Ever since the gross mistreatment of poor black men in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study came to light three decades ago, the federal government has required ethics panels to protect people from being used as human lab rats in biomedical studies. Yet now, faculty and graduate students across the country increasingly complain that these panels have spun out of control, curtailing academic freedom and interfering with research in history, English and other subjects that poses virtually no danger to anyone.

The panels, known as Institutional Review Boards, are required at all institutions that receive research money from any one of 17 federal agencies and are charged with signing off in advance on almost all studies that involve a living person, whether a former president of the United States or your own grandmother. This results, critics say, in unnecessary and sometimes absurd demands....

“It drives historians crazy,” said Joshua Freeman, the director of the City University’s graduate history program. “It’s a medical model, it’s inappropriate and ignorant.” One student currently waiting for a board to approve his study of a strike in the 1970s, Mr. Freeman said, had to submit a list of questions he was going to ask workers and union officials, file signed consent forms, describe the locked location where he would keep all his notes, take a test to certify he understood the standards....

Bernadette McCauley, a historian at Hunter College, said she ran into trouble a couple of years ago when she tried to help students working with the Museum of the City of New York on an exhibition about Washington Heights. She asked if a few nuns who had grown up in that neighborhood and whom she knew from her research would talk to the students. And that, Ms. McCauley said, was “when things went haywire.”

The review board discovered the request and lambasted Ms. McCauley for failing to consult with it, she said. The board also demanded proof that previous research for a completed book did not use any archival material involving living people and banned her from doing any research.

Michael Arena, the director of communications at City University, said in an e-mail message that Ms. McCauley initially refused to send in a “brief description” of her research so that board members could determine whether federal regulations covered her work. Ms. McCauley hired a lawyer and after six months of negotiations, the board agreed that her research was exempt.

Hal K. Rothman, the acclaimed Western historian, writer and former chair of the Univerity of Nevada-Las Vegas history department died Sunday night after a year and a half battle with Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Hal, who was widely considered one of the nation’s experts on the New West, tourism and post-industrial economies, wrote here at NewWest.Net about what he called “a hodgepodge of urban issues, environmental critique, assaults on federal agencies and their tormentors, and a few other things.”

Hal’s voice was one to be reckoned with. He wrote about water shortages, fire policy, public land politics and growth with the context only a dedicated historian could. He was unfailingly direct and sure of his words, which for this writer in particular, was a lesson in self-confidence and a testament to the knowledge and research it takes to truly dissect an issue with clarity and depth.

He had a knack for making even the most academic stories human and real and I think that’s why his writings—here and elsewhere (he wrote extensively for High Country News and the Las Vegas Sun)—resonated with such a force. He thoroughly enjoyed making people think past old ideas and delighted in watching people chime in on his columns in comment threads.

IASI, Romania -- An American historian sentenced to seven years in prison for sexual perversion and sexual abuse of minors was released Tuesday after serving less than five years.

Kurt W. Treptow, of Miami Beach, Florida, left the prison in this northeastern city in his lawyer's car.

He was sentenced to the maximum of seven years in Dec. 2002 for offenses involving two girls, aged 10 and 13, who he invited into his home in Iasi. A Romanian woman convicted of being his accomplice is still in prison.

Treptow, who looked visibly emaciated as he left the prison, declined to comment.

The historian was released early because he wrote a book entitled "The life and Times of Vlad Dracul," while he was in prison, his lawyer Liviu Bran said. The book, penned from September 2003 until October 2006, was counted as community service, Bran told reporters.

Bran told the court during the trial his client had sex only with the 13-year-old girl and that he did not know she was a minor.

Treptow, who first studied in Romania as a Fulbright scholar during the communist regime toppled in 1989, has written and edited numerous books on Romanian history, including one about Romania's pro-Hitler World War II dictator, Marshal Ion Antonescu, and another on Vlad Tepes, the historical model for Dracula.

Treptow moved to Romania in the 1990s and was director of the Center for Romanian Studies in Iasi, which is housed in a building owned by the espionage service. The service has declined to say whether Treptow worked for them.

Cynthia Fleming has a remarkable memory.

For an associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee, this skill of quickly retrieving historical details comes in handy.

Without notes, Fleming flawlessly lectured on the civil rights movement while speaking to students in one of her African-American studies classes last week. In fact, Fleming humorously says she never uses notes.

As an oral historian who joined the Peace Corps in 1971 and served in Liberia, Fleming had the opportunity to listen to Liberians speak of their tribal history.

“I was so impressed with their memory,” she said. “They could recite their long history without any notes. I decided at that moment that I wanted to be an oral historian.”

Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, Fleming would later enroll at Knoxville College. The institution’s hymn had been written by her grandfather, and she became the seventh member of her family to attend the college, thus continuing her family’s legacy.

“I went to Knoxville College during the late 60s, so I am part of the Black Power Generation,” she said.

The Black Power movement, along with a fascination of history, pushed Fleming to major in the field. She continued her studies at Duke to gain a Ph.D. with her dissertation titled “History and Philosophy of Black Education in Tennessee.”

Fleming did not know it at the time, but her dissertation would be a factor in her recruitment to UT. After graduating, she went to teach at Morehouse University. She would later be recruited by UT to fill a position that offered her teaching as well as research opportunities....

BERLIN -- Spies for communist East Germany's feared secret police had little in common with the "good Stasi agent" at the center of an Oscar-winning German film, a German historian and Stasi expert said on Monday.

"I'm happy that someone has finally dealt with the Stasi in a critical way," said historian Hubertus Knabe, director of the Hohenschoenhausen memorial museum at the site of a former Stasi prison in what used to be East Berlin.

"But there is naturally a danger that young people who learn some of their history from this film will come away thinking that the Stasi was a refuge for people secretly resisting the regime," Knabe told Reuters in an interview.

"The Lives of Others" by first-time filmmaker Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 33, won the Oscar for best foreign language film on Sunday.

"I'm delighted to have this wonderful golden phallus in my possession at last," Donnersmarck told Reuters after winning.

The film, which takes a close look at totalitarian powers once wielded by the Stasi, won rave reviews at home and abroad for its portrait of a Stasi agent who, while bugging a couple's home, develops an unexpected sympathy for them.

Is Israel guilty of ethnic cleansing? Dr Ilan Pappe, called by some as the"most hated Jew in Israel", says yes. But fellow Israeli Professor Efraim Karsh says he is"fabricating history."

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Andrew Roberts, a professional historian since the publication of his life of Lord Halifax, The Holy Fox, in 1991, which won the Wolfson History Prize in 2000. He is the author of the new book, A History of the English Speaking Peoples since 1900.

FP: Andrew Roberts, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Roberts: Many thanks for asking me. It's a delight to appear in your pages.

FP: Some have called your work a “revisionist” history of the English-speaking peoples. Can you share with us one or two revisionist interpretations you have?

Roberts: I think it was Roger Kimball of the New Criterion who said that any history writing that doesn't conform to the dictates of political correctness as adumbrated by left-liberalism was now 'revisionist history', and I tend to agree with him. My book does not consider British imperialism to have been a Bad Thing, argues that the Versailles Treaty was not harsh enough on Germany, defends the bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and considers the United States to have been a great force for good in the world since 1900. Once put in its proper historical context, the foreign policy of the Bush Administration is seen as being in the mainstream of the English-Speaking Peoples' political tradition, and none the worse for that.

FP: What was good about British imperialism?

Roberts: The British Empire provided good government, uncorrupt public administration, inter-tribal peace, the rule of law, free trade, the abolition of slavery, famine relief, the abolition of barbaric customs such as suttee and thugee, huge infrastructural advances such as railways, roads plus irrigation projects, and in every colony nurtured its native peoples towards running their own countries once they were ripe for independence.

Compared to any other global empire, it was a fantastically beneficial institution. When one looks at the history of many parts of the former Empire today - especially in Asia and Africa - the most peaceful and productive part of their history was during British rule.

FP: What are some of the way the United States has been a great force for good in the world since 1900?

