Sharon Fawcett has announced her retirement as Assistant Archivist for Presidential Libraries after 34 years in public service, effective June 4, 2011. Susan Donius, Deputy Assistant Archivist for Presidential Libraries, will be serving in an acting capacity until a replacement is named.

Fawcett’s career began in the presidential library system in 1969 as an archivist on the staff of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library. She remained with the LBJ Library until transferring to a position in the National Archives in Washington, DC. In 1980, she left the National Archives, later moving to West Branch, IA, the home of the Herbert Hoover Library, returning to the National Archives in 1988. She served as Chief of the Reference Service Branch and later the Director of User Services where she was responsible for the overall planning, development, direction, coordination, staffing and control of all research room in the National Archives Building in Washington DC, and the College Park, MD facility....

Indonesian historian Azyumardi Azra, one of the world’s leading scholars of moderate Islam says Islam and Judaism can learn from each other.

The non-moderate vein of Islam prevalent in the Middle East is due to the Arabs' “besieged” mentality, a result of centuries of Western occupations and sectarian clashing, according to an Indonesian historian and one of the world's leading scholars of moderate Islam.

"Muslims in the Middle East are on the defensive – they possess an undersiege mentality,” explained Prof. Azyumardi Azra on Monday. “They are afraid of interacting, and giving greater room,” whether to different Muslim sects or members of other religions.

Later in the day, Arza delivered a lecture on the interplay among the Indonesian state, democracy and the Shari’a, at Bar-Ilan University’s international conference on Religious Law and State Affairs. The conference, supported by the Tager Family Jewish Law Program in the university’s Faculty of Law, advances research in Jewish law from a variety of viewpoints – among them religious, historical and philosophical.

In February, the last surviving American veteran of the First World War died. It is hard to imagine the day when we say goodbye to the last survivor of the Second World War, so large do the “good war” and the “greatest generation” still loom in the national imagination. But the calendar and the census do not lie. Some 16 million Americans served in the military during World War II. On the 60th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 2001, about 5.5 million were still living. This year, as we prepare to mark the 70th anniversary, the number is closer to 1.5 million, and it drops by almost a thousand a day....

Americans’ favorite World War II stories have always been about the democratic heroism of ordinary soldiers; this kind of popular history has never disappeared, and probably never will. Laura Hillenbrand’s “Unbroken” (2010), which has resided for months near the top of the best-seller list, tells the story of Louis Zamperini, an ex-track star turned airman, who was shot down over the Pacific and survived weeks adrift on a raft and even worse ordeals in a Japanese prison camp. As the title suggests, Zamperini is an untroubling kind of war hero, because his greatness was his refusal to break, not his ability to break others — a part of the soldier’s job that is far less comfortable to read about. Zamperini was a bombardier on a B-24, and at the very time he was being tortured by the Japanese, other bomber crews, made up of men no better or worse than he, carried out “Operation Gomorrah” — the weeklong raid on Hamburg, Germany, that in July 1943 killed some 40,000 civilians and destroyed virtually the entire city. Can we make room for that story, and others like it, in our memory of World War II? And if we do, can we still keep our pride in a “good war”?

Those are the questions being asked by the new wave of World War II histories. These books are not “revisionist,” in the pejorative sense: they don’t suggest a moral equivalence between the Axis and the Allies, or minimize Nazi crimes, or deny the Holocaust. Rather, they are thoughtful works by professional historians, who are less interested in rewriting the facts of the war than in reconsidering their moral implications. Americans who learn about the war in Europe from a book like Stephen Ambrose’s “Band of Brothers” (1992), for instance, could be forgiven for thinking of the defeat of Germany as the work of doughty G.I.’s. Yet in “No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe, 1939-1945” (2007), the British historian Norman Davies begins from the premise that “the war effort of the Western powers” was “something of a sideshow.” America lost 143,000 soldiers in the fight against Germany, Davies points out, while the Soviet Union lost 11 million....

Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, a Russian émigré who came to the United States at 14, served in the Army during World War II and became one of the country’s leading scholars of Russian history, writing a college textbook that served as the American standard for teaching Russian history during the cold war, died on May 14 in Oakland, Calif. He was 87.

