony Blair and the Iraq war.
New online tool for searching early modern and nineteenth century British history
Source: Resource Shelf (11-28-09)
Budding historians are set to benefit from a new online project which will revolutionise the way we search for historical sources on the internet, thanks to a Ł198,977 cash boost from JISC.
The ‘Connected Histories’ project, which is a partnership between the Universities of Sheffield and Hertfordshire, the Institute of Historical Research, and King’s College London, will create an innovative search engine for a wide range of electronic resources relating to early modern and nineteenth century British history.
This period of British history has one of the largest collections of digital sources available on the web, including not only digitised books, but also newspapers, manuscripts, genealogical records, and even maps and images. These sources, created by both academic and commercial organisations, are accessed by hundreds of thousands of individuals every day, across the world. Until now, there has been no single starting place to search through these sources.
Alastair Dunning, programme manager for online content at JISC, said: “JISC has been involved in the digitisation of many crucial primary resources for the study of history, helping create a wealth of digitised materials, such as newspapers, pamphlets and images. The next stage of work is to knit such resources together – identifying the people, places and events that surface in multiple historical resources and making the links between them.”
[Snip]
The website will be fully launched in 2011.
The re-emergence of historian Richard Hofstadter
Source: John Moore in the National Post (11-26-09)
Ideas are like viruses. They spread in waves, retreat, mutate and return. The latest proof is the recent re-emergence of academic historian Richard Hofstadter in the political consciousness.
Hofstadter, who died in 1970, was at one time amongst America's pre-eminent historians. He documented the evolution of the country's political culture and its populist underpinnings from the Revolution to the post-Kennedy-assassination era. It's no surprise that his work is still generally relevant, but his landmark 1964 essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, is Cassandra-like in its prescience.
The Paranoid Style asserts that a pervasive angst about the United States being under siege from within is an integral mutant string in the DNA of American politics. In 30-to-40-year intervals, a cohort of the population (almost invariably found on the right of the political spectrum) is seized with the conviction that the Republic is on the brink of destruction. Sound familiar?
Which is why the essay reads as if it was written last month and not 40 years ago. When Hofstadter described the right wing's "qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy" he wasn't writing about Sarah Palin or the frothing tea bag brigade but of Senator Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society.
He identified a sizable segment of the population that lives in permanent fear of outsiders, secret societies and covert plots to subvert the Constitution. This genus of political citizen styles himself the ultimate patriot. "His sense," wrote Hofstadter, "that his political passions are unselfish and patriotic ... goes far to intensify his feeling of righteousness and his moral indignation."
This mindset is not to be confused with healthy dissent or alternative political perspectives. It's a deep-seated, emotional and irrational conviction. There's a difference between concern that your country is headed down the wrong track and insistence that the President is a non-citizen, that his health reforms are a Nazi-inspired eugenics project and that his foreign policy is a plot to bring about one world government...
Historian's says Hudson's 'did not discover anything'
Source: North Jersey (11-26-09)
Four-hundred years ago, Henry Hudson set sail from Europe in an attempt to discover a new route to Asia by heading east. His mission was not successful, but he traveled along what has become the Hudson River between New York and New Jersey.
River Edge resident and local historian Kevin Wright explores the quadricentennial of Hudson's voyage in his new book, "1609: A Country That Was Never Lost: 400th Anniversary of Henry Hudson's Visit with North Americans of the Middle Atlantic Coast."
"I titled the book, the 'Country That Was Never Lost' because during Hudson's visit, he did not discover anything. Instead he was the one discovered," Wright said. "Four centuries ago, all of this was covered under ice. This was not a new world, but an ancient world intruded upon. People had lived here for generations before Hudson came."
Before Europeans came to America, various groups considered the area to be their home, including the Manhattans, the Minisinks of Bachom's Country, the Lenape of the Schuylkill estuary, the Mahicans, Susquehannocks, and Mohawks. It is the interactions with these people that Wright focuses on his new book. He does that not only as a historian, but also as someone who is descended from those same people. His great-grandfather was a direct descendent of a full-blooded member of the Minisink nation...
Historians are at war over 'old-fashioned' flagship series
Source: The Herald Scotland (11-26-09)
TELEVISION historian Neil Oliver has been likened to a “pygmy on a giant’s territory” by a leading academic as the bitter row over the BBC’s flagship A History of Scotland series intensifies.
Jenny Wormald, honorary fellow in Scottish History at Edinburgh University, has joined the debate about the authenticity and quality of the series while revealing she left her role as advisor to the programme after just two meetings.
She also condemned recent comments by Mr Oliver, who launched a personal attack on the eminent historian Professor Tom Devine after the academic was critical of the series.
The distinguished historian questioned the “scant” handling of subjects such as the Enlightenment and also referred to Mr Oliver as “hapless” and having a “sad lack of authority”.
Ms Wormald writes in a letter in today’s Herald: “Professor Devine’s critique was directed mainly towards the series, not the presenter.
“Perhaps he might have been wiser to scale down his comments on Oliver, but these were little compared to Oliver’s extraordinary outburst in response, in its level of personal abuse and its lurid attack on the ‘narrow range’ of a historian famed for having done more than anyone to bring Scottish history – the Scottish history worth hearing and thinking about – so far out of the confines of Oliver’s contemptuously dismissive ‘classroom’.”
She contrasted the series with Diarmaid MacCulloch’s “outstanding” History of Christianity and the recent Tudor series by David Starkey, whom she described as a “highly gifted historian”...
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Israeli historian calls Jewish people an invention--and reaps controversy
Source: NYT (11-24-09)
Despite the fragmented and incomplete historical record, experts pretty much agree that some popular beliefs about Jewish history simply don’t hold up: there was no sudden expulsion of all Jews from Jerusalem in A.D. 70, for instance. What’s more, modern Jews owe their ancestry as much to converts from the first millennium and early Middle Ages as to the Jews of antiquity.
Other theories, like the notion that many of today’s Palestinians can legitimately claim to be descended from the ancient Jews, are familiar and serious subjects of study, even if no definitive answer yet exists.
But while these ideas are commonplace among historians, they still manage to provoke controversy each time they surface in public, beyond the scholarly world. The latest example is the book “The Invention of the Jewish People,” which spent months on the best-seller list in Israel and is now available in English. Mixing respected scholarship with dubious theories, the author, Shlomo Sand, a professor at Tel Aviv University, frames the narrative as a startling exposure of suppressed historical facts. The translated version of his polemic has sparked a new wave of coverage in Britain and has provoked spirited debates online and in seminar rooms.
Professor Sand, a scholar of modern France, not Jewish history, candidly states his aim is to undercut the Jews’ claims to the land of Israel by demonstrating that they do not constitute “a people,” with a shared racial or biological past. The book has been extravagantly denounced and praised, often on the basis of whether or not the reader agrees with his politics.
The vehement response to these familiar arguments — both the reasonable and the outrageous — highlights the challenge of disentangling historical fact from the sticky web of religious and political myth and memory....
Joshua Brown: LBJ also promised to get the job done (illustration)
[Joshua Brown doubles as a historian and illustrator. He is the co-director of the New Media Lab and Executive Director of the Center for Media and Learning/American Social History Project (ASHP) at the CUNY Graduate Center. He received his Ph.D. in American history from Columbia University. Since the beginning of the Iraq War he has become well-known for his caustic illustrations. ]
Book Outlines Intertwined History of Cotton, Race
Source: ABC News (11-25-09)
Gene Dattel grew up in the segregated South and was one of the few Mississippians enrolled at Yale University in 1962 when his home state became ensnared in a bloody confrontation over integration.
More than 1,200 miles and a cultural universe away from the land of cotton, the white freshman found himself answering questions about the violent resistance to James Meredith's court-ordered admission as the first black student at the University of Mississippi.
"I was really put on the defensive," Dattel, now 65 and living in New York City, recalled recently.
He said his struggle to answer questions, and to understand what led to events of the day, prompted him to begin an intense course of study. He earned a bachelor's degree in history from Yale in 1966 and a law degree from Vanderbilt University in 1969.
Now, after decades of working in international finance and lecturing occasionally at universities, Dattel has written a book titled "Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power." The publisher, Ivan R. Dee of Chicago, gave the book an initial print run of 7,500 copies.
"Cotton and Race" is a compelling story of how the cash crop shaped the 19th-century global economy and magnified the United States' racial problems. His narrative begins during the framing of the U.S. Constitution in the 1780s, decades before the cotton boom. It ends in about 1930, when, Dattel says, subsidies made cotton "a permanent ward of the federal government."
While Dattel's work condemns slavery as "a tragedy of racial epic proportions," the book focuses more on money than morality.
"Without cotton, slavery would most probably have been headed for extinction," Dattel writes.
The book outlines changes in society, including Europeans' demand for clothing made from cotton rather than wool, that made the crop the top U.S. export from 1803 to 1937. It also notes that the cotton trade helped propel New York to commercial prominence...
"Nazi Twins" a Myth: Mengele Not Behind Brazil Boom?
Source: National Geographic (11-25-09)
Recent reports have held up a remote Brazilian town—filled with blonde, blue-eyed twins—as evidence of Mengele's postwar attempts to add to the ranks of an Aryan "master race."
But research announced today says Cândido Godói's "Nazi twins" are nothing more than a myth.
The outback town of about 7,000 has a twin rate nearly 1,000 percent higher than the global average.
The twins' fair features are no mystery—Cândido Godói (map) is largely populated by the descendents of German immigrants. But the frequency of twin births is a decades-old mystery.
Earlier this year Argentine historian Jorge Camarasa offered a bombshell of an explanation in his book Mengele: The Angel of Death in South America...
... According to Camarasa, Mengele likely continued his twin experiments in the 1960s while on the run in South America.
Mengele disguised himself as a roaming physician and veterinarian and gave pregnant women in Cândido Godói an ahead-of-its-time, twin-inducing mix of drugs or hormones, the historian suggests.
Camarasa cites interviews with locals who say they remember the visits of a traveling German doctor who provided mysterious potions or drugs.
The locals recalled him by different names, Camarasa explained. But each interviewee had the same reaction when shown a picture of Mengele: "That's him." ...
Edmonton OK's historian laureate (Canada)
Source: Edmonton Sun (11-25-09)
The city is touting a newly created post as history in the making.
Council yesterday approved plans to hire a historian laureate to chronicle the city's past, present and future, making Edmonton the first Canadian city to create such a role.
The city will now search for a candidate, with a historian's background, to fill the two-year position, which includes a $5,000 annual honorarium.
Michael Payne, the city's archivist, said as the first historian laureate appointed by a Canadian municipality, Edmonton will take centre stage in the nation for its commitment to preserving and celebrating history.
Edinburgh historian lists names of Irish war dead
Source: The Journal (UK) (11-25-09)
An Edinburgh historian has put together the first roll of honour to list all those from Ireland who died during the Second World War.
The list, which was compiled by Yvonne McEwen of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for the Study of the Two World Wars, includes the names of 9,100 Irish men and women who died in active service.
Ms McEwen, who presented the list to the Irish parliament, said: "We covered over 200 corps of the British Army alone.
"We had a presentation of the Roll of Honour at Trinity College. It received a lot of media and as a result of the media attention, the public, north and south and around the world, actually contacted, more by email than letter, asking for information about their loved ones."
The June presentation included some 7,500 names. Due to the response from the public regarding relatives and loved ones that had fought in the war, McEwen was able to add another 1,600 names to the list for the November presentation.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
UNH historian pens book on how nation denied liberty to a free black man
Source: Foster's Daily Democrat (11-24-09)
DURHAM — In 1775, Thomas Jeremiah was one of fewer than 500 "Free Negros" in South Carolina and possibly the richest person of African descent in British North America. A slave owner himself, Jeremiah was falsely accused by whites — who resented his success as a Charleston harbor pilot — of sowing insurrection among slaves at the behest of the British.
In the new book The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah: A Free Black Man's Encounter with Liberty (Yale University Press, 2009), J. William Harris, professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, recounts and analyzes the trial and execution of Jeremiah and illuminates the contradiction between a nation that would be born in a struggle for freedom and yet deny it — often violently — to others.
Thomas Jeremiah's story exposes in dramatic and poignant fashion the multiple ironies of the American Revolution, when Americans fought for their own liberty while enslaving others, and when the British king, rather than the American patriots, represented true justice for many slaves and free blacks...
David Forsmark reviews Thomas Fleming's 'founding fathers The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers'
Source: Frontpage (11-24-09)
Every once in a while, you come across a great book whose premise seems so obvious that you think, “Why hasn’t anyone done this before?” People have talked all around this topic, or dealt with it in pieces, but why hasn’t there been a serious book-length treatment of this-or-that much discussed subject?
Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism fit that bill. Now comes historian Thomas Fleming’s The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers, which will no doubt have other historians saying, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
In this relentlessly fascinating book, Thomas Fleming, our most interesting historian of the Revolution, takes a magnifying glass to the personal lives of six of the Founders; and the result is the most compelling history book of the season. Fleming explains his motive for looking at the Founders’ relationships with wives, mothers, daughters—and lovers:
“Knowing and understanding the women in their lives adds pathos and depth to the public dimensions of the founding fathers’ political journeys. We do them no dishonor when we explore how often public greatness emerged in spite of personal pain and secret disappointment. Far from diminishing these men and women, an examination of their intimate lives will enlarge them for our time. In their loves and losses, their hopes and fears, they are more like us than we dared to imagine.”
And it works spectacularly. I know of no other volume—or even a collection of biographies- that gives the reader the sense of knowing George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison as human beings in the way this relatively short book does.
Standard biographies of great men who accomplished great things, invariably center around the larger events that made us interested in them in the first place. By all but isolating these great men from those events—they are in the background for each to give context only—and bringing their intimate relationships to the foreground, the Founders emerge as flesh and blood, rather than icons or secular plaster saints.
And, we learn a lot about some remarkable women, too.
It’s the ubiquitous question in American politics: What about a politician’s private life is relevant? How much do we really want to know—and what do we have the right to know? Baby Boomers seem to think they are the first to deal with the question, pointing back to the media’s willingness to overlook JFK’s philandering and buy the Camelot image– and acting as though that was the standard from time immemorial.
Demolishing that conceit, Fleming shows that our increasingly partisan press has still not sunk to the depths of the first generation to write under the First Amendment. It’s still pretty rare—Sarah Palin being a current obvious exception—for so-called reporters to sink to the level of deliberately false rumor-mongering and completely fabricated political hit jobs in the way that was either done to—or at the behest of– each of the Founders in this book.
Even the revered George Washington was not immune, Fleming reveals in a chapter called The Other George Washington Scandals, in which he details all manner of slanders made up of whole cloth that were directed at Washington by political opponents.
The worst of these hacks was named James Thompson Callender. Callender was the original “source” of the allegations about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings— a delicious irony, since Jefferson had originally commissioned Callender to make up stories about corruption by Alexander Hamilton. Callender turned on Jefferson because the new President would not make him Postmaster of Richmond.
On the other hand, it was John Adams himself who exaggerated Benjamin Franklin’s sex life out of all semblance to reality. Franklin did, in effect, have a wife in both London and Philadelphia before the Revolution. And while it’s possible that a woman who was close to him in France was his lover, Adams’s portrayal of Franklin as a depraved indiscriminate womanizer in Paris was extremely unlikely, Fleming writes. Franklin made himself the toast of France by engaging in the banter of the time, but at his advanced age and health, Adams’s reports are difficult to believe. (And the gratuitous bathtub scene in the HBO miniseries John Adams is purely from the peculiar imagination of the screenwriter).
Fleming arranges the book as mini-bios of the personal lives of the following founders:
George Washington: Fleming does an enormous service by rescuing Martha Washington from the cliché that she was merely the rich matronly widow that George married to secure his future while his heart stayed with Sally Fairfax, his neighbor’s flirtatious wife. Fleming notes that after their marriage, the Washingtons were THE Virginia couple; Martha had been the colony’s most sought-after widow. Her winning and witty sociability was remarked upon by everyone including as strong a personality as Abigail Adams who looked on her as a role model. Every surviving letter (Martha had most of their personal correspondence burned) displays a deep affection.
As for George, while he had to settle for being the Father of his Country, he was a devoted and sensible step-parent and grandparent, whose household often included a large number of grandchildren and relations.
Benjamin Franklin: Fleming sorts through the tangled love life of perhaps the most brilliant of the Founders. Franklin is often pigeonholed as a libertine, partly because of his youthful autobiography, partly because of John Adams’s puritanical (literally) public disapproval; but the accounts of his supposed debauchery in France are greatly exaggerated.
Franklin rejected his youthful immorality and had a successful marriage for many years, fathering a bright and accomplished daughter. It was his illegitimate son, William, however who was the light of Benjamin’s life. Franklin guided the chip-off-the-old-block’s career in the British establishment too well, however, and William stayed a Loyalist, actively opposing the Revolution in ways that forever estranged him from his father.
Alexander Hamilton: If you think South Carolina Mark Sandford is entirely too talkative about his Argentinian “soulmate;” and makes you want to cover your ears and yell “Too much information,” get a load of Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton published a book-length explanation of a long-over affair to the mortification of both his allies and his wife Elizabeth, the mother of his 7 children.
But while Hamilton confessed to the affair Callendar wrote about, Fleming says that his deepest attachment was likely with his wife’s glamorous sister, Angelica Despite her long-suffering, Fleming also rescues Elizabeth from the mere label of wronged wife. This devoutly Christian woman forgave her husband and after his death collected his papers and helped restore him to his rightful place in American history. She also became a force in charity work and in raising money for the Washington Monument.
John Adams: While the marriage of the Adamses may be the most examined—and idealized– in American history, Fleming gives us a warts and all look at the relationship. John Adams’s personality defects have been much discussed, and Fleming gives the requisite credit to Abigail for keeping John on track. However, he also illustrates that Abigail’s political ear had just as much tin as John’s. She was an avid advocate for the Alien and Sedition Acts, for instance; and egged on some of the needless quarrels that Adams engaged in. The Adamses were involved and loving parents; but were equally over-demanding and both contributed to the all or nothing outcomes in their children’s lives, the extremes of which were John Quincy’s brilliant career and his brother Charles’s drinking himself to death.
Thomas Jefferson: While nearly every recent examination of Thomas Jefferson’s personal life focuses on the subject of a supposed romance with slave Sally Hemings, Fleming reminds us that Jefferson was a tragic figure who outlived all but one of his children, and lost his beloved wife at a young age. More than any other Founder, Jefferson put his family considerations above those of his personal ambition, and even the Cause itself, at one time leaving Virginia without representation in the Congress while he saw to his wife’s health.
As to the subject that fascinates so many, Fleming demolishes the notion of a nearly 4-decade affair between Jefferson and Hemings, showing that both the layout and constant activity at Monticello make such a thing nearly impossible. Fleming disproves much of the timeline of the so-called statistical study which alleges Jefferson was the father of all of Hemings’s children. He also expresses doubt that Jefferson ever had a dalliance with Hemings, though concludes that is impossible to rule out.
As for the DNA test, Fleming writes, all it proved is that sometime in the last 200 years, a descendant of Sally Hemings has someone related to Thomas Jefferson in his family line. Fleming provides at least one more likely—but less famous—suspect, Jefferrson’s younger brother, Randolph.
James Madison: While today, all that is remembered about the Madison marriage is as good as it should be, the Madisons endured perhaps the worst slanders of any of the Founders. The fact that the shy and sickly Madison could land such a prize as the robust and witty Dolley had some wags alleging it was a marriage of political convenience, and that Dolley improperly used her considerable charms to persuade congressmen and diplomats to her husband’s point of view.
However, Fleming writes, the enduring portrait of the ebullient hostess who invented the office of First Lady, and the heroic couple who courageously faced the British invasion of Washington in 1812 is a wholly accurate one.
It may be an exaggeration to say I’ve even scratched the surface here. This book is a treasure trove of information and insight that will satisfy both the history buff and captivate the reader with a more casual interest.
The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers is addictively readable, informative, fascinating, engaging, revelatory and provocative. Which, you might say, is just another way of saying– it’s a Thomas Fleming book.
2009 AHA Election Results
Source: AHA Blog (11-24-09)
See below for the winners of the 2009 AHA Election. These individuals will begin their terms of office following the 124th Annual Meeting in San Diego.
President
Barbara Metcalf (Univ. of California at Davis, emerita)
President-elect
Anthony Grafton (Princeton Univ.)
Vice-President, Teaching Division
Patricia Nelson Limerick (Univ. of Colorado at Boulder)
Councilor Profession
Laura Isabel Serna (Florida State Univ.)
Councilor Research
Thomas J. Sugrue (Univ. of Pennsylvania)
Councilor Teaching
Cheryll Ann Cody (Southwest Coll., Houston Community Coll.)
Committee on Committees
Jorge Cańizares-Esguerra (Univ. of Texas at Austin)
Nominating Committee
Position 1: Jan Ellen Lewis (Rutgers Univ.-Newark)
Position 2: Page Herrlinger (Bowdoin Coll.)
Position 3: Julia Adeney Thomas (Univ. of Notre Dame)
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Scholars Honored John Hope Franklin
Source: Brooklyn College (11-23-09)
The Harvard University scholar chosen to coauthor the latest revision of John Hope Franklin's seminal text, "From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans," told an audience of educators gathered to honor the former chair of the Brooklyn College history department (the first black scholar to head a history department at a predominantly white U.S. college) that there will be much new material in the ninth edition of his work when it is published in January.
Delivering the keynote address at the John Hope Franklin Memorial Conference on Tuesday, Nov. 17, Professor Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham said she had rewritten Franklin's text extensively in the current eighth edition, changed chapter headings and added many new subjects, including sections on the early history of African slaves in Spanish Florida; the experience of black women through the centuries; the development of blues and jazz and the black artists and musicians who gravitated to Paris during the 1920s and '30s; as well as a number of more recent topics, such as the civil rights movement, the rise of black power, hip-hop culture and other matters.
"The questions we bring to the past arise from the concerns we have for the present," she said.
Higginbotham, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African-American Studies (and a noted scholar and author in her own right) said that, in 2006, Franklin had asked her to act as coauthor and editor for the upcoming revision of his 60-year-old textbook. She said that she was able to show him the first 15 revised chapters before his death earlier this year and that he had approved them.
What Niall Ferguson thinks now
Source: Globe Investor (11-23-09)
There's nothing like a long-running equity rally, a return to something resembling normalcy in the credit world and fresh signs of economic recovery to lift the gloom of a dreary late November day.
Sure, there are still occasional rough waters. Take last week, when weaker than expected U.S. housing stats, a downbeat profit report, downgrades in tech land and yet another warning from an inflation-fearing central banker reminded jittery investors it's not only free-spending governments that need a sound exit strategy. Tomorrow, we'll undoubtedly hear that U.S. consumers are still suffering from a shortage of confidence, which tends to happen when jobless rates keep rising...
... Far be it from me to rain on that parade. I'll leave that task to one of the world's best known and least cuddly of doom-and-gloom bears - Harvard University financial historian Niall Ferguson.
"I don't think it's possible to infer from the stock market rally anything resembling a sustained recovery," the peripatetic professor says in an e-mail exchange. He rightly notes that at least half (and probably much more) of the third-quarter U.S. economic growth of 3.5 per cent stemmed from one-off government measures and that the consumer remains tapped out.
"The stock market rally has been largely due to near-zero interest rates and a weaker dollar. In foreign currency terms there's been no rally." ...
... Prof. Ferguson, whose most recent timely best-seller, The Ascent of Money, is now out in paperback, does some hedge-fund advising on these big global themes.
