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: HNN Staff
4-21-12
Below is a list of award winners at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians/National Council on Public History. Full OAH coverage can be found here.Roy Rosenzweig Distinguished Service Award: Ira BerlinFrederick Jackson Turner Award: David Sehat, Georgia State University. The Myth of American Religious FreedomMerle Curti Award: Susan J. Pearson, Northwestern University. The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age AmericaJames A. Rawley Prize: Cindy Hamovitch, College of William & Mary. No Man's Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable LaborRichard W. Leopold Prize: William A. Dobak, U.S. Army Center of Military History (retired). Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862-1877Avery O. Craven Award: Nicole Etcheson, Ball State University. A Generation at War: The Civil War Era in a Northern Community
Source: Pulitzer website
4-16-12
[Pulitzer in History]
Source: WaPo (AP)
4-16-12
[Pulitzer in History][Manning] Marable, a longtime professor at Columbia, died last year at age 60 just as “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention” was being released. Years in the making, the book was widely praised, although some of Malcolm X’s children objected to the troubled portrait Marable offered of the activist’s marriage to Betty Shabazz.“It is so rewarding to see Manning’s work honored as a landmark achievement in the documentation of 20th century American history,” Wendy Wolf, associate publisher at Viking, said in a statement.[Pulitzer in Biography]Another long-term project, John Lewis Gaddis’ ”George F. Kennan: An American Life,” won the Pulitzer for biography. Gaddis is a Yale University professor and leading Cold War scholar who began work on the Kennan book in the early 1980s. The project was delayed by Kennan’s longevity. Kennan, a founding Cold War strategist and a Pulitzer winner, was in his 70s at the time he authorized the book. He asked only that Gaddis wait until after his death.Kennan lived to be 101.“He was a prize-winning author himself, so he would have been pleased,” said Gaddis, whose biography also won the National Book Critics Circle award.
Source: NYT
4-16-12
Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty have spent the last decade tracking the incomes of the poor, the middle class and the rich in countries across the world. More than anything else, their work shows that the top earners in the United States have taken a bigger and bigger share of overall income over the last three decades, with inequality nearly as acute as it was before the Great Depression....
“In a way, the United States is becoming like Old Europe, which is very strange in historical perspective,” Mr. Piketty said. “The United States used to be very egalitarian, not just in spirit but in actuality. Inequality of wealth and income used to be much larger in France. And very high taxes on the very rich — that was invented in the United States,” he said.
Mr. Saez added, “Absent drastic policy changes, I doubt that income inequality will decline on its own.”
The two economists’ project of mapping income inequality started two decades ago, when Mr. Saez was teaching at Harvard and Mr. Piketty teaching down the road at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Their innovation was to measure American income inequality historically. Existing data went back only to the 1970s. Tedious archival research at the Internal Revenue Service allowed them to stretch the data all the way back to 1913.
Once they had collected the data, the computation was easy.
Source: NYT
4-14-12
PROF. PIERS J. HALE knew something was up when his students at the University of Oklahoma were clamoring this spring to get into his medical ethics class, which was formerly populated largely by social science majors. What led to the sudden burst of popularity, he discovered, were plans by the Association of American Medical Colleges to revise the medical school admissions test to incorporate a hefty dose of social science....“Enrollment doubled and I had to turn 20 away,” said Professor Hale, a professor of the history of modern science. “But what’s really exciting is not that taking this class will get these kids into medical school, but that it will help them become better physicians.”......[T]he Association of American Medical Colleges began three years ago to redesign the MCAT, surveying thousands of medical school faculty members and students to come up with a test tailored to the needs and desires of the 21st century. In addition to more emphasis on humanistic skills, the new test had to take into account important new values in medicine like diversity, with greater focus on health care for the underserved, Dr. McGaghie said.
Source: NYT
4-12-12
Robert Caro probably knows more about power, political power especially, than anyone who has never had some. He has never run for any sort of office himself and would probably have lost if he had. He’s a shy, soft-spoken man with old–fashioned manners and an old-fashioned New York accent (he says “toime” instead of “time” and “foine” instead of fine), so self-conscious that talking about himself makes him squint a little. The idea of power, or of powerful people, seems to repel him as much as it fascinates. And yet Caro has spent virtually his whole adult life studying power and what can be done with it, first in the case of Robert Moses, the great developer and urban planner, and then in the case of Lyndon Johnson, whose biography he has been writing for close to 40 years. Caro can tell you exactly how Moses heedlessly rammed the Cross Bronx Expressway through a middle-class neighborhood, displacing thousands of families, and exactly how Johnson stole the Texas Senate election of 1948, winning by 87 spurious votes.
