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: Voice of America
9-23-10
World War One drew in people from around the world, including 140,000 Chinese workers who served on the Western Front. A new museum exhibition in Flanders, Belgium, highlights China's role in the war. It appears the curators have had to cancel plans to take it to China.
The little known story of the 140,000 Chinese who served on the Western Front during WWI has drawn new interest in recent years.
The Toiling for War exhibition at the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres,
Source: WaPo
9-23-10
Is the Tea Party one of the most successful scams in American political history?...
The Tea Party is not the only small group in history to wield more power than you'd expect from its numbers. In 2008, Barack Obama did very well in party caucuses, which draw far fewer voters than primaries. And it was Lenin who offered the classic definition of a vanguard party as involving "people who make revolutionary activity their profession" in organizations that "must perforce
Source: Times of India
9-22-10
Renowned historian Bipin Chandra is set to give a different interpretation to the life of martyr Bhagat Singh. Chandra is writing a biography of the revolutionary hero showing that Singh was on the way to become a Gandhian.
"If Bhagat Singh had lived, he would have become a Marxist Gandhian," Chandra told TNN during his recent visit to Beijing. "He was constantly developing and imbibing new thoughts," Chandra, who is also the chairman of the National Book Trust,
Source: Fox News
9-22-10
Prosecutors in Poland say a British historian who denies the Holocaust is touring World War II sites including former Nazi death camps.
Author David Irving is leading a group on a visit to the camps and other World War II sites but is not releasing his exact itinerary.
Poland's National Remembrance Institute said Wednesday that its prosecutors know where Irving is....
Source: New American Media
9-21-10
EDITOR’S NOTE [FROM NEW AMERICAN MEDIA]: Eminent scholar and historian Franz Schurmann, who co-founded Pacific News Service in 1970, passed away on August 20, 2010. Richard Rodriguez, a long-time editor and writer with PNS, remembered him in a powerful eulogy delivered Sept. 19 at UC Berkeley Alumni House.
Franz Schurmann was a terrible driver.
I remember once, after lunch, in his car, he was still talking about the Peloponnesian War or Richard Nixon in China or the spi
Source: Guardian (UK)
9-21-10
Keith Jeffery, author of the first – and possibly only – official history of MI6, said today he had made a "Faustian pact" that had in some cases "overridden the imperatives of historical scholarship". But he was given an offer he could not refuse – "the holy grail of the British archives".
Those archives are records of MI6 operations from 1909, when Britain's Secret Intelligence Service was set up, to 1949, when the history stops. MI6 said today that i
Source: Guardian (UK)
9-21-10
British historian and Holocaust-denier David Irving will not be permitted to give tours at Poland's Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, museum officials said Tuesday after the controversial historian arrived in Poland to lead a tour of Nazi sites.
"Proper actions" will be taken if Irving made statements that denied or played down the Holocaust while visiting Auschwitz, a museum spokesman told the Polish Press Agency PAP.
"We cannot allow statements that har
Source: OAH News
9-16-10
Robert A. Hohner, a historian of early twentieth-century southern politics, died on August 8, 2010, at his home in London, Ontario. In an educational career interrupted by service in the U.S. Navy, Bob received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Duke University. After teaching briefly at the U.S. Naval Academy, Bob took a position in 1965 at the University of Western Ontario (uwo), where he remained in the Department of History until his retirement in 2001.
His pioneering dissertation,
Source: NYT
9-19-10
Fathi Osman, an influential scholar who articulated a liberal version of Islam and published an authoritative guide to the Koran for non-Arabic readers, died on Sept. 11 at his home in Montrose, Calif. He was 82....
“He had two major projects,” said Reuven Firestone, a professor of medieval Jewish and Islamic studies at Hebrew Union College and a senior fellow of the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California. “The first was to make the case to no
Source: OUPblog
9-20-10
A new HBO series, Boardwalk Empire, premiered this weekend. Worlds away from what we see on Jersey Shore, it has reignited interest in New Jersey history and culture. Bryant Simon (author of Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America and Professor of History at Temple University) has been interviewed for the accompanying HBO documentary, and here we ask him some questions about the “dreamlike” place that is AC.You’ve described yourself as a native of S
Source: NYT
9-20-10
[Roger Cohen is a columnist with the NYT.]
