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.
In a SPIEGEL interview, the best-selling British historian Ian Kershaw talks about the last days of the Third Reich, why the Germans persevered when it was clear that all was lost and the devastating consequences of the failed July 20, 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler.
SPIEGEL: Professor Kershaw, you have spent the last three years studying the collapse of Nazi Germany. In the end, are we left to shake our heads in amazement at the absurdity of the final phase, or do you, as a historian, also feel something akin to admiration for the perseverance of the Germans?
Kershaw: The head-shaking predominates, at any rate. I'm convinced that we English would have given up much earlier. It's certainly unusual for a country to continue fighting to the point of complete self-destruction. It's the sort of thing we usually see in civil wars, but not in conflicts in which hostile nations are at war with one another.
SPIEGEL: The question of why the Germans persevered for so long is the starting point of your new book. What would have been the obvious thing to do?
Kershaw: In any armed conflict, there is eventually a point at which one side realizes that it's over. If the people in power don't give up but instead continue to plunge the country into ruin, there is either a revolution from below, as was the case in Germany and Russia near the end of World War I, or there is a coup by the elites, who attempt to save what can still be saved. An example of that is the overthrow of Benito Mussolini in Italy in July 1943....
Cornel West, the public intellectual, activist and Ivy League professor, is taking a "significant pay cut" to leave Princeton and return to where he began his teaching career: Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York.
His new title: Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practices....
Four professors who have changed their teaching approach to engage their students in the learning process and have provided research opportunities for undergraduates are being honored today as U.S. Professors of the Year....
Mr. Volk, a professor of history and chair of the Latin American studies division, has been teaching Latin American political history for 26 years. To maximize discussion time in the classroom, he posts video lectures on the Web that students can watch before the class. Mr. Volk said he started doing that so that students can actively participate in their own learning.
"Every class is a discussion, because that is the way that students can construct their own understanding and knowledge, rather than me telling them what's going on," he said....
Dr David Starkey has ignited conflict with his fellow academics by calling a Trinity history Fellow an "immigrant who was trying to push a multicultural agenda in education", and arguing that most of Britain was a "white mono-culture."
Starkey, who is an honorary fellow at Fitzwilliam College, became involved in the dispute with Dr Joya Chatterji and Professor Richard Evans, Regius Professor of History and President of Wolfson College, at a recent historians' conference debating the future of history teaching in schools.
Dr Starkey made the argument that the national curriculum should consist of "a serious focus on your own culture" echoing Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove's recent announcement that he aimed to put "our island story" at the heart of Britain's national curriculum....
The former chairman of the history department for 16 years, died on Friday at the Sarah Bush Lincoln Health Center in Charleston.
Robert Edward Hennings, 86, served as the chairman of the history department from 1974-1990 and helped steer the department through challenging times and was responsible for many excellent hires, said Anita Shelton, chair of the history dept.
Hennings came to Eastern when the history dept. had recently been created out of the old social science department.
He was also one of several faculty members to launch the very successful Historical Administration masters program in 1974, Shelton said....
La Crosse, Wis. – A UW-La Crosse Professor who has been named the state’s top educator says his students deserve the recognition.
“This award, in the end, belongs to them. I wouldn’t be here without them,” says Greg Wegner, UW-L professor of history. “My ability to teach, research, write and publish is refreshed and renewed through teaching students.”
Wegner will accept the 2011 Wisconsin Professor of the Year award today in Washington, D.C. He was selected from college educators across the U.S. for the award from The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.
Wegner, a UW-L graduate, says questions are what ‘make a university tick’ and a good teacher respects the power of the question....
Nov. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Stephen Greenblatt won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in New York last night for "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern" (Norton), the history of an ancient Roman book, Lucretius's "On the Nature of Things," and how its rediscovery fueled the Renaissance.
"I find myself fighting back tears," said Greenblatt, a humanities professor at Harvard. "My book is about the power of books to cross boundaries, to speak to you impossibly across space, time and distance. To have someone long dead seem to be in the room with you and speaking into your ear."...
“I know he says they paid him as a historian to give a historic lesson, but I’m unaware of any history professor being paid that much money to give someone a history lesson,” Abramoff told NBC’s David Gregory....
A book about controversial 20th century saint Padre Pio has won the Cundill Prize, a $75,000 award from McGill University for historical literature.
Italian historian Sergio Luzzatto won the top award on Sunday in London for his book Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age.
Padre Pio was an Italian Capuchin priest famous for his stigmata who was declared a saint because of his popularity, despite much skepticism at the Vatican. The Cundill jury called the book “masterful” and acclaimed it as an examination of the politics of sainthood and the persistence of mysticism in the modern world....
