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This page includes, in addition to news about historians, news about political scientists, economists, law professors, and others who write about history.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

An Old Essay by Richard Hofstadter Used to Explain Tea Partiers

Source: International Herald Tribune (3-10-10)

The name Richard Hofstadter has been summoned up a lot lately in liberal opinion columns and the blogosphere as an eloquent and intellectually impeccable explanation for political developments like the Tea Party movement, the stardom of Sarah Palin, and the claim on right-wing talk radio that Barack Obama is a “socialist,” maybe even a “bolshevik” leading America to ruin.

Mr. Hofstadter was the highly respected, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Columbia University among whose most famous essays was one called “The Paranoid Style of American Politics,” published in Harper’s Magazine in 1964, which is the piece of writing being cited most often these days.

“I call it the paranoid style because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind,” Mr. Hofstadter wrote, describing what he viewed as a menacing proneness in America to irrational anger and passion....

Others, including The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, have found Mr. Hofstadter useful to explain the utter absence of any restraint in emotionally fervent attacks on Mr. Obama’s health care reform — congressional Republicans, for example, rallying under images of Nazi death camps with the caption “National Socialist Healthcare.” The liberal Huffington Post has published so many references to Mr. Hofstadter these days that it requires several pages to list them all.

“His paranoid style has been bandied about lately,” the Columbia University historian Eric Foner said of Mr. Hofstadter’s famous essay, “and if he were alive I’m sure he would apply it to the Tea Party and other things.”

David S. Brown, a professor of history at Elizabethtown College and author of the book “Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography,” said, “He would have a strong feeling of déjà vu.”...

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

J. Matthew Gallman responds to Jon Wiener's tobacco exposé

Source: The Nation (3-9-10)

J. MATTHEW GALLMAN

I read this article with interest because I have been on the periphery of some of the events Jon Wiener describes. I would like to take this opportunity to correct the record on a few points.

In April 2008 Dr. Gregg Michel, an historian from Texas, contacted me in my capacity as graduate coordinator in the history department at the University of Florida. He was working for a law firm representing one of the tobacco companies, and he was looking for some advanced students to do microfilm research. He e-mailed me a short ad, offering $20 an hour for part-time research. I passed it on to the graduate students. I believe that he interviewed and hired two students at the time, and added two more some time later.

I later learned that the graduate students were assigned to read specific Florida newspapers for specific years. They were to look for and copy any stories that pertained to tobacco and health. Their instructions were quite clear: they were not to make any decisions about whether the stories supported or contradicted the arguments made by Big Tobacco. They were to identify everything remotely relevant and pass it on to Michel....

Sir Kenneth Dover, classicist who wished to kill colleague, dies at 89

Source: AP (3-9-10)

Sir Kenneth Dover, a distinguished historian of Greek culture who gained wider fame by admitting his wish to kill a troublesome colleague, has died at 89....

Dover shockingly admitted his loathing for Trevor Aston, a fellow historian at Corpus Christi College in Oxford University, in his 1994 autobiography, "Marginal Comment." Aston, according to Dover, had become an embarrassment because of his drunken and irrational behavior.

"It was clear to me that Trevor and the college must somehow be separated, and my problem was one which I feel compelled to define with brutal candor: how to kill him without getting into trouble," wrote Dover, who was president of Corpus Christi at the time of Aston's death.

Aston died from a drug overdose in October 1985 on the day he was notified of divorce proceedings by his second wife, and several days after a heated confrontation with Dover. There was no evidence that Dover had any role in the death.

Would Dover have tried to kill Aston had he not committed suicide?

"Oh no, no no," Dover told The Associated Press in 1994.

"Well, I think it just wasn't practicable," he said....

Posted on Tuesday, March 9, 2010 at 5:55 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, March 8, 2010

Sergo Mikoyan, Russian historian and son of Stalin associate, dies at 80

Source: Radio Free Europe (3-8-10)

Prominent Russian historian and journalist Sergo Mikoyan has died in a Moscow clinic of leukemia, RFE/RL's Russian Service reports.

Mikoyan, 80, was an ethnic Armenian born in Moscow. His father was Soviet Communist Party leader Anastas Mikoyan, a long-time associate of Josef Stalin....

