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: WSJ
12-7-09
Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) was an influential historian, minor Victorian politician and the author of India's legal code. His educational reforms in India are largely the reason English is the tongue that unites the subcontinent today. His greatest literary legacy was the "History of England From the Accession of James II," which established the Whig or "progressive" view of history. In all, a life of influence in many spheres, and generally for the good.
Source: Charlotte Conservative News
12-6-09
Before the Democratic primary vote on Tuesday in Massachusetts to replace the late Senator Ted Kennedy, a chance to catch up with how just before Thanksgiving, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin — a Bay State resident and a favorite of NBC News where she regularly pops up to deliver conventional liberal wisdom in the guise of historic insights — crossed into partisan politics to campaign for one of the four liberal candidates.
On Sunday, November 22, Kearns was the star at a “Women at W
Source: The Buffalo News
12-6-09
Architectural historian Martin Wachadlo served two decades in the U.S. Navy before a Victorian beauty on West Avenue caught his eye. Simple and unassuming, well-designed and solidly built, his old house became a life project — much like his obsession with architecture.
At age 47, Wachadlo is considered an expert on Buffalo's stock of old buildings — compiling neighborhood surveys, researching historic districts, drafting National Register nominations. With an advanced degree in arch
Source: C-Span
10-8-09
The International Republican Institute honors former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger with its 2009 Freedom Award at an awards dinner for his contribution to the security and progress of the United States. IRI Chairman Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) presented the award to Sec. Kissinger, followed by a conversation with Kissinger moderated by Niall Ferguson.
Washington, DC
Source: New Zealand Herald
12-6-09
One of the country's most internationally renowned historians has serious head injuries after being struck by a truck while crossing Princes St in Auckland city.
Dame Judith Binney is in Auckland City Hospital with serious head injuries after being hit on Friday night. The truck stopped after hitting her in heavy rain.
Prime Minister John Key and culture minister Chris Finlayson were told of the accident only hours after it happened.
Binney is celebrated fo
Source: Financial Times
12-5-09
Many Swiss libraries devote more space to works about Switzerland's role in the second world war than to histories of watchmaking, pharmaceuticals - and even crossbows - combined.
That this small, neutral nation should exhibit such a vivid interest in the war says much about the intensity of feeling about what happened between Switzerland and its neighbours during the rise of Nazism and the conflagration beyond. For its detractors, Switzerland was the small, but significant, base th
Source: Shropshire Star
12-4-09
TV historian Adam Hart-Davis stopped off in Ironbridge to help round off the 300th anniversary celebrations of Abraham Darby’s ground-breaking first use of coke to smelt iron.
The star was at Enginuity in Ironbridge to deliver a lecture on industry and the environment, just days before the climate change summit in Copenhagen, which starts on Monday.
The lecture on Tuesday was jointly sponsored by the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust and the University of Birmingham.
Source: Hurriyet Daily News
12-4-09
Fabio L Grassi is an Italian historian who has been living in Istanbul since 1998. The writer of the first Italian-language biography of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Grassi says he admires the man without sacrificing his objectivity. 'Let us try neither to anachronistically condemn the past nor look at things with the eyes of the 1920s and 1930s,' the author says
Fabio L. Grassi was always interested in history, but it was a university professor of his who set him down the road of Turkish
Source: Temple University
12-3-09
As President Barack Obama announces his new blueprint for the war in Afghanistan, which includes an increase of up to 30,000 U.S. troops, it can be easy to take for granted that those troops come from an all-volunteer force.
It has been a full 37 years since President Nixon fulfilled his campaign promise and ended the draft in 1973, shortly after the last American combat troops returned from Vietnam. In America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force, Temple historian Beth Bailey tel
Source: Bsanna News
12-4-09
President of the Republic of Bulgaria Georgi Parvanov awarded Thursday Serbian writer and Vice President of the Serbian PEN Center prof. dr. Mihailo Pantic and historian and byzantinist Srdjan Pirivatric, the Serbian Ministry of Culture stated.
