Next week, after the confetti from Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee celebration has been swept from the streets of London, more than 100 scholars will convene at Kensington Palace to ponder a phenomenon as puzzling as it is familiar: the robust survival of the British monarchy in a democratic age that long ago consigned similar institutions to the gilded dustbin of history.

This three-day conference, which will feature talks on subjects ranging from hats and monarchs to the role of the Crown in a constitutional system, commemorates the 60th anniversary of the Queen’s ascension to the throne as well as the recently completed renovation of the palace. But it can also be seen as an unofficial celebration of another refurbishment: that of the study of modern monarchy itself.

Biographers and popular historians have never lost sight of royalty, especially if madness, romance and scandal were involved. But until recently the serious study of modern British monarchy — those kings and queens who for the past two centuries have reigned but not ruled — was covered in a thick layer of dust, if not disrepute....

Richard W. Lyman, who as president of Stanford in the 1970s shepherded the university through an era of political turbulence, died on Sunday at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 88.

His death was announced by the university, where Mr. Lyman was president from 1970 to 1980.

An academic historian, Mr. Lyman joined Stanford in 1958 as an associate professor. He went on to hold various administrative posts there, serving as vice president and provost from 1967 to 1970, a period, amid the Vietnam War, when unrest shook campuses across the country.

He stepped down as Stanford’s president to become president of the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, a post he held until 1988....

ALBANY — Nearly 150 years after the last fusillade of the Civil War, historians, authors and museum curators are still finding new topics to explore as the nation commemorates the sesquicentennial of America's bloodiest conflict.

Even the long-accepted death toll of 620,000, cited by historians since 1900, is being reconsidered. In a study published late last year in Civil War History, Binghamton University history demographics professor J. David Hacker said the toll is actually closer to 750,000.

"That number just sat there — 620,000 — for a century," said Lesley Gordon, a professor at the University of Akron and editor of the journal, a 57-year-old publication considered the pre-eminent publication in its field....

Peter Reddaway is a professor emeritus of political science at George Washington University, a former director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies and author of books on human rights abuses in the Soviet era.

Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of politics and Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University.  His The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin, also published in Moscow, will appear in paperback in June.

Many Western observers believe that Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime has in effect banned a Russian edition of a widely acclaimed 2007 book by the British historian Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia. A professor at University of London’s Birkbeck College, Figes himself inspired this explanation. In an interview and in an article in 2009, he suggested that his first Russian publisher dropped the project due to “political pressure” because his large-scale study of Stalin-era terror “is inconvenient to the current regime.” Three years later, his explanation continues to circulate.

We doubted Figes’s explanation at the time—partly because excellent Russian historians were themselves publishing so many uncensored exposés of the horrors of Stalinism, and continue to do so—but only now are we able to disprove it. (Since neither of us knows Figes or has ever had any contact with him, there was no personal animus in our investigation.) Our examination of transcripts of original Russian-language interviews he used to write The Whisperers, and of documents provided by Russians close to the project, tells a different story. A second Russian publisher, Corpus, had no political qualms about soon contracting for its own edition of the book. In 2010, however, Corpus also canceled the project. The reasons had nothing to do with Putin’s regime but everything to do with Figes himself....

BOSTON — The man considered the unofficial dean of Boston history was buried Thursday. Thomas O’Connor had taught at Boston College for more than 50 years and wrote more than a dozen books, including “Boston Catholics,” “Civil War Boston,” and “The Boston Irish.” He died Sunday at his home in Milton at the age of 89.

Part of O’Connor’s legacy is having created a new generation of historians, and among them is Jim Vrabel, an independent Boston historian who was guided and mentored by O’Connor. In a conversation with WBUR’s All Things Considered host Sacha Pfeiffer, Vrabel said O’Connor changed the way Boston history is taught.

Jim Vrabel: For a long time, Boston history, in a way, stopped in the 1880s, when the Brahmins stopped writing down their accomplishments and left it to others to write about theirs. No one really picked up the ball until Tom O’Connor came around. He actually brought Boston history into and through the 20th century and into the 21st century.

Sacha Pfeiffer: How was history written before him, and then how did he change it?

There’s a phrase: “History is written by the winners.” And the winners in Boston were the Brahmins, who owned and ran the city up until the 1880s. The Irish came as a result of the potato famine in the 1850s and gradually they assumed control of the politics of the city, if not the economy of the city — and when they did, that’s really when written history about Boston stopped. Tom O’Connor kind of picked up the ball.

About the Boston Irish he said: “They harbored the conviction that they were not good enough, important enough, deserving enough, influential enough to be considered part of real history.” And Tom O’Connor changed that — not just for the Irish, but for everyone who came later....

What book is on your night stand now?

Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Stranger’s Child,” Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” Katherine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,”  “The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It” (Library of America). I always seem to be reading several books at once.

Where and when do you like to read?

Everywhere and anywhere — but always at night before I go to sleep.

What was the last truly great book you read?

