HISTORY BUZZ: HISTORY NEWS RECAP

By Bonnie K. Goodman

Ms. Goodman is the Editor of History Musings. She has a BA in History & Art History & a Masters in Library and Information Studies from McGill University, and has done graduate work in history at Concordia University.

HISTORY BUZZ: HISTORY NEWS RECAP

IN FOCUS:

 
• Ronald Reagan’s legacy at 100, from 3 very different perspectives: Had he lived just a few years longer, Ronald Reagan would have turned 100 this Sunday. In his memory, the nation will honor his mark on history – and debate his legacy. His widow, Nancy Reagan, will lay a wreath at the Reagan library in California, where the 40th president was buried when he died in 2004 at the age of 93. A group of F-18s from the USS Ronald Reagan will salute him from the air.
  In Washington, the city where he made his greatest impact, politicians will salute his tenure. One of them is President Barack Obama, who, though a liberal who yearns to undo much of Reagan’s domestic record, admires the way Reagan changed the course of history….
  Sean Wilentz is a professor of history at Princeton University and the author of the book “The Age of Reagan.” He wrote there that while he was sometimes critical of Reagan’s leadership, after deep study of his record, “my views have ripened over time.” In an interview, Wilentz said Reagan was the most important political figure of the last 30 years. He includes him in august company. “In American political history, there have been a few leading figures … who for better or worse have put their political stamp indelibly on their time,” Wilentz wrote in his book. “They include Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt – and Ronald Reagan.”… – Kansas City Star, 2-3-11

IN FOCUS:

 
• A House Divided: News & Views about the 150th anniverary of the American Civil War “A House Divided” is a blog dedicated to news and issues of importance to Civil War enthusiasts across the country and around the world. Blogger Linda Wheeler and a panel of respected Civil War experts will debate and dissect historical issues and explore new concepts. Wheeler will also report on conferences and seminars, find little-known battlefields and sites to explore, keep track of local, national and international stories of interest to readers and provide advice on upcoming events…. – Ongoing Civil War coverage — Our Civil War panel of experts — Tweeting the War

Tweeting the Civil War: The Washington Post is tweeting the Civil War, in the words of the people who lived it — from journals, letters, official records and newspapers of the day. Follow us.

Mary Hadar: Escape from Ft. Sumter: As preparations for war increase, the women and children who have been living at Fort Sumter leave on board the steamer Marion, bound for New York. Their safe passage was negotiated by Maj Anderson, commander of Fort Sumter, with South Carolina’s Gov. Pickens. Follow our tweets of the Civil War day by day in the words of the people who lived it… – WaPo, 2-3-11

• Gordon Wood: Revolution and its seeds are still defining nations: And it looked as though Virginia would soon join the rush toward abolition. As Gordon S. Wood, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and history professor at Brown University, points out, Virginia had more abolition societies than all of the Northern states combined….
  But Wood, who spoke Friday in Williamsburg, described how a chasm between the North and the South began to widen after the Revolution. Spurning slavery, the North turned into maybe the most commercialized society the world had ever known, one that celebrated labor as none had before.
  At the same time, the South celebrated, well not exactly sloth, but sitting back and letting someone else work for you. It’s true that not everyone in the South owned slaves. Many whites planted and picked their own cotton. But the idea that they might make enough money to buy someone to work for them was almost universal, Wood told me in a phone interview last week.
  “These two societies were going to clash,” he said, “and I think the threat posed by Lincoln’s election was very scary to the Southerners.”… – Hampton Roads, 2-21-11
• Virtual president’s desk enlivens JFK’s 1800s desk: A new online feature called The President’s Desk is giving people a chance to learn more about John F. Kennedy’s life and administration. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library is introducing its latest project on Monday morning at the library’s museum in Boston…. – AP, 2-22-11
• Elizabeth VanderVen: The Chinese Zodiac Explained: “The purpose of the New Year is to sweep away all the old and anything unpleasant,” Dr. Elizabeth VanderVen, an assistant history professor at Rutgers … – FOX 4 News, 2-4-11

HISTORY NEWS:

 
• Photos: America’s last WWI vet: He quit school at 16, bluffed his way into the Army, and didn’t gain notoriety until much later in life. These are snapshots from along the way. Frank W. Buckles died early Sunday, sadly yet not unexpectedly at age 110, having achieved a singular feat of longevity that left him proud and a bit bemused…. – WaPo, 2-28-11
• James N. Gregory: Dust Bowl migration sparks history project: It was once called another name — a negative term of the era. “Olivehurst was known as ‘Little Oklahoma,'” James N. Gregory said. “It was a very poor community of self-built homes.” Gregory, a history professor at the University of Washington and the author of “American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California,” spoke about the subject that the Sutter County Historical Society is researching…. – Appeal-Democrat, 2-19-11
• Sheldon M. Stern: Report Gives a Majority of States Poor Grades on History Standards: A majority of states received failing or near-failing grades on the quality of their standards for teaching history in K-12 schools, according to the latest review Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader from the Washington-based Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
  In “The State of State U.S. History Standards 2011,” the research and advocacy group says the average grade across all states was barely a D. The majority—28 states—received scores of D or lower and only one state, South Carolina, earned a straight-A score. 

  “If students are not going to get the history in K-12, they’re not going to get it at all,” said Sheldon M. Stern, a historian formerly with the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston and one of the study’s co-authors. “The irony in the whole thing is that it’s not very difficult… – Edweek, 2-16-11

• Archivist of the US Announces NARA Reorganization Plan: Recently, Archivist of the United States David Ferriero marked his first year in office and many of the initiatives he began since taking the helm are starting to bear fruit. Last summer, Ferriero created a staff task force to draft a plan for the “transformation” of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Ferriero recently unveiled Charting the Course, the reorganization plan for “reinventing” the National Archives…. – Lee White, National Coalition for History, 2-14-11
• Leslie Harris: Emory examines its ties to slavery University organizes conference for colleges to examine racial past: Emory University history professor Leslie Harris leads the Transforming Community Project, which promotes discussions about race. Emory is confronting its past ties to slavery… – AJC, 2-6-11
• National Archives have Jacqueline Kennedy’s pink suit, but hat is missing: An expanded collection of Kennedy treasures and trivia was unveiled this month at an exhibit as well as online to coincide with the 50th anniversary of JFK’s inauguration; it includes the fabric of his top hat (beaver fur) down to his shoe size (10C). But missing and hardly mentioned are what could be the two most famous remnants of Kennedy’s last day. The pink suit, bloodstained and perfectly preserved in a vault in Maryland, is banned from public display for 100 years. The pillbox hat – removed at Parkland Hospital while Jacqueline Kennedy waited for doctors to confirm what she knew – is lost, last known to be in the hands of her personal secretary, who won’t discuss its whereabouts…. – WaPo, 2-4-11
• The Google Art Project Makes Masterpieces Accessible to All: Gone are the days of jet-setting to galleries in Manhattan, Florence, London, or Madrid. As of yesterday, all you need to become a museum maven is an Internet connection. Google Art Project, the brainchild of a small group of art-happy Google employees, brings the Street View technology of Google Earth and Google Maps inside 17 museums around the world. The roster includes The Uffizi, the Tate Britain, The Met, MoMA, and the Van Gogh Museum.
  The Google Art Project collection, as a whole, consists of 1,000 works of art by more than 400 artists, and this is only the beginning. Google hopes to add more museums and works of art to its virtual dossier soon…. – The Atlantic, 2-2-11 — Google Art Project
• Bay Area antiquities experts fear Egyptian looters took massive toll on treasures: “Damage to or theft of these pieces is not just tragic for Egypt, but for the whole world,” said Renee Dreyfus, curator of antiquities for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which hosted the traveling Tutankhamun exhibit at the M.H. de Young Museum in 2009.
  “These things are part of our world heritage, where much of what we consider the civilized world began,” she said. “They are part of everyone’s history.”… – Oakland Tribune, 2-1-11

HISTORIANS NEWS:

 
• Professors to walk out of classrooms Tuesday: According to the TAA, the march could be a turning point in the protest of Gov. Scott Walker’s bill, showing the city and the nation that some of the UW-Madison faculty wants to protect the collective bargaining rights of public sector workers.
  333 UW-Madison faculty members signed a letter addressed to Walker, state legislators and citizens of Wisconsin, which was released Sunday. It states their support for collective bargaining rights for all workers.
  Associate history professor William Jones signed the letter and said he supports the faculty’s march to the Capitol.
  “There are several aims [of the letter],” Jones said. “One is to register our support for the principal of collective bargaining as a right and as a democratic process that’s been established both in the U.S. and around the world, as a fundamental human right.” … – Daily Cardinal, 2-22-11
• Dominic Sandbrook accused of “recycling” the work of other historians in latest book: …[H]erein lies the most troubling flaw of [Dominic Sandbrook’s “Mad As Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right” one that won’t be apparent to the casual reader. It’s only by consulting the book’s footnotes that one discovers, by looking inside the books he cites, that Mr. Sandbrook shamelessly and repeatedly cannibalizes the work of others, offering what could be generously called a 400-page mash-up of previous histories of the 1970s.
  Take this passage, where Mr. Sandbrook, in vivid prose, describes the 1976 bicentennial celebration in Boston: “As the orchestra reached the climax of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, the church bells pealed, howitzers thundered, fireworks sent shards of color wheeling through the sky, and red, white, and blue geysers burst from a fireboat behind the Hatch shell.”
  These aren’t Mr. Sandbrook’s words but two sentences grafted together—one from a 1976 Time magazine article (“As the orchestra reached the climax of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, howitzers boomed, church bells pealed”), the other from J. Anthony Lukas’s “Common Ground” (“geysers of red, white, and blue water burst from a fireboat behind the band shell”)—with a bit of strategic re-editing. Both sources are named in the book’s footnotes, but in the text the sentence is passed off as the author’s own…. – WSJ, 2-12-11
• Thomas DiLorenzo: Loyola professor faces questions about ties to pro-secession group: A Loyola University Maryland economics professor is denying ties to a group that endorses a second Southern secession after he came under fire from a Missouri congressman because of the alleged association. Thomas DiLorenzo, a Loyola professor since 1992, was in Washington on Wednesday to testify at a House subcommittee hearing on the Federal Reserve Bank. But Rep. William Lacy Clay, a Democrat from St. Louis, quickly raised questions about DiLorenzo’s ties to the League of the South, which is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center…. – Baltimore Sun, 2-11-11
• Jan Gross and Irena Grudzinska Gross: Publisher defends book on Polish plunder of Jews: A Polish publishing house is defending its decision to publish a book that says some Poles actively profited from Jewish suffering during the Holocaust – a claim that challenges a national belief about Polish actions during World War II.
  “Golden Harvest,” by Princeton academics Jan Gross and Irena Grudzinska Gross, argues that rural Poles sometimes sought financial gain from Jewish misfortune in a variety of ways, from plundering Jewish mass graves to ferreting out Jews in hiding for rewards.
  Gross said the starting point of the book is a photograph showing Polish peasants digging up human remains at the Treblinka death camp just after the war in a search for gold or other treasures that Nazi executioners might have overlooked. Scattered in front of the group are skulls and bones…. – WaPo, 2-9-11
• Scholarly Reportage: Fad or Movement?: Most academics are content to teach their classes and publish their research – usually for a small number of scholars in their subfield. Yet, there have always been academics who want to reach a much larger audience, to have influence beyond their classrooms, scholarly journals and the faculty club. For them, the call to become a public intellectual is strong. But as long as there has been this desire to “cross over,” there has also been a tension between those who do and those who do not.
  Scholars who manage to break beyond the narrow scholarly niche are often derided as mere popularizers, lacking the disciplinary rigor of their more professional colleagues. To some, they are lightweights who jump onto the latest in intellectual fashion and leave no lasting mark on intellectual life or academia. And this is largely because, crossing over, or, as my agent calls it, ‘going trade,’ too often means consciously leaving disciplinary concerns behind, as writing and speaking beyond a narrow academic community requires new skills and a much more interdisciplinary approach…. – Inside Higher Ed, 2-10-11
• Va. historian denies tampering with Lincoln pardon: An amateur Virginia historian is denying allegations by the National Archives that he changed the date on a presidential pardon issued by President Abraham Lincoln. Seventy-eight-year-old Thomas P. Lowry of Woodbridge, Va., said Monday that he was pressured by federal agents to confess. The Archives says Lowry has confessed to using a fountain pen to change the date on a pardon by Lincoln from 1864 to 1865. The change made it appear that Lowry had discovered a document languishing in the Archives that was likely Lincoln’s final official act before he was assassinated…. – AP, 2-7-11
• In Arguments on Corporate Speech, the Press Is a Problem: In the year since the Supreme Court handed down its 183-page decision in Citizens United, the liberal objection to it has gradually boiled down to a single sentence: The majority was wrong to grant First Amendment rights to corporations. That critique is incomplete. As Justice John Paul Stevens acknowledged in his dissent, the court had long recognized that “corporations are covered by the First Amendment.” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, listed more than 20 precedents saying that.
  But an old and established rule can still be wrong, and it may be that the liberal critique is correct. If it is, though, it must confront a very hard question. If corporations have no First Amendment rights, what about newspapers and other news organizations, almost all of which are organized as corporations?…
  Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, has reviewed the historical evidence. The bottom line, he said, is this: “If ordinary business corporations lack First Amendment rights, so do those business corporations that we call media corporations.”… – NYT, 2-7-11

