Historians in the News

Fredrik Logevall wins Pulitzer for history; Tom Reiss and Gilbert King win for biography and non-fiction

Fredrik Logevall, John S. Knight Professor of International Studies at Cornell University, has won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam, published by Random House last year.Embers of War, which the Washington Post called a "product of formidable international research ... lucidly and comprehensively composed," is a study of France's war in Vietnam, from the end of World War II to the eventual French withdrawal in 1954.Though the war was foughtly primarily between the French and their colonial auxiliaries on one side and the Viet Minh on the other, Logevall argues that the conflict was truly international in scope and American policymakers had great influence over French decisions from the very beginning. In particular, he maintains that Franklin D. Roosevelt, long an advocate of decolonization, would have pressured the French to exit Indochina in 1945, had he lived. But with Roosevelt's death and Harry Truman's de-emphasis on decolonialization and his policy of vehement anticommunism in Europe and Asia, the seeds were sown for a long, bloody conflict in Southeast Asia.

Times Higher Ed.: U.S. humanities PhDs ‘produce more employable graduates’

Arts and humanities PhD graduates from the US are more employable than their UK counterparts, a conference on doctoral education has heard.The extra length of the US doctoral education – on average seven years compared with four in the UK – creates graduates with significantly more experience in teaching and administration, said Dina Iordanova, professor of film studies at the University of St Andrews.“Those coming out of UK programmes often have little experience in teaching and next to no experience in administration,” Professor Iordanova told the UK Council for Graduate Education’s International Conference on Development in Doctoral Education and Training on 12 April, where she was speaking in a personal capacity.Both factors contribute to university employers not being certain of applicants’ command of the field at large, she said....

Number of history majors decline; lowest level in ten years

Robert Townsend is the AHA’s deputy director, and the author of History’s Babel: Scholarship, Professionalization, and the Historical Enterprise, 1880–1940 (Univ. of Chicago Press).During the 2010–11 academic year, the number of undergraduate students earning degrees in history dropped—albeit by a small percentage—for the first time in a decade, even as the number of students earning degrees in all fields continued to rise. As a result, the history discipline's share of degrees earned in 2011 declined to the lowest level in 10 years (fig. 1).According to new information from the Department of Education, history programs conferred 35,059 bachelor's degrees in the discipline, and another 3,588 students earned degrees with history as their second major. Together, 0.6 percent fewer students earned history degrees this year compared to last.1

RIP Leading Historian and Author Prof Bernard Magubane

Anti-apartheid struggle stalwart, leading historian and academic Prof Bernard Magubane passed away at his home in Fourways, Johannesburg on Sunday.Magubane was born in 1930 on a farm near Colenso in Natal, but moved with his family to the city of Durban.In Bernard Magubane: My Life and Times, an autobiography written to coincide with his 80th birthday, Magubane relates how as a child he was radicalised by the conditions apartheid imposed on the majority of the country’s people. He became a teacher and rubbed shoulders with many of the country’s great educationists, his passion for learning leading him on to the University of Natal and eventually to the United States of America, in 1961, for postgraduate studies in the social sciences....

Cantankerous Historian of Science Questions Whether Science Can Achieve “Truth”

One of the best things about teaching at Stevens Institute of Technology, which I joined in 2005, is shooting the shit with distinguished historian of science James E. McClellan III. Jim has authored, co-authored or edited half a dozen books, including Science and Technology in World History: An Introduction, which he wrote with our late Stevens colleague Harold Dorn. The book, which won an award from the World History Association, serves as my textbook when I teach “History of Science and Technology.” Every time I read the book I learn something new, which perhaps means that I never read it carefully enough. Just kidding. I’ve learned more about the history of science from Jim than I like to admit....Horgan: To what extent can we learn about the emergence of modern science by focusing on pre-revolutionary France?

Dallek and Leuchtenburg cited in McClatchy article on culture shift

...“On cultural issues, the direction the country is moving is more progressive,” said Will Marshall, president of the centrist Progressive Policy Institute. “But that’s less clear on economic issues.”The trend to more liberal cultural views is part of a “compassionate impulse” Americans have long held, said author and historian Robert Dallek....“There is a move in the direction of cultural pluralism,” said William Leuchtenburg, historian at the University of North Carolina, with people more accepting of different cultures, different lifestyles and different attitudes .That’s not to say that change comes smoothly. The willingness to change “goes in cycles,” Dallek said, as people stop to absorb a wave of change. Thus, the social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s gave way to the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment for women, the rise of the Moral Majority and evangelical Christians in politics, and the tide of culturally conservative blue-collar Democrats abandoning their party and helping elect President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s....

