Roundup: Talking About History

Lee Formwalt: Report on the 2006 OAH Annual Meeting

"Yeah, we're the gateway drug. We're the pot and you're the cocaine." I'm not sure that the couple hundred American historians at the 2006 OAH convention plenary session on presidential assassinations had ever thought of themselves as the cocaine of history. Or that the popular purveyors of history like Assassins librettist John Weidman and the quirky writer Sarah Vowell who made this crack were the gateway drug that brought readers to seriously intoxicating professional history. But t

John K. Wilson: The Footnote Police vs. Ward Churchill

[John K. Wilson is the founder of the Web site College Freedom and the author of Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies (forthcoming from Paradigm Publishers).] The University of Colorado committee investigating Ward Churchill has found him guilty, guilty, guilty. And on some level, they’re right: Churchill is guilty of occasionally shoddy scholarship and the dubious practice of ghostwriting, and perhaps even more. But we should be alarmed by the investigative commi

Richard Moe: Historic Preservation ... An Unfinished Agenda in the West

[An Address by Richard Moe President, National Trust for Historic Preservation City Club Of Denver] Like many Americans, I thought for a long time that historic preservation was just about saving grand historic and architectural landmarks – places such as Four Mile here in Denver and the Hotel de Paris in Georgetown – as well as areas such as Lower Downtown where preservation could be a tool for revitalization. There

American Council of Trustees and Alumni: How Many Ward Churchills?

Ward Churchill was not always a household name. But ever since his inflammatory remarks calling victims of 9-11 “little Eichmanns,” he has become the veritable poster boy for extremists in American academe. The controversy surrounding ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill now focuses on whether the University of Colorado will find him guilty of professional misconduct. But the case of Ward Churchill raises questions with far greater ramifications. Is there really only one Ward Chur

John H. Summers: C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite

[John H. Summers teaches intellectual history at Harvard. He is currently writing a biography of C. Wright Mills.] "The powers of ordinary men are circumscribed by the everyday worlds in which they live, yet even in these rounds of job, family and neighborhood they often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern." The opening sentence of "The Power Elite," by C. Wright Mills, seems unremarkable, even bland. But when the book was fi

Linda K. Kerber: Protecting the Nation's Memory

[Linda K. Kerber is a professor of history at the University of Iowa and president of the American Historical Association.] You may have read that the National Archives and Records Administration has allowed some federal agencies to withdraw declassified documents from public view. That the Smithsonian Institution has signed an agreement with Showtime Networks to create an on-demand cable-television channel. That the Federal Bureau of Investigation wants to search the p

Presidents & Their Medical Conditions

Of the thirty-seven U.S. presidents from George Washington to Richard Nixon, almost half may have suffered from a mental illness, according to a Duke University study. Two of the psychiatrists who authored the study reviewed biographical material on each president and assessed the likelihood that each chief executive suffered from various psychological disorders. While acknowledging the “limitations” of this method, they report that eighteen presidents exhibited tendencies suggestive of mental i

William C. Kashatus: Intellectual McCarthyism?

[William C. Kashatus is an assistant professor of history at Luzerne County Community College. He can be contacted at bill@historylive.net. ] WHEN I WAS a graduate student, a professor handed back an early draft of my dissertation - a treatment of how Quakers influenced the beginnings of public schooling in 19th century Philadelphia - and exclaimed: "You're religious! What else is wrong with your thinking?" I immediat

LAT Editorial: Politically correct history

IT IS, FORGIVE US, A TEXTBOOK LESSON in political meddling. State Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica) has introduced a bill, SB 1437, that would require California textbooks to tell the stories of the contributions made to history by gays and lesbians. If we didn't know any better, we'd say that Kuehl, a talented legislator who was the first openly gay member of the Legislature, was trying to write herself into the history books. Under her proposal, textbooks would have to "accu

Jonathan Zimmerman: The danger of trying to put a 'positive' face on the past

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is author of"Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century," scheduled to be published in the fall by Harvard University Press.] In 1950, a U.S. Senate committee released a report on the "employment of homosexuals and other sex perverts" in the federal government. The report warned that gays "lack the emotional stability of normal persons," so they could be easily blackmaile

Creation of a website for the controversy regarding Gavin Menzies's book

Dear H-Asia Listers, As has probably been apparent to some on the list, a number of persons around the globe have become a trifle upset with the fabrications of Mr. Gavin Menzies, his publishers and his co-conspirators. Rather than rebutting each claim repeatedly and diversely, it has been decided to create a website where rebuttals and criticisms can be mounted alongside the original claims. Persons interested in the issues can then access these at will. The new website

So Muslims Came to America Before Columbus?

