Historians in the News

Gay Historian Louis Crompton Dies

Historian Louis Crompton, whose books include the scholarly and critically praised 2003 book "Homosexuality and Civilization," has died at age 84. A July 19 obituary at The San Francisco Chronicle outlined the scholar’s life: born in 1925 in Ontario, Crompton had a long and varied career in academic life, as a professor of mathematics at the University of British Columbia and then a professor of English at two universities, Toronto and Nebraska at Lincoln. Cro

State Dept Offers New Caveat on Nixon Tapes

The transcripts of Nixon White House tape recordings that are published in the State Department’s official Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series are merely “interpretations,” not official records, the State Department acknowledged in the latest FRUS volume that was released this month. As such, those transcripts are susceptible to revision and correction.“Readers are advised

Medieval battle records go online

The detailed service records of 250,000 medieval soldiers - including archers who served with Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt - have gone online. The database of those who fought in the Hundred Years War reveals salaries, sickness records and who was knighted. The full profiles of soldiers from 1369 to 1453 will allow researchers to piece together details of their lives. Thomas, Lord Despenser is the youngest soldier on the database, whose career began w

Tariq Ramadan ... Scholar's Visa Denial Suit Revived

A federal appeals court has revived the challenge by scholarly and civil liberties groups to the U.S. government's denial of a visa to Tariq Ramadan, an internationally acclaimed scholar, to accept a faculty position at the University of Notre Dame. The decision, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, does not grant Ramadan a visa. But it orders a lower court's inquiry into the possibility that he was denied the opportunity to show consular officers that there was no l

Harvard professor Gates arrested at Cambridge home

Update: Charge against Harvard professor dropped. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the nation's pre-eminent African-American scholars, was arrested Thursday afternoon at his home by Cambridge police investigating a possible break-in. The

Inaugural Semester-long seminar on Constitutional History offered at N-Y Historical Society this fall

In its capacity as the New York City home of the Institute for Constitutional History (ICH)—an organization that is co-housed in Washington, DC, at the George Washington University Law School—the New-York Historical Society is pleased to announce that its first semester-long graduate course will take place in autumn 2009 as the Robert H. Smith Seminar. In keeping with the Lincoln Bicentennial theme of the Historical Society’s programs in 2009, including its major exhibition Lincoln and New York,

Daniel Pipes believes Iraq will become Obama's Vietnam

In an opinion piece today,"The Big Decisions to Come," Washington Post columnist David Ignatius argues that the Middle East hosts all four of Barack Obama's major foreign policy challenges: the Israeli-Palestinian problem, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. Along the way, Ignatius reports that"Afghanistan is already being called 'Obama's Vietnam'." But I think that"Obama's Vietnam" is better

Journalist--author of WW II history books--accuses Simon Wiesenthal of fabricating much of his own Holocaust story

Since the early 1960s Simon Wiesenthal’s name has become synonymous with Nazi hunting. His standing is that of a secular saint. Nominated four times for the Nobel peace prize, the recipient of a British honorary knighthood, the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, the French Légion d’honneur and at least 53 other distinctions, he was often credited with some 1,100 Nazi “scalps”. He is remembered, above all, for his efforts to track down Adolf Eichmann, one of the most notorious war criminals.

Jackson Lears continues his search for the origin of our times

Rebirth of a Nation is ambitious in conception, sharp in tone, stylish in composition, erudite in argument, and unified by the force of conviction. It continues the project that Jackson Lears has been pursuing since his first book, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (1981), then in Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (1994) and Something for Nothing: Luck in America (2003). These books purport to uncover the origin

Margaret MacMillan says we botch the use of history

We all live in history. Some of us make it, others are made — or broken — by it. Many of us read it. A few of us write it. Most of us try, at least fitfully, to make use of it, usually by ransacking the past for analogies to explain the present and to predict the future. And more than a few of us, in Margaret MacMillan’s amply documented opinion, routinely botch it. MacMillan, the Canadian-reared warden of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, is an accomplished historian who has written ab

