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: CNN
2-9-10
As the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution approaches this week, with the promise of mass protests from Iran's growing opposition movement, it's tempting to compare the upheaval with unrest that ultimately toppled the shah of Iran.
A coalition of Iranian reformist groups is urging opponents of the regime to stage nonviolent protests this week, serving as a show of force for citizens who oppose the government's stiff crackdown on those who protested Iran's disputed election la
Source: NYT
2-9-10
Eva Longoria and Yo-Yo Ma have a common ancestor.
It takes a long time and considerable patience to get to that surprise denouement of “Faces of America,” a four-part PBS series, beginning on Wednesday, about family roots by the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. And even with charming celebrities — Meryl Streep, Mike Nichols and Queen Noor of Jordan are among the 12 whose genealogy is explored almost back to Paleolithic times — the telling can at times be a little wearisome..
Source: Guardian (UK)
2-7-10
They are giants of medicine, pioneers of the care that women receive during childbirth and were the founding fathers of obstetrics. The names of William Hunter and William Smellie still inspire respect among today's doctors, more than 250 years since they made their contributions to healthcare. Such were the duo's reputations as outstanding physicians that the clienteles of their private practices included the rich and famous of mid-18th-century London.
But were they also serial kil
Source: Historian Ron Radosh at his blog
12-12-09
In 1997, Matt Damon played the part of a janitor who turned out to be not only a math wizard, but one of the most brilliant men you could find anywhere. Trying to impress an arrogant Harvard student, who thought he knew everything, Damon’s character quotes from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. He tells the Harvard kid and a psychiatrist at the hospital he works at that “you’re surrounding yourself with all the wrong fuckin’ books. You wanna read a real history book, read
Source: The Nation
2-4-10
[Eric Foner, a member of The Nation's editorial board, is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and editor of Our Lincoln, a collection of essays recently published by W. W. Norton and author of Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction.]
Friedrich Nietzsche once identified three approaches to the writing of history: the monumental, the antiquarian and the critical, the last being history "that judges and condemns." Howard Zinn, who di
Source: The Daily Mail (UK)
2-7-10
With their close ties to David Cameron and illustrious careers in academia and publishing, they were a formidable couple.
But last night it appeared that the 16-year marriage of celebrated historian Niall Ferguson and former newspaper editor Sue Douglas has ended.
The Harvard professor has left his wife for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a glamorous Somali lawyer threatened with death for scripting a film critical of Islam.
A friend of Miss Douglas, 52, said: 'Despite al
Source: NYT
2-4-10
...Hans L. Trefousse was known for his well-received books about both men. A specialist in Civil War and Reconstruction-era history, he died on Jan. 8, at 88, at his home on Staten Island, his son, Roger, said.
His books include “Impeachment of a President: Andrew Johnson, the Blacks, and Reconstruction”; “Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth-Century Egalitarian,” about the congressman who led the impeachment effort; and “Rutherford B. Hayes.”
At his death, Professor Trefousse
Source: BBC History Magazine
2-4-10
[Dominic Sandbrook is a freelance writer on history and current affairs. His most recent book is White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (Little, Brown, 2006). He is the regular columnist for BBC History Magazine.]
...To scour the latest scholarly journals often means ploughing through pages of detailed analysis in which the human element is almost entirely absent. All too often, historians underestimate the personal and elevate the general: as the excellent medieva
Source: Newton Daily News
2-9-10
These freedom-seekers took the biggest risk of all involved.
Historian Galin Berrier made this and other realities of the underground railroad clear at a Chautauqua lecture at William Penn University on Thursday night. Berrier currently serves as an adjunct instructor at Des Moines Area Community College.
Berrier focused on the fact that much of what is known about the underground railroad has been told by white people assisting recently escaped African-Americans.
Source: Jerusalem Post
2-7-10
The Israel Society at Cambridge University has succumbed to pressure and canceled a talk by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev historian Benny Morris after protesters accused him of “Islamophobia” and “racism.”
Morris was scheduled to speak to students at the university on Thursday, but following a campaign led by anti-Israel activist Ben White the Israel Society canceled the talk. Instead Morris was invited to speak at an event hosted by the university’s Department of Political and
Source: NYT
2-8-10
Prime Minister François Fillon of France announced a few symbolic measures on Monday to provide concrete results from France’s bitterly contentious debate over “national identity.”
