IN FOCUS:
- Will Tuesday Be the Darkest Day in 456 Years?: A painting of a total lunar eclipse viewed from the surface of the moon, as imagined by Lucien Rudax in the 1920s. Break out the flashlights. When a full lunar eclipse takes place on the shortest day of the year, the planet may just get awfully dark. The upcoming Dec. 21 full moon — besides distinguishing itself from the others in 2010 by undergoing a total eclipse — will also take place on the same date as the solstice (the winter solstice if you live north of the equator, and the summer solstice if you live to the south).
Winter solstice is the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and marks the official beginning of winter. The sun is at its lowest in our sky because the North Pole of our tilted planet is pointing away from it…. – Fox News, 12-18-10
- First Winter Solstice Meeting With Lunar Eclipse In 456 Years: This year’s winter solstice will coincide with a full lunar eclipse for the first time in 456 years. The winter solstice is the shortest day of the year, and it has not fallen on the same day as a lunar eclipse since 1554, according to NASA.
This eclipse will be the second on two eclipses in 2010. The first was a partial lunar eclipse that took place on June 26, 2010.
Some believe that this event holds special significance, such as one ancient culture who saw the winter solstice as a time of renewal.
The winter solstice played an important role in the Greco-Roman rituals.
“It’s seen as a time of rebirth or renewal because, astrologically, it’s a time where the light comes back,” Shane Hawkins, a professor of Greek and Roman studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, told the Montreal Gazette. “If (the eclipse) happened on the 21st, they might well have been drunk,” he said. However, skeptics say that it is just an event with not significance…. – Red Orbit, 12-18-10
- Retraction and Apology Issued to Professor Guenter Lewy: In the summer 2008 issue of its Intelligence Report, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that Guenter Lewy, a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, was part of a network of persons, financed by the Government of Turkey, who dispute that the tragic events of World War I constituted an Armenian genocide. We now realize that we misunderstood Professor Lewy’s scholarship, were wrong to assert that he was part of a network financed by the Turkish Government, and were wrong to assume that any scholar who challenges the Armenian genocide narrative necessarily has been financially compromised by the Government of Turkey. We hereby retract the assertion that Professor Lewy was or is on the Government of Turkey’s payroll….
Professor Lewy adds the following comment: “The SPLC has made important contributions to the rule of law and the struggle against bigotry. Thus I took no pleasure in commencing legal action against it. But the stakes, both for my reputation as a scholar and for the free and unhindered discussion of controversial topics, were compelling. It must be possible to defend views that contradict conventional wisdom without being called the agent of a foreign government.” – PR Newswire, 12-1-10
HISTORY NEWS:
- Beneath the Dead Sea, Scientists Are Drilling for Natural History: Five miles out, nearly to the center of the Dead Sea, an international team of scientists has been drilling beneath the seabed to extract a record of climate change and earthquake history stretching back half a million years.
“We knew the lake went through high levels and lower levels,” said Prof. Zvi Ben-Avraham, a leading Dead Sea expert and the driving force behind the project, “but we did not know it got so low.” Professor Ben-Avraham, a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and chief of the Minerva Dead Sea Research Center at Tel Aviv University, had been pushing for such a drilling operation for 10 years…. – NYT, 12-18-10
- A protest against tuition hikes becomes a generational phenomenon in Britain: IN LONDON The first sign that something is awry inside the venerable halls of University College London is a fresh red scrawl on the side of the regal entrance that simply reads, “Join the fight.” “A lot of students feel this overwhelming sense of disillusionment,” said Sylvia Ellis, associate professor of history at Northumbria University. “This is the first time that many of them have come face to face with the fact that politicians will let them down.” Now, the student opposition – including building occupations at Cambridge, Manchester University, Birmingham University and scores of others – has generated the seven-month-old coalition’s most serious political challenge. The Liberal Democrats are bitterly split, with one block set to vote against the measure. In an olive branch to students, the government agreed Wednesday to offer more flexible student loan terms…. – WaPo, 12-8-10
HISTORY OP-EDs:
- Eric Weinberger: All the [Harvard] President’s Books, Drew Gilpin Faust: I took charge of the president’s books because it was my assigned job to write thank-you letters for them. I would send her the books and the unsigned draft replies on presidential letterhead; for each one, she sent me back the signed letter and, most of the time, the book, meaning she had no further use for it. Some books she would keep, but seldom for very long, which meant those came back to me too, in one of the smaller offices on the third floor of Mass Hall where there was no room to put them. Furthermore they weren’t so easily disposed of. Often they bore inscriptions, to President Drew Faust or to her and her husband from people they knew; and even if the volume was something rather less exalted — a professor from India sending his management tome or a book of Hindi poems addressed, mysteriously, to “Sir” or to the “vice-chancellor of Harvard University” — these books obviously couldn’t end up in a secondhand bookshop or charity bin or anywhere they could cause embarrassment. All were soon moved to an overflow space at the very end of the hall, coincidentally looking out at a donation bin for books at a church across the street…. – Inside Higher Ed, 12-13-10
- Stephanie Coontz: Is marriage becoming obsolete?: According to a TIME/Pew research poll released last week, 40 percent of Americans believe that marriage is becoming obsolete, up from just 28 percent in 1978. In that same poll, only one in four unmarried Americans say they do not want to get married. And among currently married men and women, 80 percent say their marriage is as close as or closer than their parents’ marriage. These seemingly contradictory responses reflect the public’s recognition of a new and complex reality. On the one hand, marriage as a voluntary relationship based on love and commitment is held in higher regard than ever, with more people saying that love is essential to marriage (Consider that in 1967, two-thirds of college women said they’d consider marrying a man they didn’t love if he met other criteria, such as offering respectability and financial security.)… – CNN, 11-24-10
HISTORY REVIEWS:
- NYT 100 Notable Books of 2010 – NYT, 12-5-10
- NYT: The 10 Best Books of 2010: Stacy Schiff: CLEOPATRA: A Life: With her signature blend of wit, intelligence and superb prose, Schiff strips away 2,000 years of prejudices and propaganda in her elegant reimagining of the Egyptian queen who, even in her own day, was mythologized and misrepresented.
