Historians in the News Archive
This page includes, in addition to news about historians, news about political scientists, economists, law professors, and others who write about history. For a comprehensive list of historians' obituaries, go here.
SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed (5-19-11)
Survey courses in "Western Civilization," once a common component of undergraduate curriculums, have almost disappeared as a requirement at many large private research universities and public flagships, according to a study released Wednesday by the National Association of Scholars.
The report finds that, since 1968, the number of the selected colleges that require Western Civilization courses as a component of general education curriculums and U.S. history as a component of history majors has dropped. This decrease has coincided with more focus on world history courses.
The association argues that Western Civilization courses are uniquely capable of introducing students to key themes of a liberal education. "In the absence of such an organizing principle the curriculum spins out into an all-things-to-all-people cornucopia of offerings, many of them exceptionally narrow in scope and many of them trivial in character," the report states.
Historians and curriculum researchers attribute the de-emphasis on Western Civilization courses to significant changes in higher education curriculums, student diversity, university educational goals, and how history researchers study the world and receive training. They argue that survey courses and Western Civilization courses might not be the best model for all students, and that a more complete world history course is actually better suited for the modern liberal arts education....
SOURCE: Amy Goodman in the Guardian (UK) (5-18-11)
Amy Goodman is an award-winning broadcast journalist, columnist, investigative reporter and author. She is the principal host of Democracy Now!, an independent global news programme broadcast daily on radio, television and the internet. Her most recent book is a collection of her weekly columns, Breaking the Sound Barrier (2009)
Judy Ancel, a Kansas City, Missouri, professor, and her St Louis colleague were teaching a labour history class together this spring semester. Little did they know, video recordings of the class were making their way into the thriving sub rosa world of rightwing attack video editing, twisting their words in a way that resulted in the loss of one of the professors' jobs amid a wave of intimidation and death threats. Fortunately, reason and solid facts prevailed, and the videos ultimately were exposed for what they are: fraudulent, deceptive, sloppily edited hit pieces.
Rightwing media personality Andrew Breitbart is the forceful advocate of the slew of deceptively edited videos that target and smear progressive individuals and institutions. He promoted the videos that purported to catch employees of the community organisation Acorn assisting a couple in setting up a prostitution ring. He showcased the edited video of Shirley Sherrod, an African American employee of the US department of agriculture, which completely convoluted her speech, making her appear to admit to discriminating against a white farmer. She was fired as a result of the cooked-up controversy. Similar video attacks have been waged against Planned Parenthood.
Judy Ancel has been the director of the University of Missouri-Kansas City's institute for labour studies since 1988. Using a live video link, she co-teaches a course on the history of the labour movement with Professor Don Giljum, who teaches at University of Missouri-St Louis. The course comprises seven day-long, interactive sessions throughout the semester. They are video-recorded and made available through a password-protected system to students registered in the class....
SOURCE: Jewish Telegraph Agency (5-18-11)
JERUSALEM (JTA) -- A retired history professor from the United States was arrested for allegedly smuggling stolen antiquities from Israel and selling them illegally.
The American man sold among other things, bronze and silver coins from the Second Temple period and a 1,500-year-old clay oil lamp....
The suspect, who works as a tour guide, had been in the country for two weeks....
SOURCE: http://www.fundweb.co.uk (5-17-11)
In an interview with the Financial Times, Russell Napier, the financial historian and strategist at CLSA, the broker, says the S&P 500 index of large companies could hit a low of 400, lower than the 666 reached in March 2009.
According to Napier, emerging markets have propped up the world’s supply of money since the crisis, including to the American government. However, this massive injection has led to inflation and will cause the developing world to tighten its monetary policy further.
SOURCE: Thomas Ricks in Foreign Policy (5-17-11)
Historian Niall Ferguson likes to think big. If most Washingtonians are satisfied with shaping a discrete national policy issue, Niall Ferguson isn't satisfied unless he can challenge the global conventional wisdom of a generation.
Ferguson's most recent strategic expository centered on the geopolitical implications of China possibly eclipsing American and Western power, reflections he recently shared at Chatham House in London [published as, "The West and the Rest: the Changing Global Balance of Power in Historic Perspective," May 9, 2011.
His compelling if provocative analysis built not only on his latest tome, Civilization: the West and the Rest, but also the much-anticipated sweeping history, On China, written by the Henry Kissinger, and published today.
Kissinger's narrative sees Confucian roots in contemporary Chinese decision-making and upheavals. This is a consequential conclusion, because for Kissinger it means that as China's power ascends the temptation to wield power the way Europe or even America has done so will be tempered by tradition. Rather than seeking imperial rule, for instance, China will be content with finding its place under heaven, essentially as the regional Middle Kingdom. It is also likely to employ a classical Chinese strategy of playing external barbarians off one another, only occasionally clinching a few of the barbarians into its ambit.