Posted on Monday, March 8, 2010 at 5:56 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Eminent China Scholar Will Deliver 2010 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities

Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (3-8-10)

Jonathan D. Spence, an expert on Chinese history and culture and a professor emeritus at Yale University, will deliver the 2010 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities announced on Monday.

The humanities endowment calls the annual lecture, which carries a $10,000 honorarium, "the most prestigious honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities." Lecturers in recent years have included the writer John Updike, the bioethicist Leon R. Kass, and the political theorist Harvey C. Mansfield.

Mr. Spence will deliver his lecture, "When Minds Met: China and the West in the Seventeenth Century," on May 20 at the Warner Theatre, in Washington, D.C....

Posted on Monday, March 8, 2010 at 4:25 PM | Comments (0) | Top

NCPH to meet in Portland, OR on March 12

Source: Press Release from the National Council on Public History (3-3-10)

History at work in the world. Celebrating its 30th anniversary, the National Council on Public History will be meeting in Portland next week. Adam Hochschild, nominated for the National Book Award, will be the conference’s keynote speaker in a free, public event, “Adventures in Public History,” at the Hilton Portland, Friday, March 12, at 8:00 p.m. Public history is a booming profession in which historical research and interpretation are made with and useful to the public, typically outside of the classroom. This conference is an opportunity to explore how public history is merging with the growing interest in civic engagement.

NCPH’s 2010 Annual Meeting, “Currents of Change,” is a joint conference with the American Society for Environmental History. Over 1,200 participants are expected for more than 150 sessions and working groups, 10 fieldtrips, Speed Networking, book exhibits, Consultants Reception, and other events. The full conference program is available at the NCPH website, www.ncph.org. Of special note this year are the floating seminar boat excursion, Speed Networking for new professionals, NCPH’s 30th Anniversary Reception, and professional development workshops on digital history. All are welcome to come see what the 21st-century intersection of public and environmental history looks like.

Keynote speaker, Adam Hochschild, is an award-winning author and journalist who uses history to reveal the lingering inequities of the past. His address, “Adventures in Public History,” is open to the public. Hochschild’s most recent book, Bury the Chains, was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award, and his Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (1994) is a deeply moving exploration of history and memory shortly after the end of the Cold War. It was primarily because of King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998), which brought to light the horrors of Belgian colonial rule in the Congo, that the leading historical organization in the United States, the American Historical Association, awarded Hochschild the 2009 Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Prize. According to the AHA, “Hochschild’s book triggered the first open national discussion of imperial injustices and eventually spurred other investigations and led to an official apology being tendered by the Belgian government, underlining the quiet power that a well-researched and well-written story text could exert in the public sphere.” Hochschild has been a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, a commentator on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” and a co-founder of and editor and writer at Mother Jones magazine.

Founded in 1980, NCPH is a national nonprofit advancing the field of public history, promoting professionalism among history practitioners and encouraging their engagement with the public. It is a membership association of consultants, museum professionals, government historians, professors & students, archivists, teachers, cultural resource managers, curators, film & media producers, historical interpreters, policy advisors, and many others. Members confer at the annual meeting each spring and share their expertise in a scholarly journal, The Public Historian, in a quarterly newsletter, and in multiple online formats. Learn more at http://www.ncph.org.

For more inform
John Dichtl, Executive Director
Tel. (317) 272-7142, Fax (317) 278-5230
March 3, 2010
National Council on Public History Annual Conference, with Adam Hochschild as Keynote Speaker, in Portland.

Posted on Monday, March 8, 2010 at 9:52 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Amateur pro-Pius XII Jewish historian draws controversy

Source: NYT (3-7-10)

At home here on Long Island, he is Gary L. Krupp, medical equipment dealer, now retired after a career of ups and downs. He shares one car and a small house in a no-frills neighborhood with his wife, Meredith, and wryly describes himself as “an average schlemiel, just a Jewish kid from Queens.”

At the Vatican, he is known as Commendatore Gary Krupp, Knight Commander of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of St. Gregory the Great. For short, the Swiss Guard and cardinals address him as “Your Excellency.”...

But the more curious and complicated story is the transformation Mr. Krupp has undergone since. With no previous training or special interest in history, he has emerged as the Vatican’s most outspoken Jewish ally in a heated debate at the crux of tensions between Roman Catholic and Jewish leaders and historians: whether Pope Pius XII, the pontiff during World War II, did as much as he could have to save Jews from the Holocaust....

