ROME -- British historian David Irving, who was jailed in Austria for questioning the Holocaust, visited the Auschwitz death camp and renewed his claim that there was no proof it had gas chambers during an Italian TV program aired Friday.

In the Sky TG24 documentary program "Controcorrente" (Countercurrent), Irving is filmed walking down the remains of railroad tracks in the former death camp in southern Poland as he insists that engineering techniques back his claims that mass gassings by the Nazis during World War II didn't occur there...

Earlier this year, Irving told Sky in an interview that there was no doubt the Nazis killed millions of Jews, but said the killings did not take place at Auschwitz.

History of Madness is the book that launched Michel Foucault’s career as one of the most prominent intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century. It was not his first book; that was a much briefer volume, Maladie mentale et personnalité, that had appeared seven years earlier, in 1954, in the aftermath of a bout of depression and a suicide attempt. (A translation of the second edition of that treatise would appear in English in 1976, in spite of Foucault’s vociferous objections.) But History of Madness was the first of his works to attract major attention, first in France, and a few years afterwards in the English-speaking world. Still later would come his swarm of books devoted to the “archaeology” of the human sciences, the place of punishment in the modern world, the new medical “gaze” of Paris hospital medicine, the history of sex – the whole vast oeuvre that constituted his deconstruction of the Enlightenment and its values, and that served to launch the Foucault industry, influencing and sometimes capturing whole realms of philosophical, literary and sociological inquiry.

But in the beginning was Madness – a book introduced to the anglophone world by a figure who then had an iconic status of his own, the renegade Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing. It was Laing, fascinated by existentialism and other things French, who recommended the project to the Tavistock Press, pronouncing it “an exceptional book . . . brilliantly written, intellectually rigorous, and with a thesis that thoroughly shakes the assumptions of traditional psychiatry”. In those days, his imprimatur counted for much....

Madness and Civilization was not just short: it was unhampered by any of the apparatus of modern scholarship. What appeared in 1965 was a truncated text, stripped of several chapters, but also of the thousand and more footnotes that decorated the first French edition. Foucault himself had abbreviated the lengthy volume that constituted his doctoral thesis to produce a small French pocket edition, and it was this version (which contented itself with a small handful of references and a few extra pages from the original text) that appeared in translation. This could be read in a few hours, and if extraordinarily large claims rested on a shaky empirical foundation, this was perhaps not immediately evident. The pleasures of a radical reinterpretation of the place of psychiatry in the modern world (and, by implication, of the whole Enlightenment project to glorify reason) could be absorbed in very little time. Any doubts that might surface about the book’s claims could always be dismissed by gestures towards a French edition far weightier and more solemn – a massive tome that monoglot English readers were highly unlikely, indeed unable, to consult for themselves, even supposing that they could have laid their hands on a copy.

None of this seems to have rendered the book’s claims implausible, at least to a complaisant audience. Here, indeed, is a world turned upside down. Foucault rejects psychiatry’s vaunted connections with progress; he rejects the received wisdom about madness and the modern world. Generation after generation had sung paeans to the twin movement that took mad people from our midst and consigned them to the new world of the asylum, capturing madness itself for the science of medical men; Foucault advanced the reverse interpretation. The “liberation” of the insane from the shackles of superstition and neglect was, he proclaimed, something quite other – “a gigantic moral imprisonment”. The phrase still echoes. If the highly sceptical, not to say hostile, stance it encapsulates came to dominate four decades of revisionist historiography of psychiatry, there is a natural temptation to attribute the changed intellectual climate, whatever one thinks of it, to the influence of the charismatic Frenchman. But is it so? There were, after all, myriad indigenous sources of scepticism in the 1960s, all quite separately weakening the vision of psychiatry as an unambiguously liberating scientific enterprise....

But what even a weak translation does not disguise is the kind of evidence upon which Foucault erected his theory. Those thousand and more untranslated footnotes now stand revealed, and the evidence appears for what it is. It is not, for the most part, a pretty sight.

Foucault’s research for Madness was largely completed while he was in intellectual exile in Sweden, at Uppsala. Perhaps that explains the superficiality and the dated quality of much of his information. He had access to a wide range of medical texts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – English, Dutch, French and German – as well as the writings of major philosophers like Descartes and Spinoza. A number of the chapters that now appear for the first time in English make use of these primary sources to analyse older ideas about madness. One may object to or accept Foucault’s reconstructions, but these portions of his argument at least rest on readings of relevant source material. By contrast, much of his account of the internal workings and logic of the institutions of confinement, an account on which he lavishes attention, is drawn from their printed rules and regulations. But it would be deeply naive to assume that such documents bear close relationship to the realities of life in these places, or provide a reliable guide to their quotidian logic. There are, admittedly, references to a handful of archival sources, all of them French, which might have provided some check on these published documents, but such material is never systematically or even sensibly employed so as to examine possible differences between the ideal and the real. Nor are we given any sense of why these particular archives were chosen for examination, what criteria were employed to mine them for facts, how representative the examples Foucault provides might be. Of course, by the very ambitions they have set for themselves, comparative historians are often forced to rely to a substantial extent on the work of others, so perhaps this use of highly selective French material to represent the entire Western world should not be judged too harshly. But the secondary sources on which Foucault repeatedly relies for the most well-known portions of his text are so self-evidently dated and inadequate to the task, and his own reading of them so often singularly careless and inventive, that he must be taken to task.

Mae Timbimboo Parry, a Shoshone chief's great-granddaughter who helped correct history's account of the Bear River Massacre, has died.

Parry, 87, suffered from Parkinsons disease for several years, and her family had been preparing for her death, said a niece, Patty Timbimboo-Madsen.

Nonetheless, her passing leaves the family without its matron and the Northwest Band of the Shoshone without one of its clearest voices for historical accuracy.

At least 250 Shoshone men, women and children were slaughtered by the U.S. cavalry on Jan. 19, 1863. Still, for a century historians called it a "battle."

Parry insisted it be called a massacre, and spent decades telling her own people, historians and even bureaucrats in Washington the facts: that the tribe was cut down in a surprise dawn attack.

She told The Salt Lake Tribune in 2003 that her great-grandfather believed he was spared that day in order to tell the story to the generations.

Harvey Mansfield, one of America's leading political scientists and a widely published author, will deliver the 2007 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced today. The annual NEH-sponsored Jefferson Lecture is the most prestigious honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.

"With a distinguished career of thoughtful-and thought-provoking-discourse on political theory and higher education, Harvey Mansfield has captivated his readers and students with the strength of his convictions and the depth of his courage," said NEH Chairman Bruce Cole. "This prolific author and engaging teacher offers a truly distinctive perspective on political thought and practice."

Mansfield, the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Government at Harvard, will present the 36th Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities on Tuesday, May 8, at 7:30 p.m. at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C., on "How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science." The lectureship carries a $10,000 honorarium.

Mansfield's many books include Manliness (2006); A Student's Guide to Political Philosophy (2001); translator, with Delba Winthrop, of Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville (2000); translator, with Nathan Tarcov, of Discourses on Livy by Niccolò Machiavelli (1996); Machiavelli's Virtue (1996); America's Constitutional Soul (1991); Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (1989); translator, with Laura F. Banfield, of Florentine Histories by Niccolò Machiavelli (1988); translator of The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (1985 and second edition in 1998); editor of Selected Letters of Edmund Burke (1984); editor of Thomas Jefferson: Selected Writings (1979); Machiavelli's New Modes and Orders: A Study of the Discourses on Livy (1979, reprinted in 2001); The Spirit of Liberalism (1978); and Statesmanship and Party Government: A Study of Burke and Bolingbroke (1965). His articles with political analysis have appeared in The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, The New Republic, the Claremont Review of Books, The American Enterprise, The Chronicle of Higher Education, National Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and numerous academic journals.

Mansfield has received numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1970-71), an NEH Fellowship (1974-75), the Joseph R. Levenson Teaching Award (1993), the Sidney Hook Memorial Award (2002), and the National Humanities Medal (2004). Throughout his career, he also has served as a member of the Council of the American Political Science Association (1980-82, 2004), a fellow of the National Humanities Center (1982), a member of the USIA's Board of Foreign Scholarships (1987-89), a member of the National Council on the Humanities (1991-94), and president of the New England Historical Association (1993-94). He was educated at Harvard (A.B., 1953, and Ph.D., 1961). He lives in Cambridge, Mass.

Attendance at the lecture is by invitation and free. Those interested in receiving an invitation should call (202) 606-8400 or send an e-mail message to info@neh.gov. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and a list of previous Jefferson Lecturers is available on the Internet at www.neh.gov <http://www.neh.gov/index.html>; . The National Endowment for the Humanities gratefully acknowledges the McCormick Tribune Foundation for major support of this year's Jefferson Lecture.

Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities. NEH grants enrich classroom learning, create and preserve knowledge, and bring ideas to life through public television, radio, new technologies, museum exhibitions, and programs in libraries and other community places.

The Theodore Roosevelt Association has chosen the head of the Atlanta History Center as its new president with the intention of creating a world-class museum and research facility dedicated to the 26th president.

James Bruns, who has run the Atlanta museum for four years after serving as the Smithsonian Institution's development director and founding director of its National Postal Museum in Washington, will begin work full time with the TRA July 1 but will be involved in association business part time immediately.

Bruns said he was excited about the position because TR "changed America in such a dramatic way. He made the modern presidency."

The hiring of Bruns follows recent bumps in the road for the 88-year-old association that promotes interest in and scholarship on Roosevelt. The previous choice for president declined the job at the last minute and some historians have said the group lacks a purpose and should dissolve.

Instead the TRA board hired Bruns to expand programming, visibility and membership, with a tentative plan to have a museum in operation in about six years.

"He has an impressive record of successfully building historical organizations," said Barbara Berryman Brandt, chairwoman of the 2,000-member Muttontown-based association. "He's a proven fundraiser. He raised $43 million in four years for the Atlanta History Center."...

Edmund Morris, an influential TR biographer who serves on the TRA Advisory Board and had recommended earlier in the year that the group disband because its work is done, criticized the idea of building a museum and hiring Bruns, whose main interest would be to build it.

Morris said creating a Roosevelt center would undermine the group financially while the TR document collection at Harvard donated by the TRA remains underfunded.

Long after world communism and its American variant have been discredited, a strange effort to resurrect its memory and glamorize its "heroes" is taking place both at New York University and the Museum of the City of New York. A glimpse of the museum exhibit is provided on our page one today by Ronald Radosh. And NYU, in conjunction with the Tamiment Institute, once an educational force for the anti-Communist left wing of the 1930s, has announced a slew of programs under the auspices of a new Center for the United States and the Cold War.

The programs begin tomorrow with a meeting coinciding with the recent announcement that the Communist Party of the United States has given the Tamiment Institute its archives. That was reported in the New York Times earlier this week. Rather than a scholarly assessment of American communism and its history, the meeting tomorrow appears to be more similar to a communist caucus in the 1930s. It includes only one neutral figure.

The program includes a panel discussion on American communism with current members of the American Communist Party, well-known fellow travelers, and a few left-wing trade unionists and also includes a singing tribute to a deceased East Harlem communist leader. Called a "Symposium on the History of the CPUSA and Progressive Politics Today: Relating the Past to the Present," the panel's purpose is not to examine the nature of American communism, but to show how it can be viewed as a role model for today's activists.

The most prominent program is, scheduled for April 5 and is called "Alger Hiss and History." That day's panels are noteworthy for the absence of major writers who have painstakingly proven Hiss' guilt and activity as a Soviet spy. The keynote address is by the former editor and publisher of the Nation, Victor Navasky, a man long known for his credulous belief in Hiss's innocence. Sessions include participation by both Hiss' son Tony and Hiss' adopted son Timothy Hobson.

One panel, called "Repression, Espionage and the Red Scare," is particularly glaring. It includes historian Ellen Schrecker, who has written in her well-known book on McCarthyism that American communists "did not subscribe to traditional forms of patriotism," because they were "internationalists whose political allegiances transcended national boundaries." In other words, their spying was either necessary or excusable. Was their espionage, she actually asked, really "so awful"?