Thus, Kissinger emphasizes civilizational and cultural continuity as the common thread throughout Chinese history. In contrast, Ferguson emphasizes the simple but dominant theme of power, in a sense that Hans Morgenthau and John Mearsheimer would readily recognize (and indeed which Kissinger would have felt more comfortable with during his more youthful days as a statesman). At the heart of Ferguson's analytical question is this: what if China has not only figured out how to catch up with the West, but has also adopted an imperial Western conception of power?
Ferguson puts the breadth of historical events into the vernacular of the digerati, describing six important institutions and ideas that led to Western ascendency as 'killer applications.' As had become obvious in the 19th and 20th centuries, the West dominated the international relations; it did so, according to Ferguson, because it exploited competition, Newtonian scientific advancement, the rule of law and property rights, modern medicine, a consumer society, and a serious work ethic. The problem, he adds, is that the rest of the world has now downloaded these applications. And no country is now more poised to exploit them than is China....
SOURCE: OAH and AHA Emails (5-16-11)
An email bearing this message went out to OAH and AHA members this week.
Legislation has been introduced in the House of Representatives that would eliminate the Teaching American History (TAH) Grant Program at the U.S. Department of Education. This bill, “Setting New Priorities in Education Spending Act,” would terminate forty-three K-12 federal education programs that the House Republican leadership contends are wasteful, ineffective, and duplicative.
The Organization of American Historians joins the National Coalition for History and the National Humanities Alliance and opposes this proposed legislation. We urge you to contact your member of Congress immediately and ask them to oppose H.R. 1891.
For more information on this bill, visit: http://bit.ly/iz4ocI
Our partners at the National Humanities Alliance have set up an online advocacy tool that allows you to send an e-mail message directly to your Representative on this vital issue. Please act now and tell Congress why TAH programs are important to you, your institution, your field, your state, and/or district. Personalize your message by visiting: http://bit.ly/l2D52G
The House Education and the Workforce Committee is expected to consider H.R. 1891 at any time. It is important that you contact your member of the House of Representatives TODAY, and urge them to oppose this bill.
Related Links
AHA Email
SOURCE: PolitiFact (5-10-11)
During the May 8, 2011, edition of NBC’sMeet the Press, historian and author Doris Kearns Goodwin offered a striking statistic about combat casualties under President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Host David Gregory began the exchange by playing a video clip from Robert Kagan, a foreign policy scholar and commentator who has advised several Republican office-holders.
"The American people," Kagan said, "have an interesting quality in their character which you can trace all through their history. They want their presidents to be men of peace, but they also want to know that, if necessary, the American president can kill."
Gregory asked Goodwin whether she thought Kagan had a worthwhile point in analyzing President Barack Obama’s recent success in ordering the killing of al-Qaida mastermind Osama bin Laden.
"I think that's right," Goodwin said. "I mean, think of two of our most lovable presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, what was his slogan? Speak softly and carry a big stick. This was a big stick. Eisenhower, having won World War II, could then take enormous pride in the fact that not a single soldier had died in combat during his time. So I think what happened in this thing is, it's not just the public perception of Obama that's strengthened now because he acted as commander in chief, but you never know what happens internally to a president when they take a risky thing and it works. JFK took control of his presidency after the Cuban missile crisis. This guy will now take control of his presidency. I think he's going to be able to trust his own judgment even more than the military, and that's huge psychologically. And America feels better again. I mean, that's the huge thing that we don't know about how long that will last. But our prestige and our sense of ourself is now heightened for a while, and everybody wants that."
We thought we’d look into whether Goodwin was correct that "not a single soldier … died in combat" during the Eisenhower presidency.
We knew that Goodwin’s claim had problems when we checked the starting and ending dates of the Korean War. It was an active conflict through the signing of a truce on July 26, 1953. Since Eisenhower was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 1953, he served as commander-in-chief for the final six months of the war. His presidency ended on Jan. 20, 1961.
The final six months of the Korean war included a battle that became emblematic of the war -- the Battle of Pork Chop Hill. The battle produced many casualties at a time when the powers were negotiating an armistice, even though the battle was fought to control a topographic feature that had little inherent value. In his book The Korean War, Max Hastings wrote that the battle reflected both the "courage of the defenders and the tactical futility" of that stage of the war.
How many casualties were there during those six months? We didn’t find any official government data with casualties separated by year, but we did find a private collection. The veteran-supported Korean War Project has a website that offers day-by-day casualty figures for the war. So we looked at the figures for the first six months of Eisenhower’s presidency and found 3,406 casualties....
In addition, Eisenhower was president during the start of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall, the names of the fallen begin with Air Force T-Sgt. Richard B. Fitzgibbon Jr., with a casualty date of June 8, 1956. The number of casualties in Vietnam remained much smaller than the number during the final part of the Korean War. The first battlefield fatality came in late 1961, almost one year into the Kennedy Administration.
Eisenhower also presided over some small-scale military deployments in or near Taiwan, Lebanon and Cuba, and he was president during the Suez crisis of 1956. But we were unable to confirm any casualties for these events....
SOURCE: CNBC (5-12-11)
The factors he cited:
The “mother of all Keynsian fiscal binges” in which the government spent nearly $1 trillion on stimulus from which there will be a “hangover” with only the timing at question. “Fiscal gaps this large are really hard to close by means of austerity,” he said. “If you don’t believe me, ask the Greeks, the Irish and the Portugese.”
