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: David A. Walsh at HNN
3-25-11
[David A. Walsh is the associate editor of HNN.]MARCH 28 UPDATEMARCH 29 UPDATEThe Wisconsin Republican Party is filing legal documents to gain access to the personal emails of William Cronon, Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin—Madison and president-elect of the American Historical Association, in response to
Source: Guardian (UK)
3-29-11
The Harvard academic Niall Ferguson has warned that too few pupils are spending too little time studying history – and what they do study lacks a sweeping narrative.
He offers his own lesson plan to remedy what he says is a lack of cohesion, in which pupils place six "building block" events, including the Reformation and the French revolution, into the right order.
His plan aims to give pupils an overview of the years 1400 to 1914, and encourage them "to
Source: NYT
3-27-11
The latest technique used by conservatives to silence liberal academics is to demand copies of e-mails and other documents. Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli of Virginia tried it last year with a climate-change scientist, and now the Wisconsin Republican Party is doing it to a distinguished historian who dared to criticize the state’s new union-busting law. These demands not only abuse academic freedom, but make the instigators look like petty and medieval inquisitors.
The histori
Source: NYT
3-27-11
[Paul Krugman is an economist at Princeton University and a columnist for the NYT.]
...The Cronon affair, then, is one more indicator of just how reflexively vindictive, how un-American, one of our two great political parties has become.
The demand for Mr. Cronon’s correspondence has obvious parallels with the ongoing smear campaign against climate science and climate scientists, which has lately relied heavily on supposedly damaging quotations found in e-mail records..
Source: AP
3-24-11
Foner's "The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery" is one of three winners of the coveted Bancroft Prize for history. The prize's administrator, Columbia University, announced Thursday that the other recipients are Sara Dubow's "Ourselves Unborn" and Christopher Tomlins' "Freedom Bound."...
Source: ABC News
3-21-11
Noted Civil War historian James Robertson is retiring after more than four decades at Virginia Tech.
The 80-year-old Robertson will leave his job June 1. He founded the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia Tech in 1999 and has served as its director....
Source: Time.com
3-22-11
At first glance, it seems like an ordinary, innocent photograph: a group of Polish peasants holding shovels in a field on a sunny day. But look closer and you see the skulls and bones scattered at their feet.
According to some historians, the photo was taken at the site of the Treblinka death camp in eastern Poland shortly after World War II and shows the peasants digging up Jewish remains in search of gold or other valuables. When it ran alongside a 2008 newspaper feature about Pol
Source: Yahoo News
3-17-11
LONDON (Reuters) – Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, probably ate fare similar to today's pricey health foods such as cereal, fish and seaweed, according to a researcher who has studied the country's 5th century diet.
Food historian Regina Sexton said records kept by monks showed that Patrick, who is credited with ridding Ireland of snakes and spreading the Christian message, most likely drew his sustenance from cereals and dairy produce such as sour milk, flavored curd mi
Source: Guardian (UK)
3-20-11
The condition that affected Peter the Wild Boy, a feral child found abandoned in a German forest and kept as a pet at the courts of George I and II, has been identified more than 200 years after his death.
Peter's charming smile, seen in his portrait painted in the 1720s by William Kent on the king's grand staircase at Kensington Palace, was the vital clue.
Lucy Worsley, the historian at Historic Royal Palaces who has been researching Peter's strange life, suspected fro
Source: NYT
3-23-11
Clashes at state capitols over organized labor have become commonplace this year, with protesters throughout the country objecting to proposed limits on collective bargaining and cuts in benefits. Maine’s governor, Paul LePage, has opened a new — and unlikely — front in the battle between some lawmakers and unions: a 36-foot-wide mural in the state’s Department of Labor building in Augusta.
The three-year-old mural has 11 panels showing scenes of Maine workers, including colonial-er
Source: NYT
3-23-11
But another city, Memphis, appears to have the distinction of having once lost the highest percentage of its population for an American city of any size.
In the 1870s, a series of outbreaks of yellow fever swept through the Mississippi River Valley, killing thousands of people. In 1878, the epidemic reduced the population of Memphis by perhaps as much as 50 percent.
