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: Garry Wills in the New York Review of Books
12-2-09
[Garry Wills is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern. His most recent book, What Jesus Meant, was published in 2006.]
I did not think he would lose me so soon—sooner than Bill Clinton did. Like many people, I was deeply invested in the success of our first African-American president. I had written op-ed pieces and articles to support him in The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. My wife and I had maxed out in donations for him. Our children had been ardent for
Source: Robert Dallek in USA Today
12-9-09
[Presidential historian Robert Dallek's new book, The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope, will be published next year.]
As President Obama moves ahead with his expansion of the war in Afghanistan, history suggests that he has a better chance of being wrong than right.
Judging from the experience of Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush, miscalculations about war and peace are all too common. Despit
Source: NYT
12-10-09
Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, a groundbreaking and wide-ranging scholar of Jewish history whose meditation on the tension between collective memory of a people and the more prosaic factual record of the past influenced a generation of thinkers, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 77 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was emphysema, said his wife, Ophra Yerushalmi, a concert pianist.
An elegant writer and mesmerizing raconteur, Dr. Yerushalmi earned his reputation as one of his
Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch
8-12-09
BOWMAN, Shearer Davis, son of Carolyn and Shearer Bowman, died at his home on December 4, 2009. Born on July 9, 1949 in Richmond, Virginia, Dave attended the Collegiate Schools before enrolling at the University of Virginia, where he received a B.A. with distinction in history and served the student body as captain of the men's soccer team, president of his fraternity, vice president of the College of Arts and Sciences, vice-chair of the Honor Committee, and member of the Imp Society, TILKA, the
Source: World Bulletin
12-9-09
Turkey's internationally-acclaimed historian Prof. Kemal Karpat has received Turkish parliament's honorary award.
Turkish Parliament Speaker Mehmet Ali Sahin presented the award to Karpat at ceremony in the Turkish capital, Ankara, on Wednesday.
"I have never worked to get a prize and never have never thought I would get one someday. My only goal has been to discover my own people and to tell about them," Karpat said.
Kemal Karpat is a professor e
Source: The Star
12-9-09
Women's rights are under attack, says historian Barbara Berg.
Yes, women have made tremendous strides but many of their rights have eroded since feminism's second wave in the 1970s and 1980s, she writes in her new book, Sexism in America: Alive, Well, and Ruining our Future.
I reached the longtime married mother of three at her home in New York City.
This is an edited version of our 90-minute conversation.
Q: You surveyed some 200 women, and in
Source: VOV News
12-9-09
As an independent researcher, Stein Tonnesson challenges the existing conceptions of the Indochina war by elucidating the forces at work preceding the war’s breakout in 1946.
Referring to French and English documents, Tonnesson sourced materials for his book from some translated Vietnamese texts on Vietnam in 1946 as well as from the memoirs of the famous Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap. He visited the Vietnam Revolutionary Museum and the Ho Chi Minh Museum to see objects from th
Source: Yahoo News
12-7-09
Y2K, the first year of a new century, arrived after much anticipation. Any decade is going to be full of the predictable and the unexpected — this one was no different. We talked to a few historians to make sense of what happened.
“The new century began on a bang, and it was a shot heard ’round the world,” Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, a history professor at San Diego State University, said, speaking of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
“People are going to think that
Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer
12-8-09
On a windy Tuesday evening in November, a student crowd filled the 1,200-plus-capacity Irvine Auditorium on the Penn campus.
They'd come to catch the crème of hip-hop's past (Run-DMC's Darryl McDaniels) and present (Lupe Fiasco) in person and watch footage of John Legend, Bruce Springsteen and Eddie Vedder performing protest songs.
The message: Change isn't a marketing term Barack Obama made up. America's victories of diversity and innovation came not from presidents or
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
12-6-09
In 1991, Donald W. Livingston threw a party—well, a conference—and nobody showed up.
It was during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and Mr. Livingston, a professor of philosophy at Emory University and raised in South Carolina, decided there should be more thoughtful discourse on the topic of secession.
A political philosopher who specializes in David Hume, he searched philosophy papers published since 1940 and turned up only seven on the matter of secession from fe
Source: SF Chronicle
12-8-09
Stanley Karnow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and longtime foreign correspondent, is trying to think of a good title for a planned memoir.