A “massive monetary binge” in which the Federal Reserve ultimately will print money to the tune of nearly $3 trillion.
An ensuing spike in commodity prices, a process that has gone on virtually unabated since the beginning of Fed intervention and for which there has been a recent pullback. “It’s not just that people in the West get cheesed off and stop believing when the Fed says inflation is low,” he said. “It’s because high prices create geopolitical instability.”
China “is not the Soviet Union,” meaning the nation doesn’t have the same destabilizing economic conditions that brought down the former Communist republic.
In all, the obstacles posed against the US maintaining its global dominance will be too much to overcome, he said.
“The fiscal crisis of the United States is not going away. It is coming here soon,” Ferguson concluded. “The key decisions not just for the next four years but for the next 20 years will take place in Asia, not in the US. Welcome to the future.”
SOURCE: NYT (5-9-11)
... Mr. Kissinger’s fascinating, shrewd and sometimes perverse new book, “On China,” not only addresses the central role he played in Nixon’s opening to China but also tries to show how the history of China, both ancient and more recent, has shaped its foreign policy and attitudes toward the West. While this volume is indebted to the pioneering scholarship of historians like Jonathan D. Spence, its portrait of China is informed by Mr. Kissinger’s intimate firsthand knowledge of several generations of Chinese leaders.
Regarding the brutal crackdown on dissidents by the government of Deng Xiaoping at Tiananmen Square in 1989, Mr. Kissinger says that the American reaction left the Chinese puzzled: “They could not understand why the United States took umbrage at an event that had injured no American material interests and for which China claimed no validity outside its own territory.”
For that matter, Mr. Kissinger’s own take on Tiananmen and the Chinese government has a determinedly “on the one hand, on the other hand” feel: “Like most Americans, I was shocked by the way the Tiananmen protest was ended. But unlike most Americans, I had had the opportunity to observe the Herculean task Deng had undertaken for a decade and a half to remold his country: moving Communists toward acceptance of decentralization and reform; traditional Chinese insularity toward modernity and a globalized world — a prospect China had often rejected. And I had witnessed his steady efforts to improve Sino-American ties.”
Mr. Kissinger is even more chillingly cavalier about the tens of millions of people who lost their lives during Mao’s years in power and the devastating fallout of his Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Mr. Kissinger writes about what he describes as a “poignant” scene in which “Nixon complimented Mao on having transformed an ancient civilization, to which Mao replied: ‘I haven’t been able to change it. I’ve only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Beijing.’ ”
Mr. Kissinger then, startlingly, adds: “After a lifetime of titanic struggle to uproot Chinese society, there was not a little pathos in Mao’s resigned recognition of the pervasiveness of Chinese culture and the Chinese people.”...
SOURCE: NYT (5-10-11)
Horace Freeland Judson, a science writer whose 1979 book “The Eighth Day of Creation” is regarded as the definitive account of the breakthroughs that transformed molecular biology in the mid-20th century, died on Friday at his home in Baltimore. He was 80.
The cause was complications of a stroke, his daughter Olivia said.
Ten years in the making and based on interviews with more than a hundred scientists, “The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology” revisited the critical discoveries in molecular biology, notably the double-helix structure of DNA, its mode of replication and the role of RNA and proteins in carrying out its commands.
“It stands entirely by itself,” said the molecular biologist Matthew Meselson, who is prominent in its pages. “If he had not written it, there never would have been an account of the DNA revolution equal to its importance, that captures what really went on.”
With a novelist’s sense of pace and drama, Mr. Judson put arcane scientific information within the reach of the common reader while weaving a tale rich in incident, conflict and character.
SOURCE: NYT (5-8-11)
I ARRIVED at Butler Library on the Columbia campus last week, showed my ID and was directed to a fifth-floor room where I could examine in person a trove of documents related to Malcolm X.
That the documents were in digital format, and I would be viewing them on a Web site, made the exercise seem a bit extraordinary. Can’t you just send me a link? I asked.
But there was a reason that I had to be invited there. The Malcolm X Multimedia Study Project was created by the late Prof. Manning Marable, whose new “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention” was published last month, days after the author died of lung disease. The material I would be viewing was largely constructed around the earlier, more famous book, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” as told to Alex Haley, who died in 1992. While Columbia may have permission to share a digital version of the original copyrighted book within its campus, they certainly didn’t have permission to share it with the world.
There was another reason that it seemed fitting that I was entering a library with columns and names like Homer and Cicero inscribed above the entrance to click on a computer and open a Web browser: the brilliant online project I was viewing was slowly disintegrating, like so much parchment.
In the biography, which reached No. 3 on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, Professor Marable argues that the famous autobiography overstated Malcolm X’s past life of crime before joining the Nation of Islam and failed to discuss his political evolution toward political organizing after leaving the Nation....
SOURCE: NYT (5-8-11)
So deeply has the phrase “a nation of immigrants” seeped into the American psyche that millions of people reflexively use it while few know who coined the phrase. (It was Senator John F. Kennedy, in a 1958 book by that name.)
