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: San Francisco Chronicle (11-17-05)
Irving, 67, was detained Nov. 11 in the southern province of Styria on a warrant issued in 1989 under Austrian laws making Holocaust denial a crime, police Maj. Rudolf Gollia, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said Thursday.
Austrian media said the charges stemmed from speeches Irving delivered that year in Vienna and in the southern town of Leoben.
In a statement posted on his Web site, Irving's supporters said he was arrested while on a one-day visit to Vienna, where they said he had been invited "by courageous students to address an ancient university association."
Despite precautions taken by Irving, he was arrested by police who allegedly learned of his visit "by wiretaps or intercepting e-mails," the statement alleged. It said that en route to Austria, Irving had privately visited German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, a friend he had not seen in 20 years.
SOURCE: Columbia News (11-16-05)
With no American Navy to protect them, or even a federal system in place to raise taxes for a fighting fleet, the sailors were defenseless, says Michael B. Oren, CC '77, SIPA '78. Their vulnerability concerned residents of the port cities that comprised the young country, according to evidence Oren found in his research for Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to Present (Norton, Fall 2006).
On Thursday, Nov. 3, Oren captivated a Low Library audience of Columbia students and scholars, including several of his former professors, by presenting a piece of American history few had ever heard. Oren theorized that frustration over an inability to stand up to the North African pirates and the countries that harbored them greatly contributed to a rise of federalism and the beginnings of the U.S. Navy.
Ratification papers from the Continental Congress contain evidence of American fear and anger over the North African pirates.
During the discussion that followed the lecture, many audience members expressed concern over why this important bit of history continues to be ignored.
The author of numerous studies on the history and politics of the Middle East, Oren writes extensively for publications such as The New Republic and The New York Times. His best-known work, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, (Oxford University Press), is considered an authoritative account of this period. It has been acclaimed in the United States, winning the National Jewish Book Award for best book of 2002 and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
SOURCE: Stanford Report (11-17-05)
Conquest, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, was one of 14 recipients of the medal, the nation's highest civil award. He is known for his landmark work The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties. More than 35 years after its publication, the book remains one of the most influential studies of Soviet history and has been translated into more than 20 languages. Conquest also is author of the acclaimed books Harvest of Sorrow, Stalin and the Kirov Murder, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, Stalin: Breaker of Nations and Reflections on a Ravaged Century. His most recent book is The Dragons of Expectation.
Other 2005 recipients of the Medal of Freedom include legendary boxer Muhammad Ali, actress Carol Burnett, software designers Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, singer Aretha Franklin, economist Alan Greenspan, actor Andy Griffith, radio personality Paul Harvey, former congressman and veterans' activist Sonny Montgomery, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard B. Myers, golfer Jack Nicklaus, former baseball player and baseball team manager Frank Robinson, and Paul Rusesabagina, whose heroic actions during the 1994 Rwandan genocide inspired the movie Hotel Rwanda.
Established in 1963, the Medal of Freedom may be awarded by the president "to any person who has made an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, or world peace, or cultural or other significant public or private endeavors."
SOURCE: The Independent (London) (11-15-05)
Freddie Gollin was born in 1926 in New York, the second son of a Russian Jewish refugee brought up in dire poverty on the edge of the Bowery. In 1943, at the age of 17, Gollin joined the US Army, ending the Second World War in an armoured field artillery brigade in Germany.
Through an arrangement with Oxford University, whereby the US Army could select one or two soldiers in each division to study there for a term, Gollin found himself 'guarding SS men one day and walking in Oxford High Street the next'. His Oxford tutor, Sir John Myres, subsequently recommended him for a History BA degree at New College, which at that time boasted such star Fellows as Alan Bullock and Isaiah Berlin. When Gollin met his first wife, Gurli, then looking after the infant daughter of Lord David Cecil, Goldsmith Professor of English Literature, she was wheeling the baby round the college gardens.
In 1950, Gollin won the New College Essay Prize. After graduating, he was appointed, through a senior History Fellow, David Ogg, to an Extraordinary Lectureship. This overlapped with seven years as official historian for The Observer, during which he gained an Oxford DPhil for his thesis 'History of The Observer, 1905-1910' and a succession of major research fellowships and awards. From 1959 to 1961 he taught and researched at the University of California, Los Angeles, and from 1966 until 1994 was Associate and Full Professor, at Santa Barbara, with responsibilities for UC's teaching programme in London.
His first book, The Observer and J.L. Garvin (1960), established him as a leading authority on early-20th-century British history. His lucid and sensitive grasp of the English political mind in that period enabled his readers to absorb, with pleasure as well as understanding, the most complex events.
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For his sense of historical drama he owed much to Lord Beaverbrook, whose own style of writing history in the making impressed Gollin powerfully. Beaverbrook admired and liked him and threw open the Lloyd George papers, and other collections that he owned, for Gollin's study of Lord Milner, Proconsul in Politics (1964). Other notable works followed. In 1968 Gollin received a Doctorate of Letters at Oxford in recognition of his outstanding scholarship. Later he wrote two groundbreaking and intensively researched works on air warfare: No Longer an Island: Britain and the Wright Brothers, 1902-1909 (1984) and The Impact of Air Power on the British People and Their Government, 1909-14 (1989).
Proconsul in Politics is still the defining analysis of the once-idolised Milner, who has been generally blamed for the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899. Over the years, Milner's widow, Violet, had donated his papers and personal treasures to New College, Gollin's interest in this much- disputed imperialist was aroused:
a friend asked me why I wanted to become concerned with 'That vile brute', while another acquaintance of great charm told me that I should discover what a great and good man Lord Milner was. It seemed clear the subject was not devoid of controversy.
His level-headed portrait highlighted Milner's humanity and exceptional administrative talents but equally his inability to understand his opponents' point of view. The Labour politician Richard Crossman told Gollin, 'I always disliked Milner and this book tells me why.' A.J.P. Taylor described it as an historical contribution second to none. Most reviewers agreed with him, as would most historians today.
Although Gollin's father and uncles received little education other than the 'hard knocks' variety, the family preserved high moral standards " a yardstick for him and his brother Eugene in their rise to academic eminence, and fundamental to his outlook. Gollin was profoundly shocked by historians whom he felt to be untrustworthy on facts and was rigorous as a teacher in insisting on truth to the documents. A free spirit, he remained, in the Vietnam era, staunchly patriotic " which cost him popularity; but he also loathed official interference with individual conscience and enjoyed a fight for what he felt to be a student or a colleague's rights. He did not forgive or forget easily; and he would go generously out of his way to defend a young writer against an unfair reviewer.
Freddie Gollin was a tall, fine-looking man, with an elegant, high-shouldered figure and strong features. Although he was very private, shying away from talk about his life and achievements, the impression he gave was frank rather than inhibited. His many devoted pupils, academic and otherwise, were forever grateful for his expert guidance and encouragement, his awesome integrity and his words of praise " much valued, because not lightly spoken.
SOURCE: Hartford Courant (11-15-05)
Gaddis is a prominent historian of the Cold War who teaches Cold War history, strategy, international studies and biography at Yale.
Gilder and Lehrman founded the center in 1998. They also are co-founders and co-chairman of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, which promotes the study of American History.
The University of Connecticut Foundation Inc., which solicits and administers gifts to support UConn, has elected five new directors.
They are Theresa A. Bischoff of New York City, who is chief executive officer of the American Red Cross for Greater New York; Kelvin Cooper of East Lyme, who is senior vice president of Worldwide Pharmaceutical Sciences at Pfizer Inc.; Kathleen A. Murphy of Glastonbury, who is group president of ING's U.S. Worksite and Institutional Financial Services division; Sharon L. Nunes of Hopewell Junction, N.Y., who is vice president of business development and productivity in IBM's Systems & Technology Group and John L. Ritter of West Hartford, executive vice president and secretary of First New England Capital, a direct investment capital firm.
The foundation has more than $343 million in total assets.
SOURCE: The Independent (London) (11-16-05)
At the time Roazen was doing his political science PhD dissertation on the political thought of Freud. He was the first non-psychoanalyst ever granted access to the library at the British Psychoanalytical Institute. There, in a large cabinet in the basement, he came upon the papers of Ernest Jones, author of the three-volume, 1953-57 official biography of Freud. Roazen went through the papers, which had all the information that Jones had used to write the biography.
Anna, Freud's daughter, came to regret bitterly having granted Roazen access to the library. That was because he met psychoanalysts there, many of whom he went on to interview, and those interviews led to revelations that she disliked. Gossip is the first draft of history: the 'gossip' that Roazen elicited became crucial for understanding Freud and his followers. Roazen was a diligent interviewer and Jones, the authorised historian of psychoanalysis, Jones, had left a lot out.
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Paul Roazen's first book, Freud: political and social thought (1968) was an adaptation of his PhD thesis, but his second book, Brother Animal: the story of Freud and Tausk (1969), told a tale, elicited from his interviewees, that had not previously been published. Victor Tausk was a talented early supporter of Freud. In an official obituary of Tausk, Freud wrote, 'No one could escape the impression that here was a man of importance', and, 'Tausk was sure of an honourable memory in the history of psychoanalysis and its earliest struggles.'
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Roazen's 1975 book Freud and His Followers, his most important work, is based upon his interviews and is a crucial source of historical information. Much of that information had previously been generally unknown.
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Roazen was convinced that 'history-writing is inherently a subversive activity: students of history necessarily undermine generally received wisdom'. He liked to cite Anna Freud's comment that 'Roazen is a menace whatever he writes', a remark which is perhaps a measure of his importance in psychoanalytic historiography. Yet his wish was to add perspective to our understanding of Freud and his followers, not to undermine them.
He wrote books about Erik Erikson, Helene Deutsch, Sandor Rado and Edoardo Weiss, each of them a psychoanalyst. At the time of his death, he was researching the papers of William C. Bullitt, which had recently become available. Bullitt had been a patient of Freud in the 1920s and went on to become the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union and then ambassador to France.
SOURCE: The Daily Telegraph (LONDON) (6-16-14)
His contributions to Roman history were distinguished by very wide knowledge, logical clarity, a highly developed critical sense, and above all an intellectual integrity which found no place for display. Instead, as he himself would say, he was a penetrating critic who would not accept claims that the evidence supported claims which it did not.
Peter Astbury Blunt was born on June 23 1917, the son of a Methodist minister, the Rev Samuel Brunt, and of Gladys Eileen Brunt. His mother, whom his friends remember as a warm, cultivated and lively person, was important to him throughout his career, and died only after his retirement. He was educated at Ipswich School and Oriel College, Oxford, where he took a First in Mods in 1937, and in Greats two years later. Both the nature of these undergraduate courses and the dates were highly relevant to his intellectual development and academic record. Mods was devoted to reading the works of the Classical canon, and Greats to a combination of Ancient History, studied through the major narrative writers, and Philosophy, in which Plato and Aristotle played a large part. His eventual predecessor in the Camden Chair, Ronald Syme, who had been Examiner in 1939, was to recall later that PA Brunt's translations had been of exceptional quality.
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But his major impact, even today not yet fully absorbed or sufficiently acknowledged, was in Roman history. A number of major studies, later collected in Roman Imperial Themes (1990), analysed the working of the Empire.
His greatest originality lay in the Republic. At Oriel he had written two fundamental works, of contrasting types, both published in 1971: his massive Italian Manpower, and a slim paperback, Social Conflicts in the Roman Republic, whose title implicitly asserted that the prevailing view of Republican politics, as a mere struggle for pre-eminence between individuals, families or "factions'', simply did not correspond to the evidence. While personal ambition was of course important in Roman society, political strife related to major social and constitutional issues.
This theme, or set of themes, was more fully argued in the papers, whether new or re-printed, collected in perhaps his most important work, The Fall of the Roman Republic and Related Essays (1988).
SOURCE: Daily Astorian (11-15-05)
That fact that knowledge about the Corps of Discovery has grown so much in the last several years is partly the work of Moulton. For Lewis and Clark enthusiasts, his name is synonymous with the 13-volume collection of the explorers’ journals that the University of Nebraska history professor edited over an 18-year period and which is now considered the definitive version of the famous texts.
Moulton spoke to a packed house Monday night at the Hilltop School auditorium in Ilwaco, Wash., in the final presentation of the Ocian in View Lewis and Clark Bicentennial lecture series.
While Lewis and Clark have been American icons since their return from their western journey two centuries ago, their image among the public has evolved as new information about them has surfaced – and as the public’s taste in heroes has changed.
In the 1930s and ’40s the invincible Superman was a popular figure for Americans faced with the Depression and war. But today’s superheroes are more complex, like Spiderman, who is unsure of his new powers, Moulton said.
Lewis and Clark have undergone their own transformation from one-dimensional icons to more complex figures with their own unique quirks and failings. That’s especially true for Lewis, whose battle with depression has long been known but has received more attention in recent years.
“We wonder how he was able to get up in the morning,” Moulton said.
One of the biggest sources of debate over Lewis’ mental state are the lengthy periods on the trail when the young captain kept no journal entries, particularly in the later parts of the journey when the party was passing through uncharted lands. In one famous entry made on his birthday in August 1805 just before his pen fell silent, Lewis unburdened himself of his anxieties, leading many to believe that his emotional difficulties were overcoming him. But Moulton noted that at the end of the passage Lewis rebounds, putting his insecurities aside and writing, “I will go on.”
“Lewis’ optimism always pushes through,” he said.
It was after the expedition returned home that Lewis experienced a rapid decline. He floundered in his new administrative duties and business transactions and turned to drink and opium. On a trip to Washington, D.C. in 1809, he took his life at an isolated inn in Tennessee, without having written a word of the book on the expedition he had promised to Thomas Jefferson.
Clark, on the other hand, was always seen as the steadfast half of duo, a member of a family of Revolutionary War heroes who was a natural leader of men, who bolstered Lewis during his bouts of depression, and who led a long and successful life after the trek that made him famous.
That was until a trove of letters was found in the basement of a home in Louisville, Ky., in 1988. The letters, written by Clark to his brother, reveal intimate details of his life missing from the expedition journals, but they also show how badly he treated his slave York after the trek, denying him his freedom, beating and jailing him and even selling him off to a harsh new master.
“It turns Clark into something we never knew, a brutal slave master,” Moulton said.
SOURCE: Newsletter of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies (11-15-05)
The articles in the issue include important new information on the role of Wyman's book in bringing about the U.S. airlift of Ethiopian Jews in 1985; the response of American Catholic leaders to news of the Holocaust; and the march by 400 rabbis to the White House in 1943 to plead for rescue.
Edited by the noted Catholic scholar, Prof. Leonard Swidler, the Journal of Ecumenical Studies is published by Temple University. The special issue devoted to 'Abandonment' was guest edited by Dr. Rafael Medoff, director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and Dr. Racelle R. Weiman, director of the Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education, at Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion (in Cincinnati). Dr. Weiman is also a member of the Wyman Institute's Academic Council.
Prof. Swidler said: "Through his scholarship on the Jewish Holocaust and the Christian role in it, David Wyman has held a mirror before the face of America, and especially America's Christians. Coming from a family of minister and being himself a committed Christian, gives Wyman standing before the court of public Christianity. What America and what Christians saw in Wyman's mirror was the Mr. Hyde of Dr. Jekell. We Americans and Christians --thanks in significant measure to David Wyman-- now have a solid foothold from which we can build further a bridge to the people of the First Covenant, the Jews."
The issue features:
* The story --appearing in print for the first time-- of how advocates for the rescue of Ethiopian Jewry in 1985 used Wyman's book to convince U.S. officials to order the airlift of Ethiopian Jewish refugees to Israel.
* A previously unpublished exchange between Prof. Wyman and Dr. Eugene Fisher of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, on the response of U.S. Catholic leaders to news of the Nazi genocide.
* A memoir by the noted Jewish leader and scholar, Prof. Arthur Hertzberg, on his participation in a 1943 march to Washington by 400 rabbis, urging U.S. action to rescue Jewish refugees.
* An assessment of the impact of The Abandonment of the Jews on the public's view of such issues as the Allies' refusal to bomb Auschwitz and America's restrictionist immigration policy during the Holocaust, explored in essays by Dr. Medoff, Prof. Paul Miller, and Prof. Alex Grobman examining
* A symposium by an array of scholars and public figures, reflecting on how The Abandonment of the Jews influenced them personally. Contributors to the symposium include Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, journalist Marvin Kalb, former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, the late U.S. Senator Paul Simon, Prof. Blanche Wiesen Cook, biographer of Eleanor Roosevelt, and many others.
* New research based on issues raised by Abandonment: essays by Prof. Laurel Leff on U.S. press coverage of the liberation of the death camps; Prof. Gil Troy on the Holocaust rescue activism of playwright Ben Hecht; Dr. Efraim Zuroff on rescue efforts by American Orthodox rabbis; and Rabbi Dr. Haskel Lookstein on the response of American Jewry to the Holocaust.
The issue concludes with a new afterword by Prof. Wyman.
Review copies of the journal are available by calling the Wyman Institute at 215-635-5622.
SOURCE: Alexander H. Joffe at Frontpagemag.com (11-15-05)
A non-political association that fosters the study of the Middle East, promotes high standards of scholarship and teaching, and encourages public understanding of the region and its peoples through programs, publications, and services that enhance education, further intellectual exchange, recognize professional distinction, and defend academic freedom. [2] As president, Cole is the public face of Middle Eastern studies. His election marks an endorsement of his work by hundreds of professors in various fields of Middle Eastern studies in American universities. Cole has written four academic books but his prominence comes not from scholarship but from his commentary on history and current events. [3] As such, this commentary provides a mirror into the state of Middle Eastern studies and the widespread urge of its practioners to promote polemic over scholarship.
Israel as a Fascist Society
Juan Cole: The Likud coalition in Israel does contest elections. But it isn't morally superior in most respects to the Syrian Baath. The Likud brutally occupies 3 million Palestinians (who don't get to vote for their occupier) and is aggressively taking over their land. That is, it treats at least 3 million people no better than and possibly worse than the Syrian Baath treats its 17 million.—September 9, 2004 [4]
Middle East Quarterly: Freedom House gives Syria its lowest rating of "not free" for both political rights and civil liberties. [5] In contrast, Israel has a rating of "free." [6] The analogy between Likud and the Syrian Baath misunderstands the nature of comparative politics. The Likud has an active membership and contested leadership; the Baath is subordinate to Bashar al-Assad. Cole ignores the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, its massacres of perhaps 20,000 in Hama in 1982, and the imprisonment of at least 17,000 political prisoners. [7]
Cole: No American media will report the demonstrations in Israel [8] as fascist in nature, and no American politicians will dare criticize the Likud. But the fact is that the Israeli predations in the West Bank and Gaza are a key source of rage in the Muslim world against the United States (which toadies unbearably to whatever garbage comes out of Tel Aviv's political establishment), something that the 9-11 commission report stupidly denies.—July 26, 2004 [9]
MEQ: Cole's characterization of peaceful demonstrations as "fascist" is inaccurate. Fascism suggests an autocratic system that seeks to regiment and control every aspect of social, political, and economic life. This cannot apply to Israel, which has from its independence been fully democratic. Israelis often demonstrate against their government's policies. Cole also fails to acknowledge U.S. political criticism of various Israeli governments. In 1991, Secretary of State James Baker declared Sharon persona non grata in Washington [10] and President H.W. Bush opposed issuing loan guarantees to Israel. [11] More recently, the Pentagon blacklisted Israeli Defense Ministry director-general Amos Yaron because of a dispute over Israel's military relationship with China. [12] Lastly, Jerusalem—not Tel Aviv—is the capital of Israel.
