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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.

Friday, July 3, 2009

Peggy Noonan calls David McCullough our greatest living historian

Source: Peggy Noonan in the WSJ (7-3-09)

On David McCullough: ... He is America's greatest living historian. He has often written about great men and the reason may be a certain law of similarity: He is one also. His work has been broadly influential, immensely popular, respected by his peers (Pulitzer Prizes for "Truman" and "John Adams," National Book Awards for "The Path Between the Seas" and "Mornings on Horseback") and by the American public. It is not often—it is increasingly rare—that the academy shares the views of the local dry cleaner, the student flying coach and the high school teacher, but all agree on Mr. McCullough, as they did half a century ago on, say, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg. He is admired by normal people and esteemed by the intellectual establishment.

Why? Here are a few reasons. He has the eye of a gifted reporter and the depth of a historian. He sees and explains the true size of an incident or endeavor, he factors in, always, the fact that we are human, and he captures the detail that is somehow so telling—it was a scarf of green silk, not soft muslin, that Rodney wore to the vote on American independence. He writes like a dream, of course. He is broad gauged and has range—the Johnstown flood, the building of the Panama Canal, the founders.

Mr. McCullough betrays no need to be contrarian but is only too happy to knock down history's clichés, to wit George III, the mad doofus, who was in fact "tall and rather handsome" and played both the violin and piano. "His favorite composer was Handel, but he adored also the music of Bach." He rendered "quite beautiful architectural drawings," assembled a distinguished art collection, collected books that in time constituted "one of the finest libraries in the world," loved astronomy, was nonetheless practical, and had a gift for putting people at their ease. He impressed even crusty old Samuel Johnson, who after meeting him called him "the finest gentleman I have ever seen." As for the famous madness, he suffered not during the American Revolution but later in life from what appears to have been "prophyria, a hereditary disease not diagnosed until the twentieth century."

One can't know if Mr. McCullough is correct in his judgment here, or fully so. One can know he inspected the available data, pondered it, and attempted a fair-minded assessment. He is reliable. (Of how many can that be said?) And he loves America. His work has gone to explaining it to itself, to telling its story....

Posted on Friday, July 3, 2009 at 4:21 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Wisconsin hires military historian

Source: Inside Higher Ed (7-2-09)

When conservative critics look at the field of history, one much repeated charge is that departments have obliterated fields like military history in favor of multiculturalism. And for those who have questioned the academy's commitment to military history in recent years, no institution has been more of a target than the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Wisconsin has for several years been trying to fill an endowed chair in military history and the length of the search (extended in part to raise more money) left some suspicious. "The ostensible reason for the delay is that the university wants to raise even more money, so that it can attract a top-notch senior scholar. There may be another factor as well: Wisconsin doesn’t actually want a military historian on its faculty," said a 2006 article in National Review. The piece added that "for all intents and purposes, military history in Madison is dead. It’s dead at many other top colleges and universities as well. Where it isn’t dead and buried, it’s either dying or under siege."

As of Wednesday, military history is in fact alive and well at Madison -- with John W. Hall in place as the first Ambrose-Hesseltine Professor in U.S. Military History. And as to other fears expressed in that National Review article and elsewhere, such as that leading universities were keeping military history alive only by setting loose cultural studies scholars to analyze the military, Wisconsin landed itself an Army major with an impressive combination of military and academic credentials....

Posted on Friday, July 3, 2009 at 4:08 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Niall Ferguson cited by NYT's David Brooks in column about China

Source: David Brooks in the NYT (7-2-09)

On July Fourth, we think about our country and its future. But these days it’s impossible to think about America and its future role in the world without also thinking about China. This was the subject of a combative discussion this week at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

The agent provocateur was Niall Ferguson of Harvard. China and the U.S., he argued, used to have a symbiotic relationship and formed a tightly integrated unit that he calls Chimerica.

In this unit, China did the making, and the United States did the buying. China did the saving, while the U.S. did the spending. Between 1995 and 2005, the U.S. savings rate declined from about 5 percent to zero, while the Chinese savings rate rose from 30 percent to nearly 45 percent....

Think of China, Ferguson concluded, as Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany in the years before World War I: a growing, aggressive, nationalistic power whose ambitions will tear through pre-existing commercial ties and historic friendships.

James Fallows of The Atlantic has lived in China for the past three years. He agreed with parts of Ferguson’s take on the economic fundamentals, but seemed to regard Ferguson’s analysis of the Chinese psychology as airy-fairy academic theorizing. At one point, while Fallows was defending Chinese intentions, Ferguson shot back: “You’ve been in China too long.” Fallows responded that there must be a happy medium between being in China too long and being in China too little....

Posted on Friday, July 3, 2009 at 3:55 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, July 2, 2009

A nation of joiners: An interview with Johann N. Neem

Source: Boston Globe (6-28-09)

AMERICA IS OFTEN called a nation of joiners, and the landscape of any community testifies to our desire to belong - from the Masonic lodge to the city softball league to the suburban megachurch. This impulse spans the country, uniting citizens in a multitude of common purposes and communities to serve. Such civic engagement is seen as an obvious virtue.

But it wasn’t always seen that way. In fact, the founding fathers actually worried about it.

Historian Johann N. Neem says that our current social and political landscape, composed of an entire alphabet of competing interest groups, was far from the society that our early political leaders hoped to build. They envisioned a country where citizens’ first sense of responsibility would be to the state itself, and thought that any group developed outside the government could become a threat to the republic’s stability.

Having formed their own groups to bypass and then break British authority, the new American leaders feared that their own fragile power could be undone by strong private interests, whether those belonging to farmers, church leaders, or corporations.

Who should we blame for what took place in America? Start with Massachusetts. In his new book, “Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts” (Harvard, 2008), Neem finds that it was in Massachusetts and its neighboring states that the young country began to develop its ideas that private organizations - churches, colleges, advocacy groups - could have a public role in our democracy. Both at an elite level and at the grass roots, the pluralist civil society that we have come to inherit first took shape in the Commonwealth. How our predecessors came to understand and form these groups, Neem says, have lessons for our own time.

