IN FOCUS: KATRINA 5 YEARS LATERS

• Douglas Brinkley: What Happened To Our National Conversation On Race And Poverty?: Later Brian Williams asked historian Douglas Brinkley "what happened to that national conversation we were all supposed to have about what was exposed by Katrina?" Brinkley says we "got amnesia" and "forget quickly." One might suggest the country would be less apt to get "amnesia" and "forget" if powerful media folks like NBC and it’s uber popular anchors were more apt to shine a consistent light on the problem in the intervening years between big anniversaries. One might also suggest that we are in fact embroiled in a national conversation about race, it just simply does not look like what anyone imagined or hoped it would five years ago.... - mediaite.com, 8-29-10
• Edward Kohn: Before Katrina, There Was New York's 1896 Heat Wave What the government can learn from perhaps America's most forgotten natural disaster: Long before Americans could retreat into air conditioning to escape the worst of the summer, a 10-day heat wave claimed the lives of about 1,300 New Yorkers in "the deadliest, urban heat disaster in American history," writes historian Edward Kohn. The year was 1896, when poor laborers living in crowded tenements had few options for relief from the heat. In Hot Time in the Old Town: The Great Heat Wave of 1896 and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt, Kohn recounts how Roosevelt, then New York City police commissioner, came to the aid of the working masses. Kohn, an assistant professor of American history at Bilkent University in Turkey, recently spoke with U.S. News. Excerpts.... - US News, 8-27-10

HISTORY NEWS:

• Carlos E. Cortes: 'Dora The Explorer' may change a whole generation: So producers turned to such experts as historian Carlos E. Cortes, author of "The Children Are Watching" and "The Making -- and Remaking -- of a Multiculturalist." "He was absolutely instrumental in helping us find the best way to put Dora forward in terms of culture," said Gifford. Cortes advised that Dora should always be inclusive, so producers decided not to give her a particular country of origin.
  "I am delighted with the way 'Dora' has come out, particularly the impact it seems to be having in young people," said Cortes, professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Riverside. "The Latino kids take pride having Dora as a lead character and non-Latino kids can embrace someone different."... - AP, 8-27-10
• Harold Seymour, Dorothy Jane Mills: Author Credit for Widow of Baseball Historian: In baseball terms you might describe it as a walk-off hit deep into extra innings. Dorothy Jane Mills, the widow of the revered baseball historian Harold Seymour, has been belatedly recognized by Oxford University Press as co-author, along with Mr. Seymour, of three landmark scholarly works on the history of baseball, Publishers Weekly reported. Tim Bent, Oxford’s executive editor, said that Ms. Mills, 81, formerly Dorothy Z. Seymour, would be given formal credit and that her name would now accompany her late husband’s on the covers and title pages of “Baseball: The Early Years” (1960); “Baseball: The Golden Age,” (1971); and “Baseball: The People’s Game” (1991).... - NYT (8-22-10)
• New OAH Membership Dues Structure Adopted: In conjunction with the recently adopted strategic plan, the Executive Board of the Organization of American Historians has enacted a simplified dues structure for individual members. After studying the dues structures of other learned societies, the Board concluded that the organization needed fewer membership categories. The new structure is not only simpler, but creates a lower-priced membership category for professional historians who are in the first three years of their careers. In addition, the revised structure will reduce paperwork in the OAH office, and it will allow staff to concentrate on improving member service, develop new member benefits, and better promote the organization.... - OAH (8-12-10)
• Darrell Lewis: Historian writes about Leichhardt findings: A historian studying the life of Ludwig Leichhardt has begun collating findings about the famous explorer. National Museum of Australia spokesman Dr Darrell Lewis has been tracking Leichhardt's trail through Queensland and central Australia. Leichhardt and his expedition party disappeared in 1848 and Dr Lewis has been looking for trees marked with an "L" to trace the journey.... - abc.net.au (8-17-10)
• Katherine Rowe, Dan Cohen: Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review: For professors, publishing in elite journals is an unavoidable part of university life. The grueling process of subjecting work to the up-or-down judgment of credentialed scholarly peers has been a cornerstone of academic culture since at least the mid-20th century. Now some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career- making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work. Instead of relying on a few experts selected by leading publications, they advocate using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience.... - NYT (8-23-10)
• Historians Join Effort To Preserve Federal K-12 History Education Funding: In July, the National Coalition for History (NCH), and ten other NCH members joined forces with over 20 educational organizations representing other K-12 academic disciplines in issuing a statement to Congress and the Administration calling for the continued robust funding of core academic subjects including history. This includes maintenance of discrete budget lines—such as the Teaching American History grants—for each discipline.... - Lee White at the National Coalition for History (8-6-10)

OP-EDs:

• John B. Judis: Defending 'The Unnecessary Fall of Barack Obama': In the week since my story on "the unnecessary fall of Barack Obama" came out, I have been accused of being "hysterical" and "ahistorical," of glorifying Ronald Reagan, of "moving away from" my "previously clear-eyed stance on the primary source of Obama's troubles," and of relying on the same "white-working-class Theory of Everything" I have been "peddling ... ever since summer 2008." And that’s just in public. Privately, the criticism has been far more withering and has included words far too incendiary to print in a family magazine. But I’ve spent a lot of time considering some of the (quite thought-provoking and reasonable) counter-arguments to my piece, and I’d like to take the opportunity to respond to them here.... - The New Republic (8-25-10)
• John B. Judis: The Unnecessary Fall of Barack Obama: On April 14, 2009, as Barack Obama’s standing in the polls was beginning to slip, and as Tea Party demonstrators were amassing in Washington for tax day protests, the president gave a lengthy address at Georgetown University explaining the “five pillars” of his economic policies. The speech was intended to promote a memorable slogan for Obama’s program that would evoke comparisons with Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal, Franklin Rooseveltind’s New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.... - The New Republic (8-12-10)
• Alan Brinkley: 'Mad Men': A Conversation (Season 4, Episode 5): Much of episode 5 was about competition — a particularly deceitful kind of competition that manipulated what was supposed to be a strictly regimented process of finding an advertiser for Honda. After Roger’s implausible explosion of anti-Japanese bigotry (20 years after the end of World War II), Don tricks his competitors to violate the rules of the competition — leaving Don (and Cooper, Sterling, Draper, Pryce) one of the only competitors still standing. Don recognizes the damage done to their bid by Roger’s explosion, but he also knows that the Japanese will respond to presenting himself as the honorable man as opposed to the cheating of his rivals, which Don had tricked them into doing. (In the end, Draper’s deceit is outdone by the Japanese, who apparently never had any intention of changing agencies.) This was a clever plot line, despite Roger’s ugliness, and it revives our image of Don as the man who can always find a way out of a dilemma — a talent he seemed to have lost in the last few episodes.... - WSJ, 8-23-10
• Daniel J. Flynn: An FBI History of Howard Zinn: In the late 1940s and early 1950s, as Joseph Stalin entered the final years of his reign of terror in the Soviet Union, twentysomething Howard Zinn served as a foot soldier in the Communist Party of the United States of America—this according to recently declassified FBI files. Zinn, the Marxist historian and progressive hero who died in January, may also have lied to the FBI about his Communist Party membership. Is it at all surprising that someone who got history so wrong stood on the wrong side of history?.... - City Journal (8-19-10)

REVIEWS & FIRST CHAPTERS:

• Of Thee He Sings Historian Sean Wilentz claims Bob Dylan as one of his own: Sean Wilentz, a Princeton history professor and author of Bob Dylan in America, has agreed to lead a tour of Dylan’s Greenwich Village, a place he knows better than any other. We visit the singer’s former apartment on West 4th Street, above what’s now a sex shop; the clubs he played along Macdougal Street; the building where he first encountered Allen Ginsberg. “This whole neighborhood has such a long history that there is a sense—for some of us, anyway—of revenants, of ghosts,” says Wilentz, better-heeled than your average tour guide, in Brooks Brothers and custom-made shoes. “Dylan talks about walking around here and thinking that it really is 1880. I don’t mean to be mystical or spooky, but if you know what’s going on, you can’t help but feel it.” Although Wilentz has done plenty of journalism, the Dylan book is a departure from his hardbound oeuvre, which includes a 1,100-page tome on American democracy and biographies of Andrew Jackson and Ronald Reagan. Bob Dylan in America may be an unusually rigorous Dylan book, but “it was easier to do than the others,” he says, “because in effect I’ve been doing the research all my life.”... - NY Mag, 8-22-10
• Alex Heard: Where Hatred Ruled: THE EYES OF WILLIE MCGEE A Tragedy of Race, Sex, and Secrets in the Jim Crow South First, the facts. Willie McGee, an African-American driver of a ­grocery-delivery truck, was accused of raping a white woman, Willette Hawkins, in November 1945 in Laurel, Miss. After deliberating for less than three minutes, an all-white jury sentenced him to death, and the “small-town crime,” as Alex Heard writes, “became famous around the world.” Bella Abzug, long before she became a congress­woman, served as McGee’s defense lawyer during the appeals process, working on a case that today evokes the story line of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Albert Einstein, Norman Mailer and Paul Robeson supported McGee, and left-wing journalists ranted about the trial in The Daily Worker. In contrast to their reports, “The Eyes of Willie McGee” does not crackle with rage, despite its horrific ending: on May 8, 1951, McGee was electrocuted in the local courthouse, leaving an odor of burned flesh in the room.... - NYT, 8-29-10
• Richard Rhodes: Nuclear Family: THE TWILIGHT OF THE BOMBS Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons ...So ends the first paragraph of the first book in Richard Rhodes’s four-volume epic. In that book, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb," which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988, Rhodes explained how exactly the United States came to build atomic weapons. His next volume, “Dark Sun,” traced the early years of the cold war. “Arsenals of Folly” told the story of its end. And now “The Twilight of the Bombs” describes the fate of nuclear weapons since the Soviet Union ­collapsed.... - NYT, 8-29-10
• Alex Butterworth's "The World That Never Was," a history of anarchism: THE WORLD THAT NEVER WAS A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents Arguably, no single act produces a more immediate and lasting effect on history than a political assassination. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, such deeds were frequently the work of the anarchist movement, which rose from the anger and frustration of the working class. However, as British historian Alex Butterworth demonstrates in "The World That Never Was," too seldom was it acknowledged that these killers were also moved by the highest ideals and dreams of utopia.... - WaPo, 8-27-10
• Carolyn Warner: Review of "The Words of Extraordinary Women," a book of quotations: THE WORDS OF EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN Selected and Introduced Perhaps Shirley Temple Black said it best: "Nothing crushes freedom as substantially as a tank."
  Or maybe Lady Bird Johnson said it best: "The clash of ideas is the sound of freedom."
  So many women have said it so well on so many subjects -- politics, the arts, humor, success, family, faith, education -- that businesswoman Carolyn Warner has collected their pithy thoughts and compiled them in a slim, useful volume, "The Words of Extraordinary Women." Useful because as Warner, founder of Corporate Education Consulting, says, the right quotation can nail home your point in just about any setting.... - WaPo, 8-27-10
• Kevin Starr: The Building of a Symbol: How It Got There, and Why It’s Orange: GOLDEN GATE The Life and Times of America’s Greatest Bridge ...Despite the many existing odes to the Golden Gate Bridge, Kevin Starr seems particularly well equipped to write a biography of that famous orange bridge. The author of more than half a dozen histories of California, Mr. Starr — a professor of history at the University of Southern California and state librarian of California emeritus — has written frequently about the myths and metaphors that festoon the Golden State, and he seems to instinctively understand the place that the Golden Gate Bridge has come to occupy in the national imagination as a symbol of American enterprise and the gateway to the Pacific.... - NYT, 8-24-10
• TOM SEGEV on Jonathan Schneer: 'View With Favor': THE BALFOUR DECLARATION The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict In this comprehensive study, richly documented by diplomatic correspondence, Jonathan Schneer concludes that the famous declaration seems to have just missed the sidetrack of history: in contrast to a common myth, Britain’s support for Zionism was not the result of an inevitable process. In fact, as Schneer reveals, shortly after Balfour’s promise to the Jews, the British government offered the Ottoman Empire the opportunity to keep Palestine and to continue to fly the Turkish flag over it. Schneer, a professor at Georgia Tech’s School of History, Technology and Society, is a talented writer.... - NYT, 8-22-10
• Richard Rhodes: The unmaking of the atomic bomb: THE TWILIGHT OF THE BOMBS Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons No one writes better about nuclear history than Rhodes does, ably combining a scholar's attention to detail with a novelist's devotion to character and pacing. He began his exploration in 1987 with "The Making of the Atomic Bomb," which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He also earned praise for "Dark Sun," the story of the hydrogen bomb's creation. "Arsenals of Folly" tackled the beginning of U.S. and Soviet cooperation to end the arms race.
  In "The Twilight of the Bombs," Rhodes documents events from the end of the Cold War to 2003 that, he believes, point toward the feasibility of eradicating nuclear weapons. He chronicles the underpublicized drama of the era: the efforts to contain the spread of nuclear weapons after the Soviet Union's collapse, the nuclear disarmament of South Africa, the fallout from India's and Pakistan's nuclear tests, and the negotiations with North Korea over its nuclear ambitions. In Rhodes's telling, big personalities clash and cooperate, jokes and epiphanies punctuate the debate, and offbeat details energize the narrative.... - WaPo, 8-20-10
• Ilyon Woo's 'The Great Divorce: A 19th-Century Mother's Extraordinary Fight': THE GREAT DIVORCE A Nineteenth-Century Mother's Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times The title of historian Ilyon Woo's provocative book certainly sparks curiosity and debate. Which of our many American divorces merits the epithet "great"? In this case, it's the legislative decree won in New York by Eunice Chapman in 1818, a victory for maternal custody rights in an era when children legally belonged to their fathers. And what about the challenging subtitle?.. - WaPo, 8-20-10
• Lucy Worsley's "The Courtiers: Splendor and Intrigue at Kensington Palace" As inspiration for this account of life in the 18th-century Georgian court, Lucy Worsley takes the "portraits of forty-five royal servants that look down upon palace visitors from the walls and ceiling of the King's Grand Staircase" in Kensington Palace, best known today as the final residence of Princess Diana. This palace was "the one royal home that George I and his son [George II] really transformed and made their own," a place where the servants "witnessed romance and violence, intrigue and infighting, and almost unimaginable acts of hatred and cruelty between members of the same family."... - WaPo, 8-20-10
• Diane Ravitch reviews Three books about education reform - WaPo, 8-20-10
• Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus: Why Johnny’s College Isn’t What It Used to Be: HIGHER EDUCATION? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — and What We Can Do About It Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus have written a lucid, passionate and wide-ranging book on the state of American higher education and what they perceive as its increasing betrayal of its primary mission — for them, the teaching of undergraduates. That both are academics — one a well-known professor (Mr. Hacker) and the other consigned to the adjunct, or what they call “contingent,” faculty (Ms. Dreifus, who is also a frequent contributor to The New York Times) — provides them with memorable, often acerbic anecdotes that neatly offset their citations of statistics and (it must be said) their sometimes rather sweeping generalizations... - NYT, 8-19-10
• Andrew Pettegree: Start the Presses: THE BOOK IN THE RENAISSANCE “The humanist mythology of print.” With this phrase the British scholar Andrew Pettegree indicates the cultural story his book amends, and to some extent transforms. In an understated, judicious manner, he offers a radically new understanding of printing in the years of its birth and youth. Print, in Pettegree’s account, was never as dignified or lofty a medium as that “humanist mythology” of disseminated classics would suggest.... - NYT, 8-15-10
• Richard Toye: The Two Churchills: CHURCHILL'S EMPIRE The World That Made Him and the World He Made Winston Churchill is remembered for leading Britain through her finest hour — but what if he also led the country through her most shameful one? What if, in addition to rousing a nation to save the world from the Nazis, he fought for a raw white supremacy and a concentration camp network of his own? This question burns through Richard Toye's superb, unsettling new history, "Churchill’s Empire" — and is even seeping into the Oval Office.... - NYT, 8-15-10 - Excerpt

FEATURES:

• Bryan McNerney: Historian uses ancient maps to block ramblers: Bryan McNerney, who presented several successful history series on ITV, has been accused of blocking a footpath through the grounds of his country home. But the 57-year-old insists that a mistake by a map maker half a century ago wrongly showed the right of way through the property - ironically called "Garden of Eden".... - Telegraph (UK) (8-24-10)
• Old Irish bones may yield murderous secrets in Pa.: Young and strapping, the 57 Irish immigrants began grueling work in the summer of 1832 on the Philadelphia and Columbia railroad. Within weeks, all were dead of cholera. Or were they murdered? Two skulls unearthed at a probable mass grave near Philadelphia this month showed signs of violence, including a possible bullet hole. Another pair of skulls found earlier at the woodsy site also displayed traumas, seeming to confirm the suspicions of two historians leading the archaeological dig.... - Washington Times (8-16-10)

PROFILES:

• Forever Young: Staughton Lynd at 80: Suddenly Staughton Lynd is all the rage. Again. In the last 18 months, Lynd has published two new books, a third that's a reprint of an earlier work, plus a memoir co-authored with his wife Alice. In addition, a portrait of his life as an activist through 1970 by Carl Mirra of Adelphi University has been published, with another book about his work after 1970 by Mark Weber of Kent State University due soon.... - Center for Labor Renewal (8-25-10)

QUOTES:

• Jonathan Sarna: Black and Jewish, and Seeing No Contradiction: "Everyone agrees that the numbers have grown, and they should be noticed," said Jonathan D. Sarna of Brandeis University, a pre-eminent historian of American Jewry. "Once, there was a sense that 'so-and-so looked Jewish.' Today, because of conversion and intermarriage and patrilineal descent, that’s less and less true. The average synagogue looks more like America. "Even in an Orthodox synagogue, there's likely to be a few people who look different," Professor Sarna said, "and everybody assumes that will grow."... - NYT, 8-28-10
• Julian Zelizer: Pressure mounts for 'Sheriff' Elizabeth Warren: "The administration is hesitating because they're faced with the traditional problem that Obama has faced," said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. If the White House passes Warren over, Zelizer says, they disappoint liberals whose support has been key throughout the administration. If Warren gets the nod, the White House must deal with "political difficulties on Capitol Hill where centrists have quite a lot of power and Republicans are becoming quite obstinate," Zelizer said. - CNN.com (8-26-10)
• David A. Moss: Income inequality may contribute to financial crises, says Harvard economic historian: David A. Moss, an economic and policy historian at the Harvard Business School, has spent years studying income inequality. While he has long believed that the growing disparity between the rich and poor was harmful to the people on the bottom, he says he hadn’t seen the risks to the world of finance, where many of the richest earn their great fortunes. Now, as he studies the financial crisis of 2008, Mr. Moss says that even Wall Street may have something serious to fear from inequality — namely, another crisis....
  "I could hardly believe how tight the fit was — it was a stunning correlation," he said. "And it began to raise the question of whether there are causal links between financial deregulation, economic inequality and instability in the financial sector. Are all of these things connected?"... - NYT (8-21-10)
• Julian Zelizer: Obama Just Like Jimmy Carter: Is Barack Obama really like Jimmy Carter? Julian Zelizer, author of the forthcoming Jimmy Carter, part of Henry Holt & Co.'s American Presidents series, thinks so. Both are smart, both promised reform, and both, he adds, "entered office at a time Republicans were in bad condition as a result of previous presidents ... and found it difficult to capitalize on this situation." Other similarities: "There was a sense, that became worse over time, that Carter was cold and distant, and not very personable," Zelizer told our Suzi Parker. Also, the right succeeded in demonizing Carter's successes. And Obama should heed this Carter lesson: "Being straight with voters and telling them the reality of a situation is fine, but voters also need to know how you will make things better." - US News, 8-18-10
• David Kennedy: Happy 75th Birthday, Social Security: Social Security was a centerpiece of FDR’s New Deal reforms that helped this country recover from the Great Depression. These programs provided Americans a measure of dignity and hope and lasting security against the vicissitudes of the market and life. FDR therefore accomplished what the venerable New Deal historian David Kennedy says is the challenge now facing President Obama—a rescue from the current economic crisis which will also make us "more resilient to face those future crises that inevitably await us.".... - The Nation, 8-13-10

INTERVIEWS:

• Red Menace: David Gentilcore Talks the Tasty History of the Tomato: In his new book, "Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato in Italy," Gentilcore traces the tomato from its origins in the New World, where it was domesticated by the Maya, then cultivated by the Aztecs. It likely entered Europe via Spain, after conquistador Hernan Cortes’s conquest of Mexico. When it arrived on the scene in Italy, it was strictly a curiosity for those who studied plants — not something anyone faint of heart would consider eating. In 1628, Paduan physician Giovanni Domenico Sala called tomatoes "strange and horrible things" in a discussion that included the consumption of locusts, crickets, and worms. When people ate tomatoes, it was as a novelty. "People were curious about new foods, the way gourmets are today with new combinations and new uses of high technology in preparation," Gentilcore said. Yesterday’s tomato is today’s molecular gastronomy.... Boston Globe (8-15-10)
• William Jelani Cobb: The Root Interview: William Jelani Cobb on Obama and Black Leadership: William Jelani Cobb: Initially they made it more difficult because I'm accustomed to writing about things that are more static. This was an attempt to place the election into a context in terms of history, and in some ways in terms of irony. But this was also a rapidly changing subject. The result was that I wrote about three-quarters of the book and then threw it all out and started again from scratch. It was much more difficult to decide what story I wanted to tell.... - The Root (8-19-10)
• Obama's Teachable Mosque Moment: FrontPage Interviews Victor Davis Hanson: Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.... - FrontPageMag (8-23-10)
• Talking About Brazil with Lilia Schwarcz: On a recent trip to Brazil, I struck up a conversation with Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, one of Brazil’s finest historians and anthropologists. The talk turned to the two subjects she has studied most—racism and national identity.... - NYRBlog (8-17-10)
• Q. & A.: Sean Wilentz on Bob Dylan: The historian Sean Wilentz, the author of "The Rise of American Democracy" and "The Age of Reagan," has a long-standing interest in the songs of Bob Dylan, going back to his childhood in Greenwich Village. His father and uncle ran the Eighth Street Bookshop, an important gathering place for the Beats and other downtown literary spirits; it was in his uncle’s apartment, above the store, that Dylan first met Allen Ginsberg. Wilentz has synthesized his memories, musical impressions, and historical analysis in a striking new book entitled "Bob Dylan in America," which Doubleday will publish next month; newyorker.com runs an excerpt this week. As a sometime Dylan obsessive—in 1999 I wrote a long piece about Dylan, which will reappear in my forthcoming book "Listen to This"—I approached Wilentz with some questions about his latest work.... - New Yorker (8-16-10)

AWARDS &APPOINTMENTS:

• Kenneth M. LudmererWash U professor receives honor: Kenneth M. Ludmerer, MD, has been named the Mabel Dorn Reeder Distinguished Professor in the History of Medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Ludmerer, a renowned medical historian and educator, is professor of medicine at the School of Medicine and professor of history in the College of Arts & Sciences.... - Globe Democrat, 8-25-10
• Elaine Chalus: Bath historian finds diaries of woman who nursed Nelson: A Bath historian is hoping to give an admiral's wife - who tended to a wounded Lord Nelson - "her rightful place in history". Dr Elaine Chalus has won a major research grant of more than £100,000 to investigate diaries kept by Elizabeth Wynne.... - BBC News (8-24-10)

ANNOUNCEMENTS & EVENTS CALENDAR:

• September 17-18, 2010 at Notre Dame University: Conference aims to bring medieval, early modern and Latin American historians together: An interdisciplinary conference to be held at the University of Notre Dame this fall is making a final call for papers to explore the issue surrounding similarities between late-medieval Iberia and its colonies in the New World. "From Iberian Kingdoms to Atlantic Empires: Spain, Portugal, and the New World, 1250-1700" is being hosted by the university's Nanovic Institute for European Studies and will take place on September 17-18, 2010. Medieval News, 4-29-10
• Thousands of Studs Terkel interviews going online: The Library of Congress will digitize the Studs Terkel Oral History Archive, according to the agreement, while the museum will retain ownership of the roughly 5,500 interviews in the archive and the copyrights to the content. Project officials expect digitizing the collection to take more than two years.... - NYT, 5-13-10
• Digital Southern Historical Collection: The 41,626 scans reproduce diaries, letters, business records, and photographs that provide a window into the lives of Americans in the South from the 18th through mid-20th centuries.

ON TV:

• C-SPAN2: BOOK TV Weekend Schedule
• PBS American Experience: Mondays at 9pm
• History Channel: Weekly Schedule

BEST SELLERS (NYT):

• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - August 22, 2010
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - August 29, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/books/bestseller/besthardnonfiction.html?_r=1&ref=bestseller
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - August 15, 2010

BOOKS COMING SOON:

• Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865 (Paperback and Hardcover), September 1, 2010
• Holger Hoock: Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750-1850, (Hardcover), September 1, 2010
• Anna Whitelock: Mary Tudor: Princess, Bastard, Queen, (Hardcover), September 7, 2010
• James L. Swanson: Bloody Crimes: The Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln's Corpse, (Hardcover), September 28, 2010
• Timothy Snyder: The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke (First Trade Paper Edition), (Paperback), September 28, 2010
• Ron Chernow: Washington: A Life, (Hardcover), October 5, 2010
• George William Van Cleve: A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic, (Hardcover), October 1, 2010.
• John Keegan: The American Civil War: A Military History, (Paperback), October 5, 2010
• Bill Bryson: At Home: A Short History of Private Life, (Hardcover), October 5, 2010
• Robert M. Poole: On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery, (Paperback), October 26, 2010
• Robert Leckie: Challenge for the Pacific: Guadalcanal: The Turning Point of the War, (Paperback), October 26, 2010
• Manning Marable: Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, (Hardcover), November 9, 2010
• Elizabeth White: The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia: The Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1917-39, (Hardcover), November 10, 2010
• Elizabeth White: The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia: The Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1917-39, (Hardcover), November 10, 2010
• G. J. Barker-Benfield: Abigail and John Adams: The Americanization of Sensibility, (Hardcover), November 15, 2010
• Edmund Morris: Colonel Roosevelt, (Hardcover), November 23, 2010
• Michael Goldfarb: Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance, (Paperback), November 23, 2010

DEPARTED:

• David Weber, Southwest Expert, Dies at 69: David J. Weber, whose groundbreaking works on the American Southwest under Spain and Mexico opened new territory for historians, died on Aug. 20 in Gallup, N.M. He was 69 and lived in Dallas and Ramah, N.M. The cause was complications from multiple myeloma, said his wife, Carol.... - NYT (8-27-10)
• David Weber, Vice-president of the AHA’s Professional Division, Dies at 69: David J. Weber, historian of the Borderlands, the American West, and Latin America and vice-president of the American Historical Association’s Professional Division, died on Friday, August 20, after a long struggle with multiple myeloma.... - Debbie Ann Doyle at the AHA Blog (8-23-10)
• Bernard Knox, distinguished classicist, dies at 95: Bernard M. W. Knox, an authority on the works of Sophocles, a prolific scholar and the founding director of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies, died July 22 at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 95. The cause was a heart attack, said his son, MacGregor.... - NYT (8-17-10)
• Professor Ray Beachey, 94, of Makerere University: Professor Ray Beachey, who died on July 10 aged 94, encouraged the hopes of a generation of East African leaders as head of History at Makerere University in Uganda during the 1950s and early 1960s.... - Telegraph (UK) (8-13-10)

IN FOCUS:

• Historian Tony Judt dies aged 62 Author of Postwar and New York University professor dies after two-year fight with motor neurone disease:
  Tony Judt, the British writer, historian and professor who was recently described as having the "liveliest mind in New York", has died after a two-year struggle with motor neurone disease. Considered by many to be a giant in the intellectual world, Judt chronicled his illness in unsparing detail in public lectures and essays – giving an extraordinary account that won him almost as much respect as his voluminous historical and political work, for which he was feted on both sides of the Atlantic.
  Judt was born in 1948 and grew up in south London. His mother's parents had emigrated from Russia; his father was Belgian, descended from a line of Lithuanian rabbis.
  His academic career began with a history degree and PhD at Cambridge and took him eventually to New York University, where he was the Erich Maria Remarque professor in European studies, director of the Remarque Institute and a renowned teacher.
  His finest work was widely thought to be Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, published in 2005 and an enormous critical success. It was described by the Yale historian Timothy Snyder as "the best book on its subject that will ever be written by anyone". - guardian.co.uk, 8-7-10
• Tony Judt dies at 62; leading historian of postwar Europe: The New York University history professor's career reached its zenith with the publication of 'Postwar' in 2005. He also wrote movingly about his struggle with Lou Gehrig's disease.... - LAT, 8-7-10
• Tony Judt: A Public Intellectual Remembered: Tony Judt was a historian of the very first order, a public intellectual of an old-fashioned kind and — in more ways than one — a very brave man.
  A professor at New York University and director of the Remarque Institute on European studies there, for the last two years Judt had been living with a degenerative motor neuron disease and wrote movingly and without a touch of self-pity of the impact that it had on his body. Thankfully and remarkably, he continued writing throughout his battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, with a verve and feeling that added color to what had always been an astonishing breadth of intellectual understanding. His last book, the short polemic Ill Fares the Land — adapted from articles written for the New York Review of Books, long Judt's home outside the academy — was a cri de coeur for the virtues of social democracy, the political philosophy that had shaped the thinking of so many western Europeans, born and raised, like Judt, in the post-war period. (Read TIME's review of Judt's book Postwar)
  Judt was born to a Jewish family in England in 1948, and spent time on a kibbutz in Israel before going up to Cambridge, volunteering as a driver in the Six-Day War of 1967. (He later studied in France, and a fascination with modern French politics and society ran through all his work.) A secular, social-democratic European Jew, his criticisms of Israel in later life — and by extension, of what he considered to be a narrow defensiveness on the part of mainstream American Jewish institutions — made him many intellectual opponents in the US. He stuck to his guns.... - Time, 8-7-10
• Tony Judt, Chronicler of History, Is Dead at 62: Tony Judt, the author of “Postwar,” a monumental history of Europe after World War II, and a public intellectual known for his sharply polemic essays on American foreign policy, the state of Israel and the future of Europe, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 62.
  The death was announced in a statement from New York University, where he had taught for many years. The cause was complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, which he learned he had in September 2008. In a matter of months the disease left him paralyzed and able to breathe only with mechanical assistance, but he continued to lecture and write.... - NYT (8-7-10)
• David A. Bell: Remembering Tony Judt - Dissent (8-9-10)
• Saul Goldberg: Tony Judt: the captivating wit and intellect of my friend and teacher - The Guardian (UK) (8-7-10)

HISTORY NEWS:

• Historian reviews NC's Civil War death count: North Carolina's claim that it lost the most men during the Civil War is getting a recount from a state historian who doubts the accuracy of the accepted, 144-year-old estimate. "The time has come to get it right," said Josh Howard, a research historian with the Office of Archives and History in Raleigh. "Nobody has gone through man by man looking for the deaths."... - AP (8-9-10)
• Accused Dead Sea Scrolls identity thief rejects plea deal, plans trial: Plea negotiations broke down this morning for accused Dead Sea Scrolls cyber-bully Raphael Golb -- who now says he's taking his wacky identity theft and impersonation case to trial. Golb, 49, is charged with trying to boost his historian father's scholarship on the 2,000 year old scrolls by going online in the name of rival scholars -- notably Dr. Lawrence Schiffman of New York University -- to discredit their work.... - NY Post (8-6-10)
• Ron Radosh: Howard Zinn's FBI Files: What It Reveals: The announcement last week by the FBI that it was releasing the FBI files of the late radical historian, Howard Zinn, was not met with universal acclaim. In fact, many leftists were enraged. Typical was the reaction of Noam Chomsky, who was quoted by writer Clark Merrefield. Zinn’s files, Chomsky said, were "mostly a mixture of things that they’ve picked up here and there which is mostly false, things they’ve gotten from informants that are mostly false. We took for granted that obviously we were being monitored by the FBI." For Chomsky, anything coming from the FBI obviously has to, by definition, be lies.... - Pajamas Media (8-5-10)
• A Medieval War -- Over Arizona: On Tuesday, the Medieval Academy of America -- following an intense debate among its members -- announced that it was proceeding with plans to hold its annual meeting in Tempe in April. The meeting attracts hundreds of scholars, and those who are members of the academy narrowly voted down a plan to move the conference (although that vote was advisory only). The decision to go ahead with a meeting in Arizona is getting blasted by some academy members, some of whom say that they are calling off plans to present at the meeting and are canceling memberships.... - Inside Higher Ed (8-4-10)
• Stanford professors find works of art from darkest moments of Holocaust: "It was spread all over the 20 countries that Nazis occupied. It happened in every language and in every place. It was not hundreds of people. It was countless," said John Felstiner of Stanford's Department of English.
  "It did not serve as much as another piece of bread. It didn't kill one Nazi. It didn't stop anything," said Mary Felstiner, a visiting professor of history. "But it gave them the morale to go another day. And when we look at these works, we see transcendence."... - San Jose Mercury-News (8-1-10)
• Google books may advance scholarly research: When scholars seek to understand long-ago cultures, they tend to draw conclusions from the handful of famous writers and thinkers whose works endure today. John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle peppered their books with words like "sunlight" and "hope," so their Victorian era is often thought of as earnest and optimistic.... - San Jose Mercury-News (8-1-10)

OP-EDs:

• Robert Stacy McCain: The Case Against Howard Zinn: One of Zinn's comrades described him as "a person with some authority" within the local CPUSA section and said that Zinn's class was on "basic Marxism," the theme being "that the basic teachings of Marx and Lenin were sound and should be adhered to by those present." - American Spectator (8-2-10)
• Chris Hedges: Why the Feds Fear Thinkers Like Howard Zinn: The power of Zinn’s scholarship—which I have watched over the past few weeks open the eyes of young, mostly African- Americans to their own history and the structures that perpetuate misery for the poor and gluttony and privilege for the elite—explains why the FBI, which released its 423-page file on Zinn on July 30, saw him as a threat.... - Truthdig (8-1-10)
• Alan Brinkley: 'Mad Men': A Conversation (Season 4, Episode 3, 'The Good News'): There is Dick Whitman, the decent, caring man who sees his better self when he is with Anna. Despite his tawdry flirtation with her niece, he is loyal to Anna. He struggles with a genuine ethical dilemma — does he tell her that she has cancer, or as was fairly common in the early 1960s, does he not tell her to spare her the fear for as long as possible. (As it turns out, it seems pretty clear that Anna knows exactly what is happening to her and has decided not to let others know that she knows.) This significance of this dilemma is less about what the right answer is than it is about his struggle to do the right thing.... - WSJ, 8-9-10
• 'Mad Men': A Conversation (Season 4, Episode 2, 'Christmas Comes But Once a Year'): This is a series mostly about men, none of whom seem to be very happy or particularly admirable. Women, according to many of the assumptions about this era, are supposed to be lonely, frustrated, and unfulfilled. But some of the strongest and most capable characters in the show are women: Peggy, who may not be making good choices but appears nevertheless to be strong enough to rebound; and Joan, who enhanced her career by having an affair with Roger Sterling, but who has emerged as one of the strongest and most capable figures in the show, far more powerful than her weak and whiny husband. The significant exception is Betty, a Bryn Mawr graduate and former fashion model, who – true to "The Feminine Mystique" — is filled with frustration, anger, and disappointment, stuck in the suburbs.... - WSJ, 8-2-10

REVIEWS & FIRST CHAPTERS:

• Washington and Lee University Politics Professor's New Book Examines Political Partisanship: Name calling. Distortion. Invective. Partisan bile. Just another day on Capitol Hill...in the 1790s. As Washington and Lee University politics professor William F. Connelly Jr. outlines in his new book, "James Madison Rules America: The Constitutional Origins of Congressional Partisanship" (Rowman & Littlefield), political divisiveness has existed since the country's founding. "We tend to think of the founders as statesmen. And they were," said Connelly, "but they were also politicians, and they were partisans." Newswise, 8-9-10
• Book Review: Jesus and Gin: Evangelicalism, the Roaring Twenties and Today's Culture Wars by Barry Hankins: The decade sandwiched between the end of the Great War (1914-1918) and the Great Depression continues to fascinate the popular mind today. It was an era of stark contrasts and glowing optimism. Boosterism was the watchword in towns and cities across America. And booze was illegal, though all-too-readily available for those with thirsts to slake.... - Blog Critics, 8-9-10
• Kevin Starr: A View of the Bridge: GOLDEN GATE The Life and Times of America’s Greatest Bridge Yet today, the structure rises like "a natural, even an inevitable, entity," as Kevin Starr, the California historian and author of over a dozen volumes on his home state, writes in "Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America’s Greatest Bridge."
  This is an exultant, discursive and strange little book. Starr is not older than the bridge; at his birth, people had already been shuttling across it for three years. But his narrative tour does evoke a grandfatherly ramble. Imagine setting off over the Golden Gate and being forced to stop every few feet not only to greet each passer-by, but also to endure a cursory biography or windy tangent. It gets difficult to enjoy the view.... - NYT, 8-8-10
• Jane Ziegelman, Andrew Beahrs: Your Tired, Your Poor and Their Food: 97 ORCHARD An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement, TWAIN'S FEAST Searching for America’s Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens Jane Ziegelman tells this story exuberantly in "97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement." Highly entertaining and deceptively ambitious, the book resurrects the juicy details of breakfast, lunch and dinner (recipes included) consumed by poor and working-class New Yorkers a century and more ago. It could well have been subtitled "How the Other Half Ate."
  If Mark Twain had been consulted, the program might have worked. He loved the pure, unadulterated flavors of straight-ahead American cooking, a passion that provides Andrew Beahrs with the pretext for "Twain's Feast: Searching for America's Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens." This is a culinary stunt book fixated on the nostalgic list of American foods Twain included in his 1880 travel memoir, "A Tramp Abroad." - NYT, 8-8-10 - Excerpt
• HISTORY Review of histories of American revolution by T.H. Breen and Jack Rakove: AMERICAN INSURGENTS, AMERICAN PATRIOTS The Revolution of the People, REVOLUTIONARIES A New History of the Invention of America So tied up is American identity in the American Revolution that popular histories of it are inescapably children's books, bedtime stories that tell us how we came to be: "Mommy, Daddy, tell me about when I was born." The newest additions to this literature are by two distinguished historians, T.H. Breen of Northwestern and Jack Rakove of Stanford. Each will appeal to a different segment of the history-reading public.... - WaPo, 8-6-10
• Laura Ingraham: In 'Obama Diaries,' self-absorbed musings: THE OBAMA DIARIES ...The package contained pages and pages of private diaries: the musings of Barack Obama, first lady Michelle, Vice President Biden, first grandmother Marian Robinson and others in the inner circle. Compelled by her duty to the nation, Ingraham divulges their secret ruminations in "The Obama Diaries."
  The diaries, of course, are fictitious -- crafted by Ingraham to convey her satiric vision of Obama and his policies. Satire by nature is nasty and crude, its goal to deflate the powerful; Ingraham, a popular talk-radio host and Fox News Channel regular, holds nothing back. She lacerates Obama, his administration and his family for failures in government spending, foreign policy, business, education, immigration, morality and faith. Even the White House dog, Bo, gets a clipping.... - WaPo, 8-8-10
• FOOD "The Wild Vine: The Untold Story of American Wine," by Todd Kliman: For Washingtonian magazine food writer Todd Kliman, the mystery started one night when he saw "something wild, something alive" in the glass of red wine he was drinking. His interest and palate piqued, he decided to investigate the source: a grape known as the Norton, trademarked as "The Real American Grape!"
  What he unearthed is the subject of "The Wild Vine." He traced the wildness back to the 1820s, in Richmond, Va., when a doctor on the verge of suicide found a reason to live in a grape he developed by cross-breeding existing varieties.... - WaPo, 8-6-10
• Review of William Leeman's Naval Academy history, "The Long Road to Annapolis": THE LONG ROAD TO ANNAPOLIS The Founding of the Naval Academy and the Emerging American Republic ...William Leeman has given us an excellent history of the politics and personalities animating the long debate over whether to establish a naval academy, with many interesting anecdotes along the way... - WaPo, 8-6-10

FEATURES:

• By bridging Jewish and Arab cultures, a pair of Oberlin historians hope to shape history: As the new course in American democracy ended to applause last week, professors Carol Lasser and Gary Kornblith walked their matching bikes across the Oberlin College campus -- nearly walking on air. After more than 30 years teaching history, the husband-wife team had tried to make some. They brought two of the world's most divided peoples -- Israelis and Palestinians -- to Oberlin's serene campus to discuss how multicultural America works.... - Cleveland Plains-Dealer (8-5-10)
• Jane Humphries: Revealed: Industrial Revolution was powered by child slaves: Child labour was the crucial ingredient which allowed Britain's Industrial Revolution to succeed, new research by a leading economic historian has concluded. After carrying out one of the most detailed statistical analyses of the period, Oxford's Professor Jane Humphries found that child labour was much more common and economically important than previously realised. Her estimates suggest that, by the early 19th century, England had more than a million child workers (including around 350,000 seven- to 10-year-olds) – accounting for 15 per cent of the total labour force. The work is likely to transform the academic world's understanding of that crucial period of British history which was the launch-pad of the nation's economic and imperial power.... - Independent (UK) (8-2-10)

PROFILES:

• Michael Bellesiles Takes Another Shot: He was drummed out of academe after a controversy over his book about guns in America. Now the historian aims for a second chance... - The Chronicle of Higher Education, 8-3-10
• Scholar Emerges From Doghouse The historian Michael A. Bellesiles is trying to put a scandal behind him: His book "1877: America’s Year of Living Violently," which will be published next week, is an attempted comeback for Mr. Bellesiles, who has languished in a kind of academic no-man’s land for the past decade after a scandal surrounding his previous book cut short what looked to be a promising career. "I'd like to think that anyone reading it would give it a fair chance," he said of his latest work.... - NYt, 8-4-10

QUOTES:

• University technical college is set to make its debut Will the new university technical colleges really boost vocational learning or just mislead students?: Professor Gillian Evans, historian and theologian at Cambridge University, says it is another case of boundaries being blurred in education. "The title is going to mislead students and their families, who may feel they haven't got what they bought into. It's just another example of an inappropriate attempt to try to claim the 'university' title. Soon everyone will want one."... - Guardian UK, 8-10-10
• Robert Bartlett: 1066 and all those baby names: Norman names such as William, Henry and Alice have been popular for 1,000 years. Why did the English copy their invaders?
  "If you ask where did the Normans come from and what was their impact, most people run out of steam pretty quickly," says historian Robert Bartlett of the University of St Andrews. "It's not like the Tudor era, which people are much more familiar with thanks to TV dramas and historical novels."... - BBC News Magazine, 8-4-10

INTERVIEWS:

• Latina professor pens history of Mexican American Civil Rights Movement: Dr. Cynthia E. Orozco is a historian who teaches at Eastern New Mexico University- Ruidoso. Originally from Cuero, Texas, she earned her Bachelors degree from The University of Texas at Austin and her MA and Ph.D. from The University of California at Los Angeles. She is the author of No Mexicans, Women or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. The following interview was conducted last month at the State LULAC Convention which was held here in Austin, Texas.
  La Voz: Let's begin this interview by sharing with our readers some insight on your latest book.
  Dr. Orozco: My latest book is No Mexicans, Women or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, a history of the origins of LULAC. LULAC is the oldest Latino civil rights organization in the country and was founded in 1929 and has 700 councils today. I am proud of this book. My parents were Mexican immigrants, I grew up poor in Cuero, and now have a Ph.D.... - Latinlista.net, 8-10
• A Conversation With Historian Douglas Brinkley: Then historian Douglas Brinkley talks about Teddy Roosevelt, the "Naturalist President." Many beautiful places in the Northwest still exist because of him. Find out which places could have been mined or cut for timber. KUOW, 8-5-10
• An Interview With a Young Historian: An Interview with a Current Law School Student who was a History Major in College - Huff Post, 8-4-10

AWARDS &APPOINTMENTS:

• Civil Rights History Expert Joins Little Rock Faculty: Dr. John Kirk, noted Little Rock Central High historian and author of “Beyond Little Rock: The Origins and Legacies of the Central High Crisis” has joined the UALR -- University of Arkansas at Little Rock -- faculty as the Donaghey Professor of History and chair of the department.... - Newswise, 8-4-10

SPOTTED:

• Robertson: 'History is what it is and not what we wish it to be' Confederate monument dedication draws a crowd of 500: The crowd listened to featured speaker Dr. James I. (Bud) Robertson, a distinguished Civil War professor at Virginia Tech. Robertson, along with Dr. Frances Amos and Circuit Court Judge W.N. Alexander II spoke from the decorated balcony on the second floor of the courthouse.
  Robertson spoke of how two major things came as a result of the Civil War -- the elimination of slavery and most importantly, the establishment of a union. "Union" is the single most important word that describes the war, he said. "It's the single threat that now binds us all."
  "History is what it is and not what we wish it to be," he said. Both sides fought for their homes, their families and their ways of life, he added.
  Robertson noted the war was a "national tragedy" as Americans fought Americans, with "700,000 plus who all died ugly deaths." "We can love history, which most do, or hate history, which some do. But it is history, and we can all learn from it," he concluded.... - Franklin News Post, 8-8-10
• Dr. Howard Winn, Professor Emeritus and Luncheon Speaker Sixth Annual Clarksville Writers' Conference: Introduced by Dewey Browder, Professor and Chair of the Department of History and Philosophy, Howard Winn. Professor Emeritus of history at Austin Peay State University and co-author of A History of Austin Peay State University, 1806-2001 and Clarksville Tennessee in the Civil War: A Chronology, advised participants of the Sixth Annual Clarksville Writers’ Conference to use but not abuse history.... - Clarkville Online, 8-9-10

ANNOUNCEMENTS & EVENTS CALENDAR:

• September 17-18, 2010 at Notre Dame University: Conference aims to bring medieval, early modern and Latin American historians together: An interdisciplinary conference to be held at the University of Notre Dame this fall is making a final call for papers to explore the issue surrounding similarities between late-medieval Iberia and its colonies in the New World. "From Iberian Kingdoms to Atlantic Empires: Spain, Portugal, and the New World, 1250-1700" is being hosted by the university's Nanovic Institute for European Studies and will take place on September 17-18, 2010. Medieval News, 4-29-10
• Jeff Shesol to give Jackson Lecture at the Chautauqua Institution: Historian, presidential speechwriter and author Jeff Shesol will deliver Chautauqua Institution's sixth annual Robert H. Jackson Lecture on the Supreme Court of the United States. Jeff Shesol will give the Jackson Lecture on Wednesday, August 18, 2010, at 4:00 p.m. in Chautauqua’s Hall of Philosophy.... - John Q. Barrett at the Jackson List (6-14-10)
• Thousands of Studs Terkel interviews going online: The Library of Congress will digitize the Studs Terkel Oral History Archive, according to the agreement, while the museum will retain ownership of the roughly 5,500 interviews in the archive and the copyrights to the content. Project officials expect digitizing the collection to take more than two years.... - NYT, 5-13-10
• Digital Southern Historical Collection: The 41,626 scans reproduce diaries, letters, business records, and photographs that provide a window into the lives of Americans in the South from the 18th through mid-20th centuries.

ON TV:

• C-SPAN2: BOOK TV Weekend Schedule
• PBS American Experience: Mondays at 9pm
• History Channel: Weekly Schedule

BEST SELLERS (NYT):

• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - August 15, 2010
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - August 8, 2010

BOOKS COMING SOON:

• Alexander Hamilton: The Federalist Papers, (Hardcover), August 16, 2010
• Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865 (Paperback and Hardcover), September 1, 2010
• Holger Hoock: Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750-1850, (Hardcover), September 1, 2010
• Anna Whitelock: Mary Tudor: Princess, Bastard, Queen, (Hardcover), September 7, 2010
• James L. Swanson: Bloody Crimes: The Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln's Corpse, (Hardcover), September 28, 2010
• Timothy Snyder: The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke (First Trade Paper Edition), (Paperback), September 28, 2010
• Ron Chernow: Washington: A Life, (Hardcover), October 5, 2010
• George William Van Cleve: A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic, (Hardcover), October 1, 2010.
• John Keegan: The American Civil War: A Military History, (Paperback), October 5, 2010
• Bill Bryson: At Home: A Short History of Private Life, (Hardcover), October 5, 2010
• Robert M. Poole: On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery, (Paperback), October 26, 2010
• Robert Leckie: Challenge for the Pacific: Guadalcanal: The Turning Point of the War, (Paperback), October 26, 2010
• Manning Marable: Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, (Hardcover), November 9, 2010
• Elizabeth White: The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia: The Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1917-39, (Hardcover), November 10, 2010
• Elizabeth White: The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia: The Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1917-39, (Hardcover), November 10, 2010
• G. J. Barker-Benfield: Abigail and John Adams: The Americanization of Sensibility, (Hardcover), November 15, 2010
• Edmund Morris: Colonel Roosevelt, (Hardcover), November 23, 2010
• Michael Goldfarb: Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance, (Paperback), November 23, 2010

DEPARTED:

• Larry De Lorme, former WWU provost, dies at 73: Roland L. "Larry" De Lorme, a retired Western Washington University administrator and history professor credited with starting several campus programs, died Sunday, Aug. 1. He was 73. A celebration of life will be held in his hometown, Aberdeen, at 2 p.m. Aug. 21 at The Aberdeen Museum of History.... - Bellingham Herald. 8-6-10
• Historian and Essayist Juan Marichal Dies: SANTA CRUZ, Spain – Historian and essayist Juan Marichal, a native of the Spanish island of Tenerife, died over the weekend at his residence in Cuernavaca, Mexico, the regional government of the Canary Islands said Monday. He was 88. Marichal, who became a political exile at 19, was professor emeritus at Harvard University and among other honors received Spain’s National Prize for Literature in the category of history.... - Latin American Tribune, 8-10-10
• Newfoundland historian Peter Hart, 46, was an expert on the IRA: A good historian is expected to be meticulous and balanced. A very good historian is challenging, perceptive, integrative, and nuanced. But a great historian is all that and more – audacious and brave. Peter Hart, who died at 46 on July 22 following a brain aneurysm, was well on his way to becoming a great historian. Although only in mid-career, he was already a major international figure in Irish history.... - Globe and Mail (8-5-10)

THIS WEEK IN HISTORY:

• Coventry historian helps identify Battle of Fromelles fallen: TODAY marks the 94th anniversary of the Battle of Fromelles where 30 Coventry and Warwickshire servicemen are thought to have died. More than 7,000 British and Australian soldiers died, were wounded or taken prisoner during the First World War battle in Northern France. Bodies of the dead soldiers were buried in six mass graves by the Germans but the names of many of these remain unknown.... - Coventry Telegraph (UK) (7-19-10)

IN FOCUS:

• FBI admits probing 'radical' historian Zinn for criticizing bureau: FBI files show bureau may have tried to get Zinn fired from Boston University for his political opinions. Those who knew of the dissident historian Howard Zinn would not be surprised that J. Edgar Hoover's FBI kept tabs on him for decades during the Cold War. But in a release of documents pertaining to Zinn, the bureau admitted that one of its investigations into the left-wing academic was prompted not by suspicion of criminal activity, but by Zinn's criticism of the FBI's record on civil rights investigations.... - The Raw Story (7-30-10)

HISTORY NEWS:

• Teaching history may become a thing of past: As the start of a new school year approaches, not to mention the November elections, Americans face a dizzying array of fiscal, human, environmental and other crises. More than ever, our democracy requires an educated citizenry capable of analyzing the world around us and of making informed judgments. So this is why Americans — from parents to voters to policymakers - must address yet another deepening crisis, the one in history education at the K-12 level. As if the approval in May of gravely flawed social studies standards by the Texas State Board of Education is not depressing enough, the nation lost one of its most learned, passionate and effective public champions for the study and appreciation of our collective past with the passing of Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia in June. However complicated his own legacy, Byrd understood that we must invest in the future by understanding the past, which is why he used his considerable influence to sponsor the Teaching American History grants program. - Houston Chronicle, 7-31-10
• Japan asked for annexation apology by Korean scholars: Over 1,000 scholars, writers and attorneys from Korea and Japan asked the Japanese government for a formal apology for the annexation of Korea ahead of its 100-year anniversary next month.... - JoongAng Daily (7-29-10)
• Christopher Waldrep, Michael Pfeifer: Experts on history of lynching rebut Jeffrey Lord's Sherrod claim: Experts on the history of lynching are criticizing an American Spectator report which claimed that Shirley Sherrod's statement that her relative Bobby Hall was lynched was "factually, provably untrue." Media Matters (7-27-10)
• Construction History Society of America – Newest AHA Affiliate: The AHA welcomes the Construction History Society of America as its newest Affiliated Society.... - AHA Blog (7-20-10)
• Niall Ferguson slams Australian immigration policy: ONE of the world's leading economic historians has slammed Labor's "needless pseudo stimulus" spending. Niall Ferguson has also criticised the election campaign's "pathetic" debate over capping immigration and population growth.... - The Australian (7-27-10)
• Historian stages sleep-ins to save SC slave cabins: When Joe McGill spreads his sleeping bag on the floor of a slave cabin, he knows that spending the night there will conjure the specter of slavery.... - AP (7-23-10)
• Daniel Kevles, David Reynolds, Lizabeth Cohen, Sean Wilentz, Simon Schama: Sixteen economists and historians joined in a consensus statement demanding urgent action on unemployment and the faltering recovery: Fourteen million out of work! Sixteen notable economists and historians have joined in a consensus statement for The Daily Beast demanding urgent action on unemployment and the faltering recovery. Joseph Stiglitz, Alan Blinder, Robert Reich, Richard Parker, Derek Shearer, Laura Tyson, Sir Harold Evans, and other thought leaders have produced a manifesto calling for more government stimulus and tax credits to put America back to work.... - Hot Indie News (7-19-10)
• Conrad Black to be released from prison on bail: Conrad Black will likely be out on bail within days from the Florida jail that has been his home for the last 28 months. But it's the bail conditions that will determine where he goes next. The bail conditions will be set by U.S. District Court Judge Amy St. Eve in Chicago. St. Eve is the judge who presided over Black's trial in 2007 and who ended up sentencing him to 78 months after a jury found him guilty of three counts of fraud and one count of obstruction of justice.... - CBC News (7-20-10)
• Historian Orlando Figes agrees to pay damages for fake reviews: One of Britain's leading historians, Orlando Figes, is to pay damages and costs to two rivals who launched a libel case after a row erupted over fake reviews posted on the Amazon website.... - Guardian (UK) (7-16-10)

OP-EDs:

• Alan Brinkley: 'Mad Men': A Conversation (Season 4, Episode 1, 'Public Relations'): I'm flattered to have been invited to join this conversation about "Mad Men." Like most of us on this blog, I suspect, I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, and one of the pleasures of watching the show is being reminded of so many aspects of life in those years that now seem so much a part of the past.
  I've been watching the show since it began, and I've always been impressed by the unflinching portrayal of flawed characters whom we really want to like but are never wholly allowed to. It echoes so many parts of the culture of that era and of some of the greatest artists of the era: Cheever, Bellow, Yates, Updike, Miller, Albee, among others. And it¹s terrific on the quotidian details of the era as well ­ the clothes, the décor, the smoking, the drinking, the jargon, the sexism, the closeted homosexuality, and the casual antisemitism. Parts of it remind me of my parents. I remember the omnipresence of cigarettes and cocktails. Only later did I understand their own struggle to find a place in a world that did not come naturally to them ­ my mother, from a middle-class Jewish family, marrying a man from a lower-middle class Protestant family in North Carolina, both of them fleeing into the postwar suburban world — where backgrounds were supposed to disappear — and trying to find a place in it, not always successfully.... - WSJ, 7-25-10
• Alan Brinkley: 'Mad Men': A Conversation Every Sunday after the newest episode of “Mad Men,” lawyer and Supreme Court advocate Walter Dellinger will host an online dialogue about the show. The participants include literature professor Toril Moi, political science professor David L. Paletz, media expert Evangeline Morphos, and historian Alan Brinkley. Dellinger will post his thoughts shortly after each episode ends at 11 p.m., and the others will add their commentary in the hours and days that follow.... - WSJ, 7-25-10
• Mark Bauerlein: An Episode at Hamilton--Paquette and Urgo - The Chronicle of Higher Education (7-20-10)
• Peter Zarrow: Me, Wang Hui, and Liberal Wishy-washy-ness: Wang Hui is a cultural historian and critic, and professor at Qinghua University in Beijing. He was for several years editor of Dushu, a serious general interest magazine perhaps roughly — very roughly — equivalent to the Atlantic monthly in the US. He is also known as a leader of the so-called "New Left" intellectuals, who highlight the costs of economic liberalization, global capitalism, and rigid Western-style modernization policies. Early this year, charges of plagiarism began to appear concerning some of some of Wang Hui’s work. He has since been subject to numerous attacks, including ad hominen blog attacks.... - The China Beat (Blog) (7-16-10)

REVIEWS & FIRST CHAPTERS:

• Rick Perlstein's "Nixonland" gets the digital treatment, E-Books Fly Beyond Mere Text: E-books of the latest generation are so brand new that publishers can’t agree on what to call them. In the spring Hachette Book Group called its version, by David Baldacci, an "enriched" book. Penguin Group released an "amplified" version of a novel by Ken Follett last week. And on Thursday Simon & Schuster will come out with one of its own, an “enhanced” e-book version of “Nixonland” by Rick Perlstein.... Simon & Schuster has taken the best-selling "Nixonland," first published in hardcover in 2008 in a whopping 896 pages, and scattered 27 videos throughout the e-book.... - NYT (7-29-10)
• Niall Ferguson: Yesterday’s Banker: HIGH FINANCIER The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg Niall Ferguson's "High Financier," the biography of the Anglo-German banker Sir Siegmund Warburg, takes us back to a different era — the 1950s and ’60s — and a different conception of banking. Profits from trading were modest, and bankers made most of their money by giving advice to clients and helping businesses to raise capital. Bankers like Warburg thought of themselves as rather like family doctors, whose job it was to get to know their clients well, understand their problems and act in their best interest — a far cry from the ethos that dominates today’s Wall Street.... - NYT, 7-30-10
• Jane Ziegelman: In a Tenement’s Meager Kitchens, a Historian Looks for Insight: 97 ORCHARD An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement In the meantime we have Jane Ziegelman’s modest but absorbing “97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement.” The story it tells, about Old World habits clashing and ultimately melding with new American ones, is familiar. But Ms. Ziegelman is a patient scholar and a graceful writer, and she rummages in these families’ histories and larders to smart, chewy effect. Ms. Ziegelman, whose previous book, “Foie Gras: A Passion,” occupies a place at the plummier end of the food history spectrum, introduces us to the Glockners, the Moores, the Gumpertzes, the Rogarshevskys and the Baldizzis, who all lived at 97 Orchard Street, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, between 1863 and 1935.... - NYT, 7-28-10
• Julie Flavell: Colonials Abroad: WHEN LONDON WAS CAPITAL OF AMERICA Julie Flavell's "When London Was Capital of America" illuminates this fascinating chapter of London’s — and North America’s — past, showing how the metropolis functioned as a magnet for colonists from across the Atlantic (including the West Indies) who sought accomplishment, opportunity and commerce. An American-born scholar who is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Flavell has unearthed a host of stories that bring alive a previously neglected aspect of the colonial experience.... - NYT, 7-30-10
• Geoffrey O'Brien: Saratoga Gothic: THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF WALWORTH A Tale of Madness and Murder in Gilded Age America In addition to publishing six books of poetry as well as eight of cultural history and criticism, Geoffrey O’Brien is the editor in chief of the Library of America, whose handsome, authoritative volumes now more or less constitute the nation’s literary canon. But however central the novelist Mansfield Tracy Walworth (1830-73) may be to O’Brien’s crackerjack new history of one family’s mayhem, it seems safe to say that he will not soon be joining Welty, Wharton and Whitman at the right-hand reaches of the Library’s long, august shelf.... - NYT, 7-30-10 - Excerpt
• Thomas L. Jeffers: Turning Right: NORMAN PODHORETZ A Biography ...Thomas L. Jeffers’s exhaustive but frustratingly uncritical biography, "Norman Podhoretz," is most engaging in its early chapters, telling the story of how this brilliant and ambitious child of Jewish immigrants from Galicia rose from poverty in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn to become first, the star student of the great literary critic Lionel Trilling at Columbia University and then, at the age of 30, the editor of Commentary, the magazine of the American Jewish Committee and one of the two leading journals (along with Partisan Review) of the legendary New York Intellectuals.... - NYT, 7-30-10 - Excerpt
• Lyndall Gordon: Explosive Inheritance LIVES LIKE LOADED GUNS Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds The tale that Lyndall Gordon unveils in "Lives Like Loaded Guns" is so lurid, so fraught with forbidden passions, that readers may be disappointed to find that no actual gun goes off in this feverish account of the Dickinson family "feuds." There are metaphorical guns galore, including Dickinson’s self-portrait as lethal wallflower: "My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun — / In Corners — till a Day / The Owner passed — identified — / And carried Me away." Gordon, who has written highly regarded biographies of Charlotte Brontë, T. S. Eliot and Mary Wollstonecraft, detects two patterns of "explosive inheritance" in Dickinson, who happened to have a grandmother named Gunn: eruptions in the lives and in the poems.... - NYT, 7-30-10
• Jane Brox: Up From Darkness: BRILLIANT The Evolution of Artificial Light The lights eventually came back on, and I forgot about the burger lamp until reading Jane Brox’s "Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light," which takes us from fat to fluorescence and on into the future (beyond the bulb, that is). The book starts off promisingly, in the dim past.... - NYT, 7-30-10
• Mark Atwood Lawrence: John Lukacs: The Heart of a Realist: THROUGH THE HISTORY OF THE COLD WAR The Correspondence of George F. Kennan and John Lukacs This powerful sense of estrangement from mainstream America pervades “Through the History of the Cold War,” a gloomy but fascinating volume containing more than 200 letters exchanged by Kennan and John Lukacs over half a century. The correspondence began in 1952, when Lukacs, a Hungarian émigré who later became a prolific historian of modern Europe, wrote Kennan to commend his view that the United States needed to resist Soviet expansion through political and economic, rather than military, means. To Lukacs’s surprise, Kennan wrote back... - NYT, 7-25-10
• Wendy Moffat: Lives of the Novelists: E. M. Forster: A GREAT UNRECORDED HISTORY A New Life of E. M. Forster In “A Great Unrecorded History,” a well-written, intelligent and perceptive biography of Forster, Wendy Moffat attempts to explore that silence and at the same time to draw a picture of a figure who was sensitive, sensuous and kind, an artist who possessed a keen, plain sort of wisdom and lightness of touch that make him, to this day, an immensely influential novelist, almost a prophet. She uses the sources for our knowledge of Forster’s sexuality, including letters and diaries, without reducing the mystery and sheer individuality of Forster, without making his sexuality explain everything.... - NYT, 7-25-10
• Powerful Political Figures, Historians and Scholars Assert President Calvin Coolidge’s Relevance in Today’s Politically Charged Climate in a New Book Titled, Why Coolidge Matters: A collection of 21 essays authored by an impressive bipartisan list of historians, political figures, scholars and journalists, that includes Senator John Kerry, former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, Governors M. Jodi Rell (CT) and James Douglas (VT), Ward Connerly, founder/chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute, and Jerry Wallace, Presidential archivist, among others, Why Coolidge Matters reflects a common denominator: President Coolidge’s civility, integrity, even-handedness and scrupulous attention to propriety provides much wisdom that can be applied to present day politics.... - Earth Times (7-20-10)
• James T. Patterson's "Freedom Is Not Enough," reviewed by Kevin Boyle: FREEDOM IS NOT ENOUGH The Moynihan Report and America's Struggle Over Black Family Life -- from LBJ to Obama Shortly after the cataclysmic Watts riot in the summer of 1965, word spread around Washington that the Johnson administration had in its hands a secret report on the state of Black America. It had been written, said the rumors, by a little-known official in the Department of Labor: Daniel Patrick Moynihan. And it was "a political atom bomb," according to columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, "which strips away usual equivocations and exposes the ugly truth about the big-city Negros' plight." What followed, as Brown University historian James T. Patterson makes clear in this fine-grained study, was one of the great tragedies of postwar policy making.... - WaPo, 7-18-10
• Alex Heard's "The Eyes of Willie McGee," reviewed by Michael Kazin: THE EYES OF WILLIE MCGEE A Tragedy of Race, Sex, and Secrets in the Jim Crow South The bare facts about the case of Willie McGee seem to fit the dreadful image of a legal lynching in the Deep South back when white supremacy ruled. In 1945, McGee, a handsome black truck-driver, was jailed for allegedly raping a white housewife named Willette Hawkins in Laurel, Miss. -- while her husband slept in a nearby room and a small child slept beside her. Despite the improbable circumstances, McGee was convicted by an all-white jury and, after two appeals, was electrocuted in 1951....
  But Alex Heard, a veteran journalist who grew up in Mississippi, uncovers a story that is a good deal more intriguing, if less dramatic, than Harper Lee's iconic Southern novel. The McGee case was fought out on a global terrain. That tearful young lawyer's name was Bella Abzug. Years before she became a politician famous for big hats and robust feminism, Abzug worked for the Civil Rights Congress, a small but aggressive group with close ties to the Communist Party. The CRC, with aid from the Soviet bloc, whipped up an international outcry against McGee's execution. Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Dmitri Shostakovich dispatched cables of outrage, and a band of protesters chained themselves to one of the columns at the Lincoln Memorial..... - WaPo, 7-18-10
• Bruce Cumings: Carpet-Bombing Falsehoods About a War That’s Little Understood: THE KOREAN WAR The world will be watching, and here’s a book that American policymakers may hope it won’t be reading: Bruce Cumings’s “Korean War,” a powerful revisionist history of America’s intervention in Korea. Beneath its bland title, Mr. Cumings’s book is a squirm-inducing assault on America’s moral behavior during the Korean War, a conflict that he says is misremembered when it is remembered at all. It’s a book that puts the reflexive anti-Americanism of North Korea’s leaders into sympathetic historical context.... - NYT, 7-22-10 - Excerpt
• Alexandra Popoff: The Tolstoys' War: SOPHIA TOLSTOY A Biography As Alexandra Popoff suggests in her new biography, "Sophia Tolstoy," the countess has been maligned by history, viewed as hysterical and insanely jealous, a shrew. These misconceptions, Popoff insists (with some exaggeration), "all have one source: Chertkov. For decades, he suppressed favorable information about Sophia and exaggerated his own role in Tolstoy’s life."... - NYT, 7-18-10

FEATURES:

• Douglas Brinkley: Electric cars like Chevy's new Volt are too expensive today, but they won't be for long, if history is a guide: In 1903, most car companies were "turning out products with steep prices of $3,000 or even $4,000," writes Douglas Brinkley in Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress. In 1903, about 12,000 cars were sold in the United States The following year, Henry Ford introduced his Model B "at a startling $2,000." Now, the Bureau of Labor Statistics' inflation calculator only goes back to 1913. But $3,000 in 1913 is worth about $66,114 today. This BLS report suggests that average family income in 1901 was about $750. Any way you slice it, cars were very expensive. A luxury car cost about four times what a family earned in a year. What kind of future was there for the car as a democratic object?... - Slate (7-28-10)
• Shelley E. Roff: Women workers could be found on the medieval construction site, study finds: According to a recently published study, women could be found working on construction sites, if only occasionally, including in specialized roles such as carpenters and masons. The research is found in the article, "Appropriate to Her Sex?" Women’s Participation on the Construction Site in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, by Shelley E. Roff.... - Medieval News (7-27-10)
• Richard K. Lieberman: A 19th-Century Piano Is So Square, It's Cool: Mr. Lieberman, a professor of history at LaGuardia and director of the La Guardia and Wagner Archives, said it had an interesting history: It survived the Civil War in Kentucky, hidden in a barn where it was not burned as troops crisscrossed the area. The family legend was that someone played “Dixie” when Confederates were within earshot. It is not known whether the same pianist struck up “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” when Union soldiers were around.... - NYT (7-25-10)
• 'Mad Men' series inaccurately depicts difficulties of divorce for women in '60s: ..."As historians, most of us just love 'Mad Men' -- it is so realistic, not just in the details, but in the gender dynamics," said Stephanie Coontz, a sociologist and professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. "But, I think in this case they've gotten it wrong."
  "In 1964, Nelson Rockefeller could not run for president because he was divorced -- anyone with high aspirations, unless he was absolutely besotted with love, would never have considered getting involved in a divorce."... Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (7-25-10)

QUOTES:

• New FDR letters could be a "trove," says Goodwin: The writer was Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, who decades before had been FDR's mistress and who now was making arrangements for what would be their last meeting. Elegantly handwritten, the letter never mentions Roosevelt by name -- her love letters to him had been their undoing a quarter-century earlier when Eleanor Roosevelt found them in her husband's steamer trunk.... "Wow," said historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of "No Ordinary Time," a chronicle of the Roosevelts during the war. "This stuff sounds like it's going to be very exciting. You very rarely get a whole new trove of material."... - Star Tribune (7-28-10)
• Geoff Wade, Edward Friedman: Zheng He: Symbol of China's 'peaceful rise': "The rise of China has induced a lot of fear," says Geoff Wade of the Institute of South-east Asian Studies in Singapore. "Zheng is being portrayed as a symbol of China's openness to the world, as an envoy of its peace and friendship - these two words keep cropping up in virtually every reference to Zheng He out of China," says Prof Wade....
  Zheng He was an admiral in the time of "empire", when there were no boundaries, no frontier limits, says China expert Edward Friedman. "The expeditions were real events - Zheng's achievements were extraordinary and a marvel of the time," says Prof Friedman of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.... BBC News (7-28-10)
• Brian Carso: Treason expert says release of military files on war is not treason under the law: "But, it harms our democratic process," Carso said. "Our democratic leaders have made a decision to pursue the war effort, and while we are right to constantly debate that decision as we go forward, by the same token we shouldn’t undermine our own ability to carry out the war effort."... - The Times Leader (PA) (7-27-10)
• Nostalgia drives 'Mad Men' culture beyond small screen: Taken together, New York University's Jonathan Zimmerman says viewers aren't watching Mad Men because it affirms any secret sexism they might harbour, but rather because the show enables a kind of self-congratulation.
  "The well-to-do pride themselves on their notions of gender equality," says Zimmerman, a professor of history and culture. "They look especially at Mad Men's gender roles and say: 'My goodness, wasn't it barbaric back then?'" "Nostalgia is a profound emotion that affects us in a guttural way," says Zimmerman, a fan of the AMC series. "With just a shot of a corridor or a desk or a type of car, baby boomers can quite literally relive their youth."... Vancouver Sun (7-20-10)

INTERVIEWS:

• Will Israel's New Archive Policy Set Back a Generation of Scholarship? CHE asks Benny Morris: Earlier this month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu extended the classification of certain national- security related state archives for an additional 20 years.... For more on the potential implications of Netanyahu's decision, I turned to Benny Morris, a professor of history at Ben Gurion University of the Negev.... - CHE (7-30-10)

AWARDS &APPOINTMENTS:

• MU prof's book recognized by the Wall Street Journal: James Tobin, associate professor of journalism at Miami University, was recently recognized by the Wall Street Journal for writing one of the five best books on inventions. Tobin’s 2003 book, "To Conquer the Air," was ranked third, following "Longitude" by Dava Sobel and "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes. "To Conquer the Air” is the story of Wilbur and Orville Wright in early 20th-century America and the competition they faced from other top inventors of the time, including Alexander Graham Bell and Glenn Curtiss, to be the first aloft.... - Oxford Press, 7-23-10

ANNOUNCEMENTS & EVENTS CALENDAR:

• September 17-18, 2010 at Notre Dame University: Conference aims to bring medieval, early modern and Latin American historians together: An interdisciplinary conference to be held at the University of Notre Dame this fall is making a final call for papers to explore the issue surrounding similarities between late-medieval Iberia and its colonies in the New World. "From Iberian Kingdoms to Atlantic Empires: Spain, Portugal, and the New World, 1250-1700" is being hosted by the university's Nanovic Institute for European Studies and will take place on September 17-18, 2010. Medieval News, 4-29-10
• Jeff Shesol to give Jackson Lecture at the Chautauqua Institution: Historian, presidential speechwriter and author Jeff Shesol will deliver Chautauqua Institution's sixth annual Robert H. Jackson Lecture on the Supreme Court of the United States. Jeff Shesol will give the Jackson Lecture on Wednesday, August 18, 2010, at 4:00 p.m. in Chautauqua’s Hall of Philosophy.... - John Q. Barrett at the Jackson List (6-14-10)
• Thousands of Studs Terkel interviews going online: The Library of Congress will digitize the Studs Terkel Oral History Archive, according to the agreement, while the museum will retain ownership of the roughly 5,500 interviews in the archive and the copyrights to the content. Project officials expect digitizing the collection to take more than two years.... - NYT, 5-13-10
• Digital Southern Historical Collection: The 41,626 scans reproduce diaries, letters, business records, and photographs that provide a window into the lives of Americans in the South from the 18th through mid-20th centuries.

ON TV:

• C-SPAN2: BOOK TV Weekend Schedule
• PBS American Experience: Mondays at 9pm
• History Channel: Weekly Schedule

BEST SELLERS (NYT):

• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - July 25, 2010
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - July 18, 2010

BOOKS COMING SOON:

• Richard Toye: Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made, (Hardcover), August 3, 2010.
• Alexander Hamilton: The Federalist Papers, (Hardcover), August 16, 2010
• Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865 (Paperback and Hardcover), September 1, 2010
• Holger Hoock: Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750-1850, (Hardcover), September 1, 2010
• Anna Whitelock: Mary Tudor: Princess, Bastard, Queen, (Hardcover), September 7, 2010
• James L. Swanson: Bloody Crimes: The Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln's Corpse, (Hardcover), September 28, 2010
• Timothy Snyder: The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke (First Trade Paper Edition), (Paperback), September 28, 2010
• Ron Chernow: Washington: A Life, (Hardcover), October 5, 2010
• George William Van Cleve: A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic, (Hardcover), October 1, 2010.
• John Keegan: The American Civil War: A Military History, (Paperback), October 5, 2010
• Bill Bryson: At Home: A Short History of Private Life, (Hardcover), October 5, 2010
• Robert M. Poole: On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery, (Paperback), October 26, 2010
• Robert Leckie: Challenge for the Pacific: Guadalcanal: The Turning Point of the War, (Paperback), October 26, 2010
• Manning Marable: Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, (Hardcover), November 9, 2010
• Elizabeth White: The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia: The Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1917-39, (Hardcover), November 10, 2010
• Elizabeth White: The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia: The Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1917-39, (Hardcover), November 10, 2010
• G. J. Barker-Benfield: Abigail and John Adams: The Americanization of Sensibility, (Hardcover), November 15, 2010
• Edmund Morris: Colonel Roosevelt, (Hardcover), November 23, 2010
• Michael Goldfarb: Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance, (Paperback), November 23, 2010

DEPARTED:

• Robert C. Tucker, 92, dies; scholar of Soviet-era politics and history: Robert C. Tucker, 92, whose early State Department assignment in Moscow launched a distinguished career as a scholar of Soviet-era politics and history, notably tracing the enduring impact of Joseph Stalin's reign, died July 29 at his home in Princeton, N.J. He had pneumonia. His death was confirmed by Princeton University, where he was a professor of politics from 1962 to 1984 and the founding director of the university's Russian studies program.... - WaPo (7-31-10)
• Robert C. Tucker, a Scholar of Marx, Stalin and Soviet Affairs, Dies at 92 (NYT): Robert C. Tucker, a distinguished Sovietologist whose frustrations in persuading the authorities in Stalin’s Russia to let his new Russian wife accompany him home to the United States gave him crucial and influential insights into the Soviet leader, died Thursday at his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 92.... - NYT (7-31-10)
• Peggy Ann Pascoe, 55, historian at the University of Oregon: Peggy Ann Pascoe, 55, of Eugene, Ore., died Friday, July 23, 2010, of ovarian cancer. She taught women's history at the University of Utah from 1986 to 1996. She was the Beekman Chair of Pacific and Northwest History at the University of Oregon starting in 1996; in 2005 she also became a Professor of Ethnic S tudies at UO... - MT Standard (7-25-10)
• Historian Carola Hicks Has Died: Carola Hicks, British historian and biographer, has passed away at age 68. Her resume included college professor, research fellow, museum curator, and of course, published author. She has published several nonfiction works.... - mediabistro (7-28-10)
• Ramon Eduardo Ruiz: Honored scholar wrote a detailed history of Mexico: Pride in his heritage helped spark an interest in history and led Ramon Eduardo Ruiz to a life of teaching, researching and writing about the past.... - SD Union-Tribune (7-26-10)
• Indian historian, academician dies at 84: The writings of historian A Sreedhara Menon who died here on Friday are the most important references on Kerala history.... - Express Buzz (India) (7-24-10)
• John P. Gerber, 65, librarian and historian: John Paul Gerber of Quincy, Mass., passed away suddenly on Saturday, June 12, 2010, after a valiant year-long fight against pancreatic cancer.... - Dunn County Record (WI) (7-25-10)
• 'Legendary' SD historian dies at 92: Gilbert Fite devoted a great deal of his life to uncovering and preserving South Dakota history. In doing so, he became a part of it. Fite, 92, a history professor and acclaimed author, died July 13 in Fort Meyers, Fla.... - Mitchell Republic (SD) (7-21-10)
• George Robert Healy, 87, dies: With real sadness, I share the news that George Robert Healy died on July 8th in Auburn, Maine. He was 87. A marvelous leader and cherished friend to those who worked with him, Dr. Healy was described as "a man Thomas Jefferson would have respected."... - College of William & Mary (7-15-10)
• Jim Clifford: Dr. Georgina Feldberg, 1956-2010: The history community lost a great teacher, scholar and active historian this week. I had the pleasure of knowing Dr. Feldberg during my first year at York. She was one of the professors in a graduate course on the history of science, health and the environment. I learned a lot from her as a teacher and from her book, Disease and Class: Tuberculosis and the Shaping of Modern North American Society. A few weeks after I last met with her, I heard she had been diagnosed with cancer. This came as a big shock to all of us in the history of medicine field and particularly to a number of my friends who Feldberg supervised. Sadly, she finally lost her four year long battle with this disease, leaving behind her husband and daughter... - ActiveHistory.ca (7-14-10)

IN FOCUS: July 4th Myths & History

• T.H. Breen: The Secret Founding Fathers: Enough about Washington, Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers, says historian T.H. Breen, on July 4th we should celebrate the forgotten, ordinary men who took to the streets to fight British tyranny—and are the bedrock of our republican values.... - The Daily Beast, 7-3-10
• T.H. Breen: 'American Insurgents' fired first shots of Revolutionary War: Common men — and some women, too — set the stage and paved the path that led to the Revolutionary War and America's independence from England.
  Author T.H. Breen tells readers of "American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People" (Hill and Wang, $27) that a bevy of common men — and some women, too — set the stage and paved the path that led to the Revolutionary War. What's more, they were doing it a few years in advance of the bigwigs who get the credit.
  Famous names, such as Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington owe much to others who struggled for independence in the years leading up to 1776.... - News OK, 7-3-10
• Obama celebrates July 4th at White House barbecue: Calling the Declaration of Independence more than words on an aging parchment, President Barack Obama marked the Fourth of July on Sunday by urging Americans to live the principles that founded the nation as well as celebrate them.
  "This is the day when we celebrate the very essence of America and the spirit that has defined us as a people and as a nation for more than two centuries," Obama told guests at a South Lawn barbecue honoring service members and their families. "We celebrate the principles that are timeless, tenets first declared by men of property and wealth but which gave rise to what Lincoln called a new birth of freedom in America — civil rights and voting rights, workers' rights and women's rights, and the rights of every American," he said. "And on this day that is uniquely American we are reminded that our Declaration, our example, made us a beacon to the world." "Now, of course I'll admit that the backyard's a little bigger here, but it's the same spirit," Obama said to laughter. "Michelle and I couldn't imagine a better way to celebrate America's birthday than with America's extraordinary men and women in uniform and their families." "Today we also celebrate all of you, the men and women of our armed forces, who defend this country we love," he told the enthusiastic group.... - AP, 7-4-10
• 4th of July: Facts about the Declaration of Independence:
  On July 2 the Continental Congress voted to declare independence from Great Britain and on 4th of July 1776 the same Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. The Founding Fathers signed the document in August, after it was finished....
  Another fact about this important day in the United States of America's history is that Thomas Jefferson (3rd U.S President) and John Adams (2nd U.S. President) both died on 4th of July 1826, when the country was celebrating 50th anniversary of the signing.
  Although the capital city of the United States of America is Washington named after the great president, George Washington, the first U.S President, did not sign the Declaration of Independence because he was head of the Continental Army and no longer a member in the Continental Congress.
  The first anniversary resulted in a huge party in Philadelphia in 1777. There were fireworks, cannons, barbecues and toasts. - Providing News, 7-4-10
• Thomas Jefferson made slip in Declaration: Library of Congress officials say Thomas Jefferson made a Freudian slip while penning a rough draft of the Declaration of Independence. In an early draft of the document Jefferson referred to the American population as "subjects," replacing that term with the word "citizens," which he then used frequently throughout the final draft. The document is normally kept under lock and key in one of the Library's vaults. On Friday morning, the first time officials revealed the wording glitch, it traveled under police escort for a demonstration of the high-tech imaging. It was the first time in 15 years that the document was unveiled outside of its oxygen-free safe.... - A copy of the rough draft of the Declaration can be viewed online at http://www.myLOC.gov....- AP, 7-2-10

4th of July quotes: Best Independence Day quotes and sayings:

• The United States is the only country with a known birthday. (James G. Blaine)
• This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave. (Elmer Davis)
• Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves. (Abraham Lincoln)
• We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it. (William Faulkner)
• It is the love of country that has lighted and that keeps glowing the holy fire of patriotism. (J. Horace McFarland)
• America is a tune. It must be sung together. (Gerald Stanley Lee)
• The winds that blow through the wide sky in these mounts, the winds that sweep from Canada to Mexico, from the Pacific to the Atlantic – have always blown on free men. (Franklin D. Roosevelt)
• Where liberty dwells, there is my country. (Benjamin Franklin)
• Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world. (Woodrow Wilson)
- Providing News, 7-4-10
• Local NYer standing up for Horatio Gates: For a 14th straight year, James S. Kaplan spent the Fourth of July walking in the middle of the night among ghosts of the American Revolution.... - NYT (7-5-10)
• Fifth of July is also a day to celebrate, say historians: The unassuming date could also merit respect for providing a pair of tidy bookends in the United States labor movement. In 1934, police officers in San Francisco opened fire on striking longshoreman in one of the country’s most significant and violent labor clashes. On the same date a year later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act, guaranteeing the rights of employees to organize and to bargain collectively with their employers.
  "That’s a big moment in American labor history, absolutely," said Joshua B. Freeman, a labor historian at the City University of New York.... NYT (7-5-10)

HISTORY NEWS:

• Amazement at the speed and efficacy of historical scholarship in UT dorm case: Russell's paper -- published on the Social Science Research Network -- drew attention to William Stewart Simkins (1842-1929), for whom a dormitory at the University of Texas at Austin was named in the 1950s. Simkins was a longtime law professor at Texas, but before that, he and his brother helped organize the Florida branch of the Ku Klux Klan -- an organization he defended throughout his life, including while serving as a law professor. Russell's paper led to public discussion in Austin of the appropriateness of naming a university building for a Klan leader. On Friday, William Powers Jr., president of the University of Texas at Austin, announced that he will ask the university system's Board of Regents this month to change the name.... - Inside Higher Ed (7-12-10)
• Taiwanese historian sentenced to prison for libel: Chen Feng-yang, chairperson of the history department at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU), was found guilty of defamation charges brought by Lu Jian-rong, an ex-adjunct history professor at NTNU, after Chen allegedly attacked Lu's reputation on NTNU's website by calling him “a historian rotten from the roots” who is “malicious, sinful, and unforgivable” the court said.... - China Post (Taiwan) (7-9-10)
• UMN's graduate programs face 'right-sizing' in tough times: Faced with its own money troubles, the University of Minnesota is turning away more graduate students who would get financial help such as teaching positions. Still welcome are those who pay their own way or pursue in-demand studies such as biomedical sciences.... - Minneapolis Star Tribune (7-8-10)
• Niall Ferguson: Historian warns of sudden collapse of American 'empire': Harvard professor and prolific author Niall Ferguson opened the 2010 Aspen Ideas Festival Monday with a stark warning about the increasing prospect of the American "empire" suddenly collapsing due to the country's rising debt level.... - Aspen Daily News (7-6-10)
• New Ed. Dept. report documents the end of tenure: Some time this fall, the U.S. Education Department will publish a report that documents the death of tenure. Innocuously titled "Employees in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2009," the report won't say it's about the demise of tenure. But that's what it will show. Over just three decades, the proportion of college instructors who are tenured or on the tenure track plummeted: from 57 percent in 1975 to 31 percent in 2007.... - CHE (7-4-10)
• Review of Harvard Scholar's Arrest Cites Failure to Communicate: A new review of the arrest of a prominent scholar in black studies at his own home last July blames the incident on "failed communications" between the police officer and the scholar.... - CHE (6-30-10)
• University of Colorado Professor Uncovers First Holocaust Liberation Photos, Highlights Overlapping Narratives: David Shneer, associate professor of history and director of the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, benefited from that openness. He began researching the issue in 2002, when he visited a photography gallery in Moscow. The exhibition was titled "Women at War," and Shneer noticed that the photographers' names sounded Jewish. He asked the curator, who said, "Of course they're Jewish. All the photographers were Jewish." Before the war, many of those developing the profession of Soviet photojournalism were Jewish, Shneer noted.... - AScribe.org (7-1-10)

OP-EDs:

• Sean Wilentz and Julian E. Zelizer: Teaching 'W' as History The challenges of the recent past in the classroom: Even before the 2008 election, debate had begun about how President George W. Bush would be remembered in American history. There were many reasons that so many people were so quickly interested in Bush's historical reputation. Given how intensely polarized voters were about his presidency, it was natural that experts and pundits would scramble to evaluate it. Bush's spectacular highs and lows—the stratospheric rise in his public approval following the attacks of September 11, 2001... - Chronicle of Higher Ed, 7-11-10
• Greg Mitchell: Andrew Bacevich, His Lost Son, and Obama's War in Afghanistan - The Nation (7-8-10)
• Joe Conason: Sure, listen to Niall Ferguson -- but always ignore his bad advice: As a celebrity intellectual, Ferguson much prefers the broad, bold stroke to the careful detail, so it is scarcely surprising that he endorsed Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan's "wonderful" budget template, confident that his audience in Aspen would know almost nothing about that document.... - Salon (7-7-10)

REVIEWS & FIRST CHAPTERS:

• Charles Ogletree tackles Henry Louis Gates' arrest in new book: Harvard law professor and author Charles Ogletree, a longtime friend and colleague of Gates’, who also served as his legal counsel in the case, examines the incident and its legal and social implications in "The Presumption of Guilt: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Race, Class and Crime in America."
  The book is about much more than the arrest of an acclaimed black professor. Ogletree focuses on the long, troubled relationship between police and black men, as well as racial profiling by law enforcement and black Americans’ continuing quest for racial fairness in the criminal justice system and in everyday life. - Philadelphia Inquirer, 7-14-10
• BARRY STRAUSS: A Failed Rebel's Long Shadow: Now comes a distinguished contribution to the field by the British journalist and classicist Peter Stothard. "Spartacus Road" is a work of history, telling us of Spartacus' life and legend, but it is also a travel book, as Mr. Stothard follows Spartacus' rebellious path through 2,000 miles of Italian countryside.... - WSJ, 7-10-10
• Niall Ferguson's "High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg":
  There's a saying in publishing that the only brand is the author. Unquestionably Niall Ferguson is a brand, thanks to sweeping, Big Picture, Big Idea books such as "Colossus" and "The Ascent of Money." With Ferguson, we expect provocative interpretations of epochs, empires and civilizations. Not this time. In "High Financier," Ferguson follows a solitary capitalist into the weeds and flowers of his financial garden. This is no failing, of course; biography is simply a different enterprise. Rather than overarching, it often must be minute and particular. And Siegmund Warburg was extremely particular.... - WaPo, 7-9-10
• Jane Brox: Shining a light on the way artificial light has changed our lives: BRILLIANT The Evolution of Artificial Light
  But, Jane Brox asks, at what cost? Though she celebrates human ingenuity and technical advances in "Brilliant," her history of artificial light, Brox also presents damning evidence that in our millennia-long quest for ever more and brighter light, we've despoiled the natural world, abandoned our self-sufficiency and trained ourselves to sleep and dream less while working more. It's time, Brox urges, to "think rationally about light and what it means to us." Yes, the history of artificial light has its dark side, for those who aren't too dazzled to detect it.... - WaPo, 7-9-10
• Christiane Bird: Book review of "The Sultan's Shadow," about a 19th-century Arab princess: THE SULTAN'S SHADOW One Family's Rule at the Crossroads of East and West
  Christiane Bird's account of the Al Busaidi sultans in Oman and Zanzibar during the 19th century is, she says, "a tale rich with modern-day themes: Islam vs. Christianity, religion vs. secularism, women's rights, human rights, multiculturalism, and a nation's right to construct its own destiny." In truth those themes are not quite so visible in "The Sultan's Shadow" as its author would have us believe, for despite her lucid prose and dogged research, the book never comes together into a coherent whole. Instead, it is an oddly arranged miscellany, some parts of which are exceptionally interesting, but she never manages to connect them to each other in a convincing fashion.... - WaPo, 7-9-10
• Reviews of 'Romancing Miss Bronte,' 'Charlotte and Emily,' 'Jane Slayre' - WaPo, 7-13-10
• Kim Washburn: New Palin Biography Aimed At 9- To 12-Year-Olds 'Speaking Up' Set For September Release - WFTV, 7-9-10
• Jack Rakove on Gary B. Nash: The Ring and the Crack: The Liberty Bell Yale University Press, 242 pp., $24
  It would be easy to assume that the flag and the anthem have always been the central cultural symbols of our nationality. But in fact that has not been the case, writes Gary Nash, in this fast-moving and engaging history of a different and, he argues, superior, symbol: the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. The Pledge of Allegiance to the flag was not composed until 1892, eventually becoming the source of daily school recitals and occasional litigation, from the Jehovah’s Witnesses of the late 1930s and early 1940s to the atheist Michael Newdow’s more recent judicial quest. Then, too, the Stars and Stripes went through a long post-Civil War period as something less than a banner of universal nationality. Perhaps even now, lingering Southern attachment to the rival Stars and Bars may embody more than Confederate re-enactors’ cultural fondness for the Lost Cause. And while the "Star Spangled Banner" was composed back in 1814, only in 1931 did it acquire its official status as national anthem.... - TNR, 7-2-10

FEATURES:

• Historian calls on new generation: "There's a lot of what we do not know." That's what Dr. Mitch Kachun said about Collins in one of his two speeches at the Juneteenth celebration at Brandon Park on Saturday. Kachun, a professor of history at Western Michigan University, has extensively researched local African-American author and teacher Julia Collins. The professor expressed being gratified he could take part in helping to finally recognize Collins' work after 140 years. He said his research was done so he could help better understand and appreciate her life.... - Sun Gazette, 6-20-10
• Brian Black: A Look At The U.S.'s Man-Made Environmental Disasters: ...Here are some of the country’s most notable environmental disasters with human influence, both large-scale and small-scale, and how the government has dealt with them.... - National Journal (7-8-10)
• A walk through history: UTEP effort highlights Hispanics' significance: As far as historian David Romo is concerned, the streets of South El Paso represent a living textbook that can help students understand the complexities of the Mexican Revolution of 1910.
  "The role of El Paso in the revolution by any criteria should be part of not only the El Paso school curriculum but the national curriculum," Romo said. "Unfortunately, it's mostly ignored by the textbooks.".... - El Paso Times (7-6-10)
• Census historian weighs in on electronic future of census: As hundreds of thousands of workers knock on doors this summer to collect information for the 2010 Census, momentum is mounting to drag future Censuses into the 21st century....
  "Using the Postal Service was an enormous innovation in 1970" when Census forms were first mailed (previous Censuses were door-to-door surveys), says Margo Anderson, a professor of history and urban studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an expert on Census history. "We're 40 years later, and the mail isn't the official way most people get their information or communicate. It's really outmoded."... - USA Today (7-6-10)
• Soccer historian tells of South African soccer's origins among political prisoners: "These men believed that there would be a free South Africa while they were still alive," said Chuck Korr, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Missouri at St. Louis and the author of a book about the soccer league called "More Than Just a Game."... - NYT (7-5-10)

PROFILES:

• Easton historian worked on Emmy-nominated The Pacific: Donald L. Miller, a Lafayette College history professor, was the only person on the project who personally interviewed Eugene Sledge, one of three Marines who fought in the Pacific on whom the series is based.... - The Morning Call, 7-8-10
• As a historian in the House, Fred Beuttler puts current events in perspective: Historians do not do breaking news. Historians do not do the latest scandal scoops, election-night projections, or instant updates of Washington's winners and losers. So it is no surprise that the media's demand for historians is scant. But every now and then, when the breaking political news from Capitol Hill is in dire need of historical context, journalists and politicians alike go looking for Fred Beuttler... - WaPo (7-6-10)
• 21st-century technology helps Princeton U historian John Haldon study Byzantine era: Princeton University historian John Haldon, a leading authority on medieval Byzantine history, can't really remember a time when history didn't intrigue him.... These days, Haldon is a professor of Byzantine history and Hellenic studies at Princeton.... NJ.com (7-5-10)
• Kelly Lytle Hernández: UCLA professor chronicles rise of U.S. Border Patrol in new book: However, by the middle of the 20th century, the U.S. Border Patrol had shifted its focus and was concentrating its efforts on policing undocumented Mexican immigrants, a practice that continues to this day, UCLA historian Kelly Lytle Hernández writes in "Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol" (University of California Press, 2010).
  Drawing on long-neglected archival sources in both the U.S. and Mexico, Lytle Hernández uncovers the little-known history of how Mexican immigrants slowly became the primary focus of U.S. immigration law enforcement and demonstrates how racial profiling of Mexicans developed in the Border Patrol's enforcement of the nation's immigration laws.... - UCLA Newsroom, 6-17-10

QUOTES:

• Richard Norton Smith, David Greenberg: When Adversity Comes Calling, Some Actually Answer the Door: As a self-styled student of American history, Mr. Blagojevich would have a hard time comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy or even Gerald Ford when it comes to dealing with duress... - NYT, 7-11-10
• Walter Wark: Spy Swaps Not a Cold War Relic: The Soviet Union is now gone, and Berlin is a single city in a reunited Germany. But, as intelligence historian Walter Wark of the University of Toronto says, the latest exchange shows that spy swaps have not gone out of date.
  "We have a tendency to forget that spying goes on as usual, and when spying goes on as usual, sooner or later there will be occasion to do a spy swap," Wark said. "But it's gone out of our consciousness, I think is the only thing that's really remarkable about this. It's not that it should happen. It's just that kind of, with all the other dangers that we're facing in a 21st century world, we've forgotten about espionage," he said.... - VoA News (7-9-10)

INTERVIEWS:

• Niall Ferguson aims to shake up history curriculum with TV and war games: History should be fun. More TV should be watched in the classroom, and children should learn through playing war games. The Harvard academic Niall Ferguson, who has been invited by the government to revitalise the curriculum, today sets set out a vision of "doing for history what Jamie Oliver has done for school food – make it healthy, and so they actually want to eat it".... - Guardian (UK) (7-9-10)
• Russian spy swap: Jeffrey Burds explains - WaPo (7-8-10)
• Environmental historian Brian Black talks about impacts of oil spill - Penn State Live (6-30-10)
• The end of the Soviet Union was not inevitable, says Norman Stone - U.S. News & World Report (7-1-10)

AWARDS &APPOINTMENTS:

• Obama Nominates Larry Palmer, former historian, as U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela: U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday nominated Ambassador Larry Leon Palmer -- formerly the US Ambassador to Honduras -- as the new U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela.... - Latin American Herald Tribune (6-30-10)
• National Park Service Names New Cultural Resources Head: National Park Service (NPS) Director Jonathan Jarvis recently named Stephanie Smith Toothman, Ph.D., as the Service’s new Associate Director for Cultural Resources... - Lee White at the National Coalition for history (6-28-10)
• New Director of Education Named at the Smithsonian: Claudine K. Brown has been named director of education for the Smithsonian Institution, effective June 20.... - Lee White at the National Coalition for History (6-28-10)

SPOTTED:

• James McPherson: Historian makes Gettysburg spring to life: As I prepared last week for a tour of Civil War historic sites with 40 history teachers from northwestern Minnesota, I looked at the itinerary and wondered if I would get anything out of touring battlefields....
  The day climaxed when our group of teachers, lead by General McPherson, replicated Pickett's Charge, the famous and futile attempt by General Lee to break the Union middle by sending a mile-wide swath of 13,000 men into the teeth of the Federal guns.... - Detroit Lakes Online, 7-2-10

ANNOUNCEMENTS & EVENTS CALENDAR:

• July 28, 2010: Evan Thomas, Award-Winning Journalist, Historian to Lecture at Ventfort Hall: Known nationally and internationally as one of the most respected award-winning journalists and historians writing today, Newsweek's Editor-at-Large Evan Thomas will appear at Ventfort Hall Mansion and Gilded Age Museum on Wednesday, July 28, as part of its 2010 Summer Lecture Series. He will discuss the subject of his new book, "The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898." Thomas will be on hand to autograph copies during the subsequent Victorian Tea.... - Iberkshires, 7-13-10
• September 17-18, 2010 at Notre Dame University: Conference aims to bring medieval, early modern and Latin American historians together: An interdisciplinary conference to be held at the University of Notre Dame this fall is making a final call for papers to explore the issue surrounding similarities between late-medieval Iberia and its colonies in the New World. "From Iberian Kingdoms to Atlantic Empires: Spain, Portugal, and the New World, 1250-1700" is being hosted by the university's Nanovic Institute for European Studies and will take place on September 17-18, 2010. Medieval News, 4-29-10
• Jeff Shesol to give Jackson Lecture at the Chautauqua Institution: Historian, presidential speechwriter and author Jeff Shesol will deliver Chautauqua Institution's sixth annual Robert H. Jackson Lecture on the Supreme Court of the United States. Jeff Shesol will give the Jackson Lecture on Wednesday, August 18, 2010, at 4:00 p.m. in Chautauqua’s Hall of Philosophy.... - John Q. Barrett at the Jackson List (6-14-10)
• Thousands of Studs Terkel interviews going online: The Library of Congress will digitize the Studs Terkel Oral History Archive, according to the agreement, while the museum will retain ownership of the roughly 5,500 interviews in the archive and the copyrights to the content. Project officials expect digitizing the collection to take more than two years.... - NYT, 5-13-10
• Digital Southern Historical Collection: The 41,626 scans reproduce diaries, letters, business records, and photographs that provide a window into the lives of Americans in the South from the 18th through mid-20th centuries.

ON TV:

• C-SPAN2: BOOK TV Weekend Schedule
• PBS American Experience: Mondays at 9pm
• History Channel: Weekly Schedule

BEST SELLERS (NYT):

• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - July 18, 2010
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - July 11, 2010

BOOKS COMING SOON:

• Jane Brox: Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, (Hardcover), July 8, 2010.
• Rudy Tomedi: General Matthew Ridgway, (Hardcover), July 30, 2010.
• Richard Toye: Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made, (Hardcover), August 3, 2010.
• Alexander Hamilton: The Federalist Papers, (Hardcover), August 16, 2010
• Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865 (Paperback and Hardcover), September 1, 2010
• Holger Hoock: Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750-1850, (Hardcover), September 1, 2010
• Anna Whitelock: Mary Tudor: Princess, Bastard, Queen, (Hardcover), September 7, 2010
• James L. Swanson: Bloody Crimes: The Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln's Corpse, (Hardcover), September 28, 2010
• Timothy Snyder: The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke (First Trade Paper Edition), (Paperback), September 28, 2010
• Ron Chernow: Washington: A Life, (Hardcover), October 5, 2010
• George William Van Cleve: A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic, (Hardcover), October 1, 2010.
• John Keegan: The American Civil War: A Military History, (Paperback), October 5, 2010
• Bill Bryson: At Home: A Short History of Private Life, (Hardcover), October 5, 2010
• Robert M. Poole: On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery, (Paperback), October 26, 2010
• Robert Leckie: Challenge for the Pacific: Guadalcanal: The Turning Point of the War, (Paperback), October 26, 2010
• Manning Marable: Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, (Hardcover), November 9, 2010
• Elizabeth White: The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia: The Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1917-39, (Hardcover), November 10, 2010
• Elizabeth White: The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia: The Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1917-39, (Hardcover), November 10, 2010
• G. J. Barker-Benfield: Abigail and John Adams: The Americanization of Sensibility, (Hardcover), November 15, 2010
• Edmund Morris: Colonel Roosevelt, (Hardcover), November 23, 2010
• Michael Goldfarb: Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance, (Paperback), November 23, 2010

DEPARTED:

• Stan Katz: Barry D. Karl and the Historical Profession: My friend and long-time historical collaborator Barry Karl died while undergoing emergency open-heart surgery in Chicago early this week. Barry would have celebrated his eighty-third birthday on the 23rd of this month -- which will be the date of the first birthday of his only grandchild, Ethan. It is too bad that he could not have lived longer, but he had a long, successful and interesting career.... - Stan Katz in the CHE (7-11-10)
• Ramon Eduardo Ruiz dies at 88; historian of Mexico and Latin America at UC San Diego: Ramon Eduardo Ruiz, a renowned historian of Mexico and Latin America whose books included in-depth studies of the Mexican and Cuban revolutions, has died. He was 88.... - LA Times (7-10-10)
• Lawrence Holiday Harris, historian and diplomat, dies at 89: Lawrence Harris, who had careers as an American diplomat, an army officer and a college professor, visited 52 countries and every continent.... - Atlanta Journal-Constitution (7-7-10)
• Ann Waldron, Biographer of Southern Writers, Is Dead at 85: Ann Waldron, who wrote biographies of Southern writers and books for children and young adults, but then — at 78 — decided that she’d rather concoct tales about gruesome murders on the campus of Princeton University, died Friday at her home in Princeton, N.J. She was 85.... - NYT (7-6-10)
• Death of historian and art author Carola Hicks, 68: A famous Cambridge art historian has died at the age of 68.... - Cambridge News (UK) (6-28-10)

POLITICAL HIGHLIGHTS:

This Week's Political Highlights

• Douglas Brinkley says to use BP money to save wetlands: "They (the White House) need to attack the wetlands issue head on right now," Brinkley said... - AP (6-16-10)

IN FOCUS:

• Nurse being kissed in iconic wartime picture dies, aged 91: Edith Shain was photographed by Alfred Eisenstaedt in Times Square in 1945 being kissed by a sailor - Guardian UK, 6-23-10

THIS WEEK IN HISTORY:

On This Day in History....

This Week in History....

• Korean War: Sixty Years and Counting - Time, 6-28-10

HISTORY NEWS:

• AHA, OAH, and NCPH endorse new guidelines for tenure: Three national groups of historians -- the American Historical Association, the National Council on Public History and the Organization of American Historians -- have now all endorsed guidelines that suggest a new, broader approach to tenure when considering public historians. The joint guidelines are part of a growing movement in disciplines that have tended to base tenure decisions on traditional forms of scholarship (in this case the monograph) to broaden the way they judge contributions to a field.... - Inside Higher Ed (6-22-10)
• Historical Associations Issue Recommendations about Rewarding Public History Work for Promotion and Tenure AHA Blog (6-21-10)
• Robert B. Townsend: Recession Takes Toll on AHA Membership: The economic hard times rocking the discipline took their toll on the AHA this past year, as membership in the Association fell 7.4 percent from the year before. This erased gains made over the previous five years and dropped membership down to 13,946 active members.... - Robert B. Townsend at the AHA Blog (6-21-10)
• Robert B. Townsend: Is There an E-book in Your Future? A Report from the University Presses - Robert Townsend at the AHA Blog (6-21-10)

OP-EDs:

• Laurent Dubois: France's Soccer Empire in Ruins? - CNN.com (6-25-10)

REVIEWS & FIRST CHAPTERS:

• Book review: H.W. Brands reviews "Tocqueville's Discovery of America," by Leo Damrosch: Rather, the appeal of "Democracy in America" is that of any good coming-of-age story: We see the possibilities of youth struggling against the realities of adulthood, and even as we slide toward old age, we reimagine all that we might have been. Leo Damrosch, in the best book on this subject in 70 years, deftly depicts the fateful encounter between the young Tocqueville and adolescent America. WaPo, 6-25-10
• Book review of Hugh Trevor-Roper's "History and the Enlightenment": In the half-century following World War II, there was no more admired British historian than Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914-2003).... "History and the Enlightenment" is a posthumous collection. Editor John Robertson has gathered together Trevor-Roper's reflections on historiography and the achievements of the 18th- and early 19th-century historians, starting with Pietro Giannone -- whose "Civil History of Naples" inspired both Hume and Edward Gibbon -- and ending with Jacob Burckhardt ("The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy").... - WaPo, 6-23-10
• Dominic Lieven: 'War and Peace': The Fact-Check: RUSSIA AGAINST NAPOLEON The True Story of the Campaigns of "War and Peace" Lieven’s account in "Russia Against Napoleon" could not be more different. He concentrates on the men who led the Russian Army to victory — the young Czar Alexander and his close advisers — and shows that they won because they got more things right than Napoleon did. They understood him better than he did them, and while Napoleon may have been a battle­field genius, Alexander showed greater diplomatic skill in bringing together the coalition that eventually defeated him. That was no easy matter, given the fear of the French that prevailed in the German lands, and the fear of Russian predominance as well.... - NYT, 6-20-10
• Rabbi's Biography Disturbs Followers: Mr. Heilman, a sociologist at Queens College, and Menachem Friedman, a professor emeritus at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, offer a view into his world in their new biography, "The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson" (Princeton University Press). But they have provoked a growing chorus of complaints from people inside and outside Chabad with their characterization of the rebbe.... - NYT, 6-20-10

FEATURES:

• Doris Kearns Goodwin: New Kennedy Docs Show Perseverance, FBI Relationship, Says Goodwin - WPUR (Boston) (6-15-10)
• Douglas Brinkley, Robert Dallek: Historians weigh in on released Kennedy FBI files: The late Senator Edward M. Kennedy lived under the constant threat of violent death, a burden he inherited from his slain brothers, according to FBI records released yesterday detailing hundreds of threats issued by hate groups or relayed by agency tipsters and police across the country.... - Boston Globe (6-15-10)
• Joseph Persico, Lara Brown: Presidential historians (pre)assess Obama speech: ...Before Obama's first Oval Office address, historians were taking the measure of what might be possible for the president.... - NPR,org (6-15-10)

QUOTES:

• Shen Zhihua, the director of the Shanghai-based Center for Cold War International History Studies and professor of history at East China Normal University: Frank Views from Chinese Historian About Korean War: The Korean War was started by Stalin, who wished to establish pro-Soviet government in the Korean Peninsula, and Kim Il-sung, who wanted unified Korea, a leading Chinese academic told the state-run media Thursday. - Chosun Ilbo (6-18-10)
• Controversy in France over de Gaulle literature, Robert Paxton weighs in: "He's a great classical stylist with a vigorous point of view, which is exactly what young people should be reading," Paxton said in a telephone interview from Cluny, in the Burgundy region of France. "You can use the same critical powers on the writings of a politician as on a literary figure."... Bloomberg News (6-18-10)
• J.B. Shank: University of MN historian objects to Pawlenty comments on Daily Show: "Technophilic talk is a pernicious distraction," he says, "because it allows for a certain kind of justification for not giving the university the money it needs to provide the kind of education it wants to provide."... - DigitalBurg.com (6-17-10)
• Jean-Pierre Azema: De Gaulle truth played down?: A LEADING World War II historian has warned against manipulating history as France this week commemorates 70 years since Charles de Gaulle made his stirring appeal to resist Nazism.... - The Straits Times (Singapore) (6-16-10)

INTERVIEWS:

• Andrew Bacevich sits down with Salon on Gen. McChrystal's ouster: Should Gen. McChrystal have been fired?
  I believe this matter has already been settled. My view is that he should not have been fired.... - Salon.com (6-23-10)

AWARDS &APPOINTMENTS:

• Rick Atkinson wins prize for military writing: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian Rick Atkinson has received a $100,000 award for military writing. Atkinson has been awarded the 2010 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing.... - AP, 6-21-10
• U. of Tennessee Wins Grant to Digitize Newspapers: In two years, students, historians, and anyone else curious about nearly a century of history should have 100,000 pages of Tennessee newspapers at their fingertips. The University of Tennessee at Knoxville has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitize local newspapers from 1836 to 1922.... - CHE (6-18-10)
• Stimpson Prize for Feminist Scholarship awarded to Ellen Samuels: Professor Samuels's award-winning essay, "Examining Millie and Christine McKoy: Where Enslavement and Enfreakment Meet," is impressively interdisciplinary, combining historical analysis, visual culture studies, feminist theory, and critical race theory to explore representations of Millie and Christine McKoy, African American conjoined twins born into slavery in North Carolina in 1851. - Chicago Journals (6-13-10)

SPOTTED:

• West Point gathering examines endings of US wars: American wars usually begin with a bang, yet it's the endings that usually have long-lasting influences, a gathering of prominent military historians told West Point instructors who are training the next generation of Army officers.... - AP (6-21-10)

ANNOUNCEMENTS & EVENTS CALENDAR:

• September 17-18, 2010 at Notre Dame University: Conference aims to bring medieval, early modern and Latin American historians together: An interdisciplinary conference to be held at the University of Notre Dame this fall is making a final call for papers to explore the issue surrounding similarities between late-medieval Iberia and its colonies in the New World. "From Iberian Kingdoms to Atlantic Empires: Spain, Portugal, and the New World, 1250-1700" is being hosted by the university's Nanovic Institute for European Studies and will take place on September 17-18, 2010. Medieval News, 4-29-10
• Jeff Shesol to give Jackson Lecture at the Chautauqua Institution: Historian, presidential speechwriter and author Jeff Shesol will deliver Chautauqua Institution's sixth annual Robert H. Jackson Lecture on the Supreme Court of the United States. Jeff Shesol will give the Jackson Lecture on Wednesday, August 18, 2010, at 4:00 p.m. in Chautauqua’s Hall of Philosophy.... - John Q. Barrett at the Jackson List (6-14-10)
• Thousands of Studs Terkel interviews going online: The Library of Congress will digitize the Studs Terkel Oral History Archive, according to the agreement, while the museum will retain ownership of the roughly 5,500 interviews in the archive and the copyrights to the content. Project officials expect digitizing the collection to take more than two years.... - NYT, 5-13-10
• Digital Southern Historical Collection: The 41,626 scans reproduce diaries, letters, business records, and photographs that provide a window into the lives of Americans in the South from the 18th through mid-20th centuries.

ON TV:

• C-SPAN2: BOOK TV Weekend Schedule
• PBS American Experience: Mondays at 9pm
• History Channel: Weekly Schedule

BEST SELLERS (NYT):

• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - June 27, 2010
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - July 4, 2010

BOOKS COMING SOON:

• Ruth Harris: Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (REV), (Hardcover), June 22, 2010
• James Mauro: Twilight at the World of Tomorrow: Genius, Madness, Murder, and the 1939 World's Fair on the Brink of War, (Hardcover), June 22, 2010.
• William Marvel: The Great Task Remaining: The Third Year of Lincoln's War, (Hardcover), June 22, 2010
• Suzann Ledbetter: Shady Ladies: Nineteen Surprising and Rebellious American Women, (Hardcover), June 28, 2010.
• Julie Flavell: When London Was Capital of America, (Hardcover), June 29, 2010
• Donald P. Ryan: Beneath the Sands of Egypt: Adventures of an Unconventional Archaeologist, (Hardcover), June 29, 2010
• Jane Brox: Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, (Hardcover), July 8, 2010.
• Rudy Tomedi: General Matthew Ridgway, (Hardcover), July 30, 2010.
• Richard Toye: Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made, (Hardcover), August 3, 2010.
• Alexander Hamilton: The Federalist Papers, (Hardcover), August 16, 2010
• Holger Hoock: Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750-1850, (Hardcover), September 1, 2010
• Anna Whitelock: Mary Tudor: Princess, Bastard, Queen, (Hardcover), September 7, 2010
• James L. Swanson: Bloody Crimes: The Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln's Corpse, (Hardcover), September 28, 2010
• Timothy Snyder: The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke (First Trade Paper Edition), (Paperback), September 28, 2010
• Ron Chernow: Washington: A Life, (Hardcover), October 5, 2010
• George William Van Cleve: A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic, (Hardcover), October 1, 2010.
• John Keegan: The American Civil War: A Military History, (Paperback), October 5, 2010
• Bill Bryson: At Home: A Short History of Private Life, (Hardcover), October 5, 2010
• Robert M. Poole: On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery, (Paperback), October 26, 2010
• Robert Leckie: Challenge for the Pacific: Guadalcanal: The Turning Point of the War, (Paperback), October 26, 2010
• Manning Marable: Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, (Hardcover), November 9, 2010
• Elizabeth White: The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia: The Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1917-39, (Hardcover), November 10, 2010
• Elizabeth White: The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia: The Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1917-39, (Hardcover), November 10, 2010
• G. J. Barker-Benfield: Abigail and John Adams: The Americanization of Sensibility, (Hardcover), November 15, 2010
• Edmund Morris: Colonel Roosevelt, (Hardcover), November 23, 2010
• Michael Goldfarb: Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance, (Paperback), November 23, 2010

DEPARTED:

• Retired Vanderbilt professor, Paul Hardacre, passes away: Paul Hoswell Hardacre, a retired Vanderbilt University professor noted for his expertise on the Stuart period of English history, died on April 10 in Pasadena, Calif., at the age of 94. The professor of history, emeritus, taught at Vanderbilt for 34 years... - InsideVandy.com (6-18-10)
• Angela Gugliotta, Environmental Historian and Lecturer at the University of Chicago, 1963-2010: Angela Gugliotta, a beloved teacher of environmental history whose research challenged the categorical distinction between natural and social knowledge, died June 1 after a ten-year battle with breast cancer. She was 47... - University of Chicago (6-9-10)
• Bruce Fraser, historian of Connecticut, dies at 63: Mr. Fraser, 63, executive director of the Connecticut Humanities Council since 1982, died Sunday after battling cancer for nearly a year. A compact, athletic, intense man with a Swiftian wit and Yankee work ethic, Mr. Fraser was a gifted historian as well as a skilled advocate, organizer and fundraiser. He built the humanities council into one of the largest and most effective such agencies in the country, and then used it, in the words of Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation Executive Director Helen Higgins, "to transform Connecticut's once sleepy heritage community into a vibrant industry."... - Hartford Courant (6-16-10)

POLITICAL HIGHLIGHTS:

This Week's Political Highlights

• Pelosi Announces Retirement of House Historian, Search Committee: Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced today that Dr. Robert V. Remini, the House Historian, has chosen to retire from the post on August 31. Dr. Remini has served as Historian for the past five years, having reestablished the office in 2005.
  "Dr. Remini has been a tremendous asset to the House of Representatives," Speaker Pelosi said. "It has been an honor to have so distinguished an historian serving the House for the past five years. He has worked diligently to initiate the House Fellows Program and an oral history program for current and former Members. On behalf of my colleagues, I want to thank Dr. Remini for his service and wish him the best in his future endeavors.".... - PRNewswire-USNewswire, 6-11-10

IN FOCUS:

• Barbara Weinstein, Sean Wilentz, David Greenberg, Tony Michels: Historians for Kagan - New Yorker, 6-7-10
• Controversy continues to dog Lincoln scholar Frank J. Williams - HNN Staff (6-7-10)
• Flotilla raid could be fatal blow to Turkey-Israel friendship, says Israeli historian: "At the moment, the street and the government seem to be united in their antipathy for Israel," said Ofra Bengio, a professor of history at Tel Aviv University and author of The Turkish-Israeli Relationship: Changing Ties of Middle Eastern Outsiders.... "It was our misfortune to play into the hands of militants,” Prof. Bengio said. "There’s no doubt that Erdogan is riding high in the eyes of the public," Prof. Bengio said. "If there's going to be reconciliation between our countries, it will have to take place behind the scenes. The street is just too volatile."... Globe and Mail (6-3-10)

THIS WEEK IN HISTORY:

On This Day in History....

This Week in History....

