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: Press Release
5-6-10
Oxford University Press (OUP) is honored to have been selected by the Organization of American Historians to be the publisher of the Journal of American History and the Magazine of History.
“History lies at the very core of our publishing program and mission, and we therefore welcome the pre-eminent journal in American history and the innovative Magazine of History with open arms, and with many ideas about how we can work together to increase their already formidable influence,” n
Source: Jaime Glazov at FrontPageMag
5-6-10
[Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Russian, U.S. and Canadian foreign policy.]
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Harvey Klehr, Andrew Mellon Professor of Politics and History at Emory University. He is the author of the new book, The Communist Experience in America: A Political and Social History.
FP: Harvey Klehr, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
So what inspired you to write this new book, what
Source: NYT
5-5-10
EARLY in the first installment of “America: The Story of Us,” the 12-hour documentary series on the History cable channel that began on April 25 and covers 400 years of United States history, an actor depicting a British soldier bumps into another depicting Paul Revere, and the narrator Liev Schreiber says, “When revolution comes to North America, Revere will be at the center of it.”
Viewers might be momentarily confused when the screen goes dark, signaling a commercial break, only
Source: WaPo
5-6-10
When the Library of Congress announced this month that it had recently acquired Twitter's entire archive of public tweets, the snarkosphere quickly broke out the popular refrain "Nobody cares that you just watched 'Lost.' " Television tweets are always the shorthand by which naysayers express how idiotic they find Twitter, the microblogging site on which millions of users share their thoughts and activities in 140 characters or fewer.
"If tweets are in, how about crai
Source: Laredo Sun
5-4-10
From the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico to Washington, critics charge that the Obama administration didn't act fast enough after the April 20 oil rig explosion and subsequent spill.
Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh called the incident "Obama's Hurricane Katrina." A Palm Beach Post editorial stated that Obama "acted way too much like George Bush after Katrina.
" A Washington Examiner headline read: "Gulf oil spill becoming Obama's
Source: Spiegel Online
5-4-10
Antony Beevor, D-Day: The Battle for Normandy (Viking, 2009)D-Day may have been the beginning of the end of Germany's campaign of horror during World War II. But a new book by British historian Antony Beevor makes it clear that the"greatest generation" wasn't above committing a few war crimes of its own.
It was the first crime William E. Jones had ever committed, which was probably why he could still remember it well so many years later. He and other soldi
Source: Financial Post
5-1-10
Niall Ferguson’s resumé could put you to sleep. He’s a senior fellow here, a professor of this or that there. But despite hanging out with the elbow-patch crowd, this Scottish intellectual and author smoothly blends history, finance and politics all into one understandable package. At times he is humorous, at others frightful. His relationship with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-Dutch intellectual who has a death threat looming over her head after she was critical
Source: Radio Free Europe
5-4-10
Thirty years after his death and nearly 20 years after the disintegration of the Yugoslavia he helped create, Yugoslavia's longtime ruler Josip Broz Tito still commands affection and respect, a unifying figure in a now deeply divided region.
RFE/RL correspondent Ahto Lobjakas spoke with Sabrina Ramet, professor of political science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, a senior research associate with the Center for the Study of Civil War in Oslo, and the aut
Source: AFP
5-4-10
PARIS — Historians and anti-racism campaigners are to urge the countries that oversaw and profited from the Atlantic slave trade to recognise it as a crime against humanity, opening the way for reparations.
Next week, activists are to send a letter to the leaders of Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain asking them to recognise the trade as an historic injustice a century and a half after it ended.
They have already convinced France to do so.
Source: WaPo
5-3-10
When Virginia and the rest of the nation set out to mark the 100th anniversary of the Civil War in 1961, the party got off to a rocky start.
Intricate plans were made to mark the military conquests of the Confederate and Union armies, but little attention was paid to the experience of individuals -- soldiers, civilians and slaves.
A massive reenactment of the Battle of Bull Run at Manassas was marred by too little water and too few bathrooms. Most jarringly, some adopte
Source: NYT
4-30-10
Some people try to forecast the future. Angus Maddison devoted his life to forecasting the past.
