Gene Lyons is a columnist and co-author of "The Hunting of the President: The 10 Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton."

During a presidential campaign, the temptation is always to melodrama. Having spent most of twenty years lamenting the vanishing professional ethics of the news media, I nevertheless found myself gobsmacked, as the Brits say, by Newsweek’s cover story by Harvard University historian Niall Ferguson entitled “Obama’s Gotta Go.”

Ferguson’s surely entitled to his opinions (although not his vote, as he’s a British subject, not an American citizen) but to paraphrase the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, he’s not entitled to his own facts. Riddled with ludicrous errors and manifest deceptions, the article’s publication on the cover of a major news magazine at first struck me as ominous.

That Ferguson’s a professor made things worse. Academics theoretically hold themselves to more strenuous standards than journalists. I even found myself rummaging around in the University of Virginia honor code, where I went to school, for definitions of academic fraud.

And yes, it’s that bad. Vote for whomever you like. But if you make your choice based upon the following howler, then you’ve been had: “The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit,” Ferguson charged. “But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period.”

We're hearing about plenty of protests this year. Between Pussy Riot, the Occupy movement and demonstrations in Europe over the economy, it seems the world is always protesting. But are these protests really effecting change, or are they merely an outlet for anger?

Michael Kazin, professor of history at Georgetown, will join The Daily Circuit Monday to talk about what constitutes an effective protest in a world where most organizing and activism now occurs online....

Harvard Law School Professor Annette Gordon Reed ’84 has been appointed to the Charles Warren Professorship of American Legal History.

Gordon-Reed, a recipient of the National Book Award for Non-Fiction, the Pulitzer Prize in History, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Dorothy And Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, and a National Humanities Medal, is also a Professor of History in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Gordon-Reed was elected a member of the American Academy of Art and Sciences in 2011.

She currently shares the Warren chair with Professor Morton J. Horwitz, who plans to retire this year. For the academic year 2014-2015, Gordon-Reed will be the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at Queen’s College, University of Oxford....

Alexander Saxton, UCLA history professor emeritus, and former acting director and long-time Faculty Advisory Committee chair of the Asian American Studies Center, Alexander Saxton, passed away on Aug. 20, 2012 in Lone Pine, Calif. at the age of 94.

Professor Saxton, throughout his time at UCLA, was a staunch supporter and actively involved in the Asian American Studies Center, providing key leadership and mentoring many students over the years. Of his time at the center, Professor Saxton said:

“It turned out to be one of the most demanding (and rewarding) experiences of my life…. Being a proponent of ethnic studies at UCLA in the 1970s and ’80s was good combat training. There still was big opposition to ethnic studies on grounds that ranged from blatant racism to lack of high academic principle. We constantly had to fight for approval for research funding and core courses, and we remained endlessly involved in struggles over initial appointments and tenure promotion for scholars committed to ethnic studies.”...

Longtime history professor and renowned non-fiction writer Bill O’Neal has been named Texas State Historian, a job that will carry him across the state as ambassador of what he described the “richest and most colorful history” among all the 50 U.S. states.

O’Neal, 70, of Carthage, was appointed to the position by Texas Governor Rick Perry, who administered an oath of office at the state capitol in Austin on Wednesday.

“I am thrilled to be named to this position,” O’Neal said. ”It’s not a paying job, it is an honorary position, but as it turns out, a very busy one.”...

Elizabeth Pearce has written about drinks. She’s lectured about drinks. She’s even sung about drinks. But cocktails are not really her main concern.

“I’m less interested in drinks,” Pearce said, “and I’m more interested in drinking in America.”

Her new walking tour through the French Quarter, launched last May, uses cocktails as a lens to capture the history and the quirks of this imbibing destination. The journey starts at Vacherie restaurant, where everyone grabs a cooler bag filled with four drinks: a Sazerac, a St. Charles Hotel punch, a Hurricane and praline liqueur....

TAMPA, Fla — Newt Gingrich kicked off "Newt University" — a characteristic hybrid of a campaign event, business venture, and effort by the Republican Party to keep Gingrich busy — in a modest-sized, half-full hotel ballroom today, a room dominated by a large stand of cameras.

The event is the beginning of a sort of intellectual track of Republican politics, financed by the Republican Party and slated to last through the election. It's carried by KAPx, the distance-learning platform of the Washington Post-owned for-profit education company Kaplan, Inc., though a Gingrich spokesman said Kaplan was just a vendor, not a partner, in the effort.

The aim, Gingrich spokesman RC Hammond told BuzzFeed, is to allow Republicans to understand "why we say these things" and to "win arguments in their communities." It's modeled, for Gingrich, in part on his GOPAC tapes, training cassettes for electoral politics that were the viral media of their day, the 1980s and 1990s....

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NOTHING is visible at the intersection of Third Avenue and Eighth Street in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn to indicate that anything extraordinary is there. The artisanal-pie place on one corner and the auto body shops across the way suggest it is merely another spot in the city where grit is giving way to gentrification. But if a small group of history enthusiasts are right, this particular corner of Kings County is hallowed ground.

They believe that there is a mass grave a few dozen yards to the east of the intersection that contains the remains of American heroes: soldiers from the First Maryland Regiment under Col. William Smallwood, which saved Washington’s army during the Battle of Brooklyn on Aug. 27, 1776. Their burial site, these advocates say, deserves the same level of veneration accorded the military cemeteries at Gettysburg and Normandy.

