Cambridge classics students have been tested on the best-selling biography of Diana, Princess of Wales, a professor at the prestigious university has disclosed.

Prof Mary Beard said she also made her third-year pupils read tabloid newspapers and transcripts of the notorious "Squidgygate" and "Camillagate" tapes, which revealed intimate details of the princess and the Prince of Wales's extra-marital affairs, for a course about ancient Roman history.

The revelation comes just days after the pop lyrics of Amy Winehouse featured in a Cambridge exam paper.

Prof Mary Beard admitted some of her colleagues were "a bit dubious" about the academic value of the history course, which ran for three years.

It's like appointing a non-Jewish German to teach Holocaust studies, but Clark University has already done that.

The Worcester school recently named a Turkish historian to be chairman of Armenian genocide studies.

Taner Akçam, who was imprisoned in Turkey in the 1970s for his work on the slaughter of Armenians at the end of the Ottoman period in Turkey, was selected over several candidates of Armenian descent to hold the Armenian genocide studies post and to become an associate professor in the history department.

Despite a century of friction between Turks and Armenians, Akçam's appointment has sparked little concern in the state's vocal Armenian community.

"My appointment is a sign of change, with symbolic meaning," said Akçam, who is leaving a post as a visiting professor of history at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

"It is not important, the ethnic origin of the individual in this position; what is important is the approach of the individual to the historic wrongdoing," Akçam said. "The position should not be an issue between Turks and Armenians; this is an issue between those who violated human rights and scholars and human beings who fight against abuses of human rights."

Some local Armenians lamented that Akçam does not support Armenian claims to Turkish land and that there are not enough positions in academia to be filled by more scholars of Armenian descent.

Victor Davis Hanson, a former classics professor, is a renowned conservative scholar of ancient history and military affairs who's recently become a nationally syndicated columnist and blogger. The author of 17 books with titles like "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War," "An Autumn of War" and "Mexifornia: A State of Becoming," he is the senior fellow in residence in classics and military history at the Hoover Institution on the Stanford University campus. Hanson, whose scholarship and interest in individual freedom recently earned him a 2008 Bradley Prize worth $250,000 from the Bradley Foundation, was on his farm near the central California town of Selma when I called to ask him about his favorite war books.

Q: What’s the greatest book on war ever written?

A: I think Thucydides' "Peloponnesian War" is the most astute. It’s the second-earliest history of war and it’s not only a testament to the use of source material and the ability to provide a coherent narrative, but it's analytical and it becomes almost philosophical in its dissection of human nature.

Q: Has everyone else been trying to rise to those standards ever since?

A: Yes, I think so. The adjective "Thucydidean" is pretty much a standard brand now that people understand that ideally a historian would have three components in a successful history: One would be that they would use source materials in an analytic rather than prejudicial manner; and two, they would be able to draw together a lot of sources and provide an engaging narrative; and then three, that their history would speak to readers in terms of philosophy beyond just the particular history or period or era they are narrating.

Q: What was the best book about World War II?

A: I think Gerhard Weinberg’s “A World at Arms” (1994: Cambridge University Press). It’s a single-volume (1,208-page) history of World War II. What’s so good about it is, he looks at it in a holistic fashion, so we understand for the first time how the Balkan uprising affected German war plans. Or what was going on in the Japanese empire in places like Korea or Taiwan or Mainland China and how that affected the war with the British. Or what were people in the Nazi Party talking to Hitler about in terms of alternate plans rather than what actually happened. He understands source material very well and he has an eye for trying to give us a world at war other than just Britain, Germany and the United States. It shows how their ideas filtered out into so many different theaters and how the ultimate result of that is how lucky we were to win.

Q: What’s the best anti-war book?

A: There was a whole genre of anti-war books that followed the First World War. There are novels such as “All Quiet on the Western Front” or memoirs like Robert Graves’ “Good-bye to All That,” or poetry by people like Siegfried Sassoon that came out of the World War I experience in Europe. Europe had never experienced anything like that before. There are other things that have been written, like “The Red Badge of Courage,” and plays going back to the Greeks, like “The Trojan Women” or Aristophanes' comedy “Lysistrata,” that were anti-war in nature. But it seems to me that World War I and the advent of industrial war created entire new genres of novels, poetry and memoirs that started with the premise that there was nothing at all possibly glorious about war.

