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: HNN Staff
6-7-10
Recent Controversy
Williams steps down from R.I. Supreme Court
Former R.I. chief justice Williams cited in divorce case involving his ex-driver
6-7-10
by HNN Staff
Frank Williams, past Chief Justice of Rhode Island, has twice been found to have used language in articles about Lincoln that bear a strong resemblance to others' work.
Source: WaPo
6-7-10
Earl Taylor has spent 31 years teaching that "the Founding Fathers have answers to nearly every problem we have in America today." Only in recent months has he found so many eager students.
Two years ago, Taylor, who is president of the National Center for Constitutional Studies, made about 35 trips to speak to small church groups and political gatherings. This year, he has received so many requests that he enlisted 15 volunteer instructors, who are on pace to hold more t
Source: Charlottesville Daily Progress
6-7-10
Norman A. Graebner, a former University of Virginia professor who was known for his love of teaching and esteemed for his knowledge on American diplomatic history, died on May 10 at the Colonnades in Charlottesville. He was 94.
Graebner, who was a UVa faculty member from 1967 to 1986, was the recipient of several academic accolades, including being named the Edward R. Stettinius Professor of Modern American History and the Randolph P. Compton Professor of history. The revered histor
Source: El Paso Times
6-7-10
The murder rate in Juárez rivals the most dangerous cities in the world and is more typical of regions where government has collapsed, an expert on homicides said.
The number of murders in Juárez is more typical of regions during a civil war, a revolution or other form of a state breakdown, said Randolph Roth, a historian who studies homicides.
"Whenever you have a real struggle for power -- civil wars, revolutions -- organized gangs can get very, very bad like you
Source: AP
6-7-10
Nobody led.
Not the president of the United States. Not the chief executive of BP. Not Congress, federal agencies or local elected officials. From its fiery beginning, the Gulf oil spill has stood as a concentrated reminder of why, over four decades, Americans have lost faith in nearly every national institution....
"This spill, it's another blow to the body politic," says John Baick, professor of history at Western New England College in Springfield, Mass. It
Source: CHE
5-30-10
When Kiron K. Skinner isn't explaining history and public policy on television and radio shows, she is likely to be busy running the international-relations program at Carnegie Mellon University. Or she may be serving on think-tank or policy-advisory panels or traveling to California for her work as a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Now she has another project to squeeze in, one that could affect how future generations will understand the troubled opening years o
Source: KGUN 9 (AZ)
6-5-10
"Occupied America." It's the title of a textbook at the center of a new Arizona law that targets ethnic studies programs in public schools. That textbook is used by TUSD in an ethic studies class. So, what exactly does "occupied" mean?
Rudy Acuòa, Ph.D., is the book's author. He says the word "occupied" means "to have a history" which he says his book teaches. Acuna says "occupied" does not mean "to take over." Hence, the r
Source: Texas Tech Today
6-4-10
While politicians, law enforcement officials and citizens of every background stand divided over a recent Arizona immigration law designed to secure the state’s borders from illegal immigrants, a Texas Tech expert on immigration and border history says that the law is no different than the Repatriation Act of the 1930s or Operation Wetback of the 1950s.
Miguel Levario, an assistant professor of history, says that even since the days of the Gold Rush when Mexican-American residents o
Source: Foreign Policy
6-3-10
"The military has adapted tremendously." So began Brigadier General H.R. McMaster's American Enterprise Institute talk the other day, begging the question: "Since when?" McMaster's point is familiar to many Best Defenders but serves as an important reminder of how much the military has evolved in a short time.
McMaster harkened back to the 1990s, when we "took a break from history." The Gulf War encouraged a false sense of confidence among our armed f
Source: Globe and Mail
6-3-10
Israel’s good relations with Turkey look to become another casualty of Monday’s deadly boarding of a humanitarian flotilla bound for Gaza. The only question, analysts say, is whether the rift will lead to a more radically polarized region, or force Israel to retreat from its blockade of Gaza.
