Historians in the News

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and the Police in "Post-Racial" America

[Brandon M. Terry is a doctoral student at Yale University in Political Science and African American Studies. He is also a graduate of Harvard where he received an AB in Government and African and African American Studies, and studied under Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.] This past Thursday, the renowned Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, was reminded that sometimes, there's just one. It is the way that his white neigh

State Dept Offers New Caveat on Nixon Tapes

The transcripts of Nixon White House tape recordings that are published in the State Department’s official Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series are merely “interpretations,” not official records, the State Department acknowledged in the latest FRUS volume that was released this month. As such, those transcripts are susceptible to revision and correction.“Readers are advised

Robin Hood Discovery: An Interview with Julian Luxford

In March 2009, Julian Luxford of the University of St. Andrews made international headlines with a discovery of a passage in a 15th-century manuscript that contained an account of Robin Hood - see the

Journalist--author of WW II history books--accuses Simon Wiesenthal of fabricating much of his own Holocaust story

Since the early 1960s Simon Wiesenthal’s name has become synonymous with Nazi hunting. His standing is that of a secular saint. Nominated four times for the Nobel peace prize, the recipient of a British honorary knighthood, the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, the French Légion d’honneur and at least 53 other distinctions, he was often credited with some 1,100 Nazi “scalps”. He is remembered, above all, for his efforts to track down Adolf Eichmann, one of the most notorious war criminals.

Conservative dismisses the historians who met with Obama as lefties

Is it any surprise that the historians that attended a secret White House dinner with President Obama last month are nearly all well known for a leftist outlook on history? Is Obama programming his “historical” coverage already? Was there a Richard Brookhiser in attendance or a Larry Schweikart? Was there someone like Forrest McDonald at Obama’s secret dinner? Nope. Except for one attendee, the invited historians have all used their status as historians to make all sorts of ahistori

Gay Historian Louis Crompton Dies

Historian Louis Crompton, whose books include the scholarly and critically praised 2003 book "Homosexuality and Civilization," has died at age 84. A July 19 obituary at The San Francisco Chronicle outlined the scholar’s life: born in 1925 in Ontario, Crompton had a long and varied career in academic life, as a professor of mathematics at the University of British Columbia and then a professor of English at two universities, Toronto and Nebraska at Lincoln. Cro

Harvard professor Gates arrested at Cambridge home

Update: Charge against Harvard professor dropped. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the nation's pre-eminent African-American scholars, was arrested Thursday afternoon at his home by Cambridge police investigating a possible break-in. The

Medieval battle records go online

The detailed service records of 250,000 medieval soldiers - including archers who served with Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt - have gone online. The database of those who fought in the Hundred Years War reveals salaries, sickness records and who was knighted. The full profiles of soldiers from 1369 to 1453 will allow researchers to piece together details of their lives. Thomas, Lord Despenser is the youngest soldier on the database, whose career began w

Tariq Ramadan ... Scholar's Visa Denial Suit Revived

A federal appeals court has revived the challenge by scholarly and civil liberties groups to the U.S. government's denial of a visa to Tariq Ramadan, an internationally acclaimed scholar, to accept a faculty position at the University of Notre Dame. The decision, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, does not grant Ramadan a visa. But it orders a lower court's inquiry into the possibility that he was denied the opportunity to show consular officers that there was no l

Inaugural Semester-long seminar on Constitutional History offered at N-Y Historical Society this fall

In its capacity as the New York City home of the Institute for Constitutional History (ICH)—an organization that is co-housed in Washington, DC, at the George Washington University Law School—the New-York Historical Society is pleased to announce that its first semester-long graduate course will take place in autumn 2009 as the Robert H. Smith Seminar. In keeping with the Lincoln Bicentennial theme of the Historical Society’s programs in 2009, including its major exhibition Lincoln and New York,

Daniel Pipes believes Iraq will become Obama's Vietnam

In an opinion piece today,"The Big Decisions to Come," Washington Post columnist David Ignatius argues that the Middle East hosts all four of Barack Obama's major foreign policy challenges: the Israeli-Palestinian problem, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. Along the way, Ignatius reports that"Afghanistan is already being called 'Obama's Vietnam'." But I think that"Obama's Vietnam" is better

Jackson Lears continues his search for the origin of our times

Rebirth of a Nation is ambitious in conception, sharp in tone, stylish in composition, erudite in argument, and unified by the force of conviction. It continues the project that Jackson Lears has been pursuing since his first book, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (1981), then in Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (1994) and Something for Nothing: Luck in America (2003). These books purport to uncover the origin

Margaret MacMillan says we botch the use of history

We all live in history. Some of us make it, others are made — or broken — by it. Many of us read it. A few of us write it. Most of us try, at least fitfully, to make use of it, usually by ransacking the past for analogies to explain the present and to predict the future. And more than a few of us, in Margaret MacMillan’s amply documented opinion, routinely botch it. MacMillan, the Canadian-reared warden of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, is an accomplished historian who has written ab

Civil War historian Kenneth Stampp dies at 96

Related Links HNN History Doyen Profile WaPo ObituaryKenneth M. Stampp, 96, a historian who helped transfor

Former editorial director of Yale University Press and general editor of its celebrated Annals of Communism series is now in charge of one of the world's most important archives of Jewish life

One of the world's most important archives of Jewish life, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, in New York, has a new executive director. Jonathan Brent, 59, lately the editorial director of Yale University Press and general editor of its celebrated Annals of Communism series, assumed the post on July 1. Unlike his work on the Annals series, his new job will not require that he be ready to drink and smoke heavily. He laughs heartily when that subject comes up. He se

Rick Perlstein attacked by O'Reilly on Fox as a far left activist

A national historian for US government?

Government agencies work together, this is a fact. Intergovernmental programs are essential to the day to day running of the country. Yet, there is no official history for these actions. Many agencies have historians, but there is no one covering the government as a whole. James Carafano is a Senior Research Fellow for National Security and Homeland Security in the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation. Caraf

Authors discusses new book on James Meredith and his battle to enroll at the University of Mississippi.

In 1962, with court backing, James Meredith became the first black person to enroll at the University of Mississippi. His struggle to enroll, and the violent actions by mobs trying to keep him out, led to a legal and political showdown that reached the White House. While there have been previous studies of this period, Charles W. Eagles had access to previously unavailable federal and state records, and personal records, for his new book, The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration

David McCullough's next book is about Americans who headed to Paris

When people think of American history of the mid-1800s, they usually think of the great westward expansion, the opening up of new territory, of covered wagons and the forging of the American frontier myth. But, as historian David McCullough notes in the first chapter of his latest book: “Not all the pioneers went west.” A lot went the other way, too, intent on opening up new territories of their minds. And many went to France. So many were they, in fact, a

History Radio Show: Drive-Time History, With a Dry Sense of Humor

Three history professors spent a recent Sunday afternoon leaning into microphones in a small studio near the University of Virginia, trying to become radio stars — and attempting to invent a new model of educational programming in the process. When they don their bulky headphones, they become "the American history guys," hosts of the monthly public-radio show BackStory. Peter S. Onuf, a UVa history professor known for his work on the American Revolution, gives his perspect