HISTORY NEWS:

• Scholar asks if the Crusaders had a Muslim ally in the First Crusade: A new article is examining the relationship between Islamic states and the Crusader army during the First Crusade (1096-99) and suggests that the Fatimid kingdom of Egypt did attempt to ally with the Crusaders. The article, "Fatimids, Crusaders and the Fall of Islamic Jerusalem: Foes or Allies?" was written by Maher Y. Abu-Munshar in the latest issue of Al-Masaq: Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean.... - Medieval News (6-3-10)
• Leading Polish historian, killed in Katyn crash, now the victim of credit card theft: The Russian Federal Investigation Committee of the prosecutor's office said four conscripts had been detained for allegedly using the credit card of Andrzej Przewoznik, a leading historian who was killed in the accident.... - Telegraph (UK) (6-8-10)
• Raza studies author says "occupied" does not mean "to take over" in Arizona embroglio: "Occupied America." It's the title of a textbook at the center of a new Arizona law that targets ethnic studies programs in public schools. That textbook is used by TUSD in an ethic studies class. So, what exactly does "occupied" mean? Rudy Acuòa, Ph.D., is the book's author. He says the word "occupied" means "to have a history" which he says his book teaches. Acuna says "occupied" does not mean "to take over." Hence, the reason he says he titled his book "Occupied America" and not "Occupied Mexico."... - KGUN 9 (AZ) (6-5-10)
• Arizona Immigration Law No Different from the Past, Says Texas Tech Historian: Miguel Levario, an assistant professor of history, says that even since the days of the Gold Rush when Mexican- American residents of California were required to carry ID cards, the Arizona law is just the latest in a series of laws and events targeted specifically at Mexican-Americans.... - Texas Tech Today (6-4-10)
• Historian tapped as running mate for GOP governor candidate in South Dakota: South Dakota gubernatorial candidate Gordon Howie announced today that he has asked former Sioux Falls mayoral candidate and alderman Kermit Staggers to be his running mate in his bid for governor of South Dakota on the Republican ticket. Staggers has served in the South Dakota legislature as well as the Sioux Falls city council. He has a PhD in American History and is a professor of History and Political Science at the University of Sioux Falls.... - Dakota Voice (6-2-10)
• Rightwing historian Niall Ferguson given school curriculum role: Niall Ferguson, the British historian most closely associated with a rightwing, Eurocentric vision of western ascendancy, is to work with the Conservatives to overhaul history in schools.... - Guardian (UK) (5-30-10)

OP-EDs:

• Thomas J. Sugrue: The myth of post-racial America: Was the election of Barack Obama the turning point in America’s racial development? Is the United States now set on a path to realize all its hopes and dreams of the civil rights era and narrow the divisions between the races? Thomas J. Sugrue, a professor of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, isn’t so sure. In "Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race," Sugrue explores the question of race in Obama's America and finds that much progress is still needed before the nation can truly call itself post-racial.... - WaPo, 6-10-10
• Laurie Penny: Niall Ferguson and Michael Gove: The Tories want our children to be proud of Britain's imperial past. When right-wing colonial historian Niall Ferguson told the Hay Festival last weekend that he would like to revise the school history curriculum to include "the rise of western domination of the world" as the "big story" of the last 500 years, Education Secretary Michael Gove leapt to his feet to praise Ferguson's "exciting" ideas - and offer him the job. Ferguson is a poster-boy for big stories about big empire, his books and broadcasting weaving Boys' Own-style tales about the British charging into the jungle and jolly well sorting out the natives.... - Laurie Penny at The New Statesman (6-1-10)
• Jay Driskell: Petitioning the AHA to Use INMEX to Avoid Labor Disputes - Jay Driskell in an Open Letter (5-31-10)

REVIEWS & FIRST CHAPTERS:

• Nathaniel Philbrick, S. C. Gwynne: Men on Horseback Nathaniel Philbrick: THE LAST STAND Custer, Sitting Bull and the Battle of the Little Bighorn Excerpt S. C. Gwynne: EMPIRE OF THE SUMMER MOON Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History Exerpt In "The Last Stand," Nathaniel Philbrick, the author of the popular histories "Mayflower" and "In the Heart of the Sea," offers an account of the Battle of the Little Bighorn that gives appropriate space to Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Maj. Marcus Reno and others who fought that day. But really, Custer steals the show.
  If Custer illustrates how the spotlight of history sometimes shines on the wrong actor, Quanah Parker exemplifies the more deserving who get left in the shadows. One hopes a better fate awaits “Empire of the Summer Moon,” S. C. Gwynne’s transcendent history of Parker and the Comanche nation he led in the mid- to late 1800s... The deeper, richer story that unfolds in "Empire of the Summer Moon" is nothing short of a revelation. Gwynne, a former editor at Time and Texas Monthly, doesn’t merely retell the story of Parker’s life. He pulls his readers through an American frontier roiling with extreme violence, political intrigue, bravery, anguish, corruption, love, knives, rifles and arrows. Lots and lots of arrows. This book will leave dust and blood on your jeans.... - NYT, 6-13-10
• DAVID OSHINSKY: The View From Inside Review of Wilbert Rideau IN THE PLACE OF JUSTICE A Story of Punishment and Deliverance Few people know this better than Wilbert Rideau. Convicted of the murder of a white bank teller in 1961, Rideau, who is black, spent 44 years in prison, most of them at Angola, before being released. His painfully candid memoir, "In the Place of Justice," is indeed, as its subtitle promises, “a story of punishment and deliverance,” told by a high school dropout who escaped Angola’s electric chair to become an award-winning prison journalist. As such, Rideau is the rarest of American commodities — a man who exited a penitentiary in better shape than when he arrived.... - 6-13-10 Excerpt
• Justin Vaïsse: Leave No War Behind NEOCONSERVATISM The Biography of a Movement This definitional question, and in particular neoconservatism’s extraordinary transformation, is the principal subject of "Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement," by Justin Vaïsse, a French expert on American foreign policy who is currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. It is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the contours of our recent political past. Vaïsse is a historian of ideas. "Neoconservatism" demonstrates, among other things, that ideas really do make a difference in our lives.... - NYT, 6-13-10
• HISTORY: 'Last Call,' a history of Prohibition, by Daniel Okrent: LAST CALL The Rise and Fall of Prohibition As Daniel Okrent demonstrates in "Last Call," his witty and exhaustive new history of Prohibition, the so-called Noble Experiment created nothing like a virtuous teetotaler's paradise. The 18th Amendment, in fact, didn't so much end the country's drinking culture as merely change its ethos, replacing the male-dominated saloon with the sexually integrated speakeasy and turning a public pastime into a surreptitious exercise in cynicism and hypocrisy. "The drys had their law," as Okrent observes, "and the wets would have their liquor." And the bootleggers would have their obscene and blood-soaked profits, blissfully free of state and federal taxes.... - WaPo, 6-11-10
• POLITICS Book review: 'The Upper House' by Terence Samuel: THE UPPER HOUSE A Journey Behind the Closed Doors of the U.S. Senate Terence Samuel's "The Upper House" explores the inner workings of the U.S. Senate through the lives of several current senators, including Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, Tennessee Republican Bob Corker and Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar. He describes the near impossibility senators face in fulfilling all the promises made during a campaign and explains why voters get frustrated when an election does not produce the immediate change for which they worked, voted and hoped. WaPo, 6-11-10
• BIOGRAPHY Book review: Ronald M. Peters, Jr., and Cindy Simon Rosenthal: 'Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the New American Politics,' reviewed by Norm Ornstein: ...We can expect a wave of books about Pelosi; the first to emerge since her health reform triumph is not by journalists, either of the tell-all or political-beat variety, but by two political scientists from the University of Oklahoma. Both Ronald Peters and Cindy Rosenthal are experts on congressional leadership and history; their book is thus more than a biography of Pelosi, and more than an account of her tenure so far as speaker. Peters and Rosenthal try also to put Pelosi into the broader context of contemporary American politics and Congress.... - WaPo, 6-11-10
• The 1970s get a second look by historians: The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective Above all else, the 1970s marked the moment when world leaders and ordinary citizens alike woke up with a jolt to their common status as inhabitants of an interconnected world -- and understood, in the process, that this didn't necessarily make the planet a more predictable place. "This is the decade when things start to unravel," says Harvard historian Charles Maier, one of the editors of the new book The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective. In his essay in the book, historian Daniel Sargent offers a citation from 1975: "Old international patterns are crumbling ... The world has become interdependent in economics, in communications, and in human aspirations." The writer was Henry Kissinger... - Foreign Policy (6-1-10)
• Dan Epstein: How Green Was Their AstroTurf: BIG HAIR AND PLASTIC GRASS A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging '70s Incomprehensibly, if you read Dan Epstein’s "Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging '70s," that singular event took place almost three years later, at the 1971 All-Star Game. He gets Tiger Stadium right, but nothing else....
  Baseball fans come factory-equipped with high expectations. We set ourselves up to be disappointed. But usually that disappointment is delivered by $200 million cleanup hitters, overweight starters or Billy Beane. Not writers entrusted to feed our baseball-history tapeworm. In a book that could and should have been a valuable compendium of an under­documented decade, the Feliciano gaffe appears on Page 38. When an author pulls that big a rock that early, you start reading differently. We don’t want to be copy editors. We’d rather not keep score.... - NYT, 6-6-10
• Nathaniel Philbrick breathes new life into the hoary tale of Custer's Last Stand: THE LAST STAND Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn Nathaniel Philbrick's new book, "The Last Stand," is popular history, and it's not fair to expect him to bring new evidence to light. To be sure, there's the more or less obligatory reference to a new source -- an unpublished account by the daughter of one of Custer's soldiers, quoting from her father's private papers -- but Philbrick wisely doesn't try to convince the reader that this is important material; it's a touch here and there of marginalia. The only fair questions are whether his account is well researched, his judgments reasonable and his writing engaging. The answers are yes, yes and yes. Moreover, the book is a model of organization, with lots of maps and photographs and extensive endnotes properly delineating Philbrick's sources much more clearly than is usual in this kind of work.... - WaPo, 6-4-10
• Gary B. Nash's history of "The Liberty Bell": It is an unlikely central character for a book: A silent, 250-year-old bell. Yet in "The Liberty Bell," a biography of our nation's "nearly sacred totem," Gary B. Nash provides a stirring historical account of the icon that is America's "Rosetta Stone or . . . Holy Grail.".... - WaPo, 6-6-10
• Jack Rakove: Looking for a 'New' Narrative of Founding Fathers: Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America Into this hot fug comes Jack Rakove's new book, "Revolutionaries," which bears the subtitle "A New History of the Invention of America." Mr. Rakove is a professor of history, American studies and political science at Stanford University. He was also the winner, in 1997, of a Pulitzer Prize for his book "Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution." He sounds like an interesting man, the kind who sometimes gets his boots muddy. He has been an expert witness in Indian land claims litigation.... - NYT, 5-30-10

FEATURES:

• Ruth Harris: Letters reveal key role played by 'passionate' wife in securing justice for Alfred Dreyfus: Fresh light has been thrown on the Dreyfus Affair, the cause célèbre that divided France and shook the world in the late 19th century, by the discovery of thousands of unpublished letters. Following the exile of Captain Alfred Dreyfus after his wrongful conviction for spying for Germany against France, his wife, Lucie, was portrayed as a bourgeois heroine, the epitome of the dutiful Victorian spouse. But, according to her letters, she was a passionate woman whose undying love for her husband rescued him from the brink of suicide... - Guardian (UK) (6-6-10)
• Conservative class on Founding Fathers' answers to current woes gains popularity: Earl Taylor has spent 31 years teaching that "the Founding Fathers have answers to nearly every problem we have in America today." Only in recent months has he found so many eager students. Two years ago, Taylor, who is president of the National Center for Constitutional Studies, made about 35 trips to speak to small church groups and political gatherings. This year, he has received so many requests that he enlisted 15 volunteer instructors, who are on pace to hold more than 180 sessions reaching thousands of people. "We're trying to flood the nation . . . and it's happening," said Taylor, 63, a charter school principal.... - WaPo (6-7-10)
• Shaping Gotham's Past with Richard Rabinowitz: Elegantly dressed in a three-piece suit, gray hair framing his square-rimmed glasses, Richard Rabinowitz once met me on a blustery spring afternoon outside the New-York Historical Society, the 206-year-old institution where he has helped shape the way that hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers see their city's past. Best known as curator of Slavery in New York, an acclaimed NYHS exhibit that exposed the ties between enslaved African labor and New York City's wealth, the 65-year-old has spent more than four decades creating history exhibits for general audiences in the United States and abroad.... - The Atlantic (6-1-10)

QUOTES:

• American people cynical and uninvolved, says historian: "This spill, it's another blow to the body politic," says John Baick, professor of history at Western New England College in Springfield, Mass. It is, he says, another excuse to be cynical and uninvolved — "exactly the opposite of what has always been the American zeitgeist, a sense that we, collectively and through our institutions, can be something greater than ourselves."... "If people don't believe, if people don't give, if people don't trust, they will pick the politicians who are the loudest rather than the most sincere," said Baick, the history professor. "They will pick the rabble rouser rather than the technocrat who gets things done."... - AP (6-7-10)
• Randolph Roth says that Juárez murder rate like that of civil war: "Whenever you have a real struggle for power -- civil wars, revolutions -- organized gangs can get very, very bad like you have in Juárez today," Roth said. "It's very rare to see the rates like this in a developed country. It's very sad." Roth is a professor of history and sociology at Ohio State University who created a historical database examining U.S. homicide rates from different time periods and places. He is author of the book "American Homicide."... - El Paso Times (6-7-10)
• Tom Asbridge: Christians and Muslims are distorting crusades, says historian: "This is a manipulation of history, not a reality. I believe there is no division linking the medieval past and the conflict of the crusades with the modern world," he said. "[It's a] misunderstanding which goes back to the 19th century and western triumphalism in emerging colonialism, and the tendency of western historians to start to glorify the crusades as a proto-colonial enterprise, an [obsession] with Richard the Lionheart and a burgeoning interest in [Muslim leader] Saladin as almost the noble savage."... - Guardian (UK) (6-2-10)

INTERVIEWS:

• 5 Questions for Patrick J. Charles on Gun Control and the Second Amendment: Gun control and the Second Amendment are highly emotional and controversial issues in the United States. As a potentially landmark ruling in McDonald v. City of Chicago is shortly to be announced by the Supreme Court before its current term ends in June, Patrick J. Charles, author of The Second Amendment: The Intent and Its Interpretation by the States and the Supreme Court (McFarland, 2009) and Britannica’s new entries on both subjects, has kindly agreed to answer the following questions posed by Britannica executive editor Michael Levy.... - Britannica Blog (6-1-10)

AWARDS &APPOINTMENTS:

• John van Engen wins Grundler Prize: Western Michigan University has awarded the prestigious Grundler Prize to a University of Notre Dame scholar for his book, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages.... - Medieval News (6-8-10)
• Historians among 2010 ACLS Fellows: The American Council of Learned Societies recently announced the winners of its 2010 fellowship competition. Over $15 million was awarded to more than 380 scholars, including many historians. ACLS fellowships and grants are awarded to individual scholars for excellence in research in the humanities and related social sciences. The complete list of winners is available on the ACLS web site. Among the winners are the following historians.... - David Darlington at AHA Blog (6-8-10)
• Kiron K. Skinner International-Relations Professor to Advise on Bush Oral-History Project: Skinner has been chosen to serve on the advisory board for the George W. Bush Oral History Project, to be conducted by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. The center has done similar projects on each president since Jimmy Carter.... - CHE (5-30-10)

SPOTTED:

• Historian Spence Delivers 2010 NEH Jefferson Lecture: On May 20, Jonathan Spence, one of the world's leading experts on Chinese history and culture, delivered the 2010 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. The annual lecture, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), is the most prestigious honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities. To read the lecture, click here. In the lecture, "When Minds Met: China and the West in the Seventeenth Century," Spence explored the many ways that one of the first Chinese travelers to reach Europe shared his ideas with the Westerners he met.... - Lee White at the National Coalition for History (6-4-10)

ANNOUNCEMENTS & EVENTS CALENDAR:

• September 17-18, 2010 at Notre Dame University: Conference aims to bring medieval, early modern and Latin American historians together: An interdisciplinary conference to be held at the University of Notre Dame this fall is making a final call for papers to explore the issue surrounding similarities between late-medieval Iberia and its colonies in the New World. "From Iberian Kingdoms to Atlantic Empires: Spain, Portugal, and the New World, 1250-1700" is being hosted by the university's Nanovic Institute for European Studies and will take place on September 17-18, 2010. Medieval News, 4-29-10
• Thousands of Studs Terkel interviews going online: The Library of Congress will digitize the Studs Terkel Oral History Archive, according to the agreement, while the museum will retain ownership of the roughly 5,500 interviews in the archive and the copyrights to the content. Project officials expect digitizing the collection to take more than two years.... - NYT, 5-13-10
• Digital Southern Historical Collection: The 41,626 scans reproduce diaries, letters, business records, and photographs that provide a window into the lives of Americans in the South from the 18th through mid-20th centuries.

ON TV:

• C-SPAN2: BOOK TV Weekend Schedule
• PBS American Experience: Mondays at 9pm
• History Channel: Weekly Schedule

BEST SELLERS (NYT):

• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - June 20, 2010
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - June 13, 2010

BOOKS COMING SOON:

• John Mosier: Deathride: Hitler vs. Stalin - The Eastern Front, 1941-1945, (Hardcover), June 15, 2010
• Evan D. G. Fraser: Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, (Hardcover), June 15, 2010
• Ruth Harris: Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (REV), (Hardcover), June 22, 2010
• James Mauro: Twilight at the World of Tomorrow: Genius, Madness, Murder, and the 1939 World's Fair on the Brink of War, (Hardcover), June 22, 2010.
• William Marvel: The Great Task Remaining: The Third Year of Lincoln's War, (Hardcover), June 22, 2010
• Suzann Ledbetter: Shady Ladies: Nineteen Surprising and Rebellious American Women, (Hardcover), June 28, 2010.
• Julie Flavell: When London Was Capital of America, (Hardcover), June 29, 2010
• Donald P. Ryan: Beneath the Sands of Egypt: Adventures of an Unconventional Archaeologist, (Hardcover), June 29, 2010
• Jane Brox: Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, (Hardcover), July 8, 2010.
• Rudy Tomedi: General Matthew Ridgway, (Hardcover), July 30, 2010.
• Richard Toye: Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made, (Hardcover), August 3, 2010.
• Alexander Hamilton: The Federalist Papers, (Hardcover), August 16, 2010
• Holger Hoock: Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750-1850, (Hardcover), September 1, 2010
• Anna Whitelock: Mary Tudor: Princess, Bastard, Queen, (Hardcover), September 7, 2010
• James L. Swanson: Bloody Crimes: The Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln's Corpse, (Hardcover), September 28, 2010
• Timothy Snyder: The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke (First Trade Paper Edition), (Paperback), September 28, 2010
• Ron Chernow: Washington: A Life, (Hardcover), October 5, 2010
• George William Van Cleve: A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic, (Hardcover), October 1, 2010.
• John Keegan: The American Civil War: A Military History, (Paperback), October 5, 2010
• Bill Bryson: At Home: A Short History of Private Life, (Hardcover), October 5, 2010
• Robert M. Poole: On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery, (Paperback), October 26, 2010
• Robert Leckie: Challenge for the Pacific: Guadalcanal: The Turning Point of the War, (Paperback), October 26, 2010
• Manning Marable: Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, (Hardcover), November 9, 2010
• Elizabeth White: The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia: The Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1917-39, (Hardcover), November 10, 2010
• Elizabeth White: The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia: The Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1917-39, (Hardcover), November 10, 2010
• G. J. Barker-Benfield: Abigail and John Adams: The Americanization of Sensibility, (Hardcover), November 15, 2010
• Edmund Morris: Colonel Roosevelt, (Hardcover), November 23, 2010
• Michael Goldfarb: Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance, (Paperback), November 23, 2010

DEPARTED:

• David Valaik, emeritus professor at Canisius College, dies at 74: David Valaik, PhD, an emeritus professor of history at Canisius College, died on Friday, June 4. He was 74.... - Canisius College (6-8-10)
• Honored scholar Norman A. Graebner dies at 94: Norman A. Graebner, a former University of Virginia professor who was known for his love of teaching and esteemed for his knowledge on American diplomatic history, died on May 10 at the Colonnades in Charlottesville. He was 94... - Charlottesville Daily Progress (6-7-10)
• Lila Weinberg, Chicago historian and author, dies: Lila Weinberg, a Chicago historian, author, teacher and editor, has died. Weinberg, who died May 29 at the age of 91 from complications of cancer, collaborated with her late husband, Arthur, on six books on social history, including two on attorney Clarence Darrow. One of the books, "Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned," spent 19 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list in 1957. Arthur Weinberg died in 1989.... - Jewish Telegraphic Agency (6-1-10)

POLITICAL HIGHLIGHTS:

This Week's Political Highlights

IN FOCUS:

• Michael A. Bellesiles Contraversial New Book "1877: America's Year of Living Violently" - HNN
• Thomas Fleming "Channelling George Washington" Series - HNN
• Orlando Figes Contraversay: Who gives a Figes for Orlando? - Sydney Morning Herald, 5-18-10

THIS WEEK IN HISTORY:

On This Day in History....

This Week in History....

• Malcolm and Martin, closer than we ever thought: As the 85th birthday of Malcolm X is marked on Wednesday, history has freeze-framed him as the angry black separatist who saw whites as blue-eyed devils. Yet near the end of his life, Malcolm X was becoming more like King -- and King was becoming more like him. "In the last years of their lives, they were starting to move toward one another," says David Howard-Pitney, who recounted the Capitol Hill meeting in his book "Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and the Civil Rights Struggle of the 1950s and 1960s." "While Malcolm is moderating from his earlier position, King is becoming more militant," Pitney says.... - CNN, 5-19-10

HISTORY NEWS:

• Controversy over medieval conference location in Arizona: The site of next year's annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America is in doubt after scholars raised objections that it is being held in Arizona, the US state which recently passed controversial legislation against illegal immigration. As several scholars have made calls for the conference to be boycotted, officials with the academy have confirmed that they are examining several options, including moving the meeting out-of-state... - Medieval News, 5-24-10
• Why Arizona targeted ethnic studies: Earlier this month Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law a bill that had been pushed by Tom Horne, Arizona's longtime secretary of education,who took a disliking to the program several years ago. The bill prohibits any class in the state from promoting either the overthrow of the U.S. government or resentment toward a race or class of people, and that advocates ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals, and -- here’s the big one -- that are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group. The Tucson program offers specialized courses in African-American, Mexican-American and Native-American studies that focus on history and literature and includes information about the influence of a particular ethnic group... - WaPo, 5-25-10
• Historian Stuart Macintyre slams Australian school course: Professor Macintyre told The Australian the consultation process set up by the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority had become derailed by "capricious" decisions made to change the course without reference to the expert advisory groups or the writers.... - The Australian (5-25-10)
• Company, Harvard prof work on Web-linked textbook, WWII game: "Today's students want to be engaged, and those who play strategy games know more about history than those who just read today's textbooks," said Ferguson. "The interactive approach to learning history is going to be a game-changer."... - Boston Herald, 5-24-10
• More conservative textbook curriculum OK'd: In a landmark move that will shape the future education of millions of Texas schoolchildren, the State Board of Education on Friday approved new curriculum standards for U.S. history and other social studies courses that reflect a more conservative tone than in the past. Split along party lines, the board delivered a pair of 9-5 votes to adopt the new standards, which will dictate what is taught in all Texas schools and provide the basis for future textbooks and student achievement tests over the next decade.... - The Dallas Morning News, 5-22-10
• Texas State Board of Education Approves Controversial Social Studies Curriculum Changes: On Friday, the members of the Texas State Board of Education voted 9-5 on social studies curriculum standards for Texas Public Schools. Proposed revisions to textbooks will largely eliminate the civil rights movement from the curriculum. Former U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige and NAACP President and CEO Ben Jealous were among those who spoke before the board earlier in the week. Paige, who served as Education Secretary during President George W. Bush’s first term, implored the board members to take more time to consider the new standards, saying they will diminish the importance of civil rights and slavery.... - Diverse Issues in Higher Education, 5-24-10
• AHA Calls on the Texas State Board of Education to Reconsider TEKS Social Studies Amendments - AHA Press Release, 5-18-10
• New Report Shows Little Growth in Salaries for History Faculty: Historians in academia saw little, if any improvement in their wages over the past academic year, as average salaries for regular full-time faculty at most ranks grew by less than 1 percent according to a new study from the College and University Personnel Association for Human Resources (CUPA–HR). This represents the smallest average increase in salaries for historians in 15 years.... - Robert Townsend in Perspectives, 4-22-10
• Historian helps to save Lake Ontario steamship: An iconic photo taken by historian Mike Filey shows three canoeists paddling out of a partly submerged, abandoned Toronto ferry.... In this case instead of being scrapped, the century-old paddlewheeler was raised and refitted after Filey and his wife, Yarmila, launched a bid to save the vessel after seeing it “literally rotting” in a Toronto island lagoon.... - Toronto Sun, 5-17-10

OP-EDs:

• Joe Mozingo: An old diary throws him a curve: He could grasp having a black ancestor way back in the 1600s. But in the 1800s? A slave? It had to be a mistake. What would his family think?... - LAT, 5-22-10

REVIEWS & FIRST CHAPTERS:

• DAVID OSHINSKY on Daniel Okrent: Temperance to Excess: LAST CALL The Rise and Fall of Prohibition "Last Call," by Daniel Okrent, provides the sobering answers. Okrent, the author of four previous books and the first public editor of The New York Times, views Prohibition as one skirmish in a larger war waged by small- town white Protestants who felt besieged by the forces of change then sweeping their nation — a theory first proposed by the historian Richard Hofstadter more than five decades ago. Though much has been written about Prohibition since then, Okrent offers a remarkably original account, showing how its proponents combined the nativist fears of many Americans with legitimate concerns about the evils of alcohol to mold a movement powerful enough to amend the United States Constitution.... - NYT, 5-23-10
• Nick Bunker: Founding Entrepreneurs: MAKING HASTE FROM BABYLON The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History Maybe the most important point that Bunker highlights concerns the interplay between the Pilgrims’ faith and their education, political standing and financial position.... - NYT, 5-23-10 - Excerpt
• Hampton Sides: Death of a Dream: HELLHOUND ON HIS TRAIL The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin There’s still a line between narrative history and entertainment, in other words, and Hampton Sides flirts with it in his new book about James Earl Ray and Martin Luther King, "Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His ­Assassin." If that sounds like a graphic novel, well, you're getting the drift. Sides, whose books include "Ghost Soldiers," a World War II drama, and "Blood and Thunder," on the conquest of the American West, is not overly interested in new research, thorough­going analysis or traditional bio­graphy. He wants to deliver a heart-pounding nonfiction thriller. This must be the first book on King that owes less to Taylor Branch than Robert Ludlum.... - NYT, 5-16-10 - Excerpt
• Jonathan Alter: Penetrating the Process of Obama’s Decisions: THE PROMISE President Obama, Year One Alter’s book "The Promise" actually does give us a new perspective on the 44th president by providing a detailed look at his decision-making process on issues like health care and the Afghanistan war, and a keen sense of what it’s like to work in his White House, day by day.
  It's an effective and often revealing approach reminiscent of Mr. Alter's 2006 book, "The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope" (a book that Mr. Obama reportedly read before taking office), and Richard Reeves's 1993 book, "President Kennedy: Profile of Power," though obviously without the kind of retrospective wisdom possible decades after the completion of those presidents' tenures.... - NYT, 5-13-10
• Jonathan Alter: Interim Report: THE PROMISE President Obama, Year One One of the earliest off the mark is Jonathan Alter.... "The Promise" offers an excellent opportunity to appraise Obama's initial efforts. Drawing on interviews with over 200 people, including the president and his top aides, Alter examines everything from the economic bailouts to the military surge in Afghanistan.
  Throughout, he seeks to avoid what he refers to as the "polemics of punditry." This endows his narrative with a lapidary tone that is mercifully free of the breathless sensationalism of recent campaign books, but it also results, at times, in a somewhat cloistered quality... - NYT, 5-30-10
• David Farber: The Rise of Conservatism, in Historical Scholarship: Now, among the latest entrants to the growing list of books on the right comes David Farber's The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism: A Short History, new from Princeton University Press.... - CHE, 5-26-10
• The birth control pill's legacy at 50: Talking with Elaine Tyler May: As May writes in her new book, "America + the Pill," that is perhaps the one expectation that the Pill has actually fulfilled 50 years later. It was not the miracle drug that solved the population explosion and world poverty; nor did it help defeat communism, as many of its advocates hoped. Its primary legacy today is that it gives the women lucky enough to get it the power to control the creation of life in their bodies -- and the chance to reach for their dreams. "The Pill was hugely important in allowing women to control their fertility and their lives," said May, a professor of history and American studies at the University of Minnesota.... - Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 5-24-10
• David J. Garrow: Book review: 'Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin,' by Hampton Sides: Sides, a Memphis native, divides his book into four strands. The first one traces Ray's activities following his April 1967 escape from a Missouri prison through the assassination a year later and his flight first to Canada and then to Europe. A second strand follows King's road to Memphis, and a third paints the city's racial divisions. The final strand tracks the FBI's intense hostility toward King and covers its dogged investigation, including forensic success in identifying Ray and the pursuit of the assassin as he makes a bumbling effort to reach white-ruled Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).... - WaPo, 5-14-10
• Selina Hastings's 'The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham,' reviewed by Michael Dirda: During the second half of his life, William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was the most famous writer in the world. Not only did readers love his sardonic tales of sexual passion and dark secrets, of desperation and sudden violence, but so did Hollywood: More of his stories, novels and plays have been filmed than those of any other author. Just one short story, "Rain" -- about the prostitute Sadie Thompson and the preacher obsessed with saving her -- has provided star turns for Tallulah Bankhead, Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford and Rita Hayworth, among others. As this excellent biography by Selina Hastings makes clear, Somerset Maugham lived a life of quite astonishing richness and variety.... - WaPo, 5-19-10
• In the beginning with Obama Jonathan Alter's report just the first chapter of presidential work in progress: Which brings us to where we are. President Obama’s first year in office is done. We are hearing what many think about that. It is not a bad time to wonder what Alter thinks of it. And he obliges us with The Promise (Simon & Schuster, $28). Journalism has been called "literature in a hurry." Alter's book is history in a hurry, as he freely admits, but is a good first step for putting events in order and figuring things out.... - Chicago Sun-Times, 5-16-10

FEATURES:

• Oscar Martinez: University of Arizona historians asks why Mexico is poorer than the U.S.: Martinez, 67, is a regents professor of history at the University of Arizona, Tucson. He’s finishing his latest book, titled “Why Mexico is Poorer than the United States.” It makes the case that there is a logical, empirically measurable set of answers. "It is greatly exaggerated that Mexico is a rich country with regard to raw materials and resources. The reality is that Mexico is one of the poorest countries in terms of land,” he said. “The difference is the United States has the best space on the planet."... - El Paso Inc., 5-25-10
• Will Bagley: My brother, the historian by Pat Bagley: This week one of Utah and the West's most eminent historians turns 60. He has won dozens of awards, been awarded prestigious fellowships and lectured as far afield as Italy. He even appeared with Russell Crowe in the remake of the Western classic, "3:10 to Yuma." (OK, he's in the companion DVD, elucidating on the history of Old West outlawry.) Will Bagley also happens to be my brother. For years he wrote a column in this space called "History Matters." It was a good label. On one level it alludes to sifting evidence for the salient fact; on another it means that history is not bunk. To Will, history is not dead. I have seen him wade into a discussion and passionately defend the honor and reputation of someone he felt was being slighted. That the person in question is dead and long past caring is beside the point. His best-known work to date, Blood of the Prophets , is a gripping narrative of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the largest white-on-white murder in north America. As it deals with Mormons, Gentiles, a U.S. Army marching on Utah and the LDS Church hierarchy, it wasn't a task for a shrinking violet.... - The Salt Lake Tribune, 5-21-10
• From Tory to Turkey: Maverick historian Norman Stone storms back with partisan epic of Cold War world: It isn't every day that one interviews a figure described on an official British Council website as "notorious". That badge, which this fearsome foe of drippy-liberal state culture will wear with pride, comes inadvertently via Robert Harris. In his novel Archangel, Harris created the "dissolute historian" (© the British Council and our taxes) Fluke Kelso: an "engaging, wilful, impassioned and irreverent" maverick on the trail of Stalin's secret papers.... - Independent (UK), 5-14-10

QUOTES:

• Robert Dallek: The character issue is "always out there": As a general matter, the character issue never seems to go away. "It's always out there," says historian Robert Dallek... - U.S. News & World Report, 5-27-10
• MN Historian Calls Ft. Snelling 'Site Of Genocide': Waziyatawin, of Granite Falls, holds a doctorate in history from Cornell. She says Fort Snelling needs an extreme makeover. She wants it torn down. "It feels like a constant assault on our Dakota humanity," said Waziyatawin. "I don't want the Fort sitting on that site of genocide," she said. "I don't want the American flag flying high. I don't want soldiers reenacting marching out to that site and firing cannons every day."... - WCCO (MN), 5-27-10
• Stalin projected Moscow University's Museum of Earth Sciences as church, says historian: "On Stalin's idea, this hall was built as a kind of chapel, a kind of church, where only elite is allowed," historian Olga Zinovyeva told TV Center.... - Interfax (RU), 5-19-10
• Nancy F. Koehn: Harvard Business School historian compares Bono to Abraham Lincoln: Nancy F. Koehn, a historian, at the Harvard Business School, and author, celebrated U2's Bono's 50th birthday by celebrating the Irish musician and campaigner for his great skills as a leader. She said "Bono, like Abraham Lincoln 150 years ago, has not let himself become isolated in an elite atmosphere. He has used his touring and travels as classrooms to help him understand the hopes, dreams and tribulations of his fellow citizens, whom he often calls his brothers and sisters. And he has used this knowledge to light his way, his music and his leadership."... - Irish Central, 5-14-10
• Mark Mancall on the idea of public space in a democracy: However the idea of public space, professor of history, emeritus, Stanford university, California, Mark Mancall said, has never been fully achieved anywhere, according to historians. "Gender, ethnic differences, class groupings, all participated in defining who could enter public space," said the professor, who is the director of the royal education council, Thimphu, during the first of a series of discussions on media and democracy that the Bhutan centre for media and democracy organised yesterday. Kuensel Newspaper, 5-14-10
• USSR planned nuclear attack on China in 1969 , claims Chinese historian: Liu Chenshan, the author of a series of articles that chronicle the five times China has faced a nuclear threat since 1949, wrote that the most serious threat came in 1969 at the height of a bitter border dispute between Moscow and Beijing that left more than one thousand people dead on both sides. He said Soviet diplomats warned Washington of Moscow's plans "to wipe out the Chinese threat and get rid of this modern adventurer," with a nuclear strike, asking the US to remain neutral.... - Telegraph (UK), 5-13-10

INTERVIEWS:

• Jamie Glazov interviews Olga Velikanova: Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Olga Velikanova, an Assistant Professor of Russian History at the University of North Texas. She was among the first scholars to work with declassified Communist Party and secret police archives. Her research about everyday Stalinism, the cult of Lenin and Russian popular opinion has been broadcast by the BBC, Finnish and Russian radio and TV, as well as the History Channel in Canada. She is the author of Making of an Idol: On Uses of Lenin, The Public Perception of the Cult of Lenin Based on the Archival Materials and The Myth of the Besieged Fortress: Soviet Mass Perception in the 1920s-1930s. She is a recipient of many awards from different international research foundations.... - FrontPageMag, 5-24-10

AWARDS &APPOINTMENTS:

• The Emerson Prize 2010 Winners: The Emerson Prize is awarded annually to students published in The Concord Review during the previous year who have shown outstanding academic promise in history at the high school level. Since 1995, 74 students have won the Emerson Prize. The five laureates this year were from Ohio, New York, New York, Washington, DC, and Wisconsin. Past laureates have come from Czechoslovakia, Canada, Louisiana, Florida, California, Tennessee, Vermont, Maryland, New Zealand, Texas, Russia, Washington State, Tennessee, Connecticut, Singapore, New Hampshire, Illinois, Japan, and New York.
  2010 Jane Abbottsmith, of Summit Country Day School, in Cincinnati, Ohio (now at Princeton).
  2010 Colin Rhys Hill, of Atlanta International School in Atlanta, Georgia, (now at Christ Church College, Oxford). 2010 Amalia Skilton, of Tempe Preparatory Academy in Tempe, Arizona, (now at Yale).
  2010 Alexander Zou, of Monte Vista High School in Danville, California, (now at Pomona).
  2010 Liang En Wee, of the Hwa Chang Institution in Singapore, (now at the National University of Singapore). - The Concord Review
• Women behind the rise of the house of Orange-Nassau: WHEN the house of Orange-Nassau finally became monarchs in The Netherlands in 1815, it was the result of hundreds of years of manoeuvring: battles physical and political and, Susan Broomhall contends, a solid effort by generations of the family's women. "The male line was really weak, they died in battle or were minors for many years," says Broomhall, a professor of history at the University of Western Australia. "It was the women who kept reminding people of the family through systematically promoting it, so when The Netherlands decided on a monarchy, their family was the obvious choice." The family still rules, via Queen Beatrix. A $450,000, four-year Australian Research Council grant will help Broomhall and colleague Jacqueline Van Gent tease out the scope of the women's influence.... - The Australian, 5-26-10
• Thomas Fleming receives best book award from American Revolution Round Table of New York: The American Revolution Round Table of New York has announced that Thomas Fleming's The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers has won its 2009 award for best book on the American Revolution. A plaque will be presented to Mr. Fleming at the June 1 meeting of the Round Table at New York City’s Princeton Club. His editor, Elisabeth Kallick Dyssegaard, currently the editor-in-chief of Hyperion Books, will also be recognized at the ceremony. Previous winners include Mary Beth Norton, James Thomas Flexner, and Willard Sterne Randall.... - HNN, 5-19-10

SPOTTED:

• History, Not Politics, at Jonathan Spence Jefferson Lecture: Jonathan Spence came here to deliver a speech, but don't let that fool you: his address -- the 39th Annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, which took place Thursday -- in no way resembled the sort typically associated with D.C.... - Inside Higher Ed, 5-21-10
• Historian probes native perceptions of foreign diseases: Dr. Kevin Terraciano, professor of history and chair of the Latin American Studies Program at University of California, Los Angeles, gave the 2010 Jonas A. “Steine” Jonasson Endowed Lecture to a crowd of more than 60 people on May 12. "Most studies on the spread of disease beginning in 1520 are focused on the types of disease and how they were spread," Terraciano said. "But I want to explore what the indigenous people of the time thought the cause and spread of disease was." Linfield News, 5-14-10

ANNOUNCEMENTS & EVENTS CALENDAR:

• September 17-18, 2010 at Notre Dame University: Conference aims to bring medieval, early modern and Latin American historians together: An interdisciplinary conference to be held at the University of Notre Dame this fall is making a final call for papers to explore the issue surrounding similarities between late-medieval Iberia and its colonies in the New World. "From Iberian Kingdoms to Atlantic Empires: Spain, Portugal, and the New World, 1250-1700" is being hosted by the university's Nanovic Institute for European Studies and will take place on September 17-18, 2010. Medieval News, 4-29-10
• Thousands of Studs Terkel interviews going online: The Library of Congress will digitize the Studs Terkel Oral History Archive, according to the agreement, while the museum will retain ownership of the roughly 5,500 interviews in the archive and the copyrights to the content. Project officials expect digitizing the collection to take more than two years.... - NYT, 5-13-10
• Digital Southern Historical Collection: The 41,626 scans reproduce diaries, letters, business records, and photographs that provide a window into the lives of Americans in the South from the 18th through mid-20th centuries.

ON TV:

• C-SPAN2: BOOK TV Weekend Schedule
• PBS American Experience: Mondays at 9pm
• History Channel: Weekly Schedule

BEST SELLERS (NYT):

• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - May 23, 2010
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - May 30, 2010
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - June 6, 2010

BOOKS COMING SOON:

• Larry Schweikart: 7 Events that Made America America: And Proved that the Founding Fathers Were Right All Along, (Hardcover) June 1, 2010
• Spencer Wells: Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization, (Hardcover), June 8, 2010
• John Mosier: Deathride: Hitler vs. Stalin - The Eastern Front, 1941-1945, (Hardcover), June 15, 2010
• Evan D. G. Fraser: Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, (Hardcover), June 15, 2010
• Ruth Harris: Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (REV), (Hardcover), June 22, 2010
• James Mauro: Twilight at the World of Tomorrow: Genius, Madness, Murder, and the 1939 World's Fair on the Brink of War, (Hardcover), June 22, 2010.
• William Marvel: The Great Task Remaining: The Third Year of Lincoln's War, (Hardcover), June 22, 2010
• Suzann Ledbetter: Shady Ladies: Nineteen Surprising and Rebellious American Women, (Hardcover), June 28, 2010.
• Julie Flavell: When London Was Capital of America, (Hardcover), June 29, 2010
• Donald P. Ryan: Beneath the Sands of Egypt: Adventures of an Unconventional Archaeologist, (Hardcover), June 29, 2010
• Jane Brox: Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, (Hardcover), July 8, 2010.
• Rudy Tomedi: General Matthew Ridgway, (Hardcover), July 30, 2010.
• Richard Toye: Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made, (Hardcover), August 3, 2010.
• Alexander Hamilton: The Federalist Papers, (Hardcover), August 16, 2010
• Holger Hoock: Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750-1850, (Hardcover), September 1, 2010
• Anna Whitelock: Mary Tudor: Princess, Bastard, Queen, (Hardcover), September 7, 2010
• James L. Swanson: Bloody Crimes: The Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln's Corpse, (Hardcover), September 28, 2010
• Timothy Snyder: The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke (First Trade Paper Edition), (Paperback), September 28, 2010
• Ron Chernow: Washington: A Life, (Hardcover), October 5, 2010
• George William Van Cleve: A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic, (Hardcover), October 1, 2010.
• John Keegan: The American Civil War: A Military History, (Paperback), October 5, 2010
• Bill Bryson: At Home: A Short History of Private Life, (Hardcover), October 5, 2010
• Robert M. Poole: On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery, (Paperback), October 26, 2010
• Robert Leckie: Challenge for the Pacific: Guadalcanal: The Turning Point of the War, (Paperback), October 26, 2010
• Manning Marable: Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, (Hardcover), November 9, 2010
• Elizabeth White: The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia: The Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1917-39, (Hardcover), November 10, 2010
• Elizabeth White: The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia: The Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1917-39, (Hardcover), November 10, 2010
• G. J. Barker-Benfield: Abigail and John Adams: The Americanization of Sensibility, (Hardcover), November 15, 2010
• Edmund Morris: Colonel Roosevelt, (Hardcover), November 23, 2010
• Michael Goldfarb: Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance, (Paperback), November 23, 2010

DEPARTED:

• Norman A. Graebner, diplomatic historian, dies at 94: Norman A. Graebner, 94, who shaped the field of diplomatic history with his critiques of American foreign policy, died May 10 at the Colonnades retirement community in Charlottesville after a stroke.... - WaPo, 5-14-10

POLITICAL HIGHLIGHTS:

This Week's Political Highlights

IN FOCUS:

• Stephen Ambrose's Work Faces New Scrutiny: The late historian Stephen E. Ambrose rose to fame on the strength of an authorized biography that he claimed included details from "hundreds of hours" of interviews with former President Dwight David Eisenhower. But Richard Rayner, a writer for The New Yorker, reports today that during his research Ambrose apparently had only limited access to Eisenhower, and that archived datebooks and other records conflict with some of the times Ambrose claimed he had sat down with the former five-star general.... AOL News, 4-26-10
• Thomas Fleming "Channelling George Washington" Series - HNN
• Orlando Figes Contraversay: Who gives a Figes for Orlando? - Sydney Morning Herald, 5-18-10

THIS WEEK IN HISTORY:

On This Day in History....

This Week in History....