Former editorial director of Yale University Press and general editor of its celebrated Annals of Communism series is now in charge of one of the world's most important archives of Jewish life

One of the world's most important archives of Jewish life, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, in New York, has a new executive director. Jonathan Brent, 59, lately the editorial director of Yale University Press and general editor of its celebrated Annals of Communism series, assumed the post on July 1. Unlike his work on the Annals series, his new job will not require that he be ready to drink and smoke heavily. He laughs heartily when that subject comes up. He se

Sean Wilentz takes on the new Lincoln establishment

... The announcements in last year's publishers' catalogues that a flood of new books would accompany Lincoln's bicentennial augured an opportunity to evaluate the state of Lincoln scholarship, in part by pointing to the writings of those historians, past and present, who insist on evaluating Lincoln seriously as a political creature. (I confess that I have contributed my own bits to the bicentennial torrent.) The difficulty is that an entirely new fashion in the historiography of Lincoln seems

Rick Perlstein attacked by O'Reilly on Fox as a far left activist

Authors discusses new book on James Meredith and his battle to enroll at the University of Mississippi.

In 1962, with court backing, James Meredith became the first black person to enroll at the University of Mississippi. His struggle to enroll, and the violent actions by mobs trying to keep him out, led to a legal and political showdown that reached the White House. While there have been previous studies of this period, Charles W. Eagles had access to previously unavailable federal and state records, and personal records, for his new book, The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration

David McCullough's next book is about Americans who headed to Paris

When people think of American history of the mid-1800s, they usually think of the great westward expansion, the opening up of new territory, of covered wagons and the forging of the American frontier myth. But, as historian David McCullough notes in the first chapter of his latest book: “Not all the pioneers went west.” A lot went the other way, too, intent on opening up new territories of their minds. And many went to France. So many were they, in fact, a

A national historian for US government?

Government agencies work together, this is a fact. Intergovernmental programs are essential to the day to day running of the country. Yet, there is no official history for these actions. Many agencies have historians, but there is no one covering the government as a whole. James Carafano is a Senior Research Fellow for National Security and Homeland Security in the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation. Caraf

History Radio Show: Drive-Time History, With a Dry Sense of Humor

Three history professors spent a recent Sunday afternoon leaning into microphones in a small studio near the University of Virginia, trying to become radio stars — and attempting to invent a new model of educational programming in the process. When they don their bulky headphones, they become "the American history guys," hosts of the monthly public-radio show BackStory. Peter S. Onuf, a UVa history professor known for his work on the American Revolution, gives his perspect

Historians furious as Kew archives are 'dumbed down'

As the home of unique documents ranging from the Titanic passenger list to top-secret cabinet papers, the National Archives is Britain's single most valuable source of primary materials for social historians. But concern is growing that public access is under threat after an announcement that it is to reduce opening hours, limit access to original documents and lay off a number of specialist archivists. Leading historians, including Antony Beevor and Saul David, have this weekend ex

Colorado historian publishes book No. 50

Colorado's Clio. The Homer of the Hills. The Sage of the Silvery San Juan. The Monarch of Mining Historians. Duane Allan Smith has been called many things. But no one can deny he is Colorado's most prolific historian. "The Trail of Gold and Silver: Mining in Colorado, 1859-2009" is Smith's fiftieth book. The University Press of Colorado's Timberline Series, which features some of the best current work on Colorado as well as classic reprints, celebrates the 150th anniversar

Margaret MacMillan on "The Uses and Abuses of History"

In this provocative examination of the ways in which we use and abuse history, Margaret MacMillan passes along a story originally told by the writer Susan Jacoby. She was in a New York bar on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, and eavesdropped on a conversation between two "bewildered" men. First man: "This is just like Pearl Harbor." Second man: "What is Pearl Harbor?" First man: "That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam W