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: LA Times
Jan 3, 2012
Wrapped in a shawl on a cold morning, Gamal Banna shuffled over a dusty carpet amid fraying books on old civilizations. He knows well the intricacies of Arab history, but is far less certain where the upheavals of the last year will lead.Like the balustrade winding to his library door, the known ways are crumbling. Moments of wonder are giving way to months of bewilderment. These days, he said, are likely to prove as seminal as those after World War I, when Western powers drew the borders that shaped the Middle East for nearly a century. Islamists, who have endured decades of oppression, appear to have their chance to redefine the region's politics."One era has ended," said Banna, one of Islam's leading liberal thinkers. "But of the new era, we don't know exactly what is taking shape."...
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Jan 3, 2012
A last-minute stay from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has blocked efforts by British authorities to obtain documents from an oral history project at Boston College. While the college was prepared to turn over the documents, as ordered by a lower court, a stay was obtained on behalf of those involved in the oral history project.The stay -- issued Friday -- followed two December rulings by a district court judge, William G. Young. First, he refused a request by Boston College to have subpoenas for the documents quashed, instead saying that he could conduct a private review of the papers. In the ruling, Judge Young said he would weigh a variety of factors, including U.S. treaty obligations to Britain, and the impact of turning over confidential oral history documents on future academic research. Then last week, in a follow-up ruling, Judge Young ordered the release of documents related to interviews with Dolours Price, a woman in Northern Ireland who backed efforts by the Irish Republican Army to gain independence from Britain.
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Jan 3, 2012
The history job market is on the mend, albeit in a very small way, according to a report released Monday by the American Historical Association.The number of jobs listed with the association in the 2010-11 academic year increased by 10.2 percent over the prior year, from 569 to 627. The gain doesn't suggest a healthy job market, however, because the figures from the previous academic year represented a historic low. And just three years ago, the number of positions listed with the history association was 1,064, the highest it has ever been. (While not all history jobs are listed with the association, the AHA data are considered a reliable measure of the market.)History continues to lag behind other disciplines when it comes to improvements in the academic job market, according to the report. Adding to the woes in this discipline is the high number of Ph.D. recipients, which was more than a 1,000 last year.The report, released the same week the American Historical Association holds its annual conference in Chicago, is sure to renew controversy over whether history departments let too many students into their doctoral programs, and the role of professors in failing to encourage graduate students to consider nonacademic careers....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 2, 2012
“It remains an inconvenient truth,” she observed in 2010, “that most working-class children (and therefore most children) in 18th- and 19th-century Britain did not enjoy the freedom to develop physically and mentally through play and education. From an early age they laboured, contributing crucially to the fragile family budget and to wider manufacturing expansion.”However, in Child Workers in England, 1780-1820: Parish Apprentices and the Making of the Early Industrial Labour Force (2007), Katrina Honeyman showed that the life of the child labourer was not uniformly bleak. Many of them were able to use the skills and opportunities they acquired to advance themselves in adult life. Indeed, by early adolescence, most apprentices enjoyed greater earning capacity than their mothers and were jostling with their fathers for the position of main breadwinner.
Source: NY Daily News
Jan 2, 2012
Emory University researchers have embarked on an admirable historical project: to learn more about the names of some 9,500 Africans carried on slave ships on the Atlantic, so they can better knit together the broader history of the millions of men, women and children who were abducted and sold into captivity.The names are an accident of history.In the first half of the 19th century, the British and others intercepted many slave ships and freed the prisoners — first, making detailed registries of their identities.The result is a rare list of the original African names of thousands of would-be slaves (the name Obama, for example, appears twice)....
Source: Forward
Jan 1, 2012
Bernard Bellush, a labor historian and activist, has died of natural causes at age 94.Bernard Bellush, who was an editor of the the Forverts’s English supplement and served on the Forward Association’s board, died Friday night at a hospital, his wife, Jewel Bellush, wrote in a message to friends.Bernard Bellush was raised in the Bronx, attended public schools and graduated from City College in 1941. Although raised as a pacifist, he served in the army during World War II, taking part in the landing on Omaha Beach.He earned a master’s degree in history at Columbia University, with a thesis on Eugene V. Debs, and a Ph.D., with a dissertation on Franklin D. Roosevelt as governor of New York....
Source: WaPo
Dec 28, 2011
Valerie French, 70, a professor emerita of history at American University, died Dec. 8 at her home in the District.She had a heart ailment, her husband, Robert Beisner, said.Dr. French joined the faculty at American University in 1969. She taught history courses on ancient Greece and Rome and specialized in women, midwives, childhood and parenting in the ancient Mediterranean. From 2001 to 2003, she chaired the history department and was also associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. She retired in 2005....