Source: CBS News
3-13-12
...Katherine Howe, author of a new novel the Titanic called "The House of Velvet and Glass," said the draw of the ship is "the collision of all possible symbols available to you in 1912, the way that engineering can fail, the wealth, the poverty, all of these things coming together on one night."We've always been fascinated with class, and aboard the Titanic, the division between the haves and have-nots was in dramatically stark relief.Down in third class were immigrants heading to America, in search of a better life, dreaming perhaps of life in first class. Upstairs was the very picture of how one might imagine life in the Gilded Age: the parlors were occupied by some of the richest people in the world. Back then, to be rich was to be famous. The ship was like an exclusive Oscar party, Howe, said. The rich men on the boat, such as John Jacob Astor IV or Ben Guggenheim, Howe pointed out, were the equivalent of someone like George Clooney....
Source: This is Bristol (UK)
4-11-12
WHEN it comes to carving out a career in the competitive world of archaeology these days, it's all about finding your own niche – but few young archaeologists are carving out a future in their field quite as literally as Bristol University student Chantel Summerfield.The 23-year-old PhD student has become the world's only expert on arborglyphs – that is, tree graffiti; the inscriptions carved into tree trunks by soldiers with bayonets.From bored squaddies on Salisbury Plain to terrified GIs trekking through Normandy in the wake of the D-Day invasions – each carving Chantel uncovers tells its own story of a soldier's life."I've followed many of the First World War soldiers' carvings from trees that once stood a few miles behind the front line on the Western Front, through to finding their graves in Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries," Chantel says....
Source: HNN Staff
4-11-12
CBS news is reporting that George Zimmerman, the 28-year-old Florida man who fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida in February, has launched a website to publicly defend himself. His lawyers have confirmed that the website belongs to him.The site, http://therealgeorgezimmerman.com/, prominently features a quotation from historian, sociologist, professor, and HNN blogger James Loewen: "People have a right to their own opinions, but not to their own facts. Evidence must be located, not created, and opinions not backed by evidence cannot be given much weight." Mr. Loewen has expressed his desire to respond to Mr. Zimmerman's use of his words -- HNN will bring you more on this story as it develops.The spartan website also features quotes from Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and Henrik Ibsen, as well as an appeal for donations and a contact form. Zimmerman does not go into detail about the shooting, only referring to it as a "life altering event which led me to become the subject of intense media coverage."
Source: Education Week
3-21-12
Several education experts recently made the case for the importance of ensuring topics such as history, science, and the arts get adequate classroom time and attention as states and districts begin to implement the Common Core State Standards.The issue was the focus of a March 15 event hosted by the Washington-based research and advocacy group Common Core, which has just announced plans to create a set of curriculum maps in history and geography pegged to the common standards. Although the common standards primarily cover mathematics and English/language arts, they also address literacy in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects."There is no such thing as doing the nuts and bolts of reading in kindergarten through 5th grade without coherently developing knowledge in science and history and the arts. Period. It is false. It is a fiction," said David Coleman, a lead writer of the English/language arts standards, according to a blog post published by Common Core....
Source: Flat That News
4-9-12
Professors at the College of William and Mary have long been praised for their work in the classroom, and now they may more proof to back up the boast.A study produced by the Princeton Review in collaboration with RateMyProfessors.com named 10 College professors on the list of top 300 undergraduate professors in the United States....The 10 professors from the College who made the list are professor of English and American studies Elizabeth Barnes, associate professor of history Philip Daileader, associate professor of government David Dessler, William R. Kenan Jr. professor of humanities Melvin Patrick Ely, adjunct professor of psychology Frederick P. Frieden, distinguished associate professor of classical studies William Hutton ‘55, associate professor of geology Rowan Lockwood, premed advisor and adjunct professor of biology Beverly Sher, associate professor of psychology Peter Vishton, and Pullen Professor of history Jim Whittenburg....
Source: Jewish Journal
4-9-12
Dr. Jonathan Sarna, Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University, discusses his new book When General Grant Expelled the Jews. ...In one of the many talks you gave on this book you’ve said that “there are interesting parallels” to be made from the current political climate “to the 1868 election” - namely, that Jews who might be hesitating to vote for President Obama might be able to learn something from Grant’s transformation. What exactly did you mean?
Source: Associated Press
4-8-12
CHESTER — Joseph Edgette didn’t know much about the Titanic when he began teaching at Widener University, even though the school is named for a stunningly wealthy Philadelphia family that lost two people in the tragedy.But after a Widener descendant showed Edgette heirloom jewelry that survived the ship’s demise, the professor — who holds a doctorate in folklore — felt compelled to do a little research. And then a little more.As the world this week marks the 100th anniversary of the ocean liner’s sinking, Edgette is working to document the final resting places of all its passengers. He specializes in gravestones and cemeteries.“Basically, I’m getting through their lives by going backwards, by looking at their gravestones,” Edgette said. “That becomes a springboard into the story behind the person.”...
