Keith Jeffery, author of the first – and possibly only – official history of MI6, said today he had made a "Faustian pact" that had in some cases "overridden the imperatives of historical scholarship". But he was given an offer he could not refuse – "the holy grail of the British archives".

Those archives are records of MI6 operations from 1909, when Britain's Secret Intelligence Service was set up, to 1949, when the history stops. MI6 said today that its archives, unlike those of the domestic Security Service, MI5, and the wartime Special Operations Executive (SOE) would remain closed to the public. "As a historian I regret they won't release the documents," Jeffery, professor of British history at Queen's University Belfast, said.

On grounds of national security, he was asked not to include some material, notably the names of MI6 officers, even though they had previously been identified in what he describes as reliable and scholarly works. Immense quantities of MI6 documents were destroyed, mainly because of lack of space in its offices, Jeffery said. "I have found no evidence that destruction was carried out casually or maliciously, as some sort of cover-up," he writes in the book's preface....

Robert A. Hohner, a historian of early twentieth-century southern politics, died on August 8, 2010, at his home in London, Ontario. In an educational career interrupted by service in the U.S. Navy, Bob received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Duke University. After teaching briefly at the U.S. Naval Academy, Bob took a position in 1965 at the University of Western Ontario (uwo), where he remained in the Department of History until his retirement in 2001.

His pioneering dissertation, supervised by Richard Watson, was on prohibition as a political and social issue in Virginia. He was active in several scholarly groups focused on prohibition, and his interests led him into a study of the life of Methodist cleric and political activist, James Cannon Jr. Despite delays created by lengthy and effective administrative service at uwo, he completed what is likely to be the definitive Cannon biography, Prohibition and Politics: The Life of Bishop James Cannon, Jr. (1999)....

...Over the last decade or so, dozens—perhaps hundreds—of homes in Montgomery have been declared blighted and razed in a similar manner. The owners tend to be disproportionately poor and black, and with little means to fight back. And here's the kicker: Many of the homes fall along a federally funded civil rights trail in the neighborhood where Rosa Parks lived. Activists say the weird pattern may not be coincidence. "What's happening in Montgomery is a civil rights crisis," says David Beito, a history professor at the University of Alabama who, as chair of the Alabama State Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, held hearings on the demolitions in April of last year.

Just how many homes have been targeted over the years isn't clear, in part because most of the people targeted haven't the means or the will to fight the condemnations. But some residents believe the number is in the hundreds. It's certain that there were more than 60 demolitions in 2008. And ABC News reported last month that 29 buildings were approved for demolition in 2009, and 49 have been approved so far this year. To be fair, Montgomery has its share of eyesores, and some of the demolitions may well be intended to get rid of abandoned or neglected houses and protect public safety. But many aren't: Beito says more than 30 people testified at his hearings last year that their homes had been wrongly targeted....

Jerry Podair, professor of history and Robert S. French Professor of American Studies at Lawrence University in Appleton, said the 1940s are a tough decade to talk about....

"The '40s are a fractured decade obviously because of WWII, which in the United States lasted from 1941 to 1945, and then the post-war era from 1945 on," he said. "It's almost like you're talking about two different decades."...

"I think it's possible to say someone who grew up in Appleton in the 1930s would spend his whole life there," he said. "But in the 1940s the same person was much more likely to move to an army base in Kentucky or move out to California because that's where the jobs were in the defense industry."...

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[Hirsh is the author of the newly published Capital Offense: How Washington’s Wise Men Turned America’s Future Over to Wall Street.]

...Recently, the National Science Foundation sent out a query asking economists and social scientists to draw up “grand challenge questions that are both foundational and transformative”—a request that one recipient, Andrew Lo, a highly regarded financial economist at MIT, says is a first in his experience. But one problem is that the economics profession “has gotten much more intolerant of divergence from orthodoxy,” says Philip Mirowski, an economic historian at Notre Dame. “The range in which dissent happens is so narrow. In a sense they still cannot imagine the system can operate to undermine itself. That is not a position that is allowed anywhere in the economics profession. The field got rid of methodological self-criticism. This Great Moderation stuff was just arrogance, hubris.” Indeed, the joke on economists, says one of them, Rob Johnson, is that they create simplistic models that depend on people behaving as rational actors motivated by self-interest, yet “they have a blind spot regarding themselves.” The way they squabble mulishly to defend now-indefensible positions is itself evidence of how flawed those rational-actor models are....

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on Tuesday launched what its leader ambitiously called “the start of a national conversation on formulating a new civil rights agenda for the 21st century,” but without significant input from mainstream civil rights organizations or the panel’s two Democratic members....

James T. Patterson, a professor of history emeritus at Brown University in Providence, R.I., spoke before the commission about “the hailstorm of criticism” that Daniel Patrick Moynihan experienced when he wrote an internal report for the U.S. Department of Labor in 1965 called “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” Mr. Moynihan, a Democrat, served as a U.S. senator for New York before he passed away in 2003. His report, which was leaked to the press, said blacks had been mistreated because of racism. It also said that a “pathology” in low-income black families was impeding their economic success. As an example of that pathology, the report said that 25 percent of African-Americans were born out of wedlock at the time. It also characterized “black matriarchy” as a problem.

