Historians/History

AHA Roundup: The Rest of the Web

by David Austin Walsh

For HNN's coverage of the 2013 AHA Annual Meeting, click here.Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Credit: Wiki Commons.IndexMedia AccountsBest of the BlogsBlogs/BloggersTwitter LinksMedia AccountsJennifer Schuessler in the New York TimesMarc Perry in the Chronicle of Higher EducationColeen Flaherty in Inside Higher EdJennifer Schuessler in the New York Times

Did George McGovern Misremember His Past as a Bomber Pilot?

by Robert Huddleston

Credit: Wiki Commons/HNN staff.Mark Twain once observed, "As we grow older, we remember things that never happened." All who presume to publish a memoir need to be reminded of this reality -- as should editors and publishers.The late Senator George McGovern was rightly honored for his many years of public service, but also for his exceptional military service in the Second World War as a pilot pf a B-24 Liberator bomber.

When Assessing Zinn, Listen to the Voices of Teachers and Students

by Robert Cohen

Howard Zinn speaking in 2009. Credit: Wiki Commons.

Survival Guide for the AHA Annual Meeting

by David Austin Walsh

The Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association can be pretty overwhelming even for (well-)seasoned attendees, let alone first-timers. Here's a survival guide to the AHA 2013 in New Orleans, formatted in a handy bullet-point list.

Highlights from the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association

by David Austin Walsh

Dispatches from the AHA Annual MeetingDay 1Day 2Days 3 & 4VideosThe Death and Life of Great American NewspapersA Conversation with John SaylesDavid Hackett Fischer: Open Societies at War: A Comparative History, 1939-1945Storytelling: Keynote Address by William CrononTaking a Longer View: The 2012 Election in Historical ContextAHA Roundup: The Rest of the WebAHA Survival Guide

The Grand Emancipation Jubilee

by Alan Singer

Among historians there is significant debate over the significance of the Emancipation Proclamation issued by Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863 and its actual and immediate impact on slavery in the United States. However these contemporary newspaper articles and speeches make clear that for the majority of abolitionists and free and freed black people, it had tremendous symbolic importance and was cause for a “grand emancipation jubilee.” Frederick Douglass later summarized these feeling in his autobiography. “The first of January, 1863, was a memorable day in the progress of American liberty and civilization. It was the turning point in the conflict between freedom and slavery. A death-blow was given to the slaveholding rebellion” (351).

Did George McGovern Misremember His Past as a Bomber Pilot?

by Robert Huddleston

Credit: Wiki Commons/HNN staff.Mark Twain once observed, "As we grow older, we remember things that never happened." All who presume to publish a memoir need to be reminded of this reality -- as should editors and publishers.The late Senator George McGovern was rightly honored for his many years of public service, but also for his exceptional military service in the Second World War as a pilot pf a B-24 Liberator bomber.

The Heavy Hand of Politics and the Historical Novels of Howard Fast

by Gerald Sorin

Picturing the History of Sexuality in America

by Thomas A. Foster

Close your eyes. What’s the first image that comes to mind when you think of the word “sex”? Think about what racial and class connotations are present. Ponder how this image came to be in your head. Perhaps you feel it was influenced by the multi-billion dollar pornography or advertising industries -- or maybe your religious beliefs or personal experience. Consider what emotions you connect to this image: pleasure, pain, anger? Seriously. Try it. Picturing sex can tell us a lot about ourselves and our society.How might those questions be answered differently if you were trying to picture “sexuality” or the “history of sexuality”? In trying to develop a cover for my new book, Documenting Intimate Matters: Primary Sources for a History of Sexuality, how best to capture the topic was a loaded enterprise.

Where Are the Pseudohistory Wars?

by Michael D. Gordin

Credit: Wiki Commons/HNN staff.Why don’t we hear about “pseudohistory” more often? Historians have plenty of terms to denigrate works about the past that they think are substandard, misguided, or just plain crazy. (You can use your imagination to populate the list.) But we do not, in general, deploy the notion of “pseudohistory.”Pseudohistory as a concept is derived directly from pseudoscience, a term with rather broad currency both among scientists themselves and the lay public. Some consideration of how scientists use it to police their own borders not only illuminates the problem that the term was designed to solve, but also perhaps suggests how we have accomplished similar ends in the past, and might in the future.

Improvising Digital History in the Deep South Digital Desert

by Michael Mizell-Nelson

New Orleans in 1991. Credit: Wiki Commons.My first glimpse of the new media revolution came in 1995, as I watched analog documentary video edits that had required months of scripting and work being digitized and transferred into an online editing system in a few minutes. The collaborative experience I had enjoyed working alongside filmmakers and videographers provided a wonderful counterpoint to the solitary labors required in graduate history programs. I had absorbed many lessons in narrative, but these as well as documentary video itself counted for nothing in a traditional academic setting; nevertheless, those experiences moved me toward a number of new media projects in a region that has seldom been kind to the digital humanities.

