Today’s roundup of interesting articles and links from around the web includes a collection of articles relating to the plagiarism scandals, a feature on the racial divide of sneakers, a fun Bingo card for the AHA annual meeting in New Orleans, and more!

Professional Issues: A collection of readings inspired by the recent plagiarism scandals involving Jonah Lehrer, David Barton, and Fareed Zakaria. The AHA’s professional guidelines on plagiarism are posted on our website.

America’s Worst Historians: Writing in a tone certain to provoke, Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg use the recent Zakaria plagiarism scandal to censure "big-budget popularizers of history (many of them trained in journalism)." Burstein and Isenberg’s article has predictably generated controversy, including responses found here, here, and here.

Fareed Zakaria and the Perils of Modern-Day Punditry: In the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg offers an interesting discussion on the difference between single-item quote theft and systemic plagiarism.

Commodifying "Content": The scandal has also prompted a reflection by Aaron Barlow on the "valuation of ‘content’ as a product rather than as the culmination of a process. Today, scholarship becomes simply the thing for sale.”

Back to School: News Related to Education

Do Students Have a Constitutional Right to Evaluate Faculty Anonymously? Adjunct Nation discusses the recent case at Santa Fe College, Florida, involving student assessment, privacy, and access to public records.

Solution-Driven Unionism: Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, on education reform initiatives supported by the AFT and affiliates.

Family and Career: Women in Academia Lose Faith in Having It All: An op-ed from Professor Elizabeth Currid-Halkett on a growing trend of female doctoral students backing away from academia to remain in the domestic sphere.

History Resources and News

New Interactive Tool Helps Explain the Global Spread of Capitalism: A visualization of the global publishing history of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations from 1776 to 2001, as featured recently on Edudemic.

What "counts" as a public history dissertation? In a thoughtful piece, Richard Anderson (a doctoral student at Princeton University) argues that "Public history needs rigorous scholarship, and academic history needs faculty willing and able to engage communities and problems beyond the campus." It poses a difficult challenge for PhD programs considering alternative career options for their doctoral students.

History and Theory: The first virtual issue of History and Theory is now available for readers interested in such weighty issues as periodization, multiple temporalities, and the metaphysics of time.

In Convention Speeches, History is Made: As we approach the Republican and Democratic political conventions, Julian Zelizer offers a look back at the different types of convention speeches, each with different purposes and receptions.

AHA Bingo for 2013 Meeting in New Orleans: An unofficial 2013 Bingo Card for the annual meeting in New Orleans that asks gamers to spot historians sporting some of the following: elbow patches, ironic eyeglasses, and job candidates in sneakers (just to name a few).

Fun and Interesting Tidbits from around the Web

The Racial Divide on Sneakers: Through a mixture of history and sociology, author Emily Chertoff takes on the relationship between fashion and race, offering interesting analysis about how the choice of footwear has become more than merely a fashion statement, but a connection to black culture.

Alexandria 2.0: One Millionaire’s Quest to Build the Biggest Library on Earth: Wired profiles Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive, home of the Wayback Machine and the Prelinger Archive. As an added note for people have a lot of disk space, the archive recently made available over one million torrents of books, music, and movies.

How to Make the Prison Feast From Goodfellas: If you have ever found yourself watching the iconic film Goodfellas and wished you could recreate their famous prison-meal feast, the ShortList has recreated the meal for viewers at home.  This is part of a series where expert chefs recreate iconic movie meals for movie buffs to try at home. 

This post first appeared on AHA Today.