History News Network

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.

Remembering Jacques Barzun Remembering Robert Pitney

Barzun's mind was one of world's wonders

Jacques Barzun: An appreciation

Jacques Barzun, public intellectual, dead at 104

Jacques Barzun, wide-ranging cultural historian, dies at 104

Cultural Historian Jacques Barzun Dies At 104

Remembering the work of Jacques Barzun

Jacques Barzun's most successful book published when he was 92

NY Daily News on Barzun's passing

Jacques Barzun, R.I.P. [from the Mackinac Center]

AHA prizes to be awarded at 127th Annual Meeting

Columbia Icon Jacques Barzun Dies After Extraordinary Life of Intellectual Leadership

Is Wikipedia near completion? Historian Richard Jensen reports

60 Minutes profiles Barry Landau, the thief who stole priceless treasures from the National Archives

Jacques Barzun Dies at 104; Cultural Critic Saw the Sun Setting on the West

Peter Kornbluh on drawing the wrong conclusions from the Cuban Missile Crisis

The Renaissance of Geographic History

Grace Dent is "rooting for a Conrad Black hat-trick"

AHA Roundtable: The Presidential Debate of October 22, 2012

Julian Zelizer reflects on George McGovern's enduring impact on presidential politics

Tim Stanley: Obama's performance in third debate described as 'rude and unpresidential

Gove UK history reforms under attack by Hilary Mantel

Q&A with professor Robert Self

Historian Anna K. Nelson, RIP

Miller Center Conference Oct. 26-27 to Examine Presidential History

WSJ profiles the N-YHS's Fellows at the Academy for Teachers

Remembering Jacques Barzun Remembering Robert Pitney

SOURCE: Paul Devlin for The Daily Beast (10-29-12)

Paul Devlin is the editor of Rifftide: The Life and Opinions of Papa Jo Jones (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). He has written for Slate, The Root, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications.

Jacques Barzun, one of the brightest intellectual lights of the twentieth century died last week at the age of 104. Tributes to Barzun, who authored a massive shelf full of books from 1932-2004, will and have been manifold. From Race: A Study in Modern Superstition (1937) to the bestselling tome From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (2000), Barzun held aloft the lamp of knowledge. Aside from being an astute culture critic and a wide-ranging intellectual historian and man of letters, he taught at Columbia University from 1928-1975 and wrote extensively on teaching and higher education. The 2007 profile of him in the New Yorker says more than I ever could. I never met him and only know him through his writings, yet I think it’s safe to say that at this time of his departure, he’d want us to also remember his dear friend and intellectual comrade Robert Henry Pitney, who was also born in 1907, but died in 1944, when he and Barzun were both 37. Since Barzun was blessed with an extraordinarily long life, it seems fitting that we remember his friend who had a short one....

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Jacques Barzun, 1907-2012

Posted on: Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - 17:57

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Barzun's mind was one of world's wonders

SOURCE: San Antonio Express-News (10-30-12)

Former Express-News columnist Cary Clack is communications director for the congressional campaign of Joaquin Castro.

More than eight years ago, I went to my mailbox in the newsroom of the San Antonio Express-News, found a letter addressed to me from Jacques Barzun and almost collapsed from the anticipated intellectual beat-down no doubt coming from this historic and iconic writer and thinker. Such was my self-confidence that I assumed I'd written something Barzun had dismantled point by point. To my surprise, it was a note praising me for a column I'd written on education.

I wrote back thanking Barzun for his generous note and telling him how much I admired him and his writing. This led to an invitation to visit him and his lovely wife, Marguerite, in their Oakwell Farms home and a friendship that was enriched, over the years, by an exchange of notes, cards, books and laughter.

In between Marguerite's phone calls last Thursday, the last one bearing the news that Jacques had just died at the age of 104, I found myself thinking of his wonderful sense of humor....

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Jacques Barzun, 1907-2012

Posted on: Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - 17:55

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Jacques Barzun: An appreciation

SOURCE: Joseph Epstein in the Wall Street Journal (10-26-12)

Joseph Epstein's latest book, "Essays in Biography," has just been published by Axios Press.

I first met Jacques Barzun in the autumn of 1974. I had just been named editor of The American Scholar, the quarterly magazine published by Phi Beta Kappa, and he had long been on its editorial board and was among its leading contributors. He seemed to embody the best of the magazine in its intellectual aspirations and cultural standard. He had earlier told me, by letter, that he was planning to leave the editorial board, and the prospect so alarmed me that I made a special trip from Chicago to New York to try to dissuade him from doing so.

