A Virginia Circuit Court judge dismissed a lawsuit this morning against George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media.

Thomson Reuters Inc. had sued the university in a Virginia court in September for at least $10-million in damages, claiming that Zotero, a free software tool created by the university, made improper use of the company’s EndNote citation software.

Zotero is a plug-in for the Firefox Web browser that is designed to help scholars store and organize their online research. The program, which could convert EndNote files, had been downloaded over one million times by September.

George Mason University said in November it had not renewed a site license for EndNote, and would not make any changes to its software.

A spokesman for the university confirmed the case had been dismissed but declined to comment further. Officials at Thomson Reuters were not immediately available for comment on the dismissal.

PREFACE

This report was prepared by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) pursuant to the Inspector General Act of 1978, as amended, and Section 209 of the Foreign Service Act of 1980, as amended. It is one of a series of audit, inspection, investigative, and special reports prepared by OIG periodically as part of its responsibility to promote effective management, accountability and positive change in the Department of State and the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

This report is the result of an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the office, post, or function under review. It is based on interviews with employees and officials of relevant agencies and institutions, direct observation, and a review of applicable documents.

The recommendations therein have been developed on the basis of the best knowledge available to the OIG and, as appropriate, have been discussed in draft with those responsible for implementation. It is my hope that these recommendations will result in more effective, efficient, and/or economical operations.

I express my appreciation to all of those who contributed to the preparation of this report.

Harold W. Geisel
Acting Inspector General

KEY JUDGMENTS

• The Office of the Historian (HO) is responsible by law for the publication of a thorough, accurate, and reliable account of major U.S. foreign policy de­ cisions within 30 years of the events recorded. This is the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series. While the 30-year deadline has rarely been met, HO’s influential advisory body, the Historical Advisory Committee (HAC), fears that mismanagement of the human resources made available for the FRUS and the effect of this on morale within HO – also historically poor – threaten further delay, possibly damaging the thoroughness and ac­ curacy that give the FRUS its unparalleled prestige. OIG finds these fears to be justified.

• A large majority of present HO employees alleged to OIG cronyism, fa­ voritism, and lack of transparency on the part of HO management, and in general the creation of an unhappy workplace as the basis for their disaffec­ tion. This, they said, was made worse by the manner in which one division chief carried out security and other duties that go beyond his normal area of authority. For its part, management attributed academic atavism, displeasure with security regulations, and ignorance of Civil Service rules to the same employees. Neither side shows much confidence in the other.

• Compilation and publication of the FRUS is a years-long and highly special­ ized process. Experience is a vital component in it, but with 21 employees having left HO in the past five years for differing reasons, this experience is being lost. Contrary to the director’s assertion, “newly minted” PhDs cannot perform at the necessary level of quality after only a short time on the job. Lapses in production are therefore inevitable. This likelihood is aggravated by vacancies in the jobs of general editor and one division chief that were imposed by the special review panel.

• There is a built-in tension between HO’s FRUS-related statutory obligations and the resources made available to meet them, just as there is between the timeliness and the quality of the FRUS itself. Even with an increase in staff and in budget, HO is no closer to meeting these obligations than in the past. The foreign affairs world and the players in it continue to grow in number and complexity, outpacing efforts to have FRUS keep up. There is a need for more structured thinking about how FRUS can meet its obligations and expectations within realistic funding levels. This strategic thinking and planning should be conducted jointly with HO’s advisory body, the HAC.

• With each finding fault with actions of the other, relations between HO and the HAC today are professional but strained. The director’s advisory role in the appointment and reappointment of HAC members is controversial, while the involvement in HO employee complaints by some HAC members made disaffection in HO worse.

• Oversight of HO by the Bureau of Public Affairs (PA) has not been regular or, lately, helpful. OIG believes that HO should remain in PA, but that the bureau should provide a more structured mechanism for closer supervision of HO.

• HO has a large number of contractors – 12 of its 49 positions. This means increased costs: OIG estimates that each contractor costs the U.S. Govern­ ment about $12,000 more per year than would a direct-hire employee. It also means increased instability in an office requiring a high degree of education, training, and experience to carry out its responsibilities.

• HO needs an administrative officer as well as additional direct-hire positions for historians. These would help the FRUS by allowing more time to be spent on research and compilation and by providing a more stable workforce.