“The steps that [Israel] will undertake in the coming days will be determining its position in the region,” was the ominous warning issued Wednesday by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s Prime Mini
Source: Dakota Voice
6-2-10
South Dakota gubernatorial candidate Gordon Howie announced today that he has asked former Sioux Falls mayoral candidate and alderman Kermit Staggers to be his running mate in his bid for governor of South Dakota on the Republican ticket.Howie held a meeting in the Best Western Ramkota this afternoon to make the announcement; the move was announced earlier this morning in Sioux Falls.Staggers has
Source: Guardian (UK)
5-30-10
Niall Ferguson, the British historian most closely associated with a rightwing, Eurocentric vision of western ascendancy, is to work with the Conservatives to overhaul history in schools.
Speaking at the Guardian Hay festival, the Harvard-based academic, whose historiography is often considered to be an apology for imperialism, laid out his ideas for a vision of the school history curriculum in which, he said, children should be taught that the "big story" of the last 500
Source: NYT
6-2-10
President Obama is supposed to leave Washington in 10 days for Indonesia, Australia and Guam, but with oil still gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, some in the White House are wondering whether the weeklong trip should be scrubbed....
“This has hijacked his entire legislative agenda,” said Douglas Brinkley, a historian at Rice University who has written about Jimmy Carter, whose presidency was consumed by the Iran hostage crisis. “The White House felt they were on a roll. They were lo
Source: Guardian (UK)
6-2-10
Christian and Muslim attempts to draw parallels between the tensions of today and the crusades of almost 1,000 years ago are a distortion and manipulation of history, according to historian Tom Asbridge.
Speaking at the Guardian Hay festival today, Asbridge, author of two books on the crusades, argued that the modern belief that the Christian and Muslim worlds have been "inevitably predicated towards conflict" since the crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099 is not based on hist
Source: Jay Driskell in an Open Letter
5-31-10
Dear Colleague,
As you are probably aware, this year’s Annual Meeting in San Diego was disrupted by a boycott of the Manchester Grand Hyatt – one of the hotels in which the meeting was headquartered.
As you might also know, the AHA decided at its 2009 Business Meeting that it would not honor the boycott despite the hotel owner’s anti-worker policies and his support for the discriminatory Proposition 8. The AHA Council justified this decision by stating that pulling
Source: Jewish Telegraphic Agency
6-1-10
Lila Weinberg, a Chicago historian, author, teacher and editor, has died.
Weinberg, who died May 29 at the age of 91 from complications of cancer, collaborated with her late husband, Arthur, on six books on social history, including two on attorney Clarence Darrow. One of the books, "Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned," spent 19 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list in 1957. Arthur Weinberg died in 1989.
A resident of Chicago's Hyde Park neighborh
Source: YourNabe.com
5-27-10
The Queens borough president’s office will announce its pick for Queens historian, who will preserve the borough’s legacy Tuesday in Kew Gardens, a spokesman for Helen Marshall said.
Marshall’s office had put out the word in the spring that it was searching for a Queens resident to keep track of the borough’s history.
The position does not pay, but the selected winner could be required to make appearances on local television or in documentaries. The historian will also
Source: Laurie Penny at The New Statesman
6-1-10
[Laurie Penny is a writer, journalist and feminist activist from London.]
The Tories want our children to be proud of Britain's imperial past. When right-wing colonial historian Niall Ferguson told the Hay Festival last weekend that he would like to revise the school history curriculum to include "the rise of western domination of the world" as the "big story" of the last 500 years, Education Secretary Michael Gove leapt to his feet to praise Ferguson's "exc
Source: The Atlantic
6-1-10
Elegantly dressed in a three-piece suit, gray hair framing his square-rimmed glasses, Richard Rabinowitz once met me on a blustery spring afternoon outside the New-York Historical Society, the 206-year-old institution where he has helped shape the way that hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers see their city's past.
Best known as curator of Slavery in New York, an acclaimed NYHS exhibit that exposed the ties between enslaved African labor and New York City's wealth, the 65-year-old h