We met at the Columbia Faculty Club. He was as I imagined him from author's photographs on his books, tall, with excellent posture, handsome, elegant in an understated way. He was born in France, to a family whose intellectual connections extended to friendships with the poet and art critic Guillame Appollinaire, the composer Edgar Varese, and the novelist and biographer Stefan Zweig. Jacques came to this country at age 13, had thoroughly Americanized himself, yet had never quite altogether lost the aura of a bred-in-the-bone superior old-world culture. He was cosmopolitan in an elegant way that intellectuals rarely are....

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Jacques Barzun, 1907-2012

Posted on: Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - 17:51

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Jacques Barzun, public intellectual, dead at 104

SOURCE: LA Times (10-26-12)

...In a review of Barzun's "From Dawn to Decadance," The Times wrote, "Barzun is impressively learned, conservative and unconventional in many of his judgments.... He offers an admirably coherent and comprehensive portrait of the cultural achievements --'art and thought, manners, morals and religion' -- of what we once confidently called 'Modern,' and more recently and accurately label 'Western' civilization....

"Barzun sees only decadence: the breakdown of a rich tradition that now must somehow be thrown away for something fresh and new to arise. Decadence is not a pejorative for him but a description of this sad and somehow inexorable condition. For, according to Barzun, all the potentialities of Western culture have now been worked out and pushed to such extremes as to defy further elaboration. Only rejection, mockery, caricature remain. Deconstruction on a vast scale everywhere and in all dimensions of consciousness is the wasteland he sees around him, with only a hope of some eventual renaissance, perhaps 300 years hence, when, after centuries of 'deschooling,' he imagines how '[s]ome among the untutored group taught themselves to read, compiled digests, and by adapting great stories and diluting great ideas provided the common people with a culture over and above the televised fare.... This compost of longing, images, and information resembled that which medieval monks, poets and troubadours fashioned out of the Greco-Roman heritage.' "...

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Jacques Barzun, 1907-2012

Posted on: Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - 17:48

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Jacques Barzun, wide-ranging cultural historian, dies at 104

SOURCE: WaPo (10-26-12)

Jacques Barzun, a Columbia University historian and administrator whose sheer breadth of scholarship — culminating in a survey of 500 years of Western civilization — brought him renown as one of the foremost intellectuals of the 20th century, died Oct. 25 in San Antonio, where he had lived in recent years. He was 104.

His son-in-law Gavin Parfit confirmed his death, the Associated Press reported....

Dr. Barzun was a cultural historian, concerned with the interrelationships of intellectual movements over time and how ideas transform a civilization.

In addition to conducting dynamic and wide-ranging seminars at Columbia with literary critic Lionel Trilling, Dr. Barzun wrote dozens of books on intellectual history and several volumes on the state of American education. Other topics he explored included French and German literature; music, language and etymology; crime fiction; suspense writer Edgar Allan Poe as proofreader; and President Abraham Lincoln as prose stylist....

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Jacques Barzun, 1907-2012

Posted on: Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - 17:46

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Cultural Historian Jacques Barzun Dies At 104

SOURCE: NPR (10-26-12)

Jacques Barzun, one of the most influential historians, educators and thinkers of the 20th century, died Thursday, just one month shy of his 105th birthday. Barzun seemed to have a limitless capacity to understand and translate complex ideas — about the evolution of Western culture, what it means to be free, and even the value of American baseball. He shared his observations in numerous books and magazine articles and at Columbia University, where he held forth for half a century.

In an interview 12 years ago on All Things Considered, Barzun said he believed history is driven by emancipation. "It is getting rid of whatever constraint at the moment seems intolerable," he said, "that of class, government — and now it seems to be against clothing."

If that smacks of a kind of intellectual get-off-my-lawn-ism, well, Barzun was a thinker of uncompromisingly high standards and some degree of sarcasm. He was born in Paris, the son of a diplomat. French universities had been decimated by World War I, so he attended Columbia in New York. Barzun taught there the summer after graduating and helped design its Great Books program; he later lamented that his approach was disappearing from universities....

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Jacques Barzun, 1907-2012

Posted on: Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - 17:45

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Remembering the work of Jacques Barzun

SOURCE: Carl L. Bankston III at The Moral Liberal (10-26-12)

Carl L. Bankston III is Professor of Sociology at Tulane University in New Orleans, LA.

The great teacher, cultural historian and social critic Jacques Barzun died yesterday (October 25, 2012) at the age of 104. The French-born Barzun’s father, Henri-Martin Barzun, was a civil servant in the French ministry of labor, but the elder Barzun was also a writer and many prominent authors and artists visited the family home. In 1917, the French government sent Henri-Martin Barzun on a mission to the United States. The young Jacques went to the United States in 1920. Still a teenager, Jacques Barzun enrolled in Columbia University in New York City in 1923.