Neem, a professor at Western Washington University, spoke to Ideas by phone from his Bellingham, Wash., office.

IDEAS: What does it mean when we say that the United States is a “nation of joiners?”

NEEM: There has been a lot of discussion in the last 10 or 15 years about whether Americans have been joining enough groups. I’m looking at the period where Americans first started to form voluntary associations, join groups. What I found most surprising was coming from the 21st century backwards. Today we tend to have a very celebratory language about the value of these groups. When Americans started developing these groups, they were deeply contested. There was a real struggle to understand where these groups would fit in in a democracy....

Posted on Thursday, July 2, 2009 at 5:10 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Another error found in work by Stephen Ambrose

Source: Missouri University of Science and Technology news release (7-1-09)

Despite the stirring portrayal in “Band of Brothers,” Easy Company of the 101st Airborne Division was not the first to enter Adolf Hitler’s Berchtesgaden mountain retreat near the end of World War II, says military historian Dr. John C. McManus in a new book.

It was actually the 7th Infantry Regiment that first took Berchtesgaden, writes McManus in “American Courage, American Carnage: 7th Infantry Chronicles: The 7th Infantry Regiment’s Combat Experience, 1812 Through World War II,” published in June by Forge Books.

“American Courage, American Carnage” is the result of nearly a decade of archival research, battlefield visits, interviews and intensive study by McManus, an associate professor of history at Missouri University of Science and Technology. The final product is an authoritative, inside look at Americans in combat – from the nation’s early nineteenth century struggles as a fledgling republic to its emergence as a superpower in the twentieth.

The book is a prequel to the first installment in the 7th Infantry Chronicles series, published in June 2008 under the title “The 7th Infantry Regiment: Combat in an Age of Terror, the Korean War through the Present.” That volume covered the regiment’s involvement in battles from the Korean War through Iraq. McManus, who serves as the official historian for the 7th Infantry, notes that it is the only Army regiment to serve in every war from 1812 through the present day.

McManus’ new book – his eighth – tells the story of the 7th from its creation in the months prior to the War of 1812 through World War II. The 7th Infantry has been involved in some of the nation’s most pivotal and memorable battles. They include the Battle of New Orleans – where the infantrymen became known as “Cottonbalers” because they were said to have battled the British from behind large rows of cotton bales - to Mexico City during the Mexican-American War, Fredericksburg and Gettysburg in the Civil War, Custer's massacre at Little Bighorn, Belleau Wood in France during World War I, and epic World War II campaigns in North Africa, Sicily, Anzio, southern France, the Vosges Mountains and the breaching of the Rhine. The book ends with the 7th’s capture of Hitler’s mountain home at Berchtesgaden in May 1945.

In his 1992 book “Band of Brothers,” Stephen E. Ambrose incorrectly attributed Berchtesgaden’s capture to another Army unit: Easy Company of the 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. “Ambrose just made the mistake of taking the Easy Company guys at face value and not corroborating their stories with actual unit records,” McManus says.

McManus isn’t the first to discover the erroneous report of Easy Company’s accomplishment, but he is the first to provide detailed documentation to set the record straight. In nearly a full page of end notes on the subject, McManus cites National Archives documents and other records, including reports from Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, commander of the Allied Forces, to refute Ambrose’s report.

McManus adds that his intent was not to impugn Ambrose’s reputation as a historian. “I have great respect for Stephen Ambrose’s work and was definitely influenced by him,” he adds. “We all make mistakes, and I just wanted to help set the record straight.”

A member of the Missouri S&T faculty since 2000, McManus is considered one of the nation’s leading experts on the history of Americans in combat. A member of the editorial advisory board at World War II magazine and World War II Quarterly, McManus was recently named to History News Network’s list of Top Young Historians in 2007. In 2008, he received the Missouri Conference on History Book Award for “Alamo in the Ardennes: The Untold Story of the American Soldiers Who Made the Defense of Bastogne Possible.”

“I have always been interested in what warfare was really like for the person who fights,” McManus says. “It seems like so many books I read as a kid were very antiseptic. I didn’t like that. I knew there was a real story in there of an average person doing the real fighting and that is what fascinates me.”

McManus thinks of himself as more of an American social historian, because he looks at Americans in the combat environment. “To me, that is the ultimate environment. It tells us a lot about them.

“I think military history is very important,” McManus says. “There is this repetition of tragedy over and over again. Throughout history, humans resort to war and I want to understand why. And more than that, how it affects the people who do the fighting. It’s a sad thing to study, but it’s incredibly compelling.”

Posted on Thursday, July 2, 2009 at 1:53 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Alice L. Cochran, historian and professor at Webster University, dies

Source: http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday (7-2-09)

Alice L. Cochran, a historian and a professor at Webster University for nearly 40 years, died Saturday (June 27, 2009) after a stroke. She was 87.

Ms. Cochran was known for her dry wit and tenacity. In 1969, when she was paralyzed from the neck down by a nervous system disorder, she taught a History of the Americas course from her hospital bed by telephone. Another time, when she fell in class and broke her hip, she insisted she keep teaching the class, said a relative, Susan Scarpinato. After one hospital visit for surgery, recalled colleague Dan Hellinger, Ms. Cochran insisted on teaching the next day, and was literally wheeled into the classroom on her side.

Ms. Cochran was born in St. Louis and graduated from Wells College in New York, and received her master's and doctorate degrees in history from St. Louis University. She began teaching at Webster University in 1968, teaching courses in women's studies, early Russian history and colonial American History. She traveled nearly every summer or taught at the Webster University campuses in Europe. She retired as professor emerita in 1995.

