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: Mary L. Dudziak at Legal History Blog
9-6-11
Mary L. Dudziak is Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor of Law, History and Political Science at USC Law School. She blogs at Legal History Blog and was the editor of "September 11 in History: A Watershed Moment?"
Source: OregonLive
9-1-11
E. Kimbark MacColl, the patrician East Coast transplant who became a well-known Portland-area educator, champion of liberal causes and historian of the city's modern era, died Wednesday evening. He was 86. MacColl's son, E. Kimbark MacColl Jr., said his father died from complications related to a series of recent strokes. MacColl said his father suffered his first stroke in 2006 and had been in failing health ever since.MacColl's legacy is many layered. As a teacher at Reed College and Catlin Gabel School, he influenced thousands of students, including the likes of former Portland Mayor Bud Clark and former Metro President David Bragdon. As a historian, he wrote three well-regarded books on the evolution of Portland's modern industrial era....
Source: Reuters
9-1-11
WASHINGTON, Sept 1 (Reuters) - Aides to President Barack Obama held a secret strategy retreat where they listened to a history lesson from a presidential scholar about past presidents who could serve as models for Obama's re-election effort, Time magazine reported.Historian Michael Beschloss reportedly gave the team hope with his June presentation about Democrat Franklin Roosevelt and Republican Ronald Reagan, who both won re-election in tough economic times.According to Time, Beschloss said the strategies the two presidents used were similar: they both made the case that the economy was improving and that their opponents would make things worse....
Source: Chicago Tribune
9-1-11
Michelle Obama's two big issues — child obesity and military families — are carefully chosen, appealing and uncontroversial.Indeed, first ladies must pick their causes strategically, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who directs the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Their issues must help the president but not make it appear the first lady is usurping his power and "as a result, exercising unelected power," Jamieson said....
Source: Hurriyet Daily News
9-5-11
A book written by Armenian historian Ara Sarafyan that includes historical documents published by Turkish researcher Murat Bardakçı has sparked a new debate between the two figures.Bardakçı has accused Sarafyan of plagiarism in the book “Talat Paşa’s Report on the Armenian Genocide, 1917,” while Sarafyan has countered that Bardakçı is uncomfortable about the findings in the monograph, which draws heavily on the Turkish researcher’s work but also includes some additional documents....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
9-5-11
...I don’t think it is just the British press that he loathes. It is Britain as a whole. Ferguson moved to Massachusetts to take up a prestigious role as the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard seven years ago. He has just completed a year as Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs at the London School of Economics, but he doesn’t even bother to pretend he likes it here. His contempt is evident in his sneering delivery, the way he contorts his handsome face. “Get me to the airport,” he says, emitting a rare laugh. “I just want to get back to the US. I just want to get away from all of this.”Civilization is about the West losing its grip, though clearly he reckons that Britain lost it a long time ago. Indeed, it is difficult to know which of his gripes about the country to start with, and being with him at times feels like one long moan. I leave him – or rather he leaves me, though not before telling me to pay for our coffees, which I would have done anyway – with the distinct impression that the country should feel honoured that he has deigned to come back and spend any time with us at all....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
9-5-11
A Dutch historian has used a unique 1,700 year old map of Roman roads to create an online journey planner giving the destinations, distances and timings of routes used by ancient travellers in the days of empire.Routes are based on the Tabula Peutingeriana, a one of a kind chart, which shows an imperial Roman road network, or curses public's, that stretches from Britain to the river Ganges that flows through India and Bangladesh....René Voorburg, a Dutch historian, has used recent research, including by British academics, to bring the tabula back to life on a website, omnesviae.org.