Cole: Judaism has given us so much that is noble in ethical religion, and what the Likud is doing is an insult to that long and glorious tradition. Likud's real roots lie not in the Bible but in Zionist revisionism of the Jabotinsky sort, which is frankly a kind of fascism.—March 21, 2003. [13]
MEQ: Cole's dislike for Ze'ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940), an early Zionist leader who moved Zionism from intellectual debate to reality by organizing illegal immigration into Mandatory Palestine and helped establish a Jewish state, is a constant theme in his Internet postings. Cole resents the establishment of the Jewish state. In January 2003, he wrote, "While one certainly cheers the British for giving refuge in Palestine to Jews fleeing Hitler, it would have been nobler yet to admit them to the British Isles rather than saddling a small, poor peasant country with 500,000 immigrants hungry to make the place their own." [14] Cole's insistence that Likud's willingness to defend Israel against terrorism suggests a break with the "glorious tradition" of Judaism, a religion in which he holds no expertise, suggests a misunderstanding of both the democratic process which brought Likud to power and the divisions between religion and state which mark Israeli governance.
Dual Loyalties
Cole: It is an echo of the one-two punch secretly planned by the pro-Likud faction in the Department of Defense. First, Iraq would be taken out by the United States, and then Iran. David Wurmser, a key member of the group, also wanted Syria included. These pro-Likud intellectuals concluded that 9-11 would give them carte blanche to use the Pentagon as Israel's Gurkha regiment, fighting elective wars on behalf of Tel Aviv (not wars that really needed to be fought, but wars that the Likud coalition thought it would be nice to see fought so as to increase Israel's ability to annex land and act aggressively, especially if someone else's boys did the dying).—August 29, 2004 [15]
MEQ: Cole suggests that many American Jewish officials hold dual loyalties, a frequent anti-Semitic theme. [16] Suggestions that American Jewish officials desired "someone else's boys" to fight is anti-Semitic and a common refrain in Cole's commentary. [17] Cole's commentary is often derivative and dishonest; he often substitutes others' web commentaries for the effort of tracking down original sources. In the case of "the one-two punch," he adopts the narrative espoused by the Lyndon LaRouche movement [18] and mischaracterizes the contents of the Institute for Advanced Strategy and Political Studies paper [19] that actually chastised Israel for not supporting the U.S. fight against terrorism and made suggestions about how Jerusalem could be more supportive of Washington.
Likud Manipulation
Cole: The rightwing Zionists want to racialize the Sudan conflict in American terms, as "Arab" versus "black African" because they want to use it to play American domestic politics and create a rift among African-Americans and Arab-Americans. Both of the latter face massive discrimination in contemporary society, and they should find ways of cooperating to counter it. What is happening in Darfur is horrible with regard to the loss of life and the displacement of persons, but the dispute is not about race. It is about political separatism and regionalism.—March 27, 2005 [20]
MEQ: In contrast to those in the region, [21] Cole argues that there has not been an ethnic component to the Sudanese conflict and implies that suggestions that ethnicity is a factor are a Zionist conspiracy. Since hostilities erupted after Khartoum's 1983 decision to impose Islamic law over the predominantly Christian and animist southern region of the country, approximately two million persons have died. [22]
Cole: If Rice is going to be a successful Secretary of State, she simply has to get back control of US foreign policy from the Likudniks in the Bush administration.—January 20, 2005 [23]
MEQ: Cole promotes an anti-Semitic myth while misunderstanding the process of U.S foreign policy. The president and the U.S. Congress set the direction of U.S. foreign policy. A secretary of state is charged with implementing it. Several times weekly, a Principles' Committee, consisting of the secretaries of state and defense, the national security advisor, and the director of national intelligence, meets to resolve any policy questions. In response to charges of undue influence by Jewish American officials, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said, "I suppose the implication of that is that the president and the vice-president and myself and Colin Powell just fell off a turnip truck to take these jobs." [24]
Cole: With both Iraq and Iran in flames, the Likud Party could do as it pleased in the Middle East without fear of reprisal. This means it could expel the Palestinians from the West Bank to Jordan, and perhaps just give Gaza back to Egypt to keep Cairo quiet. Annexing southern Lebanon up to the Litani River, the waters of which Israel has long coveted, could also be undertaken with no consequences, they probably think, once Hizbullah in Lebanon could no longer count on Iranian support. The closed character of the economies of Iraq and Iran, moreover, would end, allowing American, Italian, and British companies to make a killing after the wars (so they thought).—August 31, 2004 [25]
MEQ: No Israeli expulsion of the Palestinians or annexation of Lebanese land has occurred. Cole's comment appears to reflect his belief in the Arab nationalist and Islamist claim that Israel seeks to stretch from the Nile to the Euphrates. [26] This is one of many Cole predictions that are detached from reality.
Israel as a Cause of Terrorism
Cole: That British police have received training in Israel in stopping suicide bombers with the technique of shooting the suspect in the head has not made things easier in that regard [sic].—July 25, 2005 [27]
MEQ: In most cases, Israel thwarts suicide attacks without violence. [28] Following the shooting of a Brazilian tourist by the London police on July 22, 2005, Tom Gross, the Jerusalem correspondent of The Daily Telegraph, wrote, "Had the Israeli police shot dead an innocent foreigner on one of its buses or trains, confirming the kill with a barrage of bullets at close range in a mistaken effort to thwart a bombing, the UN would probably have been sitting in emergency session by late afternoon to unanimously denounce the Jewish state." [29]
Cole: our press and politicians do us an enormous disservice by not putting the Israeli announcement about the Jerusalem barrier on the front page. This sort of action is a big part of what is driving the terrorists (and, of course, Sharon himself is a sort of state-backed terrorist, anyway). The newspapers and television news departments should be telling us when we are about to be in the cross-fire between the aggressive, expansionist, proto-fascist Likud coalition and the paranoid, murderous, violent Al-Qaeda and its offshoots.—July 11, 2005 [30]
MEQ: The separation fence has reduced terrorism 75 percent. [31] Saudi Arabia, India, Morocco, Turkey and even the United Nations in Cyprus built similar barriers before Israel, in each case reducing terrorism or, in the latter case, communal violence. [32]
Cole: According to the September 11 Commission report, Al-Qaeda conceived 9/11 in some large part as a punishment on the U.S. for supporting Ariel Sharon's iron fist policies toward the Palestinians. Bin Laden had wanted to move the operation up in response to Sharon's threatening visit to the Temple Mount, and again in response to the Israeli attack on the Jenin refugee camp, which left 4,000 persons homeless. Khalid Shaikh Muhammad argued in each case that the operation just was not ready.—July 8, 2005
MEQ: Martin Kramer points out that the 9-11 Commission determined the hijacking plan was conceived by early 1999, that Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount took place in September 2000 when he was head of the opposition, and that the Jenin operation took place in April 2002, seven months after 9/11. After these factual problems were pointed out, Cole surreptitiously changed his original posting. [33]
Cole: It is obvious to me that what September 11 really represented was a dragooning of the United States into internal Middle East political conflicts. Israel's aggressive policies in the West Bank and Gaza have poisoned the political atmosphere in the Middle East (and increasingly in the Muslim world) for the United States. It is ridiculous to suggest that radical Islamists don't care about the Palestine issue.—September 9, 2004 [34]
MEQ: Cole ignores events such as the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the attacks on U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, and on the USS Cole in 2000, all of which took place during periods of seeming progress in Israeli-Palestinian relations.
Cole: We don't need any more U.S. buildings blown up because our government is coddling cuckoo [Israeli] settlers who are stealing other people's land to fulfill some weird religious power fantasy.—January 2, 2004 [35]
MEQ: The 9-11 Commission determined that planning for the terrorist attacks began during the Camp David II process as it appeared that Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority chairman Yasir Arafat would agree to a comprehensive peace agreement. [36]
Taking Liberty with the Facts
Cole: Was American journalist Steve Vincent killed in Basra as part of an honor killing? He was romantically involved with his Iraqi interpreter, who was shot four times. If her clan thought she was shaming them by appearing to be having an affair outside wedlock with an American male, they might well have decided to end it. In Mediterranean culture, a man's honor tends to be wrought up with his ability to protect his womenfolk from seduction by strange men.—August 8, 2005 [37]
MEQ: According to Vincent's wife, he was not romantically involved with his Iraqi interpreter. [38] Iraq is not part of the Mediterranean world; Baghdad is more than 500 miles from both Tel Aviv and Beirut.
