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: Moscow News
Jul 23, 2012
Historians are known to specialize in narrow, often esoteric realms of academia. Alexander Nikishin’s specialty may on the surface prove to be more popular than others, but he has found difficulty generating interest or support.Nikishin is a historian of vodka, and the founder of a museum dedicated to the spirit.Based at the Kristall distillery, the National Vodka Museum has been in operation since 2006, and consists of Nikishin’s personal collection of more than 50,000 items connected with the history of Russian vodka....“It’s not something alien and evil like some would think,” Nikishin said. “It’s part of a huge agricultural system – a huge part of the grain harvest would be lost if we didn’t make it into spirit.”Not everyone appreciates Nikishin’s efforts at education and enlightenment. Women whose husbands drink heavily, for example, consider such museums or serious discussions about the subject unnecessary, but Nikishin takes exception to the equation of vodka consumption with alcoholism....
Source: The News-Gazette (IL)
Jul 23, 2012
SPRINGFIELD — The appointment of former University of Illinois President Michael Hogan as a history professor at the UI Springfield makes him the highest-paid employee on that campus.Hogan, who made $651,000 as president, is now earning $285,100 a year as a professor, under a formula set when he was hired as president in 2010.Only one other employee at UI Springfield earns more than $200,000, according to the UI's "gray book" of salaries. Vice President and Chancellor Susan Koch is listed at $220,000 annually. Former Chancellor Richard Ringeisen, who stepped down in October 2010, earned $281,705 as chancellor emeritus in 2011, but his appointment expired last November....
Source: LoanSafe.org
Jul 23, 2012
(Source: Michael Tsai The Honolulu Star-Advertiser (MCT) — For more than 35 years, some of the most important new ideas on world history have been generated, explored and debated in the little corner of the Pacific that Jerry Bentley called home.Bentley, a professor of history at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, died July 15 at the age of 62.A widely published and oft-cited expert on the history of early modern Europe and cross-cultural interactions and exchanges in world history, Bentley was instrumental in the establishment of UH’s Center for World History and was the founding editor of the Journal of World History....
Source: Boston Globe
Jul 23, 2012
A translator, teacher, and writer, Christina Gilmartin taught at Northeastern University. An authority on 20th-century Chinese history, with an emphasis on women and gender, she lived in China from 1978 to 1983. As one of the first US scholars to live in China, she was “a real pioneer,” said Gail Hershatter, professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz....
Source: David Cannadine in the Telegraph (UK)
Jul 21, 2012
Sir David Cannadine is Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University. His most recent book, with Jenny Keating and Nicola Sheldon, is 'The Right Kind of History’A few days ago, William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, spoke strongly in support of the importance of history in our national life. His comments were prompted by the relocation of the Foreign Office’s historians (it is the only government department to employ such in-house scholars) from a windowless basement in a distant building to more comfortable and appropriate accommodation close to the Foreign Secretary himself.“You can’t understand,” Hague observed, “the culture of any country without knowing its history. You can’t explain the politics without knowing the history.” Such words are welcome at any time from anyone in government; but they were particularly appropriate last week, for it is exactly 50 years since the death of George Macaulay Trevelyan on July 20 1962, at the age of 86. It is an anniversary that has passed virtually unnoticed; yet in his time – and it was a long time – Trevelyan was the most honoured, admired and widely read historian since his great uncle, Lord Macaulay, whose name he proudly bore.
Source: NYT
Jul 21, 2012
Stuart R. Schram was a Minnesotan who made his way to Paris, an Army nuclear physicist who became an expert in French political history, and a mind wide awake in a world remade by war and its cold aftermath.
By the late 1950s, having already worked on the Manhattan Project, published scholarly works in French and German, and taught himself Russian and Japanese, he turned his considerable intellect to a divisive and mysterious subject far across the globe and accessible to the West almost solely through written works and transcripts: Mao Zedong.
It was an ambitious and rewarding move. Over the next 50 years, Mr. Schram, who died on July 8 in France at 88, completed a seminal biography of Mao just before the disasters of the Cultural Revolution, and spent much of the rest of his life translating into English exhaustive volumes of Mao’s words, in the process shedding critical light on a rapidly changing China.
To other China scholars, Mr. Schram provided cleareyed analysis of Mao at a time when many people were eager to reduce him to either an evil dictator or a visionary hero. Mr. Schram’s works, they say, are touchstones in the study of how Mao adapted Marxism for consumption by one of the world’s oldest cultures.
