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: PBS
9-10-10
ABERNETHY:...We get some perspective now on all this from Scott Appleby, professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and an expert on interfaith relations. Professor Appleby, welcome.PROFESSOR SCOTT APPLEBY (University of Notre Dame): Thank you.ABERNETHY: Anti-minority sentiment and actions in American history have not exactly been unusual. Is what’s going on now different?APPLEBY: I
Source: Voice of Russia
9-13-10
The Russian historian Professor Andrei Sakharov has dismissed as a hoax reports from Kholmogory near the White Sea about the discovery of the remains of the Russian Emperor Ivan VI, who was killed on 1764 at 24 nearly 23 years after being deposed....
Source: LegalTimes
9-14-10
A group of historians is asking the Washington federal district court to exercise its “inherent supervisory authority” to unseal the 1975 grand jury testimony of former President Richard Nixon.
Historian Stanley Kutler, the American Historical Association, American Society for Legal History, Organization of American Historians, and Society of American Archivists filed a petition yesterday seeking the transcript of Nixon’s testimony on June 23 and June 25, 1975, and related documents
Source: NPR
9-13-10
[Michel Martin is the host of Tell Me More.]
She probably won't thank me for mentioning it all this time later, but I think I finally understand what Michelle Obama was talking about during the presidential campaign when she said that for the first time in her adult life, she was really proud of her country.
What she was talking about, I think, was finally being able to experience that feeling you get when you fall in love. When you allow yourself, like in those trust
Source: The Atlantic
8-31-10
Back in 1958, the Atlantic published "The Lesson of Iraq," by a young Harvard professor named William R. Polk. The breaking Iraqi news that then required explanation was the military coup that overthrew the Hashemite monarchy and created the Republic, which Saddam Hussein would later control.
Writing at a time when most of the world was unrecognizably different from now -- tens of millions of Chinese were starving to death during the famines of Mao's Great Leap Forward, t
Source: Ottawa Citizen
9-12-10
As national archivist during the advent of the Internet age, Jean-Pierre Wallot acted as conservator of Canada's collective memory -- from Karsh's photographs to La famille Plouffe, a Quebec TV drama in the 1950s.
Wallot, who ran the National Archives of Canada for 12 years beginning in 1985, died of cancer Aug. 30 at the General campus of The Ottawa Hospital. He was 75.
The archives, now called Library and Archives Canada (LAC), were spread over 14 buildings throughout
Source: Guardian (UK)
9-10-10
Throughout history, says Matt Fishburn, author of Burning Books, a chronicle of the phenomenon through the ages, most official book-burnings have been about "control", to announce "what a regime stands for". Like previous such ceremonies, the Nazi burnings (which Fishburn said, on their 75th anniversary in 2008, have since become "a cultural benchmark, a popular analogy and a common insult – to burn a book today is to be a 'fascist'") were, essentially, about "
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
9-10-10
Controversial historian David Irving has hit back at claims his guided history tours of Polish death camps are 'sick'.
Claiming that it is the Polish authorities who are 'tasteless' for their promotion of Auschwitz as a 'Disney-style' tourist site, Mr Irving defended his own trip which is fully-booked with American and British tourists.
Critics have slammed the trip Mr Irving is organising to Hitler's headquarters and the notorious death camp Treblinka, referring to it
Source: AFP
9-13-10
Indian academics have long dreamt of resurrecting Nalanda University, one of the world's oldest seats of learning which has lain in ruins for 800 years since being razed by foreign invaders.
Now the chance of intellectual life returning to Nalanda has come one step closer after the parliament in New Delhi last month passed a bill approving plans to re-build the campus as a symbol of India's global ambitions.
Historians believe that the university, in the eastern state o
Source: BBC Magazine
9-13-10
The defiance of Britain as it endured eight months of German bombing 70 years ago is etched on the collective memory and immortalised in the phrase "Blitz spirit". But does this image of national unity tell the whole story?...
Although there was some panic and chaos in those first few nights, says Juliet Gardiner, author of The Blitz: The British Under Attack, the term "Blitz spirit" typifies two qualities that emerged - endurance and defiance....
