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.
The Vienna Philharmonic said Tuesday that it has assigned three historians the task of investigating the prestigious orchestra's Nazi past following revelations about its honoring of war criminals.
Fritz Truempi, Oliver Rathkolb and Bernadette Mayrhofer will look into the "politicization" of the Austrian orchestra from 1938-1945, the fate of Jewish musicians and "deNazification" afterwards, a statement said, as quoted by AFP....
In the current National Review, John J. Miller has a fascinating piece about history professor Timothy Messer-Kruse. Messer-Kruse became interested in finding out all that he could about the famous Haymarket Incident, which is an important part of the left/progressive narrative about the plight of labor in 19th-century America. The presumption among historians has long been that the people put on trial were innocent victims of a repressive society. Messer-Kruse believed that himself, until a question from a student caused him to look into the transcript of the trial. He came to the conclusion that the defendants were not innocent after all. Of course, when he wrote about his findings, he was blasted by leftist historians for having the nerve to challenge the prevailing (and politically useful) view....
The author and historian Taylor Branch spent nearly 25 years exploring and writing about the civil-rights era, and the result was a popular trilogy of books, America in the King Years, one of which won a Pulitzer Prize. This semester Mr. Branch will share his knowledge of the period by teaching a course at the University of Baltimore and opening it up to outsiders on the Web as a massive open online course, or MOOC.
The course, which starts on January 23, is built around his new book, The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement, and will include face-to-face instruction with 20 University of Baltimore students, along with up to 100 auditors who will tune in online at no charge.
The idea for the course took shape as Mr. Branch worked on the new book, a 190-page distillation of his earlier 2,300-page trilogy. Mr. Branch said teachers and professors had told him that their students enjoyed learning about the civil-rights era but that they found the three heavy volumes to be too cumbersome. He said this was even the case in a course he had taught on the subject....
...Jon Lauck, whose latest book, “The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History,” will come out this fall from University of Iowa Press, says it is an exciting time for writers in South Dakota.
Since Lauck of Sioux Falls first started writing political history books more than a decade ago, he’s seen area authors make great strides in both getting published and making connections.
“Everything seems to be converging,” says Lauck, who also works as an adviser to Sen. John Thune. “It used to be that if you wrote a good book about South Dakota, you had no place to go. There are more opportunities than ever.”...
La RocadelsBous, a Paleolithic site located near the southeastern Pyrenees of Spain, has been cited by archaeologists as a key location with Neanderthal-related remains that may shed light on the changes that may have contributed to the demise of the Neanderthals in Europe. Now, a team led by Dr. Rafael Mora of the University Autonomous of Barcelona will be returning to the site in 2013 to excavate and explore lithic assemblages, fossil bone, and other remains that may date as far back as 50,000 BP. The excavations may help research efforts focused on constructing a better understanding of the factors that may have contributed to the decline and eventual disappearance of humanity's most closely related extinct human species.
The project, part of the European project POCTEFA, combines the efforts of the University Autonomous of Barcelona, ArchaeoBarcelona and resources from three countries -- France, Spain and Andorra -- and will employ innovative digital technology for collecting, organizing and storing data, in part through hand-held tablet devices. In this way a large body of information can be more efficiently and accurately collected and then more easily used for analysis and reporting of finds. The results should also provide a valuable reference for further study by researchers and students worldwide. "It is the first archaeological site in Spain that has been turned into a museum exhibition with digital technology", reports the team leadership. "Using an iPad you can take an interactive tour through videos, photos and 3D applications. Furthermore, the exact location of the findings is mapped via laser triangulation to provide an unparalleled experience."...
Search committees conducted interviews for over 154 positions at the 2013 AHA annual meeting, almost matching last year’s total of 160. The number of searches slipped a bit, which is typical in smaller meeting cities.
For the first time in recent memory, jobs with a European specialization outnumbered those for the United States, 25 to 24 percent. The next highest was Asia, followed by Latin America, and then thematic. These searches, which did not require a specific geographical area, were mostly for public and digital historians. Five percent or less of the searches asked for either African, Middle East, or world history specializations....
In December, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association grants for broadening the career horizons of humanities PhDs. At its 2013 annual meeting in New Orleans, the AHA hosted the project’s initial conversations. Dozens of directors of graduate studies, university administrators, and contingent faculty members met with AHA past president Anthony Grafton, senior project advisor Robert Weisbuch, and project director Julia Brookins. They discussed the implications of what we already know—and do not know—about the careers of history doctorates who are not postsecondary teachers.