Source: Irish Times
Jul 20, 2012
An Irish traditional singer is suing historian Prof Diarmaid Ferriter claiming the cover of the academic’s book on the Pioneers depicts him as an alcoholic.Tim Lyons, Athenry, Co Galway, claims a photo of him with two pints of stout on the cover of Prof Ferriter’s A Nation of Extremes – The Pioneers in Twentieth Century Ireland depicts him as an alcoholic. He is also suing the book’s publisher, Irish Academic Press....
Source: San Jose Mercury News
Jul 18, 2012
When UC Berkeley's Regional Oral History Office announced last week that it was beginning research on a Bay Bridge project, a question leapt to mind: UC Berkeley has a Regional Oral History Office?Yep, it's been around since 1954 -- as a division of the Bancroft Library -- dedicated to preserving the history of the Bay Area and the western United States by "conducting carefully researched, tape-recorded and transcribed interviews" of those who were witness to the past.The Bay Bridge project is timed to coincide with the dismantling of the eastern span. Research specialist Sam Redman is seeking recollections of those who watched it go up, helped build it and witnessed how lives were changed."One of the surprises is the extent to which it was used right away," he said. "Real traffic was double or triple the projections."The oral history office has meticulously documented projects ranging from arts and literature to social movement to politics to science and technology, preserving poignant slices of history....
Source: Huffington Post
Jul 17, 2012
The image is heartbreaking: An 11-year-old boy, his right arm in a sling and a look of surprised sadness on his face.The 1912 photograph of a boy who injured his hand working in a textile factory by social reformer Lewis Hine made the boy, Giles Edmund Newsom, the face of child labor in the U.S. Sympathy for his circumstances spurred efforts to safeguard children from such work.But what happened to Newsom later in life has remained a mystery until now, reports the Daily Mail.Through his research into child labor, historian Joe Manning uncovered the boy's tragic fate - he died of Spanish Flu in 1918 at the age of 18. Newsom is buried at Hollywood Cemetery in Gastonia, N.C., perhaps in an unmarked grave near his parents, Manning tells the Gaston Gazette....
Source: Network of Concerned Historians
Jul 16, 2012
From the day that the prosecutor ruled my detention, until now, everything has been upside down. I am speechless and now going back to Silivri [prison] to pack my bag – Büsra Ersanli
Source: NYT
Jul 16, 2012
The political direction of the country may be up for grabs until November, but the right has scored an interim victory — if that’s the word — in a weeklong contest to determine “the least credible history book in print” just concluded by the History News Network.After a week of voting by readers, David Barton’s “The Jefferson Lies” won with some 650 votes, narrowly edging the left-wing historian Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States,” which received 641 votes.Trailing far behind were Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard’s “Killing Lincoln” (which argues that Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton was complicit in Lincoln’s assassination); Thomas DiLorenzo’s “The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War”; and Gavin Menzies’s “1421: The Year China Discovered America.”...
Source: Daily Show (UK)
Jul 16, 2012
They are surely the most horrifying offshoot of modern technology - nuclear warheads which can smite hundreds of thousands of people dead within seconds, and leave lasting scars on a landscape for generations.And while most of us will have seen archive footage of nuclear explosions before, one thing we are unlikely to have heard is their sound.For, according to one expert, most films we see of a nuclear blast use stock 'explosion' sound effects for the bang - and audio footage is few and far between.But Alex Wellerstein, an historian of science at the American Institute of Physics, has shared a unigue video of a blast during America's testing of nukes in the Yucca Mountain area of Nevada during the 1950s.The historian was sent the video below from a Russian colleague, and has now shared it on his blog....
Source: AP
Jul 16, 2012
MAYO, Md. — Go ahead and point to an album on Jeff Place's crowded basement shelves.Ask him to identify it. Just try and stump him.It won't work, even though a splash of color and a few words are all that's visible on the spine. He identifies the record — one of more than 12,000 — in seconds.Maybe it's because he works somewhere with a collection dwarfing his own.Place is an archivist at Smithsonian Folklife Collections, which has more than 70,000 recordings, as well as photographs, correspondence and other material filling 7,000 square feet of space.Over a quarter century, he's produced 50 compilations of music, which resulted in two Grammys, numerous other nominations for the award, and a gold record. Yet, because the 57-year-old Mayo resident generally works behind the scenes, he's nowhere near as well-known as the artists he writes about and studies....
