[By Charles Glass]

'Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.'

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, United Nations General Assembly Resolution, 10 December 1948.

One of my first stories as a reporter for The Observer was a student strike in 1977 at the London School of Economics. Whenever a fellow student spoke against the strikers, they chanted, 'No free speech for fascists'. It had never occurred to me that free speech should be denied to anyone " fascist, communist or vegetarian. That was 1977, and I have since witnessed free speech denied to both those with whom I agree and those whose views repel me. But my belief in freedom of expression requires me to defend the right of both to speak. Otherwise, what is this free speech I believe in? The freedom to agree?

So, get ready. I am about to defend the right " remember, the right, not the views " of David Irving, who today languishes in an Austrian holding cell for the crime of stating a view that most of us find disgusting. He has stated that Hitler knew nothing of the genocide of Europe's Jews. It is a crank outburst here, but a crime in Austria, Germany, Poland and France. Another anti-Semitic, and much more vicious, Holocaust denier, Ernst Zundel, awaits trial in Germany on a similar charge.

Irving is a historian of the Second World War, who has uncovered important Wehrmacht documents, but defended the Nazis. He supported Zundel in court " not his right to speak, but what Zundel actually said: that the Holocaust was a myth. This places them both beyond the realm of reasonable argument. Their errors could be demonstrated in open debate " as historians have done with Irving's work. Indeed, open debate " without fear of imprisonment and fines " helps to make an open society.

Most of us spoke out in favour of someone who affirmed another genocide. The Turkish government charged the novelist Orhan Pamuk with what can only be called 'holocaust confirmation' for asserting that Turkey committed genocide against its Armenian population during and after the First World War. I think Pamuk was right, and I was among many to sign petitions for him. Turkey's citizens should not be obliged to adhere to any orthodoxy. Nor do I believe that Turkey has a right to prosecute those who accuse its armed forces of crimes against the country's Kurdish population. Outside Turkey, this is an easy (and obvious) position to assume. But within the European Community, how many in the literary and human rights worlds who rallied to Pamuk's defence have stood up for the right of two men with whom they disagree to have their say?

Q: I'd guess that some of that reputation for conservatism also stems from your record here at the university, where you've upheld certain classical traditions. You have been very distrustful of the theorists, the Frankfurt School, things like that, which have a sharply left-wing tinge.

A: We've got plenty of left-wingers. We've had plenty of left-wing professors at Boston University. And contrary to the statement that has been repeated in the newspapers ad nauseam, I never fired a tenured professor. Not one.

Q: Well, you can't.

A: No, it's not because you can't. You can fire a professor for serious misconduct or incompetence. For example, when [BU history professor] Howard Zinn was passing the hat in his class to let people draw their grades, and he told them in advance that there were only A's and B's in the hat, that's grounds for firing somebody. [Zinn contests this version of events.] You could certainly fire a person for that and make it stick. I wasn't about to make a martyr out of Howard Zinn, and he taught here until he finally decided to resign. It's not that you can't fire people when they have been sufficiently deficient. Howard Zinn led a group of students to disrupt a meeting of the Latin American Development Studies Program at Boston University when they had a conference on “Quo Vadis, Latin America?” And they had a couple of presidents from South America and Central America, and they had what we would probably call the treasurer, Roberto Campos, from Brazil, and Colombian President Carlos Lleras Restrepo and other very distinguished people. Well, he tried to break that up. I could have fired him for that. No question about it. That's not permitted academic behavior. I could have fired him under the criteria of the AAUP rules. So, it's just not true.

I don't mind having people disagree with me, but I think one thing that some left-wing professors don't want is anybody to criticize them. I think that I offended many people when I decimated the postures and the lies of Noam Chomsky in an article I wrote called “Poisoning the Well in Academe.” That wasn't a conservative screed on my part. That was a liberal's devotion to the truth, and the exposure of a liar, a person who assaults the mind by putting in false evidence.

Behind the neo-gothic town hall in the heart of Vienna sits the Josefstadt jail. This large prison, attached to the city's main criminal court, is a constant cause of complaint from the well-heeled burghers of the district, who would prefer to see the low life accommodated elsewhere.

Now the 1,200 inmates have been joined by an infamous foreigner; David Irving will be confined to a Josefstadt cell over Christmas and the New Year, pending trial on criminal charges deriving from his discredited views on the history of the second world war.