He claims no expertise as a market forecaster. But when coaxed, the historian in him comes out...
Jeffrey Herf defends his analysis of "Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World'
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education (11-22-09)
In his essay "Hate Radio," Jeffrey Herf, a professor of modern European and German history at the University of Maryland at College Park and author of Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale University Press, 2009), argues that collaboration between Arab political leaders and Nazi officials during World War II decisively influenced the development of radical Islam. "The toxic mixture of religious and secular themes forged in Nazi-era Berlin, and disseminated to the Middle East, continues to shape the extreme politics of that region," Herf writes. In a response, Richard Wolin, a professor of history and political science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, described the connection Herf draws between European fascism and contemporary political Islam as "both needlessly inflammatory and historically inaccurate."
The Chronicle Review asked Herf and Wolin to continue their debate online.
Jeffrey Herf: In my new book, I do not claim, as Richard Wolin writes, that "the World War II alliance between Nazi propagandists and Arab nationalists" is "the key to understanding contemporary political Islam." I do claim that a very important chapter in the latter's history was written and spoken in Berlin during the war. I did write that "the issue of the impact of fascism and Nazism on the Middle East and its aftereffects has become inseparable from contemporary political controversies about anti-Semitism, radical Islam, 'Islamo-fascism' and international terrorism since the attacks of September 11, 2001." I placed quotation marks around the term "Islamo-fascism" to indicate to the reader that I was referring to a term of contemporary political discourse. I am not using it as a core analytical concept. I did not, as Wolin alleges, suggest that "the term 'Islamo-fascism' best describes the combination of political authoritarianism and religious fundamentalism that suffuses the Arab world." I do offer abundant evidence that one key episode in the history of political Islam lay in its connections to fascist and Nazi ideology.
In addition, Wolin wrongly asserts that I use "the epithet Islamo-fascism" at "several pivotal junctures" in my book. I have done a search of the PDF of the manuscript. The above reference to the term's presence as a contemporary political controversy is the only time that it appears. I'm willing to defend my argument, but I am not responsible for arguments that I've not made.
That said, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World offers an unprecedented amount of documentation of the propaganda that resulted from the fusion of Nazi ideology with radical Arab nationalism and militant Islam. This accomplishment is not to be taken for granted. If examining this cultural fusion was easy, it would have been done a long time ago. The new evidence demonstrates a heretofore insufficiently appreciated connection between Nazism and the specifically religious roots of politicized Islam. It entailed a blend of radical European anti-Semitism with a selective reading of the traditions of Islam. Of particular importance was how a hatred of the Jews was fused with a hatred of Zionism. Nazi Arabic-language propaganda depicted both the Jews and the Zionists as parts of an international conspiracy whose purpose was to destroy Islam and dominate the Arab world. Politicized Islam is the product of indigenous radicalization and crises of modernization, as well as the Middle East's interaction with ideas, institutions, and policies coming from Europe, especially during World War II. Just as a key chapter in the history of Baathism in Iraq and Syria was written in fascist France, so a key chapter of political Islam was written in wartime Berlin....
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Historian analyzes Second World War surveys
Source: The Chronicle Herald (11-22-09)
For many years the acknowledged expert on the reactions of modern infantrymen in battle was the American writer S.L.A. Marshall, based on his classic 1947 book, Men Against Fire. In this slim volume, Marshall maintained — on the basis of supposedly numerous and extensive mass interviews conducted immediately after battle — that most American soldiers in the Second World War did not return enemy fire. Most of them (75 to 85 per cent) did not even fire their weapons at all; a trait assigned by extension to Canadian and British fighting men.
Despite his work on what he termed "ratio of fire," which was later shown as unscientific, Marshall’s "findings" are still accepted today as authoritative statistics by many military historians and analysts. Part of the problem in refuting Marshall’s conclusions is the lack of solid, first-hand historical evidence. Previously, many of those who disputed Marshall did so based on secondary indicators — until now.
During the Second World War, as Canadian infantry captains, majors and lieutenant colonels came out of the front lines in Italy and Northwest Europe in 1944 and 1945, they were given a lengthy battle experience questionnaire to complete, designed by the British army. These surveys contain a wealth of first-hand information from officers who had seen active combat. For years, the surveys sat unanalyzed in Ottawa’s Library and Archives Canada, until a colleague mentioned them to Robert Engen, a doctoral candidate at Queen’s University.
Engen combed through this newly revealed documentation and used it as the basis for his graduate thesis. His findings are startling and a "direct refutation of Marshall’s observations of a highly ineffective ratio of fire in Allied troops." Contrary to what Marshall claimed for U.S soldiers, Engen discovered that the vast majority of Canadian infantrymen actively took part in firefights and returned enemy fire. According to Engen, "Canadian soldiers displayed initiative and imagination in battle and proved to be capable warriors, frequently out-fighting their enemies in close combat."...
Gerald Ensley: Mission won't be the same without historian Hann
Source: Tallahassee.com (11-22-09)
Tallahassee's most historic site reaches another milestone Dec. 13 when Mission San Luis opens its new visitor center. The Spanish-styled, 24,000-square-foot facility provides a modern introduction to the ancient village of Spanish settlers and Apalachee Indians.
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But the man who's arguably done the most to tell the mission's story will miss the debut: John Hann died Nov. 7 after a year-long battle with Parkinson's disease.
Hann, 86, was the leading historian on the Florida period when Europeans first arrived. He had been the senior historian at Mission San Luis since the state bought the site in 1983. He wrote nearly a dozen books about early Florida and co-authored the definitive text about Mission San Luis.
There's an ache in the heart of all who care about Florida history.
"I loved John to bits and will always consider it one of the great honors of my life to have worked with him for 20 years," said mission director Bonnie McEwan, who co-authored Hann's book about Mission San Luis. "He laid the foundation for everything that was done here."
A native of Lowell, Mass., Hann began his career as a Catholic priest and spent several years as a missionary in Brazil.
He left the priesthood for academia, earning a Ph.D. in Latin American history from the University of Texas and coming to Tallahassee in the early 1960s to teach at Florida State.
There is irony to Hann's successful career as an author — or perhaps just sweet redemption. He could not gain tenure at FSU, Florida Atlantic or New Mexico State because he failed to publish.
Four-decade historian of UAE finally translates lifes work into native language
Source: Eye of Dubai (11-22-09)
ABU DHABI– “From Trucial States to United Arab Emirates” will be published in its fourth language, German – the native tongue of author Dr Frauke Heard-Bey, a historian who documented at first-hand the country’s creation.
Heard-Bey, who has witnessed huge changes in her four decades as an Abu Dhabi resident, has seen her book become a valuable resource for students of Arabian Gulf history since it was first published in English in 1982 by Longman in London.
It is now in its third edition published by Motivate in Dubai and is also available in Arabic and French. Sponsored by leading German private bank BHF-BANK and Abu Dhabi government-owned financial services firm Invest AD, the German translation will appear in bookshops in early 2010.
“This book has had a long life because it’s a very useful reference,” Heard-Bey said of a work that took her a decade to research, while she worked at Abu Dhabi’s Centre for Documentation and Research.
“But when I arrived, the British were pulling out, and I just found it fascinating to imagine how society would change,” she added.
Heard-Bey moved to Abu Dhabi in 1967, shortly after marrying her husband David Heard, an oil industry expert who had been based in the emirate since the early 1960s.
With a PHD in history and political science recently completed in Berlin, she began work at the Centre for Documentation and Research in 1969, just two years before withdrawal of British tutelage from 11 territories in the Gulf, which included the “Trucial States” – the –seven emirates that now form the United Arab Emirates...
Historian adds fuel to Turin Shroud debate
Source: Times of Malta (11-21-09)
A Vatican researcher rekindled the age-old debate over the Shroud of Turin, saying that faint writing on the linen proves it was the burial cloth of Jesus.
Experts said the historian may be reading too much into the markings, and they stand by carbon-dating that points to the shroud being a medieval forgery.
Barbara Frale, a researcher at the Vatican archives, said in a new book that she used computer-enhanced images of the shroud to decipher faintly written words in Greek, Latin and Aramaic scattered across the cloth.
She asserts that the words include the name "(J)esu(s) Nazarene" - or Jesus of Nazareth - in Greek.
That, she said, proves the text could not be of medieval origin because no Christian at the time, even a forger, would have mentioned Jesus without referring to his divinity. Failing to do so would risk being branded a heretic.
"Even someone intent on forging a relic would have had all the reasons to place the signs of divinity on this object," Ms Frale said. "Had we found 'Christ' or the 'Son of God' we could have considered it a hoax, or a devotional inscription."
The shroud bears the figure of a crucified man, complete with blood seeping from his hands and feet, and believers say Christ's image was recorded on the linen's fibres at the time of his resurrection...
Local author and historian Robert Jahn, 62, dies
Source: APP (11-20-09)
MANTOLOKING — Robert Jahn, a writer and local historian whose work helped inspire a generation to preserve Barnegat Bay, died this week at age 62 after a battle with lung cancer.
Jahn was the author of "Down Barnegat Bay: A Nor'easter Midnight Reader," a popular cultural history of the bay that spanned prehistoric Indian times, shipwrecks and lifesaving, and the beginnings of Ocean County's tourism industry. First published in 1980, and updated and reissued in 2000, the book introduced that heritage to many new residents as Ocean County's population — and ecological threats to the bay — grew exponentially.
"Anything historical, anything environmental, he saw the continuum," recalled William deCamp Jr., chairman of the group Save Barnegat Bay and a friend of Jahn, who died Tuesday at Ocean Medical Center in Brick.
Jahn had deep family connections to that history through his mother, the late Dorothy Brower Jahn, the longtime Mantoloking postmaster. His grandfather George Brower was Mantoloking's dockmaster for 40 years.
"I grew up listening to my grandfather talk about people like Capt. John Dorsett, the legendary Point Pleasant mariner and lifesaver," Jahn said in a 2000 interview. "I've always been interested in history, especially the history of the Jersey Shore. . .Both sides of my family had people in the Life Saving Service (the predecessor to the Coast Guard) and my mother's family came to New Amsterdam (now New York) in 1642."...
Indian democracy unique, it thrives in every state: Cambridge historian
Source: Indian Express (11-21-09)
Describing India as a fascinating federal system, Dr. Gordon Johnson, president, Wolfson College, Cambridge and the deputy vice–chancellor of the University gave an insightful peek into Indian history on Thursday.
Johnson was speaking on The Study of India: Half a century of intellectual enquiry and Universities and Society at Pune University. The talk was organised to mark 425 years and 800 years of the Cambridge University Press and University of Cambridge respectively.
Johnson, spoke about Indian history and reasoned why the republic of India is still such a successful political entity.
“ It is rather unusual that democracy is flourishing in every state in India, because this is a dynamic and multi-cultural society,” said Johnson. A renowned historian specialising in Indian History, he said that it was hard to imagine in the 1960s that India would become what it is today, “ India has begun exporting people, capital and goods and instead of expecting such a diverse group to breakdown, it has emerged as a liberated nation.”...
Historian Adam Schor dives into Christianity's early days
Source: USA Today (11-20-09)
Da Vinci Code fans may thrill to dark conspiracies surrounding the secret history of early Christianity, but how many know about the real scholarly debate surrounding the young church? Even without a sleuthing Harvard "symboligist" involved, scholars have found plenty of intrigue in how early Christianity grew.
"How did the Mediterranean world become predominantly Christian?" asks historian Adam Schor of Long Island University, in Brookville, N.Y., in the current Journal of Religious History. "Generations of scholars have approached it, but each new theoretical angle seems to reopen basic questions."
Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire, of course, after the death of Jesus around 33 AD, moving from a persecuted minority in the time of the Roman emperor Nero in 64 AD (blamed for Rome's most famous fire), to state religion with the Emperor Constantine's victory in 312 AD. But how — and how much — the early church grew in that time-frame remains a mystery, Schor notes, one that scholars have solved in widely divergent ways, starting in 1997 with sociologist Rodney Stark's book, The Rise of Christianity, with similarly conflicted answers.
"Appearances have deceived us here in many ways," Schor writes, looking at the various approaches since then that try to explain the growth in the Christian population. "Without concrete data, none (of the approches) truly counts early Christians." But, he suggests, each one may tell us something interesting. Past attempts include:
• The "mission" model, where "the rate of conversion (to Christianity) depends on the number of leading clerics and holy people," yielding a slowly accelerating curve of growth for the early church. The only problem is that by changing just a few numbers, say how many people your typical holy person converts every year, estimates will range for the early church having anywhere from 5.47 million to 15.8 million people by 350 A.D. (where the total population is no higher than 50 million.)
• The "values" model, where Christians taking to heart the advice to "be fruitful and multiply"led to exponential growth. Roman practices meanwhile, including infanticide, kept pagan population low. As well, Schor says, "values could influence conversion. Early Christians may have been vilified, but their values won admiration, even from some persecutors." In this model, early Christian numbers grow like microbes in a Petri dish, bringing about an even bigger range than the first model — from 3.5 to 34 million by 350 AD, depending on conversion rates...
Abolitionist, historian wraps up Global Perspectives series
Source: Central Florida Future (11-20-09)
"Most Americans do not know slavery not only exists in the world today, it flourishes," said Ron Soodalter, co-author of The Slave Next Door, in his presentation in the Pegasus Ballroom Monday morning.
"Somewhere around 27 million people are in bondage in the world today. Now, that's over twice the number as were trafficked in chains in the entire 350 years of the African slave trade."
Soodalter, an active abolitionist and historian, kicked off International Education Week at UCF as the keynote speaker for the Second Annual International Breakfast. The Slave Next Door presentation concluded the three-part series on "Slavery's Resurgence" facilitated by the Office of the Special Assistant to the President for Global Perspectives and the International Services Center.
The series began with Somaly Mam, a Cambodian human rights activist, former slave and author of The Road of Lost Innocence: The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine, when she shared her experiences in September.
In October, Micheline Slattery, a human-rights activist and former restavek, or domestic child slave, in both Haiti and the United States, addressed about 300 attendees.
Modern-day slavery includes around 800,000 men, women and children trafficked each year around the world. According to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Web site, about 17,500 of them end up in the United States, with a high percentage received in Florida.
Soodalter suggests a simple Google search on human trafficking for astounding results.
In spite of major federal legislation and anti-trafficking laws passed in 43 states, 103 human-trafficking convictions have resulted, Soodalter said.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Video link: Theodore H. White Lecture on Press and Politics by Taylor Branch
Source: Harvard University Institute of Politics (11-12-09)
Link to video [1 hour, 20 minutes]
Balzan Prize 2009 for the History of Science Awarded
Source: PR&D - Public Relations für Forschung & Bildung (11-20-09)
Berne - 20 November, 2009 - An appeal to encourage education, training and research, and the recognition for the activity carried out by the International Balzan Foundation in this area were the themes addressed by the Vice President of the Federal Council and Head of the Federal Department for Economic Affairs, Doris Leuthard, on the occasion of the awards ceremony for the 2009 Balzan Prizes, which took place today in Berne in the Federal Council Hall.
The 2009 Balzan Prizes were awarded to Paolo Rossi (Italy, University of Florence) for the History of Science, Terence Cave (UK, St John s College, Oxford) for Literature since 1500, Michael Grätzel (Switzerland/Germany, EPFL Lausanne) for the Science of New Materials and Brenda Milner (Canada/UK, McGill University, Montreal) for Cognitive Neurosciences. This year, too, each prize has the value of one million Swiss francs. The prizewinners must set aside half of this sum to finance research projects preferably carried out by young scholars or scientists.
The head of the Federal Department for Economic Affairs observed that it would be an error to try to save money in such a vital sector for the future: recalling John F. Kennedy, Federal Councillor Leuthard stated that "only one thing is more costly than education: no education. If we want to meet the greatest challenges of the twenty-first century, like climate change, the aging of society, the development of ecological technology and the scarcity of resources - she concluded - then a special effort is indispensable for education and research."
The President of the National Council, Chiara Simoneschi-Cortesi, gave a welcome speech to the 250 exponents from the world of politics, culture and the sciences who took part in the ceremony. The Chairmen of the International Balzan Foundation "Fund", Achille Casanova, and "Prize", Bruno Bottai, emphasized the Italian-Swiss nature of the Balzan Foundation, which stands as proof of the good relations between these two countries.
Salvatore Veca, Chairman of the General Prize Committee, which is composed of twenty personalities from ten European countries, delivered the laudatio for each of the four 2009 Balzan Prizewinners, who in their acceptance speeches stressed the importance and prestige of the recognition granted to them, as well as their satisfaction at being able to finance, with half of the prize, research projects in favour of young scholars.
The Balzan Prize was awarded to Paolo Rossi (the History of Science) "for his major contributions to the study of the intellectual foundations of science from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment", to Terence Cave (Literature since 1500) "for his outstanding contributions to a new understanding of Renaissance literature and of the influence of Aristotelian poetics in modern European literature"; to Michael Grätzel (the Science of New Materials) "for his many contributions to the Science of New Materials, and in particular for his invention and development of a new type of photovoltaic solar cell, the Dye Sensitized Cell, commonly known as the Grätzel Cell"; and to Brenda Milner (Cognitive Neurosciences): "for her pioneering studies of the role of the hippocampus in the formation of memory and her identification of different kinds of memory system".
On the previous day, Thursday, the Balzan Prizewinners Interdisciplinary Forum, organized in cooperation with the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences, was held in the Swiss National Fund for Scientific Research. The Forum was also attended by previous Balzan Prizewinners, by several members of the Balzan General Prize Committee and members of the Swiss Academy of Arts and Sciences, with Chairman Peter Suter.
The subject areas change every year and the awards ceremony alternates between Berne and Rome. In 2010, the prizes for one million Swiss Francs will be awarded in European History, 1400-1700 including the British Isles; the History of Theatre in all its Aspects, Stem-cells: Biology and potential applications, Mathematics pure or applied. Unlike other prizes, the Balzan favour new lines of study and innovative research, choosing special, interdisciplinary subjects that go beyond the boundaries of traditional subjects, both in the humanities (literature, the moral sciences and the arts) as well as the sciences (physical, mathematical, natural sciences and medicine).
Press Contact:
International Contact:
Balzan Stiftung "Preis" - Mailand
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Germany & Austria:
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Teachers, Paul Gross win Canadian history awards
Source: CBC News (11-20-09)
Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean presented awards on Friday to seven Canadian history teachers as well as to actor Paul Gross and to writer Ian McKay for their efforts in promoting Canadian history.
The annual Governor General's Awards for Excellence in Teaching Canadian History was held at Rideau Hall in Ottawa.
The ceremony honoured teachers who made learning history fun for students by incorporating film, dramatic re-creations, and comic books into their lesson plans...
... Ian McKay, a writer and history professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., was presented with the John A. Macdonald Prize for his latest book Reasoning Otherwise: Leftists and the People's Enlightenment in Canada, 1890-1920.
Among the educators being honoured was Neil Robinson, a seventh grade teacher from Calgary who was tasked with teaching his students about European exploration of Canada.
Robinson invented a role-playing game inspired by two popular board games, Settlers of Catan, and Risk. Students used a wall-sized board and simulate trading with First Nations, hunting for riches, and drafting land treaties...
Friday, November 20, 2009
Historian investigates the 'lost village' of Garscadden (Scotland)
Source: STV (11-18-09)
A Drumchapel historian who used to play as a youngster in the ruins of Garscadden before it was demolished in 1927 is appealing for anyone who has memories of the 'lost village' to contact him.
The 19th century mining locale - which once boasted a school, a shop and its own church - was the proud home a thriving community of 650 people, with as many as 14 crammed into one home.
The location of the former mining village now hosts a council refuse depot. Eric Flack is a local historian who is now trying to piece together the past of Garscadden.
He said: "There were five rows and each row contained 20 houses. These people were employed as iron stone miners, although they were digging out coal.
"The conditions were very primitive. You had to pay for your own tools and get your tools sharpened."
Jones lecture features children's book historian
Source: The Bulletin (Emporia State University) (11-19-09)
Children’s book historian Leonard Marcus presented his lecture, “A New Deal for the Nursery: Golden Books and the Democratization of American Children’s Book Publishing,” yesterday as a part of the Jones Distinguished Lecture series. The lecture was sponsored by the Jones Institute for Educational Excellence and the Emporia State Archives.
“It was interesting to hear the history behind Golden Books,” said Courtney Cohen, elementary education major said. “It’s just interesting to hear where things came from.”...
... Marcus’ presentation was based on his book “Golden Legacy” which talks about how Golden Books democratized children’s book publishing in America by providing good books that were affordable.
“We all grew up with golden books and evidently the way they came to be changed publishing in America and really brought affordable, high quality children’s literature to the general public,” Eusey said.
Marcus will also be presenting a lecture for educators entitled “Minders of Make-Believe: or, Children’s Book History in Ten Giant Steps from the New England Primer to Harry Potter” today at 3 p.m. in Visser Hall Room 330. The additional presentation is based on Marcus’ book Minders of Make Believe, which is a history of Children’s literature from the Massachusetts colony up to Harry Potter.
Conservatives go after Bruce Cumings new book on the American empire
Source: Arthur Herman in the WSJ (11-19-09)
'There is the East, there is India and China," said Missouri Sen. Thomas Hart Benton in the Senate chamber in 1855—as he pointed over his shoulder due west.
Both the statement and the paradoxical gesture neatly sum up the argument of "Dominion From Sea to Sea." Bruce Cumings traces American history along its inexorable drive westward, not merely to California and the limits of the continent's frontier but all the way to the Pacific Rim. He argues that such westward outreach has transformed America's character and helped to write its destiny, if not always for the good. "I chant the world on my Western sea," Walt Whitman sang in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War. "I chant the new empire, greater than any before." The American story, in Mr. Cumings's telling, starts at Plymouth Rock and finishes well beyond Silicon Valley—in Okinawa, Hiroshima and, not least, the trading desks of Shanghai banks, where U.S. Treasurys are not routinely bought and sold.
To make his case, Mr. Cumings, the chairman of the history department at the University of Chicago, has produced a sprawling narrative, with shifting subthemes and flashes back and forth in time. His references range widely, from John Winthrop, Ben Franklin and George Santayana to the movie "Gidget Goes Hawaiian," the comic strip "Li'l Abner" and the sexually infamous 1991 Tailhook Convention. He has only bilious things to say about Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush and clearly accepts the views of leftist historians, like Howard Zinn and Ronald Takaki, who are eager to indict the U.S., past and present, for racism, imperialism and genocide. Still, Mr. Cumings is rather bullish on the American experiment.
Mr. Cumings concedes that "the idea of a two-ocean entity" was not merely the fond hope of the 19th century's champions of Manifest Destiny. Rather, it "existed from the start" of the republic. The two-ocean idea pulled America's original Europeanized character into a more creative shape, and a push westward to the Orient created constantly shifting horizons—and new problems to overcome. In the end, Mr. Cumings has to confess that conservatives may have a point. There is indeed an American exceptionalism, and it works...
Alan Philps: Shlomo Sand 'cleared away a lot of 19th century debris'
Source: The National (11-19-09)
It is not often that an Israeli history book is translated into Arabic with a view to finding a mass readership. And it is even rarer when that book is to be translated into two other major languages of the Islamic world, Turkish and Indonesian, not to mention Japanese, Russian, German, Italian and Portuguese.
The work is The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand, a professor of history at Tel Aviv University. When it was first published in Israel last year, it spent 19 weeks in the bestseller list, thanks in part to furious denunciations by academic historians. It has just appeared in English, and the provocative title does not disappoint...