One candidate: "Interesting Times."
"You know what the Chinese curse is? `May you live in interesting times,'" he says.
Interesting times: covering the war in Vietnam, from the first Americans killed, in 1959; traveling to China for President Richard M. Nixon's 1972 visit; Karnow's friendship w
Source: The Gainesville Sun
12-8-09
Four University of Florida graduate students who did research for a tobacco company's legal defense have been caught in a debate over the role of historians in such cases.
The controversy stretches from Gainesville to Palo Alto, Calif., where Stanford University history professor Robert Proctor has publicly identified and criticized historians who work for the tobacco industry. Proctor's discovery that UF graduate students in history were working for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. attorn
Source: Huffington Post
12-3-09
As I am typing this, I am five hours and 25 minutes into a 15+ hour trip on a slow train to Baltimore. I'm en route to D.C. to interview sociologist and author Dr. James Loewen for my documentary film, A Past, Denied: The Invisible History of Slavery in Canada. This interview is two years in the making. In late 2007 when I originally conceived the idea to make a feature documentary on how Canada's over 200 years of institutionalized slavery of indigenous and African people is constantly escaping
Source: Press Release
12-8-09
It is my great pleasure to inform you that the OAH has a new Executive Director. After an extensive process that resulted in 54 applications, Katherine (Kathy) Finley has been selected by the OAH Executive Board at its Fall board meeting.
Kathy holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in history, and has served history museums and associations. In addition to her passion for history, she is also a trained and seasoned nonprofit executive whose experience and talents will help us a
Source: Press Release
12-7-09
On Sunday, December 13, at 8 PM Eastern and Pacific / 7 PM Central, THE PEOPLE SPEAK -- the long awaited documentary film inspired by Howard Zinn's books A People's History of the United States and, with Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People's History of the United States -- will air on History.
Tune in!
More details are at http://www.history.com/peoplespeak
ABOUT THE PEOPLE SPEAK
Using dramatic and
Source: The Washington Post
12-4-09
If Barack Obama's 2008 election is history's answer to Martin Luther King's 46-year-old "I Have a Dream" speech, then African Americans must be on the cusp of . . . what, exactly? In "Yes We Did?" historian Cynthia Griggs Fleming offers an academic overview of the civil rights movement's triumphant past and uncertain future.
Drawing on interviews with prominent black leaders -- including former Senator Carol Moseley Braun, Freedom marcher and Georgia Congressman
Source: Times Argus
11-29-09
MONTPELIER - In Arlington, church bells rang throughout the day on Dec. 2, 1859, and for one hour in Peacham, starting at 11 a.m., as abolitionist John Brown was hanged in a field in far-off Charles Town, Va.
"We don't know the full extent of the hanging in Vermont. We do know in Arlington, (Almera Hawley Canfield) was firmly opposed to slavery, and had her grandsons ring the bells in the Episcopal church all day long," said Civil War historian and preservationist Howard C
Source: NYT
12-7-09
WARSAW, Poland (AP) -- A Polish historian says he made a surprising find when poring through World War I archives -- the death certificate of Manfred von Richthofen, the German fighter ace known as the ''Red Baron.''
Maciej Kowalczyk said Monday that he found the file last month while going through old German archives in the western Polish city of Ostrow Wielkopolski. The area was formerly German, and Richthofen was briefly stationed there.
The entry is a one-page handw
Source: Redstone Rocket
12-1-09
In November 1979, Mike Baker was working on building shrimp boats. It was while working on a boat when someone yelled to him that he needed to call home become someone from the Army was calling him about a job.
“Hard to believe that was 30 years ago,” Baker mused in his Sparkman Center Office. “Thirty years… Wow.”
The “job” was to work at the then Missile Command’s History Office as the command’s archivist. It was a job and an office that he would never leave.
Source: Balkan Insight
12-7-09
Dusan Batakovic, 52, a Serbian historian and diplomat, has been handed the most demanding role of his life - to lead the Serbian team at the International Court of Justice in the Hague, in an attempt to dispute the legality of Kosovo’s unilateral proclamation of independence on February 17, 2008.
The Serbian team is composed mostly of legal experts, but having a historian at the helm indicates that the Serbian side might be paying some attention to the deeper causes of the Serb-Alb
