SOURCE: NYT (9-30-12)
...Praised for his meticulous research, Mr. Genovese argued that slave life in the pre-Civil War South was not one of continuous cruelty and degradation. Rather, he described a system of “paternalism” in which slaves had compelled their owners to recognize their humanity. This, he said, allowed the slaves to preserve their self-respect as well as their aspirations for freedom while enabling their owners to continue to profit from their labor.
The book in which he articulated this view most completely was “Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made,” which in 1975 won the Bancroft Prize for American history writing. The historian Edward L. Ayers, writing in The New Republic in 1994, called it “the best book ever written about American slavery.”
But others criticized the book as being weak in its analysis of the economics of the period and took issue with its view that a paternalistic relationship was peculiar to slavery in the United States. Some said that the buying and selling of slaves could hardly be considered paternalistic; parents do not normally sell their children, the historian Eric Foner wrote in 1982.
More broadly, Mr. Genovese was accused of playing down the truth that slavery, by definition, demonstrates the cruelest kind of racism. Mr. Genovese repeatedly felt compelled to assert that his books were not an apology for slavery. In subsequent books, Mr. Genovese praised intellectual life in the antebellum South, particularly its tradition of cooperative conservatism, which he saw as kinder than capitalism in the North. He cited statistics showing Southern whites, even those from disadvantaged families, were more apt to go to college than Northern whites. He argued Southerners preferred broader ownership on property and more constraints on the marketplace....
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SOURCE: Marc Bauerlein in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. (9-28-12)
Marc Bauerlein teaches English at Emory University.
Eugene Genovese died Wednesday morning, passing away in his hospital bed at home after a long battle with heart disease. When I sat with him the night before and clasped his hand, he blinked his eyes for a moment, then sank back into darkness. He was ready for months, and he anticipated, with God’s blessing, reunification with his wife, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who died five years ago. (Both of them embraced Roman Catholicism late in life—Betsey’s perceptive account of her conversion can be found in an essay that appeared in First Things in April 2000.)
Genovese will be remembered for two things that don’t often coexist in figures in our time. First, he was a scrupulous, diligent, and discerning scholar; his work on the antebellum South will stand as a monumental corpus for years to come. Second, outside the classroom and the archive, he was a vigorous partisan, sometimes confrontational, identifying political adversaries and hurling broadsides with Homeric force.
Remarkably, though, the one characteristic didn’t compromise the other. To understand why, consider Genovese’s explanation for choosing Southern slaveholders as his first subject.
“Well,” he told me, “at Columbia when I asked my adviser how to pick a dissertation topic, he told me to choose the things most opposed to my own point of view. You know, I was a leader in the Communist Youth, and the farthest I could get from that was the master on the plantation.”...
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SOURCE: Dissent Magazine (9-11-12)
The following is an exchange between Tim Barker, assistant editor at Dissent, and James Livingston, professor of history at Rutgers University and author, most recently, of Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul. In this exchange, Barker and Livingston argue about the thesis of that book as well as a number of recent essays by Livingston on socialism and socialists.
Part I: Tim Barker – Has the Left Won?
Part II: Response by James Livingston
Part III: Reply by Tim Barker
Part IV: Final Response by James Livingston
I’m going to focus in this exchange on a pair of complementary essays you wrote recently: “How the Left Has Won,” published in Jacobin, and “Socialism Without Socialists, or, What’s the Matter With Leftists?” They’re very rich interventions, so we won’t be able to address every point. At the same time, they deal with some of your most important preoccupations, so discussion will likely range beyond the texts themselves.
Interested readers should check out both pieces, but I’ll try to be explicit in explaining your thesis. So far as I can tell, you argue that most leftists hold mistaken beliefs about (a) the dynamics of historical change and historical agency and (b) the meaning of socialism. (These two strains obviously intersect at many points, but I think the analytic distinction is useful.) In this first missive, I’ll focus on your philosophy of history, trying to sum up your position and offer some of my reservations....
SOURCE: University of Winnipeg (9-24-12)
WINNIPEG, MB – The University of Winnipeg’s Oral History Centre (OHC) has received a $500,000 grant from the Aboriginal Healing Foundation to document the intergenerational effects of the residential schools through a digital storytelling project. The focus will be on Aboriginal men. The research project, entitled “Children of Survivors: The Intergenerational Experiences of Residential Schools”, will be conducted in partnership with UWinnipeg’s Indigenous Studies Department, the Prairie Women's Health Centre of Excellence, Ka Ni Kanichihk and Moon Voices.
“We are very grateful for this funding which will help promote intergenerational reconciliation of the residential school legacy and contribute to the national healing legacy,” explained Dr. Alexander Freund, Associate Professor of History, Co-director of the Oral History Centre (OHC).
“This project will help us further understand how the residential school legacy passes on between generations,” said Dr. Julie Pelletier, Chair and Associate Professor, Faculty of Indigenous Studies at UWinnipeg. “We need survivors to share their experiences, which will help the healing process and engage Canadians as we move together along the path of reconciliation.”...
SOURCE: Time (9-27-12)
TOKYO – The good news is that there won’t be a new war in Asia. The bad news is that the old one never really ended. And with Japanese and foreign patrol boats firing water cannons at each other this week, it may not be long before the real shooting resumes.
“The dispute over the Senkaku Islands is a direct legacy of the Pacific War. For many people, particularly in China, that war is still going on,” says Liu Jie, professor of history and international relations at Tokyo’s Waseda University.
Liu was among a dozen historians who converged on Tokyo this week to take a new look at the 15-year conflict that ended – or seemed to – with Japan’s surrender in August 1945. The consensus is grim: Nearly seven decades later, wartime adversaries share little agreement over how the war started, who was responsible or how to bury grudges that remain very much alive....
SOURCE: Democracy Now! (9-27-12)
In this online exclusive, we continue our discussion with University of Wisconsin professor Alfred McCoy on U.S. torture policy, the Obama administration’s refusal to prosecute war crimes, and new revelations that waterboarding was used more often than the government ever acknowledged.
Click here to see part one of this interview.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re now joined by Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He’s the author of several books, including, most recently, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation. His past books include A Question of Torture and Policing America’s Empire.
Talk about what was found in Somalia. And what is the kind of information that’s being used now?
ALFRED McCOY: Sure. The Somalia incident, I think, represents a continuity of rendition policy from President Bush to President Obama. Under President Bush, the CIA began funding the establishment of this prison inside the basement of Somalia security in Mogadishu. And they began snatching terror suspects from cities and slums across East Africa, where, as you know, al-Qaeda has been very active bombing U.S. embassies and the rest. And these suspects are flown to this prison, where they are under the custody of Somali authorities, but we pay the guards. The CIA pays the guards. And they have unlimited access to the prisoners and to the intelligence being harvested by the Somali guards’ interrogation of the detainees. This started under President Bush. It is continued under President Obama. And it is an example of rendition to a country where we cannot be certain that human rights are being observed, therefore it’s a clear violation of Article 3 of the U.N. Convention Against Torture....
SOURCE: Reason (9-26-12)
The historian Eugene Genovese has died at age 82, leaving a legacy that will be confounding ideologues for decades to come. His scholarly focus was the antebellum South, and his most famous book was Roll, Jordan, Roll, a study of slavery that broke important ground by presenting slaves as more than just victims and investigating the rich culture they built for themselves. It was the sort of book you might expect to be written by a leftist, and sure enough, Genovese came out of the left. He wasn't some mild-mannered liberal, either: His first major public controversy came when he announced that he welcomed a Viet Cong victory in Vietnam.
But Genovese was also a cultural conservative, a sympathetic interpreter of southern traditionalists, and a fierce critic of the academic left....
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SOURCE: Atlanta Journal-Constitution (9-26-12)
Eugene D. Genovese, an American historian known for his writings on the Civil War and slavery, died Wednesday. He was 82.
Dr. Genovese taught and guest-lectured at several colleges and universities across the country, including Emory University, Georgia State University, Georgia Tech, the University of Georgia, Rutgers University, the University of Rochester and the College of William & Mary....
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SOURCE: Pantagraph.com (9-26-12)
BLOOMINGTON — In a roundabout way, Central Illinois saved the United States.
That’s among the conclusions Bloomington attorney Guy Fraker reached in researching his book, “Lincoln’s Ladder to the Presidency,” about Abraham Lincoln’s years as a circuit-riding lawyer in Central Illinois.
The book goes on sale next month.
“If Lincoln had not come from Central Illinois and the circuit, he would not have been nominated (for president). … I really believe Central Illinois made Abraham Lincoln president and I believe Abraham Lincoln is the only man who could have saved the country,” Fraker said....
SOURCE: WaPo (9-25-12)
The ideas and legacy of Paul A. Volcker loom as large in contemporary economic debates as his 6’7″ frame. From the merits of the most recent Federal Reserve actions to boost the economy to how to regulate Wall Street, many of the challenges of today have echoes of those that the former Fed chief grappled with in a five-decade career. William L. Silber has written a rich and detailed new biography of a man who has left as deep an imprint on the world economy as anyone of his generation. Silber, a professor at New York University and author of a bestselling textbook on money and banking, discussed the lessons for the present from his new book, “Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence.”
Washington Post: What do you see as the lessons that Ben Bernanke and the current Federal Reserve should be taking from Volcker’s experience in the 70s and 80s?
William L. Silber: I’m going to preface what I say with this: Bernanke gets an A for what he did in 2008. He did exactly what a central banker, knowing the history of the Great Depression, should have done when confronted with the potential for panic. Open up the floodgates and lend. But now he should worry about the fallout from remaining too easy for too long, which Volcker maintains is the reason we lost the battle against inflation before....
SOURCE: NYT (9-25-12)
Honorable men, as they were called in the golden age of chivalry, were rich enough to outfit a squadron of knights and brutal enough to lead them into battle, often culminating in the killing and plundering of civilian populations. The code of chivalry defined honor in ways that are familiar to people today — as honesty, loyalty, courage — and in ways that are not. It was honorable, for example, to show mercy to a defeated enemy, but only if the enemy was a social equal.
There was no dishonor in slaughtering commoners.
Maurice H. Keen, a historian who presented that unvarnished view of the medieval nobility in his book “Chivalry,” was one of a small group of scholars in the 1980s who re-examined the record of the chivalric knights, long portrayed in romantic literature as do-gooders, and who found it — with all due respect to Thomas Malory and Walter Scott — incomplete.
There were many do-gooders and brave fellows, no doubt. And the chivalric code did moderate and civilize men’s behavior, especially toward women of equal status. But Mr. Keen, who died on Sept. 11, argued that chivalry was mainly a “cult of martial virtues” for men and about men, charting a path to glory, honor and wealth. From about 1150 to 1500, he wrote, obeying its code was the only way for aristocrats to move higher on the social ladder and the only way for commoners to reach the first rung....
SOURCE: Haaretz (9-20-12)
After 30 years, he's giving up. "This is the last book I will write about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," declares historian Benny Morris, sitting on the balcony of his home, overlooking distant lush hilltops covered with cypresses and pines. A pioneer in researching the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and one of the most prominent Israeli historians of his generation, he has had his fill of the exhausting and bloody cycle that he has documented for the past three decades. "The decades of studying the conflict, which led to nine books, left me with a feeling of deep despair. I've done all I can," he says. "I've written enough about a conflict that has no solution, mainly due to the Palestinians' consistent rejection of a solution of two states for two peoples."
SOURCE: AHA Today (9-24-12)
The American Historical Association voices concerns about recent developments in the debates over “open access” to research published in scholarly journals. The conversation has been framed by the particular characteristics and economics of science publishing, a landscape considerably different from the terrain of scholarship in the humanities. The governing Council of the AHA has unanimously approved the following statement. We welcome further discussion in the comment section below.