Q: Would you agree with that last phrase you uttered?

A: To an extent. I am not one of these people that is common now who see World War I as a tragedy in the sense that there was no moral or ethical difference between Germany of 1914 and France and England. If one were to look at the nature of German aggression in Europe, the nature of German colonies overseas, or what the German agenda was, it seems to me that it was very different than the liberal tradition in France and England that prevailed. It’s a tragedy that it had to end in a war like that, but given the superiority of the German Wehrmacht in 1914, I don’t know any other way how anybody would have stopped it. In terms of artillery, in terms of personal arms, in terms of general staff, railroads, communications, esprit de corps, it was so far superior to the colonial armies of France and England. The ambitions of the German Kaiser were so ambitious, I don’t know how anybody could have done anything other than what they did. They would have either had to appease them or capitulate. It was a tragedy. But I do think there was a qualitative difference in the fact that the Allies won. It had a profound effect on Europe. The tragedy of World War I, it seems to me, is how the Versailles Treaty ended and the Allies were not willing to remain vigilant, because given their enormous losses in the war there was sort of a utopian pacifism that followed.

Q: You’ve been reading books about the war in Iraq by various participants. They’re all sort of pointing fingers of blame at each other for various reasons. Which book so far do you find to be the most informative and the most credible?

A: I think the most recent that I read, (former undersecretary of defense) Douglas Feith's “War and Decision,” is the most informative. And I think it’s the most credible for one reason – that it’s the best documented. More importantly, he has deliberately avoided or promised not to use a technique that has been very common in other books like Tom Rick’s “Fiasco” or Trainor and Gordon’s “Cobra II.” By that I mean he has not had anonymous sources in the footnotes. So we don’t see “senior Pentagon official” or “junior American diplomat” cited after a direct quotation. Nor do we see, as we see in Bob Woodward’s books, conversations repeated verbatim inside a room with three people and we don’t know who gave him that information. That means the information can never be checked.

Whereas in the case of Feith, he not only cited things, he put it on his Web site and a person can go to the Web site and click on the footnote and see whether the footnote reflects accurately what it is supposed to. And I don’t think he was trying to get even. Part of the problem with that genre is that, a), it’s right in the middle of a war; and b), when Paul Bremer writes he’s going to blame Feith and he’s going to blame Gen. Sanchez. When Gen. Sanchez is going to write, he’s going to blame Bremer and Feith. Gen. Tommy Franks is going to say I did a great job and I left and everything was right. Gen. Sanchez is now going to blame Bremer … once you get into that cycle it’s unending.

I think if you read carefully what Feith wrote, a), he didn’t do that, and b), he takes some of the blame himself. It’s an apology in a sense for the idea that the Pentagon had a war plan, had people listened to then rather than the State Department, things would be better than they are now. It’s not “My brilliant war was ruined by somebody else’s lousy occupation.” That’s pretty much the subtext of every other (book).

Q: How many years after a war does a historian need to get a proper perspective?

A: I think it takes a half century.... It takes the death of people, and that’s usually 50 years. In the case of World War II, we had a radical change of heart once Eisenhower passed away and once Gen. Omar Bradley passed away, because they were icons of the American military. If we were to say Bradley was not as good a general as George Patton, that would have been heresy. Patton died right after the war and was caricatured as an uncouth bigmouth. But after Bradley died and there was not the Bradley core of scholars – clients, so to speak – in the military and also in the civilian world, then people began to look at World War II with a fresh start. So you can see that the last two or three biographies of Patton have been very sympathetic. They have started to say that it was Bradley who was responsible for the Falaise Gap (in Normandy); it was Bradley who didn’t have a good plan to restore the Bulge; it was Eisenhower who was naïve about Czechoslovakia and Berlin. These questions were not even raised before, because of the enormous stature they held while they were alive. That’s true of every war; you really can’t question in a disinterested fashion because the principals who are still alive have their various spheres of influence. I don’t think we’ll know about Iraq until all the major players are gone.