HISTORY OP-EDs:

 
• Scott Casper: Rebranding Mount Vernon: Today, of course, Washington is again at the center of the presidential pantheon. For that he can thank an unlikely group of allies: former slaves who worked at Mount Vernon in the late 19th century and who helped shape our modern beliefs about him — but only by hiding his complicated views on slavery behind the illusion of an Old South plantation. Everything about the restored Mount Vernon was designed to render Washington a noble but approachable figure…. – NYT, 2-21-11
• Diane Ravitch: Why should teachers have unions?: As I write, thousands of teachers are staging a protest in the state capitol in Wisconsin against proposed legislation by Gov. Scott Walker that would destroy their collective bargaining rights. Others stand with them, including members of the Green Bay Packers and other public sector workers, even those not affected by the legislation, namely, firefighters and police. Gov. Walker demanded that the teachers pay more for their health benefits and their pension benefits, and they have agreed to do so. But that’s not all he wants. He wants to destroy the union…. – WaPo, 2-22-11
• Julian Zelizer: What’s wrong with presidential rankings: Since the late 1940s, it has been an American custom for pollsters and publications to release a ranking of U.S. presidents.
  Usually based on a survey of historians and journalists or of the public, the ranking informs readers about who the “best” and “worst” presidents are. In an age when we are constantly desperate to craft Top 10 lists for every part of our lives, this approach to political history is appealing.
  But rankings don’t tell us much about presidential history. The rankings are weak mechanisms for evaluating what has taken place in the White House…. – CNN, 2-21-11
• Ravitch: Public schools are not chain stores: Last week, the New York City Department of Education received permission from the city’s Panel on Educational Policy, or PEP, to close an additional two dozen public schools because their scores are too low. The city has now closed more than 100 schools and opened hundreds of new ones. The consent of the PEP was never in doubt…. – WaPo, 2-9-11

HISTORY BOOK NEWS:

 
• Adam Arenson: The making of America’s most dangerous city: About this blog: St. Louis has earned a dubious distinction again this year – named by U.S. News and World Report as the nation’s most dangerous city. What is it that puts St. Louis in the forefront of American crime? Adam Arenson looks to history for an answer. In his book, “The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War,” recently released by Harvard University Press, Arenson charts the quest of St. Louisans to make their city the cultural and commercial capital. But their efforts ultimately failed and decisions taken as far back as the Civil War have repercussions today, as Arenson, an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at El Paso, reveals here…. – 2-24-11
• New Rumsfeld memoir criticizes Rice, other members of Bush administration: But history professor Jack Rakove warns that Rumsfeld’s writings should be viewed with a cautious eye. “Historians are universally suspicious of memoirs,” Rakove said. “The great danger of memoirs is that they’re inherently self-serving, and they can be selective.”… – Standford Daily, 2-24-11
• Grace Elizabeth Hale: Why are today’s rebels Republicans?: Now, those standing against the status quo have a decidedly different outlook: they are conservatives, fundamentalists, Tea Partiers. How did this shift come about? Why are today’s rebels Republicans? Grace Elizabeth Hale explores the nature of the outsider in American culture in her book “A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America,” recently released by Oxford University Press. Here, Hale, an associate professor of history and American studies at the University of Virginia, delves into the impulses that drive both conservative and liberal rebels…. – WaPo, 2-8-11
• Exploring the failures of the Andrew Johnson presidency: Gordon-Reed’s latest book, Andrew Johnson: The American Presidents Series / The 17th President, 1865-1869 (Times Books, $23), touches on issues of race as she examines Johnson’s role in putting the nation back together after the Civil War.
  In one sense, Andrew Johnson’s life was a tale of success. He rose from illiterate tailor’s apprentice to become president of the United States. “One of the things that I wanted to come across in this book was that he was a person of tenacity and perseverance,” Gordon-Reed said in a phone interview from her home in New York. “It’s a very American story. It’s hard to imagine that a person of his standing would rise to the highest office in the land, but he did.”
  But his life was also a story of failure. Focusing on Johnson’s presidency, Gordon-Reed aims to show how ill-suited Johnson was both to succeed Abraham Lincoln, one of America’s greatest presidents, and to heal a nation that the Civil War had torn apart. She argues that by attempting to reconcile with Southern whites, Johnson abandoned millions of newly freed slaves and lost the trust of congressional leaders.
  “Johnson is considered one of the worst presidents,” Gordon-Reed said. “The interesting thing is that he was a talented man.”… – Philly Inquirer, 2-8-11
• Jan Gross: Book on Holocaust stirs controversy: Mr Gross, a history professor at Princeton University, told the Associated Press that he wished to tell the story of the war as it happened…. – Warsaw Business Journal, 2-9-11

HISTORY REVIEWS:

 
• HISTORY REVIEW BY KEVIN BOYLE: Lawrence Goldstone’s “Inherently Unequal”: INHERENTLY UNEQUAL The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865-1903 “Constitutional law,” Lawrence Goldstone says toward the end of “Inherently Unequal,” is “simply politics made incomprehensible to the common man.” It’s meant to be a sound bite, a clever coda to a cautionary tale of justice corrupted and denied. But it speaks to a cynical strain that runs through this history of the late 19th-century American struggle to define the boundaries of racial justice – and that makes Goldstone’s story darker than it ought to be…. – WaPo, 2-25-11
• Douglas Waller: Douglas Waller’s “Wild Bill Donovan,” on the OSS spymaster: WILD BILL DONOVAN The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage The episode, recounted by Douglas Waller in this superb, dramatic yet scholarly biography, tells a great deal about the man who built a far-flung intelligence organization from scratch in the midst of World War II. Courageous but reckless, always itching to be in the center of the action, Donovan was smart, tough and seemingly endowed with boundless energy…. – WaPo, 2-25-11
• Anabasis Alexandrou: Paths of Glory: THE LANDMARK ARRIAN The Campaigns of Alexander It’s an irresistible story. Certainly Plutarch, who included this description in his masterly biography of Alexander in the second century A.D., couldn’t resist it. But he did scruple to note that not all historians accepted this account of inebriate vandalism. One who didn’t even consider it worthy of mention was Lucius Flavius Arrianus, a younger contemporary of Plutarch better known as Arrian. For him, Alexander’s burning of the palace at Persepolis — then and now a shocking act of destruction — was carefully deliberated public policy, a symbolic seal on an official campaign of vengeance: it was his own idea to pay the Persians back in kind for the burning of the Athenian temples in 479 B.C. and, Arrian wrote, “for all the other wrongs they had committed against the Greeks.”… – NYT, 2-25-11
• RAYMOND ARSENAULT: Shades of White: THE INVISIBLE LINE Three American Families and the ­Secret Journey From Black to White In an illuminating and aptly titled book, “The Invisible Line,” Daniel J. Sharfstein demonstrates that African- Americans of mixed ancestry have been crossing the boundaries of color and racial identity since the early colonial era. An associate professor of law at Vanderbilt University and an author with a literary flair, Sharfstein documents this persistent racial fluidity by painstakingly reconstructing the history of three families. In a dizzying array of alternating chapters, he presents the personal and racial stories of the Gibsons, the Spencers and the Walls. The result is an astonishingly detailed rendering of the variety and complexity of racial experience in an evolving national culture moving from slavery to segregation to civil rights… – NYT, 2-25-11
• Jeff Greenfield: With a Few Tweaks, Shaking Up History THEN EVERYTHING CHANGED Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan In his shrewdly written, often riveting new book, “Then Everything Changed,” the veteran political journalist Jeff Greenfield ponders some smaller-scale and more plausible what-ifs: three events, he says, “that came within a whisker of actually happening.” What if an actual attempt on John F. Kennedy’s life, shortly after his election to the White House, had succeeded? What if Sirhan Sirhan had been thwarted in assassinating Robert F. Kennedy in 1968? What if President Gerald R. Ford had corrected a misstep in the 1976 presidential debates and defeated Jimmy Carter?… – NYT, 2-28-11
• WALTER ISAACSON, Bettany Hughes: Wise Guy: THE HEMLOCK CUP Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life For the most part, Hughes is successful, and even when not, she’s fascinating. What we get in “The Hemlock Cup” is many books interlaced: a biography of Socrates; a gritty description of daily life in Athens; a vivid history of the Peloponnesian War and its aftereffects; and — as an unexpected delight — a guide to museums, archaeological digs and repositories of ancient artifacts, as Hughes takes us by the hand while ferreting out her evidence. At one point we travel with her to the rear of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, to study a scrap of papyrus — Fragment 4807 — in the Sackler Library. It contains some lines, apparently by Sophocles, casting light on what life may have been like during the Peloponnesian War… – NYT, 2-20-11
• Jonathan Gill: Yardley reviews Jonathan Gill’s “Harlem”: HARLEM The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America Gill, a historian who has taught at Columbia and is on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music, has done a stupendous amount of research, some of which might best have been left in his files. Though his “Harlem” certainly is authoritative and exhaustive, in addition to being well-written and perceptive, it also is exhausting and would have gained from being cut by at least 50 pages. Many of the details of Harlem’s political life could have been set aside, and some of the portraits of its most notable and familiar figures – Malcolm X, Bayard Rustin, Marcus Garvey, Father Divine, Langston Hughes, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. et al. – would have lost nothing by being briefer…. – WaPo, 2-17-11
• Timothy Beal: “The Rise and Fall of the Bible”: Rethinking the Good Book American Christians buy millions of Bibles they seldom read and don’t understand: In his new book, “The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book,” religion professor Timothy Beal describes all the angst and doubt that Bible reading provoked in him during his youth, as well as the frustration many American Christians experience as a result of their own encounters with the book. This doesn’t prevent them from buying truckloads of the things — Beal notes that “the average Christian household owns nine Bibles and purchases at least one new Bible every year” — but actually reading them is another matter. Beal believes that’s because today’s Christians are seeking a certainty in their holy book that simply isn’t there, and shouldn’t be… – Salon, 2-13-11
• Three books on the gulf oil spill: Just six months after BP stopped the oil that had been flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, a gusher of books about the spill has begun to wash ashore. The first wave includes three very different approaches to the disaster that riveted the nation most of last summer…. – WaPo, 2-11-11
• Dominic Sandbrook: Carter, Reagan and Freaky Times: MAD AS HELL The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right The cultural politics of the 1970s is irresistible to historians, the way the decade’s dance music is irresistible to D.J.’s at weddings. Thus a book like Dominic Sandbrook’s “Mad as Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right” arrives in bookstores every six months or so. Nixon, Ford, Carter: there’s little greatness there, but these presidencies are so familiar that you can hum nostalgically, dismally along…. – NYT, 2-15-11
• Gwen Ifill reviews Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir, “Known and Unknown”: Donald Rumsfeld has chosen all of the above in “Known and Unknown,” a hefty and heavily annotated accounting and defense of his life in public service. But hand-wring he does, in repeated blasts of Rumsfeldian score-settling that come off as a cross between setting the record straight and doggedly knocking enemies off pedestals. The book is full of little nuggets like that, but at its heart, it is a revenge memoir. Most readers who came to know of Rumsfeld during the last stage of his remarkable career as secretary of defense for George W. Bush will not be surprised at the tone that runs through much of the book. Rumsfeld, according to Rumsfeld, was prescient, clear-headed, loyal and almost always right…. – WaPo, 2-6-11
• BIOGRAPHY REVIEW BY WIL HAYGOOD Peter Firstbrook’s account of Obama’s roots, “The Obamas”: Even at this halfway point in his presidential term, Barack Obama already belongs to the publishing ages. The sweeping and poignant arc of his life – and his race-defying presidency – guarantees that books upon books will be written about him. We’ve already seen a healthy number. There have been tomes, but mostly the books are Teddy White-like riffs by journalists offering behind-the-scenes accounts of campaign intrigue or life in the White House.
  In “The Obamas,” Peter Firstbrook, a British documentary filmmaker turned writer, all but ignores the American side of the Obama story and plows into the Kenyan landscape, and family genealogy, of the Obama clan. The president’s father, Barack Obama Sr., was Kenyan, a member of the Luo tribe.
  Firstbrook has written a strange and well-meaning hybrid of a book. There are long stretches of oral histories, given by close and distant Obama relatives and buttressed with often numbing historical detail on Kenyan wars and tribal political intrigues. You will learn not only about those intrepid explorers Henry Morton Stanley and David Livingstone, but also far more than you need to about the ritual of lower-tooth extraction for Luo boys…. – WaPo, 2-6-11
• Two books on military-industrial complex: For example, if a 22nd-century citizen were to puzzle over the phrase “military-industrial complex,” which recurs in virtually all political and military histories of the 20th and early 21st centuries, he would be well-advised to examine one of the largest and most powerful participants in this “complex,” Lockheed Martin, subject of William D. Hartung’s careful, meticulously documented book “Prophets of War.” President Dwight Eisenhower, not one celebrated for memorable phrases, coined this one. It refers, of course, to the production of armaments – missiles, drones, submarines, etc. – regardless of whether they may be needed….
  The phrase “military-industrial complex” has stuck. Eisenhower himself remains indistinct in the public memory, framed at different times in his life by the photographer Richard Avedon as an amiable, distrait old duffer and by biographers who portray him as a clever politician. His campaigns and policies represented a form of Republicanism no longer recognizable to his successors: There was a fierce independent streak in him, as James Ledbetter demonstrates in “Unwarranted Influence.” He had always been something of a stealth thinker, even in the Army, when he kept his own counsel on opinions that his superiors might have regarded as unorthodox. Few commentators on the 34th president’s mind and methods have more rigorously considered the evolution of Eisenhower’s preoccupations than Ledbetter has…. – WaPo, 2-6-11
• Adam Goodheart Reviews: Daniel Rasmussen: Violence and Retribution: AMERICAN UPRISING The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt Early in January 1811, along the same riverbank, a small army of Louisiana slaves had briefly faced a small army of slaveholders. It was, as described in “American Uprising,” Daniel Rasmussen’s chilling and suspenseful account, the culmination of a signal episode in the history of American race relations…. – NYT, 2-6-11 — Excerpt

