Historians in the News

Historian: Breaking German codes real reason for 1942 Dieppe raid

TORONTO – New research suggests the real intent of the historic raid on Dieppe in 1942 was to steal a machine that would help crack top-secret German codes.Military historian David O’Keefe spent 15 years searching through the once-classified and ultra-secret war files and says the real purpose behind the Dieppe operation—which cost hundreds of Canadian soldiers their lives — was to capture advanced coding technology from the German headquarters near the French beach.“For years, so many veterans, men who stormed the beaches and ended up in prisoners of war camps, had no clue what the reason was that they were there,” O’Keefe tells Global National’s Christina Stevens....

Roy S. Bryce-Laporte, Who Led Black Studies at Yale, Dies at 78

Roy S. Bryce-Laporte, a sociologist who led one of the nation’s first African-American studies departments, at Yale University, and did research that advanced understanding of blacks who came to the United States voluntarily rather than as slaves, died on July 31 in Sykesville, Md. He was 78.His brother, Herrington J. Bryce, said that the cause was undetermined, but that he had had a series of small strokes.Professor Bryce-Laporte was named director of Yale’s new department of African-American studies in 1969, when colleges and universities were recruiting black students and searching for ways to include their culture, history and other concerns in the curriculum.Students participated in the selection of Professor Bryce-Laporte. One of them, Donald H. Ogilvie, praised him as “not all academician and not all activist,” adding that Professor Bryce-Laporte was “still angry.”...

Jonathan Ned Katz and his voluminous correspondence with Gore Vidal

In 1982 historian Jonathan Ned Katz initiated a correspondence with Gore Vidal that lasted, intermittently, until 2001. To mark the death of Vidal on July 31, 2012, OutHistory is reproducing the texts of Vidal’s brief, humorous thirteen letters to Katz, often on the theme of heterosexuality and, sometimes, homosexuality. The publication also includes descriptions of Katz's thirteen letters and his accounts of a telephone call from Vidal, and one meeting with him. Commenting on Katz's efforts to recover the history of same-sex and different-sex intimate relations, in one late letter Vidal exhorts: "Keep the war going" (Vidal to Katz, postmarked ?-18-1996)....

Robert Hughes, Art Critic Whose Writing Was Elegant and Contentious, Dies at 74

Robert Hughes, the eloquent, combative art critic and historian who lived with operatic flair and wrote with a sense of authority that owed more to Zola or Ruskin than to his own century, died on Monday at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. He was 74 and had lived for many years in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.He died after a long illness, said his wife, Doris Downes.With a Hemingwayesque build and the distinctively rounded vowels of his native Australia, Mr. Hughes became as familiar a presence on television as he was in print, over three decades for Time magazine, where he was chief art critic and often a traditionalist scourge during an era when art movements fractured into unrecognizability....

Was the use of nuclear weapons against Japan justified? One historian says yes

The US bombing of Hiroshima ranks as one of history's greatest controversies. Dennis Giangreco, former editor of Military Review, is also the award winning author of Hell to Pay: Operation Downfall the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947. His path breaking research into Japanese defense preparations leads him to defend the atomic strike. He offers this exclusive interview to Asia Sentinel. Q. Mr. Giangreco, please summarize the arguments of the critics of President Harry Truman over the bombing. Actually, they have changed somewhat over time. Originally, his critics maintained that Japan would have soon surrendered even without the atomic bombs or the Soviet entry into the war on August 8 1945. And, more importantly, that Truman knew this but bombed Japan to intimidate the Soviets, not save lives during a bloody invasion --- that Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked America's opening shots in the Cold War. After the death of Japanese Emperor Hirohito in 1989 and the very public struggle over how to exhibit the Enola Gay bomber that hit Hiroshima at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, a flood of documents emerged from archives on both sides of the Pacific.

Gene Smith Dies at 83; Wrote Biographies of World Leaders

Gene Smith, who with a vivid touch depicted the lives of presidents, prime ministers and generals in a series of popular biographies, among them the 1964 best seller “When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson,” died on July 25 at his home in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He was 83.The cause was bone cancer, his daughter, Jessica Smith, said.Of Mr. Wilson’s fading days after eight years in office, Mr. Smith wrote how the former president, long debilitated by a stroke and respiratory problems, had sought solace in the countryside:“He took with him an old cape bought years ago in Scotland and even on warm days wore it around his shoulders beneath the long, thin face. A cap was always on his head. He was like some apparition from the past, from Yesterday, coming along the road in his big, old open car with two small W’s painted where once the Seal of the President had been.”In tracing Wilson’s last years, “When the Cheering Stopped” chronicles the death of the president’s first wife, Ellen Axson Wilson, in August 1914; his courtship of the Washington widow Edith Bolling Galt and their subsequent marriage in December 1915; his triumphal reception in Europe after World War I; and his failed campaign for American membership in the League of Nations.

