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: Bloomberg News
Jun 18, 2013
Niall Ferguson has written an old man’s book.Not too many years ago, in “Colossus” (2004), Ferguson was advocating that the U.S. face up to its Imperial destiny. And in “Civilization: The West and the Rest” (2011) he described how “six killer apps” made the West great.No more Churchill’s sunny uplands for us, apparently, as “The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die,” makes clear. Ferguson writes, “My over-arching question is: What exactly has gone wrong in the Western world in our time?”Surely, “everything’s going to hell” is the old man’s lament. Ferguson, who once personified the Oxford history don as sex symbol, turned 49 this year, so “Degeneration” feels a bit rushed, premature. On the other hand, looking at the last five years would depress anyone.
Source: China Daily
Jun 18, 2013
The China theater of World War II is sometimes forgotten today in the West. But one historian aims to change that, Andrew Moody in Oxford reports.Rana Mitter is determined to shed light on what is often seen in the West - although clearly not in China - as the forgotten war.Despite killing up to 20 million people, including many savagely such as in the infamous Nanjing Massacre, and creating between 80 and 100 million refugees, China's War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1937-45) is often treated as a World War II sideshow."I thought it was one of the great untold stories of the 20th century and certainly the World War II period," he says....
Source: WaPo
Jun 17, 2013
William Z. Slany, a top State Department historian who helped oversee a study in the 1990s that exposed Nazi looting of Jewish property and that led to $8 billion in belated compensation for Holocaust victims and their families, died May 13 at his home in Reston. He was 84.The cause was heart ailments, said his former wife, Beverly Zweiben.Dr. Slany was the State Department’s chief historian from 1982 until his retirement in 2000. He drew the most attention for a massive, two-part study that burrowed into the history of Nazi Germany to expose the methodical theft of Jewish property.The stolen assets encompassed jewelry and other valuables belonging to victims of the regime’s persecution. The looting was so extreme as to include gold teeth taken from concentration camp victims....
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed.
Jun 17, 2013
Stephen Robertson, an associate professor of history at the University of Sydney, will be the new director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Mr. Robertson, 45, was a postdoctoral fellow in George Mason's department of history and art history from 1998 to 1999. He will begin his new job in July.Among Mr. Robertson's collaborative works is Digital Harlem, an interactive account of everyday life in that neighborhood in the early 1900s. The project won the American Historical Association's Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History in 2009 and an online-history award from a division of the American Library Association in 2011....
Source: Macleans (Canada)
Jun 17, 2013
The often controversial Niall Ferguson, 49, is one of the world’s most prominent historians. A specialist in international and economic history, a professor at Harvard and a senior research fellow at Oxford, Ferguson is the author of The Ascent of Money and Civilization: The West and the Rest, among other works. Married to feminist and atheist activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the British-American scholar is also a vocal critic of U.S. President Barack Obama. Ferguson’s latest book, The Great Degeneration, which originated in 2012 as the BBC’s prestigious Reith Lectures, condemns what he sees as an era of decline in the West, pinning the blame on our deteriorating institutions.Q: You have a reputation, rightly or wrongly, as a Western triumphalist, and now you’re writing about Western decline. Is this an about-turn?
Source: HNN Staff
Jun 14, 2013
Regina Kunzel, a professor at the University of Minnesota, will join the faculty at Princeton University as of July 1, 2013.She will be the Doris Stevens Professor in Women's Studies and hold joint appointments in history and gender & sexuality studies.Kunzel is the author of Criminal Intimacy: Sex in Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (2008), which won prizes from the American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association, and a Lambda Literary Award.She holds a B.A. from Stanford University in 1981 and her PhD from Yale University in 1990.
Source: Chicago Maroon
Jun 14, 2013
Economics professor Robert Fogel, who shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for applying economic analysis to history and taught for at the University for over 30 years, died Tuesday morning. He was 86.In an e-mail sent out over the listhost for economics majors on Wednesday, department chairman John List said that Fogel had died of pneumonia contracted after a mild heart attack.Fogel, along with Douglass North—with whom he shared the Nobel Prize—is considered a pioneer of “cliometrics”—the practice of using quantitative methods to analyze history. Called a “bomb thrower” by the New York Times after winning the Nobel Prize, Fogel’s economic approach to history often challenged conventional wisdom. His 1974 book Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery found that slavery was more economically efficient than free agriculture. Fogel’s analysis led him and co-author Stanley Engerman to conclude that because slaves were valuable economic assets, slaveowners were inclined to treat them well. While acknowledging that slaves were oppressed in ways that could not be represented through data, Fogel concluded that the demise of slavery was for political reasons, not economic ones....
