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: Prague Daily Monitor
11-7-11
Prague, Nov 5 (CTK) - Communism is still a significant phenomenon and people may tend to see hope in it mainly in the times of a crisis, Jiri Kocian, deputy head of the Czech Science Academy's Institute of Contemporary History, told CTK at the end of a three-day conference on communism Saturday.The conference held in Prague focused on the 90-year history of Czech and Slovak communism.Many people are remembering the totalitarian regime as the period of social certainties, Kocian said.He stressed that new knowledge on communism must become a part of school textbooks and the threat of communism as the period of repressions and persecution must be constantly reminded.
Source: Evening News 24 (UK)
11-5-11
For PhD and Masters degree students at The University of Malta will, from now on, be graduating in ceremonial robes and hoods designed by Nick Groves, 55, from Rouen Road, Norwich.The university held a competition for robe designers and former UEA post graduate Dr Groves – a founding fellow of The Burgon Society, which celebrates the history of university ceremonial dress – won with his designs inspired by traditional continental gowns....
Source: Newnan Times-Herald (GA)
11-5-11
Imagine a world where the South won the Civil War, where slavery continued into the 20th century, and the Nazis emerged victorious from World War II.That's the kind of world Dr. Jamil S. Zainaldin said probably would have resulted if not for a few key events in Georgia history."I think that we who live in Georgia do not really appreciate the extent of how significant Georgia is to American history and even to world history," Zainaldin told members of the Newnan Carnegie Library Foundation at their Wednesday lunch meeting at the Carnegie building.Georgia has "influenced and changed the world," he said. He shared with the board members five events in Georgia history that he said are especially significant."Number one is the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney," he said. That event in 1793 changed not just the future plantation period history of the South, but also led to the industrialization of the North, he said....
Source: Wales Online (UK)
11-4-11
They fought the enemy underground in a warren of tunnels as one of the bloodiest battles of World War I raged above them.At about 3pm on December 19, 1915, the group of five miners working 80ft below no-man’s land near La Boisselle on the Western Front became the battle’s latest victims.Now, as Remembrance Day approaches, a group of historians are calling for the site to be preserved as a memorial to the fallen men – in the face of pressure to develop it for housing.Among the men killed that fateful day was William Arthur Lloyd, a 37-year-old bar manager, from Wrexham, who was entombed with his colleagues in the tunnel when 28,000kg of explosives blasted them into oblivion.The Germans had been digging their own tunnels – often the opposing sides came so close they could hear each other working – and had detonated their charge before the British miners.Historian Simon Jones, of the La Boisselle Study Group, says many other French battlefields along the Western Front have been re-developed, but local landowners the Lejeune family are determined to preserve this site....
Source: CBC
11-2-11
Government cuts are hindering Library and Archives Canada’s ability to preserve items important to Canada’s heritage, according to some academics and historians.The Canadian Association of University Teachers launched a campaign to save Library and Archives Canada and is calling on the federal government to fund a protection project.Jim Turk, executive director of the association said the federal archives have been cut by 35 per cent since the 1990s, most of the cuts being to acquisitions and staff....
Source: FrontPageMag
10-31-11
by Steven Plaut
This past week Kent State gained a new basis for international notoriety, this time of academic standards and decency.
Source: Inside Higher Ed
10-31-11
Last month, the president and executive director of the American Historical Association issued a call for their discipline to move away from the idea that Ph.D. training is primarily about producing the next generation of professors. They called for history departments to stop talking about non-academic careers as "alternative," and to instead see them as truly equal options -- and as options that should help shape the nature of doctoral education.Their call was called "No More Plan B," as a counter to the idea that academic careers are necessarily Plan A. Today they are releasing a follow-up -- "Plan C" -- in which they provide more specific ideas about the kinds of changes history departments might consider for their Ph.D. programs.Here are some of the ideas shared in the new piece by Anthony Grafton, a Princeton University historian who is president of the AHA, and James Grossman, executive director of the association:
Source: Inside Higher Ed
10-31-11
A professor at Kent State University last week set off a debate over appropriate and inappropriate ways to express views when he shouted "death to Israel" during the question period of a lecture by an Israeli diplomat.The professor's remarks are being condemned by some -- including Kent State's president -- as inappropriate. But others say that he engaged in a legitimate expression of his political views.The shout came from Julio Pino (seen at left), an associate professor of history. The speaker at whom Pino shouted was Ishmael Khaldi, formerly the deputy consul general at the Israeli consulate in San Francisco. Khaldi, as a Bedouin and Muslim, lectures on his experiences as an advocate for Israel.According to multiple press accounts, Pino posed a question to Khaldi after his talk, and then shouted "death to Israel" and left the auditorium. It is the latter statement that has set off the controversy.
