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: Boston Globe
10-12-10
[Mark Leccese, a journalism professor at Emerson College.]
Two weeks ago, a handful of bloggers wrote scathingly about Ken Burns’ use of former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin — two prominent writers who have faced credible plagiarism and fabrication charges that you can read about here, here and here — as prominent interview subjects in Burns’ most recent documentary about baseball, “The Tenth Inning.”...
What amazes and troubles
Source: Southwest Riverside News Network
10-9-10
A retired UC Riverside professor is set to be honored by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II.
Henry Snyder, UC Riverside professor of history emeritus, will be presented with the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire medal Oct. 16 in Los Angeles, for his 32 years of work on the English Short-Title Catalogue.
The award was announced by the queen in December, and is rarely presented to individuals outside of the United Kingdom, said UCR Spokeswoman Bettye Miller in a news r
Source: The Atlantic
11-1-10
When Diane Ravitch decided that reform ideas like robust testing, charter schools, and No Child Left Behind were imperiling rather than saving American education, she managed to break with her former Republican allies and start a fight with Obama Democrats, all at once....
Teachers unions and some civil-rights groups sounded these alarms before Ravitch did. But her sharp writing and mastery of history (she’s an education professor and historian at New York University) mean that no o
Source: NYT
10-11-10
The revelation that Rich Iott, a Republican candidate for Congress from Ohio, was an active member of a group of dedicated to understanding the experience of soldiers who served in the Nazi Waffen SS by dressing up in their uniforms — and staging recreations of their battles — has forced historical re-enactors to defend their hobby....Changes have been made to the Web site of the group Mr. Iott used to be a member of, Wiking.org — and an affiliated YouTube channel — but The Atlantic
Source: NYT
10-11-10
The regular NYT feature "Room for Debate" hosted a roundtable of historians on October 13 to discuss why Woodrow Wilson sparks such animosity within conservative circles today.Jill Lepore, David Woods Kemper Professor of American History at Harvard University:This professor-president [Woodrow Wilson] has convenient similarities to our
Source: AP
10-6-10
WASHINGTON – The laws signed by Adolf Hitler taking away the citizenship of German Jews before the Holocaust were placed on rare public display Wednesday at the National Archives.
The Nuremberg Laws were turned over to the archives in August by The Huntington, a museum complex near Los Angeles where they were quietly deposited by Gen. George Patton at the end of World War II. The papers will be on display in a separate gallery from the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independen
Source: HNN Staff
10-6-10
A group of distinguished historians, educators, and filmmakers has published an open letter to the Department of the Interior to protest the National Park Service’s decision to remove the Blair Mountain battlefield in Logan County, West Virginia, from the National Register of Historic Places.The Battle of Blair Mountain was the largest armed conflict on American soil since the Civil War. Fighting broke out between 10,000 unionized coal miners, enraged by years of brutal treatme
Source: UPenn Almanac
10-5-10
Moshe “Misha” Lewin, professor emeritus of history, died August 14, in Paris, France. He was 88 years old.
Dr. Lewin was born in Wilno, Poland in 1921 to ethnic Jewish parents who died in the Holocaust. He moved to the Soviet Union in 1941 ahead of the invading Nazis and enlisted in the Soviet army in 1943. He received his BA from Tel Aviv University, Israel in 1961. That same year he received a research scholarship to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he earned a PhD in 1964. H
Source: NYT
10-2-10
NEW DELHI — When India won its bid for the 2010 Commonwealth Games seven years ago, the event instantly became an emblem of national prestige. But as the country prepares to open the games on Sunday evening, an opportunity to burnish its global image has instead become a national embarrassment.
The litany of problems plaguing the games — collapsed footbridges, filthy dorms, cartoonish corruption — have not only made headlines around the world. They have left Indians to wonder why a
Source: HNN Staff
10-3-10
Many media outlets have noted that John C. Cutler, the late doctor who led the U.S. Public Health Service syphilis experiment on Guatemalan inmates and later participated in the Tuskegee experiment, defended the latter well into the 1990s, most famously for a 1993 PBS Nova documentary entitled
Source: NYT
10-1-10
From 1946 to 1948, American public health doctors deliberately infected nearly 700 Guatemalans — prison inmates, mental patients and soldiers — with venereal diseases in what was meant as an effort to test the effectiveness of penicillin.