... Sand is a specialist in European history, so his work has been treated with condescension by specialists. Simon Schama, the historian and documentary maker, writes with academic hauteur that serious historians stopped believing in the exile many years ago, so Sand is presenting “truisms as though they were revolutionary illuminations”.
But this is to miss the point. Sand himself is the first to say that there is nothing new in his book: he has merely organised existing material in a way that Israeli historians did not care to, for fear of appearing unpatriotic, and western historians shied away from, wary of being called anti-Semitic. The point is not what is known in the ivory towers of historians, but what sustains the popular consciousness. The narrative of exile and return is still at the heart of Israeli self-belief, and remains firmly implanted in the western mindset.
Sand has cleared away a lot of 19th century debris. The narrative of a people exiled and returning, so heroically projected in the 1958 novel Exodus, which was made into a film starring Paul Newman two years later, is relegated to the realm of belief, not historical fact...
... Sand writes that books do not change the world, “but when the world begins to change, it searches for different books. I may be naive, but it is my hope that the present work will be one of them”...
... His conclusion is that Israel has to become a democratic state of all its citizens, including the 20 per cent who are Muslims and Christians, not a state of all the Jews. This book must be as seen as a milestone on that road – but it will still be a very long journey.
Expelled historian laments subverted rule of law
Source: The Australian (11-18-09)
ACADEMIC duty and a sense of outrage drove Brij Lal to speak out against Fiji's military-installed prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, for expelling Australian and New Zealand diplomats over alleged judiciary interference two weeks ago.
Retribution was swift. The Indo-Fijian Australian citizen was soon detained. His three-hour interrogation included an hour of haranguing by a lieutenant-colonel, after which Lal agreed to leave Fiji within 24 hours.
"I take the view that if we don't speak up for certain fundamental values of civilised society, then who will?" the Australian National University history professor says. "I think it's the role intellectuals, academics, responsible citizens everywhere have.
"There is something fundamentally wrong when a military overturns the verdict of the ballot box and if we keep quiet in those circumstances then we have failed our duty."
Lal was born in Fiji and has made its study his life's work. He was on a four-person panel convened in 1995 to make recommendations for a new, non-racial constitution .
"We toured around the country and took 800 oral and written submissions from people, so we conducted a kind of national dialogue about what kind of political arrangement was right for Fiji."
The 1997 constitution that resulted was not reframed exactly as Lal and his colleagues recommended. In it, 46 of 71 seats were reserved on the basis of ethnicity and 25 were open, the reverse of their suggestion. But it was still an important step from what had gone before, giving formal recognition and independence to the Great Council of Chiefs (and thus depoliticising it) and mandating that any party that won more than 10 per cent of the vote would be represented in government.
That was the momentwhen Fiji had a chance of becoming a liberal parliamentary democracy, Lal says. "There was a real possibility for an element of power-sharing, but the constitution was not given long enough to prove its worth," he adds...
Kevin Wright hosts talk, "1609--A Country That Was Never Lost,"
Source: North Jersey (11-19-09)
Park Ridge - The Pascack Historical Society will host guest speaker Kevin Wright, a noted historian and author, whose talk is titled, "1609 – A Country That Was Never Lost," on Sunday, Nov. 22 at 2 p.m.
Wright is past president of the Bergen County Historical Society and his presentation coincides with the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's voyage and the release of Wright's new book, which bears the same name as his lecture.
The Society advises that Wright will carefully construct the native world that Hudson encountered during his fateful 1609 voyage. He will describe the Native Americans' original homelands and culture and will bring the culturally diverse native societies "to life" for attendees.
Wright says that his book had its genesis in a childhood curiosity. In his home in Newton, his grandfather had a cellar display of Indian artifacts, which he and his father had collected. These worn stone tools and decorated shards of earthenware deeply connected Wright to the land and ignited his lifelong interest in who lived here.
Presidential Historian: Time to Release JFK's Files
Source: PR News Channel (11-18-09)
The late U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts prevented the release of his brother's 1963 assassination file, says presidential historian Tim Miller. Which is why as the 46th annivesary of President John F. Kennedy's death approaches Sunday, Miller is pulling out all stops to get secret files finally released.
"The time is now for the American people to get the real answers,” says Miller. "I believe there is information damaging to President Kennedy and his family wants it kept secret."
Miller, publisher of Nashville, Tenn.-based FlatSigned Press, filed a lawsuit this week claiming the federal government continues to hide pertinent facts of the Nov. 22, 1963 assassination. Sunday marks the 46th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination, the first anniversary since the death of Edward Kennedy.
Miller questions the findings of the Warren Commission, which in 1964 declared Lee Harvey Oswald the lone assassin.
Tim Miller is available for interviews. Please use the media contacts below.
About Tim Miller
As publisher of FlatSigned Press, Inc., Miller has been interviewed by television, radio and newspaper media outlets on the historical accounts and contemporary values of rare autographed books and has appeared on many local and national news shows as a presidential historian, analyst and commentator on presidents, politics, and entertainment.
He is a contributor to "The Sanders Price Guide to Autographs," the definitive price guide for autograph collectors, and many other trade and consumer autograph publications. He is a Lyndon Baines Johnson Scholar, has served as White House Press Correspondent, and worked directly for the U.S. Congress. He held certified press credentials for the White House, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the U.S. Senate and was named one of George W. Bush's 1,000 Points of Light by the Commercial Board of Appeals.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
2009 National Book Award Finalist, Nonfiction: T. J. Stiles's 'The First Tycoon'
Source: National Book Foundation (11-19-09)
CITATION
With deep and imaginative research and graceful writing, T. J. Stiles’s The First Tycoon tells the extraordinary story of a brutally competitive man who was hard to love but irresistibly interesting as a truly pivotal historical figure. With few letters and no diaries, and with layers of legend to carve through, Stiles captures Cornelius Vanderbilt as a person and as a force who shaped the transportation revolution, all but invented unbridled American capitalism, and left his mark not only all over New York City but, for better or worse, all over our economic landscape.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Founder of a dynasty, builder of the original Grand Central, creator of an impossibly vast fortune, Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt is an American icon. Humbly born on Staten Island during George Washington’s presidency, he rose from boatman to builder of the nation’s largest fleet of steamships to lord of a railroad empire. In The First Tycoon, T.J. Stiles offers the first complete, authoritative biography of this titan, and the first comprehensive account of the Commodore’s personal life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
T. J. Stiles is the author of Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, winner of the Ambassador Book Award and the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He has written for the New York Times Book Review, Smithsonian, and Salon.com, among other publications, and held the Gilder Lehrman Fellowship in American History at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He has taught nonfiction creative writing at Columbia University. He served as historical advisor and on-screen expert for "Jesse James" and "Grand Central," two films in the PBS documentary series American Experience. A native of Benton County, Minnesota, Stiles studied history at Carleton College and Columbia University, and resided in New York City for twenty years. He now lives in the Presidio of San Francisco with his wife and son.
Pamela Crossley's " The Wobbling Pivot, China Since 1800: An Interpretive History"
Source: The China Beat (11-17-09)
Prominent Qing specialist Pamela Crossley of Dartmouth College has a new book coming out in February, The Wobbling Pivot, China Since 1800: An Interpretive History, 374_Pamela_Crossleywhich is aimed at general readers and is designed to be suitable as well for classes devoted to modern Chinese history. One theme in the book that is likely to be of special interest to those who follow this blog is her frequent discussion of similarities and differences over time in patterns of unrest and the way that the state and its representatives respond to challenges from below. Focusing largely on tensions and modes of accommodation between central authorities and local communities, Crossley offers an intriguing new way of thinking about many of the big upheavals of the recent past, from the White Lotus Rebellion to the recent unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang. In this excerpt, however, which gives a good sense of the liveliness of the book’s prose as well as the kinds of subjects it addresses, we see how her approach can also be used to shed light on minor fracases of the sort that anyone who has spent time in China is likely to have witnessed at some point during their stay.
It is unusual for the contents of a semi-confidential email to become universally known on the Internet. But in March of 2009, after the nomination of Charles W. Freeman Jr. as chair of the American government’s National Intelligence Council, his email to the ChinaSec listserv group of May 26, 2006 drew attention for this comment about the Tiananmen incidents of 1989: “I find the dominant view in China about this very plausible, i.e. that the truly unforgivable mistake of the Chinese authorities was the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip the demonstrations in the bud, rather than – as would have been both wise and efficacious – to intervene with force when all other measures had failed to restore domestic tranquility to Beijing and other major urban centers in China. In this optic, the Politburo’s response to the mob scene at ‘Tian’anmen’ stands as a monument to overly cautious behavior on the part of the leadership, not as an example of rash action.”
Freeman’s suggestion that the contrast is to tactics, and not to politics, leaves the comment dangling above the ground, out of contact with historical patterns of China’s recent centuries. The hearts of China’s political capitals have been occupied by state opponents and dissidents repeatedly over the centuries. State reaction is rarely swift, though it is often bloody. These events are products of a structural relationship between government and society that was strongly in evidence from at least 1644 to 1958, and since 1976 has been reestablishing itself to a modest degree. It is a system with a peculiar way of producing social and economic order, but one that in very extreme circumstances is vulnerable to catastrophic breakdown. Considered outside its historical context, it sometimes leads observers too quickly to words like “instability,” “disorder,” “chaos.”
When I was following the thread that now runs through this book, my mind kept returning to scenes from contemporary China. I was in China for the first time in 1977. On an otherwise quiet afternoon in Luoyang, where the streets did not look particularly crowded, a loud discussion broke out between two men over a bicycle (in those days, bicycles were all Flying Pigeon, identical to any but the eye of love). A small knot of people quickly wound itself around the disputatious men, listening carefully, advising moderation and not, coincidentally, preventing the bicycle from going anywhere. The knot grew to a crowd large enough to block the narrow street. A few men at the front of the throng had joined in the conversation, questioning the men in turn, and repeatedly advising calm and honesty. After some minutes the inevitable representative of local public security arrived. She was a small woman, not plump but solidly built, with the regulation even hair length and middle part, and a bright red arm band proclaiming her official status. The crowd shifted only enough to allow her to make her way to the front, a few people darting glances of blame at the bicycle men for having brought the authorities onto the scene. The public security woman asked a few questions of the men and appeared, for a moment, to be attempting to break up the congregation and send the men on their way. But she was a late arrival on the scene. The two men who had begun negotiations between the adversaries continued in their role, with polite acknowledgment of the official’s presence. Occasionally Public Security would inject her questions or views, but at roughly the same rate and pitch as others at the center of the circle. After ten minutes, the contenders nodded agreement to each other, one moved off with the bicycle, and the crowd, including the woman distinguished by her bold red armband, moved on to their business.
I had the strong feeling that I had seen something that was not the least unusual. Everybody took the dispute, the resolution and the public participation in stride. The crowd was not merely bystanders, camp followers or observers for sport. The quickness with which they organized themselves for conflict containment and resolution, the precision with which certain individuals assumed and fulfilled their roles, suggested to me something basic about the social methods of the Luoyang inhabitants who had entered the street expecting to do their shopping or their chores, but instead became embroiled in the forensics, the philosophy and the administration of a dispute between two men over a bicycle. I did not know at the time, but am convinced now, that in 1977 such a social phenomenon in Luoyang evinced ancient practices that a decade before had been under extreme assault, and wounded seriously though not fatally.
Another side of this phenomenon seems to be evident in two anecdotes recently related by the journalist Tim Johnson in 2008. In the first, Johnson discovers that it is impossible to get taxi drivers in Changchun to actually use the meters and issue receipts from them. Since the law requires that the meters be used and the receipts issued, Johnson approached a “security guard” (the contemporary equivalent of the security maiden I spoke of in Luoyang in 1977) to complain. The guard merely shrugged. Johnson commented, “At first, I found this a little irksome. But on reflection, I sort of admired the taxi drivers. The local authorities apparently had imposed an impractical limit on fares, and the cabbies rebelled in the only way they could. The security guard understood and sympathized.” In a second vignette, Johnson ends up on a bus after the flight he expected to take was cancelled. The airline had chartered the bus at no expense to the passengers, and had obviously provided the driver with sufficient cash to take the high-speed, well-maintained toll roads to the destination. The driver, however, took a meandering, pothole-riddled route, keeping the toll fees for himself. Passengers repeatedly pointed out to him the highway ramps he was passing, but otherwise took no issue or action. Johnson experienced some outrage at this, too, but then reconsidered after taking a comparative view: “It was a minor inconvenience. I thought back to times in South America, where bus drivers would be in cahoots with armed bandits, pulling buses over at remote spots where everyone would be robbed.”
Interview With Rick Perlstein, author of "Nixonland" [video]
Source: Big Think (11-17-09)
Go to video
TRANSCRIPT:
Rick Perlstein: I’m Rick Perlstein. I’m the author of “Nixonland.”
Question: Has Obama succeeded on his promise of being a “post-partisan” President?
Rick Perlstein: Well, the problem with Obama’s post-partisan agenda is that he came into it. He came into his presidency at a time when millions of Americans, perhaps even tens of millions of Americans don’t consider a democrat president legitimate. Don’t consider liberalism legitimate. Don’t consider the idea of the state forming new programs to help people legitimate. So, he’s in a situation a lot like, you know, Abraham Lincoln faced in 1860 when you had millions of Americans who didn’t even consider what was going in Washington to have anything to do with them.
So, the big question for me was always was this post-partisan idea, this idea that you could kind of bring adversaries across a table and get them to agree to each other and agree with - to get them to agree with each other and achieve social progress, was that a deep-seated belief of his or was that, in a certain sense, a tactic? Not a cynical tactic, but a tactic. And I would be very with him if it were a way of thinking about politics, if it were a tactic, because the job of transformative leader is not to cue to the center, but define their own values as the center, as common sense. And if he, you know, I believe in the agenda he’s putting forward. For example, universal healthcare. You know, for example, you know, cap and trade and green jobs as a way to, you know, solve our energy problems while growing the economy. I think these are reasonable while liberal goals and if he presents them as reasonable and the reaction to them as one could knew they were going to - because there are these millions of people that don’t consider a liberal president legitimate - was irrational, extreme, that presented him an opportunity to say, “My program is rational, but my opposition has chosen extremism, has chosen unreason,” and be willing to take the hit, that there's always going to be a minority of the country. Thirty percent, 35 percent, even 40 percent who disagrees with him radically. Disagrees with him strongly, but if he’s still willing to pass his program with that 60 percent margin, the rest of the country will eventually catch up. The reactionaries will understand as they did with Social Security, as they did with, you know, women getting the vote, freeing the slaves, you know, Social Security - that actually these things were in their interests. They’ll accept them as part of the established order of American society, and in fact, 20, 30, 40 year down the road the Republicans and the Conservatives will be campaigning to save universal healthcare just like they campaign to save Social Security...
Robert Byrd, longest-serving Congress member, considered historian
Source: The Christian Science Monitor (11-18-09)
Before making legislative history, Sen. Robert Byrd – on Wednesday he became the longest-serving member of Congress since 1789 – spent a lifetime mastering it.
The Democrat for West Virginia once dazzled a British delegation, complaining that Americans didn’t know English history, by reciting all the kings and queens of England, from Egbert (829-839) through Elizabeth II, including riffs on their children and notable moments in their reign.
His four-volume history of the US Senate, based in part on a decade of floor speeches delivered on slow Friday mornings in the 1980s, became an instant reference on Capitol Hill. His encyclopedic grasp of Senate procedure, honed by constant study, is also a resource to colleagues on both sides of the aisle...
... “He is best known as the foremost guardian of the Senate’s complex rules, procedures and customs,” said Senate majority leader Harry Reid in a tribute to Byrd on the floor of the Senate Wednesday. “Today’s milestone is another record that will never be broken.”
In a bid to educate his Senate colleagues on the perils of the line-item veto, Senator Byrd taught himself Roman history by reading accounts of Julius Caesar, Livy, Plutarch, Tacitus, and others.
“When the Roman Senate gave up its control of the purse strings, it gave away its power to check the executive. From that point on, the Senate declined … and the Roman republic fell,” he said in one of 14 addresses on the Senate floor in 1993.
Wales is a country of grant junkies, claims historian
Source: WalesOnline (11-18-09)
THE Welsh are a nation of “grant junkies”, more heavily dependent on the public sector than almost every other country in the free world, a leading historian claims.
The only nation more dependant on the state is the special case of Northern Ireland, which is recovering from decades of terrorism, Hywel Williams will say tomorrow in the third of his six-part series for S4C.
Referring to statistics from a recent international survey by the independent think tank, Centre for Economic and Business Research, Williams says that 64.3% of Wales’ national income is accounted for by government expenditure. This means that out of every Ł3 in our pockets, nearly Ł2 comes from the public purse...
... In the programme, Williams traces the story of the Welsh economy back to before the oil crisis of 1973, to the days of Harold Macmillan’s “never had it so good” period in the 1950s and early 1960s. The economic crisis that followed was sparked by the oil-producing countries’ decision to double the price of oil and limit its supply – a situation which emphasised how domestic economies are dependent on international factors.
The Opec (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries) decision led to inflation and public spending cutbacks in Wales and to strikes and closures in the heavy industries. Margaret Thatcher’s policy of creating a grants economy to ease the pain of the closures rather than deal with the underlying problems was never questioned in Wales, Williams maintains.
Even today, Williams says, the Welsh middle class has no incentive to question their country’s over-dependence on the public purse.
Kimberly Kagan on How Taliban and Al-Qaeda Differ
Source: CBS News (11-17-09)
On this week's edition of CBSNews.com's @katiecouric, military historian Kimberly Kagan told Katie Couric that while "al-Qaeda has a global focus," the Taliban "has a slightly more narrow focus in Afghanistan."
That isn't to say that the groups don't share goals and know each other, however.
"What we have in Afghanistan is a network of enemy groups who are tied by close personal relationships between their leaders," said Kagan.
She noted that "the first few steps that these groups need to undertake are actually shared in common."
"They need safe havens," Kagan said. "They need to establish a state in which they can produce their vision of law, order and justice. And from which they can project power."
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Project makes Illinois history available online
Source: Chicago Tribune (11-17-09)
MACOMB, Ill. - Two Western Illinois University librarians are making western Illinois history more accessible online.
A grant allowed librarians Bill Thompson and Jeff Hancks to put the contents of several historical societies' newsletters on the Web.
Included in the collection are newsletters from historical societies in the western Illinois counties of Hancock, McDonough, Rock Island and Schuyler.
Angolan historian at Brazzaville international colloquium
Source: ANGOP (11-17-09)
Brazzaville - The Angolan historian, Simao Souindoula, arrived Tuesday in Brazzaville, Congo, to attend the international colloquium on the work by Congolese painter, Marcel Gotene, on November 18-21.
The official who is also the vice president of the Unesco International Scientific Committee on the “Slavery Route”, has travelled at the invitation of the Congolese minister to the Presidency for Defence, Zacharie Bowao.
Gordon S. Wood: Defending the academicians
Source: The Washington Post (11-17-09)
[Gordon S. Wood is Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University. His most recent book is Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815.]
The writing of academic history seems to be in crisis. Historical monographs -- scholarly works on highly specific subjects -- pour from the university presses (at least 1,200 or so a year) and yet have very few readers. Sometimes, sales of academic history books number only in the hundreds; if it weren't for library purchases, their sales might be measured in the dozens. Most people, it seems, are not interested in reading history, at least not the history written by academic historians. Although some blame this situation on the poor teaching of history in the schools, most critics seem to think that the problem lies with the academic historians themselves. They don't know how to write history, at least the kind of history that people want to read. After all, David McCullough, Walter Isaacson, Jon Meacham and other popular historians sell hundreds of thousands of books. If they can do it, why can't the academic historians write better, more readable, more accessible history?
Historians who sell lots of books have always thought that it was their ability to write well that made them popular. Samuel Eliot Morison, a historian who was that rare bird, an academic who was a bestseller during the middle decades of the 20th century, certainly believed that. Academic historians, he said, "have forgotten that there is an art of writing history." Instead of scintillating stories that move, they write "dull, solid, valuable monographs that nobody reads outside the profession." Barbara Tuchman, who was America's most popular historian in the 1960s and 1970s, likewise believed that academic historians did not know how to write. The reason professors of history have so few readers, she said, is that they have had too many captive audiences -- first with the dissertation supervisors, then with their students in lecture halls. They really do not know how "to capture and hold the interests of an audience." McCullough agrees, though he is too polite to put it so bluntly. History is in trouble, he suggests, because most academic historians have forgotten how to tell a story. "That's what history is," he says, "a story."
Alas, if it were only that simple. Academic historians have not forgotten how to tell a story. Instead, most of them have purposefully chosen not to tell stories; that is, they have chosen not to write narrative history. Narrative history is a particular kind of history-writing whose popularity comes from the fact that it resembles a story. It lays out the events of the past in chronological order, with a beginning, middle and end. Such works usually concentrate on individual personalities and on unique public happenings, the kinds of events that might have made headlines in the past: a biography of George Washington, for example, or the story of the election of 1800. Since politics tends to dominate the headlines, politics has traditionally formed the backbone of narrative history.
Roy Rosenzweig Fellowship Endowment Still Needs Support
Source: AHA Blog (11-17-09)
The first recipient of the Roy Rosenzweig Fellowship for Innovation in Digital History will be announced at the annual meeting in January, but the endowment for the award still needs your support.
The award was developed by friends and colleagues of Roy Rosenzweig to honor his life and work as a pioneer in the field of digital history. But in order to assure this award remains on a firm financial footing into the future, we need your assistance.
The George Mason University Foundation, Inc. manages the funds for the Rosenzweig Prize. Contributions may be tax deductible to the full extent allowable by the law.
Gifts for the AHA/CHNM Rosenzweig Prize may be mailed to:
GMU Foundation, Inc.
4400 University Drive, MS 1A3
Fairfax, VA 22030
Checks should be made payable to the GMU Foundation, Inc. and indicate that the gift is for the AHA/CHNM Rosenzweig Prize. Gifts may also be made online at give.gmu.edu, but funds must be specified for the AHA/CHNM Rosenzweig Prize in the comments section.
For questions or information on alternate methods of giving, individuals should contact: Amy Lambrecht, Director of Development, Phone: (703) 993-8706, e-mail: alambrec@gmu.edu.
Contributions may also count toward the center’s National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) matching grant in accordance with NEH guidelines.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
LGBTQ Taskforce Statement
Source: American Historical Association (11-10-09)
The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer Taskforce of the AHA was created by AHA Council at the January 2009 annual meeting. The Taskforce is composed of five members (with the vice president and a member of the Professional Division and AHA serving as co-chairs), one additional AHA member appointed by the Professional Division (PD), and two appointed by the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender History (CLGBTH), an affiliate society of the AHA. The Taskforce has a three-year charge and meets once a year always during the AHA annual meeting with several conference calls during the year for discussion of ongoing business.
As a newly constituted Taskforce of the AHA, our charge is to gather information about the concerns of LGBTQ historians and propose concrete, practical solutions for as many of them as possible. We have already begun conducting a benchmark survey of other professional organizations with an eye to best practices and policies. Ideally, this will result in an “LGBTQ equity in the workplace/best practices” guide. Another possible focus of attention will be a survey of LGBTQ historians and those doing LGBTQ history to determine hiring and discrimination trends in the field. This would result in a “status of LGBTQ people in the historical profession” report. But the Taskforce will also attend more broadly to the special problems faced by LGBTQ historians (including those teaching LGBTQ topics) on the job market, in the classroom, in the research field, and in all stages of their careers. In addition, the Taskforce will address the ways in which the AHA can best serve the needs of LGBTQ historians.