Stanford's "Reading Like a Historian" program draws national attention

#next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; } For years, bands of educators have been trying to free history instruction from the mire of memorization and propel it instead with the kinds of inquiry that drive historians themselves. Now, the common-core standards may offer more impetus for districts and schools to adopt that brand of instruction.A study of one such approach suggests that it can yield a triple academic benefit: It can deepen students’ content knowledge, help them think like historians, and also build their reading comprehension.The Reading Like a Historian program, a set of 75 free secondary school lessons in U.S. history, is getting a new wave of attention as teachers adapt to the Common Core State Standards in English/language arts. Those guidelines, adopted by all but four states, demand that teachers of all subjects help students learn to master challenging nonfiction and build strong arguments based on evidence ....

John Keegan, Historian Who Put a Face on War, Dies at 78

John Keegan, an Englishman widely considered to be the pre-eminent military historian of his era and the author of more than 20 books, including the masterwork “The Face of Battle,” died Thursday at his home in Kilmington, England. He was 78.His death was announced in The Telegraph, where he had served as the military affairs editor. No cause of death was given, though Con Coughlin, the paper’s executive foreign editor, said in an e-mail that Mr. Keegan had died after a long illness.Mr. Keegan never served in the military. At 13, he contracted orthopedic tuberculosis and spent the next nine years being treated for it, five of them in a hospital, where he used the time to learn Latin and Greek from a chaplain. As he acknowledged in the introduction to “The Face of Battle,” he had “not been in a battle, nor near one, nor heard one from afar, nor seen the aftermath.”...

UK Foreign Secretary William Hague raising the profile of historians

... The Foreign Secretary believes history has diminished as a factor in the formulation of British foreign policy in recent years and needs to be re‑emphasised. With this in mind, he has liberated the FCO’s small corps of in‑house historians from a basement in a satellite building and installed them in a newly refurbished library in the department’s imposing main premises in King Charles Street, off Whitehall.“Just as one draws on economists and people with specialist knowledge of a particular country, so we should be drawing on the insights provided by our historians,” he says, taking a break from overseeing the British response to the crisis in Syria. “The historians are an obvious resource and they were not appreciated by the last administration. They were languishing in a basement and now the light is shining on their books. It is intended to be a signal to the whole Foreign Office to use them, and to remember the importance of understanding history.”Leather-bound collections of memoranda line the shelves of the new library, the to and fro of diplomatic discourse through the ages. There are in‑house histories, too, on everything from Nato to Nazi gold.

Jon Wiener ... Remembering Gore Vidal

Victor Navasky tells one of the most revealing stories about Gore Vidal, who died July 31 in Los Angeles at age 86. In 1986, Gore wrote an essay for the magazine’s 120th anniversary issue.  Shortly after it was published, Victor was invited to lunch by the publisher of Penthouse magazine, Bob Guccione, at his East Side townhouse famous for its $200 million art collection. “We had barely consumed the amuse gueules when Bob asked me how much it cost to get Gore Vidal to write his essay,” Victor recalled. “When I told him we had paid each contributor to that issue $25 and Gore got the same $25 that everyone else got, he almost choked on his Chateau Margaux and told me he had offered Vidal $50,000 to write an article for Penthouse and Vidal declined.”Gore, who had accepted Victor’s invitation to join the magazine in 1981 as a contributing editor, published 41 articles in The Nation at those rates. Some of his most memorable quotes appeared in The Nation: “We are the United States of Amnesia,” he wrote in 2004. “We learn nothing because we remember nothing.”  In that same essay he called the US a place where “the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns.”

Government historian out with a book on the history of US-Iran relationship

For the United States and Iran the 1979 Iranian revolution — which replaced an American-allied monarchy with a virulently anti-American theocracy — has proved to be the geopolitical divorce from hell. For over three decades, as the two sides have engaged in an ugly battle for patronage over a volatile Middle East, Washington has hoped in vain that Tehran would change its ways. “The Twilight War,” David Crist’s painstakingly researched and elegantly written account of the United States-Iran cold war, is an earnest chronicle of this shadowy history. Mr. Crist’s position as a government historian and adviser to the United States Central Command, which oversees all American combat forces in the Middle East and which his father used to lead, has afforded him unique access to government officials and classified intelligence. Nonetheless he proves himself a dispassionate narrator. While no apologist for the Iranian regime, Mr. Crist pulls no punches in pointing out America’s strategic and sometimes moral failings in dealing with Iran. Other books, notably Kenneth Pollack’s “Persian Puzzle” and David Sanger’s “Confront and Conceal,” have ably covered American foreign policy toward Iran. Mr. Crist’s stands out for its focus on the troubled relationship’s military context.

