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: WaPo
11-8-10
COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Hundreds looked on as an angry mob dragged a black University of Missouri janitor from his jail cell in April 1923, publicly lynching him before he could stand trial on charges of raping a white professor's 14-year-old daughter....
Local filmmaker Scott Wilson teamed up last month with the Boone County medical examiner's office to successfully lobby state officials to change the cause of death on Scott's death certificate....
Keynote speaker Patrick Hub
Source: CNN.com
11-7-10
(CNN) -- The midterm elections dealt a powerful blow to President Obama and the Democratic Party as the country appeared to shift decisively to the right, moved by mass anger, "due to a combination of two kinds of fear," historian Michael Kazin told CNN....
Kazin, a professor of history at Georgetown University, editor of The Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History and author of "A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan" and other books, spok
Source: Haaretz
11-8-10
Historians have uncovered evidence leading to the estimation that the Nazis' wartime confiscation of wealth from Europe's Jews financed about 30 percent of the expenditure of the German armed forces during WWII.
The official study of the German Finance Ministry under the Nazis from 1933 to 1945 was conducted by historian Hans-Peter Ullmann.
Last month a similar study of the German Foreign Ministry under the Nazis established that its diplomats and bureaucrats played a
Source: St. Petersburg Times
11-8-10
History and geography professor George F. Botjer, 73, is white, and he is committed to racial justice. These two factors shaped the professor's career in a personal way at the University of Tampa.
He has taught at UT since 1962, longer than any other professor. He earned tenure during the 1965-66 school year and was promoted to full professor in 1974. He loves his work and Tampa U, as he refers to it.
Once I learned all this, I wondered why Botjer contacted me to disclo
Source: Telegraph (UK)
11-9-10
[Damian Thompson is Editor of Telegraph Blogs and a journalist specialising in religion. He was once described by The Church Times as a "blood-crazed ferret."]
From behind the Times paywall, the muffled sound of a High Table explosion. Quick, someone send for help! Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford, has suffered a devastating failure of scholarly objectivity. His face is getting redder and redder as he struggles to come to terms with… ee
Source: Alternet
10-30-10
What happened to the dream of Barack Obama's transformational politics? There's been very little deviation from the disastrous Bush years on the key issues of war, empire and the distribution of wealth in the country.
I turned to Lawrence Goodwyn, historian of social movements whose books and methods of explaining history have had a profound influence on many of the best known authors, activists and social theorists of our time. Goodwyn's account of the Populist movement, Democratic
Source: University of Manchester
11-8-10
The press - and 1980 Thatcher Government - unfairly criticised the trade union movement over its support for the newly formed Polish Solidarity Trade Union, according to the most detailed analysis of the period ever carried out.
Professor Stefan Berger, from The University of Manchester, says an initial slowness to react gave way to strong political and practical support - often behind the scenes- for Lech Walesa’s fledgling union by his UK counterparts.
The findings,
Source: Houston Chronicle
11-8-10
Oscar Brockett, a renowned theater historian and longtime University of Texas professor, has died. He was 87.
Brockett died Sunday at an Austin hospital after suffering a stroke the day before, said Sondra Lomax, assistant dean of UT's College of Fine Arts.
Doug Dempster, dean of UT's College of Fine Arts, told the Austin American-Statesman that Brockett, who retired in 2006, was "an absolute giant in the field of theater history."
"He define
Source: Dallas Morning News
11-8-10
AUSTIN – When three generations of Bushes assembled in May at a church in a fashionable part of Miami, it was more than a wedding and a family reunion.
It was a gathering of the Republican Party's most enduring modern dynasty.
"While they disdain it, especially George W. who recoils in horror at the whole thing, they are our royal family," said historian Doug Wead....
Source: The Age (AU)
11-9-10
RHYS Isaac, the first and only Australian to receive the prestigious American Pulitzer prize for history, has died of advanced melanoma at his home in Blairgowrie on the Mornington Peninsula. He was 72.
Isaac was awarded the Pulitzer in 1983 for his seminal book The Transformation of Virginia, in which he expounded methods used to understand radical changes in both blacks and whites in colonial plantation culture that had traded a king for a constitution and bill of rights.