Barzun took his bachelor’s degree from Columbia in 1927 and then began teaching and graduate study at the same institution. He received the Ph.D. degree in 1932. His dissertation was published as his first book, The French Race: Theories of Its Origins and their Social and Political Implications Prior to the Revolution (1932). In this book, Barzun examined how the idea of race had developed historically in French thought and how this idea had shaped political and social behavior. This theme of the historical emergence of the idea of race, an idea that Barzun saw as misleading and dangerous, became the basis of his second book, Race: A Study in Modern Superstition (1937). These two books were timely in their topic because the Nazi Party had risen to power in Germany during these years, advocating racial doctrines derived from the historical influences described by Barzun.

While teaching at Columbia, Barzun came into contact with prominent New York intellectuals. The literary critic Lionel Trilling became his friend and collaborator when the two taught a “Great Books” class in 1934. Barzun and his first wife, Marianna, frequently socialized with Trilling and his wife, Diana, also a renowned literary critic....

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Jacques Barzun, 1907-2012

Posted on: Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - 17:40

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Jacques Barzun's most successful book published when he was 92

SOURCE: AARP Blog (10-26-12)

Jacques Barzun was one of the great thinkers of the past century — a scholar who, in a remarkable eight-decades-long career, wrote dozens of books and analyzed subjects ranging from classical music to detective fiction, and from Jonathan Swift to baseball.

Barzun, who died yesterday in San Antonio at age 104, is best remembered for a book that, amazingly, he published in 2000 at age 92: From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life From 1500 to the Present, a sprawling 877-page opus that ambitiously sought to cover the ideas hatched by every great mind in European and American culture, from Martin Luther and Molière to comedian Bill Murray. While Barzun’s dour view, as Atlantic magazine blogger David Wagner puts it, was that western civilization “has been declining steadily since the Renaissance,” his own productivity as a writer didn’t waver as he got older....

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Jacques Barzun, 1907-2012

Posted on: Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - 17:32

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NY Daily News on Barzun's passing

SOURCE: NY Daily News (10-26-12)

Jacques Barzun, who at once celebrated and castigated Western civilization in his many works, has passed away at 104. Though long a New Yorker, Barzun had been living in San Antonio, where he died on Thursday night.

Barzun is best known for 2000's "From Dawn to Decadence," in which he argued that Western culture had fallen from the heights of the Renaissance, having shattered in the dank gulches of the 20th century. An intellectual of distinctly European vintage, he was a prolific writer and public figure with appeal beyond the groves of academe. A cover story on Barzun in a 1956 issue of Time said he was part of "a growing host of men of ideas who not only have the respect of the nation, but who return the compliment."

Born in Paris in 1907, where his father ran a prominent literary salon attended by the likes of Ezra Pound, Barzun arrived in the United States at the age of 12 to attend prep school. He went on to Columbia, where he would graduate at the top of his class in 1927. Five years later, he also obtained a doctorate from Columbia – and would go on to serve the Ivy League university in either a professorial or administrative capacity until 1975....

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Jacques Barzun, 1907-2012

Posted on: Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - 17:29

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Jacques Barzun, R.I.P. [from the Mackinac Center]

SOURCE: Mackinac Center for Public Policy (10-30-12)

Bruce Edward Walker is the former managing editor of MichiganScience, a quarterly Mackinac Center publication that explores science, technology and related policy matters, and currently a free lance writer and editor-at-large for the Center.

It hardly came as a surprise last week when Jacques Barzun shuffled off the mortal coil. He was, after all, 104. But his legacy as an anti-statist is grand.

Barzun’s death presents a renewed opportunity to discuss his important contribution to cultural history. His magnum opus, “From Dawn to Decadence, 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Cultural Life,” published in 2000, summarizes nearly 75 years of observations culled from in-depth and astute reading as well as rubbing shoulders with some of the best thinkers and artists of the 20th century.

By decline, Barzun wasn’t indicting primetime television fare, Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party protests, orStephen King novels. As he wrote in the book’s introduction, decadence:

implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance. The loss it faces is that of Possibility. The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.

In other words, we may be as a dog chasing its tail at present, but all is not lost. This is a far more cheerful assessment of our contemporary culture than what one daily reads during, say, the current election cycle wherein editorial pages opine that election of this-or-that candidate or passage of one-or-another proposal will result inevitably, in the words of REM’s Michael Stipe, “The end of the world as we know it,” conveniently forgetting the final clause: “And I feel fine.”

As should we all rest easy with the knowledge of our shared accumulated culture despite the many missteps of government encroachment into our daily lives. The fabric may be worn and sometimes frayed, but, as Bogart consoled, “We’ll always have Paris.”

Or, for we fortunate enough to live in these times, the negative rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution; the library shelves of books celebrating all that is honorable about the human race in the face of war, poverty, disease and the thousand natural shocks flesh is heir to; the art galleries trumpeting the pinnacle of human creativity; sanitary and medical advancements; the amazing technological achievements from the Guttenberg press to the Internet; and dedicated individuals willing to devote their time, efforts and sometimes entire careers to the preservation of all that represents the best of aesthetic accomplishments and governance.

Like my friend the late Russell Kirk, Barzun possessed a genius for providing a tonic against the premature assessment that our civilization was irredeemably consigned to eventual despair. In fact, rumors of the demise of our culture are greatly exaggerated.

However, Barzun and Kirk both recognized distinct disruptions in the cultural order. Barzun, for example, was among the first of the intellectual elite to identify government meddling in arts, philanthropy and education institutions as hindrances rather than remedies. Representative essays on these subjects can be found in his collections “The House of Intellect” and “The Culture We Deserve.” In the latter, he presents some of the most cogent arguments against public arts funding ever committed to paper, including the seemingly counterintuitive supposition that government-supported art may spur more art but of an increasingly diminished quality.

No commentary on Barzun can do his tremendous influence justice, as many more worldly scribes have attempted and fallen considerably short of the mark. Readers unfamiliar with his work should ferret out his many books and essays for a quick crash tutorial — but be warned, you may not be able to stop.

Those who know of his work would be well-served by a refresher course. The culture may not be dead, but it sure could use an invigorating jolt.

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Jacques Barzun, 1907-2012

Posted on: Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - 17:23

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AHA prizes to be awarded at 127th Annual Meeting

SOURCE: AHA Today (10-29-12)

The following is a list of the recipients of the various awards, prizes, and honors that will be presented at the General Meeting of the American Historical Association on Friday, January 4, 2013, in La Galerie of the New Orleans Marriott. The full citations of the prize and award committees will be printed in the booklet distributed at the General Meeting, as well as in the February 2013 issue of Perspectives on History.

The Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Award

Richard Gilder, New York, NY

Awards for Scholarly Distinction

Alfred Crosby (Univ. of Texas at Austin); Sheila Fitzpatrick (Univ. of Chicago and Univ. of Sydney); Donald Worster (Univ. of Kansas)

Eugene Asher Award for Distinguished Post-Secondary Teaching

Nicholas J. Aieta (Westfield State University)

Beveridge Family Teaching Award for K-12 Teaching

Sol Joye, and Malinda Wenze (Neil Armstrong Middle School, Forest Grove, Oregon)

Raymond J. Cunningham Prize

T. Fielder Valone (currently doctoral student, Indiana Univ.; A.B. Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, May 2011), “Destroying the Ties that Bind: Rituals of Humiliation and the Holocaust in Provincial Lithuania,” in traces: The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History, vol. 1 (spring 2012): 90ñ114. W. Miles Fletcher, faculty adviser (Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Equity Awards

Individual: Herman Bennett, Graduate Center, City Univ. of New York
Institutional: W.E.B. DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Herbert Feis Award

Richard Rabinowitz, founding president, American History Workshop

William Gilbert Award

Avishag Reisman, “The Document Based Lesson,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 44:2, (April 2012), 233-64

John E. O’Connor Film Award

The Loving Story, Nancy Buirski, director; Nancy Buirski and Elisabeth Haviland James, producers; Icarus Films

Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award

Peter S. Onuf (Univ. of Virginia)

Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History

The Clarence Darrow Digital Collection, University of Minnesota Law Library

Honorary Foreign Member

Carlo Ginzburg (UCLA/Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa)

Book Prizes

Herbert Baxter Adams Prize

E. Natalie Rothman (Univ. of Toronto, Scarborough), Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Cornell Univ. Press)

George Louis Beer Prize

Tara Zahra (Univ. of Chicago), The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II (Harvard Univ. Press)

Albert J. Beveridge Award

Rebecca M. Scott (Univ. of Michigan) and Jean-Michel HÈbrard (Univ. of Michigan), Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Harvard Univ. Press)

Paul Birdsall Prize

Edith Sheffer (Stanford Univ.), Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford Univ. Press)

James Henry Breasted Prize

Kyle Harper (Univ. of Oklahoma), Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275-425 (Cambridge Univ. Press)

John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History

Jun Uchida (Stanford Univ.), Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876-1945 (Harvard Univ. Press)

Morris D. Forkosch Prize

Geoffrey G. Field (Purchase Coll., SUNY), Blood, Sweat, and Toil: Remaking the British Working Class, 1939-1945 (Oxford Univ. Press)

Leo Gershoy Award

Ethan H. Shagan (Univ. of California, Berkeley), The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge Univ. Press)

Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women’s History

Gail Hershatter (Univ. of California, Santa Cruz), Gender of Memory: Rural Women in China’s Collective Past (Univ. of California Press) and Ruth Mazo Karras, Univ. of Minnesota, Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press)

Martin A. Klein Prize in African History

Bruce S. Hall (Duke Univ.), A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600-1960 (Cambridge Univ. Press) and Gabrielle Hecht (Univ. of Michigan), Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (MIT Press)

Littleton-Griswold Prize

Serena Mayeri (Univ. of Pennsylvania Law School), Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution (Harvard Univ. Press)

J. Russell Major Prize

Malick W. Ghachem (Univ. of Maine School of Law), The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge Univ. Press)
Helen & Howard R. Marraro Prize: E. Natalie Rothman (Univ. of Toronto, Scarborough), Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Cornell Univ. Press)

George L. Mosse Prize

Sophus A. Reinert (Harvard Univ. Business School), Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy (Harvard Univ. Press)

Premio del Rey

Marie A. Kelleher (California State Univ., Long Beach), The Measure of Woman: Law and Female Identity in the Crown of Aragon (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press)

James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History

Rebecca M. Scott (Univ. of Michigan), and Jean-Michel Hebrard (Univ. of Michigan), Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Harvard Univ. Press)

John F. Richards Prize

Douglas E. Haynes (Dartmouth Coll.), Small Town Capitalism in Western India: Artisans, Merchants and the Making of the Informal Economy, 1870-1960 (Cambridge Univ. Press)

James Harvey Robinson Prize

Reading Like a Historian: Teaching Literacy in Middle and High School History Classrooms (Teachers College Press); authors Sam Wineburg (Stanford Univ.), Daisy Martin (Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning and Equity), and Chauncey Monte-Sano (Univ. of Michigan)

Wesley-Logan Prize

Erik S. McDuffie (Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Duke Univ. Press)

Posted on: Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - 16:07

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Columbia Icon Jacques Barzun Dies After Extraordinary Life of Intellectual Leadership

SOURCE: Columbia University (10-26-12)

The Columbia University community mourns the loss of Jacques Barzun, who died yesterday in San Antonio, Texas, at the age of 104.

Whether he is considered as a scholar, teacher, author, academic role model, public intellectual or Columbia University administrator, Professor Barzun had precious few peers.

“No person has represented our University’s greatness as a center of intellectual creativity better than Jacques Barzun,” said President Lee C. Bollinger. “He has shown what it means to bring the breadth of human knowledge to bear on understanding the human condition and improving it. His role in Columbia’s history is permanent.”...

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Jacques Barzun, 1907-2012

Posted on: Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - 12:38

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Is Wikipedia near completion? Historian Richard Jensen reports

SOURCE: The Atlantic (10-25-12)

...It may seem impossible for an encyclopedia of everything to ever near completion, but at least for the major articles on topics like big wars, important historical figures, central scientific concepts, the English-language Wikipedia's pretty well filled out. (There is, of course, room for improvement in articles that have received less attention, but that is a different, yet still very important, set of challenges.) There's always going to be some tidying -- better citations, small updates, new links, cleaner formatting -- but the bulk of the work, the actual writing and structuring of the articles, has already been done. "There are more and more readers of Wikipedia, but they have less and less new to add," writes historian and Wikipedia editor Richard Jensen in the latest issue of The Journal of Military History.

Most of the major Wikipeida articles were written in 2006 and 2007, and "and have gotten relatively little attention from editors since then."...

Posted on: Monday, October 29, 2012 - 08:52

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60 Minutes profiles Barry Landau, the thief who stole priceless treasures from the National Archives

SOURCE: CBS News (10-28-12)

American history is housed in the National Archives. Forty-four of them, spread all over the country. They contain documents, photos, maps, artifacts that go back to our founding fathers. Every school kid knows about some of them: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and Bill of Rights; but there are millions of others, from the patent for Michael Jackson's moonwalking shoes, to Benedict Arnold's loyalty oath.

Many are priceless treasures which means they attract not only scholars but thieves; more and more of them all the time. Getting to the crooks before they get to the archives has become a new priority in law enforcement.

No one knows more about this than Barry Landau - a self-described presidential historian and one of the foremost collectors of presidential memorabilia. That's because Barry Landau carried out the largest theft of these treasures in American history. Prosecutors say he is one of the most accomplished conmen they've ever encountered....

Posted on: Sunday, October 28, 2012 - 22:59

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Jacques Barzun Dies at 104; Cultural Critic Saw the Sun Setting on the West

SOURCE: NYT (10-26-12)

Jacques Barzun, the distinguished historian, essayist, cultural gadfly and educator who helped establish the modern discipline of cultural history and came to see the West as sliding toward decadence, died Thursday night in San Antonio, where he lived. He was 104.