Source: AHA Perspectives
9-1-11
On September 1, 2011, the AHA opened up access to the history job advertisements posted on its web site to everyone. Until recently, the web pages where the AHA posted these ads could be accessed only by AHA members. Now nonmembers also can have full access to the ads after a simple registration process. Coming at a time when searching for history jobs has become increasingly difficult because of a shrinking job market, opening access should prove helpful to all historians.The American Historical Association has been listing job ads in various print and digital media for over 40 years (we published the first Employment Information Bulletin in December 1971, and later incorporated this separate publication into the newsletter). Over the course of time the AHA became a trusted and preferred source to find job listings in the history field, especially because the ads were published only after editing to ensure, among other things, that they conformed to the employment guidelines that the AHA recommends to employers.While the vast majority of the job ads are published in print each month in Perspectives on History, the most up-to-date listings, including a few that were slated to be “online only” ads, could be found online. But until now access to these online ads was available only to AHA members.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
8-31-11
As a lecturer, he combined an extraordinary knowledge of a wide range of subjects with an anecdotal style of lecturing that employed a genial, high-pitched address touched with an element of wonder. As an historian firmly rooted in the tradition of unrepentant bourgeois Unionism, McDowell experienced some eclipse in professional standing as his Anglocentric view of the history of Ireland became decreasingly fashionable.Nevertheless, his first book, Irish Public Opinion, 1750-1800, was recognised as an incisive treatment of a novel subject when it was published in 1944; and even today it sets a standard which few subsequent scholars have reached.His later work was uneven. It included an overlong History of Ireland in the Age of Revolution (1979) but also an admired history of Trinity College. There was also a stream of books on such subjects as the Anglican Church and the Conservative Party, as well as the Kildare Street Club, whose successful merger with the University Club he helped to bring about in Dublin during the 1970s.
Source: Slate
8-31-11
History is on President Obama’s side as the 2012 elections approach.And by "history" we mean Allan Lichtman, an American University professor who has gone 7-for-7 at predicting presidential elections since he developed his candidate-picking system roughly two decades ago.Lichtman says that based on the 13 criteria he has used to correctly forecast every presidential election since Ronald Reagan’s re-election victory in 1984, Team Obama can rest easy. "Even if I am being conservative, I don’t see how Obama can lose," Lichtman told US News....
Source: NYT
8-30-11
Stetson Kennedy, a folklorist and social crusader who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and wrote a lurid exposé of its activities, “I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan,” died on Saturday in St. Augustine, Fla. He was 94....Mr. Kennedy developed his sense of racial injustice early. A native of Jacksonville, Fla., he saw the hardships of black Floridians when he knocked on doors collecting payments for his father’s furniture store. His social concerns developed further when he began collecting folklore data for the Federal Writers’ Project in Key West, Tampa and camps for turpentine workers in north Florida, where conditions were close to slavery.After being rejected by the Army because of a bad back, he threw himself into unmasking the Ku Klux Klan as well as the Columbians, a Georgia neo-Nazi group. He was inspired in part by a tale told by an interview subject whose friend had been the victim of a racial murder in Key West....
Source: The Oregonian
8-27-11
Where are the historians of Oregon? Why do we hear so little about them?We get plenty of stories about the state's novelists, memoirists and journalists but a minimum about the historians. Why is that? Are historians simply as uncharismatic as last year's bird nest? Have we just overlooked or forgotten them?In this regard, Oregon mirrors larger American cultural landscapes. U.S. historians rarely attract the national or global attention poured on novelists and biographers.Check names of international award winners. The list of American historians as Nobel Prize winners is nonexistent, zilch, nada. Except for scholars whose first interests are science or economics, no one with a history background has won a Nobel Prize. As in Oregon, the most prestigious awards very infrequently go to historians.Enough questions and finger-pointing. We need more answers and information about Oregon's chroniclers and their writings worthy of renewed attention.In the 19th century, Oregon historians or would-be historians devoted their pages primarily to describing new peoples, landscapes and experiences they encountered coming into the Oregon Country. Bona fide historians were in short supply.
Source: Times Higher Education
8-25-11
David Starkey should not be referred to as a historian when he makes media appearances as a pundit on matters outside his area of expertise because it brings the "profession into disrepute", according to a letter signed by 100 of his peers.In the letter in today's Times Higher Education, academics criticise the "reductionist argument" made by Dr Starkey during his recent appearance on BBC Two's Newsnight, when he said that the UK riots were caused because "the whites have become black".Such a claim is "both evidentially insupportable and factually wrong", the letter says.Particular ire is reserved for the BBC for introducing Dr Starkey as a historian when inviting him to comment on matters outside his historical specialism, which is British constitutional history in the Tudor period....
