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: The Australian (1-19-06)
Windschuttle ignited Australia's immensely entertaining history wars with his 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One, Van Diemen's Land. This was a research-based critique of the work of academic historians. It effectively demolished their consensus that 19th-century European settlers launched a bloody war of extermination against Aborigines in Tasmania.
As well as demonstrating that no such war took place, Windschuttle pointed to many errors of fact in the published work of individuals. Some were the result of carelessness. But in significant instances original sources were selectively quoted or misquoted, with a few texts actually rewritten, in order to advance an ideological thesis.
Historians under scrutiny responded with vehement excess that I was not alone in finding rather shocking. Not all ad hominem attacks on Windschuttle were well-aimed. One description, intended to be pejorative, branded him a "freelance" historian.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines "freelance", in contemporary usage, as one who works for himself, not an employer and, "in any department or practice of speculation, follows the method of no particular school".
Windschuttle, the modern freelance, originally intended to write a trilogy. He now believes he has accumulated so much information that it will take at least four books to cover the ground. Volume Two, dealing with historical accounts of events in NSW and southern Queensland, will come out in the next 12 months.
This time around, historians who take offence would do well to remember that Windschuttle is a publisher as well as a writer.
Whitewash, a collection of essays edited by Robert Manne, was their hostile response to Volume One, and it suffered grievous injury at the hands of John Dawson, another freelance whose counterblast, Washout, was published by Windschuttle's Macleay Press.
Getting a bit lost recently, with reviewers in holiday mode, was a new Macleay book, The Invention of Terra Nullius by Michael Connor, whom Windschuttle met while researching Van Diemen's Land and Connor was completing his PhD in Australian colonial history at the University of Tasmania.
The Invention of Terra Nullius is intensely researched and combative.
Connor begins his narrative by quoting Bain Attwood, associate professor of history at Monash University: "The British government determined in 1785 that New Holland was terra nullius, that is, no man's land."
Resuming in his own voice, Connor declares: "No. The decision to make a settlement in New South Wales was taken in 1786, and terra nullius was never mentioned."
SOURCE: Andrew Cockburn in the Nation (1-30-06)
"Within half an hour," Scagliotti remembers, "there was a knock at the front door, and there was a man who said, 'I hear you have phone problems.' Now, I am a gay man. I know what a phone service repairman is meant to look like. The phone man is a gay icon. Tool belt, jeans, work shirt, work boots. This man has a madras shirt, Dockers, brown loafers. He goes to an outside junction box, and a few minutes later the phone is working. Off he goes."
A month later, in the course of a complaint to the phone company about an unusually high bill, Scagliotti suggests that the trouble may have stemmed from something the repairman did. After further checking, the phone company tells him they never sent a repairman that day.
As it happened, shortly thereafter Said's assistant called in to say he was too sick to make the five-hour drive from New York. But had he done so, we can opine with near certainty that the FBI would have been ready to monitor whatever calls he may have placed from rural Vermont. The reason for the near certainty is that we now know that the bureau began spying on Said more than thirty years earlier.
David Price is a professor of anthropology at St. Martin's University in Washington State. As anyone glancing through his excellent book Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists will know, Price is expert at getting secret government documents through the Freedom of Information Act. Last year, on behalf of the newsletter CounterPunch (which I co-edit), Price requested the FBI's file on Said.
The FBI released to Price 147 pages of Said's 238-page FBI file. Large sections of the file remain blacked out, with stamps indicating they remain Classified Secret until 2030, twenty-five years after their initial FOIA processing. Most of the file, Price tells us, documents FBI surveillance of Said's legal, public work with American-based Palestinian political or pro-Arab organizations, while other portions of the file document the FBI's ongoing investigations of his contacts with other Palestinian-Americans.
The FBI's first record of Edward Said appears in a February 1971 domestic security investigation of another (unidentified) person. The FBI collected photographs of Said from the State Department's passport division and various news agencies. Said's "International Security" FBI file was established when an informant gave the FBI a program from the October 1971 Boston Convention of the Arab-American University Graduates, where Said chaired a panel on "Culture and the Critical Spirit."
In the months after the Black September attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics, there was a flurry of FBI interest in Said and other Palestinian-Americans. In early October 1972, the New York FBI office investigated Said's background and citizenship information as well as voting, banking and credit records. Employees at Princeton and Columbia universities secretly--and shamefully--gave FBI agents biographical and educational information on Said, and the Harvard University alumni office provided the FBI with detailed information.
Some will say that since he was a politically active Palestinian, and also a member (before he broke with Arafat) of the Palestinian National Council, Said was a legitimate object of concern for the FBI, and the bureau would have been remiss not to have kept an eye on him. But labeling Said as a friend of Arafat misses the point that the FBI's surveillance of this US citizen found absolutely no evidence that he broke any laws--not even jaywalking or taping songs from the radio. As Price says, "FBI action needs to be based on demonstrable wrongdoing, not thought crimes or having unpopular friends. The American right perhaps understands this better than the left, and given the anti-Bush flutter I'm hearing on talk radio, they seem to understand the threat to democracy represented in unfettered surveillance expeditions."
Another way of viewing the FBI's surveillance of Said is in the context of its surveillance and harassment of other prominent activists, people like Martin Luther King Jr., who advocated lawful democratic solutions to problems of social justice. Price: "Had the federal government chosen to support rather than harass and monitor activists willing to work within extant systems, like Said and King, they could have precluded the coming of more radical and violent efforts. In effect, the FBI's surveillance and harassment of Said creates the conditions for the development of more violent efforts to resolve the Palestinian problem. If you spy on and block those advocating reason, you are aiding and abetting those who will follow with violence."
Because the FBI has yet to release the whole Said file, says Price, "we don't know what they are withholding, but I wonder if it doesn't show the sort of illegal wiretapping and surveillance we now know President Bush has illegally charged the NSA to conduct on an unknown number of Americans. The FBI's unusual step in reclassifying these files for another quarter-century raises the very real possibility that they did this to hide just what steps they were taking to spy on Said. I'll challenge this in an in-house review and my lawyer is gearing up for a suit in federal court to get a judge to look and see if the FBI was illegally spying on an American who was breaking no laws."
