Historians in the News

AHA’s Executive Director Testifies for Humanities Funding

American Historical Association Executive Director James Grossman testified today before the House Committee on Appropriations’ Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies. Speaking on behalf of the AHA and the National Humanities Alliance, Grossman urged the subcommittee to provide no less than $154.3 million to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for fiscal year 2013. This represents a small increase over the 2012 appropriation, and was the same amount requested by the Obama administration.Grossman told the subcommittee that the current level of support going to NEH was “akin to plowing under our seed corn,” as young scholars find themselves unable to complete the research that goes into the books that launch academic careers. This has wide implications, Grossman argued. Without an understanding of our own heritage, those of other nations, and of foreign languages, he stated, “We can neither formulate informed foreign policy or even military strategy, nor compete in a global marketplace.”

Peter Novick, U. of C. scholar who analyzed public interest in the Holocaust

Peter Novick, a University of Chicago history professor, ignited controversy by asserting the legacy of the Holocaust had become too much a part of American Jewish identity in his 1999 book The Holocaust in American Life.“What Peter did was say ‘How come no one was interested in this until the ’60s and ’70s?’ ” said Bruce Cumings, chair of the History Department at University of Chicago.Mr. Novick, described by friends as a non-observant Jew, died of lung cancer Feb. 17 at his Chicago home. He was 77....

India’s Archives: How Did Things Get This Bad?

Dinyar Patel is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Harvard University, currently working on a dissertation on Dadabhai Naoroji and early Indian nationalism. He can be reached at dpatel@fas.harvard.edu.Why has modern India had such a difficult time preserving its history?Tridip Suhrud, professor who has written extensively on Mohandas K. Gandhi, blamed a lack of historical sensitivity for problems in his state. Gujarat’s local maharajas and business families, he remarked, did not place much importance on keeping records.Consequently, there has been little interest in creating or patronizing archival institutions. Mr. Suhrud can only count three other scholars currently working at the Sabarmati Ashram Library in Ahmedabad, the principal repository of Gandhi’s personal papers (properly preserved in a locked, temperature-controlled room, he noted).

Tony Judt: A Final Victory

Jennifer Homans is the author of Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet. She was the wife of Tony Judt, who died in August 2010. Accompanying her essay in this issue is an excerpt from his just-published book, Thinking the Twentieth Century, written with Timothy Snyder, the author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.
 (March 2012) I was married to Tony Judt. I lived with him and our two children as he faced the terror of ALS, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. It was a two-year ordeal, from his diagnosis in 2008 to his death in 2010, and during it Tony managed against all human odds to write three books. The last, following Ill Fares the Land and The Memory Chalet, was Thinking the Twentieth Century, based on conversations with Timothy Snyder.1 He started work on the book soon after he was diagnosed; within months he was quadriplegic and on a breathing machine, but he kept working nonetheless. He and Tim finished the book a month before he died. It accompanied his illness; it was part of his illness, and part of his dying.

Anthropologists complain about TV show "American Digger"

Ric Savage is accustomed to wrestling, but for most of his career it was against guys named the Junkyard Dog and Skull Von Krush.Now he’s facing opponents like Susan Gillespie, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Florida who is on the board of the American Anthropological Association. That’s because Mr. Savage, known as Heavy Metal in his pro wrestling days, is on different turf now. Or, to be more precise, he is digging into different turf as the star of a new show that has its premiere on the cable channel Spike on Wednesday night: “American Digger.” The series, which Spike hopes will be a hit along the lines of its tattoo competition “Ink Master,” features Mr. Savage and his team traveling the country, digging up people’s lawns in search of historical artifacts. That sounds a bit like the work of archaeologists and anthropologists, and both groups are, in the words of the letter they have sent to Spike, “deeply concerned” by the show....

Professor Brian Shefton, Greek and Etruscan historian, 92

Professor Brian Shefton, who has died aged 92, was a leading expert on Greek and Etruscan artefacts; after joining Newcastle University in 1955 as a lecturer in Greek Archaeology and Ancient History, he began to build up a collection of treasures which led to the university’s Greek Museum being renamed the Shefton Museum of Greek Art and Archaeology in his honour.It was Charles Bosanquet, then Rector of the university, who had the idea of building a collection of Greek artefacts. Newcastle had a reputation for Roman archaeology, but Bosanquet had been born in Athens and wanted to show off the other great culture of the classical world. As Shefton recalled: “He called me in and said, 'Here’s £25 to get some objects to interest people who are going to take up Greek archaeology’.”...

Journals of French art historian reveal challenges to role of women

A French art historian contributed to the history of Irish art and challenged the role of women in the mid 20th century, an Eastern art professor said.Janet Marquardt, a professor of art history and women's studies and the director of the Center for the Humanities, presented the personal journals of Françoise Henry, a history that detailed her excavations on the island Inishkea North (Co. Mayo) in Ireland.Marquardt said Henry wrote about the daily events on the island, and the journals told her personal thoughts about those around her.“She kept her personal notes separate from her archeological journals, her record of the day, except for 1950 where she merged them,” Marquardt said....

Video game magazine interviews historian about upcoming action title

 Smart guy Assistant Professor of History Gregory O'Malley of the University of California Santa Cruz has aired his thoughts on Ubisoft's choice of historical setting for Assassin's Creed III.The War of Independence is the next destination for the franchise, but it's far from a 'clear cut' conflict. There's so much to draw from, he says, with "diverse and complicated" armies.Americans good, British bad? Ubisoft has been adamant neither side will come off looking so clearly defined. O'Malley agrees, citing just how complicated it all was...."There were a lot of people in North America who chose to remain loyal to Great Britain, so some American families ended up split, which could set the stage for some drama," said Gregory O'Malley."For example, Ben Franklin's son sided with Britain and they almost never spoke again," he noted."Both sides had Native American allies. Also many American colonists had spent a lot of time living on the frontier and had really changed. They seemed pretty foreign to the British, so that tension between the British and British-Americans who had kind of gone native seems interesting to me."...

Sir Martin Gilbert wins Israeli prize

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — South African artist William Kentridge, British historian Sir Martin Gilbert and American scientist David Botstein are among the winners of this year's prestigious Dan David Prize.The Dan David Foundation grants the $1 million prizes in three categories — past, present and future — for scientific, technological and cultural accomplishments....

Q&A with historian Taylor Branch

UNC alumnus Taylor Branch won the Pulitzer Prize for his three-volume history of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. More recently, he has become a well-known critic of the NCAA and college sports.Branch will be speaking at Sonja Haynes Stone Center at 7 p.m. tonight on the role of violence in protest and other areas of life._Daily Tar Heel: Why did you choose to focus on violence?Taylor Branch: I think quite frankly violence and its opposite, nonviolence, ought to be a university subject.Our media, our movies, our television are permeated with violence, and yet I dare venture most of the people in the audience at Chapel Hill on Monday night will not have seen much violence firsthand.We don’t often just think about the place of violence itself. It’s one of those rare things that’s arresting and fascinating but doesn’t get a whole lot of thought....

Keogh Relishes His Stint as Burns Scholar

Being a scholar of 20th-century Irish history when personal papers and official state archives were nearly impossible to obtain in Ireland made Dermot Keogh appreciate “the value of good material.” So imagine his delight in being the Burns Visiting Scholar of Irish Studies at Boston College, and having a chance to peruse one of the world’s most acclaimed holdings of Irish history and culture. “It’s second to none,” says Keogh of the University’s John J. Burns Library Irish Collection. “The library is simply exceptional from the point of view of a researcher, and Boston College itself is equally impressive in its energy, ethos and work ethic.” Keogh, who is emeritus professor of history and Emeritus Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration Studies at University College, Cork, will offer a glimpse into his multifaceted scholarship on March 28 when he presents the lecture "Contrasting Studies of Irish Catholic Intellectuals in a Revolutionary Age, 1908-1919," at 4 p.m. in the Burns Library Thompson Room. Some of Ireland’s most eminent experts in history, literature, bibliography, language and art have served as Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies, and use the Burns Irish Collection for research. In addition to research obligations, the Burns Scholar teaches two courses and presents two lectures each academic year....

John Steer, English art historian, 83

Professor John Steer died on 20 February aged 83. Michael Liversidge, Emeritus Dean of Arts, remembers the man whose appointment as the first Lecturer in European Art at Bristol in 1959 marked the effective birth of the University’s Department of History of Art.John Richardson Steer was born in Bournemouth, attended Clayesmore School in Dorset, and took his first degree in History at Oxford (Keble College). He decided to go on from there to the Courtauld Institute of Art when he graduated as a result of visiting the Ashmolean Museum and hearing some lectures on Venetian art by a visiting scholar from the Courtauld, Johannes Wilde – one of the great generation of immigrant art historians who helped to establish the subject in Britain when they were forced to leave Germany in the 1930s, an exodus that brought, among others, Sir Ernst Gombrich and Sir Nikolaus Pevsner to this country....