Source: Today's Zaman
Dec 26, 2011
Swiss foreign minister has urged Turkish and Armenian historians to investigate events earlier last century that have been primary cause of tensions between the two nations for decades.Micheline Calmy-Rey, who is also the president of the Swiss Confederation, told Turkish ambassadors in her keynote speech at Ambassadors Conference in Ankara on Monday that historians from both sides should investigate the Armenian genocide allegations. “The historians would then contribute to discussions with their findings,” Calmy-Rey. Calmy-Rey stressed that there is not any law in her country that acknowledges a certain incident as genocide, like in France. Armenia, backed by some historians and parliaments, says about 1.5 million Armenians were killed in what is now eastern Turkey during World War One in a deliberate policy of genocide ordered by the Ottoman government....
Source: The Nation
Dec 21, 2011
...George F. Kennan by John Lewis Gaddis Yes this massive authorized bio landed on many year-end “best” lists, but most reviewers didn’t know much about Kennan beyond his authorship of the containment doctrine at the dawn of the Cold War. The problem with this book: it minimizes Kennan’s 40 years of criticism of the Cold War. “Containment,” he said, should have focused on economic and political competition with the Soviets, rather than on a military arms race. Gaddis portrays the older Kennan as morose and self-absorbed, but barely mentions Kennan’s opposition to the Vietnam War, his endorsement of Gene McCarthy for president in 1968, and his last political statement, in 2002, at age 98, criticizing George W. Bush’s plans for a war with Iraq. Perhaps relevant in explaining these gaps: George W. Bush awarded Gaddis the National Humanities Medal in 2005 in a ceremony at the White House. For a critique of the book, see Frank Costigliola in the New York Review, here. Area 51 by Annie Jacobsen
Source: FactCheck.org
Dec 20, 2011
Newt Gingrich wrongly claimed the Dred Scott decision “ruled that slavery extended to the whole country.” It did not. The ruling stated that Congress had no authority to ban slavery in new territories, but it stopped short of applying the ruling to all states. Gingrich also claimed that President Lincoln “explicitly instructed his administration to not enforce Dred Scott.” But the research historian at the Lincoln presidential library knows of no such directive or any reason to issue one.
Source: Claire Potter for The Chronicle of Higher Ed
Dec 18, 2011
Claire Potter is a blogger and history professor at Wesleyan University.Have you followed American Historical Association president Anthony Grafton’s serial meditation on how graduate schools might respond to a bad academic job market? A market that has, since the the 1970s, been either stagnant or getting worse? A market with whose effects the blogosphere is obsessed?If you haven’t, you need to catch up. For “No More Plan B” (October 2011) and “Plan C” (November 2011), both co-written with Jim Grossman for the AHA newsletter Perspectives, go here and here. For an article about “Plan B” by Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed (October 3 2011) go here; and for a response by graduate student Dan Alloso (UMass-Amherst) go here.
Source: NYT
Dec 18, 2011
Paula E. Hyman, a social historian who pioneered the study of women in Jewish life and became an influential advocate for women’s equality in Jewish religious practice, including their ordination as rabbis, died on Thursday at her home in New Haven. She was 65.The cause was breast cancer, said her husband, Dr. Stanley Rosenbaum.Dr. Hyman, a professor of modern Jewish history at Yale University, wrote 10 books about the Jewish experience in Europe and the United States, many of them focused on women’s roles in various communities before and after the immense Jewish migrations of the 19th and 20th centuries.She spotlighted the special stresses confronting married Jewish women from Eastern Europe when they arrived in the United States, for instance: although they were used to working outside the home, even as primary breadwinners in some ultrareligious families, they were initially housebound in America, where custom placed married women in the home....
Source: Haaretz
Dec 16, 2011
The night of April 17, 1945 was a dramatic one in the Bavarian town of Ansbach. The Third Reich was on the verge of collapse and U.S. forces were besieging the city. They would take it in less than 24 hours. That night a small, courageous group of young anti-Nazis tried to get the town to surrender without bloodshed or destruction.The tragic events of that night and the following morning would enable one of Germany's most important postwar historians to clear his name of accusations that he was pro-Nazi. Through a web of lies and half-truths, the historian, Karl Bosl, swept away his Nazi past and replaced it with the image of a brave opponent of the Nazis.Research by Prof. Benjamin Z. Kedar, the vice president of the National Academy of Sciences, and Peter Herde of Wurzburg University in Germany, has exposed what really happened that night, as well as Bosl's true Nazi past. As a result, the government of the Bavarian city where Bosl was born, Cham, announced about two weeks ago that it was changing the name of a square from Dr.-Karl-Bosl-Platz and removing a statue of Bosl from town hall....