At the awarding ceremony in the Bulgarian Presidency, Pantic was presented with the Holly Brothers Cyril and Methodius award for his contribution to the popularization of the Bulgarian culture in Serbia and promotion of relation between the B
Source: CNN
12-4-09
James Gordon Meek was standing over the gravestone of a friend killed in Iraq when he noticed a familiar figure walking near him.
President Obama was walking through what's called "the saddest acre in America," Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. The section is the burial ground for U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Obama hugged graveside visitors, shook hands and listened to mourners while a "bone-chilling drizzle" fel
Source: Al Jazeera
12-2-09
The US president's decision to send 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan has received a mixed reaction from American pundits in Washington.
Tariq Ali, a historian and political activist, told Al Jazeera that Barack Obama's decision to send more troops echoed the policies of George Bush, the former president.
"Obama is masqueraded as a peace president and he's now deciding to send more troops... In order to try and appease his own supporters, he's giving an approxim
Source: Business Standard
12-5-09
Christopher Hill (1912-2003), the brilliant British Marxist historian, reminded us that history and politics were two sides of the same coin. Which meant that historians were primarily interested in ideas not only because they influence societies but also because they reveal the societies that give rise to them. It also means that since politics is always in a state of flux, history had to be rewritten in every generation because, although the past doesn’t change, the present does; each generati
Source: Andrew Smith's Blog
12-3-09
The British business and economic historian Kevin Tennent has published some thoughts about whether an independent Scotland would be a viable economic unit. On Monday, Scotland’s first minister announced that the country would soon be holding a referendum on independence. Monday was, of course, St Andrew’s day, the national day of Scotland– and the day of your humble narrator’s patron saint!
Tennent’s blog post draws on his extensive knowledge of Scottish, British, and global econom
Source: YouTube
11-30-09
Weeks from the Charter for Compassion launch, Karen Armstrong looks at religion's role in the 21st century: Will its dogmas divide us? Or will it unite us for common good? She reviews the catalysts that can drive the world's faiths to rediscover the Golden Rule.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes.
Source: Columbia Spectator
12-3-09
The West Harlem that Grace Jones knew as a child in the 1940s barely resembles today’s bustling neighborhood north of 125th Street.
With a substantial reduction in crime, an upsurge in real estate prices, and an influx of retail chains, Harlem has become a completely different world for Jones.
“This used to be a block of nothing but African Americans and Caribbean Americans,” she said, pointing out the middle- and upper-class residents increasingly making their way into
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
12-3-09
The annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association opened here on Wednesday, and its official theme is "The End/s of Anthropology." But people here might suspect that one thing will never end: the controversy surrounding Darkness in El Dorado, a 2000 book that accused two prominent scholars of misdeeds in their work with an indigenous community in South America.
Debate over the book consumed the anthropologists' meeting in 2000. Nine years later, the passions s
Source: NYT
12-1-09
[David S. Reynolds, a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, is the author of “John Brown, Abolitionist” and “Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson.”]
IT’S important for Americans to recognize our national heroes, even those who have been despised by history. Take John Brown.
Today is the 150th anniversary of Brown’s hanging — the grim punishment for his raid weeks earlier on Harpers Ferry, Va. With a small band of abolitionists, Brown had seized the federal arsen
Source: NRC Handelsblad
12-3-09
The late prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, husband of former queen Juliana, was party to an attempted coup against the government of the young Indonesian republic in 1950, a book published this Monday asserts.
The Dutch writers, historian Harry Veenendaal and journalist Jort Kelder, base their conclusions on evidence that has been available to other researchers: archived diaries of a court secretary and military police reports describing the attempted coup d'état which mention th
Source: The Daily Herald
12-2-09
Between preparing for the premiere of his documentary and promoting it with the likes of Matt Damon and Viggo Mortensen, historian and activist Howard Zinn found some time to speak with students at Dundee-Crown High School on Tuesday.
After school let out, Zinn fielded questions via teleconference from about 30 students gathered in the school's music wing.
The question-and-answer session with the renowned author of "A People's History of the United States" was
