Historians in the News

David Greenberg: Chris Christie has to watch himself at the convention

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has been tapped as the keynote speaker for the Republican convention later this month. It’s a high profile slot that can sometimes make or break a political career. David Greenberg, associate professor of history and journalism and media studies in the School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University, said Christie will have to adapt his rhetoric to fill the role of statesman at the convention. Greenberg studies the American presidency and its reflection in the media and popular culture. He is author of Nixon’s Shadow: the History of an Image, Presidential Doodles and Calvin Coolidge. He is presently working on a book about the history of political spin.Rutgers Today: Gov. Chris Christie has been named as the keynote speaker for the Republican National Convention. Why Christie?

Copyright and the Historian: How CUP v. Becker Affects You

Perspectives Online is featuring an important article on a recent landmark copyright case by Michael Les Benedict, emeritus professor of history at The Ohio State University, and a member of the AHA Task Force on Intellectual Property.This case, Cambridge University Press v. Becker, is one that directly affects how teaching historians go about their work, and should be read by anyone who has ever assigned or plans to assign, a course reading through their library’s e-reserve system.Benedict helpfully places Becker, decided in May 2012, within the context of past decisions on copyright rulings and the even larger debate over the meaning of copyright in the U.S. Constitution. He analyzes not only what this ruling means presently, but also looks at where the debate and the legal struggles will move next. He concludes by recommending that educators and librarians get involved immediately in working toward a solution that meets the needs of all parties involved, rather than wait for a “devastating court loss” to radically transform how they serve their students.

Blaxploitation birthday should mark rethink, urges historian

A cultural historian at The University of Manchester says we should change our minds about “blaxploitation” films, exactly 40 years after the term was first coined by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.Dr Eithne Quinn says that though films such as Shaft (1971) and Super Fly (1972) did contain sex, violence and racial stereotypes, what is rarely acknowledged is that they had more black workers on screen and behind the camera than almost any previous mainstream film productions in US history.The term blaxploitation first appeared, in the wake of Super Fly’s release, as a Junius Griffin quotation in a Hollywood Reporter story called “NAACP Takes Militant Stand on Black Exploitation Films,” on 10 August 1972. Griffin was head of NAACP at the time.The films, says Dr Quinn, were a major influence on ‘hip hop’ culture, typified by a silver tongued Oakland pimp called Goldie in one of the most popular ever blaxploitation films, The Mack (1973)....

Historian: Breaking German codes real reason for 1942 Dieppe raid

TORONTO – New research suggests the real intent of the historic raid on Dieppe in 1942 was to steal a machine that would help crack top-secret German codes.Military historian David O’Keefe spent 15 years searching through the once-classified and ultra-secret war files and says the real purpose behind the Dieppe operation—which cost hundreds of Canadian soldiers their lives — was to capture advanced coding technology from the German headquarters near the French beach.“For years, so many veterans, men who stormed the beaches and ended up in prisoners of war camps, had no clue what the reason was that they were there,” O’Keefe tells Global National’s Christina Stevens....

Christian Right Historian David Barton in Freefall Over ‘Jefferson Lies’

Michelle Goldberg is a senior contributing writer for Newsweek and The Daily Beast. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism and The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World, winner of the 2008 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award and the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize. Goldberg’s work has appeared in Glamour, Rolling Stone, The Nation, New York magazine, The Guardian, and The New Republic. Her next book is about the world-traveling adventuress, actress, and yoga evangelist Indra Devi.

Historian champions Hoover, his work

When thinking about the leaders of the United States, historian Timothy Walch regards former president Herbert Hoover as a champion.Walch, who served as the director of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum from 1993 to 2011, said Hoover’s determination, persistence and compassion set him apart.“When you think of all that he accomplished, saving the lives of a billion people, stepping up and setting aside a career of wealth, applying the skills he had to those who had the most need, is a wonderful message,” Walch said....

Chinese historian battling prejudice to honor Japanese settlers who perished in war

FANGZHENG COUNTY, China--Amid all the rancor in China over Japan's war responsibility, local historian Guo Xiangsheng comes across as a lone voice in the wilderness.He is campaigning to preserve the memory of thousands of Japanese settlers who died in China after the Imperial Japanese Army abandoned them in the chaotic close of World War II.The seeds of his quest lie in Japan's military occupation of northeastern China. Many Japanese were sent there as farmers to raise productivity after Tokyo established its Manchukuo puppet state in 1932.Later, the settlers were dragooned to defend its northern borders against the Soviet Red Army, which overran the region in August 1945.The settlers were left to fend for themselves after the Japanese army fled....

Egyptian authorities ban popular history book on Middle East

The Egyptian Print Censorship Authority has banned the import of A History of the Modern Middle East  by eminent academics William L Cleveland and Martin Bunton, now in its 12th edition.Khaled Fahmy, chair of history at the American University in Cairo (AUC), said that he received an email from the university informing him that the book he had requested for his modern Arab history course had been banned from entering the country. The short email did not give any reasons for the ban.