Cole: Even medieval Islamic law recognized the right of Christians, Jews, and other monotheists to practice their religion and enjoy rights to their lives and property. This relative tolerance has often been enhanced in the twentieth century by the rise of nationalism, wherein Arab Christians sometimes are privileged as symbols of national authenticity because Christianity predated Islam in the nation's history.—August 3, 2004 [39]
MEQ: As Martin Kramer points out, "Iraqi nationalists perpetrated massacres against Iraq's Christians in 1933 and against its Jews (who also predate Islam in Iraq's history) in 1941." [40] Cole's understanding of medieval Islam is also selective. Harun al-Rashid (786-809) originated the practice—revived by the Nazis more than a millennium later—of requiring Jews to wear yellow patches. [41] The eleventh century Saljuq dynasty also required Jews to wear yellow patches and shuttered Christian-owned taverns. [42] Both Christians and Jews had to pay extortionate taxes until they converted "voluntarily" to Islam. [43] In nineteenth century Iran—within Cole's self-declared scope of expertise—Islamic clerics whipped up anti-Christian pogroms. [44] Only in the early twentieth century, did Jews and Christians win equal rights within Iran, [45] and then only briefly.
Alex Joffe is director of Campus Watch, at www.campus-watch.org.
[1] Cole received a Bachelor's degree in the history and literature of religions, Northwestern University; a master's in Arabic studies from the American University in Cairo and a Ph.D. in Islamic studies from the University of California in Los Angeles. He joined the University of Michigan in 1984 and served an abbreviated term as the director of the university's Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies.
[2] "About MESA," Middle East Studies Association website, accessed Sept. 7, 2005.
[3] Robert Haug, "An Informed Commentator," Michigan Today, Summer 2004.
[4] Cole, "Dual Loyalties," Informed Comment, Sept. 9, 2004.
[5] "Country and Related Territory Reports: Syria," Freedom in the World 2004: The Annual Survey of Political Rights and Civil Liberties (New York: Freedom House, 2004).
[6] "Country and Related Territory Reports: Israel," Freedom in the World 2004.
[7] Farid N. Ghadry, "Syrian Reform: What Lies Beneath," Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2005, pp. 61-70.
[8] On July 20, 2005, several thousand Israelis protested against unilateral disengagement.
[9] Cole, "200,000 Israeli Fascists Demand Colonization of Gaza," Informed Comment, July 26, 2004.
[10] The Jerusalem Post, May 3, 1991.
[11] The New York Times, Sept. 17, 1991.
[12] The Washington Times, Dec. 30, 2004.
[13] Cole, Informed Comment, Juan Cole website, Mar. 21, 2003.
[14] Cole, "Review of Bernard Lewis' What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response," Global Dialogue, Jan. 27, 2003.
[15] Cole, "Pentagon/Israel Spying Case Expands: Fomenting a War on Iran," Informed Comment, Aug. 29, 2004.
[16] See Harold E. Quinley and Charles Y. Glock, Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Free Press, 1979), pp. 9-10.
[17] Efraim Karsh, "Juan Cole's Bad Blog," The New Republic, Apr. 25, 2005.
[18] "The Pollard Affair Never Ended!" Executive Intelligence Review (journal of the Lyndon LaRouche movement), Sept. 8, 2002.
[19] "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," report of the Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy toward 2000, The Institute for Advanced Strategy and Political Studies, Jerusalem, 1996.
[20] Cole, "The Google Smear as Political Tactic," Informed Comment, Mar. 27, 2005.
[21] Emily Wax, "‘We Want to Make a Light Baby: Arab Militiamen in Sudan Said to Use Rape as Weapon of Ethnic Cleansing," The Washington Post, June 30, 2004.
[22] Francis M. Deng, "Sudan - Civil War and Genocide," Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2001, pp. 13-21.
[23] Cole, "Rice Doublespeak at Senate," Informed Comment, Jan. 20, 2005.
[24] Quoted in Jeffrey Goldberg, "A Little Learning," The New Yorker, May 9, 2005.
[25] Cole, "Franklin Met with Naor Gilon," Informed Comment, Aug. 31, 2004.
[26] Daniel Pipes, "Imperial Israel: The Nile-to-Euphrates Calumny," Middle East Quarterly, Mar. 1994, pp. 29-39.
[27] Cole, "London and Sharm el-Sheikh Investigations," Informed Comment, July 25, 2005.
[28] The New York Times, July 25, 2005.
[29] The Jerusalem Post, July 24, 2005.
[30] Cole, "Jerusalem and Terrorism," Informed Comment, July 11, 2005.
[31] Ma'ariv (Tel Aviv), June 23, 2004.
[32] Ben Thein, "Is Israel's Security Barrier Unique?" Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2004, pp. 25-32.
[33] Martin Kramer, "Making Cole-Slaw of History," Sandbox, July 9, 2005.
[34] Cole, "Dual Loyalties."
[35] Cole, "Top 5 Tasks Remaining in 2004 in the War on Terror," Informed Comment, Jan. 2, 2004.
[36] 9-11 Commission Report (Washington, D.C.: The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, July 22, 2004), pp. 154-160.
[37] Cole, "Constitution Still Deadlocked," Informed Comment, Aug. 8, 2005.
[38] "Lisa Ramaci-Vincent vs. Juan Cole," FrontPage Magazine, Aug. 30, 2005.
[39] Cole, "Muslim Clerics Deny Targetting [sic] of Christians," Informed Comment, Aug. 3, 2004.
[40] Martin Kramer, "Cole Turkey," Sandbox, Aug. 3, 2004.
[41] Habib Levy, Comprehensive History of the Jews of Iran, Hooshang Ebrami, ed., George W. Maschke, trans. (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda Publishers, 1999), p. 64.
[42] Levy, Jews of Iran, p. 225.
[43] Bat Ye'or, Islam and Dhimmitude (Madison, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002).
[44] Abbas Amanat, Pivot of the Universe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 82-3.
[45] Daniel Tsadik, "The Legal Status of Religious Minorities: Imami Shi‘i Law and Iran's Constitutional Revolution," Islamic Law and Society, 3 (2003): 406.
SOURCE: Weekly Standard (11-14-05)
Conquest, a British subject long resident in America, is not just a great historian, but a scholar whose original labors on the Soviet Union became part of the history of the 20th century. His seminal work The Great Terror (1968) was in its day the most searching, most fearless, most comprehensive, and most devastating account of the Stalinist purges of the 1930s that had ever been published. It still is.
Conquest was not the first to chronicle the horrors of the Soviet regime--and, of course, he was writing at a time when Stalin's heirs still ruled in the Kremlin--but until The Great Terror, neither the scope nor the magnitude of the devastation had been fully appreciated outside the Soviet empire. It goes without saying that The Great Terror, and his subsequent Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, were greeted with derision among most Kremlinologists, and among Western intellectuals generally, for their stern rebuke of Soviet apologists in Europe and America, and Conquest's insight that Stalin was no aberration but a logical consequence of Marxism-Leninism and the Bolshevik Revolution.
It is not every prophet who is honored in his adopted country, or lives to see his work so richly vindicated. The Medal of Freedom is not just a satisfying badge of achievement, but a measure of the debt we owe pioneers like Robert Conquest.
We should perhaps add a postscript: Despite the solemnity of his scholarly work and the award honoring it, Conquest is by no means a typically ponderous academic but a riotously funny versifier and wit. Asked by his publisher for a new title to a revised edition of The Great Terror, following the Soviet collapse, Conquest replied, "How about I Told You So, You F--Fools?"
SOURCE: Seattle Times (11-15-05)
Mr. Deloria, who taught at the University of Colorado from 1990 to 2000, died Sunday in Denver of complications from an aortic aneurysm, his family said. He lived in nearby Golden, Colo.
"Vine was a great leader and writer, probably the most influential American Indian of the past century — one of the most influential Americans, period," said Charles Wilkinson of the University of Colorado School of Law and an expert on Indian law.
Mr. Deloria wrote more than 20 books, but it was his first in 1969, "Custer Died for Your Sins," that brought him to the nation's attention.
In 2002, Wilkinson called it "perhaps the single most influential book ever written on Indian affairs" and described it as "at once fiery and humorous, uplifting and sharply critical."
The author's disdain for Gen. George Armstrong Custer never wavered.
"Soldiers were nothing to him, except tools," Mr. Deloria told the Los Angeles Times in 1996, describing Custer as a psychopath. "The soldiers were not defending civilization. They were crushing another society."
Publication of the powerful "Custer" book followed Mr. Deloria's 1964-67 tenure as executive director of the National Congress of American Indians. His leadership in lobbying Congress and setting forth American Indian rights issues in speeches and op-ed and other articles during the 1960s is widely credited with forcing a turning point in Indian policy.
Among Mr. Deloria's other books were "We Talk, You Listen" in 1970, "God is Red" in 1973 and "Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties" in 1974, about events leading up to the confrontation between American Indian activists and federal authorities at Wounded Knee the previous year. As an expert on Indian treaties, Mr. Deloria was a key witness for the defense in the Wounded Knee trial in St. Paul, Minn.
SOURCE: Tech Central Station (11-14-05)
JUDD: We seem to be rediscovering our history at long last. Ken Burns gave us a Civil War renaissance. David McCullough got us reading about the Revolution again. Now you've brought another too-little-remembered war to our attention. How did you get interested in the Barbary Wars?
LONDON: I first became substantively aware of the Barbary Wars when a friend suggested that the early 19th century Marine action in Tripoli would make for an interesting story. I was loosely aware that America had had a Barbary War of some sort, and knew the first line of the Marine Corps hymn, but that was about it.
The more I looked into the history, however, the more I realized how little I knew. Although I already knew large chunks of American history of the general period from independence through the war of 1812, the Barbary Wars had hardly registered in my previous readings and study.
Most contemporary histories of the general period seemed content to make no mention at all of the conflict, or to relegate the subject to a couple of trivial lines or to the footnotes. Delving deeper, I discovered that there were a few works out there that focused on the Barbary story, but they were hardly in wide circulation, and the more scholarly ones had been out of print for decades. Further, as I studied these other works, I began to realize that most of the accounts were colored by jingoism or exhibited somewhat simplistic understandings of the Mahgreb -- particularly from a post 9/11 vantage point. So once I recognized that there was a need for some better history, I took it up in earnest.