Susan F. Martin, a historian at Georgetown University, embraces the term even as she warns that it hides more than it reveals. Her book — titled, yes, “A Nation of Immigrants” — argues that the United States historically has favored immigration more consistently than it has immigrants.
Three competing models evolved in the original colonies, she writes, each with a different vision of what purposes newcomers would serve. Elements of each have persisted since.
Virginia sought workers but found them in slaves.
Massachusetts sought believers but punished dissent.
Pennsylvania sought citizens, and built them from foreign stock (despite gripes from residents as cosmopolitan as Benjamin Franklin).
Each model was pro-immigration, Ms. Martin argues, but not necessarily pro-immigrant.
“They had very different ideas about what would happen after the immigrant entered the country,” she said in an interview.
SOURCE: BBC (5-11-11)
Pottery fragments from an excavation archive of Glastonbury Abbey have shown the site dates back to the Dark Ages, which is later than previously thought.
The research project into the 1951-1964 excavation archive have shown humans occupied the site in the late 4th or 5th centuries.
Archaeologist John Allan said: "We hadn't realised these periods were represented in the excavated pottery."
Other finds include "exotic" pottery from Italy, Spain, Portugal and France....
SOURCE: AFP (5-11-11)
Archaeologists on Wednesday began digging for the remains of a 16th-century woman believed to be the model for Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa in a bid to unlock an art world mystery.
The team of historians say they will try to find the remains using geo-radar equipment and then try to re-create a likeness of what the woman, Lisa Gherardini, would have looked like to compare her to the painting.
Romano said the team's radar had shown there could be burials dating back to Gherardini's time as little as two metres (6.5 feet) below the surface in what had been part of a cloister of the Sant'Orsola convent....
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (5-11-11)
A suburban house thought to have been built over the spot where Nelson Mandela buried the first weapon of the African National Congress's armed resistance will go up for auction on Thursday amid fears that bounty hunters could buy it and unearth the gun to sell abroad.
The sale of 5 George Avenue in Rivonia, northern Johannesburg, has attracted attention from around the world which is expected to send the three-bedroom property's original asking price of 3 million rand (£435,000) spiralling.
The Makarov pistol thought to lie underneath it was given to Mr Mandela by an Ethiopian colonel training him for the military campaign the ANC were to launch against the apartheid government.
The weapon is now valued at 22m rand (£1.8m) but is also known to be of considerable sentimental value to the ailing 92-year-old statesman, who has asked friends whether it has been found.
Mr Mandela buried the pistol in July 1962 in the grounds of Liliesleaf Farm, where he had been living in disguise as a houseboy and where he was subsequently arrested. He spent the next 27 years in jail before being released to become South Africa's first black president in 1994....
SOURCE: Dahlia Scheindlin at 972mag.com (4-19-11)
It has been a troubled year for Israeli academia. The rising nationalist sentiment in the government, legislature and civil society has spilled over into bitter struggles on campuses throughout the country. Nationalist groups such as IsraCampus, Israel Academia Monitor, and the ultra-nationalist Im Tirtzu have set their crosshairs on academia, seeking the dismissal of faculty members and control over curricula, and urging foreign donors to withdraw funds unless the faculty they have targeted are removed. They have published blacklists and ranked each university and department according to political legitimacy. Much of the fire has been directed at Ben Gurion University (*).According to an NRG story that appeared after the interview below, one donor threatened to suspend funds if certain political positions were not officially repudiated by Ben Gurion’s administration (Hebrew).
One striking result has been the politicization of very basic social concepts that should be part of the consensus, concepts once considered to be above politics. Thus the term “democracy,” is viewed by the ultra-nationalists as a left-wing political ideology, and it is increasingly de-legitimized in Israeli discourse. The concept of human rights is even more controversial. For the ultra-nationalist students and organizations, the term “human rights” symbolizes one-sided support for the Palestinians and subversive attempts to destroy the state. The liberal universalism that underlies human rights values is anathema to a parochial notion of state, and clashes with the creeping raison d’etat.
Therefore, a human rights conference planned by the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University in early April was a white-hot target for the nationalists. Im Tirtzu launched a well-orchestrated campaign to pressure university president Professor Rivka Carmi to cancel the conference, on the pretense that it was not “balanced.” Dr. Dani Filc, the Department chair, responded that seven right wing speakers had been invited but declined to come. Still the demands continued, reaching University officials, Minister of Education Gideon Saar, the chair of the Knesset’s Education Committee, Alex Miller (Israel Beitenu). The conference was held as planned.
In this charged environment, Professor Neve Gordon agreed to be interviewed for +972. Professor Gordon was Chair of the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University for much of this controversial period. He is the author of Israel’s Occupation and an outspoken critic of Israel’s government policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians. He is very close to the issues, having been the target of no small controversies himself in the past.
BEN GURION UNIVERSITY HAS BEEN IN THE EYE OF THE STORM. WHAT HAS BEEN THE SITUATION AT BEN GURION UNIVERSITY OVER THE LAST YEAR?
