This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream
media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously
biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in
each source note. Quotation marks are not used.
Source: Radio Free Europe
3-16-13
British writer and historian Timothy Garton Ash was in Brussels on March 16 to take part in the German Marshall Fund's annual forum of influential North American and European political, corporate, and intellectual leaders to discuss Euro-Atlantic issues. He spoke to RFE/RL correspondent Rikard Jozwiak about the future of Europe. RFE/RL: Does it still make sense for the European Union to push for further eastern enlargement? Timothy Garton Ash: It is essential. Strategically, for the future of the European Union, with a dwindling share of world population and the world economy, and bad demography, certainly in Western Europe, we need further enlargement, including in my view Ukraine and Turkey, which are the two big ones....
Source: NPR
3-19-13
The ongoing battle between historians over who was really first in flight was rekindled last week.New research advances the theory that a German immigrant in Connecticut is responsible for the first powered and controlled flight, rather than the Wright brothers in North Carolina.But historians at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum are saying not so fast....But Peter Jakab [associate director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum] and his colleagues at the Smithsonian firmly believe that the Wright brothers were the first to fly. There are clear and crisp photos to prove it. And he discounts the numerous newspaper stories about the [Connecticut] flight....
Source: NYT
3-15-13
For survivors of Hurricane Sandy in Long Beach, N.Y., the stories have become familiar by now, riveting in spite of — or perhaps because of — their similarities. Deciding not to evacuate, because Tropical Storm Irene was not so bad. Watching the water rise and rise and rise. Losing cars, basements, then more. Spending weeks at a relative’s home.They are all variations on a theme of fear and suffering, of water and darkness, and Mary Anne Trasciatti wants to hear every one of them.
Source: WaPo
3-16-13
Lenard R. Berlanstein, 65, a professor of history at the University of Virginia, died Feb. 24 at a hospital in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.He had lung cancer, said a brother, Bruce Berlanstein.Dr. Berlanstein joined U-Va.’s history faculty in 1973 and taught courses on modern European cultural history until his retirement in 2011. He wrote six books, most recently “Daughters of Eve: A Cultural History of French Theater Women From the Old Regime to the Fin-de-Siecle” (2001).Lenard Russell Berlanstein was born in Brooklyn and was a 1969 graduate of the University of Michigan. He received a master’s degree in 1971 and a doctorate in 1973, both in history from Johns Hopkins University....
Source: AP
3-18-13
NEW YORK — A history of fishing in the Atlantic Ocean and a close study of wartime conduct have been named winners of the prestigious Bancroft Prize.Columbia University announced Monday that the winners were W. Jeffrey Bolster’s “The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail” and John Fabian Witt’s “Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History.” Each author will receive $10,000 for one of the most coveted awards among historians....Related LinksRobin Lindley: Interview with John Fabian Witt on "Lincoln's Code"
Source: Sarah Richardson in the Telegraph (UK)
3-18-13
Sarah Richardson is an Associate Professor in History at the University of Warwick and author of The Political Worlds of Women: Gender and Politics in Nineteenth Century Britain. She is the guest presenter of Document: Votes for Victorian Women which is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 this evening at 8pm.Occasionally, just occasionally, you encounter a document that radically changes your view of the past. This happened to me very recently. The source was just a few scraps of parchment in a box of solicitors’ papers in Lichfield. But, at a stroke, it provided me with tangible proof that Victorian women were not only eligible to vote, but actually exercised that right, some 75 years before they received the parliamentary franchise in 1918.
Source: WaPo
3-12-13
Lelia K. Washburn, 90, who taught ancient and modern European history at American University from 1959 until her retirement in 1977, died Feb. 15 at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. She was a District resident.Mrs. Washburn had cancer, her son, Alexandros Washburn, said.Elisavet Georgia Kanavarioti was born in Athens and was a 1946 graduate of the American College of Greece. In the late 1940s, she moved to New York City to work at the United Nations. She received a master’s degree in American studies from Harvard University in 1953 and moved to the Washington area in 1958....
Source: Neil Gross for the Chronicle of Higher Ed.
3-5-13
Neil Gross is a professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia and a visiting scholar at New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge. His latest book, Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care?, will be published next month by Harvard University Press....I analyzed data from surveys and interviews with professors, including a nationally-representative survey of the American professoriate, conducted in 2006 with the sociologist Solon Simmons. My research shows that only about 9 percent of professors are political radicals on the far left, on the basis of their opinions about a wide range of social and political matters, and their self-descriptions (for example, whether they describe themselves as radicals). More common in the professoriate—a left-leaning occupation, to be sure—are progressives, who account for roughly a third of the faculty (and whose redistributionism is more limited in scope), and academics in the center left, who make up an additional 14 percent of professors.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
3-9-13
...New research suggests Robin Hood actually preyed on French invaders, fought in support of the King and – most shocking of all – came from near Tunbridge Wells, in Kent.A historian believes he has identified the real-life inspiration for Britain’s most famous outlaw.Sean McGlynn, an academic at the University of Plymouth and the Open University, has amassed evidence suggesting Robin Hood is based on William of Kensham, a largely forgotten 13th century forest bandit, who went by the alias Willikin of the Weald....
Source: HNN Staff
3-11-13
UCLA associate professor Tobias Higbie has been named the Lloyd Lewis Fellow in American History at the Newberry Library in Chicago for 2013-14.Professor Higbie received his PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2000, and is the author of Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880-1930. He co-curated the joint Newberry Library/Chicago Historical Society exhibit "Outspoken: Chicago's Free Speech Tradition" in the fall of 2004.According to the UCLA announcement, Higbie will use the fellowship to conduct research for a book project entitled "Working Knowledge: Learning and Living in a Grassroots Social Movement."The full list of 2013-2014 Newberry Library Fellows will be announced in the early summer.
Source: NYT
3-8-13
For decades, it has been one of the most politically charged questions in American history: What did Franklin D. Roosevelt do — or, more to the point, not do — in response to the Holocaust? The issue has spawned a large literary response, with books often bearing polemical titles like “The Abandonment of the Jews” or “Saving the Jews.” But in a new volume from Harvard University Press, two historians aim to set the matter straight with what they call both a neutral assessment of Roosevelt’s broader record on Jewish issues and a corrective to the popular view of it, which they say has become overly scathing. In “FDR and the Jews,” Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, professors at American University, contend that Roosevelt hardly did everything he could. But they maintain that his overall record — several hundred thousand Jews saved, some of them thanks to little-known initiatives — exceeds that of any subsequent president in responding to genocide in the midst of fierce domestic political opposition. “The consensus among the public is that Roosevelt really failed,” Mr. Breitman said in a recent interview.
Source: Time Magazine
2-28-13
It’s an open secret in Russia today that many politicians and businessmen pad their resumes with fake diplomas, either plagiarizing their dissertations or paying someone to do it for roughly the cost of a midsize sedan. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, no real effort has been made to stop this practice, in part because so many of the country’s elite — all the way up to President Vladimir Putin — might have their graduate work scrutinized. But on Feb. 6, Putin’s political underling Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev broke the taboo. At a meeting with government officials and academics, he announced a campaign to ferret out fake degrees at every level of society. The number of “phony” diplomas had “burst through all possible limits,” Medvedev said. “This will be a sort of purge.” So how far is he willing to go?...
Source: The Daily Beast
3-1-13
What’s your big idea?The big idea is that geography explains why the West rules the world—and why its domination may not last much longer.There are two sides to the story.First, geography determines how societies develop. The world’s first complex societies appeared toward the Western end of the Old World (around 9000 BC), because, thanks to geography, more plants and animals that could be domesticated had evolved there than anywhere else on earth. Geography dictated that East Asia had fewer potentially domesticable plants and animals.
Source: Haaretz
2-21-13
He will turn 87 in April and his spine is no longer as straight as it once was, but Prof. Yehuda Bauer exudes vitality. He is blessed with a sense of humor that shelters him from the ravages of time. We are barely into the conversation and it is already clear that the memory of this world-renowned historian, who has written hundreds of articles and dozens of books, is extremely weak when it comes to events in.... [PAYWALL]
Source: WSJ
3-5-13
A new book, Their Fair Share: Taxing the Rich in the Age of FDR, explores how the modern progressive income tax emerged from the Great Depression and World War II. Washington Wire posed a few questions to its author, historian Joseph Thorndike, who is director of the Tax History Project at Tax Analysts, a visiting scholar at the University of Virginia, and a fellow of the George W. Bush Institute.What gave you the idea for this book? It’s hard to work in Washington without developing a more-or-less permanent sense of déjà vu. That’s especially true when it comes to tax policy, where so many of today’s arguments are just retreads of yesterday’s. I wanted to search out some of these earlier debates, since I think they have a lot to tell us.But why the Roosevelt years? The tax system we have today is basically the same one FDR built during the 1930s and 1940s. He had a lot of help, of course, especially from Congress. But FDR’s decisions – and his ideas about fairness – are very much with us today....
Source: WSJ
3-6-13
The Dow Jones Industrial Average goes back to May 26, 1896. Richard Sylla goes a lot farther back than that.Sylla, an economist at the Stern School of Business at New York University and chairman of the Museum of American Finance, is one of the nation’s most eminent financial historians. He is a natural source to put the Dow’s latest record in long-term context.The historical perspective, Sylla tells me in this recent video interview, suggests that “if we’re lucky we may see a series of these all-time highs.” He adds wryly, “There are such things as bull markets.”...
Source: WSJ
3-6-13
A young mother worried that weeks of upheaval after superstorm Sandy would cause her baby daughter to feel insecure for a lifetime.A sixth-generation Island Park resident watched as water flooded his family home for the first time since it was built in 1930.A woman recently widowed, who moved to Long Beach to start a new life just two months before the storm, wondered if she had made a big mistake.One by one on a recent Saturday, they sat in a black chair in a coffee shop, across from Mary Anne Trasciatti, a Hofstra University professor whose mission is to stitch these disparate memories into an oral history of a coastal community caught in the path of a historic storm.Ms. Trasciatti's subject is her home on Long Island for the past 14 years: the barrier-island city of Long Beach, along with nearby communities such as Island Park. Floodwaters touched virtually every block in the area....
Source: NYT
3-6-13
BOSTON — On a concourse behind third base at Fenway Park, silent but for the periodic whoosh of the frigid wind, Dan Rea recently approached a display case devoted to the 1930s-era Red Sox. A ledger inside the case was opened to a page where an accountant once entered players’ salaries.One entry was for Smead Jolley, best known for his “difficulty playing the incline” in left field, Rea said, until the field was leveled during a 1934 renovation.Rea is one of two Red Sox employees who are also club historians. They belong to a small cadre of people with a passion for major league baseball lore who added such roles to their team jobs and later figured out what to do....
Source: WaPo
3-3-13
Joseph Frank, a longtime professor of literature whose five-volume biography of the 19th-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky is considered a landmark of historical and literary scholarship, died Feb. 27 at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 94.He had pulmonary failure, according to the New York Times, which first reported his death.Dr. Frank wrote on a wide range of literary subjects before he began to focus on Dostoevsky — the author of “Crime and Punishment,” “The Idiot” and “The Brothers Karamazov” — in the 1950s.Dr. Frank learned Russian and immersed himself in the turbulent milieu of Dostoevsky’s life — he lived from 1821 to 1881 — to write what some scholars have called an incomparable portrait of the author’s life and times. From 1976 to 2002, Dr. Frank chronicled Dostoevsky’s dramatic life in five volumes that totaled more than 2,400 pages....
Source: Reason TV
3-5-13
One computer expert working alone has built a historic newspaper site that's orders of magnitude bigger and more popular than one created by a federal bureaucracy with millions of dollars to spend. Armed only with a few PCs and a cheap microfilm scanner, Tom Tryniski has played David to the Library of Congress’ Goliath.Tryniski's site, which he created in his living room in upstate New York, has grown into one of the largest historic newspaper databases in the world, with 22 million newspaper pages. By contrast, the Library of Congress' historic newspaper site, Chronicling America, has 5 million newspaper pages on its site while costing taxpayers about $3 per page.[*] In January, visitors to Fultonhistory.com accessed just over 6 million pages while Chronicling America pulled fewer than 3 million views.
