Blogs > History Buzz, Feb 21-Mar. 8, 2010: 'Last Train From Hiroshima' Dropped

Mar 7, 2010

History Buzz, Feb 21-Mar. 8, 2010: 'Last Train From Hiroshima' Dropped

POLITICAL HIGHLIGHTS:

IN FOCUS:

  • Rosalind Rosenberg: Interview with Professor Rosenberg: Why should we continue to celebrate Women’s History Month? So that women do not disappear again from history.... - Columbia Spectator, 2-28-10

THIS WEEK IN HISTORY:

HISTORY NEWS:

  • Congressman Wants Reagan on $50 Bill, Joan Waugh objects to call to replace Grant on the $50 bill with Reagan: "President Reagan is indisputably one of the most transformative presidents of the 20th century," Rep. Patrick McHenry, a Republican, said in a letter to his fellow members of Congress."Like President Roosevelt on the dime and President Kennedy on the half-dollar, President Reagan deserves a place of honor on our nation's currency."
    "I'm outraged," Joan Waugh, UCLA history professor and the author of"U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth," told AOL News."I think it's a bad idea, and particularly troublesome coming from Southern Republicans."
    The commanding general who led the North to victory in the Civil War, Grant was not a beloved figure in the Deep South, Waugh says."But for the rest of the country, he was an incredibly popular two-term president."... - AOL News (3-3-10)

  • Diane Ravitch: Scholar's School Reform U-Turn Shakes Up Debate: Diane Ravitch, the education historian who built her intellectual reputation battling progressive educators and served in the first Bush administration’s Education Department, is in the final stages of an astonishing, slow-motion about-face on almost every stand she once took on American schooling.... - NYT, 3-3-10

  • Henry Holt drops publication of 'Last Train From Hiroshima': Henry Holt is dropping publication of"The Last Train From Hiroshima" after the author, Charles Pellegrino, failed to adequately answer questions about a source in the book and the revocation of his PhD more than 25 years ago.... - WaPo, 3-2-10

  • Pellegrino's atom bom book withdrawn from circulation: Publication has been halted for a disputed book about the atomic bombing of Japan that"Avatar" director James Cameron had optioned for a possible film, The Associated Press has learned. Publisher Henry Holt and Company, responding to questions from the AP, said Monday that author Charles Pellegrino"was not able to answer" concerns about The Last Train from Hiroshima, including whether two men mentioned in the book actually existed.... AP (3-2-10)

  • Vichy remains a source of discomfort in modern France: The tangled oak woods of the Château de l’Écluse are inhabited by a great silence. The descendants of Fernand Plée, who purchased these grounds and this red-brick manor in central France in 1941, say they have nothing to hide. Their grandfather, they say, was a good man: a decorated veteran of the First World War, a willing partner to the Allies in the second, a man of generosity and courage.... - NYT (3-1-10)

  • Historians (among others) honored at White House ceremony: "Sorry I'm a little late. I had this thing I had to do," joked President Obama, just before an afternoon ceremony at the White House on Thursday in which luminaries in the arts and academics were presented with the highest medals for achievements in their fields....
    The humanities citations went to prizewinning authors and historians Robert A. Caro ("The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, Means of Ascent and Master of the Senate"), Annette Gordon-Reed ("The Hemingses of Monticello"), David Levering Lewis ("W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963") and William H. McNeill ("Plagues and Peoples"). The list also includes speechwriter and lawyer Theodore Sorensen, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Philippe de Montebello and philanthropist Albert H. Small, as well as Wiesel, founding chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the author of"Night," whom the president gave his own big hug.... - WaPo (2-26-10)

  • Israel names two biblical tombs in West Bank heritage sites: Israel named the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Rachel's tomb in the West Bank heritage sites on Monday. Both biblical tombs are in Palestinian cities, and the decision brought warnings of violence and protests on Tuesday.... - CS Monitor, 2-23-10

  • Adrian Johns: History shows that intellectual property is more complex than either its creators or copiers care to admit, says a Chicago scholar: The history of publishing is swimming with pirates—far more than Adrian Johns expected when he started hunting through the archives for them. And he thinks their stories may hold keys to understanding the latest battles over digital publishing—and the future of the book.... - Chronicle of Higher Education (2-21-10)

  • Film Based on Book by Duke Professor Opens Nationwide Friday Duke connections helped bring"Blood Done Sign My Name" to big screen: The film version of Duke professor Timothy Tyson's best-selling memoir"Blood Done Sign My Name" opens nationwide in select theaters this Friday, Feb. 19.... - Duke News, 2-17-10

  • Tests show King Tut died from malaria, study says: King Tutankhamen, the teen-aged pharaoh whose Egyptian tomb yielded dazzling treasures, limped around on tender bones and a club foot and probably died from malaria, researchers said on Tuesday.... - Reuters, 2-16-10

OP-EDs:

  • ROBERT W. MERRY: Op-Ed Contributor The Myth of the One-Term Wonder: No doubt President Obama was sincere when he recently told ABC's Diane Sawyer that he'd"rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president." The president seemed to be saying that he would make decisions with history in mind rather than voter sentiment, even if voter sentiment would get him tossed out at the next election.
    This is perhaps a noble sensibility — and one worth reflecting on as President's Day approaches. But it's also misguided. The judgment of history — in the form of presidential rankings yielded up by those periodic polls of heavyweight historians — coincides to a remarkable degree with the contemporaneous judgment of the electorate. With few exceptions, history has not smiled upon one-term presidents. Only one such chief executive has managed with any consistency to get into the historians'"near great" category.... - NYT, 2-13-10

  • Ron Radosh: Growing Anti-Semitism On The Campus: But even more disturbing is the growing evidence that Jewish students are having a most confused response to this development.... - Minding the Campus (3-3-10)

REVIEWS & FIRST CHAPTERS:

  • Marilyn Johnson: Library Science THIS BOOK IS OVERDUE How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All NYT, 3-7-10 Excerpt

  • Karl Rove: Book review: 'Courage and Consequence' by Karl Rove: COURAGE AND CONSEQUENCE My Life as a Conservative in the Fight In his memoir, Karl Rove acknowledges mistakes during the Bush presidency, but defends his former boss.... - WaPo, 3-5-10

  • Francis Wheen: Book review: 'Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia' by Francis Wheen: STRANGE DAYS INDEED The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia Some historians believe in the great man theory of history. Not Francis Wheen. In"Strange Days Indeed," Wheen advances what might be called the" crazy man theory of history." And it makes perfect sense because he's writing about the 1970s, when world leaders exhibited astonishing levels of lunacy.... - WaPo, 3-5-10

  • James S. Hirsch: Willie Mays, the Say Hey Kid: WILLIE MAYS The Life, the Legend All those old passions rose in me again when reading James S. Hirsch’s fine new book,"Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend."... In his long, fascinating account, Hirsch tells the full story of Mays’s baseball life.... - NYT, 2-28-10 - Excerpt

  • Book Review of"Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone," by Nadine Cohodas: Indeed, what kept me from warming to Nadine Cohodas's sharply observed biography is that it tethered me to such a deeply unpleasant character: a woman who neglects her own daughter and pushes away everyone who does her a good turn, who dwindles into alcoholism and self-exile without losing an ounce of her arrogance.... - WaPo, 2-26-10

  • Nadine Cohodas: Nina Simone, Diva Out of Carolina: PRINCESS NOIRE The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone Indeed, Nadine Cohodas’s disturbing portrait in"Princess Noire" sets out to confirm Simone's genius. The author lingers on her stage performances, her musical decisions, her sartorial choices — the alchemy she created in sound and fury.... - NYT, 2-25-10 Excerpt

  • History Book review:"Our Times" by A.N. Wilson: OUR TIMES The Age of Elizabeth II The reign of Queen Elizabeth II"is the one in which Britain effectively stopped being British," A.N. Wilson argues.... - WaPo, 2-26-10