Isabel Wilkerson: THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration: Wilkerson, a former national correspondent for The Times, has written a masterly and engrossing account of the Great Migration, in which six million African-Americans abandoned the South between 1915 and 1970. The book centers on the journeys of three black migrants, each representing a different decade and a different destination. – NYT, 12-12-10
- Noah Feldman’s book on FDR’s Supreme Court: SCORPIONS The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices Now Noah Feldman, himself a Harvard law professor, has written a book similar to Simon’s, although “The Antagonists” have bulked up into “Scorpions” and two more Roosevelt appointees have entered the lists: Justices William O. Douglas and Robert Jackson. Having reviewed “The Antagonists” for The Post, I doubted that Simon’s topic deserved another look. In truth, however, it did. “The Antagonists” remains a very good book, but “Scorpions” is even better. In it, Feldman tells how four ambitious and strong-willed jurists jockeyed for position on a Supreme Court asked to rule on the constitutionality of New Deal programs and to find a balance between governmental objectives and individual rights…. – WaPo, 12-5-10
- New book chronicles largest slave revolt in U.S. history: On January 8, 1811 a group of determined enslaved Africans set into motion a plan to rise up against slavery and take their destiny into their own hands. Vowing to cast the shackles that bound them to the sugar cane plantations just west of the Crescent City, these ambitious warriors carved out a place in history for themselves that some have sought to bury for two centuries. American Uprising, a new book written by Daniel Rasmussen and slated for an early January 2011 release tells the story of the planning and execution of this uprising and its aftermath.
Rasmussen, a recent Harvard University grad, says he began researching and writing the book about three years ago after stumbling upon the story of the revolt while working on his senior thesis. “In a lot of history about slavery there were only three sentences about this revolt, the largest slave revolt in America,” he told The Louisiana Weekly. “Very little was known about it. The more I came upon this in different books, I said to myself ‘I’ve got to figure this out.’ I’ve done a fair amount of investigative journalism so the idea of looking into something that other people didn’t know about and I think some people have consciously tried to keep secret was really intriguing to me.
“The more I learned about it, the more fascinated I became,” he continued. “Number one, my thesis was exactly right, this revolt had been covered up for almost 200 years by very powerful people with very strong interests in keeping this secret. As soon as I found that out, I got even more excited.”… – Louisiana Weekly, 12-27-10
- Nonfiction Chronicle: Robert Dallek: THE LOST PEACE Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope, 1945-1953 Dallek has written at least one book about each of six different United States presidents: no wonder his latest offering assumes that Great Men really do influence history. Specifically, it indicts World War II’s victorious leaders for resorting to the traditional politics of great-power rivalry rather than imagining unprecedented global cooperation, a metadecision that saddled us with the dangers of the nuclear age. The errors of these men and their successors, Dallek argues, were “not the result of inevitable forces beyond human control; rather, they were the consequence of bad judgments.” But if Dallek proves anything (and he proves a great deal in this excellent book) it is how little room the “most talented and memorable government chiefs in modern history” had to act differently…. – NYT, 1-2-11
- Glenn W. LaFantasie: The top 12 Civil War books ever written: One great book for each month of 2011, the sesquicentennial of the War Between the States. In any event, here are a dozen books that, for me, tell the story of the Civil War with literary elegance, intellectual gusto and enormous flair….
12. “The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War” by Bruce Catton
11. “Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America”: by William E. Gienapp
10. “Lincoln’s Men: How President Lincoln Became Father to an Army and a Nation”: By William C. Davis
9. “Grant and Sherman: The Friendship That Won the Civil War”: By Charles Bracelen Flood
8. “Chancellorsville 1863: The Souls of the Brave”: By Ernest B. (“Pat”) Furgurson
7. “Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam”: By Stephen W. Sears
6. “Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches From the Unfinished Civil War”: By Tony Horwitz
5. “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory”: By David W. Blight
4. “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War”: By Drew Gilpin Faust
3. “Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era”: By James M. McPherson
2. “The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans”: By Charles Royster
1. “A Stillness at Appomattox”: By Bruce Catton — Salon, 12-26-10
- Michael Korda: Arabian Knight: HERO The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia Most treatments of Lawrence’s life can be divided into debunkings and hagiographies. “Hero” by Michael Korda, as the title implies, is closer to the latter category. Yet into this baggy but beguiling biography, Korda, the author of several works of history, has also crammed the darker incarnations of Lawrence, the shy depressive, the tortured ascetic, the “odd gnome, half cad — with a touch of genius,” in the words of one of his companions behind Turkish lines. This book, for all its worship of Lawrence, leaves the impression that his heroism lay in a unique brand of personal eccentricity, a refusal to fit into the expectations of others, an unshakable determination to do things his own way, however peculiar and wrong-headed this seemed…. – NYT, 12-24-10 — Excerpt
- David Wootton: GALILEO Watcher of the Skies; J. L. Heilbron: GALILEO: Starry Messenger Inevitably, the serious biographer also mirrors something of himself in depicting his subject. Readers who make it through the occasional eye-glazing geometrical digression in J. L. Heilbron’s “Galileo” will not be surprised to find that the author’s extensive output includes a fresh explication of Euclid. Likewise, the reader of David Wootton’s “Galileo: Watcher of the Skies,” which includes a revisionist chapter on Galileo’s “(un)belief,” as he puts it, will not be surprised to learn that Wootton has written repeatedly about atheism…. – NYT, 12-24-10
- Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Scholars Say Chronicler of Black Life Passed for White: Renown came to Jean Toomer with his 1923 book “Cane,” which mingled fiction, drama and poetry in a formally audacious effort to portray the complexity of black lives. But the racially mixed Toomer’s confounding efforts to defy being stuck in conventional racial categories and his disaffiliation with black culture made him perhaps the most enigmatic writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance.
Now Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard scholar, and Rudolph P. Byrd, a professor at Emory University, say their research for a new edition of “Cane” documents that Toomer was “a Negro who decided to pass for white.” They lob this intellectual grenade in their introduction to the book, which W. W. Norton & Company is to publish next month. Their judgment is based on “an analysis of archival evidence previously overlooked by other scholars,” Mr. Byrd and Mr. Gates write, including Toomer’s draft registrations and his and his family’s census records, which they consider alongside his writings and public statements…. – NYT, 12-26-10
- Joseph J. Ellis: A Marriage That Defied Separation and War: FIRST FAMILY Abigail and John Adams John and Abigail Adams exchanged some 1,200 letters, providing a window into the marriage of this Revolutionary-era power couple. In his new book, “First Family: Abigail and John Adams,” Joseph J. Ellis draws on those letters to create a portrait of a couple forced to spend long months apart….