Reprinted with permission from the Nation. For subscription information call 1-800-333-8536. Portions of each week's Nation magazine can be accessed at http://www.thenation.com.
SOURCE: LAT (1-18-06)
"Exposing UCLA's Radical Professors" initiative takes aim at faculty "actively proselytizing their extreme views in the classroom, whether or not the commentary is relevant to the class topic."
The group's recent campaign has upset a number of targeted professors and triggered the resignation last weekend of Harvard historian Stephan Thernstrom, a prominent affirmative action opponent and former UCLA professor, from the advisory board for Jones' organization.
Thernstrom said he joined the alumni group's more than 20-member advisory board last year because he believed it "had a legitimate objective of combating the extraordinary politicization of the faculty on elite campuses today."
Still, Thernstrom said, "I felt it was extremely unwise, one, to put out a list of targets of investigation and to agree to pay students to provide information about what was going on in the classroom of those students. That just seems to me way too intrusive. It seems to me a kind of vigilantism that I very much object to."
Thernstrom said a fellow advisory board member, Jascha Kessler, an emeritus UCLA English professor, also resigned for the same reason. Kessler could not be reached for comment, but Jones confirmed that Kessler had resigned.
SOURCE: Der Spiegal (1-18-06)
At night, when the pale winter sun has slipped behind the rooftops of Vienna's Josefstadt district, a jungle comes to life in the prison yard at the city's old Imperial-era prison. "That's when they start yelling from the windows and talking to one another," says David Irving, "it all begins at nightfall, just like in the jungle."
AP
David Irving
The elderly gentleman in a suit and tie who sits down behind the plate glass window in the prison's visitors' room doesn't seem to belong here. But, despite his appearance, David Irving seems to have settled in quite nicely. According to the prison's administration, Irving, who is here in detention awaiting trial, gets along well with the other prisoners. If only they could all be so polite, says a guard, clearly impressed by Irving's model behavior.
Irving, 67, appears cheerful and focused and says he is being treated well. Occasionally he does betray a penchant for hyperbole, though. "Someone sent me ink, thank God," he says. Irving is writing his memoirs, 20 pages a day. There is little else to do for a writer behind bars, and there's a tradition about writing while incarcerated. "Perhaps I should call it 'Mein Krieg' ('My War')," says Irving, grinning on his side of the plate glass divider. His daughter finds it "cool that Daddy is in prison," he adds, and one has the impression that Daddy himself still sees the whole thing as part of an adventure. David Irving is a man marooned on the fringes of society, but adventure is part of his business.
Before leaving London for Austria, he left behind 60 blank checks and packed eight shirts, even though the trip was only scheduled to take two days. He is always prepared for anything, says Irving, meaninfully raising his bushy eyebrows. "Be prepared," the motto of the Boy Scouts, is apparently also his motto.
He knew that there was a warrant for his arrest in Austria. In 1989, then Chancellor Franz Vranitzky personally threatened Irving with immediate arrest if he ever showed his face in Austria again. But the stubborn Hitler apologist saw Vranitzky's threat as an invitation to return to Austria as quickly as possible. "I come from a family of officers," he growls from behind the plate glass, "we march towards cannon fire." But he did make a mistake when it came to picking suitable shoes. Prisoners are allowed to walk in the prison yard every day, but Irving has, "unfortunately, only one pair of very expensive shoes," and they're slowly falling apart.
He plans to have his pinstripe suit sent to him for his trial on February 20. It's Irving's battle outfit, the same suit he had made by the most expensive Savile Row tailor for his London trial six years ago. This polite Anglo-Saxon treats Holocaust denial in the same way his countrymen treat rugby: a sport for hooligans, played by gentlemen.
The self-confident, self-taught writer has always enjoyed causing uproar, especially among mainstream historians, ever since the 1960s when he began digging up documents written by Hitler's cohorts. Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel's memoirs, SS leader Adolf Eichmann's notes, Hitler's propaganda minister Josef Goebbels' diaries -- the media-savvy author has been adept at marketing his finds to the public and promoting his own works. His sensationally written and extensively documented biographies of leading Nazi figures were bestsellers up until the 1980s.
Despite admiration for Irving's detective skills, his work increasingly came under fire after 1977, when his biography of Hitler was published. A respected military historian until then, Irving quickly became Hitler's willing discoverer, using his finds to prove the guilt of Himmler, Heydrich and others while claiming that his revered Führer was entirely blameless.
Irving, who was still giving lectures in the fading East Germany in 1990 under the title "A Briton fights for the honor of the Germans," chose contemporary history and not politics as his pulpit. "Standing in front of 10,000 people who waited an entire day, and who are now sitting on hard benches drinking their beer, waiting for you to speak -- that's the ultimate reward," he said in 1992 during a speaking tour. Auschwitz expert Robert van Pelt considers Irving hysterical. "He's quite a good speaker, but he gets his energy from his audience, and he tells them what they want to hear."
SOURCE: Press Release -- Rutgers University (1-18-06)
Professor Emeritus McCormick, who first came to Rutgers as an undergraduate in 1934, served the university community and the state of New Jersey with distinction for more than 60 years as a professor of history, university historian, dean of Rutgers College and president of the New Jersey Historical Society. Dr. McCormick was an internationally recognized expert in New Jersey history and American political history and was instrumental in the establishment of several influential historical organizations, including the New Jersey Historical Commission, the New Jersey State Historical Records Advisory Board and the New Jersey Tercentenary Commission.
Historian Michael J. Birkner – author of “McCormick of Rutgers: Scholar, Teacher, Public Historian” – said in 2001: “You can’t read New Jersey history … without reading McCormick.” He also said Dr. McCormick was one of the “few people who I’ve met who speaks in perfect paragraphs. He’s a remarkably articulate man.”
“Richard P. McCormick was one of the luminaries of the Rutgers history department,” said longtime colleague Paul Clemens, associate chair of the history department. “I met him when I was first hired at Rutgers in 1974. He befriended me from the time I arrived. I drove out to see him only last week. We had an hour-long conversation, a wonderful conversation. I promised to come back. I didn’t think it would be so soon.”