Roberts: The US liberated huge portions of the world from Spain at the start of the century, protected Europe from being taken over by Wilhelmine Germany in the Great War, called a unilateral moratorium on War Debts under the Dawes Plan, aided the Allies before Pearl Harbor, chose to destroy Hitlerism before Japan, mobilised more men in World War II and spent more money for victory than any other power, liberated North Africa, France, Germany, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Italy and Austria from the Nazis, and the Far East from the Japanese, launched the $14 Billion Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, saved Berlin from being forced into the Soviet zone of Germany in 1948, protected South Korea and Chile, attempted to her uttermost to protect South Vietnam from the murderous scourges of Communism, it reached the Moon, won more Nobel prizes per capita than any other country, discovered the cures for numerous diseases such as polio, spends more in private philanthropy than any other nation by a significant factor, financed a large part of NATO for over 60 years, masterminded ultimate victory in the Cold War under Ronald Reagan bringing democracy to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltics, and crushed Milosevic's murderous regime in Kosovo.

The US is presently shouldering around 90% of the burden defending Civilisation from the lethal and unappeasable threat of Islamic Fundamentalist terrorism. It's a glorious record, and one that deserves to be lauded more by a nation that all too often deprecated the enormously beneficial world role it has played since 1900.

FP: I agree, it is a glorious record and you have stated it powerfully and succinctly. I wonder why this side of history was never taught to me in university.

So give us a few sentences in terms of the key themes that you think mark the four world-historical struggles - against German Nationalism, Fascism, Communism and now radical Islam.

Roberts: The four great assaults on the English-speaking peoples since 1900 have been undertaken by various mutations of Fascism. The proto-Fascism of the Prussian militarists, the Axis powers' Fascism, the Red Fascism of the Soviets, and presently the Totalitarian Islamic Terrorist Fascism are all motivated by loathing of the English-speaking peoples' traditions of democratic pluralism.

FP: A large part of the Left, as you know, had a romance with Red Fascism throughout the 20th Century, just as it today cheers for Totalitarian Islamic Terrorist Fascism in our terror war. What explains this disposition of the Left? Why is it sympathetic to fascist ideologies and forces?

Roberts: Intellectuals of the Left bear a heavy responsibility for the cruelties and savagery of the 20th century, for reasons that I go into in some detail in my book. By believing that they could alter human nature given sufficient power over every aspect of people's existence, they tried to play God with human lives, around 95 million of which were lost in the process since 1900. It was a fatal conceit, yet they still believe it possible.

FP: What sacrifices do you think will be needed to maintain American greatness into the 21st century?

Roberts: I think that the English-speaking peoples will need to sacrifice their naivety about the true nature of war - and the losses that inevitably go with it - before they can win this latest bout of the anti-Fascist struggle. The experiences of conflicts such as Grenada, the Gulf War and Kosovo have instilled a belief that wars can be fought victoriously without significant allied losses. That was true of these localised, limited wars but is simply not true of the Manichean world-historical struggle they are presently engaged upon.

FP: Do the English-speaking peoples have the will to do what it takes to defeat the force of radical Islam?

Roberts: I fear, in the light of Congress's recent nonbinding (and utterly self-contradictory) resolution opposing the surge, the gross bias of much of the Left-Liberal media, and the present poll ratings of Sen Hillary Clinton, that the US will lose the will to fight the War against Terror in any manner that might hold out the hope of ultimate victory.

The alternative is isolationism, and the neutering of America and with her the English-speaking peoples. Her wealth will not protect her once the willpower has gone, as has been witnessed countless times in decaying empires of the past. It is, however, not too late.

FP: Let’s hope it is not too late. And if it isn’t too late, then may I ask what it isn’t too late for? What has to be done to win this conflict?

Roberts: The English-speaking peoples need to recognise that in a unipolar world they are not going to be as popular as they were in the pre-1989 bipolar world, especially when the other pole was Communism.

