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: University of Kentucky News
5-30-12
LEXINGTON, Ky. (May 30, 2012) — A University of Kentucky journalism professor has written a detailed account of how an author used his research without attribution, something scholars say happens often but is rarely discussed publicly. Richard Labunski, a professor in UK's School of Journalism and Telecommunications, published a 4,000-word essay on the History News Network (HNN) arguing that Chris DeRose, a Phoenix lawyer and political consultant, used data that Labunski had gathered without acknowledgment and that he did so deliberately. The story was subsequently picked up by Inside Higher Education.
Source: Albany Times-Union
5-28-12
ALBANY — Nearly 150 years after the last fusillade of the Civil War, historians, authors and museum curators are still finding new topics to explore as the nation commemorates the sesquicentennial of America's bloodiest conflict.Even the long-accepted death toll of 620,000, cited by historians since 1900, is being reconsidered. In a study published late last year in Civil War History, Binghamton University history demographics professor J. David Hacker said the toll is actually closer to 750,000.
Source: LA Times
5-27-12
For social historian and critic Paul Fussell, the most enduring moments of truth came as a 20-year-old platoon leader in France during World War II. German shrapnel tore up his back and thigh. The blood and guts of fellow soldiers were spewed on him. His staff sergeant died in his arms. He realized there was nothing romantic about war, only mud, cold, death, outrage and fear."The war," Fussell told the Washington Post decades later, "is behind everything I do," beginning with his book "The Great War and Modern Memory," a classic 1975 critique of art and literature after World War I that showed how that conflict forever changed Western society and culture....
Source: Peter Reddaway and Stephen F. Cohen in The Nation
5-23-12
Peter Reddaway is a professor emeritus of political science at George Washington University, a former director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies and author of books on human rights abuses in the Soviet era. Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of politics and Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University. His The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin, also published in Moscow, will appear in paperback in June.Many Western observers believe that Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime has in effect banned a Russian edition of a widely acclaimed 2007 book by the British historian Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia. A professor at University of London’s Birkbeck College, Figes himself inspired this explanation. In an interview and in an article in 2009, he suggested that his first Russian publisher dropped the project due to “political pressure” because his large-scale study of Stalin-era terror “is inconvenient to the current regime.” Three years later, his explanation continues to circulate.
Source: BBC News
5-29-12
The idea of a "Tudor era" in history is a misleading invention, claims an Oxford University historian.Cliff Davies says his research shows the term "Tudor" was barely ever used during the time of Tudor monarchs.There are also suggestions the name was downplayed by Tudor royals because of its associations with Wales.Dr Davies says films and period dramas have reinforced the "myth" that people thought of themselves as living under a "Tudor" monarchy....
Source: WBUR
5-24-12
BOSTON — The man considered the unofficial dean of Boston history was buried Thursday. Thomas O’Connor had taught at Boston College for more than 50 years and wrote more than a dozen books, including “Boston Catholics,” “Civil War Boston,” and “The Boston Irish.” He died Sunday at his home in Milton at the age of 89.Part of O’Connor’s legacy is having created a new generation of historians, and among them is Jim Vrabel, an independent Boston historian who was guided and mentored by O’Connor. In a conversation with WBUR’s All Things Considered host Sacha Pfeiffer, Vrabel said O’Connor changed the way Boston history is taught.Jim Vrabel: For a long time, Boston history, in a way, stopped in the 1880s, when the Brahmins stopped writing down their accomplishments and left it to others to write about theirs. No one really picked up the ball until Tom O’Connor came around. He actually brought Boston history into and through the 20th century and into the 21st century.Sacha Pfeiffer: How was history written before him, and then how did he change it?