HISTORY FEATURES:

 
• James D. Robenalt: Harding’s defender Ohio’s presidents all underrated, Cleveland history buff contends: History is in the eyes of the beholder, whose point of view might conflict with that of another beholder.
  For example, Cleveland lawyer and historian James D. Robenalt says this about Marion’s Warren G. Harding: “He was a damned good president, and he did a number of things that he’s just not getting credit for.”
  Yet that’s not the record Larry J. Sabato beholds.
  Told of Robenalt’s assertion, Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and one of the nation’s pre-eminent presidential scholars, responded: “Look, I’m sure he’s not really defending Warren Harding. That would be very difficult to make a case for.”
  Yes, Professor Sabato, Robenalt actually is defending Harding…. Columbus Dispath, 2-20-11
• Top 10 presidents: In 2010, Siena College asked 238 presidential scholars to rank the 43 commanders in chief:
  1. Franklin Roosevelt
  2. Teddy Roosevelt
  3. Abraham Lincoln
  4. George Washington
  5. Thomas Jefferson
  6. James Madison
  7. James Monroe
  8. Woodrow Wilson
  9. Harry Truman
  10. Dwight Eisenhower
• Pat Nixon portrayed as combative in biography: Pat Nixon was long regarded as the subservient political wife who wanted only to help her husband President Richard Nixon achieve his goals for the nation. But a new biography portrays the first lady as willful and combative in her relationship with her husband and his top advisers. She waged “a battle to retain control over her responsibilities,” writes Mary C. Brennan in “Pat Nixon: Embattled First Lady,” due out next month from the University Press of Kansas. “She found herself engaged in almost constant warfare with her husband and some of his advisors . . . and she refused to give up without a fight.”… WaPo, 2-14-11
• ‘Raw Deal’: Historian makes waves with scathing look at Franklin D. Roosevelt: For more than half a century, biographers have treated Franklin Delano Roosevelt with Rushmore-like reverence, celebrating the nation’s 32nd president as a colossus who eased the agony of the Great Depression and saved democracy from Nazi Germany. Which never sat right with historian Burton Folsom Jr….
  The result was “New Deal or Raw Deal?,” a scathing 300-page counter-narrative that has made Folsom a conservative hero and placed him squarely in the midst of a roiling debate over America’s past, the nature of history and, some say, its manipulation for political ends…. – LA Times, 2-12-11
• Clashing versions of Lithuania’s history and how to treat it: Since 1991 scholars from all sides have been unravelling the murderous details, meticulously comparing sources and providing a nuanced account of its interlocking causes, including prejudice, outside incitement, revenge and cowardice. But for some campaigners, mostly from abroad, the historical reckoning has been both too slow and too soft. They detect a sinister pattern of neglect of Jewish sites, foot-dragging over restitution, harassment of Holocaust survivors in an investigation of alleged atrocities by Jewish partisans and an ultranationalist approach to history that belittles the Holocaust.
  This discontent led to a public protest and bitter exchanges at a recent academic conference in London sponsored by the Lithuanian embassy (part of a year of official commemoration of the Holocaust). The campaigners read a letter denouncing both the Lithuanian government and international efforts to put Nazi and Soviet crimes on a similar footing.
  That prompted a spirited rebuttal from historians and other conference participants, and not least from Irena Veisaite, a Holocaust survivor and leading member of Lithuania’s small Jewish community. She found herself in the unusual position of being berated by a campaigner against anti-Semitism, a British-born film-maker and academic called Danny Ben-Moshe.
  Ms Veisaite and her allies deplore the glorification of the LAF. They ascribe more blame to clumsiness than to malice in the Lithuanian authorities’ actions. What worries them is hardening attitudes on both sides. Some Lithuanians feel that over-zealous foreign Jewish critics put too little store by reconciliation. “We are squeezed between two Talibans,” says Sarunas Liekis, a Yiddish-studies professor from Vilnius. The same obstinacy that plagues Lithuania’s relations with Poland, he says, lies behind politicians’ refusal to reverse their mistakes on Jewish issues…. – Economist, 2-20-11
• Anne Midgette reviews ‘Nixon in China,’ finally on stage at the Metropolitan Opera: IN NEW YORK When John Adams’s opera “Nixon in China” had its world premiere in 1987, it was provocative, edgy, audacious. 24 years later, it’s come to the Metropolitan Opera and, along the way, become a Modern Masterpiece. Wednesday night’s premiere was a big event: The crowd was lively, star-studded, and abuzz. It marked not only the Met’s first performance of this opera, but also the company debuts of Adams, who conducted, and Peter Sellars, who came up with the original concept and directed the original production, and who has, incredibly, moved from enfant terrible to veteran maverick without ever before having directed at this venue…. – WaPo, 2-3-11
• Men, women flip the script in gender expectation according to survey co-designed by Stephanie Coontz: A new portrait of single Americans, drawn from a major new survey, suggests the attitudes and behaviors of today’s singles are quite unlike their counterparts just a few decades ago…. “Men are now expressing some traditionally female attitudes, while women are adopting some of those long attributed to men,” says biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, who helped develop the survey with social historian Stephanie Coontz and Justin Garcia, a doctoral fellow with the Institute for Evolutionary Studies at Binghamton (N.Y.) University. “For me, as a historian, it’s just amazing confirmation about what has changed in the last 40 years,” says Coontz, professor of history and family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash…. – USA Today (2-2-11)

