Fabio L Grassi is an Italian historian who has been living in Istanbul since 1998. The writer of the first Italian-language biography of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Grassi says he admires the man without sacrificing his objectivity. 'Let us try neither to anachronistically condemn the past nor look at things with the eyes of the 1920s and 1930s,' the author says

Fabio L. Grassi was always interested in history, but it was a university professor of his who set him down the road of Turkish studies, ultimately culminating in a biography of the country’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

“I was enchanted by the Turkish language,” Grassi said. Such enchantment is evident because, apart from the interview, he preferred to chat in Turkish. He said he does not feel fluent enough yet in Turkish, but intends to speak it flawlessly in the future.

Born in Rome in 1963, Grassi switched to late Ottoman and early Republic history during his college years. Naturally, he then discovered Atatürk and the Westernization and modernization of Turkey that came with the founding of the Turkish Republic.

“I found it to be a very meaningful history,” he said. “I found Kemalist Turkey to be very meaningful. It was like a laboratory experiment, comparatively shut off from the outside world; [it was] an attempt to shape a new society completely different from the old one.”

Asked if he thought the experiment was successful, Grassi said: “It is partly successful because Mustafa Kemal’s psychology and culture were rooted in positivist culture. He thought there was a clear and straight road to civilization.”...

... Grassi does not perceive Turkey to be different from his own country and said he feels at home here after 11 years of residence. “I first came for pure cultural interest, which has turned later to genuine love for the country,” he said.

Now at Yıldız Technical University, Grassi has written extensively about Atatürk, including a detailed biography. “I felt a big gap in Italian historiography; the lack of a serious and comprehensive book on Atatürk,” he said. The biography was published in Italy in September 2008 and its Turkish translation appeared on the shelves of bookstores one month ago...

President of the Republic of Bulgaria Georgi Parvanov awarded Thursday Serbian writer and Vice President of the Serbian PEN Center prof. dr. Mihailo Pantic and historian and byzantinist Srdjan Pirivatric, the Serbian Ministry of Culture stated.

At the awarding ceremony in the Bulgarian Presidency, Pantic was presented with the Holly Brothers Cyril and Methodius award for his contribution to the popularization of the Bulgarian culture in Serbia and promotion of relation between the Bulgarian and Serbian people.

The US president's decision to send 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan has received a mixed reaction from American pundits in Washington.

Tariq Ali, a historian and political activist, told Al Jazeera that Barack Obama's decision to send more troops echoed the policies of George Bush, the former president.

"Obama is masqueraded as a peace president and he's now deciding to send more troops... In order to try and appease his own supporters, he's giving an approximate date for an exit strategy, but that never works.

"We've seen this before in Vietnam, where the commander in chief was saying 'the boys will be home by Christmas next year' and they didn't come home for a long time.

"I think Obama has fallen into a trap laid for him by generals... I think it's a fateful decision and it could determine whether he's a one-term president."

The British business and economic historian Kevin Tennent has published some thoughts about whether an independent Scotland would be a viable economic unit. On Monday, Scotland’s first minister announced that the country would soon be holding a referendum on independence. Monday was, of course, St Andrew’s day, the national day of Scotland– and the day of your humble narrator’s patron saint!

Tennent’s blog post draws on his extensive knowledge of Scottish, British, and global economic history. He begins his analysis with a discussion of the Darien scheme of 1690, the abortive attempt by Scotland to establish a colony in Panama. His blog post also pays attention to more recent developments. Dr Tennent writes:

“The collapse of Iceland’s banking system forced it to seek a £6bn emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund; unfortunately much of this will end up being spent recompensing savers abroad. Had Scotland been independent during the present crisis, then with RBS alone loosing around £24bn in 2008 the country would also have been driven to seek aid from the IMF; the whole of Scotland’s GDP was £86bn in 2006 (although this excludes oil and gas revenue). To cover this loss alone Scotland would have been forced to spend a more than a quarter of its GDP.”

This post should interest Canadians for two reasons. First, there is an obvious parallel between the question of Scottish independence and the separatist movement in Quebec. Would Quebec, which lacks North Sea oil, be a viable state? Second, there is the less obvious but even more important parallels between Scotland’s relationship with England and Canada’s relationship with its wealthy and populous southern neighbour. Most English-speaking Canadians would be in favour of Canada remaining independent of the USA. If they had an opinion on Scottish independence, it would probably be that Scotland should stay in the United Kingdom. Canadians are conservative in the deepest sense of the word and generally prefer to keep things as they are. But we need to ask ourselves why, if independence is a good thing for Canada, would it be a bad thing for Quebec and Scotland? What’s good for the goose may also be good for the gander.