Some historians are raising concerns about a new book by Fox News star Bill O'Reilly, looking at the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
A reviewer for the National Park Service's bookstore at Ford's Theatre has recommended that the store pull the book due to "lack of documentation" and "factual errors." Another review from the Civil War Society said the book contains numerous errors and one passage that is completely untrue.
"In 325 pages, there are four, minor misstatements, all of which have been corrected. There are also two typeset errors, one involving a date. That's a pretty good record," O'Reilly said on his show recently. He declined to discuss the matter further.
Kenneth C. Davis, author of the "Don't Know Much About History" series of books, is currently working on a book called "Don't Know Much About The Presidents." He said that minor factual errors, especially typos, or misstating the acreage of a farm, as O'Reilly's book does, shouldn't be a big deal....
Newt Gingrich appears to have a different definition of the word “historian” than, say, Webster's.
Gingrich was asked last week at a Republican debate in Michigan about his $300,000 contract to work for mortgage giant Freddie Mac five years ago. Gingrich said he was a retained as a “historian” and that he warned executives there that reckless loans would lead to collapse.
“I offered them advice on precisely what they didn’t do,” he said at the debate. “My advice as a historian, when they walked in and said to me, ‘We are now making loans to people who have no credit history and have no record of paying back anything, but that’s what the government wants us to do.’ As I said to them at the time, this is a bubble. This is insane. This is impossible.”...
Richard Greenleaf, a historian who was chairman of Tulane University's history department and director of its Stone Center for Latin American Studies, died Nov. 8 in Albuquerque, N.M., of complications from Parkinson's disease. He was 81.
Dr. Greenleaf was "a pioneering and towering figure in Latin American colonial history," said Thomas Reese, who succeeded Dr. Greenleaf as the Stone Center's executive director. "He trained generations of scholars."
A native of Hot Springs, Ark., Dr. Greenleaf grew up in Albuquerque and earned bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees at the University of New Mexico.
He started his teaching career in 1953 at the College of St. Joseph on the Rio Grande in Albuquerque.
A year later, he moved to Mexico City to teach at the University of the Americas, where he was chairman of the department of history and international relations, academic vice president and dean of the Graduate School....
Les Daniels, one of the earliest historians of comic books — from the launching (off the doomed planet Krypton) of Superman in 1938 through the countercultural comix movement of the ’60s — and an author of horror novels, died on Nov. 5 at his home in Providence, R.I. He was 68.
The cause was a heart attack, said Diane Manning, his sister and only immediate survivor.
Mr. Daniels wrote 10 nonfiction books — among them histories of superheroes and of major publishers like DC and Marvel — and five works of fiction, all revolving around a globe-trotting, time-traveling vampire, Don Sebastian de Villanueva.
But he is perhaps best known, particularly among aficionados, for his 1971 book, “Comix: A History of Comic Books In America.” Starting with the days when pulp fiction fused with newspaper cartoons, Mr. Daniels documented how the golden age of comic books — pretty much starting with an infant placed on a rocket ship from Krypton to become Superman on Earth — evolved into a period of turmoil in the industry after a noted psychiatrist, Fredric Wertham, published “Seduction of the Innocent” in 1954. Focusing on the darker elements of the genre, horror and crime, Dr. Wertham saw comics as a cause of juvenile delinquency. His assertions were the subject of Senate hearings and prompted the industry to adopt a code of self-censorship....
BAGHDAD — US army Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Brooks is on his third tour in Iraq, but his mission has not been a typical one: as an army historian, he is charged with documenting the history of the Iraq war.
On his latest deployment, Brooks, 48, is the command historian for United States Forces - Iraq (USF-I), making him the army's top historian in the country.
He is still working to document the history of the conflict, with emphasis on American involvement, even as US forces are leaving Iraq. The US withdrawal is to be completed by year's end.
There were once 16 army historians in Iraq but that number is now down to two, Brooks said....
David Starkey has provoked more controversy by claiming that most of Britain is a ‘mono-culture’ and that immigrants should assimilate.
The TV historian rejected claims by other academics that it is a diverse country, describing it as 'absolutely and unmitigatingly white' outside of London.
His outburst comes three months after he blamed ‘black culture’ for the summer riots and claimed that parts of Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech had been right.
He made his latest comments during a historians conference discussing Education Secretary Michael Gove's announcement that he wanted to put ‘our island story’ at the heart of Britain's national curriculum....
Felicia Hardison Londre, a respected theater historian on the faculty of the UMKC theater department, was eager to see director Roland Emmerich’s new film, “Anonymous,” and not just because it delves into the world of Elizabethan actors and playwrights.
