This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream
media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously
biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in
each source note. Quotation marks are not used.
Source: Scott Jaschik at the website of Inside Higher Ed
Jan 5, 2009
When Matthew Connelly was looking at graduate schools, he knew that his application wouldn’t land naturally on any one historian’s pile to review. The departments, he said, were made up of “Americanists, Europeanists, and otherists.” Connelly, now an associate professor of history at Columbia University, was none of the above. He wanted to explore ideas related to Algeria’s independence from France, but didn’t want to be called a scholar only of French colonialism or only of North Africa, and he
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed (blog)
Jan 5, 2009
During one session at the American Historical Association meeting, seasoned history professors answered questions about the job market and offered graduate students tips about what to do and what not to do in interviews. Here are some of the suggestions they shared:
Chitchat matters. Whitney A.M. Leeson, an associate professor at Roanoke College, said she telephones job candidates first at home to try to get to know them. It's a chance, she said, for prospective hires to show search
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed (blog)
Jan 5, 2009
While the number of jobs in history is down, the number of historians attending the annual meeting of the American Historical Association this weekend isn’t. The group’s convention here attracted more than 5,800 people—primarily faculty members from the United States and abroad, but also graduate students, publishers, and government and museum officials.
Last year, in Washington, D.C., 5,300 people attended the meeting.
Arnita A. Jones, the association’s executive direc
Source: Press Release--AHA
Jan 5, 2009
At its regular meeting today, the Council of the American Historical Association passed
the following resolution in keeping with the spirit of a resolution adopted by the business
meeting the previous day.
Resolution Regarding the 2010 AHA Annual Meeting
WHEREAS, The AHA is committed to equity in the workplace and equal rights
regardless of race, ethnicity, religious belief, disability, gender, or sexual
orientation;
WHEREAS, It is one aspect of the mission of the
Source: Scott Jaschik at the website of Inside Higher Ed
Jan 5, 2009
This year’s decline in academic jobs in history may be 15 percent or higher, according to preliminary data presented Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. The figures came as no surprise to the graduate students here seeking jobs. Reports abounded of job searches being called off, or of people in interviews being warned of the strong possibility that the openings might not be filled this year. People leaving the job interview area of the meeting were trading storie
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed (blog)
Jan 4, 2009
In her presidential address to the American Historical Association here Saturday night, Gabrielle M. Spiegel, a professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University, provided a valedictory goodbye to postmodernist theory. Surveying the influence of what Richard Rorty once called “the linguistic turn” in the humanities, Ms. Spiegel, a well-known theorist who has written extensively about how language has shaped the writing of history, noted that “we all sense this profound change has run its cour
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed (blog)
Jan 4, 2009
For the last eight years, progressive historians have been vocally critical of the Bush-Cheney administration’s war in Iraq, war on terror, stress on free markets, and push to privatize government services like charter schools and social-welfare programs. But at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association here, the collective judgment seems to be that those trends haven’t been all that new — and won’t be easy to change.
In 2007 a group called Historians Against the War
Source: Campus Watch
Jan 4, 2009
[Jonathan Schanzer, an adjunct scholar at Campus Watch, is director of policy for the Jewish Policy Center and author of Hamas vs. Fatah: The Struggle for Palestine (Palgrave 2008).]
In recent years, Campus Watch (CW) analysts have leveled a barrage of criticism against the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) as a bastion of groupthink for scholar-activists peddling a politicized agenda. CW's current director,
Source: Rick Shenkman, reporting for HNN.
Jan 4, 2009
UPDATE: It's official: AHA will make an issue of gay marriage at its San Diego meeting.
This could be awkward. The AHA is on its way to adopting as official policy a plan to embarrass the owner of the hotel where next year's 2010 convention will take place. The owner of the hotel, Doug Manchester, made a $125,000 contribution in support of California Proposition 8, the recently-passed measure that forbids gay marr
Source: Lee Siegel in the NYT
Jan 3, 2009
Samuel Huntington, the political theorist who died on Dec. 24 at the age of 81, was a power thinker, one of the breed of “big idea” men whose major works didn’t just explain historical transformation but seemed to crystallize it — in ways that altered how the rest of us looked at the world, for better and also for worse.
