Linton Weeks, in the Washington Post (April 28, 2004):

What started out as a memorial service for Daniel J. Boorstin yesterday at the Library of Congress also turned into a lovefest for books, reading and the power of the written word.

More than 200 people gathered in the Thomas Jefferson Building to honor the bookish, bespectacled, super-brainy man who was given to wearing bow ties. Boorstin served as the 12th librarian of Congress, from 1975 to 1987, and he died in late February of pneumonia at age 89.

James H. Billington, his successor as librarian, said Boorstin"was, above all else, a man of the book." He quoted Boorstin, who believed that"the book remains our symbol and resource for finding the unanswered question and the unwelcomed answer."

There were some chuckles during the ceremony and some choked-back tears. One speaker after another painted Boorstin as an energetic and congenial genius who opened the library to a wider public and embraced computer technology and television as a way to spread the words.

News anchor Jim Lehrer recalled that his friend and neighbor knew something about everything and was always ready to interject a thought or an idea, regardless of the subject. Lehrer read an astonishing bunch of quotes from Boorstin's 1961 book"The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America."

It turns out that Boorstin was the author of the oft-repeated quip that"a celebrity is a person who is well known for his well-knownness."

And, Lehrer noted, lifting an eyebrow, that Boorstin was also the originator of this gem:"Nothing is really real unless it happens on television."

"He struck a balance between the computer and the book," said Ted Stevens, a senator from Alaska and the chairman of the joint committee on the library.

"He was an egalitarian," said former congressman Vic Fazio, a man who wanted to make the library and its holdings available to everyone.

The librarian waged a lifelong battle against aliteracy, the tendency of people who can read to lose the desire to do so.

A summa cum laude graduate of Harvard University in 1934, Boorstin was a Rhodes scholar. He received a degree from Yale Law School. He was teaching at Harvard when he published"The Mysterious Science of the Law," the first of more than a score of books. He taught at the University of Chicago for 25 years and was a visiting professor at other colleges around the world.

In the hallway after the service, historian John Hope Franklin recalled how Boorstin had once flown to New York and stayed up all night trying to persuade him to join the Chicago faculty. Franklin eventually did....

Philip Zelikow. Executive Director. Director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs and White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Was a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and served as executive director of the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former Presidents Carter and Ford, as well as the executive director of the Markle Foundation Task Force on National Security in the Information Age.

Alexis Albion. Professional staff member. PhD candidate in International History at Harvard University, specializing in intelligence history. Formerly the historian of the International Spy Museum.

Douglas MacEachin. Professional staff member. Retired career CIA analyst who left CIA in 1995 as the Deputy Director for Intelligence. Has since become a historian, publishing four books and monographs on the intelligence-policy relationship (most recently on the Polish crisis of 1980-1981, published by Penn State UP). Has just completed a classified study on the current terrorist target.

Ernest May. Consultant. Currently the Charles Warren Professor of History at Harvard University. Author of a number of books, including most recently Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France; The Kennedy Tapes; Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Policymakers (with Richard Neustadt); and Knowing Your Enemy: Intelligence Assessment in the Two World Wars. Longtime director of Harvard’s Intelligence and Policy Project and Board Member for the Joint Military Intelligence College.

Bonnie Jenkins. Counsel. Fellow at Harvard’s JFK School’s Belfer Center. Assistant director of the State Department’s Kosovo History Project from 1999 to 2001, formerly worked on the National Commission on Terrorism (1999-2000) and as general counsel for the Commission on the Organization of the Federal Government to Combat Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Also a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve.

Jonathan Tepperman, in the NYT (April 17, 2004):

Benny Morris is used to making enemies. When his first groundbreaking book appeared in 1988, marshaling evidence that Israel's founders had deliberately — and often violently — forced Arabs to flee during the war for independence, Mr. Morris was reviled and called an anti-Zionist. For years he was unable to find work as a professor in Israel; when he finally landed a job at Ben-Gurion University, named for Israel's first prime minister, Ben-Gurion's son tried to have the radical young historian fired.

Sixteen years later, Mr. Morris is again being denounced, only this time for defending Israel's attempts to rid the country of its Arabs in 1948, arguing that"ethnic cleansing" was justified because Israel's existence was threatened.