Therefore they must toughen their hearts to unpopularity, and instead earn the respect they deserve but doing what is right. In Iraq and Afghanistan this means fighting for as long as it takes to achieve complete and final victory over Radical Islam. They ought to view the conflict as a very long-term and necessarily painful but unavoidable generational conflict, and dedicate their energy and resources to it, in the way that they were willing to devote them to the extirpation of Nazism, Showa Japanese Fascism and Soviet Communism. They should not be afraid of threatening to widen the struggle to include foreign countries that aid and abet the insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq. They need to do whatever it takes to ensure that no country becomes a safe haven for jihadist terrorism.

George W. Bush will be treated better by History than he has been hitherto by the 24/7 media, because of the aggressive way he rose to the challenge post-9/11. If either of his predecessors had put Islamic terrorism as high on their agendas as he was forced to, we might not be facing this world-historical struggle today.

FP: Andrew Roberts, thank you for joining us. You are truly a breath of fresh air.

Roberts: It's an honor: many thanks.

77% of American Jews oppose the Iraq war, according to a new Gallup poll. Only Black Protestants are more opposed, at 78%.
(Given that the Pope and the bishops oppose the Iraq War, you'd think Catholics would be against it in large numbers, too. But only 28% know what position their religious leaders have taken on it, so the Church has not been good at getting out the word. And, the hierarchy has seen its moral authority on such things deeply eroded by its silly stance on birth control and more recently by the pedophilia scandals.)

Both Jews and Blacks have a long history of preferring government spending on social justice to giving billions away to the (largely white Protestant) Military-Industrial Complex. And, of course, both overwhelmingly vote for the Democratic Party. American Jews were far less enthusiastic about going to war in 2003 than were other Americans (Only 50-some percent supported the war as opposed to 75% of the general public).
My suspicion is that the Israel factor does not play a significant role in this attitude, and that it has an almost wholly American context. Some 37 percent of American Jews say they are disturbed by Israeli policies, and less than half say that caring about Israel matters "a lot" to their sense of Jewishness.
Besides, if one did care about Israel, one couldn't take a lot of heart from the transformation of Iraq into a failed state full of determined bombers and guerrillas in training. Falluja just isn't that far from Tel Aviv. Even Yuval Diskin, head of Shin Bet, the Israeli intelligence agency, recently has admitted that Israel may end up missing Saddam Hussein: "When you dismantle a system in which there is a despot who controls his people by force, you have chaos," he said. "I'm not sure we won't miss Saddam." (Israeli television was recording him, unbeknownst to him).

Neoconservative Jews in the US like Richard Perle, Frederick Kagan and Michael Rubin at the American Enterprise Institute who vocally support the Iraq War (and have gotten rich off it) are a minority of a minority, and even are at odds with the Israeli security establishment! Moreover, the American Enterprise Institute, which crafted the Iraq War, is funded by Exxon Mobil, and last I checked it was run by white Protestants. The vice chair of AEI is Lee Raymond, former CEO of Exxon Mobil and surely Dick Cheney's old golf part ner in the Dallas years. That is, the Kagans and the Rubins, who identify with the Revisionist Zionist movement on the Israeli Right, are useful idiots for Big Oil, not movers and shakers in their own right.

A LITTLE over a century ago, Henry Roe Cloud, born in 1884 on the Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) reservation in Nebraska, enrolled at Yale, becoming the university’s first American Indian graduate in 1910. Today, American Indians make up 1 percent of Yale’s student body, matching their share of America’s population.

A little over a year ago, Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, a Tuscarora from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in New York, became Yale’s first American Indian faculty member whose teaching is entirely devoted to American Indian studies under both the American Indian Studies Program and the History Department. The joint position, a first for Yale, turned full time this past fall.

The first session of Dr. Mt. Pleasant’s Introduction to American Indian History drew about 70 students for 15 openings.

“Native and non-Native students are both interested in these classes,” said Dr. Mt. Pleasant, who had worked part time for two years as assistant professor of American studies and history at Yale. “More generally, the field has taken off in the past generation. In the past decade, we see a lot of scholars bringing in the Indian voice.”