Source: Forbes
10-30-11
...A mean-spirited argument between two intellectual celebrities, Columbia’s Jeff Sachs and Harvard’s Niall Ferguson on CNN’s GPS new show, underscores the threatening tone of the debate in America. Ferguson called Sachs ”a demagogue” for supporting OWS and more government spending and a thrust to “criminalize 3 million people,” the 1% of the nation that owns it. With loathing in his voice Sachs charged Wall Street with destroying social mobility.”...
Source: WaPo
10-26-11
NEW YORK — An award-winning historian and a managing editor for projects and investigations at Bloomberg News have been elected to the Pulitzer Prize Board, which hands out the most well-known awards in journalism.Columbia University, which administers the prizes, announced the elections of Steven Hahn and Robert Blau on Wednesday.Hahn, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has explored African-American history, as well as issues of slavery and emancipation. He won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 2004 for his book, “A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration.”Blau joined Bloomberg News in 2008, after working at The Baltimore Sun and the Chicago Tribune. At Bloomberg, he has overseen investigations on subjects including the Federal Reserve, end-of-life care and the gold mining industry....
Source: Salon
10-26-11
...For a historically informed take on the challenges and opportunities Occupy Wall Street faces, I spoke to Michael Kazin. He is professor of history at Georgetown and author of “American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation.”We’re now a month-plus into this. Does Occupy Wall Street remind you of any past movements or does it seem like a fundamentally new type of thing?
Source: Today's Zaman
10-23-11
Professor of History at Cairo University Muhammad Afifi comments on the recent criticism of European orientalists and Arab nationalists on Turkey’s increasing influence across the Middle East, especially in Egypt, in his latest book “Arabs and Ottomans.”There have been a great number of critical remarks on Turkey’s recent influence across Middle East, saying that Turkey has been taking advantage of the regional upheaval in the region and is planning to proclaim itself a leader by seeking to enhance its regional celebrity just like the old Ottoman Empire once was. The criticism continued with those arguing that the presence of Ottomans in Arab countries, including Egypt, was a period of occupation that undermined the status of Cairo and led to stagnation in politics and a worsening of conditions for trade and crafts.Afifi stresses the fact that the arrival of Portuguese and Spanish colonialists in the region and the Ottoman conquest of Egypt occurred in the same period, meaning that if Ottoman had not come to the region, then Egypt would have been colonized by these countries.
Source: The Australian
10-24-11
HOSTILITIES in the history wars could be set to re-start next month with Henry Reynolds' new history of Tasmania set for publication next month. Professor Reynolds is a prominent advocate of the academic orthodoxy that holds Aborigines fiercely contested European settlement of Australia, including in Tasmania.Keith Windschuttle disputed his thesis and use of evidence in a 2002 study of British-Aborigine contact on the Tasmanian frontier. The resulting debate saw academics close ranks around Reynolds, with some attacking Windschuttle for not possessing what they considered the qualifications needed to be a credible historian....
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
10-24-11
To some creationists, Darwin was not only wrong but poisonous - his evolutionary theory, they say, directly influenced Hitler's genocidal ideology.Historian Richard Weikart appeared in the anti-evolution film Expelled, promoting this alleged Darwin-Hitler link. Weikart has written extensively on this, arguing that Darwinian evolution destroyed Judeo-Christian morality, especially the notion of reverence for life.Weikart does not try to push the idea that this invalidates evolution as a scientific idea. But he is openly creationist - a fellow at the Intelligent Design-promoting Discovery Institute in Seattle.His message is that evolution kills morality. "If everything is a product of chance - purposeless - which is widespread in biology textbooks . . . then I don't think you have any grounds to criticize Hitler."Those are fighting words, and a number of thinkers have challenged them. Most recently University of Chicago historian Robert Richards took Weikart to task in a paper titled "Was Hitler a Darwinian?", to which he answers a definitive no....
