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
2-19-10
In 2011 the Mining History Association will meet on the campus of the University of Montana-West in Dillon, near the historic gold rush towns and districts of Bannack, Virginia City and Alder Gulch. The Program Committee invites proposals for papers, presentations and panels on any aspect of mining history in any era or location around the world. Related fields may include science and technology, law and governance, labor and social history, industrial archaeology, business history, preservati
Source: NYT
2-16-10
A new mini-series about John F. Kennedy’s presidency that is being prepared by the History channel does not yet have a cast or a premiere date. Not a frame of footage has been shot. It does, however, have prominent critics who want it brought to a halt.
The critics, including Theodore C. Sorensen, a former Kennedy adviser, say they have read the scripts for the project and that those contain errors of fact and emphasis. But like a similar controversy over a 2003 television film abou
Source: McClatchy Newspapers
2-16-10
President Barack Obama's dream of being a historically transformational figure like Franklin D. Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan may be slipping from his grasp.
To be sure, he's already made one lasting mark that changed the country's course — his election as the first African-American president broke a centuries-old racial barrier.
He also could break through with bold new initiatives that change the course of history, as Richard Nixon did late in his first term when he open
Source: Jonathan Foreman at the WSJ
12-11-09
Paul Johnson is the most celebrated and best-loved British historian in America, especially by readers of a conservative bent. Astonishingly prolific, he has over three decades produced a series of serious best sellers, all of which present a refreshingly revisionist take on their subjects. Most controversial of all, perhaps, was his defense of Richard Nixon in his "A History of the American People." But there is plenty in each of his histories to startle readers used to conventional w
Source: Guardian (UK)
2-9-10
[John Crace is a feature writer for the Guardian.]
Dry, dusty and shortly to be dead. Palaeographers are used to making sense of fragments of ancient manuscripts, but King's College London couldn't have been plainer when it announced recently that it was to close the UK's only chair of palaeography. From September, the current holder of the chair, Professor David Ganz, will be out of a job, and the subject will no longer exist as a separate academic discipline in British universiti
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
2-14-10
[John Castellucci, a former reporter at The Providence Journal, was a student of Orest Ranum.]
At about 2:30 a.m. on May 22, 1968, as New York City police entered Hamilton Hall, on Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus, to clear it of demonstrators, files belonging to Orest A. Ranum, an associate professor of history, were ransacked, and papers documenting more than 10 years of research were burned. The fire came at the tail end of a month of protests that had roiled Colu
Source: NYT
2-12-10
Whether or not North Carolinians are more inclined than other Americans to follow Thomas Wolfe’s injunction to “look homeward,” some past the age of 50 have personal reasons to cast a retrospective glance on the state of their youth. It was a time when a century of Jim Crow laws and segregation were being challenged by the advocates of civil rights in a struggle that was often more bitter and bloody than popular history likes to admit.
For Robert K. Steel, the re-evaluation of his p
Source: WaPo
2-15-10
Sometime around the middle of April 1804, a slave named John Freeman wrote a letter to the president of the United States. Freeman, technically owned by a Maryland doctor, William Baker, had been contracted to work for Thomas Jefferson, who engaged him to serve in the White House and accompany Jefferson on trips to Monticello.
Now, Freeman was writing because he wanted the president to buy him outright....
The letter was one among numerous acts of resourcefulness and in
Source: DailyFinance.com
2-16-10
Saying Steve Jobs is tight-lipped is like saying the sky is blue. Rumors may fly in advance of Apple (AAPL) product launches, usually whipping up a frenzy that puts said product, real or imaginary, in quasi-religious terms. But you won't hear a peep from Cupertino until Jobs (or a proxy) takes the stage, standing in front of mammoth projection screens, to unveil the company's newest game-changer.
But it appears that Jobs, who turns 55 next week, may be mixing up his moves as he gets
Source: NECN
2-13-10
The handcuffs used to arrest Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates are now the property of the Smithsonian Institution.
Gates told The New York Times that he donated the handcuffs after they were given to him by Sgt. James Crowley during a sit-down the two had at a Cambridge pub several months ago....
Source: John Berlau at The American Spectator
2-15-10
[John Berlau is director of the Center for Investors and Entrepreneurs at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and blogs at OpenMarket.org.]
