Historians/History

LBJ Was a Great President

by Vaughn Davis Bornet

LBJ in 1969. Credit: Wiki Commons.This quoting of the opinions of some famous people on the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson contains evaluations after his death in 1973 and my attempts at a scholarly evaluation twenty years later. Its purpose is to try to dilute the casual and even thoughtless remarks about this period of leadership that appear routinely (“Vietnam!”), and not too thoughtfully, in today’s lesser publications.

1964 Report: Humanities "Uniquely Equipped to Fill the 'Abyss of Leisure'" Made Possible by Forty-Hour Workweek

by David Austin Walsh

Credit: Wiki Commons.A new report on the state of the humanities in the United States reaffirms the importance of understanding our shared history as one of the cornerstones of democratic decision-making.The American Academy of Arts and Sciences released the comprehensive report of its Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences this week, and is presenting its recommendations to Congress on Wednesday.The Commission will emphasize the need to increase funding to the National Endowment of the Humanities (which has seen its budget decline nearly $17 million since 2010), as well as state humanities councils, and is calling for a humanities program similar to the proposed STEM Master Teacher Corps, which would provide career advancement and better pay for the top five percent of STEM teachers in the United States.The Long View

American Heritage to Subscribers: Sorry, No Refunds

by David Austin Walsh

American Heritage magazine, the embattled quarterly history periodical that suspended print publication in the fall of 2012, is not currently issuing refunds to its 120,000 subscribers, a spokesperson has told HNN.“We're currently restructuring the organization, trying to balance between the non-profit and publishing entities,” said Lee Sutton, online and editorial associate for the magazine. Mr. Sutton said he was not sure about the company's future plans for either refunding subscribers or resumption of publication of the magazine.Mr. Sutton referred our inquiry to the vice president of administration, who did not respond to HNN as of press time.Subscribers are not happy. “I paid for a two-year subscription and received two issues,” wrote one commentator. “No response from AH to my emails. Just hoping someone will take them to court to get our refunds. I used to have respect for AH magazine and its owners.”

Senate History Just Got a Little More Social

by David Austin Walsh

The U.S. Senate Historical Office has just debuted a Twitter feed designed to highlight the digital collections available on its website."Technology changes," says chief Senate historian Donald Ritchie, "and we must constantly adjust" to the ever-changing demands of the public.@SenateHistory went live yesterday, and already has nearly two hundred followers. The opening tweet shone a spotlight on the office's extensive resources on the Senate Watergate committee (the infamous break-in celebrated its forty-first anniversary yesterday).Beth Hahn, historical editor at the Senate Historical Office, said that they are also considering expanding their social media presence to Facebook, as well as other platforms. "We know the National Archives has been doing a lot with Pinterest," she related. Even YouTube is not out of the question -- while most of the Senate oral histories, a major role of the office, are not videotaped, Hahn said that there's a great deal of rare and interesting footage of committee hearings -- including the Watergate hearings -- in the Senate archives.

The Problem with Evolutionary Psychology

by Marlene Zuk

Credit: Wiki Commons.

The Case for Sparing the Rosenbergs

by Lori Clune

Credit: Wiki Commons.Sixty years ago this week, Ethel Rosenberg was strapped into the same electric chair that killed her husband Julius moments before. Her gruesome death ended the spy case that captured worldwide attention. Julius Rosenberg had been arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit espionage, specifically passing atomic bomb secrets to the Soviets.FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had also ordered the arrest of Julius’ wife Ethel, hoping to use her as a “lever” to get Julius to name other spies. He never spoke. They both died instead.The grisly executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 made their sons orphans and shocked the world. The Rosenbergs remain the only married couple executed for a federal crime and the only civilians killed for spying.

On Non-Academic Job Market, Your PhD is a Visa, Not a Passport

by David Austin Walsh

Image via Shutterstock.If being a professor will indeed no longer a viable career due to downward pressure from administrations and the disruptive potential of massive online open courses, as Cary Nelson darkly suggested at the American Association of Universty Professors conference in Washington, what are enterprising young graduate students and recent PhDs to do?It's not as if the state of the academic history job market right now is particularly encouraging. Despite an uptick of 18 percent in the number of jobs advertised with the American Historical Association in 2012, the number of PhD receipts for that year alone exceeded the number of job opening by nearly one-third.

Canadian Historians: Come Clean About Your Relationship with Big Tobacco

by Daniel J. Robinson

Image via Shutterstock.Later this month, Acadia University historian and former Dean of Arts Robert Perrins will testify in a Montreal courtroom on behalf of the tobacco industry. There he will discuss his 400+-page expert witness report on the Canadian government’s handling of tobacco issues since the 1950s.  The year-long trial involves two class-action suits seeking to compensate Quebec smokers for nicotine addiction and disease caused by smoking. The combined claim at $27 billion is the largest in Canadian history.