Administrators from a range of universities focused on disciplinary definitions of “placement.” They described how placement statistics currently encourage history departments to discount or ignore PhD alumni embarking on careers outside the professoriate, however illustrious their paths might be. They shared examples of alternative approaches in disciplines like chemistry and engineering. Participants suggested that the AHA could lead the redefinition of a successful job placement for newly minted PhDs. They also discussed ways that they and their colleagues in administration could help to make placement incentives reflect more fully what historians value about their training and abilities....
Stanley Karnow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist who produced acclaimed books and television documentaries about Vietnam and the Philippines in the throes of war and upheaval, died on Sunday at his home in Potomac, Md. He was 87.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said Mr. Karnow’s son, Michael.
For more than three decades Mr. Karnow was a correspondent in Southeast Asia, working for Time, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, The Washington Post, NBC News, The New Republic, King Features Syndicate and the Public Broadcasting Service. But he was best known for his books and documentaries....
In 2005 the prize-winning historian Nell Irvin Painter put down her pen and picked up a paintbrush.
After 17 years at Princeton University, the publication of seven groundbreaking books, and terms at the helms of two prestigious historical associations, Ms. Painter said goodbye to all that. She retired at 62 and spent $150,000 to pursue a bachelor-of-fine-arts degree from Rutgers University, followed by an M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design, in 2011.
And although she received a Centennial Medal that same year from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for her historical work, the former professor, once described by some peers as an imperious troublemaker who refused to be boxed in, is not particularly interested in returning to the ivory tower.
In an interview here at her art studio, a few blocks from Penn Station, Ms. Painter, who is now 70, describes having given away all the books in her library. She says she'll never write another word of history....
Georgetown — The estate of David Powers Sr., the former special assistant of President John F. Kennedy, is up for auction and a Georgetown historian is right in the middle of it.
McInnis Auctions Gallery in Amesbury will host a "Presidential Auction" at their gallery on Sunday, Feb. 17, selling off a massive collection of items from the Kennedy years....
Daniel Meader of Georgetown, the in-house historian for McInnis Auctions, has spent about five months sorting the massive collection and organizing it into lots. The auction house heard from David Powers, Jr., the son of the late David Powers, who was looking for an auction house to handle an enormous amount of historical Kennedy items....
Historian James H. Carter recently wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books on a new “biography” of the “The Books of Changes,” an important Chinese classical text. Asia Editor Jeffrey Wasserstrom caught up with Carter to ask him a few questions about, naturally enough, China and biography.
JW: You began your review of Richard Smith’s new “biography” of the Yi Jing (Book of Changes) with some ruminations on the whole notion of biographies that don’t focus on individuals. If there were one other book with a tie to China you think especially worthy of a “biography,” what would it be - and who would you like to see write
JHC: It’s hard to eschew “actual” biographies - ones about people - because there are so many lives in China’s past that are so rich and resonant. Zhang Xueliang, who began life as the son of China’s most powerful warlord, and saw his homeland overrun by Japanese troops after his own commanders ordered him not to resist, played a key role in kidnapping Chiang Kai-shek and forcing him to cooperate with the Communists before living for decades under house arrest in Taiwan (eventually dying - at age 100! - in Hawaii), seems a more than deserving subject.
If I were going to suggest a “non-traditional” subject for a biography, I think I’d still stick with a human being: Lei Feng, the propaganda hero of Mao’s regime. He only lived to be 20 years old, as I understand it, but his life “after death” has been fascinating. I’m not aware of a biography of Lei Feng in English, or even an in-depth study on Lei Feng in history, myth, and legend. I can’t think of anyone better to write on this than Geremie Barme, at Australian National University (or perhaps Jeff Wasserstrom!)...
“Random House is announcing that Evan Thomas will be writing a new life of Richard Nixon for editor Jon Meacham. ‘Evan is the best,’ said Meacham. ‘He writes with sensitivity and honesty, two indispensable qualities in capturing Richard Nixon.’ The deal was brokered by ICM's Amanda Urban....
Stanford historian Clayborne Carson has been researching and documenting the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr. for nearly three decades.
From Carson's trip to Washington, D.C., in 1963 to hear King give his famous "I Have a Dream" speech to his personal relationships with members of the King family, Carson's involvement with the American civil rights movement has been much more than an academic pursuit.
In 1985, Coretta Scott King asked Carson to edit and publish her late husband's papers. Carson subsequently founded the King Papers Project, which is producing the definitive record of King's writings, from speeches and sermons to personal correspondence and unpublished manuscripts.
Drawing from his personal journals and records, Carson offers a personal and candid account of his evolution from political activist into a self-described "activist scholar" in his new book Martin's Dream.
In a conversation with Corrie Goldman of the Stanford Humanities Center, Carson talked about the book and his experiences.
After so many years chronicling King's life, what was the most challenging part of writing about your own experiences?
Although much of my career has been spent assembling the documentary records of King's life, I found it difficult at times to find the documents relating to my own activities as King's editor. The King Papers Project's records were not as well organized as the King Papers, but fortunately my notes and correspondence were stored in boxes. In recalling my own activism, I relied on the fact that I wrote many journalistic articles in the 1960s, and kept a journal at times. My thousands of photographs and recorded interviews also proved very useful....
Robert Kee, Born: October 5th, 1919 Died: January 11th, 2013 In February 2005 the then British prime minister Tony Blair made a long-awaited public apology to the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven when he met members of the Conlon and Maguire families, victims of one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British history.
During an emotional meeting Blair signed a copy of Robert Kee’s book, Trial and Error: the Maguires, the Guildford pub bombings and British Justice, belonging to Patrick Maguire (13 when he was arrested) with the inscription “I am sorry it took so long.”
Many people believe it would have taken a lot longer but for the campaigning work of Kee, the British historian and journalist who died on January 11th aged 93.
Kee had a great many connections with Ireland, not least his championing of those wrongly convicted of the 1974 Guildford pub bombings, which claimed five lives. His book about the case was published in 1986 and was regarded as a significant factor in having the convictions overturned in 1989.
Since his death, a great deal has been written about his success in explaining the so-called Troubles to the British, mainly through his landmark 13-part television series Ireland: A Television History, broadcast by the BBC and RTÉ in 1980 and 1981....
Allen Mikaelian is editor of the AHA magazine Perspectives on History.
Responding to the high level of interest in the article on History Harvests in Perspectives on History, we are opening it to all readers ahead of schedule.
William G. Thomas, Patrick D. Jones (both of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln), and Andrew Witmer (James Madison University) describe the History Harvest as “exciting and rewarding work at the intersection of digital history and experiential learning.” History Harvests are “community events in which students scan or photograph items of historical interest, brought in by local institutions and residents, for online display.”
“Every family and community has a history,” the authors explain, “a connection to the larger story of the American experience, and in the History Harvest we explore those connections, talk about them, and document their meaning in partnership with the participants. Our aim is to make invisible archives and stories more visible, bringing them into the public realm to be shared, heard, and seen.”
The article provides practical advice on how to run a History Harvest, and features photographs of students at work in the community along with samples of artifacts that they helped digitize. Readers can learn more about History Harvests and view even more images at UNL’s History Harvest site and JMU’s 2012 History Harvest gallery. The Chronicle of Higher Educationcovered History Harvests in late December.
The rest of the January 2013 issue of Perspectives on History is available with a member login now, and will be open to all on February 1.
"This has been a busy week for me. I was honored Friday (Jan. 18) with the Champion of Freedom Award at city's Annual Interfaith Breakfast with Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and today (Jan. 19) I am being given my very own street," Black said as he fought back tears. "It is always good to be given your 'roses' while you can smell them. And seeing all these people here today smells so good."
A crowd of about 100 people gathered Saturday at the intersection of 50th and State streets as Ald. Pat Dowell (3rd) unveiled the honorary Dr. Timuel Black St. sign....
GRAND RAPIDS, MI — The decision by Grand Rapids native and former President Gerald R. Ford to pardon his disgraced predecessor after the Watergate scandal has put him in the pantheon of great presidents.
William & Mary Provost Michael R. Halleran sent the following message to the campus community on Jan. 17, 2013 - Ed.
I write with great sadness to share the news that Robert F. Engs, former Visiting Professor of History at William & Mary, and Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, died on Monday, January 14, 2013.