Dr. McCormick passed away on Jan. 16, 2006, surrounded by members of his family, including his son, Rutgers University President Richard L. McCormick. In addition to his son, Dr. McCormick is survived by his wife of 60 years, Katheryne Levis McCormick; their daughter, Dorothy Boulia; three grandchildren, Christopher Kelly, Betsy McCormick and Michael McCormick; and his sister, Winifred Altwater.
Born Dec. 24, 1916, in Queens, N.Y., Richard Patrick McCormick graduated from Tenafly, N.J., High School in 1933. Dr. McCormick earned his bachelor’s degree in history from Rutgers College in 1938, where he was elected to membership in Phi Beta Kappa. Dr. McCormick went on to earn his master’s degree in history from Rutgers’ Graduate School-New Brunswick in 1940.
After studying for his doctoral degree at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. McCormick returned to Rutgers in 1945 and began teaching full time in the history department. He received his doctorate from Penn in 1948, the same year he was appointed Rutgers University Historian. Also that year, Dr. McCormick inaugurated a full-year course at Rutgers on New Jersey history.
During 1961-62, Dr. McCormick was a Fellow of Jesus College, the University of Cambridge. He also served as research adviser to Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia and as a member of the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission.
A prolific writer of history, Dr. McCormick published nine books and more than 40 articles. His books included “New Jersey from Colony to State, 1609-1789”; “The Second American Party System: Party Formation in the Jacksonian Era”; and “The Presidential Game: The Origins of American Presidential Politics.” He was widely regarded as among the most influential historians of 18th- and 19th-century American politics.
Dr. McCormick also was the author of “Rutgers, a Bicentennial History,” which documents Rutgers’ growth from a Colonial-era college into one of the nation’s finest public universities. This work was awarded the biennial book prize from the American Association for State and Local History in 1968.
In addition to his scholarly achievements, Dr. McCormick served Rutgers in a number of prominent academic and administrative positions. He was chair of the history department from 1966 to 1969, chair of the Rutgers College Coeducation Committee in 1971 and dean of Rutgers College from 1974 to 1977.
In 1969, Dr. McCormick chaired a special faculty committee to address issues raised by African-American students at Rutgers in the wake of protests on the Newark, New Brunswick and Camden campuses. Among other initiatives, Dr. McCormick and fellow faculty members convinced their colleagues to contribute 1 percent of their salaries to create a special fund to assist at-risk students in the transition from high school to college. In recognition of these efforts, this past fall the Rutgers College Educational Opportunity Fund created the Richard P. McCormick Social Justice Award.
In 1974, Dr. McCormick was named a University Professor of History by the Rutgers Board of Governors.
Although he formally retired from teaching in 1982, Dr. McCormick continued to be an active and gracious member of the university community. “View from the Inside,” an interview with Dr. McCormick conducted by University Archivist Thomas J. Frusciano, appears in the current issue of Rutgers Magazine.
Dr. McCormick said in that interview: “Now, in 2006, we have one of the largest student bodies of any university in the country and are known for our diversity, as a place that reaches out to those in need, and for some of the best faculty and academic departments anywhere. What was once a sleepy little campus today educates people who will have an enormous impact in their communities, and on the state and nation.”
Upon his retirement from Rutgers, Dr. McCormick was awarded an honorary doctor of letters degree by the university, a rare distinction for a faculty member. In 1990, he was inducted into the Rutgers Hall of Distinguished Alumni.
The American Historical Association honored Dr. McCormick with the 2002 Award for Scholarly Distinction – the most prestigious award presented by the association – in recognition of his lifetime contribution to historical scholarship.
After living most of his adult life in Piscataway, Dr. McCormick moved with his wife Katheryne to Bridgewater in Somerset County in 2003.
A memorial service honoring Dr. McCormick’s life and accomplishments will take place in the Rutgers Kirkpatrick Chapel at 3 p.m. Thursday, March 9, 2006. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the Rutgers University Libraries in memory of Dr. Richard P. McCormick, and sent to the Rutgers University Foundation, 7 College Ave., New Brunswick, N.J. 08901.
Established in 1766, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is America’s eighth oldest institution of higher learning and one of the nation’s premier public research universities, serving more than 50,000 students on campuses in Camden, Newark and New Brunswick/Piscataway.
SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education (1-16-06)
Now the academic world has yielded up its own fabrication, this one involving neo-Nazis, a white supremacist radio show, a professor's firing, and a flap over academic freedom. But this time the unmasking was self-inflicted.
Last March, Jacques Pluss was fired from his job as an adjunct professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University soon after it came to light that he was a prominent member of the National Socialist Movement of the United States. This weekend, in an online essay titled "Now It Can Be Told: Why I Pretended to Be a Neo-Nazi," Mr. Pluss purports to reveal his true intentions in joining the white supremacist group: He did it all for scholarship. ...
He said in an interview with The Chronicle on Friday that no one, not even his fiancée, could corroborate his account of his intentions during that time.
"Revealing my research to others would have meant intellectualizing it to myself," he writes in his essay. "I would have lifted my psyche from its necessary emotional context. As much as was possible, I had to assume the role."
Perhaps the strangest part of Mr. Pluss's account is his claim that he engineered his own dismissal from Fairleigh Dickinson in order to suffer the kind of public marginalization often experienced by neo-Nazis. "I realized that if I were going to experience the white power movement in America I was going to have to have something happen to me on a professional level," he said in the interview. "It was not going to be enough just to hang back and make the radio show and exchange emails with people."
SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed (1-16-06)
In March, Pluss was fired from his position as an adjunct professor of history at Fairleigh Dickinson University shortly after it became known that he had become a leader of the National Socialist Movement of the United States, which is also known as the American Nazi Party. Students and colleagues at the New Jersey institution were stunned, but Pluss could be heard on Nazi radio broadcasts and made racist and anti-Semitic comments to reporters covering his dismissal.
Today, in an article being published on the History News Network, Pluss explains that he was never a real Nazi, but pretended to be one and outed himself so that Fairleigh Dickinson would fire him — all to collect material so he could write a book.
In an interview, Pluss explained why he became a Nazi by saying: “I do not believe that any historian can fully grasp the actual spirit that is the essence of their subject unless they participate in it, and that participation has to come in as full a manner as possible.”...
