The legendary radio broadcaster, writer, oral historian, raconteur and chronicler of our times, Studs Terkel, died last month at the age of ninety-six in his hometown of Chicago. Today, a Democracy Now! special tribute: We spend the hour on Studs Terkel. Over the years, Terkel has been a regular guest on Democracy Now! We play a wide-ranging interview we did with him in 2005. We also feature a rare recording of Terkel interviewing the Rev. Martin Luther King at the bedside of the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. “My curiosity is what saw me through,” Terkel said in 2005. "What would the world be like, or will there be a world? And so, that’s my epitaph. I have it all set. Curiosity did not kill this cat. And it’s curiosity, I think, that has saved me thus far.” [includes rush transcript]

Vyacheslav Manyagin has asked Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to outlaw the film, which he claims is an insult to Russian statehood.

The blockbuster, released earlier this month, has triggered an ill-tempered debate in religious and historical circles at a time when the Kremlin is encouraging Russians to take patriotic pride in their often brutal history...

... "Imagine that they made a film in America about George Washington in which the first US president was portrayed as a bloodthirsty maniac," Mr Manyagin said. "This film slanders the Russian people and state."

The "unjust" depiction of Russia's first tsar as a monster would fuel Western stereotypes about modern Russia, he added...

[Joshua Brown doubles as a historian and illustrator. He is the co-director of the New Media Lab and Executive Director of the Center for Media and Learning/American Social History Project (ASHP) at the CUNY Graduate Center. He received his Ph.D. in American history from Columbia University. Since the beginning of the Iraq War he has become well-known for his caustic illustrations. ]

Once, not such a long time ago, in colonial New Zealand, Tuhoe were permitted to rule themselves within the boundaries of what was left of their land.

It was the late 1800s and they were the only tribe to gain legal autonomy from the Pakeha Government. For a short while. Then it was taken away.

The desire for autonomy never dulled though, nor was ceded by the Urewera mountain people; and today it is on the table again with John Key's Government, as part of a singular constitutional claim.

In a powerful new book on Tuhoe, eminent New Zealand historian Dame Judith Binney argues for that autonomy to be restored.

The time has long come, Binney told the Weekend Herald. She believes there is nothing to be feared from a separate Tuhoe nation operating within New Zealand and that the tribe has a strong case.

There is still much to tell about Portugal’s role during World War II, says noted British historian Antony Beevor, whose father served London as a spy in Lisbon during the conflict, provoking the ire of Portuguese dictator António Oliveira Salazar.

Antony Beevor, whose latest book, “D Day: The Battle for Normandy”, was released in a Portuguese translation earlier this month, told the Lusa News Agency this week that his curiosity about Portugal’s role - especially the part played by his father - was hobbled by John Beevor’s silence and the fact that few documents remained from his organisation, the Special Operations Executive (SOE).

“Much material was destroyed after the war, many of SOE’s archives, and others were saved”, the historian said in a London interview.

A British diplomat has criticized the appointment of two leading Jewish academics to the UK's Iraq Inquiry panel, stating it may upset the balance of the inquiry.

Sir Oliver Miles, a former British ambassador to Libya, told The Independent newspaper this week that the appointment of Sir Martin Gilbert, the renowned Holocaust historian and Winston Churchill biographer, and Sir Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies and vice-principal of King's College London, would be seen as "ammunition" that could be used to call the inquiry a "whitewash."

Miles said the two academics were Jewish and that Gilbert was an active Zionist. He also said they were both strong supporters of former prime minister Tony Blair and the Iraq war.

Four-hundred years ago, Henry Hudson set sail from Europe in an attempt to discover a new route to Asia by heading east. His mission was not successful, but he traveled along what has become the Hudson River between New York and New Jersey.

River Edge resident and local historian Kevin Wright explores the quadricentennial of Hudson's voyage in his new book, "1609: A Country That Was Never Lost: 400th Anniversary of Henry Hudson's Visit with North Americans of the Middle Atlantic Coast."

"I titled the book, the 'Country That Was Never Lost' because during Hudson's visit, he did not discover anything. Instead he was the one discovered," Wright said. "Four centuries ago, all of this was covered under ice. This was not a new world, but an ancient world intruded upon. People had lived here for generations before Hudson came."

