Historians in the News

Researcher finds slaves quarried sandstone used to build Smithsonian Castle

The iconic red sandstone used to build the Smithsonian Castle, one of Washington’s most recognizable buildings, was quarried by slaves, including some who were once most likely owned by Martha Washington, according to new historical research to be published Thursday.The discovery by anthropology professor Mark Auslander adds to what has been a years-long reckoning with slavery’s role in Washington landmarks, including the Capitol and the White House, and adds nuance to the historical portrait of the Smithsonian Castle, which was built between 1847 and 1855.Auslander, a native Washingtonian, said in an interview that the Smithsonian has been reluctant over the years to address whether slave labor might have played a part in the history of the Castle. “It’s just an area of total silence,” said Auslander, whose findings are to be unveiled in Southern Spaces, an online, peer-reviewed journal published in cooperation with Emory University’s Robert W. Woodruff Library. “The Smithsonian hasn’t gone through the truth-and-reconciliation process that a lot of institutions have gone through. But I think there’s a willingness to do so.”...

UNO and Tulane collaborate on New Orleans history app

History lovers of New Orleans, it's time to give yourself a fun -- and free -- dose of local info. A collaboration of the History Department of the University of New Orleans and the Communication Department of Tulane University has produced New Orleans Historical, a free app for the Android or iPhone or tablet, as well as a rich website with historical photos, audio, video and more. Links to the smart phone applications are on the home page of the website.... "We finally have a way to exhibit a lot of the history we've been researching for the last few years," said Michael Mizell-Nelson, associate professor of history at UNO. "It's a platform for making undergrad and graduate research work available to the public."...

A conversation between Mark Mazower and Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Mark Mazower is Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University in New York. Widely recognised as one of the finest historians of his generation, Professor Mazower studied at Oxford and Johns Hopkins, completing his D. Phil in Oxford in 1988. He has taught at Princeton, Sussex, and London University. His chief works include No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (2009); Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (2008); Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430-1950 (2004); Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (1998); and Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44 (1993), several of which have won major prizes. His most recent book is Governing the World: The History of an Idea (2012). He is a specialist of Greece, the Balkans, and more generally of the history of Europe in the twentieth century. Prof. Mazower will deliver the Sixth [Indian Economic and Social History Review] IESHR Annual Lecture in New Delhi on December 11, 2012. Here, he responds to questions from Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Professor of History at UCLA.

Reading Eugene Genovese in the age of Occupy

STUART SCHRADER is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program in American Studies at N.Y.U. whose dissertation analyzes links between 1960s Cold War counterinsurgency and domestic policing in the United States. His article on punk rock, "A Rotten Legacy?," appeared in the December 2009/January 2010 issue of the Rail.

Mandela was a Communist, claims historian’s book

Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s anti-apartheid icon, was a member of the Communist party and held a senior rank in the organisation, a British historian has claimed in a new book.In his new book “External Mission: The ANC in Exile, 1960-1990”, Professor Stephen Ellis, has unearthed fresh evidence that during his early years as an activist, Mandela did hold senior rank in the South African Communist Party, or SACP.The former South African president now 94-years-old, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, has always denied being a member of the South African branch of the movement, which mounted an armed campaign of guerrilla resistance along with the African National Congress (ANC). According to Ellis, Mandela joined the SACP to enlist the help of the Communist superpowers for the ANC’s campaign of armed resistance to white rule. As evidence of Mandela’s Communist party membership, Ellis cites minutes from a secret 1982 SACP meeting, discovered in a collection of private papers at the University of Cape Town, in which a veteran former party member, the late John Pule Motshabi, talks about how Mandela was a party member some two decades before....

Sharing lessons in American history in 140 characters or less [VIDEO]

Watch Sharing American History Lessons in 140 Characters or Less on PBS.

Neil Leonard, Penn jazz historian, dies at 84

Neil Leonard, 84, a pioneering jazz historian and critic and a retired professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, died Sunday, Oct. 13, at Hahnemann University Hospital after a stroke. A memorial service is scheduled for Sunday, Feb. 23, at Penn.Mr. Leonard's doctoral thesis, Jazz and the White Americans: The Acceptance of a New Art Form, became a groundbreaking book on cultural awareness of jazz. It was published in 1962 by the University of Chicago Press.He was on the faculty at Penn from 1961 until 1990s. He worked in the American civilization department and later in the history department....