Irving, the controversial British historian and Nazi apologist, stands accused of denying the Holocaust happened, a criminal offence in Austria. He was barred from the country but, an inveterate risk-taker, he flew from London to Basle in Switzerland this month, rented a car and drove to Vienna.

The idea was to meet up with a bunch of student radicals from an extreme right fraternity. Their hobbies include dressing up in funny clothes and little pillbox caps, then drawing blood by slashing one another's cheeks in fencing duels. They've been at it since Bismarck's day.

The Austrian police have tape recordings and 60 pages of transcripts of two speeches Irving delivered in Austria in November 1989 and a newspaper interview he gave at the time.

The Guardian has a copy of the indictment which cites copiously from the speeches Irving made in 1989. "There were no extermination camps in the Third Reich," he declared. "Is it not time once and for all to put an end to this fairy tale of the gas chambers." Adolf Hitler "held out his hands to protect the Jews", and knew nothing of the Final Solution. Thirty thousand people were murdered at Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland - as opposed to the accepted figure of 1.5 million. After the war, the Poles fabricated the gas chamber evidence at Auschwitz to match the "fantasies" of survivors. The billions paid in reparations after the war by Germany to the state of Israel were unwarranted. "That is, of course, embarrassing. It was all a huge swindle ... Why does the German people let itself be slandered thus?"

The arguments advanced may be contemptible. But are they criminal? Is the prosecution of Irving justified, or is the looming jury trial and the prospect of a 10-year jail term if found guilty an assault on free speech?

These are some of the questions being asked here. "Dragging fools and falsifiers of history before a court is unworthy of a liberal democracy today," said Christian Fleck, president of Austria's association of sociologists.

In a long commentary in the liberal Standard newspaper, he noted that the Irving case was particularly ill-judged when contrasted with Austria's poor record in apprehending ageing war crimes suspects living in the country.

One of a series of outstanding scholars to hold the Camden Chair of Ancient History at Oxford, a position long associated with Roman History in particular, Peter Brunt made lasting contributions to the study both of ancient Greece and of Rome. He brought to the task not only an enviably clear mind, an elegant Gibbonian style, and an immunity to fashion and prejudice, but two striking attitudes that were features of the man as much as of his work. The one was a critical bent that rendered him counter- suggestible and at times, at least in conversation, almost perverse. The other was an exceptionally broad conception of what was historically interesting.

Not content with treating political, economic and (before it was fashionable) social history, and with illuminating the works of the Greek and Roman historians, he led the way in taking seriously the Hellenistic schools of philosophy, notably Stoicism, and in demonstrating the subtlety with which the history of ideas can and should be related to the political and social circumstances from which they arise and which they may affect. 'Expertise on these circumstances and on the interpretation of philosophic theories is not always combined,' he wrote. His own work showed what could be achieved when it was.

He was born in Coulsdon, Surrey in 1917, the only child of the Rev Samuel Brunt, a Methodist minister, and Eileen (nZe Blewett). His father died when he was quite young, and Peter Brunt, who never married, remained very close to his mother, who lived into his retirement. After Ipswich School, he won a scholarship to Oriel College, Oxford, in History: he did not trust his ability to compose in ancient Greek at a standard high enough to win one in Classics, the subject he went on to read. The fact is already a true indication of his primary interest in the ancient world, though the training offered by the Greats course in historiography and philosophy was also to prove of great importance for his work.

Joseph J. Thorndike, a former managing editor of Life magazine who in 1954 helped found American Heritage magazine, died Tuesday at his home in Harwich, Mass. He was 92.

The cause was congestive heart failure and complications of Alzheimer's disease, his son John said.

Mr. Thorndike, the longtime editorial director of American Heritage, started the magazine with two Life colleagues, Oliver Jensen and James Parton. Mr. Jensen died in June, at 91.

A general-interest publication that recounts the American past in the style of a newsmagazine, American Heritage is published six times a year and has a circulation of 340,000. Its corporate parent, the American Heritage Publishing Company, is a division of Forbes Inc.

[Mr. Finkelstein is the author of the new book,Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History.]

... Finkelstein debunks many favored pieties, and as a result, often faces high barriers to reaching a mass audience. As a Jew and the son of Holocaust survivors, Finkelstein has been battling the U.S. Zionist establishment for decades. Beyond Chutzpah is one of those rare books that has the potential to change the nature of the debate about the U.S.-Israel-Palestine conflict because of its willingness to go where others refuse to go with a “J’accuse” —even when leading to ostracism and perpetual underemployment. Finkelstein indicts much of the U.S. intellectual culture and the cultural institutions that obstruct an accurate rendering of the historical and diplomatic record of the conflict. I suspect Mario Cuomo and Henry Louis Gates Jr., who both praised The Case for Israel, will now be asked, “Did you really read the book or understand what’s at issue in this conflict?