• HO office space is cluttered and badly arranged; cubicles are generally small and inconvenient. The office is not sized to house 49 positions. PA should find a space planner to review the existing facility, while actively seeking larger, more suitable space for HO. The review took place in Washington, DC, between February 18 and March 27, 2009, as part of a special OIG management review of the Office of the Historian, Bureau of Public Affairs, U.S. Department of State. Ambassador Robert E. Barbour (team leader), Robert C. Bemis, John J. Eddy, and Anita G. Schroeder conducted the review.

T.R.M. Howard was not everyone’s idea of a civil rights hero, and his accomplishments have been widely neglected. But as historian David Beito and sociologist Linda Royster Beito demonstrate in their book Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power, he was in fact one of the most effective black civil rights leaders of his generation and a key figure in bringing civil rights to Mississippi and empowering black voters in Chicago. I put six questions to David Beito about his new book.

1. Howard’s life puts him at the center of a number of historic events, usually playing a vital role, particularly in the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties, yet his name rarely figures in the short list of leadership figures cited in the media. Has his role been underappreciated?

Beito: Yes, very much so. Standard works in black history rarely mention him. Much of this neglect has to do with the political biases of historians. Quite simply, Howard doesn’t fit their ideal of a civil rights leader. He was not an ascetic Gandhi-like figure, a union activist, or a clergyman, but rather a prosperous businessman who did not hesitate to display his wealth, bet on horses, stage ostentatious New Year’s Eve parties, lead big game hunts to Africa, and speed down the highway in his brand-new Cadillac. In contrast to Martin Luther King Jr., he carried guns and was ready to use them in self-defense “just in case.”

Another reason Howard has been forgotten relates to Howard himself. He never tried to pigeonhole himself as a “civil rights leader.” During the 1960s and 1970s, he increasingly focused on his medical practice and hobbies such as big-game hunting. In 1972, his life’s work culminated in the opening of the Friendship Medical Center on the South Side. It was the largest black privately owned medical facility in Chicago. While Howard supported numerous civil rights causes later in life, he preferred to do it from behind the scenes. Sometimes his ego also got in the way of working with other people.

Despite this, Howard was not a man to boast about his past civil rights accomplishments. He always had his eyes on a future project. In this respect, he was one of the premiere renaissance men in black history....

Him Mark Lai, an engineer by training and historian by avocation whose groundbreaking scholarship and treasure trove of archival documents guided generations of scholars to study the daily lives and struggles of Chinese Americans, died May 21 in San Francisco. He was 83.

The cause was complications of cancer, according to his wife, Laura.

Unassuming but tenacious, Lai was often called the dean of Chinese American studies, a field that did not exist when he taught the first university-level course on Chinese American history in 1969 at San Francisco State.

Although he was never a tenured professor, the bi-literate scholar wrote more than 100 essays and 10 books in English and Chinese, several of which are considered indispensable resources in Chinese American history. His key works include "A History of the Chinese in California, a Syllabus," co-edited with Thomas W. Chinn and Philip P. Choy, and "Outlines: History of the Chinese in America," also written with Choy, who co-taught the 1969 class.

"He was one of the most important historians of Chinese America," said Russell C. Leong, editor of UCLA's Amerasia Journal, who called Lai a historian of the people. "He has done the most to broaden and humanize what it means to be Chinese American, then and now."...

Antony Beevor is the doyen of British popular history. The world's bestselling military historian, with an astonishing four-million sales to his name, he has done more than any other current writer to drag history out of its ivory towers and into the nation's living-rooms.

Beevor came to prominence with two bestselling tomes, Stalingrad and Berlin, both of which deal with the eastern front of the Second World War. Now, however, he has turned his attention to the western theatre to tackle the D-Day campaign and the Battle for Normandy.

There is a danger inherent in this westward shift. Beevor's earlier books succeeded not only because they were brilliantly written, but also because they brought something genuinely new to the party, expanding the reader's understanding of a largely under-known subject. Stalingrad and Berlin were the first books in English, for instance, to detail the grim tribulations of the ordinary Soviet soldier in the Second World War. There is surely a risk that, in turning to the familiar surroundings of Normandy's beaches and hedgerows, Beevor will lose a part of his appeal, sacrifice his unique selling point. Crucially, can he still meet his own high standards on such familiar terrain?

