Category: History

Requiem for a Diplomat.

R.I.P. George Kennan 1904-2005. The nation has lost one of its senior diplomatic statesmen, at a moment when men and women of his wisdom, judgment, and foreign policy experience are needed in the public arena more than ever. He will be missed.

Walt Nixon World.

“Bringing Kutler to the library was going to be like Nixon going to China.” The Nixon library in Yorba Linda — the only presidential library under private management — incurs the wrath of the historical community by spiking a conference on the Vietnam War that would undoubtedly have been critical of Tricky Dick. Whatsmore, “historians still did not have access to about 800 hours of tapes and 50,000 documents withheld by the Nixon estate on the grounds that they deal with personal or political, rather than presidential, matters.” That represents a significantly larger gap in the historical record than 18 and a half minutes.

History for Dummies.

“It was only a matter of time before this kind of thinking spread to history. Politics has always colored the ways that people interpret the past, but The Politically Incorrect Guide politicizes history in a new way, reducing all scholarly inquiry to a mere stance in the culture wars.“

Slate‘s resident historian David Greenberg tears apart Thomas Woods’ enormously popular conservative hatchet-job of US history, and pins the blame for its ilk on a Faustian bargain made by right-wing intellectuals: “Conservatives who believe in open intellectual pursuit understandably blanch at the popularity of a book like this. The problem, however, isn’t a lone piece of agitprop but a cynical alliance that conservative intellectuals forged with those who hold their ideals of scholarship in contempt. It’s not surprising that the anti-intellectual currents they’ve aligned themselves with are proving too powerful for them to control.”

Ghosts in the Machine.

“In order to be eligible to teach the classes, you must have: a Ph.D., experience teaching the subject matter, a good teaching record, and an intangible quality that we don’t want to define because we feel that definition would make it tangible. We will pay you roughly $4,000 a class regardless of your experience.” Some academic gallows humor courtesy of The Chronicle of Higher Education: Dear Adjunct Faculty Member. (There’s also a pretty funny piece on the psychological afflictions of grad students making the e-mail rounds, but unfortunately it’s premium content.)

Cajuns of Nova Scotia.

“The point I’m trying to make is that one of the roles I see for a historian in the United States — and here I separate myself from, let’s say, the Ward Churchills, who are only looking to tell stories about victims and villains — is to resuscitate those points at which people faced with the dilemma of a whole new world attempted to do something good, and achieved something that was worth remembering.” Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir interviews Yale historian John Mack Faragher on A Great and Noble Scheme, his new book about the Acadian “relocation” of 1755.

Raking over the Muckrakers.

“The reasons for the companies’ actions are not hard to find: They face potentially massive liability claims on the order of the tobacco litigation if cancer is linked to vinyl chloride-based consumer products such as hairspray. The stakes are high also for publishers of controversial books, and for historians who write them, because when authors are charged with ethical violations and manuscript readers are subpoenaed, that has a chilling effect. The stakes are highest for the public, because this dispute centers on access to information about cancer-causing chemicals in consumer products.” Twenty chemical companies, including Dow, Monsanto, Goodrich, Goodyear, and Union Carbide, attempt to deflect a lawsuit landslide by subpoenaing peer reviewers of the recent book Deceit & Denial and by hiring a gunner — Phillip Scranton of Rutgers University — to defame the scholarship of its authors, historians David Rosner and Gerry Markowitz (the former of whom I took a class with several years ago.) The official Markowitz-Rosner response is here.

Scranton’s major allegation? Like every other historian and/or author in the business, Rosner and Markowitz suggested some possible reviewers to their publisher. (It seems they figured it might help to know something about carcinogens.) Otherwise, the pair appear to be guilty of making an argument that flies in the face of corporate profits and of letting their sources speak for themselves — Says AHA Vice-President Roy Rosenzweig of Deceit & Denial: “In my opinion, the book represents the highest standards of the history profession.” For his part, Scranton refused to comment for Jon Wiener‘s article for The Nation above, but if I were him, I’d start talking…because right now he comes off as the lowest of corporate stooges.

Weapon X.

“It’s time for you and me to stop sitting in this country, letting some cracker senators, Northern crackers and Southern crackers, sit there in Washington, D.C., and come to a conclusion in their mind that you and I are supposed to have civil rights. There’s no white man going to tell me anything about my rights. Brothers and sisters, always remember, if it doesn’t take senators and congressmen and presidential proclamations to give freedom to the white man, it is not necessary for legislation or proclamation or Supreme Court decisions to give freedom to the black man.” Along with the world taking stock of Hunter’s sad fate, yesterday was also tragic and memorable for being the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X. (In recognition of the occasion, a special edition of Spike Lee’s underrated biopic will be released today on DVD.)

Abe Lincoln and the World of Tomorrow.

“Bob Rogers, BRC’s founder and chairman…draws two circles, labeled ‘scholarship’ and ‘showmanship,’ on a sheet of yellow paper. The circles overlap, but only slightly. That tiny slice of shared space, he says, is where the museum needs to be.” By way of Dangerous Meta, the Washington Post examines the mild controversy surrounding high-tech exhibits at the Abe Lincoln library. If BRC is consulting a sizable number of outside historians on the scholarship, as they seem to be doing, then what’s the problem? Gimmicks like Tim Russert introducing 1860 campaign ads are a bit facile, sure, but if they help get more laypeople intrigued in Lincoln’s life and times (and don’t unduly misrepresent the history), I’m all for it. Besides, my feeling is, if historians don’t get behind such efforts, they’re going to happen anyway, and with much less historical rigor to them.