HISTORY PROFILES:

 
• Faculty Spotlight: Greg Aldrete, professor of history and humanistic studies: Greg Aldrete, professor of history and humanistic studies, stands with his group of UW-Green Bay students who assisted with his Linothorax project, a project replicating the lightweight linen armor of the ancient Greeks to demonstrate the advantages.
  Award-winning UW-Green Bay Professor of history and humanistic studies Greg Aldrete has landed another prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship for the 2012-2013 school year.
  The grant enables Aldrete to spend a year concentrating on research, rather than teaching, and working on his book, “Riots in Ancient Rome.”
  His proposal for the book states that ancient Rome seems to have been a riotous lot. For the 575-year period from 200 B.C. to A.D. 375, there are at least 154 episodes of unruly, collective behavior. The worst of these resulted in pitched battles in the streets, hundreds of deaths, widespread looting, acts of arson and even the lynching of leading magistrates of the state. Due to such incidents, Rome has often been characterized as a lawless and violent place. Its inhabitants, especially the poor, have been portrayed as disorderly and fickle. The reality, according to Aldrete, is considerably more complex…. – Fourth Estate, 2-23-11
• Richard Gamble: Professor discovers a home, and its personality: Sometimes, the old house groans and the floorboards creak. When it does, Richard Gamble picks up his coffee cup and listens intently. “This house tells me something new about itself everyday,” he said, looking in the direction of the noise. “It is almost as if it is a living personality.”
  In July of 2008, Gamble, an associate professor of history, bought an 1882 Victorian-style house in downtown Hillsdale. Between teaching, traveling and writing he has spent the past two and a half years learning about his new house and working hard to restore and renovate it.
  The project surprised Gamble, who never planned to own an old house like it. Gamble unexpectedly began to look for a home in May of 2008…. – Hillsdale Colegian, 2-17-11
• Jill Lepore on Writing Current History: Professor Lepore sees herself as a public historian who “has a civic obligation to contribute to the public debate, not just [to] be … entertaining.”… – Harvard Crimson, 2-14-11
• Niall Ferguson: visionary or crank?: Niall Ferguson is among Britain’s most valuable exports – a feted international academic with seats at Harvard, Stanford, the Harvard Business School and the LSE; he has also had spells at Oxford and Cambridge. His tomes sell in their millions; his TV shows are an engaging mix of self-confidence and charm. It’s a multi-media combination that consistently places him on lists of ‘influential people’ across the globe. Everywhere except for Britain, where he’s seen as a neo-conservative oddity…. – Spectator (UK), 2-22-11

HISTORY QUOTES:

 
• Gary Nash: The President’s House in Philadelphia tells a story of early U.S. presidents The new President’s House and its exhibit, “Freedom and Slavery in Making a New Nation,” on Independence Mall…. The site honors the location and importance of the original mansion, but it also addresses the subject of slavery in early U.S. history. Gary B. Nash, a professor emeritus of history at UCLA, and the lead historian for the exhibit, said, “A whole cloud of historical amnesia is going to be swept away. This story speaks to the themes of the Liberty Bell … [which] connects to liberty and slavery being conjoined at our nation’s birth.”… – LAT, 2-20-11
• Yoav Di-Capua: Texas expert: Egypt’s fate key to Mideast: Mubarak’s fate could affect variety range of Mideast issues and US interests, says UT historian. Yoav Di-Capua, an associate professor of history at the University of Texas, specializing in modern Arab intellectual history…. – Austin American-Statesman, 2-13-11
• Presidential bios have resonance in the press — three historians cited in NRO article on presidency: …No man had a greater influence on the presidency than its original occupant. “The office of the presidency was not only forged by George Washington,” says historian Ron Chernow, who recently published a one-volume biography of the first president. “One can make the argument that the office was forged for George Washington.” At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, most delegates assumed he would be the first executive, and they outlined the president’s responsibilities in the Constitution with him in mind — that is to say, rather vaguely. Unlike the lengthy Article I, which enumerates the legislature’s tasks, Article II is short and vague…. Thomas Jefferson, however, gave the office much more of a populist flavor, says historian Gordon Wood. “He saw himself as speaking for the people; I don’t think Washington saw it that way at all,” Wood observes. Unlike Washington, who held weekly levees reminiscent of those held by European courts, “Jefferson really threw all that out and opened himself to the people” — sometimes answering the White House’s door in his slippers…. By saving the American experiment, Lincoln allowed a future president, Theodore Roosevelt, to turn an agrarian republic into a world power. “Roosevelt made the presidency into the office of an international statesman,” says historian Edmund Morris, who recently released the final installment of his three-volume biography of the 26th president. Roosevelt succeeded in this effort largely because of his cosmopolitan personality. He had four grand tours of Europe before serving as president, spoke German and French fluently, and boasted an enormous range of international acquaintances. “The climax of his presidency was the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906, which he got for mediating the end of the Russo–Japanese war,” Morris notes. “To date, he’s the only president who’s ever been asked to mediate a foreign war.”… National Review, 2-19-11
• Robert Hunter: ISU history prof: U.S. should be flexible with the Middle East: An ISU history professor said the U.S. government should be more flexible with its Middle Eastern policies in the wake of continued unrest in the region.
  “[Our government] is going to have to be more diplomatically nimble and more sophisticated in how we deal with these countries,” said Robert Hunter, who has lived and worked in Egypt. “They’re going to be less willing to do what we want all the time.”… – Indiana Statesman, 2-17-11
• Douglas Brinkley: Effort to block national monuments may undermine future national parks: “National monuments are usually way stations to national parks, places so popular that they became national parks: They are national treasures and huge economic engines,” said Douglas Brinkley, author of a bestseller on Theodore Roosevelt and a new book, “The Quiet World,” on efforts to control land exploitation in Alaska and stave off species extinction.
  “In an America filled with lobby groups and selfish agendas, you can’t just save a place for one presidency,” Brinkley added…. “Sponsors of efforts to curb Presidential authority under the Antiquties Act are some of the same people in Congress who promote executive power in other realms,” Brinkley notes…. Seattle PI, 2-20-11
• Simon Schama: cuts will make history preserve of the rich: Schama said he was uneasy that “sciences and subjects, which seem to be on a utilitarian measure useful, have retained their state funding, while the arts and humanities are being stripped of theirs.”…
  In a thinly veiled attack on PM David Cameron and his deputy Nick Clegg, Schama said: “It behoves those people who were themselves educated at places like Westminster, and Eton – or in my case, Haberdashers’ – to understand the damage that you can do to British culture by making it essentially a wealthy pursuit.”
  He also slammed some fellow academics, adding: “You have to work very hard to make history boring, and there are plenty of people in the institutions who do a brilliant job of making it boring…. – Telegraph (UK), 2-20-11
• Paula Fass: Ensuring Domestic Tranquillity During Sleepovers: “My impression is that sleepovers are a phenomenon of the suburbs and they started taking off in the ’50s and ’60s,” said Paula Fass, a professor of history…. – NYT, 2-7-11

