Historians need to correct the assumption that women played little part in public debates during the early years of the American republic because society forbade them to do so, writes Carolyn Eastman, an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

The historical record shows, she says, that in the late 18th century, most young white women in the northeastern United States engaged in public speaking, and she suggests that historians overlook that phenomenon because they hold to modern conceptions of what constituted "public." While historians today think only of speeches made from podiums, bars, or pulpits, early Americans had a different perspective, she says: "What people in the 18th century most often meant by 'public' was sociable as opposed to solitary (which was 'private')."

At that time, "girls spoke regularly at school 'exhibitions' from Maryland to Maine at least twice a year, no matter how rudimentary the school's curriculum," she notes. Speeches by young women were commonly published in books, magazines, and newspapers of the era. And, she adds, many public discussions took place in "female-governed spaces" like parlors "that fostered practices of sociability not readily classifiable as either strictly public or private."

That all has implications for historical views of early America, Ms. Eastman argues. The evidence "suggests that republican motherhood was by no means the only model for women seeking to define their roles in the post-revolutionary era," she writes. Rather, education also "taught girls that educated and well-spoken women had an important role to play in American culture," she notes....

I must confess to a moment of churlishness when, after being lulled by your reviewer’s discussion of my book “Seizing Destiny” (Aug. 12), I was awakened by the artful thrust of the hired assassin’s knife. In the next to last paragraph, Richard Brookhiser wrote: “I cannot recommend this book, however. Kluger’s writing is some of the worst I have ever had to read. ... If I had not agreed to review this book, I would have stopped after five pages. After 600, I felt as if I were inside a bass drum banged on by a clown.”

But rather than childishly taking offense at what I interpreted as a gentle rebuke, I soon realized how dutiful — brave, even — the reviewer had been in soldiering on after those first five thoroughly nauseating pages. He even kindly illustrated my utter ineptitude by singling out this sentence I had written on the French Revolution: “French grievances were vented in alternating waves of liberation and repression that swept the overwrought masses toward the cauldron of anarchy.” How could I have butchered the English language so grievously?

Suddenly I understood how mistaken the Book Review’s critic had been about my last book, “Ashes to Ashes,” in his highly laudatory review — and how besotted the jurors were who voted it the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, not usually awarded to wretched writers (I being the fortunate exception). How foolish, I thought, the Times columnist Bob Herbert had been for referring to my “Simple Justice” as a “brilliant and powerful book.” And how blind the former Times reporter Anthony Lukas, a garlanded book author, had been for stating that my book “The Paper: The Life and Death of The New York Herald Tribune” was “probably the best book ever written about an American newspaper ... a brilliant piece of social history.” And how insensitive to hideous prose were the judges who placed both those books among the five finalists for the National Book Award in history for the years in which they were issued.

Here at last, I appreciatively recognized, was a critic astute and forthright enough to do for me what no other reviewer had done before: tell me I am a clown, not a writer. How sad I was for the publisher of my four books of social history, Alfred A. Knopf, which has gained its eminence by bringing out books by similarly dreadful authors. How bad I felt for the four eminent writers and scholars — Joseph Ellis, David Kennedy, Justin Kaplan and Dan T. Carter — who had unaccountably offered admiring words about “Seizing Destiny” for the back of the book jacket. And how insensitive Kirkus was for calling it, in a starred prepublication review, “brilliant.”

Rather than continue writing, I will henceforth devote my energies to mastering one or another percussion instrument (if not the drum, on which your reviewer seems to feel I have a head start). It was an honor to be so subtly awakened from my self-deception by Mr. Brookhiser, who has honed his own skills by laboring for 30 years on the staff of National Review, a beacon of insightful commentary as well as fair and balanced judgment. Thanks, too, to your staff for selecting him. As we say out here in Berkeley, that iniquitous den of bluest liberalism, have a nice day.

Over the past two years since Hurricane Katrina, I've seen waves of hardworking volunteers from nonprofits, faith-based groups and college campuses descend on New Orleans, full of compassion and hope.

They arrive in the city's Ninth Ward to painstakingly gut houses one by one. Their jaws drop as they wander around afflicted zones, gazing at the towering mounds of debris and uprooted infrastructure.