It’s long been recognized, within the humanities, for example, that to speak of such entities as “truths” is to make one vulnerable to the charge of being a simpleton. After all, interpretative or discourse communities determine what is “truth” based on agreement — reality is a majority vote. Even when faced with the task of owning up to gruesome realities, the utter simplicity of some phenomena in the world continue to defy the academic intelligentsia, due to such academic mainstays as the “social construction of truth,” “postmodern geographies,” and “the radically perspectival and indeterminate nature of language.” The powerful don’t have to subscribe to these norms of “intellectual integrity” anyway, often blatantly flouting them and leaving members of the “common herd” aghast when, in the defiance of all evidence, Israel is hailed as the main proponent of Middle Eastern peace despite its ongoing removal of the Palestinians from what will soon be a greater Israel.

Finkelstein described “the Holocaust Industry,” in a book of that title, distinguishing between the holocaust (the historical event) and the Holocaust (the ideological creation nurtured by Israel’s apologists to immunize the Israeli government against critiques). In Beyond Chutzpah, Finkelstein alleges that there’s anti-Semitism, a age-old form of prejudice directed against Jews that any decent person would oppose, and then there’s “anti-Semitism”—an ideologically serviceable mystery religion which accrues considerable benefits for the Israeli government. Finkelstein claims that the new anti-Semitism ends up coddling Zionist Jews, particularly American Zionist Jews, protecting them from much-deserved scrutiny in their toadying for special dispensations as oppressed “chosen people,” while in fact comprising the most privileged ethnic group in the United States. As he writes:

"Legitimate questions can surely be posed regarding when and if Jews are acting as people who happen to be Jewish or acting 'as Jews,' and, on the latter occasions (which plainly do arise), regarding the actual breadth and limits of this 'Jewish power,' but these questions can only be answered empirically, not a priori with politically correct formulae. To foreclose inquiry on this topic as anti-Semitic , intentionally or not, to shield Jews from legitimate scrutiny of their uses and abuses of formidable power (83).

Finkelstein finds that Abraham Foxman, Phyllis Chesler, Gabriel Schoenfeld, Elie Wiesel, Alan Dershowitz, and a whole host of others, have been running a lucrative extortion racket with the sole aim of shielding Israel from scrutiny as it continues an all-out assault with the United States on international law. According to Chessler’s The New Anti-Semitism, it is anti-Semitic to associate all Jews with Israel [“Anyone who does not distinguish between Jews and the Jewish state is an anti-Semite”], but by Chessler’s lights it is also anti-Semitic not to do so [“American and Diaspora Jews” must understand that “Israel is hour heart and soul…we are family” (her emphasis)] (Beyond Chutzpah, 82). Finkelstein documented in The Holocaust Industry that figures such as Edgar Bronfman (heir to the Seagrams’ fortune), Israel Singer (one-time head of the World Jewish Congress), and Elie Wiesel (holocaust survivor, and in Finkelstein’s estimation, “resident clown of the Holocaust Industry”) conspired in conjunction with the Clinton administration to conduct a “shakedown operation” against European countries in the sacred name of Holocaust survivors. In fact, as Finkelstein documents, the billions of dollars the Holocaust industry extorted from Switzerland and Poland in the name of reclaiming Jewish assets seized during WWII went not to Holocaust survivors or their families, but instead to Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and the ADL, which are U.S. front operations for the Israeli government. Hence, the Holocaust Industry has not only robbed survivors blind but also engaged in a form of ruthless grave robbery for the glorification of that massive land-based U.S. aircraft carrier, Israel.