Source: NPR
Jul 13, 2012
In Rumor, Repression and Racial Politics, author George Derek Musgrove looks at the history of black elected officials being investigated for alleged wrongdoing. He examines the role of race in U.S. politics between 1965 and 1995. Musgrove shares his research with guest host Maria Hinojosa. [FOR AUDIO, CLICK ON THE LINK ABOVE.]MARIA HINOJOSA, HOST:Some supporters of Vincent Gray have said that the investigation of his campaign is, in part, driven by race. The book, "Rumor, Repression, and Racial Politics," explores the history of investigations of black elected officials in the post-Civil Rights Era.Author George Derek Musgrove is an assistant professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and he joined us to talk about the book earlier this week.Welcome to the program.GEORGE DEREK MUSGROVE: Thank you so much for having me....
Source: AHA Today
Jul 13, 2012
The AHA’s Tuning project for history held its first full meeting in Arlington, Virginia, the weekend of June 9–10, 2012. Building on lessons from earlier AHA projects that explored the role of historical study in liberal arts education, history faculty from 65 diverse two- and four-year programs convened to frame a vocabulary to explain how history students are prepared for citizenship and careers. What does a history major offer a student? How can our students, upon graduation and beyond, draw on what they have learned to establish careers and contribute to society and civic culture?Tuning aims to equip students with clarity about the skills, understanding, and knowledge they will acquire in a given degree program. The AHA’s Tuning project provides a collaborative forum and process for history faculty to articulate the core competencies of the discipline. It then asks participating faculty members to propagate those core elements in two directions: inward, by aligning their program requirements, courses, syllabi, and individual assignments; and outward, by promoting the value of students’ education in terms of personal development, civic engagement, and career potential.
Source: CP24 (Toronto)
Jul 13, 2012
TORONTO -- American and British criticism of Canada's long and often bloody military efforts in Afghanistan has a ring of revisionism that ignores key facts, experts say.In particular, they say, the notion that blithely optimistic Canadians were reluctant to ask for outside help as they struggled alone in Kandahar province, which had been abandoned by the Americans in favour of Iraq, is ludicrous."The war (in Afghanistan) isn't exactly going well, so people look around and try to fix blame wherever they can," said Canadian military historian, Jack Granatstein....
Source: CS Monitor
Jul 13, 2012
When Boston College launched its Belfast Project the aim was to create an insiders' oral history of Northern Ireland's so-called "Troubles" by collecting the testimonies of participants on all sides of the conflict. What no one expected was for history to rear up and become the present once more.That is precisely what has now happened as a US federal appeals court has ruled that the researchers' right to free inquiry is overridden by the British state's right to investigate past crimes.
Source: Guardian (UK)
Jul 12, 2012
A satire on university politics published in 1908 introduced 'The Principle of Sound Learning', which stated that 'the noise of vulgar fame should never trouble the cloistered calm of academic existence'. This attitude to popular scholarship came to mind recently when eminent historian Sir Keith Thomas spoke to the Independent about the books he had read as a judge of the prestigious Wolfson History Prize.He said: "There is a tendency for young historians who have completed their doctoral thesis to, rather than present it in a conventional academic form, immediately hire an agent, cut out the footnotes, jazz it all up a bit and try to produce a historical bestseller from what would have otherwise been a perfectly good academic work. The reality is that only a few of these works succeed commercially."
Source: Houston Chronicle
Jul 12, 2012
“My fingers clawed into the arms of the chair while a vampire held my head and a witch prepared to inventory and steal my thoughts. And yet no whisper of witchwind or flicker of witchfire came to my aid. My power had gone entirely quiet.”Diana Bishop, descendent of the Salem witches, continues her struggle to gain control of her sorcery in “Shadow of Night,” the second book in Deborah Harkness’ “All Souls” trilogy.A professor of history at the University of Southern California, Harkness cast a spell on nearly half a million readers with 2011’s “A Discovery of Witches,” currently being transformed into a film script for Warner Bros. by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Auburn (“Proof”)....
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Jul 10, 2012
Philip L. Fradkin, a pioneering environmental journalist and historian who attached himself to Western themes as varied as Wallace Stegner, Wells Fargo and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, died Saturday at his home in Point Reyes Station. He was 77, and the cause of death was cancer.As recently as six months ago, the tall and athletic Mr. Fradkin could be seen in his white rowboat on Tomales Bay in the early morning light. And as recently as a few weeks ago, he would walk a mile a day at a brisk pace around his adopted hometown, stopping in at his office on Main Street and visiting with merchants."He was one of the most vigorous persons in the village - intellectually, physically and creatively," said Steve Costa, owner of Point Reyes Books. "His books really spoke to the soul of Point Reyes and the West."...
