In his book “Franklin & Lucy: President Roosevelt, Mrs. Rutherfurd and the Other Remarkable Women in His Life,” which comes out next week, Joseph E. Persico suggests that the affair between Franklin Roosevelt and Lucy Mercer (later Rutherfurd), which was supposed to have ended in 1918, resumed even sooner than most scholars believed — indeed, that it may never have ended at all....

While working on his book, Mr. Persico obtained from Lucy Mercer’s granddaughters a bound copy of a lecture Roosevelt gave at Milton Academy in May 1926, on the flyleaf of which is an inscription saying, “I dedicate this little work, my first, to you.” The granddaughters also gave Mr. Persico some letters that Franklin wrote to Lucy beginning in 1926 on the letterhead of the Fidelity and Deposit Company of Maryland, where he was then a vice president. The letters are chatty rather than romantic, but as Mr. Persico points out, they’re also unusually specific about his whereabouts at certain times and also about Eleanor’s absences. Some historians have suggested that all through the 1920s and ’30s, Roosevelt was on such a tight leash, guarded by his secretary, the vigilant Missy LeHand, that he couldn’t possibly have strayed. But Mr. Persico reads these letters as possible plans for liaisons.

As for Eleanor Roosevelt, Mr. Persico leaves little doubt not only that she was devastated by the discovery of the affair but that she continued to love her husband to the end. She was crushed all over again to learn that Lucy Mercer had returned to Franklin’s life, and it took her a while to forgive her daughter, Anna, who had engineered some of their meetings.

Dear colleagues,

In addition to 62 codes of ethics for historians and others (please see circular of last week), the Network of Concerned Historians website (http://www.concernedhistorians.org) also contains 71 legal cases that for one or another reason are of importance to historians. Most are available in English, some also in French, Spanish, or another language. These cases come from international courts or national supreme courts.

They involve the following countries: Andorra (1), Argentina (1), Australia (1), Austria (7), Belgium (1), Bosnia-Herzegovina (3), Bulgaria (6), Canada (2), Chile (1), France (9), Germany (11), Greece (1), Honduras (1), Netherlands (3), New Zealand (1), Poland (1), Romania (2), Rwanda (2), Slovakia (3), Switzerland (3), Turkey (6), United Kingdom (3), Uruguay (1), and Western Sahara (1).

The questions of importance to historians they raise include: academic freedom; amnesty laws; apology of war crimes; archival information, including preservation of, content of, and access to; book ban; commissioned history; defamation, including posthumous defamation; destruction of cultural momuments and sacred sites; dissemination of separatist propaganda; duty of successor regimes to investigate and prosecute; erasure of evidence for genocide; freedom of information; genocide, including denial of, and incitement to; historical treaties; lapses of time after an event; less immunity for politicians; nondisclosure of sources; peaceful assembly; privacy, including posthumous privacy; protection of personality; racial discrimination; right to know; right to mourn; right to the truth; scattering of ashes; terra nullius; wills.

Please send any legal cases of importance to historians (or a link to them) that you may be aware of to: antoondebaets@concernedhistorians.org

Thank you and with best wishes,

Antoon De Baets

If you spent your pre-Passover Saturday morning, as I did, in synagogue reading Leviticus 14:1, you may have heard that Midrashic preachers used to enjoy creating puns on the word metzora, which means leper, and motzira, which means gossip or slander. Talmudic sage Rabbi Yosi ben Zimra has God addressing the tongue itself: "What else could I have done to rein you in, O tongue of deceit?" He asks.

One need not look far in our culture to grasp the relevance. In a recent New Yorker article, Jane Kramer recounts an audacious attempt by a coterie of right-wing Jews to interfere with the tenure process at Columbia's Barnard College. The case concerned anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj, the daughter of a Long Island Episcopalian mother and a secular Palestinian Muslim father, whose 2001 book, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (University of Chicago), examined the role of archaeology in alleged biblical validation of the Jewish claim to Israel/Palestine. The tenure question proved a purely academic one in every sense of the word. Her book was recognized by the Middle East Studies Association of North America as one of the winners of its 2002 Albert Hourani Book Award. In addition, El-Haj had been approved by three separate tenure committees before reaching the final one.