It’s important to stanch the anti-democratic tide. Thugs and oppression ride on it.
If anyone needs reminding of that, read the remarkable Tony Judt, the historian who brought the same unstinting lucidity to his death last month from Lou Gehrig’s Disease as he did to the sweep of 20th-century European history. Judt was a British intellectual transposed to New York whose rigorous spirit of inquiry epitomized Anglo-American liber
Source: Slate
9-17-10
...Over the last decade or so, dozens—perhaps hundreds—of homes in Montgomery have been declared blighted and razed in a similar manner. The owners tend to be disproportionately poor and black, and with little means to fight back. And here's the kicker: Many of the homes fall along a federally funded civil rights trail in the neighborhood where Rosa Parks lived. Activists say the weird pattern may not be coincidence. "What's happening in Montgomery is a civil rights crisis," says David
Source: The Arizona Republic
9-19-10
If you were under the impression that the United States is a secular, democratic republic founded on the great ideas of the Enlightenment, think again.
We owe our form of government not to the rebellious Founding Fathers but to ancient Israel, whose government provided an all-but-perfect model for the U.S. Constitution.
Thus runs a main theme of a 29-year-old, but newly popular, book called "The 5000 Year Leap."...
The book is among the works of p
Source: Appleton Post-Crescent (WI)
9-19-10
Jerry Podair, professor of history and Robert S. French Professor of American Studies at Lawrence University in Appleton, said the 1940s are a tough decade to talk about....
"The '40s are a fractured decade obviously because of WWII, which in the United States lasted from 1941 to 1945, and then the post-war era from 1945 on," he said. "It's almost like you're talking about two different decades."...
"I think it's possible to say someone who grew
Source: NYT
9-11-10
William H. Goetzmann, who in a Pulitzer Prize-winning book overturned the idea of Western exploration in the 19th century as a series of random thrusts into the hinterland, finding instead that it was a far more systematic effort, died on Tuesday at his home in Austin, Tex. He was 80.
The cause was congestive heart failure, his wife, Mewes, said.
Mr. Goetzmann’s book “Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West” (Knopf, 196
Source: Newsweek
9-16-10
[Hirsh is the author of the newly published Capital Offense: How Washington’s Wise Men Turned America’s Future Over to Wall Street.]
...Recently, the National Science Foundation sent out a query asking economists and social scientists to draw up “grand challenge questions that are both foundational and transformative”—a request that one recipient, Andrew Lo, a highly regarded financial economist at MIT, says is a first in his experience. But one problem is that the economics profess
Source: HNN Staff
9-16-10
Maarja Krusten’s HNN article “Why Aren’t All the Nixon Tapes Now Available,” originally published in February 2009, has been cited in a legal petition for the National Archives and Records Administration to unseal former president Richard Nixon’s 1975 testimony to a grand jury. The petition was spearheaded by Stanley Kutler, another regular contributor to HNN and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin. Mr. Kutler has been invo
Source: Education Week
9-16-10
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on Tuesday launched what its leader ambitiously called “the start of a national conversation on formulating a new civil rights agenda for the 21st century,” but without significant input from mainstream civil rights organizations or the panel’s two Democratic members....
James T. Patterson, a professor of history emeritus at Brown University in Providence, R.I., spoke before the commission about “the hailstorm of criticism” that Daniel Patrick Moy
Source: The Armenian Weekly
9-15-10
On Sept. 12, Turkey voted in favor of constitutional amendments that could usher in an array of reforms and further curb the influence of the military. The 58 percent “yes” vote was touted as a victory for Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) ahead of the General Elections of 2011 and the Presidential Elections of 2012. But that’s the short—and oversimplified—version of the story....
“Once again the opposition underestimated the strength of AKP.
Source: The New Republic
9-15-10
[Jed Perl is the art critic for The New Republic.]
I know there are some communities within our technophile culture, I’m not sure how large or how small, that take a particular interest in technologies past. You see this in the vogue for Victoriana that has overtaken bohemian Brooklyn and its various outposts and colonies. Taxidermy is having a revival. Nineteenth-century men’s clothing and furnishings are all the rage. Enormous maps and charts, designed to hang in public school cl