Source: Huffington Post
5-22-12
Over five centuries after the famed explorer's death, historians are taking a fresh look at what motivated Christopher Columbus to make his voyage across the Atlantic -- and how his faith may have played into those motivations.Some scholars, after analyzing Columbus' will and other documents, have devised a new theory about the explorer. They believe he was a Marrano, or a Jew who pretended to be a Catholic to avoid religious persecution. These historians also theorize that Columbus' main goal in life was to liberate Jerusalem from Muslim control, and that he decided to take his historic quest to North America in order to find a new homeland for Jews who had been forced out of Spain.
Source: NYT Book Refiew
5-24-12
What book is on your night stand now?Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Stranger’s Child,” Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” Katherine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” “The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It” (Library of America). I always seem to be reading several books at once.Where and when do you like to read?Everywhere and anywhere — but always at night before I go to sleep.What was the last truly great book you read?Not having read “Huckleberry Finn” since high school, I returned to it last summer — ordering it on my Kindle on a bit of a whim. I was astonished to find how much of what I had been teaching and studying about race and slavery in American history was already there in a book published in 1884. The book offers as well striking — and eerily modern, or perhaps postmodern in their critical renderings of “reality” — insights into the masks and dissimulations that structure social order....
Source: The Celebrity Cafe
5-25-12
An upcoming biography on Walter Cronkite offers a different view of the late, beloved news anchor.Cronkite was written by Douglas Brinkley. It will be released in stores May 29 and states that Cronkite committed unethical acts during his career.For instance, the anchor allegedly bugged a committee room during the 1952 GOP convention, which is something which could easily get journalists fired today....
Source: HNN Staff
5-24-12
Regnery Publishing Inc. has posted an addendum to its Web description of Chris DeRose's Founding Rivals: Madison vs. Monroe, the Bill of Rights and the Election that Saved a Nation acknowledging that "Material was based on Richard Labunski, Ph.D., James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights (Oxford University Press, 2006). This material was contained on page 247 of the hardcover edition of Founding Rivals, and was not cited."This correction came in the wake of an extended article Labunski wrote for the History News Network in which he exposed how DeRose had taken statistics from his earlier work in James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights and used them without attribution in Founding Rivals.
Source: Inside Higher Ed
5-24-12
Using someone's research findings without acknowledging the contribution is frowned upon (to put it mildly) in academe. But many scholarly authors say that their findings end up in trade books without appropriate credit all the time.Richard Labunski, a professor at the University of Kentucky, was determined to fight for credit for his work, and this week he won an acknowledgment from Regnery Publishing that one of its books should have provided credit to his work on James Madison. But Regnery acted only after Labunski went public with a detailed explanation on History News Network of his grievance, and of why the material in question couldn't have come from another source -- and of how Regnery had not followed through on pledges to give his work credit.He says his story shows that scholars can insist on credit -- using public exposure when private requests go unanswered.
Source: Chicago Tribune
4-26-12
The trouble began when a "For Rent" sign appeared in the window of an aging storefront in Edgewater....
Source: RIA Novosti
5-21-12
...Vladimir Medinsky, 41, a senior official in the ruling United Russia, will replace Alexander Avdeyev, who had held the job of Culture Minister since 2008, President Vladimir Putin said....He is primarily known to the public for his Myths About Russia series of books, published since 2008 and comprising titles such as “About Russian Alcoholism, Sloth and Cruelty” and “About Russian Slavery, Dirt and ‘Prison of the Nations.’”...Numerous publications, including in the online magazines Actual History and Polit.ru, accused Medinsky of massive plagiarism in his dissertation thesis, which deals with foreigners’ accounts on Russia during the 15th-17th centuries....
Source: NPR
5-15-12
Over his long academic career, Bernard Lewis has arguably become the world's greatest historian of the Middle East. Now, at 96, Lewis turns his attention inward in a memoir that looks back on his life, work and legacy.The linguist and scholar's career began before World War II, and in a new memoir he covers more than a few sensitive areas, from race and slavery in Islam, to the clash of civilizations and his long argument with scholar Edward Said, to his role as an adviser to former Vice President Dick Cheney.NPR's Neal Conan talks with Lewis about his new book, Notes on a Century. [CLICK ON LINK FOR FULL INTERVIEW]Interview HighlightsOn religious tolerance under Islamic rule"It is required by Islam. Part of the basic rules of Islam as laid down in the Quran require a measure of tolerance. But one has to be careful in how one understands that term.
