Historians in the News

Matt Phillips Interviews Historian Charles Geistt: Financial Historian on The Dow as 'Cultural Icon'

[Charles Geisst is a professor of finance at Manhattan College. His new book, “Collateral Damaged: The Marketing of Consumer Debt to America,” was recently published by Bloomberg Press.] Wall Street without the Dow?It seems to be a possibility. We know Dow Jones & Co Inc. has been sounding out potential buyers for the company’s stock-market indexing business. The Journal’s story contains this tantalizing bit:"A new owner might have the option to renam

Ambeth Ocampo: A Ghost Writer for Teodoro A. Agoncillo

Today, Aug. 21, a nationwide non-working holiday, will provide Filipinos time to remember Ninoy Aquino and how this man’s life and death set off a chain of events that made history . We will also remember Ninoy today in the context of the life and death of his widow Cory Aquino who also began another chain of events that made history. Now that there are many moves to proclaim Cory a national hero, to begin the process of canonization, to at least have her face adorn the P500 bill alongsid

David Kaiser victim of Internet hoax

[I must again inform new visitors, brought here by an email circulating under my name that compares President Obama to Adolf Hitler, that I did not write that completely fraudulent email. For comments on it see the post, "A Great Fear," below. For more information on it see snopes.com/politics/soapbox/proportions.asp.] Not since 1935, the year of the Wagner Act and of Social Security, or 1964 and the great Civil Rights Act, has the Congress faced such a critical choice as

German historians et al. sign a declaration noting Stalin's direct involvement in the start of World War II

'We thus respond to those in Russia who are trying to defend Stalin. They don't seem to be living in the 21st century,' says CSU deputy Hartmut Koschyk, one of the declaration's signatories. The declaration is an appeal to Europe to not forget, while celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain, the circumstances in which the continent was originally divided seventy years ago. 'We are aware, and this is a painful awareness, that without the German-st

High school teacher grateful for the chance to attend Gilder Lehrman summer seminar

Last month, I experienced the best in professional development for high school history teachers. I attended a week-long seminar entitled "U.S. and the Cold War" in Washington D.C. co-sponsored by The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Twenty-four teachers from across the country and I studied with two of the country’s most eminent scholars, Melvyn P. Leffler of the University of Virginia and Christian Ostermann, direc

Richard Poirier, a founder of Library of America, Dies at 83

Richard Poirier, a prolific and populist cultural critic who founded a literary journal, Raritan: A Quarterly Review, and who was a founder of Library of America, the nonprofit publisher of American classics, died in Manhattan on Saturday. He was 83. The cause was injuries suffered in a fall in his home, said a friend, the poet Frederick Seidel. Mr. Poirier (pronounced to rhyme with “warrior”) was an old-fashioned man of letters — a writer, an editor, a publisher, a tea

Bernard A. Weisberger tells how he came to eavesdrop on the Japanese military during WW II

IN HIS MARVELOUS MEMOIR, Flights of Passage, my friend and onetime colleague Samuel Hynes, a Marine Corps combat aviator in World War II, writes that the war is the shared secret of his generation—those young men who came of age between December 7, 1941, and September 2, 1945. For those of the approximately 12 million Americans in uniform for some or all of those years, it was an experience both personal and collective like nothing before or after. Those who went through the hell of combat carry

Historian Betsy McCaughey battles with Jon Stewart over the Obama Health Care bill

The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Renowned historian Dr Geraint Jenkins mourned

Tributes have been paid this week following the death of renowned historian Dr Geraint Jenkins at the weekend. Dr Jenkins, who fomerly headed the Welsh Industrial and Maritime Museum and the Welsh Folk Museum at St Ffagan, was the author of more than 50 history books and was a leading expert in Welsh maritime history.

Louis Masur Has A Lifelong Love Of Bruce Springsteen

To say that Louis P. Masur is a fan of Bruce Springsteen is just about the epitome of understatement. Masur, the William R. Kenan Jr. professor of American institutions and values at Trinity College, is so taken with Springsteen's work that he has merged his academic research with his favorite artist. The result is Masur's latest book, "Runaway Dream: 'Born to Run' and Bruce Springsteen's American Vision" (Bloomsbury Press, $23), set for publication Sept. 1. It's an

Rick Perlstein's Nixonland hypothesis as relevant as ever?" Depends who you ask.