Source: Zee News (India)
10-22-11
London: Adolf Hitler’s temporary loss of sight was actually caused by a mental disorder known as ‘hysterical blindness’, and not by a British mustard gas attack as a heroic First World War soldier as he had claimed, a new research has revealed. The Nazi leader described in his book Mein Kampf how the British had attacked in October 1918 south of Ypres using a “yellow gas unknown to us”. By morning, his eyes “were like glowing coals, and all was darkness around me,” he wrote in the book. But now historian Dr Thomas Weber, of the University of Aberdeen, has uncovered a series of unpublished letters between two American neurologists from 1943, which debunk Hitler’s claim....
Source: NYT
10-26-11
When Taylor Branch and his wife, Christy, exchanged vows in 1978, Branch had to do more than promise to remain faithful through sickness and health: he also had to give up football.Branch had been a standout high school football player in Atlanta before turning down a scholarship to play at Georgia Tech, but his wife was not a fan. She wanted him to refrain from playing, watching, cheering — everything — and in exchange, she pledged to learn to love baseball. Branch complied and kept his distance.In the ensuing years, Branch wrote a historical trilogy on Martin Luther King, collectively titled “America in the King Years,” that won him a Pulitzer Prize. His friendship with former President Bill Clinton led to the 2009 book “The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History With the President.” And he contributed numerous articles on politics and civil rights to various magazines. But 33 years after vowing to keep his distance, the 64-year-old Branch has in a way returned to the sport that he walked away from as an 18-year-old, 210-pound linebacker....
Source: Hartford Courant
10-24-11
As a young man in his 20s, Abubaker Saad was taken in by the dashing, 27-year-old Moammar Gadhafi, who seized power in Libya in a bloodless coup in 1969."It was not only me. Most of the young educated guys were really excited. … We thought this is the bright future for the country," said Saad, who worked closely with Gadhafi for nine years as a diplomat and, at times, his personal interpreter. "He's going to promote the country and development."But within a few months, Saad, who is now a professor at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, and others who worked closely with the new leader, saw Gadhafi's dark and brutal side."He was horrible, very horrible. Very rude," Saad said. "You didn't know which word you say is going to tick him off. He was very rude, very impolite. He used to spit in people's face."...
Source: AP
10-25-11
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — A former University of Arkansas chancellor and historian has died.School officials said Monday Willard Badgett Gatewood Jr. died on Sunday. He was 80.Gatewood spent most of his 40-year academic career at the University of Arkansas, where he taught history of the United States and the South, with an emphasis on African American history.Officials say Gatewood served as chancellor in 1984 and 1985, and he initiated the first steps toward establishing the Sturgis Fellowships....
10-25-11
by David Austin Walsh
Tim Naftali, the director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, is stepping down on November 19 after over four years at the helm. He plans to devote himself full-time to writing.
Source: Newsweek
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/10/23/n
“Turkey is the only country in the region whose past seems to flow toward a positive outcome, a history with a future. As with any narrative, to make things interesting, you want a sense of progress—otherwise you get that famous definition of history as ‘one damn thing after another.’ The Turks have always played a role in making things happen in the world. For a while they seemed pretty dormant, but I knew it would change.”As the sun goes down, Prof. Norman Stone is standing on the balcony of his residence at Bilkent University in Turkey’s capital, gazing out over gleaming new tower blocks and the Anatolian hills. Ankara looks distinctly affluent these days, with the Turkish economy steadily expanding at 11 percent this year. For two days I have been gently pushing Stone to look back on his career, his decision to leave his post as professor of modern history at Oxford in the mid-1990s and to transplant himself in Turkey, his life before and since. It’s a highly poignant encounter for me, a Turk educated in the U.K., to talk to one of Turkey’s staunchest public enthusiasts—a contrarian posture in any century.