HISTORY NEWS:

• Naomi Oreskes finds that out of 928 articles on climate change, 0 challenge consensus: ...A study by Naomi Oreskes, professor of history and science studies at the University of California-San Diego, found 928 peer-reviewed articles on climate change; none opposed the unanimous conclusion that human-released greenhouse gases are affecting our climate.... - Kansas City Star, 5-9-10
• The Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress: When the Library of Congress announced this month that it had recently acquired Twitter's entire archive of public tweets, the snarkosphere quickly broke out the popular refrain "Nobody cares that you just watched 'Lost.'" Television tweets are always the shorthand by which naysayers express how idiotic they find Twitter, the microblogging site on which millions of users share their thoughts and activities in 140 characters or fewer.
  The purview of historians has always been the tangible: letters, journals, official documents.
  But on the other hand, says Michael Beschloss, historian and author of "Presidential Courage," "What historian today wouldn't give his right arm to have the adult Madison's contemporaneous Twitters about the secret debates inside the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia?" - WaPo, 5-7-10
• Europe pressed on slavery reparations by historians: Historians and anti-racism campaigners are to urge the countries that oversaw and profited from the Atlantic slave trade to recognise it as a crime against humanity, opening the way for reparations... - AFP, 5-4-10
• Va. seeks balance in marking Civil War's 150th anniversary, tapping Kennedy-era historian: ...At last, President John F. Kennedy called on a 31-year-old historian to take over as the centennial's executive director, refocusing it on sober education. Virginia has turned to the same man -- James I. Robertson Jr., a history professor at Virginia Tech and a Civil War expert -- to help the state avoid the same kinds of problems as it prepares to mark next year's 150th anniversary of the start of the war.... - WaPo, 5-3-10
• Cultural Memory and the Resources of the Past, 400-1000 research project gets funding: A new research collaboration involving historians from Cambridge is to examine how early medieval societies used the past to form ideas about identity which continue to affect our own present. The project will cover six centuries of western European history, from 400 to 1000 AD, and will investigate how earlier cultural traditions, coupled with other sources, such as the Bible, influenced the formation of state identities following the deposition of the last Roman emperor in the West in the fifth century.... - Medieval News, 4-28-10
• Historians say state should toss proposal: Historians complained of so many problems with the State Board of Education's proposed social studies curriculum standards that they urged Texas lawmakers Wednesday to ask the board to start over.... - Houston Chronicle, 4-28-10

OP-EDs:

• Jonathan Jones: Is academic snobbery to blame in the Orlando Figes affair?: I have a horrible feeling that behind this disaster lies a rebirth of insular academic snobbery, the resentment of a popular historian. I find myself thinking of the episode of Peep Show in which an academic urges Mark Corrigan to write an attack on Simon Schama – "and his interesting, accessible books".... - Guardian (UK), 4-29-10

REVIEWS & FIRST CHAPTERS:

• New Obama book by Newsweek senior editor Jonathan Alter airs private flares of temper: President Obama may cultivate an image as the unflappable Mr. Cool, but he can get hot under the collar too, according to a new book.
  In "The Promise: President Obama, Year One," by Newsweek senior editor Jonathan Alter, the author recounts a series of private blow-ups - including a particularly fiery one involving the nation's top military brass.... - NY Daily News, 5-8-10
• HISTORY Book review of "Goodbye Wives and Daughters," by Susan Kushner Resnick: The coal-mining tragedy depicted in "Goodbye Wifes and Daughters" occurred nearly 70 years ago but is still an eerily familiar storyline in 2010. While mine safety and regulation have vastly improved, recent headlines out of West Virginia make journalist Susan Kushner Resnick's excavation of the 1943 explosion that killed 75 men in Bearcreek, Mont., seem not so distant from present-day disasters. WaPo, 5-7-10
• Book reviews: 'History in Blue' by Allan T. Duffin, 'A Few Good Women' by Evelyn M. Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee: HISTORY IN BLUE 160 Years of Women Police, Sheriffs, Detectives, and State Troopers, A FEW GOOD WOMEN America's Military Women from World War I to the War in Iraq and Afghanistan
  In "Woman in the Nineteenth Century" (1845), Margaret Fuller set out the original feminist proclamation about women's access to work: "We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to woman as freely as to man."
  Both "History in Blue," by Allan T. Duffin, and "A Few Good Women," by Evelyn M. Monahan and Rosemary Neidel- Greenlee, document women's work history and provide fascinating individual stories.... - WaPo, 5-7-10
• Diane Ravitch: The Education of Diane Ravitch THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT AMERICAN SCHOOL SYSTEM How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education Ravitch's offer to guide us through this mess comes with a catch: she has changed her mind. Once an advocate of choice and testing, in "The Death and Life of the Great American School System" she throws cold water on both. Along the way she casts a skeptical eye on the results claimed by such often-praised school reformers as New York's Anthony Alvarado and San Diego's Alan Bersin, reviews a sheaf of academic studies of school effectiveness and delivers the most damning criticism I have ever read of the role philanthropic institutions sometimes play in our society. "Never before," she writes of the Gates Foundation, was there an entity "that gave grants to almost every major think tank and advocacy group in the field of education, leaving no one willing to criticize its vast power and unchecked influence."... - NYT, 5-6-10
• Woodward book on Obama coming in September: A Bob Woodward book on the Obama administration is coming out in September.... AP, 5-5-10
• Ruth Marcus reviews Laura Bush's memoir, 'Spoken From the Heart': Laura has always seemed the more interesting Bush. Certainly, the more mysterious. With George W., what you see is what you get. He is not a complicated man. But Laura leaves you wondering about the layers beneath that serene exterior. What is she thinking? What private rebellions are simmering, what resentments submerged? What forged the bond, seemingly as strong as it was unlikely, between the librarian who named her cat Dewey, after the decimal system, and the jock-turned-oilman who was soon to turn, inevitably, to the family business of politics? Laura Bush's autobiography, "Spoken From the Heart," begins promisingly enough for anyone hoping to penetrate that surface.... - WaPo, 5-2-10
• HISTORY Book review of "The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, the Rush to Empire, 1898" by Evan Thomas: More than a century before a recent president, who had never seen combat, led the United States into war with Iraq, a pair of politicians similarly unscarred by war created the playbook that has been used ever since. The prototype conflict was the Spanish-American War of 1898, studied by every school child as America's thunderous entry onto the world stage and its first foray into colonial rule. So much has been written about this seminal moment that journalist and author Evan Thomas faced a daunting task in undertaking "The War Lovers." After all, what could be said that hasn't already been covered in the some 400 or so books? Plenty, it turns out.... - WaPo, 5-2-10
• Jim Baggott: If You Build It . . .: THE FIRST WAR OF PHYSICS The Secret History of the Atom Bomb, 1939-1949 Jim Baggott, a popular British science writer, sets out in "The First War of Physics" to tell the story of the early stages of the nuclear arms race.... - NYT, 5-9-10
• LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH on Marla R. Miller: Star-Spangled Story: BETSY ROSS AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA Marla R. Miller, who teaches American history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, believes that Claypoole "planted the seeds of her own mythology in the 1820s and ’30s as she regaled her children and grandchildren with tales from her youth, her work, and of life in Revolutionary Philadelphia." In an engaging biography, Miller shows that even though the flag story is riddled with improbabilities, the life of the woman who came to be known as Betsy Ross is worth recovering. Piecing together shards of evidence from "newspaper advertisements, household receipts, meeting minutes, treasurer’s reports, shop accounts and ledgers, probate records, tools and artifacts . . . and oral traditions," Miller connects her heroine with most of the major events in Philadelphia’s early history, from the building of the city in the years when Elizabeth's great-­grandfather was establishing himself as a master carpenter to the yellow fever epidemic that in 1793 killed her parents.
  Through skillful use of small details, Miller sustains her repeated assertion that the future Betsy Ross was often "only a handshake away" from the men who made the Revolution.... - NYT, 5-9-10

FEATURES:

• From Tory to Turkey: Maverick historian Norman Stone storms back with partisan epic of Cold War world: It isn't every day that one interviews a figure described on an official British Council website as "notorious". That badge, which this fearsome foe of drippy-liberal state culture will wear with pride, comes inadvertently via Robert Harris. In his novel Archangel, Harris created the "dissolute historian" (© the British Council and our taxes) Fluke Kelso: an "engaging, wilful, impassioned and irreverent" maverick on the trail of Stalin's secret papers.... - Independent (UK), 5-14-10

QUOTES:

• Yuan Tengfei: Celebrity Chinese historian severely criticizes Mao on state TV: "If you want to see Mao, you can go to his mausoleum at the Tiananmen Square. But don't forget it's a Chinese version of the Yasukuni Shrine, which glorifies Mao, under whose hands many people were massacred," the report quoted Yuan Tengfei, a history teacher at Beijing's Jinghua School, as saying in a 110-minute special TV lecture at the state television, CCTV. "The only thing Mao did right since he founded the new China in 1949 was his death," Yuan was quoted as saying.... - Tibetan Review, 5-11-10
• British political historian explains the role of class in UK elections: Steven Fielding, a professor of political history and the director of the Center for British Politics at the University of Nottingham. Mr. Fielding said that viewers who see politicians performing on television start to regard them, in a sense, as protagonists in fictional dramas. "It's not that they confuse them with TV characters, but that they see them in the same framework," he said. "The leaders' debates exaggerate that by encouraging voters to focus on the minutiae rather than on the policy.”... - NYT, 4-30-10

INTERVIEWS:

• "In the eyes of the majority, Stalin is a winner," says Russian historian Nikolai Svanidze: Historian Nikolai Svanidze spoke to SPIEGEL about the reasons for Stalin's popularity in Russia. He argues that the archives need to be opened in order to reveal the dictator's crimes and explains why President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin have very different approaches to Russian history..... - Spiegel Online, 5-6-10
• Harvey Klehr sits down with FrontPageMag: Frontpage Interview's guest today is Harvey Klehr, Andrew Mellon Professor of Politics and History at Emory University. He is the author of the new book, The Communist Experience in America: A Political and Social History.... - Jaime Glazov at FrontPageMag, 5-6-10
• Q&A with Niall Ferguson: Niall Ferguson’s resumé could put you to sleep. He’s a senior fellow here, a professor of this or that there. But despite hanging out with the elbow-patch crowd, this Scottish intellectual and author smoothly blends history, finance and politics all into one understandable package. At times he is humorous, at others frightful. His relationship with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-Dutch intellectual who has a death threat looming over her head after she was critical of Islam, also lends him an air of controversy. Mr. Ferguson, whose latest bestseller is The Ascent of Money: The Financial History of the World, was in Calgary this past week as the headliner at the Teatro salon speaker series. He touched on everything from why he thinks the International Monetary Fund will soon be bailing out Britain, to why the United States must now tread carefully around the globe or risk the wrath of China. And he shared his thoughts on money and power and who he thinks will win the U.K. election.... - Financial Post, 5-1-10

AWARDS &APPOINTMENTS:

• Z Street lobbying group awards Daniel Pipes prize for peace plan: Z STREET awarded Daniel Pipes, the Director of the Middle East Forum and pre-eminent Middle East scholar, its first annual Z STREET Peace Plan Prize for his article, "My Peace Plan: an Israeli Victory." Z STREET is a staunchly pro-Israel organization... - Press Release, 5-10-10
• Canadian Military Historian Knighted By the Netherlands: As Canada and its Second World War allies prepare to celebrate the 65th Anniversary of Victory in Europe (VE) Day on May 8, the Netherlands is honouring a Canadian military historian with a knighthood. Dr. Dean Oliver, director of research and exhibitions at the Canadian War Museum, has received the Dutch honour, Knight in the Order of Orange-Nassau.... - Epoch Times, 5-5-10
• Caferro and Gerstel awarded Guggenheim Fellowships: William Caferro, a professor of history at Vanderbilt University, and Sharon E.J. Gerstel, Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology at UCLA, have been named 2010 Fellows by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.... - Medieval News, 4-28-10
• Ernest Freeberg named winner of the 2010 Eli M. Oboler Memorial Award: Ernest Freeberg will receive the 2010 Eli M. Oboler Memorial Award, presented by the Intellectual Freedom Round Table (IFRT) of the American Library Association (ALA). Freeberg was selected for his book,"Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent" (Harvard University Press, 2008)... - Press Release, 4-6-10

SPOTTED:

• Turkish Scholar Taner Akcam Advocates Change in Policy of Genocide Denial: Dr. Taner Akcam, one of the first Turkish scholars to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, delivered two important lectures in Southern California last week. Based on historical research, he analyzed the underpinnings of Turkey’s denial of the Armenian Genocide and proposed solutions for its official acknowledgment.... - Panorama.am (5-11-10)
• K.C. Johnson, Steve Gillon to appear in Bank of America ad on "History" - NYT (5-5-10)

ANNOUNCEMENTS & EVENTS CALENDAR:

• September 17-18, 2010 at Notre Dame University: Conference aims to bring medieval, early modern and Latin American historians together: An interdisciplinary conference to be held at the University of Notre Dame this fall is making a final call for papers to explore the issue surrounding similarities between late-medieval Iberia and its colonies in the New World. "From Iberian Kingdoms to Atlantic Empires: Spain, Portugal, and the New World, 1250-1700" is being hosted by the university's Nanovic Institute for European Studies and will take place on September 17-18, 2010. Medieval News, 4-29-10
• Digital Southern Historical Collection: The 41,626 scans reproduce diaries, letters, business records, and photographs that provide a window into the lives of Americans in the South from the 18th through mid-20th centuries.
• Oxford University Press to publish OAH's Journal of American History and Magazine of History: Oxford University Press (OUP) is honored to have been selected by the Organization of American Historians to be the publisher of the Journal of American History and the Magazine of History.... - OUP Press Release, 5-6-10
• Pizarro: Pulitzer Prize-winning historian to speak at YWCA event: The YWCA of Silicon Valley will feature Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin at its 20th annual fundraising luncheon this fall. Goodwin's 2005 book on the Lincoln presidency, "Team of Rivals," is often cited as a favorite of President Barack Obama's. And I'd expect she'll have interesting perspectives on current history, given that the Nov. 16 luncheon comes just two weeks after this year's midterm elections.... - SJ Mercury News, 5-2-10

ON TV:

• C-SPAN2: BOOK TV Weekend Schedule
• PBS American Experience: Mondays at 9pm
• History Channel: Weekly Schedule

BEST SELLERS (NYT):

• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - May 02, 2010
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - May 09, 2010
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - May 16, 2010

BOOKS COMING SOON:

• Kelly Hart: The Mistresses of Henry VIII, (Paperback) May 1, 2010
• David S. Heidler: Henry Clay: The Essential American, (Hardcover), May 4, 2010
• Nathaniel Philbrick: The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, May 4, 2010
• Mark Puls: Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution, (Paperback) May 11, 2010
• T. H. Breen: American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People, (Hardcover), May 11, 2010
• Alexandra Popoff: Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography, (Hardcover) May 11, 2010
• John D. Lukacs: Escape From Davao: The Forgotten Story of the Most Daring Prison Break of the Pacific War, (Hardcover), May 11, 2010
• S. C. Gwynne: Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, (Hardcover) May 25, 2010
• Steven E. Woodworth: The Chickamauga Campaign (1st Edition), (Hardcover), May 28, 2010
• Larry Schweikart: 7 Events that Made America America: And Proved that the Founding Fathers Were Right All Along, (Hardcover) June 1, 2010
• Spencer Wells: Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization, (Hardcover), June 8, 2010
• John Mosier: Deathride: Hitler vs. Stalin - The Eastern Front, 1941-1945, (Hardcover), June 15, 2010
• Evan D. G. Fraser: Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, (Hardcover), June 15, 2010
• Ruth Harris: Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (REV), (Hardcover), June 22, 2010
• James Mauro: Twilight at the World of Tomorrow: Genius, Madness, Murder, and the 1939 World's Fair on the Brink of War, (Hardcover), June 22, 2010.
• William Marvel: The Great Task Remaining: The Third Year of Lincoln's War, (Hardcover), June 22, 2010
• Suzann Ledbetter: Shady Ladies: Nineteen Surprising and Rebellious American Women, (Hardcover), June 28, 2010.
• Julie Flavell: When London Was Capital of America, (Hardcover), June 29, 2010
• Donald P. Ryan: Beneath the Sands of Egypt: Adventures of an Unconventional Archaeologist, (Hardcover), June 29, 2010
• Jane Brox: Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, (Hardcover), July 8, 2010.
• Rudy Tomedi: General Matthew Ridgway, (Hardcover), July 30, 2010.
• Richard Toye: Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made, (Hardcover), August 3, 2010.
• Alexander Hamilton: The Federalist Papers, (Hardcover), August 16, 2010

DEPARTED:

• Eminent historian of Irish ascendancy ascendancy dies at 79: Mark Bence-Jones, the genealogical researcher who has died at the age of 79, was the most eminent historian of the social mores of the Irish ascendancy in its decline over the last 100 years.... - Irish Times, 5-8-10
• Angus Maddison, Economic Historian, Dies at 83: Some people try to forecast the future. Angus Maddison devoted his life to forecasting the past. Professor Maddison, a British-born economic historian with a compulsion for quantification, spent many of his 83 years calculating the size of economies over the last three millenniums. In one study he estimated the size of the world economy in A.D. 1 as about one five-hundredth of what it was in 2008.... - NYT, 4-30-10

POLITICAL HIGHLIGHTS:

This Week's Political Highlights

IN FOCUS:

• Stephen Ambrose's Work Faces New Scrutiny: The late historian Stephen E. Ambrose rose to fame on the strength of an authorized biography that he claimed included details from "hundreds of hours" of interviews with former President Dwight David Eisenhower. But Richard Rayner, a writer for The New Yorker, reports today that during his research Ambrose apparently had only limited access to Eisenhower, and that archived datebooks and other records conflict with some of the times Ambrose claimed he had sat down with the former five-star general.... AOL News, 4-26-10
• Thomas Fleming "Channelling George Washington" Series - HNN
• Orlando Figes Contraversay: Who gives a Figes for Orlando? - Sydney Morning Herald, 5-18-10

THIS WEEK IN HISTORY:

On This Day in History....

This Week in History....

HISTORY NEWS:

• Naomi Oreskes finds that out of 928 articles on climate change, 0 challenge consensus: ...A study by Naomi Oreskes, professor of history and science studies at the University of California-San Diego, found 928 peer-reviewed articles on climate change; none opposed the unanimous conclusion that human-released greenhouse gases are affecting our climate.... - Kansas City Star, 5-9-10
• The Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress: When the Library of Congress announced this month that it had recently acquired Twitter's entire archive of public tweets, the snarkosphere quickly broke out the popular refrain "Nobody cares that you just watched 'Lost.'" Television tweets are always the shorthand by which naysayers express how idiotic they find Twitter, the microblogging site on which millions of users share their thoughts and activities in 140 characters or fewer.
  The purview of historians has always been the tangible: letters, journals, official documents.
  But on the other hand, says Michael Beschloss, historian and author of "Presidential Courage," "What historian today wouldn't give his right arm to have the adult Madison's contemporaneous Twitters about the secret debates inside the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia?" - WaPo, 5-7-10
• Europe pressed on slavery reparations by historians: Historians and anti-racism campaigners are to urge the countries that oversaw and profited from the Atlantic slave trade to recognise it as a crime against humanity, opening the way for reparations... - AFP, 5-4-10
• Va. seeks balance in marking Civil War's 150th anniversary, tapping Kennedy-era historian: ...At last, President John F. Kennedy called on a 31-year-old historian to take over as the centennial's executive director, refocusing it on sober education. Virginia has turned to the same man -- James I. Robertson Jr., a history professor at Virginia Tech and a Civil War expert -- to help the state avoid the same kinds of problems as it prepares to mark next year's 150th anniversary of the start of the war.... - WaPo, 5-3-10
• Cultural Memory and the Resources of the Past, 400-1000 research project gets funding: A new research collaboration involving historians from Cambridge is to examine how early medieval societies used the past to form ideas about identity which continue to affect our own present. The project will cover six centuries of western European history, from 400 to 1000 AD, and will investigate how earlier cultural traditions, coupled with other sources, such as the Bible, influenced the formation of state identities following the deposition of the last Roman emperor in the West in the fifth century.... - Medieval News, 4-28-10
• Historians say state should toss proposal: Historians complained of so many problems with the State Board of Education's proposed social studies curriculum standards that they urged Texas lawmakers Wednesday to ask the board to start over.... - Houston Chronicle, 4-28-10

OP-EDs:

• Jonathan Jones: Is academic snobbery to blame in the Orlando Figes affair?: I have a horrible feeling that behind this disaster lies a rebirth of insular academic snobbery, the resentment of a popular historian. I find myself thinking of the episode of Peep Show in which an academic urges Mark Corrigan to write an attack on Simon Schama – "and his interesting, accessible books".... - Guardian (UK), 4-29-10

REVIEWS & FIRST CHAPTERS:

• New Obama book by Newsweek senior editor Jonathan Alter airs private flares of temper: President Obama may cultivate an image as the unflappable Mr. Cool, but he can get hot under the collar too, according to a new book.
  In "The Promise: President Obama, Year One," by Newsweek senior editor Jonathan Alter, the author recounts a series of private blow-ups - including a particularly fiery one involving the nation's top military brass.... - NY Daily News, 5-8-10
• HISTORY Book review of "Goodbye Wives and Daughters," by Susan Kushner Resnick: The coal-mining tragedy depicted in "Goodbye Wifes and Daughters" occurred nearly 70 years ago but is still an eerily familiar storyline in 2010. While mine safety and regulation have vastly improved, recent headlines out of West Virginia make journalist Susan Kushner Resnick's excavation of the 1943 explosion that killed 75 men in Bearcreek, Mont., seem not so distant from present-day disasters. WaPo, 5-7-10
• Book reviews: 'History in Blue' by Allan T. Duffin, 'A Few Good Women' by Evelyn M. Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee: HISTORY IN BLUE 160 Years of Women Police, Sheriffs, Detectives, and State Troopers, A FEW GOOD WOMEN America's Military Women from World War I to the War in Iraq and Afghanistan
  In "Woman in the Nineteenth Century" (1845), Margaret Fuller set out the original feminist proclamation about women's access to work: "We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to woman as freely as to man."
  Both "History in Blue," by Allan T. Duffin, and "A Few Good Women," by Evelyn M. Monahan and Rosemary Neidel- Greenlee, document women's work history and provide fascinating individual stories.... - WaPo, 5-7-10
• Diane Ravitch: The Education of Diane Ravitch THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT AMERICAN SCHOOL SYSTEM How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education Ravitch's offer to guide us through this mess comes with a catch: she has changed her mind. Once an advocate of choice and testing, in "The Death and Life of the Great American School System" she throws cold water on both. Along the way she casts a skeptical eye on the results claimed by such often-praised school reformers as New York's Anthony Alvarado and San Diego's Alan Bersin, reviews a sheaf of academic studies of school effectiveness and delivers the most damning criticism I have ever read of the role philanthropic institutions sometimes play in our society. "Never before," she writes of the Gates Foundation, was there an entity "that gave grants to almost every major think tank and advocacy group in the field of education, leaving no one willing to criticize its vast power and unchecked influence."... - NYT, 5-6-10
• Woodward book on Obama coming in September: A Bob Woodward book on the Obama administration is coming out in September.... AP, 5-5-10
• Ruth Marcus reviews Laura Bush's memoir, 'Spoken From the Heart': Laura has always seemed the more interesting Bush. Certainly, the more mysterious. With George W., what you see is what you get. He is not a complicated man. But Laura leaves you wondering about the layers beneath that serene exterior. What is she thinking? What private rebellions are simmering, what resentments submerged? What forged the bond, seemingly as strong as it was unlikely, between the librarian who named her cat Dewey, after the decimal system, and the jock-turned-oilman who was soon to turn, inevitably, to the family business of politics? Laura Bush's autobiography, "Spoken From the Heart," begins promisingly enough for anyone hoping to penetrate that surface.... - WaPo, 5-2-10
• HISTORY Book review of "The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, the Rush to Empire, 1898" by Evan Thomas: More than a century before a recent president, who had never seen combat, led the United States into war with Iraq, a pair of politicians similarly unscarred by war created the playbook that has been used ever since. The prototype conflict was the Spanish-American War of 1898, studied by every school child as America's thunderous entry onto the world stage and its first foray into colonial rule. So much has been written about this seminal moment that journalist and author Evan Thomas faced a daunting task in undertaking "The War Lovers." After all, what could be said that hasn't already been covered in the some 400 or so books? Plenty, it turns out.... - WaPo, 5-2-10
• Jim Baggott: If You Build It . . .: THE FIRST WAR OF PHYSICS The Secret History of the Atom Bomb, 1939-1949 Jim Baggott, a popular British science writer, sets out in "The First War of Physics" to tell the story of the early stages of the nuclear arms race.... - NYT, 5-9-10
• LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH on Marla R. Miller: Star-Spangled Story: BETSY ROSS AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA Marla R. Miller, who teaches American history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, believes that Claypoole "planted the seeds of her own mythology in the 1820s and ’30s as she regaled her children and grandchildren with tales from her youth, her work, and of life in Revolutionary Philadelphia." In an engaging biography, Miller shows that even though the flag story is riddled with improbabilities, the life of the woman who came to be known as Betsy Ross is worth recovering. Piecing together shards of evidence from "newspaper advertisements, household receipts, meeting minutes, treasurer’s reports, shop accounts and ledgers, probate records, tools and artifacts . . . and oral traditions," Miller connects her heroine with most of the major events in Philadelphia’s early history, from the building of the city in the years when Elizabeth's great-­grandfather was establishing himself as a master carpenter to the yellow fever epidemic that in 1793 killed her parents.
  Through skillful use of small details, Miller sustains her repeated assertion that the future Betsy Ross was often "only a handshake away" from the men who made the Revolution.... - NYT, 5-9-10

FEATURES:

• From Tory to Turkey: Maverick historian Norman Stone storms back with partisan epic of Cold War world: It isn't every day that one interviews a figure described on an official British Council website as "notorious". That badge, which this fearsome foe of drippy-liberal state culture will wear with pride, comes inadvertently via Robert Harris. In his novel Archangel, Harris created the "dissolute historian" (© the British Council and our taxes) Fluke Kelso: an "engaging, wilful, impassioned and irreverent" maverick on the trail of Stalin's secret papers.... - Independent (UK), 5-14-10

QUOTES:

• Yuan Tengfei: Celebrity Chinese historian severely criticizes Mao on state TV: "If you want to see Mao, you can go to his mausoleum at the Tiananmen Square. But don't forget it's a Chinese version of the Yasukuni Shrine, which glorifies Mao, under whose hands many people were massacred," the report quoted Yuan Tengfei, a history teacher at Beijing's Jinghua School, as saying in a 110-minute special TV lecture at the state television, CCTV. "The only thing Mao did right since he founded the new China in 1949 was his death," Yuan was quoted as saying.... - Tibetan Review, 5-11-10
• British political historian explains the role of class in UK elections: Steven Fielding, a professor of political history and the director of the Center for British Politics at the University of Nottingham. Mr. Fielding said that viewers who see politicians performing on television start to regard them, in a sense, as protagonists in fictional dramas. "It's not that they confuse them with TV characters, but that they see them in the same framework," he said. "The leaders' debates exaggerate that by encouraging voters to focus on the minutiae rather than on the policy.”... - NYT, 4-30-10

INTERVIEWS:

• "In the eyes of the majority, Stalin is a winner," says Russian historian Nikolai Svanidze: Historian Nikolai Svanidze spoke to SPIEGEL about the reasons for Stalin's popularity in Russia. He argues that the archives need to be opened in order to reveal the dictator's crimes and explains why President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin have very different approaches to Russian history..... - Spiegel Online, 5-6-10
• Harvey Klehr sits down with FrontPageMag: Frontpage Interview's guest today is Harvey Klehr, Andrew Mellon Professor of Politics and History at Emory University. He is the author of the new book, The Communist Experience in America: A Political and Social History.... - Jaime Glazov at FrontPageMag, 5-6-10
• Q&A with Niall Ferguson: Niall Ferguson’s resumé could put you to sleep. He’s a senior fellow here, a professor of this or that there. But despite hanging out with the elbow-patch crowd, this Scottish intellectual and author smoothly blends history, finance and politics all into one understandable package. At times he is humorous, at others frightful. His relationship with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-Dutch intellectual who has a death threat looming over her head after she was critical of Islam, also lends him an air of controversy. Mr. Ferguson, whose latest bestseller is The Ascent of Money: The Financial History of the World, was in Calgary this past week as the headliner at the Teatro salon speaker series. He touched on everything from why he thinks the International Monetary Fund will soon be bailing out Britain, to why the United States must now tread carefully around the globe or risk the wrath of China. And he shared his thoughts on money and power and who he thinks will win the U.K. election.... - Financial Post, 5-1-10

AWARDS &APPOINTMENTS:

• Z Street lobbying group awards Daniel Pipes prize for peace plan: Z STREET awarded Daniel Pipes, the Director of the Middle East Forum and pre-eminent Middle East scholar, its first annual Z STREET Peace Plan Prize for his article, "My Peace Plan: an Israeli Victory." Z STREET is a staunchly pro-Israel organization... - Press Release, 5-10-10
• Canadian Military Historian Knighted By the Netherlands: As Canada and its Second World War allies prepare to celebrate the 65th Anniversary of Victory in Europe (VE) Day on May 8, the Netherlands is honouring a Canadian military historian with a knighthood. Dr. Dean Oliver, director of research and exhibitions at the Canadian War Museum, has received the Dutch honour, Knight in the Order of Orange-Nassau.... - Epoch Times, 5-5-10
• Caferro and Gerstel awarded Guggenheim Fellowships: William Caferro, a professor of history at Vanderbilt University, and Sharon E.J. Gerstel, Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology at UCLA, have been named 2010 Fellows by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.... - Medieval News, 4-28-10
• Ernest Freeberg named winner of the 2010 Eli M. Oboler Memorial Award: Ernest Freeberg will receive the 2010 Eli M. Oboler Memorial Award, presented by the Intellectual Freedom Round Table (IFRT) of the American Library Association (ALA). Freeberg was selected for his book,"Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent" (Harvard University Press, 2008)... - Press Release, 4-6-10

SPOTTED:

• Turkish Scholar Taner Akcam Advocates Change in Policy of Genocide Denial: Dr. Taner Akcam, one of the first Turkish scholars to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, delivered two important lectures in Southern California last week. Based on historical research, he analyzed the underpinnings of Turkey’s denial of the Armenian Genocide and proposed solutions for its official acknowledgment.... - Panorama.am (5-11-10)
• K.C. Johnson, Steve Gillon to appear in Bank of America ad on "History" - NYT (5-5-10)

ANNOUNCEMENTS & EVENTS CALENDAR:

• September 17-18, 2010 at Notre Dame University: Conference aims to bring medieval, early modern and Latin American historians together: An interdisciplinary conference to be held at the University of Notre Dame this fall is making a final call for papers to explore the issue surrounding similarities between late-medieval Iberia and its colonies in the New World. "From Iberian Kingdoms to Atlantic Empires: Spain, Portugal, and the New World, 1250-1700" is being hosted by the university's Nanovic Institute for European Studies and will take place on September 17-18, 2010. Medieval News, 4-29-10
• Digital Southern Historical Collection: The 41,626 scans reproduce diaries, letters, business records, and photographs that provide a window into the lives of Americans in the South from the 18th through mid-20th centuries.
• Oxford University Press to publish OAH's Journal of American History and Magazine of History: Oxford University Press (OUP) is honored to have been selected by the Organization of American Historians to be the publisher of the Journal of American History and the Magazine of History.... - OUP Press Release, 5-6-10
• Pizarro: Pulitzer Prize-winning historian to speak at YWCA event: The YWCA of Silicon Valley will feature Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin at its 20th annual fundraising luncheon this fall. Goodwin's 2005 book on the Lincoln presidency, "Team of Rivals," is often cited as a favorite of President Barack Obama's. And I'd expect she'll have interesting perspectives on current history, given that the Nov. 16 luncheon comes just two weeks after this year's midterm elections.... - SJ Mercury News, 5-2-10

ON TV:

• C-SPAN2: BOOK TV Weekend Schedule
• PBS American Experience: Mondays at 9pm
• History Channel: Weekly Schedule

BEST SELLERS (NYT):

• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - May 02, 2010
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - May 09, 2010
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - May 16, 2010

BOOKS COMING SOON:

• Kelly Hart: The Mistresses of Henry VIII, (Paperback) May 1, 2010
• David S. Heidler: Henry Clay: The Essential American, (Hardcover), May 4, 2010
• Nathaniel Philbrick: The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, May 4, 2010
• Mark Puls: Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution, (Paperback) May 11, 2010
• T. H. Breen: American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People, (Hardcover), May 11, 2010
• Alexandra Popoff: Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography, (Hardcover) May 11, 2010
• John D. Lukacs: Escape From Davao: The Forgotten Story of the Most Daring Prison Break of the Pacific War, (Hardcover), May 11, 2010
• S. C. Gwynne: Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, (Hardcover) May 25, 2010
• Steven E. Woodworth: The Chickamauga Campaign (1st Edition), (Hardcover), May 28, 2010
• Larry Schweikart: 7 Events that Made America America: And Proved that the Founding Fathers Were Right All Along, (Hardcover) June 1, 2010
• Spencer Wells: Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization, (Hardcover), June 8, 2010
• John Mosier: Deathride: Hitler vs. Stalin - The Eastern Front, 1941-1945, (Hardcover), June 15, 2010
• Evan D. G. Fraser: Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, (Hardcover), June 15, 2010
• Ruth Harris: Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (REV), (Hardcover), June 22, 2010
• James Mauro: Twilight at the World of Tomorrow: Genius, Madness, Murder, and the 1939 World's Fair on the Brink of War, (Hardcover), June 22, 2010.
• William Marvel: The Great Task Remaining: The Third Year of Lincoln's War, (Hardcover), June 22, 2010
• Suzann Ledbetter: Shady Ladies: Nineteen Surprising and Rebellious American Women, (Hardcover), June 28, 2010.
• Julie Flavell: When London Was Capital of America, (Hardcover), June 29, 2010
• Donald P. Ryan: Beneath the Sands of Egypt: Adventures of an Unconventional Archaeologist, (Hardcover), June 29, 2010
• Jane Brox: Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, (Hardcover), July 8, 2010.
• Rudy Tomedi: General Matthew Ridgway, (Hardcover), July 30, 2010.
• Richard Toye: Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made, (Hardcover), August 3, 2010.
• Alexander Hamilton: The Federalist Papers, (Hardcover), August 16, 2010

DEPARTED:

• Eminent historian of Irish ascendancy ascendancy dies at 79: Mark Bence-Jones, the genealogical researcher who has died at the age of 79, was the most eminent historian of the social mores of the Irish ascendancy in its decline over the last 100 years.... - Irish Times, 5-8-10
• Angus Maddison, Economic Historian, Dies at 83: Some people try to forecast the future. Angus Maddison devoted his life to forecasting the past. Professor Maddison, a British-born economic historian with a compulsion for quantification, spent many of his 83 years calculating the size of economies over the last three millenniums. In one study he estimated the size of the world economy in A.D. 1 as about one five-hundredth of what it was in 2008.... - NYT, 4-30-10

POLITICAL HIGHLIGHTS:

This Week's Political Highlights

• Bush memoir: 43's 'most critical and historic decisions': It's official: George W. Bush's entry into the ranks of presidential memoirs will be released Nov. 9.
  Decision Points "will be centered on the 14 most critical and historic decisions in the life and public service of the 43rd president of the United States," says the release from Crown Publishers.
  Among those topics: The disputed 2000 election, 9/11, the Iraq war, the financial crisis, Hurricane Katrina, Afghanistan and Iran. Bush also discusses his decision to quit drinking, his faith and his celebrated and politically active family.... - USA Today, 4-27-10
• The Unthinkable: A Democratic Challenge To Obama: OK, OK. Of course it's not going to happen. No Democrat in his or her right mind would contemplate challenging President Obama in 2012. In fact, when the Democratic National Committee issued a press release this month announcing the date for the party's national convention, DNC Chairman Tim Kaine emphasized -- twice -- that the Democrats fully intend to renominate President Obama and Vice President Biden. But despite the obvious long odds, anything is possible in American politics. There are historical examples of tough intraparty challenges to incumbent presidents... - NPR, 4-22-10

THIS WEEK IN HISTORY:

On This Day in History....

This Week in History....

• First Earth Day in U.S. had feel of '60s, says historian: It was part protest, part celebration, and an estimated 20 million Americans took part. On the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, millions of people across the U.S. went to large public rallies, listened to political speeches, took part in teach-ins, went to concerts and educational fairs, and helped to clean up their communities. Air and water pollution, nuclear testing and loss of wilderness were major concerns.... - CBC News (4-22-10)

HISTORY NEWS:

• Martin Barillas: Wikipedia Struggles with Holocaust Disinformation; Ravensfire Deletes Jewish Content: Wikipedia posters continued to struggle with the campaign to delete information about IBM’s involvement in the Holocaust as contributors posted and reposted conflicting theories of what should and should not be allowed to appear in the Internet encyclopedia.... - Cutting Edge News (4-26-10)
• Orlando Figes: Phoney reviewer Figes has history of litigious quarrels: ...The professor of Russian history at Birkbeck, University of London, who has previously been engaged in at least two legal disputes with other historians, has been accused and cleared of plagiarism, and received hate mail while an academic at Cambridge. One colleague who did not want to be named described the most recent episode as "the tip of the iceberg".... - Independent (UK) (4-25-10)
• Oliver Kamm: Figes' Furies - Times Online (UK) (4-25-10)
• Orlando Figes admits: 'It was me': For a week now, an extraordinary row has had Britain’s academe in turmoil with threats of libel writs and the bloodying of distinguished reputations.
  But now, in an astonishing twist to the saga, I can reveal that the offending reviews on Amazon were not, after all, written by Figes’s wife, Stephanie, herself a Cambridge University law lecturer.... The Daily Mail (UK) (4-23-10)
• Poison pen reviews were mine, confesses historian Orlando Figes - Guardian (UK) (4-23-10)
• Another Blow to the Reputation of Stephen Ambrose: In 2002, Ambrose was accused of lifting passages for The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s over Germany from the work of the historian Thomas Childers. Citing faulty citations, Ambrose apologized, and his publisher promised to put the sentences in question in quotes in future editions. But shortly after, other accusations arose: about passages in books like his Crazy Horse and Custer, Citizen Soldiers, and a volume of his three-volume biography Nixon. Ambrose responded that the relevant material was cited in his footnotes.... - Chronicle of Higher Education (4-23-10)
• Richard Rayner: Stephen Ambrose exaggerated his relationship with Eisenhower - The New Yorker (4-26-10)
• Harlem Center’s Director to Retire in Early 2011: Howard Dodson, whose wide-ranging acquisitions and major exhibitions have raised the profile of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and burnished its reputation as the premier institution of its kind, plans to retire as its director in 2011. Howard Dodson turned a research library known mostly to scholars into an institution open to anyone interested in black culture.... - NYT, 4-19-10
• Historians Call on Texas State Board of Education to Delay Vote: Historians from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Texas at El Paso have written an Open Letter to the Texas State Board of Education. The letter identifies specific problems with the proposed changes to the state’s social studies standards and recommends that the board delay adoption of the standards in order to solicit additional feedback from "qualified, credentialed content experts from the state’s colleges and universities" and the general public.... - Keith Erekson (4-14-10)

OP-EDs:

• HENRY LOUIS GATES Jr.: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game: THANKS to an unlikely confluence of history and genetics — the fact that he is African-American and president — Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the most contentious issues of America’s racial legacy: reparations, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage.... - NYT, 4-22-10
• Jon Wiener: Stephen Ambrose, Another Historian in Trouble: In his first and biggest Ike book, "The Supreme Commander," published in 1970, Ambrose listed nine interviews with the former president. But according to Richard Rayner of The New Yorker, that's not true. The deputy director of the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum in Abilene, Kansas, Tim Rives, told Rayer that Ike saw Ambrose only three times, for a total of less than five hours, and that the two men were never alone together. The Nation (4-20-10)

REVIEWS & FIRST CHAPTERS:

• Laura Bush Opens Up About Fatal Crash: Spoken From the Heart Laura Bush has finally opened up publicly about the mysterious car accident she had when she was 17, a crash that claimed the life of a high school friend on a dark country road in Midland, Tex. In her new book, "Spoken From the Heart," Ms. Bush describes in vivid detail the circumstances surrounding the crash, which has haunted her for most of her adult life and which became the subject of questions and speculation when it was revealed during her husband’s first presidential run. A copy of the book, scheduled for release in early May, was obtained by The New York Times at a bookstore... - NYT, 4-28-10
• Graham Robb: A Pointillist Tour, Revolution to Riots: PARISIANS An Adventure History of Paris “Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris” arrives with an odd subtitle (adventure history?) that makes it sound as if it were written on a skateboard and sponsored by Mountain Dew. Here’s what this book really is: a pointillist and defiantly nonlinear history of Paris from the dawn of the French Revolution through the 2005 riots in Clichy-sous- Bois, told from a variety of unlikely perspectives and focusing on lesser-known but reverberating moments in the city’s history.... - NYT, 4-28-10 Excerpt
• Assessing Jewish Identity of Author Killed by Nazis: Némirovsky's personal story contains plenty of drama, including the desperate, heart-rending attempts by her husband, Michel Epstein, to save her. He too died at Auschwitz. But along with the belated publication came charges from a handful of critics that Némirovsky, killed because she was a Jew, was herself an anti-Semite who courted extreme right-wing friends and wrote ugly caricatured portraits of Jews. Next month a new biography, "The Life of Irène Némirovsky: Author of Suite Française," and a collection of her short stories are being published for the first time in English in the United States, giving Americans another opportunity to assess Némirovsky’s life and work.... NYT, 4-26-10
• Book review of "Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978" by Kai Bird: "Crossing Mandelbaum Gate" is a fascinating book about a crucial period in the Middle East, but as a memoir it fails on the promise of its subtitle. Bird turns a beacon on the exhilarating places in which he grew up. If only he had shone the same beacon on himself.... - WaPo, 4-25-10
• Rove and Romney on the Republican Party After Bush: Karl Rove, COURAGE AND CONSEQUENCE My Life as a Conservative in the Fight, Mitt Romney, NO APOLOGY The Case for American Greatness - NYT, 4-22-10
• Alan Brinkley "A Magazine Master Builder": THE PUBLISHER Henry Luce and His American Century ...Luce’s success story would be sheer romance if it could surmount one basic problem: Luce himself. On the evidence of “The Publisher,” Alan Brinkley’s graceful and judicious biography, Luce began as an arrogant, awkward boy and did not grow any more beguiling as his fortunes rose. He made up in pretension what he lacked in personal charm, and he was “able to attract the respect but not usually the genuine affection of those around him.” ... - NYT, 4-19-10
• Jonathan Yardley reviews 'The Publisher,' by Alan Brinkley: THE PUBLISHER Henry Luce and His American Century ...Luce was a complicated, difficult man, by no stretch of the imagination a nice guy. Brinkley is very good on his tangled relationships with women -- especially his equally famous and equally difficult second wife, Clare Boothe Luce -- as well as with the men who worked with, which is to say under, him. My only qualm about this otherwise superb book is that it does not convey much sense of what life was like in his empire... - WaPo, 4-18-10
• DAVID S. REYNOLDS on Leo Damrosch "Tocqueville: The Life": TOCQUEVILLE'S DISCOVERY OF AMERICA In “Tocqueville’s Discovery of America,” Leo Damrosch, the Ernest Bernbaum professor of literature at Harvard, reveals the man behind the sage. Damrosch shows us that “Democracy in America” was the outcome of a nine-month tour of the United States that Tocqueville, a temperamental, randy 25-year-old French apprentice magistrate of aristocratic background, took in 1831-32 with his friend Gustave de Beaumont.... - NYT, 4-18-10
• Book review: Aaron Leitko reviews "The Poker Bride," by Christopher Corbett: THE POKER BRIDE The First Chinese in the Wild West In his exhaustively researched "The Poker Bride," Christopher Corbett tells how Bemis -- a Chinese woman who probably arrived in the United States as a concubine -- wound up living on a remote patch of Idaho wilderness for more than 50 years with a Connecticut-born gambler who had won her in a poker game. By the time she finally descended from the mountains in 1923, she had become a relic of a different era, a kind of modern Rip Van Winkle.... - WaPo, 4-18-10
• Roger Ekrich makes history more interesting in telling true story of "Kidnapped": According to my research, every 11-year-old has read Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson. What I didn't know when I was 11—and, in fact, didn't know until a couple of weeks ago—is that Kidnapped was based on a true story.... That true story is told in a new book, Birthright: The True Story That Inspired Kidnapped, by Roger Ekirch, a history professor at Virginia Tech. Mr. Ekirch spoke about the book yesterday at the Library of Congress.... - Chronicle of Higher Education (4-16-10)
• Schlesinger Interviews With Jacqueline Kennedy to Be Published: Nearly seven hours of unreleased interviews with Jacqueline Kennedy, recorded just months after the death of President John F. Kennedy and intended for deposit in a future presidential library, will be released as a book, the publisher Hyperion said on Tuesday.... - NYT (4-13-10)
• GARRY WILLS on David Remnick: "Behind Obama's Cool": THE BRIDGE The Life and Rise of Barack Obama David Remnick, in this exhaustively researched life of Obama before he became president, quotes many interviews in which Obama made the same or similar points. Accused of not being black enough, he could show that he has more direct ties to Africa than most ­African-Americans have. Suspected of not being American enough, he appealed to his mother’s Midwest origins and accent. Touring conservative little towns in southern Illinois, he could speak the language of the Kansan grandparents who raised him. He is a bit of a chameleon or shape-shifter, but he does not come across as insincere — that is the importance of his famous “cool.” He does not have the hot eagerness of the con man. Though his own background is out of the ordinary, he has the skill to submerge it in other people’s narratives, even those that seem distant from his own.... - NYT, 4-11-10 Excerpt

FEATURES:

• TCNJ profs say they've solved Civil War mystery: A literary mystery that has lingered since the Civil War has apparently been solved by a pair of professors from The College of New Jersey. Their findings ended up as a new book, "A Secession Crisis Enigma," by Daniel Crofts, a professor of history who turned to David Holmes, professor of statistics, while looking for an answer to a longstanding question. They wanted to determine who was the author of "The Diary of a Public Man," which was published anonymously in four installments in the 1879 "North American Review."... NJ.com (4-24-10)
• It's war: Anzac Day dissenters create bitter split between historians: A furore has erupted over Australia’s Anzac Day legacy, with the authors of a new book which questions the day’s origins accused by a rival historian of failing to acknowledge the preeminent scholar in the field. Crikey (AU) (4-19-10)
• Smithsonian exhibit brings the Apollo Theater to D.C: About 100 items are on view at the National Museum of American History, representing big names from entertainment today and from decades past.
  Michael Jackson's fedora, Ella Fitzgerald's yellow dress and Louis Armstrong's trumpet are together in a Smithsonian exhibit celebrating the famed Apollo Theater that helped these stars to shine. The not-yet-built National Museum of African American History and Culture is bringing New York's Harlem to the nation's capital with the first-ever exhibit focused on the Apollo, where many musical careers were launched. It opens Friday at the National Museum of American History. About 100 items are on view, representing big names from entertainment today and from decades past.... - USA Today, 4-25-10

QUOTES:

• Roots of Islamic fundamentalism lie in Nazi propaganda for Arab world, Jeffrey Herf claims: "Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World" "The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians would have been over long ago were it not for the uncompromising, religiously inspired hatred of the Jews that was articulated and given assistance by Nazi propagandists and continued after the war by Islamists of various sorts," said Jeffrey Herf, a history professor at the University of Maryland. - Telegraph (UK) (4-21-10)
• JAMES ROSEN, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT: An accomplished author himself, President Obama appears irresistible to his fellow literati.
  JAY WINKIK, PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIAN: And he captivates the imagination. And I think it's safe to say that the White House Press Corps has been galvanized by him. And perhaps one could also add to that. There's a touch of bias where he may reflect the sentiments of many in the White House Press Corps.... - Fox News, 4-10
• Historians weigh in on the Tea Party in the NYT: "The story they’re telling is that somehow the authentic, real America is being polluted," said Rick Perlstein, the author of books about the Goldwater and Nixon years.... - NYT (4-16-10)
• Gary Cross: For some 20-somethings, growing up is hard to do, says Penn State historian: Gary Cross is a professor of history at Penn State University whose most recent book, "Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity," addresses just that.
  "This trend has been building up over the last 50 years to where today it really is hard to see [role] models, to recognize these models of maturity," he said. "Men have, in effect, slowly and not always steadily rebelled against the role of being providers and being sacrificers."
  Now, "Men who are in their mid-20s are more independent for a longer period than before because of the rise in the age of marriage. In 1970, when I was 24, men married at 22. Now they're married at 28; that's a big difference," Dr. Cross said. "Part of it is the way boys have always been indulged more than girls in the typical family," Dr. Cross said. "One thing that has struck me is, early in the 20th century, how indulgent they were of openly naughty boys. Not so much with the girls."... - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (4-14-10)

INTERVIEWS:

• A Primer on China from Jeffrey Wasserstrom: In China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, just published by Oxford University Press, Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom provides answers to a wide range of commonly asked questions about the world's most populous country. The excerpt below describes two of the topics the book addresses: nationalism and the web.... - Forbes (4-21-10)
• Award-wining historian Natalie Zemon Davis talks to American Prospect: Natalie Zemon Davis will be awarded the 2010 Holberg International Memorial Prize on June 9 for the way in which her work "shows how particular events can be narrated and analyzed so as to reveal deeper historical tendencies and underlying patterns of thought and action." Davis describes her work as anthropological in nature. Rather than tell the political story of a time and place, concentrating on an elite narrative, Davis' work is often from the point of view of those less likely to keep records of their lives. TAP spoke with Davis, an 81-year-old professor emerita of history at Princeton University and current adjunct professor of history at the University of Toronto, about her innovative approach to history.... - The American Prospect (4-9-10)

AWARDS &APPOINTMENTS:

• American Academy of Arts and Sciences Announces 2010 Class of Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members: Ervand Abrahamian, City University of New York
  Robert P. Brenner, University of California, Los Angeles
  Paul H. Freedman, Yale University
  Jan E. Goldstein, University of Chicago
  Greg Grandin, New York University
  Carla Hesse, University of California, Berkeley
  Daniel Walker Howe, University of California, Los Angeles
  Donald W. Meinig, Syracuse University
  Heinrich von Staden, Institute for Advanced Study - AAAS Press Release (4-19-10)
• University of Glasgow creates first Chair of Gaelic in Scotland: Professor Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh has been named as the first ever established Chair of Gaelic in Scotland by the University of Glasgow. The Chair has been created to recognise the University as a centre of excellence for the study of Celtic and Gaelic.... - Medieval News (4-16-10)
• Historians on the 2010 List of Guggenheim Fellows: Andrew Apter, Joshua Brown, Antoinette Burton, William Caferro, Hasia R. Diner, Caroline Elkins, Walter Johnson, Pieter M. Judson, Jeffrey C. Kinkley, Thomas Kühne, Ms. Maggie Nelson, Susan Schulten, John Fabian Witt - Tenured Radical (4-15-10)
• Pulitzer Prize in History awarded to Liaquat Ahamed: HISTORY: "Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World" by Liaquat Ahamed - A Harvard graduate [who] was born in Kenya, Ahamed dreamed of being a writer while he worked as an investment manager. "Lords of Finance" is a compelling account of how the actions of four bankers triggered the Depression and ultimately turned the United States into the world's financial leader, the Pulitzer board said.... - AP (4-12-10)
• Ernest Freeberg named winner of the 2010 Eli M. Oboler Memorial Award: Ernest Freeberg will receive the 2010 Eli M. Oboler Memorial Award, presented by the Intellectual Freedom Round Table (IFRT) of the American Library Association (ALA). Freeberg was selected for his book,"Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent" (Harvard University Press, 2008). Press Release (4-6-10)

ANNOUNCEMENTS & EVENTS CALENDAR:

• History Doctoral Programs Site Updated at AHA Website: The AHA's History Doctoral Programs web site has now been updated to include current information on students, faculty, and departments as a whole. In addition to department-level fixes, the site has also been updated to include links to a wealth of additional information about universities in the United States... Robert Townsend at AHA Blog (4-6-10) - AHA

ON TV:

• 12-hour 'America' series gives 'an aerial view of history': History Channel has enjoyed bountiful ratings of late focusing on contemporary topics. But it returns to more traditional roots with its biggest project yet, America The Story of Us. Through dramatic re-creations and computer-generated imagery, the six-night, 12-hour series (premiering Sunday, 9 ET/PT, and continuing through May 30) covers 400 years of U.S. settlement and growth. But an American history series — the first comprehensive TV effort since Alistair Cooke's America for PBS in 1972 — had been contemplated for about 18 months. The Story of Us crystallized during Barack Obama's presidential inauguration.
  "Watching that was an historic moment. But so was the economic crisis, the wars the nation was fighting," says History Channel general manager Nancy Dubuc. "Ideas came up about where are we going in America and how we got there, and how to hit all the touch-points in a way that entertains and inspires." Obama filmed a 90-second spot to launch the series, which is narrated by actor Liev Schreiber. Observations by historians, politicians, actors and cultural observers are interspersed, including former secretary of State Colin Powell, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, Oscar winner Meryl Streep and Harvard University historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.... - USA Today, 4-22-10
• C-SPAN2: BOOK TV Weekend Schedule
• PBS American Experience: Mondays at 9pm
• History Channel: Weekly Schedule

BEST SELLERS (NYT):

• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - April 11, 2010
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - April 18, 2010
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - April 25, 2010
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - May 3, 2010

BOOKS COMING SOON:

• Hampton Sides: Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin, (Hardcover) April 27, 2010
• Max Hastings: Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945, (Hardcover) April 27, 2010
• Bradley Gottfried: The Maps of Gettysburg: An Atlas of the Gettysburg Campaign, June 3 - July 13, 1863, (Hardcover) April 19, 2010
• Kelly Hart: The Mistresses of Henry VIII, (Paperback) May 1, 2010
• David S. Heidler: Henry Clay: The Essential American, (Hardcover), May 4, 2010
• Nathaniel Philbrick: The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, May 4, 2010
• Mark Puls: Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution, (Paperback) May 11, 2010
• Alexandra Popoff: Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography, (Hardcover) May 11, 2010
• John D. Lukacs: Escape From Davao: The Forgotten Story of the Most Daring Prison Break of the Pacific War, (Hardcover), May 11, 2010
• S. C. Gwynne: Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, (Hardcover) May 25, 2010
• Steven E. Woodworth: The Chickamauga Campaign (1st Edition), (Hardcover), May 28, 2010
• Larry Schweikart: 7 Events that Made America America: And Proved that the Founding Fathers Were Right All Along, (Hardcover) June 1, 2010

DEPARTED:

• Sharon Sievers, Historian and Women's Studies Activist at Cal State- Long Beach, May 27 1938-April 5 2010 - Tenured Radical (Blog) (4-19-10)

POLITICAL HIGHLIGHTS:

This Week's Political Highlights

• Alan Brinkley concerned about "current surge of fear and loathing toward Obama": "There was a lot of hatred in the 1930s," says Alan Brinkley, the Columbia University historian and expert on populist movements. But the current surge of fear and loathing toward Obama is "scary," he says. "There's a big dose of race behind the real crazies, the ones who take their guns to public meetings. I can't see this happening if McCain were president, or [any] white male." - Newsweek (4-9-10)
• Obama learning from LBJ, according to presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin - Newsweek (3-26-10)
• Pelosi may enter history as one of the great House speakers, according to scholars: "She may get a stellar entry in the history books, but that entry will not include the word 'bipartisan,' " said John J. Pitney Jr., a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College....
  "There is nothing to strengthen a politician like a big victory," said Julian Zelizer, a congressional historian at Princeton University.... - LA Times (3-23-10)
• Republicans kick off repeal attempt, says Julian Zelizer: "You have a window where they can try to raise doubts about what’s about to happen," says Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University in New Jersey.... "No one would have imagined the conservatives would be so energized a year after 2008," says Mr. Zelizer. "Now we're talking about a possible Republican takeover of Congress. And they almost killed Obama’s biggest program." - CS Monitor (3-22-10)
• States' rights a rallying cry for lawmakers and scholars: "Everything we’ve tried to keep the federal government confined to rational limits has been a failure, an utter, unrelenting failure — so why not try something else?" said Thomas E. Woods Jr., a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a nonprofit group in Auburn, Ala., that researches what it calls "the scholarship of liberty."... - NYT (3-16-10)

IN FOCUS:

• Virginia governor amends Confederate history proclamation to include slavery: After a barrage of nationwide criticism for excluding slavery from his Confederate History Month proclamation, Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) on Wednesday conceded that it was "a major omission" and amended the document to acknowledge the state's complicated past. A day earlier, McDonnell said he left out any reference to slavery in the original seven-paragraph proclamation because he wanted to include issues he thought were most "significant" to Virginia. He also said the document was designed to promote tourism in the state, which next year marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War. However, Wednesday afternoon the governor issued a mea culpa for the document's exclusion of slavery. "The proclamation issued by this Office designating April as Confederate History Month contained a major omission," McDonnell said in a statement. "The failure to include any reference to slavery was a mistake, and for that I apologize to any fellow Virginian who has been offended or disappointed."... - WaPo, 4-7-10

THIS WEEK IN HISTORY:

On This Day in History....

This Week in History....

HISTORY NEWS:

• James McPherson: As Texas messes with history, worry that it'll multiply: A lot of attention has been focused on Texas in recent weeks, because state officials decided to rewrite social studies curriculum and force kids to learn a distorted view of the country's past....
  "One can only regret the conservative pressure groups and members of the Texas education board that have forced certain changes in high school history textbooks used in the state."... - WaPo (4-5-10)
• Some right-wingers ignore facts as they rewrite U.S. history: The right is rewriting history. "We are adding balance," Texas school board member Don McLeroy said. "History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left."...
  "History in the popular world is always a political football," said Alan Brinkley , a historian at Columbia University... - McClatchy Newspapers (4-1-10)
• Free Guide to Texas Social Studies Revision Process from University of Texas: The Center for History Teaching & Learning has published a simple and informative free guide to the ongoing K-12 social studies revision process. Texas Social Studies Simplified explains what is going on, why it matters, who is involved, and when the process will be done. It also corrects the many errors circulating in the media about the revision process.... - UTEP Center for History Teaching & Learning (3-31-10)
• History Coalition Submits Congressional Testimony on FY 2011 NARA & NHPRC Budgets - Lee White at the National Coalition for History (3-30-10)
• Headed for Auction: Back-Channel Gloom on Revolutionary War: "Such a pittance of troops as Great Britain and Ireland can supply will only serve to protract the war, to incur fruitless expense and insure disappointment," Burgoyne added in a letter in the collection that will be auctioned beginning next month by Sotheby's in New York. "Our victory has been bought by an uncommon loss of officers, some of them irreparable, and I fear the consequence will not answer the expectations that will be raised in England." NYT (3-22-10)
• Niall Ferguson: 'Rid our schools of junk history': A leading British historian has called for a Jamie Oliver-style campaign to purge schools of what he calls "junk history". Niall Ferguson, who teaches at Harvard and presented a Channel 4 series on the world's financial history, has launched a polemical attack on the subject's "decline in British schools", arguing that the discipline is badly taught and undervalued. He says standards are at an all-time low in the classroom and the subject should be compulsory at GCSE.
  Ferguson makes the comments in an essay to be released this week. It begins: "History matters. Many schoolchildren doubt this. But they are wrong, and they need to be persuaded they are wrong."... - Guardian (UK) (3-21-10)
• Book by religion historian Wendy Doniger draws criticism by Hindus: Wendy Doniger, a professor of the history of religion at the University of Chicago, has drawn the ire of some Hindus who regard her scholarship as sacrilegious. During a lecture in London in 2003, someone in the audience threw an egg at Doniger to express disagreement with her interpretation of a passage in the Ramayana, a sacred epic... - Inside Higher Ed (3-17-10)
• Students protest tenure denial to historian Ronald Granieri: On Monday night, nine College seniors in the final stages of writing their honors theses gathered on the third floor of Van Pelt Library. They wanted answers. The seniors are part of a 17-person History honors thesis class that is leading a charge to protest the tenure denial of their thesis seminar advisor, Ronald Granieri. An assistant professor of modern European history, Granieri was recently denied tenure in his second and last chance to apply for the standing. He originally applied last year in his sixth year of teaching at Penn.... - The Daily Pennsylvanian (3-16-10)

OP-EDs:

• Bill Kovarik: Feudalism in Appalachia: Underground mining is inherently dangerous, but it’s more dangerous now than it needs to be. We don’t know yet the fully explanation for this week’s accident, but several themes are apparent in historic perspective.... - NYT, 4-7-10
• Sean Patrick Adams: Tragedy's Deep Roots: Coal mining has always been a dangerous endeavor, regardless of its historical context. The 19th-century coal miners that I study trudged through rat-infested shafts and through dirty pools of standing water to bore holes in coal seams, pack in black powder, and set off a controlled (hopefully) blast to loosen the coal.... - NYT, 4-7-10
• Why do more people listen to economists than historians?: David Brooks wondered in his New York Times column last week if economists shouldn't try to become more like historians. That was interesting to read, given that I had just spent time with a bunch of historians (and a few other humanities professors) who were wondering how they could become more like economists.... - Harvard Business Review (3-31-10)

REVIEWS & FIRST CHAPTERS:

• Making It Look Easy at The New Yorker: David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, is not one to waste an opportunity. After attending John Updike’s funeral in Massachusetts in February of last year, he stopped by Harvard Law School to interview some of President Obama’s old professors. Despite the exhaustive newspaper coverage of the 44th president, Mr. Remnick suspected he had something to add. “I wrote it simply to see if I could do it,” Mr. Remnick, 51, said in an interview. “Is it really going to interest me, or is it just going to feel like a guy that went to law school, big deal?” Mr. Remnick kept writing, and the result is his sixth book, “The Bridge,” due out Tuesday. The 672-page biography examines Mr. Obama’s life and racial identity, with strands on Kenyan politics, legal scholarship, his mother’s doctoral dissertation on Indonesian blacksmithing, even a transcript of a recording of the teenage Mr. Obama joking with his buddies.... - NYT, 4-5-10
• Seeking Identity, Shaping a Nation’s: “The Bridge,” the title of David Remnick’s incisive new book on Barack Obama, refers to the bridge in Selma, Ala., where civil rights demonstrators were violently attacked by state troopers on March 7, 1965, in a bloody clash that would galvanize the nation and help lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. It refers to the observation made by one of the leaders of that march, John Lewis, that “Barack Obama is what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma” — an observation Congressman Lewis made nearly 44 years later, on the eve of Mr. Obama’s inauguration. And it refers to the hope voiced by many of the president’s supporters that he would be a bridge between the races, between red states and blue states, between conservatives and liberals, between the generations who remember the bitter days of segregation and those who have grown up in a new, increasingly multicultural America... - NYT, 4-6-10
• Jonathan Yardley reviews "Anything Goes," by Lucy Moore: ANYTHING GOES A Biography of the Roaring Twenties ... If "Anything Goes" is anything, it's a nitpicker's delight. As history, it's something else. - WaPo, 4-4-10
• Book review: 'Valley of Death,' by Ted Morgan: VALLEY OF DEATH The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America Into the Vietnam War Ted Morgan, a retired journalist who has written numerous works of history, has now given us two books in one: an intricate, compelling narrative of the horrifying battle of Dien Bien Phu, which raged from March 13 to May 7, 1954, near the Vietnamese-Laotian border, and a parallel account of deliberations among French, American and British leaders over the impending catastrophe and what to do about it while the battle raged, and of the Geneva negotiations that eventually created North and South Vietnam. The battle account draws mainly on reminiscences and primary sources, while the diplomatic one uses memoirs and secondary works effectively.... Morgan gives us military history of a very high quality at both the strategic and tactical levels.... - WaPo, 4-4-10
• Historic moments in Dakotas by former SDSU professor: ...In a new book, "Prairie Republic - The Political Culture of Dakota Territory, 1879-1889," South Dakota native and historian Jon K. Lauck comes to Turner's defense by chronicling what he calls the "genuine democratic moments" of thousands of settlers that he said were the seed and soil of statehood.
  In doing so, Lauck attempts to balance and challenge the themes of Yale historian Howard R. Lamar's 1956 "Dakota Territory - 1860-1889, a Study of Frontier Politics." Lamar's work remains a seminal piece of American history, part of a critical examination of the American West during the mid- to late 20th century.... - Argus Leader (3-25-10)
• Nominations for the least-accurate political memoir ever written: Has Karl Rove played fast and loose with historical fact in his new memoir "Courage and Consequence"? History will decide. But recollections invariably differ -- perhaps never more so than in political memoirs. And Rove's isn't the first to spark debate over what is the true tide in the affairs of men. In that spirit, we asked a variety of people to name the least accurate political memoirs ever written.... -
  JAMES K. GALBRAITH, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of "The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too."
  DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, professor of history at Rice University and author, most recently, of "The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America." - WaPo, 3-19-10
• Historic win or not, Democrats could pay a price, according to historians - WaPo (3-21-10)

FEATURES:

• The historian Tony Judt says being paralysed by a wasting disease has made his mind sharper: "It's not as though I could try being dumb and compare the two sensations," he says. "But I have to assume it’s a blessing ... [although] I’m not sure that it’s mental sharpness that has kept me going so much as sheer bloody-minded willpower — or else the sort of ego that adapts well to overachieving."... - Times Online (UK) (4-4-10)
• Pessimism back in fashion in historical circles: Niall Ferguson, one of the more important economic historians of our time, is projecting a fiscal disaster in the United States that will match the one Greece is facing at the moment. He says that, according to White House projections, gross public debt will exceed 100 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). That worries him a great deal... - Business Times (3-30-10)
• Religion is now the hottest topic for American historians: The study of religion is too important to be left in the hands of believers. So claims David A. Hollinger, a professor of American history at the University of California at Berkeley, in his response to religion emerging as the hottest topic of study among members of the American Historical Association (AHA).... - Christianity Today (3-11-10)

QUOTES:

• Presidential unpredictability can be a good thing for the nation: Presidential historian Michael Beschloss says that Kennedy "feared that the changing political environment was making it more difficult for Americans to practice the kind of leadership that had shaped our past." Kennedy meant that politics had become too expensive, mechanized and "dominated by professional politicians and public relations men." - Scripps Howard, 4-5-10
• Tom Mockaitis Historian of terrorism worried about rise in militia groups: "It doesn't take a lot of fringe elements in a country this size to do an enormous amount of damage," said Tom Mockaitis, professor of history and terrorism expert, DePaul University. "What worries me is not the lunatic fringe. It's the larger core of soft support in which these fish can swim, and say they draw energy from this larger pool of anger," said Mockaitis.... ABC News (3-30-10)
• Historians ask which American war has been the longest: Host Bob Schieffer noted that milestone during the March 22, 2010, edition of CBS' Face the Nation. "March 19th was the seventh anniversary of the Iraq invasion, which began our longest war," he said. We wondered if it really has been America's longest war.... - St. Petersburg Times (3-22-10)
• Historians blast proposed Texas social studies curriculum: "The books that are altered to fit the standards become the best-selling books, and therefore within the next two years they'll end up in other classrooms," said Fritz Fischer, chairman of the National Council for History Education, a group devoted to history teaching at the pre-college level. "It's not a partisan issue, it's a good history issue."...
  "I'm made uncomfortable by mandates of this kind for sure," said Paul S. Boyer, emeritus professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of several of the most popular U.S. history textbooks, including some that are on the approved list in Texas... - WaPo (3-18-10)

INTERVIEWS:

• Award-wining historian Natalie Zemon Davis talks to American Prospect: Natalie Zemon Davis will be awarded the 2010 Holberg International Memorial Prize on June 9 for the way in which her work "shows how particular events can be narrated and analyzed so as to reveal deeper historical tendencies and underlying patterns of thought and action." Davis describes her work as anthropological in nature. Rather than tell the political story of a time and place, concentrating on an elite narrative, Davis' work is often from the point of view of those less likely to keep records of their lives. TAP spoke with Davis, an 81-year-old professor emerita of history at Princeton University and current adjunct professor of history at the University of Toronto, about her innovative approach to history.... - The American Prospect (4-9-10)

AWARDS &APPOINTMENTS:

• New AHA Executive Director: Jim Grossman to Succeed Arnita Jones: The American Historical Association is pleased to announce that Dr. James Grossman, currently Vice President for Research and Education at Chicago’s Newberry Library, will succeed Dr. Arnita Jones as the Association’s Executive Director. Dr. Jones will retire at the end of August... - AHA Blog (3-19-10)
• University of Toronto historian wins prestigious Holberg Prize: Natalie Zemon Davis, professor emerita from Princeton University and now a University of Toronto history scholar whose books have reached a wide audience, has won one of the world's top academic prizes. The Holberg Prize - established by the Norwegian parliament in 2003 and worth $700,500 US - is awarded for outstanding scholarly work in the arts and humanities, social sciences, law or theology. Philosopher Ian Hacking, also of the University of Toronto, won the prize last year... - EurekAlert (3-16-10)

ANNOUNCEMENTS & EVENTS CALENDAR:

• Major New Russian Archive for World War II: Head of Rosarkhiv Andrei Artizov has announced plans to create an enormous new archive to unite all Russian materials relating to the Second World War. Slated for completion by the 70th anniversary of victory, i.e. 2015, the new collection will include 13 million files.... - Dave Stone at the Russian Front (3-22-10)
• Project to digitize Canada's 1812 artifacts: Sarah Maloney has a passion for history. The Port Colborne resident, who has a master's degree in history from the University of Western Ontario, was one of two people hired to by Brock University to carry out its 1812 Online Digitization Project.
  In the work carried out, Maloney and the other assistant on the project took more than 20,000 photos of artifacts and documents from RiverBrink Art Museum, Grimsby Museum, Jordan Historical Museum, Port Colborne Historical and Marine Museum, Niagara Historical Society and Museum and Niagara Falls museums, which includes Lundy's Lane Historical Museum. One thousand items revolving around the war will eventually be online at www.1812history.com and our ontario.caas well. More than 800 items can be seen on those websites now and the project wraps up at the end of the month.... - Welland Tribune (Canada) (3-15-10)
• Princeton University: Symposium explores race and the Obama presidency Tuesday, April 13, 2010, 1 p.m. · Frist Campus Center, Multipurpose Room A: Princeton scholars in the fields of African American Studies, politics, religion, sociology and history will come together Tuesday, April 13, at the University for the symposium "Race, American Politics, and the Presidency of Barack Obama." The event, which is free and open to the public, will take place from 1 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. in Multipurpose Room A of the Frist Campus Center on the Princeton campus, followed by a public reception.
  Speakers and panelists at the symposium will include Glaude; Larry Bartels, professor of politics and public affairs and director of Princeton's Center for the Study of Democratic Politics; Daphne Brooks, associate professor of English and African American studies; Kevin Kruse, associate professor of history; Douglas Massey, professor of sociology and public affairs; Imani Perry, professor of African American studies; Jeffrey Stout, professor of religion; and Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs. - Princeton

ON TV:

• HBO sought Easton professor's expertise for 'The Pacific' war series: A simple question from his 6-year-old granddaughter inspired Easton historian Donald L. Miller to start writing about World War II. Miller, a Lafayette College history professor, has since written three books on the history of World War II. That led him to his latest project, as historical consultant and a writer for HBO's "The Pacific."...
  Miller says he was "very pleased" with how the series turned out. He describes it as "very violent, explosively emotional and tremendously gut-wrenching." "What drew me into the study of war is people are at both their best and worst," he says. "People do things they didn't think they were capable of doing. There are tremendous acts of heroism and acts of barbarism." - Allentown Morning Call (3-14-10)
• C-SPAN2: BOOK TV Weekend Schedule
• PBS American Experience: Mondays at 9pm
• History Channel: Weekly Schedule

BEST SELLERS (NYT):

• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - March 21, 2010
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - March 28, 2010
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - April 4, 2010
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - April 11, 2010

BOOKS COMING SOON:

• Simon Dixon: Catherine the Great, (Paperback) April 6, 2010
• J. Todd Moye: Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, (Hardcover) April 12, 2010
• Seth G. Jones: In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (Paperback) April 12, 2010
• Nick Bunker: Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History, (Hardcover) April 13, 2010
• Dominic Lieven: Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace, (Hardcover), April 15, 2010
• Timothy J. Henderson: The Mexican Wars for Independence, (Paperback) April 13, 2010
• Hampton Sides: Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin, (Hardcover) April 27, 2010
• Max Hastings: Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945, (Hardcover) April 27, 2010
• Bradley Gottfried: The Maps of Gettysburg: An Atlas of the Gettysburg Campaign, June 3 - July 13, 1863, (Hardcover) April 19, 2010
• Kelly Hart: The Mistresses of Henry VIII, (Paperback) May 1, 2010
• Mark Puls: Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution, (Paperback) May 11, 2010

DEPARTED:

• James F, McMillan, Scottish historian of France, dies at 61: PROFESSOR James F McMillan, Richard Pares Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh, has died at the age of 61. He was an outstanding scholar, an inspirational teacher, a brilliant academic manager and a wonderful colleague: the word "collegial" might have been coined to describe him. The Scotsman (UK) (3-15-10)
• Kenneth Dover, a Provocative Scholar of Ancient Greek Literature, Dies at 89: Kenneth Dover, an eminent scholar of ancient Greek life, language and literature who became known for his willingness to break longstanding taboos in print, from his frank descriptions of sexual behavior (both the Greeks’ and his own) to his baldly stated desire to bring about the death of a vexing Oxford colleague, died on Sunday in Cupar, Scotland. He was 89... - NYT (3-13-10)
• Professor Jack Pole's reassessment of American 'exceptionalism': Professor Jack Pole, the historian who died on January 30 aged 87, was a pioneering figure in the study of American political culture whose challenge to the notion of American "exceptionalism" ignited a debate that has yet to burn out... - Telegraph (UK) (3-13-10)

POLITICAL HIGHLIGHTS:

This Week's Political Highlights

THIS WEEK IN HISTORY:

On This Day in History....

This Week in History....

HISTORY NEWS:

• Conservatives on Texas school board revising curriculum, change history: Dr. McLeroy, addressing the Texas school board (Washington Monthly) The Texas Board of Education has approved a new school curriculum that will put a stamp on history and economics textbooks that will horrify some and be questioned by others.... - Examiner, 3-14-10
• Larry Schweikart: University of Dayton historian criticizes textbooks for minimizing Reagan: ...As for controversy, Professor Larry Schweikart of the University of Dayton, sees plenty in the textbooks he reviews. When vetting a history book, Schweikart first turns to any section discussing President Ronald Reagan. He says what you find there will tell you everything you need to know about whether or not a book is slanted. Schweikart believes that's how many errors wind up in school textbooks: bias.... - FOX News (3-11-10)
• Centuries-Old Shipwrecks Found in Baltic Sea: A gas company building an underwater pipeline stumbled upon several wrecks, some dating back 800 years.... A dozen centuries-old shipwrecks dating from medieval times to the world wars have been found. The ships were very well preserved because ship worms that eat wooden wrecks don't live in the Baltic Sea. Thousands of similar wrecks have previously been found in the Baltic Sea.... - Discovery.com, 3-9-10
• Jonathan D. Spense: Eminent China Scholar Will Deliver 2010 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities: Jonathan D. Spence, an expert on Chinese history and culture and a professor emeritus at Yale University, will deliver the 2010 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities announced on Monday.... - Chronicle of Higher Education (3-8-10)
• 45 years after Selma civil rights march, some see ways to go: Robert Powell and Maria Gitin had not seen each other in 45 years until Sunday, more than four decades after they rode a donkey together through rural Wilcox County to register voters. Gitin answered the Rev. Martin Luther King's call for civil rights workers to come to Alabama after state and local law enforcement officers beat marchers trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on March 7, 1965.... - USA Today, 3-7-10
• Reagan Fever: Ronald Reagan fever has not subsided in the GOP. The most recent flare-up came with the proposal of Congressman Patrick McHenry to replace Ulysses S. Grant with Ronald Reagan on the $50 bill. "President Reagan is indisputably one of the most transformative presidents of the 20th century," McHenry wrote to his fellow members of Congress. "Like President Roosevelt on the dime and President Kennedy on the half-dollar, President Reagan deserves a place of honor on our nation's currency."
  Not exactly. It’s true that Reagan fans have been agitating for some time to memorialize the Gipper in a variety of ways, and, as the renaming of National Airport a few years ago indicates, they’ve been pretty successful. But putting him on the $50 bill doesn't make much sense. For one thing, it’s unfair to Grant. As UCLA historian Joan Waugh, who has written a history of Grant, observed in the Los Angeles Times, he has gotten a bum historical rap....- National Interest, 3-12-10

OP-EDs:

• Tevi Troy: Nerd is another word for smart Republicans have long been viewed as those who get gentleman’s "C" in the national classroom. In fact, it is almost a liberal trope to call Republican presidents "dumb."
  Democrats, in contrast, are usually cited as the smart ones in American politics....
  But this simplistic analysis of smart Democrats contrasted with dumb Republicans does not fit reality. - Politico, 3-12-10

REVIEWS & FIRST CHAPTERS:

• Ellen Fitzpatrick: Dear Mrs. Kennedy Book recalls grief of a nation, one condolence letter at a time: ...But at least one of Jane's notes ended up among the 200,000 pages that were sent to the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, where they sat largely ignored until historian Ellen Fitzpatrick decided to write "Letters to Jackie: Condolences From a Grieving Nation."
  The book, released last week by HarperCollins, includes more than 200 never-before published letters divided into three categories: vivid recollections of the day Kennedy was killed; letters that express views on society, politics and the presidency, and personal experiences of grief and loss.... - AP, 3-14-10
• Professor's book shows delicate relationship between love, honor, and politics: "The Tyranny of Opinion," written by Pablo Piccato, associate professor of history at Columbia, recounts an 1894 dispute between two politicians over a woman's love.... - Columbia Spectator, 3-9-10
• Ken Gormley: Southern Bound: 'Death of American Virtue' brings clarity: Good lord, how time marches on. It’s already been over a decade since the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal and the ensuing struggle to impeach President Bill Clinton riveted the nation. And now, in a project begun before the smoke had even cleared, we have a massive (800 pages, counting notes, bibliography and index) new book about the whole mess. Not interested? Think again, for if you have any curiosity about politics and power, "The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr" (Crown, $35) by Ken Gormley provides some much-needed balance and perspective on one of the most distasteful and divisive episodes in modern American history.... - Mobile Press-Register, 3-14-10
• Anthony Brandt: The Frozen Unknown: THE MAN WHO ATE HIS BOOTS The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage But the fabled Northwest Passage has returned to the news pages as a warming climate unlocks its deep channels, allowing access to hydrocarbons below the seabed. Anthony Brandt anchors his robust new history, “The Man Who Ate His Boots,” in that modern context.... - NYT, 3-11-10 Excerpt
• Jonathan Phillips: Butchers and Saints: HOLY WARRIORS A Modern History of the Crusades It’s tempting to dismiss the crusaders’ piety as sheer hypocrisy. In fact, their faith was as pure as their savagery. As Jonathan Phillips observes in his excellent new history — in case we needed reminding at this late date — "faith lies at the heart of holy war.".... - NYT, 3-11-10 Excerpt

FEATURES:

• Letter from America An Old Essay Used to Explain a New Movement: The name Richard Hofstadter has been summoned up a lot lately in liberal opinion columns and the blogosphere as an eloquent and intellectually impeccable explanation for political developments like the Tea Party movement, the stardom of Sarah Palin, and the claim on right-wing talk radio that Barack Obama is a "socialist," maybe even a "bolshevik" leading America to ruin. Mr. Hofstadter was the highly respected, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Columbia University among whose most famous essays was one called "The Paranoid Style of American Politics," published in Harper’s Magazine in 1964, which is the piece of writing being cited most often these days.... - NYT, 3-11-10

QUOTES:

• Amy Strebe: US honors pioneering women military pilots: Amy Strebe, a historian and author of "Flying for her Country," said the tribute came not a moment too soon. "This is the time to do it. In a couple of years they are not going to be with us anymore," she said. - AFP, 3-10-10

INTERVIEWS:

• Q+A: Interview with historian Simon Schama Dr Simon Schama interviewed by PAUL HOLMES: PAUL So you are anti federation. Obama - let's talk about Barack Obama, of whom you are a keen student, he's been President for what nearly a year, just over a year, and on the matter of Obama he's called off his trip of Asia and I think Melbourne for I think three days, this is because the White House seems to think Simon that he can possibly get his health reform through very shortly. Is he going to be able to do that do you think, realistically.
  SIMON I think he is actually, we're in act three of Obama actually Paul, I think act one was the extraordinary campaign he ran, the unrealistic expectations that him as some sort of American messiah, someone who'd bring Americans together at a moment of multiple crises. Act two was Obama being so convinced that he could bring Americans into that great national cuddle and getting on as a policy wonk person with the day to day business of governing that he forgot about politics. Act two between Spring and Christmas last year he absolutely lost the political plot, he lost all the toughness which is there underneath the rather philosophical lofty nice guy. Act three he's decided to be much more of a fighter, and the business of health care reform is he's using a process called reconciliation, which is sort of the opposite of what it sounds. It is a way to use the budgetary process to get through pieces of legislation that don't require a super majority of filibuster proof majority, just a simple majority. It was thought to be so-called nuclear option, something that could blow back in political disadvantage, but George Bush used it to enact taxcuts and that takes away an issue from the Republicans, he's gonna use that for health care reform, and he's gonna use it for financial regulation reform, and my bet is even though Republicans think it will polarise the country more, the country will actually be grateful for seeing a tougher more decisive President.... - TV New Zealand, 3-14-10

AWARDS &APPOINTMENTS:

• Janet Gezari: Professor´s fellowship fosters Euro-American relations at the American Academy in Berlin: There is no typical day for Professor Janet Gezari at the American Academy in Berlin, where she is spending the semester as the Siemens Fellow. One minute she'll be dining with a famous opera director or visiting the Federal President's office, and deeply engaged in her research or exploring the sites of Berlin in the next. "This is a remarkable opportunity for me," Gezari, the Lucy Marsh Haskell '19 Professor of English, said. "In addition to ideal conditions for working, I have the opportunity to get to know Berlin and Berliners.".... - Connecticut College, 3-12-10
• Joseph Bergin: Manchester historian honoured A University of Manchester historian has received one of the Europe’s oldest and most important history prizes: Professor Joseph Bergin was given the prize this month from the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres for his book Church, society and religious change in France 1580-1730. It recognizes the most important works published on the history of France, and is rarely given to non-French language publications. "It is a great honour to receive this award, and recognition that this book is now regarded as most comprehensive account written in any language – French included – of the subject and period," said Professor Bergin... - Manchester News, 3-11-10

SPOTTED:

• Bernard Bailyn: Pulitzer Prize-Winner Offers Lesson in History: Bernard Bailyn, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian,and professor of early American history at Harvard University, treated an intimate audience gathered in Fulton Hall Tuesday evening to an unconventional lecture on the context and piecemeal construction of the American Constitution. "I am very much interested in the contingencies, accidents, personalities, and timing that play into the outcome of historical events," Bailyn said in his introduction. Bailyn said that the writing and interpretation of the American Constitution was the "perfect example" of the outcome of such a strange mixture of factors, pointing out what he described as the numerous Constitutional accidents, compromises, and contingencies that undermine the modern-day sense of the document’s inevitability.... - BC's The Heights, 3-11-10

ON TV:

• Donald L. Miller: HBO sought Easton professor's expertise for 'The Pacific' war series HBO's 'THE PACIFIC': A simple question from his 6-year-old granddaughter inspired Easton historian Donald L. Miller to start writing about World War II. Miller, a Lafayette College history professor, has since written three books on the history of World War II. That led him to his latest project, as historical consultant and a writer for HBO's ''The Pacific.'' The 10-part miniseries on the U.S. Marine Corps' World War II campaign in the Pacific begins airing at 9 tonight. Its producers include Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg.... - Morning Call, 3-14-10
• C-SPAN2: BOOK TV Weekend Schedule
• PBS American Experience: Mondays at 9pm
• History Channel: Weekly Schedule

BEST SELLERS (NYT):

• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - March 21, 2010
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - March 14, 2010

BOOKS COMING SOON:

• Nicholas Schou: Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World, (Hardcover) March 16, 2010
• Timothy M. Gay: Satch, Dizzy, and Rapid Robert: The Wild Saga of Interracial Baseball Before Jackie Robinson, (Hardcover) March 16, 2010
• Miranda Carter: George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I, (Hardcover) March 23, 2010
• John W. Steinberg: All the Tsar's Men: Russia's General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, 1898-1914, (Hardcover) April 1, 2010
• Simon Dixon: Catherine the Great, (Paperback) April 6, 2010
• J. Todd Moye: Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, (Hardcover) April 12, 2010
• Seth G. Jones: In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (Paperback) April 12, 2010
• Nick Bunker: Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History, (Hardcover) April 13, 2010
• Dominic Lieven: Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace, (Hardcover), April 15, 2010
• Timothy J. Henderson: The Mexican Wars for Independence, (Paperback) April 13, 2010
• Hampton Sides: Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin, (Hardcover) April 27, 2010
• Max Hastings: Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945, (Hardcover) April 27, 2010
• Bradley Gottfried: The Maps of Gettysburg: An Atlas of the Gettysburg Campaign, June 3 - July 13, 1863, (Hardcover) April 19, 2010
• Kelly Hart: The Mistresses of Henry VIII, (Paperback) May 1, 2010
• Mark Puls: Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution, (Paperback) May 11, 2010

DEPARTED:

• Professor Jack Pole's reassessment of American 'exceptionalism': Professor Jack Pole, the historian who died on January 30 aged 87, was a pioneering figure in the study of American political culture whose challenge to the notion of American "exceptionalism" ignited a debate that has yet to burn out.... - Telegraph (UK), 3-13-10
• Richard Stites, Historian of Russian Culture, Dies at 78: Richard Stites, who opened up new territory for historians with a landmark work on the Russian women’s movement and in numerous articles and books on Russian and Soviet mass culture, died on Sunday in Helsinki, where he was doing research. He was 78 and lived in Washington. The cause was complications from cancer, his son Andrei said.... - NYT (3-13-10)
• Thomas Garden Barnes, Berkeley professor and advocate of Canadian history, dies at 80: UC Berkeley history and law professor emeritus Thomas Garden Barnes, who was known as an erudite academe of English, French, American and Canadian law and history, died Tuesday. He was 80.... - The Daily Californian (3-11-10)

POLITICAL HIGHLIGHTS:

This Week's Political Highlights

IN FOCUS:

• Rosalind Rosenberg: Interview with Professor Rosenberg: Why should we continue to celebrate Women’s History Month? So that women do not disappear again from history.... - Columbia Spectator, 2-28-10

THIS WEEK IN HISTORY:

On This Day in History....

