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: Panama City News Herald
Jan 27, 2012
William Price is the son of Christina Jeffrey, former Historian of the House of Representatives.As a younger man I had the misfortune of watching my mother being lured into Washington by Newt Gingrich, who hired her as the historian of the House of Representatives when he was speaker of the House.Newt and my mother, Christina Jeffrey, became close friends when she arranged for him to teach a class at Kennesaw State College in Newt’s congressional district, north of Atlanta. When Newt became speaker he had several jobs to dole out, one of which was the historian position. Newt offered the job to my mother, who was a professor at Kennesaw State. She left the security of tenure and crossed the Potomac for seemingly greener pastures.This move turned into the biggest mistake any member of academia could ever make. As soon as Newt became speaker, vitriolic congressional Democrats quickly targeted all things Newt. My mother was no exception. Barney Frank and Charles Schumer pulled a partial quote from a confidential (never believe anything is confidential with the government) review she had written on a volunteer basis for the Department of Education 10 years prior about a program aimed at teaching the Holocaust to seventh-grade children....
Source: Asia Times
Jan 26, 2012
Admiral Zheng He's armadas sailed from Nanjing to as far as East Africa over eight voyages between 1405-1433. Most Chinese lionize the Muslim eunuch as a peace loving ambassador of peace and friendship. But Australian historian Geoffrey Wade tells Victor Fic the admiral was a Ming military commander pursuing gunboat diplomacy, and indicts the commodore for war crimes.A senior research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, based in Singapore, Wade's interests include Sino-Southeast Asian historical interactions and related issues such as Chinese expansions and early Islam in Southeast Asia. Wade's work includes an online database [1] that provides English translations of over 3,000 references to Southeast Asia...Victor Fic: Geoff, how did you become fascinated with Zheng He?Geoffrey Wade: I have long been interested in how China and Southeast Asia interacted and did my PhD on Southeast Asia as represented in the Ming reign annals. A key element was the Ming maritime missions to Southeast Asia. China's commemorations of Zheng He in 2005 further piqued my interest.VF: Summarize the orthodox Chinese claim that he was a peaceful seafarer.GW: Within Chinese societies, one finds "popular" perceptions of Zheng He. One tribute translates as:
Source: AHA Today
Jan 24, 2012
Whatever might be the truth about the apocalyptic eschatology of the Mayan calendar and its endtimes forecast for the Gregorian 2012, one thing is clear, it seems: The Mayan people knew about extracting pleasures from their existential present, as they appear to have used tobacco. That the peoples of Mesoamerica used nicotine could be surmised from other evidence, but a study published on January 12, 2012, in Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell, provided material evidence of tobacco use by the ancient Maya.
Source: Ian Pryde in Russia Beyond the Headlines
Jan 24, 2012
Ian Pryde is founder and C.E.O. of Eurasia Strategy & Communications in Moscow....Niall Ferguson, for instance, the noted presenter and pundit, said last week on Bloomberg TV, where he is a contributing editor, that Romney’s experience with start-ups and turnarounds was exactly what American needed.As a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School with conservative leanings, Ferguson might be expected to say that, but in his other capacity as professor of history at Harvard, he really ought to know better. Business education or success hardly guarantees success in politics: Running a country requires far broader skills than managing a business.
Source: Public Radio International
Jan 24, 2012
...The address begins at 9 p.m. eastern (8 central) and will be carried on all the major broadcast networks and cable news channels. About half of Americans are expected to watch the address.Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, said the president realizes this is his opportunity to lay out the case for why he deserves to be re-elected."To contrast with what his opponents are saying in their primaries and caucuses," Zelizer said.And it can have a major impact. Zelizer said Ronald Reagan's 1984 address won a landmark, with huge impact on his re-election."Reagan had spent the first four years being very bellicose, and using aggressive language against the Soviet Union," Zelizer said. "By 1983 and 1984, he's mellowed. He's worried about the potential for nuclear war with the Soviets, and his advisers were telling him you have to show you're genuinely interested in peace, or you're going to scare away voters."...
Source: DNA
Jan 23, 2012
One of Pakistan's most acclaimed historians, Ayesha Jalal bemoans the fact that history as an academic discipline has failed to grow in her country, a deficiency that needs to be addressed to spawn a new breed of scholars in the subject.A professor of History at the Tufts University with as many as seven books to her credit, the Pakistani-American who is an authority on South Asia has chosen to return to Pakistan as a visiting scholar to help address the gap in her own way.In India to attend the Jaipur Literature Festival, Jalal told PTI during an interaction why she felt that the academic growth of history in India had contributed to the development of a worthy scholarship in this country....
Source: BBC News
Jan 23, 2012
Novelist Jeffrey Eugenides and the late historian Manning Marable are among the nominees for the US National Book Critics Circle awards.Eugenides is nominated for The Marriage Plot, the tale of three students caught in a love triangle, which opens on the day of their graduation.Marable, meanwhile, is shortlisted in the biography category for his revelatory history of Malcolm X.The winners will be announced on 8 March. No cash prize is given....
Source: WaPo
Jan 23, 2012
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich likes to use the word “elites” as a pejorative when he talks about things and people whom he considers liberal. But the former House speaker himself is in pretty elite company when it comes to his PhD.For one thing, earning a doctorate is a pretty elite thing to do in the United States. Nearly 40 percent of Americans ages 25 and older had an associate and/or bachelor's degree in 2010, according to the Census Bureau, while less than 3 percent had a doctorate.Only one American president in the entire history of the country has had a doctorate, Woodrow Wilson, who served from 1913 to 1921, and earned a PhD in history and political science from Johns Hopkins University. His doctorate was called “Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics.” (Wilson was also president of Princeton University.)...
Source: NYT
Jan 23, 2012
Mary C. Henderson, a scholar of the theater whose interests as a historian and curator spanned centuries and as a Tony nominator and critic were up to the minute, died on Jan. 3 at her home in Congers, N.Y. She was 83.The cause was Parkinson’s disease, her son Doug said.Ms. Henderson, who taught theater history at New York University and other schools, wrote several books, often lavishly illustrated, reflecting her familiarity with and love of theater imagery and theater artifacts. They included “The City and the Theater” (1973, revised in 2004), a history of the city’s playhouses dating to the 18th century; “Broadway Ballyhoo” (1989), a study of theater advertising; and “Mielziner: Master of Modern Stage Design” (2000), an analytical biography of the prolific and influential designer Jo Mielziner, whose more than 200 shows included the original Broadway productions of “Carousel,” “Death of a Salesman,” “A Streetcar Name Desire,” “Guys and Dolls” and “Gypsy.”...
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Jan 22, 2012
Built 20 miles north of Saigon, Long Binh Post was the largest U.S. base in Vietnam. Among its features was the Nature of the War Museum, a replica of a Viet Cong-controlled village complete with tunnels, booby traps, and weapons. It served "as a reminder to personnel that there was indeed a war going on somewhere nearby," writes Meredith H. Lair.That was not always easy to remember, she suggests, in Long Binh, a Cleveland-size enclave of American opulence that rarely saw any danger. The joke was that if the Viet Cong ever really attacked the base, with its 180 miles of roads, they would have to use the scheduled bus system for the incursion.The huge base is emblematic of Lair's fluid and engrossing new book, Armed With Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War (University of North Carolina Press).The typical experience of the American soldier in Vietnam was not "the infantryman humping the boonies on ambush patrol that Platoon and other popular treatments have enshrined in public memory," says the author, an assistant professor of history at George Mason University. While 2.5 million Americans served in Vietnam, a much smaller portion saw combat....
Source: David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
Jan 22, 2012
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Defenders of President Franklin Roosevelt's response to the Holocaust have been dealt a major blow, as a study by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has rejected a claim they frequently have made regarding the U.S. failure to bomb Auschwitz.The development comes just before International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27), which commemorates the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.In numerous speeches, articles, and conferences in recent years, officials and supporters of the Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in Hyde Park, NY have claimed that then-Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion opposed bombing Auschwitz (for fear of harming prisoners). Roosevelt supporters have made the claim to deflect criticism of FDR for the U.S. rejection of requests to bomb the death camp.But a newly-completed two-year study by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has concluded that Ben-Gurion opposed bombing the camp only for a period of several weeks when he believed it was a labor camp, and then reversed himself when he learned more about the true nature of Auschwitz, and thereafter supported bombing. Ben-Gurion's associates in Europe and the United States then repeatedly pressed Allied officials to bomb the camp.
Source: WaPo
Jan 20, 2012
The fantasy find for historian Lonnie G. Bunch III includes a tattered pair of pantaloons made of that old “Negro cloth” and a coarse linen shirt that all but disintegrated on the back of its enslaved owner. Maybe a thrashed pair of brogans, too, worn around the plantation until the soles fell off.“Slave clothing,” Bunch said, almost wistfully, of the most elusive item on his historical wish list. “Still can’t find any.”Bunch, the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, is tantalized by the possibility that somewhere — in an attic or basement — somebody has work clothing once worn by a black slave.He desperately wants to find, authenticate and restore it, then use the potent symbol of a painful past to humanize the story of slavery. But he and his staff of historical hunter-gatherers haven’t come close....
Source: Independent (UK)
Jan 20, 2012
Where are you now and what can you see? I'm in my little writing hut in my Somerset home, looking down a sloping meadow which has a pond at the end.What are you currently reading? As ever, I've got multiple books on the go. The one I'm most concentrating on is Peter Englund's brilliant history, 'The Beauty and the Sorrow'. It is a collection of disparate accounts of the First World War from people living all over the world, and it corrects the Western view that most of the key fighting was done on the Western Front.Choose a favourite author, and say why you admire her/him The historian, Professor Hew Strachan, at Oxford University, who was my mentor. He got me into military history and unlike an awful lot of historians, who don't seem to be able to keep partiality or politics out of their work, he is able to do so. It's incredibly difficult to do, I think, but you never think for a moment when reading him that he has anything other than a distant, objective view....
Source: Prague Monitor
Jan 19, 2012
Prague, Jan 18 (CTK) - Czech historians of art are opposed to the idea of the urn with famous Czech-born painter Frantisek Kupka's remains being transferred from Paris to Prague and placed at the Vysehrad cemetery where outstanding Czech personalities are buried.Some say the Czech Republic should claim its adherence to Kupka (1871-1957), a world-renowned pioneer of world abstract art who died in France and was buried in Paris.However, historians point out that Kupka chose France to live in and showed no interest to return to Bohemia.
Source: Wales Online
Jan 19, 2012
A Welsh historian who believes Wales’ part in the British Empire has been largely ignored has produced a new book to put the record straight.Swansea University-based Professor Huw Bowen believes up to now Welsh historians have often viewed the Welsh as victims of the British Empire.As a result he says, the story of Wales and the British Empire has concentrated on the working classes.But Professor Bowen says the fabric of the British Empire was studded with Welsh soldiers, sailors, administrators, entrepreneurs, surgeons, diplomats and adventurers....
Source: BBC News
Jan 18, 2012
Historian Simon Schama has launched a scathing attack on Downton Abbey, accusing it of improbable storylines and historical inaccuracies.Criticising the show's popularity in the US, he accused it of "cultural necrophilia" and of pandering to "cliches" about British stately homes."Downton serves up a steaming, silvered tureen of snobbery," he wrote in The New Statesman.Creator Julian Fellowes has previously defended the drama against such claims.Responding to people who accused the show of using anachronistic language and etiquette, he said "the programme is pretty accurate"....
Source: Salon
Jan 14, 2012
In the US today, debt is ubiquitous. Whether it’s paying back thousands of dollars in student loans, using your Visa card for a pack of gum when you’re out of cash, or taking out a mortgage on a first home, it’s been woven into our financial system so tightly, that even when we suffer the sometimes cruel and unusual detriments of borrowing, we have little to no realistic impetus to stop. But it wasn’t always this way. In fact before the 20th century, debt was a taboo, feared, shameful, and kept in the shadows. So what events and institutions brought debt from its meager beginnings to its central role in American life?
Source: Houston Chronicle
Jan 12, 2012
As far as human rights, religion and politics goes, anti-Semitism has been around for generations - but is this historic topic breathing new life?That's the question Deborah Lipstadt, the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, will discuss Tuesday in Houston.Lipstadt is not talking about whether anti-Semitism exists. She's considering the idea that a "new" form is under way, one stemming from Europe and one that is more directly related to attitudes against Israel and its close connection with the United States."But I am not, in any way, shape or form, saying that everyone who has something to say about Israel is anti-Semitic," said Lipstadt, a consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C....
Source: Mark Cheathem at Jacksonian America (blog)
Jan 12, 2012
Mark Cheathem is Associate Professor of History at Cumberland University. He blogs at Jacksonian America.This year’s AHA was the best I’ve ever attended, primarily because it’s the first I’ve attended without interviewing for a job but also because of the great weather.
Source: AHA Blog
Jan 12, 2012
Following the AHA’s 126th annual meeting this year on Twitter, through over 4,500 tweets, was fascinating. Attendees, as well as those following along from home, connected with other participants, shared links to resources and thoughts on sessions, and gave a dynamic glimpse into the various events and conversations going on at the meeting.When Twitter first came online in 2006, many of its critics saw it as a place for inane personal updates. And while that is certainly still the case for some users, Twitter has also developed into a tool for communicating ideas and creating scholarly debate.