But Mr. Ellis — the author of an astute 1993 portrait of John Adams (“Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams”), as well as of books on Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and other members of the Revolutionary generation — uses his easy familiarity with the era to invest his portrait of the couple with authoritative historical perspective. We may not learn anything appreciably new about the Adams family, per se, but in “First Family” Mr. Ellis employs his narrative gifts to draw a remarkably intimate portrait of John and Abigail’s marriage as it played out against the momentous events that marked the birth of a nation…. – NYT, 12-20-10
- Book Review – The Women Jefferson Loved – By Virginia Scharff: A historian seeks to understand Thomas Jefferson through his relationships with the women in his life.
Now Virginia Scharff, a professor of history at the University of New Mexico, has sought to understand Jefferson through his relationships with the women he loved: his mother, Jane Randolph; his wife, Martha; his daughters and granddaughters; and his slave mistress, Sally Hemings…. – NYT, 12-19-10
- Book Review – Decision Points – By George W. Bush: The 43rd president reviews his choices and finds them for the most part good. – There is something very modern, almost New Agey, and endearingly insecure, about the tone and posture the son adopts in “Decision Points.” Even as he’s bombing Baghdad back to the Stone Age, he’s very much in touch with his feelings. In college, he says, he was appalled to learn how the French Revolution betrayed its ideals…. – NYT, 12-19-10 — Excerpt
- David Horowitz: Reforming Our Universities, Reforming Our Universities: The Campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights: Why doesn’t David Horowitz give up? That question will occur to most readers well before they reach the end of his new book. Reforming Our Universities: The Campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights (Regnery, 2010) is a narrative of frustration, disappointment, resurgent optimism, further defeat, and finally the rescuing of small consolation from the wreckage of high hope. For his trouble, Horowitz endures vilification piled on calumny; gets to see his olive branches to the academic Left treated as though they were curare-tipped arrows; and secures the support of allies that range from faint-hearted Chihuahuas to politically clueless puppies.
So why doesn’t Horowitz give up? For the publication of this volume is ample proof that he hasn’t. And though Horowitz has much to complain about, Reforming Our Universities seems untouched by self-pity. He has indignation to spare, but the spirit of this narrative of his six-year campaign to persuade American universities to embrace fair-minded intellectual inquiry is the spirit of undaunted determination…. – Front Page Mag, 12-20-10
- ‘Capital Offense’ and ‘Revival’ – Book Reviews: Deeper Looks at the Crisis of ’08 and the Oval Office: Michael Hirsh: CAPITAL OFFENSE How Washington’s Wise Men Turned America’s Future Over to Wall Street; Richard Wolffe: REVIVAL The Struggle for Survival Inside the Obama White House
Michael Hirsh, in “Capital Offense,” looks at the financial crisis of 2008, and Richard Wolffe delves into the Obama administration anew with “Revival.”
In fact, the main reason the financial crisis of 2008 occurred, the journalist Michael Hirsh argues in his provocative new book, “Capital Offense,” is that “the people in charge of our economy, otherwise intelligent and capable men like Greenspan, Rubin and Summers — and later Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner — permitted themselves to believe, in the face of a rising tide of contrary evidence, that markets are for the most part efficient and work well on their own.”
Richard Wolffe’s new book, “Revival” — which argues in passing that “Obama’s economic team was the most dysfunctional group of the president’s advisers” — uses the administration’s efforts to grapple with the country’s fiscal woes and its handling of health care legislation as prisms by which to look at how this White House operates. – NYT, 12-14-10
- Book Review – Atlantic – By Simon Winchester: ATLANTIC Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories Simon Winchester tells the story of the Atlantic Ocean.
In “Atlantic,” Winchester attempts to wrap his arms around a subject so vast that it nearly defeats him at the outset. “I wanted so much to write the story of the ocean,” writes the author, an Englishman whose life has been marked by memorable encounters with the gray Atlantic. “But what and where was the structure? I was, as they say, all at sea.”… – NYT, 12-12-10
- Book Review – Pirates of Barbary – By Adrian Tinniswood: The Shores of Tripoli PIRATES OF BARBARY Corsairs, Conquests, and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean In the early 19th century, the United States Navy and Marines played a small but significant part in the demise of the Barbary corsairs, the pirates who terrorized the Mediterranean from their bases in Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and Morocco. As a result, we Americans have tended to view this history through the lens of our own past. Adrian Tinniswood’s dramatic narrative, “Pirates of Barbary,” reminds us that the corsairs had preyed on Europeans long before the United States arrived on the scene. Indeed, they reached the height of their power in the 17th century, not long after the pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock…. – A history of the Barbary pirates who menaced the Mediterranean for three centuries. NYT, 12-12-10
- Book Review – Why The West Rules — For Now – By Ian Morris: WHY THE WEST RULES — FOR NOW The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future A Stanford historian views the clash between East and West from a long perspective, and argues that we face an immediate choice — East-West cooperation or catastrophe.
In his new book, he sets out to discover broad patterns, “the overall ‘shape’ of history,” by sifting through the world’s long development process. Following the oscillating forces from prehistory to the present, he shows how both the East and West managed to catalyze themselves at different times and in different ways to progressively new heights of development. But his ultimate challenge is to make sense of all these cycles of rise and fall, the better to judge whether either side was in possession of any innate superiority. His answer to that question is an emphatic no. East and West, he tells us, are just “geographical labels, not value judgments.”… – NYT, 12-12-10
- DAVID WALDSTREICHER: Book Review – Tories – By Thomas B. Allen: TORIES Fighting for the King in America’s First Civil War A Revolutionary War history emphasizes the strangely neglected topic of the Americans who opposed the Revolutionary War. Thomas B. Allen, the author of several books about American warfare, has a strangely neglected topic in the Americans who opposed the Revolutionary War. There hasn’t been a big book about the loyalists since before the Bicentennial.- NYT, 12-12-10 — Excerpt
- Book Review – George Washington’s America – Barnet Schecter: George Washington’s story told using his collection of maps and atlases, probably one of the largest in 18th-century America.