Whenever the Israeli government faces a public-relations disaster, as it did after the ’82 Lebanon War and the Sabra and Chatila massacre, or as it did during the First and Second Intifadas, a new alarm is sounded about virulent anti-Semitism on the rise. But the more fundamental question is: How was the anti-Semitism of the Nazis transferred to Palestinians of the occupied territories? This ideological sleight-of-hand represents one of the Holocaust Industry’s triumphs. Unfortunately, since the Six-Day War, the historical record has been dominated by propaganda highlighting Jewish suffering to the exclusion of the suffering of other ethnic groups. Here, however, Finkelstein lays the ground for a rational discussion about Israel. Finkelstein shows a clear correlation between moments when the anti-Semitism alarm is rung and the needs of Israel’s apologists who deploy agitprop against anyone seeking to present a clear understanding of what Chomsky calls the “international consensus”—a reference to the fact that the United States and Israel have blocked resolution of the conflict. In polite circles, this is called the “peace process,” an Orwellian term which occludes the techniques of domination and control through which the United States and Israel stop serious peace measures, i.e., a not out-of-the-ordinary display of the power of the doctrinal system and the racism of articulate Western elites. That, in fact, according to Finkelstein is what the new anti-Semitism is all about—a desperate ploy to bury Israeli and U.S. war crimes.

Once one understands that the founding of Israel had little to do with the Holocaust; that the vast majority of Holocaust survivors—who sought to come to the U.S. but were blocked from doing so by American Jewish Zionists—were forced to migrate to Israel, in Yosef Grodzinsky’s words as “good human material” (a translation of his book’s Hebrew title—chomer ‘enoshi tov); that to describe Palestinian hatred of occupiers of Palestinian land as an expression of “anti-Semitic sentiment,” because those occupiers are Jewish, is inexplicable; and that anti-Semitism is not an ageless parasite that infects non-Jews but is instead a context-specific form of ethnic discrimination that has arisen throughout history just as other forms of ethnic discrimination; then the typical Leon Uris Exodus history becomes quite untenable. To justify Israel’s “ethnic cleansing” of the Palestinian population from the West Bank and Gaza, Israel’s apologists have had to sustain an untenable ideological juggling act, keeping several balls in the air....

[Matthew Abraham is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where he teaches courses in Rhetoric and Writing. He was named the 2005 Rachel Corrie Courage in Teaching Award Winner by the progressive special interest groups of the Conference on College Composition and Communication.]

[Allan M. Winkler is a professor of history at Miami University of Ohio. His most recent book is Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Making of Modern America (Pearson Longman, 2005).]

The first time I ever played my guitar in class almost ended my musical career. I was teaching American history for a year at the University of Helsinki, and as I prepared to lecture about the civil-rights movement, I decided to sing a couple of songs. I was not an accomplished guitarist. I had bought my first guitar in college, in the 1960s, and had fooled around without ever taking formal lessons for the next decade and a half.

At my first semipublic appearance back in 1978, my playing was ragged, but I managed to get through "Blowin' in the Wind" and "We Shall Overcome." When the class was over, one young woman came up to me and in her not-quite-fluent English said, "Sir, that was wonderful." I smiled expansively — then cringed as she went on: "Do you know why? Because you were so bad!" As my face fell, she realized what she had said and tried to repair the damage, going on to explain that she meant that I was not a professional, but was still willing to get up in front of a class. But her comment, however much it may have been the result of an awkwardness with English, stayed with me for years to come.

I didn't bring my guitar back to class for another 10 years. By that time I was teaching in Ohio, where I sometimes took charge of the large American history survey class, with its 360 students. I thought I had gotten a little better on my guitar in the intervening years and decided to try a couple of railroad songs like "Freight Train" and "Wabash Cannonball" as I lectured about industrialization in the late 19th century. I was nervous with an audience that size, but once again got through without embarrassing myself too badly, only to learn after that one of my teaching assistants was a good guitarist who played in a band and regarded my efforts with mild amusement. That set me back a few more years....

I took to putting the words up on the PowerPoint screen and asking my students to cross their arms, join hands, and sing along with me — just as students did in the 1960s. It was hokey, and they laughed sheepishly at first, but I felt just like Pete Seeger as I cajoled them into singing out, loud and clear, and each year they finally did, swaying back and forth with the lines together, united as they sang. Once, at the end of class, a few African-American students came up to tell me how much it had moved them to hear everybody singing along.

I've always played recordings in class, just as I have shown film clips and used slides (now with the aid of PowerPoint), for I think those resources illustrate the mood of a period better than words alone. But singing has given my teaching an added dimension. It's a way of letting students begin to feel what life was like in the past. For a generation raised on music, it helps capitalize on their interest.

It's also my way of trying to give new resonance to songs my students may have heard on an oldies station, but rolled their eyes at. And that's a part of the larger effort to get them interested in history itself.

My students humor me, to be sure, but I think it creates a kind of rapport, and an acknowledgment that our common endeavor can be fun. We can deal with critical analysis and close examination of texts in other parts of the course, and yet accept the fact that it's just fine to have a good time while we do. And oh yes, it's all right to take a chance and risk embarrassment, whether with an idea or a song.