Our target audience is the AHA leadership and membership and our charge does not include taking a public stand on issues such as the boycott of the Manchester Grand Hyatt, one of the headquarters for the 2010 AHA annual meeting in San Diego.
That said, the Taskforce is interested in learning more about and reflecting on how and why this situation developed, how the AHA has responded, what the impact will be on LGBTQ history and historians, and what can be done to avoid such situations in the future.
If members of the AHA have thoughts about the San Diego convention that they would like to share with the Taskforce, please e-mail Leisa Meyer at ldmeye@wm.edu.
If members of the AHA would like more information about the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History, please consult the committee’s web site and/or Facebook page:
- http://www.clghistory.org/
- http://www.clghistory.org/contact.html
- http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=53766491591 (Login required)
Monday, November 16, 2009
Renowned historian angers Scottish World War II veterans
Source: Deadline (11-15-09)
FURIOUS Scottish World War Two veterans are demanding an apology from a renowned historical writer after he accused them of COWARDICE.
Anthony Beevor’s eagerly anticipated new work – titled “D-Day – The Battle for Normandy” – contends that Scottish troops failed in key objectives during the landing, badly letting down Allied forces.
And now livid vets are “disgusted” by the passages, and say that Beevor should have interviewed them rather than relying on secondary sources.
Quoting a Canadian major, Beevor wrote: “The thing that shocked me was the 51st Highland Division.
“The Scotties threw away their weapons and equipment and fled.”
Another quote from Field Marshal Montgomery describes the 51st Highland Division as “at present not battle worthy – it does not fight with determination and has failed in every operation it has been given to do.”
But surviving veterans of the Normandy landings have hit out at the claims, describing them as a “gross injustice”.
Arabs Hostile Approach to Iran is a "Big Mistake." an Arab Historian says
Source: The Hawler Tribune (11-15-09)
Top Egyptian historian, investigative journalist and thinker Mohammad Hassanein Heikal said he believes history would harshly blame Arabs for their irresponsible approach towards Iran. “I think our [Arab states’] approach towards Iran is a big mistake which measures up to historical crimes. There is an incoherence between Iran and us, but what’s important is that this incoherence has led to hostility and there is a difference between an incoherence that leads to negotiation and one that leads to hostility,” quoted Heikal as talking to Al-Jazeera satellite channel.
He pointed to Iran’s policies under the former Shah Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi who was toppled in 1979. He said “I was an enemy of Iran in the past. This enmity was due to Iran’s complete dependence on the US [in the Pahlavi era]. It was in this era that the Islamic Revolution took place and we still continued our animosity towards Iran.”
Heikal referred to Iran’s nuclear program, which is under tight inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and said “Instead of focusing on Israel’s nuclear arsenal, we [Arabs] express worries over Iran’s nuclear program -- even though I think it is not even worth worrying.”...
From the archives: Oklahoma woman historian who struggled to rise above prejudices
Source: Enid News (11-14-09)
Called “Oklahoma’s Greatest Historian” by Gov. Brad Henry, Angie Debo was born Jan. 30, 1890, in Beattie, Kan.
She came to Oklahoma in a covered wagon with her parents and younger brother at age 9 to Marshall, Oklahoma Territory, her home for much of her life.
She taught in rural schools at age 16 in 1906 and graduated from Marshall High School at age 23 in 1913.
She majored in history at the University of Oklahoma, studying under Edward Everett Dale, and received her bachelor of arts degree in 1918.
She returned to teaching for five years, saving money for graduate school. She attended the University of Chicago and received her master of arts degree in 1924. She taught at West Texas State Teachers College in Canyon, Texas. She then returned to OU, where in 1933, she received her Ph.D.
Her dissertation, “The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic,” was published in 1934 and received the John H. During Prize from American Historical Association as the most important contribution to studies in American history in 1934. In spite of this success, she could not find a teaching position as most college history departments at the time were not even considering hiring women...
... In 1988, at age 98, she received the Award for Scholarly Distinction from the American Historical Association. She died two weeks later on Feb. 21, 1988, and is remembered for her courageous presentation of the truth.
Drake Bennett: How historians are looking deeper at the fall of the Berlin Wall
Source: Boston.com (11-15-09)
[Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail drbennett@globe.com.]
With the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall earlier this week, the news was filled with images of that epoch-ending night, and of the equally historic events that led up to and followed it. Those images, for the most part, are of crowds: strikers in Poland, the multitudes at the reburial of Hungary’s former prime minister Imre Nagy (executed in 1958 on orders from Moscow), the throngs in Prague chanting “Havel to the Castle,” the massed hecklers in Bucharest who forced Nicolae Ceausescu to try unsuccessfully to flee - and, of course, the thousands of East and West Germans who gathered restively at the Berlin Wall’s checkpoints on the night of Nov. 9 and flooded through when they opened...
... It’s hardly surprising that this is the narrative that has taken hold. It’s a stirring idea, and a powerful one, comforting in the role it accords oppressed people to rise up and make their own fate. And the crowds in the streets are what the world saw at the time. But in the intervening two decades, as the participants themselves have written their
memoirs, as transcripts and memos have been declassified, and as documents have emerged from behind the former Iron Curtain, many historians have begun to emphasize a different account. In this telling, it’s not the marching of the crowds on the street that made the difference, but something less visible: the unprecedented inaction and acquiescence of those at the top. In country after country, leaders responded to open challenges to their power by essentially giving in.
“People power,” in other words, didn’t end the Cold War, not alone. And the extent to which the popular understanding of those revolutionary months centers on the masses in the streets suggests that we may have learned the wrong lesson from the fall of the Berlin Wall. Especially here in the United States, where rioting mobs helped spark the American Revolution and marchers spurred the Civil Rights movement, there is a particular faith in the power of taking it to the streets, and it was possible to see echoes of those American movements when mass protests erupted in Eastern Europe, or at various times in countries like Ukraine, Lebanon, Burma, the Philippines, or, most recently, Iran. But, historians say, what ultimately matters in authoritarian regimes is the resolve of those at the top, and that imposes stark limits on the power of the people.
It’s not just a question for Cold War scholars to debate. Misunderstanding the potential of popular protest can have tragic results, leading today’s dissidents, whether they’re in the Arab world or Southeast Asia or elsewhere, to risk life and limb in situations where there’s little prospect of success - where, unlike in Poland and Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s, the leadership is firmly committed to doing whatever it takes to maintain the status quo...
... Today, some historians are looking in more depth at what it was that changed in the minds of the communist leaders - especially Mikhail Gorbachev, whose refusal to lend Soviet support to any crackdown forced the hand of those Eastern European governments more reluctant to change. This analysis, in which the Cold War ended not because of the many but the few, suggests that, for all the longer-term economic and political currents that shaped it, the end of the Cold War wasn’t a historical necessity. With a few different decisions, the events of 1989 might have unfolded very differently - or not at all, leaving the world frozen even today in a hostile superpower face-off. Rather than being a puzzle for historians, the end of the Cold War could still be a distant ambition of policymakers.
“There were so many points at which the whole process could have been interrupted by relatively small changes,” says Kramer. “It easily could have happened that the Cold War wouldn’t have eased much at all.”
In nearly every historian’s account, the central figure in the end of the Cold War is Gorbachev. Ronald Reagan may have disturbed the status quo with his bellicose rhetoric, and West Germany’s Helmut Kohl may have seized the initiative on uniting the two Germanys soon after the wall came down, but it was Gorbachev who bore the most responsibility, by steadfastly refusing to act as the dominos in communist Eastern Europe fell...
... In recent years, historians have suggested other factors, as well. Vladislav Zubok, a Soviet historian and, like Hitchcock, a professor at Temple, argues that Gorbachev was simply overwhelmed with problems closer to home - the perilous state of the Soviet economy, unrest in the Baltics - and had little time for Eastern Europe. James Sheehan of Stanford argues that Gorbachev fell in love with the idea that the Soviet Union might find a place, culturally and economically, in the steadily integrating community of Western European nations, and therefore had little interest in playing the role of Eastern Europe’s brute enforcer...
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Robert Nedelkoff on The "Other Challenges" Of Garry Wills
Source: The New Nixon (11-14-09)
[Robert Nedelkoff, a resident of Silver Spring, MD, received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Louisville and his Juris Doctor degree from Monterey College of Law in 1996. From 1997 until March 2009, he worked on behalf of the Richard Nixon Foundation at the National Archives in College Park, MD. He has published articles in several magazines, including GQ and McSweeney’s.]
The new issue of the New York Review of Books has a short op-ed, which first appeared as a blogpost last week at the magazine’s site, by Garry Wills, professor emeritus at Northwestern University and author of several dozen books about religion and American history. His efforts in the latter field include his Pulitzer-winning Lincoln At Gettysburg, and his bestselling 1970 book Nixon Agonistes, which, in many ways, became the template for many of the books critical of the thirty-seventh President since then.
Wills’s article, in the space of about six hundred words, offers his opinion about what President Obama should do in Afghanistan. After the President returns from his whirlwind trip to Japan and China, it will be time, as Sen. John McCain pointed out this week, to make the final decision about how many more troops to commit to the eight-year fight against the Taliban, and for how long.
A considerable number of voices in the media and in the blogosphere have argued in recent weeks that the plan toward which the President seems to be leaning – an increase in the troop levels in Afghanistan, whether or not this corresponds to the 40,000 that the commanders in the field think is required at this point – is not one he should undertake. Wills is one of these voices.
In his article he contends that the arguments in favor of maintaing a military presence in Afghanistan are “the ones that made presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon pass on to their successors in the presidency the draining and self-lacerating Vietnam War.”
It’s worth mentioning that when President Nixon resigned in August 1974, I don’t remember any column or op-ed piece on the subject – and they were legion – which said that the Vietnam War was an ongoing conflict that Nixon had passed on to Gerald Ford. As far as the liberal pundits were concerned in those days, we were well and truly removed from that conflict for good. The North Vietnamese took such sentiments to mean that if they tried to overrun South Vietnam, the United States would do nothing to stop them.
And in the spring of 1975 this proved to be true when Congress rejected President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger’s appeals to aid South Vietnam, disregarding the promises made by President Nixon to protect the sovereignity of that nation when the Paris peace accords were signed in January 1973 – promises made to protect peace, but which Wills, evidently, regards as an extension of war.
He goes on to say that “when we did withdraw, the consequences were not as fatal as those we incurred during the years that saw the deaths of over 50,000 of our soldiers and many more Vietnamese.” Well, it’s true that while many died in Vietnamese prison camps after the South was defeated, the numbers were not equivalent to the number of Vietnamese that died in the course of the war. But in Cambodia, a nation that fell into the hands of the Khmer Rouge at the same time as South Vietnam was conquered, far more civilians died in four years of “peace” than in the preceding years of war.
Cambodia is worth keeping in mind when one looks at what follows in Wills’s commentary:
Some leader has to break the spell before costs mount further while our wars are passed from president to president. Among other things, this will give our military a needed chance to repair the wear and tear on men and equipment that the overstretched regular services and the National Guard have suffered, and to make them ready for other challenges.
We are in Afghanistan in response to a challenge, if one could call the bloodbath of 9/11 such. The Taliban, with no provocation from us, allowed Osama bin Laden and his henchmen to use their nation as a base to launch the vicious attacks of that day. In the eight years that Americans have fought and died to make sure that the Taliban would not have the chance to abuse the rule of a nation in such a fashion again, it has become more and more clear that, if it were allowed to regain power, it would not only take bloody revenge on every man and woman hoping for a civilized life in Afghanistan – that is to say, perhaps as large a percentage of the population as died in Cambodia – but would do its best to help its allies in northwest Pakistan overthrow that nation’s government, and thus gain control of nuclear weapons. Then we would see “other challenges,” on a scale so abominable that “wear and tear” on our tanks and airplanes would be the least of our worries.
Yesterday’s announcement that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 conspirators will be tried for murder in New York is a reminder of what American servicepersons in Afghanistan are trying to protect us from. I hope that during their trial, enough testimony is presented about the Taliban’s acquiescence in bin Laden’s evil to remind even Garry Wills of why we have to fight in Afghanistan, and why the consequences of withdrawal would be so tragic.
In his op-ed, Wills says that Obama should get our troops out of Afghanistan even if the response to such an action results in his being a one-term President. A man so familiar with American history should remember that the subject of his Pulitzer-winning book persevered in 1864, in the face of calls from many of the pundits of his day to make peace with the South on its terms, and, within a matter of months, prevailed. The Gettysburg Address, indeed, explains just what the United States is fighting to preserve and protect now. Perhaps Northwestern’s professor emeritus of history should reread it.
Hackers Post Private E-mails of Historian and Accused Holocaust Denier
Source: Wired (11-14-09)
A group identifying themselves as “anti-fascist hackers” broke into the web site and AOL e-mail account of controversial British historian and accused Holocaust-denier David Irving and obtained his private communications as well as attendee lists for his current U.S. speaking tour.
The hackers posted Irving’s e-mail correspondence online, as well as the user name and password for his web site account and AOL e-mail account, which shared the same password. The hackers also posted the e-mail addresses and other personal information — such as names, phone numbers and shipping and credit card billing addresses — of people who made donations through his web sites, purchased his books or bought tickets for his appearances.
Irving’s username and password for his Authorize.net account, which handles the credit card transactions on his web site, were also exposed.
The data was posted on the WikiLeaks site Friday evening in advance of Irving’s Saturday speaking engagement at the Catholic Kolping Society of America in New York City. The organization reportedly canceled the event on Friday after someone contacted it.
The organization said its facility had been booked a few days ago by someone using the name “Michael Singer,” who said he wanted to hold a book reading. The organization canceled the engagement after learning that the event was scheduled for Irving....
Hackers Post Private E-mails of Historian and Accused Holocaust Denier
Source: Wired (11-14-09)
A group identifying themselves as “anti-fascist hackers” broke into the web site and AOL e-mail account of controversial British historian and accused Holocaust-denier David Irving and obtained his private communications as well as attendee lists for his current U.S. speaking tour.
The hackers posted Irving’s e-mail correspondence online, as well as the user name and password for his web site account and AOL e-mail account, which shared the same password. The hackers also posted the e-mail addresses and other personal information — such as names, phone numbers and shipping and credit card billing addresses — of people who made donations through his web sites, purchased his books or bought tickets for his appearances.
Irving’s username and password for his Authorize.net account, which handles the credit card transactions on his web site, were also exposed.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Historian John Hope Franklin to Be Honored with Memorial Conference at Brooklyn College
Source: Brooklyn College (11-12-09)
The late historian John Hope Franklin, a major figure in the writing of American and African-American history, and 1995 winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, will be honored by former colleagues and fellow historians during a daylong John Hope Franklin Memorial Conference at Brooklyn College to be held Tuesday, Nov. 17, from 11 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. in the library.
Franklin, who died earlier this year at the age of 94, was an Oklahoma native who earned a bachelor's degree from Fisk University, a historically black institution, in 1935. He earned an M.A. in 1936 and a Ph.D. in History in 1941 from Harvard University. Over the course of his lifetime, he was the recipient of more than 130 honorary degrees.
He chaired the Brooklyn College History Department from 1956 to 1964, becoming the first African-American scholar to lead the history department at a predominantly white U.S. college. In addition to Brooklyn College, he also taught at such leading institutions as Howard University, Harvard, the University of Chicago and Duke University. In 1997, he was appointed head of President Clinton's Initiative on Race. At the time of his death, he was the James B. Duke Professor of History Emeritus at Duke.
A number of Brooklyn College departments and offices are cosponsoring the event in honor of Franklin, including his own History Department; the departments of Africana Studies, Anthropology, Political Science and Sociology; the School of Education; the Programs in Children's Studies and Women's Studies; the Shirley Chisholm Project of Brooklyn Women's Activism; the Offices of the President and of the Provost; the Brooklyn College Library; and the Office of Affirmative Action, Compliance and Diversity.
The theme of the conference is "Current Trends in African-American History" in recognition of Franklin's many contributions and pioneering efforts to chronicle the central role that African-Americans have played in American history. His "From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans," first published in 1947, has sold more than three million copies and is still considered one of the definitive historical surveys of America's black experience.
The noted Harvard historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham will deliver the Franklin Memorial Lecture at a 12:30 p.m. luncheon session in the library's Christoph M. Kimmich Reading Room. Professor Higginbotham is the author of the prize-winning "Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church: 1880-1920"(Harvard University Press, 1993), co-editor of "African American Lives"(Oxford University Press, 2004) and "The African American National Biography" (2008), and editor in chief of "The Harvard Guide to African-American History"(Harvard University Press, 2001). In addition, the conference will feature three scholarly panels exploring current historical research, a panel on teaching, a presentation by Africana Studies Chair George Cunningham of books by African-American historians, and a reception. The panels will take place in the Woody Tanger Auditorium.
Current chairperson of the Department of History David Troyansky notes, "We see the event as both commemorative and forward-looking. Professor Higginbotham's talk will explore the latest version of Franklin's 'From Slavery to Freedom' as well as his legacy. We will hear from individuals who have taught the book in its various editions and we will have a taste of just-published or forthcoming scholarship from a new generation of historians."
The first panel, starting at 11 a.m. and titled "African American Women, Urban Reform and Uplift," will feature Cheryl Hicks and Sonya Ramsey, both of the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.
The luncheon and the presentation by Professor Cunningham will be followed by a second panel, "Material Culture and African-American History in New York City," beginning at 2:30 p.m. and featuring Jennifer Scott, of the Weeksville Heritage Center; Arthur Bankoff, of Brooklyn College; and Fred Winter, of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
The third panel, scheduled to begin at 3:40 p.m., will examine "Civil Rights and Black Power in New York City: Northern Struggles for Racial and Economic Justice," featuring Stefan Bradley, of St. Louis University, and Brian Purnell, of Fordham University.
The final panel, "Teaching John Hope Franklin's 'From Slavery to Freedom,'" will start at 5:05 p.m., featuring Purnell, and Michael Schoenfeld and Barbara Winslow, both of Brooklyn College.
Historian insists that finance minister apologizes for saying "feudal old men" (Bulgaria)
Source: Focus Information Agency (11-13-09)
Georgi Markov, director of the Institute for History at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS), says in an interview with FOCUS Radio that Finance Minister Simeon Dyankov will have to apologize publicly to BAS staff for saying "BAS does not do science, there are some feudal old men in BAS who collect salaries."
Markov says the minister's words only show he does not know the meaning of the words feudal lord. He notes the BAS staff are not "old men."
The historian regards such way of speaking as inappropriate for a minister.
Orange battle earns new look (Virginia)
Source: Fredericksburg.com (11-13-09)
Out in the countryside of Orange County, historians are working to breathe new life into an old battle.
When complete, their efforts should help the public appreciate one of the Civil War's least-known campaigns, called Mine Run, after the creek of the same name off State Route 20.
Mine Run may be as notable for what didn't happen as what did. It involved 145,000 troops and set up what could have been a full-bore, bloody series of battles between the armies led by Union Gen. George Gordon Meade and Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
But at the 11th hour, Meade--who had initiated the campaign under pressure from President Lincoln to bag Lee's Army of Northern Virginia--called it quits.
"Historians have tended to overlook this campaign because there was no major bloodletting," said Timothy H. Smith, a historian from Gettysburg, Pa.
Yet veterans of the Battle of Payne's Farm said its musketry was as hot as anything they'd experienced at Antietam or at Gettysburg, the latter just four months earlier...
Calgary historian honours Canada's war nurses
Source: CBC (11-12-09)
A University of Calgary instructor is drawing attention to the nearly 8,000 Canadian nurses who served in the two world wars but often remain forgotten in the November ceremonies honouring the country's war heroes.
Nurse historian Diana Mansell researched the role of Canada's nurses in the two world wars for a Remembrance Day lecture she gave in Calgary Wednesday night.
"[I] found it very interesting, and I think they are, in many ways, not acknowledged for their efforts, probably due to the silence of many of them," said Mansell.
Many of the women she spoke to who served in the Second World War suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder from witnessing events they weren't prepared to encounter.
"They were anywhere from 19 to 21, with virtually no life experience," Mansell said. "And they took on these horrendous tasks. And then came home and carry the fear with them.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Harvard historian sees banks, China dragging down U.S.
Source: Boston Herald (11-12-09)
Harvard economic historian Niall Ferguson, whose “The Ascent of Money” book and TV series traced the world’s financial system, last night painted a pessimistic prognosis for U.S. recovery unless the government takes decisive action.
To a packed audience at the annual International Place Executive Event, hosted by Hub real estate developer Donald Chiofaro, Ferguson said that while we barely avoided a second Great Depression, the nation is still in deep trouble because no reforms have been made to its underlying financial problems.
He said the government needs to break up large banks with toxic assets, stop the explosive growth of debt, cut mortgage incentives and stop allowing the devaluation of the Chinese currency.
“We must stop the 10/10 proposition with China, where they get 10 percent growth and we get 10 percent permanent unemployment,” Ferguson said, adding that fixing this problem needs to be President Obama’s top agenda item when he next visits Beijing.
Ferguson dismisses the notion that the economic meltdown was caused by deregulation and greed, contending it was the corruption of the six major pillars of the financial system: banks, bonds, stocks, insurance, mortgages and globalization.
Immigration Canada Issues New Citizenship Guide
Source: All Headline News (11-11-09)
Ottawa, Ontario (AHN) - Ottawa will issue this week a new guide to citizenship. The new guide, to be used by 250,000 immigrants yearly who subsequently acquire Canadian citizenship, will give more emphasis on Canada's military history. It would veer away from the old study guide which portrays the nation merely as a peacekeeper, said Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney.
An expert panel helped craft the new guide. Among the members of the panel are former Canadian Governor General Adrienne Clarkson, historian Jack Granatstein, retired general John de Chastelain and historian Margaret MacMillan.
Historian Karen Armstrong to Unveil Charter of Compassion
Source: The Times of India (11-12-09)
WASHINGTON: In more than two decades of studying and writing about world religions, historian Karen Armstrong, author of ‘A History of God’, ‘Faith After September 11’, and most recently, ‘The Case for God’, was repeatedly struck by the emphasis that all the great traditions place on compassion.
Whatever she was researching, this theme of compassion kept recurring — when she was examining a history of the idea of God in the three monotheistic faiths; in her study of the history of fundamentalism, where she found lack of compassion was the major flaw in these militant movements; and above all in her book ‘The Great Transformation’, which traced the history of the ‘Axial Age’ (c900-200 BCE), when all the great world faiths either came into being or had their roots, where compassion and nonviolence were so essential.
“It repeatedly struck me as sad that, despite this marvelous ideology, which should be of such benefit to our polarized world, religion is often seen as part of the problem, and secondary goals, such as doctrinal orthodoxy, often get more attention,” the British-born historian said in an interview to The Times of India on Tuesday.
In reality, the world is busy tearing itself to pieces over differences. So when she won the prestigious TED Prize in 2008, and with it was granted a wish for a better world, she proposed a Charter which would restore compassion to the centre of attention, could challenge the voices of extremism and hatred, empower people to demand compassionate speech/action, and make compassion audible in our troubled world. She calls it the Golden Rule that must now be implemented globally, “so that we treat all peoples as we would wish to be treated ourselves”.