In GEORGE WASHINGTON’S AMERICA: A Biography Through His Maps, Barnet Schecter aims “to tell Washington’s entire life story” from these fascinating materials. He concentrates on a collection of 43 maps assembled into an atlas, now owned by Yale University, that depict eastern North America from Canada to the Gulf Coast. Supplemented by other maps from the Mount Vernon library, including some drawn by Washington himself, these images provide an unusually rich visual foundation for Schecter’s narrative…. – NYT, 12-5-10
- Book Review ‘Fragments’ by Marilyn Monroe and ‘Dear Mrs. Kennedy’: By LIESL SCHILLINGER FRAGMENTS Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters By Marilyn Monroe, Edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment; Jay Mulvaney and Paul De Angelis: DEAR MRS. KENNEDY A World Shares Its Grief: Letters, November 1963
Collections of Marilyn Monroe’s private documents and of letters Jackie Kennedy received after her husband’s assassination.
Two new books refresh the images of two larger-than-life American contemporaries who continue to compel the global imagination half a century after their deaths: Marilyn Monroe, who died of an overdose of sleeping drugs on Aug. 5, 1962, at the age of 36; and President John F. Kennedy, assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, at the age of 46. Unearthing long-buried letters and private documents, these books — “Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters,” edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment, and “Dear Mrs. Kennedy: A World Shares Its Grief,” by Jay Mulvaney and Paul De Angelis — attest to the spell these figures cast, in the past and in the present… – NYT, 12-3-10
- Book Review – Bloodlands – Europe Between Hitler and Stalin – By Timothy Snyder: By JOSHUA RUBENSTEIN
How Poland, Ukraine, the Baltics and Belarus were victimized by two mass murderers with competing utopian visions. In “Bloodlands,” Snyder concentrates on the area between Germany and Russia (Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic region and Belarus) that became the site of horrific experiments to create competing utopias based on class or race war. For Stalin, this meant controlling “the largest social group in the Soviet Union, the peasantry.” They needed to be driven off small plots of land into more efficient collective farms; many were forced to move to factory zones to sustain rapid industrialization…. – NYT, 11-26-10
- GEOFFREY C. WARD on Edmund Morris: A Headlong Life: COLONEL ROOSEVELT On the evidence offered in “Colonel Roosevelt,” the third and concluding volume of Edmund Morris’s monumental life of the 26th president, both of my forebears had a point. Morris is a stylish storyteller with an irresistible subject. The seismic personality that one White House visitor said had to be wrung from one’s clothes when leaving Roosevelt’s presence infuses every one of his trilogy’s nearly 2,500 pages…. – NYT, 11-26-10
- Book Review – And the Show Went On – Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris – By Alan Riding: AND THE SHOW WENT ON Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris In gripping and painful detail, Alan Riding shows how French writers and artists adapted to the Nazis.
Thirty years ago, while reporting on Latin America for The New York Times, Alan Riding began wondering how artists and writers responded to brutal dictatorships. He then went to live in Paris and realized that not so long before, the French intellectual and cultural elite had provided an answer, in often unlovely ways. “And the Show Went On” describes this history in gripping and painful detail…. – NYT, 11-26-10
- Michael Korda’s ‘Hero,’ About T. E. Lawrence – Review: The strength of Michael Korda’s new biography of T. E. Lawrence, “Hero,” lies in its ability to analyze its subject’s accomplishments and to add something to the body of Lawrence lore. – NYT, 11-21-10
HISTORY FEATURES:
- Gary C. Anderson: Minnesota Execution 150 Years Ago Spurs Calls for Pardon: On Dec. 26, 1862, thirty-eight doomed Dakota Indians wailed and danced atop the gallows, waiting for the trapdoors to drop beneath them. The square scaffold, built here to accommodate the largest mass execution in United States history, swayed under their weight….
But one man, historians say, did not belong there. A captured Dakota named We-Chank-Wash-ta-don-pee, often called Chaska, had had his sentence commuted by President Abraham Lincoln days earlier. Yet on the day after Christmas 1862, Chaska died with the others. It was a case of wrongful execution, Gary C. Anderson, a history professor at the University of Oklahoma and Little Crow biographer, said last week in an interview. “These soldiers just grabbed the wrong guy,” he said…. – NYT, 12-13-10
- Historian David Kiehn traces old Bay Area films: David Kiehn has spent most of his life working in film-related jobs. But it wasn’t until he made a remarkable discovery – and was featured on “60 Minutes” – that anyone outside the film community took notice. For years, Kiehn knew about “A Trip Down Market Street,” a 12-minute silent film, shot in San Francisco from a cable car. The Library of Congress dated the film to 1905, but Kiehn suspected otherwise. Studying weather reports, vehicle registration records and show-biz trade publications, he discovered that “Market Street” was in fact shot four days before the great earthquake of April 18, 1906. Suddenly, the film took on a haunting poignancy: We now look at the San Francisco newsboys, the carriage jockeys and the women in elaborate hats, and know that many will soon be dead…. – San Francisco Chronicle, 12-6-10
- Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs-helmed digitization project making headway on Victorian literature: Victorians were enamored of the new science of statistics, so it seems fitting that these pioneering data hounds are now the subject of an unusual experiment in statistical analysis. The titles of every British book published in English in and around the 19th century — 1,681,161, to be exact — are being electronically scoured for key words and phrases that might offer fresh insight into the minds of the Victorians.
This research, which has only recently become possible, thanks to a new generation of powerful digital tools and databases, represents one of the many ways that technology is transforming the study of literature, philosophy and other humanistic fields that haven’t necessarily embraced large-scale quantitative analysis.
Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs, the two historians of science at George Mason University who have created the project, have so far charted how frequently more than two dozen words — among them “God,” “love,” “work,” “science” and “industrial” — appear in British book titles from the French Revolution in 1789 to the beginning of World War I in 1914. To Mr. Cohen, the sharply jagged lines that dance across his graphs can be used to test some of the most deeply entrenched beliefs about the Victorians, like their faith in progress and science: “We can finally and truly test these and other fundamental claims that have been at the heart of Victorian studies for generations.”… – NYT, 12-4-10
- William Quinn: Wreck is doomed schooner: The dean of Cape shipwreck historians thinks the wooden timbers found on Nauset Beach recently belong to the schooner Montclair, a three-masted cargo vessel that broke apart on the outer bars in March 1927. William Quinn of Orleans, said the method of construction of the timbers he has observed at the Nauset Beach wreck site jibes with what he knows about the Montclair, which was bound for New York from Halifax, Nova Scotia, when fate intervened and five men died in icy, storm-churned waters.