In a special cabinet meeting, Mr. Fillon also threw the discussion, initiated several months ago by President Nicolas Sarkozy, to an “experts committee” of politicians and historians, bringing the debate to an end in its current public form....
Mr. Fillon said that French schools will now be
Source: BBC History Magazine
2-1-10
One of the most fascinating questions raised by the economic downturn is whether it will permanently change our economic and personal behaviour. And it is a question with plenty of historical echoes. An old fashioned word – thrift – has been heard once again as the binge spending of recent years is followed by a painful consumer hangover. And thrift is often associated, as it always was, not only with saving money but also with leading a morally improved life....
Historian Katy Pett
Source: Boston Globe
2-7-10
Zinn was not the first to upend the traditional historical narrative in this way; his bottom-up vision of history drew heavily on the work of previous generations of revisionist historians. What Zinn did in his “People’s History” was stitch that work together into an overarching narrative and give it a polemical edge.
Yet Zinn’s work remains a testament to the power of vantage point, an example of how coming at a familiar set of historical facts from a different angle can completely
Source: NPR.org
2-4-10
There's a taboo not to speak ill of the dead. Or if you are going to, then at least be nuanced and even-handed about it.
And that's what hundreds said about a Jan. 28 remembrance of Howard Zinn, the activist historian who died Jan. 27....
Zinn, 87, died of a heart attack last Wednesday while on a speaking tour in California. NPR scrambled to get something on the air for All Things Considered (ATC) the next night.
The four-minute piece by Allison Keyes quote
Source: Telegraph (UK)
2-5-10
Peter Calvocoressi, who died on February 5 aged 97, had a distinguished and varied career as a wartime codebreaker, historian, publisher and author; he published books about the Second World War and world politics since 1945, as well as studies of Africa, the Middle East, Britain and Europe.
As head of air intelligence at Station X — the top secret headquarters at Bletchley Park of the codebreakers who cracked Germany’s Enigma cipher during the Second World War — Calvocoressi played
Source: Various
1-27-10
Sean WilentzTo a point, he helped correct mainstream popular conceptions of American history that were highly biased. But he ceased writing serious history. He had a very simplified view that everyone who was president was always a stinker and every left-winger was always great. That can't be true. A lot of people on the left spent their lives apologizing for one of the worst mass
Source: NYT
1-29-10
Louis R. Harlan, whose definitive two-volume biography of Booker T. Washington convincingly embraced its subject’s daunting complexities and ambiguities and won both the Bancroft Prize and the Pulitzer Prize, died on Jan. 22 in Lexington, Va. He was 87....
Mr. Harlan, a white Southerner, made race relations and Southern history his field of inquiry after attending a guest lecture by John Hope Franklin at Johns Hopkins University in the 1940s. When the historian Marquis James died in
Source: RealClearPolitics
2-2-10
The Senate Democratic primary in Illinois today carries more weight than a single election. The winner will be running to salvage a piece of the Obama presidential legacy -- if a Republican wins the seat in November, Barack Obama would become the first senator-turned-president to lose his former seat to the opposite party.
Of course, there isn't much precedent for this. In 2008, Obama became just the third sitting senator elected president, following John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Warr
Source: Forbes
2-1-10
[Laura Dean is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.]
Howard Zinn, historian, author and lifelong activist, spent his life writing about and remembering the lives of ordinary people. After his death this past Wednesday we begin to go about remembering him.
A native Brooklynite, Zinn attended New York City public schools and worked in shipyards until he joined the Army Air Force during World War II. He entered college on the GI Bill as a 27-year-old freshman and w
Source: National Humanities Alliance
2-1-10
In The Audacity of Hope, author Barack Obama recounts a conversation he had with MIT scientist Robert Langer at Northwestern University’s 2006 commencement in which they discuss a declining federal investment in research and development through the nation’s higher education institutions. The passage is important because it lays the intellectual groundwork for the soon-to-be Presidential candidate’s innovation agenda, including a $42 billion proposa
