Entries for History News

The latest issue of the American Historical Review (AHR) is out and there is much to enjoy. Of particular interest is the forum on the Constitutional Revolution of 1937, in which the participants take another look at the traditional view of 1937 as a significant watershed in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court; also of interest is Leora Auslander's look at the importance of material culture for historical study.

Bear in mind that thanks to the wisdom of the Council of the American Historical Association, all articles in the AHR since June 2005 are freely available online at The History Cooperative.

The New England Historical Association has put out a call for papers for its Spring, 2006 meeting at Bridgewater State College in Bridgewater, Mass. The meeting will be held on April 15, 2006. This is a particularly good conference for graduate students who would like a friendly atmosphere in which to present a paper. Details below:

NEHA welcomes papers on any historical topic, time period, or theme. We live and work in New England, but our members’ interests range throughout the spectrum of historical scholarship. Proposals for single papers or complete sessions are welcome. Kindly submit a title, one paragraph description, and short vita by January 15, 2006 to: Professor George Dameron, Saint Michael’s College History Department, 1 Winooski Park, Colchester, VT 05439; email: gdameron@smcvt.edu

GSU users now have access to the Historical New York Times (1851-2002) through ProQuest.

Description:

ProQuest Historical Newspapers™-The New York Times is a unique full-image archive that brings you the entire historical run of The New York Times, the definitive voice of American journalism since 1851. It offers complete coverage from 1851-2002.

As part of the ProQuest Historical Newspapers program, the database delivers every page of every issue from cover to cover, with full-page and article images in downloadable PDF. And the database just keeps growing, with a new year’s content added annually.

The Historical New York Times gives researchers quick, accurate Web access to history as it was reported by the nation’s leading newspaper with:

* Complete coverage from 1851-2002
* Display and classified ads
* Comics and cartoons
* Photos, maps, graphics, etc.
* Editorials and commentary
* Unmatched journalistic breadth and depth
* Fair, objective reporting
* First-class literary criticism
* In-depth coverage of science and politics

This database can be accessed via the Library's List of Databases.

[from H-Net Announcements via ClioWeb]

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History is now accepting applications for the 2005-2006 Gilder Lehrman Short-Term Research Fellowships in American History:

To apply, candidates should submit:

1. A cover sheet with name, mailing address, e-mail address, telephone and fax numbers; current rank, department, and institution; title of project; duration and amount of proposed fellowship; and names of recommenders.
2. A curriculum vitae.
3. A 2-3-page project proposal that lists the specific holdings in the collection you intend to use (please specify only one archive in your application).
4. Two letters of recommendation.
5. A schedule and proposed budget of expenses during the tenure of the fellowship.

Please note:

• Fellowships range in duration from a week to two months.
• Fellowship stipends range from $1,500 to $4,000.
• Fellowships are not available for scholars who live within commuting distance of New York City.
• Research must be completed within a year of notification of the award.

Application deadlines:
December 1st and May 1st.

Applications must be postmarked by the deadline.

Gilder Lehrman Fellowship Program
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
19 West 44th Street, Suite 500
New York, NY 10036
Tel (646)366-9666
Fax (646)366-9669

Fore more information, visit the Gilder Lehrman Fellowships page:  http://www.gilderlehrman.org/historians/fellowship1.html

Globalism and Film History: A Conference
April 6-8, 2006

The story of cinema is open-ended. Transformations in the social and intellectual landscape are reshaping the way we think about film and its history. This conference will explore the following themes:

• The impact on film of national borders that both shift and dissolve
• The growing recognition of diverse audience cultures and subcultures
• The challenges and opportunities of emerging technologies
• The realignment of global and local funding and distribution strategies

Additional participants, exact times, locations, and paper titles will be announced.

Keynote Speakers: Jeffrey Berg, Chairman and CEO, International Creative Management, Los Angeles; and Manthia Diawara, New York University

For further information, contact: Linda Vavra 312/996-6354; fax 312/996-2938; email lvavra@uic.edu

The latest issue of Common-place is here:

University of Connecticut historian Peter Baldwin asks who went out when the lights went on in the nineteenth-century American city? University of Michigan historian Susan Juster explores the uncertain boundaries between religious violence and racial violence in colonial America. And University of Minnesota cultural historian Thomas Augst explores a virtual recreation of P.T. Barnum's famous American Museum. Find these features as well as columns by Rhys Isaac, Tara Dirst and Allan Kulikoff, Natalie Zacek, April F. Matsen, and much more in the latest issue of Common-place.

Nathanael at The Rhine River has three great posts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) about geography and historiography, focusing on Lucien Febvre and the Annales school. While many of us think primarily of Braudel's longue durée in relation to Annales historiography, Nathanael highlights the importance of space to this tradition.

