Breaking News

Departments

HNN Interns: From A to Z

Reminder: Every Friday you should send in a report reviewing your activities. Use a bullet format and be brief. Send your reports to: editor@hnn.us.

Helpful Links

Welcome to HNN

This page is for students who have enrolled in HNN's intern program. This page lists websites to be checked by interns. Some websites are refreshed daily and should be checked daily. Others are updated weekly, monthly or quarterly and should be checked as soon as they are updated. It is vital that HNN keep its readers abreast of the latest developments on these websites.

Once you have decided that a specific article may be of interest to HNN readers, please forward the article to editor Rick Shenkman.

Your emails to the editor should resemble the Roundup posts you find on the website. Click here for an example.

Guidelines

In the subject line include the URL and nothing else.

In the main body of your email:

URL http://www.time.com/time.html (Yes ... again)
Source Time Magazine
Date 5-7-09
Author and Title John Doe: How the US Won the War (Include colon)
Author Bio [John Doe is a professor of history at Harvard University.] (Include brackets)

NOTE BENE: Please do not include the words "Source" "Date" etc. Just provide the needed information.

Then paste in the text of the entire article.

If you are sending in a link intended for the Breaking News page don't bother including the author of the piece. Be sure to include the headline!

Note Bene: The SOURCE should be the original source, not the source where you happened upon the piece. EG: If an AP story shows up on the New York Times website, it's still an AP piece and AP should be listed as the source. You can often tell the source by examining closely the URL. If it's an AP piece it will usually say AP in the URL.

Keep in mind that we are mainly interested in articles that put a current event into historical perspective. Just because an event is of historical consequence--say the explosion of the Columbia shuttle--that doesn't mean an article about that event is appropriate for us. The article must reflect a historians' sensibility. Usually, the most obvious clue that an article is appropriate for HNN is that it cites historians in the text or is written by an historian.

At the same time, as you familiarize yourself with HNN you will see that we publish articles on a wide variety of subjects. Articles about events of the past with no relevance to the present may be included in the History & Historians Department or in Roundup: History People Are Talking About. An article might also be of interest if it qualifies as Breaking News. If, for instance, you come across an article about the celebration of a Civil War anniversary, by all means send it to the editor, as it may be relevant for the Breaking News page. (But note that we usually report only on events that are of national interest. Thus, we'd probably skip the anniversary of some obscure battle that only the people of Peoria care about.)

Before sending a link from a website be sure to establish that the site is credible. We only want to draw attention to articles from websites that are authoritative. One of the central reasons readers come to HNN is because they believe we are a source of reliable information. (At the same time we obviously cannot vouch for every fact included in the articles we excerpt in the Roundup Department.) What should you look out for then? Be especially wary of websites that claim the Holocaust never happened, or that 9/11 was a Zionist plot. And never, ever, send an article link from a website sponsored by racists like David Duke. The only time you should consult such websites for HNN is if you are doing a news story about such websites.

At all times keep in mind that HNN is not a scholarly journal. It is a journal of opinion aimed at a wide readership. Thus, our articles should be accessible to the ordinary educated reader. We are not interested in publishing articles that require specialized knowledge to understand them.

!!! READ THIS !!!

By now you should have been given a group of websites to follow and review. If you haven't, please contact editor Rick Shenkman. The groups--identified by a sequence of letters--are listed below (i.e., there's Group A, Group B, and so forth).

In addition to checking websites, interns may be called on to write articles for History Q & A and to contact historians.

AT THE END OF YOUR INTERNSHIP ...

During your internship you may be called upon to contact historians. Be sure to keep a list of all of your contacts including 1. name, 2. school affiliation, 3. subject of expertise, and 4. email address.

At the end of your internship please send the list to Rick. Just pasting it into an email is A-Okay.

ALL INTERNS

HNN is divided into 11 Departments. Please familiarize yourself with each of them. The material you generate will end up in one of them.

The editor will communicate to interns individually by email. All interns will be enrolled into the HNN Yahoo Group. As a member of the group you will receive occasional emails from the editor concerning possible assignments. Hit the reply button and your response will go out to all of the members of the group. This is a great way for interns to communicate with one another and can be a rich source of brainstorming ideas. Please make full use of this simple feature.

