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: Guardian (UK)
Nov 26, 2012
This Friday sees the deadline for submissions to what will be the largest ever meeting of historians of science in the UK, and almost certainly the largest for at least a generation to come....With the individual submissions still to come in, this promises to be huge for the history of science, which usually counts conference delegates in the 10s or 100s.The event is taking place next year, 22-28 July 2013, in Manchester. It is officially hosted by the British Society for the History of Science, and is being co-ordinated locally by members of the University of Manchester's Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine....
Source: NYT
Nov 26, 2012
Henry Wiencek suspected he would be in for a rough ride when “Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves,” his scathing assessment of America’s third president, was published last month. But just how rough he may not have realized.True, Mr. Wiencek, an independent scholar, has received the kind of attention most authors can only dream of: book excerpts on the covers of both Smithsonian and American History magazines, a C-Span interview at Monticello, almost universally glowing reviews from nonspecialists. (Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post called the book “brilliant,” while Laura Miller of Salon hailed it as one “every American should read.”)
Source: Kevin M. Levin for The Atlantic
Nov 26, 2012
Kevin M. Levin is a Civil War historian based in Boston. He is the author of the book Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder and can be found online at Civil War Memory. Historians are stakeholders in anything that attempts to represent the past. The vast majority of these stories pass us by innocently enough, but when the most popular Hollywood director makes a movie about Lincoln we watch and listen closely. We also feel a strong need to educate the general public and point out interpretive shortcomings in popular films.Over the past few days I've read numerous reviews of Spielberg's Lincoln by professional historians, both in print and in my circle of social media friends. All of them are informative, even if they tend to reflect individual research agendas much more than the movie itself.Beyond nitpicking specific moments such as the roll call in the House or whether Lincoln ever slapped Robert, my fellow historians have pointed out the lack of attention on women and abolitionists, as well as the free black community in Washington, D.C. Do any of these critiques help us to better understand the movie? No. They simply reinforce what we already know, which is that Hollywood will never make a movie that satisfies the demands of scholars. Nor should it....
Source: Politico
Nov 25, 2012
Washington's political culture and the corrosive impact of money on politics are killing compromise, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin says."Even in LBJ's time, Republicans and Democrats stayed there on the weekends. They weren't running home to raise money," she said in an interview aired Sunday on CBS's "Face the Nation." "Money is the poison in the system, we can never forget that, I think." Kearns Goodwin also pointed to the effect of the 24-hour news cycle in the deterioration of Washington culture. "You have the television that honors people who are extremists on either side. You've got districts that are so apportioned. So the political culture has to change somehow," she said. "So maybe we do need to just put them all together in a room and not let them out."...
Source: WBUR
Nov 22, 2012
A great many families going to the movies over this Thanksgiving weekend will probably see Lincoln, Steven Spielberg's new film starring Daniel Day-Lewis and an impressive cast.Based on a biography by Doris Kearns Goodwin, but scripted by playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner, it's been very well-reviewed, but here's a question: How true to history is it?Ronald White, author of A. Lincoln: A Biography, tells NPR's Linda Wertheimer that if a ninth-grader were to write a school paper based on the film, she'd find that its "dramatic core" is basically on target.Interview HighlightsOn the film's overall historical correctness"The dramatic core of this remarkable four months of trying to pass the 13th Amendment [which banned slavery] is true. Is every word true? No. Did Lincoln say, 'And to unborn generations ...'? No. But this is not a documentary. And so I think the delicate balance or blend between history and dramatic art comes off quite well."...
Source: AP
Nov 20, 2012
DALLAS — The city of Dallas will mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy next year with a ceremony featuring the tolling of church bells, a moment of silence and readings by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough from the president’s speeches.“I think what we want to do is focus on the life and legacy and leadership of President Kennedy,” Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said Tuesday. “The tone is going to be serious, simple, respectful, and it’s going to be about his life.”...
Source: New Yorker
Nov 19, 2012
ABSTRACT: ANNALS OF EDUCATION about Diane Ravitch, who has emerged as one of the leading opponents of the education-reform movement. Now seventy-four, Ravitch has been a forceful voice in education debates for more than four decades. A research professor at New York University since 1995, she has taught at Columbia University’s Teachers’ College, served as an Assistant Secretary of Education, and edited education journals. She has written ten notable books on education history and policy. Most recently, she has written a series of scathing rebuttals of reform measures in The New York Review of Books and some two thousand posts on a blog she started in April, which has received almost a million and a half page views. Since the publication, in 2010, of her book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education,” she has barnstormed across the country giving speeches berating the reform movement, which, in addition to test-based “accountability,” also supports school choice and charter schools (public institutions that often receive substantial private funding and are free from many regulations, such as hiring union teachers in states that require it), and which she calls a “privatization” movement.
Source: Washington Examiner
Nov 19, 2012
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio lit up the Internet Monday after his interview with GQ devolved into a discussion of rap. The rising Republican star not only spoke knowledgeably about Public Enemy's role in hip hop, but weighed in on whether Kanye West and Nicki Minaj are rappers or singers and name-dropped Tupac Shakur. Considering that his party's nominee this year, Mitt Romney, identified a bunch of old white guys as his musical favorites (Garth Brooks, Alabama, the Eagles), Rubio looks downright edgy.He also looks very smart, according to hip hop historian Davey D, a journalist and professor at San Francisco State University."He covered all the bases," Davey D told Yeas & Nays of Rubio's favorite rap songs. "That Marco's a slick guy."...
Source: Guardian (UK)
Nov 19, 2012
With the steady growth of self-publishing, do we need to redefine what scholarship is? This week on the Higher Education Network Wanda Wyporska explains why she is a 'secret academic'."Academics no longer have to be in an ivory tower lecturing, writing peer-reviewed articles, or even be attached to a university. There are historians who have abandoned PhDs but written books, enthusiastic amateur historians whose knowledge of their field would put dons to shame, and journalists who present TV series on history although they don't actually have a degree."The other day I heard someone describe himself as a professional historian though he only had a BA in history. I found myself feeling rather huffy. Surely one needs at least a PhD to use that label? Can I still call myself a historian, given my day job outside university and the fact I haven't been to a conference on my subject for more than a decade?"My desire to pursue a PhD in history came out of my sheer lust for books. My fantasy of a professorial room came from the realisation that I needed a job to accommodate my expanding library. Doing a doctorate was a way of fulfilling my twin ambitions: to have lots of books and to write a book....
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
Nov 18, 2012
When Ukrainian historian Stanislav Kulchytskyi began poring through thousands of declassified secret police files in Kiev, he felt as if his eyes had finally been opened.The files contained reports, letters, telegrams and directives all relating to the famine in 1932 and 1933 that killed more than three million Ukrainians. Many historians like Prof. Kulchytskyi had long concluded that the famine was a man-made disaster and genocide, imposed by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to squash growing Ukrainian nationalism. But it was only after the Ukrainian government recently opened up public archives and declassified hundreds of thousands of documents that researchers have started to get first-hand accounts of what really happened. And there is much more to come. Thousands of new documents are coming to light almost daily, offering more insights into the tragedy.“It is a little bit like a vase that is broken into small pieces and we are trying to piece the various pieces together to create the full vase,” Prof. Kulchytskyi said through a translator from Winnipeg, where he is starting a Canadian tour to discuss the famine and his findings. “We are trying to understand, what was the original thinking that Stalin had?”...
Source: NYT
Nov 17, 2012
The historian David McCullough is working on a book about social and cultural implications of early aviation beginning with the Wright Brothers and ending with Lindbergh’s Paris landing, according to his longtime researcher, Michael Hill....