Where Howard Zinn's "A People's History" Falls Short

by Sam Wineburg

Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States has few peers among contemporary historical works. With more than 2 million copies in print, A People's History is more than a book. It is a cultural icon. "You wanna read a real history book?" Matt Damon asks his therapist in the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting. "Read Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. That book'll ... knock you on your ass."The book's original gray cover was painted red, white, and blue for its Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition in 2003, and it is now marketed with special displays in suburban megastores. A week after Zinn's death in 2010, A People's History was number 7 on Amazon's bestseller list—not too shabby for a book first published in 1980.

Florida Historians Standing Up to Rick Scott

by John Willingham

Rick Scott devouring Florida's university. Credit: Flickr/Wiki Commons/HNN staff.In Florida, a task force commissioned by Republican governor Rick Scott has proposed lower tuition rates for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) majors, allegedly in the interest of the state’s economy, but many of the state’s historians see the plan for what it is -- a threat to the humanities.Historians from the University of Florida and supporters across the country have responded with a formal protest and a petition campaign in late November that so far has obtained more than 2,000 signatures."The punitive differential tuition model will lead not only to a decimation of the liberal arts in Florida," the historians said in the petition. "It will also have a destructive impact on the essential and transferrable skills that these disciplines teach."

What is the Best History Book of 2012?

We asked our readers what, in their opinion, is the best history book of 2012. Over fifty books were nominated. These are the five leaders.1. The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro (Knopf)The fourth volume of Robert A. Caro's bestselling and critically acclaimed multi-volume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson covers the years 1958 to 1964. The book received near universal acclaim and became one of the cultural touchstones of the year. (The author of the New York Times Sunday Book Review article on the book? One William Jefferson Clinton.)

The Historical Dimension of the Spy Thriller

by Simon Tolkien

Heinkel He 111 over London's East End, September 7, 1940. Credit: Luftwaffe/Wiki Commons.

Erwin Rommel: Courageous Hero or Cynical Opportunist?

by Kevin Kennedy

Erwin Rommel with Adolf Hitler during World War II. Credit: German Federal Archives.On March 16, 1941, a column of soldiers from the 5th Pioneer Company of the 2nd Machine Gun Battalion -- one of the very first German army units to arrive in Africa, found itself on the Via Balbia, the highway which stretched over the entire coast of Libya. The column was then attacked by British fighter planes. One of the planes opened fire, killing a thirty-one-year old pioneer named Erich Robisch. He was shot in the throat, and bled to death on the road. Robisch was a carpenter by trade. He came from a village in eastern Brandenburg, now Polish territory. He left behind him a wife and two small daughters, one of whom was my future mother. The war would later force them to flee from their home, never to return. Robisch was not only the first casualty of his unit, but also one of the first of tens of thousands of German soldiers to die in Africa.

What Was Healthcare Like in the 1800s?

by Elaine G. Breslaw

The forces limiting government power in the area of health, the proponents of American exceptionalism, and the rejection of the needs of the poor won their day in nineteenth-century American medicine. Will they do so again?

Remembering Alfred F. Young, 1925-2012

by Linda K. Kerber

Although I had met Alfred F. Young in the early 1970s, we did not truly become colleagues and friends until 1984, when Al was inventing the pathbreaking “We The People” at the Chicago History Museum. Al’s project is now so clearly the state-of-the-art practice that it is easy to forget how recently he devised it. Although art historians have long worked collaboratively with museum curators, historians had generally left antiques to antiquarians. But Al’s student Terry Fife had gone to work at the CHM, which had a stash of objects in its vaults, donated long ago as part of an effort to show that Chicago people had taste and culture and were part of American national history. Al and Terry looked hard at these objects, asked new questions, wondering always that these things could mean.

Thomas Jefferson: Monster?

by Matthew Crow

Credit: Wiki Commons/HNN staff.Thomas Jefferson, slave owner, is once again a subject of heated debate. Recent fights among historians confirm what we already knew, not just about Jefferson, but about us: that we need him, now more than ever, as a touchstone to explain the troubled history of the United States to ourselves, its living inheritors. It seems worth pausing to reflect on how and why that is.

How Historically Accurate is Spielberg's "Lincoln"?

Louis P. Masur, William R. Kenan Jr., Professor in American Institutions and Values at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, talks about the historical accuracy of Stephen Spielberg's "Lincoln" with History News Network editor David Austin Walsh. He recently wrote an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education on the cultural history of Lincoln in cinema.Click here to download this podcast.Professor Masur is the author of Lincoln's Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union, out now from Harvard University Press.