This list includes the range of work being done by interns at HNN:

*Lexis/Nexis searches
*Surfing the official list of HNN links
*breaking news
*adding links to articles
*grant development
*surf History Blogs
*graphics
*contacting historians

IF YOU ARE SEARCHING FOR HISTORICAL MATERIAL ON THE WEB

This is a tip from an HNN reader on how to surf the web for history-related articles:

Searchable texts are a godsend, and there are quite a few to consult on the Internet. Most of the "American Memory" collections of the Library of Congress are searchable, including the potentially useful "Century of Lawmaking" collection that includes proceedings of the Continental Congress and the Congress of the US (up to 1873). But a search for the phrase "ordered liberty" turned up no "hits." Another big collection is the "Making of America" site maintained by the libraries of the University of Michigan and Cornell University. Each library's "contribution" to this gigantic digital collection of 19th-century >books and periodicals is searchable, and a search for "ordered library" on >each does turn up some hits (about 11 on one, and seven on the other).

FYI: THESE ARE THE SITES CHECKED BY THE EDITOR

1.NYT
2.WSJ
3.History Today
4.frontpagemag (David Horowitz)
5.Juan Cole Blog
6.Romanesko newsletter
7.Wash Post editorial page
8.American Heritage
9.Richard Jensen list
10.Talking History
11.National Security Archive
12.Common-Place.org
13.FPRI (Foreign Policy Research Institute)
14.Academic Questions
15.Gadfly: Weekly Bulletin from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
16.H-Net lists
17.Sightings--Martin Marty Center (U of Chicago)
18.Tom Engelhardt blog at the Nation
19.Commentary Magazine
20.Secrecy News (from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy)
21.Chronicle of Higher Education
22.Weekly Standard
23.American Experience
24. Martin Kramer Blog (Israeli academic)
25.National Journal
26. BBC History News
27. Open Democracy
28. Village Voice
28. Shalom Center (Michael Oren)
28. Georgetown Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (check ACMCU Opinion Pieces)
29. Tabsir (Daniel Martin Varisco/Hofstra)
30. History & Policy (UK)
31. MESA's Academic Freedom Committee
32. Portside (left-wing)
33. Raritan Review
34. Smithsonian Magazine
35. Electronic Iraq
36. International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies

GROUP A: Breaking News

Team 1

Before sending on a link to editor Rick Shenkman, make sure it has not already been posted on the Breaking News page.

Interns assigned to Breaking News should sign up for Yahoo's and Google's free news alerts. Please sign up for alerts about "history" and "historian." (Yahoo news alerts.)

Please also sign up for News Service for Historians. This useful service provides links to history related news.

Also check every week: (1) News involving archaeology, (2) Live Science History.

Another useful search engine that tracks topics (like history) is Inform.com. Please register and then create a channel that tracks the terms history and historian.

Sign up for the NYT summary of news links that relate to history through the paper's News Tracker service.

Check these websites daily:

Team 2

Before you send me your links check the website's Breaking News page to see if we have already posted the story you've come across. If your account highlights enough different details or a different angle as to possibly justify a second story posting then by all means follow through and send me your link.

Team 3

This is one of the most vital of all the assigned areas interns cover. It includes links to essential news websites. Interns should send to the editor up to half a dozen links a day five days a week.

Before you send me your links check the website's Breaking News page to see if we have already posted the story you've come across. If your account highlights enough different details or a different angle as to possibly justify a second story posting then by all means follow through and send me your link.

If a story published in one place is subsequently excerpted elsewhere, always send the original source link, not the secondary link. The date is the date the original piece was published.

GROUP B: Web Surfing

1.NYT College History site--check for articles related to history
2.New Republic (middle of the road, tilts left; check daily)
3.Nation (leftwing; check daily)
4.National Endowment for the Humanities (in particular: check out the magazine listed on the webpage: Humanities)
5.Dean Baker columns on economics; new columns posted Monday
4.NewsHour on PBS (Check daily. Anytime a historian is interviewed or profiled find a transcript on the PBS website and email it to HNN Editor Rick Shenkman)

GROUP C: Web Surfing

1.Salon (check daily)
2.Slate (founded by Michael Kinsley)
3.New York Review of Books
4.Atlantic Monthly
5.NY Mag (check esp. for movie reviews of history films and museum exhibits related to history)
6.Breitbart.com (check main news pages daily)
7. NYT Opinionator RSS Feed (check daily for the words "historian" and "history")