Hobbyist builds database of every US bomb dropped since WW I

Lieutenant Colonel Jenns Robertson, 45, has spent the past six years working on one of the most unusual historical projects in modern times: compiling a database of every bomb dropped by U.S. forces dating back to World War I."It has proven useful in the real world, in real time," Robertson told the Boston Globe. "You can pick any place you want and look at it in detail."The project is called THOR: Theater History of Operations Reports and allows people to use their computers to literally point and click to nearly any location on the globe and receive a near-instantaneous assessment of when and where U.S. bombs were dropped over the past century....

Harvard historian David Landes cited in Romney controversy

#next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; } ... Citing the “dramatically stark difference in economic vitality” and G.D.P. per capita between Israel and its troublesome occupied zones, Romney said he had been studying the work of David Landes, the octogenarian Harvard historian, whose 1999 tome “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations” argued that the political and economic culture of Europe played a key role in its rapid development. “Culture makes all the difference,” Romney said at the fundraiser, which took place at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, where he and his entourage were staying. “Culture makes all the difference. And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things.”

Harold Holzer celebrated in NYT

 

Lake Forest College forever changed by Vietnam War

LAKE FOREST -- The Vietnam War -- whose veterans are being saluted on Lake Forest Day -- tested the government, the Constitution, students, and soldiers. Lake Forest was no less affected -- in fact, three young local men died in the conflict -- but the war also initiated changes at Lake Forest College that resonate to this day....The college responded to all of this by bringing students and faculty more into the governing structure of the school. Lake Forest College President Eugene Hotchkiss receives a share of credit in the recollections of Michael H. Ebner of Lake Forest, professor emeritus of American history at Lake Forest College....

Mahama: writer, historian and Ghana's new president

ACCRA — Ghana's John Dramani Mahama, sworn in as president on Tuesday following the sudden death of John Atta Mills, says he was forever changed by his boyhood experiences during a 1966 military coup.The 53-year-old who had been vice president was born in Bole Bamboi in northern Ghana and holds degrees in history and communications, according to Ghanian media.He served as a diplomat in Japan in the early 1990s before returning to Ghana, where he was first elected to parliament as a member of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) party....

Eminent historian of Northeast India no more

Noted historian of the North East and Meghalaya’s first PhD degree holder Padmashree Dr Hamlet Bareh Ngapkynta passed away early this morning at his residence, his family said.He was 91. He is survived by his wife Merlicia Kharshiing and four children.A Doctorate in Philosophy from the North Eastern Hill University, Hamlet a distinguished scholar, and a prolific writer and researcher, was awarded the Padmashree in 2004....

New College promotes value of a history degree

SARASOTA - College liberal arts programs took a hit last year after some politicians — Florida Gov. Rick Scott among them — suggested they should be cut back because they do not do enough to prepare graduates for meaningful employment.Some, Scott included, suggested redirecting spending and offerings to college programs focused on STEM, or science, engineering, technology and math, as a way to get more graduates employed.Now, a national panel that includes a representative from New College of Florida is fighting back by trying to recraft college history degree programs to make graduates more employable.In all, 60 colleges nationwide are participating in the American Historical Association's three-year initiative to "tune" the history major....

Canberra historian wins PM's literary award

Canberra historian Bill Gammage's debunking of terra nullius, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, has won the $80,000 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Australian History.But the ANU professor was not at today's ceremony to receive his award from Prime Minister Julia Gillard – instead he is holidaying in Britain. As he told The Canberra Times before his departure, "I'll be somewhere between Carlisle and Wolverhampton, taking my first break in many years."Novelist Gillian Mears's Foal's Bread won the fiction award and Mark McKenna's An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark took the non-fiction award, while the inaugural poetry prize went to Luke Davies for Interferon Psalms....

Turning 'Plan B' Into a 'Plan A' Life

Susan Ferber is executive editor for American and world history at Oxford University Press USA. This column is adapted from a talk she gave in March at Temple University."Susan Ferber is executive editor for American and world history at Oxford University Press USA. Her list includes academic and trade titles on topics ranging from ancient history to contemporary history, many first books as well as works by senior scholars. Books she has edited have won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize, and five have become national best sellers. She also teaches at the book workshop of the Columbia Publishing Course."That brief bio is the public record of my life. But it's a polished narrative, like my CV, and it strikes me that the true value in the continuing discussion about alternate career paths for historians lies in talking about what usually gets erased from such documents: the detours, wrong turns, time spent stuck in traffic, even the metaphorical car crashes.