Monticello historian's digitizing project

Thomas Jefferson died 186 years ago. But J. Jefferson Looney still wants the nation’s third president to speak for himself.The Monticello historian has spent more than a quarter-century deciphering, annotating and publishing thousands of Jefferson’s letters precisely as they were written, including eccentric spellings (“knolege”), obscure capitalizations and musings on slavery, God and death.Looney’s work is part of an audacious, multimillion-dollar memorial to some of the nation’s most prominent Founding Fathers: an attempt to track down and publish an exhaustive collection of all of the significant correspondence and other documents written by -- and sent to -- George Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin....Read more here: http://www.macon.com/2013/04/14/2431291/historian-seeks-to-have-jefferson.html#storylink=cpy...

1066 and all that

FEW school subjects are so divisive. When Michael Gove, Britain’s education secretary, released draft changes to the country’s national curriculum in February it was his plan for history that created headlines. Mr Gove’s proposal called for history to be studied “as a coherent, chronological narrative”, beginning with the early Britons and ending with the cold war. Opponents said the syllabus overstressed the deeds of “posh white blokes” and underplayed those of minorities. “Unteachable, unlearnable and un-British” blasted a campaign group on April 10th. Rival camps of historians have published petitions and rowed on television. That shoot-out will last beyond the official consultation period, which closes next week.

Keeping up with Kevin Starr

Asking Kevin Starr a question is like turning on a fire hose. First there's a blast of erudition. Then, as his intellect gathers, information rushes out in a deluge. He's talking, but it's as if an invisible scholar inside his head is yanking books off shelves, throwing them open, checking the index, then racing off to find the next volume. On the outside, Starr is an avuncular 72-year-old, but his brain is sprinting like an Olympian.Amazingly, it's possible to keep up.This may be Starr's greatest gift: not just that he has amassed a phenomenal body of knowledge but that he can translate it into dynamic works of history. There are eight volumes in his seminal "Americans and the California Dream" series, from "Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915" (1973) to "Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963" (2009). It's for these books — as well as his work as California State Librarian and his stellar teaching career — that Starr will be honored with the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement at the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes on April 19....

Joel Goldstein on “Veep”: “This is nothing like reality”

Before the first season of “Veep” premiered last year, star Julia Louis-Dreyfus was sure to stipulate just how much work she’d done to ensure her performance as a disempowered vice president was realistic. She told an assembled group of critics:“What was most interesting to hear was what was it like living at vice president’s residence. What’s the reality of that? It’s surprisingly small. Where does the secret service go? What happens if you have to get up at midnight to go to bathroom? I was interested not in the grandeur of it, but the real nitty gritty of it. Certain questions were not answered directly and I thought that was interesting.”While Louis-Dreyfus may have nailed the questions about the security detail on “Veep,” the show’s second season (beginning Sunday) has a long way to go on the broader strokes, said vice-presidential historian Joel Goldstein, of Saint Louis University, who watched some but not all of season 1.“I really like Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and I think she’s terrific, but when I saw the show, my reaction was — this is nothing like reality. Since Mondale, the vice president has really been a big deal.”...

Historians discuss immigration reform on Capitol Hill

Yesterday, a short distance from the AHA offices, supporters of immigration reform marched on the National Mall, as a bipartisan group of eight senators continue deliberations that have been alternately described as “stuck,” “close,” “virtually complete,” or “about to get serious.” The senators will likely reveal their plan for comprehensive immigration reform, if there is one, today.In response to the flurry of activity on this previously languishing issue, the National History Center, a project of the American Historical Association, sponsored a congressional briefing in the Rayburn House Office Building last Friday. These briefings offer congressional staff and members a historical perspective on issues of current interest. The historians who present at these briefings avoid making recommendations to Congress, but discuss previous paths taken and their outcomes.