He's written a string of biographies, with prime ministers Tony Blair, John Major and Winston Churchill among his subjects and Margaret Thatcher next on his agenda. He directs plays with actresses such as Greta Scacchi, appears on television as a political commentator and writes profusely in the media.

Anthony Seldon, the master-elect of Britain's infamous Wellington College, is more than a principal. He is a personality who has no qualms about his high profile - he believes his outside interests, and those of the staff he likes to recruit, provide inspiration to the young people in their charge.

His students at Brighton College, the school he has led for eight years, have had the chance to join audiences in current affairs TV shows while a team of former students help him research his books.

"I encourage all our teachers to have outside interests. It is terribly important," he said, adding that he had appointed a former England international women's cricket player to be Wellington's deputy headmistress. "There is no doubt my writing and the profile it has given has helped Brighton College, and brought top people into the college," he said recently in Hong Kong.

Dr Sheldon, co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary British History, is unusual for such a prolific historian, shunning academia for school life. He met his wife Joanna at Oxford University - both were involved in the theatre there, as director and actress. Despite going on to do research, they decided they were not satisfied with academic life and instead wanted to work with adolescents. And in school, they could be involved in everything, from drama to sport.

"It has got to be an incredible privilege to be given the responsibility to lead young people: to inspire people to be extraordinary, not just ordinary. You have got to know children. To me that is what being a head is about," he said.

As such, teaching is part of the job and Dr Seldon's current subjects are philosophy, religion and history. He claims to not understand philosophy, even though he studied politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford in the 1970s, and challenged his students to beat him in this year's AS-level exam. They did - he got a low B. Dr Seldon, 52, is leaving Brighton to take on the challenge of "reengineering" Wellington for the 21st century. The latter has, in recent years, been no stranger to publicity - much of it negative. It has been rocked by various sex, bullying and drug-related scandals and sliding academic performance. The worst was in 2003 when a boy filmed himself in flagrante with his unsuspecting girlfriend.

Even before he takes over as head in January, Dr Seldon has thrown himself into reforms aimed at restoring it to its former greatness. He is not shying away from radical change which he insists is in the spirit of the pioneering founders. The all-boys Wellington, granted its Royal Charter in 1853 as a national memorial to the Duke of Wellington, faces a revolution by admitting girls in all years from next September and dropping British A-levels in favour of the International Baccalaureate soon after.

The revisionist British historian David Irving is likely to remain in custody in Austria for at least a week, prosecutors say.
The authorities are considering whether to put him on trial for denying the Nazi mass extermination of Jews, the public prosecutor's spokesman said.

He was detained a week ago on a warrant issued in 1989 under Austrian laws that make it a crime to deny the Holocaust.

Mr Irving was stopped in the southern province of Styria, en route to Vienna.

If formally charged, tried and convicted, Mr Irving could face up to 20 years in prison, said the spokesman, Otto Schneider.

In his books, Mr Irving has argued that the scale of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis in World War II has been exaggerated.

He also claimed that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler knew nothing of the Holocaust.

The Council for Advancement and Support of Education and The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching today named four university and college professors as national winners of the 2005 U.S. Professors of the Year Award. The professors, who each receive a $5,000 prize, were selected for their outstanding commitment to teaching undergraduate students and their influence on teaching. A state Professor of the Year was also recognized in 40 states, the District of Columbia and Guam.

The Professors of the Year will be honored today at a luncheon at the Grand Hyatt Washington in Washington, D.C. The four national winners will speak at the luncheon after being introduced by a former student.

They include:

Outstanding Baccalaureate Colleges Professor: W. A. Hayden Schilling, Robert Critchfield Professor of English History, The College of Wooster, Wooster, Ohio. Throughout his 42-year career at The College of Wooster, Schilling has maintained a passionate devotion to student success, encouraging undergraduates to become active participants in their own education. Schilling is known for his accessibility, careful advising and compassion in dealing with student problems. He has served as a mentor to hundreds of students and has remained an integral part of many of their lives, helping them grow from bewildered freshmen to confident seniors and successful alumni.

Now about ninety, with his fangs seemingly drawn, the old man spends his days peacefully pottering in an English garden. But Basil Davidson represents the most willful single-handed effort to mythologise African history, and his numerous books have misled millions on a continental scale.