Ms. Cochran was a firm believer in women's rights and broke many glass ceilings, Scarpinato said. While at Webster, she challenged the policy that the children of faculty members could attend the college for free, and suggested that childless faculty could sponsor a person of their choice to attend the school.

Posted on Thursday, July 2, 2009 at 1:40 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

AHA Membership Grows Modestly, as History of Religion Surpasses Culture

Source: Robert Townsend at the AHA blog (6-30-09)

Despite the hardships in the economy, membership in the AHA actually increased slightly over the past year. In our annual membership snapshot (taken on March 31 of each year), membership rose to over 15,000 members for the first time in 35 years. While this marks an important milestone, in real terms the 15,055 members marked only a modest increase (just 152 more than last year).

And beneath the changes on the surface, there was a troubling loss in the number of members in many of the higher dues-paying categories, as many faculty members and professional historians felt the effects of the economy. These losses were only offset by significant gains in the number of student members (whose memberships are subsidized by senior members). Students now comprise 28.2 percent of the membership—the highest proportion since 1996, when they accounted for 32.0 percent of the membership.

The most notable change in the profile of our membership is the continuing rise of specialists in religious history. More members selected the history of religion as field of specialization (7.7 percent in all) than any other thematic category. Religion surpassed cultural history (selected by 7.5 percent of the membership), which has been the most popular subject category among members for more than 15 years. (Cultural history eclipsed social history as the field of choice in the mid-1990s.)...

Posted on Wednesday, July 1, 2009 at 12:44 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

State Department Historical Advisory Committee Meets

Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH) (6-29-09)

On June 23, 2009, the Historical Advisory Committee (HAC) met for the first time since the issuance of the Office of the Inspector General’s (OIG) report on the operations of the Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State. The OIG recommended that Director of the Office of the Historian, Dr. Marc Susser, be replaced. As a result, Susser was reassigned within the State Department, and Ambassador John Campbell was named as Acting Director of the Office of the Historian.

Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs P. J. Crowley opened the meeting by expressing his commitment to the mission of the Office of the Historian and to ensuring that the necessary resources are allocated to the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) to meet its 30-year publication deadline.

Ambassador Campbell began his presentation by announcing he intended his tenure to be brief. He stated would be leaving the position by September 1, 2009, to assume a position with the Council on Foreign Relations. His intent is to stay no longer than that date or whenever a permanent replacement has been named, whichever comes first.

He committed himself to ensuring that the Office of the Historian addresses all of the recommendations of the IG’s report, restoring the morale and decorum among the staff, and reviving the relationship between the Office and the HAC.

Ambassador Campbell noted there were 24 specific recommendations in the IG’s report designed to improve the transparency and efficiency of the Historian’s Office. Campbell said a few had already been met, and that he had set up task forces to address the remaining ones. These include improving the office working environment, internal and external professional development, office security, the issue of print versus electronic volumes and timely completion of the Carter and Reagan FRUS volumes. He noted that staff attrition had further delayed the completion of FRUS volumes.

It was announced that William McAllister had been named Acting General Editor of the FRUS.

Posted on Tuesday, June 30, 2009 at 8:19 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Historians’ Advice for Dick Cheney on Writing His Memoirs

Source: NYT (6-27-09)

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has just signed a deal for his memoirs, reportedly worth around $2 million. President Bush, Laura Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, Condoleezza Rice and Henry Paulson are also busy writing their takes on their roles in history. The political memoir, either as a summation of the author’s importance or payback to antagonists, has long been seen as a transition back to private life.

We asked several historians, what’s the best presidential or political memoir (or the worst)? What advice exists for a political memoirist who wants the work to last, given common pitfalls like self-justification, self-aggrandizement, vagueness and boring inside-baseball detail?

* Joseph J. Ellis, historian and author, “Founding Brothers”
* Richard Reeves, presidential biographer
* Jean Baker, historian and author of “James Buchanan”
* David Levering Lewis, historian and biographer
* Alonzo L. Hamby, presidential biographer
* Kathleen Dalton, author, “Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life.”
* Mary Stuckey, professor of communication and political science
* Robert Dallek, presidential biographer
* H.W. Brands, historian

Posted on Sunday, June 28, 2009 at 8:34 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Sean Wilentz takes on the new Lincoln establishment

Source: Sean Wilentz in a long article in the New Republic reviewing books about Lincoln (7-15-09)

... The announcements in last year's publishers' catalogues that a flood of new books would accompany Lincoln's bicentennial augured an opportunity to evaluate the state of Lincoln scholarship, in part by pointing to the writings of those historians, past and present, who insist on evaluating Lincoln seriously as a political creature. (I confess that I have contributed my own bits to the bicentennial torrent.) The difficulty is that an entirely new fashion in the historiography of Lincoln seems to have arisen, which further diminishes the importance of party politics and government in his career. This new fashion--which is really a retrieval and an expansion of older lines of interpretation--takes for granted that Lincoln rose to a surpassing greatness. In one way or another, the fashion locates Lincoln's chief distinction in his literary sophistication and his empathetic powers, making only passing glances at his political astuteness. Indeed, in some quarters, Lincoln's political successes, before and during his presidency, now seem to have come almost entirely from his writing and his oratory, in what might be called a literary determinist interpretation of history. Lincoln's apotheosis remains undisturbed; the difference is that he is now an archangel of belles lettres--or, as Jacques Barzun described him fifty years ago, a man with a hidden hurt who became an "artist-saint." Therein, supposedly, lay the basis, or at least one important basis, for his political greatness....