Source: NBC Nightly News
Nov 15, 2012
Watch the video by clicking on the SOURCE link.Related LinksHNN Hot Topics: "Lincoln": The Movie
Source: The Daily Show
Nov 14, 2012
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham explains what made Thomas Jefferson an atheist in religion and a fanatic in politics.
Source: NYT
Nov 14, 2012
Bertram Wyatt-Brown, a historian of the American South who documented how honor and the sometimes violent means by which people sought to preserve it were central forces in Southern culture and in the region’s embrace of slavery, died on Nov. 5 in Baltimore. He was 80.The cause was pulmonary fibrosis, his wife, Anne, said.Mr. Wyatt-Brown’s breakthrough work, “Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South,” published in 1982, was an unusual blend of literary analysis, parlor politics, suspenseful storytelling and extensively documented historical research, a combination that reflected Mr. Wyatt-Brown’s diverse interests and his embrace of anthropology and the emerging field of cultural history.Mr. Wyatt-Brown emphasized that honor — and what he called its opposite, shame — had been important social forces in many cultures. But he asserted that honor played a special role in the antebellum South and its institution of slavery....
Source: Asia Society
Nov 14, 2012
Peter Perdue, Professor of History at Yale University, says that China's 18th Party Congress, which will usher in the new leaders of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, bears some resemblance to the Qing Dynasty practices of emperor selection among the ruling Manchus from northeast China, who were connected to the Mongols, a Central Asian people who were ruled by a khan. Perdue spoke with Susan Jakes, Editor of the website ChinaFile, a project of Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations."After a khan died, in the Mongolian tradition, there was an all-out free-for-all of brothers and uncles and other people, all fighting it out to see who would be the best man to take over," Perdue says."And then finally one succeeds and they hold what they call a khuritai, or acclamation ceremony that brings everyone together like a modern party Congress to acclaim the new leader. And then after that the new leader goes out and kills all his brothers and cousins and rivals and everybody else."...
Source: Gainsville Sun
Nov 12, 2012
A longtime University of Florida history professor whose Pulitzer Prize-nominated book helped make his reputation as a leading scholar of Southern history has died.Bertram Wyatt-Brown, 80, was a UF history professor for 21 years before retiring in 2004. He died Nov. 5 of pulmonary fibrosis in Baltimore.Wyatt-Brown put the UF history department on the map with writing that changed thinking about the South as well as his work with graduate students, said Steve Noll, a senior lecturer in the department....
Source: University of Georgia Law School
Nov 12, 2012
Georgia Law regrets to announce the passing of Professor and Law Library Director Emeritus Erwin C. Surrency (J.D.'48), who served as a faculty member at the law school from 1979 to 1994. During his time at Georgia Law, Surrency made many contributions including the introduction of computerization into the library's services and the establishment of relationships with local legal communities. He also served as president of the American Association of Law Librarians, was a founding member of the American Society for Legal History and was a founding editor of the American Journal of Legal History. This past year, Surrency was also inducted into the AALL Hall of Fame. Surrency passed away on Nov. 8 and is survived by his wife, Ida Winn Surrency, and his two children, Robert and Ellen.
Source: WaPo
Nov 12, 2012
Everyone’s a critic about the teaching profession. That includes award-winning historian David McCullough, who was profiled on CBS’ “60 Minutes” on Sunday by correspondent Morley Safer. Along with talking about teacher education, he noted that young Americans are “historically illiterate” — and it’s not just the fault of teachers, but parents too....
Source: CBS
Nov 11, 2012
France was the cradle of the modern idea of democracy. French troops were vital to America's victory in the War of Independence and Paris led the world in science, medicine and the arts. And as McCullough has written, the city was irresistible to the new citizens of a new nation.David McCullough: They came here in the droves. They were here in order to improve themselves and to go home and thereby improve their country.They were the first wave of innocents abroad, who began arriving in Paris just 50 years after Independence. Writers, artists, medical students.
