“It was a different time, 1957 or ’58. America’s love affair with racism was in full swing. NASA was no exception.” Ted at The Late Adopter sends along a sordid tale of cosmic achievement and racial injustice in this award-winning documentary on The Old Negro Space Program, a film not by Ken Burns.
Tag: History
Dead Men Tell Some Tales.
Can’t tell a hooplehead from a squarehead? What are you, from Yankton? Well, this establishment here can at least help you separate fact from fiction on HBO’s Deadwood. Some spoilers to be had, if the writers keep following the basic history of the town. (Courtesy of the formidable proprietors of Triptych Cryptic.)
Papal Ascension.
Well, you may have missed it after all the hoopla surrounding the recent deaths of comedian Mitch Hedberg (who’s responsible for the only really funny experience I’ve ever had in a comedy club) and civil liberties pioneer Fred Korematsu, but apparently Pope John Paul II was called up to the Head Office over the weekend. Since it’s not being reported anywhere, really, I thought I should at least mention it.
At any rate, now the search for a successor begins in earnest, one that might well have considerable ramifications for US politics (although, unfortunately, a progressive pope seems unlikely.) Well, just don’t put the aardvark in charge, and let’s keep Lord Papal away from the chair, shall we?
All the Presidents’ Hair.
Sigh…it’s time to face facts. I’m a failure as an American historian. All that time spent reading big, high-falutin’ books, and I could only muster 3 out of 7 Presidential Haircuts the first time around? Oof, the ignominy. (By way of my sis.)
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.