After weeks of grueling labor, they realize that they are running in place, toiling in a surreal vacuum.

Two full years after the hurricane, the Big Easy is barely limping along, unable to make truly meaningful reconstruction progress. The most important issues concerning the city's long-term survival are still up in the air. Why is no Herculean clean-up effort underway? Why hasn't President Bush named a high-profile czar such as Colin Powell or James Baker to oversee the ongoing disaster? Where is the U.S. government's participation in the rebuilding?

And why are volunteers practically the only ones working to reconstruct homes in communities that may never again have sewage service, garbage collection or electricity?

Eventually, the volunteers' altruism turns to bewilderment and finally to outrage. They've been hoodwinked. The stalled recovery can't be blamed on bureaucratic inertia or red tape alone. Many volunteers come to understand what I've concluded is the heartless reality: The Bush administration actually wants these neighborhoods below sea level to die on the vine.....

Madeleine B. Stern, a prominent rare-book dealer, biographer and literary sleuth who helped bring to print Louisa May Alcott’s long-lost Gothic tales of murder, sexual subjugation, opium dens and other things simply too dreadful to mention, died on Saturday at her home in Manhattan. She was 95.

Ms. Stern’s executor, Richard Koch, confirmed the death.

With her companion and business partner of many years, Leona Rostenberg, Ms. Stern presided over Rostenberg & Stern Rare Books, run largely from their apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. For more than half a century, the two women were an institution in the world of antiquarian bookselling, scouring the United States and Europe for printed treasures. Ms. Stern was also a founder of the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, held annually since 1960.

In 1942, Ms. Rostenberg, following clues sprinkled in Alcott’s correspondence and other writings, found evidence that Alcott (1832-88), best known for sweet novels like “Little Women,” had also written racy potboilers. Published in popular magazines anonymously or under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard, the stories were the pulp fiction of their day, awash in deceit, depravity and death. “Blood-and-thunder tales,” Alcott dismissively called them.

Starting in the 1970s, Ms. Stern oversaw their publication in assorted volumes. These included “Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott” (Morrow, 1975); “Plots and Counterplots: More Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott” (Morrow, 1976); and “Louisa May Alcott Unmasked: Collected Thrillers” (Northeastern University, 1995), all edited and with introductions by Ms. Stern.

As the dustup last fall about the deletion of “psychohistory” from our membership taxonomy indicated, inclusion on the AHA’s list of membership categories can be highly political—serving in many eyes as a mark of standing in the discipline.

Unfortunately, this sets up two competing problems. The taxonomy needs to be open to the emergence of new areas in the discipline, but it also needs to be functional in a variety of contexts—for members trying to identify themselves, historians trying to find a specialist for a meeting panel, or members of staff trying to offer a coherent profile of the membership. With 297 different options in the taxonomy (and an open field for still more specific subjects of “current research”) many members complain that the taxonomy proves quite daunting and unwieldy.

So after a decade of dealing with requests for new categories on an ad hoc basis—and more recently trying to delete a couple categories with only a small representation on a similarly ad hoc basis—the Council adopted the following formal policies for adding and deleting categories in the future, effective June 4, 2007:

Policy for Adding Categories Adding new categories requires a petition from 10 members in good standing requesting the addition of a particular category. Staff will review the membership status of the petitioners and the current selection of related topics in the open “Current Research” field, and submit a recommendation to Council. If a majority of members on Council agree, it will be added to the taxonomy.

...

The 200th anniversary of one of the most stupendous events in American history was marked on Aug. 17: Robert Fulton's steamship voyage up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany.

Fulton and crew made the 150-mile trip in the astonishing time of 32 hours, "equal to near five miles an hour," the captain observed.

Unfortunately, New York did not have a resident historian to properly commemorate this occasion. In fact, New York hasn't had a state historian since 2001. Officials blame "budget constraints."

Assemblyman Jack McEneny, D-Albany, lobbying for the reinstitution of the state historian position, called it "very poor form for a state with the greatest history in the country not to have that position filled," according to published reports.

The projected annual salary for state historian is $70,000. Meanwhile, part-time state legislators receive a base salary of $79,500 per year.

[Disclosure: Mr. Dresner is an assistant editor at HNN.]