Nationally, there are only about 30 American Indians who are professional historians. Dr. Mt. Pleasant is a graduate of Cornell with a degree in history and American studies. Her courses include “The Native American Experience in North America”; “Indian-Colonial Relations in Comparative Perspective”; “Northeastern Native America, 1850 to Today”; and “Land, Homelands and American Indian Histories.”

“Most of the time I don’t like to read about American history,” said Ashley Hemmers, an international relations major in her fourth year at Yale. “It makes me upset, especially Native history. It gets mistranslated or lost. Here, people are really concerned about the conceptualization. The way Yale is set up, it’s supportive of our endeavors. I’m able to hear the Native voice, not more dates and occurrences.”

Ms. Hemmers and Dr. Mt. Pleasant said they watched the discoveries among students as they tried to grasp all the levels of a tribe, how each state differs and each people has a different history.

“They couldn’t believe that Indians did not have the right to use courts until the 1970s,” Dr. Mt. Pleasant said. “Or how the Canandaigua Treaty still continues today. Some of our students walked out with a better understanding of the framework of United States history — that it’s not just about expansion but about diminishment of our homelands.”...

After making my way past the numerous activists handing out fliers condemning the war in Iraq and the U.S.'s conceivable Iranian escapades, I grabbed a seat in one of the old wooden pews of St. Mary's Episcopal Church on 126th in Harlem.

After recognizing a few familiar faces amongst this unusual congregation, I saw sitting up at the altar Dr. Joseph Massad, Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University, and his cospeaker Dr. Tanya Reinhart, Professor of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University and the University of Utrecht.

Massad and Reinhart's co-lecture "Channeling Israeli Apartheid" capped off Israel Apartheid Week's series of lectures, which focused on topics like divestment, marriage laws, and the media.

Although Massad's lecture began with an acknowledgment of Israel's "substantive and psychological" desire for peace, he soon added that Israel has simply requested that the world recognize its "right to be a racist state." Followed by a round of laughter, the phrase became the central rhetorical device of Massad's speech, serving as the semi-sarcastic tagline to many of his sentences. Massad criticized all existing solutions proposed to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as having accepted Israel's racist nature, racist laws, and system of apartheid. For example, after the 1993 Oslo Accords, the late President of the Palestinian National Authority Yasser Arafat recognized Israel's "need to be a racist," and following Arafat's death, his successor Mahmoud Abbas has also been persuaded to recognize this "right to be racist." In his conclusion, Massad, rejecting the proposed two-state plan, and recommended a "decolonized, binational state" as the only acceptable solution.

While Reinhart focused more on the anti-apartheid model of resistance, her lecture lacked Massad's organization. While initially criticizing international demands on the Palestinians to renounce violence and recognize past accords, Reinhart eventually lauded the South African model of anti-apartheid resistance through divestment and sanctions. She considered it the preferable, nonviolent alternative to wiping Israel off the map, the plan Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has endorsed.

I raised an eyebrow at Reinhart's faith that this anti-apartheid model had ushered in an age of "equality and dignity" for all South African citizens, whites included. Even Massad later countered that Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress were only able to bring about an end to white political domination by surrendering to American demands and accepting continued economic apartheid.

Following the two speeches was a question and answer session during which Massad explained his use of the term "right to be racist." Expressing distaste for racial theory, Massad questioned the genetic links between 19th century European Jews and the ancient Israelite kingdom. He instead argued that notions of Semitic identity were actually the result of European gentile racism that sought to paint Ashkenazi Jews as foreigners. Citing the example of Germans who trace their ancestry back to the Aryans/Teutons of northern India, Massad noted that even if such a genetic link existed, no one would agree to the Deutschland's colonization of the South Asian subcontinent.

In his closing statement, Massad's vehement opposition to an Israeli ethnic state served as a more general criticism of ethnic national identities. However, while Massad posited that this "right to be racist" was a result of perceived Jewish exceptionalism, I wondered what was exceptional about this perceived right considering the global hegemony of ethnonationalism. While I share Massad's demand for purely civic nationalism, states' de jure and de facto glorification of specific religions, dialects, races, cultures, etc. marginalize his view into the realm of idealism.