This Week in History....

HISTORY NEWS:

• Congressman Wants Reagan on $50 Bill, Joan Waugh objects to call to replace Grant on the $50 bill with Reagan: "President Reagan is indisputably one of the most transformative presidents of the 20th century," Rep. Patrick McHenry, a Republican, said in a letter to his fellow members of Congress. "Like President Roosevelt on the dime and President Kennedy on the half-dollar, President Reagan deserves a place of honor on our nation's currency."
  "I'm outraged," Joan Waugh, UCLA history professor and the author of "U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth," told AOL News. "I think it's a bad idea, and particularly troublesome coming from Southern Republicans."
  The commanding general who led the North to victory in the Civil War, Grant was not a beloved figure in the Deep South, Waugh says. "But for the rest of the country, he was an incredibly popular two-term president."... - AOL News (3-3-10)
• Diane Ravitch: Scholar's School Reform U-Turn Shakes Up Debate: Diane Ravitch, the education historian who built her intellectual reputation battling progressive educators and served in the first Bush administration’s Education Department, is in the final stages of an astonishing, slow-motion about-face on almost every stand she once took on American schooling.... - NYT, 3-3-10
• Henry Holt drops publication of 'Last Train From Hiroshima': Henry Holt is dropping publication of "The Last Train From Hiroshima" after the author, Charles Pellegrino, failed to adequately answer questions about a source in the book and the revocation of his PhD more than 25 years ago.... - WaPo, 3-2-10
• Pellegrino's atom bom book withdrawn from circulation: Publication has been halted for a disputed book about the atomic bombing of Japan that "Avatar" director James Cameron had optioned for a possible film, The Associated Press has learned. Publisher Henry Holt and Company, responding to questions from the AP, said Monday that author Charles Pellegrino "was not able to answer" concerns about The Last Train from Hiroshima, including whether two men mentioned in the book actually existed.... AP (3-2-10)
• Vichy remains a source of discomfort in modern France: The tangled oak woods of the Château de l’Écluse are inhabited by a great silence. The descendants of Fernand Plée, who purchased these grounds and this red-brick manor in central France in 1941, say they have nothing to hide. Their grandfather, they say, was a good man: a decorated veteran of the First World War, a willing partner to the Allies in the second, a man of generosity and courage.... - NYT (3-1-10)
• Historians (among others) honored at White House ceremony: "Sorry I'm a little late. I had this thing I had to do," joked President Obama, just before an afternoon ceremony at the White House on Thursday in which luminaries in the arts and academics were presented with the highest medals for achievements in their fields....
  The humanities citations went to prizewinning authors and historians Robert A. Caro ("The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, Means of Ascent and Master of the Senate"), Annette Gordon-Reed ("The Hemingses of Monticello"), David Levering Lewis ("W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963") and William H. McNeill ("Plagues and Peoples"). The list also includes speechwriter and lawyer Theodore Sorensen, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Philippe de Montebello and philanthropist Albert H. Small, as well as Wiesel, founding chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the author of "Night," whom the president gave his own big hug.... - WaPo (2-26-10)
• Israel names two biblical tombs in West Bank heritage sites: Israel named the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Rachel's tomb in the West Bank heritage sites on Monday. Both biblical tombs are in Palestinian cities, and the decision brought warnings of violence and protests on Tuesday.... - CS Monitor, 2-23-10
• Adrian Johns: History shows that intellectual property is more complex than either its creators or copiers care to admit, says a Chicago scholar: The history of publishing is swimming with pirates—far more than Adrian Johns expected when he started hunting through the archives for them. And he thinks their stories may hold keys to understanding the latest battles over digital publishing—and the future of the book.... - Chronicle of Higher Education (2-21-10)
• Film Based on Book by Duke Professor Opens Nationwide Friday Duke connections helped bring "Blood Done Sign My Name" to big screen: The film version of Duke professor Timothy Tyson's best-selling memoir "Blood Done Sign My Name" opens nationwide in select theaters this Friday, Feb. 19.... - Duke News, 2-17-10
• Tests show King Tut died from malaria, study says: King Tutankhamen, the teen-aged pharaoh whose Egyptian tomb yielded dazzling treasures, limped around on tender bones and a club foot and probably died from malaria, researchers said on Tuesday.... - Reuters, 2-16-10

OP-EDs:

• ROBERT W. MERRY: Op-Ed Contributor The Myth of the One-Term Wonder: No doubt President Obama was sincere when he recently told ABC's Diane Sawyer that he'd "rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president." The president seemed to be saying that he would make decisions with history in mind rather than voter sentiment, even if voter sentiment would get him tossed out at the next election.
  This is perhaps a noble sensibility — and one worth reflecting on as President's Day approaches. But it's also misguided. The judgment of history — in the form of presidential rankings yielded up by those periodic polls of heavyweight historians — coincides to a remarkable degree with the contemporaneous judgment of the electorate. With few exceptions, history has not smiled upon one-term presidents. Only one such chief executive has managed with any consistency to get into the historians' "near great" category.... - NYT, 2-13-10
• Ron Radosh: Growing Anti-Semitism On The Campus: But even more disturbing is the growing evidence that Jewish students are having a most confused response to this development.... - Minding the Campus (3-3-10)

REVIEWS & FIRST CHAPTERS:

• Marilyn Johnson: Library Science THIS BOOK IS OVERDUE How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All NYT, 3-7-10 Excerpt
• Karl Rove: Book review: 'Courage and Consequence' by Karl Rove: COURAGE AND CONSEQUENCE My Life as a Conservative in the Fight In his memoir, Karl Rove acknowledges mistakes during the Bush presidency, but defends his former boss.... - WaPo, 3-5-10
• Francis Wheen: Book review: 'Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia' by Francis Wheen: STRANGE DAYS INDEED The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia Some historians believe in the great man theory of history. Not Francis Wheen. In "Strange Days Indeed," Wheen advances what might be called the "crazy man theory of history." And it makes perfect sense because he's writing about the 1970s, when world leaders exhibited astonishing levels of lunacy.... - WaPo, 3-5-10
• James S. Hirsch: Willie Mays, the Say Hey Kid: WILLIE MAYS The Life, the Legend All those old passions rose in me again when reading James S. Hirsch’s fine new book, "Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend."... In his long, fascinating account, Hirsch tells the full story of Mays’s baseball life.... - NYT, 2-28-10 - Excerpt
• Book Review of "Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone," by Nadine Cohodas: Indeed, what kept me from warming to Nadine Cohodas's sharply observed biography is that it tethered me to such a deeply unpleasant character: a woman who neglects her own daughter and pushes away everyone who does her a good turn, who dwindles into alcoholism and self-exile without losing an ounce of her arrogance.... - WaPo, 2-26-10
• Nadine Cohodas: Nina Simone, Diva Out of Carolina: PRINCESS NOIRE The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone Indeed, Nadine Cohodas’s disturbing portrait in "Princess Noire" sets out to confirm Simone's genius. The author lingers on her stage performances, her musical decisions, her sartorial choices — the alchemy she created in sound and fury.... - NYT, 2-25-10 Excerpt
• History Book review: "Our Times" by A.N. Wilson: OUR TIMES The Age of Elizabeth II The reign of Queen Elizabeth II "is the one in which Britain effectively stopped being British," A.N. Wilson argues.... - WaPo, 2-26-10
• More Obama books on the way: We've seen several books on the 2008 election -- Game Change now rides the top of the non-fiction charts -- and soon we'll be seeing new, broader works on Barack Obama's life and times.... - USA Today, 2-22-10
• Ken Gormley: The President and the Prosecutor: THE DEATH OF AMERICAN VIRTUE Clinton vs. Starr: "The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr," by Ken Gormley, recreates it all, from the Clintons' investment in the Whitewater development in rural Arkansas to the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit and Clinton's affair with Lewinsky, culminating in the impeachment trial. This hefty volume, going beyond the sordid details, provides helpful context for the larger story, the fractionalization of American politics that defined the Clinton years.... - NYT, 2-16-10
• Damages: Bill Clinton's Legal Mess: THE DEATH OF AMERICAN VIRTUE Clinton vs. Starr: - NYT, 2-15-10
• David Greenberg: Book review of 'The Death of American Virtue,' by Ken Gormley: THE DEATH OF AMERICAN VIRTUE Clinton vs. Starr Ken Gormley's new book about the Clinton impeachment saga bears the lurid and trite title "The Death of American Virtue," which sounds like a mashup of works by the conservative pundit William Bennett. Happily, though, it's nothing of the sort. It is, rather, something I didn't imagine would arrive so soon: a restrained, fair-minded, soup-to-nuts history of the largely fruitless investigations of Bill Clinton that shadowed so much of his presidency.... WaPo, 2-19-10
• Nadine Cohodas: Under a Strange, Soulful Spell: PRINCESS NOIRE The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone One result was a stunning song, "Mississippi Goddam," written by Simone in the wake of the 1963 Birmingham church bombings and the killing of the civil rights advocate Medgar Evers. It was a song that inserted her into the forefront, at least musically, of the civil rights movement. Its recording is a moment that Nadine Cohodas's fascinating if turgid new biography of Simone, "Princess Noire," builds toward and then falls away from.... - NYT, 2-18-10 Excerpt

FEATURES:

• Tim Lewis: Teaching Canadian history through hockey: Turning hockey into a history lesson is a dream come true for Tim Lewis. Lewis combined his love of hockey and passion for history and developed two hockey-themed history courses in the summer including "Hockey and the Canadian Identity to 1952: The Development of a National Obsession", and "Hockey and the Canadian Identity since 1952: Canada's Game in the Cold War and Beyond".... - Canada.com (3-3-10)
• Black History Today: A Profile of Historian Crystal Feimster: Crystal Feimster went to college thinking she was going to be an attorney. The legal profession’s loss was history's gain. While she was still an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina, Feimster met a string of distinguished African-American historians who made history exciting, including Tera Hunter, Darlene Clark Hine and Clayborne Carson.... Today, Feimster, 38, is at the forefront of a new wave of black historians exploring the forgotten nooks and crannies of American history. This fall, she will move from Princeton, where she has been a visiting professor, to a position in the Department of African-American Studies at Yale University. She is married to Australian historian Daniel Bottsman, whose work centers on Japan... - The Root (2-19-10)

QUOTES:

• Missing Element in Obama's Ties With G.O.P. Leaders: Good Chemistry: "The founders' work was grounded in personal chemistry," said Ted Widmer, a presidential historian at Brown University and former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton. "They spent endless time together. They lived near each other in Philadelphia. They disagreed profoundly on things, but they all knew each other, and that helped."... - NYT, 2-24-10

INTERVIEWS:

• Robert Dallek: All Things Considered, Obama, Congress, And The Need For Toughness: President Obama is known for his consensus-building style. But does he have the stomach for the tactics to get his agenda passed? President Lyndon Johnson went one-on-one with dissenting congressmen and threatened to end their careers unless they toed the party line. Would those tactics fly today? In the wake of an unprecedented health-care summit this week, host Guy Raz talks with historian Robert Dallek about how tough presidents have to be.... - NPR, 2-27-10
• Jeffrey Wasserstrom: The Dalai Lama's Visit to D.C.: A Short Interview With Historian A. Tom Grunfeld: The lead-up to the Dalia Lama's meeting with President Barack Obama at the White House last week received a great deal of attention from the press, and there was also a considerable amount of after-the-fact assessment of the event. In order to place what happened into a broad historical perspective, I put a few questions to A. Tom Grunfeld, who is a past contributor to "China Beat" and the author of The Making of Modern Tibet. Here are the results of our interview via e-mail.... Huffington Post (2-24-10)
• Michael Kazin says America is an optimistic nation -- Interview with CNN: What does it mean when 86 percent of the Americans surveyed last week by CNN/Opinion Research Corp. say they believe that their system of government is broken? It probably means, Michael Kazin says, that Americans are behaving like they always do. A repeated theme in American history, says Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University, "is Americans believing the country is in decline and then finding ways to rebound from both the fear of decline and the problems that gave rise to that fear."... - CNN (2-23-10)

AWARDS &APPOINTMENTS:

• Robert S. McElvaine: Clintonian receives literary honor: Historian, author and longtime Clintonian Robert S. McElvaine is a winner of the 2010 Richard Wright Literary Excellence Award. The honor was presented Friday at the 21st annual Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration in Natchez. It is given annually to honor Wright, the internationally acclaimed author and Natchez native who wrote the classic books Black Boy and Native Son.... - Clintonian News, 3-4-10
• Gordon S. Wood wins American History Book Prize: The historian Gordon S. Wood won the American History Book Prize last week for "Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815," an account of how America’s leaders created the country’s democratic institutions. The award, presented by the New-York Historical Society, comes with a $50,000 prize, an engraved medal and the title of American Historian Laureate.... - NYT (2-28-10)
• Washington College Announces George Washington Book Prize Finalists: The finalists are: Richard Beeman’s Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (Random House), R.B. Bernstein's The Founding Fathers Reconsidered (Oxford), and Edith B Gelles' Abigail & John: Portrait of A Marriage (William Morrow).... - The C.V. Starr Center at Washington College
• Henry Snyder: UC - Riverside historian named Officer of the British Empire (OBE): To the titles Recipient of a National Humanities Medal and Professor of History Emeritus at UC Riverside Henry Snyder can add one more: Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. The award, which is presented to few individuals outside the United Kingdom, was announced by Queen Elizabeth II in December and will be presented to Snyder at the British embassy in Washington, D.C. in early spring.... - UC - Riverside (2-22-10)

SPOTTED:

• Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. captivates Messiah College audience with lecture on genealogy and history: On Thursday night, before a packed audience at the Eisenhower Campus Center at Messiah College in Grantham, Gates' formidable command of history and genealogy, plus his natural and authentic style at the podium, captivated an audience of students, adults and dignitaries -- young, old, black and white -- with a lecture that wove personal stories with American history, and the important implications of personal ancestry.... - Penn Live, 2-25-10

ANNOUNCEMENTS & EVENTS CALENDAR:

• Spotlight, Greenwich Offering Face Time With History: the Bruce is hosting a three-part lecture series. On Feb. 25, Philip B. Kunhardt III, a Lincoln scholar and Bard Center Fellow (and Mr. Kunhardt Jr.'s uncle), will discuss the photographs in "Lincoln, Life-Size," which span the period from 1857 to 1865. "I'm going to focus in on Lincoln’s face," he said, "what we can learn from it, how it changed over time."... - NYT, 2-21-10
• Studying and debunking Civil War myths: Civil War history is rich with tales of blood and gore, heroism, and too many lies. Some of the nation's pre-eminent historians will examine that history in a symposium, "Race, Slavery and the Civil War: The Tough Stuff of American History and Memory," at Norfolk State University in September. The conference is free and open to the public, and registration opened this week.... - The Virginian-Pilot (3-2-10)
• Civil War Web site gears up State promoting events for war's 150th anniversary: With just one year to go until the Civil War's 150th anniversary, history lovers across Tennessee have taken their battle for the past to a new front - cyberspace. The Tennessee Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission and the state Department of Tourist Development launched a new Web site this month to help promote events planned statewide for the war's anniversary, which will stretch from 2011-2015. The Web site - www.tncivilwar150.com - remains a work in progress but has already drawn praise from East Tennessee historians and preservationists.... - Knox News, 2-8-10

ON TV:

• C-SPAN2: BOOK TV Weekend Schedule
• PBS American Experience: Mondays at 9pm
• History Channel: Weekly Schedule

BEST SELLERS (NYT):

• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - March 14, 2010
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - March 7, 2010
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - February 28, 2010

BOOKS COMING SOON:

• Cliff Sloan: The Great Decision: Jefferson, Adams, Marshall, and the Battle for the Supreme Court, (Paperback) March 2, 2010
• Hugh Ambrose: The Pacific, (Hardcover) March 2, 2010
• Jonathan Phillips: Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades, (Hardcover) March 9, 2010
• Thomas Asbridge: The Crusades, (Hardcover) March 9, 2010
• Bryan D. Palmer: James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928 (1st Edition), (Paperback) March 1, 2010
• C. Brian Kelly: Best Little Stories from the Civil War, (Paperback) March 1, 2010
• Nicholas Schou: Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World, (Hardcover) March 16, 2010
• Timothy M. Gay: Satch, Dizzy, and Rapid Robert: The Wild Saga of Interracial Baseball Before Jackie Robinson, (Hardcover) March 16, 2010
• Miranda Carter: George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I, (Hardcover) March 23, 2010
• John W. Steinberg: All the Tsar's Men: Russia's General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, 1898-1914, (Hardcover) April 1, 2010
• Simon Dixon: Catherine the Great, (Paperback) April 6, 2010
• J. Todd Moye: Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, (Hardcover) April 12, 2010
• Seth G. Jones: In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (Paperback) April 12, 2010
• Nick Bunker: Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History, (Hardcover) April 13, 2010
• Dominic Lieven: Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace, (Hardcover), April 15, 2010
• Timothy J. Henderson: The Mexican Wars for Independence, (Paperback) April 13, 2010
• Hampton Sides: Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin, (Hardcover) April 27, 2010
• Max Hastings: Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945, (Hardcover) April 27, 2010
• Bradley Gottfried: The Maps of Gettysburg: An Atlas of the Gettysburg Campaign, June 3 - July 13, 1863, (Hardcover) April 19, 2010
• Kelly Hart: The Mistresses of Henry VIII, (Paperback) May 1, 2010
• Mark Puls: Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution, (Paperback) May 11, 2010

DEPARTED:

• William LaFleur, noted scholar at Penn: WILLIAM R. LaFleur was a distinguished professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, delving into such subjects as bioethics, Zen Buddhism, Japanese culture and the like, but one subject that also caught his interest was abortion. He wrote on this subject in a book, "Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan," one of his many books on subjects ranging from medieval literature to unethical medical research, religious thought, Zen and many other topics. He died of a massive heart attack Friday at the age of 73.... - Philadelphia Daily News, 3-4-10
• Professor Jack Pole: historian of the US, dies at 87: Professor Jack Pole was the foremost British historian of the United States in his generation, and his books and articles won him recognition and acclaim in the highest ranks of US historians. He was an expert on the American Revolution but he wrote on all periods and linked the history of the US to that of Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries. Times Online (UK) (2-16-10)
• David Bankier, Scholar of Holocaust, Dies at 63: David Bankier, who helped expand the contours of Holocaust research by examining the participation of ordinary Europeans in the extermination of their Jewish neighbors, died over the weekend after a long illness, Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem Holocaust center, announced. He was 63. Mr. Bankier, who was head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, focused his scholarly work on anti-Semitism, especially its use by the Nazis to promote and sustain a broader ideology. He was the author of "Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion Under Nazism" as well as a collection of essays, "Hitler, the Holocaust and German Society: Cooperation and Awareness.".... - NYT (2-28-10)

POLITICAL HIGHLIGHTS:

This Week's Political Highlights

IN FOCUS:

• Books on Abraham Lincoln: Michael Burlingame offers a Presidents Day reading list: Distinctive personal portraits of Abraham Lincoln.... - 1. Honor's Voice, By Douglas L. Wilson, Knopf, 1998
  2. The Young Eagle, By Kenneth J. Winkle, Taylor, 2001
  3. Lincoln's Melancholy, By Joshua Wolf Shenk, Houghton Mifflin, 2005
  4. Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly, By Jennifer Fleischner, Broadway, 2003
  5. Herndon's Lincoln, By William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, University of Illinois, 2006 - WSJ, 2-13-10
• Test your knowledge of presidential history: Ultimately, the Founding Fathers rejected the prevailing concept of governance at the time - a monarch - in setting up an infant nation, opting instead for someone a little closer to home. The President....
  And because we put so much faith in one man - no women, yet - we want to know as much about him as possible. So as we recognize Presidents Day today, it might be a good time to determine just what we do know about the presidents who've come and gone.... - The Gainsville Sun, 2-15-10

THIS WEEK IN HISTORY:

On This Day in History....

This Week in History....

HISTORY NEWS:

• Faulkner Link to Plantation Diary Discovered: The climactic moment in William Faulkner’s 1942 novel "Go Down, Moses" comes when Isaac McCaslin finally decides to open his grandfather’s leather farm ledgers with their "scarred and cracked backs" and "yellowed pages scrawled in fading ink" — proof of his family’s slave-owning past. Now, what appears to be the document on which Faulkner modeled that ledger as well as the source for myriad names, incidents and details that populate his fictionalized Yoknapatawpha County has been discovered.... - NYT, 2-11-10
• Niall Ferguson: Sex and summitry: the rise of the raunchy summit: So now we know what it takes to remove leading public intellectuals from their studies and source-notes. Niall Ferguson, TV historian, neo-Conservative and heart-throb of the conference circuit, has left his wife for the terrifyingly glamorous feminist writer, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.... - UK Standard, 2-11-10
• Snow Is No Longer a Joking Matter in Washington For what might be the first time ever, says Fred Beuttler, the House's deputy historian, the chamber's cafeteria was forced to close... - Time, 2-10-10

REVIEWS & FIRST CHAPTERS:

• Andrew Young's Memoir of John Edwards: THE POLITICIAN An Insider's Account of John Edwards's Pursuit of the Presidency and the Scandal That Brought Him Down In "The Politician," Young, a longtime aide to John Edwards, ventilates his abhorrence for former Senator Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, both of whom he seems to have undertaken Stakhanovite efforts to please.... - NYT, 2-12-10 Excerpt
• Jerry Z. Muller: Jews and the Burden of Money: CAPITALISM AND THE JEWS - In his slim essay collection "Capitalism and the Jews," Jerry Z. Muller presents a provocative and accessible survey of how Jewish culture and historical accident ripened Jews for commercial success and why that success has earned them so much misfortune. NYT, 2-12-10
• James S. Hirsch: A Nice Guy in a Perfect Baseball World: WILLIE MAYS The Life, the Legend James S. Hirsch's new book, "Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend," is the first biography written with Mays’s participation. (Mr. Hirsch and Mays intend to split the book’s earnings.) The result is an authoritative if sometimes listless book, one that’s less "Say Hey" than so-so. Like a long out to center field that scores a runner, however, it’s a book that gets the job done... - NYT, 2-12-10 Excerpt
• Michael Shelden: Books of The Times Mark Twain: A Public Image as Tailored as His Snow-White Suits: MARK TWAIN: MAN IN WHITE The Grand Adventure of His Final Years As Michael Shelden illustrates in his lively, star-struck and surprise-filled portrait of Twain the septuagenarian, this kind of behavior was carefully calculated. Twain made crucial, image-shaping decisions about how he would live his last years, and Mr. Shelden takes his book’s title from one of these choices... - NYT, 2-12-10 Excerpt
• Kevin Boyle: Book review of 'Root and Branch' by Rawn James, Jr.: ROOT AND BRANCH Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and the Struggle to End Segregation In "Root and Branch," Rawn James, Jr. isn't trying to add to that imposing scholarship as much as he's trying to give it a popular spin. A Washington lawyer, he moves nimbly through the complex legal issues Houston and his team raised. To add a poignant touch, he interweaves Houston's and Marshall's powerful personal stories. And he gives their campaign a stirringly triumphal arc, the story of a whole nation being forced -- by the fierce will of two learned men -- to overcome.... - WaPo, 2-12-10
• PUBLIC POLICY Book review: 'The Great American University,' by Jonathan R. Cole: THE GREAT AMERICAN UNIVERSITY Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected Our high schools may be hurting, but the best U.S. universities -- the Ivies, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, the select state universities (Virginia, California at Berkeley, Michigan and others) -- are the envy of the world. In his new book, Jonathan R. Cole, a former provost and dean of faculties at Columbia, shows how our research universities in particular came to be what they are... - WaPo, 2-12-10
• Book review: 'Inside Obama's Brain,' by Sasha Abamsky: INSIDE OBAMA'S BRAIN - Sasha Abramsky promises us a glimpse in "Inside Obama's Brain." He tells us right away what his book is not: It's not a biography, not political history, not inside-the-Beltway prattle. It is, he says, "a psychological profile writ large."... - WaPo, 2-12-10
• Bettye Collier-Thomas: Faith-Based Defiance: JESUS, JOBS, AND JUSTICE African American Women and Religion In "Jesus, Jobs, and Justice," Bettye Collier-Thomas, a professor of history at Temple University, tells the untold stories of scores of religious and politically active black women, their organizations, informal gatherings and intellectual movements. For readers who imagine that the religious and political activism of Sojourner Truth, Mary McLeod Bethune and Rosa Parks is exceptional, the book will be a revelation.... - NYT, 2-5-10
• SUSAN RUBIN SULEIMAN on Frederick Brown: French Contentions: FOR THE SOUL OF FRANCE Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus The real question for the opposing camps was not whether Alfred Dreyfus was guilty or innocent, but whether France itself was to be modern or traditional, cosmopolitan or nationalist, Catholic or secular, a republic or a monarchy. The struggle, as Frederick Brown puts it in “For the Soul of France,” his briskly paced and highly readable book, was between “champions and foes of the Enlightenment.” - NYT, 2-5-10
• Rebecca Skloot: Eternal Life: THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS In “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” Rebecca Skloot introduces us to the “real live woman,” the children who survived her, and the interplay of race, poverty, science and one of the most important medical discoveries of the last 100 years. - NYT, 2-5-10 - Excerpt
• Charles Pellegrino Book review: 'The Last Train from Hiroshima' THE LAST TRAIN FROM HIROSHIMA The Survivors Look Back But the tragedies and atrocities of World War II now belong to history, while Hiroshima is still part of our world, our continuing present, maybe our dreaded future. "The Last Train from Hiroshima" reminds us why this is so. Charles Pellegrino's account of what it was actually like on the ground in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, culled from survivors' memories and his own work in forensic archaeology, is the most powerful and detailed I have ever read. It puts flesh on the skeletons.... - WaPo, 2-7-10
• Garry Wills: Book review: 'Bomb Power': BOMB POWER The Modern Presidency and the National Security State Gary Wills begins his provocative account of the atomic bomb's impact on the republic with a high-detonation assertion.... The ensuing pages carry the reader through well-written, sometimes exciting vignettes of the bomb's damage to liberty and constitutional checks and balances. WaPo, 2-7-10
• Jonathan R. Cole: Tales Out of School: THE GREAT AMERICAN UNIVERSITY Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected As provost of Columbia University for 14 years and a professor of sociology and dean of faculties before that, Jonathan R. Cole is in an excellent position to write about the rise of the American research university and its special contribution to American life. In “The Great American University,”he makes a case for the extraordinary role such institutions play in improving our daily lives. He also argues that these “jewels in our nation’s crown” face a host of serious threats. NYT, 2-5-10

FEATURES:

• Tomb May Hold Answer to How Much Shakespeare Actually Wrote: A sarcophagus in an English parish church built by the writer Fulke Greville, a Shakespeare contemporary, could contain clues about several works traditionally attributed to Shakespeare. St. Mary’s Church in Warwick, England, contains a tomb that parishioners believe may contain clues about Shakespeare's work. The church was built by Fulke Greville, a "prominent 17th-century nobleman, ... scholar, soldier, statesman," spy, writer and Shakespeare contemporary who "some believe is the true author of several of the Bard's works," according to the Daily Telegraph. - Finding Dulcinea, 2-15-10
• HOW CHRISTIAN WERE THE FOUNDERS? The Christian "truth" about America's founding has long been taught in Christian schools, but not beyond. Recently, however — perhaps out of ire at what they see as an aggressive, secular, liberal agenda in Washington and perhaps also because they sense an opening in the battle, a sudden weakness in the lines of the secularists — some activists decided that the time was right to try to reshape the history that children in public schools study. Succeeding at this would help them toward their ultimate goal of reshaping American society. As Cynthia Dunbar, another Christian activist on the Texas board, put it, "The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next." - San Francisco Sentinel, 2-14-10
• Changing History Four new ways to write the story of the world: The fame of Howard Zinn, who died a week and a half ago, rested on his long record of challenging the status quo. As a young professor, he was a leader of the civil rights and antiwar movements, and throughout his career he was an inveterate demonstrator and speaker at rallies and strikes. His writings brought formerly obscure events like Bacon’s Rebellion, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, and the Philippine-American War into the light, arguing that such popular uprisings - and their brutal suppression - were central to the American story. It’s a vision that resonated with readers: Zinn’s 1980 book, “A People’s History of the United States,” has sold more than 2 million copies.... Boston Globe, 2-7-10
• A Chronicler of the World Now Looks Inward: In one of the short personal reminiscences that the historian Tony Judt has been writing for The New York Review of Books he mentions that he was part of the “lucky generation” born in the affluent West after World War II, free to indulge in daydreams and passions. Mr. Judt’s world, sadly, has contracted considerably. Now 62, he learned about 16 months ago that he has a form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and since then he has lost the ability to move nearly every muscle in his body, including those that help him breathe and swallow.... - NYT, 2-8-10

QUOTES:

• Mark Dyreson "It's a weird world of sports, but Winter Games have charms too": "Part of the reason we don't get the Winter Games is that we just don't understand the sports -- 300,000 Swedes lining a snow-covered path to watch people skiing strikes us as absurd," said Mark Dyreson, sports historian and professor at Penn State. "But part of it is also bald nationalism. We don't like it because we're not top dog." - LAT, 2-12-10
• On Religion A Rare Blend, Pro Football and Hasidic Judaism: For Jews, abundant as fans but uncommon as top players, the visibility of a Shlomo Veingrad serves both reassuring and cathartic roles. Having a Jew to root for — whether Hank Greenberg, Sandy Koufax or the Israeli N.B.A. rookie Omri Casspi — "has a lot to do with our desire to define ourselves as Americans in the most American way, which is sports," said Jeffrey S. Gurock, a history professor at Yeshiva University and the author of "Judaism’s Encounter With American Sports." At a deeper and more anxious level, American Jews continue to grapple with the stereotypical view of the Jew as egghead, nerd, weakling. That dismissive portrayal was a staple not only of anti-Semites, but also of early Zionists, who envisioned their "new man" with his plow and rifle as the antidote to the "golus Yid," the exilic Jew unable even to defend himself. "I don’t think those feelings are as conscious as in prior generations, but they still have some resonance," Professor Gurock said in a telephone interview. "So there’s a residual pride of someone achieving in this very secular world of sports." - NYT, 2-6-10

INTERVIEWS:

• Michael Kazin: What's Behind The New Populism?:
  In the year 2010, what is populism?
  It is as it has always been: the language of people who see ordinary people as a noble group and the elite class as self-serving. This year, the elites are perceived as Wall Street, the Obama administration and Democrats who want to increase the size of government. The left and right have been arguing in populist terms — whether the big evil is big government or big business — since the 1930s. NPR, 2-5-10
• Brown's Entry Ends Democrats' Supermajority: Republican Scott Brown was sworn in Thursday as the 41st Republican in the U.S. Senate. His election ends the Democratic supermajority in the chamber. WELNA: Senate Historian Don Ritchie says years ago it was normal that Republicans and Democrats would cross the aisle on key votes. He says its lately become normal that they dont.
  Mr. DON RITCHIE (Senate Historian): The two parties are much more internally cohesive than they ever were before. The ideological spectrum inside the Democratic conference and inside the Republican conference is much narrower than it was before, and they tend to vote together. WBUR, NPR, 2-4-10

AWARDS &APPOINTMENTS:

• Michael Burlingame "UIS professor wins 2010 Lincoln Prize": Authorities at the University of Illinois Springfield have announced two new honors for Professor Michael Burlingame, a noted Abraham Lincoln scholar. On Thursday, Burlingame was installed as holder of the Naomi Lynn Distinguished Chair of Lincoln Studies. On Friday, it was announced that Burlingame has won the 2010 Lincoln Prize for his two-volume "Abraham Lincoln: A Life," published last year by Johns Hopkins University Press.... - Chicago Tribune, 2-12-10
• Anna Pegler-Gordon: Professor wins book prize: Anna Pegler-Gordon, an associate professor in MSU's James Madison College was awarded the 2009 Theodore Saloutos book prize of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society for her book. Pegler-Gordon, who also is acting director of the Asian Pacific American Studies Program, won the award for the book “In Sight of America: Photography and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy.” - MSU State News, 2-9-10

SPOTTED:

• How Dovid Katz Thirst For Jewish History Rabbi Dovid Katz’s unique perspectives bend minds and preconceived notions: On a cold and misty Saturday evening, the small sanctuary at Beth Abraham Congregation in Northwest Baltimore is packed to overflowing. Men and women, young and old, Orthodox and Conservative, Reform and non-affiliated, have all come to hear about modern Jewish history. The speaker is Dovid Katz, the rabbi of Beth Abraham (known widely as "Hertzberg’s Shul"), who also happens to hold a Ph.D. in Jewish history and is attracting large audiences to his current 12-part lecture series — most of whom find his talks entertaining, interesting and informative. That’s one reason why the program is underwritten by the Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore, and co-sponsored by a number of local businesses and individuals.... - Baltimore Jewish Times,

ANNOUNCEMENTS & EVENTS CALENDAR:

• Noted historian to examine 'grand strategy': "The Nuts and Bolts of Grand Strategy" is the title of a lecture by Yale University historian Paul Kennedy set for 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 18, in 16 Robertson Hall. - Princeton, 2-15-10
• Civil War Web site gears up State promoting events for war's 150th anniversary: With just one year to go until the Civil War's 150th anniversary, history lovers across Tennessee have taken their battle for the past to a new front - cyberspace. The Tennessee Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission and the state Department of Tourist Development launched a new Web site this month to help promote events planned statewide for the war's anniversary, which will stretch from 2011-2015. The Web site - www.tncivilwar150.com - remains a work in progress but has already drawn praise from East Tennessee historians and preservationists.... - Knox News, 2-8-10

ON TV:

• C-SPAN2: BOOK TV Weekend Schedule
• PBS American Experience: Mondays at 9pm
• History Channel: Weekly Schedule

BEST SELLERS (NYT):

• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - February 21, 2010
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - February 14, 2010

BOOKS COMING SOON:

• Jordan Goodman: The Devil and Mr. Casement: One Man's Battle for Human Rights in South America's Heart of Darkness, (Hardcover) February 16, 2010
• Ken Gormley: The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr (Hardcover), February 16, 2010
• Jeffrey Race: War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province (Updated), (Paperback) February 16, 2010
• Patrick Tyler: World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East--from the Cold War to the War on Terror, (Paperback) February 16, 2010
• Susan Wise Bauer: The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade, (Hardcover) February 22, 2010
• Richard J. Evans: The Third Reich at War (Paperback) February 23, 2010
• Cliff Sloan: The Great Decision: Jefferson, Adams, Marshall, and the Battle for the Supreme Court, (Paperback) March 2, 2010
• Hugh Ambrose: The Pacific, (Hardcover) March 2, 2010
• Jonathan Phillips: Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades, (Hardcover) March 9, 2010
• Thomas Asbridge: The Crusades, (Hardcover) March 9, 2010
• Bryan D. Palmer: James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928 (1st Edition), (Paperback) March 1, 2010
• C. Brian Kelly: Best Little Stories from the Civil War, (Paperback) March 1, 2010
• Nicholas Schou: Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World, (Hardcover) March 16, 2010
• Timothy M. Gay: Satch, Dizzy, and Rapid Robert: The Wild Saga of Interracial Baseball Before Jackie Robinson, (Hardcover) March 16, 2010
• Miranda Carter: George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I, (Hardcover) March 23, 2010
• John W. Steinberg: All the Tsar's Men: Russia's General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, 1898-1914, (Hardcover) April 1, 2010
• Simon Dixon: Catherine the Great, (Paperback) April 6, 2010
• J. Todd Moye: Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, (Hardcover) April 12, 2010
• Seth G. Jones: In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (Paperback) April 12, 2010
• Nick Bunker: Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History, (Hardcover) April 13, 2010
• Dominic Lieven: Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace, (Hardcover), April 15, 2010
• Timothy J. Henderson: The Mexican Wars for Independence, (Paperback) April 13, 2010
• Hampton Sides: Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin, (Hardcover) April 27, 2010
• Max Hastings: Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945, (Hardcover) April 27, 2010
• Bradley Gottfried: The Maps of Gettysburg: An Atlas of the Gettysburg Campaign, June 3 - July 13, 1863, (Hardcover) April 19, 2010
• Kelly Hart: The Mistresses of Henry VIII, (Paperback) May 1, 2010
• Mark Puls: Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution, (Paperback) May 11, 2010

DEPARTED:

• Hawaii author and historian Bob Dye dead at 81: Honolulu author, historian and journalist Bob Dye died Friday following a long illness. He was 81. Dye wrote "Merchant Prince of the Sandalwood Mountains: Afong and the Chinese in Hawai'i," about the first Chinese millionaire in Hawai'i, and he was the editor of "Hawai'i Chronicles II and III.".... - Honolulu Advertiser, 2-6-10
• Hans L. Trefousse, Historian and Author, Dies at 88: Sometimes the least prepossessing American presidents are the most enduringly interesting. That is certainly the case for Andrew Johnson. His impeachment trial of 1868 was in the news again in the late 1990s, during the impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton.... - NYT, 2-4-10
• Daniel Randall Beirne: Army officer who went on to become a history and sociology professor and expert on Baltimore history: Daniel Randall Beirne, a West Pointer and retired Army officer who later had a second career as a University of Baltimore professor of sociology and history and was considered an authority on Baltimore history, died Wednesday of heart failure at his East Lake Avenue home. He was 85.... - Baltimore Sun, 2-6-10

POLITICAL HIGHLIGHTS:

This Week's Political Highlights

THIS WEEK IN HISTORY:

On This Day in History....

This Week in History....