Source: Today's Zaman
4-8-12
A distinguished professor of contemporary history has said that truth commissions are better than courts for dealing with difficult past events, such as Turkey's Sept. 12, 1980 coup d'état, many people are responsible to different degrees.“The problem with the prosecution is that it just takes a few individuals to account for criminal responsibility, whereas if you have a truth commission, a larger process, then you can explore the whole historical background and understand all the connections without having to do with [the] very specific thing of proving ... criminal responsibility,” said Timothy Garton Ash, the Isaiah Berlin professorial fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford, for Monday Talk....During his working visit to İstanbul, Garton Ash answered our questions on the coup trial and elaborated on other topics.You're in Turkey at the time of an important process; more than 30 years after the Sept. 12, 1980 military takeover, a criminal court has begun to hear the case against two retired, surviving leaders of the 1980 coup. Would you share your thoughts with us regarding this process?
Source: WickedLocal -- Newton, MA
4-5-12
Newton —Chris Daly is a Boston University journalism and history professor. He is a veteran journalist, who has worked at the Washington Post and the Associated Press. He recently finished writing “Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation’s Journalism.”How long have you lived in Newton?I have lived in Newton for 18 years. My wife and I live in Newton Highlands (near Crystal Lake), and our two sons, who are now grown, went to school in Newton.How did you get the idea and the discipline to write the book? I had been teaching a class at B.U. on the history of journalism, and I realized after a few years that it was the work I was most interested in. As I got deeper into the material to prepare my lectures, I kept finding all kinds of great stories—funny, sad, appalling, inspiring—that hadn’t been pulled together in one place. So, I thought there might be an opportunity there. I wanted to do a book about journalism that would do it justice....
Source: Iowa City Press Citizen
4-6-12
The University of Iowa has announced the second candidate for dean of the school's largest college, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.Ohio State University history professor and department chair Peter L. Hahn will interview on Monday and Tuesday. He will appear at an open forum from 4 to 5 p.m. in 240 Art Building West on Monday. A reception will follow in the Art Building West atrium. The university will ease parking enforcement starting at 3 p.m. in lots 28, 42, 55 and the music and theatre meters.Hahn has been chair of the history department at Ohio State since 2006. He has written six books, specializing in U.S. foreign relations in the Middle East since 1940. He has delivered papers and lectures in nine countries, frequently addresses the media, and has been the executive director of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations since 2002, according to a UI email announcing his candidacy....
Source: Ottawa Citizen
4-4-12
OTTAWA — Carleton University professors Ruth Phillips and Christopher Worswick are on the shortlist for the $50,000 Donner Prize in public policy writing....Phillips, a history professor at Carleton and Canadian Research Chair in Modern Culture, is the author of Museum Pieces: Towards the Indigenization of Canadian Museums, which examines the changes made to museums in Canada over the last 30 years to better reflect Canada’s diverse society....The winner of this year’s Donner Prize will be announced May 1 at an awards ceremony in Toronto.
Source: Florida Independent Alligator
4-4-12
A half hour into professor Steve Noll’s American History lecture, he’d already paused six times for waves of laughter.Tuesday’s presentation was about the economic incentives behind slavery, and Noll had already impersonated an ignorant high school teacher, cracked jokes about Florida State students and made a historical reference to Elvis Presley. And he was just warming up.“Class can be both entertaining and intellectually challenging,” Noll said. “If I’m just going to sit there and drone on, why should they even bother coming?”His teaching methods may seem unorthodox, but they’re partly why Noll and two other UF professors were named among the 300 best professors in the U.S. by the Princeton Review....
Source: WSJ
4-4-12
Anthony Grafton, a professor of history at Princeton and past president of the American Historical Association, is distressed when he contemplates the changes afoot at the New York Public Library.“My stomach hurts,” he concludes, “when I think about NYPL, the first great library I ever worked in, turned into a vast internet cafe where people can read the same Google Books … that they could access at home or Starbucks.” And yet he concedes that, given the revolution in progress in the world of books and libraries, he cannot definitively say that the library has chosen the wrong path. (Princeton’s Firestone Library, he observes, has consciously eschewed the path chosen by the NYPL, choosing to keep physical books at the center of its mission. He can’t say that’s the right decision, either.)
Source: NPR
4-10-12
Police are still investigating whether the weekend shooting spree in Tulsa, Okla., was racially motivated. A massive riot there in 1921 left about three dozen people dead. University of Michigan history professor Scott Ellsworth, a native of Tulsa, talks to Steve Inskeep about the riot. [CLICK ON THE LINK FOR FULL AUDIO]
