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: HNN staff
Jul 19, 2013
The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition announced on Thursday the finalists for the $25,000 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, awarded to books dedicated to African American history.This year's finalists are Stephen Kantrowitz's More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889 (Penguin), Sydney Nathans's To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker (Harvard) , and Brett Rushforth's Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous & Atlantic Slaveries in New France (University of North Carolina).Stephen Kantrowitz is professor of history and director of graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Nathans is professor emeritus of history at Duke, and Brett Rushforth is associate professor of history and director of graduate studies at William & Mary.The winner will be announced in the fall, and the award will be presented in New York City in February.
Source: Otago Daily Times (NZ)
Jul 19, 2013
Despite rape and other sexual assaults having low conviction rates, a London-based historian is optimistic this situation can be changed and offending reduced.Prof Joanna Bourke, author of a book titled Rape, A History from 1860 to the Present (2007), said in Dunedin this week that rape and other sexual assaults were issues for men and society, not just for women.Her optimism came partly from her perspective as an historian: ''I can see that things have changed and ... they can change again.'...
Source: The Advocate
Jul 18, 2013
A Philadelphia historian sparked a days-long — and so far fruitless — archival search when she challenged her blog readers to take an “impossible” test purportedly once given to prospective black voters in Louisiana.The test, which asks the taker to “spell backwards, forwards” among other tasks, went viral on the Internet after it posted on a noted civil rights history website. The Tennessee State Archives put a copy in its collections. Teachers are using it in their history lessons. However, history experts in Louisiana do not have a copy of it.“I suspected that was a hoax,” Andrew Salinas, reference archivist for the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, said Wednesday.A former civil rights worker who insists the test was given offered another explanation. Jeff Schwartz said Louisiana might have been reluctant to preserve an embarrassing chapter in its history....
Source: HNN staff
Jul 18, 2013
The Network of Concerned Historians, a Dutch-based advocacy group, released its 2013 report on history and human rights on Thursday.The report covers 97 countries and criticizes the United States for its failure to prosecute alleged human rights violations under the George W. Bush administration, as well as the suppression of evidence of Soviet war crimes by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II.The CIA and the Pentagon also come under scrutiny. In May 2012, the CIA refused to declassify part of its official internal history of the Bay of Pigs invasion, though the legal case is now under review, while the Pentagon censored 198 passages in Anthony Shaffer's Operation Dark Heart, a memoir of an intelligence officer in Afghanistan.
Source: The Daily Beast
Jul 17, 2013
From an interview with The Daily Beast's Noah Charney....Describe your morning routine.Absolutely. When I want to write, at home, I get up about 5, make coffee, slowly begin to be conscious. I’ll do a fair amount of other work, check email and Facebook and news sites, then I’ll bring my wife coffee and read the newspaper. It’s a long day’s reaching consciousness. By 8 I like to be at the computer and I like to write until about noon.Do you like to map out your books ahead of time, or just let it flow?I write my first draft on the computer. I used to write everything out by hand, but just don’t have the time, patience, or legible handwriting to make that possible anymore. I like to write quickly, so in ideal conditions I’ll have done a lot of research, made a lot of notes, before I sit down. But I don’t do an outline. By the time I could do an outline, I’ll already know what I need to say, so I’ll just sit and write.What do you need to have produced/completed in order to feel that you’ve had a productive writing day?
Source: UPI
Jul 17, 2013
The not guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman case has me thinking a lot about a book I first encountered in seminary, Is God a White Racist?, by the Rev. Dr. Bill Jones. As a budding seminary student, it took me by surprise. Now, as a wiser, older professor looking at the needless death of Trayvon Martin, I have to say: I get it.God ain’t good all of the time. In fact, sometimes, God is not for us. As a black woman in a nation that has taken too many pains to remind me that I am not a white man, and am not capable of taking care of my reproductive rights, or my voting rights, I know that this American god ain’t my god. As a matter of fact, I think he’s a white racist god with a problem. More importantly, he is carrying a gun and stalking young black men.
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Jul 17, 2013
Mitch Daniels, as an unconventional choice to become Purdue University's president, has repeatedly pledged his strong commitment to academic freedom. And many professors -- including some who had questioned the wisdom of appointing a governor as university president -- have given him high marks for the start of his work at Purdue.But on Monday, the Associated Press published an article based on e-mail records it obtained under Indiana's open records laws. Those e-mail records showed Daniels, while governor of Indiana, asking that no public universities teach the work of Howard Zinn, seeking a statewide investigation into "what is credit-worthy" to see that similar works were not being taught for credit, and considering ways to cut state funds to a program led by a professor who had criticized him.