“I wrote 10 books about Pius XII, but in all these years I never knew how to shake things up for the cause like this wonderful man, Mr. Krupp,” said Sister Margherita Marchione, a professor emerita at Fairleigh Dickinson University who is considered the foremost defender of Pius outside the Vatican.

Deborah Dwork, a professor of Holocaust history at Clark University, put it another way: “Pope Benedict would not have had the chutzpah to go forward with the veneration process if not for this P.R. work Gary Krupp does.”...

Holocaust scholars, who consider Pius, with his worldwide network of diplomats and clergy, to be among the first world leaders to have grasped the scope of the Jewish persecution, have asked why he did not condemn it publicly. But most consider that and other questions unanswerable until the Vatican opens the complete archives of Pius’s papacy. Although a selection of those papers has been published, the Vatican has kept most off limits to outside researchers....

The assessment of Mr. Krupp’s work among many scholars and leaders of long-established Jewish organizations has been equally harsh.

Rabbi Eric J. Greenberg, associate director of interfaith affairs at the Anti-Defamation League, called Mr. Krupp’s mission “a campaign of misinformation.”

Professor Dwork said Mr. Krupp’s research was “amateurish, worse than amateurish — risible.” More disturbing, she said, it seems to have emboldened some in the Vatican to push harder for Pius XII’s canonization....

The Rev. John T. Pawlikowski, a Catholic priest who is a founding member of the board of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and a professor of social ethics at the University of Chicago, said the Vatican was “discrediting itself by associating itself with this kind of questionable scholarship.”

Mr. Krupp has heard it all. In 2008, several historians called to ask him to cancel his three-day conference in Rome, which ultimately drew many Vatican-friendly scholars but few with independent credentials.

One caller, Paul O’Shea, who has written extensively about Pius XII, tried to warn Mr. Krupp that proponents of canonization might be trying to use him. He urged Mr. Krupp to wait for the Vatican to open its files, and for scholars to complete their work, before reaching conclusions.

Mr. Krupp thanked him for his advice and ignored it.

“Listen to me: Pius XII was the greatest hero of World War II,” Mr. Krupp said recently. “He saved more Jews than Roosevelt, Churchill and all the rest of them combined. We should not let him be an issue between Catholics and Jews.”

He added: “And I predict this: Historians are never going to solve this whole problem. There will always be questions.”...

Posted on Monday, March 8, 2010 at 9:40 AM | Comments (0) | Top

NJ street named after Marshal Petain stirs controversy, according to Robert Paxton

Source: NYT (3-7-10)

“Don’t know much about history,” goes the song first recorded by Sam Cooke, and, no, we don’t. But it can get complicated very fast when we have to learn.

Just ask local officials, aggrieved residents of a neighboring town and the folks on Petain Avenue, a tiny, two-house side street in this placid central New Jersey borough. All have suddenly had to confront the legacy of the French World War I war hero and World War II Nazi collaborator, for whom the street is named, and the balance between the burdens of the past and the demands of living in the present.

Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain was just one of the military leaders of the Great War (others were Foch, Pershing, Joffre and Haig) so honored in that part of town. From 1920 onward, Petain Avenue existed quietly, populated by 17 people in four families over the last half century. No doubt that quiet existence would have continued had not Eli Mintz, from nearby East Brunswick, dashed off a letter to Mayor Gloria M. Bradford in 2006....

The historical record is at once clear and as murky as human behavior. Robert Paxton, a retired Columbia University history professor and an expert on Vichy France, said Pétain’s life ended in disgrace, his death sentence for treason commuted to life. But rather than one of history’s great villains, a Hitler or Pol Pot, he’s a more representative historical figure, Professor Paxton added, someone long revered who in his 80s, whether out of vanity, weakness, a desire to save France, delusion or some combination, made a pact with the devil that led him into tragedy and ignominy.

“I don’t see him as a profoundly wicked man, but a deeply misguided one,” Dr. Paxton said. “His priority was to get along with the Germans, and as a result he got dragged in deeper and deeper. He was an accomplice, not an instigator.”

Professor Paxton said he understood why people would take offense, but that if we want to understand history, remembering Pétain’s fall from glory to infamy is more worthwhile than effacing his name. “His story is so much a part of the way history unfolds,” he said. “I don’t think obliterating it adds to our understanding in any way.”...