JUDD: When you started working on the book, Victory in Tripoli, were you already aware of the parallels to the War on Terror that would be there in the story? What are some of the parallels you see and what can this first encounter with Islam and terror teach us about our own?
LONDON: I did have a vague sense that America's war against Muslim piracy in North Africa held some superficial, if striking, parallels to the War on Terror. It was only as I began to sink my teeth into the details, and especially into the journals and letters of William Eaton, that I began to see just how significant aspects of this really were.
The United States encountered Islam very early in our history. America's first diplomatic encounter with Islam, in the form of John Adams' and Thomas Jefferson's meeting with the Ambassador of Tripoli to Brittan in May 1786, explicitly revealed, over two hundred years ago, the religious nature of the conflict -- the jihad -- facing the United States. That was before what we call "Colonialism" entered the lands of Islam, before there were any oil interests dragging us into the fray, and well before the founding of the State of Israel. America became entangled in that part of the world and dragged into a war with the Barbary States simply because of the religious obligation within Islam to bring belief to those who do not share it. From there, the other similarities and parallels become almost comically obvious -- the hostage crises, the arms for hostage deals, the basic sociological communications divide between Americans and Muslims, the back-handed dealings, the political calculations and expediency, etc.
Despite all of that, however, I didn't want to tell the story as a gloss on current events. I think that makes for bad history and, frankly, bad storytelling. I wanted to give a straight, completely reliable, and interesting account of this history, leaving the punditry to, well, pundits. The parallels and similarities are starkly there, I think, to anyone with an open mind....
SOURCE: NY 1 (11-10-05)
Investigators are calling 41-year-old Peter Braunstein, a freelance writer, a "person of interest" in connection with the case. [He was reportedly a candidate in history at New York University in 1997.]
According to the reports, Braunstein was already on probation for terrorizing his ex-girlfriend, who worked at the same fashion magazine as the victim.
Published reports say police have searched a Queens apartment where Braunstein either lives or once lived.
The perpetrator allegedly set a small fire in a hallway to get the victim to open her door. He then drugged and assaulted her for nearly 13 hours.
He removed her clothes, touched her body and put shoes on her feet during the encounter. Despite earlier reports, police now say there is no evidence the attacker raped the woman.
Click here for the NYT story.
SOURCE: Nixon Library Newsletter (11-14-05)
SOURCE: Ted Widmer in the NY Observer (11-13-05)
But this Norman Rockwell story was nearly thrown off track in 2002, when serious allegations of plagiarism were leveled at Ms. Goodwin. She wasn’t the only high-flying historian brought down to earth over ethics—Stephen Ambrose also borrowed from the work of others, and Joseph Ellis lied about his past. But that didn’t make the charges any less painful. Like Mr. Ellis, who profiled George Washington last year, Ms. Goodwin has scraped away some of the tarnish by writing a book about the most virtuous American. When your honesty is in doubt, there’s really only one person to turn to. Where else would George W. Bush have unfurled the “Mission Accomplished” banner but on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln?
The 19th century was terra incognita to Ms. Goodwin, darker and less telegenic than the era of the Roosevelts and the Kennedys. But she went after Lincoln with her usual pit-bull tenacity, and now, a decade after beginning the project, it’s here, all 916 pages of it.
Typically, she’s already drawn far more attention than any ordinary historian could expect. The film rights have been acquired by Stephen Spielberg. Liam Neeson (once described, disturbingly, as a “sequoia of sex”) is slated to star—and a good thing, too: In a recent interview with USA Today, Ms. Goodwin gushed over a photograph of Lincoln at age 48, cooing that he looked “vital, alive, even sexy … I don’t want to sound embarrassing, but he looks sensual.” You can be sure that when someone begins a sentence with “I don’t want to sound embarrassing,” that the rest of the sentence will do exactly that.
There will be other moments of discomfiture. Because she sits on the board of Northwest Airlines (to the tune of $25K a year), a union of striking airplane mechanics has vowed to picket her, handing out leaflets that read “The Great Emancipator Meets a Great Prevaricator.” This kind of thing simply doesn’t happen to your average historian.
But above all the background noise, there’s still a book to be read, and for admirers of Ms. Goodwin, the news is good. This is a serious biography that ranges across an immense territory. It has flaws, to be sure, and there may not be many surprises if you already know Lincoln well—although I was pleased to learn that our 16th President enjoyed bowling. Ms. Goodwin has read widely and deeply, and retains her ability to write about complicated events with a pleasing narrative that will draw in readers by the swarm....
SOURCE: Press Release (11-10-05)
Sean Wilentz for his liner notes, Bootleg Series Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, released by Legacy Recordings/Sony BMG Music Entertainment
SOURCE: Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition (11-9-05)
Laurent Dubois, associate professor at Michigan State University, will be awarded the prize for his book A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press). Focusing on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, Dubois explores the slave revolts there that brought about the 1794 abolition of slavery. His historical account sheds new light on the contradictory ways this emancipation developed, leading to its ultimate reversal in the early 19th century. On a broader scale, he examines how slaves-turned-citizens both experienced and shaped the transformations of the age.
The $25,000 annual award for the year's best non-fiction book on slavery, resistance and/or abolition, is the most generous history prize in the field, and the most respected and coveted of the major awards for the study of the black experience. The prize will be awarded at a dinner at the Yale Club of New York on February 23, 2006, as the capstone of Black History Month.
David W. Blight, director of the Gilder Lehrman Center, commented: "Laurent Dubois's Colony of Citizens is a complex, fascinating story of slave resistance in the Caribbean. The book is deeply researched in French archival sources, in ethnographical and anthropological sources and even in maps and imaginative fiction. With a focus on how the Haitian Revolution spread to Guadaloupe, Dubois transforms a seemingly local story into a much larger one about how the French Revolution itself was in part rooted in the slave systems of the West Indies. Dubois convincingly shows that slaves and free persons of color interpreted and converted republicanism to their own ends the claim of citizenship in the French empire only to have their freedom crushed again in re-enslavement."
Commented John David Smith, the Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and chair of the Frederick Douglass Prize jury: "Not since C.L.R. James in his The Black Jacobins (1938), has a scholar examined the broad nexus of revolution, slavery and emancipation as creatively and as powerfully as Dubois. A Colony of Citizens is a decidedly original, path-breaking and incredibly well-researched work that positions slavery, emancipation, re-enslavement and then eventual re-emancipation in Guadeloupe within an international framework and suggests the complex fruits of emancipation in the French Caribbean and the Atlantic World."
"This gracefully written, carefully argued, and well-documented book has important implications that transcend the time period Dubois examines and the specific events he analyzes." Smith added.
Four other books were singled out as finalists: The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia, by Claude A. Clegg III (University of North Carolina Press), Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War, by Melvin Patrick Ely (Knopf Publishers), Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving 'Port' 1727-1892, by Robin Law (Ohio University Press) and The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons and Speech, by Shane White and Graham White (Beacon Press).
This year's winning book was selected from a field of nearly 70 entries by a jury of scholars that included Colin Palmer (Princeton University) and Deborah White (Rutgers University) in addition to Smith.
The Frederick Douglass Prize was established in 1999 to stimulate scholarship in the field by honoring outstanding accomplishments. Previous winners were Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan in 1999; David Eltis, 2000; David Blight, 2001; Robert Harms and John Stauffer, 2002; James F. Brooks and Seymour Drescher, 2003; and Jean Fagan Yellin, 2004.
The award is named for Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), the onetime slave who escaped bondage to emerge as one of the great American abolitionists, reformers, writers and orators of the 19th century.
The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, a part of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, was launched at Yale in November 1998 through a generous donation by philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Its mission is to promote the study of all aspects of slavery, in particular the Atlantic slave system, including African and African-American resistance to enslavement, abolitionist movements and the ways in which chattel slavery finally became outlawed.
In addition to encouraging the highest standards of new scholarship, the GLC is dedicated to the dissemination of knowledge through publications, conferences, educational outreach and other activities. For further information on events and programming, contact the center by phone (203) 432-3339, fax (203) 432-6943, or e-mail gilder.lehrman.center@yale.edu.
SOURCE: NEH website (11-9-05)
The National Humanities Medal, first awarded in 1989 as the Charles Frankel Prize, honors individuals and organizations whose work has deepened the nation's understanding of the humanities, broadened citizens' engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand America's access to important humanities resources.
Walter Berns (Washington, D.C.), a political scientist, is a leading authority on the history of the U.S. Constitution. He is the John M. Olin University Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Berns also taught at Louisiana State University, Yale University, Cornell University, Colgate University, and University of Toronto. He earned his master's and doctorate degrees in political science at the University of Chicago and has published many works on American government and society. Among them are: Making Patriots (2001), Taking the Constitution Seriously (1987), In Defense of Liberal Democracy (1984), The First Amendment and the Future of American Democracy (1976), and Freedom, Virtue, and the First Amendment (1957). His articles have also appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Commentary, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Berns served on the National Council on the Humanities from 1982 to 1988 and the Council of Scholars in the Library of Congress from 1981 to 1985. He was also a delegate to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.
