This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream
media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously
biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in
each source note. Quotation marks are not used.
Source: WaPo
5-14-13
Growing up Catholic in England, Candida Moss felt secure in life, yet was told in church that Christians have been persecuted since the dawn of Christianity. Now, as an adult and a theologian, she wants to set the record straight.Too many modern Christians invoke, to lamentable effect, an ancient history of persecution that didn’t exist, Moss argues in her newly published book, “The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented A Story of Martyrdom.”Although anti-Christian prejudice was fairly widespread in the church’s first 300 years, she writes, “the prosecution of Christians was rare, and the persecution of Christians was limited to no more than a handful of years.”...
Source: NYU Local
5-14-13
Hey Finocchio, what grows on you when you do something wrong and lie about it?According to the NY Post, NYU art history professor Ross Finocchio was arrested on charges of unlawful surveillance, having been discovered at a West Village boutique recording women in the dressing rooms yesterday afternoon.While in another changing room, Finocchio reportedly hid his camera in a shoe, slipped it under an adjacent door, and waited for women to enter the space....
Source: Special to HNN
5-13-13
Don Romesburg, co-chair of the Committee on LGBT History, issued the following statement today in reaction to HNN coverage of the Niall Ferguson controversy:[Niall] Ferguson's subsequent attempts to clarify his statement unfortunately show little more understanding of the history of sexuality than his initial comment did. The Committee on LGBT History encourages him to consulting the field’s extensive scholarship, much of which our members have written, to avoid echoing unfounded and discriminatory stereotypes and to deepen his understanding and analysis of the LGBT past. Harvard should show leadership here by, at a minimum, hosting a major conference about LGBT history and encouraging Ferguson to attend. It is also high time that Harvard makes a new tenure-track hire in LGBT history. The incident has underscored the value of teaching and researching LGBT histories. This confronts ignorance about LGBT people, lives, and communities, and in the process, builds a more accurate historical record overall.
Source: myCentralJersey.com
5-13-13
NEW BRUNSWICK — The Rutgers Living History Society will present its 2013 Stephen E. Ambrose Oral History Award to presidential historian Michael Beschloss, familiar to millions of Americans for his many appearances on PBS’s “The News Hour.”The Rutgers Living History Society, comprised of participants in the Rutgers Oral History Archives program, will honor Beschloss at its annual meeting on Friday. Rutgers President Robert L. Barchi will present the award.“Oral history — the art of listening to people tell their own stories, and then making those stories available to others — is an essential tool of every practicing historian,” Beschloss said....
Source: Charlotte Observer
5-8-13
William Chafe is the Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of History, emeritus, at Duke University and the former dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall is the Julia Cherry Spruill Professor of History at UNC-Chapel Hill.This week, we were arrested at the General Assembly. We chose the path of civil disobedience – along with 29 others – as a means of calling attention to the headlong assault on our state’s history by the governor and the state legislature.We are not radicals. Each of us has been president of the Organization of American Historians, the leading professional organization of all American historians. We cherish the history we have spent our lives studying. Yet now we see a new generation in Raleigh threatening to destroy the very history we have spent our lives celebrating....
Source: HNN staff
5-10-13
Douglas Brinkley, the prolific Rice University historian who has already twice graced the cover of Rolling Stone (first for his interview of Bob Dylan in 2009, then for his interview of Barack Obama in 2012) has done it again.Brinkley's interview with Vice President Joe Biden made the cover of the most recent issue of Rolling Stone.A taste:There is a keen Kennedy-like vigor to Joe Biden that overwhelms any room. As was once said of Theodore Roosevelt, he, too, wants to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral. Unlike President Obama, who speaks in interviews with Hemingway-esque sparseness, Biden rambles like Thomas Wolfe, painting a robust picture of an ever-changing America where coal miners will soon be working in clean-tech jobs, gun-safety laws will be tougher and China will be reined in by the White House from poisoning the planet with megatons of choking pollutants....
Source: The Daily Beast
5-9-13
For the last seven years, the German journalist Malte Herwig, a reporter at Suddeutsche Zeitung magazine, has arduously, conscientiously tackled the challenge of researching and writing a book about the postwar German government’s “double game,” as he calls it. In Die Flakhelfer (DeutscheVerlags-Anstalt), which comes out in Germany on Monday, he reveals that, for half a century, the German leadership sought to suppress the names of prominent citizens who were Nazi Party members in the Second World War while pretending to seek them, and while simultaneously pursuing the soul-searching process of coming to terms with Germany’s grievous Second World War history—a process Germans call Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Herwig finds this behavior troubling. In New York this week he explained the genesis of his book.