His comments, in a new book published earlier this year as well as in Israeli newspapers and interviews, have not only provoked outrage but have also put Mr. Morris at the center of a bitter controversy over Israeli history and the future of the peace process.

"Ethnic cleansing has a bad name, and rightly so, but in 1948 it was justified because the 650,000 Jews who lived here were under existential threat," Mr. Morris said recently as he sat in the high-ceilinged lobby of the King David Hotel here."It was the only way to win that war."

If Ben-Gurion bore any moral responsibility for expelling the Palestinians, Mr. Morris added, it was for not having been more thorough. Having decided on transfer, he said, Israel's leaders should have resolved to"do it properly."

"Don't leave 20 percent of the Arabs still in Israel," he said, creating"a time bomb for the future."

Mr. Morris, 55, is aware how discomforting his views are:"I'm not saying it's nice, I'm not saying it's pleasant."

And he stops short of endorsing transfer today, calling it"morally wrong and politically impractical" short of what he calls an existential threat to Israel.

But he does say, somewhat wistfully, that"had all the Palestinians crossed the Jordan River in 1948, either voluntarily or under compulsion, there would have been a complete separation between the two people, which would have taken some of the causation out of the continued warfare."

Such views — and the suggestion that ethnic cleansing cannot be ruled out as a legitimate strategy in the future — have almost entirely isolated Mr. Morris: he now finds himself rejected by his former comrades on the left and still shunned by the right.

Ilan Pappe, a professor at Haifa University who was also part of the generation of leftist revisionist historians, called Mr. Morris's statements proof that he is"a bigoted thinker, very narrow-minded."

Anita Shapira, a Zionist historian at Tel Aviv University and a longtime critic of Mr. Morris, said"he still has this inclination to look for any detail that can show the unsavory side of the Israeli army or politics, and to exaggerate it out of proportion."

His is a lonely position."It's a bit unpleasant," Mr. Morris concedes,"when you walk in the corridors at Ben-Gurion University, and some of your colleagues don't say hello to you. It's been awkward."...

BENNY MORRIS'S RESPONSE

To the Editor:

Re "An Israeli Who's Got Everybody Outraged," by Jonathan D. Tepperman (Arts & Ideas, April 17), about my views on Israel's past and present:

To expel armed thugs who are trying to murder you in your home is not a war crime. And this is ultimately what happened to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who tried to destroy Israel in 1948. But massacre and rape are crimes, and their perpetrators are to be reviled.

Israel indeed has "a moral obligation" to compromise. I continue to oppose the settlements and believe that a two-state solution is just and practical. But I fear that the Palestinians want all of Palestine. That is why they rejected the Clinton-Barak proposals in 2000 as they did the Peel Commission proposals in 1937 and the United Nations partition resolution in 1947 and insist on the refugees' "right of return" to Israel, which would spell instant death for the Jewish state.

The Middle East peace process did not just "collapse," as Mr. Tepperman would have it; it was bombed and bludgeoned and knifed to death by Yasir Arafat.

BENNY MORRIS
Jerusalem, April 17, 2004

Teresa k. Weaver, in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (April 11, 2004):

Studs Terkel, oral historian emeritus of America, has a question before the conversation begins. Pointing to my small silver tape recorder, he asks, "Who's the only person whose life has been more affected by the tape recorder than mine?" When I recite the obvious answer --- Richard Nixon --- the 91-year-old icon nearly leaps out of his chair with glee.

"You got it," he roars, raising clenched fists in the air. "You got it."

Terkel is a force of nature, a national repository of what he calls history "from the bottom up," a working-class intellectual, a self-described "technological Philistine" and an unapologetic liberal.

When his time comes, he has a perfect epitaph ready:

"Curiosity did not kill this cat."

Terkel, a native of New York who moved to Chicago with his family when he was 8, was back in Manhattan recently to pick up a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle.

"Unstinting in his generosity, high attentiveness, deep insights, wry humor and empathy, Studs Terkel has greatly enriched American literature and American society," NBCC board member Donna Seaman said in bestowing the honor. "And he's had such a good time doing it, his enthusiasm and convictions are contagious."

Terkel's writing career began in 1957 with "Giants of Jazz," but the three books that followed established his unique blend of rambling conversation and focused interview. For "Division Street," he interviewed Chicagoans from all walks of life; for "Hard Times," he went nationwide, interviewing hundreds of Americans about their memories of the Depression.