David A. Yeagley, adjunct professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Liberal Studies, in frontpagemag.com (April 28, 2004): A liberal advocacy group in Washington recently committed intellectual genocide on American Indians. Authors of the group presumed to fabricate Indian history, as if real Indian history doesn’t matter. Autho

Christopher Reed: Family Skeletons ... Japan’s Foreign Minister and Forced Labor by Koreans and Allied POWs

Christopher Reed is a British freelance journalist who lives in Japan, where he was first a correspondent in the 1970s. He worked for many years as the correspondent in California for the Guardian of Britain. [Aso Mining Company had been producing coal to fuel Japan’s modernization for nearly 70 years by the time Aso Taro, Japan’s current foreign minister, was born in 1940. Faced with a severe heavy labor shortage as the China war gave way to

Harold Blook: Why Freud Matters

[Mr. Bloom's most recent book is "Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine" (Riverhead, 2005).] Sigmund Freud, one of the crucial authors and thinkers of the 20th century, was born in Moravia in 1856, and taken to Vienna as a child by his Jewish father and mother. Only a few professions were open to Jews in 19th-century Vienna, one of them being medicine. Freud consequently received a medical degree in 1881, and then wrote on hysteria. He would become the founder of modern psych

Liam Julian: Civics need to be taught in the context of history

[Liam is Associate Writer and Editor for the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. Before coming to Fordham, Liam was a political columnist at the Tallahassee Democrat.]Last month, the Washington Post's David Broder wrote a column trumpeting the value of teaching civics to American students. He interviewed Sandra Day O'Connor and former Colorado Governor Roy Romer (now serving as Superintendent of Los Angeles's schools), both of whom are spokespersons for the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools

Humberto Fontova: Movie Critics Aghast at Andy Garcia's 'The Lost City' for telling the truth

Andy Garcia blew it big-time with his movie "The Lost City." He blew it with the mainstream critics, that is. Almost unanimously, they're ripping a movie 16 years in the making. In this engaging drama of a middle-class Cuban family crumbling during free Havana's last days, which he both directs and stars in, Garcia insisted on depicting some historical truth about Cuba – a grotesque and unforgivable blunder in his industry. He's now paying the price. Earlier, many film fe

David Brion Davis: The Importance of History

I’m concerned with the erosion of interest in history -- the view expressed by even some leading teachers and intellectuals that we should “let bygones be bygones,” “free” ourselves from the boring and oppressive past, and concentrate on a fresh and better future. I’m passionately committed to the cause that distinguishes us from all other animals -- the ability to transcend an illusory sense of NOW, of an eternal present, and to strive for an understanding of the forces and events

Jill Lepore: When America won its independence, what became of the slaves who fled for theirs?

...No one knows how many former slaves had fled the United States by the end of the American Revolution. Not as many as wanted to, anyway. During the war, between eighty thousand and a hundred thousand (nearly one in five) left their homes, running from slavery to the freedom promised by the British, and betting on a British victory. They lost that bet. They died in battle, they died of disease, they ended up someplace else, they ended up back where they started, and worse off. (A fifteen-year-o

Gordon Wood: History's vital role in America

''HARDLY A MAN is now alive/ Who remembers that famous day and year," wrote the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, about April 18-19, 1775. Of course, Longfellow in 1860 wrote his popular poem ''Paul Revere's Ride" in order that future generations would never forget the events of that night and day. But no one reads Longfellow anymore. It is not surprising therefore that the meaning of April 19, 1775, has slipped from our memory. This is unfortunate, for Patriots Day ought n

Christopher Klemek: Remembering Jane Jacobs

On Wednesday The Chronicle spoke about Ms. Jacobs's complicated legacies with Christopher Klemek, an assistant professor of history at Florida International University. (This fall, he will move to George Washington University.) Mr. Klemek conducted several long interviews with Ms. Jacobs around 2001, when he was writing a dissertation on popular movements against "urban renewal" in Berlin, Boston, London, New York, Philadelphia, and Toronto. The University of Chicago Pres