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: BBC News
9-7-10
Nearly three quarters of people believe retirement as we currently understand it will not be possible in the future, a BBC Newsnight poll has suggested.
Some 70% of the 1,000 asked thought it would not be feasible for people to stop work then live on a pension for up to 30 years, the ComRes survey found....
Jeremy Black, professor of history at the University of Exeter, said younger people who were yet to retire were having to adjust to a dramatic change in fortunes.
Source: JHU Gazette
8-30-10
Anthony John R. Russell-Wood, the Herbert Baxter Adams Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University and a widely published expert in the history and culture of pre-Columbian and colonial Latin America, died Aug. 13 at his Lutherville home after a brief illness.
A faculty member at Johns Hopkins since 1971, Russell-Wood, 70, was a prolific author and one of the world’s foremost historians of Brazil and the Portuguese seaborne empire.His voracious appetite
Source: Deutsche Welle
8-28-10
A plan existed to bring the 1968 Olympic Games to Berlin, which was divided by then East and West Germany, a sports historian said Saturday. But the Allies, along with the West German government, would not allow it.
Christopher Young, who also heads German studies at the University of Cambridge, told the online edition of daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel that the idea was the brainchild of eventual Chancellor Willy Brandt.
"It was somewhat of a crazy idea of (the t
Source: NYT
9-6-10
Each year, 36 young lawyers obtain the most coveted credential in American law: a Supreme Court clerkship. Clerking for a justice is a glittering capstone on a résumé that almost always includes outstanding grades at a top law school, service on a law review and a prestigious clerkship with a federal appeals court judge.
Justice Clarence Thomas apparently has one additional requirement. Without exception, the 84 clerks he has chosen over his two decades on the court all first traine
Source: The Scotsman (UK)
3-15-10
PROFESSOR James F McMillan, Richard Pares Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh, has died at the age of 61. He was an outstanding scholar, an inspirational teacher, a brilliant academic manager and a wonderful colleague: the word "collegial" might have been coined to describe him.
His death robs the historical profession of a bright star whose warmth and humanity won him so many friends, in Edinburgh and many other places.
Jim McMillan showed ear
Source: Steven J. Zipperstein at the CHE
9-5-10
[Steven J. Zipperstein is a professor of Jewish culture and history at Stanford University. He is the author, most recently, of Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing (Yale University Press, 2009).]
Tony Judt, who died last month at the age of 62 after suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease, was an unlikely celebrity academic. He was soft-spoken, dressed much like a graduate student, rarely appeared on television or radio, and derided postmodernism and ethnic stud
Source: CHE
9-5-10
In Greenwich Village, not far from where Bob Dylan got his start—but in a chic Italian bistro, not a smoky dive like the late, lamented Gaslight Cafe—the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz is choking up, recalling when Dylan's new recordings began to mean something to him again, after he'd drifted away from Dylan in the 1980s.
It was 1994, and Wilentz's father, Eli, who had run or co-run the Village's Eighth Street Bookshop, a center of New York literary life from the 1940s until it c
Source: CNN.com
8-26-10
Pressure continues to mount on President Obama to select Elizabeth Warren as the nation's first consumer financial protection regulator.
Warren, 61, has become something of a cause célèbre as the administration's top pick to run the new agency charged with protecting consumers from abusive mortgage and credit card practices....
"The administration is hesitating because they're faced with the traditional problem that Obama has faced," said Julian Zelizer, a pro
Source: NYT
8-27-10
David J. Weber, whose groundbreaking works on the American Southwest under Spain and Mexico opened new territory for historians, died on Aug. 20 in Gallup, N.M. He was 69 and lived in Dallas and Ramah, N.M.
The cause was complications from multiple myeloma, said his wife, Carol.
When Mr. Weber began writing about the history of the borderlands between present-day Mexico and the United States, the subject was regarded as a backwater.
“United States historian
Source: NYT
8-26-10
Franz Schurmann, an expert on China during the cold war and a globe-trotting professor who helped found the Pacific News Service, a provider of news and commentary about Asia, died on Aug. 20 at his home in San Francisco. He was 84. The cause was complications of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, his wife, Sandy Close, said.
Mr. Schurmann, who was fluent in as many as 12 languages and read a variety of foreign papers daily, taught history and sociology at the University of Calif
Source: BBC News
8-24-10
A Bath historian is hoping to give an admiral's wife - who tended to a wounded Lord Nelson - "her rightful place in history".
Dr Elaine Chalus has won a major research grant of more than £100,000 to investigate diaries kept by Elizabeth Wynne....
Dr Chalus will use her funding from the British Academy to bring to light more than 40 volumes of Elizabeth's diaries, most of which have never been published....
Source: John B. Judis in The New Republic
8-25-10
[John B. Judis is a senior editor of The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.]In the week since my story on “the unnecessary fall of Barack Obama” came out, I have been accused of being “hysterical” and
Source: Center for Labor Renewal
8-25-10
Suddenly Staughton Lynd is all the rage. Again. In the last 18 months, Lynd has published two new books, a third that's a reprint of an earlier work, plus a memoir co-authored with his wife Alice. In addition, a portrait of his life as an activist through 1970 by Carl Mirra of Adelphi University has been published, with another book about his work after 1970 by Mark Weber of Kent State University due soon.
In an epoch of imperial hubris and corporate class wa
Source: Telegraph (UK)
8-24-10
Bryan McNerney, who presented several successful history series on ITV, has been accused of blocking a footpath through the grounds of his country home.
But the 57-year-old insists that a mistake by a map maker half a century ago wrongly showed the right of way through the property - ironically called "Garden of Eden".
Mr McNerney and his wife Cate, a nurse, bought the property set in wooded grounds in the village of Banham, near Attlebrough, Norfolk, three y
Source: SF Chronicle
8-23-10
Franz Schurmann, a sociologist and historian who was an influential scholar of modern China and a co-founder of Pacific News Service in 1970, died Friday at his San Francisco home of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, his family said. He was 84.
Mr. Schurmann taught at UC Berkeley for 38 years and headed its Center for Chinese Studies. He spoke a dozen languages and wrote more than a half dozen books on China and U.S. foreign policy. His writings early in the Cold War accurately
Source: NYT
8-21-10
David A. Moss, an economic and policy historian at the Harvard Business School, has spent years studying income inequality. While he has long believed that the growing disparity between the rich and poor was harmful to the people on the bottom, he says he hadn’t seen the risks to the world of finance, where many of the richest earn their great fortunes. Now, as he studies the financial crisis of 2008, Mr. Moss says that even Wall Street may have something serious to fear from inequality — namely, another crisis. The possible connection between economic inequality and financial crises came to Mr. Moss about a year ago, when he was at his research center in Cambridge, Mass. A colleague suggested that he overlay two different graphs — one plotting financial regulation and bank failures, and the other charting trends in income inequality. Mr. Moss says he was surprised by what he saw. The timelines danced in sync with each other. Income disparities between rich and poor widened as government regulations eased and bank failures rose. “I could hardly believe how tight the fit was — it was a stunning correlation,” he said. “And it began to raise the question of whether there are causal links between financial deregulation, economic inequality and instability in the financial sector. Are all of these things connected?”
Source: Boston Globe
8-15-10
August in New England is the height of tomato season, when fat red beefsteaks, purple and green heirlooms, and tiny, sweet Sungolds beckon at the farmers market. They’re wonderful in crisp salads, as refreshing gazpachos, and all on their own. Perhaps most of all, tomatoes are synonymous with Italian cuisine.
Without the tomato, pizza would be bread and cheese, spaghetti would seem naked. The North End without red sauce? Impossible. But the tomato’s role in Italian food is fairly re
Source: City Journal
8-19-10
[Daniel J. Flynn, author of A Conservative History of the American Left, blogs at www.flynnfiles.com.]
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, as Joseph Stalin entered the final years of his reign of terror in the Soviet Union, twentysomething Howard Zinn served as a foot soldier in the Communist Party of the United States of America—this according to recently declassified FBI files. Zinn, the Marxist historian and progressive hero who died in January, may also have lied to the FBI about
Source: Debbie Ann Doyle at the AHA Blog
8-23-10
[Debbie Ann Doyle works with the Professional Division and staffs the Task Force on Disability and the LGBTQ Historians Task Force.]
David J. Weber, historian of the Borderlands, the American West, and Latin America and vice-president of the American Historical Association’s Professional Division, died on Friday, August 20, after a long struggle with multiple myeloma.
Weber was Robert and Nancy Dedman professor of history and founding director of the William P. Clements
Source: NYT
8-23-10
For professors, publishing in elite journals is an unavoidable part of university life. The grueling process of subjecting work to the up-or-down judgment of credentialed scholarly peers has been a cornerstone of academic culture since at least the mid-20th century.
Now some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of