GROUP D: Web Surfing

1.American Prospect (liberal journal of opinion)
2.Mother Jones (leftwing)
3.Blog for Eric Alterman
4.Blog for Michael Novak
5.Foreign Policy in Focus (Leftwing site)
6.City Journal (Manhattan Institute) (Rightwing site)
7. Max Hastings's columns in the Daily Mail (he's a historian)

GROUP E: Web Surfing

1.Glenn Reynolds’s InstaPundit.com
2.Harvard Project on Cold War Studies
3.University Newswire (keep an eye out for any events related to history and current events)
4.Wilson Quarterly
5.History Now
6.National Review (Rightwing site)

GROUP F: Web Surfing

1.Accuracy in Academia (conservative watchdog)
2.Project on Defense Alternatives
3.Archaeological News
4.The Newsletter of the Society For Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR)
5.American Thinker
6.Atlantic Magazine's survey of influential columnists (review the top columns each week for pieces using history to put events into perspective)

GROUP G: Web Surfing

1.Pat Buchanan's conservative magazine
2.China Study Group (News Site/check for Breaking News related to history)
3.Education Week
4.New Criterion
5.Jamestown Foundation (Look for articles HNN might excerpt)
6.The Root (webzine run by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.)

GROUP H: Web Surfing

1.Time Magazine
2.New Yorker
3.Cronaca Blog
4. Dissident Voice (Look for articles by historian Gary Leupp in particular as well as others.)
5. Counterpunch (Look for articles by historian Gary Leupp in particular as well as others.) 6.EUROCLIO- European Association of History Educators

GROUP I: Blogs

There are some 500 blogs now run by historians. Most do not concern current events (you may be thinking: thank goodness!). But many do. Your job is to survey 10 blogs a week from the list that appears on the Cliopatria Blog Roll (below) to find interesting commentaries on current events. (You can skip Altercation; the editor reads that daily.) If you have time to check out other blogs on the Cliop[atria Blog Roll feel free to do so!

Cliopatria Blog Roll: Contemporary Commentary.

GROUP J: Web Surfing

1. Wall Street Journal: sign up for the paper’s daily newsletter BEST OF THE WEB and check for any articles related to history and current events The editor monitors the articles that appear in the Journal itself. The intern is respnsible for monitoring the Best of the Web daily newsletter, which provides links to articles on other websites.
2.Harpers

GROUP K: Outreach

HNN is a great resource for teachers at both the high school and college level. But market research shows that most of our readers are college professors or graduate students. To expand our base we want to reach out to teacher associations and other groups that might help us improve our visibility among high school teachers.

GROUP L: Adding Links to HNN Articles

1. Each week HNN publishes about a dozen articles listed on the homepage. The intern assigned to this group should find "Related Links" to post at the bottom of each article. These links should help readers locate primary sources, news stories, and essays related to the topic discussed. Often, articles published previously by HNN should be linked as these may be the most useful of all. Usually, no more than 3 or 4 related links are necessary.

GROUP M: Web Surfing

1.Jeff Pasley Historical Punditry
2.Washington Monthly
3. Newsweek
4. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
5. crowdeye.com (A search engine that tracks discussions on Twitter. Do a daily search of the word "history" and skim the results to see what comes up. Send links that look interesting. Use your best judgment. )

GROUP N: Lexis-Nexis ... Daily Newspapers

Lexis-Nexis is one of the great repositories of newspapers and magazines in the world. You should be abe to access this search engine through your college library.

Check for "history" and "historian" in top few paragraphs of General NEWS and TODAY'S NEWS. When you find stories suitable for HNN's BN and HIN pages locate the stories on the web and post them on HNN.

GROUP O: Web Surfing

1.Arts & Letters Daily
2.Website of historian Victor Davis Hanson
3.realclearpolitics.com/

GROUP P: Web Surfing

1.AlterNet (a syndication service featuring lots of articles)
2.Truthdig
3.Truthout

GROUP Q: Web Surfing

1.findlaw legal history
2.TomPaine.com
3.The Public Historian (This periodical may not publish the articles online that are relevant to HNN's mission. Paper copies may have to be reviewed at the library. The editor should be informed about any articles, online or not, that may be suitable for HNN.)

GROUP R: Web Surfing

1. mattstodayinhistory
2. mediamatters
3. abc
4. abc/worldtoday
5. archaeologychannel
6. democracynow
7. world
8. stonepages
9. voanews

GROUP S: Great TV

1. In our weekly editions of History Buzz we include links to pages featuring upcoming history shows on television. We call this: Great TV. Your job is to recommend the shows you think have particular value for our audience. These shows can include documentaries, biographies, docu-dramas, and historical dramas. Every Friday please send editor Rick Shenkman two or three recommendations for shows that will be on television the following week. Please include: Show Title, Channel, Date and Time plus a link to a page that tells readers something about the show's content.

GROUP T: Teacher's Edition of HNN

Our newest project is The Teacher’s Edition of HNN. Our plan envisions the creation of a special weekly edition of the website designed to help high school teachers use current events to interest their students in history.

The Teachers' Edition will offer teachers a quick way to access our material for class work. We can help teachers prepare lessons about current events based on our material. Five minutes on our site and they should be able to build an entire class around almost any event in the news and do so by providing historical context. It's ideal for teachers of history who are trying to show students how history is relevant to their lives. It's also obviously ideal for social studies teachers.

Key to the success of the Teacher’s Edition is increasing teachers’ awareness of HNN. HNN currently reaches nearly 300,000 unique visitors a month—or about 4 million a year. But a survey indicates that most of our readers are either college professors (57%) or graduate students (12%). Just 6% are high school teachers. This means that very few high school history teachers are taking advantage of the great content we provide. One of our vital goals therefore is raising our profile among high school teachers.

GROUP U: Blogs

Monitoring HNN blogs for spelling and punctuation mistakes.

GROUP V: Audio/Video

Post new listings to the Audio/Video page. Listings should include audio/video interviews with historians talking either about subjects in the news or some exciting development in their field of expertise.

You will be assigned a user name and password. Log in by going to the Audio/Video page and clicking on the LOG IN button in the left-hand column below the list of HNN Departments.

You will be responsible for creating a SINGLE new entry for each audio/video selection.

To post an entry click where it says: "Click Here to Post an Entry." You will notice that when you create a new entry the system generates a title field and two large boxes. Put the title of your entry in the title field (use existing entries as a template); include in brackets [ ] the length of the audio/video. Put text in the first big box. Leave the second big box blank. Include a couple of paragraphs from the SOURCE where you found the audio/video selection.

Then fill in the remaining open fields: SOURCE. DATE (this refers to the date when the audio/video was published by the Source). URL (this is the http://... ). You must include the entire URL, including the http:// part.

Then click: PUBLISH. Once the entry is published recheck it to make sure it came out the way you wanted. If there's a mistake you go back in and re-edit the entry. At the bottom of the entry there will be something like this:

Posted on Friday, January 4, 2008 at 6:17 PM | Comments (0) | Top | Edit | Delete.

To re-edit the entry click on "Edit." Then, when you're done, remember to click on the PUBLISH button again.

KEEP IN MIND THAT THE SYSTEM TIMES OUT AFTER A FEW MINUTES. ONCE YOU CLICK TO CREATE A NEW ENTRY YOU HAVE TO FINISH YOUR WORK ON THE ENTRY IN UNDER 5 MINUTES OR YOU WILL LOSE EVERYTHING YOU POSTED. THAT IS, YOU HAVE TO CLICK ON THE "PUBLISH" BUTTON.

Thanks to Simon, our computer guru, you do not have to do html coding when you blog. The system will automatically insert line and paragraph breaks and automatically turn your URL's into hot links (just as it does when readers post comments on the discussion boards). If you go back into an entry and make changes html coding will NOT be inserted automatically. The system only automates coding on the first pass--when you first create the entry. Subsequently, if you go back into an entry and make changes you may have to add new coding. If, for instance, you add a paragraph of text you'll need to add the coding for a paragraph break: 

 < P  >

Questions? Contact editor Rick Shenkman.

Sites that should be checked include:

1. NPR: All Things Considered
2. NPR: Morning Edition
3. NPR: Weekend Edition Saturday
4. NPR: Weekend Edition Sunday
5. NPR: Day to Day
6. BBC
7. bookguys.com
8. booktv.org
9. http://www.fora.tv/
10. http://www.researchchannel.org/
11. http://soundprint.org/  
12. http://wpr.org/book/shows.html
13. NPR
14. NewsHour (PBS)
15. BigThink (YouTube for intellectuals)
16. Making History Podcast: The Blog
17. Talking History
18. Nate DiMeo's thememorypalace
19. History Counts
20. Back Story

GROUP W: Interviews with Historians

Search the web each week for interviews with historians, combing through publisher websites.

New books often are accompanied by interviews with historians. Check the major publisher websites (Knopf, Random House, HarperCollins, Cambridge University Press, University of Kansas Press, etc.) and hunt for interviews.

Basic Books (division of Perseus)
Cambridge University Press
Casemate Publishing
Columbia University Press
Columbia University Press
Continuum International Publishing
Crown Publishers
Doubleday
Farrar Straus Giroux
Free Press (division of Simon and Schuster)
Globe Pequot
Goldberg McDuffie Communications
HarperCollins
Henry Holt and Company
Hill and Wang
Hyperion
John Wiley & Sons
Knopf (division of Random House)
Little Brown (division of AOL Time Warner)
Longman Publishers
McGraw Hill
Metropolitan Books
The New Press
Oxford University Press
Palgrave Macmillan
Pearson Custom Publishing
Penguin Putnam
Perseus Books Group
Princeton University Press
Public Affairs (division of Perseus)
Regnery
Routledge
Seven Stories Press
St. Martin's Press
Stanford University Press
Sunbelt Publications
SUNY (State University of New York) Press
Syracuse University Press
The Book Report Network
University of Arkansas Press
University of California Press
University of Chicago Press
University of Indiana Press
University of Michigan Press
University of Pennsylvania Press
University Press of America
University Press of Kansas
University Press of Kentucky
Viking Penguin
Yale University Press

GROUP X: H-Net Reviews

Every week H-Net--"an international interdisciplinary organization of scholars and teachers dedicated to developing the enormous educational potential of the Internet and the World Wide Web--publishes new scholarly reviews of books. Your job is to look through the reviews and determine which ones might be suitable for HNN. The reviews are posted here
.

We are interested in reviews that link history to current events or that tell readers about an exciting new development in historiography.

GROUP Y: Social Networking Websites

To increase our readership we are now posting links to new articles on the HNN homepage to social networking websites like digg.com. These are listed at the bottom of every article using the SHARE THIS button. Each week your job is to post links to the new articles appearing on the HNN homepage to at least 3 social networking websites. (Please always include digg.com.) Note bene: ONLY concern yourself with the ARTICLES posted on the HNN homepage. IGNORE Breaking News, Roundup and all other categories.

GROUP Z: Interviewing Historians

The intern responsible for this Group will interview historians by email about one of 2 subjects: (1) Why he or she became a historian, (2) Advice for students wanting to become historians.

Who should be interviewed: It will be the intern's responsibility to come up with names of possible interview subjects. (The editor may sometimes make suggestions.) Once Editor Rick Shenkman has approved the name of an interviewee the person should be contacted to see if they are willing to be interviewed.

How many questions should be asked? Probably ten or so questions should be sufficient. Once the intern has drafted a list they should be run by Editor Rick Shenkman for review. Then they can be sent to the interviewee. Questions should be based on a knowledge of the historian's work and career. Questions should range broadly including subjects drawn from both the historian's life and work.

How many interviews should be scheduled? About 2 a month.

Anything else? Each interview should include a short paragraph identifying the historian. The identification should include where they got their PhD, where they are teaching, the book or books for which they are known.

Comments (1)

Home Newsletter Submissions Advertising Donations Archives Internships About Us FAQs Contact Us All Articles

 

 

News

Hot Topics

Features

Roundup

HNN Blogs

Etc.

ASHP-CUNY Banner

Subscribe to HNN's newsletter.

HNN Donations--click here.

Subscribe to HNN's newsletter.

Just How Stupid Are We? By Rick Shenkman

Subscribe to HNN's newsletter.

Subscribe to HNN's newsletter.

Subscribe to HNN's newsletter.