AHA Statement on Scholarly Journal Publishing
(4 September 2012)
Many members of the international scholarly and scientific community are justifiably concerned by a growing inequality of access to the fruits of their labors. The subscription prices for many journals, especially scientific journals, have escalated to the point where almost no individuals and fewer and fewer institutions can afford to subscribe. Prosperous universities and institutes maintain their subscriptions and their members thereby enjoy free access to the content of thousands of journals. Other, less fortunate, scholars have free access to declining numbers of journals, thereby impoverishing the research and pedagogical capabilities of their communities.
In today’s digital world, many people inside and outside of academia maintain that information, including scholarly research, wants to be, and should be, free. Where people subsidized by taxpayers have created that information, the logic of free information is difficult to resist.
The AHA, like other scholarly societies, has been wrestling with this complex discourse for some time. The issues have provided a focus of conversations in our governing Council; and staff have participated in relevant conference panels. Recently, however, decisions made at individual institutions regarding faculty publication, debates over federal legislation, and the influential “Finch report” in the United Kingdom have drawn broader attention the issue of open access to scholarly journals.
The Finch Report is particularly significant because it is likely to influence public policy. Relying implicitly on evidence and practices largely drawn from the sciences, the Report builds a case for open-access journals, free to everyone with internet access. It recognizes, however, that information is not free (indeed never has been); financial resources are required to produce high quality academic journals – even of the digital variety. Accordingly, the Report recommends a transition in the financing of journals away from subscription revenues to a system in which authors pay journals when their work is published and all content is offered free to readers. In the Finch Report, this is called an author payment charge, or APC.
The concerns motivating these recommendations are valid, but the proposed solution raises serious questions for scholarly publishing, especially in the humanities and social sciences.
(a) Would the unfairness of unequal access be replaced by a different unfairness, one of opportunity to publish based on the availability of funds? Rich universities (and rich authors) can with equanimity pay a charge to have work published. So can those funded by research grants with provisions for publication subventions built in. But others, especially junior scholars and those with only tenuous institutional arrangements, cannot pay. This different unfairness would be at least as pernicious as the current one. It would particularly diminish publication opportunities in fields where grants tend to be small and not central to the way research is done. For a foundation considering a million dollar physics grant, the inclusion of an additional $6,000 to publish the three articles that the proposers hope will result is completely trivial; for a historian who already funds his/her own summer trips to archives, that same $6,000 could represent a substantial share of the year’s salary.
(b) While libraries (and individuals) would be able to maintain journal subscriptions, would universities and research institutes find themselves robbing Peter to pay Paul? Would the money saved from library budgets instead be used to subsidize publication for scholars?
(c) Would the finances of the most comprehensive “flagship” journals be imperiled? While they accept roughly the same number of articles as others, they must evaluate many more submissions across a much wider swath of their disciplines, and have larger sections devoted to book reviews and other content that produces no revenue? Last year the American Historical Association spent over $460,000 to support the editorial processes of the American Historical Review, such as arranging double-blind peer review for articles, administering the selection of books and reviewers, and copyediting the content. How could AHR and others like it maintain the highest editorial standards without lowering its standards and accepting many more articles? Alternatively, flagship journals would have to charge much higher publication fees to cover the costs of reviewing the submissions they do not accept; this, too, would create perverse effects, encouraging more junior scholars or those at less wealthy institutions to shy away from the journals where their findings would get the most attention.
(d) Would an APC system create perverse incentives for both journals and authors? Would it tempt journals to publish as many articles as possible, and inspire authors to post papers on websites and bypass journals and peer review altogether? The American Historical Review, for instance, currently publishes only about nine percent of the articles received. The Editor and Associate Editor read all articles submitted, and if the articles are accepted for further review, the staff refer to an extensive (and expensive) database to find historians working in an array of institutional settings. Peer review is a costly procedure but justified where quality of scholarly publication is a high priority.
The current system of access to journal content certainly contains elements of unfairness, in addition to adding burdens to budgets of institutions already coping with diminishing resources. But solutions that ignore the wide differences between the respective landscapes of science and humanities journals generate new, and more difficult, dilemmas. Requiring authors to pay the costs of their own publications is not the answer. The AHA suggests that historians begin thoughtful conversations at their own institutions and participate in the discussions that we will initiate at our annual meeting, our web site and other appropriate venues.
Drafted by the AHA Research Division, approved by Council August 13, 2012
SOURCE: The Verge (9-24-12)
What is a Team Historian?
"I could dig into books, and I could dig into historic magazines, things that are really geeky for a historian, but I had to translate it into easy access material for [the Assassin's Creed 3 team]," says Maxime Durand, the Team Historian on Assassin's Creed 3....
Durand hadn't previously worked on a game. Ubisoft snapped up Durand directly from university where he'd studied history, contracting him for two months. That was two and a half years ago....
He says the job is bigger than anyone expected. He was part of the original group of ten or so people working on Assassin's Creed 3. At the beginning, his role was figuring out where historical figures were and when, helping to build a historically accurate time line. Or at as least close accurate as a game about secret assassin societies and ancient precursor races can get....
SOURCE: Phys.org (9-21-12)
(Phys.org)—Three political essays by one of the greatest British statesmen of the last 250 years have been discovered by a historian at Queen Mary, University of London.
The new finds constitute the earliest political writings by Edmund Burke (1729-97), dating from around 1757, when he was 27-years-old, a period often described as the 'missing years' of his biography.
Professor Richard Bourke, from the School of History at Queen Mary, came across the early essays among a series of notebooks belonging to William Burke, a close friend and distant relation of parliamentarian, Edmund....
SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed (9-24-12)
The movement toward "open access" publishing -- in which scholarly journal articles are available free -- is taking off without consideration of the impact on humanities scholarship, says a statement being released today by the American Historical Association.
The statement notes that there are many frustrations with the current system of journal publishing, in which high journal subscription prices limit access to scholarship. But the AHA statement says that proposed solutions such as open access may do more harm than good.
Specifically, the statement says that the arguments for open access in the sciences (where most work is supported in part by federal funds) could soon be applied to the humanities (where most work is not supported with federal funds).
"In today's digital world, many people inside and outside of academia maintain that information, including scholarly research, wants to be, and should be, free. Where people subsidized by taxpayers have created that information, the logic of free information is difficult to resist," the statement says....
SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Ed (9-24-12)
These days, say James G. Blight and janet M. Lang, even their best graduate students in political science know little, if anything, about the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. "It might as well be the Peloponnesian Wars, frankly," says Blight, a professor of foreign-policy development at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario.
Students have bought into "a fairy tale—the notion of a brief shining moment for the beautiful Kennedy family in Camelot" and of "the good guy, Kennedy," who stared down the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, "a bad guy who made Fidel Castro let him park nuclear missiles in Cuba."
Blight and Lang, a research professor of international affairs at Waterloo, have spent almost 30 years investigating how those events almost brought the world to nuclear war.
The latest result is The Armageddon Letters: Kennedy, Khrushchev, Castro in the Cuban Missile Crisis, just out from Rowman & Littlefield. Blight and Lang have created a companion "transmedia, multiplatform" Web site at armageddonletters.com....
SOURCE: NYT (9-21-12)
The editor of a Web site that encourages Mormons to question church history and doctrine has been told that he faces a church trial and possible excommunication because he is an apostate who is trying to lead church members astray.
David Twede, a fifth-generation Mormon who lives in Florida, is the managing editor of MormonThink, one of the most influential of the many Web sites on which active and former Mormons debate church teaching. Such sites have drawn increased traffic as Mormons turn to the Internet to find answers to controversial questions about Mormon history and traditions that the church does not address....