HISTORY INTERVIEWS:

 
• H.W. Brands on American Presidents: Today is Presidents Day in the U.S. In honour of the occasion, bestselling historian H W Brands introduces five excellent presidential biographies
  You were among the distinguished historians invited to advise President Obama during his first year in office. Do you believe that the stories of past presidencies contain clues to solving the problems of the present? As a historian, I think that being aware of the what’s occurred in the past—what’s worked in the past, what hasn’t worked in the past—does provide some guidance for the present…. – The Browser, 2-21-11
• David Driskell: Artist, educator, curator to the stars: David Driskell is a painter, printmaker, collagist, professor emeritus, writer, collector, consultant, curator, art historian and nice guy. This polymath, originally from North Carolina, is a specialist in African-American art and also makes quite a bit of it himself. He is a pre-eminent voice in publicizing African-American artists through history, so much that he has a center named after him at the University of Maryland. He took a break from hanging out with friends Bill Cosby and Oprah to talk to WEEKEND about art and life…. – Yale Daily News, 2-17-11
• John McMillian: High Times for Wikileaks, Bath Salts and Egyptian Democracy: A Review of Smoking Typewriters — the Sixties Underground Press and Rise of Alternative Media in America: The arrests and office ransackings of journalists in Egypt resonates a little bit more deeply with American history professor John McMillian: the same kind of intimidation and outright sabotage of revolutionary dissent occurred just two generations ago in a more familiar country — the United States…. – East Bay Express, 2-11-11
• John C. McManus: How Revolutions Go Viral: A Historian’s Perspective on Egypt and Tunisia: As revolt in the Middle East has spread from Tunisia to Egypt, with additional unrest in Jordan and Yemen, the uprising echo past political revolutions, says a historian at Missouri University of Science and Technology.
  Dr. John C. McManus, an associate professor of military history at Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T), says the recent uprisings are similar to past revolutions. Just as the American Revolution inspired France to win its own independence and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 spread throughout the former Soviet bloc, revolutions can become viral, McManus says… – Newswise, 2-4-11
• Laurence Reisman: Q&A with historian, presidential biographer Douglas Brinkley: Historian Brinkley uses research to opine on political questions such as did Reagan have Alzheimer’s while in the White House?
  Perhaps it’s sheer coincidence that presidential author and Rice University professor Douglas Brinkley will pinch-hit for the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan Saturday night as part of The Emerson Center’s Celebrated Speakers Series. But timeliness is everything. Brinkley, author of two books on late President Ronald Reagan, will speak on the eve of the 40th president’s 100th birthday.
  Brinkley’s interests and expertise are varied. He’s written numerous books on presidents, and about all sorts of other Amertican history, from Rosa Parks and Hurricane Katrina to Hunter S. Thompson and Dean Acheson. He’s even taught college history classes by taking students cross-country on buses…. – TC Palm, 2-1-11

HISTORY AWARDS & APPOINTMENTS:

 
• Philip Gleason: Honoring the Historian: Philip Gleason, professor emeritus of history at the University of Notre Dame and the country’s pre-eminent historian of American Catholicism, will receive an honorary degree from the University of Dayton this spring…. – University of Dayton – News Home, 2-22-11
• Prestigious Lincoln Prize goes to Eric Foner: Prominent historian Eric Foner will receive the 2011 $50,000 Lincoln Prize for his book, “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery” according to an announcement this morning by prize sponsors Gettysburg College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. He will receive the award on May 11 at the Union League Club in New York. Foner, the DeWitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia University, wrote in Fiery Trial about the evolving attitude of Lincoln toward slavery and slaves as the Civil War unfolded. The 16th President, who always said he abhorred slavery, initially sought to eradicate it by promoting colonization of other countries by former slaves. Later he changed that opinion and sought full citizenship for African Americans in this country…. – WaPo, 2-10-11
• Steve Hindle: Huntington Library names new research director after world-wide search: Steve Hindle, a history professor at England’s Warwick University, was named Monday to succeed Robert “Roy” Ritchie on July 1 as director of research at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens…. – Pasadena Star-News, 2-7-11
• Dr. Eric Miller receives 2011 Book Award from Christianity Today: Congratulations to Geneva College Associate Professor of History Dr. Eric Miller for receiving Christianity Today’s 2011 Book Award for History/Biography in honor of his latest book, Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch (Eerdmans, 2010).
  Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch is the first published biography of Christopher Lasch, historian, social critic and author of The Culture of Narcissism. The book has received positive reviews from a number of national sources such as the The Weekly Standard and the Commonweal. Alan Wolfe of The New Republic says, “This is anything but a quickly written effort to explore the relationship between a thinker and his times. Miller has not only dug deeply, he has also pondered carefully…. I never met the man, but thanks to this book I now feel that I have. I could not be more grateful to Miller for facilitating the introduction.”… – Geneva College, 2-7-11
• Historian Allison Blakely Appointed to Humanities Council: The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has announced that historian Allison Blakely has been appointed to the National Council on the Humanities. Blakely was nominated by President Barack Obama on August 5 and confirmed by the Senate December 21. Blakely is a professor of European and Comparative History at Boston University and previously taught at Howard University for 30 years. He is the author of Blacks in the Dutch World: The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society; Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought and numerous scholarly articles on Russian populism and the various European aspects of the Black Diaspora…. – Lee White, National Coalition for History, 2-1-11
• David L. Preston: Citadel historian wins distinguished book prize: David L. Preston, associate professor of history at The Citadel, won the prestigious Albert B. Corey Prize for 2010 for his recent work, “The Texture of Contact: European and Indian Settler Communities on the Frontiers of Iroquoia, 1667-1783.” The Corey Prize recognizes the best book on Canadian-American relations or on the history of both countries. The prize is awarded every two years by the American Historical Association and the Canadian Historical Association, the two premier professional organizations for historians in the United States and Canada…. – Media Newswire, 2-7-11

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:

 
• Yvonne Haddad: Georgetown professor speaks on Muslim identity, politics: On Wednesday night, Yvonne Haddad, a professor of the history of Islam and Christian-Muslim relations at Georgetown University, presented a public lecture titled “Islamophobia and the Reconstruction of Muslim American Culture” to a group of approximately 50 students and community members in Robertson Hall.
  “What my talk will be about is how we moved from Islamophobia into a coalition of groups in order to find a space for Muslims in North America,” Haddad said at the start of her talk. “What you have is Muslims now engaged in the political process. They feel very comfortable being American and feel very comfortable criticizing American foreign policy. This would not have been possible 10 years ago.”
  Haddad gave an extensive account of the troubled history of Islam’s relations with Christianity, discussing the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and the Protestant Reformation. Daily Princetonian, 2-24-11
• Michael Rawson: Environmentalist historian Rawson lectures on Boston’s urban growth: Michael Rawson, an assistant professor of history at City University of New York’s Brooklyn College, spoke at Bowdoin on Wednesday night about his recent book, “Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston.” The lecture took place in Main Lounge in Moulton Union. Rawson is an environmental historian who focuses on the urban environment…. – Bowdoin Orient, 2-18-11
• Samuel Moyn: Columbia Univ professor lectures on human rights – The Brandeis Hoot, 2-11-11
• Emory ‘regrets’ slavery ties, holds conference on topic: The founders of Emory University owned slaves. They used slave labor to build the campus. Their pro-slavery views helped drive the North-South schism in the Methodist Episcopal Church leading up to the Civil War. The university’s slave legacy doesn’t end with the antebellum era. In 1902, the college forced a professor to resign for an article he wrote condemning lynching. Fast forward to 2003 when a professor’s use of a racial slur led to campus-wide debates. That incident spurred self-reflection…. – Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 2-3-11

HISTORY ON TV:

 
• C-SPAN2: BOOK TV Weekend Schedule
• PBS American Experience: Mondays at 9pm
• History Channel: Weekly Schedule

HISTORY BEST SELLERS (NYT):

 
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List – February 27, 2011
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List – February 20, 2011
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List – February 13, 2011
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List – February 6, 2011

UPCOMING HISTORY BOOK RELEASES:

 
• 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
• Julia P. Gelardi: From Splendor to Revolution: The Romanov Women, 1847–1928, (Hardcover), February 15, 2011
• Lucy Moore: Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties, (Paperback), February 22, 2011
• Sarah Rose: For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History, (Paperback), February 22, 2011
• David Strauss: Setting the Table for Julia Child: Gourmet Dining in America, 1934-1961, (Hardcover), February 26, 2011
• G.J. Meyer: The Tudors: The Complete Story of England’s Most Notorious Dynasty, (Paperback), March 1, 2011
• Jack Weatherford: The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire, (Paperback), March 1, 2011
• Bruce S. Thornton: The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens, Munich, and Obama’s America, (Hardcover), March 1, 2011
• Miranda Carter: George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I, (Paperback), March 8, 2011
• John D. Plating: The Hump: America’s Strategy for Keeping China in World War II (General), (Hardcover), March 9, 2011
• David Goldfield: America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation, (Hardcover), March 15, 2011
• Matt Spruill: Decisions at Gettysburg: The Nineteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Campaign, (Paperback), March 16, 2011
• Adrienne Mayor: The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy, (Paperback), March 22, 2011
• Michael O’Brien: Mrs. Adams in Winter: A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon, (Paperback), March 29, 2011
• Dominic Lieven: Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace, (Paperback), March 29, 2011
• Rudy Tomedi: General Matthew Ridgway, (Hardcover), March 30, 2011
• Kim Wilson: Tea with Jane Austen (Second Edition), (Hardcover), April 1, 2011
• Nick Bunker: Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History, (Paperback), April 5, 2011
• Nell Irvin Painter: The History of White People, (Paperback), April 18, 2011
• Christopher I. Beckwith: Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present, (Paperback), April 21, 2011
• Andrew F. Smith: Eating History: Thirty Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine, (Paperback), April 22, 2011
• Barbara Frale: The Templars: The Secret History Revealed, (Paperback), May 1, 2011
• Alison Plowden: The Young Victoria (New), (Paperback), May 1, 2011
• Bill Morgan: The Typewriter Is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation, (Paperback), May 1, 2011
• Rebecca Skloot: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, (Paperback), May 3, 2011
• Lynne Olson: Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour, (Paperback), May 3, 2011
• Jane Ziegelman: 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement, (Paperback), May 31, 2011
• Jonathan R. Dull: The Age of the Ship of the Line: The British and French Navies, 1650-1815, (Paperback), June 1, 2011
• Jasper Ridley: The Freemasons: A History of the World’s Most Powerful Secret Society, (Paperback), June 1, 2011
• David Howard: Lost Rights: The Misadventures of a Stolen American Relic, (Paperback), June 8, 2011
• Kelly Hart: The Mistresses of Henry VIII, (Paperback), July 1, 2011
• Christopher Heaney: Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones, and the Search for Machu Picchu, (Paperback), July 5, 2011
• Eric Jay Dolin: Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America, (Paperback), July 5, 2011
• Edward P. Kohn: Hot Time in the Old Town: The Great Heat Wave of 1896 and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt (First Trade Paper Edition), (Paperback), July 12, 2011

HISTORIANS REMEMBERED:

 
• Meiqing Zhang: Prof dies after long illness: Meiqing Zhang, a senior lecturer in East Asian studies who had taught Chinese since 1988, died Saturday after a long illness.
  “It is a huge loss for Brown and especially for East Asian studies,” said Dean of the Faculty Rajiv Vohra P’07. She was a “highly regarded figure in the field of Chinese language pedagogy,” according to a statement on the East Asian studies website…. – Brown Daily Herald, 2-24-11
• Dame Judith Binney dies: The historian and widely-respected scholar passed away last night. She was Emeritus Professor of History at Auckland University. Dame Judith was a member of the Arts Council and the Historic Places Trust and a pioneer in New Zealand history…. – Newstalk ZB, 2-15-11
• Michael Harsegor, Israeli medievalist, dies at 87: Tel Aviv University Professor Michael Harsegor, one of Israel’s most-prominent historians, passed away on Thursday at the age of 87. For decades Harsegor taught history at Tel Aviv University and was considered an expert on Late Middle Ages European History. He was most well-known to the Israeli public for hosting the long-running Army Radio program “historical hour”…. – Jerusalem Post, 2-10-11
• Ernst Presseisen, 82, a Temple professor: Ernst L. Presseisen, 82, of Center City, an emeritus professor of history at Temple University and a Holocaust survivor, died of complications of pneumonia … – Philadelphia Inquirer, 2-9-11