On Thursday, Armstrong will unveil in Washington DC the Charter of Compassion, a “single document crafted by people from all walks of life, nationalities, beliefs and backgrounds with the intent to unify, inspire and bring compassion back into the hearts of society”. Thousands of entries from over 100 countries have poured in from the time Armstrong revealed her quest (at charterforcompassion.org) to build a global community “where people of all persuasions can live together in peace”...
Historian Can Keep His Manuscript on Tobacco Studies, Judge Rules
Source: Science Insider (11-11-09)
A Florida circuit court has ruled in favor of a Stanford University professor who is trying to keep his unpublished book manuscript out of the hands of tobacco company R.J. Reynolds, which had subpoenaed it as evidence for an upcoming suit.
Historian Robert Proctor plans to testify as an expert witness against tobacco companies in a number of cases brought by smokers in Florida. He is also working on an 800-page book, The Golden Holocaust, which describes, Proctor claims, the shaky scientific rhetoric and bogus clinical studies that tobacco companies used to sell their products. A judge in Volusia County (which contains Daytona Beach) ruled last August that Proctor had to surrender the manuscript, which Proctor says is largely jottings and notes at this point and not ready for other people to scrutinize.
The Volusia case is still pending appeal, but a judge in Duval County (which contains Jacksonville) ruled today that Proctor did not need to surrender The Golden Holocaust for cases in Duval.
The ruling is not technically binding in other counties with pending tobacco cases, but Bill Ogle, a lawyer working on Proctor's behalf, hoped the Duval ruling would have persuasive sway in other counties and help develop a consensus for Proctor's side.
The judge in the Duval case issued the ruling partly to move the case forward to trial more quickly but also, Ogle says, because of the free-speech issues the request for the manuscript raised. A scholar or an author has certain constitutionally protected rights, Ogle says, and they have the right to withhold speech until they see fit to publish. Ogle says he suspects that the friend-of-the-court brief that Stanford University sent on Proctor's behalf helped sway the Florida court, because the decision cited arguments from the brief (though not the brief itself by name).
There is no written record of the decision at this point, but one will likely be available within a week from the Duval Circuit Court.
D-Day historian: 'Ryan' not best war film
Source: CNN (11-11-09)
(CNN) -- Some reviewers have called "Saving Private Ryan," Steven Spielberg's World War II film about D-Day and the search for a soldier, one of the greatest war movies.
Military historian Antony Beevor begs to differ.
Not only is it not the greatest war movie, it's not even the best cinematic depiction of D-Day, says Beevor, author of the newly published "D-Day: The Battle for Normandy" (Viking).
He admires the famed Omaha Beach opening -- "Probably the most realistic battle sequence ever filmed," he said -- but described the rest of "Saving Private Ryan" as "ghastly."
"It's sort of a 'Dirty Dozen' cliche of the worst form," he said.
He has expanded on the criticism in a lecture. "Spielberg's basic story line had great potential. It shows the tension between patriotic and therefore collective loyalty, and the struggle of the individual for survival: those mutually contradictory pressures, which in many ways lie at the heart of war," Beevor observed in the talk.
If any filmmakers wish to take on D-Day again, Beevor's book provides enough material for a dozen screenplays. Making use of first-person accounts stored in the National Archives, as well as a wealth of other material, Beevor depicts in painstaking detail not only the D-Day landings by American, British, Canadian and Free French forces, but also the subsequent battle for the whole of Normandy that proved pivotal in defeating Nazi Germany.
Beevor says a director would do well to remember that the Allied effort to retake the continent extended well beyond that single day of June 6, 1944.
"D-Day, although an iconic moment, was not actually the end of it. Films like 'The Longest Day' and 'Saving Private Ryan' almost give the impression that D-Day was 'it' and then the next thing people know about was the liberation of Paris," he said. "But in fact it was the fighting in Normandy which was far worse. Casualties on D-Day were far lighter than expected -- [military leaders] had expected 10,000 dead and only 3,000 died.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Ferriero Confirmed by Senate as Archivist of the United States
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH) (11-6-09)
On November 6, the United States Senate voted unanimously to confirm David Ferriero as the 10th Archivist of the United States. Mr. Ferriero was the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the New York Public Libraries. Mr. Ferriero, who was nominated by President Obama on July 28, 2009, will succeed Professor Allen Weinstein who resigned as Archivist in December 2008 for health reasons.
On October 1, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs held a hearing to consider the Ferriero nomination. The hearing was presided over by Senator Thomas Carper (D-DE), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, Federal Services, & International Security.
As the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the New York Public Libraries (NYPL), Mr. Ferriero was part of the leadership team responsible for integrating the four research libraries and 87 branch libraries into one seamless service for users, creating the largest public library system in the United States and one of the largest research libraries in the world. Mr. Ferriero was in charge of collection strategy; conservation; digital experience; reference and research services; and education, programming, and exhibitions.
Before joining the NYPL in 2004, Mr. Ferriero served in top positions at two of the nation’s major academic libraries, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, and Duke University in Durham, NC. In those positions, he led major initiatives including the expansion of facilities, the adoption of digital technologies, and a reengineering of printing and publications.
Mr. Ferriero earned bachelors and master’s degrees in English literature from Northeastern University in Boston and a master’s degree from the Simmons College of Library and Information Science, also in Boston. After serving in the Navy during the Vietnam War, he started in the humanities library at MIT, where he worked for 31 years, rising to associate director for public services and acting co-director of libraries.
In 1996, Mr. Ferriero moved to Duke University, where he served as University Librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affairs until 2004. At Duke, he raised more than $50 million to expand and renovate the university’s library and was responsible for instructional technology initiatives, including overseeing Duke’s Center for Instructional Technology.
Historian links fall of Berlin Wall to rise in religious extremism in Pakistan
Source: Daily Times (11-10-09)
KARACHI: Prominent historian Dr Mubarak Ali believes the fall of the Berlin Wall is an event that changed the whole political scenario in the Indian subcontinent since it resulted in strengthening the rightist forces in Pakistan and consequently, the rise in religious extremism in the country.
“For the people of the West, it was a matter of happiness, but the fall of the Berlin Wall had some dire consequences for the secular forces in Pakistan,” said Dr Ali, while delivering a lecture at the Goethe-Institute during a programme arranged by the German Consulate to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
He was called from Lahore to deliver a lecture on the topic, ‘Impacts of the fall of the Berlin Wall on South Asia’.
“The day some Western historians interpreted the fall of the Berlin Wall as the defeat of communism, secular and communist forces in Pakistan were weakened and religious extremists took it as their victory,” Dr Ali informed the audience.
Dr Ali is one of the leading modern day historians and a critic of history that is taught in the country’s schools and colleges.
He said after the weakening of communism, rightist forces assured the society that there was no place for capitalism as well in Pakistan, and hence the religious system was the best option left...
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Conservatives Feel Seminar Organized by Historian Gabriel Piterberg 'demonized' Israel
Source: Eric Golub at Frontpage Magazine (11-10-09)
[Eric Golub is the publisher of the Tygrrrr Express blog. He wrote this article for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.]
Last week, the Center for Near Eastern Studies (CNES) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) co-sponsored a seminar with the ungainly title, “Invasion Is a Structure, Not an Event: Settler Colonialism Past and Present.” It was billed as a “two-day event organized by Gabriel Piterberg,” a notoriously anti-Israel UCLA history professor. True to form, the seminar featured some of the most politicized and biased academics in the field of Middle East studies.
The audience of around 30 included perhaps 15 professors and a cadre of the aging hippie revolutionaries (not mutually exclusive groups) one grows accustomed to seeing at anti-Israel events.
Having covered earlier this year a “Gaza and Human Rights” symposium at UCLA that was widely criticized for devolving into Israel-bashing and anti-Semitism, I attended this event with a watchful eye.
UCLA professors, perhaps aware that they are now being monitored, have become somewhat wary. The panel included Jewish and Israeli speakers in an attempt at “diversity,” but as is typical in academe, it was intellectually homogeneous. The “Jewish perspective” was represented by the far left of the political spectrum and differed little from the so-called pro-Palestinian perspective. To the extent any true debate existed, the seminar was an exercise in the indefensible vs. the incomprehensible.
New York University Middle Eastern studies and history professor Zachary Lockman introduced the indefensible by labeling Israel the “Zionist entity” and the “Zionist project,” while referring to Palestinians as the “indigenous people.” He claimed that “Israel can be compared to South Africa” because it “uses coercion” and concluded that “colonialism is Zionism.”
University of California, San Diego sociology professor Gershon Shafir provided the incomprehensible as his “rebuttal.” His defense of Israel was as weak as his communication and organizational skills.
Shafir began by quipping, “I didn’t expect such a large crowd. I only brought five handouts.” In looking at his own notes, he said, “I can’t read this.”
He was self-deprecating and generous in his praise of his opponent Lockman, who was neither. As he put it, “I’m not from New York. I can’t speak as quickly.”
Shafir’s academic jargon rendered syntax worthy of a mathematics class:
Antecedent conditions lead to a critical juncture which leads to structural persistence which leads to a reactive sequence which leads to an outcome.
At one point, he almost managed to offer a pro-Israel sentiment, but then backed away:
I have all kinds of things to say about [Palestinian] violence, but I would get some ugly looks if I do.
He then looked at the other professors, who motioned for him to sit down. So much for intellectual diversity.
Patrick Wolfe, a history professor at La Trobe University in Australia, spoke next. He said he had no stake in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which led me to wonder, “Then why are you here?”
It turns out he was there to offer the Marxist position, including the following:
Black labor and red people’s land has been used for white people’s benefit.
The primary goal is not the exploitation of labor. It is the seizure of land.
Half of the Jews are Arabs, so the Jewish/Arab conflict makes no sense.
As to the latter, it makes plenty of sense. Arabs are murdering Jews, and Jews are against this.
Making less sense was Stanford University history professor Joel Beinin, who chaired the next panel. He began by praising Lockman and then claimed, against all evidence, “It is extraordinary to have such a rich discussion of the issues.”
Sticking to his usual biases, Beinin juxtaposed current Israeli leadership with Israel’s founders, to the detriment of the former: “The young Turks are militarizing the conflict to advance themselves.”
At this point Piterberg opined that, “Increased settler movement is meant to spread Judeo supremacy at all costs.”
And Lockman chimed in:
In 1948 Jews succeeded in getting rid of many indigenous Palestinians, but they can’t kill them all. This is the logic and contradiction of the Zionist project.
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities history professor Patricia Lorcin spoke about sexuality in colonial Algeria. She managed to unite Lockman and Shafir, both of whom desperately wanted her presentation to end: It was a distraction from bashing Israel.
Piterberg, who was slated to discuss leftwing Israeli writer Amos Oz, offered bizarre and at times, tactless thoughts instead. Here is a sampling:
Israeli settlers are running around like R2D2. [I guess that would make C3PO a colonizer, since he was British.]
Israel looted Palestinian land after 1948. It was colonial sexual excitement.
Like an adulterous woman, the nomads moved forward.
Picture an Oriental Jewish woman fantasizing about a man with a mustache.
Likud policies are about exerting sexual power.
And perhaps most outrageously:
A proper white woman must become a Moroccan slut to experience true physical pleasure.
Beinin emoted that:
Amos Oz is the Israeli author I most love to hate. We need an extra five minutes to expose his racism and misogyny.
While Lorcin noted helpfully:
Sexual anxiety creates a fear of Arabs and Muslims.
UCLA anthropology professor and chair of CNES’s Faculty Advisory Committee Sondra Hale, trying to reign in the discussion, asked, “How does that relate to settlers?”
Without missing a beat, Lorcin replied, “Demographic promiscuity.”
Rounding out the panel’s apparent preoccupation with sex, Lorcin added:
Sexual anxiety leads to the politics of this moment. Periods of calm mean that there is no need for “Frenchness.”
I’m not sure if this was intended as praise or an insult, but it was at least consistent with everything else she said.
Having had his fill of sex talk, Beinin moved on to implicitly accusing Israel of committing genocide:
The logic of settler colonialism is “eliminationist.” [That is not an actual word, but why let that stand in the way of making a good point?]
As “proof,” he cited the work of Columbia University Arab studies professor Rashid Khalidi:
In 1884, violence occurred two years after Zionists arrived in Palestine.
Beinin followed Khalidi’s incorrect assertions with his own:
The Nakba [or catastrophe, used by radicals to describe Israel’s founding] occurred in July, 1948. Yitzchak Rabin expelled 50,000 Palestinians.
Then he added, “I am not here making a pacifist solution,” which drew loud laughter from the professors, some of whom have a history of justifying violence against Israelis while decrying Israeli self-defense.
When somebody asked about problems with Palestinian leadership, Beinin replied, to more laughter, “Some things I don’t discuss in black and white.” Apparently, Beinin only applies this approach to discussions of Israel.
The conclusion of this bizarre conference was stunningly and unintentionally honest.
Piterberg stated:
We all write about the settlers, but none of us write about the indigenous population. This could be for a variety of reasons.
To which Hale replied:
We are only interested in the settlers because we are careerists. That is unkind, but true. There is plenty of material on the indigenous people; we just ignore it.
The question of which peoples can be declared “indigenous” aside, she is absolutely right in admitting that criticizing Israel on campuses is good for business, not to mention much easier than rigorous, objective research.
The lowest moment of the conference occurred during a break, when Sondra Hale conversed with two women in the audience. Speaking loud enough for everyone to hear, Hale, showing her true colors, made the following outlandish statements:
Stand With Us [a pro-Israel organization] are the White Citizen’s Council without the sheets. They are McCarthyists.
The ZOA [Zionist Organization of America] are Nazis.
Moreover, she agreed with the other two when they said that “Zionists are more despicable than Baathists. If we could just use the courts, we could make the Zionists feel the financial sting.”
Some portions of the seminar were less harmful than silly. For instance, a couple people were simply outraged that the coffee cups they were using were not biodegradable.
Yet beyond the oddball assortment of environmentalists, Marxists, and supporters of Algerian eroticism, the bulk of the seminar hewed tightly to its clear and harmful purpose: demonizing and delegitimizing Israel. It’s a further sign of the continued politicization of Middle East studies.
Response by Gershon Shafir
I would like to take exception to the republication by HNN of a deceptive article published in Front Page on a conference on "Settler Colonies" at UCLA, of which I was a participant.
The premise of Eric Golub's original article was that scholarly work is best viewed as blatant partisanship. Jewish and Israeli speakers, it states, were "included" in the conference to offer a "Jewish perspective" but to his lament I failed to provide an appropriate "defense of Israel." In fact, I was not "included" in the conference, our panel was devoted to a discussion of my, by now, 20 year old book Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Arab Conflict, 1882-1914, which examines the long term effects of the Israeli Labor Settlement Movement's formative period. It should not be surprising that I provided no defense, either weak or robust, of Israel; this was an intellectual exchange over the merits and shortcoming of an analysis of the historical record. In short, it was a scholarly exchange not an exchange of partisan barbs.
Since I would not be the wished-for defender, the article made me the target of an offence. Let me point to three glaring inaccuracies in the Golub piece.
*** Golub seeks to present as gibberish the following sentence from my talk: "Antecedent conditions lead to a critical juncture which leads to structural persistence which leads to a reactive sequence which leads to an outcome." This is an overview, elaborated in the talk, of the five steps of "path dependence" from James Mahoney's The Legacies of Liberalism. Mahoney's book, by the way, won the American Sociological Association Barrington Moore award for best book in comparative-historical sociology, and is widely used for elucidating a tight and formal model of path dependence.
*** I am alleged to have looked at my own notes and said "I can't read this." The reference, in fact, is to my quip in response to the moderator's note telling me I had only one minute left.
*** Golub also writes that I "was self-deprecating and generous in his praise of [my] opponent Lockman, who was neither." On the contrary, while we disagreed on several substantive points, Professor Lockman was unfailingly courteous and gracious, the model of a thoughtful scholar and consummate gentleman. I will be glad to continue our discussion in the future; hopefully in front an audience all of whose members take good notes and appreciate the merits of academic scholarship.
Gershon Shafir
Department of Sociology
University of California, San Diego
Response by Zachary Lockman
I feel compelled to express my severe disappointment and distress at your decision to post on the HNN website an item titled "Conservatives Feel Seminar Organized by Historian Gabi Piterberg 'demonized' Israel" ( http://hnn.us/roundup/14.html#119728). This item purports to be an account of a scholarly conference sponsored by UCLA's Center for Near Eastern Studies on October 29-30, 2009, in which I was a participant. I would have expected better of History News Network, of which I am a regular reader.
As you no doubt know, this account was originally written for, and first posted on, the Frontpage and Campus Watch websites -- right-wing political outfits not generally regarded by historians or other scholars as reliable sources and notorious for trashing scholars with whom they disagree. And in fact, the author of the piece in question wrenched various phrases and sentences uttered by me and other conference participants out of their contexts, often mangled or completely misconstrued them, and then strung them together to produce an account that suited his political agenda. It should have been obvious from even a cursory reading of the piece that this is not a serious attempt to convey the scholarly exchanges that actually went on at the conference or to take issue with what the participants actually said. Rather, it is yet one more product of the campaign that Frontpage and Campus Watch have long waged against scholars who do not share these outfits' political positions with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Your guidelines indicate that you regard certain things as so beyond the pale that you would not publish them -- the writings of Holocaust deniers, for example. I have to wonder, then, how you could have deemed such an obviously tendentious and distorted item worthy of dissemination by HNN. I am all for the free exchange of ideas, and of course HNN should feature a wide range of viewpoints and promote vigorous debate. But it is hard for me to understand how posting this article could be deemed to serve HNN's goals. I very much regret that you apparently did not see things that way.
Author re-examines Truman's controversial decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan
Source: Kansis City Star (11-7-09)
Of all 20th-century presidents, four led soldiers in close-combat situations.
They were Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, George H.W. Bush and Harry Truman.
For the millions of Americans in uniform during World War II, Truman’s service under fire became a matter of national significance as of April 1945. That’s when Truman, the new president after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, was charged with making the century’s most profound military decision.
Ultimately, Truman authorized the use of atomic weapons, and World War II soon ended without a traditional invasion of Japan’s home islands.
Did Truman’s combat experience play a role? D.M. Giangreco, a Kansas City area author who for 20 years served as an editor at Military Review, which is published at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, thinks it could have.
Giangreco has written two new books about Truman: “The Soldier from Independence: A Military Biography of Harry Truman” and “Hell to Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947.”
Most biographers agree that Truman’s time in uniform in World War I was perhaps the defining experience of his life. Before the war, he was a Grandview farmer.
After the war, he was a combat veteran with a new taste for leadership.
Giangreco is especially puzzled how some historians have shrugged off Truman’s wartime service, especially the several months he spent leading an artillery battery across France.
In “The Soldier from Independence,” Giangreco writes that Truman’s combat experiences “were far more interesting and complex than previously realized.” Also, he adds, the man who later pondered an invasion of Japan in the face of massive casualty estimates “understood exactly what he was asking of our soldiers, sailors and marines, and he understood it at level that most Americans today would find unfathomable.”
Giangreco maintains that the decision Truman made was an informed one and perhaps filtered through his own combat experience.
Giangreco is especially interested, for example, in how Truman once ignored orders from a colonel who directed that the exhausted men of Truman’s artillery battery double-time up a hill.
Truman, instead, ordered the battery off the road and into the woods for a rest.
Just how Truman finessed this isn’t entirely clear even today, although Giangreco cites evidence suggesting the colonel dressed Truman down in earnest. (“The Colonel insults me shamefully,” Truman wrote in a wartime journal.)
Lesson: As an Army officer, Truman was khaki to the core, but he still recognized common sense when he saw it.
If such experiences influenced Truman’s decision in 1945, however, Giangreco suggests that they may have been trumped by the terrible casualty estimates then being given him.
Ever since a national controversy caused the 1995 cancellation of an exhibit of the Enola Gay (the aircraft used to deploy the atomic bomb over Hiroshima) at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, the wisdom of Truman’s decision has become the focus of what one historian, Geoffrey C. Ward, once called a “vast quarrelsome literature.”
Some historians think Truman made a reasonable decision in authorizing the use of atomic weapons; others maintain that he had options.
In “Hell to Pay,” Giangreco challenges some historians who have suggested that Japan was preparing to surrender and that casualty estimates for the planned invasion of Japan later were exaggerated.
According to Giangreco, the numbers were frightful enough in 1945. Estimates in circulation that July, he writes, suggested that any invasion would kill between 5 million and 10 million Japanese, and perhaps cost the United States between 1.7 million and 4 million casualties, including between 400,000 to 800,000 killed.
Truman’s decision was made in real time, Giangreco writes, using the most reliable estimates then available. Those numbers, Giangreco maintains, also were the result of cumulative research of many parties over a long period and not the result of any casual tweaking.
The fact remains, he writes, “albeit uncomfortable or inconvenient for some, that President Harry S. Truman’s much-derided accounts of massive casualties projected for the two-phase invasion of Japan is richly supported by U.S. Army, White House, Selective Service and War Department documents produced prior to the use of nuclear weapons against Japan, and stretching all the way back through the last nine months of the Roosevelt administration.”
If “Hell to Pay” is sometimes rugged going, with the reader challenged to stay alert to casualty estimates, invasion scenarios and the possible use of atomic weapons during an invasion, that’s no reflection on the author.
It’s more a result of a surplus of evidence presented in service of a grim version of possible world-altering events. It’s hard to imagine a breezy treatment of this topic.
MEET THE AUTHOR
D.M. Giangreco will speak at the Truman Library, 7 p.m. Wednesday, Veterans Day.
U.S. Rep. Ike Skelton also is scheduled to be there.
The event is free, but reservations are recommended. Call 816-268-8244. A wine reception begins at 6 p.m.
The Soldier from Independence: A Military Biography of Harry Truman, by D.M. Giangreco (304 pages; Zenith Press; $28)
Hell to Pay: Operation DOWNFALL and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947, by D.M. Giangreco (362 pages; Naval Institute Press; $36.95)
Skowhegan's sacrifice was 'great' in war says local historian (Maine)
Source: Kennebec Journal (11-9-09)
SKOWHEGAN -- Two-thousand, five-hundred U.S. service men from the state of Maine were killed during World War II.
Thirty-three of them were from the town of Skowhegan, an extraordinary number, given Skowhegan's population of 5,000 at the time, says local historian and retired high school history teacher David Harville.
Two of the soldiers, he said, were killed before war even was declared.
"Thirty-three boys killed from this little town," Harville said. "Skowhegan's sacrifice was great and came very, very early in the war; in fact, it came before Pearl Harbor, when a boy named Bernet Eaton lost his life in maneuvers down in North Carolina, two and a half weeks before Pearl Harbor.
"That Sunday morning at Pearl, we lost John French."
And so it went, the United States declared war on Japan after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Germany and Italy declared war on the U.S. three days later...
... Harville, 59, said it is important to remember the many men killed during the war and as Veterans Day approaches. He said he collects ideas for stories, memorabilia and newspaper clippings about local men who went to war and never came back to preserve their memories.
"By doing these projects, we are keeping their names and their faces in front of the public, in front of the people of Skowhegan so the people of Skowhegan will never forget," he said. "Can you imagine giving your life for this country and years later no one even knows your name?"
Harville said as a historian, many families have given him artifacts from their long-ago war heroes.
"Many of the families of these boys had these artifacts and they were so willing to give them to me so I could keep the memory of these boys alive," he said. "World War II becomes a nation's history, the state of Maine's history and we can look at Skowhegan's sacrifice in World War II and then percolate this to the family histories, they all interface."
Harville said that no matter where the United Sates fought during the war, there were Skowhegan men on the front lines -- Iwo Jima, Okinawa, the Battle of the Bulge, Pearl Harbor, Normandy Italy, Saipan.
"We had Skowhegan boys in all of those places," Harville said. "Skowhegan boys were not only there, but they gave their lives."
Hungarian historian: 'Kohl's promise was not kept'
Source: EuroActiv (11-9-09)
Chancellor Helmut Kohl's promise that no one’s life will be worse than it was before Germany’s reunification was not met, György Fehéri, a literary historian, told EurActiv Hungary in an interview.
As commemorations get underway to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, EurActiv explores the significance of the event in a series of interviews.
György Fehéri, a fellow of the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin, is a Hungarian citizen who was living in East-Berlin. From the mid-1980s, he owned a so called “world passport” allowing him to travel to the West.
"I used its advantages and went to West Berlin to spend my time there in the library or in the museum," he told EurActiv Hungary. Thus, when the Wall fell down, he didn’t fully realise the importance of the event.
Fehéri felt a wind of change in the previous 6-12 months. More than two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hungarian dissidents and Austrian intellectuals organised a joint “pan-European picnic” on 19 August 1989. On that occasion, the Hungarian authorities agreed to open one of the border’s gates for a short time. On that day, some 900 East Germans who were living in Hungary escaped the country.
Less than a month later, on 11 September, Hungary dismantled its border with Austria. This moment "created huge tension that could be felt here in East Berlin," said Fehéri...
Former Poet Laureate accused of plundering historian's work for his new poem
Source: Mail Online (11-7-09)
Sir Andrew Motion has been accused of shamelessly 'ripping off' a military historian's book for his Remembrance Sunday poem.
The poem, An Equal Voice, was published as a tribute to war veterans and described as a 'found' poem rather than an original work.
The former poet laureate said he had 'stitched together' the words of several generations of shellshocked soldiers from the First World War to the present day.
'It's a poem by them, orchestrated by me,' he said in his introduction to the work.
But he was accused of plagiarism and 'shameless burglary' by military historian Ben Shephard.
Mr Shephard said most of the Motion poem was copied from his own book, A War Of Nerves, about the history of medical psychiatry.
Mr Shephard, who also produced the World At War television series, complained that Sir Andrew had simply extracted 'sexy soundbites' from his book...
Obituary: Joe Levitt, Soldier, hero, historian
Source: National Post (11-9-09)
Joseph Levitt, a Montrealer by birth, was a product of both Montreal’s famous Baron Byng High school, where many Quebec Jews (including Mordecai Richler) cut their teeth, and Harbord Collegiate in Toronto, where his family moved in the mid-1930s. He was a bright, intuitive young man who was offered a scholarship by the University of Toronto when he enrolled in its social science program.
But when war broke out while he was a student, Joe, an avowed communist, decided his education would have to wait. Despite strong opposition to all war, he and many of his Jewish friends felt it was their duty to sign up for active service to oppose fascism and the horrors of Nazism. In 1941, Joe Levitt became one of almost 17,000 Jews enlisted in the Canadian armed forces, which constituted more than one-fifth of the entire Jewish male population in the country. He enlisted in the Governor-General’s Foot Guards and served overseas for several years.
Joe became a hero, recognized for his courage, leadership and action in the face of extreme danger. As a Guardsman, Joe spent time in France, Belgium, Italy, Holland and Germany, where he was part of many dangerous battles. But it was in Normandy that his bravery became most apparent...
... It was in London where he met his future wife, Kari Polanyi Levitt, while he was on leave from active duty. After the war, she joined him in Canada in 1947, and they were married in 1950. Joseph’s contribution to Canada did not end with the war: He returned to his studies at the University of Toronto, where he eventually received his PhD in 1967. As a historian and professor at the University of Ottawa, Joe became an expert on influential Quebec politician Henri Bourassa, on whom he wrote extensively. Indeed, Joseph’s wartime experiences never fully left him. As an academic, he became very active in the fight against nuclear proliferation as a member of Veterans Against Nuclear Arms.
Joseph Levitt’s strong, calm demeanour led him to become a leader in the battlefield and an excellent teacher. The lives he saved, and the worlds he changed, will never be forgotten.
Obituary: Scholar who ignited Batman controversy (Australia)
Source: Brisbane Times (11-9-09)
Marjorie Tipping was a scholar in the arts and history. She caused a row in the bicentenary year by finding a letter in Sydney's Mitchell Library suggesting that Melbourne pioneer John Batman had been a convict and not a migrant from Sydney to Hobart as Melburnians had always believed.
Later research showed Batman had left Sydney for Tasmania suddenly, but not without explanation, rather than being transported. The letter Tipping found referring to him as an ''assigned servant'' (convict) was either a mistake or perhaps referred to a different John Batman.
Tipping flourished as an historian in the 1970s and 1980s when several of her books were published, including Eugene von Guerard's Australian Landscapes (1975), Melbourne on the Yarra (1977), Ludwig Becker: Artist & Naturalist with the Burke & Wills Expedition (1979) and Convicts Unbound: The Story of the Calcutta Convicts and Their Settlement in Australia (1988), a book that took her 35 years of patient research. She also wrote a narrative for the Victorian government publication of William Strutt's sketchbook, Victoria the Golden (1980), and was a contributor to the Australian Dictionary of Biography.
Tipping chaired the consulting committee for a Royal Historical Society of Victoria-sponsored presentation at the Myer Music Bowl in 1974 celebrating the bicentenary of Matthew Flinders's birth. She was on the committee of the Friends of the State Library, a member of the Victorian Arts Advisory Council and worked for many community organisations. She was honoured with an MBE in 1981 for her contribution to the arts.
In 1990, she was the first woman to be awarded a doctorate of letters (considered to be a higher degree than a PhD) by examination from the University of Melbourne; it was based on her extensive published scholarly works.
Pulitzer Prize winning historian to lecture on Mormon diarists (Missouri)
Source: Missourian (11-9-09)
COLUMBIA— Imagine a religious group on an interstate trek in the mid-1800s. What if you could read the travelers' journals? Undoubtedly, they would have more than your average story to tell.
Harvard University history professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich will uncover the personal stories of Mormon diarists as they traveled from Nauvoo, Ill., to Council Bluffs, Iowa, when she speaks at 7 p.m. Monday at MU.
"I believe I used about a dozen diaries, by men and women both, in this paper," Ulrich said in an e-mail about her recent research. "Some have been published, some digitized, some still in manuscript in various archives."
In a lecture titled "Mud and Fire: Mormon Diarists Cross Iowa," Ulrich will discuss some of the spiritual struggles faced by the group while on its treacherous journey. She will also discuss the Mormon historical connection to Missouri...
Monday, November 9, 2009
Pulling hair and calling names, historians disagree about Scotland
Source: Times Online (11-9-09)
BBC Scotland has been castigated by one of the nation’s distinguished academic historians over its showpiece documentary series about the country’s past, which he characterised as “a mediocre B-movie”.
According to Professor Tom Devine the scripts of A History of Scotland are “lame, boring and flaccid” and its “hapless, long-haired presenter”, Neil Oliver, suffers from “a sad lack of personal authority or presence”.
The series, Professor Devine claimed, is fatally imbalanced, with only three of its ten programmes devoted to the making of modern Scotland, while some of the most important issues — the Enlightenment and the Scottish diaspora — are, he said, almost entirely ignored.
Aside from these shortcomings — and with the proviso that the series has a predictable narrative style — the documentaries “could not have been more timely”, said Professor Devine, who is head of the school of history, classics and archaeology at the University of Edinburgh.
Professor Devine based his remarks, made in a television review, on episodes from the documentary’s first five-part series, and the opening episode of series two, which he had been sent on DVD by the BBC, along with production notes for forthcoming episodes.
The result, he concluded, was “a profound disappointment and a missed opportunity”.
Oliver, who has a 2:1 in archaeology from the University of Glasgow, did not pull his punches as he hit back at his august critic, characterising Professor Devine as “a silly old fool”, though he denied he had been upset by the personal tone of the attack...
Big Tobacco Strikes Back at Historian in Court
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education (11-8-09)
A Stanford University professor who has sought to expose ties between historians and the tobacco industry is being accused in court of having broken the law in challenging the employment of four graduate students at the University of Florida as researchers assisting tobacco companies in litigation.
In motions filed in two Florida state courts last month, tobacco-company lawyers allege that Robert N. Proctor, a professor of the history of science at Stanford, engaged in illegal witness tampering and witness harassment in having the students put under pressure to cease working as paid researchers for a historian aiding the tobacco companies as an expert witness.
The motions, filed in connection with two personal-injury lawsuits against the companies, ask the courts to bar Mr. Proctor from serving as an expert witness for the plaintiffs. Such an outcome could badly hurt their prospects of success and could jeopardize the Stanford scholar's role as one of the nation's leading experts testifying for people suing tobacco companies.
Mr. Proctor already had been involved in a bitter legal battle with R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company over its efforts to force him to hand over an unfinished manuscript on the tobacco industry. That dispute has potentially major legal implications for publishers and scholars, pitting the professor's interest in retaining sole possession of a work in progress against the tobacco company's interest in obtaining whatever information it needs to defend itself in court.
The new battle over the Stanford scholar's interactions with the University of Florida raises a fresh set of thorny questions: What are the ethical obligations of professional historians who earn extra income as expert witnesses? What responsibilities do colleges have to guide or limit the outside employment of their graduate students?
The stakes are high enough that both Florida and Stanford have received subpoenas ordering them to turn over e-mail messages between Mr. Proctor and the Florida professor that he contacted with his concerns about the students' work. And those two scholars, along with a third professor, from the University of Southern Mississippi, who gave Mr. Proctor the graduate students' names, have been deposed by lawyers for tobacco companies for hours of intense questioning about their exchanges...
Scottish historian takes to the water as he recreates river cruises
Source: Herald Scotland (11-8-09)
Pandaw River Cruises, a small Edinburgh firm, has succeeded in navigating the Ganges between Varanasi and Calcutta in India, the first passenger service to do so since the 1920s.
Creating tourism opportunities on another great Asian river comes on top of Pandaw’s pioneering of the Mekong in Cambodia and Vietnam, the Irrawaddy in Burma and Borneo’s Rajang...
... The steamers were built on the Clyde, then dismantled and shipped to Mandalay to be re-assembled. The Irrawaddy Flotilla Company became known as the greatest river fleet on the planet. At its peak in 1930, it had 602 ships running from Rangoon to Upper Burma.
The fleet was scuttled in 1942 to stop it falling into Japanese hands during the Second World War, and may have disappeared forever if it hadn’t been for a young Scots historian, Paul Strachan. In 1995, he came across the rusting hulk of one of the scuttled vessels, the Pandaw, in the mud near Mandalay.
Strachan’s great-grandfather had been a ship’s captain for the Irrawaddy Flotilla and this prompted the historian to turn entrepreneur. He revived the company, renovating the Pandaw and putting her back into service in 1997.
The flotilla’s Cinderella story has not been without setbacks: The military rulers of Burma, or Myanmar, have been the target of international sanctions since they cracked down on peaceful demonstrators in 1988 and 2007, killing an estimated 3,000 people.
Although an outspoken critic of the junta, Strachan has simultaneously tried to bolster tourism in a country that receives just 1% of the tourist numbers of neighbouring Thailand...
Web site clicks with historical group in N.H.
Source: TMC News (11-7-09)
The Pelham Historical Society has earned special recognition for having the most modernized and informational historical Web site in the state.
At a ceremony held recently at the New London, N.H., Historical Society complex, the Hayes-Genoter History and Genealogy Library, founded by Pelham historian William Hayes, and Web site designer Karen Genoter, received "The 2009 Research and Documentation Award" from The Association of Historical Societies of New Hampshire, Inc.
On the award-certificate, the AHSNH judges recognized Hayes' and Genoter's "dedication and contribution to local history within the State of New Hampshire." Earlier this year, Hayes proudly told The Sun that the Pelham Historical Society's Web site has grown into "one of the largest and most comprehensive online small-town history and genealogy libraries in the country." By using the latest digital-conversion technology and document-enhancement software to post town meeting reports, gravestone etchings, and archived news articles in a searchable database on the Internet, "we became the first historical library was the first to grant historians, genealogists, students and casual readers round-the-clock access to literally hundreds of thousands of pages of (information) relating to the Pelham's history," said Hayes.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
For Canada's war historians, every day is Remembrance Day
Source: The Star (11-7-09)
OTTAWA–Sean Maloney has been to Afghanistan eight times, experienced two attacks by improvised explosive device and survived at least five attempts on his life.
"I've been shot at, rocketed, mortared, all of it. My view always was that I needed to understand these things so I could do the job properly," he says.
Maloney is not a soldier, but he is on a mission. When he ventures outside the relative safety of Kandahar Airfield, there is a Canadian flag on one arm of his military-issued shirt and a patch on the other arm identifying him as a military historian.
He's one of a small group employed by the Canadian Forces who are gathering the facts and details of today that will make up the official record of the country's involvement in Afghanistan for generations to come.
It is their year-round work that defines the Nov. 11 experience for countless Canadians. But for the corps of military historians, every day is Remembrance Day.
War histories have been around as long as there has been conflict between factions, cultures, nations or ideologies, but the job of an official military historian demands an urgency and sometimes reckless devotion to the profession that is far removed from the academic's reflective perch.
At its safest, Canada's military historians are in constant contact with the bomb-strewn front lines in Kandahar, demanding precise, detailed, written accounts of soldiers' experiences which are recorded in war diaries. From the weather to operational plans and results, to casualties and nuances of the fight, the war diary is the traditional treasure trove for historians...
Case Against Russian Historian Elicits Public Outcry
Source: The Other Russia (11-7-09)
A criminal case against a historian who researched repressed German settlers in the Arkhangelsk region of Russia is now being transferred to the investigative committee of the general prosecutor’s office, according to a statement by authorities.
The case against Professor Mikhail Suprun and Police Colonel Aleksandr Dudarev had elicited a strong public outcry, prompting the investigation. According to the general prosecutor’s office (SKP), Suprun received a grant in 2007 from the German Red Cross and a German historical research society to work with forty thousand archival documents located in Arkhangelsk. He then built an electronic database of five thousand settlers of German and Polish heritage, repatriated from German territory to the Arkhangelsk oblast at the end of World War II.
“The information collected by Suprun contained biographical information, the composition of family ties, facts and grounds for moving…and information about service in the German army,” the statement says. It claims that Colonel Dudarev provided Suprun with “unhindered access” to the archives, with “the possibility of copying materials without the agreement of people about whom information was gathered, and their relatives.” Additionally, investigators believe that Suprun was “planning to transfer the information abroad.”...
Talking with Historian and Activist Howard Zinn [audio 11 minutes, 35 secconds]
Source: Chicago Public Radio (12-31-69)
Today, we bring you a conversation with historian and playwright Howard Zinn. He’s been active in civil rights and anti-war movements in America. But Zinn may be best known for writing A People’s History of the United States. The book strives to reveal the stories of those he feels have been left out of the established American narrative. Tomorrow night, Zinn will be the keynote speaker on an issue he’s taken on in recent years. The 9th annual Campaign to End the Death Penalty convention takes place tomorrow on the University of Chicago campus.
Matthew Kaminski: From Solidarity to Democracy (on Adam Michnik and the end of the Cold War)
Source: WSJ (11-7-09)
[Mr. Kaminski is a member of the Journal's editorial board.]
'Fantastyczne!"
That's the word Adam Michnik, the man who played one of the starring roles in bringing the Cold War to an end, exclaims in Polish as he thinks back over the two decades since the Berlin Wall fell that Nov. 9 evening. He repeats it in rapid fire, each time flawlessly, with no hint of his trademark stutter.
"Fantastic! Fantastic! Poland has not had such 20 years in its last 400 years, 300 years. We are on the side of the West. We are sovereign. We have all possible civil rights. Democratic elections. Open borders. No censorship. That is simply a fantastic change."
So too is the story of his own transformation.
Mr. Michnick was born into the communist establishment. His father, a Polish Jew, was a leader of the illegal pre-war Communist Party. As a teenager, Mr. Michnik took part in leftist discussion groups with names like the "Crooked Circle" or the "Seekers of Contradiction." A believer, he wanted to reform communism. At 18, he was arrested for the first time for writing a protest letter to the government. And in 1968, he was jailed for a year after student protests in Warsaw.
The experience thrust him firmly into the opposition. The next two decades were spent publishing samizdat, advocating for worker's rights and then helping lead, from its founding in 1980, Solidarity, the trade union that morphed into a national movement...
... Trained as a historian, Mr. Michnik says he harbors no illusions about the inevitability of anything. He notes that Central Europe's democrats could have been crushed as the Chinese students were at Tiananmen Square the same year the wall fell. So who is to say now that Western liberalism will prevail in the future? Even of Poland—now a member of the European Union and NATO—he says that: "We are headed in the right direction, but on a narrow path. One false step and we become Russia."
If the new cliché is the "return of history," then the danger isn't a second coming of communism but of authoritarianism. Russia is the region's most worrying bad pupil. It tasted civic freedoms in the chaotic 1990s. Then, under Vladimir Putin, the KGB colonel who took over in 2000, the country veered backward. Political liberties were decimated and the rule of law was trampled. In their place came aggressive nationalism, "sovereign democracy," and the promise of "order." Meanwhile, the economy was hijacked by a rapacious state and privileged oligarchs.
Much like the Soviet Union and Czarist Russia, this new illiberal Putinstan poses a danger to those in its periphery: His Russia has used armed force against Georgia and Chechnya, and energy blackmail against Ukraine and countries further west in Europe. The rise of Putinism has showed how easily a society—particularly a frail one lacking the traditions of democracy or liberalism—can be suborned into signing away freedom in exchange for an illusive stability.
But Mr. Michnik worries as well about the threat of the "inner Putin" in many European leaders on both sides of the old Iron Curtain. To him, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, also the country's richest man, is a variation on this theme. By flouting corruption charges and owning the media, Mr. Michnik believes Mr. Berlusconi epitomizes the danger of "legal nihilism." At the same time, nationalist politicians push separation for France's Corsica, Spain's Basque region and Northern Ireland, often by subverting free choice with terrorist violence. "Nationalism is always—always—a danger to democracy," he says...
Friday, November 6, 2009
Edwin Black's scrutiny of the powerful is a career pattern
Source: Cleveland Jewish News (11-6-09)
Investigative author and reporter Edwin Black is zero for 40 and proud of it. That’s 40 years of writing about corporate greed, genocide, academic fraud, philanthropic abuse, and other delicate topics without a single retraction, error or threat of litigation.
Google “Edwin Black errors” or “Edwin Black sued” if you don’t believe him. Go ahead … the author of a half-dozen non-fiction books and numerous articles and essays says he has nothing to hide, unlike the powerful people and corporations he writes about. Ask Black to back up an assertion from one of his books with hard evidence, and he’ll instantly retrieve a document out of an intricately organized footnote file.
Black, 59, who will be in Cleveland early next week as part of a multi-city tour (details, p. 11), has had his exhaustive research techniques tested many times. Perhaps the most well-known challenge to his work came in response to his book IBM and the Holocaust, which documents the strategic relationship between the corporation and Hitler’s Third Reich. The author asserts that IBM developed custom-made data processing programs to facilitate the identification and roundup of millions of Jews and maintained a bureau at Auschwitz. When challenged to prove this claim, he was able to produce the Auschwitz camp telephone book with IBM’s manager and number listed.
Black has taken on many other controversial topics. In Internal Combustion, he writes about a massive criminal conspiracy perpetrated by General Motors to undermine local mass transit in dozens of cities across the U.S. In his four-part investigative piece for JTA entitled “Funding Hate,” Black states that the multi-billion dollar philanthropy Ford Foundation was a leading bankroller of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hate overseas. And his article “Eugenics and the Nazis” reports how The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.
The author, a native of Chicago who now lives in Washington, D.C., keeps a mountain of physical evidence filed away at his 1,500 square-foot home office. Every document is subjected to a team of rigorous fact checkers. Internal Combustion contains more than 1,500 footnotes alone.
“I document defensively,” remarks Black. Only by “instantaneous rebuttal with unshakeable facts” can he defeat those who would challenge or spin his efforts, he contends.
This near-obsessive diligence extends to his personal life. Black does not have a blog; nor does he use social utilities such as Twitter or Facebook. He does not want random, unsubstantiated comments floating through cyberspace.
“I only say what I know and what I can verify,” Black explains. “My role is to uncover the truth. I find justice in an unjust world, where truth is a weapon.”
Black’s relentless method of investigative journalism is more than a professional attribute – it is a veritable lifestyle, he notes. It’s even gotten to the point where Black’s reputation precedes him...
Czech Historian Says President Vaclav Klaus Using Decrees To Get out of Isolation
Source: Prague Daily Monitor (11-5-09)
Czech President Vaclav Klaus highlighted the issue of the post-war Benes decrees in a discussion on the EU reform Lisbon treaty only because he is more and more ending up in isolation, Czech historian Ondrej Matejka said in Vienna on Wednesday, the APA Austrian agency reports Thursday.
"He (Klaus) put the dirtiest card he had available on the table to re-gain support of the Czech public," APA quotes Matejka, from the Antikomplex NGO, as saying in a debate at the Vienna University on Wednesday within the opening of the exhibition "Forgotten Heroes - German Antifascists in the Czech Lands."
Klaus actually did not care for the decrees issued by Czechoslovak President Edvard Benes, said Matejka who is dealing with the history of German-speaking inhabitants of the Czech Lands.
He added that Klaus's step was surprising since the Benes decrees were not a hot issue on the Czech political scene lately.
Moreover, Klaus's behaviour does nor reflect the atmosphere in the Czech Republic where most inhabitants are not Eurosceptical and 70 percent are of the view that Klaus harmed the authority of the Czech Republic, according to opinion polls, Matejka said...
Chinese historian in Cape Cop sheds light on China's 20th Century
Source: Cape Cod Day (MA) (11-5-09)
BREWSTER —
There are very few retired Chinese human rights activists in our vicinity, which makes 90-year-old Gu Chang-Sheng’s new memoir all the more interesting. He is the author of several histories and biographies in Chinese, but “Awaken: Memoirs of a Chinese Historian” is his first book in English. Half history of twentieth century China, and half personal journey, it’s a book as confounding as it is gripping.
Gu’s story begins and ends with the author’s censorship in China. In 2007, an article on Christianity he published was abruptly banned. Gu wrote: “Here we are in at the beginning of the 21st century with China supposedly emerging as a super power, so why are the authorities… afraid of me? I am a nonentity.”
The action confirmed Gu’s belief that not much has changed in China since the Tiananmen Square massacre. “Democracy and civil rights, despite current trends in China and among its relations, are a long way off,” he said.
Professor Gu is now settled into retirement on Cape Cod, “paradise” he says, astonished and grateful for all the freedoms we take for granted. He lives modestly and productively in senior housing at Tonset Woods in Orleans, befriended by members of his church and community. At age ninety, he is still in good health and feisty on behalf of his favorite cause, the pursuit of human rights in China - “fifty, maybe a hundred years off.” He keeps a sense of humor about everything, he says.
Gu loves the United States, has become a citizen and brought his daughter and grandson to live on the Cape. The coincidence of his visit to the United States, at the invitation of Congress, with the Tiananman Square revolt determined his choice to remain in this country...
Historian Felix Luna dies at 84
Source: Bueno Aires Herald (11-6-09)
Argentine historian Félix Luna died today at the age of 84, losing a battle to a long illness, his family reported.