Source: AHA Today
Jul 16, 2013
Courtesy Julie-Irene Nkodo, project assistant at the AHA.Bernadotte Schmitt Grant: to support research in the history of Europe, Asia, and AfricaJeffrey Ahlman, Smith College “Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana.”Laura Beers, American University “Red Ellen: Socialist, Feminist, Internationalist.”Alexander Bevilacqua, Princeton University “Islamic Culture in the European Enlightenment.”Jessica Clark, McGill University “Imperial Beauty: The Global Trade in Appearance, 1830-1930.”Surekha Davies, Western Connecticut State University “Mapping the Peoples of the New World: Ethnography, Imagery and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe.”Erin Hochman, Southern Methodist University “Anschluss before Hitler: The Politics of Transborder Nationalism in Germany and Austria, 1918-1938.”
Source: Illinois Times
Jul 13, 2013
A GROUP of leading academics is calling on the Scottish Government to intervene in a controversy over the Catholic Archives in Edinburgh.Historians Professor Dauvit Broun, Professor Thomas Owen Clancy, Dr Jenny Wormald, and Professor Ewen Cameron have already attempted to force the issue on the Parliament's Public Petitions Committee, calling for the Church to reverse plans to split the archives, dating back to Mary, Queen of Scots, and move on claims they are deteriorating.Although the committee has responded claiming the bid was outside its remit, it has advised those behind it to enrol the support of sympathetic politicians if they want a debate on the issue in Parliament....
Source: UPenn News
Jul 12, 2013
Michael Katz has been elected to the American Philosophical Society. He is the Walter H. Annenberg professor of history and a research associate at the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Election to the APS recognizes accomplishments in math and physical sciences, biological sciences, social sciences, humanities and the arts and various professions and recognizes leaders in public and private affairs....
Source: ABC News (AU)
Jul 12, 2013
An oral history project will document the life stories of gay and lesbian Australians in a first comprehensive record of the changing attitudes to homosexuality.The joint three-year project by Macquarie University and the National Library of Australia will use historians from the University of Queensland and the University of Melbourne to record the life stories of 60 gay and lesbian people across Australia.Professor Clive Moore, who is involved in gathering the interviews from the University of Queensland, says the project is looking to hear from a range of perspectives."We want to gather [stories] from people who were born from about 1940 through to the younger generation that might be 20 years-old," Professor Moore says....
Source: NYT
Jul 10, 2013
A group of prominent writers and scholars filed a lawsuit on Wednesday to stop the New York Public Library from demolishing the stacks in its flagship 42nd Street building or moving any books off the site. The complaint, filed in New York State Supreme Court, formalizes concerns about the Central Library Plan, which would replace the stacks with a circulating library and is expected to cost at least $300 million.
“Removal of the stacks, and the off-site displacement of the materials they hold, threatens to endanger the central library’s status as one of the world’s leading research facilities,” the complaint says, “and irrevocably alter the architectural integrity of the central library, a New York City landmark and a national historic landmark.” The plaintiffs include the writer Edmund Morris; the historian David Nasaw; Joan W. Scott, a social science professor at the Institute for Advanced Study; and Stanley N. Katz, a professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton.
Along with the library and its executives, the lawsuit names the city and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg as defendants.
Source: NYT
Jul 10, 2013
“It is the duty of every honest person to write the truth about Stalin,” Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, a Soviet historian and dissident, wrote in the preface of his seminal book “The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny,” published illegally in 1981.A survivor of the gulag whose parents died in Stalin’s purges, Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko spent a lifetime in almost fanatical devotion to that duty, working until his death on Tuesday in Moscow at 93 to expose the darkest truths of the Soviet era.His books cracked through the shell of Soviet censorship that surrounded much of the Stalin-era brutality, offering readers at home and in the West a vivid portrait of tyranny and violence....
Source: Joseph J. Ellis in The Daily Beast
Jul 10, 2013
Joseph J. Ellis (b 1943) was educated at the College of William and Mary (B.A.) and Yale University (M.A., Ph.D.). Since 1972 he has taught courses in American history at Mount Holyoke College, where he also served as Dean of Faculty for ten years and Acting President (1983-84). He recently retired from his position as the Ford Foundation Professor of History Emeritus.EDMUND MORGAN, who died Monday, was my teacher at Yale from 1965 to 1969 and my mentor and role model in America history ever since. In our last conversation, he declared that he was ready to go, that he had outlived his beloved Benjamin Franklin and did not wish to outlive himself.Ed was a rare breed, almost extinct these days, revered within the historical profession as the epitome of scholarly sophistication, while also the author of books that the general public found readable and seductive.He was a small man, almost diminutive, but the famous description of James Madison also applied to Ed: “Never have I seen so much mind in so little matter.” A plausible case can be made that he was the most significant and influential American historian in the last half of the 20th century....