Mr. Twede’s situation was first reported on Friday by the Web site The Daily Beast, which suggested that Mr. Twede was being disciplined because he had posted several articles on MormonThink critical of Mr. Romney....
Philip Barlow, a professor of Mormon history and culture at Utah State University, said that other Mormon bloggers had posted negative articles about Mr. Romney without any repercussions from the church....
SOURCE: Wyman Institute Press Release (9-20-12)
With the role of the Jewish vote becoming one of the hottest topics in this year's presidential race, the first-ever conference on the topic will be held in New York City on Sunday, September 23. Former mayor Ed Koch and U.S. Congressman Bob Turner will be among the featured speakers.
The conference, "The Jewish Vote, the Holocaust, and Israel," is the theme of the tenth national conference of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. It will take place on Sunday, September 23, 2012, at the Fordham University School of Law, 140 West 62 St., New York City, from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm.
Highlights of the conference:
MORNING SESSION:
--Prof. David S. Wyman, author of the bestseller 'The Abandonment of the Jews,' will speak on "Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Jewry"
--Dr. Tevi Troy, President George W. Bush's liaison to the Jewish community, and Hank Sheinkopf, a former Clinton adviser, will speak on: "Two Bush Administrations and the Jewish Vote"
AFTERNOON SESSION
--Mayor Edward I. Koch & U.S. Congressman Bob Turner will speak on "The Jewish Vote in 2012: Lessons from the 1980 Presidential Election and the 2011 New York City Congressional Race" (with Prof. Thane Rosenbaum as Commentator)
--Prof. Sonja Schoepf Wentling will speak on "Herbert Hoover & the Jews"
-- Dr. Rafael Medoff will speak on "A New Look at the Jewish Vote in the Truman-Dewey-Wallace Race of 1948"
Stephen M. Honig, Esq., the distinguished Boston attorney, will chair the conference. Prof. Thane Rosenbaum, scholar and novelist (and Fordham Law School faculty member) will serve as Master of Ceremonies.
For more information, please call the Wyman Institute at 202-434-8994 or visit www.WymanInstitute.org
SOURCE: NYT (9-19-12)
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School has identified a scrap of papyrus that she says was written in Coptic in the fourth century and contains a phrase never seen in any piece of Scripture: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife ...’ ”
The faded papyrus fragment is smaller than a business card, with eight lines on one side, in black ink legible under a magnifying glass. Just below the line about Jesus having a wife, the papyrus includes a second provocative clause that purportedly says, “she will be able to be my disciple.”
The finding was made public in Rome on Tuesday at the International Congress of Coptic Studies by Karen L. King, a historian who has published several books about new Gospel discoveries and is the first woman to hold the nation’s oldest endowed chair, the Hollis professor of divinity....
SOURCE: NYT (9-17-12)
WASHINGTON — Justice Clarence Thomas has not asked a question from the bench in more than six years, and he seldom appears in public in Washington, a city he says is full of cynics, smart alecks and people who have agendas rather than convictions....
The occasion for the interview was the Constitution’s 225th anniversary and the publication of a new book called “America’s Unwritten Constitution.” Its author, Akhil Reed Amar, a law professor at Yale, questioned Justice Thomas for more than an hour.
When Professor Amar mentioned that there are, for the first time in history, no Protestants on the Supreme Court, Justice Thomas changed the subject.
“We’re all from the Ivy League,” he said. “That seems to be more relevant than what faith we are.”...
SOURCE: NYT (9-17-12)
WASHINGTON — With Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel engaged in an unusually public dispute with the Obama administration over Iran, Mr. Netanyahu’s man in Washington, Michael B. Oren, has been working rooms all over town.
He has run up to Capitol Hill for damage control. He has spent hours with reporters making Israel’s case against Tehran. He went to a Rosh Hashana party celebrating the Jewish New Year at Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s house. He had the White House chief of staff and hundreds of others over for Rosh Hashana at his own house. He went to a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Maryland to open the North American headquarters of an Israeli military contractor. He even made a quiet trip to press his arguments about Iran at J Street, the dovish Jewish lobbying group.
