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: NJ.com
4-6-11
Detroit’s fortunes have been in decline for years, but the latest Census data have made everyone sit up and take notice: The city lost 25 percent of its population over the past decade. Middle-class blacks are the latest to flee the Motor City in droves, fed up with crime, poor services and low-performing schools. In the 1950s, the population was 1.8 million. Now, it’s only 713,777, heading toward the 1910 figure of 400,000, when the auto industry that made Detroit was in its infancy.
Source: Brown Daily Herald
4-11-11
Ignoring the convention of separating personal stories from academic discourse, President Ruth Simmons shared her connection to slavery as the great-granddaughter of slaves in an emotional keynote address that kicked off this weekend's "Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development" conference Thursday in Salomon 101.
The conference — which highlighted the North's connections with slavery and was hosted by Brown and Harvard — drew students, community
Source: NYT
4-11-11
The city giveth, and the city taketh away. So it was that Edward I. Koch received a bridge on Monday, and Dr. Theodore L. Kazimiroff lost a boulevard.
Dr. Kazimiroff, to the unacquainted, was a dentist, naturalist, amateur archaeologist and the first official historian of the Bronx. He once, legend has it, extracted a tooth from the mouth of a live lion in the Bronx Zoo.
Until Monday, he was also the namesake of a few scenic blocks of Bronx thoroughfare running along a
Source: NYT
4-11-11
The New-York Historical Society has long seemed like a remote fortress on Central Park West because of the stately but insular architecture of its stone building and a certain bumpiness in its public relations.
A sale of part of its collection in the 1990s, a shift to a more national focus a decade later, and plans, since abandoned, to build a tower and five-story annex, have at one point or another put the museum at odds with preservationists, city historians or neighborhood group
Source: Newsweek
4-10-11
Henry Louis Gates Jr., known to all as “Skip,” remembers the day he became obsessed with the subject of race. It was 1960, and he was 9 years old, staring at his grandfather’s corpse lying in state at a funeral home in Cumberland, Md. Gates himself has medium-brown skin, the color of walnuts, but his grandfather looked like a white man. In life, Pop Gates was so pale his grandchildren called him “Casper” behind his back. In death, he appeared even whiter. “I thought, how ridiculous he looks,” Ga
Source: WaPo
4-10-11
...Jeremy A. Stern, a historian who reviewed state academic standards this year for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said differences in the timing and scope of Civil War education across the United States are dramatic. Often, he said, the war is not taught systematically until middle school.
For elementary teachers, a central challenge is to explain why the war happened. Edward L. Ayers, president of the University of Richmond and a historian who has written about the Civil War and
Source: Times of India
4-10-11
LONDON: A top Italian history professor has caused outrage after he claimed that the Roman Empire fell due to the rise of homosexuality.
Roberto De Mattei, 63, a devout Roman Catholic, had already raised eyebrows by saying the Japanese tsunami was "divine punishment", and now with his latest claim he faces calls to resign.
"The collapse of the Roman Empire and the arrival of the Barbarians was due to the spread of homosexuality," the Daily Mail quote
Source: CNNMoney
4-6-11
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The fiscal year is 189 days old, and the federal government is still operating without a long-term spending bill. And now, if lawmakers can't cut a deal, the government will shut down.
Usually, lawmakers make some effort to pass a real, 365-day budget. Not this year.
Instead, lawmakers have passed six short-term spending bills. With their Friday deadline bearing down, the two parties remain billions of dollars apart on spending cuts.
Source: Bloomberg News
4-6-11
April 7 (Bloomberg) -- Germany is bettering its European rivals in the race to harness Chinese growth as exports to the Asian nation begin to outstrip those to the U.S.
With its consumers and companies sating their appetite for power turbines, cars and electronics, China became Germany's largest non-European customer at the end of last year, helping drive up share prices from BASF SE to Bayerische Motoren Werke AG. Economists expect data tomorrow to show German exports rose the most
Source: Worchester News & Telegram
12-31-69
The truth is that not everyone who participated in the Boston Tea Party was able to resist the allure of the tea itself.
Tea, after all, had become the beverage of choice by the late 18th century. It was a commodity much sought after by both the elite and middle classes, and tea drinking was a societal ritual. Women coveted the best tea services; social conventions grew up around serving and sipping the exotic, pricey drink whose origins were in Asia.
In his latest book
Source: Hindustan Times
4-3-11
The founder of the Soviet Union, the most charismatic American President of the 20th century, the architect of communist China, the man behind the holocaust, and India’s Father of the Nation. They changed the world. But did they change their partners too? A controversial new book on Mahatma Gandhi b
y a Pulitzer Prize winning author, which some reviewers interpret as suggesting that he was bisexual, has triggered an uproar in India. But the book by Joseph Lelyveld, former executive editor
Source: History Unfolding (Blog)
4-3-11
[David Kaiser currently teaches at the Naval War College and blogs at History Unfolding.]
Yesterday the New York Times printed one of the funniest corrections that has appeared in that august paper for some time. It read:"Because of a production error, a review on the cover of the Book Review, about 'Bismarck: A Life,' by Jonathan Steinberg, omits the byline in some copies.
Source: AP
4-5-11
The White House site, http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presidents, offers one-page summaries of all 44 presidents, granting equal time to sluggers and bench-warmers. Much of the material is taken directly from a companion book by the White House Historical Association first released in 1964 and last reissued in 2009. "The Presidents of the United States of America" is a glossy, illustrated paperback that includes a foreword by Pre
Source: The Nation
4-4-11
I first met Manning Marable in a moment of desperation. It was my first year at Columbia—his, too—and I had no money. Word was he had some additional funding for graduate students. It wasn’t a long meeting, but I left the office that day with a new job and a new mentor. Without it—without him—I never would have made it.
As it turns out, Manning’s act of generosity would change my life—not just because it helped me pay for graduate school but, more crucially, because it provided me w
Source: NYT
4-4-11
Edwin S. Gaustad, who took his place in the front rank of American religious historians with seminal works on the religious ideas of the founding fathers, especially Thomas Jefferson, and the arguments about church versus state that evolved from the dissenting sects in colonial America, died on March 25 at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 87. The death was confirmed by his daughter Susan.
Although his principal field was colonial religious history, Professor Gaustad ranged far and
Source: NYT
4-1-11
For two decades, the Columbia University professor Manning Marable focused on the task he considered his life’s work: redefining the legacy of Malcolm X. Last fall he completed “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,” a 594-page biography described by the few scholars who have seen it as full of new and startling information and insights.
The book is scheduled to be published on Monday, and Mr. Marable had been looking forward to leading a vigorous public discussion of his ideas. But on
Source: Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette
3-31-11
“Well-behaved women seldom make history.”
That now famous quote (by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich) is affixed to Christine Erickson’s office door at IPFW, where she is an associate history professor.
Last year, Erickson says, someone scribbled a few choice words on the bumper sticker: “That’s because women didn’t do anything important.”
Perhaps the proposed National Women’s History Museum is needed now more than ever.
On Wednesday, a bill th
Source: OAH press release
3-30-11
The Executive Committee of the Organization of American Historians, led by President Alice Kessler-Harris, R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of History at Columbia University, issued a statement on March 30, 2011, supporting academic freedom and deploring the recent efforts of Wisconsin politicians to intimidate OAH member and professor William Cronon. Cronon, a professor of environmental and U.S. western history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been thrust into the spotlight for his March 15
Source: KMOX (MO)
3-30-11
ST. LOUIS, Mo. (KMOX) –A local historian says there is no other fan in the nation like a Cardinal fan — and he says the reason is KMOX Radio.
University of Missouri St. Louis Professor of History Emeritus Chuck Korr says Cardinal fans were created decades ago by the Cardinal’s Radio network at a time when there was no other Major League Baseball team south or west of St. Louis.
“You talk to anybody over 40 who’s a Cardinal’s fan and he’ll tell you it’s because of KMOX
Source: LINKS--International Journal of Socialist Renewal
3-28-11
On March 27, 2011, prominent US anti-Iraq-War writer Juan Cole posted this"Open letter to the left on Libya" on his website, Informed Comment.The article argued for support for the UN Security Council authorised military intervention in Libya. In the interests of left discussion, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal posts Cole's art