Professor Maddison, a British-born economic historian with a compulsion for quantification, spent many of his 83 years calculating the size of economies over the last three millenniums. In one study he estimated the size of the world economy in A.D. 1 as about one five-hundredth of what it was in 2008.
He died on April 24 at a hospital in Paris after a long illness, his daug
Source: NYT
4-30-10
Typically, encounters between British prime ministers and their political enemies here are immature exercises in name-calling in front of baying rows of overstimulated legislators in the weekly contest known as prime minister’s questions.
The televised debates among the three men competing to run the country after next week’s election were meant to provide a corrective to that, replacing the histrionics with gravity and purpose. But their main effect, it seems, has been not to get p
Source: Medieval News
4-28-10
A new research collaboration involving historians from Cambridge is to examine how early medieval societies used the past to form ideas about identity which continue to affect our own present.
The project will cover six centuries of western European history, from 400 to 1000 AD, and will investigate how earlier cultural traditions, coupled with other sources, such as the Bible, influenced the formation of state identities following the deposition of the last Roman emperor in the Wes
Source: Medieval News
4-29-10
An interdisciplinary conference to be held at the University of Notre Dame this fall is making a final call for papers to explore the issue surrounding similarities between late-medieval Iberia and its colonies in the New World. “From Iberian Kingdoms to Atlantic Empires: Spain, Portugal, and the New World, 1250-1700” is being hosted by the university's Nanovic Institute for European Studies and will take place on September 17-18, 2010.
The conference organizers hope that their inte
Source: Medieval News
4-28-10
William Caferro, a professor of history at Vanderbilt University, and Sharon E.J. Gerstel, Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology at UCLA, have been named 2010 Fellows by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
The two highly regarded medieval scholars are among 180 recipients in the United States and Canada selected for the coveted fellowship. Artists, scholars and scientists in all fields are eligible to apply for the fellowships, which are awarded on the basis of impre
Source: Foreign Policy Journal
4-16-10
Dr George Barnsby, who died on April 11 at the age of 91 in Wolverhampton, was a leading radical activist and historian of the working class movement in the Black Country. Born in London in a working class family, his father died he was only three years old. Now his mother had the sole responsibility to take care of her two infant sons in dire circumstances. The vicissitudes of his early life made George aware that the station in life of many people was determined by their social and economic st
Source: Guardian (UK)
4-29-10
[Jonathan Jones writes on art for the Guardian and is on the jury for the 2009 Turner prize]
Someone has to put in a good word for the historian Orlando Figes in the affair of the Amazon comments, and it may as well be me. As Tacitus wrote long ago, I am free from the usual pressures to be biased.
I have no connections with university departments, nor have I met any of the feuding scholars. I am, however, their target audience: a general reader who has found a great dea
Source: Houston Chronicle
4-28-10
Historians complained of so many problems with the State Board of Education's proposed social studies curriculum standards that they urged Texas lawmakers Wednesday to ask the board to start over.
With severe budget projections facing Texas next year, it makes sense to postpone the $800 million price tag for new history books, some legislators said....
A dozen historians and other experts took aim at the proposal, which the education board plans to adopt May 21.
Source: AOL News
4-26-10
LOS ANGELES (April 26) -- The late historian Stephen E. Ambrose rose to fame on the strength of an authorized biography that he claimed included details from "hundreds of hours" of interviews with former President Dwight David Eisenhower.
But Richard Rayner, a writer for The New Yorker, reports today that during his research Ambrose apparently had only limited access to Eisenhower, and that archived datebooks and other records conflict with some of the times Ambrose claime
Source: NJ.com
4-24-10
A literary mystery that has lingered since the Civil War has apparently been solved by a pair of professors from The College of New Jersey.
Their findings ended up as a new book, "A Secession Crisis Enigma," by Daniel Crofts, a professor of history who turned to David Holmes, professor of statistics, while looking for an answer to a longstanding question.
They wanted to determine who was the author of "The Diary of a Public Man," which was published