Bancroft Prize awarded to Distinguished Professor of Law: Tomiko Brown-Nagin

Aging Professors Create a Faculty Bottleneck

When Mary Beth Norton went to work at Cornell University in 1971, she was the history department's first female hire. But now the accomplished professor has a different mark of distinction: She is the oldest American-history scholar at Cornell."I've always thought of myself as the sweet young thing in the department," Ms. Norton, who will turn 69 this month, says with a laugh. "But that's not true anymore."A growing proportion of the nation's professors are at the same point in their careers as Ms. Norton: ­still working, but with the end of their careers in sight. Their tendency to remain on the job as long as their work is enjoyable—or, during economic downturns, long enough to make sure they have enough money to live on in retirement—has led the professoriate to a crucial juncture.Amid an aging American work force, the graying of college faculties is particularly notable. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of professors ages 65 and up has more than doubled between 2000 and 2011. At some institutions, including Cornell, more than one in three tenured or tenure-track professors are now 60 or older. At many others—including Duke and George Mason Universities and the Universities of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Texas at Austin, and Virginia—at least one in four are 60 or older....

Peter Novick also challenged historians' assumptions in 1988 book

In his most-noted books, Peter Novick, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Chicago who died on February 17, questioned values held by two groups to which he belonged: historians and American Jews.His 1988 work, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge University Press), discussed historians' changing attitudes toward that stated ideal. "We should disregard far-reaching claims to objectivity," he said at the American Historical Association in 1991. "We don't have to be definitive; we can just be interesting or suggestive."...

Florida Atlantic historian celebrates first English Channel flight

Nearly 100 women from the USA, Canada and Europe are in Kent to commemorate the centenary of the first flight by a female pilot across the Channel.Harriet Quimby flew from Dover to northern France a year after she became the first woman to gain a pilot's licence in the USA...."This is a very important event," said history professor Dr Barbara Ganson.Dr Ganson, of Florida Atlantic University, said: "It is always a joy to talk and to study history but I want to help make history and celebrate history."I'm flying the Channel - that's why I came here."...

Bowling Green History Professor to Appear on NBC Show

BOWLING GREEN, KY (3/8/12) - John Hardin, a history professor at Western Kentucky University, will appear in the NBC show “Who Do You Think You Are?” Friday (March 9). Dr. Hardin, a co-editor of the Kentucky African American Encyclopedia Project, appears with Jerome Bettis as the NFL star discovers how his great-great-grandfather survived slavery in rural Calloway County in the 1850s. “His story was not unlike others who lived through this period of American history and later migrated to other states,” Dr. Hardin said. “His family later wound up in Michigan where Jerome was born.”...

Stanford scholars deconstruct Middle East uprisings by looking at Europe's past

The recent political uprisings across the Middle East share similarities with the unrest that rippled through Eastern Europe in the late 20th century.Stanford scholars say studying these connections may lead to a better understanding of what comes next in today's movements."We are all trying to puzzle through these various scenarios and understand what political possibilities lie before us," said Robert Crews, associate professor of history and director of the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES)....The center recently hosted the 36th Annual Stanford-Berkeley Conference on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. Fifteen scholars participated in panel discussions on who makes revolutions, why some fail and how to interpret protest movements.The daylong conference, "From Prague Spring to Arab Spring: Global and Comparative Perspectives on Protest and Revolution, 1968 – 2012," took on a unique twist from years past by looking beyond the boundaries of Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia. It drew an audience of high school students, undergraduates, faculty and others....

Women’s History Month: Meet Nellie Neilson

Many of the stories we will hear during Women’s History Month will be of “firsts” of pioneers and trailblazers. Often these stories are cast as turning points and new beginnings, as if once the barriers were knocked down, a new world suddenly appeared. But the story of Nellie Neilson, the American Historical Association’s first female president, shows how halting and sporadic change can be.Nellie Neilson had first been nominated for the presidential position at the AHA in 1932, but wasn’t elected until 1943. And then, even after the long process of lobbying and persuading the historians of the United States that the profession would not collapse into utter ruin with a woman at the helm, even after her successful term, another woman would not serve as president until Natalie Zemon Davis in 1987. As Jacqueline Goggin wrote in the American Historical Review, “these gains were fragile,” and, she continued, they reminded her of Jesse Bernard’s description of the “flowing and ebbing tides” of women’s fortunes in the professions.

Israeli professor sees hope in Muslim attitudes to Jews

Many observers believe that all Muslims have just a single shared attitude to Jews and Israel — hostility. Moshe Ma’oz, professor emeritus of Hebrew University’s Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, strongly disagrees.What’s more, he says, such thinking is counterproductive and makes it harder for both sides to discover and develop areas where they hold similar interests.He noted that Iranian nuclear capability is seen as a major threat not only by Israelis, but equally or even more so by Sunni-led Arab states throughout the region....Maoz, a professor of Middle East history at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a previous director of the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace, has devoted his career to studying Muslim politics and culture....