Source: Financial Advisor
5-8-13
Thomas M. Kostigen is coauthor of The Green Book: The Everyday Guide to Saving The Planet One Simple Step at a Time (Three Rivers Press).I was in the audience at the Altegris conference in Carlsbad, Calif., last week when Niall Ferguson, well-known historian, Harvard professor and author, spewed his remarks knocking economist John Maynard Keynes for being homosexual and not having children. Indeed, it was my blog post that drew worldwide attention to the comments. The following day, Ferguson issued an unqualified apology. I thought that was that. But I was wrong.Ferguson issued yesterday an open letter to the Harvard community, explaining himself and qualifying his remarks. He equivocates, and points out that Keynes had said offensive things himself. Ferguson also goes to town on his critics and detractors, and hammers the "blogosphere." Most importantly, he tries to explain how Keynes' homosexuality affected his judgment....
Source: NYT
5-8-13
After his Keynesianism-is-gay remarks got him in trouble, Niall Ferguson did the right thing and offered a straightforward, no excuses apology. Unfortunately, it seems that he has reverted to type; sigh.But this does seem to call for an update on a subject I have written about occasionally: the remarkable way in which the Great Recession, by bringing us back into a world of persistent inadequate demand, has unleashed a sort of reign of error among anti-Keynesian economists and pundits. And I’m not talking about the usual Heritage or Cato hacks; I’m talking about people with serious reputations either for research or for seemingly judicious commentary.Oh, and by “error” I don’t mean “views I disagree with”; I mean raw conceptual or empirical banana-peel episodes, the kind of thing that defenders of these men (who have a lot of defenders) try to justify not by claiming that they were right, but by claiming that they didn’t say what they did, in fact, say....
Source: Catholic News
5-5-13
A historian claims that many stories about the persecution of early Christians were invented or exaggerated to further the religion. Candida Moss, a professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Notre Dame maintains Christianity is so laden with such tales that it has given rise to a myth of persecution among modern believers. A Catholic, Moss expects her claims to be the source of irritation to the faithful - but that they're missing the point.Moss, from South Bend, Indiana, claims only a handful of martyrdom stories ever actually occurred and there was no widespread Roman persecution. The stories were largely invented to inspire loyalty among the masses.Moss says that modern Christians to drop the victim complex inherited from them. "Christians were never the victims of sustained, targeted persecution. The idea of the persecuted church is almost entirely the invention of the 4th century and later," she adds....
Source: Harvard Crimson
5-7-13
Niall Ferguson is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University.Last week I said something stupid about John Maynard Keynes. Asked to comment on Keynes’ famous observation “In the long run we are all dead,” I suggested that Keynes was perhaps indifferent to the long run because he had no children, and that he had no children because he was gay. This was doubly stupid. First, it is obvious that people who do not have children also care about future generations. Second, I had forgotten that Keynes’ wife Lydia miscarried.I was duly attacked for my remarks and offered an immediate and unqualified apology. But this did not suffice for some critics, who insisted that I was guilty not just of stupidity but also of homophobia. I have no doubt that at least some students were influenced by these allegations. Nobody would want to study with a bigot. I therefore owe it to students—former and prospective—to make it unambiguously clear that I am no such thing.
Source: Voice of America
5-8-13
PHNOM PENH — British historian Philip Short took the stand for the second day at the U.N.-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal Tuesday, as he continued to describe the relationship between Vietnamese communists and their Cambodian counterpart. Short, the 68-year-old author of “Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare,” told the court Tuesday that the Vietnamese had an “undeniable” interest in the Khmer Rouge, providing support and training for the communist insurgency in its early days. Short is testifying in the atrocity crimes trial of Khmer Rouge leaders Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan. Much of his testimony on Tuesday was centered around the relationship between the regime and Vietnam, which would eventually become its enemy....
Source: The Australian (AU)
5-6-13
PRE-EUROPEAN history could be taught at some Pacific universities for the first time ever if plans devised by local history academics come to pass.The collaboration between academics led by Max Quanchi and Morgan Tuimalealiifano aims to produce a Pacific-wide undergraduate history course to be taught at universities from Papua New Guinea to New Caledonia, Samoa and French Polynesia....
Source: WaPo
5-7-13
E.B. Smith, a retired University of Maryland history professor, died of congestive heart failure at the Hospice of the Chesapeake in Harwood on April 30, the day before his 93rd birthday. He lived at Tracys Landing on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay.A daughter-in-law, Barbara Smith, confirmed his death.Dr. Smith joined the faculty at Maryland in 1968 and became a professor emeritus in 1990. He specialized in the Civil War and had written about the pre-Civil War presidencies of Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore and William Buchanan and about the Civil War-era politician Francis Preston Blair, a founder of Silver Spring....