Here we go again.

The American Historical Association has proposed new rules for adding and eliminating membership categories, those “areas of scholarly interest” which allow university presses and conference panel organizers to find us when they need us. The last time they tried to eliminate “psychohistory” they got slammed, and these procedures are a response to that, an attempt to assuage feelings of persecution by creating a “fair procedure.” The process for adding a category is only slightly absurd: ten members in good standing have to sign a petition and, after verifying the good standing of the signatories, the association “staff” will make a recommendation to the Council (our highest muckety-mucks, the ones we vote for) regarding the inclusion of the category in the taxonomy of professional historians.¹ The procedure for eliminating a category is a very impersonal one, by contrast: when the number of members picking a category drops below five for several years in a row, and warning people in Perspectives doesn’t change that, then “subject to Council’s final approval, that category will be deleted or consolidated.”

The categories are already a bit odd, frankly: revision wouldn’t be a bad idea. Take my own taxonomic position:

First area of scholarly interest: 258 Meiji Restoration, 1868-1912 (Japan)
Second area of scholarly interest: 710 Demography, Population, and Social Life
Third area of scholarly interest: 250 Japan

The first thing, of course, is that 1868-1912 isn’t the Meiji Restoration, but the Meiji era, and there isn’t a “19c” category to cover the growing scholarship on the transition. Second is that “Demography” is one of many choices I could have made to cover my study of Japanese labor migration to Hawai’i, including

705 - Asian American
726 - Labor
759 - Diaspora Studies
760 - Immigration
711 - Diplomatic/International

I actually was expecting to find a “transnational” category: “708 - Comparative” doesn’t quite cover it, and very little of what I do qualifes as “diplomatic history.” Third, of course, is that you’re only allowed to pick three categories, so my interest in Japanese colonial migration would have to be expressed in one of the following:

259 - Taisho and Early Showa Japan, 1912-1941
260 - Rise of Militarism and World War II (Japan)
275 - Colonial Korea, 1910-1945

There’s no category for “imperialism” or “colonialism” generally.² Moreover, picking one of those would mean that I’d have no way to indicate “Japan” generally as something I’m interested in: clearly some form of nesting tree structure would make more sense than completely discreet categories.

OK, now let’s take a look at the categories which would be vulnerable to elimination under this system (their list is on the right). Twelve of the twenty-two categories (only seventeen of them are immediately endangered) are Asian, and four are African. Two are Byzantine and there’s Numismatics and Psychohistory (again).

They say that “This is not intended to make a statement about the relative merits of a particular subject or area of inquiry, just to assure that the taxonomy offers a proper reflection of the broad contours of the Association’s membership.” That sounds good, but I have another reading of this, one which goes beyond the grossly outdated database functions the AHA is using to keep track of us. I think that this list indicates that the AHA is failing to actually attract and keep as members those scholars who teach outside of the core Western fields. It’s certainly not done all that well attracting Asianists to the national meeting, though I think they’ve done better lately with the American Historical Review. Nor has the AHA, for all its talk about public history and expanding the definitions of historical practice, attracted archaelogists or other scholars of physical culture. How could numismatics, one of the earliest fields tieing archaeology and history together, be on the cutting block? How could a dozen Asian fields, most of them pretty healthy as scholarly endeavors, be out of the AHA, if the AHA were really working to represent and to serve the entire historical community? Asian studies is not a secondary field, but the study of the bulk of humanity and of some of the most interesting history. When will the American Academy start treating it as such?

1. Do I have a better idea? Yes: allow people who pick “599 - Other” to include a short description (I would expect the database could handle a couple of dozen extra characters) and staff could monitor those. When a number of “others” listing something similar reached a certain level, then the Council could consider acting. This would also have the benefit of allowing people whose taxonomies have lapsed to continue listing themselves under their old categories [↩]
2. My neologism “Colonialogy” hasn’t caught on yet, but we might be able to correct that [↩]

Philip Masters, whose passion was history, which he literally dived into to help find the undersea wreck of the ship of Blackbeard the pirate, died on Aug. 18 in the Bronx. He was 70.

The cause was a metastasized melanoma, his daughter Torrie Lloyd-Masters said.

