Historians in the News Archive
This page includes, in addition to news about historians, news about political scientists, economists, law professors, and others who write about history. For a comprehensive list of historians' obituaries, go here.
SOURCE: World Peace Herald (9-4-05)
Though having come to Viet Nam times and again, Alain Ruscio has never ceased his wish of further exploring the country of "Uncle Ho" - the beloved name that all Vietnamese address to late President Ho Chi Minh.
On the 60th National Day of Viet Nam (Sept. 2), the French historian once again arrived in Ha Noi as a guest of the Viet Nam Union of Friendship Organisation for the "Meeting with international friends for solidarity, friendship, and cooperation with Viet Nam".
Ruscio supported Viet Nam in the 1960s when he joined his friends in demonstrations against the US-waged war in Viet Nam. "We were so happy upon learning that your country was completely liberated on April 30, 1975," the French historian recalled with strong feeling.
He first arrived in Viet Nam in 1978 as a resident L'Humanite correspondent. What impressed Ruscio most during his three-year term of office in Viet Nam was the extreme hardship endured by the Vietnamese people. "The war has passed but the local people still have to struggle with hunger and poverty," the L'Humanite correspondent noted.
He said he has followed developments in Viet Nam with keen interest, including the launching of the renewal process in 1986 and the lifting of the US embargo against the country.
On the 60th National Day of Viet Nam (Sept. 2), the French historian once again arrived in Ha Noi as a guest of the Viet Nam Union of Friendship Organisation for the "Meeting with international friends for solidarity, friendship, and cooperation with Viet Nam".
Ruscio supported Viet Nam in the 1960s when he joined his friends in demonstrations against the US-waged war in Viet Nam. "We were so happy upon learning that your country was completely liberated on April 30, 1975," the French historian recalled with strong feeling.
He first arrived in Viet Nam in 1978 as a resident L'Humanite correspondent. What impressed Ruscio most during his three-year term of office in Viet Nam was the extreme hardship endured by the Vietnamese people. "The war has passed but the local people still have to struggle with hunger and poverty," the L'Humanite correspondent noted.
He said he has followed developments in Viet Nam with keen interest, including the launching of the renewal process in 1986 and the lifting of the US embargo against the country.
Sunday, September 4, 2005 - 20:13
Comments
SOURCE: Atlanta Journal-Constitution (9-4-05)
Rebecca Solnit's troubling new book [A Field Guide to Getting Lost] ends abruptly where it should have started, with the author having a frightening flashback about her late father. He had returned home late one night and found a glass of sour chocolate milk on the kitchen counter. Enraged at what he perceived as grotesque wastefulness, he grabbed the glass and ran into little Rebecca's room and thrust the milk on her sleeping face.
Solnit, now an accomplished writer in her 40s, does not allow herself an iota of rage or anger but instead chooses to bask in confusion and muted regret. She rationalizes and analyzes her father's perverse act, donning the cap of a social scientist ruminating on the nature of family loss and disintegration, always careful to couch all experience under the umbrella of some arcane universal "we."
But pain is personal and best understood through the starkness of a single voice, unencumbered by the need to explain itself. Solnit often writes as if she has not yet decided if she is entitled to such a catharsis. Her book of loosely strung autobiographical essays is often more focused on her journey to escape her past rather than excavate it and, in many ways, offers the reader an interesting meditation on the merits of remembering past trauma....
Solnit, now an accomplished writer in her 40s, does not allow herself an iota of rage or anger but instead chooses to bask in confusion and muted regret. She rationalizes and analyzes her father's perverse act, donning the cap of a social scientist ruminating on the nature of family loss and disintegration, always careful to couch all experience under the umbrella of some arcane universal "we."
But pain is personal and best understood through the starkness of a single voice, unencumbered by the need to explain itself. Solnit often writes as if she has not yet decided if she is entitled to such a catharsis. Her book of loosely strung autobiographical essays is often more focused on her journey to escape her past rather than excavate it and, in many ways, offers the reader an interesting meditation on the merits of remembering past trauma....
Sunday, September 4, 2005 - 19:20
SOURCE: Independent (UK) (9-2-05)
... With [his new book] Rough Crossings, [Simon] Schama may well - at least in the US - shoot right off the mischief-making scale. This book turns much conventional wisdom about the American Revolution on its head. It concerns the "black loyalists": the multitude of slaves in the 1770s and 1780s who, lured by the promises of freedom made by the British, fled American rebel masters in their scores of thousands to rally to the flag of King George. Especially in the South, that ever-so-righteous war for liberty against British tyranny begins to look more like a brutal slavers' insurgency to enforce control over human chattels.
"The evidence just can't let you reach any other conclusion," says the magus of mischief. "Whatever we think about American and British behaviour, the blacks themselves voted with their feet, in overwhelmingly greater numbers, for the King - however deluded they may be."
Interspersed with the story of the British abolitionists, Rough Crossings tracks the hard path of the former slaves who kept faith with the crown. It follows them, and their stalwart British backers, through the hopes, hardships and betrayals of an epic journey out of the new slave-owners' Republic, into a Nova Scotian wilderness settlement, and then - astonishingly - back over the Atlantic to the "free and virtuous black society" built in Sierra Leone under the heroic if neurotic eyes of the visionary first governor, John Clarkson (younger brother of Thomas, leader of the anti-slavery campaign).