Source: HNN Staff
5-8-13
Sam Wineburg, Margaret Jacks Professor of Education and (courtesy) History, is the director of the Stanford History Education Group. Their signature project, "Reading Like an Historian," which promotes a secondary school curriculum based around critical engagement with primary sources, recently made the cover of Stanford's alumni magazine:Designed by the Stanford History Education Group under Professor Sam Wineburg, the website offers 87 flexible lesson plans featuring documents from the Library of Congress. Teachers can download the lessons and adapt them for their own purposes, free of charge. Students learn how to examine documents critically, just as historians would, in order to answer intriguing questions: Did Pocahontas really rescue John Smith? Was Abraham Lincoln a racist? Who blinked first in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Russians or the Americans?Apparently the program has struck a chord. In school districts from red states and blue, New York City and Chicago to Carmel, Calif., history teachers are lining up for workshops on how to use the materials. The website's lessons have been downloaded 800,000 times and spawned a lively online community of history educators grateful for the camaraderie—and often desperate for help.
Source: David S. Wyman Center Press Release
5-7-13
Washington, D.C. - One hundred and seven leading Holocaust and genocide scholars from around the world have sent a letter of protest to President Obama, urging him to cancel a planned visit to the United States by Sudanese leaders involved in the Darfur genocide.
The delegation will represent Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for his role in the Darfur genocide. Heading the delegation will be Bashir adviser Nafie Ali Nafie, a prominent participant in the mass killings.
The letter of protest was organized by The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, based in Washington, D.C. It is the latest in a series of Wyman Institute initiatives seeking U.S. action to stop the Darfur atrocities and bring Bashir to justice.
"We must make it clear to the perpetrators of genocide that the United States will treat them as outlaws and bring them to justice, not treat them as respected statesmen and bring them here for friendly visits," the letter of protest argues.
Source: University of Virginia Press Release
5-7-13
The University of Virginia’s Miller Center has named nine promising young scholars as 2013–14 Miller Center national fellows. Each fellow will receive a one-year $22,000 grant to support research and writing as they complete dissertations on the history of U.S. politics, foreign policy, and global politics. Each fellow will also be guided by a “dream mentor,” a leading scholar in their field, and take part in workshops to learn how to reach a broader audience with their scholarship.
The 2013–14 Miller Center fellows are:
Laura Blessing, Politics, University of Virginia
“The New Politics of Taxation: The Republican Party and Anti-Tax Positions”
Sean Beienburg, Politics, Princeton University
“Constitutional Resistance in the States, 1880–2010”
Rebecca Brubaker, International Politics, University of Oxford
“From the Un-Mixing to the Re-Mixing of Peoples: Understanding U.S.-Led Support for Minority Returns Following the Ethnic Conflict in Bosnia”
Brent Cebul, History, University of Virginia
Source: WaPo
5-6-13
When Native American activists from around the United States took over Alcatraz in 1969, George P. Horse Capture was a steel inspector for the California Department of Water Resources — a young man on his way to a solid career and ever further away from any sense of pride in his Montana reservation roots.“I was very happy climbing that white mountain of success,” he once said. “But then I looked down over the top, and there was nothing there.”The solution was to switch mountains. Joining the protesters for short periods over their 19-month stay, Mr. Horse Capture went on to become a passionate advocate for Native American culture and a museum curator who helped give his people an unprecedented voice in how their heritage would be presented and their artifacts displayed.“He was profoundly important in contemporary American Indian history,” said Herman Viola, a longtime friend and curator emeritus of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington....
Source: PopMatters
4-30-13
Richard Slotkin is one of the most well-known historians of American history and culture. His writings on the frontier, the Old West, Hollywood Westerns, the Civil War, and World War I, among other topics, have played a significant role in shaping the field of American Studies.In 1973, Slotkin published Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860, the first of his trilogy on the mythology of the American West. The book remains a cornerstone in American Studies in its examination of how the colonization of the frontier and the violence used against Native Americans defined certain attitudes and prejudices that influenced American culture for years to come. The subsequent books of the trilogy, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890, and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, further explore these themes of American mythmaking....What drew you first to General George McClellan, or “The Young Napolean”, as he’s often been called? What is it about him that makes him so compelling not only as a notable figure from history but as a character that stands out on the page?
Source: Times Higher Education
4-28-13
A celebration of the life and influence of legendary historian Eric Hobsbawm, who died last October at the age of 95, brought out family, friends and fellow scholars in force at Birkbeck, University of London this week.In a speech of welcome, David Latchman, master of Birkbeck – which Professor Hobsbawm joined as a lecturer in 1947 and where he served as president from 2002 until his death – said he was someone who had “clearly made a difference to people’s lives”.At graduation ceremonies, Professor Latchman recalled of Professor Hobsbawm, “the production line would be slowed down by people saying: ‘You influenced me! You are the reason I am here! You are the reason why I graduated!’ A proportion of them would be so excited at meeting their hero that they walked off the stage without remembering to shake hands with me.”...