There’s an assault on Israeli academia in general. It involves an alliance between forces such as IsraCampus and Israel Academic Monitor on the one hand, who try to convince donors to stop giving money to universities that harbor leftists, and Im Tirzu, which tries to mobilize government Ministers and Members of Knesset to pressure the top university executives to discipline recalcitrant academics. There’s an alliance between elements in civil society, a handful of donors, and the government to stifle academic freedom and criticism of Israeli policy. The phenomenon is not only in the academic sphere…it also includes, for example, the attacks on the human rights organizations in Israel.
As I understand it, the assault has a twofold objective. The idea is to prevent the flow of information from Israel abroad, and because both academics and the Israeli human rights community have strong networks outside of Israel they are the one’s currently targeted. Simultaneously, there is an attempt to stifle internal debate, by reducing the limiting discussions about policies that lead to social wrongs and more violence and aggression.
HAVE THEY SUCCEEDED?
To a certain extent. We are seeing a totally new phenomenon in Israeli academia: students sitting in class, filming the classes and then passing information on to the monitor groups and the media. The recordings are almost always edited, so the information doesn’t reflect what really went on in class.
Such students consider themselves to be class monitors , rather than people who have come to the university in order to study, broaden their horizon and expand their knowledge…not unlike the McCarthy era in the US, some Israeli student see themselves as agents of the state, as spies.
DO YOU MEAN THEY’RE NOT COMING TO CLASS TRULY TO LEARN, BUT RATHER TO GET AFFIRMATION FOR THEIR OPINIONS?
Some are open-minded and some are less so…We are blessed with excellent students; I think the student qua spy is still a small minority. But they definitely exist.
Another issue is foreign donors. Donations are a relatively small percentage of the budget, often 10% or less. Yet the donors wield immense influence…The monitors send information to donors in the US or England and a handful of these donors send letters to university administrations pressuring them to stifle academic freedom.
So there are attacks from Knesset and from foreign donors, and the mechanism of academic monitors feeds both.
WHAT ABOUT ISRAELI DONORS?
There are very few. But I believe they would be less influenced, because the sphere of legitimate discourse is still much broader inside Israel,when it comes to criticizing government policy.
WHAT HAS BEEN THE IMPACT OF THOSE CIVIL SOCIETY CAMPAIGNS?
It’s hard to judge in the short term, but I believe we’ll see that they’ve succeeded a great deal in the long term.
Up to now, they haven’t managed to get anyone fired from the universities, because we still have a tenure system. But they’ve created gatekeepers. It’s becoming increasingly impossible to hire people who are critical of the Israeli government, or who have signed a [critical] petition…If [potential candidates] know this in advance, they will stop expressing their opinions and if they do decide to speak out, it will be more difficult for them to get hired…Not only the IsraCampus monitors but also politicians, the media and university administrators now agree that it’s OK for students to film professors in class and to monitor what petitions they sign…That’s a great success for those movements.
It’s extremely disturbing, because the student doesn’t understand his or her role in the university, and sees him or herself as an uncritical agent of the state… Ultimately the criticism is internalized, and many professors think twice or fear to speak their opinions.
The right turns the whole notion of academic freedom on its head – they say that people like me are the ones who stifle free speech. I find the implication that we control the discourse in Israel to be ludicrous. All one needs to do is turn on the television or read a newspaper. People who think like me are on the margins and their views are rarely heard in the mainstream media.
WHAT ABOUT THE FREQUENT ACCUSATION OF GROUPS SUCH AS IM TIRTZU, THAT RIGHT WING POLITICAL OPINIONS AREN’T ACCEPTED OR ARE PENALIZED?
The two last editors of Ben Gurion’s Department of Politics and Government student newspaper were [involved with] ImTirzu. The people who protested against the human rights conference were members of our department. I’m proud they feel comfortable doing this, knowing they won’t be penalized. [The idea that their opinions are stifled] is a lie that certain activists are disseminating to the press …The Department and Ben Gurion University has proven itself open to a plethora of viewpoints.
But those who assault academic freedom don’t really want to debate, they want to attack. They don’t want to appear at our conferences – we invited people who represent the other side and they declined to come…Knesset members, donors and protesters demanded that our human rights conference will be “balanced” by including people who are against human rights. The whole notion of “balanced” is now being used as a weapon against the left. If there’s a conference on Darwin we do not need to invite creationists. For a Holocaust conference we should not be inviting Holocaust deniers – although one could claim that in the name of balance we would have to. Why, one might ask, should we invite people who are against human rights? We need to ask ourselves in which countries are HR conferences criticized? Iran, China, Syria..Are these the countries we want to follow?
The radical right wants to create a situation whereby only its views heard. The recent request to suspend me from teaching required courses is extremely telling. [A few weeks ago, Kadima MK Otniel Schneller wrote to Alex Miller (Israel Beitenu), Chair of the Knesset’s Education, Culture and Sports Committee, demanding that “at the very least, Gordon be prevented from teaching required courses that would force students to hear his defamatory views.”] (Hebrew)
HOW HAVE OTHER UNIVERSITIES IN ISRAEL REACTED?
