Historians in the News

This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in each source note. Quotation marks are not used.

Source: Asia Society
6-18-13

Jeff Wasserstrom considers three tumultuous years in ever-changing China

This month Asia Society Associate Fellow Jeffrey Wasserstrom, China expert and Professor of History at the University of California-Irvine, is coming out with an updated version of his book China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press), originally published in 2010. Since three years is a long time in rapidly changing China, we were curious to know what changes he made to the text to make it as relevant as possible for today's readers.Since the writing of your book China has gone through one of its ten-year leadership changes with the entrance of the Xi Jinping administration. What did you feel people needed to know about a new government that has declared its focus to be fulfilling the "Chinese Dream?"

Source: ABC 7
6-20-13

Former USC history prof. Walter Lee Williams arrested for child molestation

LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- A former University of Southern California professor accused of engaging in illicit sex acts with children pleaded not guilty to federal charges Thursday afternoon.The FBI says Walter Lee Williams, 64, allegedly traveled from Los Angeles to the Philippines in January 2011 to engage in sex acts with two 14-year-old boys he met online in 2010.Williams was arrested in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, on Tuesday after being recognized by a tipster. He returned to Los Angeles Wednesday night....Williams taught history, anthropology and gender studies at USC until 2011. The investigation into Williams started in 2011 after a student at USC notified authorities that the professor may have targeted young boys for sex....

Source: Pritzker Military Library press release
6-25-13

Novelist Tim O'Brien winner of $100k Pritzker military history prize

CHICAGO, June 25, 2013 - On behalf of the Pritzker Military Library, historian and journalist Sir Max Hastings announced Tim O’Brien as the winner of the 2013 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. Sponsored by the Tawani Foundation, the coveted $100,000 literature award will be presented at the Library’s annual gala on November 16, 2013. Since its inception in 2007, the Library’s Literature Award has become one of the most prestigious literary awards of its kind. Past recipients of the award, which includes a medallion, citation, and $100,000 honorarium, are Rick Atkinson, Carlo D’Este, Max Hastings, James McPherson, Allan Millett and Gerhard Weinberg. “I'm delighted and honored to receive this very special award, which in previous years has gone to such distinguished writers,” said O’Brien.  “To find myself in their company is both immensely satisfying and a little daunting.” 

Source: UVa Press Release
6-25-13

Gary Gallagher joins UVa Miller Center, will lead lecture series on presidency

Leading Civil War historian and University of Virginia professor Gary W. Gallagher has joined U.Va.’s Miller Center as a senior faculty associate. Gallagher has written and edited more than 30 books on the Civil War.Gallagher will supervise the Center’s Historical Presidency lecture series, a new initiative that will offer perspective on how presidential leadership has evolved over time. The theme for the 2013-14 academic year will be “The American Presidency and the Crises of the Nineteenth Century.” Speakers will focus on moments of national crisis that provide good vantage points from which to perceive the strength and weaknesses of leaders and political institutions.“Gary Gallagher is one of the nation’s pre-eminent scholars of the Civil War and the nineteenth century,” said William I. Hitchcock, the Miller Center’s director of research and scholarship. “In fact he is a national treasure, and known to thousands of U.Va. students for his thrilling lectures on the Civil War era. We are extremely fortunate to have him join our ranks, and to take up the leadership of this exciting presidential lecture series.”

Source: AP
6-21-13

CU launches diversity study

BOULDER, Colo. (AP) — University of Colorado regents are conducting a survey to determine whether the school respects diversity for people who disagree on politics, race, gender and sexual orientation.The survey, which was approved Thursday by University of Colorado regents, is planned for the upcoming school year on all campuses.Some conservatives have expressed concern that many educators are too liberal, while other critics have complained that some school officials are intolerant of social differences.In March, the university hired a history professor to be the resident conservative at the Boulder campus. Steven Hayward will serve as the school's first visiting scholar in conservative thought and policy, a temporary position paid by more than $1 million in private funds....

Source: NYT
6-22-13

Martin Bernal, ‘Black Athena’ Scholar, Dies at 76

Martin Bernal, whose three-volume work “Black Athena” ignited an academic debate by arguing that the African and Semitic lineage of Western civilization had been scrubbed from the record of ancient Greece by 18th- and 19th-century historians steeped in the racism of their times, died on June 9 in Cambridge, England. He was 76.The cause was complications of myelofibrosis, a bone marrow disorder, said his wife, Leslie Miller-Bernal.“Black Athena” opened a new front in the warfare over cultural diversity already raging on American campuses in the 1980s and ’90s. The first volume, published in 1987 — the same year as “The Closing of the American Mind,” Allan Bloom’s attack on efforts to diversify the academic canon — made Mr. Bernal a hero among Afrocentrists, a pariah among conservative scholars and the star witness at dozens of sometimes raucous academic panel discussions about how to teach the foundational ideas of Western culture....

