Historians in the News

Princeton history department responds to blogger's complaints of decline

Jeremy Adelman, chair of the Princeton history department, responded to my request for a response to the charge that his program's"once great" American-history side has"fallen onto troubled times." The suggestion came from the deliciously named blogger Ambrose Hofstadter Bierce III, who, as I noted this week, is bidding to become the history profession's go-to source for informed, online gossip. Adelman s

Political Scientists Question the Direction of American Political Studies

The American Political Science Association's annual conference opened here on Thursday, and the U.S. presidential campaign is, not surprisingly, on almost everyone's lips. The program includes dozens of panels on voter turnout, presidential rhetoric, campaign advertising, and the politics of race. But amid the frenzy of election-season chatter, four prominent scholars came together on Thursday afternoon for a grim panel discussion on the health of the subfield known as American poli

Stevenson's 1952, Clinton's 1992 Speeches Among Historian Favorites

NewsHour presidential historian Richard Norton Smith and Peniel Joseph, associate professor of African-American studies and history at Brandeis University, share their favorite speeches from the history of Democratic Party conventions. Joseph picked Bill Clinton’s 1992 address in New York when he argued that the party needed a “new covenant” with America. “What Clinton offers in 1992 in terms of rhetorical eloquence and political genius is this notion that the Democratic Part

Convention '08: Studying History as It Happens

Denver — Michelle Pearson, a history teacher in Colorado, had a star-studded morning at the Democratic National Convention here yesterday, thanks to her involvement in a university-run, hands-on history program. She first attended a breakfast with Thomas A. Daschle, where the former majority leader of the U.S. Senate spoke about leadership. Then she heard from Michelle Obama at a meeting of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. For teachers and professors attending the Dem

Sean Wilentz: Under attack from Obama fans for raising doubts about Obama

[Mr. Sleeper, a journalist, is a lecturer at Yale.] As Bill Clinton was squashing most of the media's hopes for a Clintonista uprising against Barack Obama last night, Charles Kaiser, the veteran reporter and scourge of bad faith in journalism, was up in Newsweek squashing a perverse Clinton dead-ender, the increasingly and pathetically power-hungry Princeton professor Sean Wilentz. As late as this week, Wilentz was sti

David Irving: Sues for loss of archives

... Irving is suing his former lawyers Howard Kennedy, solicitor Peter Laskey, and legal executive Peter Ling in a dispute over his £750,000 Mayfair flat and for the loss of his historical archives. In court papers, Irving alleges that his lawyers failed to carry out his instructions to deal with a possession order issued against the property in Duke Street following his unsuccessful libel action against the American academic Deborah Lipstadt. Irving had sued her for libel after she accus

Vietnamese historian spends a lifetime collecting old maps

Rare old maps are valuable evidence of long-gone cultures and dynasties. A Ho Chi Minh City historian has collected thousands to help him research for his books on the old Vietnam. Vietnamese historian Nguyen Dinh Dau has spent more than half a century collecting over 3,000 antique maps. His small room is packed with rare maps from all over the world and spanning 1,027 years of Vietnamese history, from the Ly, Tran and Le to the Nguyen dynasties. The largest map

Author defends Maori cannibalism book after complaint of racism

The author of a book on cannibalism in Maori history is disappointed a racism complaint has been made about it to the Human Rights Commission. Historian Paul Moon is defending his book This Horrid Practice and stands by his research. "I spent several years researching this book, using an enormous body of documentation, and I'm not about to denounce it just because it upsets a few people," he told the New Zealand Herald. An anonymous complaint said

Martin Kramer: Objects to apparent endorsement of an anti-Israel rally by Georgetown Arab center

Back in the spring, some students at Georgetown University took umbrage at a celebration of Israel's sixtieth anniversary, organized by a pro-Israel student group. Their protest took the form of sitting on the lawn next to the revelers, mouths taped shut. The student newspaper The Hoya covered the demonstration, and described it thus: About 30 demonstrators, many of whom were graduate students, wore black s

Ken Burns: Produces documentary about Ted Kennedy

A digital project by historians illustrates voting patterns over time via a series of animated maps