His family said he died in a nursing home after a two-year illness.

Professor Riasanovsky taught Russian and European intellectual history at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1957 until his retirement in 1997. He specialized in the reign of Emperor Nicholas I (1825 to 1855), a period he examined from different perspectives in a half-dozen books focusing on the monarchy itself, the emergence of state-sponsored nationalism and the alienation of Russia’s intellectual elite. His writing was known for its scrupulous examination of perceptions and misperceptions on all sides in unfolding events.

But when Professor Riasanovsky decided to write a textbook for undergraduates in the early 1960s, he was motivated at least in part by concern with the perceptions that Americans had about Russia, said Mark Steinberg, a professor of Russian history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a former Riasanovsky student....

Oxford University has appointed its first chair of Israel studies to research the economics, society and politics of the Jewish state, following a £3m benefaction by a charitable foundation.

Derek Penslar, professor of Jewish history at Toronto university, will take up the post next year as a fellow of St Anne's College. He said he regarded himself as under an obligation to "strive for political neutrality" and would study Israel "within a global context". "One cannot understand Zionism without studying the history of nationalism, both within Europe and as a reaction against European colonialism.

"One cannot understand Israeli politics, or the relationship between the Israeli state and its military, outside of the framework of Arab-Israeli relations and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict," Penslar told the Guardian in an email. "Israel's economy is, particularly in recent years, very much a product of trends towards globalization."...

SPRINGFIELD — Democratic lawmakers moved ahead Tuesday with their plans to redraw the state's legislative district boundaries despite complaints from a prominent Latino voting rights group that the proposal shortchanges minorities....

Representatives for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund said the plan falls short of the requirements of the federal Voting Rights Act, which prohibits diluting minority voting strength. Meeting the Voting Rights Act is a key element of redistricting.

Nina Perales, litigation director for MALDEF, stopped short of threatening a lawsuit Tuesday but noted the group has a history of going to federal court to challenge Illinois redistricting plans.

Attempting to counter MALDEF's warning and set a legal marker for a potential lawsuit, House Democrats retained Allan Lichtman, a professor of history at American University in Washington and a noted redistricting expert, at a rate of $400 an hour in taxpayer funds....

MOUNT VERNON, Va., May 25, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- The seventh annual George Washington Book Prize, co-sponsored by Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and George Washington's Mount Vernon, honoring the year's best book about America's founding era, has been awarded to Pauline Maier for Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 (Simon & Schuster, 2010). Maier, author of five previous books on the history of revolutionary America, received the $50,000 prize Wednesday evening, May 25, at a black-tie dinner at George Washington's Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens.

"This book will really prove to be an eye-opener to many people who think that drafting the Constitution was the end of a long road to creating a strong and effective government," said Mount Vernon's president, James C. Rees. "But getting the document ratified was an uphill struggle most historians ignore, and on more than one occasion, the entire unification process was almost doomed to failure."

The debates over drafting the Constitution that took place in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 have long been enshrined in American history. But Maier's book reveals an equally dramatic and essential -- though almost forgotten -- series of debates that played out during the year that followed, as citizens, journalists, and politicians argued state-by-state over whether to ratify the nation's founding document....

Just who are the Africans who helped shape the Americas, and where did they come from?

It's a question professor David Eltis and his team at Emory University in Atlanta are trying to answer with a new online project called "African Origins."

Launched in April, the online database could help trace the roots of more than 100,000 Africans who were shipped to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade.

"In the 19th century, when the slave trade was in the process of being suppressed, there were a set of international courts established around the Atlantic world and captured slave vessels were brought into these ports and adjudicated by the courts," Eltis said....

An outspoken historian is facing the threat of a criminal trial for his writings on the Thai monarchy, spurring an international appeal by scholars for the protection of academic freedoms in Thailand.

Somsak Jeamteerasakul, a history professor at Thammasat University in Bangkok, has accused the Thai military of forcing the government to prosecute him under a century-old royal defamation law. He said that he had received an anonymous phone call that said he would be arrested soon.

