This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream
media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously
biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in
each source note. Quotation marks are not used.
Source: NYT
Jul 29, 2013
The historian Howard Zinn won a dubious prize of sorts last year when his best-selling “People’s History of the United States” came in second in an informal online poll to determine the “least credible history book in print.”But now some of Mr. Zinn’s strongest scholarly critics have rushed to his defense, following the revelation that former Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana had, while in office, sent e-mails to a state education official asking for assurance that Mr. Zinn’s “truly execrable, antifactual piece of disinformation” was “not in use” in Indiana classrooms....
Source: NYT
Jul 29, 2013
FIRST came years of being a foot messenger in New York City and working in data entry. Then, frustrated with his life, and feeling the responsibility of providing for a child, Michael D. Hattem entered the Borough of Manhattan Community College — the only college that would admit him, he says, as a high school dropout with a G.E.D. He succeeded at community college, and, in 2011, graduated from City College.Today, Mr. Hattem, 38, is a graduate student at Yale working on a dissertation in American history that “explores the role of competing historical memories of 17th-century Britain in shaping late colonial political culture.”He told his exceptional story to help explain why he came to the defense of the American Historical Association last week when it issued a statement calling on universities to allow newly minted Ph.D’s to “embargo” their dissertations for up to six years — that is, keep them from being circulated online....
Source: Indianapolis Star
Jul 27, 2013
...[Former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels] upset Stanford University professor Sam Wineburg by invoking Wineburg’s criticisms of Zinn to defend his own stance. Wineburg objected to Daniels using his work to rationalize a ban on the textbook.“This is not about Zinn, per se,” Wineburg told the Star. “This is about whether in an open democratic society we should be exposed — whether you’re in ninth grade or seventh grade or a freshman at Purdue — whether you should be exposed to views that challenge your own cherished view.”In a tweet directed at Daniels, Wineburg wrote: “How could I possibly agree that ‘banning Zinn’ makes sense when I assign him in my own classes?”...
Source: Der Spiegel
Jul 26, 2013
British-American historian Walter Laqueur experienced the demise of the old Europe and the rise of the new. In a SPIEGEL interview, he shares his gloomy forecast for a European Union gripped by debt crisis. SPIEGEL: Mr. Laqueur, you experienced Europe and the Europeans in the best and the worst of times. Historical hot spots and the stations of your personal biography were closely and sometimes dramatically intertwined. Which conclusions have you reached today, at the advanced age of 92?Laqueur: I became a historian of the postwar era in Europe, but the Europe I knew no longer exists. My book "Out of the Ruins of Europe," published in 1970, ended with an optimistic assessment of the future. Later, in 2008, "The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent" was published. I returned to the subject in my latest book, "After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent." The sequence of titles probably says it all.SPIEGEL: The last two, at any rate, sound as if the demise of the Western world were imminent.
Source: Vanderbilt News
Jul 25, 2013
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham will be a dynamic presence at Vanderbilt University during the fall 2013 semester, teaching a political science course and leading two events open to the general public.“I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to be a part of the vibrant Vanderbilt world,” said Meacham. “The university seems to be in a kind of golden age–at once culturally exciting and intellectually exacting.”Meacham, executive editor and executive vice president at Random House, was awarded the Pulitzer for American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House. His most recent book, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and made many critics’ “best of the year” lists. Meacham is a contributing editor to Time and a former editor of Newsweek. A fellow of the Society of American Historians, he is a trustee of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, chairs the National Advisory Board of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University, and is a scholar-trustee of the New-York Historical Society....
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed.
Jul 25, 2013
Leslie Cohen Berlowitz has agreed to resign as president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on July 31, after she was accused of embellishing her résumé with a spurious doctoral degree, The Boston Globe reported....
Source: AHA Today
Jul 24, 2013
The AHA’s Statement on Policies Regarding the Embargoing of Completed History PhD Dissertations has generated wide discussion, controversy, articles inInside Higher Education and the Chronicle of Higher Education, and a number of questions. In the Q&A below, we’ve summarized some of the most common claims and questions about the statement that we’ve seen on Twitter, blogs, and the comment section of the AHA’s announcement. We welcome further discussion on this issue. Is the AHA recommending that students embargo their dissertations? No. The AHA is recommending that universities adopt flexible policies that will allow newly minted PhDs to decide for themselves whether or not to embargo their dissertations.
Source: NYT
Jul 23, 2013
For decades the dominant story of postwar American religious history has been the triumph of evangelical Christians. Beginning in the 1940s, the story goes, a rising tide of evangelicals began asserting their power and identity, ultimately routing their more liberal mainline Protestant counterparts in the pews, on the offering plate and at the ballot box.But now a growing cadre of historians of religion are reconsidering the legacy of those faded establishment Methodists, Presbyterians and Episcopalians, tracing their enduring influence on the movements for human rights and racial justice, the growing “spiritual but not religious” demographic and even the shaded moral realism of Barack Obama — a liberal Protestant par excellence, some of these academics say.After decades of work bringing evangelicals, Mormons and other long-neglected religious groups into the broader picture, these scholars contend, the historical profession is overdue for a “mainline moment.”
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Jul 22, 2013
The American Historical Association on Friday released a statement criticizing the way Mitch Daniels (when he governor of Indiana, prior to becoming president of Purdue University) exchanged e-mail messages with staff members criticizing the work of the late Howard Zinn. "Whatever the strengths or weaknesses of Howard Zinn’s text, and whatever the criticisms that have been made of it, we believe that the open discussion of controversial books benefits students, historians, and the general public alike. Attempts to single out particular texts for suppression from a school or university curriculum have no place in a democratic society," said the statement....
Source: David Austin Walsh for HNN
Jul 22, 2013
David Austin Walsh is the editor of the History News Network.It's a cliche, but it's true: historical controversies are as much about contemporary politics as they are about history.Laurence Zuckerman, a former reporter for the New York Times and currently an adjunct professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, just published a feature article in the The Nation that profiles the dispute between Richard Breitman and Allen Lichtman on the one hand and Rafael Medoff on the other about President Franklin D. Roosevelt's response to the Holocaust and his failure to save European Jews.Roosevelt's critics, argues Zuckerman, are motivated less by the historical evidence and more by contemporaries challenges faced by Israel. "The not-so-subtle message" of critics like Medoff, Zuckerman writes, is "like the Jews of Europe in 1939, Israel is under an existential threat and cannot count on anyone for help -- even the United States, even liberals, even Jews in the United States."
Source: HNN staff
Jul 22, 2013
In 1945, Detroit was the American Dream.During World War II, the Detroit region was the center of American wartime production. The Willow Run factory near Ypsilanti, a few miles outside of Detroit proper, produced nearly half of the some 18,500 B-24 Liberator bombers built during the war. Ninety-one percent of all G.I. helmets were produced in Detroit. The city was home to the nation's first tank plant; a quarter of the nearly 90,000 tanks produced by the United States during the war were built in Detroit.That was the Detroit Tom Sugrue's parents and grandparents knew. But it was a city largely built on quicksand, reliant on the postwar auto industry for continued growth and which dealt with the large wartime influx of African American workers with discriminatory housing policies and at times brutal violence.The good times wouldn't last.
Source: Stanford Daily
Jul 21, 2013
Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and a former Director of Middle East Studies at the American University in Cairo. As Egypt continues to grapple with the aftermath of a military-assisted popular uprising against the incumbent president, Beinin talked with The Daily about the recent events in Egypt, the role of the military in bringing about a change of government and how the transition may affect American foreign policy towards the African nation.The Stanford Daily (TSD): What do you make of the recent events in Egypt?
Source: Kansas City Star
Jul 20, 2013
Don’t underestimate the reach of “The Daily Show.”After Jonathan Sperber, a University of Missouri history professor, appeared on the show in April to discuss “Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life,” his biography of the German philosopher and revolutionary, he heard from several old friends.
