Historians in the News

Frederick Kagan: Interviewed about his Iraq War Plan

President Bush, in a primetime speech Wednesday, admitted that he erred in having failed to send more troops to Iraq. As part of a new war plan, Bush will be sending 21,500 additional troops to Iraq to stomp out the sectarian violence that has been ravaging the nation and threatening to send it into civil war. However, a recent AP poll suggests that most Americans oppose such a move. Such overwhelming opposition reflects increasing doubt that the U.S. was c

Historians concerned about the murder of Turkish writer

Dear colleagues, International PEN issued a statement after the appalling murder yesterday of Armenian-Turkish writer Hrant Dink. Below it is reproduced and preceded by a NCH summary of Dink's case. In addition, NCH wants to draw your attention to the fact that, sadly, historians and others concerned with the past are sometimes assassinated. Some recent examples from Iraq, Sudan, and Colombia: **Last week, NCH circular #47 contained details about five historians assassinat

Sarah Igo: On her new book, pushy pollsters, and the self-help industry

Last week, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released a “Portrait of Generation Next,” a wide-ranging collection of survey data from Americans aged 18-25. The report collapsed a generation into a few crisp adjectives. Generation Nexters, it turns out, are tolerant, tech-savvy, idealistic, and liberal-leaning. And alongside all of their catalogued assumptions, one goes unsaid: None of them will find it strange that they and 42 million peers have been distilled into a press rele

Robert J. Cottrol: Retracts allegations he made against peer review process that approved publication of article by Bellesiles

[Robert J. Cottrol is Professor of Law, of History, and of Sociology, and Harold Paul Green Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University and his J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center. He was a critic of Michael Bellesiles, the historian who left Emory University after his research denying the importance of guns in early American history was called into question.] During the October [2006] symposium [at George Maso

James Loewen: Criticized by David Horowitz

The following report identifies several academic departments at Pennsylvania State University which openly and regularly violate the academic freedom provisions of the university. These provisions were only recently made applicable to students at Penn State by a resolution of the faculty senate (20.00) in May. The new policy was a response to the Pennsylvania academic freedom hearings and the campaign for academic freedom waged by Students for Academic Freedom and the David Horowitz Freedom Cent

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto: Busted, battered, but I love you USA

For a few hours I belonged to the underclass. I made my first friend among Atlanta’s jailbirds while I was sitting in the cramped, fetid paddy wagon. Ronnie — a gangly, frizzy-haired black guy who claimed, rather improbably, to be a pure-blood Apache — blinked curiously at me through the cage wire that separated us. He was bleary with dope, but I looked worse. The policemen who assaulted me had left me bruised, with a bleeding temple. They had ripped my venerable charcoal-grey suit. I was

What happened to a historian

... A few weeks ago, I saw an odd comment on Paul Halsall's English Eclectic:"I moved, and have been trying out as a mortgag[e] broker." If you don't know who Paul Halsall is or why that struck me as so unusual, you should. He is the creator of the remarkable Internet History Sourcebooks Project. It includes primary source documents i

Zachary Schrag: Professor starts blog to examine institutional review boards

To hear it from Zachary Schrag, assistant professor of history at George Mason University, getting clearance from an institutional review board to conduct an oral history project is not only onerous, but it can place demands on a researcher that compromises professional ethics. An IRB must approve any study that involves human subjects, and IRBs at some institutions have asked oral historians to destroy primary sources of information such as taped interviews. “I once had to fill out

Michael Oren: Video of his appearance on Jon Stewart's Daily Show

Distinguished Yale Historian Wins Award for Scholarly Distinction

David Brion Davis, a preeminent scholar of the history of slavery and abolition, was honored with an American Historical Association (AHA) Award for Scholarly Distinction at the recent annual meeting of the AHA in Atlanta. One of the most respected historians in his field, Davis is the Sterling Professor Emeritus of History and the founding director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale. Among the 18

Michael Baigent and Richard Leig: Historians Appeal ‘Da Vinci Code’ Case

The two historians who lost their plagiarism case against the British publishers of the best seller “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown turned to the Court of Appeal in Britain yesterday in an effort to reverse their loss in a case that also saddles them with a legal bill of more than $2 million, The Associated Press reported. Lawyers for the historians, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, argued that the “vast amount of skill and labor” they expended in writing their book “The Holy Blood and the Ho

Alistair Horne: Bush is reading his book on Algeria (on Kissinger's recommendation)

... During his “60 Minutes” interview, Mr. Bush mentioned that he was reading Alistair Horne’s classic history, “A Savage War of Peace,” about why the French suffered a colonial disaster in a guerrilla war against Muslims in Algiers from 1954 to 1962. The book was recommended to W. by Henry Kissinger, who is working on an official biography of himself with Mr. Horne. Mr. Horne recalled that Dr. Kissinger told him: “The president’s one of my best students. He reads all t

Petition for historians and other academics killed in Iraq

Dear colleagues, Among the more than 250 college professors who have been killed since 30 April 2003 in Iraq are the following historians: **Khalid M. al-Janabi, PhD. in Islamic history, faculty member at the College of Art, Babylon University. Date of assassination unknown. **Essam Sharif Mohammed (also spelled Hissam Sharif), Ph.D in History, assistant professor at the College of Art, Baghdad University. Date of assassination: 25 October 2003. **Mahfoudh al-Qazz

Victor C. Uchendu: Historian who taught at Illinois killed in Africa to prevent his becoming mayor

The Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign is very sadden to share the news that Prof. Victor C. Uchendu, founding director of our unit has passed away on December 7, 2006. He was buried in Nsirimo, Nigeria on December 22, 2006. It is particularly troubling because we understand from his family that he was killed in his home at Umuahia, Abia State, Nigeria, and that individuals were hired to kill hi

Brian Wills: UVa-Wise historian examines Hollywood's portrayal of Civil War

A new book by historian Brian S. Wills examines the Civil War's depiction in cinema. Wills, a Kenneth Asbury Professor of History at the University of Virginia's College at Wise, combines two of his passions - history and movies - in his latest book, "Gone With The Glory: The Civil War in Cinema." Wills said he has been an avid movie fan since boyhood. "I always preferred the historical epics to other genres, partly because of my interest

John Hope Franklin: Miles to Go Before He Sleeps

(Historian and civil rights activist John Hope Franklin explains how the movement toward Martin Luther King's dream has been significant—that we can expect a black president 'soon'—but 'not nearly as effective as it should be.') The life of John Hope Franklin—as poignantly reflected in his autobiography “Mirror to America”(Farrar Straus Giraux)—is not just the story of a single life, but also serves as a chronicle of race relations in 20th century America. Born in 1915 in an all-bla

Martin Gilbert: Famed historian maps Jewish history

One of the world's best known historians shared his fascination for maps yesterday, using them to talk about the Holocaust at a University of Western Ontario lecture. Sir Martin Gilbert, Winston Churchill's official biographer, said he began making maps to illustrate his research in 1959 and has been doing it ever since. He said mapping helps him to focus, verify and visualize the information he gathers. It's an important part of his process in writing hist

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto: The accidental criminal

Arrested, beaten and jailed by police in Atlanta for crossing a road in an illegal manner, the British historian and writer reflects on his shocking ordeal - and what it reveals about the US "No one truly knows a nation," said Nelson Mandela, "until one has been inside its gaols." Last week, after living in the USA for more than a year without understanding the country, I acquired - briefly - a gaolbird's authority. I can now share insights you can only get from

Donny George: How an Iraqi archaeologist survived Saddam Hussein, only to have to flee to Long Island in the face of the civil war

Donny George, man of history, had vowed never to leave Baghdad, where he was the keeper of the keys to the looted Iraqi National Museum. Then his teenage son opened a letter with a bullet inside and a threat to cut off his head because his father “worked for the Americans.” An estimated 1.8 million Iraqis have fled their country since the U.S. invasion, but George, an archaeologist, along with his wife, Najat, and 17-year-old son, Martin, are some of the very few—only 500 a year—who’ve been gran

Handbook offers ideas for professors in Middle Eastern studies who find themselves under attack

Post-9/11, many of the most intense debates about academic freedom have involved Middle Eastern studies. There have been numerous cases in which candidates for jobs or tenure have been opposed at least in part because of their views on the Middle East, with recent flare-ups at Barnard College and Wayne State University. At least 15 of the professors named by David Horowitz in his book last year on “the 101 most dangerous academics” study the Middle East — a proportion that is notable when consid