Posted on Monday, March 8, 2010 at 9:37 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Joan Waugh objects to call to replace Grant on the $50 bill with Reagan

Source: AOL News (3-3-10)

eviving a controversy about which American historical figures deserve to be honored on the nation's currency, a North Carolina congressman is proposing replacing a portrait of Ulysses S. Grant on the $50 bill with one of conservative icon Ronald Reagan.

"President Reagan is indisputably one of the most transformative presidents of the 20th century," Rep. Patrick McHenry, a Republican, said in a letter to his fellow members of Congress. "Like President Roosevelt on the dime and President Kennedy on the half-dollar, President Reagan deserves a place of honor on our nation's currency."

This is not the first time McHenry has lobbied for Reagan to take Grant's coveted place. In 2005, McHenry introduced a bill in Congress calling for the switch. That measure never made it past the House Financial Services Committee.

Previous attempts were also made to have Reagan take over for Franklin Roosevelt on the dime, as well as to take Andrew Jackson's place on the $20 bill.

"I'm outraged," Joan Waugh, UCLA history professor and the author of "U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth," told AOL News. "I think it's a bad idea, and particularly troublesome coming from Southern Republicans."

The commanding general who led the North to victory in the Civil War, Grant was not a beloved figure in the Deep South, Waugh says. "But for the rest of the country, he was an incredibly popular two-term president."...

Posted on Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 9:10 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Diane Ravitch's School Reform U-Turn Shakes Up Debate

Source: NYT (3-3-10)

Diane Ravitch, the education historian who built her intellectual reputation battling progressive educators and served in the first Bush administration’s Education Department, is in the final stages of an astonishing, slow-motion about-face on almost every stand she once took on American schooling.

Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schools and free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically critical. She underwent an intellectual crisis, she says, discovering that these strategies, which she now calls faddish trends, were undermining public education. She resigned last year from the boards of two conservative research groups.

“School reform today is like a freight train, and I’m out on the tracks saying, ‘You’re going the wrong way!’ ” Dr. Ravitch said in an interview.

Dr. Ravitch is one of the most influential education scholars of recent decades, and her turnaround has become the buzz of school policy circles.

“What’s Diane up to? That’s what people are asking.” said Grover J. Whitehurst, who was the director of the Department of Education’s research arm in the second Bush administration and is now Dr. Ravitch’s colleague at the Brookings Institution.

Among the topics on which Dr. Ravitch has reversed her views is the main federal law on public schools, No Child Left Behind, which is up for a rewrite in coming weeks in Congress. She once supported it, but now says its requirements for testing in math and reading have squeezed vital subjects like history and art out of classrooms....

Posted on Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 11:17 AM | Comments (0) | Top

New Islamic proclamation condeming terror - historian Furnish unsure of its effectiveness

Source: Washington Times (3-3-10)

The leader of a global Muslim movement Tuesday issued a rare religious edict condemning terrorism and denouncing suicide bombers as "heroes of hellfire" in an effort to help prevent the radicalization of young British Muslims....

Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, a former Pakistani lawmaker and a leading scholar of Islam, has issued similar, shorter decrees in the past. But the new fatwa makes the most detailed and comprehensive case against Islamic extremism by a Muslim, diplomats and analysts said....

Timothy R. Furnish, a historian of Islam, said the fatwa may not carry significant weight for many Muslims because Mr. Tahir-ul-Qadri is a Sufi Muslim, and not a Koranic literalist, as are such Sunni groups as the Wahhabis and the Salafis, who form the core of groups such as al Qaeda.

"It would seem to be simply another example of this centuries-long Sufi/Wahhabi-Salafi spat over how to interpret the authoritative texts of Islam," said Mr. Furnish, who noted that he has not read Tuesday's fatwa. "For every such legal pronunciamento, there is an antithetical one from the literalist camp …, which justifies such attacks with clear Koranic and Hadith [Traditions] citations."...

Posted on Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 10:33 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Teaching Canadian history through hockey

Source: Canada.com (3-3-10)

Turning hockey into a history lesson is a dream come true for Tim Lewis.

Lewis combined his love of hockey and passion for history and developed two hockey-themed history courses in the summer including Hockey and the Canadian Identity to 1952: The Development of a National Obsession, and Hockey and the Canadian Identity since 1952: Canada's Game in the Cold War and Beyond.