Q: Some people have said Iraq is the worst blunder in the history of American foreign policy. What do you say when you hear that statement?

A: Two things come to mind: One, people must not know things that we’ve done in the past. I’m not saying it was a blunder, but you could easily have used that terminology when we armed the Soviet Union and it killed 30 million of its own people to stop Hitler; we went to war to ensure that Eastern Europe was liberated from Nazi totalitarianism and we ended up assuring that Eastern Europe was subjected to Soviet totalitarianism and we empowered an empire that was every bit as bad as Hitler. But that was something that a prior generation accepted…. On a tactical level, Iraq is not even close to World War II. Putting pilots in Devastator torpedo bombers; or trying to sell the idea that the Sherman tank, for all of its strengths about maintenance, was going to be anywhere near comparable to a German tank; and the thousands of people who found out with the cost of their lives that wasn’t true … I could go down the line.

Whether it’s the Civil War, or the First World War, or the Second World War, or the status of American armed forces in August of 1950, we’ve made so many more blunders and we reacted so much more slowly to correct them than anything we have seen in Iraq. So I just don’t think anybody has any historical comparison.

That being said, is Iraq a fiasco or a blunder? If we were to get out and were to lose, I would concede that it would be. But if we stay and we are successful in creating a constitutional government, then you can see that that would be an amazing achievement. It would not only make Saddam Hussein’s Iraq an ally rather than an enemy that attacked its neighbors, but it would have a very deleterious effect on Iran. We can talk in terms of Iran undermining Iraq – that’s true. But if Iraq was to win that struggle, then it would be -- by its very presence as a constitutional state -- undermining Iran as well as putting pressure on other countries who don’t have our interests at heart. All we did by going into Iraq was raise the ante; great good can come of it or great evil depending upon how we prevail. As far as the losses, I don’t quite understand it. I don’t like to be heartless, but in six years we’ve lost about the same amount of soldiers we lost in two or three days in a major campaign in World War II. During an eight-year period of the Clinton administration, when the military was two or three times larger and not nearly as adept in its training, I think we lost almost twice as many as we’ve lost in Iraq in peacetime accidents. I think in the eight years of the Clinton administration we lost over 7,000 dead in accidents. So if you look at the rate of casualties this month, for example, we’re averaging about less than one a day. It was always pretty much a standard figure that we would lose three soldiers a day in the military in the 1980s and 1990s – it was well over a thousand a year. It’s not happening in the military in general and it’s not happening in Iraq. It doesn’t mean it’s not tragic we are losing people, but given the stakes, I’m always amazed at how well the military does.

Q: If you were to write a book about the war in Iraq now, after six years -- and I know you’d probably say it’s too early to write one -- what would it focus on?

A: I think I would concentrate on two issues: One is how victory or defeat would affect the position of the United States in a geopolitical sense. That would touch on everything from the price of oil to the nuclear arming of Iran or to the weapons of mass destruction programs that we know took place under Saddam but more importantly in places like Pakistan, Libya and Syria. I’d make the argument that a victory would discourage proliferation of all these weapons and encourage reform and a defeat would make things much worse than they were before.

The second thing, I would be concentrating on how the military evolved; an artillery-armor-rapid-moving column that won the war and then in a bureaucratic sense was static in the occupation had to adjust and the degree to which it adjusted faster than the insurgents did. I think we’re going to see in the next round of Army promotions a whole new cadre of colonels who are more versed in counterinsurgency than they are in armor, artillery or air support.

Q: What lessons has the war in Iraq taught future historians?