  • More Obama books on the way: We've seen several books on the 2008 election -- Game Change now rides the top of the non-fiction charts -- and soon we'll be seeing new, broader works on Barack Obama's life and times.... - USA Today, 2-22-10

  • Ken Gormley: The President and the Prosecutor: THE DEATH OF AMERICAN VIRTUE Clinton vs. Starr: "The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr," by Ken Gormley, recreates it all, from the Clintons' investment in the Whitewater development in rural Arkansas to the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit and Clinton's affair with Lewinsky, culminating in the impeachment trial. This hefty volume, going beyond the sordid details, provides helpful context for the larger story, the fractionalization of American politics that defined the Clinton years.... - NYT, 2-16-10

  • Damages: Bill Clinton's Legal Mess: THE DEATH OF AMERICAN VIRTUE Clinton vs. Starr: - NYT, 2-15-10

  • David Greenberg: Book review of 'The Death of American Virtue,' by Ken Gormley: THE DEATH OF AMERICAN VIRTUE Clinton vs. Starr Ken Gormley's new book about the Clinton impeachment saga bears the lurid and trite title"The Death of American Virtue," which sounds like a mashup of works by the conservative pundit William Bennett. Happily, though, it's nothing of the sort. It is, rather, something I didn't imagine would arrive so soon: a restrained, fair-minded, soup-to-nuts history of the largely fruitless investigations of Bill Clinton that shadowed so much of his presidency.... WaPo, 2-19-10

  • Nadine Cohodas: Under a Strange, Soulful Spell: PRINCESS NOIRE The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone One result was a stunning song,"Mississippi Goddam," written by Simone in the wake of the 1963 Birmingham church bombings and the killing of the civil rights advocate Medgar Evers. It was a song that inserted her into the forefront, at least musically, of the civil rights movement. Its recording is a moment that Nadine Cohodas's fascinating if turgid new biography of Simone,"Princess Noire," builds toward and then falls away from.... - NYT, 2-18-10 Excerpt

FEATURES:

  • Tim Lewis: Teaching Canadian history through hockey: Turning hockey into a history lesson is a dream come true for Tim Lewis. Lewis combined his love of hockey and passion for history and developed two hockey-themed history courses in the summer including"Hockey and the Canadian Identity to 1952: The Development of a National Obsession", and"Hockey and the Canadian Identity since 1952: Canada's Game in the Cold War and Beyond".... - Canada.com (3-3-10)

  • Black History Today: A Profile of Historian Crystal Feimster: Crystal Feimster went to college thinking she was going to be an attorney. The legal profession’s loss was history's gain. While she was still an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina, Feimster met a string of distinguished African-American historians who made history exciting, including Tera Hunter, Darlene Clark Hine and Clayborne Carson.... Today, Feimster, 38, is at the forefront of a new wave of black historians exploring the forgotten nooks and crannies of American history. This fall, she will move from Princeton, where she has been a visiting professor, to a position in the Department of African-American Studies at Yale University. She is married to Australian historian Daniel Bottsman, whose work centers on Japan... - The Root (2-19-10)

QUOTES:

  • Missing Element in Obama's Ties With G.O.P. Leaders: Good Chemistry: "The founders' work was grounded in personal chemistry," said Ted Widmer, a presidential historian at Brown University and former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton."They spent endless time together. They lived near each other in Philadelphia. They disagreed profoundly on things, but they all knew each other, and that helped."... - NYT, 2-24-10

INTERVIEWS:

  • Robert Dallek: All Things Considered, Obama, Congress, And The Need For Toughness: President Obama is known for his consensus-building style. But does he have the stomach for the tactics to get his agenda passed? President Lyndon Johnson went one-on-one with dissenting congressmen and threatened to end their careers unless they toed the party line. Would those tactics fly today? In the wake of an unprecedented health-care summit this week, host Guy Raz talks with historian Robert Dallek about how tough presidents have to be.... - NPR, 2-27-10