Happily, D-Day is vintage Beevor. Written with tremendous verve and flair, it segues seamlessly between the various locations of the narrative – Normandy, London, Berlin and Paris – and between the macro of grand strategy and the micro of soldiers' experiences, without ever losing its way or appearing disjointed. All the salient points of the story are elegantly and engagingly retold – from the rugged heroism at Pointe du Hoc, to the grim confrontation at Falaise and the joyous liberation of Paris....

I first met Amos Elon in Germany in the 1990s. We were participants in one of a series of meetings generously hosted by the Bertelsmann Foundation, where Germans, Israelis, and Jews gathered to exchange platitudes. Most of those present sought either to proselytize and grandstand (in the case of Israelis and Jews) or else to avoid giving offense (in the case of the Germans). Amos, uniquely, did neither. There, as on every occasion when I heard him speak, he succeeded in being both outspoken and yet somehow effortlessly sensible—he dominated conversation by force of reason. He had a mordant wit and a dismissive eye; he was contemptuous of fools and pedants; he smiled only rarely but when he did so it was real. He made a lasting impression upon me.

The German setting was altogether fitting. Amos, who was born in Vienna and was the author of an influential biography of Theodor Herzl, never lost his attachment to German culture and history, a subject on which he wrote frequently and with empathetic insight. The Pity of It All, his 2002 study of the Jewish presence in Germany from the Enlightenment to Hitler, displayed a fine sensitivity to the tragedy of Germany's Jews. For good and ill they remained profoundly attached to their cultural homeland, long after they were forced to leave it for Israel or America or elsewhere: more than the Jews of any other European land, they would feel their loss.[1]

But it is for his writings on Zionism and Israel, and his lifelong engagement with the country and its dilemmas, that Amos Elon will be best remembered. In The Israelis: Founders and Sons (1971) he offered a critical history of Zionism, its practitioners, and its heirs; an account that directly confronts the shortcomings of the Zionist project and its outcome. Today such critical accounts are common currency in debates in Israel; in those days they were rare indeed. Amos Elon's commitment to Israel, the country where he lived and worked for most of his life, was never in question. But for just this reason his awkward stance, relentlessly engaging with the country's failings, set him apart. His courageous refusal to endorse the clichés with which Israel's defenders parry every criticism contrasts not only with the defensiveness of contemporary left-wing Israeli commentators but also and especially with the pusillanimous apologetics of Israel's American claque....

In The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama writes of "the psychodrama of the baby-boom generation" with its "old grudges and revenge plots." A case in point: A generation ago, a group of mostly white, boomer journalists and intellectuals published a series of influential books and articles on the "failure" of civil rights politics. Their accounts began with an idealized story of the Southern civil rights movement, focusing on the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, which they contrasted starkly to the supposed excesses of the late 1960s: a divisive racial politics that played out mostly in the North, directed by black radicals and enabled by white leftists who together alienated the white "silent majority," weakened the Democratic Party, and thwarted Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of an integrated America. In this account, the North is the spoiler in an otherwise uplifting story of racial redemption.

This version of history took root in the conservative soil of the 1980s and 1990s and had a clear political purpose: to discredit controversial race-conscious programs, including affirmative action, school desegregation, and minority voting districts, as a betrayal of "the movement." To make that argument required a selective–and narrow–reading of civil rights history. Like most didactic narratives, it rested on simple binaries: integrationism versus separationism, nonviolence versus violence, Martin versus Malcolm. Mainstream historians have largely moved beyond such reductionism, and yet it is difficult to read Richard Kahlenberg’s review of my book Sweet Land of Liberty without feeling sucked into that old boomer psychodrama once again ["Wrong on Race," Issue #12].

Spanning the long period from the 1920s to the 1990s, Sweet Land of Liberty gives voice to the diverse activists who joined the struggle for racial equality, tries to present their views evenhandedly, and does not shy away from controversial issues, including the domestic impact of the cold war, black power, and welfare rights. Yet Kahlenberg prefers to view civil rights in the North through a pinhole, from the vantage point of angry ex-leftists like New York teacher unionist Albert Shanker and a few blocks in Brooklyn. In this view, a handful of black nationalists, spouting anti-Semitic slogans and advocating affirmative action, destroyed liberalism.