American tax dollars, through the National Institutes of Health, even paid for syphilis-infected prostitutes to sleep with prisoners, since Guatemalan prisons allowed such visits. When the prostitutes did not succeed in infecting the men, some pri
Source: Examiner.com
10-2-10
Of course everyone has heard by now the appalling discovery unearthed by Wellesley College professor, Susan Reverby on how the US Public Health Service (a medical branch of the US government) conducted clearly unethical and dangerous syphilis experiments in Guatemala in the mid-40s....
Cutler, the government physician, would also take part in the equally abhorrent US government sponsored Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
Do you think Cutler was just a rogue doctor performing dan
Source: News Blaze
10-2-10
WELLESLEY, Mass. - Digging in the archives at the University of Pittsburgh, Wellesley College medical historian Susan M. Reverby knew what she found was important enough to keep it *out* of the book she was writing on the history and myths surrounding the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study. She did not expect what she finally wrote up to make it to the White House, through the State Department and to Guatemala.
Reverby's book, "Examining Tuskegee," published in November 2009
Source: Deutsche Welle
9-30-10
Philip D. Zelikow worked on German reunification as a senior National Security Council official under President George H.W. Bush. Together with Condoleezza Rice, he is the author of"Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (1995)." Zelikow also served as executive director of the 9/11 Commission and as the top adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He is currently the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the Uni
Source: Psychology Today
9-29-10
Don't knock masturbation," Woody Allen famously quipped. "It's sex with someone I love." But masturbation has of course been knocked around some, historically. According to Thomas W. Laqueur, a professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley (and the author of "Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation") masturbation was not a topic of great interest to the powers that be until 1712, when a con man named John Marten anonymously published a book sp
Source: Fox News
10-1-10
The U.S. government apologized Friday for "unethical" and "reprehensible" research conducted in Guatemala more than 60 years ago, after a professor documented how U.S. scientists intentionally infected people in the country with sexually transmitted diseases.
Susan Reverby, a women's studies professor at Wellesley College, published a paper detailing the joint research program between the U.S. and Guatemalan governments. From 1946-1948, doctors enabled men in pr
Source: NYT
10-1-10
The son of a prominent professor at the University of Chicago was convicted on Thursday of impersonating a New York University professor and other scholars who disagreed with his father’s theories on the origin of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Jurors took half a day to find the son, Raphael Haim Golb, a 50-year-old real estate lawyer, guilty on 30 of 31 counts, including identity theft, criminal impersonation and aggravated harassment....
Prosecutors contended that Mr. Golb had
Source: CHE
9-26-10
[Deborah Kaplan is an associate professor of English and cultural studies at George Mason University. She prepared a collection of Roy Rosenzweig's essays, Clio Wired: The Future of the Past in the Digital Age, to be published by Columbia University Press this winter.]
My husband, Roy Rosenzweig, died in 2007 of an illness we had no reason to anticipate. Ten percent to 15 percent of lung cancers in the United States occur in people who have never smoked; he was one of them. Giving u
Source: Truthdig
9-28-10
[Visit William Pfaff’s Web site for more on his latest book, “The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy” (Walker & Co., $25), at www.williampfaff.com.]
A splendid and courageous new book, “Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War,” by Andrew J. Bacevich of Boston University (and for many years previously, the U.S. Army), describes with lucidity the degree to which the power of the American presidency
Source: USA Today
9-26-10
First lady Michelle Obama hadn't even spent her first night in the White House yet when the comparisons to Jacqueline Kennedy began.
President Obama was among the first to make the connection on the evening of his inauguration when he quipped, "Tonight I have the very special honor of being known as the guy who accompanied Michelle Obama to the ball." He was invoking the words of John F. Kennedy, who made a similar remark during a 1961 trip to Paris with his similarly glam