Professor Engs came to William & Mary in the fall of 2008 as the Visiting J.P. Harrison Professor of History. He taught a course that explored the Civil War experience as described by black and white Southerners, mostly from the Tidewater area. He also researched and wrote a report on what was known about the history of African Americans at the College and the steps that needed to be taken to complete that history. His work led to the Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation. After retiring from the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Engs returned to William & Mary in the fall of 2009 to bring together a number of local and College efforts exploring slavery, Jim Crow, integration and efforts toward College/community reconciliation, and acted as the initial consulting scholar for the Project. He was an expert on the post–Civil War American South, particularly the responses of freed people and white Southerners to emancipation, and he had a special interest in the roles of education, religion and the missionaries in the emancipation process. Professor Engs also wrote numerous articles and books, including “Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Va., 1861-1863,” and had developed an electronic archive on the middle 19th century, titled “The Crisis of the Union Archives.” He was currently editing a collection of Civil War letters....
Alexis Coe is a writer in San Francisco and a columnist for SF Weekly.
When I was a graduate student in history, I loved to read the acknowledgements sections of books. If you looked carefully, all the trade secrets kept within the small, competitive field were revealed, from who was the most helpful specialist in an archive to creative means of financing research.
Inadvertently, I also learned quite a bit about historian's marriages. Consider For Cause and Comrades, in which Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James McPherson writes, "The person most instrumental in helping me produce this volume has also been the most important person in my life for the past forty years, my wife Patricia. In addition to enriching my life every day, she has been a superb research assistant, having read almost as many soldiers' letters and diaries as I have."...
Despite all this, my cohorts and I believed that we were entering a radically different kind of history department, one where women could forge their own careers, rather than merely supporting their husbands'. Surely, the changing of the guard in progressive institutions had already occurred. A new study from the American Historical Association suggests, however, that many of the field's problems remain unresolved.
For historians, marriage can accelerate the path towards full professorship - but only for males. For female historians, marriage can slow down a woman's career.
Robert B. Townsend, deputy director of the AHA, surveyed 2,240 associate and full professors of history and released the findings in this month's Perspectives on History. Female historians who were either married or had been married at the time of the 2010 survey took an average of 7.8 years to move from associate to full professor. Women who had never married were promoted in an average of 6.7 years. Almost two times as many of the female full professors listed their status as divorced or separated, which suggests their professional obligations were somehow less compatible with marriage than their male colleagues. They were also more likely than their male colleagues to have never wed at all....
WASHINGTON — As he tucked into a salad and a beef pastry, President Obama looked around the family dining room in the White House and stared into his future. By some forecasts, it may not be a pretty sight.
Gathered with him that evening were several of the nation’s leading historians, who reminded him of the sorry litany of second terms — the cascade of scandal, war, recession, political defeat and other calamities that afflicted past presidents after the heady crescendo of re-election.
For Mr. Obama, who will be sworn in for another four years in a quiet ceremony on Sunday and then again in more public fashion on Monday, the lessons were familiar if daunting. Embarking on the next half of his presidency, he and his advisers are developing a second-term strategy intended to avoid the pitfalls of his predecessors with a robust agenda focused on the economy, gun control, immigration and energy....
Jim Bendat is an expert on U.S. presidential inauguration history, and has written the book “Democracy’s Big Day: The Inauguration of Our President 1789-2013.” Bendat spoke with Tom Fox, who is a guest writer of the Washington Post’s Federal Coach blog and vice president for leadership and innovation at the Partnership for Public Service. Fox also heads up the Partnership’s Center for Government Leadership.
Can you reflect on some of your favorite leadership moments from past inaugurations?
My favorite leadership moments are those inaugurations which served to heal the nation. Thomas Jefferson’s inauguration in 1801 marked the first real change of power in Washington. Jefferson became president after a bitter election, and during his inaugural address — in an attempt to bring the nation together — he declared, “We are all Republicans; we are all Federalists.” Then in March of 1865, in his inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln stated, “With malice toward none, with charity for all,” a phase that he used to indicate that the Civil War was ending and we were going to come back together. Finally, in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt became president during the Great Depression. He showed leadership when he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”...
...But with a crowded race for City Hall this year and some likely candidates suggesting they would like appoint a different top cop, it remains unclear what’s might come next for the long-time commissioner. Metropolis spoke with historian Edmund Morris, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a trilogy about Teddy Roosevelt, on how Kelly compares with New York’s other famous police commissioner. Here is the edited interview:
Metropolis:What drew TR into the police force? And how was policing different back then?
Morris: TR came back to the city of his birth in 1895, after six long years as a civil service commissioner in Washington, ambitious to be a moral force in the reform administration of Mayor William L. Strong.