• An act of defiance that changed history: Fifty years ago, African Americans in Greensboro and across the South lived in a separate, but not necessarily equal, society. On Feb. 1, 1960, that started to change. That day, the wall of segregation that divided blacks and whites began to crumble. It happened on South Elm Street in Greensboro.... - News Record, 1-31-10

HISTORY NEWS:

• FDR Defenders Top List Of Absurd Holocaust Statements: This is one "top ten" list no author wants to find himself on. The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies has just released its annual list of the "ten most absurd statements about the Allies' response to the Holocaust." Those who made the 2009 list range from old time Franklin Roosevelt diehards to legitimate historians who should know better. The Wyman Institute publishes the list each year in conjunction with International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is commemorated on January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.... - Jewish Press, 1-27-10

OP-EDs:

• Jonathan Zimmerman: GOP due for another purge With the "birthers" making inroads in Congress, paranoia is back in style: So here's a question for Scott Brown as he prepares to enter the U.S. Senate: Do you believe President Obama was born in the United States? And here's why it needs to be asked: Many "Tea Party" activists who backed Brown think Obama was born overseas, which would make him constitutionally ineligible to be president. Somehow, these folks insist, the most closely observed man on the planet managed to keep his origins a secret from everyone - except them. In short, they're paranoid.... - Philadelphia Inquirer, 2-2-10

REVIEWS & FIRST CHAPTERS:

• Jeffrey H. Jackson: Après le Déluge: PARIS UNDER WATER How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910: ...Jackson, a professor of history at ­Rhodes College in Memphis, explains in an afterword that he discovered the story of the Paris flood not long before Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, and parallels between the two catastrophes are apparent throughout the book.... - NYT, 1-29-10
• Jeffrey H. Jackson: Book review: 'Paris Under Water' by Jeffrey Jackson PARIS UNDER WATER How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 - WaPo, 1-29-10
• Christopher Andrew: Smiley's People: DEFEND THE REALM The Authorized History of MI5 In order to write this compendious but highly readable book, Christopher Andrew, a professor of modern and contemporary history at Cambridge University, and his team of researchers plowed through some 400,000 MI5 files. Marking the 100th anniversary of the service, "Defend the Realm" shines a penetrating light into some of the darkest corners of a secret world. It is not only a work of meticulous scholarship but also a series of riveting and true spy stories.... - NYT, 1-29-10
• Christopher Andrew: DEFEND THE REALM The Authorized History of MI5 Excerpt - NYT, 1-29-10
• ANDREW WHEATCROFT on Matthew Carr: Cast Away: BLOOD AND FAITH The Purging of Muslim Spain Who remembers the last survivors of Muslim Spain, whom Spaniards contemptuously called Moriscos ("little Moors")? Impressive research on them has appeared in the last 30 years, yet until now, none of it has escaped beyond the walls of the academic ghetto. Matthew Carr's well-balanced and comprehensive book brings the story of their tragic fate to a wider public.... - NYT, 1-29-10
• Paul Strathern: Book review: 'The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior' by Paul Strathern: THE ARTIST, THE PHILOSOPHER, AND THE WARRIOR The Intersecting Lives of da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Borgia and the World They Shaped Five hundred years after his death, Cesare Borgia still ranks as one of history's most reprehensible figures: ruthless, power-hungry and peacock-vain. But his reputation as a brute obscures the full human dimensions of this duke who sought to reunite Italy and place himself at the head of a new Roman Empire. As Paul Strathern explains in his masterful narrative history, "The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior," Borgia was also brilliant, handsome, charismatic and well-versed in the classics, "a superb exemplar of the Renaissance man."... - WaPo, 1-29-10
• The all-powerful American president Garry Wills, in a new book, says Congress and the courts have become immaterial: It's time we revised our eighth-grade social studies textbooks. America has no presidency any longer, but a monarchy. Absurd? Historian Garry Wills says it isn't that far from the truth. So he argues in his new book, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State. An exquisitely researched, passionately written political history, Bomb Power argues that for the last six decades, an increasingly militarized presidency has usurped power once limited to Congress and the courts.... - Philadelphia Inquirer, 2-1-10
• McGraw-Hill Contemporizes Classic Text 'From Slavery to Freedom' to Bring African American History into the 21st Century: Renowned historian and author John Hope Franklin hands down his work to Harvard's Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham... - PR Newswire

FEATURES:

• Vince Leggett: Historian seeks Chesapeake Bay's hidden past: Looking at blacks in history, including Underground Railroad - Baltimore Sun, 1-31-10

QUOTES:

• Chester Pach: Obama isn't alone among presidents with first-year frustrations: "People are starting to blame him for things not getting better," Chester Pach, a presidential historian and a professor at Ohio University. "My guess is that until the economy improves substantially, his ratings are going to stay somewhere between 45 and 55 percent," or just south of so-so, historically speaking.... - Kansas City Star, 1-30-10
• Stephen Hess: Obama isn't alone among presidents with first-year frustrations: Historians say the economy isn't all that drives these ratings. "A lot has to do with the type of leader you are," said Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institute. Contrary to Reagan's rosy persona in the face of recession, "Obama, he's kind of a cool cat," which may not seem so cool to people losing jobs, Hess said. "In the long term, we might all be thankful for having an intellectual, farsighted president," Hess said. "But in the short term, people trying to feed their families aren’t so generous." - Kansas City Star, 1-30-10

AWARDS &APPOINTMENTS:

• ASU prof to co-host PBS series: Eduardo Obregón Pagán, an associate professor of history and American studies, has been signed as a permanent co-host for History Detectives.... - Latino Perspectives, 2-10

SPOTTED:

• UT professors offer perspective, predictions about the future: Predicting the future has always fascinated mankind. "Among some, it's known as the world's second-oldest profession," said Michael Stoff, a history professor at the University of Texas. Stoff and three other UT professors headlined a program called "Perspectives on the Future" at the Park City Club in Dallas.... - Dallas News, 1-31-10

ANNOUNCEMENTS & EVENTS CALENDAR:

• Museum Review: International Civil Rights Center and Museum Four Men, a Counter and Soon, Revolution: The International Civil Rights Center and Museum is at 132 South Elm Street, Greensboro, N.C.; (336) 274-9199, sitinmovement.org One of the achievements of the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, which is opening Monday in that former Woolworth building, is that you begin to understand how such a place became a pivot in the greatest political movement of the 20th century.... - NYT, 1-31-10

ON TV:

• C-SPAN2: BOOK TV Weekend Schedule
• PBS American Experience: Mondays at 9pm
• History Channel: Weekly Schedule

BEST SELLERS (NYT):

• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - February 7, 2010

BOOKS COMING SOON:

• Andrew Young: The Politician: An Insider's Account of John Edwards's Pursuit of the Presidency and the Scandal That Brought Him Down (Hardcover) Feb 2, 2010
• Charles Lachman: The Last Lincolns: The Rise & Fall of a Great American Family (Paperback), February 2, 2010
• S. M. Plokhy: Yalta: The Price of Peace (Hardcover), February 4, 2010
• Richard Beeman: Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (Paperback), February 9, 2010
• Philip Dray: Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen (Paperback) February 11, 2010
• Ken Gormley: The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr (Hardcover), February 16, 2010
• Susan Wise Bauer: The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade, (Hardcover) February 22, 2010
• Richard J. Evans: The Third Reich at War (Paperback) February 23, 2010
• Seth G. Jones: In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (Paperback) April 12, 2010

DEPARTED:

• Louis R. Harlan, Historian of Booker T. Washington, Dies at 87: Louis R. Harlan, whose definitive two-volume biography of Booker T. Washington convincingly embraced its subject’s daunting complexities and ambiguities and won both the Bancroft Prize and the Pulitzer Prize, died on Jan. 22 in Lexington, Va. He was 87. The cause was liver failure, said his wife, Sadie. - NYT, 1-29-10
• Howard Zinn, Historian, Is Dead at 87: Howard Zinn, historian and shipyard worker, civil rights activist and World War II bombardier, and author of "A People's History of the United States," a best seller that inspired a generation of high school and college students to rethink American history, died Wednesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 87 and lived in Auburndale, Mass. The cause was a heart attack he had while swimming, his family said.... - NYT, 1-28-10

POLITICAL HIGHLIGHTS:

This Week's Political Highlights

THIS WEEK IN HISTORY:

On This Day in History....

This Week in History....

HISTORY NEWS:

• Couple finds Thomas Jefferson letter at Old Town Alexandria's American Legion - WaPo, 1-25-10
• Historical Society to Open a Children's Museum: When thinking of ways to spend a rainy Saturday afternoon, studying history is not high on the list for most families. Now, in a bid to make history more vivid, alluring and accessible for the Wii generation, an interactive "museum within a museum," focusing on the lives of young New Yorkers, will open in November 2011 on the lower level of the New-York Historical Society, museum officials said.... - NYT, 1-22-10
• Arnved Nedkvitne: NORWAY: Sacked professor sues the state: Earlier this month, five days were spent in an Oslo court to hear testimonies in a case where sacked University of Oslo Professor Arnved Nedkvitne is suing the Norwegian government. Professor Arnved Nedkvitne has demanded he either be reinstated as a full professor in medieval history or paid financial compensation until he reaches pension age.... - University World News, 1-24-10
• White House welcomes KU professor: President Obama has made a Jayhawk one of the newest members of his administration. Karl Brooks, associate professor in the history and environmental studies departments, will serve as one of 10 regional administrators for the Environmental Protection Agency. Brooks will be the head of Region 7, based in Kansas City, Kan, which covers Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska and nine tribal nations.... - University Daily Kansan, 1-25-10

OP-EDs:

• HAROLD M. HYMAN: Fight over 'Negro' has a sad history: The headline over Chronicle reporter Mike Tolson's article said, "Sparks fly over use of ‘Negro' by Census" (Page A1, Jan. 14). "Not so long ago," the article noted correctly, "the word [Negro] was considered benign, a means of racial identification much preferred to crude colloquial alternatives. For recent generations [however], the word Negro, with the N capitalized, is at best archaic and at worst is seen as racist, a holdover from Jim Crow days." Tolson's commendable insight deserves a further dig into relevant history. It's not a pretty tale.... - Houston Chronicle, 1-23-10

REVIEWS & FIRST CHAPTERS:

• Walter Isaacson on Garry Wills, John Yoo: Who Declares War?: CRISIS AND COMMAND The History of Executive Power From George Washington to George W. Bush, BOMB POWER The Modern Presidency and the National Security State In "Crisis and Command," his sweeping history of presidential prerogatives, John Yoo argues that national security crises inevitably ratchet up the power of the president at the expense of Congress. "War acts on executive power as an accelerant," he writes, "causing it to burn hotter, brighter and swifter." In "Bomb Power," Garry Wills argues much the same thing, adding that the advent of atomic weapons has made this concentration of power in the White House even greater. "The executive power increased decade by decade," he writes, "reaching a new high in the 21st century — a continuous story of uni­directional increase." Where the two authors disagree is on whether this trend should be celebrated or denounced. Yoo finds increased executive power appealing and in accord with the Constitution. Wills finds it appalling and a constitutional travesty.... - NYT, 1-22-10
• Joyce Appleby: Capitalist Chameleon: THE RELENTLESS REVOLUTION A History of Capitalism Appleby, a distinguished historian who has dedicated her career to studying the origins of capitalism in the Anglo-American world, here broadens her scope to take in the global history of capitalism in all its creative — and destructive — glory... - NYT, 1-22-10
• Alison Weir: Anne Boleyn, Queen for a Day: THE LADY IN THE TOWER The Fall of Anne Boleyn Alison Weir, a respected and popular historian, has already written about Anne in "The Six Wives of Henry VIII" and "Henry VIII: The King and His Court." Her new book focuses on the last few months of Anne’s life. She has sifted the sources, examining their reliability. Doubts have already been cast on Weir’s assumptions; the historian John Guy has recently suggested that two sources she took to be mutually corroborating are in fact one and the same person.... - NYT, 1-22-10
• Alison Weir: THE LADY IN THE TOWER The Fall of Anne Boleyn, Excerpt Chapter 1: Occurrences That Presaged Evil - NYT, 1-22-10
• Mary Elise Sarotte: The Year That Was: 1989 The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe But this order of things was hardly inevitable, as Mary Elise Sarotte, a professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, reminds us in "1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe." Between the wall’s opening (November 1989) and Germany's unification (October 1990), history lurched forward with no fixed destination. Sarotte describes a host of competing conceptions of post-cold-war Europe that flourished, mutated and perished in the maelstrom of events that led up to German unity. In the end, the visions of President George H. W. Bush and Chancellor Helmut Kohl prevailed — which may not necessarily have been the best of all possible outcomes, though Sarotte stops short of this conclusion.... - NYT, 1-22-10
• Donald Kagan: History and its flaws seen in Thucydides: Thucydides The Reinvention of History This is an important book, largely right and largely misguided, by one of the most eminent scholars in the field. Kagan, who is Sterling Professor of Classics and History at Yale University, is a foremost authority on the Peloponnesian wars (431-404 B.C.), that interminable, swampy, wasteful, and tragic attrition-match between Sparta and Athens, which ended in disaster for Athens and the end of its democracy and empire. That means he's also a scholar of Thucydides (circa 460-395 B.C.), the historian of those wars. Kagan's utter mastery is on display in this vigorous, elegantly written, provocative book. Thucydides is persuasive about its namesake as a great (if willful and biased) historian, but not in its broader aim: to retell the story of the wars themselves.... - Philadelphia Inquirer, 1-30-10
• Paul Johnson's Churchill: According to the British historian Walter Reid, some 1,663 books have been written on Winston Churchill. The latest addition to this extensive list, Paul Johnson's biography, Churchill, may be one of the shortest -- and one of the most enjoyable.... - American Spectator, 1-11-10

FEATURES:

• Charles Joyner: Conservative exterior, colorful exterior: This is certainly not the kind of intro learned folks would expect from a 75-year-old professor popular, in part, for penning a book about slavery in a South Carolina community called "Down by the Riverside."
  Joyner was recently honored at a meeting of the Southern Historical Association. The group of more than 5,000 historians from around the globe celebrated "Down by the Riverside" as a model for scholarship combining local and universal viewpoints.... - Sun News, 1-24-10
• Patrick Bellegarde-Smith: UWM professor holds hope for rebuilding Haiti: Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, who was born in Haiti, is a professor of Africology at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee and an expert on Haiti and its Vodou religion. At least nine of his relatives died in the earthquake.... - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 1-22-10
• Barry Goldberg: Professor Mines History to Show How Americans Create Conceptions of the Past: Barry Goldberg, Ph.D., says that while early members of the American labor movement compared their situation to that of slaves, many were explicitly racist.... - Fordham Online, 1-19-10
• William Styple: Chatham historian compiles forgotten notes about Lincoln into a book: William Styple, a Chatham author and historian recently published his latest book, "Tell Me of Lincoln, Memories of Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War and Life in Old New York." The book is based on notes by James Edward Kelly (1855 to 1933) who was an artist and sculptor of public monuments. Kelly possessed a life long fascination with the Civil War and wanted to create a realistic statue of President Lincoln. To do so, he interviewed more than 50 people who had known the 16th president. Kelly died prior to completing his Lincoln sculpture; however he kept thousands of pages of notes. Styple discovered these notes at the New York Historical Society. Independent Press, 1-22-10

QUOTES:

• Obamas' carefully crafted image of ordinariness may be working 'If you were to create the perfect American family in the laboratory, the Obamas would be it,' says one observer. "Who could possibly dispute or do anything but admire her involvement with military families or planting vegetable gardens?" said Richard Norton Smith, a presidential historian. "Both are safe."
  "Their appeal," said Ted Widmer, a professor of history at Brown University and a former advisor to President Clinton, "is that they reach out to so many people." - LAT, 1-25-10
• Deborah Lipstadt: Evolution of International Holocaust Day reflects changing times: Deborah Lipstadt, an Emory University historian who has written widely about the phenomenon of Holocaust denial, said she was "gratified as a historian that there is this attention to this event that is now in the past, especially as the survivor generation is passing." But, she said, "One hopes that there is attention in a deeper way: to examine how this emerged and happened, while the world stood silently by." - JTA, 1-20-10
• Stephanie Coontz: Study: Marriage benefits men economically, too: "Just as women are saying they want more from marriage than an economic security blanket, men are more open to marrying women with more education and earnings," says historian Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage: A History. - USA Today, 1-19-10
• Rallies, parades honor King's legacy: "I don't want to sanitize Martin Luther King Jr.," Cornel West said. "Even with your foot on the brake, there are too many precious brothers and sisters under the bus," West said of Obama. "Where is the talk about poverty? We've got to protect him and respect him, but we've also got to correct him if the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. is going to stay alive." - San Francisco Chronicle, 1-18-10

AWARDS &APPOINTMENTS:

• National Book Critics Circle Finalists Are Announced: The National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists for its 2009 book awards on Saturday night at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in New York. The organization consists of some 600 book reviewers and was founded in 1974. The awards will be given out on Thursday, March 11, at the New School in New York.... - 1-23-10

SPOTTED:

• Gordon Wood: Brown professor addresses MV faculty: The Mystic Valley Charter School faculty received a treat in the form of a lecture by one of the world’s top professors of American History, Gordon S. Wood. Dr. Wood spoke to the faculty during their latest professional development meeting.... - Boston Globe, 1-21-10

ON TV:

• UNM Historian Paul Hutton to Appear on PBS' American Experience 'Wyatt Earp': UNM Distinguished Professor of History Paul Hutton will appear on the PBS program American Experience "Wyatt Earp," on Monday, Jan. 25 from 9-10 p.m. on PBS. "Wyatt Earp" features interviews with Hutton and other biographers and historians of the American West to present a fresh take on an old legend.... - UNM Today, 1-20-10
• C-SPAN2: BOOK TV Weekend Schedule
• PBS American Experience: Mondays at 9pm
• History Channel: Weekly Schedule

BEST SELLERS (NYT):

• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - January 31, 2010
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - January 24, 2010
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - January 17, 2010

BOOKS COMING SOON:

• Andrew Young: The Politician: An Insider's Account of John Edwards's Pursuit of the Presidency and the Scandal That Brought Him Down (Hardcover) Feb 2, 2010
• Charles Lachman: The Last Lincolns: The Rise & Fall of a Great American Family (Paperback), February 2, 2010
• S. M. Plokhy: Yalta: The Price of Peace (Hardcover), February 4, 2010
• Richard Beeman: Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (Paperback), February 9, 2010
• Philip Dray: Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen (Paperback) February 11, 2010
• Ken Gormley: The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr (Hardcover), February 16, 2010
• Susan Wise Bauer: The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade, (Hardcover) February 22, 2010
• Richard J. Evans: The Third Reich at War (Paperback) February 23, 2010
• Seth G. Jones: In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (Paperback) April 12, 2010

DEPARTED:

• My Friend A Teacher Jim Kluger Died: My lifelong friend, Dr. James Kluger, professor of American History died yesterday at 5:40 pm of kidney failure.... - Tucson Citizen, 1-13-10

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. DAY

IN THE NEWS....

• Martin Luther King, Jr. - Beyond Vietnam - A Time To Break The Silence: Starting in 1965, King began to express doubts about the United States' role in the Vietnam War. In an April 4, 1967 appearance at the New York City Riverside Church—exactly one year before his death—King delivered a speech titled "Beyond Vietnam".[80] In the speech, he spoke strongly against the U.S.'s role in the war, insisting that the U.S. was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony"[81] and calling the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today".[82] He also argued that the country needed larger and broader moral changes... - Salem News, 1-18-10
• King papers have reach beyond library walls: In the years since the city of Atlanta acquired more than 10,000 of Dr. Martin Luther King's personal papers, the collection has been pored over by researchers and used in groundbreaking history courses at Morehouse College. Come February, the writings of Dr. King will be fully available to the public at the Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center. - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 1-15-10
• Rallies, parades honor King's legacy: "I don't want to sanitize Martin Luther King Jr.," Cornel West said. "Even with your foot on the brake, there are too many precious brothers and sisters under the bus," West said of Obama. "Where is the talk about poverty? We've got to protect him and respect him, but we've also got to correct him if the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. is going to stay alive." - San Francisco Chronicle, 1-18-10

PRESIDENT OBAMA

• Obama to America's youth: Civil rights struggle isn't old news: The president hosts a group of African American 'elders' at the White House, hoping to remind young people that the battles Martin Luther King Jr. fought weren't that long ago.... - LAT, 1-18-10
• Service and Dr. King: In honor of Martin Luther King Day, President Barack Obama serves lunch in the dining room at So Others Might Eat, a soup kitchen in Washington January 18, 2010... - WH, 1-18-10
• Emancipation Proclam. on display at WH: During an event to mark the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, President Obama said the Emancipation Proclamation -- the 1863 document that marked the beginning of the process to free the slaves -- would be on loan to the White House. It is being displayed in the Oval Office.
  This copy of the document is one of the authorized copies that was made in 1864, according to the White House press office. The original -- signed Jan. 1, 1863 -- is in the National Archives. This one may hang in the Oval for six months after which it will be placed in the Lincoln Bedroom where the original was signed.... - MSNBC, 1-18-10
• Obama Takes to the Pulpit: President Obama told a black church in the nation's capital today that the promise inherent in his election as the nation’s first African-American president has yet to be fully realized, acknowledging that partisan Washington politics continued to play a big role in governance.
  But Mr. Obama promised that his health reform package — now hanging in the balance because of the Massachusetts Senate race — will soon become law. "Under the legislation I plan to sign into law, insurance companies won't be able to drop you," he said, to murmurs from the congregation at the Vermont Avenue Baptist Church, which was founded by freed slaves. - NYT, 1-17-10

HISTORIANS

• Freedom singer delivers civil-rights lessons in Seattle: Freedom singer Bernice Johnson Reagon was the featured speaker at a celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. at Mount Zion Baptist Church in Seattle. In a speech at Mount Zion that was part history lesson, part performance and part message about nonviolence, Reagon, a cultural historian and civil-rights activist, spoke about the era when she established herself as a freedom singer.... - Seatle Times, 1-15-10
• Peniel E. Joseph "Many say U.S. race relations have improved under Obama, but divides remain": "Light-skinned is equated with good, an ability to pass, to fit in the mainstream," said Peniel E. Joseph, a Tufts University historian and author of a new book about the shifting racial attitudes that allowed for Obama's election as the nation's first black president. "He's light enough and mainstream enough to appeal to a broad audience. Those who are not really stand out in a conspicuous way as 'the other.'"... - WaPo, 1-12-10
• Peniel E. Joseph, From 'Dark Days' to 'Bright Nights,' Reexamining the Civil Rights Era: Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama - Well, it's a phrase coming out of the 1960s and really coming out of the civil rights era. Stokely Carmichael was a civil rights activist who first used the term in Greenwood, Mississippi, on June 16, 1966. And for Carmichael, he really was referring to political self-determination. He felt that black people needed political, social, economic self-determination if they were going to really exercise their democratic rights in the country.
  As soon as Carmichael says it, it becomes a racial controversy. It becomes a national controversy. It's going to be perceived as fomenting violence, as anti-white, as really the opposite of civil rights and Dr. King's dream of a beloved community.
  Well, Carmichael was really one of the few civil rights activists who becomes a black power militant. So, Carmichael had been a grassroots organizer in Mississippi and Alabama. And for him, black power meant actually exercising the voting rights and exercising the citizenship rights that he had struggled to organize, along with many other civil rights activists, during the first half of the 1960s. So, it meant black elected officials. It meant black political leaders, but it also meant community control of schools. It meant a different definition of black identity. Before this period, African- Americans were really called Negroes or referred to as people of color. It's after the black power period that they're referred to as black or Afro-American, and, by the 1980s, African-American.
  When we think about our civil rights history and the history of the 1960s and '70s, in a way, we flatten that story to a story about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, the Voting Rights Act, and the "I Have a Dream" speech.
  People like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael added their voices to that period of time. And they were really voices of trying to transform American democracy, but in militant and, at times, combative ways.... - PBS Newhour, 1-18-10

POLITICAL HIGHLIGHTS:

This Week's Political Highlights

THIS WEEK IN HISTORY:

On This Day in History....

This Week in History....

HISTORY NEWS:

• Moynihan Letters to Be Published: Letters, journals and other correspondence written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan over the course of his half-century career in public service will be published in a coming book.
  On Wednesday, PublicAffairs said it would release a book culled from more than 10,000 pages of letters written by Mr. Moynihan, the former senator from New York, during his time on Capitol Hill and in the administrations of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford. NYT, 1-13-10
• King papers have reach beyond library walls: In the years since the city of Atlanta acquired more than 10,000 of Dr. Martin Luther King's personal papers, the collection has been pored over by researchers and used in groundbreaking history courses at Morehouse College. Come February, the writings of Dr. King will be fully available to the public at the Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center. - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 1-15-10
• Egypt unveils more proof that Jews did not build pyramids: Egypt displayed this week newly discovered tombs more than 4,000 years old and said they belonged to people who worked on the Great Pyramids of Giza, presenting the discovery as more evidence that slaves did not build the ancient monuments. The discovery further erodes the myth that Jewish slaves built the pyramids, officials in Egypt said.... - AP, 1-14-10
• Same-Sex Marriage Case Arguments at Court: Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the case challenging the constitutionality of Proposition 8, unfolded this week in a federal courtroom in San Francisco.... The plaintiffs, represented by Theodore B. Olson and David Boies, sought to prove that opponents of same-sex marriage were motivated by discriminatory animus when they backed the proposition. Defense lawyers sought to blunt efforts to frame this as a civil rights case.... - NYT, 1-15-10
• Is Google Good for History?: At a discussion of "Is Google Good for History?" here Thursday, there weren't really any firm "No" answers. Even the harshest critic here of Google's historic book digitization project confessed to using it for his research and making valuable finds with the tool.... - Inside Higher Ed, 1-8-10

OP-EDs:

• Julian E. Zelizer: Sports and political oversight do mix: When baseball slugger Mark McGwire admitted he had used steroids in his record-breaking 1998 season, he recalled refusing to talk about the subject in his 2005 testimony to Congress....
  McGwire's admission come as the House Judiciary Committee has been investigating the problem of brain injuries to football players, following heated discussions October 28, when the committee aggressively questioned NFL officials to figure out why the league had done so little to curb this well-known problem....
  The government must help guide the industry toward better practices. There is a precedent for investigation. And sports has depended too much on government to now claim to be a free agent. - CNN, 1-16-10
• AMNON RUBINSTEIN: Guest Columnist: Judt unpicks Israel's Jewishness: The drawing is as important as the article itself: Tony Judt - an illustrious NYU historian - has written an article entitled "Israel must unpick its ethnic myth" (Financial Times, December 7). Illustrating the article is a drawing depicting an Israeli flag whose Star of David is being removed. Prof. Judt's argument is simple:Israel must rid itself of its Jewishness.... - Jerusalem Post, 1-14-10
• Alan Brinkly: Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Franklin Delano Roosevelt may be the most chronicled man of the twentieth century. He led the United States through the worst economic crisis in the life of the nation and through the greatest and most terrible war in human history. His extraordinary legacy, compiled during dark and dangerous years, remains alive in our own, troubled new century as an inspiring and creative model to many, and as a symbol of excessive government power to many others.... - OUP Blog, 1-12-10

REVIEWS & FIRST CHAPTERS:

• POLITICS Book review of 'Game Change' by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin: GAME CHANGE Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime - WaPo, 1-17-10
• John Heilemann and Mark Halperin: Election Confidential GAME CHANGE Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime - NYT, 1-14-10
• BOOK REVIEW 'Game Change' by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin: The political journalists provide juicy insider tidbits about the 2008 presidential candidates, their spouses and other players, but it's hard to see the enlightenment behind the entertainment.... "Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime" - LAT, 1-13-10
• Cultural Studies Elizabeth Edwards Teeters on Her Pedestal: GAME CHANGE Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime - NYT, 1-15-10
• Harold Holzer: Bookshelf, Lincoln, Medicine and the Depression Of Mutual Influence: The City and the 16th President: Lincoln and New York - NYT, 1-15-10
• Elizabeth Partridge: Children's Books Children Who Changed the World MARCHING FOR FREEDOM Walk Together, Children, and Don't You Grow Weary - NYT, 1-15-10
• Stephen Kotkin with a contribution by Jan T. Gross: Bonfire of the Bureaucrats UNCIVIL SOCIETY 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment - NYT, 1-14-10
• Seth Lipsky, Jack N. Rakove: More Perfect: THE CITIZEN'S CONSTITUTION An Annotated Guide, THE ANNOTATED U.S. CONSTITUTION AND DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE - "The Citizen's Constitution" is a magpie's miscellany of curiosities. It is governed by a newspaperman's sensibility, one more interested in conflict and color than order and synthesis.... Jack N. Rakove takes a more serious and dutiful approach in "The Annotated U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence." - NYT, 1-8-10
• Jenny Uglow: Return of the King A GAMBLING MAN Charles II's Restoration Game Uglow has, it seems, recast Charles's restoration as a fable for our times. She sets the scene this way: "A young, charismatic man is called to power, greeted in his capital by vast cheering crowds. But what happens when the fireworks fade and the euphoria cools? Can he unite the divided nation, or will he be defeated by vested interests, entrenched institutions and long-held prejudices?" - NYT, 1-8-10
• Michael D. Gordin: Nuclear Monopolist: RED CLOUD AT DAWN Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly Gordin's "Red Cloud at Dawn" is about the brief period between August 1945 and August 1949, between Hiroshima and Kazakhstan, when the United States held a nuclear monopoly. It's about how the Soviets caught up and how America learned that that happy hour was ending a lot sooner than expected... - NYT, 1-15-10
• Jack Rakove on John Yoo: Book review of John Yoo's 'Crisis and Command': CRISIS AND COMMAND A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush Yoo's account has a deceptively simple theme: At critical moments, the decisive exercise of power by the president has been the driving force in American history, and neither Congress nor the Supreme Court has ever rivaled the presidency in its capacity to direct how the nation responds to unexpected challenges to its essential interests. Efforts to devise new ways to cabin our presidents -- the best as well as the mediocre and mendacious, such as Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon -- risk restraining exactly the kind of initiative we want the executive to mount... - WaPo, 1-8-10
• Gary Gallagher on John Keegan: HISTORY Book review: THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR A Military History Unfortunately, "The American Civil War" fails to provide anything particularly new. The structure is straightforward: The first six chapters address the background of the war, the challenges of raising and provisioning armies, the risks of a soldier's life and the importance of geography; the next nine present a chronological narrative of campaigns by the major armies; and the final eight return to a topical format that examines, among other things, African American military participation, the naval war, the home fronts, medical care, generalship and the experience of battle. - WaPo, 1-8-10
• Leslie Holmes, Stephen Lovell, Gil Troy: COMMUNISM: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION, THE SOVIET UNION: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION, THE REAGAN REVOLUTION: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION - ...Mr. Troy does a good job showing the part Ronald Reagan's statesmanship played in hastening communism's end in the Soviet Union and its satellite states. President Reagan's religious upbringing and his reading of free-market economists played a role, as did his anti-communist credentials. He knew that communism had gotten human nature dead wrong and that a command economy couldn't work; thus he knew where the Soviet Union was vulnerable.... - Washington Times, 1-14-10
• John Yoo: A Brief For Bush: Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush And the idea behind his latest book, Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power From George Washington to George W. Bush, is simple: throughout American history, crisis has inspired constitutional daring, and the race to presidential greatness goes not to the leader who hews most faithfully to the constitutional text but to the one most willing to bend the document to meet the perceived demands of the day. - The American Conservative, 2-1-10

FEATURES:

• Forging The Past: OUP And The 'Armenian Question': Donald Bloxham's The Great Game of Genocide. Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians.
  The book includes nine photographs printed on glossy paper. Eight of the photographs are credited. One is not. It shows a man in an unbuttoned jacket and tie standing in front of a circle of ragged children and one apparent adult with something in his hand. The caption reads: 'A Turkish official taunting starving Armenians with bread'. Even a cursory glance is enough to show there is something wrong with this photo..... - History of Truth, 1-15-10
• Fallou Ngom: The lost script: It's a writing system called Ajami, it's a thousand years old, and a Boston University professor thinks it could help unlock the story of a continent... - Boston Globe, 1-10-10
• Historians, Sons, Daughters: In what appeared to be a pattern on a panel of historian parents and their historian offspring at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, it turns out that the way you rebel against an American historian parent is to become a medievalist.... - Inside Higher Ed, 1-12-10
• Denis Smyth, Historian claims to have finally identified wartime 'Man Who Never Was': A historian claims to have conclusively proved the identity of the "Man Who Never Was", whose body was used in a spectacular plot to deceive the Germans over the invasion of Sicily in the Second World War...
  Professor Denis Smyth, a historian at Toronto University, whose book Operation Mincemeat: Death, Deception and the Mediterranean D-Day is due to be published later this year, believes he has now finally laid to rest such "conspiracy theories"..... - Telegraph, UK, 1-3-10

QUOTES:

• Donald Ritchie "Depression-era star muckraker shapes Wall Street inquiry": "Pecora's revelations enraged the public and stampeded Congress into creating the SEC and separating commercial banks from investment banks. "In many ways it was one of the most productive congressional hearings, because it led to so many laws being passed," says Senate historian Donald Ritchie. - USA Today, 1-12-10

INTERVIEWS:

• David C. Engerman 'Know Your Enemy': There was a time, improbable though it may now seem, when it was not considered inherently dubious for academics to work with or for the government. For several decades in the mid-20th century, Soviet studies -- a field born of America's post-World War II desire to understand its ally-turned-enemy -- enjoyed a wealth of government funding and scholarly attention. In a new book, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts, David C. Engerman, associate professor of history at Brandeis University explains how Soviet Studies rose so rapidly, and why its decline began well before the fall of the Soviet Union.... - Inside Higher Ed, 1-8-10

AWARDS &APPOINTMENTS:

• Annete Gordon-Reed, Beryl Satter: For Faculty Authors At Rutgers University, Newark, 2009 Was A Very Good Year For Awards, Recognition: Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, "Best Books" Lists Among Honors - Rutgers News, 1-5-10

SPOTTED:

• Richard Etulain: Professor presents new angle on author's life and works about the West: Richard Etulain speaks at Columbia Forum about writer Wallace Stegner - Daily Astorian, 1-12-10
• Freedom singer delivers civil-rights lessons in Seattle: Freedom singer Bernice Johnson Reagon was the featured speaker at a celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. at Mount Zion Baptist Church in Seattle. In a speech at Mount Zion that was part history lesson, part performance and part message about nonviolence, Reagon, a cultural historian and civil-rights activist, spoke about the era when she established herself as a freedom singer.... - Seatle Times, 1-15-10

ON TV:

• C-SPAN2: BOOK TV Weekend Schedule
• PBS American Experience: Mondays at 9pm
• History Channel: Weekly Schedule

BEST SELLERS (NYT):

• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - January 24, 2010
• NYT Non-Fiction Best Sellers List - January 17, 2010

BOOKS COMING SOON:

• Alison Weir: The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn, January 5, 2010
• Charles Pellegrino: The Last Train from Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back (Hardcover), January 19, 2010
• Catherine Clinton: Mrs. Lincoln: A Life (Reprint) (Paperback) January 19, 2010
• Andrew Young: The Politician: An Insider's Account of John Edwards's Pursuit of the Presidency and the Scandal That Brought Him Down (Hardcover) Feb 2, 2010
• Charles Lachman: The Last Lincolns: The Rise & Fall of a Great American Family (Paperback), February 2, 2010
• S. M. Plokhy: Yalta: The Price of Peace (Hardcover), February 4, 2010
• Richard Beeman: Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (Paperback), February 9, 2010
• Philip Dray: Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen (Paperback) February 11, 2010
• Ken Gormley: The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr (Hardcover), February 16, 2010
• Susan Wise Bauer: The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade, (Hardcover) February 22, 2010
• Richard J. Evans: The Third Reich at War (Paperback) February 23, 2010
• Seth G. Jones: In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (Paperback) April 12, 2010

DEPARTED:

• Charles Stuart McGehee: Prominent West Virginia historian dies: The founder of one of West Virginia's most comprehensive archives on the state's coal history, Charles Stuart McGehee, died earlier this week. McGehee, 55, was the founder of Bluefield's Eastern Regional Coal Archives, a professor of history at West Virginia State University, and the author of five books on West Virginia. He died Tuesday.... - WV Gazette, 1-14-10
• Ihor Sevcenko, 87; professor, scholar of Byzantine era: Ihor Sevcenko taught at Harvard University for two decades... - Boston Globe, 1-11-10

2009 IN REVIEW:

• From Wars to Recession, a Review of Decade's Politics: MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, Presidential Historian: It would have to be the attack of Sept.11, 2001, because, you know, not only has that caused all sorts of obvious changes in American society, but look at the kind of events that led to.
  George W. Bush declared a war on terrorism, led us into war in Afghanistan, Iraq, used very harsh measures against terrorism. In 2004 -- I think Andrew -- Andy would agree with this -- George Bush was reelected largely by people who may have been concerned about his other policies, but were worried about terrorism.
  2008, it's very unlikely that Barack Obama would have been nominated by the Democrats if he were not so against the war in Iraq, able to benefit from an anti-war sentiment. So, if 2001, if those attacks had not happened, our decade would have been very different.... - PBS Newshour, 12-31-09
• Julian Zelizer: Five turning points of the decade: The first decade of the 21st century in the United States was defined by terrorism, crisis and uncertainty. The exuberance of the 1990s, with its strong economic growth and the sense of American military omnipotence, came to an end.
  Most Americans have been left reeling from nine very difficult years, even though the decade neared its close with a presidential election that spoke to the promise and potential of the nation.
  We must remember that any "most important" list should be seen as the beginning of a conversation, not a definitive judgment.
  Historians learn that it is extraordinarily difficult to discern exactly which events will be transitory and which will have the most long-lasting effects.... September 11, 2001...
  Iraq War...
  Hurricane Katrina...
  Financial crisis of 2008...
  Election of 2008...
  Any most important list is inherently incomplete, and only captures a small part of what the nation experienced. Should Congress pass health care reform, which seems likely, that could become a crucial moment in the history of our government. Nonetheless, these five events will certainly be ones that historians will look back to for years to come.... - CNN, 12-21-09
• Gil Troy "Name That Decade: the '00s, the Whatever Decade": As we enter the last few weeks of the first decade of the twenty-first century, if we had a better name for this period, we might have a firmer fix on its identity. Modern Americans are decade-focused, packaging our historical memories in easily-labeled ten-year chunks: the Sixties, the Seventies, the Eighties, the Nineties. Yet neither the "oh-ohs" nor the "oughts" has stuck as a label, making this decade's character elusive. With 2010 fast approaching, branding our trying times can help us understand them better....
  Great pessimism during economic busts is as characteristically American as great optimism during boom times. The oh-ohs' whateverism is less fleeting and thus more dangerous. A culture of denial, disengagement, dissociation is dysfunctional. We need a culture of engagement and responsibility, even with all our traumas, distractions and high-tech toys. - HNN, 12-15-09
• Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman "9/11 to climate change: Historians look back on the decade": "The new century began on a bang, and it was a shot heard 'round the world," Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, a history professor at San Diego State University, said, speaking of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001... "It's something that's really solidified in the past decade," noted Hoffman, who's also the author of "In the Lion's Den: A Novel of the Civil War." "All kinds of people who were either eager to believe or eager to disbelieve all came to stand at the same spot to realize this is something we have to take seriously." - AP, 12-7-09
• Bruce Schulman "9/11 to climate change: Historians look back on the decade": "People are going to think that 9/11 is a significant historical turning point no matter what happens, because it certainly altered the international order," said Bruce Schulman, who teaches history at Boston University.... "If in 2004 you told me that in the next election we would elect a black president, I would have said, 'You're crazy. That’s not happening maybe for my lifetime,'" Schulman said. "Now...could you imagine that ever again, at least ever again at least in the next 16 or 20 years, we would have two tickets that would be all white males? I don't think we'll ever see that again." - AP, 12-7-09
• Brian Balogh "9/11 to climate change: Historians look back on the decade": Brian Balogh, a history professor at the University of Virginia, pointed out that 9/11 demonstrated the power of non-state actors and has kept us talking about "homeland security," a term not widely used before the attacks. Hoffman said 9/11 revealed that the U.S. didn't have a post-Cold War strategic vision.... Balogh added that the 2000 election contributed to political partisanship because the close race caused each side to use "any weapon in their arsenal." Nowadays there are fewer political moderates and fewer legislative compromises — a trend exemplified in the current debate over health care reform. Bills emerged from Congress with the support of just one Republican. In the 1960s, Balogh noted, Democrats got more GOP support to pass landmark civil-rights legislation.... "The most dramatic change [of the decade] is, in essence, expecting to have all the information in the world at our fingertips and to be constantly in touch with people whenever we want to be, however we want to be," said Balogh, who also cohosts a radio show called "BackStory with the American History Guys." "We're increasingly connected by what we buy, by what we read, by lifestyles. I think we're less connected by geography and by our allegiances and attachments to nations.".... - AP, 12-7-09
• Julian Zelizer "9/11 to climate change: Historians look back on the decade": As a result of 9/11, the political polarization was amplified, said Julian Zelizer, a history professor at Princeton University and author of "Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security — From World War II to the War on Terrorism." Zelizer said he thinks evolving media technology — and the development of the 24/7 news cycle, thanks in part to the rise of Internet blogging and social-networking sites — has helped increase partisan bickering this decade.... - AP, 12-7-09
• Daryl Michael Scott "9/11 to climate change: Historians look back on the decade": "Diversity is leading to a different America," said Daryl Michael Scott, a history professor at Howard University. "African-Americans have been the largest minority in the country since its founding, and I think it takes place within the 2000s, this formal passing of the guard."... - AP, 12-7-09
• The '00s: Goodbye (at Last) to the Decade From Hell: Instead, it was the American Dream that was about to dim. Bookended by 9/11 at the start and a financial wipeout at the end, the first 10 years of this century will very likely go down as the most dispiriting and disillusioning decade Americans have lived through in the post–World War II era. We're still weeks away from the end of '09, but it's not too early to pass judgment. Call it the Decade from Hell, or the Reckoning, or the Decade of Broken Dreams, or the Lost Decade. Call it whatever you want — just give thanks that it is nearly over.... - Time, 11-24-09
• 100 Notable Books of 2009: The New York Times Book Review selects outstanding works from the last year - NYT, 11-09
• The 10 Best Books of 2009: By THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW - NYT, 12-09