He stressed that he finds Nazi ideology offensive. He said that he realizes his approach upset his former colleagues and students at Fairleigh Dickinson; at William Paterson University, where he previously was a tenured professor of history; and at the University of Chicago, where he earned his Ph.D. Pluss said that he couldn’t tell anyone about his deception as that would have disturbed his “method acting approach.”
He said he did make one exception: He told his mother, who he said was Jewish and who recently died, that he was faking his Nazi ties. (Pluss said that his one-time Nazi colleagues never learned that he had a Jewish parent, and that he does not practice any religion.)
A spokeswoman for Fairleigh Dickinson said that officials there did not have any comment on the latest revelations from Pluss. She said she did not know of anyone at the university who was aware of the deception.
Rick Shenkman, editor of the History News Network, said today’s article came about when Pluss contacted him to complain about being listed on the Web site’s “Historians on the Hot Seat” list of scholars involved in various scandals.
Shenkman said that Pluss was surprised that his October resignation from the Nazi organization hadn’t been noticed or led to his removal from the list....
SOURCE: Press of Atlantic City (1-17-06)
McCormick died Monday after an extended illness, the university said in a statement Tuesday.
He first arrived at the public university in 1934 as an undergraduate, and, with the exception of a stay at the University of Pennsylvania to earn his doctoral degree in the 1940s, McCormick spent most of his career at Rutgers.
During his tenure, he served as a history professor, university historian, dean of Rutgers College and president of the New Jersey Historical Society.
"Richard P. McCormick was one of the luminaries of the Rutgers history department," said Paul Clemens, associate chairman of the department, in a statement.
McCormick is survived by his wife; his son, university president Richard L. McCormick; a daughter, a sister and three grandchildren.
SOURCE: NYT (1-15-06)
The cause was complications of skin cancer, his nephew William Kristol said.
Mr. Himmelfarb was a member of an astonishingly accomplished intellectual clan with working-class and liberal roots that evolved into neoconservative royalty. His younger sister, Gertrude Himmelfarb, is a historian of Victorian thought who has criticized the distortion of American scholarship by deconstruction and other fashionable schools of thought. His brother-in-law, Irving Kristol, is a founder of neo-conservatism; and his nephew is the founding editor of the influential conservative periodical The Weekly Standard....
Perhaps Mr. Himmelfarb's best-known essay was "No Hitler, No Holocaust," published in a 1984 issue of Commentary, in which he confronted historians who attributed the Holocaust to larger socioeconomic forces and shrugged off the role of demonic individuals.
"Hitler willed and ordered the Holocaust, and was obeyed," he wrote. "Traditions, tendencies, ideas, myths - none of these made Hitler murder the Jews. All that history, all those forces and influences could have been the same and Hitler could as easily, more easily, not have murdered the Jews."
SOURCE: Atlanta Journal-Constitution (1-14-06)
Thirty years later, the Georgia State University historian is still trying to shed light on the city's worst outbreak of racial violence. "Most Atlantans have never heard of it," he says.
This year marks the centennial of the riot, in which thousands of whites rampaged through downtown Atlanta attacking black people at random. At least two dozen were killed, according to historical accounts.
On Sunday, Kuhn will lead an hourlong walking tour of sites associated with the riot. It's part of a year of events sponsored by the Coalition to Remember the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot (www.1906atlantaraceriot.org), a group representing the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site and numerous other institutions in the city. The tour begins at 1 p.m. under the gazebo in Woodruff Park, near where the bloodletting began.
Five Points, shown in a postcard from a decade after the riot, was the center of the violence. The caption calls Peachtree 'The White Way', a reference to street lighting, not race.
The mob laid bodies of its victims at the base of the Henry Grady monument on Marietta Street.
SOURCE: The Guardian (London) (1-17-06)
He was fast, fluent, accurate and - beneath a forbidding carapace - a widely read and civilised man. A friend recalls him in a hotel room in some colonial outpost where a big story had broken, stripped to his underpants and fuelling himself with beer as he fired off copy in perfectly rounded sentences to papers and radio stations across the globe. An imposing presence with a craggy, lived-in face - more John Wayne than Gregory Peck - he did his national service as a Royal Marine commando and parachutist. The "wings" on his broad chest caught the eyes of the girls.
His big stories as a BBC TV reporter included a 13-minute, mainly ad-libbed, report from Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972 (which won a Cannes TV Festival award), the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971 and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974. His final incarnation as a historian was pursued in the Mediterranean calm of a Cypriot farmhouse - he liked to describe himself as a "palm-tree man". The military historian Sir John Keegan wrote of Alamein: War Without Hate (2002), which Bierman co-authored with fellow journalist Colin Smith: "Few historians write as fluently as they do; few journalists achieve their standards of accuracy and inclusiveness."
Bierman was born within the sound of Bow Bells in London. His father, an antiques dealer, beat a hasty exit, and his mother, who ran a dress shop, paid attention to her son only when in funds. Largely raised by his grandparents, and evacuated from London during the second world war, he had, therefore, a peripatetic childhood that ideally prepared him for life as a globetrotting reporter. His love of the English language was acquired young. Despite attending 16 schools, he had a sound basic education, and could recite long passages of poetry.
He revelled in the bohemian London of his youth - the story goes that Dylan Thomas was once sick over his new suede shoes - and he knew the music hall songs of the era. At the time of his death, he was engaged on a memoir of this period with the working title Guttersnipes.
Bierman learned his craft the old-fashioned way, in the provinces. In 1954, he took off for Canada, where he worked on several papers and married. Back in England, he became a Fleet Street sub-editor on the Mirror and the Express, rising rapidly to the Express backbench, where senior subeditors called the shots. The hours were long, and the after-hours spent in the then newspaper fashion of drinking till the morning buses rolled.
...
Bierman himself was of Ukrainian/ Jewish stock, but totally secular. Despite having lived and worked in Israel, he did not darken the door of a synagogue until he attended a friend's wedding late in life. He is survived by Hilary and Jona- than, and by two daughters and a son from his first marriage, which ended in divorce.