The West Harlem that Grace Jones knew as a child in the 1940s barely resembles today’s bustling neighborhood north of 125th Street.

With a substantial reduction in crime, an upsurge in real estate prices, and an influx of retail chains, Harlem has become a completely different world for Jones.

“This used to be a block of nothing but African Americans and Caribbean Americans,” she said, pointing out the middle- and upper-class residents increasingly making their way into the area.

Relics of the past century—old brownstones, historic theaters, and street signs from the block’s construction dating back to 1891—still color the streets of Harlem today, but local preservationists and historians say that maintenance is increasingly difficult due to rapid development and the complex bureaucracy of designating landmarks. Now, though, as the aftermath of recession lingers and discourages developers from breaking ground on new projects, some say that there is an opportunity to preserve what remains...

... Michael Henry Adams, a local historian and graduate of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, agreed, saying, “Harlem is grossly under-landmarked, and so is every black neighborhood in the city.” He added, “If you look at the Upper East Side and Upper West Side, all the places where the richest people live, there’s the most landmarking.”

Landmarks Commission Preservation spokesperson Elisabeth de Bourbon contested these claims, saying, “I don’t see how anyone could conclude that it is an underrepresented neighborhood in terms of buildings that are landmarked.”

[David S. Reynolds, a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, is the author of “John Brown, Abolitionist” and “Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson.”]

IT’S important for Americans to recognize our national heroes, even those who have been despised by history. Take John Brown.

Today is the 150th anniversary of Brown’s hanging — the grim punishment for his raid weeks earlier on Harpers Ferry, Va. With a small band of abolitionists, Brown had seized the federal arsenal there and freed slaves in the area. His plan was to flee with them to nearby mountains and provoke rebellions in the South. But he stalled too long in the arsenal and was captured. He was brought to trial in a Virginia court, convicted of treason, murder and inciting an insurrection, and hanged on Dec. 2, 1859.

It’s a date we should hold in reverence. Yes, I know the response: Why remember a misguided fanatic and his absurd plan for destroying slavery?

There are compelling reasons. First, the plan was not absurd. Brown reasonably saw the Appalachians, which stretch deep into the South, as an ideal base for a guerrilla war. He had studied the Maroon rebels of the West Indies, black fugitives who had used mountain camps to battle colonial powers on their islands. His plan was to create panic by arousing fears of a slave rebellion, leading Southerners to view slavery as dangerous and impractical.

Second, he was held in high esteem by many great men of his day. Ralph Waldo Emerson compared him to Jesus, declaring that Brown would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” Henry David Thoreau placed Brown above the freedom fighters of the American Revolution. Frederick Douglass said that while he had lived for black people, John Brown had died for them. A later black reformer, W. E. B. Du Bois, called Brown the white American who had “come nearest to touching the real souls of black folk.”

Du Bois was right. Unlike nearly all other Americans of his era, John Brown did not have a shred of racism. He had long lived among African-Americans, trying to help them make a living, and he wanted blacks to be quickly integrated into American society. When Brown was told he could have a clergyman to accompany him to the gallows, he refused, saying he would be more honored to go with a slave woman and her children.

Between preparing for the premiere of his documentary and promoting it with the likes of Matt Damon and Viggo Mortensen, historian and activist Howard Zinn found some time to speak with students at Dundee-Crown High School on Tuesday.

After school let out, Zinn fielded questions via teleconference from about 30 students gathered in the school's music wing.

The question-and-answer session with the renowned author of "A People's History of the United States" was part of an ongoing series of talks with major scholars at the Carpentersville high school.

Zinn answered students' questions on topics ranging from the impact of religion on feminism and the role of big business in American domestic and foreign policy.

Dr Natalie Zacek, from The University of Manchester says the 1861–1865 Civil War changed American racing forever, by forcing it to modernise using the English model.

The American researcher, who grew up near the world famous Saratoga Race Track in New York, said before the late 1850s, a cross section of all citizens - from Presidents to slaves - took a passionate interest in the sport.