The courses aren't based on the pure history of hockey, but rather he uses hockey as a prism through which to understand wider issues in Canadian society.

Lewis admits he falls under a stereotypically Canadian umbrella when it comes to hockey. Born in a small town outside Moncton, N.B., he grew up on skates. If he wasn't skating with friends on a frozen pond, he was in his backyard shooting the puck on dad's homemade rink....

Despite Canada's big win on Sunday, Lewis still believes Canada's finest hockey moment was when Paul Henderson scored the game winning goal against the Soviet Union in Game 8 of the Summit Series in 1972.

Posted on Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 9:23 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Professor Jack Pole: historian of the US, dies at 87

Source: Times Online (UK) (2-16-10)

Professor Jack Pole was the foremost British historian of the United States in his generation, and his books and articles won him recognition and acclaim in the highest ranks of US historians. He was an expert on the American Revolution but he wrote on all periods and linked the history of the US to that of Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Jack Richon Pole was born in London in 1922. His father, Joe Pole, had arrived in Britain from Ukraine as a boy. The Jewish family were en route to New York but got no farther than Glasgow. Joe was imprisoned as a conscientious objector in the First World War and later he worked as a journalist and as the head of publicity for United Artists in London. There he met Jack’s mother, Phoebe Rickards, from a more anglicised Jewish family who ran a fleet of horse-drawn carriages, and later, taxis. She had been a suffragette and was once arrested in Hyde Park. Later she was a prominent Labour member of the council in Finchley and frequently crossed swords with the local MP, Margaret Thatcher. When his mother died, Jack Pole received a handwritten letter of condolence from Mrs Thatcher, by then the Prime Minister.

This radical background left Pole with an ingrained lifelong hatred of social and racial injustice. He campaigned for the rights of Commonwealth immigrants in Britain in the 1960s and supported the struggle for black civil rights in the US. He was sent to progressive schools: first, aged 4, to the experimental Malting House School in Cambridge founded by the educationist Geoffrey Pyke, which Pole disliked, and then King Alfred School in Hampstead where he was much happier.

On leaving school he went straight into the Army and for most of his six years in uniform he served in antiaircraft batteries, at Scapa Flow, in Somaliland and on the South Coast trying to shoot down V1 flying bombs.

He went up to The Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1946 where he took a First in modern history. His closest friend in the college, F. M. L (Michael) Thompson, also became a distinguished professor of history. Pole could have become a French historian, but he chose to work on the then unfavoured subject of US history and studied for his PhD in Princeton from 1949. It was unusual for a young British historian to be trained in the US at this time, but it was the making of Pole’s career. It introduced him to the US, its leading historians and their most recent work. During one summer holiday he and another notable English historian, Gerald Aylmer, took a road trip across America. Pole met Marilyn Mitchell in New York. They married in 1952 and had three children. The marriage was dissolved in 1988....

Posted on Tuesday, March 2, 2010 at 6:04 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Residential school graves research a daunting task

Source: CBC News (3-2-10)

Investigations into cases of students who died or went missing while attending Canada's residential schools are a priority for the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission, says the group's new research director.

Trent University history professor John Milloy was appointed last month as director of research for the federal commission, which is charged with creating a historical account of the residential school system, helping people heal and encouraging reconciliation.

The Missing Children Research Project was launched in 2008 with the aim of documenting how many children died, went missing or were buried in unmarked graves at residential schools across the country from the late 1800s through much of the 1900s.

However, work on the project was delayed for a year when infighting at the $60-million truth and reconciliation commission led to the resignation of its three commissioners.

Though the restructured commission has yet to come up with a firm budget for the missing children project, Milloy's appointment in January raises hopes that the project has regained momentum....

Posted on Tuesday, March 2, 2010 at 5:05 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Hastings, Beevor to publish competing general histories of World War II

Source: Sunday Times (UK) (2-28-10)

The generals of Britain’s second world war book industry are planning a head-to-head clash with heavyweight new tomes retelling the story of the 1939-45 conflict.

Sir Max Hastings and Antony Beevor, who between them have covered campaigns from Normandy to Stalingrad and the Pacific, plan the 800-page volumes in 2012 as the pinnacles of their military history careers.

Beevor, author of Stalingrad, D-Day, and Berlin: the Downfall, has already won the first engagement with a publisher’s advance believed to be about £1m. Hastings is not far behind.