Ironically, his restless progressivism ran into even more opposition here than it had been in the nation’s capital. This was partly because TR was just one member of the city’s four-man board of police commissioners (as president of the board, he had only titular preeminence). But it was also because he seemed to go out of his way to alienate such entrenched, conservative interests as the saloon industry, Wall Street, and indeed the corrupt ranks of the police force itself.
Although his decent idealism and flamboyant ways of enforcing discipline (such as prowling the city streets at night to spy on malfeasing cops) endeared him to the majority of New Yorkers, two years on the job were more than enough for him, and it proved to be the only one in his career that he quit with a sense of failure....
When students failed to show up for a lecture given by Guy Halsall, professor of history at the University of York, you might imagine that he suffered a flicker of self-doubt and that the empty seats bruised the confidence of a sensitive scholar.
Not a bit of it: Professor Halsall berated his students for missing a lecture from "probably the most significant historian of early medieval Europe under the age of 60."
He posted the comments within the university's virtual learning environment, which is used for online contact between students and tutors.
According to York student newspaper Nouse, Professor Halsall responded to an underattended second-year lecture by telling students they were failing to make the most of the "obscene amounts of money" that "mummy and daddy" were paying for their education....
Gary Ostrower, professor of history at Alfred University (AU), has been named a “SuperProfessor” by FacultyRow.com.
FacultyRow, with 91,000 members in 103 countries, was launched in 2011 and is increasingly gaining recognition in traditional academic institutions throughout the world. “SuperProfessors” has become a prominent platform highlighting achievements of leading academics; instructors given the title “SuperProfessor” are considered the most admirable in their field. They demonstrate excellence, passion, and clarity, and have a wide range of knowledge within their respective field of study.
Ostrower was chosen out of a pool of 4,000 applicants for the official 2013 list of SuperProfessors. Currently, there are about 400 SuperProfessors nationwide.
Currently the Joseph K. Kruson Distinguished Professor at the University, Ostrower is an AU alumnus. He earned a bachelor of arts degree in history at AU and a master of arts degree and Ph.D. in history from the University of Rochester. He has spent most of his teaching career at Alfred, but previously taught at Vassar College and the University of Pennsylvania....
Northwestern University issued the following obituary of former professor Jan Carew, who died Dec. 6:
Jan Carew, professor emeritus of African American studies at Northwestern University, died Dec. 6 in Louisville, Kentucky. He was 92.
Professor of African American Studies from 1973 to 1987, Carew was described as the “quintessential Renaissance Man – an author, historian, internationalist, public intellectual, social justice activist and pioneer in experimenting with sustainable lifestyles for people of color.”
Darlene Clark Hine, Board of Trustees Professor of African American studies and professor of history at Northwestern, said Carew was an important leader of Black studies....
Award-winning, bestselling author Edwin Black will chronicle the centuries of intersection between Islam and Jewry that led to the Farhud pogrom in Baghdad in 1941 and the ensuing Arab-Nazi alliance in the Holocaust in a major address at Fordham University 6 PM January 31, 2013. Black's presentation is based on his recent bestselling and critically acclaimed book, The Farhud: Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust. The event at the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham is sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy. Black's presentation will be followed by a 28-minute filmed testimony by actual victims in the documentary "The Farhud," screened by Professor Haim Shaked.
Dr. Shaked is flying in from Miami for the special event. He is the director of The Sue and Leonard Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies at the University of Miami. Black's presentation and the film are predicted to "completely re-define people's perception of mideast history, the Palestine conflict, and the basis for the robust international Arab alliance with the Nazis," said author Black.
Walid Phares, author of Future Jihad and Fox TV Terrorism Analyst, declared the book was "monumental in scope. The Farhud sheds light on the under-researched, 14-century-long confrontation between the Caliphate and the Jewish communities, and offers new exhaustively documented details of exactly how the Pan-Arabist and Jihadist movement of the Levant, led by the Mufti of Jerusalem, al-Husseini, partnered with the Nazis during the darkest days of the Holocaust." Lyn Julius of the London-based Association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa wrote, "As with other Black books, The Farhud is exhaustively researched ... Black takes his time setting the scene, not sparing the reader the graphic details. Graphic detail is what Black does best ... He also surprises us with little known facts ... Edwin Black’s The Farhudshould be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the Arab-Nazi alliance at the root of conflict in the Middle East."...