Jill Lepore plagiarized by Fareed Zakaria

   

Roy S. Bryce-Laporte, Who Led Black Studies at Yale, Dies at 78

Roy S. Bryce-Laporte, a sociologist who led one of the nation’s first African-American studies departments, at Yale University, and did research that advanced understanding of blacks who came to the United States voluntarily rather than as slaves, died on July 31 in Sykesville, Md. He was 78.His brother, Herrington J. Bryce, said that the cause was undetermined, but that he had had a series of small strokes.Professor Bryce-Laporte was named director of Yale’s new department of African-American studies in 1969, when colleges and universities were recruiting black students and searching for ways to include their culture, history and other concerns in the curriculum.Students participated in the selection of Professor Bryce-Laporte. One of them, Donald H. Ogilvie, praised him as “not all academician and not all activist,” adding that Professor Bryce-Laporte was “still angry.”...

Jonathan Ned Katz and his voluminous correspondence with Gore Vidal

In 1982 historian Jonathan Ned Katz initiated a correspondence with Gore Vidal that lasted, intermittently, until 2001. To mark the death of Vidal on July 31, 2012, OutHistory is reproducing the texts of Vidal’s brief, humorous thirteen letters to Katz, often on the theme of heterosexuality and, sometimes, homosexuality. The publication also includes descriptions of Katz's thirteen letters and his accounts of a telephone call from Vidal, and one meeting with him. Commenting on Katz's efforts to recover the history of same-sex and different-sex intimate relations, in one late letter Vidal exhorts: "Keep the war going" (Vidal to Katz, postmarked ?-18-1996)....

Robert Hughes, Art Critic Whose Writing Was Elegant and Contentious, Dies at 74

Robert Hughes, the eloquent, combative art critic and historian who lived with operatic flair and wrote with a sense of authority that owed more to Zola or Ruskin than to his own century, died on Monday at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. He was 74 and had lived for many years in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.He died after a long illness, said his wife, Doris Downes.With a Hemingwayesque build and the distinctively rounded vowels of his native Australia, Mr. Hughes became as familiar a presence on television as he was in print, over three decades for Time magazine, where he was chief art critic and often a traditionalist scourge during an era when art movements fractured into unrecognizability....

Was the use of nuclear weapons against Japan justified? One historian says yes

The US bombing of Hiroshima ranks as one of history's greatest controversies. Dennis Giangreco, former editor of Military Review, is also the award winning author of Hell to Pay: Operation Downfall the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947. His path breaking research into Japanese defense preparations leads him to defend the atomic strike. He offers this exclusive interview to Asia Sentinel. Q. Mr. Giangreco, please summarize the arguments of the critics of President Harry Truman over the bombing. Actually, they have changed somewhat over time. Originally, his critics maintained that Japan would have soon surrendered even without the atomic bombs or the Soviet entry into the war on August 8 1945. And, more importantly, that Truman knew this but bombed Japan to intimidate the Soviets, not save lives during a bloody invasion --- that Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked America's opening shots in the Cold War. After the death of Japanese Emperor Hirohito in 1989 and the very public struggle over how to exhibit the Enola Gay bomber that hit Hiroshima at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, a flood of documents emerged from archives on both sides of the Pacific.

Gene Smith Dies at 83; Wrote Biographies of World Leaders

Gene Smith, who with a vivid touch depicted the lives of presidents, prime ministers and generals in a series of popular biographies, among them the 1964 best seller “When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson,” died on July 25 at his home in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He was 83.The cause was bone cancer, his daughter, Jessica Smith, said.Of Mr. Wilson’s fading days after eight years in office, Mr. Smith wrote how the former president, long debilitated by a stroke and respiratory problems, had sought solace in the countryside:“He took with him an old cape bought years ago in Scotland and even on warm days wore it around his shoulders beneath the long, thin face. A cap was always on his head. He was like some apparition from the past, from Yesterday, coming along the road in his big, old open car with two small W’s painted where once the Seal of the President had been.”In tracing Wilson’s last years, “When the Cheering Stopped” chronicles the death of the president’s first wife, Ellen Axson Wilson, in August 1914; his courtship of the Washington widow Edith Bolling Galt and their subsequent marriage in December 1915; his triumphal reception in Europe after World War I; and his failed campaign for American membership in the League of Nations.

