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: Indian Country News
12-2-11

Non-Native Wins Prestigious Native American History Award

Dartmouth College professor Colin Calloway was honored in September with the 2011 American Indian History Lifetime Achievement Award, which is presented to an individual for “helping Native American students and advancing the study of American Indian history.”He received the award during the Western History Association Conference held in Oakland, California....

Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
12-1-11

Penn Scholar of Black Politics and Religion Wins Grawemeyer Award

Barbara D. Savage, a professor of history and American social thought at the University of Pennsylvania, will receive the 2012 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion for her 2008 book, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (Harvard University Press)....

Source: AP
12-1-11

New book compares FDR and Pearl Harbor to pre-9/11 intelligence failures

A new book reports that two days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that officially brought the United States into World War II, President Roosevelt was warned about such a possible attack in a memo from naval intelligence.U.S. News' Paul Bedard writes more about the story:In the newly revealed 20-page memo from FDR's declassified FBI file, the Office of Naval Intelligence on December 4 warned, "In anticipation of open conflict with this country, Japan is vigorously utilizing every available agency to secure military, naval and commercial information, paying particular attention to the West Coast, the Panama Canal and the Territory of Hawaii."

Source: Aletho News
12-1-11

Gershom Gorenberg attacked as "apologist for ethnic cleansing"

The popular internet magazine Slate recently published an excerpt from The Unmaking of Israel, a new book by the historian Gershom Gorenberg. The title of the excerpt asked “Did Israel actually plan to expel most of its Arabs in 1948? Or not?” (“The Mystery of 1948,” 7 November 2011).

Source: Robert Townsend in AHA Perspectives
12-1-11

The Ecology of the History Job: Shifting Realities in a Fluid Market

Robert Townsend is deputy director of the American Historical Association.Ask almost any historian employed in academia today, and they will tell you how lucky they are to have a job. The problems of the academic job market in history extend back to 1970, rising and falling through a series of seemingly intractable crises in every decade since. But the solutions, much like the problems, are not as simple or straightforward as they often appear. Bringing the number of new PhDs conferred each year into line with the number of new academic jobs that become available cannot in itself solve all the problems.As a discipline, we need to get past the notion that the history job market is neatly characterized by the ratio of academic jobs to PhDs. Examining the relationship is important, as it does help us to see that the number of PhDs conferred in history has been fairly consistent—at about 1,000 per year for more than a decade—while the number of jobs has gone through a series of rather wild gyrations that generally follow the larger economy up and down (Figure 1).

Source: Daily Mail (UK)
11-30-11

Oxford don who quoted Voltaire accused of racial discrimination against black chef

An Oxford University history don has been accused of racial discrimination for comparing a black chef to a character in a book.Dr David Parrott described New College Oxford's former deputy head chef Gregory Lewis as 'Mr Pangloss himself' during the cook's unsuccessful interview for promotion in 2007. Mr Pangloss is a character in Candide, the satire written by the French philosopher Voltaire.Mr Lewis, who is of Afro-Caribbean origin and was later dismissed by the college, claimed at an Employment Tribunal, that the reference to Pangloss - ridiculed by Voltaire for his over-optimistic view that we live in 'the best of all possible worlds' - was racially charged as it implied he was lazy and unoriginal....

Source: Kevin Carey for The New Republic
11-23-11

Diane Ravitch: The Dissenter

Kevin Carey works for Education Sector, a think tank in Washington, D.C. This article appeared in the December 15, 2011, issue of the magazine.On July 30, 2011, thousands of public school teachers rallied on the southwest corner of the Ellipse, near the White House. Union members mingled with the occasional communist pamphleteer, and, on a temporary stage, a series of activists, students, scholars, and teachers put forward variations on a theme: Standardized tests and corporate interests are ruining public education.Late in the program, the actor Matt Damon showed up and began chatting amiably with an older, gray-haired woman sitting next to him on the stage. It turned out he wasn’t the only star in attendance. The next speaker “is the torchbearer, the champion for children,” an organizer announced. “Like Britney and Cher and Gaga, in the education world, all you need to say is ‘Diane.’ ”

Source: Yahoo News Canada
11-28-11

U.S. historian contends that Canada won the war of 1812

Safe to say Eliot Cohen may not be getting many invitations from Americans marking the upcoming bicentennial of the War of 1812, though he could find himself an honoured guest at Canadian festivities.The Johns Hopkins University history professor, once a senior adviser to former U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, has just published a book that concludes Canada won the war.The admission comes as the Conservative government ramps up plans to celebrate the war, which it is elevating to the kind of defining historical moment for Canada on a level with the Battle of Vimy Ridge in the First World War.Cohen's book, entitled Conquered Into Liberty, states "ultimately, Canada and Canadians won the War of 1812."...

