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: AAAS Press Release
4-19-10
CAMBRIDGE, MA – The following historians are among the two hundred and twenty-nine leaders in the sciences, the humanities and the arts, business, public affairs, and the nonprofit sector who have been elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.· &nb
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
4-16-10
According to my research, every 11-year-old has read Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson. What I didn't know when I was 11—and, in fact, didn't know until a couple of weeks ago—is that Kidnapped was based on a true story. In 1728, a boy named James Annesley, the son of a baron, was kidnapped, forced into indentured servitude, escaped, and tried to prove his aristocratic lineage in the days before fingerprints, photographs, and DNA.
That true story is told in a new book, Birthright:
Source: Cutting Edge News
4-19-10
[Martin Barillas is senior correspondent for the Cutting Edge News.]Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia
created by anonymous editors, has reacted to disclosures in The Cutting Edge News that three of its editors were jointly seeking to water down or delete the history of IBM's involvement in the Holocaust. One editor has been banned and a second has been openly challenged for being “annoying” and revising an entry on IBM despite the open appear
Source: Guardian (UK)
4-18-10
MI5 secretly planted bugs in 10 Downing Street despite repeated official denials and they remained in place for more than 10 years during the tenure of five prime ministers.
The disclosure was to have been included in the official history of MI5 by the Cambridge historian, Christopher Andrew, published last year to mark the agency's 100th anniversary. It is believed to have been suppressed by senior Whitehall officials to protect the "public interest".
Bugs ar
Source: Guardian (UK)
4-18-10
An extraordinary literary "whodunnit" over the identity of a mystery reviewer who savaged works by some of Britain's leading academics on the Amazon website has culminated in a top historian admitting that the culprit was, in fact, his wife.
Prof Orlando Figes, 50, an expert on Russia and professor of history at Birkbeck College, London, made the startling revelation in a statement through lawyers following a week of intrigue, suspicion, legal threats and angry email excha
Source: Baltimore Sun
4-15-10
"I was amazed that people didn't take to the streets after the health care reform bill passed," said a politician of my acquaintance the other day. That got me to wondering about what has happened to the power of "the street" in affecting what governments do. It seems to have seeped away, stealthily, over the years. People can gather in great numbers in Washington, London and other capital cities, wave their signs, shout their slogans, voice their displeasure with war, aborti
Source: Tenured Radical
4-15-10
Andrew Apter, Professor of History and Anthropology, and Director, James S. Coleman African Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles: A study of slave coasts and hinterlands in Afro-American perspective.
Joshua Brown, Executive Director, American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, The Graduate Center, CUNY: The visual culture of the American Civil War.
Antoinette Burton, Professor of History and Bastian Professor of Global and Transnation
Source: Keith Erekson
4-14-10
Historians from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Texas at El Paso have written an Open Letter to the Texas State Board of Education. The letter identifies specific problems with the proposed changes to the state’s social studies standards and recommends that the board delay adoption of the standards in order to solicit additional feedback from “qualified, credentialed content experts from the state’s colleges and universities” and the
Source: Time Out Chicago
4-14-10
As an LGBT historian and an out man since the Stonewall era, John D’Emilio thought he’d seen it all—until he moved here in 1999. “The rainbow pylons on Halsted had just gone up the year before,” he says. “I am driving around and when I see these things I just began to laugh. I thought, Oh, my God, a city has actually put up markers saying this is a gay-friendly neighborhood. Who ever heard of such a thing?” For D’Emilio, 61, a professor of history and women’s and gender studies at the University
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
4-14-10
Gary Cross is a professor of history at Penn State University whose most recent book, "Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity," addresses just that.
"This trend has been building up over the last 50 years to where today it really is hard to see [role] models, to recognize these models of maturity," he said. "Men have, in effect, slowly and not always steadily rebelled against the role of being providers and being sacrificers."
