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: WSJ
11-19-10
The British historian and Harvard University professor talks to The Wall Street Journal Europe about how he starts his weekend.
Best-selling author Niall Ferguson's travel schedule is out of hand. "I often don't even know what day it is," he says, only half mockingly.
When he isn't shuttling all over the world to give speeches, do research or film documentaries, the financial and economics historian splits his time between Boston and London. His most recent b
Source: National Post
11-18-10
One of Canada’s most prominent social scientists has weighed in on a question that is becoming a growing obsession in this country: how to cope with spiraling health care costs. Michael Bliss, the noted University of Toronto historian, offers a fresh, outsider’s perspective on the health system and its problems in a paper for the C.D. Howe Institute, and at least one dramatic call for change.
For starters, Prof. Bliss suggests that we stop fretting over the ballooning cost of medica
Source: USA Today
11-18-10
Marriage is increasingly optional and could be on its way to obsolescence,according to a survey of more than 2,600 Americans that examines changing attitudes about relationships today.
Among the 2,691 adults surveyed by the Pew Research Center last month, 39% say marriage is becoming obsolete, up from 28% who responded to the same question posed in 1978 by Time magazine, which participated in the survey....
Stephanie Coontz, professor of history and family studies at Ev
Source: FrontPageMag
11-18-10
Stanford University history professor Joel Beinin made the latest in a series of appearances on the Peninsula Peace and Justice Center (PPJC) Palo Alto cable television program “Other Voices” on November 2, 2010. The subject of the show was “Israel-Palestine: A New Protest Generation” a
Source: NYT
11-18-10
Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a history professor at Indiana University, has been named the new director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, to begin in July. New York Public Library officials made the announcement on Wednesday, ending a sometimes contentious search.
Dr. Muhammad, 38, will succeed Howard Dodson Jr., 71, who in April announced his plan to retire after leading the Schomburg, a research library within the city public library system, since 1984. Under Mr.
Source: Canadian Jewish News
11-18-10
The heroism of a Muslim Turkish ambassador who saved Jewish lives in Nazi-occupied France was the subject of a sharp but friendly debate between a Jewish researcher and Turkey’s consul general in Toronto.
The encounter, which took place recently at Temple Sinai Congregation during Holocaust Education Week, pitted Arnold Reisman against Levent Bilgen.
Reisman, the author of An Ambassador and a Mensch: The Story of a Turkish Diplomat in Vichy France, claimed that
Source: Brownsville Herald
11-17-10
The days of Cesar Chavez are past. Latinos living in the United States today do not have a national leader, a study released this week by the Pew Hispanic Center concluded....
The reason Latinos lack a national leader, say some experts, is that the Latino community encompasses a wide and diverse spectrum of people. In many cases, Latinos have little in common with each other, other than being lumped into the category of Hispanics, said Neil Foley, an associate professor of history a
Source: Straits Times
11-13-10
SAINT PETERSBURG - A RUSSIAN publicist and author of a book defending Stalin's deportations of the Chechens in 1944 has been attacked by two assailants of Caucasian appearance, police said on Saturday.
'Igor Pykhalov was beaten on Thursday night near his house by two people aged about 30 and of Caucasian appearance,' a police representative from the southeastern Nevsky district of Russia's second largest city told AFP....
Source: Helsingin Sanomat
11-17-10
In November 1940, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov arrived in the German capital Berlin to pick up from where he had left off just over a year earlier with his German colleague Joachim von Ribbentrop....
The renowned German historian Werner Maser says that the luggage included one historically significant object: a personal gift from Stalin to Hitler.
It was a painting by an unknown Russian artist taken from the collections of the Hermitage Museum
Source: HNN Staff
11-16-10
A history professor at Duke University has attracted criticism from bloggers for posting a picture of engaged in BDSM activity on his Facebook profile.The photograph of Peter Sigal, a historian of sexuality and Latin America at Duke University, was published on K.C. Johnson’s blog Durham-in-Wonderlan
Source: Badger Herald
11-14-10
Historians around the country recently elected a University of Wisconsin professor as president of the American Historical Association, UW officials announced Friday.