Ms. Schrecker's fellow panelists include like-minded academics, all of whom view Hiss exclusively from the perspective of a victim of the Red Scare. This center of learning does not have the participation of John Haynes, who with Harvey Klehr has written three major books on Soviet espionage and American communism. It certainly appears that their perspective was meant to be excluded. The organizers of the event seem to want only those who, as their announcement states, see the case as one that "reinforced Cold War ideology and accelerated America's late 1940s turn to the right."

If the Cold War center's new panels are not enough, the Museum of the City of New York is joining NYU in opening an exhibit celebrating the so-called Abraham Lincoln Brigade and its role in supposedly forging anti-fascist unity in New York of the 1930s. Accompanying the exhibit are their own panels and events. These include celebrations of the old communists. Historian Peter N. Carroll, the man who edited the catalog and has written a hagiographical book on the Lincoln Battalion, leads one panel....

In 15 chapters and 501 well-annotated pages, my book “Medical Apartheid” offers a careful, nuanced discussion of trends, cases, problems, ethics and persistent patterns in the disparate treatment of black research subjects. However, Ezekiel Emanuel’s review (Feb. 18) ignores its rich content in order to claim that “Medical Apartheid” fails to place the experience of African-Americans in context. He dramatically misrepresents the work within an untrustworthy review that is rife with distortions, contradictions, errors, exaggerations and confusions.

Emanuel’s own troubling research agenda, elements of which I criticize in “Medical Apartheid,” may be pertinent. He champions such dubious policies as offering undue inducement to poor people and offering research subjects in developing countries inferior medications and standards of protection.

I have been allotted 650 words, insufficient for a point-by-point refutation, so I’ll address a smattering of his many mischaracterizations and errors.

Emanuel ignores how consistently “Medical Apartheid” quantifies my statements about the disproportionate use of blacks in abusive medical research. For example, researchers’ own statements reveal that the experimental development of gynecologic surgeries like Caesarian section, vesicovaginal fistula repair and ovariotomy were perfected almost exclusively using enslaved black women. The disproportionate theft of black cadavers was validated by records and events like the 1989 discovery of 9,800 bones, 75 percent from blacks, in the basement of the Medical College of Georgia’s former anatomical laboratory. Dr. Eugene Saenger’s fatal radiation experiments in 1950s Cincinnati were performed on a subject pool that was 75 percent black. The subjects of many other radiation experiments were all black, like the patients at Dooley and St. Phillip hospitals in Virginia who were intentionally given third-degree radiation burns by scientists “for investigational purposes.” By 1983, 43 percent of women sterilized by federally funded eugenic programs were black. Approximately 80 percent of the boys in the 1970s Baltimore XYY studies were black, as were nearly all of the children in that city’s KKI lead study. Every boy in a 1990s New York City fenfluramine experiment was black.

Medical treatment and public-health initiatives can also constitute medical research. Emanuel disingenuously writes as if an initiative must be either one or the other in order to accuse me of conflation. Despite Emanuel’s bewildering claim to the contrary, the “Black Stork” chapter does focus heavily upon medical research, including racialized studies that fueled involuntary sterilizations, Norplant and Depo-Provera investigations, research distortions that created the myth of the “crack baby,” and nonconsensual research with pregnant black South Carolina women.

Far from castigating directly observed therapy for tuberculosis, I lament that it is too often eschewed in favor of imprisonment. Thalidomide is indeed being given to black women subjects in Africa, and researchers fear that its presence in semen may make its use in men hazardous. Despite Emanuel’s assertion, the book is supported by a plethora of notes filling 50 pages.

Emanuel’s tenuous grasp of history is typified by his non-exculpatory focus on tangential, oft-told events and by the errors crammed into the single sentence with which he attempts to reconstruct the U.S.P.H.S. Study of Syphilis in the Untreated Negro Male. The men first were denied Salvarsan, not only penicillin; a significant minority obtained treatment; the study’s goals included not only observation but also a validation of a racially dimorphic progression of syphilis and diagnostic refinements. Researchers’ goals could not be accomplished without autopsy, and so were not achieved before death.