Before Europeans came to America, various groups considered the area to be their home, including the Manhattans, the Minisinks of Bachom's Country, the Lenape of the Schuylkill estuary, the Mahicans, Susquehannocks, and Mohawks. It is the interactions with these people that Wright focuses on his new book. He does that not only as a historian, but also as someone who is descended from those same people. His great-grandfather was a direct descendent of a full-blooded member of the Minisink nation...

Despite the fragmented and incomplete historical record, experts pretty much agree that some popular beliefs about Jewish history simply don’t hold up: there was no sudden expulsion of all Jews from Jerusalem in A.D. 70, for instance. What’s more, modern Jews owe their ancestry as much to converts from the first millennium and early Middle Ages as to the Jews of antiquity.

Other theories, like the notion that many of today’s Palestinians can legitimately claim to be descended from the ancient Jews, are familiar and serious subjects of study, even if no definitive answer yet exists.

But while these ideas are commonplace among historians, they still manage to provoke controversy each time they surface in public, beyond the scholarly world. The latest example is the book “The Invention of the Jewish People,” which spent months on the best-seller list in Israel and is now available in English. Mixing respected scholarship with dubious theories, the author, Shlomo Sand, a professor at Tel Aviv University, frames the narrative as a startling exposure of suppressed historical facts. The translated version of his polemic has sparked a new wave of coverage in Britain and has provoked spirited debates online and in seminar rooms.

Professor Sand, a scholar of modern France, not Jewish history, candidly states his aim is to undercut the Jews’ claims to the land of Israel by demonstrating that they do not constitute “a people,” with a shared racial or biological past. The book has been extravagantly denounced and praised, often on the basis of whether or not the reader agrees with his politics.

The vehement response to these familiar arguments — both the reasonable and the outrageous — highlights the challenge of disentangling historical fact from the sticky web of religious and political myth and memory....

Recent reports have held up a remote Brazilian town—filled with blonde, blue-eyed twins—as evidence of Mengele's postwar attempts to add to the ranks of an Aryan "master race."

But research announced today says Cândido Godói's "Nazi twins" are nothing more than a myth.

The outback town of about 7,000 has a twin rate nearly 1,000 percent higher than the global average.

The twins' fair features are no mystery—Cândido Godói (map) is largely populated by the descendents of German immigrants. But the frequency of twin births is a decades-old mystery.

Earlier this year Argentine historian Jorge Camarasa offered a bombshell of an explanation in his book Mengele: The Angel of Death in South America...

... According to Camarasa, Mengele likely continued his twin experiments in the 1960s while on the run in South America.

Mengele disguised himself as a roaming physician and veterinarian and gave pregnant women in Cândido Godói an ahead-of-its-time, twin-inducing mix of drugs or hormones, the historian suggests.

Camarasa cites interviews with locals who say they remember the visits of a traveling German doctor who provided mysterious potions or drugs.

The locals recalled him by different names, Camarasa explained. But each interviewee had the same reaction when shown a picture of Mengele: "That's him." ...

An Edinburgh historian has put together the first roll of honour to list all those from Ireland who died during the Second World War.

The list, which was compiled by Yvonne McEwen of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for the Study of the Two World Wars, includes the names of 9,100 Irish men and women who died in active service.

Ms McEwen, who presented the list to the Irish parliament, said: "We covered over 200 corps of the British Army alone.

"We had a presentation of the Roll of Honour at Trinity College. It received a lot of media and as a result of the media attention, the public, north and south and around the world, actually contacted, more by email than letter, asking for information about their loved ones."

The June presentation included some 7,500 names. Due to the response from the public regarding relatives and loved ones that had fought in the war, McEwen was able to add another 1,600 names to the list for the November presentation.

Every once in a while, you come across a great book whose premise seems so obvious that you think, “Why hasn’t anyone done this before?” People have talked all around this topic, or dealt with it in pieces, but why hasn’t there been a serious book-length treatment of this-or-that much discussed subject?

Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism fit that bill. Now comes historian Thomas Fleming’s The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers, which will no doubt have other historians saying, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

In this relentlessly fascinating book, Thomas Fleming, our most interesting historian of the Revolution, takes a magnifying glass to the personal lives of six of the Founders; and the result is the most compelling history book of the season. Fleming explains his motive for looking at the Founders’ relationships with wives, mothers, daughters—and lovers:

“Knowing and understanding the women in their lives adds pathos and depth to the public dimensions of the founding fathers’ political journeys. We do them no dishonor when we explore how often public greatness emerged in spite of personal pain and secret disappointment. Far from diminishing these men and women, an examination of their intimate lives will enlarge them for our time. In their loves and losses, their hopes and fears, they are more like us than we dared to imagine.”

And it works spectacularly. I know of no other volume—or even a collection of biographies- that gives the reader the sense of knowing George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison as human beings in the way this relatively short book does.

Standard biographies of great men who accomplished great things, invariably center around the larger events that made us interested in them in the first place. By all but isolating these great men from those events—they are in the background for each to give context only—and bringing their intimate relationships to the foreground, the Founders emerge as flesh and blood, rather than icons or secular plaster saints.

And, we learn a lot about some remarkable women, too.

It’s the ubiquitous question in American politics: What about a politician’s private life is relevant? How much do we really want to know—and what do we have the right to know? Baby Boomers seem to think they are the first to deal with the question, pointing back to the media’s willingness to overlook JFK’s philandering and buy the Camelot image– and acting as though that was the standard from time immemorial.

Demolishing that conceit, Fleming shows that our increasingly partisan press has still not sunk to the depths of the first generation to write under the First Amendment. It’s still pretty rare—Sarah Palin being a current obvious exception—for so-called reporters to sink to the level of deliberately false rumor-mongering and completely fabricated political hit jobs in the way that was either done to—or at the behest of– each of the Founders in this book.

Even the revered George Washington was not immune, Fleming reveals in a chapter called The Other George Washington Scandals, in which he details all manner of slanders made up of whole cloth that were directed at Washington by political opponents.

The worst of these hacks was named James Thompson Callender. Callender was the original “source” of the allegations about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings— a delicious irony, since Jefferson had originally commissioned Callender to make up stories about corruption by Alexander Hamilton. Callender turned on Jefferson because the new President would not make him Postmaster of Richmond.

On the other hand, it was John Adams himself who exaggerated Benjamin Franklin’s sex life out of all semblance to reality. Franklin did, in effect, have a wife in both London and Philadelphia before the Revolution. And while it’s possible that a woman who was close to him in France was his lover, Adams’s portrayal of Franklin as a depraved indiscriminate womanizer in Paris was extremely unlikely, Fleming writes. Franklin made himself the toast of France by engaging in the banter of the time, but at his advanced age and health, Adams’s reports are difficult to believe. (And the gratuitous bathtub scene in the HBO miniseries John Adams is purely from the peculiar imagination of the screenwriter).

Fleming arranges the book as mini-bios of the personal lives of the following founders:

George Washington: Fleming does an enormous service by rescuing Martha Washington from the cliché that she was merely the rich matronly widow that George married to secure his future while his heart stayed with Sally Fairfax, his neighbor’s flirtatious wife. Fleming notes that after their marriage, the Washingtons were THE Virginia couple; Martha had been the colony’s most sought-after widow. Her winning and witty sociability was remarked upon by everyone including as strong a personality as Abigail Adams who looked on her as a role model. Every surviving letter (Martha had most of their personal correspondence burned) displays a deep affection.

As for George, while he had to settle for being the Father of his Country, he was a devoted and sensible step-parent and grandparent, whose household often included a large number of grandchildren and relations.

Benjamin Franklin: Fleming sorts through the tangled love life of perhaps the most brilliant of the Founders. Franklin is often pigeonholed as a libertine, partly because of his youthful autobiography, partly because of John Adams’s puritanical (literally) public disapproval; but the accounts of his supposed debauchery in France are greatly exaggerated.

Franklin rejected his youthful immorality and had a successful marriage for many years, fathering a bright and accomplished daughter. It was his illegitimate son, William, however who was the light of Benjamin’s life. Franklin guided the chip-off-the-old-block’s career in the British establishment too well, however, and William stayed a Loyalist, actively opposing the Revolution in ways that forever estranged him from his father.

Alexander Hamilton: If you think South Carolina Mark Sandford is entirely too talkative about his Argentinian “soulmate;” and makes you want to cover your ears and yell “Too much information,” get a load of Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton published a book-length explanation of a long-over affair to the mortification of both his allies and his wife Elizabeth, the mother of his 7 children.

But while Hamilton confessed to the affair Callendar wrote about, Fleming says that his deepest attachment was likely with his wife’s glamorous sister, Angelica Despite her long-suffering, Fleming also rescues Elizabeth from the mere label of wronged wife. This devoutly Christian woman forgave her husband and after his death collected his papers and helped restore him to his rightful place in American history. She also became a force in charity work and in raising money for the Washington Monument.

John Adams: While the marriage of the Adamses may be the most examined—and idealized– in American history, Fleming gives us a warts and all look at the relationship. John Adams’s personality defects have been much discussed, and Fleming gives the requisite credit to Abigail for keeping John on track. However, he also illustrates that Abigail’s political ear had just as much tin as John’s. She was an avid advocate for the Alien and Sedition Acts, for instance; and egged on some of the needless quarrels that Adams engaged in. The Adamses were involved and loving parents; but were equally over-demanding and both contributed to the all or nothing outcomes in their children’s lives, the extremes of which were John Quincy’s brilliant career and his brother Charles’s drinking himself to death.

Thomas Jefferson: While nearly every recent examination of Thomas Jefferson’s personal life focuses on the subject of a supposed romance with slave Sally Hemings, Fleming reminds us that Jefferson was a tragic figure who outlived all but one of his children, and lost his beloved wife at a young age. More than any other Founder, Jefferson put his family considerations above those of his personal ambition, and even the Cause itself, at one time leaving Virginia without representation in the Congress while he saw to his wife’s health.

As to the subject that fascinates so many, Fleming demolishes the notion of a nearly 4-decade affair between Jefferson and Hemings, showing that both the layout and constant activity at Monticello make such a thing nearly impossible. Fleming disproves much of the timeline of the so-called statistical study which alleges Jefferson was the father of all of Hemings’s children. He also expresses doubt that Jefferson ever had a dalliance with Hemings, though concludes that is impossible to rule out.

As for the DNA test, Fleming writes, all it proved is that sometime in the last 200 years, a descendant of Sally Hemings has someone related to Thomas Jefferson in his family line. Fleming provides at least one more likely—but less famous—suspect, Jefferrson’s younger brother, Randolph.

James Madison: While today, all that is remembered about the Madison marriage is as good as it should be, the Madisons endured perhaps the worst slanders of any of the Founders. The fact that the shy and sickly Madison could land such a prize as the robust and witty Dolley had some wags alleging it was a marriage of political convenience, and that Dolley improperly used her considerable charms to persuade congressmen and diplomats to her husband’s point of view.

However, Fleming writes, the enduring portrait of the ebullient hostess who invented the office of First Lady, and the heroic couple who courageously faced the British invasion of Washington in 1812 is a wholly accurate one.

It may be an exaggeration to say I’ve even scratched the surface here. This book is a treasure trove of information and insight that will satisfy both the history buff and captivate the reader with a more casual interest.

The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers is addictively readable, informative, fascinating, engaging, revelatory and provocative. Which, you might say, is just another way of saying– it’s a Thomas Fleming book.

There's nothing like a long-running equity rally, a return to something resembling normalcy in the credit world and fresh signs of economic recovery to lift the gloom of a dreary late November day.

Sure, there are still occasional rough waters. Take last week, when weaker than expected U.S. housing stats, a downbeat profit report, downgrades in tech land and yet another warning from an inflation-fearing central banker reminded jittery investors it's not only free-spending governments that need a sound exit strategy. Tomorrow, we'll undoubtedly hear that U.S. consumers are still suffering from a shortage of confidence, which tends to happen when jobless rates keep rising...

... Far be it from me to rain on that parade. I'll leave that task to one of the world's best known and least cuddly of doom-and-gloom bears - Harvard University financial historian Niall Ferguson.

"I don't think it's possible to infer from the stock market rally anything resembling a sustained recovery," the peripatetic professor says in an e-mail exchange. He rightly notes that at least half (and probably much more) of the third-quarter U.S. economic growth of 3.5 per cent stemmed from one-off government measures and that the consumer remains tapped out.

"The stock market rally has been largely due to near-zero interest rates and a weaker dollar. In foreign currency terms there's been no rally." ...

... Prof. Ferguson, whose most recent timely best-seller, The Ascent of Money, is now out in paperback, does some hedge-fund advising on these big global themes.

He claims no expertise as a market forecaster. But when coaxed, the historian in him comes out...