Historians

What happened and why? Whether investigating the ruins of the Acropolis or the civil rights demonstrations of the '60s, historians ask many questions as they try to piece together a picture of the past, an interpretation of events that can change as new information is disclosed. Learn how historians research the past through some interactive activities and adventures through the direct links on The Times Launch Point Web site: http://www.latimes.

Bob Stewart, a television producer who created such popular game shows as "To Tell the Truth," "The $10,000 Pyramid," and the enduring daytime hit "The Price Is Right," has died. He was 91. Stewart died Friday of natural causes at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said a son, Sande. "He was brilliant at creating game shows that America gravitated to," said Fred Wostbrock, a friend and game-show historian. "Bob was a really bright guy. He saw the commonality in everybody.

"Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train," is not just another in the sea of topical political documentaries relating to the coming election. It's a study of more than 50 years of political activism, as embodied by its still-active subject. A writer, professor and historian, Zinn's wrote the popular "A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present," which is in its fifth edition, having sold more than 1 million copies.

Long before there were "real" housewives on television, actor-politicians and even potential celebrity politicians like Donald Trump, theme restaurants, virtual online vacations and Kim Kardashian, who makes her living by being Kim Kardashian, there was "The Image," historian Daniel Boorstin's prescient examination of a nation in transition, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of its publication this year. When "The Image" first appeared, one critic predicted that it would join William Whyte's "The Organization Man" and John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Affluent Society" as one of those seminal books that not only capture the zeitgeist but change the American mind-set.

Fifteen years after Gerald R. Ford's post-Watergate pardon of Richard M. Nixon shocked the nation and gravely wounded his presidency, that action is getting more favorable reviews from historians than it got back then from the public, political leaders and even some of those same historians. Stephen E. Ambrose, respected biographer of Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Nixon, "cursed and screamed" when he first heard of the pardon.

"For me," Joseph J. Ellis told a reporter in November, "the teaching side of my life and the writing side of my life are part of the same collective whole." If true, that could be a problem now for Ellis, a popular professor at Mount Holyoke College who won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in history for his book "Founding Brothers" but was found this week to have made false claims to his students about serving in Vietnam. Ellis' deception has prompted a lively public and private debate among academics.

Historian Stephen E. Ambrose, the best-selling author of books about Lewis and Clark and World War II, suffered serious injuries in a fall, hospital officials said. The 62-year-old Ambrose was admitted Sunday to Meriter Park Hospital in Madison, Wis., and listed in serious condition. The Helena, Mont., resident had been in Madison to meet with a Winston Churchill discussion group. Ambrose is a leading scholar of military and diplomatic history.

Call it the paradox of Christmas: Every winter, just as the seasonal darkness is at its bleakest, Christians around the world celebrate the year's most jubilant holiday. Yuletide cheer is a welcome break from winter doldrums--and a deliberate one, says a historian who has charted the origins of the Christmas holiday. J. Patout Burns, professor of Christian thought at Washington University in St. Louis, has spent most of his life studying the origins of Christmas and other religious traditions.

Described as "a man to match the mountains," John W. Robinson is being honored for his research and writing about the San Gabriel mountains. Robinson, a Fullerton resident and retired teacher, will receive the Donald H. Pflueger Local History Award from the Historical Society of Southern California at a luncheon Sept. 26. The award goes to teachers and authors of outstanding books and articles on local history.

One of France's leading "revisionist" historians, who claims the Holocaust never took place, was severely beaten Saturday by three youths said to belong to a group called "The Sons of the Memory of the Jews," officials said. Robert Faurisson, 60, was ambushed by the youths while walking his dog in a park in Vichy. The trio repeatedly kicked and punched Faurisson, breaking his jaw, then ran off, a police report said.

For a piece of history that gave us the rockets' red glare and bombs bursting in air, the War of 1812 tends to evoke a collective "Huh?" on the U.S. side of the border with Canada. "The War of 1812 has no compelling narrative that appeals to the average American," said Jerald Podair, a history professor at Lawrence University in Wisconsin. "It's just a hodgepodge of buildings burning, bombs bursting in air and paintings being saved from the invaders, all for a vaguely defined purpose.

During his five-year overhaul of the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, Cold War historian Timothy Naftali won wide praise for transforming a much-ridiculed institution into a house of serious scholarship under the auspices of the National Archives and Records Administration. Yet nobody was surprised that the private Richard Nixon Foundation — run by fierce loyalists of the former president — didn't honor Naftali when he left as director last month to join a think tank and write a book.

At first glance, the Doors seem to be an unusual object of study for Greil Marcus, the music critic and cultural historian who likes to draw connections between punk music and world history ("Lipstick Traces") or Elvis Presley and the American myth ("Mystery Train"). The Los Angeles band is, after all, an act that these days mainly gets airplay for a few scattered hits such as "Light My Fire" and "Break on Through (To the Other Side). " They wouldn't seem substantial enough for Marcus' intense gaze.

Newt Gingrich appears to have a different definition of the word “historian” than, say, Webster's. Gingrich was asked last week at a Republican debate in Michigan about his $300,000 contract to work for mortgage giant Freddie Mac five years ago. Gingrich said he was a retained as a “historian” and that he warned executives there that reckless loans would lead to collapse. “I offered them advice on precisely what they didn't do,” he said at the debate. “My advice as a historian, when they walked in and said to me, 'We are now making loans to people who have no credit history and have no record of paying back anything, but that's what the government wants us to do.' As I said to them at the time, this is a bubble.

Like Richard Henry Dana Jr., who described the towering coastal bluffs of Dana Point and the bay below as "the only romantic spot" on the California coast in his 1840 classic "Two Years Before the Mast," Doris Walker-Smith fell in love with the area when she and her husband and infant son first moved there in 1963. A native of Cleveland who had lived in the Los Angeles area for three years before moving to Orange County, Walker-Smith not only loved the place named after Dana, she also felt compelled to write about it. Her 1981 book "Dana Point Harbor/Capistrano Bay: Home Port for Romance" is considered the definitive history of the area.

Oscar Handlin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Harvard University whose classic portrait of 19th century European emigrants launched the modern study of immigration as the predominant American story, died Sept. 20 in Cambridge, Mass. He was 95. The cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Lilian. Handlin, who taught at Harvard University for nearly 50 years, was a prolific scholar best known for "The Uprooted: the Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People.

PORTLAND, Maine -- Long John Silver of "Treasure Island" fame, hobbling along on a peg leg with a talking parrot on his shoulder, set the mold for Hollywood's image of a pirate. Then came Captain Hook, thirsting for revenge against Peter Pan for cutting off his right hand and forcing him to wear an iron hook.

Clifford J. Walker is a historian and an expert on a river many think is a myth--the 150-mile Mojave River, one of the longest and largest underground rivers in the world. "A lot of people don't believe there is a Mojave River. They see the dry bed not realizing that beneath it flows a wide, wide river," said Walker, 60, who teaches a course on the history of the Mojave Desert at Barstow Community College.

A recent decision by a French court — paving the way for the return of former dictator Gen. Manuel Noriega to Panama after more than 20 years in prisons in the United States and France — has made a long-standing question suddenly urgent: What happened to the thousands of boxes of documents U.S. forces seized during Operation Just Cause in Panama in 1989? The surprising answer, the U.S. government recently confirmed, is that the U.S. Army still has them. The United States should immediately return these documents to Panama, where they are needed not only by historians and human rights researchers but also by attorneys on both sides of legal proceedings that will follow Noriega's return.

Vesta Williams Singer of R&B hits in 1980s Vesta Williams, 53, an R&B singer who had hits in the 1980s with "Once Bitten Twice Shy" and "Congratulations," was found dead Thursday evening of a possible drug overdose in an El Segundo hotel room. An autopsy will determine the cause of death, according to Los Angeles County coroner's officials, but they said a drug overdose is suspected. Born Mary Vesta Williams in Coshocton, Ohio, on Dec. 1, 1957, she had hits with "Don't Blow A Good Thing," "Sweet, Sweet Love" and the torch song "Congratulations," in which she emotionally bids goodbye to her ex, about to marry someone else, on his wedding day. Besides her solo work, she was a member of the singing group Wild Honey and was a backup singer for Chaka Khan, Gladys Knight, Anita Baker and others.