De
Source: NYT
9-14-10
...While many of the scientists who made atom bombs during the cold war became famous, the men who filmed what happened when those bombs were detonated made up a secret corps....
The images are getting “seared into people’s imaginations,” said Robert S. Norris, author of “Racing for the Bomb” and an atomic historian. They bear witness, he added, “to extraordinary and terrifying power.”...
When originally made, the films served as vital sources of information for scienti
Source: NYT
9-11-10
...[P]owerlessness in the face of economic free fall has emerged as a hallmark of the modern presidency. While Mr. Obama is facing a more acute economic crisis moment than his predecessors, characterized by a near depression, the truth is that every president going back to Jimmy Carter, at one point or another, has had to campaign or govern in an environment dominated by the same cyclical and stubborn factors — recession, unemployment, rising energy costs. And so perhaps Mr. Obama’s presidency,
Source: Telegraph (UK)
9-9-10
David Irving, the controversial historian, has outraged war veterans and survivors’ groups with a tour of sites related to the Nazi occupation of Poland.
Irving will be shadowed by the Polish secret service as he takes a week-long guided trip round various sites related to the German occupation of Poland, including a trip to the notorious SS-run camp Treblinka, where more than 800,000 Jews died between 1942 and 1943.
The £1,500-a-head tour, organised by Irving’s Focal
Source: Austin American-Statesman
9-9-10
Historian William H. Goetzmann, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1967, and emeritus professor at the University of Texas died on September 7, 2010. His book Exploration and Empire , a study of the 19th century scientific exploration of the American West, won both the Pulitzer and Parkman prizes in history in 1967. His book on the art of the American West, The West of the Imagination co-authored with son William N. Goetzmann was the subject of a PBS television series by the same name in 1985. His
Source: The Atlantic
9-9-10
Nearly half a century after he released his first album, Bob Dylan continues to release new albums (including, last year, a compilation of Christmas songs) and tour the country playing concerts. Sean Wilentz, an American history professor at Princeton University and"historian-in-residence" at BobDylan.com, traces Dylan's influence on American culture in his new book, Bob Dy
Source: Montreal Gazette
9-6-10
An old wooden box excavated from beneath an Arctic cairn is being flown unopened today to Ottawa from the Nunavut hamlet of Gjoa Haven.
The Nunavut government launched the excavation after an Inuit family relayed oral history suggesting that the cairn contained records from the ill-fated 1845 expedition led by Sir John Franklin in search of the Northwest Passage.
But Canadian historian Kenn Harper, who has spent months researching the cairn, says the box will prove to c
Source: Harvard Crimson
9-7-10
After two unsuccessful searches to replace Harvard’s two endowed professorships in Latin American history, the history department will, for the second consecutive year, rely on visiting faculty to fill the two positions.
While the history department awaits clearance from the University to launch another search in the spring, undergraduates hoping to write Latin American history theses and graduate students in the field continue to find creative ways to pursue their course of study.
Source: Independent (UK)
8-13-10
Historians turning their hands to fiction are all the rage. Since Alison Weir led the way in 2006, an ever-growing number of established non-fiction writers – Giles Milton, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Harry Sidebottom, Patrick Bishop, Ian Mortimer and myself included – have written historical novels.
So successful has been the experiment, with many of the books making the bestseller lists, that earlier this year Penguin bought two novels from Kate Williams, one of our finest young histo
Source: NYT
9-1-10
Reading about it online, you would think that the controversy over this year’s assigned reading for students new to Brooklyn College would have led to fevered student and faculty protests by now, making the campus the latest to be roiled by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But so far at least, the furor over the book — “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America,” by Moustafa Bayoumi, an associate English professor at Brooklyn College – is unfolding a bit lik
Source: LA Times
9-5-10
"No one ever seems to go in or out of that building," says Sean Wilentz, pointing out Princeton's Nassau Hall, a campus landmark old enough to have been held by the British during the Revolutionary War.
It's appropriate that this eminent American historian ("The Rise of American Democracy," "The Age of Reagan") is talking about spirits from the past and mysteries of the present. His new book, " Bob Dylan in America," (Doubleday) is about how
