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: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 6, 2012
A leading historian and Cambridge academic has outlined all the key events in British history that teenagers should learn.The dates range from the Anglo-Saxon conquest in 500 A.D to the appointment of Winston Churchill as Prime Minister in 1940.The Battle of Agincourt, the Magna Carta, the Abolition of slavery and the King James Bible are included in the chornology that shows how Britain was shaped over 1,500 yearsProfessor David Abulafia, professor of Mediterranean history at Gonville and Caius College, said pupils were too often required to interpret sources instead of studying history itself. This had ‘deadened interest in the past among students’....
Source: Robert B. Townsend at the AHA Blog
Mar 5, 2012
Robert B. Townsend is deputy director of the American Historical Association.The American Historical Association is pleased to announce the expansion of the William Gilbert Award for the Best Article on History Teaching. Starting this year, the award will be conferred annually and the winning author of the article as well as the journal that publishes it will each receive $1,000. These changes will (we hope) encourage journals to accept more articles on the teaching of history.Edwyna Gilbert, a professor of English at the University of Kansas, established the award in the memory of her late husband, a historian, in 1995. Her goal was both to promote history teaching and to encourage journals to seek essays on pedagogy for publication. She passed away last May, leaving an additional $110,000 to supplement the original $10,000 bequest for the award. After due consideration, the AHA’s Teaching Division decided to expand the award in a way that seems consistent with her original wishes. And in recognition of her very generous support of the award, the Division and the AHA Council agreed to change the name to the “William and Edwyna Gilbert Award.”
Source: Stanford University News
Mar 5, 2012
There are no orderly rows of desks in Valerie Ziegler's high school history class – students sit in groups of three or four at small tables around the room. There also is no lectern because there are no lectures. And perhaps most striking, there are no textbooks.The 11th-grade class at Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco learns about the Vietnam War, women's suffrage, civil rights, the Great Depression and other major events in U.S. history by analyzing journal writings, memoirs, speeches, songs, photographs, illustrations and other documents of the era."I always tell my students they're historians-in-training, so the work we do in here is that of a historian," Ziegler said.The nontraditional curriculum Ziegler uses, called Reading Like a Historian, was designed at Stanford and is among the projects of the Stanford History Education Group.The curriculum was introduced in 2008 at five schools in the San Francisco Unified School District as part of a study by Abby Reisman, who was the head curriculum designer while completing her doctoral work at Stanford.
Source: Winnipeg Free Press
Mar 5, 2012
A history professor at the University of Winnipeg is asking residents to search their basements and attics for hidden treasure.But Prof. Alexander Freund, the chair in German-Canadian studies at the university, isn't looking for gold or jewels -- he's hoping to find tapes of interviews with refugees who came to Manitoba after the Second World War and during the Cold War.Freund is leading a project to digitize and archive the history of refugees in the province."We're very convinced there are interviews out there," he said in an interview. "We don't know how many."...
Source: WaPo
Mar 5, 2012
DALLAS — A Dallas conference to explore the power and mystique of first ladies that will culminate with a panel featuring Laura Bush and her mother-in-law, Barbara, began Monday with a discussion on the influence of the women who have held the post throughout history.“The thing to me that is so remarkable about the women who have assumed this position is how much guts they have, how much brains they have, stamina that is beyond imagination and a willingness to rise above it and just do it,” said Allida Black, a research professor of history and international affairs at The George Washington University....In a morning panel, historians discussed several first ladies including Dolley Madison, whose influence in Washington went far beyond her time as first lady, and Lady Bird Johnson, who had the hard task of taking on the role after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.“It wasn’t like when anybody else came into the White House,” said Bess Abell, who was White House social secretary for the Johnsons....
Source: Paul Hockenos in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
Mar 4, 2012
Paul Hockenos is a journalist and political analyst in Berlin. His books include Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic: An Alternative History of Postwar Germany (Oxford University Press, 2008).
Source: Houston Chronicle
Mar 3, 2012
In a quest worthy of Indiana Jones, official Rice University historian Melissa Kean braves menacing cobwebbed recesses on her campus that few others even know exist. In search of historic gems - Rice turns 100 this year - the intrepid researcher has discovered vacuum tube-studded remnants of an early computer, old student scrapbooks, the first school president's black top hat and boxes brimming with relics of ancient gridiron battles lost and won.In a typical day, the lawyer-turned-academic explores, gathers and interprets for 10 hours or more. Then she retreats to her home, where, in a chatty university history blog, www.ricehistorycorner.com, she shares her discoveries with the world.
