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: The Root
8-19-10
Dr. William Jelani Cobb, one of the country's most visible African-American intellectuals, is an associate professor and chair of the history department at Spelman College in Atlanta. His meditation on the hip-hop aesthetic, To the Break of Dawn, is one of the most important texts on this cultural phenomenon.
In his latest book, The Substance of Hope, Cobb turns his attention to the 2008 election, the political climate preceding the election and his own involvement as a delegate for
Source: FrontPageMag
8-23-10
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.
FP: Victor Davis Hanson, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
I would like to talk to you today about the proposed mega-mosque next to Ground Zero and how Obama is handling it.
First, what do you make of the controversy surrounding the mosq
Source: NYT
8-22-10
In baseball terms you might describe it as a walk-off hit deep into extra innings. Dorothy Jane Mills, below, the widow of the revered baseball historian Harold Seymour, has been belatedly recognized by Oxford University Press as co-author, along with Mr. Seymour, of three landmark scholarly works on the history of baseball, Publishers Weekly reported. Tim Bent, Oxford’s executive editor, said that Ms. Mills, 81, formerly Dorothy Z. Seymour, would be given formal credit and that her name would n
Source: NYRBlog
8-17-10
On a recent trip to Brazil, I struck up a conversation with Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, one of Brazil’s finest historians and anthropologists. The talk turned to the two subjects she has studied most—racism and national identity....Robert Darnton: Brazil’s emergence as a major world player provokes questions about its national identity, some of them hostile, such as the one you said you encountered on your last trip to the US: How can you live in a country overrun with favelas and
Source: Stuff (NZ)
8-18-10
Respected Ngati Porou academic and historian Te Kapunga Matemoana, or "Koro" Dewes, has passed away at the age of 80.
He died from cancer yesterday in Te Araroa.
Mr Dewes was a pioneering educationalist in the 1960s and 70s.
He started in adult education at Auckland University and then laid the foundations for Victoria University's Maori studies department, before returning home to the East Coast and helping form Te Runanga o Ngati Porou.
Source: The Scotsman
8-18-10
NAZI claims that Hitler was a hero of the Great War have been debunked as a propaganda myth by a Scottish historian.
Throughout his life, Hitler was portrayed as a courageous soldier who fought in some of the fiercest battles of the First World War and was decorated twice with the Iron Cross for his bravery.
But in a new book, Dr Thomas Weber has used material uncovered for the first time in German archives that reveals a dramatically different picture.
Dr Weber
Source: Lee White at the National Coalition for History
8-6-10
In July, the National Coalition for History (NCH), and ten other NCH members joined forces with over 20 educational organizations representing other K-12 academic disciplines in issuing a statement to Congress and the Administration calling for the continued robust funding of core academic subjects including history. This includes maintenance of discrete budget lines—such as the Teaching American History gr
Source: OAH
8-12-10
In conjunction with the recently adopted strategic plan, the Executive Board of the Organization of American Historians has enacted a simplified dues structure for individual members. After studying the dues structures of other learned societies, the Board concluded that the organization needed fewer membership categories. The new structure is not only simpler, but creates a lower-priced membership category for professional historian
Source: abc.net.au
8-17-10
A historian studying the life of Ludwig Leichhardt has begun collating findings about the famous explorer.
National Museum of Australia spokesman Dr Darrell Lewis has been tracking Leichhardt's trail through Queensland and central Australia.
Leichhardt and his expedition party disappeared in 1848 and Dr Lewis has been looking for trees marked with an "L" to trace the journey.
Source: New Yorker
8-16-10
The historian Sean Wilentz, the author of “The Rise of American Democracy” and “The Age of Reagan,” has a long-standing interest in the songs of Bob Dylan, going back to his childhood in Greenwich Village. His father and uncle ran the Eighth Street Bookshop, an important gathering place for the Beats and other downtown literary spirits; it was in his uncle’s apartment, above the store, that Dylan first met Allen Ginsberg. Wilentz has synthesized his memories, musical impressions, and historical
Source: NYT
8-17-10
Bernard M. W. Knox, an authority on the works of Sophocles, a prolific scholar and the founding director of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies, died July 22 at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 95.