His death was announced by Arthur Krystal, Barzun’s friend and the executor of his estate.

Mr. Barzun was a man of boundless curiosity, monumental productivity and manifold interests, encompassing both Berlioz and baseball. It was a life of the mind first cultivated more than a century ago in a childhood home outside Paris that became an avant-garde salon....

In his 2000 book, “From Dawn to Decadence,” he argued that one of the great virtues of the West was its character as a “mongrel civilization”: over the course of its development, it was resiliently constructed out of dozens of national cultures.

He traced periods of rise and fall in the Western saga, and contended that another fall was near — one that could cause “the liquidation of 500 years of civilization.” This time the decline would be caused not by scientism and absolutism, he maintained, but by an internal crisis in the civilization itself, which he believed had come to celebrate nihilism and rebellion.

And yet, in the cycles of history, he believed another renewal would come.

“It is only in the shadows,” he wrote, “when some fresh wave, truly original, truly creative, breaks upon the shore, that there will be a rediscovery of the West.”...

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Jacques Barzun, 1907-2012

Posted on: Friday, October 26, 2012 - 09:09

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Peter Kornbluh on drawing the wrong conclusions from the Cuban Missile Crisis

SOURCE: Slate (10-24-12)

Speaking with Slate's Robin Wright on Bloggingheads.

Posted on: Thursday, October 25, 2012 - 15:34

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The Renaissance of Geographic History

SOURCE: Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker (10-29-12)

...As a form of poetry, space history is very old. Milton sang of “the Mountain Nymph, sweet Liberty,” implying there was a reason that the Swiss were freer than the French, and the idea that geography shapes character is essential to Montesquieu: southern peoples are sweaty and stolid; mountain dwellers are springy and defiant, and so on. France, in his view, is ideal, because it is, like Mama Bear’s porridge, neither too cold nor too hot. (Actually, it is too cold, but the myth that the French live in a beautifully temperate climate is impossible for them to surrender, even in January.) In recent years, space history has been armed with data and detail and an urge to explain everything. Like the “naked ape” anthropology of the nineteen-seventies, sure in its belief that the missionary position in sex explains all of human bonding, the new space history has imperial ambitions. Russians always want a warm-weather port and will always have a huddled, suspicious culture, whether Tsarist, Soviet, or Putinish. Ideology is mere summer clouds above an unchanging terrain.

Two new books meant for a popular audience lay out this geographic turn in eloquent and encyclopedic form, though with two different purposes: Robert D. Kaplan’s “The Revenge of Geography” (Random House) is mostly predictive, while “Why Geography Matters: More Than Ever” (Oxford), by Harm de Blij, a professor at Michigan State, is essentially retrospective. De Blij wants students to study more geography; Kaplan wants journalists to think first of all about terrain. Kaplan’s book can be summed up in a single phrase from Ambrose Bierce: “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” In particular, Kaplan insists, the Iraq war was a way of teaching neoconservatives to pay attention to terrain. That war, of which he was an enthusiast, was a catastrophe, he now admits, and he lays the blame for that on a failure to pay attention to the lay of the land. The view, prevalent among “humanitarian interventionists,” was that you could build liberal institutions more or less wherever you wanted: tiny island Trinidad and cold, vast, latitudinal Canada; rainy Scotland and sunny northern Italy; the tropics of Taiwan and the deserts of Israel. Let smart people make money with new ideas in a society where the cops can’t easily be bribed and the judges aren’t entirely bought, and liberal democracy will prosper. This thesis, simple and majestic, has banged its shins against reality; Kaplan’s book is the howl....

Posted on: Thursday, October 25, 2012 - 12:14

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Grace Dent is "rooting for a Conrad Black hat-trick"

SOURCE: Independent (UK) (10-23-12)

Newsnight, Boulton & Co, Have I Got News For You; this week is shaping up to be quite the media carousel for convicted multi-million-pound fraudster Conrad Black. Or more namely, Baron Black of Crossharbour, PC, Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory the Great. I’m unsure if Conrad uses his full Game of Thrones-style title when making restaurant bookings. Or if Conrad and his fragrant wife Barbara even reserve tables at all, so certain are they of their place at society’s high table. I imagine the pair simply pitching up at Dabbous on a Saturday night, eschewing the six-month wait, then glowering imperviously until they’re provided with beef tartare.

Love or loathe Black, his appearances this week show he’s a tricksy, Teflon-coated character. In a Wes Anderson film, he’d be played by Bill Murray and his square-ups with news-show hosts would give us great glee. “I’m here selling books not to answer your somewhat predictable questions,” he quacked at Adam Boulton yesterday. Well, Black knew it was Boulton by the end of the interview – he asked to be reminded of Boulton’s name mid chat. I defy anyone not to find that slightly delicious....

Posted on: Wednesday, October 24, 2012 - 23:28

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AHA Roundtable: The Presidential Debate of October 22, 2012

SOURCE: AHA Today (10-22-12)

The Respondents:

“If the White House treats Iran, as Governor Romney claimed last night, ‘the same way we treated . . . apartheid . . . South Africa,’ then Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his regime…have nothing to worry about."

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—Carol Anderson, Emory University

“As an international lawyer, perhaps the most surprising moment of this debate for me was when Romney suggested that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should be ‘indicted’ under the UN’s Genocide Convention for incitement. Seriously?”
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—Elizabeth Borgwardt, Washington University in St. Louis

“I returned from Beirut, Lebanon this past Sunday, October 21, a Lebanon where a grotesquely huge bomb triggered by cowardly fanatics shattered the tenuous tranquility that the vast majority of ordinary Lebanese crave…”
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—Leila Fawaz, Tufts University

“As moderator Bob Schieffer observed, a debate held during the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis can offer compelling reminders, but President Obama and Governor Romney seemed to be reading outdated books.”
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—Max Paul Friedman, American University

“What was evident throughout was that the goal of neither Obama nor Romney was to enlighten and stimulate thinking. The tenor of the debate was consistently pedestrian. Rather than arguing about whether the U.S. should place any daylight between itself and Israel, the candidates made sure that there was no daylight between the two of them.”
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— Richard H. Immerman, Temple University

“In short, the debates seemed to assume nearly complete freedom in many of the ways that history suggests we need to recognize constraints; and, on the other hand, it remained stuck within a very narrow chronological window, without much thought about where we have come from historically … or about where the large sweep of history might be taking us.”
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—Kenneth Pomeranz, University of Chicago

Posted on: Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - 22:56

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Julian Zelizer reflects on George McGovern's enduring impact on presidential politics

SOURCE: Public Radio International (10-22-12)

George McGovern, in 1972, lost his bid to be elected president in a landslide. But four years earlier, he led a commission that totally changed how presidential party nominees are chosen. That system remains in place to day and is, perhaps, one of McGovern's most enduring legacies. He died this weekend, at age 90....

Princeton University professor Julian Zelizer said McGovern played a key role in changing the rules of politics conventions.

"After 1968, the Democrats setup a commission to reform the nomination process. And McGovern is a key figure heading up that commission," he said....

Posted on: Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - 22:37

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Tim Stanley: Obama's performance in third debate described as 'rude and unpresidential

SOURCE: Catholic Online (10-23-12)

According to U.S. historian Tim Stanley, Mitt Romney won the third presidential debate. Stanley says that while Romney looked like a proper head of state, Obama's antics made him "look like a lawyer," at the third and final debate in Boca Raton, Florida, last night.

Stanley says the debate was encapsulated in a single exchange. When Romney says that the U.S. Navy now has fewer ships than it did in 1916, Obama glibly retorted, "I think Governor Romney maybe hasn't spent enough time looking at how our military works.

"You mentioned the navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military's changed." Audience response was favorable, as everyone laughed....

Posted on: Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - 22:26

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Gove UK history reforms under attack by Hilary Mantel

SOURCE: Financial Times (UK) (10-19-12)

Michael Gove, education secretary, is proposing “pernicious” reforms to history teaching in schools, according to Hilary Mantel, the novelist who this week won the Man Booker prize for a second time.

In an interview with the Financial Times, the author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies , which are set in the 16th century, said: “I don’t like the idea that we’re going to go back to spoon-feeding children with a cut-and-dried and patriotic version [of history] . . . One telling is not enough, particularly not one telling done de haut en bas....

Posted on: Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - 22:15

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Q&A with professor Robert Self

SOURCE: Brown Daily Herald (10-23-12)

Robert Self, an associate professor of history, recently published a new book entitled “All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s.” Last summer, he also wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that assessed the state of the contemporary Republican party in the context of social reform movements in the 1960s. The Herald sat down with him to talk about his work, the evolution of politics over the past half-century and the current election cycle.

The Herald: What drew you to the topic of your new book?
Self: I was struck by how much of our contemporary politics involved questions of gender, sexuality, family and how … most of my own life, this seemed to be a principal terrain on which Americans talked about the country, what mattered and the national government. And I wanted to understand why that was the case.

And second … there had emerged within American politics a distinction that I found to be artificial between culture and values on the one hand and economics on the other. All of my training as a historian convinced me that these were not separate things, and so I wanted to try to understand how they came to be talked about as separate....

Posted on: Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - 22:10

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Historian Anna K. Nelson, RIP

SOURCE: Federation of American Scientists (10-22-12)

We were sad to learn that Professor Anna K. Nelson, a tenacious and effective advocate for improved public access to national security records, passed away last month.

For decades, Prof. Nelson argued for improved declassification practices in almost every venue imaginable, from congressional hearings to the most obscure and transient advisory bodies. As a professor of history at American University, she insisted that government records were public property and that access to such records was one of the foundations of good citizenship.

Among many other posts, she served as a presidentially-appointed member of the JFK Assassination Records Review Board, which was tasked to oversee the declassification of records concerning the assassination of President Kennedy. Because of the perseverance of Dr. Nelson and her colleagues, that Board was uniquely productive in overcoming longstanding barriers to declassification, particularly those pertaining to intelligence agency records....

Posted on: Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - 22:07

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Miller Center Conference Oct. 26-27 to Examine Presidential History

SOURCE: University of Virginia (10-16-12)

In anticipation of Election Day, some of the nation’s top social scientists and historians will offer their unique perspectives on U.S. presidential history at a two-day conference convened by the University of Virginia’s Miller Center Oct. 26-27.

The conference, “Recasting Presidential History,” seeks to jump-start a new generation of scholarship about the presidency that capitalizes on key insights of leading scholars, many of whom have not concentrated on the presidency. Groundbreaking work in sub-disciplines, ranging from cultural to social history, have created new frameworks that can inform and enrich work on the presidency

Key themes of the conference will include how presidents have tried to reform economic, social, global and political structures; how presidents have shaped and been shaped by cultural trends; how presidents have portrayed and sought to harness the media; and how they have interacted with the world.

The Miller Center’s Brian Balogh, Dorothy Danforth Compton Professor of History in U.Va.’s College of Arts & Sciences, will co-chair the conference with Bruce Schulman of Boston University’s American Political History Institute.

Other participants include Stephen Skowronek, political science professor at Yale University; William Galston, senior fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution; James Kloppenberg, professor of American civilization at Harvard University; Susan Douglas, professor of communication studies at the University of Michigan; David Greenberg, associate professor of history, journalism and media studies at Rutgers University; John Judis, senior editor at The New Republic; and Allison Silver, executive editor of opinion at Reuters.

On Oct. 26, panelists will explore the state of the field of presidential study, presidents and the political structure, presidents and the economy, and presidents in the world. The panel on presidents in the world will serve as the Miller Center’s Ambassador William C. Battle Symposium on American Diplomacy, named for the former U.S. ambassador to Australia.

On Oct. 27, discussions will focus on presidents and the social structure, presidents and the culture of politics, presidents and the media, and future steps for presidential study.

“Recasting Presidential History,” which will take place at the Miller Center, is free and open to the public. For a complete agenda, click here. A live webcast of the entire conference will be available at millercenter.org.

Editor's Note: HNN will be covering the conference at the Miller Center.

Posted on: Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - 22:06

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WSJ profiles the N-YHS's Fellows at the Academy for Teachers

SOURCE: WSJ (10-16-12)

Listening to Kenneth Jackson, a professor of history at Columbia University, lecture 15 top New York City public school history teachers at the New-York Historical Society on Monday morning, I was reminded of another great history teacher, Charles Cook....

[H]e glowed even when it came to eras in which he didn't have a vested interest. He had a particular passion for the Civil War. In common with other great educators, he never talked down to his students; he never taught by rote; his talent seemed merely a felicitous byproduct of his passion for his subject.

It was obvious that Mr. Jackson, a former president of the New-York Historical Society, also has the gift. As he discussed the causes of World War I, the teachers, most of them from high schools and a few from middle schools, were assembled around him, seminar-style, in the Society's soaring library. They included representatives from the Bronx Academy of Letters; the Beacon School; J.H.S. 157 Stephen A. Halsey; Midwood High School; the High School for Environmental Studies; Stuyvesant High School; I.S. 190; and the High School of American Studies at Lehman College.

All of them were freshly minted Fellows at the Academy for Teachers, a new initiative that recognizes great teachers in the New York City public school system, treating them as intellectuals and bringing them together in dialogue with leading scholars. The Academy, a nonprofit started by Sam Swope, the dean of the New York Public Library's Cullman Center Institute for Teachers, kicked off only last spring....

Posted on: Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - 22:03

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AHA Roundtable: The Presidential Debate of October 22, 2012

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Tim Stanley: Obama's performance in third debate described as 'rude and unpresidential

Gove UK history reforms under attack by Hilary Mantel

Q&A with professor Robert Self

Historian Anna K. Nelson, RIP

Miller Center Conference Oct. 26-27 to Examine Presidential History

WSJ profiles the N-YHS's Fellows at the Academy for Teachers