Professors have coordinated to sign petitions [against such attacks], and there have been some discussions. But there isn’t really any organized, strategic or concerted attempt to deal with the phenomenon.
WHY IS THIS HAPPENING NOW?
Universities are not islands, they are part of Israeli society, and the attack on academic freedom merely reflects the more general attack on liberal values. The attacks on human rights organizations, the fact that the Education Minister wants to erase democracy and citizenship studies from the curricula and replace it with Zionism and Judaism and the spate of racist and anti-democratic legislation going on in the Knesset, as well as the recent poll of youth attitudes, are all part of the same trend in Israeli society.
DO YOU FEAR FOR THE FUTURE OF ISRAELI DEMOCRACY?
We don’t need to imagine a dark future, we’re already there. Democracy is severely curtailed, we’re on a dark path, and unless something radical changes, unless a miracle happens, I think that within not so many years, the last remnants of Israeli democracy might be lost. The pattern may still change, but if the youth polls are correct, Knesset legislation in the future will be even worse. Democracy will be destroyed.
WHAT SHOULD ACADEMICS DO ABOUT THIS?
I’m not sure it’s the role of academics to change society. People should speak out in support of democracy and criticize undemocratic elements, but not necessarily through academia. Civil society movements should lead… academics are not only academics, they are also something else, they are also members of civil society. And as members of civil society, academics need to struggle for social justice, locally and nationally.
WHAT IS THE ROLE OF UNIVERSITY IN SOCIETY?
I think it has three major roles. One is the search for truth and knowledge. The second is to teach student how to think critically. The third role is to educate the students to be good citizens. Our role is not to try to convince students of our views; when we do that we become didactic, rather than encouraging critical thinking we encourage dogma. We want them to be independent thinkers; not to tell them what to think.
*Proper disclosure: I teach as an adjunct faculty member in the Politics of Conflict program at the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University).
First published in http://972mag.com/
SOURCE: Perspectives, the monthly newsletter of the AHA (5-9-11)
[HNN Editor: In the latest issue of Perspectives the AHA explores how political history is practiced today.]
... The first essay by Julian Zelizer, sets out what he considers to be the "defining aspect" of the new political history—its interdisciplinarity—and argues that practitioners of political history should tap the full range of scholarship that exists outside history departments. In the essay that follows, that in some ways resonates with Zelizer's, Steven Pincus and William Novak declare that traditional political history is dying, but see it being reincarnated as "a synthetic and integrative history" that is in tune with a "reconceived concept of the 'political'." Taking what appears to be an entirely different tack, but arriving at the same destination of reconfiguring what is meant by "political" (and thus, of political history), Karen Offen proposes that the history of feminism is political history. She also seeks "integration" then, of the history of feminism into the teaching and study of political history.
The two articles that follow, by Durba Ghosh and Vinayak Chaturvedi, respectively, consider larger questions relating to political history, albeit from the perspective of South Asia. Ghosh points out that India "appears to be a dream case for optimists and political historians." Chaturvedi discusses what he sees as an apparent paradox in South Asian historiography—the decline of political history even as histories of politics were in the ascendant.
Sean Perrone's article takes us to a different time and place, in examining the challenges and implications of researching representative institutions and processes in early modern Europe. As he phrases it, "A reassessment of representation is crucial to the study of politics in early modern Europe."
In a clutch of three articles, Jason Parker, David Nickles, and Christopher Dietrich analyze what is perhaps the bellwether (and the persistent anchor) of contemporary political history—the history of international relations and diplomacy—from different angles and vantage points. While there are some inevitable echoes and overlaps in these three essays, the restatements in different voices and registers help to clarify the issues.
The challenges of teaching about specific aspects of political history are the primary concerns of the essays by Gretchen Adams, Kellie Carter Jackson, and Rachel Burstein. Adams examines the ways in which access to digital materials helps her to discuss in more effective ways the issue of memory and political history. Jackson considers the difficult pedagogic problem of teaching about the role of violence in political history. Burstein's essay describes how she uses images in the classroom to discuss events in political history, and how that has helped her to get students more engaged with the topics of discussion. Also addressing teaching issues, and the use of digital resources, E. Thomas Ewing describes how he has been able to use online material for teaching a research seminar for history majors on the theme of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Darren Dochuk's essay, which leavens, so to speak, the three teaching essays, addresses the "religion problem," taking off from the 2004 essay by Jon Butler.
Bringing up the rear, as it were, but dealing with the all-important sources that can be used by researchers and teachers, are the three articles by Carl Ashley, Donald Ritchie, and Rosemarie Zgarri. Ashley's article discusses the resources available for doing research into diplomatic history, including the comprehensive series published by the State Department, the Foreign Relations of the United States. Ritchie points to the riches waiting to be mined in the archives of the U.S. Congress. Zagarri describes the "New Nation Votes" database and hints at the riches it contains, especially for those seeking to understand the political history of the early Republic.
