Historians in the News
Highlights
- Pressure mounts for 'Sheriff' Elizabeth Warren, says Zelizer
- David Weber, Southwest Expert, Dies at 69
- Franz Schurmann, Cold War Expert on China, Dies at 84
- Bath historian finds diaries of woman who nursed Nelson
- John B. Judis: Defending ‘The Unnecessary Fall of Barack Obama’
- Forever Young: Staughton Lynd at 80
- Historian uses ancient maps to block ramblers
- Historian and China expert Franz Schurmann dies
- Income inequality may contribute to financial crises, says Harvard economic historian
- Red Menace: David Gentilcore Talks the Tasty History of the Tomato
WEEK OF MARCH 29, 2010
Free Guide to Texas Social Studies Revision Process from University of Texas
History Coalition Submits Congressional Testimony on FY 2011 NARA & NHPRC Budgets
Obama learning from LBJ, according to presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin
Film restoration projects imperiled by financial meltdown, says historian
WEEK OF MARCH 22, 2010
French historian dismisses comparison of Quebec sovereignty movement to French resistance
New AHA Executive Director: Jim Grossman to Succeed Arnita Jones
Pelosi may enter history as one of the great House speakers, according to scholars
Nominations for the least-accurate political memoir ever written
WEEK OF MARCH 15, 2010
Historic win or not, Democrats could pay a price, according to historians
Jeffrey Goldberg: Juan Cole's Anti-Israel Propaganda Campaign
Book by religion historian Wendy Doniger draws criticism by Hindus
University of Toronto historian wins prestigious Holberg Prize
HBO sought Easton professor's expertise for 'The Pacific' war series
Kenneth Dover, a Provocative Scholar of Ancient Greek Literature, Dies at 89
WEEK OF MARCH 8, 2010
Professor Jack Pole's reassessment of American 'exceptionalism'
Thomas Garden Barnes, Berkeley professor and advocate of Canadian history, dies at 80
University of Dayton historian criticizes textbooks for minimizing Reagan
An Old Essay by Richard Hofstadter Used to Explain Tea Partiers
Sir Kenneth Dover, classicist who wished to kill colleague, dies at 89
Sergo Mikoyan, Russian historian and son of Stalin associate, dies at 80
Eminent China Scholar Will Deliver 2010 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities
NJ street named after Marshal Petain stirs controversy, according to Robert Paxton
WEEK OF MARCH 1, 2010
Joan Waugh objects to call to replace Grant on the $50 bill with Reagan
New Islamic proclamation condeming terror - historian Furnish unsure of its effectiveness
Hastings, Beevor to publish competing general histories of World War II
Controversial historical Irish slaughter re-examined by Scottish and Irish academics
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Why do more people listen to economists than historians?
Source: Harvard Business Review (3-31-10)
David Brooks wondered in his New York Times column last week if economists shouldn't try to become more like historians. That was interesting to read, given that I had just spent time with a bunch of historians (and a few other humanities professors) who were wondering how they could become more like economists.
The occasion was a conference at Oxford University's Saïd Business School on Reputation, Emotion and the Market. I was there to speak about my book on the history of financial theory, but ended up mainly engaged in a long discussion with the 30-or-so historians (and a smattering of scholars from other humanities disciplines) on hand about why economists had gained so much influence over the past half century and historians had lost so much....
The one economist in the audience had [a] suggestion. Most economic work was aimed at prediction, and the world is always hungry for predictions. He added that most macroeconomic predictions are worthless (he was a microeconomist), but that doesn't seem to have damped the demand for them.
After the conference, at dinner, I heard another explanation from the historians themselves. It's that, especially in the U.S., only the tiniest minority of academic historians concern themselves anymore with matters of economic policy (or diplomacy, or war, or politics in the big-picture sense). The discipline has moved mostly to the study of identity (gender, race, etc.) and culture, ceding territory to the economists and political scientists. Yeah, yeah, there's always Niall Ferguson. But he's more the exception that proves the rule — not to mention, in the view of academic historians, a pop-culture figure who is no longer really one of them....
Free Guide to Texas Social Studies Revision Process from University of Texas
Source: UTEP Center for History Teaching & Learning (3-31-10)
The Center for History Teaching & Learning has published a simple and informative free guide to the ongoing K-12 social studies revision process. Texas Social Studies Simplified explains what is going on, why it matters, who is involved, and when the process will be done. It also corrects the many errors circulating in the media about the revision process.
What people are saying about Texas Social Studies Simplified:
- · “This gives a lot of good information. It covers all areas of what is going on with the TEKS.”
- · “It really clarifies the process and speaks to the myths floating around out there.”
- · “Thank you very much for doing this for our community. We need more voices advocating for our education system.”
Publication of Texas Social Studies Simplified is part of the Center’s ongoing TEKSWatch effort to monitor and document the revision process.
The Center for History Teaching & Learning is a division of UTEP’s History Department created to promote scholarly teaching among department faculty, support teacher education among our students, and provide outreach and professional development opportunities for area social studies teachers.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Historian of terrorism worried about rise in militia groups
Source: ABC News (3-30-10)
As the last suspect in a plot to kill police was arraigned in court Tuesday, some experts say the number of militia groups has grown.
Joshua Stone, 21, will be held without bond until a hearing Wednesday. He peacefully surrendered Tuesday night in Michigan.
Authorities say the group plotted to kill police in hopes of touching off an uprising....
"It doesn't take a lot of fringe elements in a country this size to do an enormous amount of damage," said Tom Mockaitis, professor of history and terrorism expert, DePaul University.
Mockaitis and others say that the number of militia groups nationwide has grown.
While all do not all have identical ideologies, there generally are some common threads - distrust of a federal government seen as too powerful, anger over taxes and a poor economy and, in many cases, Mockaitis suggests a racial component - resistance to an African American in the White House.
"What worries me is not the lunatic fringe. It's the larger core of soft support in which these fish can swim, and say they draw energy from this larger pool of anger," said Mockaitis....
History Coalition Submits Congressional Testimony on FY 2011 NARA & NHPRC Budgets
Source: Lee White at the National Coalition for History (3-30-10)
On March 19, the National Coalition for History submitted testimony on the President’s proposed Fiscal Year (FY) 2011 budgets for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) to the House Committee on Appropriations’ Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government.
The Honorable José E. Serrano
Chairman
Subcommittee on Financial Services
& General Government
Committee on Appropriations
U.S. House of Representatives
B-300 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
Dear Mr. Chairman:
The National Coalition for History (NCH) is a consortium of over 50 organizations that advocates and educates on federal legislative and regulatory issues affecting historians, archivists, political scientists, teachers, and other stakeholders. As researchers and conservators of American history and culture we care deeply about the programs and activities of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC). Thank you for the opportunity to submit our views on the agency’s proposed fiscal year (FY) 2011 budget.
We want to thank you Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Emerson, and all of the members of the subcommittee for their strong support of NARA’s budget in FY 2010. Despite tight budget constraints, you were able to provide NARA with increased funding. We especially want to express our appreciation for the extra funding that you specifically included to hire additional archival staff.
On February 1, President Obama sent to Congress a proposed Fiscal Year 2011 budget request of $460.2 million for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The requested amount for NARA is a two percent decrease of $9.6 million from the FY 2010 appropriated funding levels of $469.8 million. The National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) would receive $10 million in grant funding, a $3 million cut from FY 2010.
While we are disappointed in the proposed cuts, we realize Congress continues to face enormous fiscal challenges in crafting the federal budget for fiscal year 2011. Nonetheless within these tight budget parameters, we have identified some specific priorities that we feel should be addressed at NARA and the NHPRC in next year’s budget.
National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC):
We appreciate the Subcommittee’s strong support for the NHPRC in the FY 2010 budget. The $13 million for grants reflected a sizeable increase of $3.75 million over the $9.25 million in grant money the NHPRC received in FY 2009. In addition, last year was the first time the NHPRC’s budget exceeded its fully authorized amount of $10 million.
While we are disappointed the Obama Administration has recommended funding the NHPRC grants programs at a level of $10 million, this macro number does not tell the whole story. The NHPRC’s FY 2010 budget included a one-time allocation of $4.5 million to the congressionally-mandated project to make the papers of the Founding Fathers available on-line. So in reality, the NHPRC’s core grant programs received $8.5 million last year. Viewed from that perspective the $10 million recommended by the Administration this year could be considered an increase. Ideally, we would like to see the NHPRC funded at last year’s $13 million level, but we understand the need for fiscal responsibility during this time of soaring budget deficits.
Unfortunately, the NHPRC’s $10 million annual authorization expired at the end of FY 2009. So, the Administration’s recommended funding level is in line with the NHPRC’s previous authorization. We have been urging the authorizing committees in the House and Senate to pass legislation that would reauthorize the NHPRC at a level of $20 million per-year for the next five fiscal years. We hope this will be achieved before the end of the current session of Congress.
Obama learning from LBJ, according to presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin
Source: Newsweek (3-26-10)
It's called "the treatment." All presidents administer it, one way or another. The trick is to use the perks of the office and the power of personality to bring around doubters and foes. LBJ was the most outlandish and sometimes outrageous practitioner. With three televisions blasting in the background, Johnson would get about six inches away from the face of some beleaguered or balky senator or cabinet secretary. Sometimes LBJ would beckon the man into the bathroom and continue to cajole or harangue while he sat on the toilet.
Air Force One is a favorite tool presidents use to inspire and overawe. With much guffawing and backslapping, recalcitrant lawmakers are led to a luxurious cabin where they are granted a presidential audience and bestowed with swag, like cuff links with the presidential seal (Johnson gave away plastic busts of himself). Dennis Kucinich, seven-term congressman from Ohio and potential vote-switcher for health reform, was invited aboard Air Force One a couple of weeks before the climactic vote in the House. He had dealt with Presidents Clinton and Bush before, but Obama was different. The president was sitting in shirt sleeves behind a desk, computer to one side, notepad and pen at the ready. "He doesn't twist arms," recalls Kucinich. Rather, the president quietly listened. He was "all business," and sat patiently while Kucinich expressed his concerns, which Obama already knew. Then the president laid out his own arguments. Kucinich wasn't persuaded by the president, he told NEWSWEEK. But he voted for the bill because he did not want the presidency to fail, and he was convinced Obama would work with him in future.
A president's first year in office is often a time for learning. The harshest lessons are beginners' mistakes, like the Bay of Pigs fiasco for JFK. The real key is to figure out how to use the prestige of the office to get things done: when to conserve your political capital, and when and how to spend it. Judging from Obama's campaign, which revolutionized politics with its ability to tap grassroots networks of donors and activists, many expected President Obama to go over the heads of Congress and mobilize popular passions to achieve his top priorities. But on what may be his signature issue, that wasn't really the case....
manipulative disdain.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Pessimism back in fashion in historical circles
Source: Business Times (3-30-10)
PESSIMISM is back in fashion. Recently, several economists, political scientists and historians have begun to suggest that the world is headed towards a major disaster. They worry according to the demands of their expertise and discipline.
Niall Ferguson, one of the more important economic historians of our time, is projecting a fiscal disaster in the United States that will match the one Greece is facing at the moment. He says that, according to White House projections, gross public debt will exceed 100 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). That worries him a great deal.
He has made his reputation by studying the decline and eventual fall of great empires and nations. Large debt overhang is almost always the cause. That is what brought down the Ottoman Empire in the early part of the 20th century and the British Empire 50 years later.
Is America headed the same way? Mr Ferguson believes that is indeed the case. What is causing large fiscal deficits is not only the US government decision to use public money to revive the economy; what is also contributing is the big burden being created by the ageing of the population and its claim on increasing amounts of resources by way of Medicare and Social Security payments....
Film restoration projects imperiled by financial meltdown, says historian
Source: DNA India (3-29-10)
The financial crisis in the US, as is well known by now, felled many iconic Wall Street giants, with catastrophic consequences for the global economy. But far away from the public glare, the crisis, which continues to have a cascading effect on the US economy to this day, has also effectively pulled the plug on an ongoing Hollywood-inspired effort to preserve the cultural legacy of iconic Indian film director Satyajit Ray.
That project to restore the collected cinematic works of Indian filmdom’s Renaissance Man, which were at serious risk of being lost for posterity, was commissioned in the 1990s by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which hosts the annual Oscar ceremony. Over the years, it was funded by, among others, the Academy, the Ford Foundation and private donations from director Martin Scorsese and philanthropist David Woodley Packard, scion of the Hewlett-Packard family.
