Historians in the News

John Boswell: A gay classicist and college president who assisted Boswell in his research on gay history gets married

[Ralph Hexter, the president of Hampshire College, married his longtime partner September 1. They announced the news this week, which was reported at the website, InsiderHigherEd.com.] ... For Hexter, the marriage also marks a personal milestone that relates to an important part of his scholarly career. While he was at Yale, he was a close friend and colleague of John Boswell, a historian whose two books on gay history in medieval Europe are considered to have been path-breaking

Dick Scott: Honored with $43,000 (US) award by New Zealand prime minister

The Prime Minister's literary awards today honoured three writers - a historian, a poet and a novelist. The three writers - historian Dick Scott, poet Bill Manhire and novelist Fiona Farrell - have all been recognised in the Prime Minister's Awards for Literary Achievement, in a ceremony at Premier House in Wellington tonight. Each received $60,000 [NZ $] in recognition of their significant contribution to New Zealand literature. Prime Minister Helen Clark

David Oliver: Museum director heading to Afghanistan in troop deployment

David Oliver's two lives evolved from one unusual childhood habit. "I didn't read about Dr. Seuss," he said. "I read about World War II." Oliver, director of the Tinker Homestead and Farm Museum in Henrietta, will leave his historian's life for a military one when his National Guard unit mobilizes this month in preparation for deployment to Afghanistan. After two months of training at Fort Bragg, N.C., members of Alpha Company, 1st Battalion,

Ken Burns: Latinos plan protests of "The War"

Cartoonist Hector Cantu decided if Ken Burns didn't tell the stories of Latinos in his World War II documentary, he'd have Baldo do it. This week, Cantu and co-creator Carlos Castellanos unveiled Benito "Benny" Ramirez in their syndicated comic strip "Baldo," which appears in 200 newspapers. Ramirez is a composite of the actual stories of several Hispanic World War II veterans featured in a book by University of Texas journalism professor Maggie Rivas-Rodr

Jack Rakove: Historian Tells How to "Live with Founders"

U.S. citizens live with the Founding Fathers in a distinct and unique way, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian told a BYU audience Monday."To live with the Founding Fathers, in a historical sense, is to try to live with ambiguity, because a documentary record is always incomplete," said Jack Rakove, a professor of political science at Stanford and 1997 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for history."History is a dynamic process." Rakove spoke in the JSB auditorium on"Living With the Fo

Waskar T. Ari Chachaki: Bolivian historian talks about his long fight to gain admitance to US

Waskar T. Ari Chachaki, a Bolivian historian and an Aymara Indian, was one of the first indigenous people from Latin America to earn a Ph.D. at an American institution. Yet for two years the U.S. government would not allow him into the country to teach, relenting only when his hiring institution, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, sued. Mr. Ari talks about his long road back to American academe.

Ken Burns: Subtext of WW II series, says Newsweek, is the Iraq War

[HNN: This is a very long feature, running across 6 web pages.]"The thing that really got me mad," Ken Burns says in explaining why he felt called to begin"The War," his forthcoming documentary series,"was finding out that a huge number of our high-school graduates think that we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the second world war. It's so unbelievable." Now you or I might have set about trying to fix America's broken educational system, but Burns is a practical man—

Ken Burns: $10 million spent to promote his WW II series

Notice something different about your current Bank of America statement? "Bank of America is a proud sponsor of THE WAR, a Ken Burns film," it says, in even bigger print than your balances. Or reach for an orange. It might be one of the 25 million that bear a message urging citrus lovers to watch "The War," Burns's seven-part, 16-hour documentary about World War II, which begins airing on PBS next Sunday. WGBH will broadcast it locally. "If you

Norman Finkelstein: Claims that he was fired for his scholarly views are derided by conservative

[Steven Plaut is a professor at the Graduate School of the Business Administration at the University of Haifa and is a columnist for the Jewish Press.] The Norman Finkelstein affair at DePaul University was not yet buried when an entire revisionist "narrative" of the affair was being churned out by the Far Left. A bit of revisionism was to be expected, one supposes, regarding the favorite "academic" of those promoting Holocaust Revisionism and "New History&q

Mark Edmundson: Why he decided to write about Freud

[Mark Edmundson is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is author of The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days, published this month by Bloomsbury.] Why publish a book about Sigmund Freud in 2007, a time when many people — perhaps most — think that Freud is passé? Even a reasonably sympathetic observer is likely to believe that what's best in Freud's work has already been absorbed into the culture. Everyone, this line of thinking runs, now knows wha

Campus Watch fights accusations it tries to blacklist scholars

[Winfield Myers is director of Campus Watch.] In an uninformed entry at the blog Huffington Post, Marjorie Cohn, a professor of law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego and president of the National Lawyers Guild, misrepresents Campus Wat

Tony Judt: Notes the downside to multicultural studies

The historian Tony Judt, a self-described “old leftist” and the director of the Remarque Institute at N.Y.U., which examines Europe and European-American relations, said undergraduates often arrive unprepared from high school and seeking courses “in what we might have thought of as the old-fashioned approach” — broad surveys. But many young professors aren’t interested in teaching outside their narrow specialties, nor are they generally prepared to do so. And colleges are loath to reinstate the

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt: Vilified by colleagues

John Crook: Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge University (Obit.)

John Anthony Crook, ancient historian: born London 5 November 1921; Assistant Lecturer in Classics, Reading University 1948-49, Lecturer 1949-51; Fellow, St John's College, Cambridge 1951-2007, Tutor 1956-64, President 1971-75; Assistant Lecturer in Classics, Cambridge University 1953-55, Lecturer 1955-71, Reader in Roman History and Law 1971-79, Brereton Reader 1974-79, Professor of Ancient History 1979-84 (Emeritus); FBA 1970-80; died Cambridge 7 September 2007. Though he would ce

"The End of H-Net?" asks a historian

... Back in the late 1990s H-Net was the coolest way for academics, teachers, and others with an interest in the humanities and social sciences to connect, discuss, and even engage in some serious scholarship online. Of course, in the late 1990s, email was still the killer app of the Internet and we still hadn’t experienced non-stop spamming, nor could we imagine the rapid growth of blogs as a means of communication and community building. And we certainly didn’t know how social networking would

James L. Kugel: Exploring Irreconcilable Differences in Bible's Interpretations

“How to Read the Bible” is a most unusual how-to book. For one thing, it is more than 800 pages long and has 971 endnotes. It is true that all the familiar figures and events of the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament are here: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David and the prophets. But the book, written by James L. Kugel and just published by the Free Press, also propounds a stark and challenging thesis, namely that contemporary Bible readers are confronted with t

Donald Kagan: Dems protest his selection as 9/11 speaker at Yale

The choice of history professor Donald Kagan to give the keynote address at today’s Sept. 11 memorial service provoked the Yale College Democrats to withdraw its sponsorship of the event. The College Democrats, who had co-sponsored the event last year alongside the College Republicans, declined to participate in the service after Kagan, a noted conservative, was invited to speak by the event organizers, Laura Marcus ’10 and Luke Palder ’09. The Dems said Kagan was too partisan a fig

Kevin Gover: Named new head of Smithsonian American Indian Museum

On September 11, 2007, Kevin Gover was named director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, effective Dec. 2. He is currently a professor of law at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University in Tempe, an affiliate professor in its American Indian Studies Program and co-executive director of the university’s American Indian Policy Institute....

Paul Johnson: He has a new big book out--on Art

One of the many interesting components of historian Paul Johnson’s comprehensive history volumes “Modern Times” and “A History of the American People” is that he did not skimp on the impact of art on a people and a culture. Amidst his thick, detailed and often riveting accounts of wars, elections, economic upheavals, and the people in the middle of the constantly moving eye of history’s storms, Johnson included narratives on how music, art, theatre, etc., also shaped their times and subsequent c

James Belich: Acclaimed New Zealand historian to join new faculty

Award-winning historian James Belich to return to Victoria Renowned New Zealand historian and prize-winning author James Belich is to join Victoria University's Stout Research Centre as a Professor of History. Victoria Vice-Chancellor Professor Pat Walsh says Professor Belich's appointment will further strengthen the University's history programme – ranked the highest among New Zealand universities in the most recent Performance-Based Research Funding (PBRF) exercise.