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: Irish Times
10-6-12
MAURICE KEEN: UNTIL THE second World War, most British medieval historians avoided cultural history, remaining more concerned with the church, government or the law; institutions and politics.Except for the literate pious, what might have made medieval people tick was treated as self-evident, immaterial or unknowable. In the subsequent revolution of approaches, Maurice Keen, who has died aged 78, played a seminal role. His major book, Chivalry (1984), which won the Wolfson prize that year, remains one of the great works of history in English of the past 70 years.After Chivalry, no one could look at Keen’s subject, the knightly life, unaffected by his comprehensive and nuanced exposition of the nature and significance of the culture of those who ruled western Europe for half a millennium....
Source: BBC News
10-7-12
Speaking truth to power has always been a high-risk strategy in China. Its rulers tend to prefer flattery, and writers who forget this do so at their peril. China's "grand historian" - 2,000 years ago - was one of many who have paid a terrible price."Among defilements, none is so great as castration. Any man who continues to live having suffered such a punishment is accounted as a nothing."The man who wrote those words is by no means a nothing today. In a nation obsessed by its history, Sima Qian was the first and some say the greatest historian....
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed.
10-8-12
Eugene D. Genovese, a historian who wrote about slavery in the American South, died on September 26 after a long illness. He was 82. Early in his career he identified himself as a Marxist, but he later denounced that affiliation and veered toward conservatism....Eric J. Hobsbawm, an economic historian of the 19th century and longtime Communist Party member, died on October 1 in London. He was 95. A professor of economic and social history at the University of London, he wrote a trilogy covering the period 1789 to 1914: The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, and The Age of Reason. After he retired from the London institution, he taught at Stanford and Cornell Universities, among others....Related LinksEugene Genovese, 1930-2012Eric Hobsbawm, 1917-2012
Source: Belfast Newsletter (UK)
10-8-12
Leading Ulster historian BRIAN M WALKER reveals how research into the Ulster Covenant has uncovered that a largely forgotten unionist leader of the time is his ancestorWHO do you think you are? Currently there are a number of fascinating programmes on television that explore people’s backgrounds and discover what their ancestors did. Of course, once you start down this path of inquiry there is no telling what you will find.Recently many people have investigated their ancestors’ role in the Ulster Covenant of 1912. In my own case, I discovered not only that several family members signed the Covenant but also that I was related to one of the key figures in 1912, who was one of the three elected unionist leaders in the period from 1911-21. Few people today have heard of this man....
Source: Jon Wiener in the LA Review of Books
10-4-12
Jon Wiener teaches U.S. history at UC Irvine. His most recent book is Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivory Tower. He is a contributing editor to The Nation and hosts a weekly afternoon drive-time interview show on KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles.ERIC HOBSBAWM, WHO DIED OCTOBER 1 at age 95, was one of the world’s greatest historians, and also a Marxist. He was not just an academic — he was also a lifelong Communist with a capital “C,” a full-fledged member of the Party since his teenage years. Unlike most of his comrades, he didn’t leave the Party in 1956 after Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin’s crimes, or after the Soviets’ repression of the Hungarian uprising; he didn’t leave in 1968 when the Soviets crushed the Prague Spring; he stayed until the end. Hobsbawm mentioned his long Party membership in his final book, How to Change the World, but didn’t really answer one of the big questions about his life: “Why the CP?”
Source: Journal of Blacks in Higher Education
9-21-12
Duke University has announced that it has acquired a vast archive of papers of John Hope Franklin. Professor Franklin was the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of History at Duke University and one of the most prolific and respected historians of the twentieth century. He died of congestive heart failure on March 25, 2009 at Duke University Hospital. He was 94 years old.The archive includes more than 300 boxes of materials that were donated to the university by his son and daughter-in-law. Included in the archive are diaries, correspondence, manuscripts, drafts of speeches, photographs, and video recordings. The collection will be housed at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke. The collection will be made available to researchers once it has been preserved and cataloged.John Hope Franklin was born in Rentiesville, Oklahoma, in 1915. His grandfather had been a slave. His father was one of the first black lawyers in Oklahoma. His mother was a schoolteacher. Franklin was named after John Hope, the former president of Morehouse College and Atlanta University....
Source: NPR
10-3-12
[CLICK HERE FOR AUDIO]Voters who tune in to the debates Wednesday night will likely hear conflicting interpretations of history. What truly happened in the past is the subject of an ongoing, loud debate in politics. Steve Inskeep delves into this topic with college professor Timothy Messer-Kruse, who attempted to make a small edit on the Wikipedia page for the 1886 Haymarket Square riot in Chicago.