Source: Jon Wiener in The Nation
Dec 15, 2011
Jon Wiener teaches US history at UC Irvine....To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918, by Adam Hochschild. I loved this story about a big war and the small number of people who said it was wrong—not the Iraq war or the Vietnam war but World War I, one of history’s most senseless exercises in violence. Hochschild focuses on Britain and on those who were jailed for trying to stop the war that killed so many millions and broke so many of the barriers to what we considered permissible. Written with impressive narrative power and moral clarity, thke book offers an unmistakable lesson for our own time....
Source: Jerusalem Post
Dec 15, 2011
A new biography of Reinhard Heydrich argues that decisions to exterminate the Jews were not made in the 1930s but developed in stages, often in response to changing political and military circumstances.
Source: Jewish Telegraph Agency
Dec 15, 2011
(JTA) -- Noted Jewish feminist Paula Hyman, who served as the first female dean of the Seminary College of Jewish Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary, has died.Hyman died Thursday at the age of 65.She was the Lucy Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History at Yale University, a position she held for 25 years, including more than a decade as chair of the Jewish studies program....
Source: Mark LeVine for Al Jazeera
Dec 15, 2011
Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine.
Source: LA Times
Dec 14, 2011
During his five-year overhaul of the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, Cold War historian Timothy Naftali won wide praise for transforming a much-ridiculed institution into a house of serious scholarship under the auspices of the National Archives and Records Administration. Yet nobody was surprised that the private Richard Nixon Foundation — run by fierce loyalists of the former president — didn't honor Naftali when he left as director last month to join a think tank and write a book. The raw, unflinching Watergate exhibit he unveiled in March was, in the loyalists' view, deeply unkind to Nixon's legacy. The foundation, which had run the library with private funds from its inception in 1990, had a chilly relationship with Naftali since he was appointed director in 2006 with the clear orders to make over an institution that seemed designed only to burnish Nixon's image. Now, a fuller portrait is emerging of the campaign the loyalists waged and the tactics they employed — including the use of high-level political pressure — to thwart Naftali's efforts at the library....
Source: MSNBC
Dec 14, 2011
On Dec. 14, 1911, a five-man Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen became the first explorers to reach the South Pole. Another five-man expedition reached the pole just 34 days later, this time a led by British Navy Captain Robert Falcon Scott.But a century later, both teams still seem to be competing against one another....Initially, Scott was seen as a tragic hero, particularly in Britain and other English-speaking countries. Many observers outside Scandinavia regarded Amundsen — who had secretly changed his destination from the North to the South Pole — as a usurper who had unsportingly jumped in on Scott's long-planned mission.Shifting reputations Then in 1979, a book by Roland Huntford, a British journalist with long experience in Scandinavia, painted an entirely different picture. In "Scott and Amundsen," Huntford portrayed Scott as an incompetent martinet and Amundsen as a perfect team leader who serenely achieved results....Recently, views have begun to change again.Some historians point to the two ventures' contrasting goals. While Amundsen sought only the pole, they say, Scott's expedition included several prominent scientists who carried out significant research in other parts of Antarctica as the five-man team undertook its polar journey....
Source: HNN Staff
Dec 14, 2011
Anthony Grafton, president of the American Historical Association, will be chairing a just-announced session at this year’s AHA convention in Chicago, entitled “Jobs for Historians: Approaching the Crisis from the Demand Side.” The session was prompted by an exchange with Jesse Lemisch on the History News Network over the proper way to address the jobs crisis amongst history PhDs. Mr. Lemisch proposed that the AHA endorse a proposal for a WPA-style federal writers’ project for out-of-work historians, in turn prompted by an earlier exchange (For Lemisch’s original article and a rebuttal by Grafton and AHA executive director James Grossman, go here and here.). Mr. Lemisch will be on the panel, along with Edward Balleisen of Duke University, John R. Dichtl of the National Council for Public History, and Lynn Hunt of UCLA.Mr. Lemisch has also announced the formation of Occupy History, a group that seeks to add the voice of historians “in support of those speaking out against demanding solutions to growing injustice and inequality, both economic and social.” Occupy History’s website is http://occupyhistoryna.wordpress.com/.