To support his argument, Kahlenberg restates the widely discredited backlash thesis, namely that "the Northern civil rights movement took some wrong turns along the way, unnecessarily alienating working-class whites who shared common interests with blacks." Yes, activists sometimes took wrong turns, like the strange alliance between some leading black power activists and the Nixon Administration that I describe in Sweet Land of Liberty. And yes, black radicals sometimes alienated whites, with high political costs, including the rise of a destructive law-and-order politics in the late 1960s.

But Kahlenberg’s assumption that an interracial working-class movement was just around the corner in 1968–or at any other point in the twentieth century, for that matter–is wishful thinking. The persistence of racial inequality in the last 40 years of the twentieth century was not the result of the betrayal of a "subset of whites" who would have been integrationists had it not been for Sonny Carson. It was the result of a long history of public policies, deindustrialization, and systematic disinvestment from black communities, persistent segregation in housing and education, discriminatory practices by employers and unions, and long-standing racial gaps in wealth, health, and income.

A whole generation of urban and political historians has dismantled the backlash thesis. Along with my first book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, studies of Baltimore, Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Cleveland, Gary, Los Angeles, Newark, Oakland, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Seattle, among other cities, document the depth of white racism in Northern and western metropolitan areas and the fragility of the New Deal coalition well before the 1960s. Only a minority of Northern whites ever supported civil rights (at King’s peak of popularity in 1964, a majority of Northern whites believed that civil rights activists were pushing too far, too fast). Whites fought black incursion into their neighborhoods, fled to suburbs, and opposed school desegregation long before the Black Panthers shouted "off the pigs" or Stokely Carmichael mounted his soapbox.

The consequence is that even in the era of Barack Obama, Northern metropolitan areas remain highly segregated by race, if less so than at mid-century. Schools have resegregated. The weight of the past bears heavily on the present....

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.]

Some comentators have suggested that the reason Western reporters were shocked when Ahmadinejad won was that they are based in opulent North Tehran, whereas the farmers and workers of Iran, the majority, are enthusiastic for Ahmadinejad. That is, we fell victim once again to upper middle class reporting and expectations in a working class country of the global south.

While such dynamics may have existed, this analysis is flawed in the case of Iran because it pays too much attention to class and material factors and not enough to Iranian culture wars. We have already seen, in 1997 and 2001, that Iranian women and youth swung behind an obscure former minister of culture named Mohammad Khatami and his 2nd of Khordad movement, capturing not only the presidency but also, in 2000, parliament.

Khatami received 70 percent of the vote in 1997. He then got 78% of the vote in 2001, despite a crowded field. In 2000, his reform movement captured 65% of the seats in parliament. He is a nice man, but you couldn't exactly categorize him as a union man or a special hit with farmers.

The evidence is that in the past little over a decade, Iran's voters had become especially interested in expanding personal liberties, in expanding women's rights, and in a wider field of legitimate expression for culture (not just high culture but even just things like Iranian rock music). The extreme puritanism of the hardliners grated on people.

The problem for the reformers of the late 1990s and early 2000s was that they did not actually control much, despite holding elected office. Important government policy and regulation was in the hands of the unelected, clerical side of the government. The hard line clerics just shut down reformist newspapers, struck down reformist legislation, and blocked social and economic reform. The Bush administration was determined to hang Khatami out to dry, ensuring that the reformers could never bring home any tangible success in foreign policy or foreign investment. Thus, in the 2004 parliamentary elections, literally thousands of reformers were simply struck off the ballot and not allowed to run. This application of a hard line litmus test in deciding who could run for office produced a hard line parliament, naturally enough.

But in 2000, it was clear that the hard liners only had about 20% of the electorate on their side.

By 2005, the hard liners had rolled back all the reforms and the reform camp was sullen and defeated. They did not come out in large numbers for the reformist candidate, Karoubi, who only got 17 percent of the vote. They nevertheless were able to force a run-off between hard line populist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a pragmatic conservative billionaire. Ahmadinejad won.

But Ahmadinejad's 2005 victory was made possible by the widespread boycott of the vote or just disillusionment in the reformist camp, meaning that fewer youth and women bothered to come out.