Mr. Patterson said Mr. Moynihan was called a racist and “hammered” by feminists. As a result, he said, the U.S. has endured decades of “nondebate or dishonest debate” about black families. Mr. Patterson also noted that the percentage of African-American children born out of wedlock has escalated to 73 percent since the Moynihan study, compared with an average of about 40 percent of all U.S. children.

Mr. Patterson cited President Barack Obama’s support of holistic educational programs as promising policies for combatting the breakdown of the black family structure.

As an example, he pointed to the success of the Harlem Children’s Zone, which provides low-income families in Harlem with social and educational programs from before children are born through their school careers. He noted that the Obama administration has pushed for funding to create similar programs throughout the nation....

[Jed Perl is the art critic for The New Republic.]

I know there are some communities within our technophile culture, I’m not sure how large or how small, that take a particular interest in technologies past. You see this in the vogue for Victoriana that has overtaken bohemian Brooklyn and its various outposts and colonies. Taxidermy is having a revival. Nineteenth-century men’s clothing and furnishings are all the rage. Enormous maps and charts, designed to hang in public school classrooms, are popular at the flea markets. Indeed, Cartographies of Time has its origins in a feature that Rosenberg worked on for Cabinet, the quarterly review with offices in Brooklyn that mixes art and history and the history of science to achieve a brainy stylishness that is well nigh irresistible. The hipster appeal of both these books, and I would not underestimate it, has nothing to do with hipster lite; it’s the real McCoy, grounded in scholarly avidity and original thought. Both volumes might be described as salutes to the nerd imagination through history. That the authors may themselves be a bit nerdy makes them especially sympathetic to the material they are presenting....

Perspective—our perspective on world history—is the subject of [Daniel] Rosenberg and [Anthony] Grafton’s easygoing, brainy Cartographies of Time, a book that bears comparison with two of my favorite illustrated volumes of all time: Mario Praz’s Illustrated History of Furnishing (1964) and A. Hyatt Mayor’s Prints and People: A Social History of Printed Pictures (1971). What Rosenberg and Grafton have in common with Mayor and Praz is a feeling for the poetic powers of material culture, for the way that stylistic evolutions express changing worldviews. By looking at timelines and how their shape and form have morphed over the years, Rosenberg and Grafton manage to describe the evolving physiognomy of the historical imagination. This book does for timelines what Grafton’s glorious The Footnote: A Curious History did for footnotes. It takes intellectual confidence to compose a text that partners with pictures without overwhelming them—that allows the images to dance and sing. Mayor and Praz had that confidence. So do Rosenberg and Grafton.

The Russian historian Professor Andrei Sakharov has dismissed as a hoax reports from Kholmogory near the White Sea about the discovery of the remains of the Russian Emperor Ivan VI, who was killed on 1764 at 24 nearly 23 years after being deposed....

[Michel Martin is the host of Tell Me More.]

She probably won't thank me for mentioning it all this time later, but I think I finally understand what Michelle Obama was talking about during the presidential campaign when she said that for the first time in her adult life, she was really proud of her country.

What she was talking about, I think, was finally being able to experience that feeling you get when you fall in love. When you allow yourself, like in those trust exercises you do in Outward Bound or whatever, to really fall hard, without reservation or holding anything back, sure in the belief that your trust and love will be returned....

I was thinking about all that because I was thinking about Ronald Walters, a pre-eminent professor of political science and African-American studies, who died Sept. 10 of cancer. He was 72.

At the time of his death, he was a professor at the University of Maryland, where he chaired the African American Leadership Institute. He had also taught at Brandeis and Syracuse universities but perhaps most notably at Howard University.

But more to the point, he was one of those people who, without ever really saying it, were forever reminding people of why they should try to fall in love with a country that did not always love them back. At Howard, he taught people like Rep. Elijah Cummings. In a statement acknowledging Walters' death, Cummings said Walters was so popular that there were waiting lists to get into his classes, even though he was known as a very strict grader. Cummings said that as a mentor, Professor Walters saw things in him that he did not see in himself, would consistently tell him what he needed to hear even if he did not want to hear it, and despite a demanding schedule of teaching and writing, always made time for him when he faced difficult decisions....

As national archivist during the advent of the Internet age, Jean-Pierre Wallot acted as conservator of Canada's collective memory -- from Karsh's photographs to La famille Plouffe, a Quebec TV drama in the 1950s.

Wallot, who ran the National Archives of Canada for 12 years beginning in 1985, died of cancer Aug. 30 at the General campus of The Ottawa Hospital. He was 75.

The archives, now called Library and Archives Canada (LAC), were spread over 14 buildings throughout the Ottawa area when Wallot took on the job....

Controversial historian David Irving has hit back at claims his guided history tours of Polish death camps are 'sick'.

Claiming that it is the Polish authorities who are 'tasteless' for their promotion of Auschwitz as a 'Disney-style' tourist site, Mr Irving defended his own trip which is fully-booked with American and British tourists.

Critics have slammed the trip Mr Irving is organising to Hitler's headquarters and the notorious death camp Treblinka, referring to it as 'Nazi Travel'....


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