Early American Cartographies
March 2-4, 2006
The Newberry Library

A conference sponsored by the Society of Early Americanists; the Newberry Library's Center for Renaissance Studies, Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography, D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History, and Dr. William M. Scholl Center for Family and Community History; and the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame.

Keynote speaker: Barbara Mundy, Fordham University
Co-director of Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America 1520-1820

This cross-disciplinary conference investigates the enduring significance of space and place in scholarship of the early Americas against the backdrop of the Newberry Library's world-class cartographic holdings. We welcome proposals for papers and panels on the materials and metaphors of mapping the early Americas from marchlands to middle grounds, from borderlands to contact zones, from frontiers to public spheres.

Papers concerning the following topics are especially welcome: Native American mapping; cartographic fantasies and maps in literature from the Americas; cartography's relations to imperial conflicts and colonialism in the Americas; the portrayal of rural and urban spaces; Midwestern and Great Plains geographic space and the Jeffersonian grid; the map trade and map consumption in the Americas; maps used in land speculation, Boosterism, and promotional schemes; mapping and exploration; the mapping of early transportation networks; the history of pedagogic cartography; and the use of maps in contemporary high school and college classrooms.

Those interested in participating should submit a 350-word abstract for receipt by October 1, 2005 to renaissance@newberry.org (e-mail preferred) or:

Center for Renaissance Studies
The Newberry Library
60 W. Walton St.
Chicago, IL 60610-7324

If you would like to attend the Early American Cartographies Conference, please fill out and send in the registration form (PDF) along with your payment.

Please contact us at renaissance@newberry.org or 312-255-3514 for more information.

Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, 1750-1850
(formally Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, 1750-1850)

The 2006 meeting of the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, 1750-1850 will be taking place in Atlanta, GA, March 2-4, 2006. Hosted by Georgia State University, most of the conference events will be taking place at the Downtown Atlanta Hilton, with easy access from the airport by MARTA train and within walking distance of most Atlanta attractions. Consider bringing the family: the new Atlanta Aquarium is due to open in late 2005!

We are soliciting panel proposals treating any aspect of history, literature, or art or music history on the period from 1750 to 1850. As this is our inaugural meeting with our new name, which is meant to encourage broad geographical coverage, we are especially hopeful that scholars working on the Atlantic World and other regions will consider attending the Consortium. The Consortium also publishes Selected Papers for each annual meeting.

Keynote speakers will include Laurent Dubois of Michigan State University, Michael Broers of Oxford University, and Linda Colley of Princeton University.

The program committee prefers proposals for complete sessions (three papers, plus a chair and a commentator). However, we will accept proposals for incomplete sessions, and even individual paper proposals. Session proposals should include name of presenter, title of paper, and brief abstract (no more than one page single-spaced) for each paper; and brief CVs (no more than 2 pages) for each participant. The deadline for proposals is October 15, 2005.

Submit proposals to:
Denise Z. Davidson
Consortium on the Revolutionary Era
History Department
Georgia State University
Atlanta, GA 30303
hisdzd@langate.gsu.edu

Email submissions are acceptable; please attach documents in Word format.

Any questions may be addressed to Denise Davidson at hisdzd@langate.gsu.edu.

The ConIH Committee invites graduate students to submit proposals for the Sixth Annual Graduate Student Conference on International History (ConIH6), to take place at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 17-18 March, 2006.

The theme of this year's conference is "Universalities in World History." Religions and other universal belief systems offer a particular problem for students of international history: supposedly able to transcend all boundaries, they must still function in contexts where borders and other divisions are of tremendous importance. This conference aims to explore the multifarious roles that universalities have played in relations between peoples, communities, and states throughout world history.

We welcome submissions that look at universalities historically and analytically. Papers could examine the spread of specific religions into new lands and across national boundaries, at the experience of conversion from the perspectives of both missionaries and converts, or at religious communities of various sizes from national diasporas to those with a global reach such as pan-Islamism. They may also focus on the connections between universal belief systems and state policies, social movements, or migration. All papers should attempt to provide answers to some of the broader questions of the conference: Is religion a motive force in history or a tool? How and why do some universalities spread? What happens when adherents of different universal belief systems come into contact with each other?

There are no temporal or geographic limits to this theme. We expect the conference to contain a diversity of topics that will look at populations from all parts of the world, as well as ancient, pre-modern, modern, and contemporary contexts. Papers will be selected on the basis of their strength, novelty of subject and interpretation, and utility as bases for historical comparison.