Source: Jerusalem Post
5-20-12
BERLIN – Arno Lustiger, an autodidactic historian and author who brilliantly and meticulously chronicled Jewish resistance to the Hitler movement, died on Tuesday in Frankfurt.Lustiger, who survived six Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and two death marches, was 88 years old. He was born in 1924 to Polish-speaking Jews in Bedzin (Bendzin in Yiddish), in that part of Upper Silesia which became part of Poland after World War I.He worked tirelessly to debunk the prevailing German historical view that Europe’s Jews allowed themselves to be carted off to Nazi extermination camps “like sheep to the slaughter.”Lustiger’s seminal work, Fighting to the Death: The Book of Jewish Resistance 1933-1945, was published in 1994....
Source: Transportation Nation
5-21-12
(New York, NY — Anna Sale, It’s a Free Country.Org) “Don’t you think this is a wonderful thing to walk across this bridge!”Historian David McCullough has had a lot of honors in his career – two Pulitzers, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and just this week a gold medal for biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters – but he still gets that thrill crossing the Brooklyn Bridge.On a bustling, bright morning this week, the 78 year-old and I started walking over from Manhattan. He is re-releasing a 40th anniversary edition of his 600-page history, The Great Bridge: the Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge.Every few minutes, he pauses to command “Look at this!” with a sweeping gesture of his hand....
Source: Palo Alto Online
5-21-12
In this age of glowing screens, George Knoles' boxes of correspondence feel like treasure chests. Letters are penned on blue Aerogrammes or typed on gossamer onionskin paper. The handwriting can be impossibly small. Dip into a box, and you might find a letter from Knoles during World War II, stamped with "Passed By Naval Censor." Or a 1950s plea from one of Knoles' Stanford students for a better grade. For years, there's an annual missive from Stanford's history department, offering Knoles a job for the coming year: as assistant, and then instructor, and then acting assistant professor, and on up the ladder. One of the first reads: "It was voted to recommend you to the President for a position as assistant in history for the year 1935-36 at a salary of $400 for three quarters." Since Knoles has been a historian for decades, it makes sense that he ensured his papers were cared for. The letters are part of the 15 linear feet of George Harmon Knoles Papers in Stanford University Libraries' Department of Special Collections and University Archives....
Source: Montgomery Advisor
5-21-12
Ed Bridges, director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History for the past 30 years, has announced plans to retire as the state’s top historian.Bridges, 66, informed the department’s board of trustees of his retirement decision last week and made it official Monday, citing several reasons, including stamina.“Physically, I can no longer maintain the pace of work that the job requires,” he said, in a letter to George Evans, chairman of the department’s board of trustees. “It seems a little ironic that what on the surface may appear to be a quiet, easy job is, in fact, a very demanding one.”The trustees are expected to have a successor in place by Oct. 1, as Bridges completes his fifth six-year term....
Source: Boston Herald
5-21-12
Thomas O’Connor, a Boston College historian and professor emeritus known for his work on the history of Boston, has died.School officials said Monday afternoon that O’Connor suffered a fatal heart attack in his Milton home on Sunday. He was 89.A South Boston native, O’Connor explored his hometown in books including "Boston Catholics," ”Civil War Boston" and "The Boston Irish."...
Source: BBC News
5-11-12
The BBC has named the renowned economic historian Niall Ferguson as the 2012 Reith Lecturer.The lecture series titled 'The Rule of Law and its Enemies' will explore the influence of man-made institutions on global economic growth and democracy.Radio 4 controller Gywneth Williams says she is "delighted" to appoint Prof Ferguson - "an eminent historian with a global perspective."Prof Ferguson says it is "an immense honour" to be chosen as Reith Lecturer....