The old
Source: NYT
4-13-10
Nearly seven hours of unreleased interviews with Jacqueline Kennedy, recorded just months after the death of President John F. Kennedy and intended for deposit in a future presidential library, will be released as a book, the publisher Hyperion said on Tuesday. The original interviews with Mrs. Kennedy took place in the spring of 1964 with the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. as part of an oral history project intended to preserve memories of Kennedy and his administration. In the seven inter
Source: The American Prospect
4-9-10
Natalie Zemon Daviswill be awarded the 2010 Holberg International Memorial Prize on June 9 for the way in which her work "shows how particular events can be narrated and analyzed so as to reveal deeper historical tendencies and underlying patterns of thought and action."
Davis describes her work as anthropological in nature. Rather than tell the political s
Source: Newsweek
4-9-10
Stewart Rhodes does not seem like an extremist. He is a graduate of Yale Law School and a former U.S. Army paratrooper and congressional staffer. He is not at all secretive. In February he was sitting at a table at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at a fancy downtown hotel in Washington, handing out fliers and selling T shirts for his organization, the Oath Keepers. Rhodes says he has 6,000 dues-paying members, active and retired police and military, who promise never t
Source: AP
4-12-10
HISTORY: "Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World" by Liaquat Ahamed
A Harvard graduate [who] was born in Kenya, Ahamed dreamed of being a writer while he worked as an investment manager.
"Lords of Finance" is a compelling account of how the actions of four bankers triggered the Depression and ultimately turned the United States into the world's financial leader, the Pulitzer board said.
"Mr. Ahamed does a superlative job
Source: LA Times
4-12-10
[Gregory Rodriguez is a columnist for the LA Times.]
A few months ago, Ohio State University historian Randolph Roth published a groundbreaking book, "American Homicide," that offers something like a unified theory of why Americans kill each other at such a high rate and what can be done about it.
After meticulously tracing trends in violence and political power in the U.S. from colonial times to the present, Roth concludes that high homicide rates "are n
Source: WaPo
4-7-10
...The older things get, the more they're secret? The Pentagon has been holding back some documents, requested by the independent researchers at the National Security Archive 18 years ago, about a project that has come to be known as "Poodle Blanket." This is about contingency plans in 1961 for a possible confrontation over West Berlin. That would be "a city that is no longer divided, a confrontation with a country that no longer exists and a war that ended 20 years ago," sai
Source: Robert Townsend at AHA Blog
4-6-10
The AHA’s History Doctoral Programs web site has now been updated to include current information on students, faculty, and departments as a whole. In addition to department-level fixes, the site has also been updated to include links to a wealth of additional information about universities in the United States.
Since the site was first brought online five years ago, staff have only been able to regularly change some of the information—such as the general program descriptions and inf
Source: Press Release from Mark Carnes
4-6-10
Going to the OAH? Join us for what History News Network called "the loudest,the most boisterous, and simply the most fun panel of the [AHA] convention … the most optimistic and enthusiastic panel I have been to during the entire meeting … Why couldn’t I have taken a class like this?” (HNN--1/10/10)
“REACTING TO THE PAST”: THE COLLISION OF IDEA
Source: Times Online (UK)
4-4-10
Tony Judt is dying, cruelly. Eighteen months ago the British historian — a professor of European history at New York University and the author of Postwar, a bravura history of the continent since 1945 — was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Known in the US as Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS is a motor neurone disorder. It is a hideous condition. Imagine the human body is a house, filled with lit rooms. ALS turns off the electricity, switch by switch. First you lose the use of your fi
Source: WaPo
4-5-10
A lot of attention has been focused on Texas in recent weeks, because state officials decided to rewrite social studies curriculum and force kids to learn a distorted view of the country's past.
Folks in other states are worried that the changes will wind up appearing in schools outside Texas. The state, with almost 5 million students in kindergarten through high school, dictates what is in the textbooks it purchases from publishers, and other states often buy the same materials....