SOURCE: Lee White in Perspectives, the monthly newsletter of the AHA (5-9-11)
Teaching American History grants (Department of Education): The Teaching American History Grants (TAH) program sustained a 61 percent cut of $73 million reducing the allocation from $119 million in fiscal 2010 to $46 million. While this is disheartening, throughout the budget process House Republicans had repeatedly targeted the program for elimination. The administration, too, had zeroed out TAH for fiscal 2011 and had proposed consolidating history education in a new Well Rounded Education program where it would have competed for funding with arts, music, foreign languages, civics, economics and other subjects....
National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC): The NHPRC allocation was cut by $6 million from $13 million in fiscal 2010 down to $7 million this year. While this is a significant reduction, the House in a previous Continuing Resolution had cut the NHPRC amount to a $4 million level and there were House Republicans pushing for outright elimination of the commission....
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH): The NEH budget was reduced by 7.5 percent, with a cut of $12.5 million from the fiscal 2010 level of $167.5 million down to a level of $155 million. There had been a series of amendments to previous CRs in the House that would have imposed more draconian cuts in the NEH budget which were fended off by the advocacy efforts of the National Humanities Alliance.
National Park Service: While no programmatic details are available concerning the Park Service's history-related programs, two preservation programs were eliminated in one of the short term CRs passed earlier this year. They had been targeted for elimination under the Administration's proposed fiscal 2011 budget.
Save America's Treasures program–eliminated ($14.8 million): These funds are used to make small, one-time grants for specific local historic preservation projects to preserve a building or artifact which might otherwise be lost.
Preserve America program—eliminated ($4.6 million): This program provides small grants to local communities in support of heritage tourism, education and historic preservation planning activities.
Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS): The IMLS budget was reduced by $44 million down to a level of $238 million. In fiscal 2010 the IMLS received $282.3 million, $16 million of which was for congressional earmarks. The $44 million reduction includes the amount of those earmarks plus $28 million of cuts in programmatic funding. There is no breakdown available yet as to how the money will be divided between museum and library programs.
SOURCE: Robert Townsend in Perspectives, the monthly newsletter of the AHA (5-9-11)
Average salaries for history faculty in four-year colleges and universities increased by just 0.5 percent over the academic year 2010–11—the smallest increase for our discipline in 25 years of surveying by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR).1 Since the national inflation rate measured just under 2 percent over the same span (academic year 2010–11), the minuscule salary rise actually marked a real decline in the earning power of historians.
Historians in colleges and universities also lost ground in relation to faculty in the rest of academia. At public colleges and universities, the average salary for faculty members in all disciplines rose 1.1 percent, from $71,500 to $72,291, while the average for historians increased only 0.3 percent, from $63,178 to $63,391. The picture was only slightly better at private institutions, where the average salary for history faculty gained 0.6 percent, from $65,699 to $66,106. But here again, the increase in average salaries for faculty in all fields was more than double the growth in history, rising 1.4 percent, from $69,703 to $70,683....
SOURCE: NYT (5-4-11)
ALEDO, Tex. — In an unmarked office building in this ranching town, among thousands of Revolution-era documents and two muskets with bayonets, David Barton might seem like a quirky history buff. But the true ambition of this slender man in cowboy boots is to use America’s past to remake its future, and he has the ear of several would-be presidents.
Mr. Barton is a self-taught historian who is described by several conservative presidential aspirants as a valued adviser and a source of historical and biblical justification for their policies. He is so popular that evangelical pastors travel across states to hear his rapid-fire presentations on how the United States was founded as a Christian nation and is on the road to ruin, thanks to secularists and the Supreme Court, or on the lost political power of the clergy.
Through two decades of prolific, if disputed, research and some 400 speeches a year on what he calls the forgotten Christian roots of America, Mr. Barton, 57, a former school principal and an ordained minister, has steadily built a reputation as a guiding spirit of the religious right. Keeping an exhaustive schedule, he is also immersed in the nuts and bolts of politics and maintains a network of 700 anti-abortion state legislators.
Many historians call his research flawed, but Mr. Barton’s influence appears to be greater than ever. Liberal organizations are raising the alarm over what they say are Mr. Barton’s dangerous distortions, including his claim that the nation’s founders never intended a high wall between church and state....
SOURCE: NYT (5-4-11)
Related Links
David Barton on the Jon Stewart Show (5-4-11)
ALEDO, Tex. — In an unmarked office building in this ranching town, among thousands of Revolution-era documents and two muskets with bayonets, David Barton might seem like a quirky history buff. But the true ambition of this slender man in cowboy boots is to use America’s past to remake its future, and he has the ear of several would-be presidents.
Mr. Barton is a self-taught historian who is described by several conservative presidential aspirants as a valued adviser and a source of historical and biblical justification for their policies. He is so popular that evangelical pastors travel across states to hear his rapid-fire presentations on how the United States was founded as a Christian nation and is on the road to ruin, thanks to secularists and the Supreme Court, or on the lost political power of the clergy.