SOURCE: The Guardian (London) (1-17-06)
Even so, you should be careful about taking Jardine at face value. After surgery, followed by gruelling courses of radio and chemotherapy, out for most people means out. With Jardine it's not that simple. She says that her year of cancer treatment gave her the time and space to reassess her priorities, but, when you press her, it's hard to see what impact it did have on her working life. She didn't stop either her teaching, or her research. "Queen Mary (the University of London college where she works) was wonderful to me."
So what did change? She thinks for a while. "I suppose I have got better at saying no to things I don't want to do, more quickly."
Her official titles are centenary professor of renaissance studies at Queen Mary and director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters - also at Queen Mary - but these scarcely do her justice. Her writing and research credits are four times longer than even most successful academics; she speaks French, Italian, Dutch, Modern Greek, Ancient Greek, Latin and some Hebrew; and - a piece de resistance for a history and English scholar - she's picked up the Royal Society medal for popularising science and is on the governing body of the Royal Institution.
Where some academics might have used a serious illness to reflect on a career well done, her initial response was of disappointment. "Faced with losing everything, you can't help but look back on your life so far," she says. "And my feeling was that I hadn't done enough. I want to do more, much more, and my resolution at the start of the current academic year was to work faster.
"What I really want is to produce a research book, such as Simon Schama's Embarrassment of Riches or Jung Chang's Wild Swans, that stops the informed reading public in its tracks. My books on Erasmus and Wren did grab their attention, but I still don't feel that I've managed to write about the ideas that matter to me in a way people can properly share with me."
Jardine hopes she will achieve this with her next major book, on Anglo-Dutch relations, which will be published in roughly four years' time. "All my big, familiar themes are there," she says. "I'll try to show that the strands of history are woven so tightly together that there is no idea of nationhood, that there is no concept of the Orient as a mysterious other and that one cannot isolate faiths."
SOURCE: HNN (1-15-06)
Click here to read the story--"Now It Can Be Told: Why I Pretended to Be a Neo-Nazi":
http://hnn.us/articles/20313.html
Unanimously recommended for funding by an NEH panel of experts, which gave Stein's proposal for"The U.S. Supreme Court's Sexual Revolution? 1965-1973" its highest possible ratings, Stein's proposal was vetoed by NEH Chair Bruce Cole. When Stein applied again in the next funding cycle, he was rejected again, this time based on allegations about his"personal agenda." HNN featured Stein's article on our homepage.
Following the publication of his paper other scholars joined Stein in criticizing the NEH, as reported by Inside Higher Education:
Other historians are joining Marc Stein's attack on the fairness of the National Endowment for the Humanities, claiming that the NEH discriminates against queer studies scholarship.
Stein's attack published on HNN and presented as a paper at the American Historical Association this past weekend was widely discussed at the history meeting, with other gay scholars saying that he had demonstrated that their work was being unfairly evaluated and excluded.
“It’s absolutely appalling,” said Leisa D. Meyer, chair of the AHA’s Committee on Gay and Lesbian History and a professor of history and women’s studies at the College of William and Mary. “It’s really dangerous the way the NEH is held hostage.”
In an interview Sunday, Erik Lokkesmoe, a spokesman for the endowment, said that Stein’s assumptions were incorrect and that there was no bias against work in gay studies. “The only litmus test we have is excellence,” he said, adding that he would encourage gay studies scholars to apply for NEH grants. His message to these scholars: “Please call our program officers. We welcome your applications. They will get full consideration.”
SOURCE: Cliopatria, HNN Blog (1-12-06)
Beginning this week he plans on blogging about the Iraq War.
He writes:
"First, these observations come secondhand; I'm nominally an infantry sergeant, but am currently parked at a not-very-interesting desk job in Kuwait. What I write here comes from what I've read, what I've observed at the periphery of the war, what I've experienced in training, and the discussions I've had with other soldiers who have been in Iraq."
Click on the Source link above to continue reading about Bray's approach.
SOURCE: Knight Ridder (1-12-06)
Philadelphia's David Waldstreicher, Temple history professor and fellow Franklin biographer, wasn't among the honored guests. That's despite his well-reviewed "Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004).
It's not hard to figure out why. Waldstreicher falls into a long line of historians who see the OTHER side of Franklin. The wiry, sardonic 39-year-old author is not a fan of rah-rah Franklin books, especially given his view that "Franklin's anti-slavery credentials have been greatly exaggerated."
He regards Isaacson's "Benjamin Franklin: An American Life" as "a good read" with "insightful moments," but sees Isaacson as "already on the stump, talking about why we should find Franklin inspiring, why he's better, why he's neither too far left nor too far right, why he's so reasonable.
"It's been disturbing to see it called the standard biography now," Waldstreicher says, because "it doesn't build on any of the scholarship in early American history."
Waldstreicher labels Wood's "The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin" as "an artful recycling of themes in Franklin scholarship and in his own work. It's not original. It's a minor work by a major historian."
As for Schiff's "A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America," Waldstreicher wrote in the Boston Globe that "Schiff stumbles only when Franklin returns to America."
Making his way through the Constitution Center's Franklin exhibition one recent holiday afternoon, Waldstreicher notices things.
A panel, for example, that attributes Franklin's famous bolting from his family and duties in Boston to "ambition" that "got the better of him."
"It takes the conflict out of it," observes Waldstreicher, "the conflict with other people, which is precisely the way Franklin tended to tell stories. ..."
In fact, Waldstreicher says, the 19th-century "language of apprenticeship" employed by the exhibition's panels about Franklin's early Boston life obscures that young Franklin was, in 18th-century terms, an "indentured servant," a labor slave more than a trainee.
"It turns his running away into a virtue," says Waldstreicher, "whereas contemporaries would have seen it as a crime."
The most annoying thing to Waldstreicher is the downplaying of the Franklin who participated in slaveholding for much of his life, and the trumpeting of his alleged activism against it in his final years.
One exhibition panel talks of "the family servants and slaves."
"The servants belong to the family, not to him," cracks Waldstreicher, rolling his eyes.
In his book, however, Waldstreicher argues that Franklin's supposed "prominent stand" and activism against slavery, all in the last three of his 84 years, amounted to lending his name to the cause while "he and [John] Hancock squashed the petition that the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery asked them to present to the convention."