It was so popular that Congress would go out of session when a race was held, George Washington was one the country’s top jockeys and Presidents Jackson and Jefferson were leading breeders of thoroughbreds.

Dr Zacek said: “Before the Civil War, a horse’s stamina was more important than its speed as races, run on dirt, were in three heats of three or four miles.

“The animals weren’t so young as they are today and would walk a couple of hundred miles between races. Nowadays, they just aren’t up to that.

“Because of today’s pressures to be ever faster – which began in the 1860s - inbreeding has gone too far: horses are too young and lightweight, but their strength makes them delicate.

DWIJENDRA NARAYAN JHA, an eminent historian, has campaigned extensively against the communalisation of history. His book Myth of the Holy Cow,wherein he dispelled popular misconceptions that Muslims introduced beef-eating in India, created ripples in political circles. An ardent critic of the Hindu nationalist ideology, Jha, along with three other historians, sought to prove in a report, “Ramjanmabhoomi–Babri Masjid: A Historians’ Report to the Nation”, that there was no evidence of the existence of a Ram temple under the Babri mosque and that the controversy was created by the Sangh Parivar for political gains. In an interview to Frontline, he talks about his findings in Ayodhya and the role of professional historians in countering hate politics for a better nation-building process. Excerpts:...

... Could you briefly tell us about the findings of the independent report prepared by M. Athar Ali, Suraj Bhan, R.S. Sharma and you?

The Babri Masjid was built by Mir Baqi, a military officer in the kingdom of the Mughal ruler Babur, in 1528-29. The main contention of the Sangh Parivar is that the mosque was built by demolishing a Ram temple and that it was the birthplace of Rama. But it was only in 1948-49 that you see a miraculous appearance of idols under Gobind Ballabh Pant’s chief ministership [of the United Provinces] and Nehru’s prime ministership. Between then and the mid-1970s, one does not hear of this controversy at all. It was only after the VHP [Vishwa Hindu Parishad] came into being that it started talking about Kashi, Mathura and Ayodhya as pilgrimage centres. Gradually in 1986, you see the opening of the locks [of the masjid] and, subsequently, the shilanyaas.

All these developments coincided with the emergence of the VHP as a strong force and other organisations such as the Bajrang Dal and the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh] in the Hindutva camp. They made political use of it.

I think the dispute is really an artefact created by the Hindutva camp for fundamentalist purposes that culminated in the demolition of the mosque in 1992. Before 1992, slogans like “Mandir wohin banayenge”, and “this is Ram’s janmabhoomi [birthplace]” rent the air in North India. But if you look at the historical texts and evidence, Ram Janmabhoomi does not find prominence....

... There seems to be a gap between history in classrooms and popular historical notions, as is clearly reflected in the Ram Janmabhoomi case. Similarly, the state tries to create its own history as part of nation building and the political parties teach another kind of history for indoctrination. How do you assess the role of a professional historian in engaging with popular history to reshape historical understanding among the masses? Do you see any space in between from where history writing is possible in order to create a harmonious society instead of a divisive one?

I think, in this regard, historians are at fault to a certain extent. If professional historians write for the people that will ultimately have some impact.

In Gujarat, what happened in 2002 can be attributed to the kind of history that was being taught in the State for the past 40 years. In North India, schools like Sishu Mandir and Vidya Bharati are teaching non-history in the name of history.

Ninety per cent of professional historians are the most secular people in the country, but the state has to play a greater role in unifying the education system. Anything that is not borne out by rationality and evidence should be stopped altogether by the state.

The problem, however, is that education is both a Central and a State subject. The NCERT brings out model textbooks, but the States do not adopt them. They make their own changes. Secularisation of education and promotion of scientific temper should be a state effort. Otherwise, whatever historians write, it won’t be of any help. I don’t see any indication of this in the ATR. The state makes its own compromises according to political pressure, as was seen in the Ram Setu case recently.

Historians who come in proximity to power change their secular lines, too. There should be an atmosphere of dialogue in the academic community. Intellectuals should come out in the open and say that there was no Ram temple in Ayodhya, which most of them believe. They should make their assumptions clear to the reader and then be as objective as possible in writing history. Only then the reader will judge the writer and historical facts better.