She was excited to see the movie because Emmerich and screenwriter John Orloff embrace a theory about the authorship of William Shakespeare’s plays and poetry that has been subject to disdain and outright mockery by traditionalists for decades: that the true writer was Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. That’s what Londre, a proud Oxfordian, thinks.
The idea articulated by the film is that Oxford wrote the tragedies, comedies, history plays, sonnets and narrative poems attributed to Shakespeare but, because of his social station, could not attach his name to his literary works....
It's Richard Nixon unplugged. Newly-released documents and recordings of the former president are the result of years of work by University of Wisconsin-Madison emeritus professor Stanley Kutler.
His successful court challenge is responsible for the release of the secret records and documents, including a transcript of Nixon's grand jury testimony related to the Watergate investigation. The National Archives and its Nixon Presidential Library released the testimony Thursday, which afforded a rare look inside grand jury proceedings....
OTTAWA — China will attempt to drive an economic and political wedge between Canada and the United States as it moves for a greater stake in this country's natural resources, celebrity historian and author Niall Ferguson said Friday.
"It wouldn't be China if it wasn't looking for a chance to detach Canada from its big southern neighbour and to exploit the resentment many Canadians feel about the United States," said Ferguson.
"There will be more friction between China and the U.S. in the next 10 or 15 years and Canada will find itself in the middle if that becomes a rather fraught relationship," he added.
"Imagine if either the United States or China said to Canada, 'You have to choose.'"...
Canada and other western nations should consider China a "threatening state," he said.
"Look behind the facade," he said. "It looks westernized — you see Kentucky Fried Chicken signs practically the moment you get off the plane. It looks a lot like they're westernized — more than Japan actually — but behind the facade is a one-party state where the power of the state is pretty much sacrosanct and individual freedom is circumscribed in a way we would find intolerable"...
It is shaping up to be the tastiest historical scrap since Rob Newman's comedy professor character compared the girlfriend of David Baddiel's don to Peter Beardsley. The warring academics, beloved of 1990s students for their "that's you, that is" repartee, have made way for Niall Ferguson and Pankaj Mishra, after the latter likened Ferguson to Tom Buchanan in the Great Gatsby.
As with all the best academic spats, spectators are advised to equip themselves with a dictionary and a history degree to follow the action.
Mishra, the Indian author and essayist, argued in the London Review of Books that Ferguson was "homo atlanticus redux", a "retailer of emollient tales about the glorious past" whose books "are known less for their original scholarly contribution than for containing some provocative counterfactuals". Summing up Ferguson's latest tome, Civilisation: The West and the Rest, as "gallimaufry", Mishra accused the TV historian and Harvard scholar of ignoring facts that complicate his narrative of Western dominance, such as Muslim contributions to science. Ferguson's acknowledgment of colonial misdeeds was "very selective" and he was "immune ... to humour and irony".
Ferguson responded with a letter to the "notoriously left-leaning" coterie at the LRB, raging that Mishra's critique was "a crude attempt at character assassination" that "mendaciously misrepresents my work but also strongly implies that I am a racist". Mishra, huffed Ferguson, "owes me a public apology" for his "libellous and dishonest article"....
The History Department hopes to determine why the number of history majors has dropped significantly in recent years as it prepares for an external review next semester.
The University awarded 131 history degrees in the 2010-’11 year, down from 217 in 2001-’02, according to data from the Office of Institutional Research. History professors interviewed said the department is investigating the cause of the decline, but they and students disagreed over whether it should be cause for concern.
“We want to be reactive to any kind of changes in the undergraduate environment,” Steven Pincus, director of undergraduate studies for the History Department, said. “Yes, there has been a decline in the number of majors — it is not a catastrophic decline, but we want to know why that’s happening and what we can do to make the major more attractive to undergraduates.”
In February, a committee of professors from other universities will visit the department to assess its strengths and weaknesses and make suggestions for future improvement, History Department chair Laura Engelstein said. The department held its first meeting last Tuesday to discuss changes, and Pincus has assembled an advisory committee of current history majors to receive student feedback on the major, he said....
On Friday I wrote about the decision of Ford’s Theatre not to offer Bill O’Reilly’s bestsetlling new book on the Lincoln assassination at its bookstore because an expert National Park Service reviewer found the work to be riddled with factual errors.
Now, in a review in a leading Civil War magazine, a second expert has flunked O’Reilly’s “Killing Lincoln,” calling it “somewhere between an authoritative account and strange fiction.”
The review (which is not online) appears in the November issue of North & South, the official magazine of the Civil War Society.
“The narrative contains numerous errors of people, place, and events,” writes reviewer Edward Steers Jr., authorof more than five books on the Lincoln assassination. He goes on to list about 10 errors of fact in “Killing Lincoln,” which O’Reilly co-authored with Martin Dugard and which has been atop bestseller lists for weeks....
They might not have been Canada’s fights but some of the Canadians who chose to take up arms became some of the most distinguished soldiers on the battlefield.
Of the 10,312 soldiers buried in the U.S. Civil War cemetery at Marietta, Georgia, only two received the highest American award for bravery in the face of the enemy. One of the men to receive the Medal of Honor was Denis Buckley, a Canadian.
Buried under the wrong name for 140 years, Buckley is one of 104 known Canadians who have earned the medal. Bart Armstrong, a Saanich resident and the only Canadian member of the Medal of Honor Society, was instrumental in uncovering Buckley’s story and that of some 50 other Canadians who were awarded the highest honour in the U.S. military.
For the second year in a row, the 62-year-old Armstrong is hosting an information booth at the Royal B.C. Museum to educate visitors on the Canadian recipients of the medal....
Katherine Siva Saubel, a Native American scholar, Cahuilla historian, co-founder of the Malki Museum, and one California's most respected tribal elders, died Tuesday at her home on the Morongo Indian Reservation, her nephew and caregiver said Wednesday.
"It is windy today, because the wind is looking for her," Kevin Siva, a lifelong resident of the Morongo Reservation, said in a phone interview. "She always told me stories about the wind when I was younger."
Saubel died Tuesday at home in bed, "very peacefully," said Siva, who has been his aunt's caregiver for the past 15 years.
Saubel was born in March 1920 in her village Pachaval in northern San Diego County, Siva said....
Is Ottawa creating squadrons of rent-a-regiment re-enactors by flooding Ontario and Quebec with funds for its War of 1812 bicentennial bash?
That's what historian Gordon Terry fears.
Federal funds are flowing to support more than 100 historical events in towns scattered throughout the two provinces - and Terry cautions the municipalities may have to sweeten the pot to entice overworked volunteer re-enactors to over to their camps.
"What is not realized is it is a finite resource," he said, cautioning an influx of government cash could create a fiercely competitive market environment.
"It's the same money but it competes with itself to buy, to outbid participation."...
Russian police said Monday that a historian arrested last week for desecrating several Nizhny Novgorod cemeteries had kept 29 female mummies at home and dressed them up like dolls.
The 45-year-old local resident was detained last week and accused of digging up dead bodies at the local cemeteries over the past two years.
A search of his apartment came up with 29 self-made dolls made of mummified human remains and dressed up in clothes of the buried women. Police said that several plaques from gravestones, maps of local cemeteries and doll-making manuals had been retrieved during the search. Forensic experts matched the man’s fingerprints and footprints with the ones lifted from disturbed graves at the Nizhny Novgorod cemeteries....
Browsing the bookstore shelves can pose its grim challenges for the ordinary mortal. The reproachful cover of “1,000 Places to See Before You Die” is bad enough. There’s also “100 Birds to See Before You Die,” “100 Belgian Beers to Try Before You Die!” and “1,001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die.” Make your way through “50 Places to Play Golf Before You Die” and you’re still not done: “50 More Places to Play Golf Before You Die” is staring right at you.
nto this profusion of lists comes Matthew White, a self-described “atrocitologist” and numbers freak from Richmond, Va., who has compiled yet another — more sobering — roll call to ponder. With its stylishly lurid graphics and goofy asides, “The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities” may seem more like an aspiring classic of macabre bathroom reading than a serious effort. But Mr. White’s book, published this week by W. W. Norton, arrives trailing some impressive scholarly affirmation, including a ringing foreword from the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker....
He has no college degree or formal training in history or statistics. He does not attend academic conferences or publish in scholarly journals. He does not visit archives, instead culling numbers from far-flung secondary sources during off hours from his job as a librarian at the federal courthouse in Richmond. His Web site includes links to Tolkien-inspired maps and random self-help reflections (the page for “How to Overcome Procrastination” is listed as “Under Construction”), along with links to carefully annotated compilations of war statistics. He prefers jaunty terms like multicide, megadeath and hemoclysm to sober, morally charged ones like genocide....
In his foreword to “The Great Big Book” Mr. Pinker — who drew on Mr. White’s work for own new book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” — credits him with compiling “the most comprehensive, disinterested and statistically nuanced estimates available.”
Charles Maier, a historian of modern European history at Harvard who stumbled on Mr. White’s Web site five years ago when searching for reliable death counts in the two world wars, doesn’t put it that strongly but welcomes his painstaking efforts nonetheless.
“These figures are notoriously elusive,” Mr. Maier said, adding that Mr. White “seems to have tried to get the best figures he could.”...