The timbers that emerged on the beach last week have now been covered again by tide and sand. But Quinn cited the presence of tapered dowels and bronze spikes at the wreck site as evidence that it was the Montclair that surfaced from the sand again. The historian was also on scene when the broken remains of the Montclair made an appearance on Nauset Beach in 1957. “I think it’s one and the same,” Quinn said…. – Boston Herald, 11-26-10
- Christopher Colombowicz: America’s discoverer Polish not Portuguese, claim historians: He is celebrated as the humble Italian weaver who ended up discovering the Americas. But the conventional wisdom relating to Christopher Columbus is under threat after academics concluded the explorer was actually a Polish immigrant. An international team of distinguished professors have completed 20 years of painstaking research into his beginnings…. ‘Another nutty conspiracy theory! That’s what I first supposed as I started to read… I now believe that Columbus is guilty of huge fraud carried out over two decades against his patrons,’ said US historian Prof. James T. McDonough…. Daily Mail (UK) (11-29-10)
- Cold War Air Defense Relied on Widespread Dispersal of Nuclear Weapons, Documents Show: Washington, D.C., November 16, 2010 – To counter a Soviet bomber attack, U.S. war plans contemplated widespread use of thousands of air defense weapons during the middle years of the Cold War according to declassified documents posted today at the National Security Archive’s Nuclear Vault and cited by a recently published book, Continental Defense in the Eisenhower Era: Nuclear Antiaircraft Arms and the Cold War (Palgrave Macmillan) by historian Christopher J. Bright. The U.S. government publicly acknowledged the facts of the deployments in the 1950s, yet they garnered surprisingly little public opposition, Bright concludes, in disclosing for the first time that air defense weapons comprised as much as one-fifth of the US nuclear arsenal in 1961. Still, nearly 25 years after the United States retired the last of them in 1986, their exact number remains secret…. – National Security Archive at GWU, 11-16-10
HISTORY PROFILES:
- Raul Ramos: Texas history professor immerses himself in dorm life: In retrospect, Raul Ramos says his first eight years at the University of Houston were spent in “blissful ignorance.” “I didn’t know how parking works, how the dining halls work, how financial aid works,” said the associate professor of history. “Now I do.” Ramos, 43, is fully immersed in campus life, living in a dorm for the first time in more than two decades, along with his wife, Elizabeth Chiao, and their sons, Noe and Joaquin Ramos Chiao…. – Houston Chronicle (11-28-10)
HISTORY QUOTES:
- Alan Brinkley: 111th Congress most productive “since at least the 60s”: The 111th Congress capped its remarkable term – which historian Alan Brinkley called “probably the most productive session of Congress since at least the ’60s” – with a flurry of legislative activity that President Obama described as “the most productive post-election period we’ve had in decades.”… – WaPo, 12-23-10
- Joseph Crespino: Barbour wrong on Citizens Council claims: Joseph Crespino, an associate professor of history at Emory University, also noted a particular incident in Yazoo City undermining Barbour’s claims. “One of the things the Citizens Council would do is carry out economic harassment — sometimes physical intimidation — against local blacks,” he said. “There was this well-known incident in Yazoo City in the 1950s where a handful of black parents tried to file a lawsuit against a local public school. They lost their jobs because they filed a lawsuit and they participated in the local civil rights movement. So it’s well- documented that the kind of harassment that blacks faced when they tried to desegregate the schools there in Yazoo City.”… – Huff Post, 12-20-10
- Of Course the Civil War Was About Slavery: Concrete concerns about saving and expanding slavery, and not the nebulous theology of states’ rights, ignited the U.S. Civil War. Why does that message keep getting lost?
“Of course, when South Carolina did secede, there was enormous celebration, dancing in the streets and so on,” said James McPherson, a Princeton Civil War historian and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning history Battle Cry of Freedom…. “Probably 90 percent, maybe 95 percent of serious historians of the Civil War would agree on the broad questions of what the war was about and what brought it about and what caused it,” McPherson said, “which was the increasing polarization of the country between the free states and the slave states over issues of slavery, especially the expansion of slavery.”…
In the post-Reconstruction era of national “reunion,” Yale historian David Blight says the country came back together around the idea of the common valor of soldiers on both sides of the war, around a common economy and around the imperial adventures of America as it began to grow into a world power. “But primarily — and this is complex — but primarily the country reunified ultimately by the 1890s and the turn of the 20th century around white supremacy,” Blight said, “around the Jim Crow system, which took deep hold in the South but also in the North.”
Some historians call this era the most racist in American history — even more so than the age of slavery. This racism, and the new narrative of an unfortunate war between brothers, took hold in popular fiction, in presidential speeches, in monument building. The story of the emancipation of 4 million slaves — and of the 200,000 blacks who fought for the Union army — “all but vanished from the national story by 1900, 1910,” Blight says…. – Miller-McCune, 12-20-10
- Bob Sutton: Confederacy: 150th Anniversary, Civil War about slavery: Most historians would disagree, and strongly! “Slavery was the principal cause of the U.S. Civil War, period,” said Bob Sutton, chief historian for the National Park Service. “Yes, politics was important. Yes, economics were important. Yes, social issues and states’ rights were important. But when you get to the core of why all these things were important, it was slavery!”… – Atlanta Examiner, 12-11-10
- Eric Foner: Lincoln’s party is not today’s GOP: Foner is a history professor at Columbia University and has written many acclaimed books on the Civil War period, including “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men.”… How different is today’s GOP party from the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln?
It could not be more different. Lincoln in 1860 did not receive a single vote in most of the southern states. His Republican party was the party of opposition to the expansion of slavery and later of emancipation, and a strong federal government protecting the civil and political rights of black Americans. Today the party’s center of gravity is in the South, it opposes most federal initiatives (except defense) and is the inheritor of Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” aimed almost exclusively at white voters…. – CNN.com, 12-7-10
- Small-City Congregations Try to Preserve Rituals of Jewish Life: According to Jonathan D. Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, most Jews in the United States have migrated from small communities to large cities: he estimates that 85 percent of the country’s 5.2 million Jews live in 20 metropolitan areas, primarily on the East and West Coasts and in Sun Belt states….