The leader of the find-the-Marylanders group is Bob Furman, a Brooklyn historian and president of the Brooklyn Preservation Council, a nonprofit organization dedicated to maintaining brownstone Brooklyn’s look and feel. “The evidence is quite strong,” Mr. Furman said. “I’m confident enough that I tell everyone I know....

HNN received an email from Laurie Brand, Chair of the Committee on Academic Freedom for the Middle East Studies Association, responding directly to an article published on August 13 by Alan Luxenberg, director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, that criticized a perceived anti-Israeli bias within the organization, specifically at its 2011 conference. Read the original article here.

Dear Mr. Luxenberg,

I am writing in response to the e-mail message dated August 19, 2012 that you sent to members of the Middle East Studies Association’s Committee on Academic Freedom (CAF) and that included the text of an article you published on the History News Network on August 13, 2012. In that article you expressed concerns about: (1) a problem that arose with regard to participation on a panel at the Middle East Studies Association’s annual meeting in December 2011; (2) what you claim is CAF’s disproportionate focus on violations of academic freedom by Israel; and (3) MESA’s position with regard to the public campaign advocating the academic boycott of Israel.

(1) At the 2011 annual meeting, the two Israeli scholars involved, both of them MESA members, complained to MESA’s executive secretary and president about what had transpired at the panel. MESA’s president subsequently issued a letter of apology to the two scholars. As your article indicated, that letter also clarified MESA’s position on the issues involved and conveyed its commitment that what happened with that panel would not be allowed to recur. The two Israeli scholars graciously accepted this apology and promise regarding future panels. Given that the issue was fully addressed and resolved by MESA’s board, there was no reason for further intervention by CAF; nor do we see any reasonable grounds for claiming that MESA’s actions in this case were disingenuous or betrayed its firm and longstanding commitment to academic freedom, as your article alleges.

(2) The members of CAF are scholars who have diverse backgrounds, country and regional expertise and disciplinary training; they volunteer their time and energy out of a common commitment to defending academic freedom, in the Middle East and North Africa as well as in North America. CAF addresses cases as they come to its attention, either through its members’ contacts or by referral from other MESA members or the Middle East studies community more broadly. It is not now, nor has it ever been, CAF’s policy or practice to focus disproportionately on any particular country or set of countries. Examination of the page on MESA’s website at which CAF’s letters are posted (http://www.mesa.arizona.edu/committees/academic-freedom/intervention/index.html) will demonstrate that CAF has protested violations of or threats to academic freedom in a wide range of countries; similarly, MESA has given its annual Academic Freedom Award to individuals and organizations based in many different countries, in the region and beyond (http://www.mesa.arizona.edu/awards/mesa-academic-freedom.html). We therefore reject your allegation that Israel has been unfairly singled out for criticism.

(3) While individual members of MESA are of course free to take whatever stand they feel appropriate with regard to the campaign for the academic boycott of Israel, CAF’s letter of May 13, 2005 continues to reflect that body’s position with regard to this question.

In this connection I would also point out that your HNN article inaccurately conveys what actually happened at the debate on academic boycotts held at MESA’s 2006 annual meeting. As you acknowledge, two of the four panelists vigorously opposed academic boycotts, including the academic boycott of Israel; your subsequent statement that “ALL [sic] four panelists … expressed support for the BDS movement” is, therefore, misleading.

We would appreciate it if you would circulate this letter to all those individuals, organizations and media outlets to whom you circulated your original article, so that they can have our perspective on the issues you raised.

Sincerely,

Laurie A. Brand, CAF Chair

Laurie A. Brand
Robert Grandford Wright Professor
and
Professor of International Relations
USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
University of Southern California

Chair, Committee on Academic Freedom
Middle East Studies Association (MESA)

Hillel Fradkin is director of the Center on Islam, Democracy, and the Future of the Muslim World at the Hudson Institute.

Bernard Lewis has published many books and still more articles on the history of the Middle East and Islam.  On these subjects he is, simply, the pre-eminent authority.  At 96, he has now published yet another book, a memoir titled Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian.  It provides a fascinating account of the varied, extraordinary, unexpected life he has led; it also points beyond the personal to questions of history and the vocation of the historian.

As those familiar with Lewis’s work know, he is a master of the telling anecdote, story, or citation—telling because with these devices, he immediately illuminates subjects that he also discusses in more typical scholarly fashion.  The same is true of his memoir, which recounts not just his scholarship but his vast travels in the Muslim world and experiences with his many Muslim friends and acquaintances, all facilitated by his extraordinary command of many languages.  He is, he says, a man who “relishes” language; but his command of his native English is especially complete and gives this book the graceful charm characteristic of his writings.

The theme of the historian’s responsibility is in part expressed, with Lewis’s characteristic modesty, by the book’s subtitle, Reflections of a Middle East Historian—but only in part, because Lewis is not “a” Middle East historian: He was one of the very first modern, professional European historians of the Middle East in the contemporary sense.  Surprising as it now seems, when Lewis was appointed in 1938 as lecturer in the history of the Near and Middle East at the University of London, he was the first individual in Britain to hold such a position....