Source: Oxford Press
Jul 9, 2013
OXFORD — A Miami University history professor has taken his interest in coffee from the classroom to the business world, opening the Oxford Coffee Company at 21 Lynn Avenue.
Bob Thurston said his interest in coffee goes back many years, starting as a personal interest. As his research took him to other countries and he added to his knowledge of the subject, it crossed over from curiosity to scholarly interest.
“I taught the history of coffee at Miami and taught about the history of coffee in other courses,” he said....
Source: NYT
Jul 9, 2013
Edmund S. Morgan, an award-winning historian who illuminated the intellectual world of the Puritans, explored the paradox of freedom and slavery in colonial Virginia and, in his 80s, wrote a best-selling biography of Benjamin Franklin, died on Monday in New Haven. He was 97.His death was confirmed by his editor, Robert Weil.Like his mentor and fellow atheist, the Harvard historian Perry Miller, Professor Morgan found his richest material in the religious thought of Puritan New England and endless fascination in the theological debates and spiritual struggles of men like John Winthrop, Roger Williams and Ezra Stiles.“I think that any group of people who have a system of belief that covers practically everything, and who act upon it, are bound to be interesting to any scholar,” he said in a 1987 interview with The William and Mary Quarterly....
Source: Bernama
Jul 9, 2013
MELBOURNE, July 9 (Bernama) -- An Australian National University history professor has become the first Australian woman to win a major international prize for the promotion of peace in Asia.Prof. Tessa Morris-Suzuki was presented with the prestigious Fukuoka Prize worth A$33,000 (US$30,286.89) on Tuesday, the Canberra Times reported.The annual award, sponsored by the Japanese city of Fukuoka, celebrates connections between Asian countries and aims to further peaceful relations between them....
Source: Jennifer Reut for AHA Today
Jul 8, 2013
Jennifer Reut is associate editor of the AHA magazine Perspectives.With the recent proliferation of the digital humanities (DH) in and outside the academy, we thought it might be useful to draw attention to the kinds of projects historians are developing. The National Endowment of the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities (NEH-ODH) has been an early and substantial supporter of projects and workshops across the DH community, so it made sense to look at the recent round of NEH-ODH grantees as a way of highlighting recent work by historians.True to the nature of DH, many of the projects are broadly applicable to scholarship in the humanities, rather than just history, particularly those that construct platforms or environments for data and artifact sharing, analysis, and publication. We’ve focused on a few that were either specifically designed by historians or with an obvious application to historical studies, but we encourage you to view the full range of past and present grants at the NEH-ODH site and explore some of the other projects for possible intersection with your own interests and research.Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants, which we are featuring here, are smaller grants for projects that are still in the planning or prototype stage. Wherever possible, we have used the text from the grantees description.
Source: Beach Carolina
Jul 8, 2013
NASHVILLE, TN July 8, 2013 — The American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) proudly announces that the N.C. Museum of History in Raleigh is the recipient of an Award of Merit from the AASLH Leadership in History Awards for the permanent exhibit History in Every Direction: Tar Heel Junior Historian Association Discovery Gallery. The AASLH Leadership in History Awards, now in its 68th year, is the most prestigious recognition for achievement in the preservation and interpretation of state and local history.The interactive exhibit History in Every Direction features hands-on activities related to exploring history through five kinds of primary sources: artifacts, documents, photographs, oral history, and buildings and sites. The exhibit also showcases award-winning projects by members of the Tar Heel Junior Historian Association, which is based at the N.C. Museum of History. THJHA’s many annual contests encourage students in grades four to 12 to discover and share the historical significance of people, places and events in their own communities. There are more than 5,000 Tar Heel junior historians in 47 counties across North Carolina....
Source: WSJ
Jul 8, 2013
PITTSBURGH — A Pittsburgh bridge has been renamed for Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough on his 80th birthday.County officials gathered Sunday to rename the 16th Street Bridge in McCullough's honor. A Pittsburgh native and two-time Pulitzer prize winner, McCullough said no honor has touched him like the decision to rename the bridge after him.McCullough, who wrote a book about the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, said he's had many honors."But no pat on the back has ever touched me to the heart, to the depths of what I am, the way this announcement of a bridge named in my honor has," the Pittsburgh-Post Gazette reported. "There's something magical about a bridge."...