“Max and I are both great friends and great rivals,” said Beevor, whose book will be published in Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. “It’s the whole war and yes, it’s a terrifying prospect.”...

Both Beevor and Hastings are known for their ability to cover the broad sweep of history while including vivid human stories. “It’s vital to get the point of view of those involved from both ‘above and below’, as it were,” said Beevor.

Hastings, whose most recent work was Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord, has his own thoughts about the 1939-45 conflict. “It’s perceived, albeit in some ways wrongly, as the last great simple collision between good and evil. It, of course, also includes a staggering range of remarkable stories of extreme human experience. Even now I keep discovering remarkable things about the period.”...

Posted on Tuesday, March 2, 2010 at 2:17 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Studying and debunking Civil War myths

Source: The Virginian-Pilot (3-2-10)

Civil War history is rich with tales of blood and gore, heroism, and too many lies.

Some of the nation's pre-eminent historians will examine that history in a symposium, "Race, Slavery and the Civil War: The Tough Stuff of American History and Memory," at Norfolk State University in September.

The conference is free and open to the public, and registration opened this week.

James Horton, professor, author, and consultant to film and television, will lead the conference. He has signed on several noted Civil War scholars, including Pulitzer Prize-winning author James McPherson and David Blight, director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Cassandra Newby-Alexander, an award-winning professor and department chair of history at NSU, also will participate.

Horton said one of the biggest myths about the Civil War is that slavery was not a cause....

Posted on Tuesday, March 2, 2010 at 12:50 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Controversial historical Irish slaughter re-examined by Scottish and Irish academics

Source: stv.tv (UK) (3-2-10)

An attempt to resolve one of Irish history’s most hotly disputed controversies is being tackled by Scottish academics it has been revealed.

University language experts have been given the go-ahead to use cutting-edge software technology to pore over thousands of witness accounts of an alleged massacre of Protestants centuries ago.

The so-called Depositions of English and Scottish settlers at the coal face of the 1641 Rising by Catholic rebels have been exploited by historians, politicians and propagandists through the years.

Now, researchers have been given a £334,000 grant to settle once and for all whether the death toll and notorious propaganda images of settlers being raped, mutilated and murdered were exaggerated.

Dr Barbara Fennell, senior language and linguistics lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, who will lead the project, said they expect to prove within a year whether witness statements were genuine or overstated by commissioners working for Oliver Cromwell....

Locked away in Trinity College Dublin (TCD) since 1741, the 20,000 pages of text were transcribed into digital format over the past two years....

Jane Ohlmeyer, professor of modern history at TCD, said the new evidence will help drive the debate on one of the most formative and contested events in Irish history.

Posted on Tuesday, March 2, 2010 at 12:41 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Pellegrino's atom bom book withdrawn from circulation

Source: AP (3-2-10)

Publication has been halted for a disputed book about the atomic bombing of Japan that “Avatar” director James Cameron had optioned for a possible film, The Associated Press has learned.

Publisher Henry Holt and Company, responding to questions from the AP, said Monday that author Charles Pellegrino “was not able to answer” concerns about “The Last Train from Hiroshima,” including whether two men mentioned in the book actually existed....

Doubts were first raised about the book a week ago after Pellegrino acknowledged that one of his interview subjects had falsely claimed to be on one of the planes accompanying the Enola Gay, from which an atom bomb was dropped by the United States on Hiroshima in 1945. Holt had initially promised to send a corrected edition....

“I read a number of books on this period of time and none of them mentioned Mattias or MacQuitty. I knew there was no way those people could have been omitted if they were real,” said history professor Barton Bernstein of Stanford University.

Pellegrino’s own background was also questioned. He sometimes refers to himself as Dr. Pellegrino, and his Web site lists him as receiving a Ph.D. in 1982 from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. But in response to a query from the AP, the school said it had no proof that Pellegrino had such a degree....

Posted on Tuesday, March 2, 2010 at 12:33 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Communist Party Needs to Loosen Its Grip in China

Source: NYT (3-1-10)

Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas, and the Chinese Communist Party is not exactly itching to release its iron grip on society and the economy.

But that is exactly what the party needs to do to prolong the fast economic growth that underpins its political legitimacy: Cutting state-owned companies down to size and opening up to private enterprise hold the key to sustaining productivity gains and redistributing income more equitably.

