Dr. Darrell Newton of Salisbury University’s Communication Arts Department examines the influence of West Indian immigrants and others on the British Broadcasting Corporation in his new book, Paving the Empire Road: BBC Television and Black Britons.
It was “a date which will live in infamy.” Early on the morning of Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese warplanes and submarines attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, sinking or severely damaging 30 ships and killing some 2,400 military personnel and civilians. Now, as Americans prepare to mark the 70th anniversary of that attack, a Florida State University historian and scholar is prepared to offer his expertise on a war that altered the course of history.
Millions of people across the United States will sit down Nov. 24 to a traditional Thanksgiving meal, including turkey, potatoes, squash, corn and cranberries. These foods have become synonymous with Thanksgiving, but how did they end up on tables from Maine to California? According to Bruce Smith, senior scientist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, much of what is eaten at Thanksgiving today came from Mexico and South America.
Sunday, December 25, marks the 20th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s last official day of existence, when then-president Mikhail Gorbechev’s resignation formally ended the government Vladimir Lenin instituted.
Carol Abraczinskas has spent most of her career drawing dinosaur bones at the University of Chicago, but her artistic ability and compulsive eye for detail have led to inspections that have taken her from ancient burials in Luxor, Egypt, to FBI archives in Seattle, Washington.
Richard Rufus of Cornwall may be the most important figure in Western philosophy you've never heard of. A project based at Indiana University and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities aims to change that.
Soon historians and political junkies will have more Richard Nixon material to kick around, thanks to a UW-Madison professor emeritus who has fought for years to get the secret records of the former president made public. Stanley Kutler, the UW emeritus professor of law and history whose successful court challenge is responsible for the release of the records, says the records will be a chance to hear Nixon minus his lawyers, handlers and "spinmeisters."
A new partnership between the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and the Watermen's Museum in historic Yorktown Virginia lets schoolchildren use robotic subs to study shipwrecks from last major battle of the American Revolution.
An Indiana University of Pennsylvania professor has recovered original journal entries of explorer David Livingstone which show new perspectives on an 1871 massacre in the Congo.
Texans who liberated European concentration camps are telling their stories in video interviews by the Institute for Oral History at Baylor University. The project funded by the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission. Transcripts will be given to libraries and Holocaust museums in Texas.
The online Encyclopedia of Cleveland History has launched a new look today, along with more articles, maps and photos. Cleveland and Chicago are the only large cities with web-based encyclopedias.
Historians and archivists at Mississippi State are announcing the discovery of what they believe to be a historic treasure: a hair lock from the 19th century’s best known African American social reformer. The artifact was found among items in the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Collection, which is housed at the university’s Mitchell Memorial Library.
The manuscript seems straight out of fiction: a strange handwritten message in abstract symbols and Roman letters meticulously covering 105 yellowing pages, hidden in the depths of an academic archive.
The Occupy Wall Street movement could offer a similar opportunity to left-wing politicians as the Tea Party movement did to the right, says a Vanderbilt University historian.
Jeremi Suri, professor in the Department of History and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, mined more than 200 years of U.S. policy to explain the successes and failures of nation-building operations and offer a plan for how to move forward. The findings are detailed in his new book, "Liberty's Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building from the Founders to Obama" (Simon & Schuster, Sept. 27 2011).
The Civil War — already considered the deadliest conflict in American history — in fact took a toll far more severe than previously estimated. That’s what a new analysis of census data by Binghamton University historian J. David Hacker reveals.
Thursday, August 19, through Sunday, August 21, marks the 20th anniversary of the Soviet coup attempt during which members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union attempted to take control from Mikhail Gorbachev. American University faculty experts are available to provide commentary on the coup attempt’s significance.
“An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle Over Equality in Washington, D.C.,” a recent book by a Northwestern University professor, places the capital at the center of a fresh analysis of Reconstruction and the debate over the meaning of equality in the period after slave emancipation. The author shows how the issues still haunt America today.
A well preserved "four-room house" from the period of the Kingdom of Israel has been uncovered at Tel Shikmona, Israel.
Remains of a Persian city and a Byzantine town have been exposed at the site.
The samplers embroidered by girls in colonial America not only brightened the home, but also shone the light of literacy into the needleworkers’ young lives.
To bring these historic American treasures to the public eye, the University of Delaware in collaboration with the University of Oregon is now launching the Sampler Archive Project, a major effort to build a national digital archive and searchable database of samplers stitched by American girls in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. UD won a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to develop the resource.
Ritchie Garrison was helping to clean out his late uncle’s attic in Massachusetts when he came upon an intriguing department store bag. “When I saw what was inside, I almost fell over,” the University of Delaware history professor says.
A new book by Rebecca Alpert, associate professor of religion and women's studies at Temple, "Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball," tells the story of Jews who were involved in the world of black segregated baseball during the Great Depression.
UALR’s Department of History and the university's new Institute on Race and Ethnicity will host the symposium, “Sit-Ins, Freedom Rides, and Beyond: Direct Action and Civil Rights in 1960s Arkansas” from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, July 9, at the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center, 501 West 9th St. in downtown Little Rock to explore the state's struggle for civil rights beyond the 1957 crisis at Central High. The symposium will bring together veterans of the Arkansas SNCC campaign to integrate lunch counters, country school districts, and other public facilities. The campaign resulted in several court victories, including a SCOTUS ruling that outlawed "freedom of choice" school integration plans.
University of Maryland archaeologists are reconstructing the inner world of early Irish immigrants - of city children taught at home to read before widespread public education or child labor laws, and insular rural communities defying assimilation. "These people helped build the Washington Monument and U.S. Capitol," says UMD’s Stephen Brighton.
Historian Edward O. Frantz challenges conventional wisdom on U.S. politics by examining the racial issues and complex political rhetoric of the period from the Civil War to the Great Depression.
"Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll." That declaration was given nearly 30 years ago with little fanfare and was only audible to a few thousand people in northern New Jersey. But the launch of Music Television, also known as MTV, on Aug. 1, 1981, had permanent implications for the music industry and popular culture.
The papers of an important 20th century American diplomat, George S. Messersmith, have been digitized and are now available for the first time online at the University of Delaware Library, making them accessible to researchers around the world.
A new book titled “Children, War and Propaganda” examines wartime contributions of U.S. children in World War I and World War II. Author Ross Collins, Ph.D., communication professor at North Dakota State University, Fargo, researched how groups have integrated children into the war experience through propaganda.
Fredrik Logevall, Cornell University professor of history, is a leading historian of the Vietnam War. He is the author of several books on the Vietnam War, including “Twilight War,” to be released by Random House in early 2012. Here, he comments on the official release of the Pentagon Papers.
University of Maryland archaeologists are uncovering an unexpectedly rich haul of household materials from an historic African American home in Annapolis. Purchased in 1850 by one of the first African Americans to work for the Naval Academy, the house reveals how the family adapted a middle class lifestyle to the realities of post-Civil War Annapolis.
Women and Slavery in America offers readers an opportunity to examine the establishment, growth and evolution of slavery in the United States as it impacted women — enslaved and free, African American and white, wealthy and poor, northern and southern.
Each year brings new books, films, museums, commemorations and educational campaigns devoted to the Holocaust. But the result, Indiana University scholar Alvin H. Rosenfeld argues in a new book, has often been a weakening of its memory and its meaning.
In his new book, "World War I: The Global Revolution," Dr. Lawrence Sondhaus moves beyond dusty European history lessons to explore the war as a launching point for the political, social and technological forces that have shaped the 20th and 21st centuries.