American History Notes

Whatever happened to Historians TV? The AHA agreed to an association with a British production company, WebsEdge, which promised to produce daily half-hour in-house programs at the AHA convention and subsequent video clips from the convention to a broader audience. Ten days after the convention closed, however, the only offerings on Historians TV are seven commercials. They were bought by the Smithsonian's yet-to-be-created National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Naval History and Heritage Command, Michigan's Department of History, Arts and Libraries, and history departments at James Madison University, UMass, Boston, Murray State University and Princeton University. At this point, Historians TV offers commercials only. No programming.

David Courtwright,"Why Soldiers Fight – or Flee," WSJ, 12 January, reviews Dora L. Costa's and Matthew E. Kahn's Heroes & Cowards: The Social Face of War. Costa and Kahn are UCLA economists who make use of Robert Fogel's database to do an econometric study of desertion from the Union army during the American Civil War. Here is Princeton University Press's webpage for the book. The authors are guest-posting about their book at The Volokh Conspiracy this week.

The bulk of the Martin Luther King Papers at the Atlanta University Center's Woodruff Library are digitized and went online yesterday. You can browse and search the digital finding aids here, but access to"digital surrogates" is restricted to on site use and researchers will not have direct access to original or photocopied documents."No downloads, photocopies or photographs of King collection materials are permitted." Access to the archive's dedicated terminals is by 30 minute intervals, up to a maximum of 90 minutes. The archive's hours are very limited. It is a nightmare for researchers from out of town.

Gary J. Bass,"Unvarnished Conclusions After Covering, and Uncovering, the White House," NYT, 12 January, reviews David E. Sanger's The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power.