"There's no evidence," says Waldstreicher, "that he said anything in the convention against slavery."
The Constitution Center's exhibition reflects a wave of hagiography in Franklin biography that pooh-poohs criticism of the so-called First American. (Some contemporary historians think that title might more properly belong to a Native American.) It marginalizes such longtime lightning rods for Franklin critics as his slave-trade activities, womanizing, hardball politics, and spinmeister shaping of his own image.
Waldstreicher's critique thus comes at a welcome time. It steers attention from the mind-numbing "Benergy" campaign, and lopsided biographies of Franklin that make him a safe adoptable symbol and hero, to a countertradition.
Isn't this, after all, the same Founder who hoped, in his 1751 essay, "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind," that America could be for whites and Indians only, writing, "Why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawnys, of increasing the lovely White. ..."
The bad boy who counseled in a famous 1745 letter that a man should "prefer old women to young ones" for lovemaking? (Two of his famous reasons: "(R)egarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old from a young one," and "They are so grateful!!")
SOURCE: The Daily Telegraph (LONDON) (1-11-06)
Opium in its medicinal form of laudanum was widely used as a pain-killer from the late 18th century onwards, but was particularly attractive to Romantic writers such as Coleridge, Keats and de Quincey because it seemed to provide a means whereby the dreamer could control his dreams, switching them on and off and having access to the marvellous at will.
In fact, what he experienced were waking dreams which, Alethea Hayter revealed, had a number of common themes, including the particular horror of limitless yet enclosed space which is to be found in Poe, de Quincey and, to a lesser extent, Coleridge.
In what she described as "one of the best attested examples of an opium interlude in the work of a non-addicted writer'', she described how, in 1819, Walter Scott was too ill to write The Bride of Lammermoor and had to dictate to his appalled assistants from his bed, with the help of huge doses of laudanum. When he recovered and read the finished narrative, he did not recollect one single incident, character or conversation it contained.
Another key text was The Moonstone. During its composition, she revealed, Wilkie Collins was in such pain from gout that only large doses of laudanum could relieve it. The Moonstone was dictated to its conclusion accompanied by Collins's screams; and when he saw the proofs, he, like Scott, did not recognise it as his own work.
The life of the opium addict, Alethea Hayter emphasised, was nevertheless a wretched one, and she concluded that if a writer was not naturally gifted, the drug would not make up for his deficiencies.
Alethea Catharine Hayter was born on November 7 1911 in Cairo, where her father was legal and sometime financial adviser to the Egyptian government in what was then a British protectorate. She spent her childhood in Cairo before being sent to Downe House, from where she won a scholarship to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, to read Modern History. Of her siblings, her brother William was to become Ambassador in Moscow and Warden of New College, Oxford; her sister Priscilla (Napier) was an acclaimed author and poet.
SOURCE: Brooklyn College (1-6-06)
Heyman receives a grant of $40,000 to support research for her book, A Comprehensive Thematic Catalog of the Complete Works of the American Composer Samuel Barber (1910–1981). She was one of fifty recipients whose projects were included in a special category, We the People, which recognizes work that advances the study, teaching, and understanding of American history and culture.
Her award-winning biography Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music (Oxford University Press, 1994) has become a standard in music history scholarship.
An accomplished violinist and pianist, Heyman earned a bachelor’s degree in music from Barnard College. She went on to receive a master’s degree from Columbia University and a Ph.D. from the City University of New York. Her biography of Barber was based on her doctoral research.
SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education (1-11-06)
... Hiram Caton believes he has found compelling evidence to explain what drove Freeman. The recently retired professor of history and politics at Griffith University, in Australia, specializes in political psychology, with a particular interest in cult leaders and followers. He worked closely with Freeman from 1983 to 1993 and stayed in touch with him until his death.
In "The Exalted Self: Derek Freeman's Quest for the Perfect Identity," published last year in the Canadian journal Identity, he argues that the anthropologist, who had a reputation for eccentric and antagonistic behavior, had a clinically diagnosable narcissistic-personality disorder. Freeman's urgency stemmed as much from that disorder as from his critique of Mead and cultural anthropology, Mr. Caton believes.
Not surprisingly, this starkly psychoanalytic view discomfits some scholars. Peter Hempenstall, a professor of history at the University of Canterbury, in New Zealand, is preparing a biography of Freeman with Donald F. Tuzin, a professor of anthropology at the University of California at San Diego. While he finds some of Mr. Caton's ideas "suggestive," Mr. Hempenstall says, the "presentation of Derek Freeman's personality as the result of a clearly established clinical pathology is too extreme and unconvincing."
Sounding a Mind
The question of Derek Freeman's mental health and its role in his scholarly work is not new to close observers of the battle over Margaret Mead and her legacy. As Mr. Caton notes, Freeman was "shadowed by a reputation that he was a 'difficult man' who suffered from a mysterious psychological disorder."
"Until his last breath," Mr. Caton says, "he denied imputations of a disorder, styled them 'defamatory,' and unequivocally affirmed his complete mental health and self-control."
But Freeman's reputation — along with at least two major documented mental-health crises during his career — served as ammunition for his many detractors, who whispered that his ideas could not be trusted. During the Mead-Freeman debates of the 1980s, more than one ethnographer made remarks to this reporter like, "You know he was carried out of Borneo in a straitjacket, don't you?"
Such statements did have a basis in fact, Mr. Caton acknowledges. And yet, he says, they do not tell the whole story.
To try to understand Freeman's motivations, Mr. Caton delved into a trove of correspondence between the anthropologist and administrators of Australian National University, where he taught, as well as other internal documents in the university's archives. There Mr. Caton discovered letters about Fredeman's soundness of mind and what Mr. Caton calls his "tireless defense" of it.
He also found statements from three psychiatrists who had determined that Freeman suffered from panic attacks and delusions, but that the disorders were temporary and could be expected to pass once he returned from the field to the campus, in Canberra.
The documents shed new light on the incidents that led detractors to attack Freeman as mentally ill. His "mental turmoil," says Mr. Caton, was most dramatic during two episodes: the first in Sarawak, in 1961, and the second in Samoa, in 1967.