Then, in 1974, Terkel wrote "Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do." The theme of disillusionment runs deep in interviews with dozens of Americans. A few were famous (film critic Pauline Kael, actor Rip Torn, football coach George Allen), but the vast majority were people like Hub Dillard, a heavy equipment operator, or Hots Michaels, a bar pianist, or Alice Washington, an order filler at a shoe factory.

"Who are celebrities?" Terkel asks. "They're known for being known. . . . I find that pretty boring stuff. People whose lives are unexplored --- those are the ones I find interesting."

Born Louis Terkel in 1912, Studs acquired his nickname because of his strong identification with the hero of James T. Farrell's trilogy "Studs Lonigan." He earned a law degree from the University of Chicago, but after flunking the bar exam, he went into radio, working as a sportscaster, disc jockey and actor, typically cast as a gangster. He switched briefly to television, hosting a talk show called "Studs' Place" until he got blacklisted during the McCarthy era.

In 1952, Terkel began working for the brand-new WFMT, Chicago's fine-arts radio station, interviewing novelists, biographers, playwrights, historians and poets for what would be a remarkable 45-year run. He still does occasional on-air interviews with authors --- "when I feel like it," he says.

His self-deprecating humor and slightly ruffled demeanor endear him to listeners and readers, as they do to the unsuspecting people he interviews.

"He's a great actor," says Andre Schiffrin, Terkel's publisher since 1967, first at Pantheon and now as head of The New Press. "He's able to completely conceal . . . that he has an incredible amount of knowledge in all sorts of fields, and he's incredibly well-read. I think he's probably better-read than anyone I know. . . .

"He has a remarkable capacity, and he also has an incredible memory. He remembers every single person he's ever interviewed."...

Jonathan Calt Harris, managing editor of Campus Watch, in frontpagemag.com (April 15, 2004):

A Catholic priest gave pronouncements “in the name of Allah.” [1] Signs were sold proclaiming “Support Armed Resistence [sic.] in Iraq and Everywhere,” next to tomes of Marx, Trotsky and Che Guevara. A smiling student marched carried a sign saying “Long Live Fallujah,” and another held a Bush effigy aloft on a noose. Such was the scene at the latest anti-war rally that occurred April 10 in San Francisco, where Hatem Bazian, a senior lecturer in Islamic studies at Berkeley called for an “intifada” in America.

As reported by LittleGreenFootballs.com, (and viewable here) Bazian declared to the cheering crowd, “we’re sitting here and watching the world pass by, people being bombed, and it’s about time that we have an intifada in this country that change(s) fundamentally the political dynamics in here.” He placed his opposition to U.S. forces upfront: “(Y)ou know, the occupation is a source of tremendous violence against Iraqis. I think we've got to support the resistance; we've got to say that we support attacks against the occupying forces.”

He continued, “(W)e in this movement (should) support the resistance against American imperialism by any means necessary.” The Berkeley-trained Ph.D. concluded his call to violence with a promise of more to come: “They’re gonna say, ‘some Palestinian being too radical’ — well, you haven’t seen radicalism yet!” [2]

This call to violence in the U.S. may seem extreme, but it is certainly not the first time for radicalism from Bazian; it has long been a hallmark of his career. A native Palestinian, Bazian has made a name for himself being an outspoken anti-Zionist.

In May 2002, Bazian was the sole speaker for a two-day event at San Francisco’s George Washington High School so inflammatory as to generate formal letters of apology from the school administration to the public. Advertised as a Middle Eastern “cultural assembly,” the event featured a rap song by a student comparing Zionists to Nazis as students ran back and forth with Palestinian flags. Student and faculty observers called the supposedly multicultural event “pure pro-Palestinian propaganda.” [3]

In October of 2002, at the University of Michigan, at the Palestinian Solidarity Movement’s annual conference, Bazian shared a forum with revisionist historian Ilan Pappé and the now-jailed academic and terrorist fundraiser Sami Al-Arian of Florida Atlantic University. At Michigan and elsewhere Bazian consistently denies being an anti-Semite, calling the accusation a ploy of opponents. “(The charge of) anti-Semitism is used as a means of neutralizing the opposition so the mainstream American public will distance itself from the ‘extremists.’”