Source: Guardian (UK)
11-7-10
A public inquiry into one of Britain's darkest postwar military incidents, the alleged massacre of 24 unarmed villagers by UK troops in Malaya, has moved a step closer after the official British historian of the "Malayan emergency" last week withdrew his account of the 1948 incident. Professor Anthony Short said his initial report absolving British troops was "wrong".
The plantation workers were shot by a 16-man patrol of the Scots Guards. Many of the victims' bo
Source: CBC News
11-5-10
Nova Scotia rights icon Viola Desmond is being honoured by Cape Breton University,+ which is creating a chair in her name — the Viola Desmond chair in social justice.
Desmond, a black woman, was convicted in 1946 for sitting in the whites-only section of a movie theatre in New Glasgow. She was pardoned by the province earlier this year.
History professor Graham Reynolds will be the first holder of the chair....
Source: Hampton Roads Daily Press
11-5-10
...Melvin Ely, professor of history and black studies at the College of William and Mary, knows the drill. Rumors offered as fact. Secondhand sources. Snippets of quotes with no context, chronology or original source.
"People who say that there were black soldiers seem to think that we have a political problem with the idea that there would be black soldiers for the Confederacy," Ely told me. "If there were soldiers fighting for the Confederacy, I would be the first t
Source: NYT
11-5-10
...“There’s a strong strand of divine-guidance thinking, thinking about American exceptionalism,” said Mary Beth Norton, a professor of early American history at Cornell University. “People have certainly seen the texts of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as the equivalent of a secular religion, with the idea then that you can’t challenge these texts.”...
If anything, the Constitution is especially vulnerable to literalism. “There is a major translation problem f
Source: Spicezee
11-7-10
Eire comes out with 2nd memoir London: He`s still waiting for snow, only now he`s doing so literally in Bloomington, Ill., not figuratively in Havana.
It`s 1963, Carlos Eire is 13 and when the snowflakes finally fall in his new corner of the world, he writes, they "snuck up on me, just like the Cuban Revolution. Except this is the best of all surprises, not the worst."...
Now 59, Eire is not dying, nor does he live in Miami. He is a professor of history and r
Source: American Thinker
11-6-10
It happened in July. A group of 25 selected professor historians met in Hawaii at a workshop sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). They were to present and hear scholarly papers on the history of these United States in World War II. It was to be a high-level intellectual rendering of that war receding now into history.
It turned out to be a largely left-liberal diatribe about our nation's sinful past. It was partisan as hell and, worst of all, an awkward atte
Source: TVNZ (New Zealand)
11-7-10
Paul Holmes interviews Professor Simon Schama.
PAUL Welcome back to Professor Simon Schama, one of the world's most widely read historians. An Englishman who lives in New York, he is Professor of History and the History of Art at Columbia University, he's also a writer and television presenter. He's responsible for the books and the TV series Obama's America and The American Future. Professor Schama is a political commentator for the BBC and CNN, amongst others, and so he's got t
Source: Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
11-7-10
...Once known for their strictly agricultural lifestyle and rejection of modernity -- including electricity, cars and telephones -- the Amish increasingly are turning away from the farm, accepting technology and opting for nontraditional jobs, academic researchers and church members say....
The shift from farmer to entrepreneur began decades ago, according to Kraybill and Steven Nolt, a professor of history at Goshen College in Indiana.
In Amish communities near Goshen,
Source: Cleveland Plains Dealer
11-7-10
...The impatience narrative is compelling because the world is in a constant state of change and the public expects speedy action. Yet lack of patience isn't anything new, says Andrew Cayton, a distinguished professor of history at Miami University.
What's new is the ability to grouse about it, en masse and instantly.
"Now, because of cable TV and phones and the Internet, it's much easier for that to get momentum across a wide group of people," Cayton said. Wh
Source: NYT
11-5-10
...[N]ew findings contradict the conventional belief that Italians began to enforce anti-Semitic laws only after German troops occupied the country in 1943, and then reluctantly. In a spate of studies, many of them based on a little-publicized Italian government report commissioned in 1999, researchers have uncovered a vast wartime record detailing a systematic disenfranchisement of Italy’s Jews, beginning in the summer of 1938, shortly before the Kristallnacht attacks in November....