John Lewis Gaddis (New Haven, Conn.), is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of History and Political Science at Yale University. Educated at the University of Texas in Austin, Gaddis has also taught at Ohio University, the United States Naval War College, the University of Helsinki, Princeton University, and Oxford University. His books include The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (1972, second edition 2000); Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States: An Interpretive History (1978, second edition 1990); Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (1982, revised and expanded edition 2005); The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (1987); The United States and the End of the Cold War: Reconsiderations, Implications, Provocations (1992); We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1997); The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (2002); and Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (2004). His latest book, The Cold War: A New History, will appear from Penguin Press at the end of this year. Gaddis teaches Cold War history, grand strategy, international studies, and biography at Yale, where he was the 2003 recipient of the Phi Beta Kappa William Clyde DeVane Award for undergraduate teaching. He is on the advisory board of the Cold War International History Project and is currently working on a biography of George F. Kennan.
Richard Gilder (New York, N.Y.) is co-founder and co-chairman of the Gilder Lehrman Collection and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History to promote the love and study of American History, now with teaching programs in fifty states, and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale. Gilder and Lewis Lehrman are founders and sponsors of the Lincoln Prize, the Frederick Douglass Book Award, and co-sponsors of the George Washington Book Prize. In 1971, he pioneered the renovation of Central Park and in 1978 became a founding and continuing trustee of the Central Park Conservancy. He also participated in the transformation of the Hayden Planetarium and of its parent, the American Museum of Natural History, into the world-class institutions they have become. In 2003 he joined the Board of the New-York Historical Society, where he serves as co-chairman, and he is a trustee of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and the American Museum of Natural History. Gilder heads the brokerage firm Gilder, Gagnon, Howe & Co.
Alan Charles Kors (Wallingford, Pa.), has been teaching European intellectual history since 1968 at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is professor of history and holds the George H. Walker Endowed Term Chair. He has published extensively on the conceptual revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and was recently editor-in-chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, an international project published in four volumes in 2002. Kors was confirmed by the United States Senate in 1992 to the National Council on the Humanities, serving in that capacity for six years. He has served on the executive boards of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and The Historical Society, where he is on the Board of Governors. He has done two videotape and audio courses for The Teaching Company, one on "The Birth of the Modern Mind" and one on "Voltaire: The Mind of the Enlightenment." Kors has been involved in the defense of academic freedom since his arrival at the University of Pennsylvania. His colleagues at Penn have elected him four times to University and School Committees on Academic Freedom and Responsibility, and since 1998 he has been chairman of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. He has received two awards, the Lindback Foundation Award and the Ira Abrams Memorial Award, for distinguished college teaching, numerous awards for the defense of academic freedom, and, in 2005, The Conference on Value Inquiry Award for "extraordinary contributions to the appreciation and advancement of human values." He writes and lectures widely on academic life. In 1998, he coauthored, with Harvey Silvergate, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses.
Lewis Lehrman (Greenwich, Conn.), is currently a senior partner, L. E. Lehrman & Co., an investment firm he established, and the co-founder and co-chairman of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, which promotes the teaching of history in American high schools and colleges through seminars, workshops and an extensive Web site featuring original documents. Lehrman was the Cardinal Cooke honoree in 1983 of the Archdiocese of New York for his early work in developing the Inner City Scholarship Fund. He has been a trustee of the American Enterprise Institute, the Morgan Library, the Manhattan Institute and the Heritage Foundation. He is a former Chairman of the Committee on Humanities of the Yale University Council. In April of 1987, Lehrman joined Morgan Stanley & Company, investment bankers, as a senior advisor and a director of Morgan Stanley Asset Management. In 1988, he became a managing director of the firm. Lehrman has written books and articles on American history, national security, and economic and monetary policy. He has co-authored the book Money and the Coming World Order (1976). He has also written on economic, foreign policy and national security issues in publications such as Harper's, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Policy Review. He actively lectures and writes on economic and American history. He has published numerous articles on Abraham Lincoln, Alexander Hamilton, and other historical figures, in addition to teaching a seminar on Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg College. He is the managing partner of the Gilder Lehrman Collection, a national resource of American historical documents, now on deposit at the New-York Historical Society, where he is also a trustee. Lehrman is co-founder of the Lincoln Prize, given annually to the best scholarly work published on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. The Gilder Lehrman Institute is a co-sponsor of the George Washington Book Prize. Lehrman is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, which gives the annual Frederick Douglass Prize. He is chairman of The Lehrman Institute, a public policy research and grant making Foundation founded in 1972. The Lehrman Institute created The Lincoln Institute, which has promoted the study of America's 16th president--particularly through five Web sites (see: www.abrahamlincoln.org).
The Papers of George Washington (Charlottesville, Va.), was established in 1969 at the University of Virginia, under the joint auspices of the university and the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association of the Union, to publish a complete edition of Washington's correspondence. Letters written to Washington, as well as letters and documents written by him, will eventually be published in the complete edition that will consist of approximately 90 volumes. Fifty-two volumes are now finished. The new edition is supported financially by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, as well as the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association and the University of Virginia. The staff spent much of the first ten years of the project's life collecting Washington documents from repositories and private owners all over the United States and Europe. The 135,000 Washington documents now deposited in photographic form in the project's offices represent one of the richest collections of American historical manuscripts extant. There is almost no facet of research on life and enterprise in the late colonial and early national periods that will not be enhanced by material from these documents. The publication of Washington's papers will make this source material available not only to scholars, but also to all Americans interested in the founding of their nation. Theodore J. Crackel, editor-in-chief of the Papers of George Washington Project, will accept the National Humanities Medal on behalf of the project.
SOURCE: Metro Times (11-9-05)
Subtitled Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, the University of Pennsylvania historian’s 1996 book has been lauded as a milestone in contemporary American history. It resists oversimplification, but its key points are clear: The flight of jobs that began immediately after World War II was key to the fate of cities like Detroit, as were the racial barriers in employment and housing faced by their black citizens. Sugrue spoke recently to Metro Times by phone on the occasion of a new edition of Origins from Princeton University Press.
Metro Times: Your new preface begins with a visit to your father’s childhood home around Chalfonte and Santa Rosa, south of Fenkell on the West Side.
Thomas Sugrue: My grandparents’ house was still there, but there is a lot of abandonment and a lot of vacancy in that neighborhood, and — being the good social scientist that I like to be — I went back to the 2000 census and began doing some research to see what had changed in the period when my father grew up there in the 1940s and early 1950s.
I found that it was a neighborhood that in many ways was Detroit in microcosm; it was a neighborhood that had been all-white that became overwhelmingly African-American in a very short period of time in the early 1960s. It’s a neighborhood whose white residents had fiercely resisted black movement into their neighborhoods prior to the 1960s, and it’s a neighborhood that experienced white flight, disinvestment, the combined effects of land contracts and unscrupulous real estate dealings and absentee landlords that led to a deterioration of properties. It’s a neighborhood that saw its commercial district pretty much gutted from the 1960s to the present, and it was a neighborhood that had once been home to blue-collar Detroit workers, and still has some blue-collar workers, but had, in 2000, a sizable segment of the population that was unemployed and underemployed, again representing larger trends that had transformed the city.
MT: What was your gut reaction?
Sugrue: There is a sadness that I can’t help but feel when I visit neighborhoods like that. I saw some beautifully manicured lawns, some nice gardens; some kids were shooting hoops at a basketball net that they had set up on a telephone pole. So there were signs of life and vitality. But it was also a place where vacant lots and crumbling houses and a very eviscerated shopping district kind of overwhelmed the signs of hope and opportunity.
MT: Going back to the old neighborhood — and despairing — is a common experience for Detroiters of a certain age.
Sugrue: One of the reasons why I wrote Origins of the Urban Crisis was because of my conversations with folks who had grown up in Detroit who would offer easy conventional wisdom about why the city had changed. Almost all of it came down to when they moved in — they meaning African-Americans — everything went downhill. They didn’t keep up their properties. They didn’t have the same values or commitment to home ownership. They didn’t work as hard. They didn’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps. So when I visited that neighborhood, and when I began writing my book, part of my task was really to try to come up with a deeper, certainly better researched, and, I think, more compelling explanation than what still passes as conventional wisdom.
When I look at the abandoned houses and the vacant lots and the deterioration in that neighborhood, my first reaction — having written my book, and I hope my readers’ first reaction — is to see the combined impact of persistent residential segregation, discrimination in the workplace and the massive economic disinvestment that has plagued Detroit and other metropolitan areas. Those go a lot further in explaining the landscape of Detroit than arguments about the individual motivations of homeowners or people’s values and attitudes.
MT: Detroiters repeat that we’re the most segregated big metropolitan area almost like a mantra, but your book has broad relevance because Detroit is so typical of Rust Belt cities.
Sugrue: Almost all of the old industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest are highly segregated by race. Detroit happens to be extreme, but the variation between Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee and so forth is pretty small. All of them have a very long way to go before there is any degree of racial integration or racial diversity. Detroit’s is very much a story that can be retold — with variations in timing, with some variations in local detail — for Philadelphia or Cleveland or St. Louis or Oakland. The overall pattern is one that’s depressingly familiar.
MT: One of the discoveries of your Detroit research was the extent of the white homeowners movement.
Sugrue: A little-known aspect of the history of the city and of most other Northern and Midwestern cities was the deeply entrenched resistance by whites to African-Americans moving into their neighborhoods. It was resistance that played out politically in terms of whites supporting conservative politicians like Detroit’s Mayor Cobo in the 1950s, but it’s also a movement that played out in protests and violence. I found more than 200 incidents of whites protesting, picketing, breaking windows, committing arson and attacking African-Americans who were the first or second or third to move into what were formerly white neighborhoods. These organized acts of protest and resistance played a crucial role in shaping the racial divide in Detroit and the metro area at large.
MT: You called it one of the largest grassroots movements in the city’s history
Sugrue: Its history is one that is largely forgotten. I had to piece it together using a wide range of different sources: the African-American press, the records of city agencies, the records of civil rights organizations. ...
SOURCE: Frontpagemag.com (11-8-05)
FP: Victor Hanson, welcome back to Frontpage Interview.
Hanson: Thank you Jamie for having me back.
FP: In your new book, you draw some powerful and fascinating parallels between the Peloponnesian War and to our modern-day conflicts. Before we talk about that, can you first tell us a bit about the Peloponnesian War and its significance?
Hanson: It endures for roughly three reasons:
First: the war pitted two antithetical systems-cosmopolitan, democratic, Ionic and maritime Athens at its great age versus parochial, oligarchic, Dorian and landlocked Sparta-and thus became a sort of referendum on the contrasting two systems.
Second: the historian Thucydides who recorded the war was both a participant and contemporary witness and a brilliant philosopher who employed the war to illustrate his tragic view of human nature and how thin is the veneer of civilization when ripped off during plague, war, and civil discord; his descriptions of the plague, the stasis at Corycyra, the debate over Mytilene, and the Melian Dialogue then are riveting and almost literary in their power to evoke emotion.
Third: Athens lost and with its spiritual and psychological depression ended the city of Socrates, Pericles, Sophocles, Euripides, Pheidias and the dream of an enlightened democratic empire that employed its power and wealth in the service of high culture.
That has been troubling us supporters of democracies these past 2,400 years.
FP: How do you think this ancient conflict can serve as a metaphor to some of our modern conflicts, including the terror war today?
Hanson: Everything we have seen in the present global war-slaughtering schoolchildren in Beslan; murdering diplomats; taking hostages; lopping limbs; targeted assassinations; roadside killing; spreading democracy through arms-had identical counterparts in the Peloponnesian War. That is not surprising when Thucydides reminds us that the nature of man does not change, and thus war is eternal, its face merely evolving with new technology that masks, but does not alter its essence.
More importantly, Athens' tragedy reminds of us of our dilemma that often wealth, leisure, sophistication, and, yes, cynicism, are the wages of successful democracy and vibrant economies, breeding both a sort of smugness and an arrogance. And for all Thucydides' chronicle of Athenian lapses, in the last analysis, rightly or wrongly, he attributes much of Athens' defeat to infighting back at home, and a hypercritical populace, egged on by demagogues that time and again turned on their own.
So the war is also a timely reminder about the strengths-and lethal propensities-of democracies at war. And we should remember that when we hear some of the internecine hysteria voiced here at home-whether over a flushed Koran or George Bush's flight suit- when 160,000 Americans are risking their lives to ensure that 50 million can continue to vote.
FP: Your book is a first rate military account. You are clearly an expert in your understanding of strategic objectives in war. What strategic objectives and tactics would you recommend to America today in fighting the terror war in general and the Iraq war in particular?
Hanson: We need to know what our objectives are and where we wish to be when the fighting stops, and, as the failed peace during the Peloponnesian War reminds us, that it will stop only with the defeat of one side and the victory of another. After all, there is no living with a fascist jihad; in its own words, it promises to destroy all a liberal West holds dear.
Otherwise, we have a classic bellum interruptum of the Middle East or Cypriot kind, and should not ask our precious young people to die for a war we do not intend to win and perhaps should go back to the Clintonian strategy of appeasement with cruise missiles and tolerance for the occasional harvesting of diplomats and soldiers abroad. But if we wish to stop all that and to go to war, then we must be determined to win and know how to do so.
So it seems to me we must articulate our goals: the creation of a stable democratic Afghanistan and Iraq; a global coalition of Europe, India, Russia and China that establishes that Pakistan can no longer harbor terrorists, that Syria cannot promote terrorism, that Saudi Arabia cannot use its petrodollars to promote jihad; and that Iran cannot become nuclear in its pursuit of hyper-terror. We have had success and are really down to these four countries whose behavior must radically change.
We must establish a culture of ostracism for radical Islam. We are seeing that now inside Holland, Great Britain, and now apparently France as well. By that I mean we wish to create a landscape similar to what a Nazi felt in 1946 or a Stalinist saw in 1989: that the ideology is bankrupt and no one will tolerate it anymore, and praising suicide bombing in Haifa or celebrating IEDs in Iraq is the moral equivalent of calling for Waffen SS victories in WWII or praise for the Baatan Death March, which earns a person deportation from the West and social exile abroad. There is no reason, after Iran's boast to wipe out Israel, that such a country belongs in the UN, or that any civilized country would have diplomatic personnel in Teheran. It should be seen as Nazi Germany circa 1939.
We are not there yet in establishing such a moral reawakening, but these should be our ultimate military and political goals; defeat and kill terrorists in the field; pressure and isolate their national sponsors; and discredit their ideology. Do that and we win; fail and we endure the present sort of global Lebanization of seeing schoolgirls beheaded in Indonesia, or schoolchildren shot in Beslan, or schoolteachers assassinated in Iraq, beside the sick carnage from New York to New Dehli and the spectre of escalation to the nuclear level in Iran.
FP: What are your thoughts about the Left’s role in the terror war?
Hanson: I am baffled by it. After all, al Qaeda, Dr. Zawahiri, Zarqawi, and others are not 1960 communist icons like Fidel, Che, and Mao, mass murderers who deceived the gullible with their fashionable veneer of radical egalitarianism.
No, what we saw on September 11, Madrid, London, Washington, Kabul, and Baghdad is a horrific fascism-anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-modern-that is at war with all the Enlightenment had achieved. So I felt a Chomsky, Moore, and the European intellectuals would hate fascism more than they disliked the United States, and this was at last a war against real fascism that the Left could get behind.
In that, I was in error, and now grasp that whether we recall Michael Moore's comparison of the killers in Iraq to "Minutemen", or former Clinton advisor Nancy Soderberg musing about hoping we "lose" in Iraq, or recent accounts that French ministers thought a rapid US victory in Iraq would be disastrous, we can detect a broad desire on the part of the left that we should lose in Iraq. Some are candid about that, others more subtle, but it is clear that US defeat would be welcome to a variety for a variety of ways. Maybe if Al Qaeda were to go after Fidel or Hugo Chavez--in the way Hitler turned on Stalin-they would eagerly at last join the fray against the Islamic fascists.
This was not a war for Israel, not a war for oil, not a war for hegemony, but a costly dangerous, and yes, idealistic, gambit-and thus logically hated by both the palaeocons and the Scowcroft realists-for radical change in the Middle East, an end to the old pathology of backing dictators who allow terrorists to deflect popular angst against the United States. The only man of the Left who rightly fathomed that was Christopher Hitchens-a dream-come-true for proper leftists it should have been when the United States at last unleashed its formidable power to help the oppressed under the Taliban and perennially despised Kurds and Shiites. Like it or not, we are on the side on the underdogs; Sunni dictatorships, EU triangulators, and the global left, either by inaction or implicit sanction, are mostly on the side of fascists with a horrific past record.
FP: What do you think of Cindy Sheehan?
Hanson: I think she is a tragic figure who in her grief said and did things that she will soon come to regret, since she transferred her anger away from the jihadists who killed her son to the country that is trying to defeat such fascists and allow democracy for millions from Kabul to Baghdad.
The left energized her as a useful popular icon, and then when the dog days of August were past and the chill winds of November brought the next media hysteria-Libby, Rove, the Miers nominations-they dropped her.
The greater tragedy is the relative silence about the hundreds of other mothers, both of the dead in Iraq, and of the 3000 who died on September 11, whom we have forgotten in the media circus that surrounded Ms. Sheehan. Most felt anger at the Islamic fascists for their violence, not anger at the United States. So if you ask the US public which grieving mother did it know, they would reply "Sheehan" although she is not representative of the great majority that did not blame the US government for their losses. In that sense Ms. Sheehan was emblematic of a press that reports only the IEDs, but never the heroism of American soldiers, and accentuates the pessimistic, without mention of anything optimistic.
FP: How do you interpret the riots in Paris?
Hanson: In two ways: the banal take that is on everyone's lips is that France fails to integrate and assimilate its "other" due to innate aristocracy, smugness, and racism so embedded in European postmodern society. So this Parisian intifada can be a good reminder of why would not wish to create such apartheid ethnic blocks inside the United States. Paris is a wake-up call for America to get serious about illegal immigration, and begin to dismantle the machinery of ethnic separatism-bilingual government documents, etc., ethnic chauvinism in our schools, tribal set-asides, romance, crack-pot history about a mythical Atzlan, etc-and work on improving the melting pot.
But second, I was struck how few in France had the intellectual courage and integrity to ask anything of the Muslim immigrants: why did they come, why did they stay, what do they want? Obviously if life is bad in the west, North Africa is a day's voyage away; so why romanticize the culture you under no circumstances wish to return to to, but demonize the country under no conditions you wish to leave? Both the immigrant and the naturalized citizen should be asked that, and told to go half way: learn French well, the history and culture of your country, and the larger traditions of the West that you have chosen to join.
Yet when we see such inexplicable and contradictory psychological states of desire and anger, then we realize the primordial emotions are at play: hurt pride, envy, jealousy. And when you add a jobless society that offers rich unemployment benefits, then you have the worst of both worlds: just enough money to subsidize and encourage an idle cohort of angry young men, who lack the character of their fathers to sacrifice for the future, but have the time and enough money to nurse their hurts and envy with relative ease.
Even Mr. Villepin will now realize that the logical escalation of all this is for a radical cohort of these intifadists to embrace the West Bank/London route of real terror and bombing, especially if they sense French weakness and easy concession. They should read the 3rd book of Thucydides to remember the cycle of events on Corfu that spiral into something like Lebanon of the 1980s.