John Keegan, Historian Who Put a Face on War, Dies at 78

John Keegan, an Englishman widely considered to be the pre-eminent military historian of his era and the author of more than 20 books, including the masterwork “The Face of Battle,” died Thursday at his home in Kilmington, England. He was 78.His death was announced in The Telegraph, where he had served as the military affairs editor. No cause of death was given, though Con Coughlin, the paper’s executive foreign editor, said in an e-mail that Mr. Keegan had died after a long illness.Mr. Keegan never served in the military. At 13, he contracted orthopedic tuberculosis and spent the next nine years being treated for it, five of them in a hospital, where he used the time to learn Latin and Greek from a chaplain. As he acknowledged in the introduction to “The Face of Battle,” he had “not been in a battle, nor near one, nor heard one from afar, nor seen the aftermath.”...

Stanford's "Reading Like a Historian" program draws national attention

#next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; } For years, bands of educators have been trying to free history instruction from the mire of memorization and propel it instead with the kinds of inquiry that drive historians themselves. Now, the common-core standards may offer more impetus for districts and schools to adopt that brand of instruction.A study of one such approach suggests that it can yield a triple academic benefit: It can deepen students’ content knowledge, help them think like historians, and also build their reading comprehension.The Reading Like a Historian program, a set of 75 free secondary school lessons in U.S. history, is getting a new wave of attention as teachers adapt to the Common Core State Standards in English/language arts. Those guidelines, adopted by all but four states, demand that teachers of all subjects help students learn to master challenging nonfiction and build strong arguments based on evidence ....

Government historian out with a book on the history of US-Iran relationship

For the United States and Iran the 1979 Iranian revolution — which replaced an American-allied monarchy with a virulently anti-American theocracy — has proved to be the geopolitical divorce from hell. For over three decades, as the two sides have engaged in an ugly battle for patronage over a volatile Middle East, Washington has hoped in vain that Tehran would change its ways. “The Twilight War,” David Crist’s painstakingly researched and elegantly written account of the United States-Iran cold war, is an earnest chronicle of this shadowy history. Mr. Crist’s position as a government historian and adviser to the United States Central Command, which oversees all American combat forces in the Middle East and which his father used to lead, has afforded him unique access to government officials and classified intelligence. Nonetheless he proves himself a dispassionate narrator. While no apologist for the Iranian regime, Mr. Crist pulls no punches in pointing out America’s strategic and sometimes moral failings in dealing with Iran. Other books, notably Kenneth Pollack’s “Persian Puzzle” and David Sanger’s “Confront and Conceal,” have ably covered American foreign policy toward Iran. Mr. Crist’s stands out for its focus on the troubled relationship’s military context.

Hobbyist builds database of every US bomb dropped since WW I

Lieutenant Colonel Jenns Robertson, 45, has spent the past six years working on one of the most unusual historical projects in modern times: compiling a database of every bomb dropped by U.S. forces dating back to World War I."It has proven useful in the real world, in real time," Robertson told the Boston Globe. "You can pick any place you want and look at it in detail."The project is called THOR: Theater History of Operations Reports and allows people to use their computers to literally point and click to nearly any location on the globe and receive a near-instantaneous assessment of when and where U.S. bombs were dropped over the past century....

UK Foreign Secretary William Hague raising the profile of historians

... The Foreign Secretary believes history has diminished as a factor in the formulation of British foreign policy in recent years and needs to be re‑emphasised. With this in mind, he has liberated the FCO’s small corps of in‑house historians from a basement in a satellite building and installed them in a newly refurbished library in the department’s imposing main premises in King Charles Street, off Whitehall.“Just as one draws on economists and people with specialist knowledge of a particular country, so we should be drawing on the insights provided by our historians,” he says, taking a break from overseeing the British response to the crisis in Syria. “The historians are an obvious resource and they were not appreciated by the last administration. They were languishing in a basement and now the light is shining on their books. It is intended to be a signal to the whole Foreign Office to use them, and to remember the importance of understanding history.”Leather-bound collections of memoranda line the shelves of the new library, the to and fro of diplomatic discourse through the ages. There are in‑house histories, too, on everything from Nato to Nazi gold.

Jon Wiener ... Remembering Gore Vidal

Victor Navasky tells one of the most revealing stories about Gore Vidal, who died July 31 in Los Angeles at age 86. In 1986, Gore wrote an essay for the magazine’s 120th anniversary issue.  Shortly after it was published, Victor was invited to lunch by the publisher of Penthouse magazine, Bob Guccione, at his East Side townhouse famous for its $200 million art collection. “We had barely consumed the amuse gueules when Bob asked me how much it cost to get Gore Vidal to write his essay,” Victor recalled. “When I told him we had paid each contributor to that issue $25 and Gore got the same $25 that everyone else got, he almost choked on his Chateau Margaux and told me he had offered Vidal $50,000 to write an article for Penthouse and Vidal declined.”Gore, who had accepted Victor’s invitation to join the magazine in 1981 as a contributing editor, published 41 articles in The Nation at those rates. Some of his most memorable quotes appeared in The Nation: “We are the United States of Amnesia,” he wrote in 2004. “We learn nothing because we remember nothing.”  In that same essay he called the US a place where “the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns.”