Source: WaPo
John Hubbard, U.S. ambassador and USC president, d
John R. Hubbard, a historian and former U.S. ambassador to India who was president of the University of Southern California in the 1970s, died Aug 21 at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., the university announced.The broad-shouldered and outspoken Texas native, widely known as “Jack,” was 92. No cause of death was reported.During his decade-long presidency, Dr. Hubbard was credited with helping to boost USC’s finances and academic reputation. His term was also marked with controversies over donations from the shah of Iran and from corporations doing business in Saudi Arabia.Dr. Hubbard, who was an expert on British diplomatic history and U.S.-India ties, continued to teach part time at USC until he was 91, even if it meant sometimes leaning on a walker....
Source: Civil War Memory
8-25-11
Kevin Levin writes for Civil War Memory.Over the past three days I’ve come across two references that place Robert K. Krick, squarely in the camp of Southern historians. The reference is meant not simply to denote field of interest but a “pro-South” or “pro-Confederate” bias. As many of you know Krick worked for 31 years as the chief historian at Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park. These claims are made with apparently no attempt at verification; it’s as if his body of scholarship speaks for itself in terms of his place of birth. Of course, Krick is not native to the South; rather he was born and raised in California. Before proceeding let’s be clear that Krick’s work on the Army of Northern Virginia is essential reading for any Civil War enthusiast. In short, few people know more about Lee’s army than Krick.
Source: New York Daily News
8-25-11
A Funky fresh Fordham University professor is rapping about rent to warn the Bronx about gentrification. But housing and census experts believe the borough has nothing to fear.Mark Naison, who rhymes under the stage name Notorious PhD, [performed] "Not in the Bronx" Thursday at the Urban Plunge, an annual community service event just for Fordham freshmen.The history scholar has watched yuppies and hipsters transform parts of Brooklyn and Harlem, crowding out longtime residents and wants Fordham students to help protect the Bronx....
Source: Gainsville Times
8-24-11
Growing up during the Cold War made the young Martin Blackwell wonder what the world was hiding."I wanted to know what life was like behind the Iron Curtain," he said. "I traveled a lot as a kid and what struck me as unfair was that these kids (in the Soviet Union) couldn't travel."Several years later, Blackwell's appreciation for Russian culture resulted in one of the first academic journals about the country's post-World War II society.The journal, "Contemporary History of Russia," is intended to create a spirit of collaboration between foreign and Russian scholars and to understand the big picture of society in post-WWII Russia....
Source: San Fernando Valley Sun
8-25-11
Polish Jews faced a cruel destiny in 1940. Nazis soldiers had crammed more than 400,000 Jewish citizens into 1.3 square miles of territory known as the Warsaw Ghetto. From there they would be taken by trains to death camps.Left in ruin, with faltering spirits, shattered hope and deteriorating health, the people of the ghetto began collecting all kinds of information to document their history for the future. The group was called the Oneg Shabes -- Joy of Sabbath group. It was organized by a history professor who was an underground leader and social worker in the ghetto named Emanuel Ringelblum.Their work came to be known as the Ringelblum archives. They contained, among other things, underground newspapers, public notices by the Jewish council, stolen Nazi propaganda and poetry, which was all illegal to write and possess under penalty of death."I thought it would be very interesting to look at the Yiddish poetry," said Sarah Moskovitz, professor emeritus at California State University, Northridge who compiled poems from the Warsaw ghetto into a new online book, "Poetry in Hell."
Source: Radio New Zealand
8-29-11
A New Zealand war historian will head back to Gallipoli in September as part of an archaeological survey of the Anzac battlefield.Ian McGibbon will be working there for the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, along with Turkish and Australian historians and archaeologists....
Source: Outlook India
8-30-11
Legendary filmmaker Khwaja Ahmad Abbas was a believer of Gandhian principles but would not have approved of Anna Hazare and the manner in which the whole issue of corruption was "hijacked" for ulterior motives, says historian Suresh Kohli."He (Abbas) believed in Gandhi, and admired Nehru. He would surely not have approved of Anna Hazare, and the manner in which the whole issue of corruption has been hijacked for ulterior motives. Gandhi never approved of that."He never allowed his supporters to hijack his vision, and silently watched the blackmailed methodology that has seeped into contemporary body politic," Kohli, who has edited Abbas' book of stories An Evening in Lucknow, told PTI.According to Kohli,Abbas had a unique storytelling style."Like in other areas of creative expression, Abbas had an unusual approach to telling a story. Most of his stories are a mix of fact, and fiction, observed or experienced reality compounded with fantasy to make the work readable. He felt he must communicate his feelings, observations, philosophy with as wide a spectrum as possible."...