So to believe that the 20% hard line support of 2001 has become 63% in 2009, we would have to posit that Iran is less urban, less literate and less interested in cultural issues today than 8 years ago. We would have to posit that the reformist camp once again boycotted the election and stayed home in droves.

No, this is not a north Tehran/ south Tehran issue. Khatami won by big margins despite being favored by north Tehran.

So observers who want to lay a guilt trip on us about falling for Mousavi's smooth upper middle class schtick are simply ignoring the last 12 years of Iranian history. It was about culture wars, not class. It is simply not true that the typical Iranian voter votes conservative and religious when he or she gets the chance. In fact, Mousavi is substantially more conservative than the typical winning politician in 2000. Given the enormous turnout of some 80 percent, and given the growth of Iran's urban sector, the spread of literacy, and the obvious yearning for ways around the puritanism of the hard liners, Mousavi should have won in the ongoing culture war.

And just because Ahmadinejad poses as a champion of the little people does not mean that his policies are actually good for workers or farmers or for working class women (they are not, and many people in that social class know that they are not).

So let that be an end to the guilt trip. The Second of Khordad Movement was a winning coalition for the better part of a decade. Its supporters are 8 years older than the last time they won, but it was a young movement. Did they all do a 180 and defect from Khatami to Ahmadinejad? Unlikely. The Iranian women who voted in droves for Khatami haven't gone anywhere, and they did not very likely much care for Ahmadinejad's stances on women's issues:

'In a BBC News interview, Mahbube Abbasqolizade, a member of the Iranian Women’s Centre NGO, said, “Mr. Ahmadinejad’s policies are that women should return to their homes and that their priority should be the family.”

* Ahmadinejad changed the name of the government organization the “Centre for Women’s Participation” to the “Centre for Women and Family Affairs”.

* Ahmadinejad proposed a new law that would reintroduce a man’s right to divorce his wife without informing her. In addition, men would no longer be required to pay alimony. In response, women’s groups have initiated the Million Signatures campaign against these measures.

* Ahmadinejad’s administration opposes the ratification of the UN protocol called CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. This doctrine is essentially an international women’s Bill of Rights.

* Ahmadinejad implemented the Social Safety program, which monitors women’s clothing, requires the permission from a father or husband for a woman to attend school, and applies quotas limiting the number of women allowed to attend universities.'

Mir Hosain Mousavi was a plausible candidate for the reformists. They were electing people like him with 70 and 80 percent margins just a few years ago. We have not been had by the business families of north Tehran. We've much more likely been had by a hard line constituency of at most 20% of the country, who claim to be the only true heirs of the Iranian revolution, and who control which ballots see the light of day.

Jo Ann K. McNamara died in New York City May 20, age 78, from complications from shoulder surgery in March. Her most recent book is a translation of Paris in the Middle Ages (2009), written by Simone Roux. Prof. McNamara was a scholar of world-wide renown. Her most widely acclaimed book, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millenia, was published by Harvard University Press in 1996 and reviewed in the New York Times Book Review by Antonia Fraser. She argued that women as nuns have struggled through the ages to create a separate life which subverts the traditional gender roles assigned to women in every era. The body of her scholarly work has focused primarily on the history of the early middle ages and has ranged broadly over the areas of religion, gender, institution-building, and an attempt to reperiodize and reinterpret the years from 400 to 1100.

Dr. McNamara was a pioneer in making visible women’s roles in medieval society, including the role of women in religion, bringing these perspectives into the mainstream of writing about medieval history and inspiring a new generation of medievalists. Scholars who undertake gender studies and medieval history today automatically turn to McNamara’s contributions. The broad sweep of her innovative thinking turned to rethinking the transition from Roman to medieval times. She early began to argue forcefully that Roman culture did not decline and fall in the 5th century (pace Edward Gibbon), but continued to influence subsequent centuries down to the 12th century.