Through two decades of prolific, if disputed, research and some 400 speeches a year on what he calls the forgotten Christian roots of America, Mr. Barton, 57, a former school principal and an ordained minister, has steadily built a reputation as a guiding spirit of the religious right. Keeping an exhaustive schedule, he is also immersed in the nuts and bolts of politics and maintains a network of 700 anti-abortion state legislators.
Many historians call his research flawed, but Mr. Barton’s influence appears to be greater than ever. Liberal organizations are raising the alarm over what they say are Mr. Barton’s dangerous distortions, including his claim that the nation’s founders never intended a high wall between church and state.
SOURCE: NYT (5-3-11)
David Ferriero, the nation’s archivist, said Tuesday that he was uncomfortable with letting White House staff members decide whether their electronic messages from personal accounts were work-related and must be saved. Mr. Ferriero told a House hearing that official communications sent from a presidential employee’s personal device, using personal accounts, must be preserved under the law, but that a staff member gets to determine what is official. Asked whether he was comfortable with a voluntary system, he replied, “Any time there is human intervention, then I’m not comfortable.”
SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Ed (5-2-11)
War is hell—and it's a helluva story. Throughout history, from Homer's time on through the Civil War and into the present-day war on terror, we've been powerfully drawn by war narratives.
Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard University and a prominent historian of the Civil War, made that bloody fascination the subject of her 2011 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, delivered here Monday night at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The Jefferson Lecture is the federal government's most prestigious award for intellectual accomplishment in the humanities.
Ms. Faust has had a distinguished career as a historian of the Civil War and the antebellum South. Her most recent book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), won the 2009 Bancroft Prize. Her five other books include Mothers of Invention, an examination of the lives of the South's slaveholding women during the war....
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (5-1-11)
Professor Richard Holmes, who died on April 30 aged 65, was one of Britain's most distinguished military historians, and a distinctive broadcaster with a soldierly mien, imparting knowledge and enthusiasm in equal measure.
Battlefields were Holmes's natural habitat, and defined him as a television presenter, often up to his knees in mud for the BBC series War Walks in the 1990s, in which he toured the trenches of the First World War. He went on to make documentaries about the American Revolution in Rebels and Redcoats (2003), an acclaimed profile of Oliver Cromwell as part of the 100 Greatest Britons series in 2002, and the wide-ranging In The Footsteps Of Churchill (2005), which he accompanied with a book.
Although a born communicator with a quiet but decisive air and always at ease in front of the camera, Holmes was an unlikely media star. His old-school persona and academic background in a field of study that had lain largely neglected by modern television might have consigned him to obscurity, but he lit the vital spark to fire the viewer's interest and, simply by being himself, struck the perfect balance between erudition and populism. "I don't really see myself as a TV presenter," Holmes explained. "I'm a historian who likes telling stories."
His subject was war, described where possible from the point of view of the soldier of the line. He always sought to balance his innate gung-ho enthusiasm with a desire to keep the ordinary soldier centre stage. Although one critic mocked him as "the Sister Wendy Beckett of blood and guts", Holmes was always at pains never to glorify war....
SOURCE: Star Tribune (5-4-11)
A North Oaks couple who moved here in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina have wrongfully collected more than $430,000 in medical and disability benefits for their children since 2006, according to an affidavit filed in federal court.
James and Cynthia Hood have claimed those benefits -- meant for people with limited financial resources -- despite having a combined retirement portfolio of more than $1 million, more than a dozen bank accounts with a total of nearly $1 million in cash and two homes worth more than $1 million combined. Special Agent Jane Lewis, an investigator for the Social Security Administration, said in an affidavit that the Hoods' extensive assets would have made them ineligible for such aid.
The Hoods never told officials about their wealth, Lewis said. In fact, when Cynthia Hood applied for Medical Assistance and Social Security disability benefits in early 2006, she said she was the "sole legal guardian" of her three children and did not own any vehicles, stocks, bonds or property....
Investigators began examining their retirement portfolios, bank records and property records. James Hood, who worked as a history professor at Tulane from September 1970 to January 2008, had more than $1 million in his retirement portfolio as of Sept. 3, 2010....
Investigators began examining their retirement portfolios, bank records and property records. James Hood, who worked as a history professor at Tulane from September 1970 to January 2008, had more than $1 million in his retirement portfolio as of Sept. 3, 2010....
SOURCE: Wesleyan Argus (5-3-11)
Most bloggers treat their blog as an online journal. Others use it to communicate with others about their pregnancy, eating habits, or their last trip to Spain. Claire Potter, professor of History and American Studies, has a different approach.
“The Tenured Radical is an alternate personality,” Potter said. “It’s kind of like me in drag, or something.”
Perhaps Wesleyan’s most famous blog, and certainly it’s most controversial, Claire Potter’s “The Tenured Radical” brims with sarcasm, criticism, and wit. The Tenured Radical was early to the blogosphere, as Potter began its first incarnation in 2007. It was immediately popular.
“Right off the bat, I was getting something like 200 hits a day,” Potter said.
Currently, the blog averages around 1,500 hits per day, largely because of her recent coverage of an Oklahoma transgender professor’s denial of tenure. However, more has changed since 2007 besides the size of the audience....