Mr. Masters, whose jobs ranged from jewelry salesman to lighting executive to cabdriver to stockbroker, was that unusual amateur who succeeds in a professionalized field. He used evenings, weekends and vacations to burrow into 57 archival libraries in the United States and Europe and took an intensive course in Spanish paleography so he could read original documents in the archives in Seville, Spain.

His breakthrough came in 1987 in his favorite haunt, the rare-book room of the New York Public Library. He found a book published in 1719 in London that told of a pirate’s trial in Charleston, S.C., in November 1718. In the book’s appendix was an account of events in Beaufort Inlet off the coast of North Carolina in June 1718, when Blackbeard’s ship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, was lost.

Mr. Masters teamed up with archaeologists from North Carolina and other experts to pursue his hunch, and the eventual result was the discovery, in November 1996, of one of the most complete wrecks of a pirate ship ever found. It appeared to be that of Blackbeard, the self-proclaimed “devil’s brother” who was said to have forced a captive to eat his own ears.

An historian has retired after spending his entire career writing a book for his local council.

And he hasn't finished it.

Robert Dunning, 69, began his definitive history of Somerset in 1967 and has been paid up to £38,000 a year since then.

But the work, covering every aspect of the county back to the beginnning of records, is so detailed that he's not reached half way and is handing the project over to an assistant.

In that time he has spent a mind-numbing 50,000 hours on research, visited 380 churches and chapels, inspected 200 stately homes and read millions of documents.

"Some might say it was boring, but for me it was absolutely fascinating," Mr Dunning said yesterday at this home in Taunton.

His work is part of a project called the Victoria County History launched at the end of the 19th century to celebrate Queen Victoria's rule....

[Editor's Note: Haleh Esfandiari is the wife of George Mason University historian Shaul Bakhash.]

The lawyer for the American-Iranian scholar released Tuesday after over three months in jail said the Iranian authorities still held the scholar’s passport, but that by Iranian law, she should be permitted to leave the country.

The scholar, Haleh Esfandiari, 67, said in a brief telephone interview in Tehran that said she was “fine and happy,” but declined to be interviewed.

Her lawyer, the Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, said that Ms. Esfandiari, who had been held on security-related charges, should be allowed to return to her home in Washington but would be legally required to return to Iran for trial.

“She is released on bail now, and legally she can leave the country and return for her trial when the date is set,” Ms. Ebadi said in an interview....

In the opinion of a British professor and Balkan expert, Mark Almond, one of the possible solutions to the Kosovo issue involves a "Great Agreement" between the U.S. and Russia on all unresolved separatist issues.

Such a deal would involve Russia agreeing to hold its nose over Kosovo independence, with the United States and its allies promising to look the other way while the people of Pridnestrovie and some other unrecognized countries in the post-Soviet space exercise their right to self determination.

The professor, who teaches modern history at Oriel College at Oxford University, is a Balkans specialist who has written extensively on Serbia, Kosovo and the history of the regions. He identifies several potential solutions to the Kosovo problem, including a so-called great agreement between the U.S. and Russia on all unresolved separatist issues.

He added that another would be maintaining the status quo, while a third would involve the West unilaterally recognizing an independent Kosovo, which would directly lead to a proclamation of independence by the north of Kosovo, thus complicating the position of the western countries even further.

" - Therefore, the current unsatisfactory situation is, in some way, at least from the West’s point of view, the least painful option. Whether the Serbs and the Kosovo Albanians feel the same way is another matter," reflected Almond.

[Norman Finkelstein's most recent book is Beyond Chutzpah: On the misuse of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history (University of California Press). His web site is www.NormanFinkelstein.com.]

Raul Hilberg died on August 4. A refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria, Hilberg was the founder of the field of Holocaust studies.

I cannot now remember when I first read Hilberg's magnum opus The Destruction of the European Jews, but it must have been in my early youth. In fact at first I wasn't even sure whether I did plow my way through the first edition, published in 1961 by Quadrangle Books, with its forbidding double columns of text in 10-point font but I just pulled it off the shelf, binding broken, pages loose, and sure enough it was all marked up.