Jo Ann McNamara was also among the first scholars to insist that the paradigms of women’s history could be applied to men’s history. In her first essay on the subject, she coined the word “Herrenfrage” to convey the concept that gender for men was as problematic and socially constructed as it was for women. This article, “The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the Gender System, 1050 to 1150," appeared in Medieval Masculinities (1994), edited by Clare A. Lees. Accordingly, McNamara saw the great ecclesiastical reform movement in 11th-and12th-century Europe as an effort to make celibate priests the new “manly men,” a concept of masculinity meant to replace the warrior as hero and still serve as the role model for Christian society. In this context, she wrote of “chastity” as comprising a “third gender.” Embracing chastity also made both women and men more nearly co-equals than were the two sexes whose separate reproductive roles in secular society underpinned their distinct and hierarchically assigned gender roles.

McNamara’s commitment to exploring new questions regarding sex and gender in the midddle ages was a part of a life of concern about the world around her. As a student in the 1960s all the burning issues of civil rights, the Vietnam war, and the women’s movment made her very politically aware. She actively joined antiwar activities and when the National Organization for Women brought a legal suit against the “men only” policy at McSorleys’ Old Ale House in New York City in1970, she joined a sit-in to make the point. She maintained the life of a political activist and sharp critic throughout her life, along with her deepening scholarly questioning all she had been taught about medieval history as a graduate student. Doing so, she was replicating the experiences of other feminist historians for whom the women’s movement opened up new question about their own lives and the lives of women in the past.

Prof. McNamara’s academic research began with a book on Giles Aycelin: Servant of two Masters (1973). Thereafter she turned to path-breaking work on women, gender, and power in both secular and religious contexts. For this work she was honored by two volumes of medieval history. The first, published in 2003, entitled Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages, is co-edited by Maryanne Kowaleski and Mary C. Erler. The volume is dedicated to her and published an essay by her reflecting on the first article she and Suzanne Wemple wrote in 1973, “Women and Power through the Family Revisited.” The second volume of essays dedicated to her is Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe (2008), edited by Lisa M. Bitel and Felice Lifshitz. It is inscribed: “To Jo Ann McNamara magistra doctissima et mater omnium bonarum.” Other essays in this volume examine many of the new interpretations she had brought forward in a series of articles that followed the publication of her book A New Song: Celibate Women in the First Three Christian Centuries (1983).

Asked to contribute an autobiographical essay to Women Medievalists and the Academy (2004-2005), edited by Jane Chance, McNamara wrote about her active participation in the causes about which she felt deeply. She entitled her essay “The Networked Life,” and with a nod to “sympathetic men,” she wrote: “I look back today at the women who befriended me in graduate school, the women who hired me and the innumerable women I knew and those I never knew who have struggled in my lifetime to secure our place in the academy and to advance a scholarship that gives us the means to understand our own experiences. Sisterhood is powerful indeed and it provides a working model for all humanity.”

Born in Janesville, Wisconsin, in 1931, McNamara moved every few years with her family, following her father who held a job as an executive with General Motors. Her early education was in Catholic schools run by nuns. Thereafter, she spent two years as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania as a theatre-arts major and completed her undergraduate education in Columbia University’s School of General Studies as an English major in 1956. To “recoup her finances,” as she put it in her autobiographical essay, she worked in the military for two years in France as an entertainment director. Back at Columbia University graduate school, she worked as a secretary in the Geology Department. She now turned to medieval history, earning her Ph.D. in 1967. By that time she had begun teaching part time at Hunter College, in its evening session, which was coed, the college itself becoming so in 1964 after a long tradition as a woman’s college. She joined its history department full time when she had earned her doctorate, and later, in the 1990s, became as well a mentor to graduate students at the City University Graduate School.

At Hunter, McNamara took part in the founding of the women’s studies program in the mid 1970s. She joined sister historians in the New York area to form a branch of the Coordinating Council on Women in the Historical Profession, established in 1969 as a caucus within the American Historical Association. She also joined the new Institute for Research in History, created to meet the needs of historians with and without an academic affiliation in the fiscal crises of New York City in the mid 1970s. She helped found a research group in Family History and continued to meet with it until her death, as she did with an equally long-lived interdisciplinary Hagiography research group she founded for studying the lives of saints. She played an active role in the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women from its beginning in1973, insisting on including medievalist in its programs and co-chairing the entire conference in 1982.

An active participant in the annual meetings of the American Historical Association, she joined its program committee in 1991 and co-chaired the annual meeting in 1992.