He falsely claims that “for Washington, the answer comes down to one thing: skin color.” Actually, I describe a terrible confluence of factors that changed over time, including a precise variant, scientific racism. My discussion of factors that tempered or trumped racism includes economics, politics, utilitarianism, communitarianism, black complicity, white beneficence, forbidden knowledge, deontological frameworks and social-justice issues. Emanuel’s failure to acknowledge these sophisticated arguments is a startling omission. Perhaps he is interested only in silencing them.

[To read the book critic's response click on the SOURCE link above.]

A week after Ohio University announced that Thelma Wills Foote would become the next chair of African-American studies, with the rank of full professor, the university announced that she wouldn’t be coming to the university after all.

The second announcement followed an investigation into her publication record and the university’s conclusion that she claimed to have co-written a book in which her publicly noted contribution consists of only five paragraphs.

When Foote, a Harvard University Ph.D., applied to the university, she had two books on her publication record: Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City (Oxford University Press) and (with Tina Andrews) Sally Hemings: An American Scandal: The Struggle to Tell the Controversial True Story (Malibu Press). It was the second book that was problematic.

Norman Goda, chair of history at Ohio, had been asked to review Foote’s qualifications for appointment as full professor. He had not been a member of the search committee that selected Foote, and was reviewing background materials, but couldn’t find anything to back Foote’s claim that she had written the Sally Hemings book. Goda then notified Ben Ogles, dean of arts and sciences, of his concern.

Ogles, after finding that the book in question wasn’t in the university’s collection (not shocking as Malibu does not appear to be a scholarly press), bought the book. He could find credit only for Foote contributing five paragraphs. The work is credited entirely to Andrews, a television actress whose credits include appearances on “Falcon Crest” and “Days of Our Lives” and who produced a television movie version of the Hemings book.

When Ogles wrote to Foote, she wrote back that her contributions had been “ex-nominated” (meaning not acknowledged, she explained) and that this was a common television industry practice, but that she regretted the way she described her contribution to the book. Ogles then tried to verify Foote’s contributions with Andrews, but did not hear back....

"It looks like college used to look in the movies," Pulitzer Prize-winning author, historian and television host David McCullough said of his first visit to the campus of DePauw University. "It sort of looks like the college I dreamed I would go to someday," the author of John Adams and Harry Truman added as he wrapped up his day at DePauw, which he called a "rare and very welcome experience," with a Timothy and Sharon Ubben Lecture entitled "First Principles."

McCullough spent much of his more than hour-long talk focusing on Adams and the other founding fathers of America, and [DOWNLOAD AUDIO: "The Miracle" 601KB]"the fact that they all rose to the occasion and did what they did, accomplished what they did against the most horrendous odds is the real miracle. And the more I know about that period, the more I read about it, and the more I come to understand it, the more convinced I am that it's a miracle that the United States ever happened." (BONUS CLIP: [DOWNLOAD AUDIO: "We're the Beneficiaries" 529KB])

McCullough says one of the first principles of the signers of the Constitution was clearly bravery, as they literally risked their life to take a stand for independence.

"If the people of Philadelphia, the founders, had been the kind of politicians who are poll-driven, they would have scrapped the whole thing, because only about a third of the country was for it-- at most a third of the country was for it; at least a third, or more, were adamently against it; while the remaining third, in the good old human way, were waiting to see who came out on top."

McCullough says America's founders also embraced education, reading about and learning from the past. [DOWNLOAD AUDIO: "Powerful Motivation" 703KB]"They were steeped in, soaked in, marinated in, the classics: Greek and Roman history, Greek and Roman ideas, Greek and Roman ideals. It was their model, their example. And they saw themselves very much like the Greeks and the Romans, as actors on a great stage in one of the great historic dramas of all time, and that they, individually and as a group, had better live up to these heroic parts in which history had cast them. That's a powerful motivation," the author asserted.

A two-time winner of both the National Book Award and the prestigious Francis Parkman Prize, McCullough worries that some shortchange early America as a time when people were primitive.

"I'm always distressed by some of the hubris of some historians and biographers, who kind of look down on people of the past for not knowing as much as we do. There were quite as intelligent, maybe more so than we are, and very much more articulate than we are. And a lot that we think is the upward road of progress hasn't been at all. Do you know the literacy rate in Massachusetts in 1776, or 1780 or '90, was higher than it is in Massachusetts today. And we think we've come a long way," McCullough said.

Frederick Kagan, a military historian and leading advocate of the surge, said: “It is very early days but I’m very encouraged by what is happening. America only has two brigades out of five there and we haven’t even started our major operations yet. I had not expected this little resistance.”

Darrin McMahon still cannot define happiness after spending six years researching and writing a book about it.

While that has been a frustration, the Florida State University history professor said it is also what gives happiness its power and allure.
His book, "Happiness: A History," was recently named by The New York Times as one of the 100 notable books of 2006.

It traces what the great thinkers of Western philosophy have thought about happiness. They include Aristotle, Socrates, Locke, Rousseau, Darwin, Marx, Freud and Thomas Jefferson, who famously counted "the pursuit of Happiness" as an "unalienable right" in the Declaration of Independence.

"The book is more about the pursuit than the attainment, because in some ways you never get there," McMahon said in an interview. "Happiness, as I try to argue in the book, tends to slip away from you when you think about it too much."

He got the idea for the book while teaching at Columbia University in New York during the 1990s. The Berlin Wall had fallen and the world appeared headed for democracy. The stock market was booming and most people seemed to be prospering.

"Happiness was in the air," McMahon recalled. "Clinique, the cosmetics company, came out with a perfume called Happy; you could still remember the Bobby McFerrin song 'Don't Worry, Be Happy.' "

Happiness also dovetailed nicely with McMahon's academic focus on the 17th and 18th centuries, the period of Enlightenment, when Jefferson and others put a new spin on the subject.

Until then, most people did not think of it as a right, unalienable or otherwise. It was more a matter of luck or virtue.

[Maxwell Goss is the editor of Right Reason, the weblog for philosophical conservatism. He interviewed Mr. Nash in comnjunction with the 30th anniversary of the publication of Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, which has been updated and re-issued.]

MG: Why did you choose to begin your history of American conservatism in 1945?

GN: My book was originally a doctoral dissertation in History at Harvard University. While searching for a dissertation topic I had become interested in the role of intellectuals in American politics in the twentieth century. For a short time I worked on a dissertation about the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), which was founded in 1947. I soon abandoned that topic and, with the encouragement of my adviser, decided to examine what was happening on the"right" side of the intellectual/political spectrum in that same period: the years immediately after World War II.

It soon became apparent that the year 1945 was an appropriate point of departure for my investigation. There was no organized conservative intellectual presence in the United States at the end of World War II. Conservative voices here and there -- yes, but not what historians would consider a movement. I now had a story to research and tell: the story of the emergence of this movement or community from weakness and obscurity to power and influence in the new era known as the Cold War.

MG: Your book traces the development of three camps, three strands of thought, that coalesced into the post-war conservative movement: libertarians, traditionalists, and anti-communists. At first glance, these groups seem to have little in common. Can you say a bit about what brought them together?

GN: You are quite right: in the beginning (the 1940s) there was not one right- wing renaissance in America but three, each reacting in diverse ways to a perceived challenge from the Left. No rigid barriers separated these groups, but they tended to act independently of one another. What gradually brought the three emerging components of the conservative revival together was a shared antipathy to twentieth century liberalism as well as a deepening sense of being under siege from the forces of leftism and liberal modernity.

As these three independent wings of the conservative revolt against the Left became more self-conscious in the 1950s, many among them felt the need for greater intellectual coherence and for what we might call better networking. Here an event of enormous importance was the founding of National Review in 1955 by William F. Buckley, Jr. Apart from his extraordinary talents as a writer and polemicist, Buckley personified each impulse in the nascent coalition. He was at once a defender of the free market, a traditional Roman Catholic, and a staunch anticommunist (a source of his ecumenical appeal to conservatives). His magazine provided an indispensable forum for the multiplying voices of protest from the Right against liberal orthodoxy. Here was a place where conservatives of many stripes could seek and often common ground. ...