FP: Victor Davis Hanson, it was a pleasure to speak with you today.
Hanson: Thank you for having me again, Jamie.
SOURCE: AP (11-9-05)
Craig was "the most distinguished historian of modern Germany in this country and possibly one of the greatest in the world," colleague Peter Stansky, a retired Stanford history professor, said in a statement.
The professor was a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, and a source of information on Germany for politicians and the news media.
The scholar, born in Glasgow, Scotland, was educated at Princeton University. He taught briefly at Yale and spent 20 years at Princeton before joining Stanford in 1961. His move played an important role in the university's development, officials said.
"He was among a handful of people in the late '50s and early '60s who ... helped elevate Stanford from a good local university to a great national university," said James Sheehan, the university's Dickason Professor in the Humanities.
SOURCE: Martin Kramer at his blog, Sandstorm (11-7-05)
Consider this strident claim:"There's a ludicrous allegation that the universities are liberal. That allegation is ludicrous because huge chunks of the university which nobody ever talks about are extremely conservative by their very nature." (Notice the trademark hyperbole: ludicrous, huge, extremely.)
Khalidi mentions business and med schools, but doesn't stop there--no, he can't stop there. For Khalidi is determined to prove that there's a plot to snuff out the last embers of liberal dissent on campus. It's here that Khalidi--carried away by his rhetoric and the prodding of his radical interviewers--goes right over the top.
"Where is there a law school that's liberal?" Khalidi asks.
Well, there might be a couple of law schools that are slightly liberal. Slightly. But there's a range of opinion in most of them, and most of them are quite conservative, and many of them are extremely conservative. The University of Chicago, for example. Nobody ever talks about that.
Does Khalidi have even a clue as to who populates the faculty of America's law schools? A new study, the final version of which is about to appear in the Georgetown Law Journal, has researched the campaign contributions ($200 or more) of professors at America's top 21 law schools over eleven years. 81 percent of contributing profs gave wholly or predominantly to Democrats; only 15 percent gave wholly or mostly to Republicans."Academics tend to be more to the left side of the cont inuum," commented the dean of Northwestern's law school on the study."It's a little worse in law school."
And what about the University of Chicago's law school, which Khalidi cites as his prime example of an"extremely conservative" school? A study of the party political affiliation of law faculty has established that Chicago's law profs include 55 Democrats and 8 Republicans--a ratio of about 7 to 1. (That's only" conservative" by the standards of Columbia, where the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is 12 to 1.)
Alright, you say, so Khalidi probably doesn't kno w much about law schools. But how about schools of international relations and international affairs? He should definitely know the score there, right? After all, at the University of Chicago he directed the Center for International Studies. At Columbia, he directs the Middle East Institute, part of the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). So here he goes:"Most schools of international affairs are conservative (i.e., security studies). They're not extremely conservative, necessarily, but they're certainly not left-liberal or liberal." Certainly not.
Now as it happens, the current issue of Foreign Policy has an article summarizing the findings of a fall 2004 survey of international relations faculty. The survey asked them this question:"How would you describe your political philosophy?" This is how the the researchers summed up the answer to this and other questions:
Sixty-nine percent of international relations professors, describe themselves as liberal; a scant 13 percent see themselves as conservative. They overwhelmingly opposed the U.S. war in Iraq, almost unanimously believe that the United States is less respected in the world because of it, and they think that this loss of respect poses a significant problem for U.S. foreign policy. Seventy-seven percent of them support free trade, and only 10 percent believe the United States should beef up its military budget.
So Khalidi's claim that"most schools of international affairs are conservative," and that"they're certainly not left-liberal or liberal," is also fact-free (perhaps"ludicrous" would be the right word).
All this leaves one wondering just what's going on in Khalidi's head. The answer, of course, is that Khalidi is a radical. If you're a campus radical, you dismiss anyone who isn't totally with you as a" conservative" or an"extreme conserva tive." You may be surrounded by people who view themselves as liberals, who opposed the Iraq war, who believe in"soft power." But because they won't denounce America as a resurrected empire or rally to the likes of Joseph Massad, you cast them all as" conservatives" who are part of the problem.
That's why I've never understood the willingness of liberals to see Khalidi as a"friendly." Behind their backs, to his soulmates at the Radical History Review, he trashes them contemptuously. He's most dismissive the liberal university administrators (you know, the ones who've provided him with job after job). He t hinks they too are conservative drones, who haven't done enough to defend academic freedom:
The institutions are all cautious and conservative. And everybody is worried about alienating this senator, or that committee, or this department of government, because the universities are deeply dependent on the government... This university won't do it because the president feels this way, that university may not because they have a Republican governor who will be angry.
Given that some of these timid liberals have gone out of their way to help radical Rashid shimmy up the academic pole, he probably regards them as useful idiots. He'd be right.
SOURCE: AP (11-9-05)
But for Doris Kearns Goodwin, the Great Hall is a landmark graced by history: Abraham Lincoln was here. He stood on that stage and spoke in early 1860, an address that established him as a national candidate, not just an Illinois lawyer and orator, and helped get him elected.
"You can't imagine what it's like for somebody who has tried to bring him to life to know he was actually here," she says, looking toward the back of the room, where a portrait of Lincoln hangs.
For the past decade, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian has dwelled with the spirit of Lincoln, the most scrutinized of all American presidents. It was a needed break for Goodwin from a time when she herself was scrutinized. Her new book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, has just been published by Simon & Schuster ($35).
Three years ago, well into the Lincoln book, Goodwin acknowledged a Weekly Standard report that her 1987 release The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys contained sections of text taken without attribution from another author, Lynne McTaggart.
Goodwin, 62, has said the copying was accidental, the result of a longhand note-taking system that didn't distinguish between her own observations and passages from other texts. Both she and McTaggart said they had reached a settlement years earlier that included an undisclosed payment and revisions to Goodwin's book.
But the controversy grew. After discovering additional passages that closely paralleled the original sources, Goodwin ordered the book removed from stores and promised a new edition, which has yet to be written.
'More important'
"I just got right back to this (the Lincoln book), which was more important," says Goodwin, who has no plans to revise her work until after her tour.
Once the most public of historians, especially after winning the Pulitzer in 1995 for No Ordinary Time, a portrait of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt during World War II, she became untouchable. Numerous colleges withdrew offers for speaking engagements.
She resigned from the Pulitzer board and stopped appearing on PBS' Newshour With Jim Lehrer.
She apologized, defended herself and relied, more than ever, upon history. If the scandal didn't actually affect the content of Team of Rivals, it did make her that much happier while writing it.
"All along I felt an enormous attachment to the book and, more important, an attachment to him," she says. Whatever damage she caused herself, it has not lowered expectations for her new book, which contains more than 100 pages of source notes. Simon & Schuster announced a first printing of 400,000 copies, and Team of Rivals quickly entered the top 10 on Amazon.com. Steven Spielberg has acquired film rights.
She remains highly respected among her peers, with Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Sean Wilentz and Robert Dallek among those who defended her.
Besides reaffirming the public's trust in her integrity, Goodwin's greatest task is reaffirming interest in Lincoln, the subject of more than 1,000 books. Her approach was a group biography in which his rise is set against the lives of three former political rivals who became Cabinet members after the 1860 election: William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase and Edward Bates.
As Goodwin notes, all three foes were better known and seemingly more qualified to be president than Lincoln, who had never held high political office. But Lincoln overlooked competing ambitions, past insults and other political sins, and assembled a Cabinet unusual for its depth of experience and diversity of opinions.
"The qualities of decency and compassion and empathy and kindness are, in the hands of a great politician, great political resources," she says....
SOURCE: NYT (11-6-05)
SOURCE: Emory Wheel (11-4-05)
David Garrow, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., was charged with simple battery in 2002, after then-Law School Senior Manager of Operations Gloria Mann filed criminal and civil charges against Garrow, saying he grabbed her wrists, pushed and verbally assaulted her.
Garrow went on voluntary leave in 2002 and officially resigned on Aug. 31 of this year. He has since joined the faculty at Homerton College, University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and moved there with his wife in September.
Jeff Brickman, an attorney who represents Garrow in the criminal trial, declined to give details about the case, except to say that the legal teams hope to resolve the charges within the coming weeks.
“The case is currently pending in the DeKalb County solicitor’s office, and we have been in negotiations with them in an effort to resolve this case in a manner satisfactory to both parties,” he said.
Keith Lindsay, Garrow’s attorney for the civil trial, said the civil charges also should be resolved soon, though he declined to give any further details about the nature of a resolution.
Mann no longer works at the university, and neither she nor her attorneys could be reached for comment.
Garrow would not comment on the case’s anticipated conclusion. But he said any parallels between the start of his position at Cambridge and the end of his legal entanglement in the United States are coincidental.
“It’s just the happenstance of the timing,” he said in an interview with the Wheel.
Garrow said he did not discuss the case with his new employers but that he “knew the appropriate human resources officials were aware of it.”
Garrow’s official resignation from Emory resolves a three-year question about the university’s relationship with its prize-winning former professor.
Though Garrow went on voluntary leave from the university and moved to Ohio soon after being charged with assaulting Mann, he continued to publish articles in which he was listed as an Emory faculty member.
The university issued a statement about Garrow’s status in late 2004, which said only that “Garrow is on voluntary leave for an indefinite period of time.”
Garrow said he originally left Atlanta to be with his wife, who had accepted a position at Ohio State University. He said he pursued the Cambridge job after his wife was offered a position there.