[ON GARRY WILLS]

The current fascination with Lincoln as a writer originated with Garry Wills's Lincoln at Gettysburg, which was published to a rapturous reception in 1993. Amid erudite and illuminating discussions of classical oratory, American sermonizing, and New England Transcendentalist philosophy, Wills described Lincoln's address, in November 1863, as a turning point in the Civil War and, thus, in American history. By proclaiming that the Union was fighting to save a government dedicated from its inception to the idea that all men were created equal, Wills said, Lincoln turned Jefferson's egalitarian Declaration of Independence into the nation's foundational text, on which the Constitution was later built. Yet Lincoln also cunningly expanded the slaveholder Jefferson's conception of equality by embracing blacks, slave and free, and promising that the war would finally bring "a new birth of freedom." In a span of fewer than three hundred brilliant words--and in a speech that many, at the time, deemed ordinary, even perfunctory--Lincoln supposedly revolutionized the nation's highest ideals.

Wills's account, like numerous later books that dissect one or another of Lincoln better-known orations, over-dramatizes the speech's importance....

[ON MICHAEL BURLINGAME]

... Michael Burlingame, who has written or edited a dozen books on Lincoln, gained considerable notice in the world of Lincoln scholarship a few years ago with a study, heavily indebted to Jungian psychology, that purported to describe and to analyze Lincoln's inner life. It was not the first time that a biographer or a historian has put Lincoln on the couch, if only to puzzle through Lincoln's famous chronic bouts of severe depression and to speculate about what some have seen as his burdensome marriage to an unstable woman. But Burlingame is deeply immersed in the sources on Lincoln, primary and secondary, so his judgments carried far more authority than the usual jerry-built psycho-histories.

Now Burlingame offers a massive two-volume life study so copiously documented that he and his publisher have decided to make the full footnotes available only on the Internet (where they can be updated as any new documentation or relevant secondary literature becomes available). Burlingame reliably and astutely covers Lincoln's political career, and he grasps the subtleties of Lincoln's political machinations. Still, reactions to this vast book will depend on how useful one thinks Jungian archetypes are in evaluating long-departed political leaders. To his credit, Burlingame refrains from heavy theorizing; but his psychological method is unmistakable, and it leads him to make some far-fetched assertions on the basis of scanty evidence. Is it likely, or even possible, that Lincoln's traumatic childhood in a dirt-poor family--"I used to be a slave," he recalled as an adult--accounted for his later hatred of slavery? The claim did make me stop and think, but then I wondered whether older meanings of the word "slave" as any kind of coerced dependence or obedience had played tricks on Burlingame's imagination.

If Burlingame's devotion to deep psychological analysis is itself a bit slavish, the documentation that he provides in his book is sometimes unsettling. Most historians would think twice about relying as much as he does on second-and even third-hand testimony, often published decades after the events described. It is as if Burlingame has so steeped himself in Lincolniana that he thinks he can intuit which highly questionable sources are actually truthful--a kind of historical clairvoyance that does not inspire confidence. On other matters--his insistent demonization of Mary Todd Lincoln; his contention that Stephen A. Douglas, a heavy drinker, was practically falling down drunk during his famous debates with Lincoln--Burlingame is labored and unpersuasive....

[ON RONALD C. WHITE]

... Ronald C. White Jr.'s biography of Lincoln is another story of an evolving glorious hero who also was plagued by doubt, including intense self-doubt. White sometimes gives in to the urge to supply his readers with too much information. But his book is much less detailed, less grandiose, and more vivid than Burlingame's; and, like Burlingame, White skillfully evaluates most of Lincoln's political maneuvering. Still, with all of its strengths, A. Lincoln does not supersede the best modern one-volume biography, David Herbert Donald's Lincoln, which was published in 1995 (and is especially strong on Lincoln's political career).

Donald's book is flawed by its insistence on seeing Lincoln as a passive man, based partly on a misreading of Lincoln's own reflections about his inability to control events. White's book, by comparison, is oddly superficial and circumspect on various issues, large and small, laying out the basic facts but leaving it up to the reader to supply answers. What explains Lincoln's repeated plunges into what looks today like suicidal clinical depression? Why did the anti-slavery politician--who claimed he had detested the institution since his youth--become such close friends with the Kentucky slaveholder Joshua Speed, or take another Kentucky slaveholder, Henry Clay, as his political idol? White's book discusses such perplexing, sometimes delicate matters, but leaves them unresolved....

[ON FRED KAPLAN]

... Kaplan goes much too far in making Lincoln a literary man, and in making Lincoln's use of words the key to his soul and his greatness. Kaplan hears all sorts of "Shakespearean resonance" and similar echoings in Lincoln's speeches. Some of this is certainly there, but some of it is also an illusion--and some of Lincoln's most "literary" work actually echoes American politicians, not British playwrights and poets. It is this indifference to the political context, and to Lincoln's immersion in political writing, that leads Kaplan astray.

Consider an example. Analyzing Lincoln's powerful closing to his "House Divided" speech of 1858, Kaplan pauses over its description of a united Republican Party drawn from "strange, discordant, and even hostile elements," in contrast to the divided Democrats, who were "wavering, dissevered and belligerent." Here is a passage, Kaplan rhapsodizes, that "emulated the distinctive intensity of Shakespearean language," and represents "the best of literary English from Shakespearean oration to Tennyson's 'Ulysses.'" In particular, he claims, the speech's "distinctively original use of 'discordant' and 'dissevered' make this mission statement the most distinctively powerful by any American president." The trouble is, these words and lines came, in some cases directly, from Daniel Webster's famous second reply to Robert Hayne delivered in 1830, one of Lincoln's favorite congressional speeches. Lincoln's meaning was different, but his "original" prose was not Shakespearean, it was Websterian--not John, nor even Noah, but Daniel....

[ON HENRY LOUIS GATES JR.]

... By concentrating on Lincoln's writings about race and slavery, Gates also misunderstands how much more besides race affected Lincoln's political approach to slavery. Apart from the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery in 1865, Gates does not discuss the Constitution much, even though references to it abound in the Lincoln documents that he has selected, and even though constitutional issues were pivotal in Lincoln's thinking about both slavery and the Union. For Lincoln, to destroy slavery while destroying the Constitution would have been no victory at all, as it would demonstrate to the world that the American Revolution and republican government were follies or frauds--impervious to reform. Yet in accord with most anti-slavery men, Lincoln held that, like it or not, the Constitution tolerated and even protected slavery in the states where it already existed. How, then, could Americans abolish slavery under the terms of their own Constitution?...