Yet, Steven Emerson, in his book American Jihad, quotes Bazian sermonizing at the American Muslim Alliance conference in May 1999 in Santa Clara, California, promoting the Islamic State of Palestine. Excerpts from the quote read, “‘In the Hadith, the Day of Judgment will never happen until you fight the Jews ... and the stones will say, ‘Oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him!’” [4] There are a lot of passages in the Koran that do not advocate killing Jews. Why search out Hadith reports that do?

Post-Saddam, Bazian makes the rounds to Muslim Student Association events decrying the war and finding new ways to blame Israel for all American foreign policy. Speaking in Montreal in February 2004, at McGill University’s MSA-sponsored lecture entitled “The New American Empire and its Adventures in the Middle East,” Bazian named neoconservative think tanks, Israel-centric public officials, the Christian Right, and Oil, as the four forces behind American foreign policy.

He reserved particular invective for Israel. Listing off virtually every key member of Bush’s inner circle, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, former CIA chief James Woolsey and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Bazian called them “Israeli-centric,” a term he apparently finds damning in itself. Bazian declared, “The New York conservatives wanted to make the Middle East a safe neighborhood, but not for Arabs; they wanted to make it a safe neighborhood for Israel.” [5]

Bazian’s rhetoric at the April 10th anti-war rally is therefore highly typical of his career.

Why are California taxpayers paying for this extremist’s salary? Why is the University of California implicitly endorsing his venom by continuing to employ him?

Jonathan Calt Harris is managing editor of Campus Watch.

ENDNOTES:

[1] http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=10611

[2] “An Intifada in This Country,” April 11, 2004, LittleGreenFootballs at http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=10615

[3] Goldsmith, Aleza. “Anti-Zionist speaker causes ruckus at S.F. high school,” Jewish Buliten of

Northen California at http://www.jewishsf.com/bk020517/sf08.shtml

[4] Emmerson, Steven. American Jihad the terrorists living among us, New York: The Free Press, 2002, P. 214.

[5] Pickard, Geordie. “What drives U.S. policy in Middle East?,” The Concordian, Wednesday, February 11, 2004 at http://www.theconcordian.com/news/2004/02/11/News/What-Drives.U.Policy.In.Middle.East-606147.shtml?page=1

David Kipen, in the San Francisco Chronicle (April 13, 2004):

Sam Tanenhaus started work Monday. If this milestone somehow escaped your notice, if the sun seemed to rise and set with its usual indifference, then you probably don't toil in the vineyards of the publishing industry. For Tanenhaus didn't spend his first day on the job filling out W-4 forms and peeing into a cup just anywhere, but rather at the New York Times Book Review, where he's the new editor in chief.

Since his appointment a few weeks ago, Tanenhaus' likes and dislikes, his authorship of a prize-winning biography of anti-Communist icon Whittaker Chambers and an uncompleted one of William F. Buckley -- all but his hat size has been parsed and glossed with the earnestness of old-time Kremlinology. Literary insiders have done everything to divine his standards except, typically, to read a whole book Tanenhaus wrote on the subject in 1984.

This slender, out-of-print volume is called "Literature Unbound: A Guide for the Common Reader."...

[P]eople still talk about the power of a Times review, much as they still talk anachronistically about the cover of Rolling Stone. So it's at least noteworthy to pick up "Literature Unbound" and read that the new editor considers the Divine Comedy "the most influential and beautiful poem ever written." Tanenhaus also thinks Henry James "far and away the best critic the novel has ever had," and Isaac Babel "perhaps the best short-story writer of the century." Also, that "Tolstoy is to fiction what Shakespeare is to drama." Defensible if arguable statements, every one. They should also reassure any publicists fearful that the new sheriff in town might harbor an unwelcome aversion to blurb-ready praise.

"Literature Unbound" is actually pretty good, and goes a ways toward dispelling two out of the three principal anxieties that most NYTBR loyalists have about the new regime. These are: 1) that Tanenhaus will dumb the section down; 2) that he'll hijack it to the right; or 3) that he'll gut the fiction coverage. As it turns out, if the Times brass had wanted the section dumber -- as they inadvertently implied in a recent interview with the indispensable literary column "Book Babes" (www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=57) -- this is not a vision anyone would think to ask the author of "Literature Unbound" to implement.