Source: AP
6-21-13

Brown names Neil Safier as new John Carter Brown library head

PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island — Brown University has chosen a University of British Columbia history professor to be the new director and librarian of the John Carter Brown Library.Neil Safier will assume his new job at Brown in October. He succeeds Edward Widmer, who last year was named an assistant to the president for special projects....

Source: OUPblog
6-20-13

Oral History Review signing off for the summer

Dear readers, the time has come for the Oral History Review (OHR) social media team to say so long for now. We’ve had a fantastic time bringing you the latest and greatest on scholarship in oral history and its sister fields. However, all sorts of summer adventures are calling our names, so we’re taking a brief hiatus from the world wide web. In fact, as you are reading this, I am on my way to Nigeria for two months! Managing editor Troy Reeves will lurk around Twitter and Facebook for a few weeks, until he succumbs to the allure of Madison sunshine — which any Wisconsinite will tell you is an elusive blessing that must be enjoyed whenever possible. We will both return in mid-August with all new podcasts and witty twitter banter. We even have a few new social media surprises in store!

Source: CNBC
6-18-13

Niall Ferguson: Paris could burn this summer

High youth unemployment in Europe and disappointing growth expectations in the emerging world could mean more mass protests like the ones seen in Brazil, Niall Ferguson told CNBC's "Power Lunch" on Tuesday."There are two kinds of city that we could see burn this summer," Ferguson said. "The big European cities with Paris at the top of the list look extremely vulnerable. Paris has a greater tradition of urban rioting than almost any city in the world."Ferguson, a Harvard University professor, said the French economy is bad and "the youth unemployment problem right across Latin Europe is really an explosion waiting to go off."...

Source: WaPo
6-17-13

William Z. Slany, historian who exposed Nazi theft of Jewish property, dies at 84

William Z. Slany, a top State Department historian who helped oversee a study in the 1990s that exposed Nazi looting of Jewish property and that led to $8 billion in belated compensation for Holocaust victims and their families, died May 13 at his home in Reston. He was 84.The cause was heart ailments, said his former wife, Beverly Zweiben.Dr. Slany was the State Department’s chief historian from 1982 until his retirement in 2000. He drew the most attention for a massive, two-part study that burrowed into the history of Nazi Germany to expose the methodical theft of Jewish property.The stolen assets encompassed jewelry and other valuables belonging to victims of the regime’s persecution. The looting was so extreme as to include gold teeth taken from concentration camp victims....

Source: Bloomberg News
6-18-13

Bloomberg: Niall Ferguson is "grumpy" former sex symbol, thinks world is going to hell

Niall Ferguson has written an old man’s book.Not too many years ago, in “Colossus” (2004), Ferguson was advocating that the U.S. face up to its Imperial destiny. And in “Civilization: The West and the Rest” (2011) he described how “six killer apps” made the West great.No more Churchill’s sunny uplands for us, apparently, as “The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die,” makes clear. Ferguson writes, “My over-arching question is: What exactly has gone wrong in the Western world in our time?”Surely, “everything’s going to hell” is the old man’s lament. Ferguson, who once personified the Oxford history don as sex symbol, turned 49 this year, so “Degeneration” feels a bit rushed, premature. On the other hand, looking at the last five years would depress anyone.

Source: China Daily
6-18-13

Oxford historian sheds light on China in WWII

The China theater of World War II is sometimes forgotten today in the West. But one historian aims to change that, Andrew Moody in Oxford reports.Rana Mitter is determined to shed light on what is often seen in the West - although clearly not in China - as the forgotten war.Despite killing up to 20 million people, including many savagely such as in the infamous Nanjing Massacre, and creating between 80 and 100 million refugees, China's War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1937-45) is often treated as a World War II sideshow."I thought it was one of the great untold stories of the 20th century and certainly the World War II period," he says....

Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed.
6-17-13

Stephen Robertson, digital-history expert to lead new-media center

Stephen Robertson, an associate professor of history at the University of Sydney, will be the new director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Mr. Robertson, 45, was a postdoctoral fellow in George Mason's department of history and art history from 1998 to 1999. He will begin his new job in July.Among Mr. Robertson's collaborative works is Digital Harlem, an interactive account of everyday life in that neighborhood in the early 1900s. The project won the American Historical Association's Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History in 2009 and an online-history award from a division of the American Library Association in 2011....

Source: Macleans (Canada)
6-17-13

Niall Ferguson on the hot seat

The often controversial Niall Ferguson, 49, is one of the world’s most prominent historians. A specialist in international and economic history, a professor at Harvard and a senior research fellow at Oxford, Ferguson is the author of The Ascent of Money and Civilization: The West and the Rest, among other works. Married to feminist and atheist activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the British-American scholar is also a vocal critic of U.S. President Barack Obama. Ferguson’s latest book, The Great Degeneration, which originated in 2012 as the BBC’s prestigious Reith Lectures, condemns what he sees as an era of decline in the West, pinning the blame on our deteriorating institutions.Q: You have a reputation, rightly or wrongly, as a Western triumphalist, and now you’re writing about Western decline. Is this an about-turn?