In 1878 alone, the population of about 40,000 dropped by more than half, said Charles W. Crawford, a prof
Source: HNN Staff
3-20-11
[David A. Walsh is the associate editor of HNN.]The Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians closed in Houston this Sunday morning with a whimper, and as the final tally for the convention was estimated at 1,317, OAH officials could not help but express mild disappointment. “It’s a bit of a letdown,” OAH executive director Katherine Finley said, “but not unexpected in this economy. We had projected 1,400 to 1,500 attendees, so we’re only short by one hundred.”
Source: National Review
3-18-11
Winter is bleak enough as it is. This year the gloom was deepened by the publication of How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism, by Eric Hobsbawm, one of Britain’s most feted historians, and, oh yes, a man who stuck with the Communist party until 1991 despite a global killing spree that took perhaps one hundred million lives. Naturally Hobsbawm’s new book has triggered the usual hosannas from the usual congregation for, to quote the Guardian, this “grand old man.”...
But
Source: Ron Radosh and Steve Ustin in the Weekly Standard
3-28-11
[Ronald Radosh is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at The Hudson Institute, and a Prof. Emeritus of History at the City University of New York. Steven T. Usdin is senior editor at Biocentury Publications and the author of "Engineering Communism
How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley"]
Three years ago, Morton Sobell gave an interview to Sam Roberts of the New York Times that surprised readers and stunned many who continued to believe that So
Source: NYT
3-15-11
Donny George, an esteemed Iraqi archaeologist who tried to stop the looters ransacking the Iraq National Museum after the invasion of 2003, then led in recovering thousands of stolen artifacts in the ensuing years, died on Friday in Toronto. He was 60.
His friend Gwendolen Cates said he had a heart attack in the Toronto airport.
Dr. George fled Iraq in 2006 because of threats to his family. He was also angry that Iraq’s post-invasion politicians seemed interested mainly
Source: AP
3-12-11
NORTHAMPTON, Mass (Reuters) – A U.S.-led research team may have finally located the lost city of Atlantis, the legendary metropolis believed swamped by a tsunami thousands of years ago in mud flats in southern Spain.
"This is the power of tsunamis," head researcher Richard Freund told Reuters.
"It is just so hard to understand that it can wipe out 60 miles inland, and that's pretty much what we're talking about," said Freund, a University of Hartford
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
3-12-11
Adolf Hitler's heroic exploits during the First World War were an invention of the Nazi propaganda machine, new research has revealed.
The Nazi leader served as a messenger on the Western Front during the war and was awarded the Iron Cross for carrying messages.
He claimed in his autobiography, Mein Kampf, that he 'looked death in the eye' and risked his life 'probably every day' while he served as a messenger on the Western Front.
But a new book, Hitler's
Source: NYT
3-15-11
Leo Steinberg, one of the most brilliant, influential and controversial art historians of the last half of the 20th century, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.
His death was confirmed by his assistant, Sheila Schwartz.
Mr. Steinberg was an inspirational lecturer, a writer of striking eloquence and an adventurous scholar and critic who loved to challenge the art world’s reigning orthodoxies. Though trained in the study of the Renaissance and Baroque eras
Source: WSJ
3-14-11
The topic for the evening's talk—"Empire City: Will New York Remain the Capital of the World in the 21st Century?"—would have been relevant to anyone who considers himself a New Yorker, but it seemed especially so given the well-heeled crowd.
The person assigned to answer the question was Kenneth T. Jackson, a former president of the New-York Historical Society and the Jacques Barzun Professor in History and the Social Sciences at Columbia University. And the 40 or so peop
Source: mySA.com
3-11-11
...Adoptive San Antonian Jacques Barzun, one of the nation’s leading intellectuals, a Columbia graduate and a former provost and professor of history at the university, took up the issue in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal. His opinion piece is behind the paywall. But here are a few snippets from his devastating take down of Columbia’s repugnant treatment of the military:With Congress having repealed that edict last year, Columbia faculty have raised new arguments against