I read the expanded three-volume Holmes & Meier edition published in 1985 many times. Whenever I ventured to write something on the Nazi holocaust I would again peruse all the volumes cover to cover. They provided the psychological security I needed before daring to render a judgment of my own. Wanting to stand on the firmest possible intellectual foundations I reflexively reached for Hilberg. As it happens, in preparation for a statement I was commissioned to write on the Nazi holocaust, I was just in the midst of reading the three-volume third edition published by Yale University Press in 2003 when news of his death arrived.

Hilberg was not pleased with the first edition--a vital table he pored over many weeks to get just right was botched in the cramped composition--but he couldn't do better: no major publishing house expressed interest in his groundbreaking study, and he only managed to find any publisher due to a private benefactor who agreed to defray indirectly some of the costs. (The Israeli Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem had also rejected the manuscript and initially even barred him from its archive.)

In his often acrid memoir The Politics of Memory Hilberg tells the story that when he first proposed studying the Jewish genocide to his advisor at Columbia University, the great German-Jewish sociologist Franz Neumann (author of Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, a classic study of the organization of the Nazi state), Neumann warned him that "this will be your funeral."

It is hard now to remember that the Nazi holocaust was once a taboo subject. During the early years of the Cold War, mention of the Nazi holocaust was seen as undermining the critical U.S.-West German alliance. It was airing the dirty laundry of the barely de-Nazified West German elites and thereby playing into the hands of the Soviet Union, which didn't tire of remembering the crimes of the West German "revanchists." The major American Jewish organizations rushed to make their peace with Konrad Adenauer's government (the Anti-Defamation League took the lead) while those holding commemorations for the Jewish dead were tagged as Communists, which as a rule they were.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, published in the mid-1960s, Hannah Arendt could draw on only one other scholarly study apart from Hilberg's on the Nazi holocaust in the English language. Nowadays there are enough studies to fill a good-sized library, although it is perhaps not accurate to grace all these publications with the descriptive "scholarly."

Arendt borrowed extensively from Hilberg's work with less-than-generous attribution. He never forgave her this oversight and--what truly is unforgivable--her condescending references to his study in private correspondence and her recommending against its publication by Princeton University Press. In his memoir Hilberg parries the insult, asserting, wrongly in my opinion, that Arendt's study The Origins of Totalitarianism lacked originality. It is true that Arendt could be lazy about facts, which might account for Hilberg's harsh judgment, but the first part of Origins contains many shrewd insights on the dilemmas of Jewish assimilation and paradoxes of the nation-state.

Hilberg reserved even greater contempt (and loathing) for Lucy Dawidowicz, author of the highly touted The War Against the Jews. Here it can be said that his verdict was faultless. During the heyday of the Holocaust religion in the 1970s-1980s, Dawidowicz was its designated high priestess. The problem was that, as Hilberg brutally demonstrates in his memoir, she got the most elementary facts wrong. I once asked my late mother, who survived Maidanek concentration camp, about Dawidowicz's depiction of all the Jews in the ghettos and camps furtively staying faithful to their religion until their final steps into the gas chambers. "When I first entered my block at Maidanek, all the women inmates had dyed-blond hair," my mother laughed. "They had been trying to pass as Gentiles." The shocking accounts of Jewish corruption that could be found in conveniently forgotten memoirs like Bernard Goldstein's The Stars Bear Witness were deleted in Dawidowicz's fantasy.

Hilberg's reputation for mastery of the primary sources was such that my former coauthor (and an authority in her own right on the Nazi holocaust) Ruth Bettina Birn feared their first meeting: no mortal being, she thought, could have stored so many Nuremberg Tribunal documents in his brain. The magnitude of Hilberg's achievement is hard to appreciate today because the scholarly breakthrough has passed into commonplace. His sequential-chronological account of the steps pressing ineluctably from the Nazi definition of Jews to their expropriation, massacre, deportation and assembly-line extermination has been assimilated into the infrastructure of all subsequent scholarship.

Stylistically Hilberg's study might be said to be the opposite of current Holocaust fare: a sparseness of adjectives and adverbs such that when he reaches for one it packs unusual intensity. Apart from professional discipline his terse rendering was perhaps also meant to capture the desiccated esprit of the bureaucratic--dare I say banal?--process through which millions of Jews were shoved along to their deaths....