ConIH welcomes innovative research approaches and agendas. Particular attention will be given to papers developing comparative perspectives and utilizing multi-archival research bases. We actively encourage students to reach beyond the immediate conclusions of their research to consider universality as a conceptual tool in international and world history.

The conference will conclude with a plenary session, at which several leading scholars in the field of international & world history will discuss these broad issues.

Commentary on papers will be provided by specialists from Harvard and beyond. Graduate student presenters who must travel from outside New England will receive a small stipend to help defray expenses. Details will be available in the weeks ahead on the conference website: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~conih. Information can also be found here on past conferences.

Graduate students who are interested in participating in the conference should submit a one-page paper proposal and curriculum vita (in Word, RTF, or PDF format) to conih@fas.harvard.edu. Proposals must be received by October 31, 2005 in order to be considered. Notification of acceptance will be made by November 30, 2005. For additional information about the conference, please contact the conference organizers at conih@fas.harvard.edu or visit the conference website.

V for Victory: Georgia Remembers World War II is an ongoing exhibiton at the Atlanta History Center:

World War II was the largest, most expensive and most devastating human conflict in history. As a result, it had a greater global impact and touched more lives than any previous war. V for Victory: Georgia Remembers World War II, on display through January 2, 2006, examines the individual stories and experiences of Georgians and others who experienced the war years from 1941-1945, including snapshots into life just before and after the conflict. From patriotic activities on the home front to the establishment of military training bases throughout the state, the exhibit will examine life for Americans with their families, in their neighborhoods, on the job, in the military and on the front lines. Featured in the exhibit are three videos produced exclusively for the Atlanta History Center by the History Channel which will highlight oral histories gathered in conjunction with the Veterans History Project.

Edwardian Summer - Can the world learn from its past follies? The Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott examines this question, as he draws parallels between the "first" age of globalization – just prior to World War I – and the current second phase. There are several similarities between the two eras: belief in unrestricted capital flows and free trade, profound income inequality, and large-scale migration. Elliott also highlights the similarity between Britain's decline as lone superpower at the end of the 19th century, and the now-eroding global dominance of the United States. He writes, "The world is traditionally at its most fragile at times when the global balance of power is in flux." Is history doomed to repeat itself? "It may be different this time," says Elliott, "with the second age of globalization avoiding the pitfalls of the first." The world may have much to learn. (YaleGlobal Online)

This is more current events than history news per se, but it's certainly a major historical happening should it stick:
IRA leadership announces end to armed campaign - The IRA Army Council has formally ordered an end to the organisation's armed campaign, effective from this afternoon. It has ordered all IRA units to dump their weapons, and all members have been "instructed to assist the development of purely political and democratic programmes through exclusively peaceful means". The IRA leadership said it would work with the IICD to "complete the process to verifiably put its arms beyond use". (Irish Times)

See the BBC story for the usual array of background info, timelines, documents, and video footage of Tony Blair's reaction.

UPDATE:  See also the story in the July 29 Christian Science Monitor.

Making the rounds in the history blogosphere today is this story from The Daily Telegraph:

Documents from the National Archives used to substantiate claims that British intelligence agents murdered Heinrich Himmler in 1945 are forgeries, The Daily Telegraph can reveal today. It seems certain that the bogus documents were somehow planted among genuine papers to pervert the course of historical study.The results of investigations by forensic document experts on behalf of this newspaper have shocked historians and caused tremors at the Archives, the home of millions of historical documents, which has previously been thought immune to distortion or contamination.

[link from Dave at the new blog History (welcome Dave!) via Sharon at Early Modern Notes]

Ralph Luker has a great post at Cliopatria spurred by the 50th anniversary of the publication of C. Vann Woodward's Strange Career of Jim Crow. A Strange Career of Alleys, Avenues, Boulevards, and Interstates ... looks at the changing dynamics of racial proximity in Atlanta and how it evolved into segregation, but on a complex scale. Anyone interested in the history of Atlanta should take a look. Dr. Luker also links to an article in the Boston Globe that looks back at Woodward's landmark book.

Japan city adopts contentious history textbook - A Japanese city on Wednesday adopted for use in its schools a history textbook that critics say whitewashes Tokyo's militaristic past, a decision likely to further chill ties with China and South Korea. The education board of the city of Otawara in Tochigi Prefecture, 150 kilometers (90 miles) north of Tokyo, became the first municipal government to adopt "The New History Textbook," written by nationalistic scholars for junior high schools. Japan's Education Ministry approved the textbook in April, sparking anti-Japanese protests in China and fraying ties with South Korea. Resentment of Japan's past military aggression runs deep in both countries, 60 years after the end of World War II. (Reuters)