“But now money isn’t available in California because of the downturn,” says Dilip Basu, professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was asked by the Academy to oversee the film restoration project, and heads the Satyajit Ray Film and Study Center at the university.“California today is a failed state economically, and perhaps has more homeless people than Kolkata,” Basu told The Mag in Hong Kong recently.
Institutional funding for the project, which has so far successfully restored 21 of Ray’s 39 films (including short films), is drying up, given that the state of California, saddled with enormous budget deficits, is cutting back on public spending, and universities are abolishing inter-disciplinary programmes.
History or cash for Turnpike stops?
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer (3-27-10)
Your poetry may be timeless, but as the name of a New Jersey Turnpike rest stop, your days may be numbered.
James Simpson, the new commissioner of the state Department of Transportation, is contemplating selling naming rights to the turnpike's rest stops as he scrambles for new revenue.
"The 'Nike Stop' . . . maybe that would be worth $10 million," Simpson said in a recent interview, pondering ways to wring more money out of turnpike concessions.
(It might also prompt a new verse of Kilmer's "Trees": I think that I shall never see/A rest stop lovely as Nike.)
The turnpike's 12 rest stops are named for historical figures who lived in New Jersey, from presidents (Woodrow Wilson and Grover Cleveland) to poets (Kilmer and Walt Whitman). But there's not much money in marginally famous dead people - though Alexander Hamilton is memorialized on the $10 bill as well as the rest stop at southbound Mile 111....
Turnpike rest stops are utilitarian places, not eye-catching monuments to human endeavor, noted Howard Gillette, author and professor of history at Rutgers University in Camden. So maybe it's not so bad to lose the names.
They're different from bridges, which are "monumental presences and give identity to the region, like the Walt Whitman Bridge, Ben Franklin Bridge, or Betsy Ross Bridge," Gillette said.
"I wouldn't see it as a huge sacrifice to get more money by naming rest stops," he said.
"In some cases, like with Vince Lombardi" - whose stop is in Ridgefield Borough, Bergen County - "there is a generation that won't even know who it was. Many won't know who the poet [Joyce Kilmer] is....
Friday, March 26, 2010
Health care bill anger a sign of the times?
Source: CNN International (3-26-10)
Americans have always exercised their Democratic rights under the U.S. Constitution to speak out against the government.
Amid the bitter fight over health care reform, a round of hate-filled messages and sometimes violent actions toward members of Congress has prompted calls to ease up on the rhetoric.
Experts say that although protests against social issues such as health care reform are nothing new for the country, such reaction to a landmark bill's passing is uncommon.
"It's unusual that you get this kind of outrage and response to a piece of legislation," said historian Robert Dallek, author of the upcoming book "The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope."
"Of course, it's being fanned in some ways by Republican leaders who keep saying majorities are against this legislation, when in fact there is a pretty even divide in the country, from what the polling data shows," he added.
And those polls indicate that while the country was somewhat evenly divided on the issue in the months leading up to the vote, there has been a bounce in favor of President Obama and the bill....
Historic moments in Dakotas by former SDSU professor
Source: Argus Leader (3-25-10)
Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 declaration that settlement of the frontier had put a unique stamp on America's character was one of the most debated historical works of the 20th century.
Some later historians would mock Turner for romanticizing the frontier, for downplaying the greed and violence that they said accompanied the westward movement and destroyed native civilizations in their way.
In a new book, "Prairie Republic - The Political Culture of Dakota Territory, 1879-1889," South Dakota native and historian Jon K. Lauck comes to Turner's defense by chronicling what he calls the "genuine democratic moments" of thousands of settlers that he said were the seed and soil of statehood.
In doing so, Lauck attempts to balance and challenge the themes of Yale historian Howard R. Lamar's 1956 "Dakota Territory - 1860-1889, a Study of Frontier Politics." Lamar's work remains a seminal piece of American history, part of a critical examination of the American West during the mid- to late 20th century.
Lauck argues that Lamar's book reflected a period when many historians viewed the frontier as a repository for American ills from genocide to boom- and-bust economics, and that it was time for a new look. He argues that the "middle border" connections to the Midwest made eastern South Dakota different from West River's identification with the Wild West frontier.
In the end, Lauck makes a compelling, if incomplete, case for the "forces of republicanism and C hristianity" that he says still exist on the prairie.
Lauck, 38, is a native of Madison, a former assistant professor of history at South Dakota State University and now a senior adviser to U.S. Sen. John Thune, R-S.D.
"Prairie Republic," due out in April, focuses on eastern Dakota Territory in the 1880s, years that included three constitutional conventions and a decade-long struggle that finally culminated in statehood on Nov. 2, 1889.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Disinformation campaign by special interests at heart of climate change skepticism, say historians of science
Source: Peace, Justice, & Earth News (3-25-10)
Even though 2009 was the fifth warmest year since 1850, and 2000-09 the warmest decade ever, according to the World Meterological Organisation, surveys show that public concern about global warming in the United States and Canada has dropped sharply in the past 18 months.
Why? Because of a relentless disinformation effort from an unlikely cabal of fossil fuel interests, Christian evangelicals and the media, says Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California, San Diego. "They have managed to reopen the debate over global warming in people's minds," she told IPS.
Oreskes and co-author Erik Conway, a science historian at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, document similar efforts to manufacture doubt around the science on acid rain, the ozone hole, secondhand cigarette smoke, and the pesticide DDT in their forthcoming book, "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming".
Oreskes and co-author Erik Conway, a science historian at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, document similar efforts to manufacture doubt around the science on acid rain, the ozone hole, secondhand cigarette smoke, and the pesticide DDT in their forthcoming book, "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming"....
Obama's improbable win on health-care reform is one for the history books and will boost his credibility
Source: Business Week (3-25-10)
The success or failure of President Barack Obama's sweeping overhaul of the American health-care system will be clear soon enough. The measure will be revised and amended in successive Congresses. If, over the next decade, it curbs costs and improves outcomes, health care will supersede any other possible legislative accomplishment as Obama's great legacy....
Still, the victory is historic, one that eluded Presidents from Harry Truman through Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. At several critical junctures it appeared likely to elude Obama, too. Yet even when close associates wavered, his resolve did not. "A lot of Presidents would have concluded it's too risky; maybe get safely reelected and take up health care in year five," says historian Michael Beschloss. "Obama said the rewards were so high, it was worth gambling his Presidency."...
Although most Republicans, including the major Presidential hopefuls, are signing pledges to repeal Obamacare, it will be revealing whether this issue is emphasized by Republicans in a few months. Already privately some are saying they should get off it. Republican strategist Ken Khachigian, a former Ronald Reagan aide and now adviser to Carly Fiorina's California Senate quest, suspects that the health-care issue "will fade" as the November election becomes dominated by the economy....
George Mason University historian Richard Norton Smith adds that if the measure had been defeated, history would have seen Obama as enormously gifted and well-intentioned but ultimately labeled his a "failed Presidency." Instead, he says: "It's a rejuvenated, energized, and in many ways vindicated Presidency."
Campus Watch issues challenge to Juan Cole
Source: American Thinker (3-25-10)
[Winfield Myers is director of Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.]
University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole is desperate for you to know that he is eminently qualified to speak publicly on the Middle East. He is, we are told in the opening paragraph of his recent response to the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg,
[a] Middle East expert who lived in the Muslim world for nearly 10 years, travels widely there, speaks the languages, writes history from archives and manuscripts and follows current affairs ...
But from this triumphalist beginning, the story takes a tragic turn: In spite of these qualifications (which you, dear reader, almost certainly do not share), Cole "found that none of [his] experience counted for much when [he] entered the public arena in the United States."...
In his response to Goldberg, Cole attempts to smear Middle East scholar Martin Kramer (who has penned devastating critiques of Cole):
He has a relationship with the so-called "Middle East Forum," which runs the McCarthyite "Campus Watch," and which was part of a scheme to have me cyber-stalked and massively spammed.
At no time has any project of the Middle East
Forum taken part in anything remotely resembling the actions described in these baseless assertions. I challenge Juan Cole to produce evidence that Campus Watch or the Middle East Forum have, at any time, been part of a "scheme" to have him or anyone else "cyber-stalked and massively spammed." Such charges are self-serving conspiracy-mongering with no basis in truth.
We challenge Cole to prove his latest charges against Campus Watch.
Surely the self-declared Ted Williams of his discipline can hit this ball out of the park.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Historian: Arabs were more than just pawns in Cold War
Source: Lebanon Daily Star (3-25-10)
BEIRUT: Exclusively Arab alternatives to Soviet and American Cold War ideologies which competed to shape modernization in the 20th century received a rare but welcome boost at a lecture held at the American University of Beirut, Tuesday.
“The Crush of Ideologies: The United States, the Arab World, and the Cold War Modernization” challenged common historical assertion that the “Third World” was merely a pawn positioned between two superpowers.
Instead visiting speaker Nathan Citino, an associate professor at Colorado State University, strives to prove both Pan-Arab nationalism and political Islamism were forces of equal magnitude to those of communism and liberal capitalism.
The lecture corresponds with Citino’s wider attempt to attach greater historical significance to the Middle East in an era otherwise largely dominated by a bipolar politics.
His book “From Arab Nationalism to OPEC: Eisenhower, King Sa’ud, and the Making of US-Saudi Relations” (currently in its second edition timed to coincide with the centenary of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) has already helped to position Citino at the heart of a new, self-imposed discipline; a fusion of Middle East history with US foreign relations....
French historian dismisses comparison of Quebec sovereignty movement to French resistance
Source: Canada.com (3-23-10)
Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe "obviously" erred in comparing Quebec's sovereignty movement to the French resistance, a prominent historian here said Tuesday.
Duceppe also made a historical blunder by declaring that France's liberation wouldn't have been possible without the famed anti-Nazi underground movement, said Olivier Wieviorka.
"Obviously, this is not based on reality, because you can't compare the situation of France during the Second World War to the situation of Canada nowadays," he told Canwest News Service.
"First of all, Canada is not at war, and Canada is very much a democracy, so the comparison of the situation of Quebec nowadays and the situation of France is not relevant."
Wieviorka said ordinary French citizens would be puzzled to learn of a Quebec nationalist politician making such a comparison in Canada.
"Canada is very popular in France and I think also Quebec, of course, is very popular too, because they speak French and so on. But I think that the comparison is not serving the (Quebec sovereigntist) cause."
New AHA Executive Director: Jim Grossman to Succeed Arnita Jones
Source: AHA Blog (3-19-10)
The American Historical Association is pleased to announce that Dr. James Grossman, currently Vice President for Research and Education at Chicago’s Newberry Library, will succeed Dr. Arnita Jones as the Association’s Executive Director. Dr. Jones will retire at the end of August.
AHA President Barbara Metcalf expressed the enthusiasm of the AHA Council over Dr. Grossman’s appointment: “He is an accomplished scholar, a passionate advocate for history, and a leader in both public humanities and history.” At the Newberry Library he has overseen programs for the general public as well as for scholars and teachers, and has built a strong reputation for bridge-building across fields and disciplines.
Grossman is the author of Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (1989) and A Chance to Make Good: African Americans, 1900-1929 (1997). He was also project director and coeditor of The Encyclopedia of Chicago (2004), labeled by one prominent urban historian “one of the very finest and likely one of the most durable works of North American historical scholarship in our era.” A collaborative project of the Newberry Library, the Chicago History Museum, and Northwestern University, it involved over 700 contributors, and is now available in both print and digital formats.
Current Executive Director Arnita Jones considers Grossman “an ideal person to lead the Association at a time when scholarly societies, higher education and research institutions are confronting many new challenges, including the digital revolution.” Dr. Grossman has been an active member of the AHA for many years and a leader of its National History Center, a new initiative which helps historians reach out to broader audiences. His goals for the AHA include enhancing the role of historians in public culture, collaborating with counterparts in other scholarly associations to explore new opportunities opened by innovations in digital communication, and maintaining the AHA’s strong advocacy voice on open access and other issues of importance to historians....
A history of British budgetary battles
Source: BBC News (3-21-10)
Chancellor Alistair Darling is due to deliver his Budget on Wednesday 24 March, but why does he bother?
It is less than four months since he made his pre-Budget report, so we have a good idea of what he is planning to do with taxation this year, and chief secretary to the Treasury Liam Byrne said last week that taxes would not have to go up, although there has been some backtracking since that statement was made....
For an example of an occasion on which the Finance Bill was not passed, you have to go all the way back to 1909.
Liberal Chancellor David Lloyd George was trying to pass his People's Budget, which introduced higher income taxes for higher earners and also a land tax, in order to fund programmes such as the introduction of old age pensions.
The Conservative-Unionist-dominated House of Lords vetoed the Budget, which meant that a Finance Bill was not passed until 1910, after a general election had been held.
The veto of 1909 led to the Parliament Act of 1911, which stripped the House of Lords of the power to block financial legislation.
Questions were asked in the House of Commons in March 1910 as to whether people would be entitled to tax refunds on the basis that the Finance Bill had not been passed.
The Chancellor replied that he had received legal advice that a bill allowing income tax to be collected for 1909-10 did not have to be passed before the end of that financial year and that as a result it was fine to collect the taxes in anticipation of such a bill being passed.
Headed for Auction: Back-Channel Gloom on Revolutionary War
Source: NYT (3-22-10)
Despite King George’s boast that “once these rebels have felt a smart blow, they will submit,” back-channel messages from British generals and diplomatic officials in America during the Revolutionary War, some of them previously unpublished, turn out to have been decidedly more pessimistic.
As early as June 1775, after the Battle of Bunker Hill — which the Redcoats technically won — Gen. John Burgoyne pronounced British military prospects in America “gloomy” in what he called “a crisis that my little read in history cannot parallel.”
“Such a pittance of troops as Great Britain and Ireland can supply will only serve to protract the war, to incur fruitless expense and insure disappointment,” Burgoyne added in a letter in the collection that will be auctioned beginning next month by Sotheby’s in New York. “Our victory has been bought by an uncommon loss of officers, some of them irreparable, and I fear the consequence will not answer the expectations that will be raised in England.”
By the next summer, Henry Strachey, the secretary to Gen. William Howe and Adm. Richard Howe, the brothers who served as commanders in chief of the army and naval forces in the colonies until 1778, was also voicing despair. The Howes had been dispatched to New York to negotiate peace with the rebellious American colonies and, failing that, to wage war against them.
“Killing seems to me a very unnatural trade, but these people are beyond nature as well as reason,” Strachey wrote to his wife after the British won the Battle of Long Island in August 1776. “They might at this moment have peace and happiness, but they insist upon having their brains knocked out first.”...
Despite King George’s boast that “once these rebels have felt a smart blow, they will submit,” back-channel messages from British generals and diplomatic officials in America during the Revolutionary War, some of them previously unpublished, turn out to have been decidedly more pessimistic.
As early as June 1775, after the Battle of Bunker Hill — which the Redcoats technically won — Gen. John Burgoyne pronounced British military prospects in America “gloomy” in what he called “a crisis that my little read in history cannot parallel.”
“Such a pittance of troops as Great Britain and Ireland can supply will only serve to protract the war, to incur fruitless expense and insure disappointment,” Burgoyne added in a letter in the collection that will be auctioned beginning next month by Sotheby’s in New York. “Our victory has been bought by an uncommon loss of officers, some of them irreparable, and I fear the consequence will not answer the expectations that will be raised in England.”
By the next summer, Henry Strachey, the secretary to Gen. William Howe and Adm. Richard Howe, the brothers who served as commanders in chief of the army and naval forces in the colonies until 1778, was also voicing despair. The Howes had been dispatched to New York to negotiate peace with the rebellious American colonies and, failing that, to wage war against them.
“Killing seems to me a very unnatural trade, but these people are beyond nature as well as reason,” Strachey wrote to his wife after the British won the Battle of Long Island in August 1776. “They might at this moment have peace and happiness, but they insist upon having their brains knocked out first.”...
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Major New Russian Archive for World War II
Source: Dave Stone at the Russian Front (3-22-10)
Head of Rosarkhiv Andrei Artizov has announced plans to create an enormous new archive to unite all Russian materials relating to the Second World War. Slated for completion by the 70th anniversary of victory, i.e. 2015, the new collection will include 13 million files.
The only English-language coverage I found was from Voice of Russia, and the translation isn’t entirely correct. 13 million files in the Russian original becomes 13 billion documents in English, for example.
Artizov gives no concrete reason for the policy beyond the general Good Thing of bringing together all materials relating to the Great Fatherland War. It’s not difficult to imagine, though, what’s driving this plan. The Putin-Medvedev administration has made World War II a central part of the regime’s project of self-justification, and something grandiose to commemorate the war is a logical step. As seems typical for the current government in Russia, this big idea appears to have come out of nowhere with little public discussion or preparation. Though Artizov says that the necessary legislation is in the works, I searched in vain on Rosarkhiv’s website for any indication of the potential for such a major step. Clearly some preparatory work has been done–Rosarkhiv does feature a compilation of all photographic records of the war under the heading “Pobeda [Victory], 1941-1945.”
Niall Ferguson: 'Rid our schools of junk history'
Source: Guardian (UK) (3-21-10)
A leading British historian has called for a Jamie Oliver-style campaign to purge schools of what he calls "junk history".
Niall Ferguson, who teaches at Harvard and presented a Channel 4 series on the world's financial history, has launched a polemical attack on the subject's "decline in British schools", arguing that the discipline is badly taught and undervalued. He says standards are at an all-time low in the classroom and the subject should be compulsory at GCSE.
Ferguson makes the comments in an essay to be released this week. It begins: "History matters. Many schoolchildren doubt this. But they are wrong, and they need to be persuaded they are wrong."
He points to the popularity of TV series and books by celebrity historians such as Simon Schama, David Starkey, Peter Snow and Andrew Marr. "History, it might be said, has never been more popular. Yet there is a painful paradox. At the very same time, it has never been less popular in British schools," writes Ferguson....
He argues that there is far too much emphasis on teaching pupils about Nazi Germany (studied by half of those at GCSE and eight out of 10 at A-level) and complains that pupils are asked to choose "a smorgasbord of unrelated topics". The form of selection, he adds, "explains why, when I asked them recently, all three of my children had heard of the Reverend Martin Luther King, but none could tell me anything about Martin Luther."...
Professor Colin Jones, president of the Royal Historical Society, said he applauded some of Ferguson's ideas, such as teaching history in longer, chronological blocks. But Ferguson's language was condescending and the argument ideological, he added.
"To change things we should work with teachers and other bodies and not just dismiss what is going on as 'junk history'. It is demeaning, unpleasant and untrue," said Jones, who warned against Ferguson's emphasis on western ascendancy.
"It is more ideological than he claims and the danger is it will be taught in a way in which the answer is known in advance and it is 'west is best'."...
Christian Science Church Seeks Truce on Medicine
Source: NYT (3-23-10)
Since the founding of their church 131 years ago, Christian Scientists have been taught to avoid doctors at all cost. It is a conviction rooted so deeply in church dogma that dozens of members have gone to jail rather than surrender an ailing person to what they see as the quackery of medical science.
But faced with dwindling membership and blows to their church’s reputation caused by its intransigence concerning medical treatment, even for children with grave illnesses, Christian Science leaders have recently found a new tolerance for medical care. For more than a year, leaders say, they have been encouraging members to see a physician if they feel it is necessary....
Religious scholars say the church’s past reticence, even secrecy, in the face of what its leaders have considered persecution, makes it difficult to know how widely the new message is being embraced among members, or how long it will last.
Publicly, the church has always said that its members were free to choose medical care. But some former Christian Scientists say those who consult doctors risk ostracism.
The truth may lie somewhere in between, said Rennie B. Schoepflin, a professor of religious history at California State University in Los Angeles and author of “Christian Science on Trial: Religious Healing in America.”
“There has never been a monolithic ‘Church of Christian Science,’ ” he said. “There has always been a tension between those in the church who were more zealous and those who were less so.”
The source of deepest tension between the two groups, said Gary Dorrien, the Reinhold Niebuhr professor of social ethics at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan, “is the fact that Christian Scientists are best known right now for denying medical care to people,” especially children, who subsequently die....
Historians ask which American war has been the longest
Source: St. Petersburg Times (3-22-10)
Host Bob Schieffer noted that milestone during the March 22, 2010, edition of CBS' Face the Nation. "March 19th was the seventh anniversary of the Iraq invasion, which began our longest war," he said.
We wondered if it really has been America's longest war....
It's worth noting that answering this question is more art than science. James Bradford, a Texas A&M historian, points out that the American Revolution may have begun with the Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776) -- or earlier, with the breakout of hostilities at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. Meanwhile, the end of the war could have been the the British surrender at Yorktown (Oct. 17, 1781), the signing of the Treaty of Paris (September 1783), the ratification of the treaty by the Continental Congress (Jan. 14, 1784), the ratification by King George III of England (April 9, 1784) or the exchange of the ratification documents (May 12, 1784).
Another problem: "It depends on how one conceptualizes a war," said Richard H. Kohn, a historian at the University of North Carolina. "Afghanistan could be considered simply a campaign of the 'war on terror' if one accepts that as a war, just as Korea and Vietnam could be considered campaigns of the Cold War rather than separate wars."
Finally, no one knows when the Iraq War (or Afghanistan) will end. "Maybe [Schieffer] figures Iraq will be the longest by the time we eventually leave, which of course is still possible," said Lance Janda, a historian at Cameron University in Lawton, Okla....
Pelosi may enter history as one of the great House speakers, according to scholars
Source: LA Times (3-23-10)
In the tense hours Sunday leading up to the House vote on a historic healthcare bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took time to call the former president of Notre Dame, Father Theodore Hesburgh.
The House Democrats' leader was not seeking spiritual guidance. What she wanted was Hesburgh to help lock up the vote of Rep. Joe Donnelly, a Democrat from South Bend, Ind., who was wavering over the abortion issue.
Donnelly ultimately pressed the "yes" button late Sunday night.
The incident, one of scores on the road to the Democrats' healthcare victory, illustrates that Pelosi -- long the target of Republican attacks -- is beginning to play the game as well as powerful former speakers such as legendary Masters of the House "Tip" O'Neill and "Mr. Sam" Rayburn....
"She may get a stellar entry in the history books, but that entry will not include the word 'bipartisan,' " said John J. Pitney Jr., a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College....
"There is nothing to strengthen a politician like a big victory," said Julian Zelizer, a congressional historian at Princeton University....
"Great past speakers like Rayburn and O'Neill became great not by winning one vote but by parlaying victories into sustained policy accomplishments and by using them to cement their party's hold on the House," said Donald F. Kettl, dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy.
"Has she helped the Democrats take the first big step toward a sustained majority?" he asked. "Or will resurgent Republicans use the vote to clobber the Democrats in the midterm election?"...
Republicans kick off repeal attempt, says Julian Zelizer
Source: CS Monitor (3-22-10)
Republican lawmakers and activists had no trouble segueing to their new mantra following the passage of health care reform: “Repeal it.”...
“You have a window where they can try to raise doubts about what’s about to happen,” says Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University in New Jersey....
“No one would have imagined the conservatives would be so energized a year after 2008,” says Mr. Zelizer. “Now we’re talking about a possible Republican takeover of Congress. And they almost killed Obama’s biggest program.”
Monday, March 22, 2010
Nominations for the least-accurate political memoir ever written
Source: WaPo (3-21-10)
Has Karl Rove played fast and loose with historical fact in his new memoir "Courage and Consequence"? History will decide. But recollections invariably differ -- perhaps never more so than in political memoirs. And Rove's isn't the first to spark debate over what is the true tide in the affairs of men. In that spirit, we asked a variety of people to name the least accurate political memoirs ever written....
JAMES K. GALBRAITH, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of "The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too."
That would be Richard Nixon. On this matter, I have to defer to a higher authority, specifically my father [John Kenneth Galbraith], who reviewed Nixon's memoir for the New York Review of Books on June 29, 1978. "A central theme of this book," he wrote, is that "Mr. Nixon never did anything wrong unless someone else had done something like it first. And all evil disappears if it has a precedent."
Runner up is L. Paul Bremer's "My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope," which was reviewed by my brother Peter in the NYRB. Peter wrote, in an email: "Nothing in his description of the country and its people suggests he was actually there."
Second runner-up: Robert Rubin's "In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington." Book World's review, which I wrote, held that, as philosophy, it compared poorly to the motto of the "great Austin ice cream parlor known as Amy's: 'Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first.' " At National Airport a few days later, I was introduced by accident to Karl Rove. His eyes narrowed. "The James K. Galbraith?" he asked. I nodded. "The only man," he said, "ever to get a mention of Amy's Ice Cream into The Washington Post."
DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, professor of history at Rice University and author, most recently, of "The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America."
My candidate would be James Buchanan's wildly disingenuous "Mr. Buchanan's Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion" (1866). Buchanan had the gall to shirk all responsibility for the Civil War. He blamed everybody but himself for the dissolution of the Union. A pathetic memoir aimed at trying to exonerate himself from serial wrongheadedness and flatfooted policy initiatives. What Buchanan wrote was revisionist blather.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Historic win or not, Democrats could pay a price, according to historians
Source: WaPo (3-21-10)
As the final round of the battle over health-care reform begins Sunday, President Obama and the Democrats are in reach of a historic legislative achievement that has eluded presidents dating back a century. The question is at what cost.
By almost any measure, enactment of comprehensive health-care legislation would rank as one of the most significant pieces of social welfare legislation in the country's history, a goal set as far back as the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt and pursued since by many other presidents. But unlike Social Security or Medicare, Obama's health-care bill would pass over the Republican Party's unanimous opposition.
Even Republicans agree on the magnitude of what Obama could pull off, while disagreeing on the substance of the legislation. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said: "Obviously, he will have achieved as president something nobody else has done. So in that sense, it's historic." But he added, "It doesn't end the health-care debate -- it just changes it. And if it does pass, it would be a historic mistake."...
In Texas Curriculum Fight, Identity Politics Leans Right
Source: NYT (3-19-10)
The social studies curriculum recently approved by the Texas Board of Education, which will put a conservative stamp on textbooks, was received less as a pedagogical document than as the latest provocation in America’s seemingly endless culture wars.
“Why Is Texas Afraid of Thomas Jefferson?” the History News Network asked, referring to the board’s recommendation that Jefferson, who coined the expression “separation of church and state,” be struck from the list of world thinkers who inspired 18th- and 19th-century revolutions.
Other critics were more direct: “Dear Texas: Please shut up. Sincerely, History,” was the headline of an online column for The San Francisco Chronicle.
This reaction wasn’t altogether surprising. The board’s wrangling over the curriculum had been a spectacle for months, not least because its disputes mirrored those taking place across the nation. In mid-September, citizens showed up with firearms at tumultuous town hall meetings on health care reform, and the Tea Party movement emerged as the vehicle of conservative insurgents....
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Jeffrey Goldberg: Juan Cole's Anti-Israel Propaganda Campaign
Source: The Atlantic (3-16-10)
[Jeffrey Goldberg is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. Author of the book Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror, he has reported from the Middle East and Africa.]
Juan Cole writes of me:
People like Goldberg never tell us what they expect to happen to the Palestinians in the near and medium future. They don't seem to understand that the status quo is untenable. They are like militant ostriches, hiding their heads in the sand while lashing out with their hind talons at anyone who stares clear-eyed at the problem, characterizing us as bigots.
I can't speak for people like Goldberg, but Goldberg himself has stated publicly for years what he expects to happen to the Palestinians in the near and medium future. If Juan Cole has ever read anything I've written, in The Atlantic and elsewhere, he would know that:
I'm for the creation of a Palestinian state on one hundred percent of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (or a Palestinian state that equals one hundred percent of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, through land swaps); a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem that mirrors the Israeli capital in West Jerusalem; an immediate end to all settlements; Israeli negotiations with Syria that would bring about peace and an end to Israel's occupation of the Golan Heights....
And yes, I've stared clear-eyed the problem, and the problem is people like Juan Cole, who want to deny to the Jewish people a state in their ancestral homeland.
Related Links
Religion is now the hottest topic for American historians
Source: Christianity Today (3-11-10)
The study of religion is too important to be left in the hands of believers.
So claims David A. Hollinger, a professor of American history at the University of California at Berkeley, in his response to religion emerging as the hottest topic of study among members of the American Historical Association (AHA).
Perhaps surprisingly, leading evangelical scholars voiced general agreement with his basic premise.
"The practice of history is best served by many historians working from all their separate angles," said Rick Kennedy, president of the Conference on Faith and History (CFH) and a professor of history at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. "What is good about the new surge in religious history is that something that was neglected is now gaining its rightful place."
Barry Hankins, resident scholar at the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, said he shared Hollinger's sentiments, "as long as the understanding of faith is not left only to unbelievers."
"The trick for insiders is to think critically about their own tradition, while the trick for outsiders is to try to develop a feel or affinity for the group he or she is studying," said Hankins.
In an annual survey of AHA members, 7.7 percent of respondents selected religion as one of three areas of interest. That topped the 7.5 percent who chose cultural history, ranked number one for 15 years....
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
States' rights a rallying cry for lawmakers and scholars
Source: NYT (3-16-10)
Whether it’s correctly called a movement, a backlash or political theater, state declarations of their rights — or in some cases denunciations of federal authority, amounting to the same thing — are on a roll.
In Utah, a bill by Representative Carl Wimmer, a Republican, would require the state to sign off on any federal health reform.
Gov. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, a Republican, signed a bill into law on Friday declaring that the federal regulation of firearms is invalid if a weapon is made and used in South Dakota.
On Thursday, Wyoming’s governor, Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat, signed a similar bill for that state. The same day, Oklahoma’s House of Representatives approved a resolution that Oklahomans should be able to vote on a state constitutional amendment allowing them to opt out of the federal health care overhaul.
In Utah, lawmakers embraced states’ rights with a vengeance in the final days of the legislative session last week. One measure said Congress and the federal government could not carry out health care reform, not in Utah anyway, without approval of the Legislature. Another bill declared state authority to take federal lands under the eminent domain process. A resolution asserted the “inviolable sovereignty of the State of Utah under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution.”...
“Everything we’ve tried to keep the federal government confined to rational limits has been a failure, an utter, unrelenting failure — so why not try something else?” said Thomas E. Woods Jr., a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a nonprofit group in Auburn, Ala., that researches what it calls “the scholarship of liberty.”
Mr. Woods, who has a Ph.D. in history, and has written widely on states’ rights and nullification — the argument that says states can sometimes trump or disregard federal law — said he was not sure where the dots between states’ rights and politics connected. But he and others say that whatever it is, something politically powerful is brewing under the statehouse domes.
Other scholars say the state efforts, if pursued in the courts, would face formidable roadblocks. Article 6 of the Constitution says federal authority outranks state authority, and on that bedrock of federalist principle rests centuries of back and forth that states have mostly lost, notably the desegregation of schools in the 1950s and ’60s.
“Article 6 says that that federal law is supreme and that if there’s a conflict, federal law prevails,” said Prof. Ruthann Robson, who teaches constitutional law at the City University of New York School of Law. “It’s pretty difficult to imagine a way in which a state could prevail on many of these.”...
Book by religion historian Wendy Doniger draws criticism by Hindus
Source: Inside Higher Ed (3-17-10)
Wendy Doniger, a professor of the history of religion at the University of Chicago, has drawn the ire of some Hindus who regard her scholarship as sacrilegious. During a lecture in London in 2003, someone in the audience threw an egg at Doniger to express disagreement with her interpretation of a passage in the Ramayana, a sacred epic.
The egg did not connect. But it proved that she had her audience’s attention. So does the response to her book The Hindus: An Alternative History, published last year by Penguin. In January, the National Book Critics Circle named it as one of five finalists in nonfiction for 2009. Around 30 protesters gathered outside the Tishman auditorium of New School University in New York when Doniger appeared with other finalists who were reading from their books at a public event. Countless others (well, thousands anyway) had signed petitions calling for Penguin to withdraw The Hindus from the market. Clearly "there's no such thing as bad publicity" is not a Vedic principle....
Doniger's book is a work of popularization and synthesis, but it performs those functions under a distinctly scholarly protocol. Her approach is to focus on the interaction, across the centuries, between the codified layer of belief found in the Sanskrit scriptures and various local forms of Hinduism. The latter, in turn, consist of both oral and written strands of vernacular tradition. In other words, Doniger takes great heterogeneity (at all levels: linguistic, theological, cultural, and political) as a given.
Sexuality is commonly found in folklore and secular writing, and it is an aspect (if not the only one) of the material Doniger examines. Some of the Hindu gods and goddesses are frisky, like their Greek and Roman colleagues. The elongated stone figure of the linga associated with Lord Shiva can be interpreted as a pillar of light, but it is hardly a case of Freudian enthusiasm to note its resemblance to an erect penis. And indeed there are believers who can accept this without suffering any cognitive dissonance....
There are, to be sure, cases of actual problems, such as when Doniger two different sets of dates for the life and death of the poet Mirabi. I wish that sort of thing still shocked me. But long exposure to the work of academics tends to dispel any notion that they are more accurate than, say, journalists. Sorry, that's just the way it is. Last month I read a book by an Ivy League professor who referred to the global impact when Khruschev gave his 1961 speech denouncing the crimes of Stalin. (A decent "Jeopardy" contestant might be expected to know that the speech took place in 1956.) For Doniger to have made various small citation errors, or to have attributed the doings of one emperor to another, seems par for the course in a book of several hundred pages....
The most interesting perspective on l’affaire Doniger that I have seen was published last week in The Hindustan Times, in a column by Ashok Malik.
Malik points to the recent case of M. F. Husain, an Indian painter who was driven into exile by the furor over his nude portraits of certain goddesses. Malik attributes the campaign against Doniger to a new sort of activist, “the internet Hindu,” who blogged and tweeted with excitement about the victory over Husain -- then went looking for more excitement. The infrastructure of indignation sprang into action when the NBCC decided to name The Hindus: An Alternative History as a finalist....
Historians blast proposed Texas social studies curriculum
Source: WaPo (3-18-10)
Historians criticized proposed revisions to the Texas social studies curriculum Tuesday, saying that many of the changes are historically inaccurate and that they would affect textbooks and classrooms far beyond the state's borders....
"The books that are altered to fit the standards become the best-selling books, and therefore within the next two years they'll end up in other classrooms," said Fritz Fischer, chairman of the National Council for History Education, a group devoted to history teaching at the pre-college level. "It's not a partisan issue, it's a good history issue."...
"I'm made uncomfortable by mandates of this kind for sure," said Paul S. Boyer, emeritus professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of several of the most popular U.S. history textbooks, including some that are on the approved list in Texas.
Boyer said he had not fully reviewed the Texas curriculum and did not know how he would respond to it. But he added that in theory, changes in his text could be required that would make him uncomfortable endorsing his own book....
"We now have the ability to deliver completely customized content" to different states, said Josef Blumenfeld, spokesman for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, one of three major publishers that supply Texas with most of its social studies textbooks.
But some historians weren't so certain. Fischer, who is a historian at the University of Northern Colorado, noted that first-year teachers fall back on what's most readily available to them -- their textbooks.
"Teachers have a lot to do and a lot on their plate, and if there's a nice big textbook that the kids have been taking home, they'll use it," he said.
Ask Congress to Support National History Day!
Source: Lee White at the National Coalition for History (3-17-10)
National History Day (NHD) is asking for your help to gain support from members of Congress for a $1 million National History Day appropriation that will help state programs grow and improve. NHD NEEDS YOUR HELP TODAY! We have two more days left and it is critical that you pick up the phone to contact your members of Congress and ask them to sign the NHD “Dear Colleague” letter.
Representative Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) is circulating what is called a “Dear Colleague” letter (see the full Dear Colleague letter at the end of this post). The letter is similar to a petition that members of Congress sign in support of funding a program. Our goal is get as many members of Congress to sign this letter, which will demonstrate wide-spread support for funding for the NHD program.
The Dear Colleague asks all members of the House to sign their name to the letter supporting NHD. This letter is addressed to the Chairman and Ranking Member of the House Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations Subcommittee asking them to support funding NHD in the FY 2011 budget. This is a very common practice, which is implemented during the appropriations process. It is important that we get as many signatures as we can – as soon as we can by COB Friday, March 19. The appropriations committee will literally count every signature and the more signatures we have the better chance we will have of getting $1 million in support.
Thanks to your past efforts, NHD was included in the omnibus spending bill for FY 2009 & FY 2010 with an appropriation of $500,000! It’s important to note that to be included in a congressional budget for the first time is a major accomplishment. National History Day clearly has the attention of members of Congress, so let’s try and build on our success. Keep in mind that we have programs across the country that could use the extra help of an increased congressional appropriation.
What to do?
Never called your Member of Congress before? Don’t worry, it’s easy! All congressional offices can be reached through the U.S. Capitol switchboard at (202)224-3121. When you reach your Representative’s office, your call will be answered by a receptionist. Tell him or her that you want to leave a message for the Representative. The receptionist will take down your message.
When calling a Representative’s office, tell them:
- Your name and the city and state you live in.
- You are calling to urge the Representative to sign the Dear Colleague letter, in support of funding for National History Day in the FY 2011 budget. The letter is being circulated by Rep. Van Hollen.
- Why this money would be helpful to the NHD program in your state and district, how it would make an impact to increase the number of participants and improve overall programmatic efforts in the state.
- They can contact Sarah Schenning in Rep. Van Hollen’s office at (202) 225-5341 with questions or to sign the letter.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Students protest tenure denial to historian Ronald Granieri
Source: The Daily Pennsylvanian (3-16-10)
On Monday night, nine College seniors in the final stages of writing their honors theses gathered on the third floor of Van Pelt Library. They wanted answers.
The seniors are part of a 17-person History honors thesis class that is leading a charge to protest the tenure denial of their thesis seminar advisor, Ronald Granieri.
An assistant professor of modern European history, Granieri was recently denied tenure in his second and last chance to apply for the standing. He originally applied last year in his sixth year of teaching at Penn.
His students — many of whom call him a mentor, a friend and the best teacher they’ve had at Penn — say the University’s decision raises serious questions about its commitment to quality teaching.
“Over the past year and a half Professor Granieri for all of us has been the most amazing teacher, honors director [and] support mechanism,” said Aro Velmet, a College senior in the seminar. “It seems terribly puzzling that a professor who is this well respected by undergraduates, has won this many teaching awards, is under threat of leaving the University.”
School of Arts and Sciences Dean Rebecca Bushnell declined to comment because of the confidential nature of the faculty appointment and promotion process. The exact reason for Granieri’s tenure denial is unknown and is not likely to be available to the general public....
Oliver Kamm: David Irving on the Pacific War
Source: Times Online (UK) (3-16-10)
[Oliver Kamm is a leader writer and columnist at The Times. He was previously an investment banker and co-founder of an asset management firm.]
I'm deliberately not providing a link for the article that I'm criticising in this post. The reason is that the article is by David Irving, who a court of law has determined is a Holocaust denier. But you can take my word for it that the material I'm referring to can be found on Irving's website.
I've recently written about Irving's notorious inflation of the number of victims of the Allied bombing of Dresden. I wasn't familiar, however, with Irving's techniques in writing about the Pacific War, in which the Allies defeated another racist power, Imperial Japan. I was thus interested to read an article that Irving has recently posted on his website but that he wrote in 1995, on the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima....
I've dealt with this claim of revisionist historians - and also of the fraudulent ignoramus Howard Zinn, who wasn't a historian at all - many times and won't do so here. It's bogus. The shock of the A-bomb - Nagasaki as well as Hiroshima - was crucial for the 'peace party' in Japan's Cabinet to prevail. My interest here is not in Irving's argument, on which he's out of his depth, as in his supporting material. For he prefaces his article with a disturbing photograph. It shows mounds of corpses against a bleak and devastated landscape. And the souce is cited as the Robert L. Capp Collection in the Hoover Institution Archives....
The photograph that Irving illustrates his Hiroshima article with is one of that series. It isn't of Hiroshima at all: it's of the 1923 earthquake. Moreover, the American historian who found the photographs in the Hoover Institution archive, Sean Malloy, acknowledges that he was mistaken....
My view of David Irving has long been that he has an extensive knowledge of primary and secondary historical sources and is a capable linguist. It's what he does with the source materials that is objectionable and an offence against historical truth. But this episode causes me to change my opinion. Irving is not only a racist faker: the man's a bluffer.
University of Toronto historian wins prestigious Holberg Prize
Source: EurekAlert (3-16-10)
Natalie Zemon Davis, professor emerita from Princeton University and now a University of Toronto history scholar whose books have reached a wide audience, has won one of the world's top academic prizes.
The Holberg Prize - established by the Norwegian parliament in 2003 and worth $700,500 US - is awarded for outstanding scholarly work in the arts and humanities, social sciences, law or theology. Philosopher Ian Hacking, also of the University of Toronto, won the prize last year.
"This is simply outstanding news for the University of Toronto, and such a fitting tribute to the stature of our humanities scholars in the international community," says Peter Lewis, acting vice-president, Research, University of Toronto.
Professor Davis has earned a reputation as a top scholar and a popular lecturer of the early modern era. A pioneer of early modern history, social and cultural histories and the study of women and gender, Davis has been praised for her archival work, her creativity, her compelling narration and her work in history on film. She is widely read outside of academic circles and has a long history of political activism in civil rights, women's rights, anti-racism, and issues of free speech. Her publications include Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1975), The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (1987), Women on the Margins: Three Sixteenth-Century Lives (1995), The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (2000), Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision (2000), and Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds (2006). A Passion for History, a book of conversations about her life as a historian, is to appear in May 2010. A popular essay writer, she has published over 70 articles....
Monday, March 15, 2010
James F, McMillan, Scottish historian of France, dies at 61
Source: The Scotsman (UK) (3-15-10)
PROFESSOR James F McMillan, Richard Pares Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh, has died at the age of 61. He was an outstanding scholar, an inspirational teacher, a brilliant academic manager and a wonderful colleague: the word "collegial" might have been coined to describe him.
His death robs the historical profession of a bright star whose warmth and humanity won him so many friends, in Edinburgh and many other places.
Jim McMillan showed early promise as a dux medallist at St Mirin's School in his home town of Paisley. He went on to the University of Glasgow and in 1969 emerged as the top Modern History graduate in his year. He then proceeded to Balliol College, Oxford, where he completed a D.Phil. thesis on The Effects of the First World War on the Social Condition of Women in France under the supervision of Richard Cobb.
This was the basis for his path-breaking book, Housewife or Harlot? The Place of Women in French Society 1870-1940 (1981), published at a time when "women's history" was still a minority interest.
After a year as a tutorial assistant in Glasgow in 1972-73, Jim's academic career began at the University of York, where he served as lecturer, and then senior lecturer, from 1973 to 1992.
His years at York were happy ones, especially after his marriage to Donatella Fischer. As well as producing two further books, Dreyfus to de Gaulle: Politics and Society in France 1898-1969 (1985) and Napoleon III (1991), Jim demonstrated his intellectual breadth by teaching undergraduate courses on the history and sociology of religion as well as on literary theory and history....
He was a truly inspiring figure whose remarkable human qualities and exceptional scholarship will be sorely missed by his colleagues, friends and family. He is survived by his wife, Donatella, lecturer in Italian at the University of Glasgow.
Project to digitize Canada's 1812 artifacts
Source: Welland Tribune (Canada) (3-15-10)
Sarah Maloney has a passion for history.
You can hear it in hear voice and see it in her eyes as she talks about the project she's been working on for the past several months.
The Port Colborne resident, who has a master's degree in history from the University of Western Ontario, was one of two people hired to by Brock University to carry out its 1812 Online Digitization Project.
"It's exciting because I got to see, handle and examine all of Niagara's hidden 1812 gems.
Niagara is rich in 1812 history, a lot happened in the area," the 24-year-old Maloney says.
"A good portion of what museums have is in storage. This project allows people to see everything there is to see. There's nothing hidden away."
"It brings the War of 1812 to life."
In the work carried out, Maloney and the other assistant on the project took more than 20,000 photos of artifacts and documents from RiverBrink Art Museum, Grimsby Museum, Jordan Historical Museum, Port Colborne Historical and Marine Museum, Niagara Historical Society and Museum and Niagara Falls museums, which includes Lundy's Lane Historical Museum.
One thousand items revolving around the war will eventually be online at www.1812history.comand ourontario.caas well. More than 800 items can be seen on those websites now and the project wraps up at the end of the month....
Renewed controversy in Australia over Boer War executions
Source: Daily Telegraph (AU) (3-16-10)
BOER War soldier Harry "Breaker" Morant was the victim of a cruel and calculated conspiracy by his British commanders, a Parliamentary committee has heard.
More than 100 years after Morant and his co-accused Peter Handcock were executed, the descendants of the men yesterday sought the help of Parliament to pardon the men.
But historians said they were guilty of murdering Boer prisoners, civilians and a German missionary - and their crimes should not be forgiven.
"Morant and his colleagues started randomly killing these people, we really don't know why, but it is incontrovertible that that's what they did," Professor Craig Wilcox said at the committee yesterday....
Professor Wilcox, who wrote Australia's Boer War, said there was no evidence of an order to kill prisoners from Lord Kitchener and pardoning the men would create great anguish for the descendants of those killed.
"What about the descendants of the people that they killed," Professor Wilcox said said. "I've looked into their eyes, I've talked to them."
War Memorial historian Ashley Ekins also opposed a pardon.
"These men were all guilty of cold-blooded murder of prisoners of war," Mr Ekins said....
Historian warns against copyright-fight heavy hitting
Source: The Register (UK) (3-15-10)
Copyright-dependent industries risk alienating the public and undermining intellectual property laws with their unregulated and aggressive tactics, according to an historian who has studied nearly 400 years of piracy and intellectual property law.
Adrian Johns, a professor of history at [the University of Chicago], told technology law podcast OUT-LAW Radio that the behaviour of large multinational companies whose business is based on copyright, such as record labels, publishers and broadcasters, threatens to turn the public against them.
"There's a trend towards almost absolutism, which I think is very unfortunate and could in the end be self-defeating," he said. "The big concern that I have is not the one that most people have which is that this is going to crimp the future of cultural change, though I think it may do that. It's that eventually the nit-pickiness of this kind of move might create a backlash that is more damaging than what it is trying to prevent."
Johns has just published a history of piracy, noting that the concept was first applied to ideas, rather than maritime theft, as early as 1650. He said that current industrial practices relating to the defence of intellectual property are risky....
HBO sought Easton professor's expertise for 'The Pacific' war series
Source: Allentown Morning Call (3-14-10)
A simple question from his 6-year-old granddaughter inspired Easton historian Donald L. Miller to start writing about World War II.
While walking with his granddaughter, they came across a World War II monument. Miller told her about his father, who had served in World War II. The girl asked if he was going to write about it....
Miller, a Lafayette College history professor, has since written three books on the history of World War II. That led him to his latest project, as historical consultant and a writer for HBO's ''The Pacific.''...
Miller says he was ''very pleased'' with how the series turned out. He describes it as ''very violent, explosively emotional and tremendously gut-wrenching.''
''What drew me into the study of war is people are at both their best and worst,'' he says. ''People do things they didn't think they were capable of doing. There are tremendous acts of heroism and acts of barbarism.''
Miller says the story of the Pacific campaign is filled with ''racism and violence.''...
Miller also is a historical consultant and writer for ''The Pacific'' Web site, which launches Monday. It provided content for seven hours of extras on the series DVD and Blu-ray.
Kenneth Dover, a Provocative Scholar of Ancient Greek Literature, Dies at 89
Source: NYT (3-13-10)
Kenneth Dover, an eminent scholar of ancient Greek life, language and literature who became known for his willingness to break longstanding taboos in print, from his frank descriptions of sexual behavior (both the Greeks’ and his own) to his baldly stated desire to bring about the death of a vexing Oxford colleague, died on Sunday in Cupar, Scotland. He was 89.
His death was announced by the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Mr. Dover retired as the university’s chancellor in 2005.
The author of many books on the Greek classical age, Mr. Dover was known in particular for “Greek Homosexuality” (Duckworth, 1978). It was the first openly published scholarly work to talk about Greek male love in unfettered sexual terms. (A few earlier books on the subject had been privately published and were little known as a result.)
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Professor Jack Pole's reassessment of American 'exceptionalism'
Source: Telegraph (UK) (3-13-10)
Professor Jack Pole, the historian who died on January 30 aged 87, was a pioneering figure in the study of American political culture whose challenge to the notion of American "exceptionalism" ignited a debate that has yet to burn out.
Pole, who was Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford from 1979 to 1989, published some of his most important work in the 1960s, when he was Reader in American History at Cambridge University. Most notable was Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic (1966), a revisionist work which examined the development of representative politics in the key American colonies of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia. He built on this foundation in his equally ground-breaking The Pursuit of Equality in American History (1978), in which he traced ideas of equality through the experience of different groups in American society, from slaves to feminists.
Pole, who stressed the value of a distinctively British voice in American historical studies, saw 18th-century Americans and their British contemporaries as fellow citizens in a great republic of Whig ideas. The difference was in the receptiveness of American political thinkers to the ideas of the Radical Whigs who, in the late 18th century, promoted the view that Britain's growing public debt augured impending national bankruptcy.
This view provided the backdrop for understanding how America came to see Britain's decision to tax the colonies after the Seven Years War as an unfolding conspiracy against their liberty by an imperial power seeking to relieve the tax burden of the British populace by bleeding its colonies dry.
But as Pole pointed out, Radical Whig ideals were being disseminated in what was essentially a highly deferential political culture. In a seminal article, Historians and the Problem of Early American Democracy (1962), Pole identified a paradox at the centre of American politics. While adult white male participation in 18th-century elections was widespread, only a favoured few – sifted from the ranks of the gentry – could stand for office. In a society of deference it was possible for the broad mass of people to consent to a scheme of government in which their own share was limited; but at the same time, by consistently voting for their social superiors, they lent a legitimacy to an unequal social and economic order....
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Richard Stites, Historian of Russian Culture, Dies at 78
Source: NYT (3-13-10)
Richard Stites, who opened up new territory for historians with a landmark work on the Russian women’s movement and in numerous articles and books on Russian and Soviet mass culture, died on Sunday in Helsinki, where he was doing research. He was 78 and lived in Washington.
The cause was complications from cancer, his son Andrei said.
Mr. Stites made a practice of seeking out unexplored historical byways. After publishing “The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism and Bolshevism, 1860-1930” (1978), a book that virtually created a subdiscipline, he turned his attention to mass entertainment.
In books like “Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900” (1992), he shed light on cultural forms previously ignored or dismissed, writing about the variety stage, the composers of factory songs and beloved actors like Lyubov Orlova, a star in musical comedy films of the 1930s, who, as he put it, “sang and danced her way through a decade of terror and mass executions.”
“Popular culture is part of history because it is as much a human experience as war, slavery, revolution and work,” he wrote in The Los Angeles Times in 1989. “It is what most people create and consume in their spare time. Looking at its themes and styles is the best way to uncover values held by millions of people about life, love, friendship, success and the outer world.”
One of his most important works, “Serfdom, Society and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power” (2005), explored the little-known world of the theaters maintained by noblemen on their provincial estates in the 18th and 19th centuries, whose peasant actors, musicians and painters influenced Russian high art.
“His works were one of a kind, outstanding in their writing and in their scholarship,” said Richard S. Wortman, an emeritus professor of Russian history at Columbia University. “He dealt with subjects that other people had not yet gone into.”
Richard Thomas Stites was born on Dec. 2, 1931, in Philadelphia and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1956. He received a master’s degree in European history from George Washington University in 1959 and accepted a teaching position at Lycoming College in Pennsylvania on the condition that he acquire expertise in Russian history.
To that end he enrolled at Harvard, where he studied with Nicholas V. Riasanovsky and, under Richard Pipes, wrote his dissertation on women in the time of Czar Alexander II. He received his doctorate in 1968.
After teaching at Brown University and the Ohio State University at Lima, he joined the history faculty at Georgetown University in 1977....
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Thomas Garden Barnes, Berkeley professor and advocate of Canadian history, dies at 80
Source: The Daily Californian (3-11-10)
UC Berkeley history and law professor emeritus Thomas Garden Barnes, who was known as an erudite academe of English, French, American and Canadian law and history, died Tuesday. He was 80.
Born April 29, 1930, Barnes graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard University in 1952, and went on to receive his doctorate in history at Oxford University three years later.
Barnes began teaching history and law at UC Berkeley in 1960 and retired in 2005 after 45 years of service. He was named a professor of history and law emeritus in January 2006, and is considered one of the leading historians of legal history in the 17th century, according to Roger Hahn, a campus history professor emeritus and long-time colleague of Barnes.
Family members of Barnes could not be reached for comment by press time....
University of Dayton historian criticizes textbooks for minimizing Reagan
Source: FOX News (3-11-10)
While the Texas textbook battle continues to simmer – what’s in, what’s out – parents may be inspired to start digging into their own children’s books to see what’s inside. Experts say that's a great idea. Gilbert T. Sewall, Director of the American Textbook Council, says, “The facts are often used to create an interpretation or reality that simply is at the very least controversial and may be dead wrong.”
As for controversy, Professor Larry Schweikart of the University of Dayton, sees plenty in the textbooks he reviews. When vetting a history book, Schweikart first turns to any section discussing President Ronald Reagan. He says what you find there will tell you everything you need to know about whether or not a book is slanted. Schweikart believes that’s how many errors wind up in school textbooks: bias. “The reason why textbooks get to where they are is because this is the world view of (a) the people who write the text books (b) people who edit the text books and (c) people who publish them.” According to Schweikart, “They all tend to come from New York, Boston, Washington and Philadelphia,” giving them a “drastically” different viewpoint from the rest of America. Schweikart says the majority of books he’s examined credit Mikhail Gorbachev with ending the Cold War, and not President Reagan. Calling the characterization “a joke” the history professor ads, “I lived through the Reagan years, I remember.”...
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
An Old Essay by Richard Hofstadter Used to Explain Tea Partiers
Source: International Herald Tribune (3-10-10)
The name Richard Hofstadter has been summoned up a lot lately in liberal opinion columns and the blogosphere as an eloquent and intellectually impeccable explanation for political developments like the Tea Party movement, the stardom of Sarah Palin, and the claim on right-wing talk radio that Barack Obama is a “socialist,” maybe even a “bolshevik” leading America to ruin.
Mr. Hofstadter was the highly respected, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Columbia University among whose most famous essays was one called “The Paranoid Style of American Politics,” published in Harper’s Magazine in 1964, which is the piece of writing being cited most often these days.
“I call it the paranoid style because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind,” Mr. Hofstadter wrote, describing what he viewed as a menacing proneness in America to irrational anger and passion....
Others, including The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, have found Mr. Hofstadter useful to explain the utter absence of any restraint in emotionally fervent attacks on Mr. Obama’s health care reform — congressional Republicans, for example, rallying under images of Nazi death camps with the caption “National Socialist Healthcare.” The liberal Huffington Post has published so many references to Mr. Hofstadter these days that it requires several pages to list them all.
“His paranoid style has been bandied about lately,” the Columbia University historian Eric Foner said of Mr. Hofstadter’s famous essay, “and if he were alive I’m sure he would apply it to the Tea Party and other things.”
David S. Brown, a professor of history at Elizabethtown College and author of the book “Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography,” said, “He would have a strong feeling of déjà vu.”...
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
J. Matthew Gallman responds to Jon Wiener's tobacco exposé
Source: The Nation (3-9-10)
J. MATTHEW GALLMAN
I read this article with interest because I have been on the periphery of some of the events Jon Wiener describes. I would like to take this opportunity to correct the record on a few points.
In April 2008 Dr. Gregg Michel, an historian from Texas, contacted me in my capacity as graduate coordinator in the history department at the University of Florida. He was working for a law firm representing one of the tobacco companies, and he was looking for some advanced students to do microfilm research. He e-mailed me a short ad, offering $20 an hour for part-time research. I passed it on to the graduate students. I believe that he interviewed and hired two students at the time, and added two more some time later.
I later learned that the graduate students were assigned to read specific Florida newspapers for specific years. They were to look for and copy any stories that pertained to tobacco and health. Their instructions were quite clear: they were not to make any decisions about whether the stories supported or contradicted the arguments made by Big Tobacco. They were to identify everything remotely relevant and pass it on to Michel....
Sir Kenneth Dover, classicist who wished to kill colleague, dies at 89
Source: AP (3-9-10)
Sir Kenneth Dover, a distinguished historian of Greek culture who gained wider fame by admitting his wish to kill a troublesome colleague, has died at 89....
Dover shockingly admitted his loathing for Trevor Aston, a fellow historian at Corpus Christi College in Oxford University, in his 1994 autobiography, "Marginal Comment." Aston, according to Dover, had become an embarrassment because of his drunken and irrational behavior.
"It was clear to me that Trevor and the college must somehow be separated, and my problem was one which I feel compelled to define with brutal candor: how to kill him without getting into trouble," wrote Dover, who was president of Corpus Christi at the time of Aston's death.
Aston died from a drug overdose in October 1985 on the day he was notified of divorce proceedings by his second wife, and several days after a heated confrontation with Dover. There was no evidence that Dover had any role in the death.
Would Dover have tried to kill Aston had he not committed suicide?
"Oh no, no no," Dover told The Associated Press in 1994.
"Well, I think it just wasn't practicable," he said....
Monday, March 8, 2010
Sergo Mikoyan, Russian historian and son of Stalin associate, dies at 80
Source: Radio Free Europe (3-8-10)
Prominent Russian historian and journalist Sergo Mikoyan has died in a Moscow clinic of leukemia, RFE/RL's Russian Service reports.
Mikoyan, 80, was an ethnic Armenian born in Moscow. His father was Soviet Communist Party leader Anastas Mikoyan, a long-time associate of Josef Stalin....
Eminent China Scholar Will Deliver 2010 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (3-8-10)
Jonathan D. Spence, an expert on Chinese history and culture and a professor emeritus at Yale University, will deliver the 2010 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities announced on Monday.
The humanities endowment calls the annual lecture, which carries a $10,000 honorarium, "the most prestigious honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities." Lecturers in recent years have included the writer John Updike, the bioethicist Leon R. Kass, and the political theorist Harvey C. Mansfield.
Mr. Spence will deliver his lecture, "When Minds Met: China and the West in the Seventeenth Century," on May 20 at the Warner Theatre, in Washington, D.C....
NCPH to meet in Portland, OR on March 12
Source: Press Release from the National Council on Public History (3-3-10)
History at work in the world. Celebrating its 30th anniversary, the National Council on Public History will be meeting in Portland next week. Adam Hochschild, nominated for the National Book Award, will be the conference’s keynote speaker in a free, public event, “Adventures in Public History,” at the Hilton Portland, Friday, March 12, at 8:00 p.m. Public history is a booming profession in which historical research and interpretation are made with and useful to the public, typically outside of the classroom. This conference is an opportunity to explore how public history is merging with the growing interest in civic engagement.
NCPH’s 2010 Annual Meeting, “Currents of Change,” is a joint conference with the American Society for Environmental History. Over 1,200 participants are expected for more than 150 sessions and working groups, 10 fieldtrips, Speed Networking, book exhibits, Consultants Reception, and other events. The full conference program is available at the NCPH website, www.ncph.org. Of special note this year are the floating seminar boat excursion, Speed Networking for new professionals, NCPH’s 30th Anniversary Reception, and professional development workshops on digital history. All are welcome to come see what the 21st-century intersection of public and environmental history looks like.
Keynote speaker, Adam Hochschild, is an award-winning author and journalist who uses history to reveal the lingering inequities of the past. His address, “Adventures in Public History,” is open to the public. Hochschild’s most recent book, Bury the Chains, was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award, and his Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (1994) is a deeply moving exploration of history and memory shortly after the end of the Cold War. It was primarily because of King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998), which brought to light the horrors of Belgian colonial rule in the Congo, that the leading historical organization in the United States, the American Historical Association, awarded Hochschild the 2009 Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Prize. According to the AHA, “Hochschild’s book triggered the first open national discussion of imperial injustices and eventually spurred other investigations and led to an official apology being tendered by the Belgian government, underlining the quiet power that a well-researched and well-written story text could exert in the public sphere.” Hochschild has been a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, a commentator on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” and a co-founder of and editor and writer at Mother Jones magazine.
Founded in 1980, NCPH is a national nonprofit advancing the field of public history, promoting professionalism among history practitioners and encouraging their engagement with the public. It is a membership association of consultants, museum professionals, government historians, professors & students, archivists, teachers, cultural resource managers, curators, film & media producers, historical interpreters, policy advisors, and many others. Members confer at the annual meeting each spring and share their expertise in a scholarly journal, The Public Historian, in a quarterly newsletter, and in multiple online formats. Learn more at http://www.ncph.org.
For more inform
John Dichtl, Executive Director
Tel. (317) 272-7142, Fax (317) 278-5230
March 3, 2010
National Council on Public History Annual Conference, with Adam Hochschild as Keynote Speaker, in Portland.
Amateur pro-Pius XII Jewish historian draws controversy
Source: NYT (3-7-10)
At home here on Long Island, he is Gary L. Krupp, medical equipment dealer, now retired after a career of ups and downs. He shares one car and a small house in a no-frills neighborhood with his wife, Meredith, and wryly describes himself as “an average schlemiel, just a Jewish kid from Queens.”
At the Vatican, he is known as Commendatore Gary Krupp, Knight Commander of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of St. Gregory the Great. For short, the Swiss Guard and cardinals address him as “Your Excellency.”...
But the more curious and complicated story is the transformation Mr. Krupp has undergone since. With no previous training or special interest in history, he has emerged as the Vatican’s most outspoken Jewish ally in a heated debate at the crux of tensions between Roman Catholic and Jewish leaders and historians: whether Pope Pius XII, the pontiff during World War II, did as much as he could have to save Jews from the Holocaust....
“I wrote 10 books about Pius XII, but in all these years I never knew how to shake things up for the cause like this wonderful man, Mr. Krupp,” said Sister Margherita Marchione, a professor emerita at Fairleigh Dickinson University who is considered the foremost defender of Pius outside the Vatican.
Deborah Dwork, a professor of Holocaust history at Clark University, put it another way: “Pope Benedict would not have had the chutzpah to go forward with the veneration process if not for this P.R. work Gary Krupp does.”...
Holocaust scholars, who consider Pius, with his worldwide network of diplomats and clergy, to be among the first world leaders to have grasped the scope of the Jewish persecution, have asked why he did not condemn it publicly. But most consider that and other questions unanswerable until the Vatican opens the complete archives of Pius’s papacy. Although a selection of those papers has been published, the Vatican has kept most off limits to outside researchers....
The assessment of Mr. Krupp’s work among many scholars and leaders of long-established Jewish organizations has been equally harsh.
Rabbi Eric J. Greenberg, associate director of interfaith affairs at the Anti-Defamation League, called Mr. Krupp’s mission “a campaign of misinformation.”
Professor Dwork said Mr. Krupp’s research was “amateurish, worse than amateurish — risible.” More disturbing, she said, it seems to have emboldened some in the Vatican to push harder for Pius XII’s canonization....
The Rev. John T. Pawlikowski, a Catholic priest who is a founding member of the board of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and a professor of social ethics at the University of Chicago, said the Vatican was “discrediting itself by associating itself with this kind of questionable scholarship.”
Mr. Krupp has heard it all. In 2008, several historians called to ask him to cancel his three-day conference in Rome, which ultimately drew many Vatican-friendly scholars but few with independent credentials.
One caller, Paul O’Shea, who has written extensively about Pius XII, tried to warn Mr. Krupp that proponents of canonization might be trying to use him. He urged Mr. Krupp to wait for the Vatican to open its files, and for scholars to complete their work, before reaching conclusions.
Mr. Krupp thanked him for his advice and ignored it.
“Listen to me: Pius XII was the greatest hero of World War II,” Mr. Krupp said recently. “He saved more Jews than Roosevelt, Churchill and all the rest of them combined. We should not let him be an issue between Catholics and Jews.”
He added: “And I predict this: Historians are never going to solve this whole problem. There will always be questions.”...
NJ street named after Marshal Petain stirs controversy, according to Robert Paxton
Source: NYT (3-7-10)
“Don’t know much about history,” goes the song first recorded by Sam Cooke, and, no, we don’t. But it can get complicated very fast when we have to learn.
Just ask local officials, aggrieved residents of a neighboring town and the folks on Petain Avenue, a tiny, two-house side street in this placid central New Jersey borough. All have suddenly had to confront the legacy of the French World War I war hero and World War II Nazi collaborator, for whom the street is named, and the balance between the burdens of the past and the demands of living in the present.
Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain was just one of the military leaders of the Great War (others were Foch, Pershing, Joffre and Haig) so honored in that part of town. From 1920 onward, Petain Avenue existed quietly, populated by 17 people in four families over the last half century. No doubt that quiet existence would have continued had not Eli Mintz, from nearby East Brunswick, dashed off a letter to Mayor Gloria M. Bradford in 2006....
The historical record is at once clear and as murky as human behavior. Robert Paxton, a retired Columbia University history professor and an expert on Vichy France, said Pétain’s life ended in disgrace, his death sentence for treason commuted to life. But rather than one of history’s great villains, a Hitler or Pol Pot, he’s a more representative historical figure, Professor Paxton added, someone long revered who in his 80s, whether out of vanity, weakness, a desire to save France, delusion or some combination, made a pact with the devil that led him into tragedy and ignominy.
“I don’t see him as a profoundly wicked man, but a deeply misguided one,” Dr. Paxton said. “His priority was to get along with the Germans, and as a result he got dragged in deeper and deeper. He was an accomplice, not an instigator.”
Professor Paxton said he understood why people would take offense, but that if we want to understand history, remembering Pétain’s fall from glory to infamy is more worthwhile than effacing his name. “His story is so much a part of the way history unfolds,” he said. “I don’t think obliterating it adds to our understanding in any way.”...
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Joan Waugh objects to call to replace Grant on the $50 bill with Reagan
Source: AOL News (3-3-10)
eviving a controversy about which American historical figures deserve to be honored on the nation's currency, a North Carolina congressman is proposing replacing a portrait of Ulysses S. Grant on the $50 bill with one of conservative icon Ronald Reagan.
"President Reagan is indisputably one of the most transformative presidents of the 20th century," Rep. Patrick McHenry, a Republican, said in a letter to his fellow members of Congress. "Like President Roosevelt on the dime and President Kennedy on the half-dollar, President Reagan deserves a place of honor on our nation's currency."
This is not the first time McHenry has lobbied for Reagan to take Grant's coveted place. In 2005, McHenry introduced a bill in Congress calling for the switch. That measure never made it past the House Financial Services Committee.
Previous attempts were also made to have Reagan take over for Franklin Roosevelt on the dime, as well as to take Andrew Jackson's place on the $20 bill.
"I'm outraged," Joan Waugh, UCLA history professor and the author of "U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth," told AOL News. "I think it's a bad idea, and particularly troublesome coming from Southern Republicans."
The commanding general who led the North to victory in the Civil War, Grant was not a beloved figure in the Deep South, Waugh says. "But for the rest of the country, he was an incredibly popular two-term president."...
Diane Ravitch's School Reform U-Turn Shakes Up Debate
Source: NYT (3-3-10)
Diane Ravitch, the education historian who built her intellectual reputation battling progressive educators and served in the first Bush administration’s Education Department, is in the final stages of an astonishing, slow-motion about-face on almost every stand she once took on American schooling.
Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schools and free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically critical. She underwent an intellectual crisis, she says, discovering that these strategies, which she now calls faddish trends, were undermining public education. She resigned last year from the boards of two conservative research groups.
“School reform today is like a freight train, and I’m out on the tracks saying, ‘You’re going the wrong way!’ ” Dr. Ravitch said in an interview.
Dr. Ravitch is one of the most influential education scholars of recent decades, and her turnaround has become the buzz of school policy circles.
“What’s Diane up to? That’s what people are asking.” said Grover J. Whitehurst, who was the director of the Department of Education’s research arm in the second Bush administration and is now Dr. Ravitch’s colleague at the Brookings Institution.
Among the topics on which Dr. Ravitch has reversed her views is the main federal law on public schools, No Child Left Behind, which is up for a rewrite in coming weeks in Congress. She once supported it, but now says its requirements for testing in math and reading have squeezed vital subjects like history and art out of classrooms....
New Islamic proclamation condeming terror - historian Furnish unsure of its effectiveness
Source: Washington Times (3-3-10)
The leader of a global Muslim movement Tuesday issued a rare religious edict condemning terrorism and denouncing suicide bombers as "heroes of hellfire" in an effort to help prevent the radicalization of young British Muslims....
Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, a former Pakistani lawmaker and a leading scholar of Islam, has issued similar, shorter decrees in the past. But the new fatwa makes the most detailed and comprehensive case against Islamic extremism by a Muslim, diplomats and analysts said....
Timothy R. Furnish, a historian of Islam, said the fatwa may not carry significant weight for many Muslims because Mr. Tahir-ul-Qadri is a Sufi Muslim, and not a Koranic literalist, as are such Sunni groups as the Wahhabis and the Salafis, who form the core of groups such as al Qaeda.
"It would seem to be simply another example of this centuries-long Sufi/Wahhabi-Salafi spat over how to interpret the authoritative texts of Islam," said Mr. Furnish, who noted that he has not read Tuesday's fatwa. "For every such legal pronunciamento, there is an antithetical one from the literalist camp …, which justifies such attacks with clear Koranic and Hadith [Traditions] citations."...
Teaching Canadian history through hockey
Source: Canada.com (3-3-10)
Turning hockey into a history lesson is a dream come true for Tim Lewis.
Lewis combined his love of hockey and passion for history and developed two hockey-themed history courses in the summer including Hockey and the Canadian Identity to 1952: The Development of a National Obsession, and Hockey and the Canadian Identity since 1952: Canada's Game in the Cold War and Beyond.
The courses aren't based on the pure history of hockey, but rather he uses hockey as a prism through which to understand wider issues in Canadian society.
Lewis admits he falls under a stereotypically Canadian umbrella when it comes to hockey. Born in a small town outside Moncton, N.B., he grew up on skates. If he wasn't skating with friends on a frozen pond, he was in his backyard shooting the puck on dad's homemade rink....
Despite Canada's big win on Sunday, Lewis still believes Canada's finest hockey moment was when Paul Henderson scored the game winning goal against the Soviet Union in Game 8 of the Summit Series in 1972.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Professor Jack Pole: historian of the US, dies at 87
Source: Times Online (UK) (2-16-10)
Professor Jack Pole was the foremost British historian of the United States in his generation, and his books and articles won him recognition and acclaim in the highest ranks of US historians. He was an expert on the American Revolution but he wrote on all periods and linked the history of the US to that of Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Jack Richon Pole was born in London in 1922. His father, Joe Pole, had arrived in Britain from Ukraine as a boy. The Jewish family were en route to New York but got no farther than Glasgow. Joe was imprisoned as a conscientious objector in the First World War and later he worked as a journalist and as the head of publicity for United Artists in London. There he met Jack’s mother, Phoebe Rickards, from a more anglicised Jewish family who ran a fleet of horse-drawn carriages, and later, taxis. She had been a suffragette and was once arrested in Hyde Park. Later she was a prominent Labour member of the council in Finchley and frequently crossed swords with the local MP, Margaret Thatcher. When his mother died, Jack Pole received a handwritten letter of condolence from Mrs Thatcher, by then the Prime Minister.
This radical background left Pole with an ingrained lifelong hatred of social and racial injustice. He campaigned for the rights of Commonwealth immigrants in Britain in the 1960s and supported the struggle for black civil rights in the US. He was sent to progressive schools: first, aged 4, to the experimental Malting House School in Cambridge founded by the educationist Geoffrey Pyke, which Pole disliked, and then King Alfred School in Hampstead where he was much happier.
On leaving school he went straight into the Army and for most of his six years in uniform he served in antiaircraft batteries, at Scapa Flow, in Somaliland and on the South Coast trying to shoot down V1 flying bombs.
He went up to The Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1946 where he took a First in modern history. His closest friend in the college, F. M. L (Michael) Thompson, also became a distinguished professor of history. Pole could have become a French historian, but he chose to work on the then unfavoured subject of US history and studied for his PhD in Princeton from 1949. It was unusual for a young British historian to be trained in the US at this time, but it was the making of Pole’s career. It introduced him to the US, its leading historians and their most recent work. During one summer holiday he and another notable English historian, Gerald Aylmer, took a road trip across America. Pole met Marilyn Mitchell in New York. They married in 1952 and had three children. The marriage was dissolved in 1988....
Residential school graves research a daunting task
Source: CBC News (3-2-10)
Investigations into cases of students who died or went missing while attending Canada's residential schools are a priority for the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission, says the group's new research director.
Trent University history professor John Milloy was appointed last month as director of research for the federal commission, which is charged with creating a historical account of the residential school system, helping people heal and encouraging reconciliation.
The Missing Children Research Project was launched in 2008 with the aim of documenting how many children died, went missing or were buried in unmarked graves at residential schools across the country from the late 1800s through much of the 1900s.
However, work on the project was delayed for a year when infighting at the $60-million truth and reconciliation commission led to the resignation of its three commissioners.
Though the restructured commission has yet to come up with a firm budget for the missing children project, Milloy's appointment in January raises hopes that the project has regained momentum....
Hastings, Beevor to publish competing general histories of World War II
Source: Sunday Times (UK) (2-28-10)
The generals of Britain’s second world war book industry are planning a head-to-head clash with heavyweight new tomes retelling the story of the 1939-45 conflict.
Sir Max Hastings and Antony Beevor, who between them have covered campaigns from Normandy to Stalingrad and the Pacific, plan the 800-page volumes in 2012 as the pinnacles of their military history careers.
Beevor, author of Stalingrad, D-Day, and Berlin: the Downfall, has already won the first engagement with a publisher’s advance believed to be about £1m. Hastings is not far behind.
“Max and I are both great friends and great rivals,” said Beevor, whose book will be published in Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. “It’s the whole war and yes, it’s a terrifying prospect.”...
Both Beevor and Hastings are known for their ability to cover the broad sweep of history while including vivid human stories. “It’s vital to get the point of view of those involved from both ‘above and below’, as it were,” said Beevor.
Hastings, whose most recent work was Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord, has his own thoughts about the 1939-45 conflict. “It’s perceived, albeit in some ways wrongly, as the last great simple collision between good and evil. It, of course, also includes a staggering range of remarkable stories of extreme human experience. Even now I keep discovering remarkable things about the period.”...
Studying and debunking Civil War myths
Source: The Virginian-Pilot (3-2-10)
Civil War history is rich with tales of blood and gore, heroism, and too many lies.
Some of the nation's pre-eminent historians will examine that history in a symposium, "Race, Slavery and the Civil War: The Tough Stuff of American History and Memory," at Norfolk State University in September.
The conference is free and open to the public, and registration opened this week.
James Horton, professor, author, and consultant to film and television, will lead the conference. He has signed on several noted Civil War scholars, including Pulitzer Prize-winning author James McPherson and David Blight, director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Cassandra Newby-Alexander, an award-winning professor and department chair of history at NSU, also will participate.
Horton said one of the biggest myths about the Civil War is that slavery was not a cause....
Controversial historical Irish slaughter re-examined by Scottish and Irish academics
Source: stv.tv (UK) (3-2-10)
An attempt to resolve one of Irish history’s most hotly disputed controversies is being tackled by Scottish academics it has been revealed.
University language experts have been given the go-ahead to use cutting-edge software technology to pore over thousands of witness accounts of an alleged massacre of Protestants centuries ago.
The so-called Depositions of English and Scottish settlers at the coal face of the 1641 Rising by Catholic rebels have been exploited by historians, politicians and propagandists through the years.
Now, researchers have been given a £334,000 grant to settle once and for all whether the death toll and notorious propaganda images of settlers being raped, mutilated and murdered were exaggerated.
Dr Barbara Fennell, senior language and linguistics lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, who will lead the project, said they expect to prove within a year whether witness statements were genuine or overstated by commissioners working for Oliver Cromwell....
Locked away in Trinity College Dublin (TCD) since 1741, the 20,000 pages of text were transcribed into digital format over the past two years....
Jane Ohlmeyer, professor of modern history at TCD, said the new evidence will help drive the debate on one of the most formative and contested events in Irish history.
Pellegrino's atom bom book withdrawn from circulation
Source: AP (3-2-10)
Publication has been halted for a disputed book about the atomic bombing of Japan that “Avatar” director James Cameron had optioned for a possible film, The Associated Press has learned.
Publisher Henry Holt and Company, responding to questions from the AP, said Monday that author Charles Pellegrino “was not able to answer” concerns about “The Last Train from Hiroshima,” including whether two men mentioned in the book actually existed....
Doubts were first raised about the book a week ago after Pellegrino acknowledged that one of his interview subjects had falsely claimed to be on one of the planes accompanying the Enola Gay, from which an atom bomb was dropped by the United States on Hiroshima in 1945. Holt had initially promised to send a corrected edition....
“I read a number of books on this period of time and none of them mentioned Mattias or MacQuitty. I knew there was no way those people could have been omitted if they were real,” said history professor Barton Bernstein of Stanford University.
Pellegrino’s own background was also questioned. He sometimes refers to himself as Dr. Pellegrino, and his Web site lists him as receiving a Ph.D. in 1982 from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. But in response to a query from the AP, the school said it had no proof that Pellegrino had such a degree....
Communist Party Needs to Loosen Its Grip in China
Source: NYT (3-1-10)
Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas, and the Chinese Communist Party is not exactly itching to release its iron grip on society and the economy.
But that is exactly what the party needs to do to prolong the fast economic growth that underpins its political legitimacy: Cutting state-owned companies down to size and opening up to private enterprise hold the key to sustaining productivity gains and redistributing income more equitably.
Coming from Western economists, such a prescription is standard stuff. What is striking is the urgency with which some prominent Chinese academics are making the same case.
“In the financial crisis, China seems to have performed quite well,” said Yang Yao, director of the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University. “But the problem is that government involvement in the economy has increased significantly.”...
The phrase “guojin mintui” — the state advances as the private sector retreats — has become common currency in debate about the Chinese economy....
Zhang Lifan, a liberal scholar and historian, goes so far as to argue that the retreat of the private sector was an underlying factor behind the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 and the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution.
“History has proved that ‘guojin mintui’ is not sustainable,“ Mr. Zhang wrote in a recent article. “If we can’t curb the advance of the state sector, it will definitely have an impact on China’s future industrial structure and economic development.”...
Vichy remains a source of discomfort in modern France
Source: NYT (3-1-10)
The tangled oak woods of the Château de l’Écluse are inhabited by a great silence.
The descendants of Fernand Plée, who purchased these grounds and this red-brick manor in central France in 1941, say they have nothing to hide. Their grandfather, they say, was a good man: a decorated veteran of the First World War, a willing partner to the Allies in the second, a man of generosity and courage.
But an otherwise ordinary legal battle between the nearby town of Salbris and Mr. Plée’s descendants, who inherited the estate after his death 40 years ago, has brought to light a somber chapter of the man’s past, and that of the Château de l’Écluse.
The property had once belonged to a Parisian entrepreneur, Émile Akar. In 1941, however, Mr. Akar being of Jewish descent, the wartime Vichy government confiscated the chateau. Fernand Plée then purchased it through the General Authority for Jewish Questions, the agency officially charged with France’s “Aryanization.”
Mr. Akar died well before war’s end, and any public memory of Mr. Plée’s act was apparently lost in the confusion and bliss and national forgetting of post-liberation France. He never returned the estate to the family of its rightful owner, despite laws obliging him to do so. It now falls to his descendants to confront that history.
President Jacques Chirac first officially acknowledged France’s “collective wrongdoing” during the Vichy years in 1995. Since then, the state has taken great pains to confront that dark era, compensating tens of thousands of victims and establishing the public memory of a long-repressed past. It is now widely felt, among Jews as among the general populace, that the nation has done everything in its power to right its past wrongs....
“The French Republic has done all it can,” said Tal Bruttmann, a noted French scholar of Vichy. “The Second World War is still here.”...
The family always assumed that Mr. Akar had leased the property. Despite some worldly success — he made a name for himself as co-founder of Amilcar, an early brand of automobile — he was known to be a mediocre bookkeeper and constantly in debt. But archival documents show that he purchased the chateau and its 1,940 acres in April 1936. He died in Marseille, having fled the Nazi-occupied north, on Nov. 16, 1940.
“What is important for us and our children is that this story be known,” said Jean-François Akar, 69, Émile’s great-nephew and adjunct mayor of Meudon, near Paris. “We’re not going to take revenge on these children for their parents’ errors,” he said, referring to the Plées. “One would not do justice in punishing the innocent.”...
‘Hero of Ukraine’ splits nation, inside and out
Source: NYT (3-1-10)
Half a century after his death at the hands of the K.G.B., Stepan Bandera, a World War II partisan, has not lost his ability to rally Ukrainians against Russia — and against each other.
Monuments to Mr. Bandera have sprung up across western Ukraine, his fight for the country’s independence glowingly recounted to schoolchildren on field trips, as if he were the George Washington of Ukrainian nationalism. But in eastern Ukraine and as far away as Moscow and Brussels, Mr. Bandera is reviled as a Nazi puppet.
This disputed legacy has ensured him a prominent role in today’s Ukraine. In a parting shot as his presidency was ending, Viktor A. Yushchenko named Mr. Bandera a “Hero of Ukraine,” one of the country’s highest honors.
That touched off a political battle that may make it more difficult for Viktor F. Yanukovich, who succeeded Mr. Yushchenko as president last week, to address the ethnic, regional and historical passions that divide the country....
Nikolai Svanidze, a Russian historian who serves on a Kremlin panel intended to combat “attempts to falsify history,” said the world often failed to understand the trauma suffered by the Soviet Union in World War II, when 25 million Soviet citizens died. Mr. Svanidze said that to honor someone with links to the Nazis was to sully the sacrifice of those people.
He compared some other former Soviet republics to teenagers who were asserting their individuality.
“They reject everything that seems unpleasant to them, that seems alien to them, or unnatural to them, everything that gets in the way of their own sense of identity,” he said.
Some Ukrainians described that view as condescending and self-serving.
“In the Russian mentality, there must always be an enemy,” said Mykola Posivnych, a Ukrainian historian and expert on Ukrainian partisans. “This enemy, Bandera, is very useful to them.”
Mr. Lesiv, the museum director, said the issue was even simpler: Russia has never come to terms with Ukrainian sovereignty. He said people in western Ukraine would rise up if Mr. Yanukovich tried to withdraw the Bandera award....
Monday, March 1, 2010
Historians (among others) honored at White House ceremony
Source: WaPo (2-26-10)
"Sorry I'm a little late. I had this thing I had to do," joked President Obama, just before an afternoon ceremony at the White House on Thursday in which luminaries in the arts and academics were presented with the highest medals for achievements in their fields....
The humanities citations went to prizewinning authors and historians Robert A. Caro ("The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, Means of Ascent and Master of the Senate"), Annette Gordon-Reed ("The Hemingses of Monticello"), David Levering Lewis ("W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963") and William H. McNeill ("Plagues and Peoples"). The list also includes speechwriter and lawyer Theodore Sorensen, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Philippe de Montebello and philanthropist Albert H. Small, as well as Wiesel, founding chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the author of "Night," whom the president gave his own big hug....
Delivering remarks at the end of the ceremony, Obama said that all of the honorees had touched his life in some way, including Caro, whose book "The Power Broker," about urban planner Robert Moses, the president had read when he was 22 and found "mesmerizing." And speaking of Sorenson, who once wrote speeches for President John F. Kennedy, Obama joked that he "had used up all the good lines for everybody."
David Bankier, Scholar of Holocaust, Dies at 63
Source: NYT (2-28-10)
David Bankier, who helped expand the contours of Holocaust research by examining the participation of ordinary Europeans in the extermination of their Jewish neighbors, died over the weekend after a long illness, Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem Holocaust center, announced. He was 63.
Mr. Bankier, who was head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, focused his scholarly work on anti-Semitism, especially its use by the Nazis to promote and sustain a broader ideology. He was the author of “Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion Under Nazism” as well as a collection of essays, “Hitler, the Holocaust and German Society: Cooperation and Awareness.”
Born in Germany just before the state of Israel was created, Mr. Bankier grew up and was educated here, earning his doctorate in Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He held a professorship at Hebrew University and had served as a visiting professor in Britain, the United States, South Africa and South America. He spoke excellent English and Spanish, in addition to German and Hebrew.
Divorced, Mr. Bankier is survived by three children.
Debate in Australia over history curriculum standards
Source: The Australian (AU) (3-1-10)
AUSTRALIA'S curriculum chief today argued that the study of history would increase as he fended off allegations that he was promoting a "black armband"version of the past.
Professor Barry McGaw told The Australian Online that the proposed national curriculum did not underplay the role of Europeans in Australian history.
He was responding to opposition education spokesman Christopher Pyne, who argued that the draft curriculum, unveiled today by Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, placed too much emphasis on indigenous history.
“I'm disappointed that (Mr Pyne) feels that having looked at the material,” said Professor McGaw, the head of the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority.
“It's not our intention that there's to be no European history”.
Professor McGaw said the curriculum would bolster the study of history and promote a more balanced view of Australia's past....
Gordon S. Wood wins American History Book Prize
Source: NYT (2-28-10)
The historian Gordon S. Wood won the American History Book Prize last week for “Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815,” an account of how America’s leaders created the country’s democratic institutions. The award, presented by the New-York Historical Society, comes with a $50,000 prize, an engraved medal and the title of American Historian Laureate....
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