That's when a group led by an American-born West Bank settler named Paula Stern, who owned a small technical writing business, emulating campaigns by the likes of David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes and their organizations Campus Watch and FrontPage magazine, started making motzira. She created an Internet petition calling on Columbia to reject El-Haj, insisting that her scholarship was substandard and corrupted by an alleged hatred of Israel. Denying El-Haj tenure became a cause célèbre among this community of right-wing Jews, neoconservative adventurers and pseudoscholars, much as preventing Yale from hiring the much-admired Middle East historian (and blogger) Juan Cole had galvanized a similar group in 2006. The targets this time were Columbia alumni, in particular, large donors.

The campaign was a house of sand from the start. In October 2007 Larry Cohler-Esses, editor at large of the Jewish Week, with Richard Silverstein of the Tikun Olam weblog, debunked Stern's charges, and she admitted that the information contained in her petition might not be "100 percent accurate." Her admission was consistent with the observation of Jonathan Boyarin, whom Kramer describes as an Orthodox Jewish academic and El-Haj's friend, that the underlying motivation of the motzira-makers was a desire to express their Jewishness through an uncompromising defense of the Jewish state. Boyarin said he could not identify a single "reasoned, progressive scholar who's on the same side as those guys" in their attempt to undermine El-Haj's scholarship and deny her tenure.

To be honest, I know nothing about the quality of El-Haj's anthropological arguments or of her feelings about Israel. Regarding the former, how fortunate I was not appointed to her tenure committee. And regarding the latter, well, so what? Have we really reached the point where a person's politics, alleged or no, are somehow relevant to determining the worthiness of his or her scholarship? And if so, why stop at scholarship? Shouldn't auto mechanics or oral surgeons be asked to fill out political questionnaires before we hire them as well?

And what are we to make of scholars like Pipes, Columbia epidemiologist Judith Jacobson, Barnard religion professor Alan Segal, former SUNY Purchase archaeology lecturer Alexander Joffe and others associated with the misnamed Scholars for Peace in the Middle East who have joined such efforts to intervene in the time-honored tradition of politically disinterested tenure?

The antics of Horowitz--direct political descendant of Joe McCarthy--are no secret to the readers of this column. Pipes, whom Wikipedia identifies as the son of famed right-wing historian of the Russian Revolution Richard Pipes, is not nearly so well-known, but he enjoys significant scholarly credentials. He has taught at numerous respected universities and is treated in the media as an impartial expert on Middle Eastern matters. This is true despite the fact that his work on the Arab world was accurately characterized in one 1983 Washington Post book review as displaying "a disturbing hostility to contemporary Muslims," of being "frequently contemptuous of them" and of being "marred by exaggerations, inconsistencies, and evidence of hostility to the subject." (Like Horowitz's various tentacles, his organization Campus Watch offers its kosher seal of approval for ideologically kosher academics while attacking all others.) In his discussion of the El-Haj case, Pipes gives away the game by publicly renouncing the entire concept of academic freedom. University-based scholars, he explains, "are financed by the public and are thus accountable in some way to the public. They say, No, only we can judge and evaluate each other's work. Well, that's not how things work in this country."

Actually, it is how things work, at least at Barnard, where El-Haj was eventually tenured. The larger question of why any respected scholar anywhere would wish to associate him- or herself with such shameful sentiments, however, remains. And why do journalists continue to treat such academics as legitimate practitioners of scholarly debate? True, it is not always easy for a journalist to judge bona fides, but the case of Pipes is an open-and-shut one. Journalists' unwillingness to investigate such questions results in the perpetuation of no end of purposeful disinformation. Al Gore has noted, for instance, that despite the fact that virtually no disagreement can be found among peer-reviewed scientific journal articles regarding the reality of global warming, more than half of mainstream press articles until recently continued to dispute it.

Rabbi ben Zimra would know just what to say.

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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.

Writer discusses Abu El-Haj’s doctoral dissertation, which was revised and published in 2001 under the title “Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society.” The book looked at the role of archeology in what was essentially a political project: the Biblical validation for Jewish claims to what is now Israel. After teaching at the University of Chicago and spending a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Abu El-Haj moved to New York and joined the faculty of Barnard College. In April of 2006, she came up for tenure there. No one in her department doubted she would get it. Over the next year, her tenure file passed the scrutiny of three committees, which recommended her for tenure. By the spring of 2007, all that remained was the approval of a fourth committee. In August of 2007, a petition entitled “Deny Nadia Abu El-Haj tenure” was posted on the Internet. It found its way onto a number of email lists and Web sites. The author of the petition was a Barnard alumna named Paula Stern. Writer notes that Stern’s complaints against Abu El-Haj’s work were inaccurate. Stern later predicted that Barnard and Columbia were going to lose a lot of alumni money if Abu El-Haj got tenure. Writer discusses the legacy of the late Columbia professor Edward Said. Many of the attacks on Abu El-Haj made pointed reference to his influence. Tells about Rashid Khalidi, who came under attack for accepting the chair named after Said. Mentions Columbia president Lee Bollinger’s stinging introduction of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who spoke at the university last year. Gives biographical information about Abu El-Haj, who was born in New York and raised in Iran and Lebanon. She attended Bryn Mawr and later Duke, where her dissertation adviser, Virginia Dominguez, helped her focus her research on how Israel’s Jewish national “self” came to be constructed. Discusses Abu El-Haj’s work on the subject. Tells about “Columbia Unbecoming,” a film about the alleged intimidation of Jewish students by three Middle Eastern professors. A university committee that investigated the claims found no evidence of harassment, but two professors were cited for “episodes” three years earlier. One of these men, Joseph Massad, is currently awaiting word on tenure. Mentions the activities of pro-Israel advocacy groups led by David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, and Charles Jacobs. Tells about criticism of Abu El-Haj by Professor Alan Segal and others during her tenure process. On November 1, 2007, Abu El-Haj was informed that she had received tenure. “What happened last year—it wasn’t about me. I was a cog in the big wheel of the issue of the Middle East and Israel,” she says.

I always think of Thomas D. Clark in the spring.

Perhaps it's because, soon after I returned to Lexington in the spring of 1998, I asked Kentucky's historian laureate to speak to the Herald-Leader staff. He stood and lectured for nearly an hour without notes, putting Kentucky's array of issues, controversies and quirks into the context of history's great sweep.

It was an impressive performance, especially for a man about to turn 95.

While cleaning out files recently, I found a 15-page autobiographical memo Clark sent so I could introduce him properly that day. Hammered out on his manual typewriter, it was filled with typos and seemed to be missing a page or two. Mostly it was his exposition of Kentucky problems that need to be fixed.

It was classic Clark. He didn't study history to bask in the glow of a romanticized past. Rather, he saw history as the recipe for who we are and as a guide to the future that could help us learn from the mistakes of the past.

After Clark retired from a long and distinguished teaching career, he became even more active and outspoken. He drove himself around the state, speaking to legislative committees and garden clubs alike -- anyone who was willing to listen. And he never pulled punches. Herald-Leader reporter Andy Mead wrote my favorite description of Clark, calling him "a sort of unofficial state grandfather -- but not the kind who spoils you."

Clark didn't let up until his death on June 28, 2005 -- 16 days short of his 102nd birthday.

Perhaps I also think of Clark this time of year because spring is a time of renewal, a time to sort through old things and get serious about the future.

This is an especially good day to read Clark's observations, as the General Assembly heads home from Frankfort, having left so many of Kentucky's needs unmet.

Here are some excerpts:

"I thoroughly abhor the political corruption which has so often stained the democratic process in Kentucky's history. Every vote 'bought,' every private driveway paved at public expense, every mean and selfish act of a public school board, failure of the courts and criminal act by a public official has soiled Kentucky's image and diluted its integrity. One has only to examine the electoral statistics of past elections to see how much Kentuckians lack faith in their governing process...."

Last week, while rushing to finish up a review of Francois Cusset’s French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (University of Minnesota Press), I heard that Stanley Fish had just published a column about the book for The New York Times. Of course the only sensible thing to do was to ignore this development entirely. The last thing you need when coming to the end of a piece of work is to go off and do some more reading. The inner voice suggesting that is procrastination disguised as conscientiousness. Better, sometimes, to trust your own candlepower — however little wax and wick you may have left.

Once my own cogitations were complete (the piece will run in the next issue of Bookforum), of course, I took a look at the Times Web site. By then, Fish’s column had drawn literally hundreds of comments. This must warm some hearts in Minnesota. Any publicity is good publicity as long as they spell your name right — so this must count as great publicity, especially since French Theory itself won’t actually be available until next month.

But in other ways it is unfortunate. Fish and his interlocutors reduce Cusset’s rich, subtle, and paradox-minded book (now arriving in translation) into one more tale of how tenured pseudoradicalism rose to power in the United States. Of course there is always an audience for that sort of thing. And it is true that Cusset – who teaches intellectual history at the Institute d’Etudes Politiques and at Reid Hall/Columbia University, in Paris – devotes some portions of the book to explaining American controversies to his French readers. But that is only one aspect of the story, and by no means the most interesting or rewarding....

The National Council on Public History held its Annual Meeting in Louisville, KY, April 10-13, 2008. Click on the SOURCE link above to read blog comments.

"Archaeology has become a weapon of dispossession," Yonathan Mizrachi, an Israeli archaeologist, said in a recent telephone interview with us. He was referring to the way archaeology is being used in Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood in the oldest part of Jerusalem, where, we believe, archaeological digs are being carried out as part of a concerted campaign to expel Palestinians from their ancestral home.

That effort is orchestrated by an Israeli settler organization called Elad, a name formed from Hebrew letters that stand for "to the City of David." For several years, Elad has used a variety of means to evict East Jerusalem Palestinians from their homes and replace them with Jewish settlers. Today Silwan is dotted with about a dozen such outposts. Moreover, practically all the green areas in the densely populated neighborhood have been transformed into new archaeological sites, which have then been fenced and posted with armed guards. On two of these new archaeological sites, Jewish homes have already been built.

Although the balance of power is clearly in the settlers' favor, Silwan's residents have begun a campaign, "Citizens for Silwan," to stop the excavations. They are joined by a number of noted international scholars and a handful of Israeli academics, who are trying to help them remain in their homes. Among those involved are David A. Bell, dean of faculty and professor of the humanities at the Johns Hopkins University; Judith Butler, professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley; Lorraine Daston, director of Berlin's Max Planck Institute for the History of Science; Natalie Zemon Davis, professor of history emerita at Princeton University; Rashid Khalidi, professor of Arab studies at Columbia University; Thomas W. Laqueur, professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley; Sheldon Pollock, professor of Sanskrit and Indian studies at Columbia University; Marshall Sahlins, professor of anthropology and social sciences emeritus at the University of Chicago; and Robert A. Schneider, professor of history at Indiana University at Bloomington and editor of The American Historical Review. We joined David Shulman, professor of South Asian studies, and Yaron Ezrahi, professor of political science, both from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as Israeli signatories. Notably absent from the list are prominent Israeli archaeologists, many of whom depend on funds from the Israel Antiquities Authority....

Columbia University has taken the next step in its plan to add new multicultural classes to its core curriculum, the great books undergraduate program.

The university announced it would spend $50 million on a project to enhance the core curriculum's multicultural offerings last fall, shortly after students conducted a week-long hunger strike to protest the weakness of the classes. Now Columbia is assigning a young professor of Western civilization, Roosevelt Montas, 34, to direct the effort.

It will not be an easy job. The position will involve balancing the concerns of academics who worry that the university could veer from its focus on a canon of Western texts and students who have been pushing the university to make the core curriculum, called the Core, more inclusive.

Mr. Montas, a Dominican immigrant who moved to New York in his teens and attended Columbia as a scholarship student, is quick to acknowledge that his ethnic and economic background "embodies diversity," which some believe is missing from the core curriculum. Yet he is also one of the Core's most passionate defenders.

Washington, DC—Leading scholars of Middle East studies and African studies are set to gather in the nation's capital for the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa's (ASMEA) annual conference later this month where they will be joined by the preeminent authority in Middle East studies, Professor Bernard Lewis of Princeton University.

Hailed as "the world's foremost Islamic scholar" (Wall Street Journal) and as "the doyen of Middle Eastern studies" (New York Times), Professor Lewis's views on the issues facing the Islamic World inform the ranks of academia, policymakers and pundits.

Set for April 24-26, 2008 at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C., the conference is entitled: "The Evolution of Islamic Politics, Philosophy, and Culture in the Middle East and Africa: From Traditional Limits to Modern Extremes." It will feature a combination of panels and roundtables with scholars presenting new research findings on the importance of the Islamic influence in these regions, as well as a keynote speech from Professor Lewis.

As the conference's keynote speaker, Professor Lewis—who also serves as chairman of ASMEA—will speak to attendees about the future of these regions in a speech entitled Studying the Other: Different Ways of Looking at the Middle East and Africa.

In “Slavery by Another Name” Douglas A. Blackmon eviscerates one of our schoolchildren’s most basic assumptions: that slavery in America ended with the Civil War. Mr. Blackmon unearths shocking evidence that the practice persisted well into the 20th century. And he is not simply referring to the virtual bondage of black sharecroppers unable to extricate themselves economically from farming.

He describes free men and women forced into industrial servitude, bound by chains, faced with subhuman living conditions and subject to physical torture. That plight was horrific. But until 1951, it was not outside the law.

All it took was anything remotely resembling a crime. Bastardy, gambling, changing employers without permission, false pretense, “selling cotton after sunset”: these were all grounds for arrest in rural Alabama by 1890. And as Mr. Blackmon explains in describing incident after incident, an arrest could mean a steep fine. If the accused could not pay this debt, he or she might be imprisoned.

Alabama was among the Southern states that profitably leased convicts to private businesses. As the book illustrates, arrest rates and the labor needs of local businesses could conveniently be made to dovetail....

Susan Mann, a renowned historian of China, has been named the 2008 Faculty Research Lecturer by her colleagues at the University of California, Davis.

"Susan Mann is internationally known for her pioneering work on the history of women in China," history professor Alan Taylor said in announcing the 66th annual award last month at the spring meeting of the UC Davis Academic Senate. "... She revolutionized the study of Chinese history."

The Faculty Research Lecture is the highest honor bestowed by UC Davis faculty on their peers and recognizes outstanding scholarly research. It comes with a $1,000 cash award. In keeping with tradition, Mann will deliver a spring Faculty Research Lecture to the campus and community; the free lecture will take place at 7 p.m. May 6 in ARC Ballroom B. Titled "The Sex Education of a Sinologist," it will offer the first public preview of Mann's forthcoming book, "Gender and Sexuality in Modern China."

Mann grew up in a Detroit suburb, in what she describes as a "classic middle-class, postwar, 50s family." She was a freshman at the University of Michigan in 1961 when she first decided to study Chinese. At the time -- four years after the Russian launch of the Sputnik satellite -- the United States government was encouraging students to study "exotic languages" as a way to gain ground in the space race and defeat communism. Mann went on to earn her bachelor's degree in Far Eastern languages and literatures at Michigan and her master's and Ph.D. in Asian languages at Stanford University. She then moved to Chicago, where she taught at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

She credits a group of radical women students at the University of Chicago in the mid-1970s with pointing her toward the field of women's history and gender studies. The students, who made up the Women's Union on campus, needed a faculty sponsor. They appealed to Mann. She agreed, and also acceded when the students asked if they could use her house as a meeting place. At the meetings, as the students discussed women's wages and the emergence of feminist theory in academia, Mann began asking new questions about her area of focus: China in the 18th century. At the time, no one had studied the writings of Chinese women of that era from a historical perspective.

"Where are the women?" Mann wanted to know. "What did life look like from their point of view?"

Mann has answered these and other questions in three books, four edited volumes and 35 research articles and essays.

She first made her mark with a 1987 article in the field's premier publication, the Journal of Asian Studies. There, she demonstrated new possibilities for studying women's experience and gender relations to yield novel insights about Chinese government and society.

That article led to her 1997 book, "Precious Records: Women in China's Long Eighteenth Century," which won the Joseph R. Levenson Prize, the premier annual prize awarded in the field of pre-20th century China.

In 2002, she was recruited by the editors of the "Cambridge History of China" to write a chapter on "Women, Families and Gender Relations" in the 17th and 18th centuries. The chapter "offers a thorough and elegant summary of a burgeoning field which she helped to create," according to Ted Margadant, professor and chair of history at UC Davis.

Her latest book, "The Talented Women of the Zhang Family," reconstructs the lives of three generations of women who married into, or descended from, a family of scholar-officials. The University of California Press, which published the book last year, says that it "illuminates a China that has been largely invisible."

Margadant, who nominated Mann for the Faculty Research Lecture award, also praised her teaching, leadership and service to the campus. "Her scholarly productivity is especially striking because of her commitment to teaching, her leadership in national organizations and her service to the university," Margadant wrote in his nominating letter.

Among her many honors, Mann in 2000 was elected president of the Association of Asian Studies, an organization of 7,000 historians, literary scholars and social scientists. At UC Davis, where she has been a member of the faculty since 1989, she has chaired both the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Department of History and received the Outstanding Mentor Award from the UC Davis Consortium for Women and Research.