Jo Ann McNamara married Eldon Clingan in 1959, retaining her own name, and was divorced from him in 1973. She is survived by her son Edmund Clingan, who has followed in his mother’s footsteps to become a professor of history at Queensborough Community College, CUNY, in the field of modern German history. Other survivors are her sister Patricia Gail Leopardi of Beesleys Point, New Jersey, and her widowed sister-in-law, Carolyn McNamara of North Tonawanda, New York. Her death is greatly mourned by friends and colleagues in this country and throughout the world.

Former President Bill Clinton is coming to North Carolina to speak at an event honoring the late historian John Hope Franklin and his wife, Aurelia.

Duke University said Wednesday that the campus will host an event next week to celebrate the Franklins. Clinton will be one of the featured speakers.

During his presidency, Clinton awarded Franklin the Presidential Medal of Freedom and later appointed Franklin in 1997 to chair a national task force on race. Franklin died in March at the age of 94. His wife died in 1999.

[Carl A. Zimring is Assistant Professor of Social Science in the Professional and Liberal Studies Department at Roosevelt University.  Rutgers University Press will publish a paperback edition of his book Cash for Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America this fall.  He would like to thank Erik S. Gellman, Michael K. Honey, and Lisa Phillips for assistance with this article.]

At a time when American labor has new hopes (with the possibility of the Employee Free Choice Act becoming law) and fears (with the threat of more job losses with the bankruptcies in the automobile industry and other economic troubles), historical perspectives on labor and working-class experiences remain as relevant as ever.  The end of May brought the Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA) to downtown Chicago for a conference at Roosevelt University's Auditorium Building.  Over four days, the conference (see the website at http://chi-lawcha09.indstate.edu for a full schedule) represented a broad array of topics on working-class and labor-related scholarship and activism, using the organizing theme of Race, Labor, and the City.  Panels included working-class community structures, including housing and education, environmental quality and justice, migration and settlement patterns, the changing structure of organized labor in the 21st century, and the myriad ways in which race, class, and gender interact in society.

A special dimension of the conference was the co-sponsorship by the Labor Fund for History and Culture whose members' focus on Laborlore celebrated working-class culture through art forms like song.  In both the plenary session and a Friday night performance, LAWCHA president Michael Honey played guitar behind Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Freedom Singer Bettie Mae Fikes's gospel vocals on a series of labor and freedom songs. 

Friday night also brought a performance by folksinger/musicologist Bucky Halker and a series of guests including Janet Bean of Freakwater and Eleventh Dream Day, and Jon Langford of the Mekons and Waco Brothers.  (Between performances, one of the picketers walking the line at the Congress Hotel -- a hotel one block south of the conference that has been the subject of a labor action for the past six years -- spoke about the hotel's refusal to recognize its workers' right to organize and invited conference participants to picket over the weekend.)  Other music presentations discussed the significance of country, folk, jazz, and blues music to working class society.  One highlight that bridged performance and presented scholarship was the paper sung by country music scholar Bill Malone that weaved more than eighty years of country and blues songs through changes in the economic history of the United States in a fifteen-minute a cappella recital.

The conference included workshops on activism, oral history, and writing labor history for a broad audience and several papers to opened up new lines of inquiry for working class scholars. During the opening plenary, Carnegie Mellon University Professor Joe W. Trotter Jr., the Newberry Library's James Grossman, and incoming University of North Carolina professor Zaragosa Vargas raised central questions about race, labor, agency, and deunionization.  A Saturday luncheon honored the Reverend Addie Wyatt of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union with the LAWCHA Distinguished Service to Labor and Working Class History Award; elsewhere, a panel discussed the significance of Laurie Green's work, Battling the Plantation Mentality, which won the 2008 Taft Award.

Absent from the conference were luminaries who passed away after the initial schedule was posted, including Laborlore founder Archie Green, surrealist poet Franklin Rosemont, and oral history legend Studs Terkel.  Participants remembered and celebrated their lives and accomplishments in several panels, and the phrase "don't mourn, organize" was repeated often in their memory.  The conference concluded with a dinner and discussion of the theme of Labor in the 21st Century with James Thindwa (Jobs with Justice), Jorge Ramirez (Chicago Federation of Labor) and Tom Balanoff (SEIU Local 1) providing remarks and a Sunday morning bus tour that took advantage of Chicago's rich legacy of working-class history by highlighting sites featured on the Chicago Labor Trail map (www.labortrail.org/) on the city's South Side.  Participants left with an impression that labor history in the 21st century is a vibrant and diverse field, boding well for future meetings of LAWCHA, and for further explorations of class and culture past and present.