On the basis of this 20-year-old book, it's safe to say that Tanenhaus ain't dumb. He writes like a man on intimate terms with Western literature -- so much so, in fact, that he may not know there's any other kind. After a perfunctory prelude about the transition from oral to written culture, the book cleaves neatly into two halves. The first is a thematic history of Western literature, by turns covering the realistic novel (Austen, Dickens, Bellow, that crowd), the psychological novel (Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Salinger), the visionary voice (Blake and Yeats, mostly) and what he calls "literature as a game." ...

Eric Hoover, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscribers only) (April 13, 2004):

When boys in Texas go to bed, sleep gallops them off to defend the garrison in San Antonio. At least that's where dreams took Stephen L. Hardin when he was growing up in McKinney, just north of Dallas. Instead of reading books aloud at night, his father made up stories, sound effects and all, about Davy Crockett, always ending with the line, "And then Davy rode off to the Alamo."

Mr. Hardin was in the second grade when his parents dressed him up in a bow tie and took him to a theater to see John Wayne's The Alamo, in 1960. During the film, the young Mr. Hardin felt his eyes grow big as cannonballs. A fire lit in his gut. When the lights came back on, he saw men weeping.

That first glimpse of the past in motion set him on the trail of Texas history, which he now combs for a career. Mr. Hardin, a professor of history at Victoria College, has written three nonfiction books about his home state, including Texian Iliad: A Military History of the Texas Revolution (University of Texas Press, 1994). He has learned enough about the Alamo to know that much of what he saw in Wayne's film was pure bunkum.

But Mr. Hardin remains grateful for the number that the Duke did on his imagination, so much so that when Hollywood came knocking half a lifetime later, seeking his help with the most ambitious Alamo film ever, he could only say yes. He knew, though, that he was stepping onto a battlefield of expectations.

The Walt Disney Company has spent more than $100-million on The Alamo, which was scheduled to open last week, and the studio is banking on a blockbuster. Yet money may not be the best measure of the film's success. For many Americans, the story of fewer than 200 men fighting overwhelming odds carries a mountain of emotional weight. The same goes for hordes of historians and Alamo buffs, some of whom still debate -- ferociously -- the details of the 1836 siege and its aftermath. So moviegoers and scholars alike have many reasons to scrutinize the latest version of a seminal American story.

That's why John Lee Hancock, the film's director, asked Mr. Hardin and Alan C. Huffines, another Texas historian, to help him get the details right -- down to the buttons on the soldiers' uniforms. The film condenses reams of contemporary scholarship into elaborate portrayals of the battle and its participants. The narrative also offers the perspectives of diverse characters, including that of Juan Seguín, a Mexican-born soldier who fought against the Mexican army. And like many prominent historical books of the last decade, the film reveals the warts of its heroes: Col. Jim Bowie, Crockett, Gen. Sam Houston, and Lt. Col. William Barret Travis.

Still, even in his meticulousness, Mr. Hancock did not attempt to sever every thread of myth from the story. As a native Texan, he knew better. The Alamo neither canonizes its protagonists nor kicks them in their shins. And even though the depiction of Crockett's death -- the most controversial of all Alamo-ments -- conforms to the so-called revisionist account, the scene is also a cinematic nod to his heroism.

"It's a tough thing to separate the mythology of the Alamo from the new facts that historians have learned," Mr. Hancock says. "But I've tried to embrace them both."...

Dan Eggen, in the Washington Post (April 8, 2004):

When national security adviser Condoleezza Rice testifies this morning in front of the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a former colleague and longtime friend will be sitting on the other side of the witness table: Philip D. Zelikow, the panel's executive director.

Zelikow worked for Rice on the National Security Council staff during the administration of George H.W. Bush, and went on to write a book with Rice on German reunification that drew heavily on classified documents both had access to during their time in government. In December 2000, Rice brought Zelikow back to the White House to aid in the transition to the current administration.

During that month-long stint, Zelikow sat in on briefings by counterterrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke and others, made recommendations for changes in the NSC's structure and proposed language for security directives having to do with terrorism, according to those familiar with his position.

Zelikow has recused himself from issues involving the NSC transition, and has refrained from questioning Rice during private interviews, panel officials said. But as the White House's record on counterterrorism policy has come under sharp scrutiny from the commission, so too has Zelikow's role in helping formulate those policies.