Source: WaPo
10-1-12
Eric J. Hobsbawm, whose upbringing amid the rise of European fascism provoked loyalty to the Communist Party long after it had been discredited and shaped his scholarly career as an influential chronicler of sweeping historical forces such as democratization, industrialization and nationalism, died Oct. 1 at a hospital in London. He was 95.He died of complications from pneumonia and leukemia, his daughter Julia Hobsbawm told the Associated Press.The Cambridge-educated Dr. Hobsbawm spent most of his prodigious literary career in England after an early life set against the backdrop of cataclysmic events. He was born in Egypt to European Jews in 1917, the year of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. He passed his formative years in Austria and, after being orphaned, in Germany during the rise of the Nazis....Related LinksEric Hobsbawm, 1917-2012
Source: CNN.com
10-1-12
Eric Hobsbawm, seen by many peers as the greatest post-war historian of European ideas, has died aged 95. Here, Timothy Snyder, Housum Professor of History at Yale University, explains why Hobsbawm's determination to stick with Marxism long after it went out of fashion made his message so special to historians and readers around the world. The paperback of Snyder's most recent book, "Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin," was released on Monday....To be a man of Hobsbawm's generation was to have experienced the collapse of capitalism in the Great Depression, to be a Jew of Hobsbawm's generation was to have seen the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany. In those years of the 1930s, the years when Hobsbawm was a brilliant youth, was to face what seemed to be a binary choice, to be with the Nazis or against them. And no one seemed to be more against the Nazis than the communists. Hobsbawm joined the Communist Party as a very young man, and was loyal, in his way, to the end.
Source: Stephen Mark Kotkin in The New Yorker
10-1-12
Stephen Mark Kotkin is Professor of History and director of the Program in Russian Studies at Princeton University...[His] best book, at least to my mind, remains the memoir “Interesting Times” (2002), one of the very few—dare I say—great life stories of a historian. (I wrote about it for The New Yorker.) His memoir enacts the core principles of all his historical work: he wrote for the public, not just for the guild, and he wrote not only with compelling narrative, which is how popular history is delivered, but with strong analysis, too. Does that add up to more than legions of students and well-grounded original interpretations? It is arguably Hobsbawm’s overall life/work rather than any single piece that has been and will continue to prove most influential. On that front, there’s also this: having embraced and never relinquished the passionate early Marx, E. J. Hobsbawm, as he reaffirmed in his last book, was in it to change the world.Related LinksEric Hobsbawm, 1917-2012
Source: Matthew Boudway for Commonweal
10-1-12
Matthew Boudway is an associate editor of Commonweal....Despite his lucidity and widely attested personal decency, Hobsbawm also became an object lesson in the dangers of ideological devotion. His passion for justice drew him into a cause that would require him to excuse the many injustices that took place in the Soviet Union under Stalin. A lot of Western Communists abandoned ship after the Soviet crackdown on Hungary in 1956. Not Hobsbawm. Nor did he quit after the tanks rolled into Prague twelve years later. In a 1994 interview with Michael Ignatieff he famously claimed that if the Soviet Union had succeeded in creating a true communist society, it would have been worth the deaths of the twenty million people who perished under Stalin. Didn’t Marx himself say that ”no great movement has been born without the shedding of blood”? So self-sacrifice wasn’t the only kind of sacrifice that socialism might require....Related LinksEric Hobsbawm, 1917-2012
Source: Eric Foner in The Nation
10-1-12
Eric Foner, a member of The Nation’s editorial board, is the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. Eric Hobsbawm, who died on October 1 at the age of 95, was perhaps the twentieth century’s preeminent historian and a life-long advocate of social justice. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1917 to a British father and Austrian mother, he was educated in Vienna and Berlin. His family sent him to London in 1933 when Hitler came to power and he lived for the rest of his life in England, where he taught for many years at London’s Birkbeck College....
Source: Guardian (UK) Editorial
10-1-12
When future generations come upon the webpages and news bulletins of the last 24 hours, something may puzzle them about their contents. How was it, they may ask themselves, that the death of a venerable Marxist historian could be seen as such a large shared national loss by so many people whose assumptions and worldviews often had so little in common with his? Worthy of an obituary, of course. But a front-page news story?It is not an unreasonable question. Part of the answer lies in the late Eric Hobsbawm's sheer academic productivity and prowess. He cast the net of his curiosity far wider than most historians. He knew so much about so many things in the history of so many countries. And he had an unrivalled ability to marshal them in clear prose. No wonder he was such a sage to so many....Related LinksEric Hobsbawm, 1917-2012
Source: Guardian (UK)
10-1-12
The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, led tributes to the Marxist historian and academic Eric Hobsbawm, who died on Monday , calling him "an extraordinary historian, a man passionate about his politics and a great friend of my family".Hobsbawm, one of the leading historians of the 20th century and an intellectual giant of the left, died in the early hours of Monday morning at the Royal Free hospital in north London, his family said, following a long illness. He was 95.Miliband said Hobsbawm had "brought hundreds of years of British history to hundreds of thousands of people. He brought history out of the ivory tower and into people's lives."...Related LinksEric Hobsbawm, 1917-2012
Source: Telegraph (UK)
10-1-12
Michael Burleigh is a historian and author of 'Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II', and winner of the Nonino International Master of His Time Prize (2012)...Everything Hobsbawm wrote deceitfully downplayed the grim role of the Communists in Spain in the Thirties or the forcible nature of the coups the Soviets carried out in Eastern Europe after 1945. Such a cosmopolitan thinker had ironically become imprisoned within a deeply provincial ideological ghetto, knowing or caring nothing for the brave Czechs or Poles who resisted Stalin’s stooges, while being manifestly nonplussed by the democratic transformations of Central Europe since 1989-90. That the secret police – the Sword and Shield of the Revolution – would end up running Vladimir Putin’s FSB-mafia state was literally inexplicable to him.
Source: Guardian (UK)
10-1-12
Niall FergusonIt may surprise readers of the Guardian to know that Eric Hobsbawm and I were friends.We were poles apart politically, of course. I still remember the disappointment I felt when I read his autobiography, Interesting Times, which I had hoped would contain some expression of remorse for his decision to remain a member of the Communist party even after the exposure of Stalin's crimes. Indeed, we disagreed about most contemporary political questions.But his politics did not prevent Hobsbawm from being a truly great historian. I continue to believe that his great tetralogy – The Age of Revolution (1962), The Age of Industry (1975), The Age of Empire (1987) and The Age of Extremes (1994) – remains the best introduction to modern world history in the English language.David PriestlandOf all the British Marxist historians, Eric Hobsbawm is probably the most read today, and that is a mark of his extraordinary intellectual flexibility.Catherine Merridale
Source: Jonathan Jones for the Guardian (UK)
10-2-12
Jonathan Jones writes on art for the Guardian and was on the jury for the 2009 Turner prize.The historian Eric Hobsbawm, who has died aged 95, is rightly being mourned as a great intellectual of modern times. Yet Hobsbawm was more than a powerful historian and political thinker; nor should he be remembered in solitary splendour. He was part of a group of British Marxist scholars who profoundly influenced our understanding of what culture is.More than 50 years ago, a bunch of dissident Oxbridge-educated academic historians changed the way the British saw culture. They understood, long before anyone else, that culture is what shapes the world. They also saw that culture is totally democratic and comes from the people. While the official guardians of the arts, such as Kenneth Clark, were praising the "civilisation" of the elite on television and in print, Hobsbawm and co were resurrecting the lost cultures of Luddites, the masked poachers and anyonymous letter writers, of William Blake and John Milton. They discovered and popularised the value of popular culture – something so integral to our lives today it seems bizarre it was ever denigrated.
Source: AP
10-2-12
Eric Hobsbawm, who was honored as one of Britain's most distinguished historians despite retaining an allegiance to the Communist Party that lasted long after many supporters had left in disgust, has died. He was 95.Hobsbawm died early Monday at a London hospital, said his daughter Julia Hobsbawm. He had pneumonia and leukemia.Read by generations of students and revered for his ability to make history come alive, Hobsbawm used his socialist perspective to tell stories from the people's point of view....Related LinksEric Hobsbawm, 1917-2012
Source: U.S. Intellectual History (Blog)
10-1-12
Henry F. May, one of his generation’s most distinguished historians, died Saturday, September 29, at the age of 97. May was Margaret Byrne Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of California Berkeley, where he had taught from 1952 until his retirement in 1980. He was a prominent campus citizen throughout his tenure at Berkeley, and served as Chair of the Department of History during the Free Speech Movement of 1964. He was honored by the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate in 1981 as Faculty Research Lecturer.
Source: MacArthur Foundation
10-1-12
Dylan C. Penningroth is a historian who examines shifting concepts of property ownership and kinship in order to shed light on long-obscured aspects of African American life under slavery and in the half-century following slavery’s abolition. In his book The Claims of Kinfolk (2003), he elucidates the informal customs that slaves in the antebellum South used to recognize ownership of property, even while they were themselves considered by law to be property at the time. He also traces the interactions of these extra-legal, vernacular customs with the formal realm of law after emancipation by teasing stories of claims and disputes from such sources as the Freedman’s Bureau and Southern Claims Commission records compiled by the federal government after the Civil War. In addition to demonstrating that ownership of land, livestock, and other material possessions was much more widespread among slave communities than previously believed, Penningroth’s research draws out the underlying social relations and reliance on family members’ labor that made such ownership possible.