Source: University of Chicago News
Mar 2, 2012
Peter Novick, a University of Chicago historian whose specialty was the study of history itself, or historiography, died Feb. 17 at the age of 77. Novick, professor emeritus of history, used his formidable skills to explain how different views of the past can shape the retelling of history and establish narratives that have a power of their own.Early success suggests Novick might have had a career as an historian of 20th-century France. His Columbia University doctoral thesis, awarded the Clark M. Ansley Award, was published in 1968 as The Resistance Versus Vichy: The Purge of Collaborators in Liberated France. In response to a vigorous national debate about the role of Vichy in wartime France, the book was translated and published in 1985 as L’Epuration Française, 1944-1949, a popular “Le Grand Livre du Mois” book club selection. But Novick’s interest in how the past is talked, thought and written about led to the two landmark books that followed: That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (1988) and The Holocaust in American Life (1999).
Source: AP
Mar 1, 2012
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — South African artist William Kentridge, British historian Sir Martin Gilbert and American scientist David Botstein are among the winners of this year's prestigious Dan David Prize.The Dan David Foundation grants the $1 million prizes in three categories — past, present and future — for scientific, technological and cultural accomplishments....
Source: Oklahoma Daily
Feb 28, 2012
Instructors need to teach the U.S. Constitution to all students in a stimulating way to create well-educated citizens who are aware of their responsibilities, according to seven panelists in a discussion Tuesday [at the University of Oklahoma]....National Public Radio host Diane Rehm moderated the panel, which was part of OU’s inaugural “Teach-In: A Day with Some of the Greatest Teachers in America.”The U.S. needs leaders and teachers who can make the Constitution relevant to students of all ages and backgrounds, Pulitzer-prize winning historian David McCullough said.“There is nothing wrong with the younger generation,” he said. “The younger generation is terrific, and any problems they have, any failings they have, and what they know and don’t know is not their fault — it’s our fault.”Teachers are the most important people in the society, and they should not be blamed for these failings either, McCullough said.“I think that history, the love of history and the understanding of history begins truly, literally at home,” McCullough said....
Source: Wicked Local
Feb 27, 2012
Harvard University Prof. Maya Jasanoff is one of three finalists for the $50,000 George Washington Book Prize. Administrators of the prize at Washington College announces that Jasanoff earned the honor with “Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World,” published by Knopf.The prize, which is co-sponsored by Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and George Washington’s Mount Vernon, recognizes the past year’s best books on the nation’s founding era, especially those that have the potential to advance broad public understanding of American history. Three distinguished historians served as jurors for the 2012 prize -- Richard Beeman, the John Welsh Centennial Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and the 2010 winner of the George Washington Book Prize; Thomas Fleming, distinguished historian and author; and Marla R. Miller of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst....
Source: NYT
Feb 26, 2012
As the conservative polemicist Pat Buchanan prepared last fall for the release of his book “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?,” some friends who worked with him at MSNBC were worried. The book, they told him, would provoke controversy and threaten his professional well-being.Undeterred, Mr. Buchanan began his book tour, but his friends were right. He stopped being asked to appear on shows on MSNBC, the cable news channel where he had been employed for nearly 10 years. On Feb. 16, the channel said in a brief statement: “We’ve parted ways with Pat Buchanan. We wish him well.”...Timothy Stanley, a British historian whose biography of Mr. Buchanan, “The Crusader,” was released two weeks ago, said he thought the departure was a “marketing decision” by MSNBC, a unit of Comcast. “They took an opportunity to get rid of someone who was doing damage to their liberal brand.”...Mr. Stanley said that “Buchanan is very clever and careful at not saying whether the end of white America is a good or bad thing.”...
Source: Rachel Donadio for the NYT
Feb 25, 2012
Rachel Donadio is the Rome bureau chief of The New York Times, who has been reporting from Greece....Where is the line between a weak state and a failed state?I posed the question to Thanos Veremis, a reform-minded historian and a supporter of Prime Minister Lucas Papademos, the former European Central Bank official who is now attempting to govern Greece ahead of elections expected this spring. “Greece is a strong failed state,” he answered almost cheerily. I looked around the room. We were drinking Earl Grey tea in the elegant Grande Bretagne Hotel in Syntagma Square. Across the tiled mosaic floor, the other tables were filled with politicians, former politicians, one long-bearded priest in black robes and several smartly dressed men doing business over their laptops. If this was a failed state, it functioned remarkably well....