Digital Humanities in the Spotlight at PhillyDH@Penn

by Michelle Moravec

Tuesday, June 4, found just under two hundred very excited people gathered on the sixth floor of the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania for PhillyDH@Penn sponsored by PhillyDH, a consortium of "universities libraries / archives, museums, cultural institutions and digital media innovators."View from the sixth-floor balcony. Photo Courtesy of Jen Rajchel.

FDR’s Alter Ego: Interview with Historian David L. Roll on Harry Hopkins

by Robin Lindley

Harry Hopkins as secretary of commerce. Credit: Wiki Commons.During the war years Hopkins would become the only person in the U.S. government other than the president to thoroughly understand the interrelationships of war, diplomacy, politics, economics, and logistics.--David L. Roll, The Hopkins Touch

A New Way to Look at America's Wars

by Thomas Fleming

Via Tumblr.From my early days as an historian, I have always looked for insights that explain the past on a deeper level than a series of merely exciting or disturbing events. I still vividly remember my first experience. I was working on a book about the year 1776 and had file drawers crammed with research. But I felt the need for something fundamental, a pattern of thought that drew the narrative together in a new, more meaningful way.Suddenly the words swarmed into my mind: 1776: Year of Illusions. It was my first encounter with what I now call a disease in the public mind.

How Roaring Were the 1920s?

by Ian Reifowitz

Credit: Life Magazine.

Why the Boston College Oral History Ruling Isn't a Victory

by Chris Bray

Boston College motto: "Ever to Excel," engraved on the Bapst Library on campus. Credit: Wiki Commons.The journalists are mostly wrong. A federal appeals court decision in Boston this week is a victory, of sorts, but not for oral history. Neither is it much of a victory for Boston College, which filed the appeal. In the end, the university merely protected confidential archival material that its own curious negligence put at risk. (Read the First Circuit's complete opinion here.)

The Real Uncle Tom and the Unknown South He Helped Create

by Thomas Fleming

Today's readers of Uncle Tom’s Cabin have no idea that there was a real Uncle Tom.

How Memory Works: Interview with Psychologist Daniel L. Schacter

by Robin Lindley

Image via Shutterstock.Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today’s events.--Albert EinsteinMemory is the stuff of history. Historians rely on the memories of individuals as they seek and discover the facts and stories from which we create our public memory. Thus, knowledge from a scientific perspective of how human memory works can be instructive to historians.

How to Do Research on the Movies

by Thomas Doherty

The Thatcher Library in Citizen Kane (1941).The most famous depiction of an archive in Hollywood cinema is the Thatcher Library in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), a foreboding and noirishly lit mausoleum presided over by a prissy custodian who resents the intrusion of an actual researcher. The drudge work of scholarly investigation may yield rose buds of precious information, but the task of acquisition will be dust-ridden and tedious, and the stewards of the stacks will be cranky spinsters who eye you with suspicion as they hand over white gloves and caution you to use only the pencils and papers provided for note taking.

The Brutal War on Vietnamese Civilians: Interview with Nick Turse

by Robin Lindley

U.S. commanders wasted ammunition like millionaires and hoarded American lives like misers, and often treated Vietnamese lives as if they were worth nothing at all.--Nick Turse, Kill Anything That MovesIn March 1968 U.S. infantry troops of the Army’s Americal Division massacred five hundredVietnamese civilians, mostly women and children, in the village of My Lai. The military described the massacre as an anomaly, an aberration, the result of a few bad apples in the ranks, and the mainstream media embraced that explanation.In 1971, decorated Navy veteran (now Secretary of State) John Kerry testified before the Senate that such atrocities in Vietnam were not “isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.” Kerry told of U.S. veterans who “relived the absolute horror” of what their country made them do.

Military History in the Spotlight at Oregon State

by Steven McLain

Christopher McKnight Nichols at the American Military and Diplomatic History Conference.

Remembering Elbert B. Smith

by Senator Tom Harkin

E.B. Smith in the 1960s.Madam President, with the recent death of Dr. Elbert B. Smith -- known to his friends simply as "E.B."-- I lost a much beloved mentor, advisor, and friend.Obituaries in the Washington Post and elsewhere have captured the essential facts of his life. Since 1990, he was professor emeritus at the University of Maryland. He served in the Navy in World War II, earned his master's degree and PhD at the University of Chicago, and taught at Iowa State University, among other colleges, before joining the faculty at Maryland in 1968. Over the years, he also served as a Fulbright professor at the University of Tokyo and at Moscow State University, and elsewhere. He ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate as a Democrat in Iowa in 1962 and again in 1966.What those factual obituaries fail to capture is the spirit of this remarkable man -- his personal warmth, his talent for friendship, his great love of history and scholarship, and his passion for progressive causes.

Allen Weinstein's Truth to Tell About Alger Hiss

by Ronald Radosh

Credit: Wiki Commons.Originally printed in the Weekly Standard.