Polish nationalists defend historian who blamed Jews for Holocaust

JTA — Leaders of a Polish nationalist movement said a historian’s claims that Jews helped perpetrate the Holocaust were “factual” and “necessary.”The historian who made the claims, Krzysztof Jasiewicz, was “far from politically correct but his statements are supported by historical facts,” Robert Winnicki, president of the All-Polish Youth, said in a statement published Tuesday on the website of the ultra-nationalist organization, which has a few thousand registered members.Artur Zawisza, a former lawmaker in the Polish parliament, is quoted as telling the news site NaTemat.pl that Jasiewicz “said too much common sense that has long been present in the literature.” He said the historian’s claims were a “necessary part of open debate.”...

Cuban Historian Enrique Ros, Father of Rep. Ros-Lehtinen, Dies

MIAMI – Cuban historian Enrique Ros died this week of respiratory complications, his daughter, U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, said Thursday. He was 89.Ros died Wednesday at South Miami Hospital, the South Florida lawmaker said in a statement....

Ken Burns on The Daily Show to discuss his new film

Documentarian Ken Burns questions the New York City institutions that botched the "Central Park Five" case.

Gap widens for faculty at colleges, report finds

For the academic elite — tenured professors at private research universities — average pay this year is $167,118, while at public research universities such professors earn $123,393, according to the annual report by the American Association of University Professors.After three years in which overall increases in full-time faculty pay lagged behind the rate of inflation, this year’s average increase, 1.7 percent, kept pace with consumer prices.But the difficult economic climate of recent years is taking a serious toll on higher education, especially public institutions. As states cut back their support for public institutions, the gap between the pay scales at private and public universities is continuing to grow, the report found. Average pay for assistant professors at private colleges that award only bachelor’s degrees is $62,763, while public colleges paid $58,591....

In history departments, it’s up with capitalism

A specter is haunting university history departments: the specter of capitalism.After decades of “history from below,” focusing on women, minorities and other marginalized people seizing their destiny, a new generation of scholars is increasingly turning to what, strangely, risked becoming the most marginalized group of all: the bosses, bankers and brokers who run the economy.Even before the financial crisis, courses in “the history of capitalism” — as the new discipline bills itself — began proliferating on campuses, along with dissertations on once deeply unsexy topics like insurance, banking and regulation. The events of 2008 and their long aftermath have given urgency to the scholarly realization that it really is the economy, stupid....

NYT gives Robert Remini grand obit

 

WaPo publishes Robert Remini obit

Robert V. Remini, an award-winning historian who was considered a preeminent biographer of President Andrew Jackson and who also served as official historian of the U.S. House of Representatives, died March 28 at a hospital in Evanston, Ill. He was 91.His death was announced by the University of Illinois at Chicago, with which Dr. Remini had been associated for nearly five decades. He had complications from a stroke, said his son-in-law Dennis Costello.Equal parts scholar and storyteller, Dr. Remini was regarded as one of the finest political biographers of his era. His subjects included presidents John Quincy Adams and Martin Van Buren, House speaker Henry Clay, senator and statesman Daniel Webster and Mormon leader Joseph Smith. Dr. Remini also wrote a sprawling history of the House of Representatives, where he served as historian from 2005 to 2010....

Historian invites former students to dinner as part of ‘retirement odyssey’

Silvio Laccetti was cleaning out his office after 43 years of teaching at the Stevens Institute of Technology, a science and technology school in Hoboken, New Jersey, when he stumbled across a pile of unreturned reports, assignments and examinations from some of the thousands of students he had taught over the years.It gave him an idea: invite some of his best former students for dinner. Not all at once, however: one at a time.What Dr Laccetti, who taught history, called his “retirement odyssey” involved 83 dinners and lunches consumed over three and a half years with 104 of his one-time students, mostly individually but a few in small groups.He spoke by phone with another dozen who lived too far away to meet in person.The odyssey gave him an opportunity academics seldom get: to measure his impact on the world.“They had listened to my advice,” Dr Laccetti, 72, said. “They maintained an interest in the humanities. They even talked about me to their kids, and taught their children some of the things that I taught them.”...

Haitian historian Georges Corvington, who chronicled the country’s capital, dies at age 88

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Georges Corvington, a prominent Haitian historian best known for his exhaustive study of the Caribbean nation’s capital of Port-au-Prince, died Wednesday at age 88, a close friend said.Fellow historian and longtime friend Georges Michel said that Corvington died peacefully in his sleep at his home in the capital he wrote so much about. Michel said Covington had recently spent a few weeks in the hospital and the cause of death was heart failure.“He’s a giant that has fallen,” said Michel, who is also a physician. “He was the greatest living Haitian historian.”...