Coming from Western economists, such a prescription is standard stuff. What is striking is the urgency with which some prominent Chinese academics are making the same case.

“In the financial crisis, China seems to have performed quite well,” said Yang Yao, director of the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University. “But the problem is that government involvement in the economy has increased significantly.”...

The phrase “guojin mintui” — the state advances as the private sector retreats — has become common currency in debate about the Chinese economy....

Zhang Lifan, a liberal scholar and historian, goes so far as to argue that the retreat of the private sector was an underlying factor behind the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 and the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution.

“History has proved that ‘guojin mintui’ is not sustainable,“ Mr. Zhang wrote in a recent article. “If we can’t curb the advance of the state sector, it will definitely have an impact on China’s future industrial structure and economic development.”...

Posted on Tuesday, March 2, 2010 at 10:44 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Vichy remains a source of discomfort in modern France

Source: NYT (3-1-10)

The tangled oak woods of the Château de l’Écluse are inhabited by a great silence.

The descendants of Fernand Plée, who purchased these grounds and this red-brick manor in central France in 1941, say they have nothing to hide. Their grandfather, they say, was a good man: a decorated veteran of the First World War, a willing partner to the Allies in the second, a man of generosity and courage.

But an otherwise ordinary legal battle between the nearby town of Salbris and Mr. Plée’s descendants, who inherited the estate after his death 40 years ago, has brought to light a somber chapter of the man’s past, and that of the Château de l’Écluse.

The property had once belonged to a Parisian entrepreneur, Émile Akar. In 1941, however, Mr. Akar being of Jewish descent, the wartime Vichy government confiscated the chateau. Fernand Plée then purchased it through the General Authority for Jewish Questions, the agency officially charged with France’s “Aryanization.”

Mr. Akar died well before war’s end, and any public memory of Mr. Plée’s act was apparently lost in the confusion and bliss and national forgetting of post-liberation France. He never returned the estate to the family of its rightful owner, despite laws obliging him to do so. It now falls to his descendants to confront that history.

President Jacques Chirac first officially acknowledged France’s “collective wrongdoing” during the Vichy years in 1995. Since then, the state has taken great pains to confront that dark era, compensating tens of thousands of victims and establishing the public memory of a long-repressed past. It is now widely felt, among Jews as among the general populace, that the nation has done everything in its power to right its past wrongs....

“The French Republic has done all it can,” said Tal Bruttmann, a noted French scholar of Vichy. “The Second World War is still here.”...

The family always assumed that Mr. Akar had leased the property. Despite some worldly success — he made a name for himself as co-founder of Amilcar, an early brand of automobile — he was known to be a mediocre bookkeeper and constantly in debt. But archival documents show that he purchased the chateau and its 1,940 acres in April 1936. He died in Marseille, having fled the Nazi-occupied north, on Nov. 16, 1940.

“What is important for us and our children is that this story be known,” said Jean-François Akar, 69, Émile’s great-nephew and adjunct mayor of Meudon, near Paris. “We’re not going to take revenge on these children for their parents’ errors,” he said, referring to the Plées. “One would not do justice in punishing the innocent.”...

Posted on Tuesday, March 2, 2010 at 10:42 AM | Comments (0) | Top

‘Hero of Ukraine’ splits nation, inside and out

Source: NYT (3-1-10)

Half a century after his death at the hands of the K.G.B., Stepan Bandera, a World War II partisan, has not lost his ability to rally Ukrainians against Russia — and against each other.
Monuments to Mr. Bandera have sprung up across western Ukraine, his fight for the country’s independence glowingly recounted to schoolchildren on field trips, as if he were the George Washington of Ukrainian nationalism. But in eastern Ukraine and as far away as Moscow and Brussels, Mr. Bandera is reviled as a Nazi puppet.

This disputed legacy has ensured him a prominent role in today’s Ukraine. In a parting shot as his presidency was ending, Viktor A. Yushchenko named Mr. Bandera a “Hero of Ukraine,” one of the country’s highest honors.

That touched off a political battle that may make it more difficult for Viktor F. Yanukovich, who succeeded Mr. Yushchenko as president last week, to address the ethnic, regional and historical passions that divide the country....