The process of dismantling a community, experts say, is fraught with potential tensions involving both purse and heartstrings. Mark A. Raider, a professor of modern Jewish history at the University of Cincinnati, cited disagreements over disposition of material assets…. – NYT, 12-1-10
HISTORY INTERVIEWS:
- Todd Moye: Segregationist Citizens Councils Were A ‘Terrorist Organization’: So what was Gov. Haley Barbour doing, exactly, when he defended the reputation of the Citizens Councils, a segregationist movement that was formed to oppose the civil rights movement after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision? Barbour released a statement this afternoon, declaring: “My point was my town rejected the Ku Klux Klan, but nobody should construe that to mean I think the town leadership were saints, either. Their vehicle, called the ‘Citizens Council,’ is totally indefensible, as is segregation.” So let’s take a look at exactly who they were.
Earlier, I asked Todd Moye, an associate professor of history at the University of North Texas, and also the author of Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986, for his expertise on the matter. He called the councils a “terrorist organization.”… Talking Points Memo, 12-21-10
- Times Q& A: El Paso historian: Billy the Kid undeserving of a pardon: Bernie Sargent, director of the El Paso County Historical Commission, has researched the legend of Billy the Kid. He has strong opinions about the case…. – El Paso Times, 12-20-10
- Robert E. May: Professor’s talk looks at Antebellum Christmases in the South: In the pre-Civil War South, Christmas traditions were a lot different than what they are today. The holiday brought out surprising kindness in slave owners, giving their slaves numerous gifts and lavish banquets, according to Purdue University history professor Robert E. May. Still, often these acts of kindness had a dark side to them. May discussed this segment of American history during the holidays at Tippecanoe County Public Library, during his talk, “Christmas in the Confederacy.”
Question: What was Christmas like in the South before the Civil War? Answer: Churchgoing, shopping and gift-giving were extremely important to Southern whites before the Civil War, and the holiday became crucial in mitigating the possibility of slave revolts in the region. Many masters were remarkably generous to slaves at Christmas, throwing them sumptuous banquets (including astounding amounts of liquor) and giving them many days off from work and many presents — some under a ritual with psychological nuances called “Christmas Gif.” Slave weddings commonly took place over the holidays, for reasons that I will get into at my talk…. – BoilerStation.com, 12-13-10
- The Last Utopia with Samuel Moyn: The German critic Walter Benjamin once gave a set of satirical pointers about how to write fat books — for example, by making the same point repeatedly, giving numerous examples of the same thing, and writing a long introduction to outline the project, then reminding the reader of the plan as often as possible. Whether or not they are aware of doing so, many academic authors seem to follow his advice closely. Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, published by Harvard University Press, is a remarkable exception. Its survey of the legacy of ideas later claimed as cornerstones of the politics of human rights is both dense and lucid; its challenging reassessment of recent history is made in a little over two hundred pages. It’s almost as if the book were written with the thought that people might want to read it. After writing a review of The Last Utopia, I interviewed the author by e-mail; a transcript follows. Moyn is a professor of history at Columbia University and the editor of Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press…. – Inside Higher Ed (12-8-10)
- Daniel Pipes: “You can’t fight Islamism with ideas coming out of Europe”: Citizen Times: Mr. Pipes, you head various organizations concerning the Middle East and Islam, and are one of the best known American writers on these subjects. How did this all begin for you?
Daniel Pipes: I am a historian of Islam with a special interest in the role of Islam in public life. I received my Ph.D. in 1978, just as Ayatollah Khomeini appeared. For the first time in modern history, Islam had a large and obvious role in Western public life. What had been in the 1970s an abstract interest turned very practical. Islamic matters subsequently became very topical. That prompted me to transit from medieval history to current events. While I cover many other topics besides Islam, Islam remains central to my interests. I have a perspective I hope is useful to understand the role of Islam in politics.
Citizen Times: And what is that perspective?
Daniel Pipes: That Islam is deeply important to the public lives of Muslims. That Islam is a religion of laws, and those laws are quite permanent and universal. That they are not the same everywhere at all times, but the basics are consistent. That there are times of greater emphasis and times of lesser emphasis but Muslims always come back to these laws. Now, of course, is a time of greater emphasis. Islamic laws have far greater power than they had when I entered this field over forty years ago. How does one understand this change; how do Muslims view it, and how does the West respond to it? – these are some of the questions that I focus on…. – Citizen Times (12-1-10)
HISTORY AWARDS & APPOINTMENTS:
- 2 historians are chosen for UR’s Eiseman Award: Two historians, connected by the University of Rochester and their love of climbing, are the winners of the Eiseman Writers Award for their book, “Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes.”
Stewart Weaver, professor of history and department chair at the University, and Maurice Isserman, who received his doctorate in history from the University in 1979 and is a professor of history at Hamilton College in Clinton, are co-authors of this first comprehensive history of Himalayan mountaineering written by professional historians.
The Eiseman Writers Award celebrates writers from western New York who have been published during the previous two calendar years and comes with a $1,000 prize.
Hailed as an “awe-inspiring work of history and storytelling,” “Fallen Giants” (Yale University Press, 2008) chronicles 250 years of the international quest to climb the world’s tallest peaks. “Isserman and Weaver,” wrote Bruce Barcott in the New York Times, “brilliantly present the complete picture — the political context, the changing social dynamics, the emergence of modern climbing technique — without losing sight of the need to entertain. ‘Fallen Giants’ absolutely brims with vivid characters, from the Duke of the Abruzzi to George Mallory … hard men and egotists, saints and scoundrels.”… – The Daily News Online, 12-11-10
- A Leadership Change at the Adirondack Museum: The Board of Directors of the Adirondack Historical Association announced today that Caroline M. Welsh, the Director of the Adirondack Museum since 2007, has been replaced by Michael Lombardi, the current Director of Finance and Operations. Lombardi is being named Interim Director, and Welsh, who has been with the museum since 1987, will become Senior Art Historian and Director Emerita…. – Adirondack Almanack (12-1-10)
- Walter Muir Whitehill Prize announced by the Colonial Society: In 1990, members of the Colonial Society established a prize of two thousand five hundred dollars, in memory of Walter Muir Whitehill, for many years Editor of Publications for the Colonial Society and the moving force behind the organization. It is be awarded for an outstanding essay on colonial history, not previously published, with preference being given to New England subjects. A distinguished committee of members of the Colonial Society act as judges: Bernard Bailyn, Adams University Professor and James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History, Emeritus, Harvard University; Robert Middlekauff, Hotchkiss Professor of U.S. History, University of California, Berkeley; and Edmund Sears Morgan, Sterling Professor Emeritus, History, Yale University.By arrangement with the editors of The New England Quarterly, the winning essay is published in an appropriate issue of that journal.
The deadline for receiving submissions for the 2010 prize is 31 December 2010. The Society expects to announce the winning candidate in the spring of 2011. For further information on this prize, please contact the Whitehill Prize Committee, c/o Linda Smith Rhoads, Meserve Hall, Second Floor, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115. – Press Release (12-1-10)
- Jon Butler to head Univ. libraries: History professor Jon Butler will become Acting University Librarian Dec. 1, just months after stepping down as dean of the Graduate School. Butler, whose six-year term as dean ended this June, was on leave to write a book, but has agreed to assume leadership of Yale’s libraries after the sudden death of University Librarian Frank Turner GRD ’71 from a pulmonary embolism Nov 11. Until a new librarian is found, Butler said he will work full time in the post and will resume his leave of absence at the end of the spring term.
“I’m very honored that the President would ask me, and I hope I can help…make sure that the library has a sense of leadership and continuity while the University searches for a permanent librarian,” Butler said in an interview last Monday…. – Yale Daily News (11-29-10)
HISTORY ANNOUNCEMENTS & EVENTS CALENDAR:
- Bruce Catton papers now indexed online at the University of Wyoming: An inventory of papers and correspondence of Bruce Catton, widely regarded (along with Shelby Foote) as the most popular of America’s Civil War historians, is now accessible online through the University of Wyoming American Heritage Center. There are no access restrictions on the materials for research purposes, and the collection is open to the public…. A description and inventory for this collection [is now] accessible at http://rmoa.unm.edu/docviewer.php?docId=wyu-ah04032.xml/ – University of Wyoming, 12-20-10
- Black history catalogued at new U. of C. website: ….On Friday at the University of Chicago’s Joseph Regenstein Library, researchers unveiled a new website intended to make it easy for the public and scholars alike to locate these African-American artifacts as well as a host of others in the city from the same period in history…. The website is the “cutting edge portal into discovering primary source materials to study and know black Chicago’s history from the 1930s to the 1970s,” said Jacqueline Goldsby, a former U. of C. professor who headed up the three-year project…. – Chicago Sun-Times, 12-11-10 — uncap.lib.uchicago.edu
- Camelot’s archives, available with the click of a mouse: During a 1962 news conference, a reporter asked President John F. Kennedy if he’d consider locating his presidential library in Washington, D.C., after leaving the White House so scholars and historians would have the broadest possible access to it. No, he replied playfully, “I’m going to put it in Cambridge, Massachusetts.”…
A four-year, $10 million effort to digitize the JFK Library and Museum’s archives, making hundreds of thousands of documents, photographs, and recordings available online, is nearing completion of its first phase. A formal announcement will come Jan. 13, one week before the 50th anniversary of JFK’s inauguration, at a press conference in the nation’s capitol.
“Access to a Legacy,” as the project is called, marks the first time a presidential library established in the paper age has fully committed itself to the digital era. The amount of material to be posted online in January is huge — 200,000 pages of text, 1,500 photos, 1,250 files of audio recordings and moving images, and 340 phone conversations totaling 17 1/2 hours — but represents just a small portion of the collection….
Presidential historian Robert Dallek, who has made liberal use of the Kennedy archives, said the primary payoff is reaching the largest possible international audience. “What this means is, people in Japan or Germany can have access to [JFK’s] office files, and that’s a splendid step forward.” Other presidential libraries will probably follow suit, he added, “because they don’t want to expire, so to speak. Plus, there’s still tremendous interest in subjects like World War II, Vietnam, and the New Deal.”… – Boston Globe (11-28-10)
- THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY MAKES ITS MOST IMPORTANT COLLECTIONS RELATING TO SLAVERY AVAILABLE ONLINE: Rich trove of material becomes easily accessible at www.nyhistory.org/slaverycollection The New-York Historical Society is proud to announce the launch of a new online portal to nearly 12,000 pages of source materials documenting the history of slavery in the United States, the Atlantic slave trade and the abolitionist movement. Made readily accessible to the general public for the first time at www.nyhistory.org/slaverycollections, these documents from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries represent fourteen of the most important collections in the library’s Manuscript Department….
- “ Understanding the Iran-Contra Affairs,” is the only comprehensive website on the famous Reagan-era government scandal, which stemmed from the U.S. government’s policies toward two seemingly unrelated countries, Nicaragua and Iran. Despite stated and repeated denials to Congress and to the public, Reagan Administration officials supported the militant contra rebels in Nicaragua and sold arms to a hostile Iranian government. These events have led to questions about the appropriateness of covert operations, congressional oversight, and even the presidential power to pardon…. – irancontra.org
- Thousands of Studs Terkel interviews going online: The Library of Congress will digitize the Studs Terkel Oral History Archive, according to the agreement, while the museum will retain ownership of the roughly 5,500 interviews in the archive and the copyrights to the content. Project officials expect digitizing the collection to take more than two years…. – NYT, 5-13-10
- Digital Southern Historical Collection: The 41,626 scans reproduce diaries, letters, business records, and photographs that provide a window into the lives of Americans in the South from the 18th through mid-20th centuries.
HISTORIANS SPOTTED:
- Doris Kearns Goodwin makes puzzling remark on CBS Social Security special: If there were prizes given for the most one-sided, misleading story about Social Security this year, a segment aired on the CBS Evening News before Thanksgiving would make a great candidate. In a breathless recitation of the horrors befalling the system, CBS painted a grim picture of Social Security, using scare words and phrases like “the system is headed for a crisis,” “the government is confronting a painful reality,” and “there’s no debating that we’re running out of time.” How’s that for opinion journalism on a news show?… CBS presented a puzzling remark from historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who must have been consulted for a sound bite because she knew something about FDR, the father of Social Security; or maybe she was tapped in an effort to give “balance” to the piece without bringing on experts who might have known the ins and outs of the subject.
