David Vine, author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia appeared on Democracy NOW! with Olivier Bancoult, leader of the Chagos refugees.   Speaking of the fate of his people’s culture, Bancoult said “They just want to destroy it. This is why it’s so important for us to have our dignity and our fundamental rights back as all human beings to be able to live in our birthplace.”

David Vine has been working hard to make their story known.

Albert Einstein’s exploding global fame and budding Zionism came together in the spring of 1921 for an event that was unique in the history of science, and indeed remarkable for any realm: a grand two-month processional through the eastern and midwestern United States that evoked the sort of mass frenzy and press adulation that would thrill a touring rock star. The world had never before seen, and perhaps will never again, such a scientific celebrity superstar, one who also happened to be a gentle icon of humanist values and a living patron saint for Jews.

Princeton University Press, as volume 12 in its Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, is publishing his correspondence for this amazing and critical year of his life. It includes the full text of 169 letters he wrote this year along with 180 that he received. Also included is a detailed calendar of his year that draws on information from hundreds of other documents. All told, the volume presents an exquisite and rich tapestry of Einstein’s initial involvement with the Zionist movement and with the United States, which 12 years later would become his home.

Over at History News Network, they are running an adapted excerpt from Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s by Gil Troy. The subject of the essay? Michael Jackson, of course!

It is not stretching to credit Michael Jackson as one of the trailblazers for Barack Obama, himself just three years younger than Jackson.

…

For those of us, like Obama, born toward the end of the baby boom in 1961, Michael Jackson was not just a phenomenon but our phenomenon.

Read the rest at HNN.

ROROTOKO has posted a wondeful interview with Shane Hamilton, author of Trucking Coutnry: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy. You can view it by clicking here!

Keep your flashlights handy.  Last month’s Earth Hour, which saw cities  dim their lights across the globe, may be the harbinger of darker times ahead.  And this is a good thing.

In New York, Earth Hour participants included such iconic night-sights as the Empire State Building, the George Washington Bridge, and the United Nations.  Although the savings were more symbolic than significant–about $102 for the UN–they helped cast a figurative spotlight on a positive trend.  For ecological and economic reasons, the current recession is prompting businesses and individuals to turn down the wattage and pump up the publicity on their “green” accomplishments.  As The Times has reported (“Efficiency’s Mark: City Glitters a Little Less,” November 2008), more “blank” spaces are sprouting in the skyline, and fewer office towers blaze in boastful disregard for the cost.  Darkness is in.

Princeton University Press, Rotunda at University of Virginia Press, and the Papers of Thomas Jefferson project at Princeton University announce that on April 13th (Thomas Jefferson’s birthday), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition will be added to Rotunda’s American Founding Era collection. The digital edition of this important collection will include all volumes of this ongoing papers project, starting with all of the thirty-three existing volumes that encompass the period 14 January 1760 to 30 April 1801. Four of the existing volumes the Jefferson Papers Retirement series will appear later this year.

Of the Rotunda project, the release notes that “although each database already provides, on its own, a fascinating look at the life and mind of notable founding-era figure, the newly developed platform allows students and scholars a unique opportunity to access a conversation—several voices contributing to perhaps the most important times in our nation’s history. Newly inter-operable in this platform, the databases may now be navigated and searched simultaneously. Searches of crucial events and themes will return results by a host of the era’s participants, not only our title figures but their numerous and distinguished correspondents. This is a view of the era unlike any ever offered.”

Princeton University Press is proud to publish the print edition and pleased to partner with Rotunda for the digital version, which will expand the reach and usefulness of these critical documents.  The Papers of Thomas Jefferson is a projected 60-volume series containing not only the 18,000 letters written by Jefferson but also, in full or in summary, the more than 25,000 letters written to him. Including documents of historical significance as well as private notes not closely examined until their publication in the Papers, this series is an unmatched source of scholarship on the nation’s third president.

Volume 34 (1 May to 31 July 1801) and Volume 35 (1 August to 30 November 1801) of the Papers project have just been published in print editions, too.

Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn’s HEROES AND COWARDS, a groundbreaking study of 40,000 Civil War soldiers that reveals the benefits and limits of diversity, has been making the news in the past few days. Larry Gordon discusses the new book in the Los Angeles Times, an article that has been picked up in a number national papers including The Baltimore Sun, and David Glenn writes about it in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Woodrow Wilson School taped an interview with Anne-Marie Slaughter and G. John Ikenberry, two of the contributors to The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century. View the interview below, or visit the WWS Web site where they’ve posted a great article about John Ikenberry and his research.

Also, just prior to departing for Washington, DC and a new post with President Obama’s administration, Anne-Marie Slaughter lectured at the Carnegie Council in New York. “Everybody wants to be Wilson’s heir, or at least everyone in the last decade,” she noted at the beginning of her presentation before turning to the subject of the book in which she, along with Ikenberry, Thomas J. Knock and Tony Smith, considers George W. Bush’s foreign policy in relation to Wilsonian ideals. A complete transcript of the evening, including an insightful Q&A session, is available here.

On Friday the 13th, HEROES AND COWARDS: The Social Face of War took the Page 99 Test.

The question is, did they pass or fail?

Okay, perhaps that isn’t the question, but as the site quotes the wonderful Ford Madox Ford: “Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.”

Not a bad way to check out a book!

Skip Gates dropped by TODAY this morning to chat with Meredith Vieira about his PBS Documentary, “Looking for Lincoln” which airs tonight on most PBS stations (9:00 pm EST).

Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn have written a new book called Heroes & Cowards: The Social Face of War, which uses the life histories of 40,000 Civil War soldiers to uncover the ways in which social bonds determined behavior. Costa and Kahn both teach at UCLA. In the essay below, Costa discusses some of their fascinating findings.

Bee Wilson, author of Swindled, spoke with Minnesota Public Radio last week about the melamine scandal in China and the long historical roots of food fraud in Britain and America.