Mr. Somsak is the latest public figure to be accused of lèse-majesté, a crime that carries a potential 15-year jail term. Dozens of cases are pending against politicians, activists, and journalists accused of defaming King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the constitutional ruler, and his family, who are typically shielded from public scrutiny....

Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution." 

The right-wing British historian Niall Ferguson seems to have conquered America: pushing his latest perishable book, "Civilization," this one based on the trendy and quickly dated conceit of the six (or is it seven?) "killer apps" of Western civilization; writing cover stories for Newsweek; debating foreign policy on TV with Zbigniew Brzezinski; and pouting and snarling his way through a debate about economics with Paul Krugman, Jeff Madrick and Bill Bradley. If you missed his Chicago lecture on the imminent decline of America, then at least on YouTube you can still catch him warning before the 2008 presidential election that "Islamic jihadists" and "Europeans" were hoping that John McCain would lose. Recently, it was announced that Henry Kissinger has made him his official biographer, perhaps in the hope that Ferguson, who thinks that the Kaiser should have been allowed to crush Europe, will be equally kind to Kissinger’s reputation. Time magazine in 2004 named Ferguson one of the 100 most influential people in the world, which might help to explain the condition of the world.

"The Elite Turns Against Obama," screamed a recent headline in the Daily Beast.

According to former New York Daily News gossip columnist Lloyd Grove, the evidence that "the intelligentsia" was turning against Obama consisted of a panel at the Aspen Institute, where the right-wing New York Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman agreed with Ferguson that the Democrats are hurting America. Ferguson, described as a "dashing Brit" by gossip columnist Grove, praised Republican congressman Paul Ryan’s scheme for abolishing Social Security and Medicare, a plan so callous and unpopular that other Republicans have scrambled to distance themselves from it. The Dashing Brit then told the assembled plutocrats that unemployed Americans are lazy: "The curse of long term unemployment is that if you pay people to do nothing, they’ll find themselves doing nothing for long periods of time." On an earlier occasion he created a stir when he compared Barack Obama to the lascivious cartoon character Fritz the Cat, because, he said, both are "black and lucky."

What accounts for the attention lavished by the American media on a huckster as vulgar and shallow as Niall Ferguson? His accent surely is part of the explanation. Only a combined lack of personal and national self-confidence can explain the way that America’s publishers and producers -- many of them insecure, upwardly mobile social climbers -- will fawn over a mediocre British pundit or pop historian whom they would completely ignore if he were Tony Zacarelli from Long Island or Fred Huffernagel from Oregon. Little has changed since the Midwesterner Jay Gatz, to be taken seriously on the Anglophile East Coast, had to change his name to Gatsby before he could qualify as "dashing."

Ferguson is the most prominent of a number of British conservative intellectuals and journalists who have found more sympathetic audiences in the U.S. than in their own country, where their enthusiasm for Victorian imperialism and Victorian economics stigmatizes them as cranks. His Old World accent and reactionary politics might not have been sufficient to earn Niall Ferguson his cisatlantic celebrity, were it not for the demise of American intellectual conservatism, chronicled by Sam Tanenhaus and others. The mass extinction of America’s intellectual right at the hands of anti-intellectual Jacksonian populists like the Tea Partyers has created a lack of native conservative thinkers with impressive academic credentials who are willing to dash to a TV studio at a moment’s notice. And in an era when the conservative movement is symbolized by lightweights like Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter and Jonah Goldberg, rather than William F. Buckley Jr., George Will and Irving Kristol, even Niall Ferguson can be mistaken for an intellectual.

History professors Tom Devine, Christopher Smout and Michael Lynch, and archaeologist Dr Anna Ritchie - all former trustees of the National Museums of Scotland - say they fear standards will slip without expert advice at a crucial time.

They have now written to the new Scottish Government to make their concerns clear about the make-up of the current museum leadership.

They claim the NMS board, chaired by banker Sir Angus Grossart, now has more financial, managerial and legal clout than academic expertise.