The book, a true tale written with more creative force and fire than 99 per cent of the year's "literary fiction", is studded with the immensely moving voices of the freed slaves themselves and strewn with nuggets of dazzling detail. So we learn (in one of my favourite gems) that, in Sierra Leone in 1792, "the first women to cast their votes for any kind of public office anywhere in the world were black, liberated slaves who had chosen British freedom".
Schama made his own less-than-rough crossing when he moved from Oxford to Harvard in 1980, and then to Columbia University in 1993. Now a "University Professor" there, he can teach the courses that he chooses in the art history he loves. He's also making a new BBC series in the triumphant wake of A History of Britain - about turning-points in the work of great artists - and writing the books that made up half of a seven-figure print-and-screen deal struck with the Beeb in 2003.
Although still an occasional essayist for the New Yorker (which he loves for its "real family feeling"), he no longer writes the art reviews collected in Hang-Ups. At the height of Schama's multi-platformed plate-spinning act, he was also "trying to be a husband and a dad - and I was about to lose it completely". So the column went, while the teaching shrank, and the children grew: one at college, one a trainee journalist on the New Republic. Still, Schama's comparatively quiet life sounds like most people's mega-decibel frenzy.
Rough Crossings will not reduce the volume much. This revisionist bombshell of a book seems a curious present to offer the United States to mark Schama's quarter-century of success across the Atlantic. You can understand why, a short while ago, he felt "very relieved to have his Green Card replaced". Yet it comes out of his long-cherished design "to do a book that was coloured by the fact that I'd spent about half my life in America - in gratitude and deep scepticism, both alienated and utterly immersed, as someone who likes both cricket and baseball". Inevitably, the aftermath of 11 September hastened this project, but "my recoil instinct was to make it as little like a 'Special Relationship' book as possible".
Rather than dangle another bland hand across the sea, Schama wanted to focus on the sharp edges and raw wounds of Anglo-American history. He is drawn to "post-divorce custody battles"; to "a history of arguments" - over the meaning of freedom, of beauty, of art. "Britain and America are like a couple who are irreversibly divorced, but who kind of fancy each other still. There is something in each other's political and literary bloodstreams that bonded them together."...
"The evidence just can't let you reach any other conclusion," says the magus of mischief. "Whatever we think about American and British behaviour, the blacks themselves voted with their feet, in overwhelmingly greater numbers, for the King - however deluded they may be."
Interspersed with the story of the British abolitionists, Rough Crossings tracks the hard path of the former slaves who kept faith with the crown. It follows them, and their stalwart British backers, through the hopes, hardships and betrayals of an epic journey out of the new slave-owners' Republic, into a Nova Scotian wilderness settlement, and then - astonishingly - back over the Atlantic to the "free and virtuous black society" built in Sierra Leone under the heroic if neurotic eyes of the visionary first governor, John Clarkson (younger brother of Thomas, leader of the anti-slavery campaign).
The book, a true tale written with more creative force and fire than 99 per cent of the year's "literary fiction", is studded with the immensely moving voices of the freed slaves themselves and strewn with nuggets of dazzling detail. So we learn (in one of my favourite gems) that, in Sierra Leone in 1792, "the first women to cast their votes for any kind of public office anywhere in the world were black, liberated slaves who had chosen British freedom".
Schama made his own less-than-rough crossing when he moved from Oxford to Harvard in 1980, and then to Columbia University in 1993. Now a "University Professor" there, he can teach the courses that he chooses in the art history he loves. He's also making a new BBC series in the triumphant wake of A History of Britain - about turning-points in the work of great artists - and writing the books that made up half of a seven-figure print-and-screen deal struck with the Beeb in 2003.
Although still an occasional essayist for the New Yorker (which he loves for its "real family feeling"), he no longer writes the art reviews collected in Hang-Ups. At the height of Schama's multi-platformed plate-spinning act, he was also "trying to be a husband and a dad - and I was about to lose it completely". So the column went, while the teaching shrank, and the children grew: one at college, one a trainee journalist on the New Republic. Still, Schama's comparatively quiet life sounds like most people's mega-decibel frenzy.
Rough Crossings will not reduce the volume much. This revisionist bombshell of a book seems a curious present to offer the United States to mark Schama's quarter-century of success across the Atlantic. You can understand why, a short while ago, he felt "very relieved to have his Green Card replaced". Yet it comes out of his long-cherished design "to do a book that was coloured by the fact that I'd spent about half my life in America - in gratitude and deep scepticism, both alienated and utterly immersed, as someone who likes both cricket and baseball". Inevitably, the aftermath of 11 September hastened this project, but "my recoil instinct was to make it as little like a 'Special Relationship' book as possible".
Rather than dangle another bland hand across the sea, Schama wanted to focus on the sharp edges and raw wounds of Anglo-American history. He is drawn to "post-divorce custody battles"; to "a history of arguments" - over the meaning of freedom, of beauty, of art. "Britain and America are like a couple who are irreversibly divorced, but who kind of fancy each other still. There is something in each other's political and literary bloodstreams that bonded them together."...
Friday, September 2, 2005 - 19:36
SOURCE: Guardian (8-31-05)
The French revolutionary militant and Marxist historian, Pierre Broué who has died aged 79 of prostate cancer, was the author of some 20 books. He made his name with La Révolution Et La Guerre D'Espagne (1961), written jointly with Emile Témime. Published in Britain in 1972 as The Revolution And The Civil War In Spain, this 550-page book, in the authors' polemical and romantic introduction, "intended, in the face of ignorance, neglect, and falsification, to recreate this struggle in the most truthful way possible".
Friday, September 2, 2005 - 12:44