Nikolai Svanidze, a Russian historian who serves on a Kremlin panel intended to combat “attempts to falsify history,” said the world often failed to understand the trauma suffered by the Soviet Union in World War II, when 25 million Soviet citizens died. Mr. Svanidze said that to honor someone with links to the Nazis was to sully the sacrifice of those people.

He compared some other former Soviet republics to teenagers who were asserting their individuality.

“They reject everything that seems unpleasant to them, that seems alien to them, or unnatural to them, everything that gets in the way of their own sense of identity,” he said.

Some Ukrainians described that view as condescending and self-serving.

“In the Russian mentality, there must always be an enemy,” said Mykola Posivnych, a Ukrainian historian and expert on Ukrainian partisans. “This enemy, Bandera, is very useful to them.”

Mr. Lesiv, the museum director, said the issue was even simpler: Russia has never come to terms with Ukrainian sovereignty. He said people in western Ukraine would rise up if Mr. Yanukovich tried to withdraw the Bandera award....

Posted on Tuesday, March 2, 2010 at 10:34 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, March 1, 2010

Historians (among others) honored at White House ceremony

Source: WaPo (2-26-10)

"Sorry I'm a little late. I had this thing I had to do," joked President Obama, just before an afternoon ceremony at the White House on Thursday in which luminaries in the arts and academics were presented with the highest medals for achievements in their fields....

The humanities citations went to prizewinning authors and historians Robert A. Caro ("The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, Means of Ascent and Master of the Senate"), Annette Gordon-Reed ("The Hemingses of Monticello"), David Levering Lewis ("W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963") and William H. McNeill ("Plagues and Peoples"). The list also includes speechwriter and lawyer Theodore Sorensen, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Philippe de Montebello and philanthropist Albert H. Small, as well as Wiesel, founding chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the author of "Night," whom the president gave his own big hug....

Delivering remarks at the end of the ceremony, Obama said that all of the honorees had touched his life in some way, including Caro, whose book "The Power Broker," about urban planner Robert Moses, the president had read when he was 22 and found "mesmerizing." And speaking of Sorenson, who once wrote speeches for President John F. Kennedy, Obama joked that he "had used up all the good lines for everybody."

Posted on Monday, March 1, 2010 at 6:48 PM | Comments (1) | Top

David Bankier, Scholar of Holocaust, Dies at 63

Source: NYT (2-28-10)

David Bankier, who helped expand the contours of Holocaust research by examining the participation of ordinary Europeans in the extermination of their Jewish neighbors, died over the weekend after a long illness, Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem Holocaust center, announced. He was 63.

Mr. Bankier, who was head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, focused his scholarly work on anti-Semitism, especially its use by the Nazis to promote and sustain a broader ideology. He was the author of “Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion Under Nazism” as well as a collection of essays, “Hitler, the Holocaust and German Society: Cooperation and Awareness.”

Born in Germany just before the state of Israel was created, Mr. Bankier grew up and was educated here, earning his doctorate in Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He held a professorship at Hebrew University and had served as a visiting professor in Britain, the United States, South Africa and South America. He spoke excellent English and Spanish, in addition to German and Hebrew.

Divorced, Mr. Bankier is survived by three children.

Posted on Monday, March 1, 2010 at 5:00 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Debate in Australia over history curriculum standards

Source: The Australian (AU) (3-1-10)

AUSTRALIA'S curriculum chief today argued that the study of history would increase as he fended off allegations that he was promoting a "black armband"version of the past.

Professor Barry McGaw told The Australian Online that the proposed national curriculum did not underplay the role of Europeans in Australian history.

He was responding to opposition education spokesman Christopher Pyne, who argued that the draft curriculum, unveiled today by Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, placed too much emphasis on indigenous history.

“I'm disappointed that (Mr Pyne) feels that having looked at the material,” said Professor McGaw, the head of the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority.

“It's not our intention that there's to be no European history”.

Professor McGaw said the curriculum would bolster the study of history and promote a more balanced view of Australia's past....

Posted on Monday, March 1, 2010 at 1:24 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Gordon S. Wood wins American History Book Prize

Source: NYT (2-28-10)

The historian Gordon S. Wood won the American History Book Prize last week for “Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815,” an account of how America’s leaders created the country’s democratic institutions. The award, presented by the New-York Historical Society, comes with a $50,000 prize, an engraved medal and the title of American Historian Laureate....

Posted on Monday, March 1, 2010 at 11:42 AM | Comments (0) | Top

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