Source: Taipei Times
Jun 14, 2013
A history camp planned by the student association of National Chengchi University’s history department has been criticized as a brainwashing campaign after a press release praised Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and his son, former president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國).Titled “Images, Lives and Histories,” the university’s third history camp will take place from July 8 to July 10, and is open to 50 senior-high school students. Each participant will have to pay a registration fee of NT$2,500.However, the camp sparked criticism after the association issued a press release saying: “The event seeks to let the exploits of important historical figures, including former presidents Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo, unfold vividly in front of the eyes of young pupils and the public through multimedia systems.”...
Source: WaPo
Jun 13, 2013
Robert W. Fogel, a Nobel Prize-winning economic historian who used empirical data in innovative and iconoclastic ways, most notably to dispute longheld assumptions about why slavery collapsed as an institution in the United States, died June 11 at a rehabilitation facility in Oak Lawn, Ill. He was 86.The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter-in-law Suzanne Fogel. Dr. Fogel, a Chicago resident, spent much of his career at the University of Chicago and directed its Center for Population Economics.Dr. Fogel shared the 1993 Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences with Douglass North, then of Washington University in St. Louis. Both winners were on the 1960s vanguard of a field known as cliometrics, which merges economic theory with statistical analysis of hard numbers raked from the past; Clio is the muse of history in Greek mythology....
Source: US News and World Report
Jun 13, 2013
President Obama seems more committed to protecting national security than promoting civil liberties and privacy rights, which puts him firmly in the tradition of most of his predecessors, says presidential historian Robert Dallek."It's not surprising," Dallek tells me. "This is what presidents do."Dallek says one reason is that there are "real national security concerns" that preoccupy every commander in chief. In Obama's case, they include fear of a repetition of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombings....
Source: All Things Liberty
Jun 12, 2013
I recently asked our readers via Facebook who they’d most like to see interviewed next and T.H. Breen was among the handful of historians named (hat tip to Matthew Kroelinger). Breen is the William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University and a specialist on the American revolution. He is the author of several books and more than 60 articles. In 2010, he released his latest book, American Insurgents, American Patriots. Breen won the Colonial War Society Prize for the best book on the American Revolution for Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (2005). Breen currently lives in Greensboro, Vermont, and recently took the time to answer a few questions about past and future works, recommended reading and time travel.1 // American Insurgents, American Patriots reminds us that revolutions are violent events. Do you think there was a greater strategy behind most of the violence, or was it primarily raw emotion and vengeance?
Source: Tablet
Jun 12, 2013
Adolf Hitler loved American movies. Every night at about 9:00, after the Führer had tired out his listeners with his hours-long monologues, he would lead his dinner guests to his private screening room. The lights would go down, and Hitler would fall silent, probably for the first time that day. He laughed heartily at his favorites Laurel and Hardy and Mickey Mouse, and he adored Greta Garbo: Camille brought tears to the Führer’s eyes. Tarzan, on the other hand, he thought was silly.As it turns out, Hitler’s love for American movies was reciprocated by Hollywood. A forthcoming book by the young historian Ben Urwand, to be published by Harvard University Press in October, presents explosive new evidence about the shocking extent of the partnership between the Nazis and major Hollywood producers. Urwand, a former indie rock musician and currently a member of Harvard’s prestigious Society of Fellows, takes the subject personally: His parents were Jewish refugees from Egypt and Hungary. Digging through archives in Berlin and Washington, D.C., he has unearthed proof that Hollywood worked together with the Nazis much more closely than we ever imagined.
Source: Guardian (UK)
Jun 10, 2013
Washington is due to nominate the head of finance of Barack Obama's re-election campaign, Matthew Barzun, as the new US ambassador to London, according to diplomatic sources.Barzun's nomination has been delayed by the general backlog of personnel appointments at the state department as it looks around for new faces to fill critical roles in Obama's second administration, but it is said now to be imminent.Barzun, 42, is a Kentucky-based businessman who was made ambassador to Sweden in 2009 in recognition of his work on the 2008 Obama campaign, where he won praise for amassing large numbers of small scale contributors. But he was called back to the US two years later to lead the fundraising drive for the 2012 campaign, the most expensive in US history. The campaign Barzun ran raised $730m (£470m)....