Borrowing a technique from Hollywood, historians at the University of Richmond have created animated maps that chart voting patterns in U.S. presidential elections since 1840. The maps show county-by-county data for every major election year in which data are available, and that information shifts over time. One map, for example, highlights counties where the victor won by only a small margin. It reveals how "battleground states" have changed over the years. The maps are d

Timothy Furnish: Historian returns from trip to Iran

August 10-17 I went to Iran for the Fourth Annual International Conference on Mahdism. It was an all-expenses-paid trip courtesy of the Bright Future Institute, a quasi-governmental organization dedicated to paving the way for the reappearance of the Twelfth Imam as the Mahdi. Traveling to Iran is not something one should attempt solo. I've been to other Middle Eastern countries on my own but I would never have gone to Iran without official sanction from the IRI government. And even then I

Robert Caro: Talks more about his next LBJ volume

... Johnson died in 1973, and no writer has done more to sustain the debate than Caro, whose three LBJ books have been praised, honored and condemned. His second work, "Means of Ascent," was so harsh a portrait that former Johnson aide Jack Valenti wondered why Caro bothered with a man "he thoroughly despises." The third book, "Master of the Senate," pleased Valenti so much that he reconciled with Caro, agreed to be interviewed for the fourth volume and even asked C

David Williams: Historian suggests Southerners defeated Confederacy

Generations of students have been taught that the South lost the Civil War because of the North's superior industry and population. A new book suggests another reason: Southerners were largely responsible for defeating the Confederacy. In "Bitterly Divided: The South's Inner Civil War" (New Press, $27.95), historian David Williams of Valdosta State University lays out some tradition-upsetting arguments that might make the granite brow of Jefferson Davis crack on Stone Moun

Andrew Bacevich: Spat between him and HNN blogger turns negative

On 15 August, Andrew Bacevich appeared on Bill Moyers' Journal to discuss his book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, and three interlocking crises that the United States faces. On 19 August, our colleague, Chris Bray, raised questions about Bacevich's position in a post,"A Deceptively Pristine History," here at Cliopatria. I invited Profes

University of Chicago historian Norman Golb pioneered work on the Dead Sea Scrolls--Did another scholar not give him due credit?

University of Chicago historian Norman Golb in 1980 broke ranks with conventional wisdom in assigning the authorship of certain discovered texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Jews of Jerusalem. Peter Kaufman claims on the website, http://www.nowpublic.com, that Golb's argument has been borrowed by another scholar without proper acknowledgement.

Robert Caro: Speaks of the LBJ centennial

As the centennial of Lyndon Johnson's birth approaches, historian Robert A. Caro would like to think of his longtime subject at his happiest and most fulfilled. That wasn't when Johnson was president, in anguish over Vietnam, but rather a few years before. That's when LBJ was in his glory as Senate majority leader -- a one-man legislative machine. Carol's a Pulitzer Prize-winner now in the middle of writing his fourth and final volume on Johnson's life, which will cove

Mark Cave: Historian collects stories of life in immediate aftermath of Katrina

So what really happened in New Orleans in the twilight-zone days immediately following Hurricane Katrina? That's one of the questions to which Mark Cave, an oral historian with the Historic New Orleans Collection, has been seeking answers in his personal interviews over the last three years with 500 police officers, firefighters, National Guard troops and emergency medical personnel who were on the ground after the storm. Since any trial lawyer knows that two people vie

Douglas Farnie: Historian of the cotton industry

Douglas Farnie was the pre-eminent historian of the Lancashire cotton industry in its 19th- and 20th-century heyday. On the staff of the History Department at Manchester University for over 30 years, he influenced generations of students. Born in 1926 in Salford, the youngest son of Arthur Farnie, a tailor, and his second wife, Ethel, Douglas went to Salford Grammar School, from which he entered the Intelligence Corps in 1944, serving in Field Security with the Indian Airborne, 1945

Andrew Ward: Drawing wide praise for his book about slaves

As the Civil War raged, those in bondage felt torn about whether to root for the Union military or to hope for the safety of their masters who supported the Confederacy. Andrew Ward, author of "The Slaves' War" (Houghton Mifflin, 386 pages, $28), notes, "The feature of the slave South that puzzled and disappointed the more idealistic Yankees was the diligence with which so many of the slaves they encountered protected and sustained their masters' plantations."