According to one historian, the anti-government rallies that made their way across the country last summer, known as tea parties, may explain more about Americans than their views on high taxes and gun control.

Ohio State University historian Randolph Roth claims that the distrust of government on display at the tea parties earlier this year has appeared sporadically throughout America's history and may be linked to homicide rates. In short, when Americans begin routinely complaining about how they hate their government and don't trust their leaders, they commit more murders...

... At any one point in time, researchers may find an association between one of these causes and homicide rates in a particular area. But once you try to apply those theories more broadly, at different places and in different eras, the links disappear.

For example, during the Great Depression the homicide rate in the United States went down, even while poverty was increasing. In the 1960s, the United States had more police and more people in prison than nearly any other nation on earth, along with strong economic growth – and yet the murder rate skyrocketed...

Lewis H. Lapham leans forward behind his wide wooden desk and within minutes of speaking has mentioned Mark Twain, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Goethe, Cicero, John Locke, Hamilton, Adams and Madison. A laptop on a side table is piled high with papers.

As the media metabolism becomes endlessly speeded up, Mr. Lapham has slowed down. Two years ago he moved from a monthly, Harper’s magazine, to publishing four times a year with Lapham’s Quarterly, a scholarly journal that he has tried to give more mass-market appeal. The target audience, he said, is “people who wished they had paid more attention in school.”

It has a Web site, laphamsquarterly.org, but up-to-the-minute is not the mantra: recently the home page featured an audio interview with Gordon S. Wood, the Brown University historian of early America, that was recorded more than a year ago during the presidential campaign.

“The idea was to bring the voices of the past up to the microphone of the present,” said Mr. Lapham, describing the quarterly’s mission, before quickly paraphrasing Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” (He sashayed straight to Schlesinger’s “notion of history as an antidote to folly.”)

Mr. Lapham, 74, left Harper’s in 2006, after serving as editor since 1983, following an earlier five-year stint. Last year he started his nonprofit quarterly as a selection of historical writings with a single topic for each issue. War was the first topic, and others have been money, nature and crime.

The current issue is about medicine, and includes selections from Hippocrates, Plato, Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Woolf and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, all noteworthy for being — among other things — dead and therefore cheap. It is fronted by a long essay by Mr. Lapham that begins with a quotation from Montaigne and near the end quotes Socrates...

... Politically, the Obama era is an odd time for Mr. Lapham, who in one of his last columns before leaving the editorship of Harper’s called for President George W. Bush’s impeachment. The disconnect between his upbringing and his affinity for the country club life, and his words and purported values — on paper he has been a stalwart liberal and defender of meritocracy — are perplexing to some.

In many ways Mr. Lapham’s views are a remnant of a period of radicalization of the American ruling class that began in the 1960s, reflecting a politics that blends a certain populism with aristocratic values. William F. Buckley Jr., who founded the conservative magazine National Review, was the embodiment of this on the right.

“I think the mix of high culture and populism and redistributionist politics doesn’t fit with liberalism,” said Jacob Weisberg, chairman of the Slate Group and author of “The Bush Tragedy.” “It falls to the left and the right of liberalism.”

He added, “I suspect Lewis would be the first to agree that it is outside the prevailing political consensus.”...

An ailing World War II veteran from New York wants to fix a government goof in Brooklyn's Williamsburg area that has slighted a Founding Father from Delaware since the 1800s.

As streets were named for Declaration of Independence signers, officials erred on the last to sign -- Thomas McKean of Delaware. They mistook the start of his last name as an initial and the N with a final flourish as a P.

The result? Keap Street.

Despite the error's age, John Slagg, a retired court worker from Flushing, N.Y., said, "Isn't now the time to fix it? If not now, when?"

Slagg, now in his 80s, says he gave its name no thought when he lived there. "I moved to Keap Street when I was 2 years old and moved out when I got married 32 years later."

But he recently got into history, starting in that area of the city.

He saw streets named for other signers, such as Rodney Street, next to Keap, for Caesar Rodney, who rode to Philadelphia to break Delaware delegates' tie to favor independence. "But I kept wondering, who the heck is this guy Keap?" he said.

In "Brooklyn by Name," by Leonard Bernardo and Jennifer Weiss, he read of the error blamed on McKean's "scrawled signature." Slagg didn't mind the book's error that McKean signed for Pennsylvania but wants his old street to honor the man it aimed to honor.