Luna, also a writer and university professor, was born in Buenos Aires to a family originally from La Rioja Province, in 1925. A grandfather had founded the La Rioja chapter of the newly-established centrist Radical Civic Union (UCR) in 1892, and an uncle, Pelagio Luna, had been Vice President of Argentina for President Hipólito Yrigoyen, between 1916 and 1919.
He enrolled at the University of Buenos Aires and earned a law degree in 1951. He was first published in 1954, with his biographical work, Yrigoyen.
Some of his best-known works include El 45, referring to the pivotal year 1945 in Argentina (1968), Breve Historia de Argentina and Argentina: de Perón a Lanusse, an overview of the tumultous generation between Perón's 1945 advent and 1973.
He was the founder of the history monthly Todo es Historia (It's All History), in 1967, and was honoured with numerous Konex Awards.
U.Va. historian Jennifer Burns examines Ayn Rand's life, philosophy
Source: NewLeader.com (11-5-09)
Burns, an assistant history professor at the University of Virginia, has just published "Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right," a peer-reviewed study of the controversial author/philosopher/atheist/libertarian.
"So much of what was written about her was either pro or con and written by people who had known her," Burns said. "There was no academic book on this important topic."
As a graduate student in history at the University of California-Berkley, Burns knew writing about Rand would be risky. Author of "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged," Rand tended to polarize debate. But, everywhere Burns went, she found someone reading Rand. Burns began a study of conservatism and again encountered Rand.
"There was a growing interest in conservatism, but she did not fit into that movement," Burns said, noting that Rand was still on the right of the political and social spectrum. "I wanted to see how she fit into the American tradition of thought. It was like a detective story, and I had the field all to myself."...
Florida Gulf Coast University professor discussed the war in Afghanistan
Source: Cape Coral Daily Breeze (11-5-09)
A Florida Gulf Coast University professor and wartime historian discussed the war in Afghanistan and Iraq at the Rotary Club of Cape Coral's weekly meeting Wednesday.
Guest speaker Dr. Peter Bergerson has been an educator for 42 years. Before becoming a professor at FGCU eight years ago, he taught at Southwest Missouri State University for 34 years.
Paul Sanborn, Rotary Club speaker chairman, said he chose Bergerson because of his resume. He added that Bergerson is a war historian and would discuss Afghanistan, which is a timely subject...
... Bergerson explained that Afghanistan is rural, tribal and mountainous. There are no borders between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Tribes, families and local customs are what separate the two countries, he said.
When the United States invaded Afghanistan after Sept. 11, the troops had to uncover and search 80,000 caves, Bergerson said.
Toward the end of his discussion, Bergerson addressed the issues that President Barack Obama is facing concerning the war. He said Obama is in the process of producing a policy, along with making a decision on whether troops should be sent to Afghanistan.
"There is a debate among foreign policy," Bergerson said, adding that the topic of what should come next in Afghanistan is also being discussed.
Bergerson said he believes an announcement will be made soon concerning the next step the administration will take concerning the war.
He said Obama commented on the Afghanistan war three weeks ago by stating that it is a "war of necessity, not of choice" and "this is a war worth fighting."
"There is no easy solution, and whatever the president decides there will be a mountain of criticism," Bergerson said, adding that international support will be a big factor on the policy...
Historians assess Obama's presidency, one year after his election
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria (11-4-09)
A year after his election, historians assess President Obama: Walter Isaacson, Michael Kazin, Rick Perlstein, Ted Widmer, and Garry Wills, Daily Beast, 2 November; and Doris Kearns Goodwin, Huffington Post, 3 November.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Aussie citizenship 'may have saved' Lal
Source: World News Australia (11-5-09)
Threatened, verbally abused and told to leave Fiji or else, Professor Brij Lal says being an Australian citizen may have saved his life.
But back on home soil after a turbulent 12 hours, the long-serving Australian National University academic and Fiji expert has refused to sever his ties with the troubled Pacific nation.
He's vowed to return - and to see an end to the military regime which has ruled Fiji since the December 2006 coup, although he admits that may still take some time.
Prof Lal, a respected and frequent commentator on Fiji, was taken from his Suva residence on Wednesday and given 24 hours to leave the country after publicly criticising the military.
He was talking to Australian media about the latest political drama to unfold between the two Pacific neighbours, which began when Fiji ordered the Australian and New Zealand high commissioners out of the country.
Hours later, Prof Lal was given similar marching orders.
"There was no physical assault, but a lot of verbal violence, a lot of foul language, a lot of explosive anger and a clear threat," Prof Lal told reporters at Canberra Airport on Thursday.
"It's not something that I would wish upon my worst enemy."
He worries about possible repercussions for his friends and family still in Fiji, telling AAP his Australian citizenship may have been his saving grace during the interrogation.
His wife, who spends several months of the year in Fiji, remains in Suva.
Diplomats, foreign journalists and now foreign academics have all been ordered out by Fiji's self-appointed Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama during his rule, but Prof Lal said he would continue to speak out.
"The price of living in Fiji is silence," said the 57-year-old, who has written numerous books on Fiji and helped draft the country's constitution in 1997.
History Prof's New Book Spotlights Forgotten Heroine
Source: University of Guelph (11-3-09)
When Eglantyne Jebb started Save the Children, the world's first international child-welfare agency in 1919, she inspired a generation of women to use their skills and minds to make a difference as volunteers.
Three years later, Jebb drafted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, a series of children's rights proclamations that eventually evolved into the famous United Nations Rights of the Child that were adopted in 1959.
Yet history has largely overlooked this important historical figure — until now. University of Guelph history professor Linda Mahood has just published a first academic book about the social activist’s life and legacy, Feminism and Voluntary Action: Eglantyne Jebb and Save the Children, 1876-1928.
The book’s publication coincides with the 90th anniversary of Save the Children in the United Kingdom...
... Mahood was drawn to researching and writing about Jebb because of an earlier academic interest in child-welfare issues of the 19th and 20th centuries. Over the years, the project ballooned into a history of women’s volunteerism and activism.
“It occurred to me that Jebb’s life story shows the role that volunteering still plays in women’s lives and how it really paves the way for other forms of social activism. Her life became my lens through which to view the way women worldwide tried to rebuild society after the devastation of the first world war and subsequent wars and natural disasters.”
Many doors were closed to women of Jebb’s generation, but charities often provided them with outlets, Mahood said. “For some, it was a social activity, for some it was a thankless chore; but for others, it was a way to break out of oppressive domestic roles, to use their education and talents to rebuild society in the name of the child.”
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Historian Eric Foner discusses Obama's place in history
Source: The Grio (11-4-09)
Eric Foner is DeWitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia University. He sat down with msnbc.com's Cynthia Joyce to discuss Obama's place in history one year in to his presidency.
Q: As a close observer of history, were you personally surprised by the outcome of the 2008 election?
Eric Foner: I wasn't surprised. I couldn't imagine anyone voting Republican after eight years of Bush. I wrote an article in the Washington Post saying that Bush was the worst president in all of American history. I still think that.
So I was not surprised - all of what they call the political fundamentals - and here I'm sounding like a political pundit - were heading in the Democratic direction. Unless Obama totally screwed up, a Democrat was going to win.
Q: In a historical context, race was what made the election of Barack Obama so significant. But now that the euphoria has passed, we seem to have such a strong impulse to get past it. Why is that?
EF: It is a major turning point in American history, and I don't think that should be denigrated or minimized. On the other hand - and there was a lot of euphoria immediately following the election even among people who didn't vote for him - the fact is that now most people are viewing President Obama the way they would any other president. In other words, with a "what are you doing for me?"
If you look at the first eight or nine months of almost any president, they didn't really accomplish a heck of a lot - except for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who came in under even a more dire situation than Obama. (And much of what he did in his first 100 days was sent to the scrap heap within a year or two of his administration anyway and later had to be changed.) So it's still too early to tell what will happen with Obama's presidency.
Q: There's often a lot of talk about the need for a national dialogue on race - and occasionally awkward attempts to force one [i.e. Beer Summit 2009]. But does it ever truly take place?
EF: I don't know that a national dialogue on race is what we need. That's a kind of psycho-history, psycho-politics. Because, the problem is, race has come to be seen almost as a personal problem. "The bigot" is the problem, and it's just a matter of overcoming our prejudices and loving our neighbor. Which is fine - we should love our neighbor - but that takes you away from the structural racism that is still around.
I saw an interesting statistic recently on family wealth (National Urban League - The State of Black America 2009 p.27- Median Wealth in 2005 Dollars) - the average for white families was $100,000. For black families, it was $10,000. Why? This is the accumulation of history.
I'm less interested in a national conversation than in people saying, "Well, if we do have a problem, what can we do to address it? Are there social policies we can adopt?"
Q: Do you think that's more likely to happen under Obama?
EF: No. Obama is a mainstream politician. I admire Obama, he's certainly a lot more eloquent than many others, but he's a mainstream politician. You never hear Obama say a word about "the poor." Everything is the middle class - middle class tax cuts, middle class this and that. That's fine, I don't mind the middle class. But the poor - which is a rather disturbingly large number of people in this country - never get mentioned.
Now, Obama is doing things to help the poor, but it's kept under the radar. Similarly, Obama very strategically does not present himself as "a black president" in the sense of having a particular commitment to black America. I don't think Obama's going to come forward with a plan that says here's what I'm going to do to help black America. I think he says, here's what I'm going to do to help the American middle class, on the assumption that a lot of that will help blacks. And certainly, raising taxes on people earning over $250,000 a year is not going to hit a lot of black people, helping expand Medicaid will. Those aren't race-based policies, but they will have racial effects, among others...
Historian's plea to resurrect 'disappearing' monument (Australia)
Source: This is South Devon (11-4-09)
A PROMINENT memorial in the heart of Totnes which honours a famous explorer of Australia appears to be disappearing down under itself.
The Wills Memorial near to the Brutus Bridge was set up to honour the ill-fated explorer of Australia John Wills but it is shrinking, according to one historian.
Over the last century the 22ft high granite monument which sits on The Plains has shrunk by around 18 inches.
It also appears to have begun to lean a couple of inches in a westward direction.
Totnes historian James Bellchambers reckons that while the large monument seems to have sunk slightly into the ground under its own weight most of its lost base has disappeared because of a build up of the road and then pavement surfaces that have been added over the years.
Now he would like to see the missing section of the memorial uncovered in time for the giant 2011 celebration to mark the 150th anniversary of the Burke and Wills expedition across Australia in which both men died.
Military Historian Says the Huns Were Tricky
Source: Bi-College News (11-4-09)
On Thursday night Bryn Mawr welcomed Dr. Edward Luttwack, a military historian and strategist, to campus.
In addition to teaching, Luttwack has written numerous books including, "Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace" (1987, rev. ed. 2002), and "Coup d’etat: A Practical Handbook" (1968; rev. ed. 1979). His newest book, "The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire," was the main focus of Thursday night’s lecture, “Attila the Hun and Roman Strategy: A Comparison between the Earlier Romans and the East Empire."
Luttwack was extremely enthusiastic about his opportunity to speak at Bryn Mawr.
“I would much rather talk to a group of students and teachers than a bunch of bureaucrats,” he said.
Luttwak spoke about the key to survival for the Byzantines and the East Roman state. According to Luttwack, the key to their survival was the triple identity of the Byzantines’ Christian faith, Greek background, and strong Roman influence...
... Luttwack has become an extremely influential writer and speaker, and his books have become the topic of many classroom discussions and conversations among historians. He has been writing about war strategies for years, and has received both admiration and criticism for them...
The Future of the Former Rosemont Manor in Weirton is About to be Uncovered (PA)
Source: WTRF Channel 7 (11-3-09)
WEIRTON -- A $2,500 grant will help a Pittsburgh historian research the former summer home of steel magnate E.T. Weir.
Historian Carol Peterson will prepare a historical profile of the property and make suggestions of possible uses, as well as identify any needed improvements.
The business development corporation won the grant for the property, which is now owned by Williams Country Club.
Tilly Panel Series at 2009 SSHA: Charles Tilly's and Louise Tilly's Work and Legacy
Source: SSRC (11-4-09)
November 13-14, 2009 (Friday and Saturday)
34th Annual Social Science History Association Meeting, Long Beach, CA, 12-15 November 2009, on the Queen Mary. Conference Theme: “Agency and Action”
The 2009 SSHA conference features a presidential panel series of 4 panels and over 20 speakers devoted to Charles Tilly’s and Louise Tilly’s work and legacy. The conference also features the Tilly Fund’s inaugural presentation of the Charles and Louise Tilly Prize for the Best Graduate Paper in Social Science History.
Friday, November 13
Panel 1: Charles Tilly’s Contributions to the Study of European History
Time: Friday, November 13: 02:15 PM-04:15 PM
Organizer: Andreas Koller, Social Science Research Council. Chair: Ron Aminzade, University of Minnesota
*
Mark Traugott, University of California, Santa Cruz. We Never Forget Our First Loves: Charles Tilly and French History
*
Marc Steinberg, Smith College. The Political History that Chuck Built
*
Daniel Nexon, Georgetown University. Charles Tilly and the Study of State (Trans-) Formation
*
Wayne Te Brake, SUNY-Purchase. European Revolutions
Discussant: Eric Hobsbawm, President of Birkbeck, University of London (via video link)
Abstract: This panel investigates Charles Tilly’s contributions to the study of European history in major areas of his historical work, including French history, British history, state (trans-) formation, European revolutions and democratization in Europe. Each of his historical contributions will be put in the temporal context of his intellectual and theoretical trajectory. Together, the papers shed light on a lifetime of research at the frontiers of history and social science and on Tilly’s quest for superior explanations of social processes by straddling the boundary between them.
Panel 2: Understanding Mechanisms, Empowering Agency: Charles Tilly and the Social Process
Time: Friday, November 13: 04:30 PM-06:30 PM
Organizer and Chair: Andreas Koller, Social Science Research Council
* Neil Gross, University of British Columbia. Charles Tilly and American Pragmatism
* Jack Goldstone, George Mason University. Contentious Politics: From Structure to Agency
* Kim Voss, UC-Berkeley. Categorical Inequality
* Rogers Brubaker, UCLA. Charles Tilly as a Theorist of Nationalism and Ethnicity
* George Steinmetz, University of Michigan. Charles Tilly, Historical Sociology, and the Legacy of the German émigré Historicist Sociologists.
Discussant: Harrison White, Columbia University
Abstract: In response to the SSHA conference theme “Agency and Action“, this panel investigates the work and legacy of Charles Tilly by focusing on his shift from structure to action. While his close attention to action and interaction reaches at least as far back as to 1977 when he first formulated the idea of “repertoires” of contention, he realized the eminently cultural notion of this idea only much later – “after years of denial,” as he put it. In striking resemblance to classic American Pragmatism, Tilly’s later work suggested that if one understands the recurrent causal mechanisms, one can put things right. Social scientists need to provide “superior stories” which capture the actual mechanisms and processes better than everyday stories. This enhances the quality of “public politics” and, consequently, agency in the social process. Understanding the central mechanisms at work enables agency. The panel papers all shed light on these core questions from their respective area, investigating Tilly’s work on methodology and explanation; contentious politics; social inequality/stratification; nationalism and ethnicity, including social boundaries, stories and identities; and Tilly’s role in the history of (historical) social science.
7:00 - 8:00pm: Social Event: Reception for SSHA graduate students and friends
Saturday November 14
Panel 3 (Roundtable Discussion): The Intergenerational Legacies of Louise Tilly’s Work
Time: Saturday, November 14: 01:00 PM-03:00 PM
Organizer: Miriam Cohen, Vassar College Chair: Mary Jo Maynes, University of Minnesota
Discussants:
* Miriam Cohen, Vassar College
* Emily Bruce, University of Minnesota
* Leslie Page Moch, Michigan State University
* Elizabeth Pleck, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
* Maddalena Marinari, University of Kansas
Abstract: Louise Tilly’s historical studies of women, work and family, social protest, immigration and transnational social systems influenced the work of many social scientists in the last few decades of the twentieth century; they continue to have relevance for scholars in the new millennium. This roundtable on the legacy of Louise Tilly features some of the current work of Louise’s colleagues and students as well as the work of a younger generation of scholars now studying with her former students. We look forward to a lively discussion with audience and panel members on the current studies and the significance of Louise Tilly’s scholarship for our times.
Panel 4: Cities, States, Trust and Rule: New Departures from the Work of Charles Tilly
Time: Saturday, November 14: 03:15 PM-05:15 PM
Organizer: Chris Tilly, University of California, Los Angeles, and Mike Hanagan, Vassar College
Chair: William Roy, University of California, Los Angeles
* Chris Tilly, University of California, Los Angeles, and Mike Hanagan, Vassar College. Cities, States and Trust Networks
* Ariel Salzmann, Queen’s University, Kingston. Is there a Moral Economy of State Formation? Religious Regimes and Secular Political Change within Euro-Asia 1250-1750
* Hwa-ji Shin, University of San Francisco. Colonial Legacy of Ethno-racial Inequality in Japan
* Peter Evans, University of California, Berkeley, and Patrick Heller, Brown University. Cities and Citizens: Challenges of Urban Governance and Democracy in the 21st Century
Discussant: Peter C. Perdue, Yale University
Abstract: At the time of his death, Charles Tilly was working on a monograph entitled Cities and States in World History. In this panel, we combine his thoughts from that uncompleted work with other current work on cities and states from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Some of the current papers are historical; others are contemporary. Some apply Tilly’s “trust and rule” framework; others are critical of that framework or strike out in new directions. The goal is to generate a vibrant discussion on cities and states in historical and contemporary perspective.
5:30 - 6:00pm: SSHA Business Meeting, including the announcement of the winner of the Charles and Louise Tilly Prize for the Best Graduate Paper in Social Science History
6:00 - 6:30pm: SSHA Presidential Address by Julia Adams, Yale University
6:30 - 8:00pm: Social Event: President’s Reception
Further Information
General conference information can be found here.
Budget accommodation for students: Vagabond Inn Long Beach or Rodeway Inn Long Beach
Conference hotel: The Queen Mary
Conference registration online: For students who are otherwise non-program participants, the conference registration is only 10 USD.
Questions about conference registration? contact: Melissa Kocias: iuconfs@indiana.edu 812.855-4224 * 800.933.9330 (US only) * 812-855-8077 (fax)
McGovern: Get Out of Afghanistan
Source: Truthdig (11-4-09)
George McGovern has some advice for President Barack Obama: Get U.S. troops out of Afghanistan.
“I’m convinced that war is going to turn sour. I’m convinced we’re not going to prevail there,” McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, said Sunday at a Truthdig event in West Los Angeles.
The former U.S. senator from South Dakota noted that “some of the best reporters over there are telling us that the Taliban are getting stronger and we’re getting weaker in the minds of the people, and that you have a corrupt government involved in drugs, involved in just plain old-fashioned stealing and corruption. It’s a lousy government, and it’s very difficult, even for a great country like [the U.S.], to make them look good. So I think we have every reason to withdraw.”
McGovern’s comments came on the heels of a New York Times report that Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, on the CIA payroll for nearly eight years, is suspected by many top American officials of being involved in that country’s lucrative and illicit opium trade. President Karzai himself drew criticism after the United Nations declared one-third of his votes in his Aug. 20 re-election to be fraudulent, forcing a runoff with Dr. Abdullah Abdullah. Karzai’s rival eventually withdrew, saying the runoff would not be any less rigged. The vote was canceled and Karzai was officially declared the winner Monday.
Against this backdrop, and with October the deadliest month yet for U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan with 55 killed, Obama has put off a decision on whether to send thousands more troops to that country as requested by the top U.S. commander there, Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
McGovern said Sunday he did not want to see Obama head down the path of Democrat Lyndon Johnson, for whom another quagmire, the Vietnam War, spelled the end to his presidency. McGovern, who won the Distinguished Flying Cross for heroism during World War II, noted he was the first member to oppose the Vietnam War on the floor of the Senate.
A historian, McGovern said he would remind Obama that foreign powers have been trying unsuccessfully to prevail in Afghanistan “ever since Alexander the Great. Genghis Khan even made a shot at it. The British throughout the 19th century were in there several times trying to pacify the [country] and finally gave up. The Russians were there for 11 years, 1979 until 1990, they put in 100,000 crack soldiers, 25,000 of them killed ... in Afghanistan, another 25,000 crippled or injured. And the Russian treasury went broke, and some of our best Soviet experts believe that’s what really led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.”...
Genesee museums, historians aim to pool resources
Source: The Daily News (NY) (11-3-09)
Historians, museums, historical societies and related organizations are in the process of creating a countywide federation, the Genesee County Human Service Committee was told Monday.
"We're going to try to pool in our resources. It's trying to do more with what we've got," County Historian Susan Conklin said.
Conklin discussed the new organization, which has yet to be named, while giving an update on her department to the Human Service Committee.
She said the informal federation is working on a mission statement and bylaws.
Conklin said she envisions the new group publishing a brochure to help publicize all of its members' services and locations, but the main focus will be on a Web site. Collaboration will make it easier for small groups to get their content online without having to maintain their own Web sites, she said.
Other entities that will be invited to join the federation include cemetery associations and clubs such as the Daughters of the American Revolution.
"There's quite a bit in Genesee County that I don't think everybody is aware of," including eight or nine museums, Conklin said.
The county historian said it will probably take a year or two to work through the logistics to form the federation.
British historian lands major prize
Source: Montreal Gazette (11-3-09)
Lisa Jardine, author of Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory, has been awarded the Cundill International Prize in History, described as the world's largest historical literature award for non-fiction.
Jardine collected a prize of $75,000 U.S. at the Mount Royal Club in Montreal Sunday night.
"It is humbling to be chosen as this year's winner from such a stellar list of historians," Jardine said. "The Cundill prize is the most important history prize in the world."
Two runners-up each pocketed a prize of $10,000 U.S.:
In Champlain's Dream, published by Knopf Canada, author David Hackett Fischer presented the first full-scale biography in decades of explorer Samuel de Champlain, whose travels extended from the St. Lawrence to the Spanish Empire in Mexico.
Fischer dealt with Champlain as a complex, elusive man whose impact on North America continues to reverberate four centuries after a life lived in mystery.
Fischer is a professor at Brandeis University.
In Comanche Empire, Pekka Hämäläinen described a long-gone empire built by the Comanche Indians in the 18th and early 19th centuries...
... Hämäläinen teaches at the University of California at Santa Barbara....
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Humanities, Smithsonian, Library of Congress and Park Service budgets hold steady
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH) (10-30-09)
Related Links
Lee White: How the National Park Service did Lee White: How Smithsonian did
Lee White: How Library of Congress did
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) will receive $167.5 million under the Interior, Environment and Related Agencies fiscal year (FY) 2010 appropriations bill (H.R. 2996) (H. Rept. 111-316) that was signed into law by President Obama on October 30. This represents a $12.5 million increase over the FY 2009 level of $155 million.
The Administration proposed transferring oversight responsibility for the National Capital Arts and Cultural Affairs program (NCACA) from the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts to the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Obama administration’s budget included $10 million in new funding to NEH to administer a redesigned program of competitive grants to arts, historical, and cultural institutions in the District of Columbia. However, Congress rejected this proposal and the bill retains the status quo with respect to the NCACA.
FY 10 NEH Funding by Program (FY 10 vs. FY 09 enacted)
(Amounts in thousands)
$40,370 – Federal/State partnership ($35,000) +$5,370
$17,116 – Preservation and access ($16,000) +$1,116
$15,616 – Public programs ($14,500) +$1,116
$16,866 – Research programs ($14,500) +$2,366
$15,616 – Education programs ($14,500) +$1,116
$750 – Program development ($400) +$350
$14,500 – We The People Initiative grants ($15,800) -$1,300
$4,866 – Digital Humanities Initiatives ($4,000) +$866
$125,700—Subtotal Grants————-($114,700) +$11,000
$4,800 – Treasury funds ($5,000) -$200
$9,500 – Challenge grants ($9,300) +$200
$14,300– Subtotal Matching Grants—-($14,300)
$27,500 – Administration ($26,000) +$1,500
$167,500 – TOTAL HUMANITIES ($155,000) +$12,500
Uncovering an Abraham Lincoln not often seen
Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer (10-25-09)
He's typically depicted in paintings and sculptures as sullen and melancholy. His cheeks are sunken, and he has a long neck. His huge, veined hands are crossed over an ill-fitting, wrinkled suit.
But a different side of Abraham Lincoln has emerged in recently discovered accounts by those who knew him well and witnessed historic moments in his life and presidency.
In notes compiled early last century by artist and interviewer James E. Kelly, and uncovered by New Jersey historian William B. Styple, Lincoln is animated and athletic, passionate and engaging. He weeps and prays as he walks the streets of Washington, assessing the Civil War's cost. He smiles, laughs, and erupts in anger.
After collecting stories for at least 16 years, Kelly planned to write a book about the Lincoln few knew. He also hoped to produce a sculpture of the president, but he died in 1933 without finishing either.
Styple discovered Kelly's unpublished notes and correspondence - from civic leaders, politicians, artists, and soldiers - in the New York Historical Society about 70 years later and has turned them into a book.
"DO NOT represent him as if he were half asleep, or in mourning," wrote a Lincoln secretary, William Stoddard, in a 1919 letter to Kelly. "Make him living! For he was one of the most 'all alive' of men. . . .
"Remember that he was exceptionally vigorous physically, and notably outspoken in all his utterances - NEVER WEAK. I have seen his face light up as if God had kindled a bonfire behind it."
Styple devoured 27 boxes of Kelly's documents and learned of the artist's unusual friendship with a physician whose descendant - a South Jersey resident - inherited some of the artist's sculptures and sketches.
"When I found Kelly's notes, I knew how important they were," said Styple, 49, author of several Civil War books and a resident of Chatham, Morris County. "After 150 years, to find 50 new personal accounts [of Lincoln] is a rarity."
Eight of Kelly's bronze statuettes, four figurines, and a dozen plaster bas-reliefs were passed through the family of a Kelly friend to Henry Ryder, a professor of economics at Gloucester County College.
"Kelly's artwork has been pretty much forgotten," Ryder said. "His accounts and conversations were never known until Bill uncovered them."
Many critically acclaimed artistic works by Kelly, including equestrian pieces, are in parks, public places, and battlefields at Freehold, N.J.; Gettysburg, Pa.; Frederick, Md.; Washington; New York; and other East Coast cities.
To complete them, Kelly did extensive homework in the same way he had begun preparations for his Lincoln project.
He sketched, painted, and sculpted aging generals while chatting about historic events in which they and others shaped the Civil War.
He was enthralled by their eyewitness descriptions of the opening shots at Fort Sumter, the killing fields of Gettysburg, the Appomattox surrender, and the assassination of Lincoln.
His interviewing ability intrigued Styple, who studied Kelly's papers, including those about his conversations with Gens. Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, Philip Sheridan, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, and Alexander S. Webb. The public can see the documents at the historical society...
Berlin Wall Anniversary Sparks Look At History
Source: Voice of America (11-2-09)
November 9 marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. We spoke with British historian Frederick Taylor, an expert on the Berlin Wall, author of the book The Berlin Wall - A World Divided 1961-1989, about what prompted East German authorities to build the wall in the first place.
Under the terms of the 1945 Yalta Agreement, the victorious allies of World War II divided Germany into four sectors, or zones of occupation: the American, British, French and Soviet zones.
About 160 kilometers inside the Soviet zone lay Germany's war scarred capital Berlin. The city was also divided into four sectors along the same lines as Germany.
As the post-war period went from months into years, tensions emerged between the Soviets and the three Western allies. In 1949, the Western zones of Germany split from the communist, Soviet-allied government in East Germany - the area that surrounded Berlin. Historian Frederick Taylor.
"Berlin, sitting inside the Soviet zone - a kind of Trojan horse, if you will, of capitalism as the Soviets and their German communist allies saw it - became this symbol of a Western way of life continuing to exist inside what was increasingly the frozen and repressive Cold War Soviet bloc," said Frederick Taylor.
Taylor says a border was built between East and West Germany.
"By 1952, in fact, there was a fortified border where you could be shot for trying to cross it from East to West," he said. "But in Berlin, because of the peculiar status of the city as a military-controlled area - and it continued to be controlled by military law, even after the two German states were set up - there were checkpoints and so on but people could actually travel pretty easily between East and West Berlin. This meant that East Germans, who were tired of the kind of poor standard of living and the lack of freedom in the communist-ruled East Germany, which by 1951 in fact was poorer than it had been four, three years earlier, not richer - could do so."
Taylor says between 1949 and 1961, East Germany - out of a population of 17 million - lost around two and a half million people to West Germany.
"In effect, what was obvious to the East German government and indeed, eventually, to their Soviet masters, by the end of the 1950s, as we go into 1960-61, was that their country was bleeding to death - bleeding its best and its brightest to the West," said Taylor. "So something had to be done about it. And the question was what."
The historian says East German leaders had options.
"They could have offered reforms, they could have offered a more efficient and productive economy," he said. "They could have offered the kinds of political freedoms and freedom of movement that most educated and civilized people require. But of course they didn't - they were attached to the Stalinist model of a command economy, now found in very, very few places in the world, possibly only in North Korea and Cuba, really."
Taylor says the East German leadership felt the only way to stop the exodus of East Germans to West Germany, was to build a physical barrier. And they decided to do it between East and West Berlin...
... "It's the great tragedy of this time," said Taylor. "It was the dashed hopes, the disappointment, the claustrophobia, the ghastly feeling of this lack of freedom of movement, the freedom to breathe, the freedom to feel, I think - that when I talked to people who lived through all that, that's always the most striking thing. I think it's very hard for us to understand."
Historian Carleton Mabee chronicles Father Divine
Source: Chronogram (10-29-09)
In the 1930s, Gardiner town historian and former SUNY New Paltz history professor Carleton Mabee was a student at Columbia University. Possessing a sense of racial justice not in fashion at the time, Mabee often took the short trek uptown to Harlem, where a startling urban renaissance offered jazz, gospel, theater, and art. Mabee was fascinated with this flowering of Negro culture, and breathed freely of its perfume. He would attend the Abyssinian Baptist Church on Sundays, where gospel masses shook the rafters. One of the most compelling uptown attractions, however, was Father Divine.
A short African-American man dressed in a tailored suit and radiating charisma, Divine drew people because he offered low-cost feasts (25 cents or less) at a time when the Depression had emptied most pockets. Mabee, whose modest budget was gobbled up by the cost of college books, was grateful for the bountiful meals of chicken, gravy, and mashed potatoes.
In addition to a full belly, Mabee also received an earful of rhetoric. Father Major Jealous Divine (1880-1965) was the head of a religious sect called the Peace Mission Movement. Preaching a combination of Old and New Testament scriptures, Divine gathered followers and organized utopian communities. Here, black and white people lived together—a startling proposal during this racially charged era. Mabee was fascinated by this emerging sect. He heard Father Divine fulminate only once, speaking of the enduring power of God’s love, but the memory of that magnetic preacher persisted.
Seven decades later, Mabee (who turns 95 on Christmas Day) has returned to the story of Father Divine. A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian (for a 1943 biography of Samuel F. B. Morse), Mabee has completed a book on Father Divine, who had a community of followers in Ulster County.
The result of six years of research by Mabee—often by poking through old newspapers and musty county records and by interviewing survivors of the sect—is Promised Land: Father Divine’s Interracial Communities in Ulster County, New York (Purple Mountain Press, 2008)...
Interview: Clinton Historian Seeks To Dispel "Cartoon Images"
Source: The Atlantic (11-2-09)
The Clinton Tapes, a 720-page chronicle of eight years worth of candid, once-secret conversations between oral historian Taylor Branch and former President Bill Clinton, travels familiar terrain of the Clinton years, touching on military initiatives (the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo), international diplomacy (Clinton's friendship with the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin) and titillating anecdotes (Russian President Boris Yeltsin once ended up in his underwear, drunk, on Pennsylvania Avenue).
Before embarking on this 17-year-long project, Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Martin Luther King Jr.'s three-volume biography, had denounced politics after growing disenchanted as a campaign volunteer during the 1972 McGovern campaign -- for which he, incidentally, worked closely with Clinton in Texas. But weeks after Clinton won the presidency in November 1992, the then president-elect summoned Branch to a clandestine dinner at Katherine Graham's house and asked him to be the official historian of the eight years that were yet to come. I met Branch last Monday night at Politics and Prose, where we talked about his no-holds-barred approach to the relatively controversial project -- Clinton kept these cassettes in the back of his sock drawers for fear of his own aides finding out and leaking them to the media. A slightly edited transcript of our conversation follows:
Tali Yahalom: Why did you decide to take on this project? What were your goals and do you think you achieved them?
Taylor Branch:
Well you never think you've accomplished a goal, if you're a writer,
until everybody on Earth has read your book. I wanted to get a preview
of what an unfiltered access to a president being president is like,
trying to preserve memories. This is second best, third best, fourth
best to actually recording his phone conversations and in meetings.
This was his idea -- the project was his idea, it wasn't mine. I'm not
making any judgments about Clinton -- it's too soon and I'm too, I'm
not impartial. But I do think that it's primary record. And the second
goal is that I try to take people inside the White House, to give them
some sense of what it's like to be around a sitting president in the
white house, which it gives a little relief to the book, but also some
primary experience, because I think that we have an unrealistic and an
overly ideological cartoon-images of presidents.
TY: How did President Clinton convince you to do this?
TB:
He was concerned about the preservation of [historical] material. I was
stunned that he was thinking about that before he took office, because
I had kind of written him off as a cookie-cutter politician, I was a
little cynical about politics, I had even told him that I wasn't going
to be involved in any more political campaigns after 1972 because I was
disillusioned with politics. There was a little negotiation, because he
wanted me to move into the White House and be his in-house historian. I
told him that I didn't think that would work, that it wouldn't be taken
seriously. We talked about various other alternatives, what he could
do, I recommended that he keep a diary all by himself and he said that
he couldn't do it.
TY: Why not?
TB: He said
that he had a fabulous memory, but that the problem was when he sat
down at the end of the day, there were too many topics to talk about.
He didn't have any sort of sense of where to start, he could talk all
day about any one of 100 things.
TY: How did you manage to keep this project a secret?
TB:
I couldn't talk about it, I couldn't tell my friends I was doing it, I
couldn't tell most of my relatives. I had a lame, in my view,
defensible cover story that we had reignited, that we had gotten
reacquainted in occasional conversations about history, and that's what
I would say.
TY: People believed that?
TB:
Yes, we had been roommates before, and they didn't know how often I was
going there, and they certainly didn't know I was going in late at
night and doing recordings. A couple of people on his staff
occasionally did see me before I could hide my recorders. I know Leon
Panetta did, the chief of staff did, but they didn't say 'What are you
doing here, what's the nature of that?' I don't really know what went
through their mind.
TY: What will this book do for Clinton's legacy and his role in public memory?
TB:
Some people think that it reinforces what they already think of him --
that he was all over the place and that he was angry. Or that he felt
persecuted by the press. Other people think, my own view is, that,
relative to my own image of him, let alone the cynicisms that I felt
about him as someone who didn't believe in anything and who was
rudderless and a creator of Dick Morris and all that, I didn't see any
of that and, in that sense, I felt that I was on another planet from
the kind of prevailing consensus. ... There's now a myth that politics
is useless and that Clinton, in particular, was Bubba from Arkansas --
there's a lot of condescension there, and I don't think that will live.
I think that some of that will be adjusted...
Stanford Historian Robert Proctor vs. R.J. Reynolds
Source: PR Watch.org (11-2-09)
History is unkind to tobacco companies, and never more so than since a federal court in 2006 found the industry guilty of perpetrating 50 years of fraud and deceit upon the American people. It's a sordid history to live down, and maybe that's why R.J. Reynolds is harassing one of the few historians who has been willing to step up and testify in court about the real history of the tobacco industry's behavior: Professor Robert N. Proctor of Stanford University.
Dr. Proctor specializes in the history of 20th- and 21st-century scientific controversies, including the history of tobacco and "agnotology,", the study of the cultural production of ignorance and doubt -- a field familiar to tobacco companies. After all, Brown & Williamson wrote in a 1969 proposal that
Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' [linking smoking with disease] that exists in the mind of the general public ... If we are successful in establishing a controversy at the public level, then there is an opportunity to put across the real facts about smoking and health.
Philip Morris (PM) also realized the importance of fostering doubt and ignorance about tobacco's health hazards. In a 1990 think-piece about why the industry was losing the public relations war over tobacco, PM mused that,
The way out of our increasingly bleak dilemma is clear and realizable ... [We must] squarely face up to the health issues and demonstrate the genuine doubts, conflicts, ambiguities and contradictions that characterize the evidence against smoking.
We now know in retrospect, thanks to industry documents, that the tobacco industry is really two separate industries: one that we see, that makes and sells cigarettes, and the other we don’t see, that has spent generations and an untold fortune trying to convince the world, against our collective better judgment, that smoking is a normal human behavior and should stay that way.
Tobacco companies hate Dr. Proctor because he helps draw a clear picture for juries about how the industry reacted when the hazards of smoking were revealed in the 1950s an onward. He has also evaluated how the history of smoking in the U.S. might have been different had the industry had responded honestly to evidence that its products cause disease. Dr. Proctor has even taken other medical historians to task for testifying in the industry's favor in lawsuits.
Big Tobacco has employed historians in the courtroom to help demonstrate how "everyone knew" about the dangers of smoking at any given point in time. More than 40 historians have testified for the industry, but only three have testified against. Dr. Proctor is one of those brave three. He has testified in 15 tobacco lawsuits since 1998, and now, in the latest suit, Koballa v. Philip Morris, et al, R.J. Reynolds is trying to stop him.
Stella Koballa is a rare lung cancer survivor who also suffers from emphysema. She and her family allege that tobacco companies concealed information about the hazards of smoking during the 1950s and 1960s, and purposely led people to disregard the health risks. A qualified historian like Dr. Proctor walks juries through the history of tobacco industry behavior, highlighting, for example, ad campaigns designed to reassure a frightened public that smoking was safe, like RJR's "More doctors smoke Camels" campaign, and showing them how cigarettes were marketed by claiming they had "health protection" qualities.
RJR has found a unique way to harass Dr. Proctor in this case: they are trying to force him to reveal the unedited manuscript of a book he is currently working on, tentatively titled "Golden Holocaust: A History of Global Tobacco." RJR is trying to subpoena the rough manuscript for the Koballa case. Proctor points out that RJR's attempt to grab the manuscript is an attack on his private work, an invasion of his privacy and infringes on his right to freely gather information. He points out that RJR's effort to get his notes and thoughts before they are compiled into a completed manuscript impairs his ability to conduct research, and -- most importantly for RJR and other tobacco companies-- will probably dissuade other historians from testifying against the industry.
The industry has a track record of intimidating researchers who work in tobacco policy-relevant areas, and has been known to use its legal and economic power to harass and frighten opponents. RJR in particular revealed its legal strategy of bleeding the other side's resources in the company's famous R.J. Reynolds Son-of-a-Bitch memo.
Doubtless RJR wants to scour Dr. Proctor's manuscript for any bit of information they can potentially use to embarrass him and ruin his credibility before juries. They could also use it to dig up information useful in embarrassing him in his cross-examination.
So far, Dr. Proctor has been forced to spend about $27,000 of his own money on legal fees to try and protect his work. The good news is that Stanford University filed an amicus brief supporting Dr. Proctor in resisting RJR's subpoena for his work, saying that forcing scholars to reveal unreviewed work can damage their reputations and deter others from serving as expert witnesses in legal cases.
How true.
Proctor's battle to protect his manuscript has broad implications for privacy, protection of academic work, and future court cases in which scholars, researchers and other experts are tapped to testify. As Dr. Proctor has pointed out, it is already difficult to find historians who are willing to testify against the industry. Now we can see why. It obviously takes courage to do so, and can lead to significant extra expense. That Dr. Proctor has had to spend so much of his own money to participate in this case is egregious.
This intimidation of Dr. Proctor, if the court allows it to continue, will only make the tobacco industry's path to win cases easier, and punish those who step up in court to tell the truth about this industry's past.
Treaty historian says the repeal of the Foreshore and Seabed Act puts the Maori Party in a powerful position
Source: NZ City (11-3-09)
A treaty historian says the repeal of the Foreshore and Seabed Act puts the Maori Party in a powerful position.
The Government has signaled the Act will be repealed by the end of next year and hopes for political consensus on its replacement.
Historian Paul Moon says the move puts the Maori Party in a strong position, considering it came into being to fight the legislation. He says the party can now say to its electorate that it has achieved what it set out to do and has changed Government policy.
Dr Moon says the next step for the Government and the Maori Party is to consult with the public about what form the new legislation should take. He believes a co-management approach to beaches could be the way forward. Dr Moon says the challenge for the Government is to find a way to ensure some sense of ownership for hapu and iwi alongside the recognition that the beach is part of New Zealand culture.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Cambridge Historian Writes Definitive History Of Britain's MI5
Source: Radio Free Europe (11-1-09)
Christopher Andrew, a history professor at Cambridge University, recently published the first authorized history of the domestic branch of the British intelligence establishment -- officially designated the Security Service and commonly known as MI5. In writing his book, titled "Defend The Realm," Andrew had extensive access to MI5 archives, although parts of it still remain closed. He discussed the results of the work in an interview with RFE/RL correspondent Ahto Lobjakas.
RFE/RL: What, in your view, was MI5's biggest failure in the Cold War?
Christopher Andrew: I think that it was the amount of time taken to discover the five leading spies from my university. It's rather ironic that a historian from Cambridge University should have been the person who was appointed to write the [MI5] history. But, in other words, it was the five, "The Magnificent Five" as the KGB, or some of the KGB, began to call them after the film "The Magnificent Seven" came out in 1960. It loved Westerns. The reasons were, partly, because [the British government] had had no vetting system before World War II, so these people had got embedded. But MI5's investigation [also] missed a number of key points.This is a rare example in which it's really misled by a defector. Anatoly Golitsyn, who came over at the beginning of the 1960s, was the most dangerous kind of KGB defector -- in other words, one who has some really good intelligence combined with an awful lot of conspiracy theories. Now, he insisted that the Cambridge Five all had been at Cambridge at the same time and that they all knew each other. Now, MI5 accepted that definition, and it wasn't until 1980 that it actually solved the case. It solved the case then because there was another defector, Oleg Gordievsky, who was far, far, far better informed than Golitsyn had ever been -- and had no conspiracy theories.
MI5 then discovered that it had actually solved the case in 1964. In other words, it had found the identity of the five major spies at Cambridge, but [had missed that] two of them -- Anthony Blunt, the so-called "fourth man," and John Cairncross, the so-called "fifth man," certainly fourth and fifth in order of discovery, and also fourth and fifth in order of recruitment -- it hadn't grasped that they were part of the ring of five. You know, to suddenly realize in 1982 that your most difficult intelligence problem had been solved 18 years before -- yes, I think that was the worst example.
RFE/RL: What effect did the Cambridge Five have on the conduct of the Cold War?
Andrew: One of the things that treachery always does is very difficult to calculate. In other words, where you create distrust, that has a corrosive, long-term effect. Otherwise, plainly, the main damage they did was not in Britain, it was in Eastern Europe. And there are people who died -- who were killed, and in a number of cases tortured to death -- because of members of the [Cambridge] Five, and who would not otherwise have met that grisly fate.
You know, [British intelligence agent and Cambridge Five member Kim] Philby was a young idealist, the first of them to be recruited [by the Soviets] in 1934. You can see just by looking at his memoirs -- which, of course, were a public relations job -- the way that he becomes brutalized by working for Josef Stalin. It’s difficult, after all, to remain a normal human being if you're working for Josef Stalin.
So, for example, he talks about "freedom fighters" -- because that's what they are, that's what I think they're recognized as nowadays, certainly in Ukraine -- [parachuting] into Ukraine. Kim Philby had provided the coordinates and they were picked up. And he makes a little joke of it. He says, "I don't know exactly what happened to them, of course, but I can make a pretty good guess. " So, treachery costs lives, and the [Cambridge] Five cost lives...
National Archives is under-resourced -historian
Source: Stabroek News (11-1-09)
Historian Dr Melissa Ifill says important archival materials are no longer being presented to the National Archives due to a lack of confidence in the institution’s ability to preserve records, and that a lack of funding and adequate staffing has affected the res-toration work of the archives.
In a passionate lecture on Friday in observance of Archives Week, Ifill said the relevant authorities seem to lack an understanding of how critical the preservation of records are, particularly its impact on future generations. She said the state of records at some public institutions in the country point to critical information being dumped in bins and crammed together in rooms among other unfortunate situations. According to her, certain records of significance to Guyana are now being protected overseas in countries such as the US and the UK, beyond the reach of the average Guyanese researcher.
Prior to her lecture, Minister of Culture, Youth and Sport, Dr Frank Anthony disclosed on Wednesday that plans are underway to procure copies of archival materials currently in the possession of overseas entities, including those in the British and Dutch Archives. At the time, he was addressing a National Archives workshop. He said too that a comprehensive collection is lacking, adding that the institution will move forward when there is a broader collection of records.
Ifill struck a chord within the small audience gathered and as she spoke a few persons were heard agreeing with her. The Minister of Culture and the Director of Culture, Dr James Rose both were absent from the lecture owing to other engagements.
Medical historian urges vaccination
Source: The ChronicleHerald.ca (10-31-09)
BRIDGEWATER — Dr. Allan Marble hopes to get both his flu shots next week because he knows just how deadly the flu can be.
He is writing a book — his third — on the history of medicine in Nova Scotia. He is the first person to take a look at the impact of the 1918-1919 Spanish flu epidemic on Nova Scotia.
"Nothing had ever been written on it," he said. ""Not one thing. It was the forgotten epidemic."
The Spanish flu killed 1,780 Nova Scotians in six months and a further 300 during its second wave beginning in February 1920.
"It was an H1N1 flu," Dr. Marble said, though it had different characteristics than the one that is currently leaving hundreds of Nova Scotians standing outside for hours waiting to be vaccinated.
Cabarrus historians work to keep war history alive (N. Carolina)
Source: TMC News (10-30-09)
Independent Tribune (Concord, NC)--Veterans of several wars gathered on Wednesday at the Wm. L. Whitley Sr. Annex Chapel in Kannapolis for lunch, speakers and a chance to make a video record of their war experiences.
The Historic Cabarrus Association's Concord Museum has undertaken a project to record local residents' war experiences for future generations.
George Patterson, a war historian, along with Jimmy and Bonte Kee, are the three primary volunteers working with the veterans to record the personal information.
World War II veterans are dying at up to 1,000 a day, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
"You think you know the history, but you don't until you sit down with these guys," Jimmy Kee said. "That's where you get the history." So far, they have collected between 200 and 250 stories.
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