Not having read “Huckleberry Finn” since high school, I returned to it last summer — ordering it on my Kindle on a bit of a whim. I was astonished to find how much of what I had been teaching and studying about race and slavery in American history was already there in a book published in 1884. The book offers as well striking — and eerily modern, or perhaps postmodern in their critical renderings of “reality” — insights into the masks and dissimulations that structure social order....

Regnery Publishing Inc. has posted an addendum to its Web description of Chris DeRose's Founding Rivals: Madison vs. Monroe, the Bill of Rights and the Election that Saved a Nation acknowledging that "Material was based on Richard Labunski, Ph.D., James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights (Oxford University Press, 2006). This material was contained on page 247 of the hardcover edition of Founding Rivals, and was not cited."

This correction came in the wake of an extended article Labunski wrote for the History News Network in which he exposed how DeRose had taken statistics from his earlier work in James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights and used them without attribution in Founding Rivals.

Labunski first contacted Regnery back in March informing the company of DeRose's lack of citation(s), but Regnery, while acknowledging that DeRose failed to cite Labunksi's research, called it "inadvertent." Regnery assured Labunski that "Regnery would immediately post a notice on its Web site 'citing [Labunski's] research for this data...'" Only after Labunski's article appeared on HNN on May 21 did Regnery post this correction, issuing a statement to Inside Higher Ed that "Regnery History has responded to Labunski's concerns regarding our book, Founding Rivals by Chris DeRose. We have taken the necessary actions to give his research proper credit and to correct any misconceptions in the marketplace, including updating the eBook version, our website, and adding the appropriate notes to future printings of the book."

Labunski, for his part, attributes the publication of his article on HNN for prompting Regnery to issue the correction. He told Inside Higher Ed that "I doubt [Regnery] would have taken these actions had I not discussed this situation publicly [on HNN]."

The trouble began when a "For Rent" sign appeared in the window of an aging storefront in Edgewater....

For more than a decade, the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives has occupied this space on Granville Avenue near the rattling Red Line. But when word got out that the space was for rent and the library's board had quietly made plans to relocate to Rogers Park, a group of patrons and former board members protested. The group alleged that the library's long-standing president had effectively taken sole control of the collection, alienating many in the city's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community and endangering the institution.

"This used to be one of the most attractive walk-in community spaces you could find," said John D'Emilio, a former board member and a professor of gender and women's studies and history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "But in the last year or so it looks like the most disorderly resale shop you've ever walked into. It's an atrocity. Those of us who have gotten behind the locked doors of the archives room know it's being completely neglected and in total disarray."...

Over his long academic career, Bernard Lewis has arguably become the world's greatest historian of the Middle East. Now, at 96, Lewis turns his attention inward in a memoir that looks back on his life, work and legacy.

The linguist and scholar's career began before World War II, and in a new memoir he covers more than a few sensitive areas, from race and slavery in Islam, to the clash of civilizations and his long argument with scholar Edward Said, to his role as an adviser to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

NPR's Neal Conan talks with Lewis about his new book, Notes on a Century. [CLICK ON LINK FOR FULL INTERVIEW]

Interview Highlights

On religious tolerance under Islamic rule

"It is required by Islam. Part of the basic rules of Islam as laid down in the Quran require a measure of tolerance. But one has to be careful in how one understands that term.

"In the first place, it doesn't apply to everybody. It only applies to monotheists. In the second place, it does not grant them equal status. It grants them an inferior status, with some, though not all, of the rights of the dominant group. But it does allow them to practice their own religions and follow their own laws, and in one respect it is more tolerant than our present Western system, and, that is, they were allowed to live under their own laws and follow their own religions and even enforce their own laws in such matters as marriage and inheritance and so on."...

(New York, NY — Anna Sale, It’s a Free Country.Org) “Don’t you think this is a wonderful thing to walk across this bridge!”

Historian David McCullough has had a lot of honors in his career – two Pulitzers, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and just this week a gold medal for biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters – but he still gets that thrill crossing the Brooklyn Bridge.

On a bustling, bright morning this week, the 78 year-old and I started walking over from Manhattan. He is re-releasing a 40^th anniversary edition of his 600-page history, The Great Bridge: the Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Every few minutes, he pauses to command “Look at this!” with a sweeping gesture of his hand....

Ed Bridges, director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History for the past 30 years, has announced plans to retire as the state’s top historian.

Bridges, 66, informed the department’s board of trustees of his retirement decision last week and made it official Monday, citing several reasons, including stamina.

“Physically, I can no longer maintain the pace of work that the job requires,” he said, in a letter to George Evans, chairman of the department’s board of trustees. “It seems a little ironic that what on the surface may appear to be a quiet, easy job is, in fact, a very demanding one.”

The trustees are expected to have a successor in place by Oct. 1, as Bridges completes his fifth six-year term....

The BBC has named the renowned economic historian Niall Ferguson as the 2012 Reith Lecturer.

The lecture series titled 'The Rule of Law and its Enemies' will explore the influence of man-made institutions on global economic growth and democracy.

Radio 4 controller Gywneth Williams says she is "delighted" to appoint Prof Ferguson - "an eminent historian with a global perspective."

Prof Ferguson says it is "an immense honour" to be chosen as Reith Lecturer....