A little over a year ago, when Rick Perlstein published his mammoth study of “the American berserk” – the original subtitle of Nixonland – in the years between 1965 and 1972, he concluded his 748-page saga of heated hardhats and howling hippies (or was it the other way around?) by arguing that the culture and political wars of the late Sixties and early Seventies had not only not died, but had never really gone away.Perlstein maintained that the 37th President’s legacy to the nat

The historian behind the claim that Obama's in favor of death panels

Asaf Romirowsky: Challenging Norton Mezvinsky's Stance on Isreal

[Asaf Romirowsky, writing at the website of the Middle East Forum (a Conservative website run by historian Daniel Pipes).] A newly formed"educational think tank," the International Council for Middle East Studies (ICMES), is poised to influence U.S. policy toward the Middle East in ways that could further harm American interests in the region. It will be led by Norton Mezvinsky, a radical anti-Zionist who recently retired after a 42-year-career teaching Middle East history at Centra

Conservatives complain that Yale's purge of the Mohammed images gets more sordid

Remember how the Times said Yale got a "unanimous" recommendation against publishing the images from a 24-member panel of experts (whose identities Yale refuses to reveal)? Indeed, not content with mere unanimity, John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press, insisted that the experts' recommendation to censor the images was “overwhelming and unanimous.” Well, it turns out that (a) the experts were not unanimous, and (b) the New York Times is aware of that fact but has yet to c

Juan Cole shares health tips at his history blog

I am sure they are smart people, but every once in a while the journalists working for the mainstream media deliver themselves of the opinion that exercise does not help you lose weight, or that, indeed, there is no way to lose weight.This article in Time says that the reporter's friends removed the benefit of the exercise they had done by going to Starbucks afterward and having a muffin. But he implies that they are doomed to do so. No blame is laid on corporate food for Am

Distinguished British historian, Christopher Elrington, dies at 79

Professor Elrington, who lived in Lloyd Baker Street, was a man who lived and breathed antiquity. He combined his day job as general editor of the Victoria County History (VCH) with his role as president of Islington Historical and Archaeological Society. At VCH, before he retired in 1992, he wrote the history of every county in England, professionally, systematically and from original sources, on behalf of the Institute of History, based at the University of London...

Brandeis professor accuses Yale University Press of gag order

[Note: This story is about Brandeis Professor of Comparative Politics, Jytte Klausen.] Why is Yale hiding behind the decision of anonymous"experts" to defend its decision to pull all illustrations of Muhammad from Jytte Klausen's forthcoming book, The Cartoons that Shook the World? What does it have to hide? Who was behind the decision?Ye

On the writings of the late Jack Kirby

Jack Temple Kirby, a historian who decried stereotypes of the American South and traced the ways its people and landscapes have shaped one another, died Aug. 6 in St. Augustine, Fla. He was 70... In 2007, Dr. Kirby was one of two recipients of the Bancroft Prize, which is awarded annually by Columbia University to the authors of books “of exceptional merit” in American history, biography and diplomacy. The Bancroft jurors cited Dr. Kirby’s 2006 book, “Mockingbird Song:

Women historians 'too timid' to write about men

Helen Rappaport, who has just written a biography of Lenin, called Conspirator, said they should be "bolder" rather than limiting themselves to wives and mistresses. Earlier this year Dr David Starkey, the historian and Tudor specialist, caused a storm by accusing female authors of "feminising" British history. However, rather than taking issue with Dr Starkey, she said: "I think in a way Starkey raised one or two valid points. &qu

Juan Cole was right about Sunni fighters

I argue in my new book, Engaging the Muslim World, that the Sunni Arab guerrilla war against the US was wrongly interpreted as religious in character when mostly it was a manifestation of Sunni Arab nationalism, and that most Sunni Arabs in Iraq are secular-minded. That is, the Bush administration propaganda about fighting"al-Qaeda" in Iraq was just t