Realigning America
By R. Hal Williams (2010)

Only a handful of presidential elections have become the stuff of political folklore. Prominent among them is the 1896 contest between William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan, known as the "Battle of the Standards" because the candidates clashed bitterly over monetary policy—Bryan delivered his famous "Cross of Gold" speech at the Democratic convention. The common view of the election was that wealthy businessman Mark Hanna engineered McKinley's election. But legends often mask reality—the campaign involved much more than "Cross of Gold" and Mark Hanna. In "Realigning America," R. Hal Williams got the story of the '96 campaign right at last. As Williams shows, the true architect of the GOP success was not Hanna but the candidate himself. "All of us want good times," McKinley said, "good wages, good prices, good markets, and then we want good money too." His program of sound money and tariff protection ended a generation of stalemated national politics and created a durable Republican majority. Williams's lucid retelling of the story of McKinley's triumph is a bracing reminder of the intellectual pleasures of synthesis. In a brief but compelling narrative, the author illuminates how and why Gilded Age Americans voted as they did, but he also shows us how much campaigns have changed in the long sweep of the nation's history.

Before the Storm
By Rick Perlstein (2001)

In November 1964, Lyndon Johnson bestrode the American political world while Barry Goldwater appeared destined for the ranks of other badly beaten presidential candidates, such as John W. Davis (1924) and Alton B. Parker (1904). Half a century later, Johnson seems an archaic anomaly of a discredited liberalism. Goldwater's losing campaign invites continued scrutiny as the harbinger of the modern world of conservatism. There is no better place to start than Rick Perlstein's "Before the Storm," a lavish re-creation of the 1964 campaign with a focus on Goldwater and conservatism. Perlstein's judgments are sharp and his prose telling: "The Eastern Establishment had no clothes. But to many it was still garbed in the cloak of limitless power." Fair and judicious to all the subjects of his narrative, Perlstein achieves the difficult feat of evoking human sympathy for most of the participants in the events of 1964....

As the end to her long and distinguished career at the University of Iowa approaches, professor Linda Kerber has a better word for retirement.

“I prefer to say ‘liberation,’ since I expect to continue to be a historian so long as my brain and eyesight hold out,” Kerber said last week in a lecture to UI’s Graduate History Society. “It’s the formal academic structures in which I’ve been embedded — structures that I admire, structures that I sought, structures that I have always considered myself lucky to have been part of — from which I retire.”

Kerber, the first woman to hold a chaired professorship at UI and one of the nation’s preeminent scholars in women’s history, will step away from classroom at the end of academic year after four decades of teaching in Iowa City. Before bidding farewell, however, she will be honored April 3 with a Distinguished Achievement Award at UI’s annual Celebration of Excellence and Achievement Among Women....

Alan Brinkley is an historian at Columbia University.

The new era doesn’t seem to have had much impact on the ad men.   The opening moments of the season begins with a civil-rights demonstration on Madison Avenue, where cretinous ad men at Young and Rubicam are throwing water bombs out of the window down onto African-American marchers. At Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, there are no such juvenile attacks.  Not because they have respect for the marchers, but because the windows don’t open in their building.  Sterling Cooper publishes an advertisement showing that the company supports equal opportunity – eager to embarrass Y&R. But they soon find a crowd of African Americans in the lobby waiting for jobs.  Perhaps needless to say, they had no interest in hiring African Americans.

For a while in this first episode, it seems that Don has reached something close to contentment.   He has moved into an expensive, attractive apartment – not the drab, dark rooms he inhabited before.  His children are spending time with him, and the family looks more or less happy.  Even at work, he seems unperturbed when Peggy presents a failed advertisement for baked beans.  I had thought that by the time the new season began, Megan would be gone – or on her way to being gone.  But no. Don and Megan are married and still together. Megan is even joining him in the company, no longer a secretary but a colleague of Peggy.  And perhaps most surprising, Don has confided in Megan with her darkest secret – Dick Whitman....

A former University of Wisconsin professor of American history who gained international recognition as a religious scholar died in Madison on Saturday at the age of 76 after a short bout with cancer.

Paul Boyle was UW Merle Curti Chair Emeritus in American history. His work centered on religion and its impact on American life. He published a number of books on American history, including on the Salem witch trials of the 17th century and American culture in the age of the atomic bomb.

Florencia Mallon, the chair of UW’s history department, described Boyer as humble, generous and supportive of other colleagues.

“He was an incredibly unassuming person,” Mallon said. “He was one of the most outstanding people in his field. … He was an internationally-known historian, but he was a very humble man. He never blew his own horn.”...

Michael J. Hogan, whose leadership style and policies as president of the University of Illinois were criticized by many faculty members, has resigned, the chairman of the system's Board of Trustees announced on Thursday.

In a written statement, the chairman, Christopher G. Kennedy, said that Mr. Hogan, who has been president for less than two years, would remain in office "through a transition period" until July 1. He will then serve as a tenured faculty member, the university said. Mr. Hogan, a historian, would be replaced permanently, Mr. Kennedy wrote, by Robert Easter, who is interim vice chancellor for research on the flagship campus, in Urbana-Champaign, and has served in a number of leadership roles throughout the system.

"The board feels that the most appropriate next step in univer­sity leadership should come from a proven administrator with a track record of collaboration and success within our university," the chairman wrote....

Peter Novick, a University of Chicago history professor, ignited controversy by asserting the legacy of the Holocaust had become too much a part of American Jewish identity in his 1999 book The Holocaust in American Life.