The lecture ended with a short argument between the two professors about the merits of a one- and two-state solutions; however, as expressed earlier, they both believed a continuation of Israel's policies was, as Reinhart stated, "suicidal" for Israel and that "saving Palestinians is saving Israel."

OXFORD, Miss. Winthrop Jordan, 75, professor emeritus of
history and African-American studies at the University of
Mississippi, died at his home Friday (Feb. 23) after a long
illness. He was a Quaker and a member of the Oxford Friends
meeting.

Jordan won four national prizes in 1968-69 for his book
"White Over Black: American Attitudes Towards the Negro,
1550-1812," including the Society of American Historians'
Parkman Prize, Columbia University's Bancroft Prize, Phi
Beta Kappa's Ralph Waldo Emerson Award and the National
Book Award for History and Biography.

As part of its 50th anniversary, American Heritage magazine
ranked "White Over Black" as the second-best book of all
time in African American history, second only to W.E.B.
DuBois' "Souls of the Black Folk."

"This book helped lead a revolution in the understanding of
how slavery became an accepted part of early American
life," said Robert Haws, who chaired the university's
history department from 1986 to 2007. "It forever changed
our understanding of the roots of racism in the United
States."

Jordan received several awards, including another Bancroft
Prize, for his "Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An
Inquiry Into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy" (1993).

He was slated to receive the B.L.C. Wailes Award from the
Mississippi Historical Society March 3 in Jackson.

"Through the years, no faculty person has achieved greater
distinction at Ole Miss than Winthrop Jordan," said
Chancellor Robert Khayat. "Historians across the world are
aware of his work, his colleagues respected him without
reservation and he was much admired by his students.
Although we have lost him, his legacy lives on."

Born in 1931 in Worcester, Mass., Jordan received his
bachelor's degree in social relations from Harvard College
in 1953, master's degree in history from Clark University
in 1957 and doctoral degree in history from Brown
University in 1960.

Jordan began teaching in 1955 as a history instructor at
Phillips Exeter Academy before joining the faculty at the
University of California-Berkeley, where he served from
1963 to 1982. He also served as associate dean for minority
group affairs in the UC-Berkeley graduate school.

Jordan joined the UM faculty in 1982. He became the first
holder of the William F. Winter Professorship of History in
1993 and retired in 2003.

Haws called Jordan "the most distinguished faculty member
ever" in the university's history department.

"Before he had turned 40, his scholarship had defined the
entire field of general race relations and set the
scholarly agenda for the study of race in American history
for two generations of scholars," Haws said

Jordan's numerous awards include fellowships from the
Institute of Early American History and Culture, Guggenheim
Foundation, Social Science Research Council and the Center
for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences. He also
received a Distinguished Alumnus Citation from Brown
University.

Jordan is survived by his wife, Cora; three sons, Joshua
Jordan of Davis, Calif., Mott Jordan of Santa Cruz, Calif.,
and Eliot Jordan of Berkeley, Calif.; three step-children;
his former wife, Phyllis Jordan of Berkeley, Calif.; five
grandchildren and five step-grandchildren.

Hodges Funeral Home in Oxford is handling arrangements. A
campus memorial is being planned.


Visit Ole Miss on the World Wide Web at www.olemiss.edu.

YEREVAN (YERKIR) - For the first ever an Armenian historian has accepted Turkey's thesis of collaborative study, PanARMENIAN.Net reported.

As reported by Sabah newspaper, Ara Sarafyan, one of the most important historians of the Armenian Diaspora and the editor of Blue Book accepted the suggestion of the chairman of the Turkish History Institution, Halaco?lu, to carry out a collaborative study.

It's worth noting that Armenian President Robert Kocharian stated that normalization of relations between Armenia and Turkey depends on governments but not on historians. The Armenian leader underscored that Armenia is ready for dialogue with Turkey without preconditions.

The Blue Book by British historians Lord James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee which is formally known as The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915-1916 is one of the most important written evidence of the Armenian Genocide.