In provocative books like “Political Order in Changing Societies” and “The Clash of Civilizations,” Mr. Huntington’s talent — some would say weakness — for the gran
Source: Newsweek
Jan 3, 2009
If there is one central, recurring mistake the United States makes when dealing with the rest of the world, it is to assume that creating political stability is easy. We overthrew Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, and then cavalierly dismantled the entire structure of the Iraqi state, sure that we could simply set up a new one. We toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan and were confident that with foreign aid, elections and American know-how, we would build a new, modern Afghan nation. After all, the
Source: Guardian (UK)
Jan 3, 2009
The journey from prime ministerial bookshelf to the honours list is an uncertain one. Tony Blair carried the Bible everywhere but never managed to honour the authors. Gordon Brown has his own chosen texts, including studies of Britishness. Two of their authors were rewarded this week, Linda Colley, now a CBE, and David Cannadine, now a Knight Batchelor - a title overlooking the fact the two are married. Although the new Sir David got a greater reward than his wife, Ms Colley's brilliant book Bri
Source: Excerpted from the Washington Monthly
Jan 2, 2009
ANDREW J. BACEVICH
Barack Obama has identified Reinhold Niebuhr as "one of my favorite philosophers" and is familiar with the great Protestant theologian’s various writings. Yet as Obama assumes the mantle of Most Powerful Man in the World, Niebuhr’s Irony of American History is one volume that deserves a careful second reading.
Published in 1952, when the Cold War was at its frostiest and Americans were still coming to terms with what it meant to exercise glo
Source: Stan Katz in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
Jan 2, 2009
I am about to head into New York City for the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. So far as I can recall, the first AHA annual meeting I attended was in Chicago in December, 1961. At the time I was completing my Ph.D. dissertation, and having my first (unsuccessful) job interview (with the University of Toronto). The 1961 meeting was “highlighted” by the anti-Semitic presidential address of the early American urban historian from Brown University, Carl Bridenbaugh, who suggest
Source: NYT
Jan 2, 2009
Sir Michael Levey, a prolific and wide-ranging art historian who presided over the expansion of the National Gallery in London as its director from 1973 through 1986, and who acquired important paintings by Caravaggio, David and Monet for its collection, died on Sunday. He was 81 and lived in Louth, Lincolnshire, England.
The cause was a stroke, said his daughter, Kate.
Mr. Levey, who spent his entire career at the National Gallery, was a writer whose beautifully shaped
Source: FoxNews.com
Jan 2, 2009
Wal-Mart wants to build a Supercenter within a cannonshot of where Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant first fought, a proposal that has preservationists rallying to protect the key Civil War site.
A who's who of historians including filmmaker Ken Burns and Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough sent a letter last month to H. Lee Scott, president and CEO of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., urging the company to build somewhere farther from the Wilderness Battlefield.
"The Wild
Source: Robert Townsend in a draft of a preliminary report at the AHA annual convention 2009
Jan 2, 2009
By most indicators, new and recent
history PhDs enjoyed an exceptional
hiring season in the 2007–08
academic year, but there is ample evidence
that troubles in the economy are now hitting
the history job market hard.
In the good news department, the number
of jobs advertised through the AHA grew
faster than the number of new history
PhDs conferred. This marked the third year
in which the number of job ads exceeded
the number of new PhDs entering the
market—a rare event over the p
Source: Bruce Cole in Humanities, magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
Jan 1, 2009
Scholar entrepreneur Phil Cantelon has discovered that it is possible to make research and writing pay. In 1980, he and three collegues hung a shingle for their services as historians, building a business whose clients would eventually range from the United States government to a Las Vegas museum devoted to organized crime.
NEH Chairman Bruce Cole: When people think about historians, they usually think of academic historians, or maybe they think of independent historians or people w
Source: Jane Landers in Perspectives, the magazine of the AHA
Jan 1, 2009
On behalf of the 2008 Nominating Committee, I am pleased to report the results of the 2008 election for AHA offices. The committee is extremely grateful to all the candidates who agreed to stand for Association elective office and committee positions despite their many other obligations. The Association depends for its continued well-being on the willingness of its members to serve. Elected candidates are indicated in blue boldface....
Source: AHA
Jan 1, 2009
The AHA annual conference is the first in the world where you can watch Historians TV – the new online television channel dedicated to historians’ news and views.
We’ll be screening a new special episode each and every day of the conference. You can watch around the conference, in your hotel room and online here.
Whether it’s a workshop, debate or speech, Historians TV will be there to cover all the important issues that emerge. You’ll also be able to watch exclusive r