A dogged group of relatives of Sept. 11 victims has renewed its call in recent weeks for Zelikow's removal because of his links to Rice and others in the Bush administration. Some Democratic commissioners have also warned that, although they have great confidence in his credentials and expertise, Zelikow must strive to stay far away from any conflict that might call into question the commission's findings.

"This next phase of the commission's work is going to test his capacity, to the maximum, to remain credible," said Democratic member Bob Kerrey, a former Nebraska senator. "I don't mean that in a personal way. . . . But any perception of conflict will fall against Philip and will hurt his reputation, as well as the credibility of the commission's final work, if he's involved in any way, shape or form in the analysis of the transition."

Zelikow, 49, said he has strived to steer clear of any conflicts. "I knew I'd be attacked about this when I took the job, and it was one of the arguments against taking it," he said yesterday. "The families [of Sept. 11 victims] raised this with me early on. The only answer you can make to things like this, and the answer I gave to them was, 'It doesn't do any good to say you are a person of integrity. . . . Your questions will have to be answered by the work.' "

Some relatives of Sept. 11 victims remain critical. "Rice brought him in because of his terrorism expertise, but apparently he didn't do such a good job because nine months later, al Qaeda killed 3,000 people," said Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband, Ronald, died in the World Trade Center. "Why you would hire him to be a staff director of this commission is beyond my comprehension."

Molly Petrilla, in the Daily Pennsylvanian (April 7, 2004):

On Monday afternoon, History professor Steven Hahn received a phone call. "It was someone from The Associated Press," Hahn recalled. "She said, 'Well, I'm calling to talk to you about the Pulitzer Prize,' and I said, 'What do you want to talk about?' and she said, 'Well, you won it.'"

Though Hahn knew that his book, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration, had been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for history, he had not heard anything about his victory.

"She didn't have to convince me in the sense that I knew I was nominated for the prize, and I knew that they were going to make an announcement" on Monday, Hahn explained. "I believed her, but I was stunned."

Yet it seems that Hahn should have been well prepared for the news, since his book received the Bancroft Prize for the best book on American history and the Merle Curti Prize for the best book in social history earlier this year.

A Nation Under Our Feet is "a book about thinking about slaves as political people and how the politics that were forged under slavery gave shape to the politics that developed after slavery ended," Hahn explained. "It's a very complicated, multifaceted story."

Because of the book's complicated, innovative subject, Hahn said he took extra precautions to ensure that it would appeal to a wide audience.

"It's a scholarly book, and yet is not encumbered with all the scholarly paraphernalia that would make it of no interest to people who are not academic historians, which is the audience I'm used to writing for," he explained.

But even though he was careful to ensure that his book would be accessible to nonacademics, Hahn said that he was still surprised by the Pulitzer committee's decision.

Based on feedback he received along the way, Hahn said he knew that his book "was certainly passing muster on scholarly ground," but he remained uncertain of how those outside of the academic community might receive it.

"I thought that the book was a little too scholarly and a little too edgy because books that win the Pulitzer oftentimes are more journalistic -- written by people who have addressed large audiences for a long time."

However, according to History Department Chairman Jonathan Steinberg, it is what Hahn describes as the book's "edgy" subject matter that makes it "absolutely brilliant."

Hahn "has done something which, once it's done, is obvious, but nobody thought to do it before," Steinberg said. "That's true of a lot of great ideas."

A large part of his pride in winning a Pulitzer, Hahn said, comes from the fact that his book focuses on such underrepresented people.

"I obviously feel excited for myself, but I feel really excited that a book on a subject like this would get recognition," he said. "I mean, this is a book about grassroots politics -- it's not about prominent leaders. It's not about people who are well known, it's about people who kind of emerge and in some ways evaporate, at least in the historical record."

Hahn said he became interested in history as an undergraduate at the University of Rochester during the Civil Rights Movement.

"I was in undergraduate school in the early 1970s, and history was very infused with all sorts of important political concerns," Hahn said. "History seemed to be a way I could combine social and political concerns with intellectual ones."

It was this passion for history that he cultivated as an undergraduate which eventually led Hahn to a professorship at Penn, where he began teaching this year.

"Penn has had a deep tradition of excellence in history," he said. "I think it's the most exciting History Department in the country right now."