Source: Deseret News
Jun 9, 2013
LAYTON, Utah (AP) — The Mormon History Association has awarded its highest honor to a University of Utah professor.The organization presented the Leonard J. Arrington Award to Martha Bradley-Evans at a banquet Friday night in Layton during its annual two-day conference....
Source: WaPo
Jun 7, 2013
Richard G. Doty, a scholar of money who helped humanize coins and currency by showing how the objects might reflect the culture, values and history of a society, died June 2 at the Powhatan Nursing Home in Falls Church. He was 71.The cause was complications from lymphoma, said his wife, Cindi Roden.At the time of his death, Dr. Doty was the senior numismatic curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. “He was really a historian, more than a numismatic,” said Ute Wartenberg Kagan, executive director of the American Numismatic Society. “He interpreted the coins, and that made him very special.”...
Source: Wales Online (UK)
Jun 7, 2013
A Welsh historian’s expert knowledge of the British army helped secure compensation announced for Kenyans tortured during the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s.Dr Huw Bennett from Aberystwyth University, unearthed new evidence showing the British government knew about and sanctioned physical abuse and torture of thousands of Kenyans at the end of British colonial rule.On Thursday Foreign Secretary William Hague announced Britain is to pay out £19.9m in costs and compensation to more than 5,000 elderly Kenyans who suffered torture and abuse during the Mau Mau uprising....
Source: NYT
Jun 5, 2013
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the prestigious 233-year-old scholarly society in Cambridge, Mass., said on Tuesday that it is standing behind its president, Leslie Cohen Berlowitz, after accusations that she had falsely claimed on at least two grant proposals to have a doctorate....The accusations, reported in The Boston Globe on Tuesday, sent shock waves through intellectual circles in Cambridge and beyond, along with speculation that a leader who has long weathered criticism about her sharp-elbowed management style might be out the door....Few ... associated with the academy were willing to speak on the record, though even some who spoke warmly of Ms. Berlowitz suggested that a deliberate attempt to inflate credentials would be unforgivable.“I have enjoyed a good working relationship with her for many years, and appreciate many of the things she has done for the academy,” David Hollinger, a historian at the University of California, Berkeley, and a fellow since 1997, said via e-mail. “But if it comes to be clearly proven that she has systematically deceived the academy, she should resign forthwith.”
Source: AP
Jun 5, 2013
WASHINGTON — Three historians are recommending the use of passages from key speeches by President Dwight D. Eisenhower — including his message to troops during the D-Day invasion — to help represent the 34th president in a planned memorial in the nation’s capital.On Wednesday night, the Eisenhower Memorial Commission hosted a public forum on which of Ike’s words should be included in the memorial planned for a site near the National Mall. The design of the planned memorial has been hotly debated.Professor Louis Galambos of Johns Hopkins University, Professor Richard Striner of Washington College in Maryland and former Library of Congress historian Daun van Ee studied Eisenhower’s speeches to recommend six for consideration. Two are from Eisenhower’s tenure as World War II general and four come from his presidency....
Source: Get Reading (UK)
Jun 5, 2013
A critically acclaimed book by a University of Reading professor about life under Italian dictator Benito Mussolini has scooped another prestigious award.Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy by Christopher Duggan has won the Wolfson History Prize which recognises the best historical writing produced in the UK.Professor Duggan, a leading authority on the political, social and cultural history of modern Italy, was presented with the award at a ceremony at Claridge’s in London on May 14.The latest award follows Prof Duggan’s success in March when the book was named Political History Book of the Year at The Paddy Power and Total Politics Political Book Awards 2013....
Source: UW Madison
Jun 5, 2013
On June 6, 1944, a massive military force arrived on the beaches of Normandy in a surprise invasion intended to overthrow Nazi Germany. The story of brave Allied forces splashing ashore under heavy fire has been immortalized in novels, memoirs, documentary films, and blockbuster movies — with American GIs cast as the unequivocal heroes of the day.A famous photo circulating the globe at the time summed things up: a happy GI embraced by ecstatic French girls.But that photo also illuminates a darker side of the story, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison History Professor Mary Louise Roberts. In her new book, "What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France," Roberts writes that while heroism abounded during liberation, for some Allied troops, command of geographical territory meant command of sexual territory, as well. As they entered and occupied the port towns of Le Havre, Reims, Cherbourg and Marseilles, many soldiers took what they wanted — when and where they wanted — from the French female population....