The cause was a heart attack, said his son, MacGregor.
An American born and raised in Britain, Bernard Knox led a life as richly textured as the classics he interpreted for modern readers. After studying classics at Cambridge, he fought with the Republican forces in the Spa
Source: Guardian (UK)
7-9-10
Basil Davidson, who has died aged 95, was a radical journalist in the great anti-imperial tradition, and became a distinguished historian of pre-colonial Africa. An energetic and charismatic figure, he was dropped behind enemy lines during the second world war and joined that legendary band of British soldiers who fought with the partisans in Yugoslavia and in Italy. Years later, he was the first reporter to travel with the guerrillas fighting the Portuguese in Angola and Guinea-Bissau, and brou
Source: Washington Times
8-16-10
Young and strapping, the 57 Irish immigrants began grueling work in the summer of 1832 on the Philadelphia and Columbia railroad. Within weeks, all were dead of cholera.
Or were they murdered?
Two skulls unearthed at a probable mass grave near Philadelphia this month showed signs of violence, including a possible bullet hole. Another pair of skulls found earlier at the woodsy site also displayed traumas, seeming to confirm the suspicions of two historians leading the ar
Source: Telegraph (UK)
8-13-10
Professor Ray Beachey, who died on July 10 aged 94, encouraged the hopes of a generation of East African leaders as head of History at Makerere University in Uganda during the 1950s and early 1960s.
A quiet believer in the benefits of the British Empire, he liked to refer to Makere as a crossroads of the world. His students included Benedicto Kiwanuka, Uganda's first prime minister; Yusuf Lule, the country's provisional president in 1979; and Mwai Kibaki, the current Kenyan preside
Source: Guardian (UK)
8-8-10
[Geoffrey Wheatcroft is a British journalist and contributor to the Guardian.]
Tony Judt, in Manhattan, in 2008. In the summer of that year he learned he had Lou Gehrig's disease, a variant of motor neurone disease, that left him paralysed. Photograph: Lisa Carpenter
In the 1960s, Cambridge produced a remarkable generation of historians – David Cannadine, Linda Colley and Simon Schama among others – but one name acquired a particular resonance. Well before his death at
Source: Rupert Cornwell for the Independent (UK)
8-12-10
[Rupert Cornwell is Washington correspondent for the Independent.]
I never met Tony Judt but I will miss him, badly. First and foremost of course there's the loss of his historical scholarship, his marvellous books and his evident relish of intellectual combat. Our lives, geographically at least, were also not dissimilar. We both lived for long spells on the continent of Europe before settling, by accident or design, in the US.
Then there were the two dozen or so essays
Source: Mark LeVine for Al Jazeera
8-12-10
[Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine and senior visiting researcher at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden. His most recent books are Heavy Metal Islam (Random House) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books).]
New York University (NYU) professor and internationally renowned historian Tony Judt died last week of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known in the US as Lou Gehrig's disease after the famous baseball pla
Source: AOL News
8-11-10
(Aug. 11) -- With illegal immigration an increasingly potent issue, some Republican senators are proposing changes to the 14th Amendment, starting with the first sentence -- the one that guarantees citizenship to anyone and everyone born on U.S. soil, including the children of parents here unlawfully. Nearly 150 years ago, however, it was the GOP that had to fight to get the amendment in place.
When the amendment was ratified in 1868, its citizenship clause was a necessity that deal
Source: Anchorage Daily News
8-10-10
From Sean Cockerham in Anchorage –
I spoke to Stephen Haycox, author and professor of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage, after the news of Ted Stevens’ death.
“I’d put him pretty much at the top of the people who have helped shape Alaska. He’s right up there with James Wickersham and Sheldon Jackson and Bob Bartlett,” Haycox said....
Haycox called Stevens as big of a presence in defining modern Alaska as anyone.
“Now that presence i
Source: Truthout
8-11-10
For those not familiar with his work, former Army Col. Andrew Bacevich might seem an unlikely figure to spearhead some of the most incisive criticism of American foreign and national security policy available in print. But Bacevich - now a professor of history and international relations at Boston University - has built a career combining his on-the-ground knowledge of military culture with his skill for writing rigorous but accessible analyses like his 2008 bestseller"