Some historians claim that Lincoln conceded that the choking off of slavery that he had in mind would take at least a hundred years to complete--a poor reflection on Lincoln's anti-slavery zeal. Gates accepts the claim, and writes, cuttingly, that "at that rate, some black people born in my birth year, 1950, would have been born slaves." Lincoln's actual remarks, delivered during his debates with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, were far less definitive, and more like throwaway lines than position statements. They hardly endorsed the concept of a gradual emancipation protracted over the century to come. But the important point is that, until the Civil War, and even through the war's opening months, most Americans thought of emancipation in terms of one form or another of gradual emancipation. That was how slavery had come to an end in parts of the Caribbean and Latin America, as well as in the northern United States. (New Jersey passed its emancipation law in 1804, yet in 1860 there were still a few slaves in the state, called "apprentices for life.")...

... So it is impossible to understand the seriousness of Lincoln's anti-slavery politics before 1862 without paying close attention to his ideas, and to the ideas of others, about the Constitution. Yet Gates virtually ignores the Constitution, or he dismisses concerns about its integrity as underhanded evasions. This ahistorical judgment leads Gates to complain, a little obtusely, that Lincoln only occasionally and obliquely recognized slavery as the basic cause of the Civil War until he delivered his forceful Second Inaugural Address in 1865. In fact, between 1854 and 1865, virtually every speech Lincoln delivered, and every political letter that he wrote (including those that Gates reprints), made it clear, at some level, that slavery and its expansion lay at the heart of the sectional divide....

... Gates's confusion about words and politics also lies behind his own variation of this myth. Lincoln, he writes, experienced a "great sea change" in his thinking about the war during the summer of 1862. Until then, supposedly, Lincoln refused to acknowledge that slavery had caused the war, and was adamant about not recruiting blacks into the army. Only after the war went badly for the Union in 1861 and 1862, Gates claims, did Lincoln conclude, in despair, that the emancipation of the slaves in the rebel states and the recruitment of black troops were acute military necessities. Yet even as he prepared to sign the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, Gates observes, Lincoln told a delegation of two anti-slavery ministers from Chicago not only that an edict of emancipation would be useless "as we are now situated," but also that he feared black soldiers lacked competence and would be overrun by the rebel forces.

Why, then, did Lincoln change his mind about recruiting blacks, including ex-slaves? Gates, the literary critic and rare-book lover, finds the key to the riddle in a literary text. Specifically, Gates proclaims that Lincoln came to his senses after reading a brief book called An Historical Research Respecting the Opinions of the Founders of the Republic on Negroes as Slaves, as Citizens and Soldiers, written by one George Livermore--a Cambridge, Massachusetts abolitionist, merchant, bibliophile, and collector of Americana--about the Founding Fathers' admiration of black soldiers during the American Revolution. One of the headnotes in Gates's book is more emphatic, stating that Livermore's writing had "persuaded" Lincoln by the late summer of 1862 about the Founding Fathers' views--a chronological impossibility at the very least, since Livermore's book was not even published until October 1862, and Lincoln did not receive a copy of it until November. Anyway, that book turns out to have been influenced by an earlier volume written by the black abolitionist William C. Nell. It was, Gates writes, "quite cleverly" presented to President Lincoln--in what Gates calls "an important, and little noted, subtle coup"--by Senator Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts radical Republican, and a friend of Livermore. In Gates's telling, the scales then fell from the president's eyes, and Lincoln changed his policies. Thereafter black soldiers fought so valiantly that Lincoln completely repudiated his earlier doubts, and became the black troops' greatest champion--a change that eventually pushed the president into contemplating limited black suffrage once the war was over.

Gates's account of Lincoln's conversion experience makes greater allowance than some historians and critics do for the military exigencies of the war. But it also amounts to a variation of the old populist story: instead of arguing that runaway slaves prompted the Emancipation Proclamation, Gates says that Lincoln's opposition to black recruitment changed with Sumner's "coup" of giving the president a book influenced by a black abolitionist writer, and that thereafter the intrepid black troops began changing his mind about blacks in general. The problem is that most of what Gates says about the decision-making behind emancipation and black recruitment is either dubious or inaccurate, and much of it is preposterous, and some of it runs afoul of basic scholarly standards....

... Gates simply fails to understand what historians have long known was transpiring beneath Lincoln's political artifice. He takes Lincoln's words at face value when it suits his own arguments--such as his remarks to the Chicago ministers in September 1862 about black military incompetence--but he is unable to see Lincoln for what his finest biographers have shown he was: a shrewd leader who could give misleading and even false impressions when he wanted to do so, and made no public commitments until the moment was ripe. So it was with the Emancipation Proclamation, which (on the advice of Seward) Lincoln delayed releasing until after the outcome of the battle of Antietam on September 17, which gave the Union cause more credibility....

[ON JOHN STAUFFER]

... Since Carl Sandburg wrote of the "streak of lavender" that he detected in Lincoln, there has been speculation about Lincoln's affection for men, and Stauffer is determined to give it one more whirl. He notes an intellectual debt to C.A. Tripp's The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, a discredited hodgepodge of supposition and deception, which appeared in 2003, though he does not endorse Tripp's sensational claim that Lincoln was "predominantly homosexual." Stauffer favors the more diffuse argument, adapted from Foucault and now generally accepted in the academy, that until the words "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" were invented (some say in 1868, others in 1886 or 1892), sexual love between men was a repertory of acts and not a trait of personality. In America, so the argument goes, sexuality was much more polymorphous before the Civil War than after. Yet if Stauffer sees the antebellum sexual universe as, in his words, "very blurry indeed," he is adamant about one thing: "Lincoln's soul mate and the love of his life was a man named Joshua Speed."