February is an important month in the history of American commerce. In this month is the birthday of one of the country's earliest business innovators and large-scale entrepreneurs.
During a time period of America's existence as an English colony and then a young nation -- when, to put it mildly, communication and transportation fa
Source: realhistoryreform.org
2-15-10
North Carolina’s Accountability and Curriculum Reform Effort (ACRE) has proposed a curriculum that eliminates teaching U. S. History before 1877 as a required subject in public high schools. We are citizens, educators and students against North Carolina’s proposed new U.S. History Curriculum....
The purpose of this website is to educate our fellow North Carolinians about the proposed changes in the state’s History Curriculum and to generate sufficient public support to make sure tha
Source: NYT
2-11-10
“American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein” is a cautiously respectful documentary portrait of a political firebrand who presents himself as a beacon of moral truth in the murk of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A scholar, author and passionate advocate of the Palestinian cause, Mr. Finkelstein, 56, is a thorn in the side of the Israel lobby....
Early in the film, directed by David Ridgen and Nicolas Rossier, Mr. Finkelstein is shown at a 1982 rally in front of the Israel
Source: Brendan Goldman at FrontPageMag
2-11-10
[Brendan Goldman is a senior at New York University majoring in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, and an intern at the Middle East Forum. This essay was sponsored by Campus Watch.]
“This is not an Israeli-Palestinian debate,” Stanley Cohen, the director of the Scone Foundation, said. “It is [a conference] to honor the archivist profession.”
Cohen’s statement was half true: the event was not a “debate,” but only because there were no dissenting opinions to challenge keynote s
Source: Telegraph (UK)
2-12-10
[Simon Heffer is a columnist for the Daily Telegraph (UK)]
Sussex University is one of the better establishments of our higher education system. It is proposing, because of cuts, to emasculate its history department by scrapping research into, and in-depth teaching of, British history before 1700 and European before 1900. One should not need a GCSE in the subject to see the insanity of this. Our country remains shaped today by the Reformation, the Civil War and the Glorious Revoluti
Source: Telegraph (UK)
2-11-10
Academics have attacked a decision by a top university to scrap research into English history before 1700.
It was claimed that the move by Sussex University risked jeopardising the nation’s understanding of the subject and “entrenching the ignorance of the present”.
Under plans, research and in-depth teaching into periods such as the Tudors, the Middle-Ages, Norman Britain, the Viking invasion and the Anglo-Saxons will be scrapped, along with the Civil Wars.
Source: Newsweek
2-7-10
Nowadays when people think Henry Louis Gates Jr., they think of the Beer Summit. But Gates is so much more than that—the Alphonse Fletcher University professor at Harvard University and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. Editor and author of countless books, including the African American National Biography, Gates is also the editor in chief of TheRoot.com. In his eternal quest to answer the questions"What made America?" and"What makes us?"
Source: The Age (Melbourne, AU)
2-11-10
A petition to pardon Australian Boer War soldiers Breaker Morant and Peter Handcock is feeding off their myth as folk heroes instead of their reality as cold-blooded killers, an historian says....
Craig Wilcox, author of Australia's Boer War: The War in South Africa, says Morant and Handcock should not be honoured with a pardon for their war crimes.
"I've got a gloomy view of the man himself and his elevation as a folk hero. Those who don't share that view are bli
Source: Inside Higher Ed
2-10-10
...“When Palin and others describe Obama as professorial in style, they are invoking themes and tropes that have a long history in American politics,” says Neil Gross, an associate professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia. “That longstanding tendency in American politics is also in this case being drawn together with an implicit criticism of liberal professors, which really only became a mainstay of conservative discourse in the 1950s.”
A leading voice in that di
Source: The Daily Mail (UK)
2-10-10
She was the mystery figure at Hitler's side that the world never knew about during the lifespan of the Third Reich.
Now the first comprehensive biography of Eva Braun reveals how the hidden First Lady of Nazism was the polar opposite of everything her beloved Adolf decreed should be found in a woman.
'Eva Braun: Life With Hitler,' by renowned German historian Heike B. Goertemaker, paints Eva not as an air-head besotted by a dominant man, but a fiercely loyal, independen