  • Jeffrey Wasserstrom: The Dalai Lama's Visit to D.C.: A Short Interview With Historian A. Tom Grunfeld: The lead-up to the Dalia Lama's meeting with President Barack Obama at the White House last week received a great deal of attention from the press, and there was also a considerable amount of after-the-fact assessment of the event. In order to place what happened into a broad historical perspective, I put a few questions to A. Tom Grunfeld, who is a past contributor to"China Beat" and the author of The Making of Modern Tibet. Here are the results of our interview via e-mail.... Huffington Post (2-24-10)

  • Michael Kazin says America is an optimistic nation -- Interview with CNN: What does it mean when 86 percent of the Americans surveyed last week by CNN/Opinion Research Corp. say they believe that their system of government is broken? It probably means, Michael Kazin says, that Americans are behaving like they always do. A repeated theme in American history, says Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University,"is Americans believing the country is in decline and then finding ways to rebound from both the fear of decline and the problems that gave rise to that fear."... - CNN (2-23-10)

AWARDS &APPOINTMENTS:

  • Robert S. McElvaine: Clintonian receives literary honor: Historian, author and longtime Clintonian Robert S. McElvaine is a winner of the 2010 Richard Wright Literary Excellence Award. The honor was presented Friday at the 21st annual Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration in Natchez. It is given annually to honor Wright, the internationally acclaimed author and Natchez native who wrote the classic books Black Boy and Native Son.... - Clintonian News, 3-4-10

  • Gordon S. Wood wins American History Book Prize: The historian Gordon S. Wood won the American History Book Prize last week for"Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815," an account of how America’s leaders created the country’s democratic institutions. The award, presented by the New-York Historical Society, comes with a $50,000 prize, an engraved medal and the title of American Historian Laureate.... - NYT (2-28-10)

  • Washington College Announces George Washington Book Prize Finalists: The finalists are: Richard Beeman’s Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (Random House), R.B. Bernstein's The Founding Fathers Reconsidered (Oxford), and Edith B Gelles' Abigail & John: Portrait of A Marriage (William Morrow).... - The C.V. Starr Center at Washington College

  • Henry Snyder: UC - Riverside historian named Officer of the British Empire (OBE): To the titles Recipient of a National Humanities Medal and Professor of History Emeritus at UC Riverside Henry Snyder can add one more: Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. The award, which is presented to few individuals outside the United Kingdom, was announced by Queen Elizabeth II in December and will be presented to Snyder at the British embassy in Washington, D.C. in early spring.... - UC - Riverside (2-22-10)

SPOTTED:

  • Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. captivates Messiah College audience with lecture on genealogy and history: On Thursday night, before a packed audience at the Eisenhower Campus Center at Messiah College in Grantham, Gates' formidable command of history and genealogy, plus his natural and authentic style at the podium, captivated an audience of students, adults and dignitaries -- young, old, black and white -- with a lecture that wove personal stories with American history, and the important implications of personal ancestry.... - Penn Live, 2-25-10

ANNOUNCEMENTS & EVENTS CALENDAR:

  • Spotlight, Greenwich Offering Face Time With History: the Bruce is hosting a three-part lecture series. On Feb. 25, Philip B. Kunhardt III, a Lincoln scholar and Bard Center Fellow (and Mr. Kunhardt Jr.'s uncle), will discuss the photographs in"Lincoln, Life-Size," which span the period from 1857 to 1865."I'm going to focus in on Lincoln’s face," he said,"what we can learn from it, how it changed over time."... - NYT, 2-21-10

  • Studying and debunking Civil War myths: Civil War history is rich with tales of blood and gore, heroism, and too many lies. Some of the nation's pre-eminent historians will examine that history in a symposium,"Race, Slavery and the Civil War: The Tough Stuff of American History and Memory," at Norfolk State University in September. The conference is free and open to the public, and registration opened this week.... - The Virginian-Pilot (3-2-10)