Stauffer's rehearsal of the old Speed story illustrates the difference between a historian and a professor with an agenda. Joshua Speed was a young storeowner and the son of a wealthy Kentucky planter. Between 1837 and 1841, he roomed with Lincoln above Speed's store in Springfield. As was then the custom, they shared a bed ("a very large double-bed," Speed later recalled); and they became, according to numerous accounts, intimate friends, confessing to each other their hopes, fears, and ambitions, while musing aloud and gossiping about politics and (especially) literature. Stauffer works hard to suggest that what he calls this "romantic friendship" included loving sexual contact. As evidence, he presents a mish-mash of strained analogies and literary references (including, inevitably, Ishmael and Queequeg) as somehow telling. He notes that "male-male sex was also common in the military." He dismisses as "rhetorical gymnastics" David Herbert Donald's detailed denial of homoeroticism in Lincoln's and Speed's friendship. And so he concludes that "there is no reason to suppose that [Lincoln] didn't also have carnal relations with Joshua Speed."

The trouble is there is no reason to suppose that they did. Speed's letters to Lincoln during the years in question, Stauffer records, "have sadly been lost"; but Lincoln's letters to Speed betray no signs of any passion or romance, let alone a sexual bond, apart from some pledges of undying friendship. (Lincoln did, as Stauffer notes, close one letter to Speed "Yours forever"--but Donald pointed out that Lincoln used the same phrase in letters to his law partner and an Illinois congressman.) As Stauffer does not bring Lincoln's sexuality to bear either on his relations to Douglass or on any other later aspect of his life, including his marriage, it is difficult to see why the Speed story arises at all, especially given how fragmentary the evidence is. It is also difficult to understand why Stauffer would devote so much time and space to the imputation of a profound homoeroticism that, by his own admission, cannot be proved, at least with the available documentation....

Posted on Sunday, June 28, 2009 at 7:11 PM | Comments (0) | Top

My Secret Life: Simon Schama, historian, 64

Source: Interview in the Independent (UK) (6-27-09)

The home I grew up in ... was a removal van: my father was always going broke.

When I was a child I wanted to be ... a nuclear physicist – but I'm crap at geometry.

My greatest inspiration ... is emotional and psychological bravery without cheap sensationalism.

The moment that changed me for ever ... was the birth of my first child. My life since then has been a permanent spasm of involuntary unselfishness.

My real-life villain is ... the Taliban, who hate women.

I drive ... like John Prescott, I've joined that socially reprehensible, enjoyable club and bought myself a convertible Jaguar.

At night I dream of... When I was a child, being pursued by medieval armoured firemen up a tall tower: Hello Dr Freud. Later, being forced to return to college to find the portcullis slamming down: Hello Dr Kafka....

Posted on Sunday, June 28, 2009 at 6:47 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Meet Britain's young new historians

Source: Oliver Marre in the Guardian (6-28-09)

What does history mean to you? Dusty tweed in ivory towers, perhaps, or a man of a certain age, with a slightly funny voice, being both caustic and informative on television? Does it mean tramping around a site of historical interest on a wet afternoon? Or, at best, a weighty tome read by an open fire.

Today's schoolchildren do not leap at the chance to study history - in fact, it's no longer even a core subject. The Conservative education spokesman, Michael Gove, says that history has been dying out in Britain's schools in the last decade - and it's true that the percentage of pupils taking GCSEs in the subject has fallen. But that might be about to change because history is becoming cool and the fightback is being spearheaded by a group of young, fashionable writers.

They have been an actor, an artist and a TV presenter, are aged between 25 and 35 and they all have book contracts. One wrote his account of the year 1381 in a corner of the trendy London members' club, Soho House, during leave from his day job at a men's magazine. And rather than being looked down upon by the old guard, they are highly regarded by the academic establishment: David Starkey is considered a mentor by two of them; Simon Sebag Montefiore by others.

"They have brilliant new ideas, excellent writing and they're exceptionally clever," says Georgina Capel of the literary agency Capel & Land, who represents established historians Sebag-Montefiore and Tristram Hunt, and who counts four of the new crop among her clients. Her only worry is that they might be "too pretty" to be taken seriously. "They'll just have to prove what formidable minds they have."

So who are the new history boys (and girls) and why have they come along now, when the subject is said to be in decline? The crop of six being tipped as the Starkeys of the future are Dan Jones, Claudia Renton, Ben Wilson, John Bew, Francesca Beauman and Simon Reid-Henry. They believe the key to revitalising history is a mix of strong narratives, exciting personalities and quirky facts....

Posted on Sunday, June 28, 2009 at 6:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Turkish Parliament bestows historian with award

Source: http://www.hurriyet.com.tr (6-27-09)

Out of a pool of high-profile academics and artists, the parliamentary board for Parliament’s Honor Award has chosen Professor Kemal Karpat, historian, as the recipient of this year’s award.

The board consisted of five members from the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, and one member from each of the following opposition parties: the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, Nationalist Movement Party, or MHP, and Democratic Society Party, or DTP.

Karpat was nominated for the award by AKP Adana deputy Necdet Ünüvar. Other nominations included Professor Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, general secretary of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, nominated by the Governorship of Istanbul; Nobel Prize winning novelist Orhan Pamuk, nominated by Istanbul independent deputy Ufuk Uras and Haluk Özdalga. The final list was shortened to six names. Although the board did not hold a vote, Karpat was chosen by the will of the majority of the members. Canan Arıtman, CHP deputy from İzmir had nominated humanitarian Türkan Saylan, who died this year, but the board rejected her name because she is no longer among the living.

Posted on Sunday, June 28, 2009 at 6:34 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, June 26, 2009

Historian Will Lead a Community College in the Bronx

Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed (6-26-09)

When Felix V. Matos Rodriguez was growing up in Puerto Rico in an extended family of sea captains, garment workers, teachers, and storytellers, the seeds of a lifelong fascination with Latino history were being sown.

Next month he will take over as president of Hostos Community College of the City University of New York, which in 1970 opened in a converted tire factory in the South Bronx to educate members of a primarily Puerto Rican community.

Like Mr. Matos Rodriguez, who moved to the mainland United States at age 18, many of those students face cultural and linguistic challenges as they make the transition to college life.

Hostos is one of six community colleges in the 23-institution CUNY system. It now enrolls about 5,100 students; about 61 percent are Hispanic and 32 percent are black. Half of the college's students have a native language other than English.

Its new president, who grew up in a suburb of San Juan, has pursued a varied career as a history professor, academic administrator, and public servant in the United States and Puerto Rico....

Posted on Friday, June 26, 2009 at 10:31 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Economic historian Niall Ferguson partnering on sequel to best selling strategy game ‘Making History’

Source: http://www.gamezone.com (6-25-09)

Mamba Games is pleased to announce that they have acquired the European, Australian/NZ and Eastern Europe (including Russia) rights for ‘Making History II: The War of the World’ developed by Muzzy Lane Software.

Developed in partnership with renowned economic historian and policy icon Niall Ferguson, MAKING HISTORY II: The War of the World marks a dramatic step forward in the Making History series. From the factories and shipyards on the home front, to epic battles across the globe, MHII gives WWII grand strategy gamers the opportunity to lead a nation and remake history. "Economic resources were decisive in the outcome of the war”, says Ferguson. “By giving equal measure to economic as well as military components, MAKING HISTORY II presents a more complete model of the driving forces behind WWII." MHII reflects the reality that economics win wars as much as combat, so players can customize the development of specific cities, regions and units to support their objectives. Along the way they will face rival political factions both domestic and international, diplomatic choices that affect their nation's status and reputation, and a reactive artificial intelligence that alters its strategy based on player actions. The detailed 3-D map creates an immersive environment and allows players to spend more time on the map building their cities and planning battles.

Posted on Friday, June 26, 2009 at 9:54 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Ed Ayers teaching high school teachers about the South

Source: Press Release--University of Richmond (6-26-09)

While summer is often believed to be a time of rest and relaxation for K-12 teachers, more than two dozen high school teachers from 20 states will spend next week as students of "The South in American History," a course taught by University of Richmond president Edward L. Ayers. The course is part of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

The course will cover the Colonial period, Civil War and the 20th Century, with students visiting Jamestown, the Slave Trail in Richmond (including Lumpkin's Jail and the Negro Burial Grounds,) the Drewery's Bluff Civil War site and the Robert R. Moton homeplace and museum in Prince Edward County.

The students will be asked to develop an audio podcast about one of the places visited, using iPods provided by the university. Students will present their podcasts to the class at the end of the course.

Related Links

Ed Ayers briefly discusses the role of the South in American history

Posted on Friday, June 26, 2009 at 9:29 PM | Comments (0) | Top

AHA protests Russian attempt to suppress history

Source: AHA website (click here to read the letter) (6-17-09)

AHA executive director Arnita Jones sent a letter today to Russian Federation president Dmitrii Medvedev, expressing concern on behalf of the American Historical Association over the recent creation of a Commission to Counteract Attempts at Falsifying History to Damage the Interests of Russia.

Posted on Friday, June 26, 2009 at 1:35 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Fifty Years After Stonewall, Queer Studies Matures

Source: Scott McLemee at the website of Inside Higher Ed (6-24-09)

... Today the abbreviation LGBT (covering lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people) is commonplace. Things only become esoteric when people start adding Q (questioning) and I (intersex). And the scholarship keeps deepening. Six years ago, after publishing a brief survey of historical research on gay and lesbian life, I felt reasonably well-informed (at least for a rather unadventurous heteroetcetera). But having just read a new book by Sherry Wolf called Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics, and Theory of LGBT Liberation (Haymarket) a few days ago, I am trying to process the information that there were sex-change operations in Soviet Russia during the 1920s. (This was abolished, of course, once Stalinism charted its straight and narrow path to misery.) Who knew? Who, indeed, could even have imagined?

Well, not me, anyway. But the approaching anniversary of Stonewall seemed like a good occasion to consider what the future of LGBT scholarship might bring. I wrote to some well-informed sources to ask:

“By the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, what do you think (or hope) might have changed in scholarship on LGBT issues? Please construe this as broadly as you wish. Is there an incipient trend now that will come to fruition over the next few years? Do you see the exhaustion of some topic, or approach, or set of familiar questions? Or is it a matter of a change in the degree of institutional acceptance or normalization of research?”

The responses were few, alas -- but substantial and provocative. Here, then, in a partial glimpse at what may yet be on the agenda for LGBT studies.

Claire Potter is a professor of history at Wesleyan University. In 2008, she received the Audre Lorde Prize for “Queer Hoover: Sex, Lies, and Political History,” an article appearing in Journal of the History of Sexuality.

One of the changes already underway in GLBTQ studies is, ironically, destabilizing the liberation narrative that begins with Stonewall in 1969 and ends with the right to equal protection in Romer v. Evans (1996). Part of what we know from the great burst of energy that constitutes the field is that the Stonewall Riot we celebrate as the beginning of the liberation movement is not such a watershed, nor is the affirmation of equal protection the end of the story.

For example, I begin the second half of my queer history survey with Susan Stryker’s “Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Café” documenting a similar San Francisco rebellion in 1966, three years prior to Stonewall; I end with Senator Larry Craig being arrested in a Minneapolis men’s room. GLBTQ liberation is unfinished and becoming more complex as the research emerges that takes us on beyond Stonewall. But I would also add a caveat: Where are the transnational and comparative histories that are on the cutting edge in other fields, like ethnic studies, cultural studies, anthropology and women’s studies?...

Posted on Friday, June 26, 2009 at 1:30 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, June 25, 2009

NCH: "Ask Congress to Increase Funding for the Office of Museum Services"

Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH) (6-24-09)

Representatives Paul Tonko (D-NY) and Louise Slaughter (D-NY) are circulating a “Dear Colleague” letter in the House of Representatives encouraging Members of Congress to join their letter to the House Appropriations Committee urging $50 million for the Office of Museum Services (OMS) at the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). CLICK HERE to ask your Representative to sign the Tonko/Slaughter appropriation letter. Time is of the essence so please contact your Member of Congress no later than June 30.

The Tonko/Slaughter letter highlights the many educational and other vital services museums provide and asks the Appropriations Committee to support $50 million for FY10 (a $15 million increase over FY09) for OMS. These funds will help to protect collections nationwide and to help museums continue to meet the increasing demands for their unique programs and services.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary federal agency responsible for supporting the nation’s 17,500+ museums. Its Office of Museum Services awards grants to museums of all types for educational programming, technology upgrades, professional development, and preservation of treasured collections. The Office of Museum Services is funded through the House Appropriations Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Subcommittee.

Funding for the IMLS’ Office of Museum Services has been essentially flat for the past several fiscal years, despite increased attendance at museums, collections subject to increasing risk, and museum staff members needing professional development in conservation, education, and technology. The educational services museums provide are in greater demand than ever, and in this volatile economy, museums have taken an active role in providing critical social services in their communities.

Posted on Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 9:43 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Hundreds in Salem for World History Conference

Source: Salem News Online (6-25-09)

SALEM — Two doctoral students in history from Peking University in China had lunch this week at Red's Sandwich Shop. Gao Hao had the open-faced barbecue sandwich, while Huang Shuo chose the Cuban, which is stuffed with roast pork, onions and pickles.

There should be a lot of dining scenes like that the next few days as the World History Association descends on the city for its 18th annual conference.

More than 400 scholars and teachers from the United States and around the globe, many accompanied by family members, have signed up for the four-day event, which begins today.

Hosted by Salem State College, the historians will take part in workshops, panel discussions, lectures, film presentations and sightseeing tours.

While the conference is based at the college, many of the historians and professors will eat and sleep in the city and in neighboring communities. A shuttle bus will run between the college and downtown.

"We have managed to fill up a couple of hotels," said Alfred Andrea, vice president of the World History Association.

City officials are thrilled that Salem was chosen to host the conference and even put up a banner to welcome the visitors....

Posted on Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 7:47 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Nelson Lichtenstein: New Book by UCSB History Scholar Examines Wal-Mart as a Business Model

Source: News announcement at the website of USC (6-24-09)

Wal-Mart has come a long way since 1962, when founder Sam Walton opened his first discount store in Rogers, Arkansas. With nearly 8,000 retail outlets in 15 countries, 2.1 million employees worldwide, and sales of $401 billion for fiscal year 2009 alone, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. has become the largest company in the world and has changed the way the world does business.

In a new book titled "The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business" (Metropolitan Books), Nelson Lichtenstein, professor of history at UC Santa Barbara, investigates the rise of the merchandising giant and the business model through which it achieved such immense financial success.

"Deploying computer-age technology, Reagan-era politics, and Protestant evangelism, Sam Walton's firm became a byword for cheap goods and low-paid workers, famed for the ruthless efficiency of its global network of stores and factories," said Lichtenstein. "But the revolution has gone further. Sam's protégés have created a new economic order that puts thousands of manufacturers, indeed whole regions, in thrall to a retail royalty."

Like the Pennsylvania Railroad and General Motors in their heyday, Wal-Mart sets the commercial model for a huge swath of the global economy, Lichtenstein explained. "For 120 years, the companies that manufactured things in America –– from toothpaste to TV's –– were on top, dictating the kind of products they would make and the prices at which they would sell," he said. "But the retail revolution subverted that manufacturing power, giving to Wal-Mart and the other big box retailers that followed its lead unprecedented economic and social power."

According to Lichtenstein, the two most significant elements of Wal-Mart's business plan are the decision to go discount in rural and small-town America, which had been underserved by high-priced mom-and-pop businesses, and the development of a truly revolutionary distribution system. Wal-Mart's system is based on hyper-efficient distribution centers where goods are not stored, but are transferred by truck to retail outlets within hours of receipt from the factory. "And after the 1990's, low wages and benefits proved crucial when Wal-Mart began to compete with unionized grocery chains," he said.

"Sam Walton was a beloved father-figure to hundreds of thousands of Wal-Mart employees or ‘associates,' as he called them," Lichtenstein continued. "But he was always a tightfisted manager who kept wages low, broke the wage and hour laws, and reminded workers that no one was so good that they could not be replaced."

Not all Wal-Mart employees are low-paid, however. Lichtenstein noted that company truck drivers, whose work is at the core of its distribution system, make four times as much as cashiers, and that's not likely to change.

"Wal-Mart has been willing to accommodate some of the complaints and demands made by environmentalists, anti-sweat shop activists, even by gay and lesbian Americans, but it draws the line at trade unionism," he said. "The country remains as hostile to unionism today as when Sam Walton founded Wal-Mart half a century ago.

Lichtenstein does see a chink in Wal-Mart's armor, however. "Today, Wal-Mart is staking much of its future on international expansion," he said. "But the sailing has not been all smooth. In Mexico, Canada, and the United Kingdom, the company is number one or two in the retail market. But Wal-Mart has failed in Germany, South Korea, and Hong Kong; and in China, store expansion has been painfully slow.

"Wal-Mart's stock price has been flat for nearly a decade because mass retailing is now a mature industry, so every competitor has adopted the once revolutionary innovations pioneered by the Arkansas discounter. Moreover, Wall Street fears that health, labor, and wage reforms proposed by the Obama administt Wal-Mart more than its unionized, high-wage, high-benefit competitors."

Lichtenstein, who is also director of the campus's Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy, is the author of "American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century."