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: Public Radio of Armenia
4-20-13
As the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide approaches, historian Taner Akcam suggests Turkey open its borders with Armenia as a step to normalize relations between the two countries. Talking to Today’s Zaman Akcam claims that the Armenian issue cannot be solved unless diplomatic ties are established.Akcam, who describes the 1915 events as “genocide,” says that Turkey should stop wasting its time with the argument that 1915 was not genocide “by exploiting people’s ignorance about this matter and creating an unnecessary debate.” He argues that 1.2 million Armenians were forced to relocate under the rule of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) during the Ottoman Empire.He also argues that thirst, hunger and diseases were among the main reasons for the deaths, but the groups that were forced to migrate were intentionally led to take the longer routes and were not provided water and food during their journey....
Source: Arkansas Times
4-22-13
LITTLE ROCK — Dr. Ray Granade, chair of the Arkansas History Commission, and Richard Davies, Director of the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism, announced today the hiring of Dr. Lisa K. Speer as the new State Historian and Director of the History Commission. Speer succeeds Dr. Wendy Richter, who resigned in December, 2012. The Arkansas History Commission is the official state archives, with research facilities in Little Rock, Powhatan, and Washington, Arkansas.Born in Fayetteville, Dr. Speer grew up near Malvern, graduated from Glen Rose High School and then from Ouachita Baptist University in 1988 with a degree in History. She earned an MA and PhD in American History from the University of Mississippi, where she worked as Curator of the Mississippi Collection in the University’s Archives and Special Collections. She then earned an MA in Library and Information Studies with archival certification from the University of Alabama, where she worked as an archival technician. For just over a dozen years, Dr. Speer has directed the Special Collections and Archives at Southeast Missouri State University....
Source: The Economist
4-13-13
FEW school subjects are so divisive. When Michael Gove, Britain’s education secretary, released draft changes to the country’s national curriculum in February it was his plan for history that created headlines. Mr Gove’s proposal called for history to be studied “as a coherent, chronological narrative”, beginning with the early Britons and ending with the cold war. Opponents said the syllabus overstressed the deeds of “posh white blokes” and underplayed those of minorities. “Unteachable, unlearnable and un-British” blasted a campaign group on April 10th. Rival camps of historians have published petitions and rowed on television. That shoot-out will last beyond the official consultation period, which closes next week.
Source: WSJ
4-16-13
Robert Caro, the biographer of LBJ and Robert Moses, delivered a talk about a fellow historian, Barbara Tuchman, to a standing-room-only crowd at the Links Club on a recent evening. The event was sponsored by the Library of America, which was marking its reissue of her masterwork about the events leading up to World War I, "The Guns of August."The Library of America may not be familiar to all—it's actually not a library but a nonprofit publishing house—but most bibliophiles would probably recognize its handsome series (241 volumes and counting) in matching black covers decorated with a red, white and blue stripe. The series is devoted to great American writers; most, but certainly not all, are deceased.So expertly and elegantly are the books published, and so affordably priced, that I have a hunch: Were an author offered the option of a Library of America edition and an unmarked grave, or no book and a splendid sarcophagus, he or she would choose the former....
Source: Times Higher Education
4-15-13
Arts and humanities PhD graduates from the US are more employable than their UK counterparts, a conference on doctoral education has heard.The extra length of the US doctoral education – on average seven years compared with four in the UK – creates graduates with significantly more experience in teaching and administration, said Dina Iordanova, professor of film studies at the University of St Andrews.“Those coming out of UK programmes often have little experience in teaching and next to no experience in administration,” Professor Iordanova told the UK Council for Graduate Education’s International Conference on Development in Doctoral Education and Training on 12 April, where she was speaking in a personal capacity.Both factors contribute to university employers not being certain of applicants’ command of the field at large, she said....
Source: Fox News
4-19-13
The Boston bombing suspect who is the subject of a massive manhunt reached out to a Massachusetts professor two years ago for help on research "rediscovering his Chechen origins," the professor told FoxNews.com Friday. Professor Brian Glyn Williams, who teaches the only course in the U.S. on the Chechen wars, said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev emailed him in the spring of 2011, asking questions on Chechen history for a research project he was doing at the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. Williams said that based on conversations with a friend who taught Tsarnaev -- and who recommended he reach out to Williams -- he learned that Tsarnaev was "studying his past."...