Source: Joe Nocera in the NYT
Feb 25, 2012
Joe Nocera is a columnist for the NYT.“Rick Santorum is John Winthrop,” the historian and author John M. Barry was saying the other day.Barry is in a unique position to make such a judgment. His most recent book, published last month, is entitled “Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul.” To call it a biography sells it short. What it is, really, is the history of an idea — an idea that Williams articulated before anyone else — about the critical importance of separating church from state. So revolutionary was this idea that it caused Williams to be banished from Massachusetts and to seek refuge in nearby Rhode Island, which he founded. In doing so, Williams created the first place in the Western world where people could believe in any God they wished — or no God at all — without fear of retribution.
Source: Courtney E. Martin in the CS Monitor
Feb 24, 2012
Courtney E. Martin is leading The Op-Ed Project’s Public Voices Fellowship Program at Princeton, which aims to get more women and people of color to enter public debate. You can read more about her work at courtneyemartin.com.While watching Melissa Harris-Perry debut her own show on MSNBC last weekend, I found myself reacting with a sort of battered awe: A woman of color, hosting a serious show on a serious cable-news channel? Another glass ceiling, shattered.
Source: AP
Feb 24, 2012
ALBANY, N.Y. — Feb. 27 is an important date in Harold Holzer's life for a couple of reasons, not the least of which it's his wedding anniversary.The other is linked to Abraham Lincoln, the subject of numerous Holzer books, essays, lectures and television appearances over the years. It was on that date in 1860 when the tall, gaunt lawyer from Illinois gave a political speech at Manhattan's Cooper Union, an address Holzer and other historians credit with setting Lincoln on the path to the White House in that year's presidential election.Feb. 27 serves as another milestone for Holzer when his 42nd book — "Emancipating Lincoln: The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory," is published Monday by Harvard University Press.The book's release is timed to the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which the nation's 16th president spent months contemplating, discussing and rewriting in 1862 before issuing it in September of that year, just days after Union forces turned back Gen. Robert E. Lee's Confederate Army at the bloody Battle of Antietam in Maryland....
Source: The Blaze
Feb 22, 2012
With President Barack Obama recently signing into law the Federal Aviation Administration’s bill that would modernize flight to include GPS technology and in turn open up the sky to commercial and private unmanned aerial vehicles, there are not only concerns over stronger oversight by law enforcement but also in hobbyist drone operation.For example, drones have been used by the media to capture aerial footage of Russian protests and riots in Poland. A civilian drone operated in Texas recently spotted a meat packing plant violating laws by dumping animal products into a local stream.
Source: AHA Today
Feb 22, 2012
Last week we announced that the AHA is initiating a History Tuning Project, supported by a grant from Lumina Foundation, to define what a student should understand and be able to do at the completion of a history degree program. The announcement received a great response and was featured in articles at Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle.Many history professionals contacted us to express their desire to be involved, and today we have information on how to do so.Apply The AHA seeks an enthusiastic group of 60 history faculty who represent institutions of diverse types in terms of size, source of funding (public/private), populations served, curricular emphases, location, and degrees offered to be a part of the History Tuning Project. Interested parties should fill out this application by March 16, 2012.
Source: Minnesota Public Radio
Feb 21, 2012
A New York Times op-ed, "The M.R.S. and the Ph.D" sparked a conversation among The Daily Circuit team last week about educated women today and their prospects for marriage. For more than a century, women were often forced to choose between an education and a husband. We were wondering: Is this still the case? Does marriage suit educated women?Kerri Miller will be speaking with Stephanie Coontz, professor of history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. She is the author of the op-ed that spurred this in-depth segment....
Source: UPenn Almanac
Feb 21, 2012
Dr. Lee Benson, professor emeritus of history and a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Netter Center for Community Partnerships, died on February 10 from complications after a fall. He was 90 years of age.He was co-founder of the Netter Center’s university-assisted community school program that has, since its inception in 1985, been seen as a national model of university civic engagement. Dr. Benson continued to be fully engaged with the Netter Center, serving on its Faculty Advisory Board, writing and co-teaching with the Center’s director an undergraduate seminar on “Urban University-Community Relations” until his death. He was co-executive editor of the Netter Center’s Universities and Community Schools journal, co-author of Dewey’s Dream (2007), and was the author or co-author of dozens of articles and chapters on university civic engagement and the role of higher education in educating students for democratic citizenship.Dr. Ira Harkavy, director of the Netter Center called his colleague, “a distinguished scholar, inspiring and beloved teacher, and active citizen, who devoted his life to working to change the world for the better. Lee’s pioneering work, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, introduced the application of social science theory and methodology to the discipline of history.”