Historians are confident: Texas secession is real doubtful

WASHINGTON — Retired Del Mar College professor Herb Arbuckle's thoughts turned to a little known provision relating to the Lone Star State after he read about an online petition with nearly 119,000 signers calling for Texas to secede "peacefully" from the Union.To be clear, Arbuckle, who taught math and history, pointed out Texas can't legally secede, and he wasn't singing the praises of those who signed the petition on WhiteHouse.gov in what political observers believe is a sign of protest at President Obama's re-election."We did fight a bloody Civil War, which proved no one has the right to secede," Arbuckle, 68, said in a telephone message. "If these idiots with their petition don't understand that, then they are indeed fools."...

Ron Radosh on Stone's "Untold History" [VIDEO]

New biography of Howard Zinn published

John Tirman is executive director of the MIT Center for International Studies and the author of “The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars.”When I first met Howard Zinn 40 years ago, I had known him as a leading antiwar critic, civil rights activist and radical historian. I expected a brooding and perhaps angry intellectual deeply at odds with a nation that shortly afterward reelected Richard Nixon by a landslide. But my first impression of him, sitting in his office at Boston University, was of a casual, jovial and self-deprecating professor who, I learned, was provoked to a kind of controlled fury only by war and injustice. It was an impression shared by his legions of friends.Zinn was a force in the civil rights movement and one of the originators of oral history and history “from below.” His work in the South in the 1950s and early ’60s, while he taught at Spelman College in Atlanta, was galvanizing for a new generation of black students, Alice Walker, Julian Bond and Marian Wright Edelman among them. He helped guide the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a major component of the black uprising, and wrote a number of seminal articles and books about the movement, including “The Southern Mystique” and “SNCC: The New Abolitionists.”...

Defending W.: NRO interviews Stephen E. Knott

Whether the subject is tax policy, Republican recriminations and prospects, or war, George W. Bush remains in the news. Much of the conventional wisdom going in and out of the final presidential debate between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney focused on Romney’s perceived need to distance himself from the presidency of George W. Bush. A recent book, Rush to Judgment: George W. Bush, the War on Terror, and His Critics, by Stephen F. Knott, a professor of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, defends the Bush foreign-policy record as nothing to be ashamed of. Professor Knott talks with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez about the Bush record.KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Two thousand Americans dead in Afghanistan. Do you really mean to defend the “War on Terror”?

James C. Scott profiled in NYT ... for his farming as well as his writing

DURHAM, Conn. — The Yale political scientist James C. Scott may share his 46-acre farm in this picturesque hamlet with a flock of laying hens, a pair of Highland cattle and an active honeybee colony. But don’t mistake him for your typical Connecticut country squire.For Mr. Scott, the farm, about 20 miles northeast of New Haven, is both a place to blow off steam and an embodiment of the kind of hands-on, ground-up, local knowledge that he has championed during a career spanning five decades and a string of highly influential and idiosyncratic books.“I’m as proud of knowing how to shear a sheep as I am of anything,” Mr. Scott, who turned 76 on Sunday, said during a recent interview in the living room of his rustic 1826 farmhouse, seated across from a pair of rocking chairs draped with skins of home-butchered Montadales. “I’ve been a better scholar partly because I’ve had this other activity.”...

Stuart Hilwig, historian of modern Italy, dies in car crash

Stuart Hilwig, professor of history at Adams State University in Alamosa, Colorado, died on October 28, 2012, in an automobile accident in New Mexico. Two of his children—Jack, 6, and Charlotte, 4—are in serious condition.Raised in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Hilwig received his BA from Vanderbilt University on a full scholarship and his MA and PhD from The Ohio State University, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on the 1968 student protests in Italy. After joining the faculty of ASU in 2000, Hilwig taught European history, Latin American history, and historiography, received the university's Exemplary Faculty Award for 2005–2006, served as president of the faculty senate from 2005 to 2007, and was faculty representative, Colorado Commission on Higher Education, in 2005–2006.Hilwig was a specialist in modern Italian history, a subject he embraced from a young age because of his family roots and his rich experience working for Sicilian immigrants in a pizzeria during his high school years. A frequent traveler to Italy, most recently with his family in 2011, Hilwig relished his many friends, their intense conversations, and the country's beauty and contrasts. A fluent Italian speaker, he regarded this country as his second home....

Teagle foundation to support new AHA initiative

What are the best practices for teaching history to undergrads? How can history departments better work with teaching and learning centers at their institutions? What does a graduate student in history need to know about the latest pedagogical theories, practices, and debates?The American Historical Association, with the help of a grant from the Teagle Foundation, hopes to address these questions over the course of the next two years. Assembling a team of leading experts in history teaching and historical thinking, the AHA will explore ways to more effectively integrate the scholarship on teaching and learning into graduate history education.The project will start with a look at the required pedagogy course for history doctoral students at the University of California, Berkeley. An advisory panel with expertise in the scholarship of teaching and learning will assist the Berkeley history faculty in focusing their course on giving graduate students a deeper understanding of how undergraduates learn history, and instilling an openness to developing their full potential as teachers through engagement with scholarship on teaching and learning history....

Nebraska lynch mobs not always “Wild West” creation, says historian

Lincoln, NE – Justice by lynch mob was more common in Nebraska’s early history than Nebraskans might think. Research into one of state history’s darker chapters reveals lynching was not only about hanging cattle rustlers and train robbers.Listen NowWhether your impression of the old American West comes from history classes or cowboy movies, the images many of us created of “hang ‘em high” justice in that new frontier probably involves a rope noose thrown over a tree limb in a remote place where there weren’t many judges or juries to sort out the details of the crime at hand....

Magee Historian Sheds New Light on Plantation of Ulster

University of Ulster academic has helped shed new light on the Ulster Plantation and how it shaped identity in Ulster, Ireland and beyond.The Magee based historian, Dr Éamonn Ó Ciardha is co-editor of ‘The Plantation of Ulster Ideology and Practice’, a collection of essays that make up the first major academic study of the Ulster Plantation in over 25 years. Dr Ó Ciardha is a senior lecturer in Irish History and internationally recognised as a leading authority on early modern Irish History and Literature. He described the collection as a ‘who’s who’ of early modern Irish history and literature and said it offers an important redress in terms of previous coverage of the plantation.“The essays are by leading scholars in the field and cover a broad range of historical and literary topics, moving away from an exclusive colonial perspective to include the native Irish perspective.”...

Stephen Platt wins $75K Cundill Prize in History

Stephen Platt, an American historian, has won the $75,000 US Cundill Prize in History, for his book giving a gripping account of China’s 19th century Taiping Rebellion.In Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, The West, And The Epic Story of The Taiping Civil War, he argues the rebellion shaped modern China.His book examines the Western role in the Taiping Rebellion, how events in China interacted with the simultaneous Civil War in the U.S., and how difficult it can be to distinguish between humanitarian intervention and imperialism....

Labor historian reviews lessons from union movement

"From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement" takes a critical look at Chavez and the rapid rise and fall of the United Farm Workers agricultural union he guided.Labor historian Matt Garcia defends his assessment as a search for "usable knowledge" for future organizing, and a way to "hold the UFW leadership accountable to the thousands of farmworkers who were let down by the union's retreat from the fields."In 1960, there was no union for California grape pickers. By 1970, fully 12,000 were members of the UFW, Garcia reports. "From the Jaws of Victory" concludes with this sobering fact: "Today not one field worker laboring on grape farms in California is covered by a labor contract."...

The shadows of science – a Princeton historian’s take on pseudoscience

Princeton University historian Michael Gordin has been researching pseudoscience for a new book, and he has good news and bad for those scientists determined to keep their pursuit free of imposters. The good part is that scientists should take the proliferation of pseudoscience as a compliment. It's because the public respects and even reveres science that so many fakers and wannabes clothe themselves in scientific trappings. The bad news is that pseudoscience can't be eradicated. "It's not a pathogen or a germ that we can cure from American culture," he said. "It's more like a cancer." If scientists try to emphasize some distinguishing trait of science, pseudoscientists will try to copy it. If being published in a peer reviewed journal is important for science, then pseudoscientists will create their own peer reviewed journals devoted to ESP, creationism, or cold fusion. If testability is the key, the pseudoscientists will claim to have passed one.Gordin's book is called The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe, and as the title implies, he centers his case on one particularly charismatic 20th century peddler in pseudoscience....

Israel, Zionism studies require detachment: historian

SDE BOKER, Israel — Israeli and Zionist history is viewed as objectively as possible at Ben-Gurion University’s (BGU) Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism.There are no rose-coloured glasses to be seen or peered through, says Ofer Shiff, a senior lecturer at the institute.This level of research study requires an exacting degree of scholarly detachment, said Shiff, who until last year headed BGU’s Israel studies program.Yet there is no getting around the fact that when the vast majority of the teachers and students of Israel and Zionism are Jewish, there’s a risk that scholarly detachment can only go so far, he said....