A: It’s a reminder that there are new lessons in war. No war turns out as one predicts. So those who were arguing after the three-week victory that we’d have a constitutional government up and running in six months given the euphoria of the pretty brilliant victory were wrong, just as people have been wrong about the Civil War lasting one summer or World War I being over in September. And then those who thought that the insurgency had won and it was hopeless; the United States could never go into the heart of the Caliphate and know what they were doing; the idea that Arabs could ever vote in a peaceful or orderly fashion among themselves was impossible – they’re wrong, as well. I think it reiterates that the strengths of the United States’ system – civilian control of the military, reliance on high technology, logistics and most importantly consensuality among the ranks so that people who have different ideas or different strategies are allowed to be heard – for all the problems we’ve had in Iraq, if we have enough patience, will finally come into play. We get somebody like Gen. Petraeus and he turns around the theater and the unheard of and the impossible starts to happen -- that being that suddenly a Shia-dominated government is attacking Shia radicals that are surrogates of Iran while appealing to Sunnis to join them and to do their part in routing al-Qaida and Wahhabi insurgents. Nobody in their right mind would have believed that was possible just a year and half ago. But with patience, we get the right kind of people in such a system that can change things around. I think that’s happened.

MR. RUSSERT: Doris, in Boca Raton on Thursday, Barack Obama was asked about vice president, specifically about Hillary Clinton, and here's his answer, which talks about you.

(Videotape)

Unidentified Man: When the time comes, will you be willing to consider everybody who is a possible help to you as a running mate, even if his or her spouse is an occasional pain in the butt?

SEN. OBAMA: I, I--well, look. Well, look, look, look. The--we've got a little more work to do. So I don't want to jump the gun. I will tell you, though, that my goal is to have the best possible government. And that means me winning. And so I am very practical-minded. I'm a practical-minded guy. And, you know, one of my, one of my heroes is Abraham Lincoln. And a while back there was a wonderful book written by Doris Kearns Goodwin called "Team of Rivals," in which--talked about how Lincoln basically pulled in all the people who had been running against him into his Cabinet because whatever, you know, personal feelings there were, the issue was how can we get this country through this time of crisis? And I think that has to be the approach that one takes.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT: Who did Lincoln take into his Cabinet?

MS. KEARNS GOODWIN: Lincoln took all of his chief rivals into his Cabinet--Seward, Chase and Bates. He also took Stanton in, who had called him an ape, who had said terrible things about him, much worse than Clinton has ever said about Obama. But what it showed--and I think that's what Obama is suggesting--is that he was big-hearted enough, he was confident enough not to have to have just people who would be his personal supporters and not question his authority. And I think what Obama is saying is if this person can help me win this election, fit the jigsaw puzzle pieces together, she has one part of the map, I have another, I can rise above those personal feelings. But I suppose--and Lincoln put it in noble fashion, he said, "Look, people are wondering why have I done this? First of all, the country's in peril. These are the strongest and most able men in the country. I need them by my side." But perhaps my old buddy Lyndon Johnson might have put it in less noble fashion, "better to have your enemies inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in."

MR. RUSSERT: I just heard the beep. Like keep your enemies closer?

MS. KEARNS GOODWIN: Keep your enemies closer.

MS. DOWD: Both of them?

MR. MEACHAM: I like the way Doris says it.

A brain disorder drove historian Edward Renehan Jr. to record an album with folk legend Pete Seeger, work with New York publishers and write six books, including one on the Kennedys, the author says.
But that same illness ---- diagnosed last year as bipolar disorder ---- may have pushed Renehan to steal and sell rare letters written by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, a federal crime that could send him to jail or force him to pay up to $250,000 in fines.

In federal court in Manhattan last week, Renehan admitted to stealing the letters from a New York vault. He sold the letters through Swann Galleries for $97,000. Prosecutors said he stole them from the Theodore Roosevelt Association in Oyster Bay on Long Island between January 2006 and October 2007.
"When I look back at what a madman I was … I'm stunned at what I did," said the 51-year-old author, who works in a book-crowded basement in his ranch house in North Kingstown. "The manic [bi-polar] behavior is your enemy, but it's also who you are.".

Renehan was the acting director of the association when he stole one letter handwritten by President Lincoln on March 1, 1840, and two letters by President Washington, one written on Aug. 9, 1791, and another on Dec. 29, 1778, said New York U.S. Attorney Michael J. Garcia.

The critically acclaimed biographer faces a fine and up to 30 months under federal sentencing guidelines, said his lawyer, Peter Brill. He will also have to pay restitution. Sentencing is set for Aug. 21.

Brill yesterday said he will seek leniency.

Renehan's condition, combined with family issues and other stresses , clouded his judgment, he said. The author has no prior record.

"We don't really think jail is appropriate under the circumstances," said Brill. "This was a single aberrant act in an otherwise honorable life." Renehan apologized during his plea and told his family, friends and colleagues he was sorry....

Renehan, a freelance book reviewer, has written pieces for The Providence Journal, including a recent review of Manic: A Memoir, a look at bipolar disorder by Terri Cheney, a Beverly Hills entertainment lawyer."For someone who was wrestled with the same demons, Cheney's book reeks with scary deja vu," Renehan wrote in February."It's all here: The sudden, unexpected, rapid-cycling flights into sadness, fits of rage, or mad schemes."

As a result of his new medication, Renehan said he no longer writes with the same confidence and bravado he once did.

"I'm more reflective now," he said,"which may be a good thing."

One year ago, we published Maureen Ogle’s winsome account of leaving academic history to “go popular.” Two issues later, the Historical Society’s president, Eric Arnesen, himself a frequent writer of reviews for the Chicago Tribune, wrote an essay expressing concern that so-called popular historians do not make sufficient effort to incorporate the fruits of academic historical scholarship in their books. Arnesen selected two books to illustrate his concern. One of them was Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains, on the abolition of the British slave trade and slavery. Hochschild, an accomplished writer and editor, responded to Arnesen with a thoughtful letter that we published in the November/December 2007 issue. He also suggested that he would welcome further discussion on the relationship between popular and academic history. We invited Hochschild to write a think-piece, “Practicing History without a License.” Historically Speaking editor Donald A. Yerxa then recruited a good number of prominent historians and editors to respond to Hochschild. These include several authors of bestselling history books (one of whom won the Pulitzer Prize), editors of publications geared to general readers, and an editor of one of the world’s leading academic presses (which also has a trade division). Hochschild then drafted a rejoinder.

The following contributions to "Do You Need a License to Practice History?" are posted here in full:

Adam Hochschild, "Practicing History without a License"

Responses to Hochschild:
John Demos
Joseph J. Ellis
Joyce Seltzer

The print version includes other responses to Hochschild's piece by:

H. W. Brands
John Ferling
Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Thomas Fleming
James Goodman and Louis Masur: A Correspondence
John Lukacs
Joyce Lee Malcolm
Wilfred M. McClay
Greg Neale
Barry Strauss
Derek Wilson
John Wilson
Jay Winik

On May 22, Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein announced the establishment of the “Controlled Unclassified Information Office” (CUIO) within the National Archives and Records Administration. Weinstein also announced that William J. Bosanko, director of the Information Security Oversight Office, will head up this newly formed office. The Office is being created in response to the Memorandum for the Heads of Departments and Agencies on the Designation and Sharing of Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) issued by President Bush on May 9, 2008.

The Presidential memorandum designated the National Archives as responsible for overseeing and managing the implementation of the CUI framework.

The new CUI policy is an attempt by the Bush administration to standardize procedures for the treatment of what is referred to as “Sensitive But Unclassified” (SBU) information. The memorandum issued by the president adopts, defines and institutes “Controlled Unclassified Information” as the new standard for the treatment of such information. There are currently over 100 different markings for sensitive information that has led to over-classification. The new CUI policy would reduce that to three categories....

The news appeared in the blogosphere late last fall: Columbia University had reportedly denied the tenure bid of Joseph A. Massad, a Palestinian-American scholar at the university.

"Raise your cup," Paula Stern, a Jewish American who blogs from Israel, wrote last November. "Joseph Massad will not remain at Columbia University."

But six months later, Mr. Massad—an associate professor of Arab politics in Columbia's embattled department of Middle East and Asian languages and culture—is still a professor at the university. His third book, Desiring Arabs (University of Chicago Press), just won the prestigious Lionel Trilling Book Award, given by a committee of undergraduates at the university. And Columbia has made no announcement about his tenure status.