Barbaric kingdoms were romanticised, tyrants whitewashed, and cruel and bloodthirsty customs expunged (or simply ignored) in order to impress well-meaning western middle-classes who wanted to believe only the best about the cultures of the new, free, ‘liberated’ African states.

the romantic adventurer
Beginning as a romantic adventurer, Davidson was smuggled into Yugoslavia during World War II by the SOE (the Special Operations Executive run by the British Government). His boss was James Klugman, head of Special Ops Balkan operations at Bari, and a life-long communist and Cambridge contemporary of Kim Philby and his friends.

After the war Davidson resumed his pre-war career in journalism and worked for various national papers. He also produced his own pamphlets published by the Union of Democratic Control, a small Leftist group inherited from his father. He was available as a free-lancer for various “progressive” causes ranging from that of newly-established People’s China to the tiny anti-Salazar Portuguese Opposition in exile.

Strangely, however, considering what should have counted as his worthy and reputable Left-wing writing, the International Department of the British Communist Party warned party-members against trusting Davidson, telling them he was a Colonial Office agent. This was in the early 1950s, a time when London was seething with numerous groups of African exiles agitating for independence.

propaganda: the true vocation
It was among these exiles that Davidson discovered his true vocation. With the independence of a growing number of African states his books entered the remunerative field of required reading for students of African History on campuses throughout the world. Davidson found himself in constant demand as a lecturer, and apotheosis was reached when the BBC commissioned him to direct a highly successful TV series of doubtful scholarship on African history.

Fame and fortune came not just in the West. There were vastly greater rewards from translations in the communist world. In the Soviet Union and its satellites editions of politically acceptable works reached astronomical figures by Western standards.

There was however a royalty problem. The USSR and its vassals were not signatories to international copyright agreements and hence under no compulsion to pay royalties. Any ingenuous Western author who imagined he would automatically receive them soon realized he would have to toe the line. Davidson was perfectly aware of the constraints placed upon him. In his case they were twofold. He had to satisfy not only his communist publishers, but also his African supporters. It was probably the second who first gave him the idea of embroidering history to provide an inspiring vision of the African past.

Davidson first came into contact with African folklore in the halcyon days of négritude. Its most talented exponents were to be found in a circle around the Paris magazine Présence Africaine. One of these was the Angolan Mário de Andrade, a founder of the MPLA, (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola, or People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola) the political party which was to rule Angola after independence a quarter of a century later.

Andrade held the highly original view that Angola, at its time of first contact with the Portuguese in the late fifteenth century, enjoyed a level of civilization equivalent to that of eighteenth-century Europe. Davidson lapped this fantasy up and proceeded to direct his research and writing towards an extravagant eulogy of pre-colonial African kingdoms, their technology, and their philosophy. This approach pleased not only Mário de Andrade but also the generality of African liberationists in exile. ...

John Dichtl: How did you first get involved with OAH?

Edward Linenthal: I first got involved with OAH through my work with the National Park Service while writing about the contested places of American battlefields. At the time, the professional meeting I usually attended was the American Academy of Religion, especially the religion in America sections. When I began attending the OAH annual meeting I found it an even more congenial intellectual home. As I moved from thinking about contested public spaces in American battlefields to writing about the making of the United States Holocaust Museum and the Enola Gay controversy, then to my immersion in the cultural aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, I continued to work with the National Park Service on the problematics of interpretation of historic sites. OAH became a natural home, particularly, of course, given the very strong ties that OAH developed with NPS.

I had also written for the JAH on several occasions including an article on my work in public history and another on the Enola Gay controversy. When Tom Schlereth retired from editing the museum exhibition section of the JAH, Joanne Meyerowitz asked if I would be willing to become a contributing editor. I asked Kym Rice in the Museums Studies Program at George Washington to coedit this with me, and we enjoyed doing that enormously over those years. Kym is still a contributing editor for the museum exhibition review section, and she has been joined by Benjamin Filene at the Minnesota Historical Society.

JD: How has the field and profession of American history changed during your career?

EL: During my work with the National Park Service, I came to appreciate--from a nonacademic perspective--how important it is to have scholars and public historians working together to enrich the public presentation of American history. For example, new scholarship helped change the way that the significance of slavery is depicted at Civil War sites. While the Park Service initiated this, it was that push of scholarship that helped change things. I think that it can work the other way too. The absolutely stunning oral histories that NPS is collecting at Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site will become grist for the mill for historians. It is wonderful when the world of public history and academic history work together....