Stanford Middle East history professor Joel Beinin's appearances on the Peninsula Peace and Justice Center (PPJC) Palo Alto cable television program"Other Voices" reliably produce anti-American, anti-Israel invective. In September 2008, Beinin declared,"The American empire is going down," and during a taping for the February 2009 show,"Gaza and the Future," he pronounced,"The United States aids and abets Israeli war crimes."

What Beinin labeled Israeli"war crimes" (i.e. defending its citizenry) and U.S. collusion therewith were central to his discussion, as the show aired soon after Israel's military incursion into Gaza in December 2008.

One might have thought Obama's election would make Beinin optimistic about the prospects for weakening U.S. support for Israel, but his mood was decidedly downbeat. Obama, Beinin predicted, would"act like all America presidents" by"pushing U.S. interests with foreign policy." (What country doesn't pursue its own interests with foreign policy?) But, Beinin allowed, if Obama were to simply issue a"statement" telling Israel"it's committing war crimes,""going against U.N resolutions," and that"the U.S. will no longer sell Israel weapons,""the Israel Lobby and AIPAC would crumble." The crowd of mostly aging hippies murmured in agreement.

Jimmy Carter, the most rabidly anti-Israel U.S. president and author of the widely criticized book, Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid, was the only American leader Beinin praised. Beinin lauded Carter as a"deeply religious man" but, he qualified with a chuckle,"in a good way." Apparently, he only sees the minority of practicing Christians who toe the anti-Israel line as palatable.

In a case of tortured logic, Beinin blamed Israel for making"Hamas and Hezbollah…heroes in the Arab world" with its defensive military actions."It's almost as if Israel was trying to make Hamas appear to represent the Palestinian cause," Beinin continued—apparently forgetting that Gazans elected Hamas by a landslide—and then quipped,"not to get conspiratorial or anything."

Beinin proceeded to do exactly that by echoing many of his peers in the perennially anti-Israel field of Middle East studies with the statement:

The Gaza operation was premeditated. It had nothing to do with rockets, terrorism, or anything the Israeli government claims.

Regarding Hamas's deliberate use of civilians as human shields and civilian buildings as targets, Beinin made the equally preposterous statement:

Of course Hamas hides among civilians. Gaza's a very small, densely populated place. Where else are they going to hide?

Similarly, on the advisability of either Israel or the U.S. negotiating with Iran and Syria, Beinin made the axiomatic statement that,"You have to talk with the people you're trying to negotiate with."

On the prospects for a two-state solution, Beinin claimed that"successive Israeli administrations have done everything to prevent it from happening: The settlements, the wall, the roads." There was no word on the role of Palestinian violence toward Israelis in the failure of the"peace process," which, he allowed, was"effectively dead."

Beinin also avoided focusing on internecine battles among Palestinian factions, either in the Middle East or in the U.S. When an audience member asked him about a highly circulated video produced by Minnesotans Against Terrorism depicting a pro-Palestinian rally at the state capital in St. Paul that descended into a pitched battle between Fatah and Hamas supporters, Beinin was clueless. (The rally featured the first Muslim congressman, Minnesota's Keith Ellison, being shouted down by followers of Hamas, apparently for not being radical enough.) Seemingly unaware that Minnesota is a center for Islamist activity, Beinin was surprised that a story from that state could have any significance and brushed the question off.

Beinin's actions since this interview have amplified his anti-Israel credentials. Although Middle East studies academia has largely avoided Israel Apartheid Week since its inception in 2005, Beinin took part this year, with a talk at the University of California, Berkeley on March 5^th. So too did University of Massachusetts Boston political science assistant professor Leila Farsakh, who spoke at York University the same day. Beinin's participation in this propagandistic and offensive week of Israel-bashing further affirms his lack of objectivity on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Although Beinin's audience at the Peninsula Peace and Justice Center likely consists of like-minded viewers, his students are another matter. They should treat most of what he says with the skepticism one reserves when listening to ideologues.