So what happened?

Administrators at Columbia won't say, citing the privacy and confidentiality of tenure cases. Prominent professors in the department of Middle East and Asian languages and culture—or Mealac, as it is known—and other departments would not speak publicly about the process. Mr. Massad, too, declined to comment.

But other faculty members, both inside Columbia and out, who have knowledge of the tenure case say Alan Brinkley, the university's provost, did indeed turn down the professor's tenure bid last fall.

The provost's decision followed what professors describe as a narrow vote in favor of Mr. Massad by an ad hoc committee of five scholars who judged his tenure file. When the provost subsequently rejected the bid, professors say, the decision prompted an angry letter from senior faculty members at Columbia who support Mr. Massad. They apparently have persuaded the provost to reconsider the case and give the professor the unusual opportunity of a second chance at tenure at Columbia.

The federal investigation into thefts of Theodore Roosevelt Association artifacts that led to a guilty plea this week by former director Edward Renehan Jr. turned up three more missing items.

Besides four letters previously publicized, the National Park Service Investigative Services Branch recovered two books and a letter by Roosevelt that had been consigned to auction houses by Renehan and sold.

Renehan's attorney concedes the letter belonged to the association but insists the books were owned by Renehan. Nonetheless, federal officials said the three items would be returned to the TRA.

The issue of reparations in America provokes a lot of interest, but the public debate usually occurs at the level of historical accounting: "Who owes what for slavery?" This book attempts to get past that question to address racial restitution within the framework of larger societal interests. For example, the answer to the "why reparations?" question is more than the moral of payment for an injustice done in the past. Ronald Walters suggests that, insofar as the impact of slavery is still very much with us today and has been reinforced by forms of postslavery oppression, the objective of racial harmony will be disrupted unless it is recognized with the solemnity and amelioration it deserves. The author concludes that the grand narrative of black oppression in the United States---which contains the past and present summary of the black experience---prevents racial reconciliation as long as some substantial form of racial restitution is not seriously considered. This is "the price" of reconciliation.

The method for achieving this finding is grounded in comparative politics, where the analyses of institutions and political behaviors are standard approaches. The author presents the conceptual difficulties involved in the project of racial reconciliation by comparing South African Truth and Reconciliation and the demand for reparations in the United States.

Ronald W. Walters is Distinguished Leadership Scholar and Director, African American Leadership Program, and Professor of Government and Politics, University of Maryland.

Spencer Downing has a tale to tell, and he lands some big laughs along the way. Using very minimal costuming –- "layering" might be a better word -- an overhead projector and a series of hilarious hand-drawn transparencies, he tells the story of being one of the first college grads chosen for Teach for America, a Peace Corp-style program that asks participants to commit two years to teaching disadvantaged students across the U.S. Downing’s stint was in the early 1990s in a very rural, and racist, part of North Carolina.

From the start, the show struggles a little with tone -- the audience initially is lectured on its ignorance and insensitivity, but gradually you realize Downing is talking to himself. He comes across at times –- especially early on –- as superior and not that likable, but by the time he’s dirty dancing at the prom he has the audience howling (and I’m still chuckling at Alexis de Tocqueville’s sideburns from one early transparency).

Downing’s problem, and it’s a pretty significant one, is he doesn’t appear to be a trained actor or storyteller. (He’s a UCF history professor by day.) It would be interesting to see his writing in the hands of somebody who was.

The US political author and critic of Israel Norman Finkelstein was denied entry to the Jewish state on Friday, his lawyer said.

Finkelstein landed at Ben Gurion international airport near Tel Aviv in the early morning and was told by a representative of the ministry of interior that he would not be allowed into the country on 'security' grounds, attorney Michael Sfard told dpa.

'This usually means a 10-year ban on entry,' Sfard added.

Finkelstein, who is Jewish and the son of Holocaust survivors, has written critical books on Israeli policies in the Palestinian territories and on what he called 'exploitation' of the Jewish tragedy during World War II.
Finkelstein has received with the fierce disapproval of some authors and academics, while others have praised his controversial works.