“That included the girl I had a crush on in 1966,” Sperber said recently....
Source: jconline.com
Jul 20, 2013
What would the late historian Howard Zinn have been doing in the classroom last week after being called out as a fraud, his name dragged around three years ago by a man who was then Indiana’s governor and now president of one of the state’s major research universities?“He would teach the controversy,” said Nadine Dolby, a Purdue University professor watching as a beloved teacher from her days at Boston University was publicly upbraided by the president of her present university. “That’s just what he’d do.”...To Dolby, a curriculum studies professor in the College of Education, her professor’s story is one of dissent. She calls Zinn a role model when it comes to professors. And she recounts several stories about her time in class and beyond with Zinn in her 2011 book, “Rethinking Multicultural Education for the Next Generation.” Here’s her take.
Source: South China Morning Post
Jul 20, 2013
A translated work that apparently censored remarks on politics - such as Democratic Party founding chairman Martin Lee Chu-ming comparing the handover of Hongkongers to China to "surrendering Jews to Adolf Hitler's Germany" - will be recalled after its writer cried foul over the unapproved changes.The book's mainland-funded local publisher, Chung Hwa Book Company, agreed last night to withdraw the Chinese edition of A Concise History of Hong Kong from sale. It also apologised to the history professor who penned the work in English.Professor John Carroll, associate dean of the University of Hong Kong's arts faculty, earlier said he was "shocked and disappointed" about the changes....
Source: Cornell News
Jul 19, 2013
Eminent historian Andrew Roberts will offer a course at Cornell this fall as the inaugural Merrill Visiting Professor in History. His lecture course, Great European Leaders of the 19th and 20th Centuries and their Influence on History, will investigate the roles of 12 influential figures, including Napoleon, Stalin, Churchill and Thatcher.The visiting professorship is made possible by the Merrill family, who also support the annual Merrill Presidential Scholars Program and provided major funding for Cornell’s Merrill Family Sailing Center....
Source: Waterbury Republican-American
Jul 19, 2013
WATERBURY — A 74-year-old community college professor was found guilty of risk of injury to a minor, but was cleared of sexual assault Wednesday in Waterbury Superior Court.Mirvet Muca, an associate professor of political science and history at Naugatuck Valley Community College, is still employed by the school, but an official there said Thursday his status is under review....
Source: Queen's University Journal
Jul 19, 2013
A woman who received two threatening letters on Wednesday for being in a same-sex relationship is revealed to be Queen’s University history professor Karen Dubinsky.Dubinsky and her partner Susan Belyea say they received two letters that claimed affiliation with a Christian group based in the “Deep South,” which told the couple to move from Kingston or be subject to “deadly serious consequences.”...
Source: Toronto Globe and Mail
Jul 19, 2013
Once the dynamic heart of automotive America, the city of Detroit took the humbling step of filing for bankruptcy on Thursday – the largest U.S. municipality ever to do so. On Friday, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder defended his decision to authorize the bankruptcy filing....The Globe’s Joanna Slater spoke with Thomas Sugrue, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, an award-winning social history of the once-proud city, about its long decline....What are the most important factors that contributed to Detroit’s current mess?
Source: Ogden Standard-Examiner
Jul 19, 2013
OGDEN — “There are only two kinds of people who smile all the time: fools and Americans.”“It’s a great, old Russian saying,” said Susan Matt, Weber State University history department chairwoman and professor. “Americans tend to seem happy all the time, even if they are not, underneath.”Matt just returned from an Organization of American Historians fellowship that took her to Germany to teach a university course about emotions in United States history. And although most of her students at the University of Tübingen were fluent in English, Matt did encounter the occasional cultural divide.“I would say something and pause for a laugh, and there would be deafening silence,” Matt recalled with a laugh. “I would realize that a joke didn’t translate. So I suggested someone write a paper on American humor, and the differences between German and American humor.”...
