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Chris Beneke   Tom LoBianco, “Daniels Looked to Censor Opponents,” The Associated Press , July 16, 2013 “Emails obtained by The Associated Press through a Freedom of Information Act request show Daniels requested that historian and anti-war activist Howard Zinn's writings be banned from classrooms and asked for a "cleanup" of college courses. In another exchange, the Republican talks about cutting funding for a program run by a local university professor who was one of his sharpest critics. … The emails are raising eyebrows about Daniels' appointment as president of a major research university just months after critics questioned his lack of academic credentials and his hiring by a board of trustees he appointed.” The Mitch Daniels email , February 9, 2010 “This terrible anti-American academic finally passed away. The obits and commentaries mentioned that his book ‘A People’s History of the United States’ is ‘the textbook of choice in high schools and col...

Randall Stephens Scott Hovey, managing editor of the Journal of the Historical Society , points us to the July 12th issue of Time magazine online. In it doctoral student in history at Boston University Matthew Pressman challenges the idea that a "gentlemen's agreement" existed between the press and Franklin Roosevelt regarding the president's disability.  Writes Pressman: The recently discovered film clip of President Franklin D. Roosevelt being pushed in a wheelchair, despite showing neither Roosevelt’s face nor the wheelchair, has become an object of considerable public interest. One reason people find the clip so fascinating is that it seems to represent a radically different era in American political life—one in which the president could rely on the press corps to help him hide from the larger public something so glaringly obvious as the fact that he was a paraplegic from having contracted polio at age 39.  An NBC Nightly News report on the discovery stated that ...

Randall Stephens Readers might find interesting this recent article in the Guardian about history battles.   On the heels of the Niall Ferguson scandal , Labour Education spokesman and historian Tristram Hunt writes: "From curriculum rows to Niall Ferguson's remarks on Keynes, our past is the fuel for debate about th Read the above at the BBC e future." ( "History is where the great battles of public life are now being fought," Guardian , May 12, 2013). Here's a brief excerpt: For as [Niall] Ferguson has discovered to his cost, history enjoys a uniquely controversial place within British public life. "There is no part of the national curriculum so likely to prove an ideological battleground for contending armies as history," complained an embattled Michael Gove in a speech last week. "There may, for all I know, be rival Whig and Marxist schools fighting a war of interpretation in chemistry or food technology but their partisans don't ten...