The first episode was rooted in Freeman's intense dislike of Tom Harrisson, curator of the Sarawak Museums and chief ethnographer of that region of Borneo. Freeman accused Harrisson of manufacturing pornographic icons and then misrepresenting them as expressions of local culture.
Mr. Caton says Freeman took it upon himself to become "the protector of native culture." He was eventually removed from Sarawak — not in a straitjacket, as some of his detractors have suggested, but highly distraught and in the care of Australian diplomatic officials and his university department head. Even so, Freeman, in an apparently manic state, saw himself as "having triumphed over the evil that he had confronted," Mr. Caton reports.
In 1967 a similar incident occurred, this time in Samoa. Drawing from the archives, Mr. Caton concludes that sexuality was once again the trigger. Freeman came to believe that Mead's depiction of adolescent girls as guiltlessly promiscuous was a projection of her own fantasies of free love.
Most telling about the episodes was how Freeman spun them, Mr. Caton suggests in his essay: "In published autobiographical statements, Freeman likens the Sarawak episode to a religious conversion." Like Freeman's conviction about Mead, Mr. Caton says in an interview, the breakdown served as an epiphany that "was going to drive him towards his new conception of anthropology, which in fact he already held to."...
SOURCE: Scott Jaschik in Inside Higher Education (1-10-06)
Crane’s work relates more directly to Iraq. A West Point graduate (with a Stanford University Ph.D.), Crane spent most of his career in the Army, including nine years teaching at his alma mater. When he left the Army, he said he had a hard time getting hired as a scholar by the Army War College because, he said, “they assumed a historian would be irrelevant and want to live in the past.”
In fact, Crane co-wrote a report for the college’s Strategic Studies Institute — published in 2003 — that outlined many of the problems that have come to hinder the U.S. forces since they gained control of Iraq’s government. The report warns of the “how difficult this was going to be,” and specifically predicts likely sources of tension, the possibility of significant casualties among U.S. forces, and other issues. The report was based on in-depth study of past U.S. military occupations, and study of Iraq.
As an example of the kind of situation identified by the report, Crane noted that government officials always like to talk about an “ideal vision of transition” after a war in which U.S. military forces turn over control to U.S. civilian forces who in turn give control to indigenous forces. But the capabilities of the indigenous forces are always much slower to rise than expected, and the U.S. military role tends to last much longer than expected.
Crane said that one of the myths currently in circulation is that there was no planning by the U.S. government for the problems it would face in Iraq after Saddam was gone. In fact, Crane said, his report was but one of many attempts at planning. The problem is that these efforts weren’t coordinated or considered, not that they didn’t exist, he said.
Those critical of the war may be relieved to know that his most recent assignment was to conduct a study — again based on history — of how the U.S. military disengages from a country. But here too, the history suggests that any positive outcomes may not be visible for some time.
“We use history to show how difficult it is to build democracy,” Crane said, noting that after the Civil War, “it only took us 100 years to build democracy in the American South.”
His studies and those of other historians, Crane said, show the need for political and military leaders to take history seriously. When it comes to advising those who run the country, Crane said, “we’ve conceded the field to political scientists,” and he urged his fellow historians to make their perspectives better known.
SOURCE: NYT (1-9-06)
"I moved quickly on it because I think it's a terrific book, it's long awaited, it's very dramatic," said Stephen J. Koepp, the deputy managing editor at Time.
Time, which is owned by Time Warner, put together a big package for its Jan. 9 issue, including a cover photograph of Dr. King, an eight-page excerpt from the book, exclusive photos and an online interview with Mr. Branch. The issue went online on Sunday, Jan. 1, and landed on newsstands a day later.
But the editors at Time got a rude surprise when they looked online that same Sunday morning and saw that Newsweek's issue included a long essay about Dr. King and Mr. Branch's book written by Jonathan Alter, one of Newsweek's senior editors and columnists.
While the book was not embargoed before release, it had been sent out to many media outlets for review, and Newsweek had put in a bid. To Mr. Koepp, Newsweek's piece smacked of dirty pool.
"I knew that other people had access to it. There's a kind of an honor system that if you've read a book for serial rights and you're not going to buy them, you don't go and do the book before it's out, and we observe that," he said. "Obviously, not everybody else does."
Jon Meacham, the managing editor of Newsweek, which is owned by the Washington Post Company, said that there was nothing sneaky about publishing Mr. Alter's essay. The publication of the book is a "big, literary historical event" and Mr. Alter had a unique perspective to offer, said Mr. Meacham.
SOURCE: NYT (1-8-06)
Painter would seem to be an ideal choice for such a task. Her many important works are models of clarity, especially her beautifully wrought biography of Sojourner Truth. Alas, the same cannot be said of this plodding and distressingly chauvinistic volume. Beginning with a chapter on Africa, it travels the familiar route through the slave trade, slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era and so on up to the present. Part of Painter's problem is that she tries to cover the whole complex panorama of African-American history in 359 pages, about a third of them taken up with illustrations. There is simply no space to evaluate the relative importance of the events she touches on, or engage the reader with the fascinating moral, cultural, political and intellectual issues raised in the study of them.
The book's main claim to novelty is its reproductions. Painter tells us that she will "share the story" of black history with these artists because, being free from the demands of scholarship, they give us "the emotional dimension of this history."
I was indeed often moved by these black artists' attempts to imagine the hidden depths of suffering as well as the resistance, creative energy and unbroken dignity of their ancestors. But I began to grow uneasy when told that they would "present the unknown greatness of the African-American past." And my unease turned to dismay with Painter's comment that she has excluded virtually all nonblack artists from her selection. Since, according to Painter, there were "pitifully few black artists working before the 1920's," this meant replacing all works done by whites from the 16th century to the 20th with renditions by modern African-Americans. Because of this questionable decision, readers are denied, for example, any of the many fine portraits of Sojourner Truth by contemporaries.
Painter is neither an art historian nor a keen observer of art, so there is really no illuminating dialogue between artist and historian here, of the kind found, say, in Simon Schama's studies of 17th-century Dutch life and culture. Instead, the art works and commentary too often get in the way of the narrative. Thus 7 of the 21 pages devoted to the slave trade are taken up with images and attendant commentary that add little to the subject. Still, "Creating Black Americans" may prove useful to history teachers in fine arts departments and, possibly, to Afro-American studies departments wary of traditional biases in the treatment of the black past.