Source: HNN Staff
6-14-13

Regina Kunzel moves from Minnesota to Princeton

Regina Kunzel, a professor at the University of Minnesota, will join the faculty at Princeton University as of July 1, 2013.She will be the Doris Stevens Professor in Women's Studies and hold joint appointments in history and gender & sexuality studies.Kunzel is the author of Criminal Intimacy: Sex in Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (2008), which won prizes from the American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association, and a Lambda Literary Award.She holds a B.A. from Stanford University in 1981 and her PhD from Yale University in 1990.

Source: Chicago Maroon
6-14-13

Chicago Maroon remembers Robert Fogel

Economics professor Robert Fogel, who shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for applying economic analysis to history and taught for at the University for over 30 years, died Tuesday morning. He was 86.In an e-mail sent out over the listhost for economics majors on Wednesday, department chairman John List said that Fogel had died of pneumonia contracted after a mild heart attack.Fogel, along with Douglass North—with whom he shared the Nobel Prize—is considered a pioneer of “cliometrics”—the practice of using quantitative methods to analyze history. Called a “bomb thrower” by the New York Times after winning the Nobel Prize, Fogel’s economic approach to history often challenged conventional wisdom. His 1974 book Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery found that slavery was more economically efficient than free agriculture. Fogel’s analysis led him and co-author Stanley Engerman to conclude that because slaves were valuable economic assets, slaveowners were inclined to treat them well. While acknowledging that slaves were oppressed in ways that could not be represented through data, Fogel concluded that the demise of slavery was for political reasons, not economic ones....

Source: Taipei Times
6-14-13

Taiwan history camp slammed for being pro-Chiang

A history camp planned by the student association of National Chengchi University’s history department has been criticized as a brainwashing campaign after a press release praised Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and his son, former president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國).Titled “Images, Lives and Histories,” the university’s third history camp will take place from July 8 to July 10, and is open to 50 senior-high school students. Each participant will have to pay a registration fee of NT$2,500.However, the camp sparked criticism after the association issued a press release saying: “The event seeks to let the exploits of important historical figures, including former presidents Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo, unfold vividly in front of the eyes of young pupils and the public through multimedia systems.”...

Source: WaPo
6-13-13

Robert W. Fogel, an innovative and Nobel Prize-winning economic historian, dies at 86

Robert W. Fogel, a Nobel Prize-winning economic historian who used empirical data in innovative and iconoclastic ways, most notably to dispute longheld assumptions about why slavery collapsed as an institution in the United States, died June 11 at a rehabilitation facility in Oak Lawn, Ill. He was 86.The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter-in-law Suzanne Fogel. Dr. Fogel, a Chicago resident, spent much of his career at the University of Chicago and directed its Center for Population Economics.Dr. Fogel shared the 1993 Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences with Douglass North, then of Washington University in St. Louis. Both winners were on the 1960s vanguard of a field known as cliometrics, which merges economic theory with statistical analysis of hard numbers raked from the past; Clio is the muse of history in Greek mythology....

Source: Tablet
6-12-13

Ben Urwand, Harvard Junior Fellow, reveals Hollywood moguls' creepy love affair with Hitler

Adolf Hitler loved American movies. Every night at about 9:00, after the Führer had tired out his listeners with his hours-long monologues, he would lead his dinner guests to his private screening room. The lights would go down, and Hitler would fall silent, probably for the first time that day. He laughed heartily at his favorites Laurel and Hardy and Mickey Mouse, and he adored Greta Garbo: Camille brought tears to the Führer’s eyes. Tarzan, on the other hand, he thought was silly.As it turns out, Hitler’s love for American movies was reciprocated by Hollywood. A forthcoming book by the young historian Ben Urwand, to be published by Harvard University Press in October, presents explosive new evidence about the shocking extent of the partnership between the Nazis and major Hollywood producers. Urwand, a former indie rock musician and currently a member of Harvard’s prestigious Society of Fellows, takes the subject personally: His parents were Jewish refugees from Egypt and Hungary. Digging through archives in Berlin and Washington, D.C., he has unearthed proof that Hollywood worked together with the Nazis much more closely than we ever imagined.

Source: US News and World Report
6-13-13

Robert Dallek: "Not surprising" Obama put security above privacy

President Obama seems more committed to protecting national security than promoting civil liberties and privacy rights, which puts him firmly in the tradition of most of his predecessors, says presidential historian Robert Dallek."It's not surprising," Dallek tells me. "This is what presidents do."Dallek says one reason is that there are "real national security concerns" that preoccupy every commander in chief. In Obama's case, they include fear of a repetition of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombings....