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: NYT
1-23-12
Mary C. Henderson, a scholar of the theater whose interests as a historian and curator spanned centuries and as a Tony nominator and critic were up to the minute, died on Jan. 3 at her home in Congers, N.Y. She was 83.The cause was Parkinson’s disease, her son Doug said.Ms. Henderson, who taught theater history at New York University and other schools, wrote several books, often lavishly illustrated, reflecting her familiarity with and love of theater imagery and theater artifacts. They included “The City and the Theater” (1973, revised in 2004), a history of the city’s playhouses dating to the 18th century; “Broadway Ballyhoo” (1989), a study of theater advertising; and “Mielziner: Master of Modern Stage Design” (2000), an analytical biography of the prolific and influential designer Jo Mielziner, whose more than 200 shows included the original Broadway productions of “Carousel,” “Death of a Salesman,” “A Streetcar Name Desire,” “Guys and Dolls” and “Gypsy.”...
Source: David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
1-22-12
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Defenders of President Franklin Roosevelt's response to the Holocaust have been dealt a major blow, as a study by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has rejected a claim they frequently have made regarding the U.S. failure to bomb Auschwitz.The development comes just before International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27), which commemorates the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.In numerous speeches, articles, and conferences in recent years, officials and supporters of the Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in Hyde Park, NY have claimed that then-Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion opposed bombing Auschwitz (for fear of harming prisoners). Roosevelt supporters have made the claim to deflect criticism of FDR for the U.S. rejection of requests to bomb the death camp.But a newly-completed two-year study by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has concluded that Ben-Gurion opposed bombing the camp only for a period of several weeks when he believed it was a labor camp, and then reversed himself when he learned more about the true nature of Auschwitz, and thereafter supported bombing. Ben-Gurion's associates in Europe and the United States then repeatedly pressed Allied officials to bomb the camp.
Source: Prague Monitor
1-19-12
Prague, Jan 18 (CTK) - Czech historians of art are opposed to the idea of the urn with famous Czech-born painter Frantisek Kupka's remains being transferred from Paris to Prague and placed at the Vysehrad cemetery where outstanding Czech personalities are buried.Some say the Czech Republic should claim its adherence to Kupka (1871-1957), a world-renowned pioneer of world abstract art who died in France and was buried in Paris.However, historians point out that Kupka chose France to live in and showed no interest to return to Bohemia.
Source: Wales Online
1-19-12
A Welsh historian who believes Wales’ part in the British Empire has been largely ignored has produced a new book to put the record straight.Swansea University-based Professor Huw Bowen believes up to now Welsh historians have often viewed the Welsh as victims of the British Empire.As a result he says, the story of Wales and the British Empire has concentrated on the working classes.But Professor Bowen says the fabric of the British Empire was studded with Welsh soldiers, sailors, administrators, entrepreneurs, surgeons, diplomats and adventurers....
Source: Independent (UK)
1-20-12
Where are you now and what can you see? I'm in my little writing hut in my Somerset home, looking down a sloping meadow which has a pond at the end.What are you currently reading? As ever, I've got multiple books on the go. The one I'm most concentrating on is Peter Englund's brilliant history, 'The Beauty and the Sorrow'. It is a collection of disparate accounts of the First World War from people living all over the world, and it corrects the Western view that most of the key fighting was done on the Western Front.Choose a favourite author, and say why you admire her/him The historian, Professor Hew Strachan, at Oxford University, who was my mentor. He got me into military history and unlike an awful lot of historians, who don't seem to be able to keep partiality or politics out of their work, he is able to do so. It's incredibly difficult to do, I think, but you never think for a moment when reading him that he has anything other than a distant, objective view....
Source: BBC News
1-18-12
Historian Simon Schama has launched a scathing attack on Downton Abbey, accusing it of improbable storylines and historical inaccuracies.Criticising the show's popularity in the US, he accused it of "cultural necrophilia" and of pandering to "cliches" about British stately homes."Downton serves up a steaming, silvered tureen of snobbery," he wrote in The New Statesman.Creator Julian Fellowes has previously defended the drama against such claims.Responding to people who accused the show of using anachronistic language and etiquette, he said "the programme is pretty accurate"....
Source: Jordan Michael Smith in the American Conservative
1-9-12
Jordan Michael Smith, a contributing writer at Salon, has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe.The premier Cold War historian first met the premier Cold War diplomat in 1974. Then a very junior professor at Ohio University, John Lewis Gaddis asked the already iconic George Frost Kennan if he could interview the former policy planner and ambassador to the USSR for an article he was writing for Foreign Affairs. It was only a brief interview, says Gaddis, and they met “only a couple of other times” before Kennan agreed to let Gaddis become his authorized biographer in 1981. Finally released in November after 30 years of work, George F. Kennan: An American Life is a triumph of scholarship and narrative. It is the best book yet written on the most important American foreign-policy thinker-practitioner of the 20th century.
Source: Salon
1-14-12
In the US today, debt is ubiquitous. Whether it’s paying back thousands of dollars in student loans, using your Visa card for a pack of gum when you’re out of cash, or taking out a mortgage on a first home, it’s been woven into our financial system so tightly, that even when we suffer the sometimes cruel and unusual detriments of borrowing, we have little to no realistic impetus to stop. But it wasn’t always this way. In fact before the 20th century, debt was a taboo, feared, shameful, and kept in the shadows. So what events and institutions brought debt from its meager beginnings to its central role in American life?
Source: Inside Higher Ed
1-11-12
CHICAGO -- Analysis of current events is too important for historians to ignore, one of the nation’s preeminent scholars on the Middle East argued last week at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association.Juan Cole, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, spoke on a panel titled “Historians, Journalists, and the Challenges of Getting It Right,” one of several sessions at this year’s conference devoted to the interplay of history and journalism. Other sessions included discussions on the American biography and the Cold War, publishing and the American century, and American intervention.
Source: Houston Chronicle
1-12-12
As far as human rights, religion and politics goes, anti-Semitism has been around for generations - but is this historic topic breathing new life?That's the question Deborah Lipstadt, the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, will discuss Tuesday in Houston.Lipstadt is not talking about whether anti-Semitism exists. She's considering the idea that a "new" form is under way, one stemming from Europe and one that is more directly related to attitudes against Israel and its close connection with the United States."But I am not, in any way, shape or form, saying that everyone who has something to say about Israel is anti-Semitic," said Lipstadt, a consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C....
Source: Inside Higher Ed
1-9-12
CHICAGO -- The history of the history profession may provide some guidance to those trying to figure out the terrible job market, said panelists Friday at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago.In the last year, there have been frequent calls, including one by AHA leaders, for job candidates to develop alternative career paths, because the academic job market is not going to bounce back to pre-recession levels any time soon.A paper presented at the session by Thomas Bender, a professor of history at New York University, suggested that even though nonacademic careers may be the obvious direction to go, a shift in thinking can only come about when the leading history departments in the country begin to actively back this kind of thinking. “Without that leadership, the changes proposed will be considered something subpar and thus not the thing for an aspiring department or student,” Bender said in his paper. He said research by the AHA Committee on Doctoral Education has shown that graduates students are afraid to tell their advisers that they are contemplating careers outside the academe.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
1-9-12
"The most Luddite person you can imagine" is how Anthony T. Grafton describes himself. But it's in part thanks to Mr. Grafton, a professor of history at Princeton University, that the American Historical Association has finally put digital-humanities scholarship on its agenda.Mr. Grafton just stepped down as president of the association, after a year of energetic public campaigning to get both the group and the discipline to broaden their horizons.At the association's annual meeting, held this past Thursday through Sunday in Chicago, Mr. Grafton appeared to be everywhere, moderating panels and plenaries, delivering a typically engaging and erudite lecture on Francis Daniel Pastorius and "The Republic of Letters in the American Colonies," and praising colleagues' scholarship and professional contributions as "extraordinary" at every turn.The Chronicle sat down with Mr. Grafton in Chicago to talk about his presidential year, scholarly directions in the field, the push to rethink graduate education and history careers, and the work that remains to be done.
Source: Leonard Cassuto in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
1-8-12
Leonard Cassuto, a professor of English at Fordham University, writes regularly about graduate education in this space. He welcomes comments, suggestions, and stories—including descriptions of the kinds of innovative graduate teaching described in this article—at lcassuto@erols.com.A couple of months ago, Anthony T. Grafton and James Grossman made a "very modest proposal" that wasn't very modest at all. As president and executive director of the American Historical Association, respectively, the two mounted history's official disciplinary pulpit to endorse a new way of looking at graduate education in the field."Many of these students," the authors wrote, "will not find tenure-track positions teaching history in colleges and universities"—and it's time to stop pretending otherwise. The job market "is what it is." We face no "transient 'crisis,'" but rather "the situation that we have lived with for two generations."That's a refreshing assertion, and an encouraging sign that the graduate-school-industrial complex is beginning to embrace not just the not-so-new economic reality—which has, after all, been apparent for a long time—but also what that reality means for the future of graduate programs.
Source: Mark Cheathem at Jacksonian America (blog)
1-12-12
Mark Cheathem is Associate Professor of History at Cumberland University. He blogs at Jacksonian America.This year’s AHA was the best I’ve ever attended, primarily because it’s the first I’ve attended without interviewing for a job but also because of the great weather.
Source: AHA Blog
1-12-12
Following the AHA’s 126th annual meeting this year on Twitter, through over 4,500 tweets, was fascinating. Attendees, as well as those following along from home, connected with other participants, shared links to resources and thoughts on sessions, and gave a dynamic glimpse into the various events and conversations going on at the meeting.When Twitter first came online in 2006, many of its critics saw it as a place for inane personal updates. And while that is certainly still the case for some users, Twitter has also developed into a tool for communicating ideas and creating scholarly debate.
Source: In These Times
1-9-12
With barbed tongues and references to the Occupy Wall Street movement, worried historians debated what to do about the jobs crisis in their field at the American Historical Association’s conference in Chicago this past weekend.A panel discussion titled “Jobs for Historians: Approaching the Crisis from the Demand Side” grew out of a strongly-worded online exchange between Anthony Grafton and Jim Grossman, the president and executive director of the AHA, respectively, and Jesse Lemisch, a professor emeritus at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. An October article by Grafton and Grossman, “No More Plan B,” challenged the profession to abandon the idea that tenure-track professorships are the only real measure of success for doctoral students. History PhD graduates have greatly outnumbered tenure-track openings for decades, sometimes by as much as two to one. “Our only choice,” they say, “…is to train fewer historians or to find a more diverse array of employment opportunities.”
Source: WGN Radio 720
1-8-12
Jim Grossman, formerly of Newberry Libray and now executive director of the American Historical Association, talks about the American Historical Association's conference in Chicago to WGN Radio. Click on the link above to listen.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
1-8-12
Historians have to broaden their sense of their discipline and how, where, and why they practice it. That message was broadcast clearly at the American Historical Association's annual conference, which ended here on Sunday.About 4,700 scholars attended the meeting. Anxiety about job prospects percolated at panels and in hallway conversations. But the meeting drew energy and optimism from two dozen digital-humanities panels, which complemented more traditional fare, and from the association's recent push to expand what counts as respectable employment for historians.The official theme, "Communities and Networks," generated sessions on topics such as the history of information and spatial history. It also described the group's current desire to appeal to historians who work outside the academic world, or within it in nontraditional ways.
Source: NYT
1-7-12
On Thursday I asked four government officials who deal daily with secret documents about the significance of the unauthorized disclosure of American diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks.There was silence in the meeting room at the Marriott Chicago Downtown. Then Carl Ashley, who oversees declassification in the State Department’s office of the historian, spoke with succinct severity:“Are you familiar with the concept of the third rail? That’s how WikiLeaks is viewed in the Department of State,“ he said, not a word more. He was referring to “third rail” as a topic to be avoided because of its offensive nature rather than part of an electric railway.Few heard the archival insiders, including one from the Central Intelligence Agency, discussing American state secrecy. That’s too bad. There were wonderful tidbits, like how our backlog of declassified documents is 400 million pages, and a serious discussion of whether we go overboard with secrecy....
Source: WSJ
1-6-12
Christopher Shea blogs for the Wall Street Journal.Federal prosecutors, at the request of the British government, have told Boston College to hand over records relating to interviews with former members of Protestant and Roman Catholic paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland — part of the college’s Belfast Project.Researchers had assured the interview subjects that the their identities would remain confidential, but, unfortunately — depending on your perspective — oral historians have no special right to keep information relating to possible crimes secret, observes the Chronicle of Higher Education. There’s a debate about whether the Boston College researchers were informed of this, at the start. But, in any case, three researchers involved in the project said this week that they’d like to see the interviews “either returned or shredded,” if they can’t be protected. Some of the participants in the oral-history project also have asked that the interviews be returned to them....