Kearns Goodwin said that one reason Social Security was established was to get older workers to retire so younger ones could get jobs; she told viewers that “it’s ironic today that we’re in the opposite direction in wanting older people to work longer, so that we can afford to keep paying them.” Gosh! That makes it sound like the main reason they should work longer is just to get a government handout. Kearns Goodwin doesn’t come to my mind as a Social Security expert, and apparently she doesn’t understand that older workers hang onto their jobs because they must, given the demise of good employer-provided pensions, the inadequacy of 401(k) plans, and the difficulty of moving around the workplace when you’re older…. – Columbia Journalism Review (11-29-10)
- Presidential historian Edmund Morris curses, calls Americans ‘lazy and obese’: Presidential biographer Edmund Morris delivered one of the more, well, colorful lines on this week’s Sunday morning shows. On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” host Bob Schieffer, anchoring an authors roundtable discussion with the likes of Bob Woodward and Arianna Huffington, kept engaging the panelists in discussion about how America’s Founding Fathers would have felt about today’s political climate. “What would Teddy Roosevelt think of today’s politics, Edmund?” “You keep asking these presentist questions,” said the Kenyan-born, British-accented historian. “As the immortal Marisa Tomei said in ‘My Cousin Vinny,’ ‘That’s a b——t question!'” Morris said, relishing the word as network censors bleeped him out…. – Politico (11-28-10)
HISTORY ON TV:
HISTORY BEST SELLERS (NYT):
UPCOMING HISTORY BOOK RELEASES:
- Alison Weir: The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn, (Paperback), December 28, 2010
- T. Harry Williams: Lincoln and His Generals, (Paperback), January 11, 2011
- Robert Wright: Our Man in Tehran: The Truth Behind the Secret Mission to Save Six Americans during the Iran Hostage Crisis and the Ambassador Who Worked with the CIA to Bring Them Home, (Hardcover), January 11, 2011
- Jay M. Shafritz: Classics of Public Administration, (Paperback), January 14, 2011
- Petra Pertici: Battle of San Romano: A Day in History, (Paperback), January 16, 2011
- Alan Bennett: Captain Roy Brown: The Definitive Biography, Including His Encounter with the Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen, (Hardcover), January 16, 2011
- Douglas Brinkley: The Quiet World: Saving Alaska’s Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960, (Hardcover), January 18, 2011
- Lawrence Goldstone: Inherently Unequal: The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865-1903, (Hardcover), January 18, 2011
- Michael G. Long: Marshalling Justice: The Early Civil Rights Letters of Thurgood Marshall, (Hardcover), January 18, 2011
- Edward G. Lengel: Inventing George Washington: America’s Founder, in Myth and Memory, (Hardcover), January 18, 2011
- Ron Reagan: My Father at 100, January 18, 2011
- Deborah Blum: The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, (Paperback), January 25, 2011
- Peter N. Stearns: World Civilizations: The Global Experience (New Edition), (Hardcover), January 28, 2011
- Barbara F. Stokes: Myrtle Beach: A History, 1900-1980, (Paperback), January 28, 2011
- Donald A. Clark: The Notorious “Bull” Nelson: Murdered Civil War General (1st Edition), (Hardcover), January 31, 2011
- Michael D. Coe: The Maya (Eighth Edition), (Paperback), January 31, 2011
- Molly Caldwell Crosby: Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic That Remains One of Medicine’s Greatest Mysteries, (Paperback), February 1, 2011
- Jonathan Gill: Harlem: The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America, (Hardcover), February 1, 2011
- Amy Louise Wood: Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940, (Paperback), February 1, 2011
- David Eisenhower: Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life with Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961-1969, (Hardcover), February 2, 2011
- Frederick Brown: For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus, (Paperback), February 8, 2011
- Donald Rumsfeld: Known and Unknown: A Memoir, (Hardcover), February 8, 2011
- Holger H. Herwig: The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World, (Paperback), February 8, 2011
- Christopher Corbett: The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West (Reprint), (Paperback), February 8, 2011
- Justin Fox: The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street, (Paperback), February 8, 2011
HISTORIANS PASSINGS:
- Jacqueline de Romilly, Studied Greek Culture, Dies at 97: Jacqueline de Romilly, one of France’s leading scholars of Greek civilization and language and only the second woman to be elected to the Académie Française, died on Saturday in the Paris suburb Boulogne-Billancourt. She was 97…. – NYT, 12-20-10
- J. M. Hagopian, Who Told of Armenian Genocide, Dies at 97: J. Michael Hagopian, a survivor of the Armenian genocide who came to the United States from Turkey after World War I, studied filmmaking and made a series of documentaries based on interviews with hundreds of other survivors, died on Dec. 10 at his home in Thousand Oaks, Calif. He was 97…. – NYT, 12-20-10
- Dan Kurzman, Military Historian, Is Dead at 88: Dan Kurzman, who wrote military histories that illuminated little-known incidents in World War II and an exhaustively reported account of the first Arab-Israeli war, died Dec. 12 in Manhattan. He was 88 and lived in North Bergen, N.J…. – NYT, 12-24-10
- Historian Donald Curl, an original FAU faculty member, dies at 75: Donald Walter Curl, an original faculty member at Florida Atlantic University and a Florida historian considered the expert on Addison Mizner architecture, died Saturday after battling lymphoma for three years. He was 75. Born in East Liberty, Ohio, Curl received his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from Ohio State University, where he studied American history. He moved to Boca Raton in 1964 to teach history at FAU, where he was one of 60 original faculty members, and remained there until his retirement in 2004…. – Palm Beach Post, 12-6-10
- Bob DeArmond: Noted Southeast Alaska historian dies: Bob DeArmond, a prolific writer about the history of Alaska and one of the founding fathers of the city of Pelican, died Friday at home in Sitka. He was 99. DeArmond also wrote for several Southeast Alaska publications, including the Empire and the Ketchikan Daily News…. Juneau Empire, 11-29-10
- Margaret T. Burroughs, Archivist of Black History, Dies at 95: Margaret T. Burroughs, a founder of the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago, one of the first museums devoted to black history and culture in the United States, died on Sunday in Chicago. She was 95. Her death was confirmed by her grandson Eric Toller…. – NYT, 11-27-10
- Raymond Ward: Founder of Chicago’s DuSable Museum dies: A founder of one of the oldest African-American history museums in the country has died. A spokesman for the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago, Raymond Ward, says Margaret Burroughs died in her sleep at her Chicago home Sunday morning at age 93. President Barack Obama said in a statement that Burroughs was “widely admired for her contributions to American culture as an esteemed artist, historian, educator, and mentor.”… – WaPo, 11-22-10
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On January 8, 1811 a group of determined enslaved Africans set into motion a plan to rise up against slavery and take their destiny into their own hands. Vowing to cast the shackles that bound them to the sugar cane plantations just west of the Crescent City, these ambitious warriors carved out a place in history for themselves that some have sought to bury for two centuries.
History Musings 