The assumption throughout this book is that black artists have valuable insights to offer on events and personalities in black history hundreds of years before their time, and that these insights trump the vision of any white artists of the period. The fact that an important scholar could embrace such a view attests, more than anything else, to the dangers of black cultural identity and the urgency of Shelby's overdue critique.
SOURCE: Carlin Romano in the Philadelphia Inquirer (1-8-06)
Philadelphia's own David Waldstreicher, Temple history professor and fellow Franklin biographer, won't be among the honored guests. That's despite his well-reviewed Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004).
It's not hard to figure out why. Waldstreicher falls into a long line of historians who see the other side of Franklin. The wiry, sardonic 39-year-old author is not a fan of rah-rah Franklin books, especially given his view that "Franklin's anti-slavery credentials have been greatly exaggerated."
He regards Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin: An American Life as "a good read" with "insightful moments," but sees Isaacson as "already on the stump, talking about why we should find Franklin inspiring, why he's better, why he's neither too far left nor too far right, why he's so reasonable.
"It's been disturbing to see it called the standard biography now," Waldstreicher says, because "it doesn't build on any of the scholarship in early American history."
Wood's The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin Waldstreicher labels as "an artful recycling of themes in Franklin scholarship and in his own work. It's not original. It's a minor work by a major historian."
As for Schiff's A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America, Waldstreicher wrote in the Boston Globe that "Schiff stumbles only when Franklin returns to America."
Making his way through the Constitution Center's Franklin exhibition one recent holiday afternoon, Waldstreicher clearly lacks that "Philly's Got Benergy!" spirit.
He notices things.
A panel, for example, that attributes Franklin's famous bolting from his family and duties in Boston to "ambition" that "got the better of him."
"It takes the conflict out of it," observes Waldstreicher, "the conflict with other people, which is precisely the way Franklin tended to tell stories... ."
In fact, Waldstreicher says, the 19th-century "language of apprenticeship" employed by the exhibition's panels about Franklin's early Boston life obscures that young Franklin was, in 18th-century terms, an "indentured servant," a labor slave more than a trainee.
SOURCE: Baton Rouge Advocate (1-8-06)
Among the unsung heroes, Brinkley said, are those anonymous boat operators -- dubbed the Cajun navy -- who navigated their private fishing boats and other vessels through flooded New Orleans to lend a hand after the hurricane hit.
The sight of it all made him rethink his view of some laborers.
"I saw guys chain-smoking cigarettes ... with tattoos out there saving dozens of lives," he said in a recent address to the annual meeting of the Council for a Better Louisiana.
Brinkley said official rescuers stood to the side, in some cases unable to navigate the streets-turned-waterways that demanded the navigational savvy of natives to the area.
"The Cajun navy knows Louisiana," he said.
Brinkley, whose book is set for publication in April, is not so charitable to politicians.
He said getting panicked residents of New Orleans out of harm's way was clearly the job of the city, which is headed by Mayor Ray Nagin.
"The city of New Orleans was not properly prepared for a hurricane," Brinkley said.
Better use of city buses, school buses, and even Amtrak trains before the storm hit would have eased the crush at the Superdome, which turned violent and chaotic when thousands poured in for days.
"Those buses should have been used to ferry people out of town," he said. "It is the city's responsibility for the evacuations."
Brinkley also said President Bush made key missteps in overseeing the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, including what he sees as a lack of leadership now to rebuild New Orleans.
He said Ronald Reagan, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman and others "would be on the stump saying we have to save one of the great cities of the world.
"This is not happening," Brinkley said. "Right now no one wants to take that on, no national leaders. The money and the will power are not there right now."...
SOURCE: Brandeis University (1-6-06)
Professor Fischer is a pioneer among historians who are combining modern methods of research and interpretation with renewed appreciation for the importance of contingency, choice, and character in the unfolding of the American drama. His bestselling books Washington’s Crossing (Oxford, 2004), which received the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in History, and Paul Revere’s Ride (Oxford, 1994) are more than meticulous retellings of great revolutionary events: they provide readers with a vivid sense of how the events were experienced in the immediate moment and of how they affected choices and decisions yet to come.
Although he describes himself as “primarily a storyteller and old-fashioned history teacher,” Professor Fischer’s historical narratives are also notable for their deep illumination of social and cultural circumstance.
The Irving Kristol Award, AEI’s highest award, recognizes individuals who have made extraordinary intellectual or practical contributions to improved government policy or social welfare. The award was established in 2002 in honor of AEI senior fellow Irving Kristol, replacing the Institute’s Francis Boyer Award, which had been awarded annually for the previous twenty-five years. The Irving Kristol Award is selected by AEI’s Council of Academic Advisers.
The article, entitled"Inciting Speech," can be read at the following link: www.barnard.edu/reacting/commentary.htm.
The article describes an innovaative approach Mr. Carnes developed to help students understand the past:"Reacting to the Past."
"Reacting to the Past," pioneered by Barnard College, consists of elaborate games, set in the past, in which students are assigned"roles" with"victory objectives" informed by classic texts in the history of ideas. Class sessions are run entirely by students; instructors advise and guide students and grade their oral and written work. Although a majority of the schools in the consortium conceive of Reacting as a first-year general education course, some fit it into the curriculum as an upper-level seminar. One reason why existing consortium members seek additional member institutions is to expand the pool of faculty specialists to collaborate in developing new games.
First offered at Barnard College in the fall of 1995, Reacting has undergone considerable development and expansion. This fall, over forty faculty from five colleges are offering"Reacting" classes, which normally consist of three"games" a semester. Existing games, most of which consist of several hundred pages of rules and advisories, include:"Democracy at the Threshold: Athens in 403 BC,""Confucianism and the Succession Crisis of the Wanli Emperor, 1587 AD,""The Trial of Anne Hutchinson, 1637,""Rousseau, Burke and Revolution in France, 1791," and"Defining a Nation: Gandhi and India on the Eve of Independence, 1945."
The website featuring Reacting was chosen by HNN last year as Website of the Month.