  • Civil War Web site gears up State promoting events for war's 150th anniversary: With just one year to go until the Civil War's 150th anniversary, history lovers across Tennessee have taken their battle for the past to a new front - cyberspace. The Tennessee Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission and the state Department of Tourist Development launched a new Web site this month to help promote events planned statewide for the war's anniversary, which will stretch from 2011-2015. The Web site - www.tncivilwar150.com - remains a work in progress but has already drawn praise from East Tennessee historians and preservationists.... - Knox News, 2-8-10

ON TV:

BEST SELLERS (NYT):

BOOKS COMING SOON:

  • Cliff Sloan: The Great Decision: Jefferson, Adams, Marshall, and the Battle for the Supreme Court, (Paperback) March 2, 2010

  • Hugh Ambrose: The Pacific, (Hardcover) March 2, 2010

  • Jonathan Phillips: Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades, (Hardcover) March 9, 2010

  • Thomas Asbridge: The Crusades, (Hardcover) March 9, 2010

  • Bryan D. Palmer: James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928 (1st Edition), (Paperback) March 1, 2010

  • C. Brian Kelly: Best Little Stories from the Civil War, (Paperback) March 1, 2010

  • Nicholas Schou: Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World, (Hardcover) March 16, 2010

  • Timothy M. Gay: Satch, Dizzy, and Rapid Robert: The Wild Saga of Interracial Baseball Before Jackie Robinson, (Hardcover) March 16, 2010

  • Miranda Carter: George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I, (Hardcover) March 23, 2010

  • John W. Steinberg: All the Tsar's Men: Russia's General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, 1898-1914, (Hardcover) April 1, 2010

  • Simon Dixon: Catherine the Great, (Paperback) April 6, 2010

  • J. Todd Moye: Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, (Hardcover) April 12, 2010

  • Seth G. Jones: In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (Paperback) April 12, 2010

  • Nick Bunker: Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History, (Hardcover) April 13, 2010

  • Dominic Lieven: Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace, (Hardcover), April 15, 2010

  • Timothy J. Henderson: The Mexican Wars for Independence, (Paperback) April 13, 2010

  • Hampton Sides: Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin, (Hardcover) April 27, 2010

  • Max Hastings: Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945, (Hardcover) April 27, 2010

  • Bradley Gottfried: The Maps of Gettysburg: An Atlas of the Gettysburg Campaign, June 3 - July 13, 1863, (Hardcover) April 19, 2010

  • Kelly Hart: The Mistresses of Henry VIII, (Paperback) May 1, 2010

  • Mark Puls: Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution, (Paperback) May 11, 2010

DEPARTED:

  • William LaFleur, noted scholar at Penn: WILLIAM R. LaFleur was a distinguished professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, delving into such subjects as bioethics, Zen Buddhism, Japanese culture and the like, but one subject that also caught his interest was abortion. He wrote on this subject in a book,"Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan," one of his many books on subjects ranging from medieval literature to unethical medical research, religious thought, Zen and many other topics. He died of a massive heart attack Friday at the age of 73.... - Philadelphia Daily News, 3-4-10

  • Professor Jack Pole: historian of the US, dies at 87: Professor Jack Pole was the foremost British historian of the United States in his generation, and his books and articles won him recognition and acclaim in the highest ranks of US historians. He was an expert on the American Revolution but he wrote on all periods and linked the history of the US to that of Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries. Times Online (UK) (2-16-10)

  • David Bankier, Scholar of Holocaust, Dies at 63: David Bankier, who helped expand the contours of Holocaust research by examining the participation of ordinary Europeans in the extermination of their Jewish neighbors, died over the weekend after a long illness, Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem Holocaust center, announced. He was 63. Mr. Bankier, who was head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, focused his scholarly work on anti-Semitism, especially its use by the Nazis to promote and sustain a broader ideology. He was the author of"Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion Under Nazism" as well as a collection of essays,"Hitler, the Holocaust and German Society: Cooperation and Awareness.".... - NYT (2-28-10)


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