The largest organization for anyone who studies history, UW professor William Cronon said he will serve as president of the AHA for three years.
Cronon said he will serve as president-elect in 2011 before assuming his position as president in 2012.
Cronon, who teaches in UW history department,
Source: HuffPo
11-11-10
Stephen F. Cohen wrote his new book, The Victims Return, which tells the stories of survivors of Stalin's Terror, more than two decades after he first outlined it. He began research in the 1970s, while living in Russia and befriending former Gulag inmates, but then put the project aside. In 2007, the year his friend the historian Robert Conquest turned 90, Cohen picked up where he left off. In the opinion of Anna Larina, the widow of the prominent Stalin victim Nikolai Bukharin, recounting this
Source: NYT
11-16-10
A history of the humanities in the 20th century could be chronicled in “isms” — formalism, Freudianism, structuralism, postcolonialism — grand intellectual cathedrals from which assorted interpretations of literature, politics and culture spread.
The next big idea in language, history and the arts? Data....
These researchers are digitally mapping Civil War battlefields to understand what role topography played in victory, using databases of thousands of jam sessions to
Source: Salon
11-15-10
Four Loko -- the latest wildly popular, wildly caffeinated, wildly alcoholic beverage to take hold with recreational drinkers -- is not long for the Big Apple. On Sunday, Gov. Paterson announced New York would join a growing number of states, including Michigan, Washington, Utah and Oklahoma, that have banned the sweet, fruity concoction, nicknamed"blackout in a can" and" liquid crack." In addition to being super-potent (one 23.5-ounce can has as much alcohol as three beers and one to two servin
Source: NY Press
11-15-10
If New York City had its own currency, Ed Koch would surely be on one of the bills. He left office in 1989 but still stays in the public eye any way he can, from being a pundit and author to a TV judge and movie columnist. But Koch was more than a folksy catchphrase (“How’m I doin’?”) or a brash personality. He came into office as the city faced bankruptcy and put in policies that reinvented New York physically and financially.
Historian Jonathan Soffer’s biography, Ed Koch and the
Source: Telegraph (UK)
11-12-10
Elena Lazzarini, a researcher from Pisa University, believes the enormous fresco is replete with homosexual imagery, including a man being dragged into Damnation by his testicles and kisses and embraces between male figures.
She has explored the theory in a new book, claiming that Michelangelo drew much of his knowledge of male anatomy from his frequent visits to gay brothels and 'Turkish baths' in 16th century Italy.
"The virile male bodies are inspired by the phy
Source: Front Page Mag
11-15-10
Juan Cole’s recent lecture at Auburn University in Alabama was a jarring reminder of the importance of pursuing accountability from our academics. Speaking in the Haley Center’s primary auditorium to a room overflowing with students and a smattering of aging hippies, Cole provided an hour-long lecture on America’s relationship with the Middle East. While the seating arrangement was not uncomfortable, the lighting and the acoustics left something to be desired.
The overarching theme
Source: HNN Staff
11-14-10
Penelope Blake, a history professor at Rock Valley College in Rockford, IL, appeared on Fox News’s Hannityon November 11 to discuss her outrage over a National Endowment for the Humanities-sponsored workshop on the Pacific War she attended in July. She came away from
Source: Deutsche Welle
11-12-10
The question of how to compensate victims of forced labor under the Nazis was long-debated in Germany until the German government teamed up with the private sector to set up a 5.2 million euro fund. The foundation Remembrance, Responsibility, Future (EVZ) was created in 2000 to handle compensation cases.
Payments from the fund were completed in 2007. Now the EVZ, along with an international network of historians, is trying to get Europe to come to terms with its history of forced la
Source: Jakarta Post
11-12-10
Des Alwi Abubakar, the prominent historian who was the adopted son of Indonesia's first vice president, Mohammad Hatta, died early Friday morning in Jakarta.
“I have received word from [former vice-president] Try Soetrisno's aide and I am going to the funeral home,” Eminent Persons Group Indonesia-Malaysia member Musni Umar said as reported by Antara news service....