Source: The Canadian Jewish News
12-1-11

Benny Morris: Israel’s occupation delegitimizes it

Israel’s continuing occupation of the West Bank looms as a major factor in its growing delegitimization, claims a leading Israeli historian.“Today, we’re witnessing the steady delegitimization of Israel in the international community,” said Benny Morrris in a recent speech at Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto.The erosion of Israel’s legitimacy is taking place especially in European university campuses, the incubators of future political leaders in Europe, noted Morris, who teaches Middle Eastern history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev....

Source: NYU News
11-27-11

NYU history professor wins Liberty Prize

NYU Russian history and politics professor Stephen Cohen visited Russia on a whim. After taking a year to study at Birmingham University in England, Cohen decided to stretch out his time abroad and found himself in Russia.This month, over 50 years after his first visit, Cohen was awarded the 2011 Liberty Prize for his work advancing cultural bonds between the United States and Russia."It was an award that brought together the two countries that have shaped my entire adult life, so because it was an American-Russian award, it really was special for me," Cohen said.The Liberty Prize is sponsored by the publisher Kontinent USA and the American University in Moscow. Every year, the jury selects individuals who have brought awareness and interest to Russian affairs....

Source: NYT
11-28-11

History Proving a Touchy Subject in Britain

LONDON — As the novelist George Orwell observed, he who controls the past controls the future, so it is perhaps not surprising that Orwell’s home country is the latest setting for a battle over what history is and how it is taught. In recent weeks, two conferences here have seen the polite tones of academic debate shattered as historians traded accusations of racism, dumbing down and just plain ignorance.At the same time Michael Gove, the education minister, has been urged by some of the country’s most eminent historians to abandon his plan to revamp the way history is taught in schools.David Starkey, the author of several books about Henry VIII and his wives and a frequent guest on British television programs, argued at a historians’ conference in London this month that schools ought to focus more on Britain’s “own culture.”...

Source: LA Times
11-29-11

Harvard historian Niall Ferguson threatens suit over bad review

Niall Ferguson, a historian who teaches at Harvard, has responded to a negative review of his book "Civilization: The West and the Rest" with an angry letter and by saying, "Don't force my hand by forcing me to put it in the hands of lawyers." The long review, threaded through with analyses of Ferguson's previous works and related histories, was written by Pankaj Mishra and appeared in the Nov. 3 issue of the London Review of Books:Ferguson himself is homo atlanticus redux. In a preface to the UK edition of Civilisation: The West and the Rest, he writes of being seduced away from a stodgy Oxbridge career, early in the 2000s, to the United States, ‘where the money and power actually were’....

Source: The Economist
11-28-11

A conversation with Kennan's biographer John Lewis Gaddis

JOHN LEWIS GADDIS, a cold-war historian, is the author of “George F. Kennan: An American Life” (2011; reviewed by The Economist here). He is Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University and a Distinguished Fellow and Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. He serves on the advisory board of the Cold War International History Project and is the author of “The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past” (2002); “Surprise, Security and the American Experience, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy During the Cold War” (2004; reviewed by The Economist here); and “The Cold War: A New History” (2005; reviewed by The Economist here). How would you define containment?  

Source: Jon Wiener for The Nation
11-28-11

Berkeley Faculty Votes to Condemn Chancellor for Police Violence

Jon Wiener teaches history at UC Irvine and writes for the Nation magazineThe Berkeley Academic Senate voted 336 to 34 on Monday afternoon to “condemn” Chancellor Robert Birgeneau for his administration’s “authorization of violent responses to nonviolent protests over the past two years,” culminating in the police attack on nonviolent Occupy Cal demonstrators on Nov. 9. A million people have seen the YouTube video of that attack....The resolution, co-authored by Wendy Brown, professor of political science, Judith Butler, professor of rhetoric and comparative literature, and Barrie Thorne, professor of sociology and of gender and women’s studies, originally had expressed "no confidence" in the chancellor, but some faculty members took that as a call for the chancellor’s resignation, which the authors did not seek. As a result, they deleted the call for “no confidence” and substituted the phrase about condemning the chancellor for the police attacks....

Source: The Daily Beast
11-28-11

Russian Historian Anatoly Moskvin Collected Dead Girls at Home

On a cold, gray morning last weekend, a group of about 30 relatives and neighbors waited for the funeral of a 65-year-old woman outside a five-story building on Lenin Prospect in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod. Some of them discussed the latest news in low voices: “Our Rima Stesheva would be too old for that maniac! He dragged home only the corpses of young women,” one of the women at the funeral said, referring to the deceased. “They said he placed musical boxes inside the mummies, set them up around his living room and had tea, while they were singing for him,” the other woman said, citing a recent article from a local newspaper. Soul-troubling details settled over the crowd, like wet snow, as more pedestrians joined the discussion in the courtyard: “He dug them out at night and turned the remains into pretty dolls”; “he collected clothes of dead women”; “his apartment was packed with the mummies he made out of dead bodies.” The moment the coffin showed up from the doorway, the gloomy-faced crowd quieted and boarded a bus to follow the deceased one to the cemetery.

Source: NYT
11-28-11

Gingrich Wields History, Seeking to Add Chapter

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Newt Gingrich is a historian. He earned a Ph.D. in history. If you’ve forgotten, he’ll remind you.During a six-candidate forum in Iowa recently, Mr. Gingrich dropped in references to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, Capt. John Smith’s leadership of Jamestown, the French Revolution and, as a bonus, the Latin root of “secular.”A few days earlier, as guests at a fund-raising breakfast forked into slabs of coffeecake, Mr. Gingrich told a lengthy anecdote about John Quincy Adams.

Source: NYT
11-27-11

The Tweets of War: What’s Past Is Postable

Hitler spent decades plotting his campaign for world domination. Alwyn Collinson, 24, a recent graduate in Renaissance history from Oxford University, hatched his own plan to invade Poland in a mere five days.On Aug. 26 Mr. Collinson was just a marketing manager at a magazine in Oxford toying with the notion of starting some kind of a real-time Twitter project that would get people’s attention — maybe something like Orson Welles’s 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast, but that wouldn’t scare them to death.Then suddenly he hit on the idea of tweeting the biggest terrestrial war of all time, and on Aug. 31 — roughly 72 years to the hour after Hitler’s tanks moved across the frontier — the Twitter feed RealTimeWWII was under way.

Source: National Post
11-27-11

Canada won the War of 1812, U.S. historian admits

In a relatively rare admission for an American scholar, a leading U.S. historian who authored a provocative new tome about North American military conflicts states bluntly that Canada won the War of 1812.Johns Hopkins University professor Eliot Cohen, a senior adviser to former U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, writes in his just-published book Conquered Into Liberty that, “ultimately, Canada and Canadians won the War of 1812.”And Cohen acknowledges that, “Americans at the time, and, by and large, since, did not see matters that way.”The book also echoes a key message trumpeted by the federal Conservative government in recent weeks as it unveiled ambitious plans to commemorate the bicentennial of the War of 1812 over the next three years: that the successful fight by British, English- and French-Canadian and First Nations allies to resist would-be American conquerors — at battles such as Queenston Heights in Upper Canada and Chateauguay in Lower Canada — set the stage for the creation of a unified and independent Canada a half-century later....

Source: Jon Wiener for The Nation
11-25-11

Berkeley Faculty: No Confidence in Chancellor Over Campus Police Violence

Jon Wiener teaches history at UC Irvine and writes for the Nation magazine.Berkeley is not only a school with an honored history of campus protest; it’s also our greatest public university, and its faculty include some of the country’s most brilliant and accomplished people. So when those faculty members meet to debate police violence against the “Occupy” movement on their campus, it’s big news.On Monday, the Berkeley Academic Senate will vote on a resolution expressing “no confidence” in their chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, because of police violence against Occupy Cal campus activists there on November 9. The chancellor’s defense of police conduct was particularly outrageous: “It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms,” he declared the day after the police confrontation. “This is not non-violent civil disobedience.”Linking arms is “not non-violent”?...

Source: Alaska Dispatch
11-25-11

Fallout continues from confrontation between Douglas Brinkley, Alaska congressman

Dr. Douglas Brinkley, the Rice University professor who earlier this month got into a heated confrontation with Alaska Rep. Don Young during a Congressional hearing on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, is fanning the flames of their sudden feud.A week ago, Young and Brinkley got testy with one another after Young incorrectly called Dr. Brinkley "Dr. Rice," and then referred to the professor's testimony on ANWR as "garbage." Brinkley confronted Young, correcting him on his name and incorrectly claiming that Young never graduated from college.Young eventually told Brinkley, "You just be quiet. You be quiet," at which point the committee chair stepped in to mediate between Young and the still-riled Brinkley....