“What Peter did was say ‘How come no one was interested in this until the ’60s and ’70s?’ ” said Bruce Cumings, chair of the History Department at University of Chicago.

Mr. Novick, described by friends as a non-observant Jew, died of lung cancer Feb. 17 at his Chicago home. He was 77....

Jennifer Homans is the author of Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet. She was the wife of Tony Judt, who died in August 2010. Accompanying her essay in this issue is an excerpt from his just-published book, Thinking the Twentieth Century, written with Timothy Snyder, the author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.
 (March 2012)

I was married to Tony Judt. I lived with him and our two children as he faced the terror of ALS, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. It was a two-year ordeal, from his diagnosis in 2008 to his death in 2010, and during it Tony managed against all human odds to write three books. The last, following Ill Fares the Land and The Memory Chalet, was Thinking the Twentieth Century, based on conversations with Timothy Snyder.¹ He started work on the book soon after he was diagnosed; within months he was quadriplegic and on a breathing machine, but he kept working nonetheless. He and Tim finished the book a month before he died. It accompanied his illness; it was part of his illness, and part of his dying.

The book is a history of twentieth-century thought. It begins with his reflections on Jewish idealism and Jewish suffering in Europe and ends with a devastating account of the failure of American politics in the post–cold war world. It is also an intellectual autobiography—of sorts. “Of sorts” because Tony rarely wrote in the first person, and the autobiographical sections of the book were wedged in, almost reluctantly, between the ideas, the history, the politics, and the ethical dilemmas that were central to his life.

This doesn’t mean that the book is not personal. For Tony, ideas were a kind of emotion, something he felt and cared about in the way that most people do about feelings like sadness or love. This, as the book shows, goes back to the beginning—even before the beginning—of his life: Tony was named after his father’s cousin Toni, who perished as a young girl in Auschwitz. As he was growing up, his father passed on his own passion for left-wing politics and European history as a form of parental love: Tony’s thirteenth birthday present, which he devoured, was Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume study of Trotsky. Ideas and the need for historical explanations ran deep, back then and right through to Thinking the Twentieth Century....

Professor Brian Shefton, who has died aged 92, was a leading expert on Greek and Etruscan artefacts; after joining Newcastle University in 1955 as a lecturer in Greek Archaeology and Ancient History, he began to build up a collection of treasures which led to the university’s Greek Museum being renamed the Shefton Museum of Greek Art and Archaeology in his honour.

Smart guy Assistant Professor of History Gregory O'Malley of the University of California Santa Cruz has aired his thoughts on Ubisoft's choice of historical setting for Assassin's Creed III.

The War of Independence is the next destination for the franchise, but it's far from a 'clear cut' conflict. There's so much to draw from, he says, with "diverse and complicated" armies.

Americans good, British bad? Ubisoft has been adamant neither side will come off looking so clearly defined. O'Malley agrees, citing just how complicated it all was....

"There were a lot of people in North America who chose to remain loyal to Great Britain, so some American families ended up split, which could set the stage for some drama," said Gregory O'Malley.

"For example, Ben Franklin's son sided with Britain and they almost never spoke again," he noted.

"Both sides had Native American allies. Also many American colonists had spent a lot of time living on the frontier and had really changed. They seemed pretty foreign to the British, so that tension between the British and British-Americans who had kind of gone native seems interesting to me."...

UNC alumnus Taylor Branch won the Pulitzer Prize for his three-volume history of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. More recently, he has become a well-known critic of the NCAA and college sports.

Branch will be speaking at Sonja Haynes Stone Center at 7 p.m. tonight on the role of violence in protest and other areas of life._

Daily Tar Heel: Why did you choose to focus on violence?

Taylor Branch: I think quite frankly violence and its opposite, nonviolence, ought to be a university subject.

Our media, our movies, our television are permeated with violence, and yet I dare venture most of the people in the audience at Chapel Hill on Monday night will not have seen much violence firsthand.

We don’t often just think about the place of violence itself. It’s one of those rare things that’s arresting and fascinating but doesn’t get a whole lot of thought....

John Richardson Steer was born in Bournemouth, attended Clayesmore School in Dorset, and took his first degree in History at Oxford (Keble College). He decided to go on from there to the Courtauld Institute of Art when he graduated as a result of visiting the Ashmolean Museum and hearing some lectures on Venetian art by a visiting scholar from the Courtauld, Johannes Wilde – one of the great generation of immigrant art historians who helped to establish the subject in Britain when they were forced to leave Germany in the 1930s, an exodus that brought, among others, Sir Ernst Gombrich and Sir Nikolaus Pevsner to this country....

When Mary Beth Norton went to work at Cornell University in 1971, she was the history department's first female hire. But now the accomplished professor has a different mark of distinction: She is the oldest American-history scholar at Cornell.

"I've always thought of myself as the sweet young thing in the department," Ms. Norton, who will turn 69 this month, says with a laugh. "But that's not true anymore."

A growing proportion of the nation's professors are at the same point in their careers as Ms. Norton: ­still working, but with the end of their careers in sight. Their tendency to remain on the job as long as their work is enjoyable—or, during economic downturns, long enough to make sure they have enough money to live on in retirement—has led the professoriate to a crucial juncture.

Amid an aging American work force, the graying of college faculties is particularly notable. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of professors ages 65 and up has more than doubled between 2000 and 2011. At some institutions, including Cornell, more than one in three tenured or tenure-track professors are now 60 or older. At many others—including Duke and George Mason Universities and the Universities of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Texas at Austin, and Virginia—at least one in four are 60 or older....