Source: The New Inquiry
4-19-13
Laurel Braitman, historian of science and author of Animal Madness: How anxious dogs, compulsive parrots and elephants in therapy show us the wildness of our own minds (forthcoming from Simon and Schuster), interviews the veterinarian Dr. Andrew Springer Browne. Dr. Browne has treated companion animals throughout the United States, studied zoonotic diseases in Kenyan camels, worked at a falcon hospital in Abu Dhabi, holds degrees in veterinary medicine and public health, and has raised bantam chickens since he was five years old.Laurel Braitman: First of all, can an animal get high on marijuana?Dr. Andrew Springer Browne: Yes, but I would call it a very bad trip rather than being stoned or high.Why? What are the signs in, say, dogs?The main clinical signs in dogs are low body temperature, dilated pupils, increased sensitivity to noise and movement, being unsteady on their feet, and dribbling urine. The animals are usually distressed and whimpering or howling. With really high doses they are collapsed, breathing slowly, with a very slow heart rate, and are barely responsive. This can last 24 to 48 hours. Usually they survive....
Source: WaPo
4-18-13
NEW YORK — Historian and author Robert Caro has won yet another award.Caro’s latest Lyndon Johnson book, “The Passage of Power,” has received the Mark Lynton History prize. Caro, whose many honors during the past 40 years have included the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, will receive $10,000....
Source: NYT
4-8-13
For the academic elite — tenured professors at private research universities — average pay this year is $167,118, while at public research universities such professors earn $123,393, according to the annual report by the American Association of University Professors.After three years in which overall increases in full-time faculty pay lagged behind the rate of inflation, this year’s average increase, 1.7 percent, kept pace with consumer prices.But the difficult economic climate of recent years is taking a serious toll on higher education, especially public institutions. As states cut back their support for public institutions, the gap between the pay scales at private and public universities is continuing to grow, the report found. Average pay for assistant professors at private colleges that award only bachelor’s degrees is $62,763, while public colleges paid $58,591....
Source: David Austin Walsh for HNN
4-16-13
Fredrik Logevall, John S. Knight Professor of International Studies at Cornell University, has won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam, published by Random House last year.Embers of War, which the Washington Post called a "product of formidable international research ... lucidly and comprehensively composed," is a study of France's war in Vietnam, from the end of World War II to the eventual French withdrawal in 1954.Though the war was foughtly primarily between the French and their colonial auxiliaries on one side and the Viet Minh on the other, Logevall argues that the conflict was truly international in scope and American policymakers had great influence over French decisions from the very beginning. In particular, he maintains that Franklin D. Roosevelt, long an advocate of decolonization, would have pressured the French to exit Indochina in 1945, had he lived. But with Roosevelt's death and Harry Truman's de-emphasis on decolonialization and his policy of vehement anticommunism in Europe and Asia, the seeds were sown for a long, bloody conflict in Southeast Asia.
Source: Robert Townsend in AHA Perspectives
4-15-13
Robert Townsend is the AHA’s deputy director, and the author of History’s Babel: Scholarship, Professionalization, and the Historical Enterprise, 1880–1940 (Univ. of Chicago Press).During the 2010–11 academic year, the number of undergraduate students earning degrees in history dropped—albeit by a small percentage—for the first time in a decade, even as the number of students earning degrees in all fields continued to rise. As a result, the history discipline's share of degrees earned in 2011 declined to the lowest level in 10 years (fig. 1).According to new information from the Department of Education, history programs conferred 35,059 bachelor's degrees in the discipline, and another 3,588 students earned degrees with history as their second major. Together, 0.6 percent fewer students earned history degrees this year compared to last.1
Source: AHA Today
4-11-13
Yesterday, a short distance from the AHA offices, supporters of immigration reform marched on the National Mall, as a bipartisan group of eight senators continue deliberations that have been alternately described as “stuck,” “close,” “virtually complete,” or “about to get serious.” The senators will likely reveal their plan for comprehensive immigration reform, if there is one, today.In response to the flurry of activity on this previously languishing issue, the National History Center, a project of the American Historical Association, sponsored a congressional briefing in the Rayburn House Office Building last Friday. These briefings offer congressional staff and members a historical perspective on issues of current interest. The historians who present at these briefings avoid making recommendations to Congress, but discuss previous paths taken and their outcomes.
Source: Times of Israel
4-11-13
JTA — Leaders of a Polish nationalist movement said a historian’s claims that Jews helped perpetrate the Holocaust were “factual” and “necessary.”The historian who made the claims, Krzysztof Jasiewicz, was “far from politically correct but his statements are supported by historical facts,” Robert Winnicki, president of the All-Polish Youth, said in a statement published Tuesday on the website of the ultra-nationalist organization, which has a few thousand registered members.Artur Zawisza, a former lawmaker in the Polish parliament, is quoted as telling the news site NaTemat.pl that Jasiewicz “said too much common sense that has long been present in the literature.” He said the historian’s claims were a “necessary part of open debate.”...
Source: Latin American Herald Tribune
4-11-13
MIAMI – Cuban historian Enrique Ros died this week of respiratory complications, his daughter, U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, said Thursday. He was 89.Ros died Wednesday at South Miami Hospital, the South Florida lawmaker said in a statement....
Source: Salon
4-12-13
Before the first season of “Veep” premiered last year, star Julia Louis-Dreyfus was sure to stipulate just how much work she’d done to ensure her performance as a disempowered vice president was realistic. She told an assembled group of critics:“What was most interesting to hear was what was it like living at vice president’s residence. What’s the reality of that? It’s surprisingly small. Where does the secret service go? What happens if you have to get up at midnight to go to bathroom? I was interested not in the grandeur of it, but the real nitty gritty of it. Certain questions were not answered directly and I thought that was interesting.”While Louis-Dreyfus may have nailed the questions about the security detail on “Veep,” the show’s second season (beginning Sunday) has a long way to go on the broader strokes, said vice-presidential historian Joel Goldstein, of Saint Louis University, who watched some but not all of season 1.“I really like Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and I think she’s terrific, but when I saw the show, my reaction was — this is nothing like reality. Since Mondale, the vice president has really been a big deal.”...
Source: WaPo
4-14-13
Thomas Jefferson died 186 years ago. But J. Jefferson Looney still wants the nation’s third president to speak for himself.The Monticello historian has spent more than a quarter-century deciphering, annotating and publishing thousands of Jefferson’s letters precisely as they were written, including eccentric spellings (“knolege”), obscure capitalizations and musings on slavery, God and death.Looney’s work is part of an audacious, multimillion-dollar memorial to some of the nation’s most prominent Founding Fathers: an attempt to track down and publish an exhaustive collection of all of the significant correspondence and other documents written by -- and sent to -- George Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin....Read more here: http://www.macon.com/2013/04/14/2431291/historian-seeks-to-have-jefferson.html#storylink=cpy...
Source: UKZN Press
4-15-13
Anti-apartheid struggle stalwart, leading historian and academic Prof Bernard Magubane passed away at his home in Fourways, Johannesburg on Sunday.Magubane was born in 1930 on a farm near Colenso in Natal, but moved with his family to the city of Durban.In Bernard Magubane: My Life and Times, an autobiography written to coincide with his 80th birthday, Magubane relates how as a child he was radicalised by the conditions apartheid imposed on the majority of the country’s people. He became a teacher and rubbed shoulders with many of the country’s great educationists, his passion for learning leading him on to the University of Natal and eventually to the United States of America, in 1961, for postgraduate studies in the social sciences....
Source: Scientific American
4-15-13
One of the best things about teaching at Stevens Institute of Technology, which I joined in 2005, is shooting the shit with distinguished historian of science James E. McClellan III. Jim has authored, co-authored or edited half a dozen books, including Science and Technology in World History: An Introduction, which he wrote with our late Stevens colleague Harold Dorn. The book, which won an award from the World History Association, serves as my textbook when I teach “History of Science and Technology.” Every time I read the book I learn something new, which perhaps means that I never read it carefully enough. Just kidding. I’ve learned more about the history of science from Jim than I like to admit....Horgan: To what extent can we learn about the emergence of modern science by focusing on pre-revolutionary France?
Source: McClatchy
4-15-13
...“On cultural issues, the direction the country is moving is more progressive,” said Will Marshall, president of the centrist Progressive Policy Institute. “But that’s less clear on economic issues.”The trend to more liberal cultural views is part of a “compassionate impulse” Americans have long held, said author and historian Robert Dallek....“There is a move in the direction of cultural pluralism,” said William Leuchtenburg, historian at the University of North Carolina, with people more accepting of different cultures, different lifestyles and different attitudes .That’s not to say that change comes smoothly. The willingness to change “goes in cycles,” Dallek said, as people stop to absorb a wave of change. Thus, the social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s gave way to the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment for women, the rise of the Moral Majority and evangelical Christians in politics, and the tide of culturally conservative blue-collar Democrats abandoning their party and helping elect President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s....
Source: Enet English
4-16-13
Greece's demands for wartime reparations from Germany – particularly in regard to loans – are justified, a German historian who has lectured in Greece for 30 years has said.Hagen Fleischer, professor emeritus of history at the University of Athens, told Deutsche Welle, Germany's international broadcaster, that he is convinced that the issue of reparations is not yet settled 68 years after the end of the Second World War.Last week, Foreign Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos said that international justice – and not comments by German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble – would determine whether Greece is entitled to war reparations which, according to reports, could run to €162bn....
