This week, the Majority and Minority leadership of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was announced. Representative Edolphus Towns (D-NY) was selected by the House Democratic Caucus to chair the Committee. In addition, the House Republican Conference voted to confirm Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) as the Ranking Minority Member.
In early December Footnote.com and the National Archives and Records Administration unveiled the release of the first-ever interactive World War II collection, which includes an interactive version of the USS Arizona Memorial, WWII Hero Pages and WWII photos and documents previously unavailable on the internet.
On December 4, 2008, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library released recordings and transcripts of President Johnson’s telephone conversations for May 1968 through January 1969. With this final release, the archivists at the Library will have reviewed and released to the public approximately 642 hours of recordings of President Johnson’s telephone conversations.
The Office of History and Preservation in the Office of the Clerk of U.S. House of Representatives recently published, “Black Americans in Congress, 1870–2007.” A website was launched along with the new publication that includes lesson plans and other educational resources.
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Council of Independent Colleges, with the UNCF, will cosponsor a seminar on Slave Narratives to be held at Yale University on June 7-10, 2009. The deadline for completed nominations is January 12, 2009. Guidelines and the nomination form are available on CIC’s website by clicking here.
On December 11, in a letter to Walmart President and CEO Lee Scott, 253 historians from throughout the country urged the retail giant to reconsider plans to build a 138,000 square-foot supercenter immediately adjacent to the Wilderness Battlefield in Orange County, VA. A formal application for the project was filed on December 5, 2008.
On December 3, 2008, historians Peter Robert Lamont Brown and Romila Thapar were named recipients of the $1 Million 2008 Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Study of Humanity. They are the sixth and seventh recipients since the Prize’s 2003 inception. Each awardee will receive half of the $1 million prize. The Kluge Prize is international; the recipient may be of any nationality, writing in any language. The main criterion for a recipient is deep and sustained intellectual accomplishment in the study of humanity that has an impact beyond narrow academic disciplines.
