New NEH Chair
The US Senate unanimously confirmed Lynne V. Cheney on May 21 as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. She succeeds William J. Bennett, who became secretary of the US Department of Education in February 1985. In the interim, NEH Deputy Chairman John Agresto served as acting chairman.
Lynne Cheney is a native of Wyoming and graduated from Natrona County High School in Casper in 1959. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, she earned her bachelor’s degree with honors from Colorado College and her master’s degree from the University of Colorado in 1964. She received her PhD in nineteenth-century British literature from the University of Wisconsin in 1970.
She has taught at the University of Wyoming, George Washington University, Northern Virginia Community College, and the University of Wisconsin.
She is also the author of two novels, Executive Privilege (Simon and Schuster, 1979) and Sisters (New American Library, 1981). She is co-author, with her husband, Representative Richard Cheney (R-WY), of Kings of the Hill (Continuum, 1983), a history of the US House of Representatives.
Before the NEH, Lynne Cheney was a senior editor of the Washington Magazine. She is the author of many articles on American history, literature, culture, and politics, which have appeared in such publications as American Heritage and Smithsonian magazines as well as The Washingtonian. She has worked as a researcher/writer on the public television program Inside Washington.
According to a July 7 report in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Cheney has not set out in detail her plans for the Endowment. But one of her first projects was to view some of the films made with Endowment help. She thinks well made movies could go a long way toward solving one of the major problems she wants to address: the lack of basic knowledge of history and America’s heritage among high school students.
“It’s a problem that the larger society needs to address.” Cheney said. “We’re not a society that pays as much attention as perhaps it should to our heritage.” Historical films made for television are difficult to do well, she acknowledged, but they “could be a way to generate an awareness of history.”
Historian Elected President of SSRC
Frederic E. Wakeman, Jr., professor of history and former chair at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, was elected president of the Social Science Research Council effective July 1. Wakeman, also a former Council member of the AHA (1983), is the first historian to be elected to the SSRC presidency.
One of the nation’s foremost historians of modern China, Frederic Wakeman has authored or edited six books on China, including The Fall of Imperial China (1976) and The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China (two volumes, 1985), and numerous articles.
Furthermore, Wakeman graduated from Harvard College in 1959 and studied for a year at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris. He received a PhD in Far Eastern history and Oriental languages from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1965 and has taught there for the past twenty-one years.
Active in several scholarly associations, Wakeman most recently has spent several years in China in various capacities: he was a visiting professor at Beijing University and a consultant to the US National Academy of Sciences. His wife, Carolyn, also a China scholar, co-authored To the Storm: The Odyssey of a Revolutionary Chinese Woman (1985).
Lewis Appointed as Director of Annenberg Research Institute
AHA Council member Bernard Lewis was named director of the new Annenberg Research Institute for Judaic and Near Eastern Studies in Philadelphia. Formerly Dropsie College, the center is being reborn in a more ambitious form with a broader intellectual mandate.
Modeled in part on the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, NJ, the new center is to begin operating next year in a colonial-style building being constructed through financing by the Annenberg Fund on a site donated by General Accident Insurance Company of America. The center will be a block off of Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia.
Plans for the center include the establishment of a communications center that would provide a central, computerized repository of ancient Judaic and Near Eastern texts, including millions of entries, that would be instantly accessible to any researcher anywhere. Professor Lewis said the center will seek to expand and modernize its research methods and extend the range of studies.
Historian Wins Thomas Jefferson Award
AHA member Norman A. Graebner, who holds the Randolph P. Campton Professorship of Public Affairs at the Miller Center, has been awarded the University of Virginia’s highest honor, the annual Thomas Jefferson Award.