Much of it was the crisis management and daily business conducted by any Israeli ambassador to the United States, who always finds an open door in Washington. But with the New Jersey-born-and-bred Mr. Oren [who received his PhD in Near Eastern studies from Princeton University], there is a difference: He is representing a prime minister who has infuriated the White House....
SOURCE: BostInno (9-18-12)
Editor's Note: President Faust's recent book has been made into a documentary by Ric Burns: "Death and the Civil War." It will be shown on PBS stations this week.
Harvard President Drew Faust is the latest local academic to make an appearance onThe Colbert Report. She visited Colbert to discuss her book This Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War, which six-time Emmy award-winning filmmaker Ric Burns has turned into a documentary that will air tonight on PBS from 8 p.m. – 10 p.m.
Of course, Colbert had to point out her Harvard ties, telling Faust, “You’re one of those smart people who Rick Santorum says that the GOP is never going to attract. Why are you so prejudiced against people who do not value education?”
Faust kept her composure, giggling the question off, even as Colbert jokingly accuses her of kicking all the conservatives off Harvard’s campus. When asked, “Is Harvard for dumb people?” All Faust says is, “It’s never dumb to get an education,” to which the audience responds by breaking out in applause.
The interview, although heavy on the history, is still humorous, and it’s nice to see the President in a primetime light. To hear what Faust has to say about the upcoming documentary — apparently the Civil War wasn’t totally a downer — check out the clip from The Colbert Report below.
SOURCE: AHA Today (9-18-12)
The following is a letter sent by AHA Executive Director James Grossman to the Governor of Georgia, Nathan Deal, in response to the recent announcement that the state plans to close the Georgia Archives to the public.
Dear Governor Deal:
I write on behalf of the American Historical Association—the leading organization of historians in the United States—to express our grave concern about plans to effectively close the Georgia Archives.
An early and active proponent of state archives laws in the United States, the AHA remains committed to the preservation of our heritage, and to its accessibility. We understand that a shortage of financial resources has forced the state to make some difficult financial choices, and that in such situations, everyone claims that their particular activity is sacrosanct. The Georgia Archives, however, tells the story of all Georgians. Genealogists, students, historians, journalists: all require access to these vital records to participate in the preservation of the state’s heritage and the practical use of its past.
Beyond the interests of historical researchers stand a wide variety of civic-minded Georgians who depend on open access to archives. Teachers, lawyers, real estate developers, leaders of neighborhood associations—all rely not only on the vital records housed in the Georgia Archives, but on the expert advice of its archivists.
The records of any government represent the heritage of its people, and can serve that role only when its citizens have access to consult those records. Closing the doors to the Archives would represent a devastating blow not only to historians, genealogists, and others with an interest in the past, but also the state’s policymakers and leaders who need a solid understanding of the past to help shape Georgia’s future.
I urge you to reconsider this decision, and to work with the Secretary of State to allocate resources that will enable this vital service to remain open and accessible to all.
Best regards,
James R. Grossman
Executive Director
SOURCE: WaPo (9-16-12)
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has named David Allison, associate director of curatorial affairs, as acting director, said a museum spokeswoman.
The appointment came after Director John Gray, who had headed the museum since July, had a heart attack Tuesday morning and was taken to George Washington University Hospital, where he was reported in stable condition as of Friday evening....
SOURCE: NYT (9-15-12)
Michael Wreszin, a biographer of radical 20th-century American intellectuals who were prominent antiwar activists, among them the social critic Dwight Macdonald, died on Aug. 12 in Manhattan. He was 85....
Mr. Wreszin, a history professor at Queens College and an antiwar activist himself, was a student of the American left and the many ideological movements competing for dominance of it between the 1920s and 1960s, including socialism, communism, libertarianism and anarchism.
His subjects were cosmopolitan, humanist thinkers who saw a growing militarism in American political culture but whose scrupulous habits of mind could make them misfits in the ideological camps they joined....
