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: propublica.org (independent journalism website)
7-27-09
A charity headed by star Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. is filing an amended 2007 report to the Internal Revenue Service because $11,000 it paid to foundation officers as compensation was mischaracterized as being for research grants.
Questions about Inkwell Foundation emerged over the weekend, part of a tsunami of attention Gates has received since July 16, when he was arrested at his home by a police officer responding to a report about a possible burglary in p
Source: Martin Kettle in the Guardian
7-27-09
Dr Gordon Brown is a qualified historian. As readers of his biography of James Maxton will know, he can be a considerable and a rigorous one. As a politician, though, Prime Minister Gordon Brown is an opportunist about his former academic discipline. He plays fast and loose with British history, and rarely more so than in his most recent remarks about the first world war.The
Source: Press --Wyman Institute
7-24-09
One hundred leading Holocaust and genocide scholars from around the world have signed a petition praising the Ugandan government for blocking Sudan's president from attending a conference in Uganda this weekend, because of his role in the Darfur genocide.
“During the Holocaust, the international community failed to act against the Nazi genocide,” said Dr. Rafael Medoff, director of the Washington-based David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, which organized the petition. “By
Source: Inside Higher Ed
7-27-09
Much has been written about the immigration of Jewish scholars and others who opposed or feared the Nazis to the United States and other countries. A new book focuses on one discipline -- mathematics -- and how this migration affected not only those who moved, but scholarship. The book is Mathematicians Fleeing from Nazi Germany: Individual Fates and Global Impact, by Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze, professor of the history of mathematics at the University of Agder, in Norway. The work, just out fro
Source: Adam Liptak in the NYT
7-24-09
Two big ideas animate “Packing the Court.” One is that the court has for more than 200 years illegitimately claimed a power not granted to it by the Constitution. The other is that it has on the whole used this power to protect the powerful and to thwart progress.
James MacGregor Burns is a distinguished historian best known for his work on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the book’s title is, of course, a reference to Roosevelt’s failed attempt to increase the number of justices afte
Source: Melody Rod-Ari in the NYT
7-22-09
[Melody Rod-Ari, University of California, Los Angeles, Ph.D. candidate, 2010, art history]
Getting through each day is a battle: a battle of mental stamina, emotional ups and downs, moments of self-perceived brilliance and confirmed scholastic inadequacy. Those who can identify with me are probably graduate students, too. I belong to your academic sorority. I am a doctoral candidate in U.C.L.A.’s department of art history.
What this means is that I have finished all my
Source: U.tv.news
7-26-09
There are a lot of questionable stories about the diminutive, sparkly and very sociable historian Andrew Roberts. An ex-girlfriend claims he has framed pictures of Margaret Thatcher not just in his study and drawing room but also next to his bed. During his single days, he was supposed to rival Casanova with his successful romantic conquests. And there's a widespread belief among the denizens of social London that his wealth comes not from history but from a family interest in the British franch
Source: Miami Herald
7-24-09
Last September, historian Marvin Dunn and a partner quietly purchased five acres of land in Rosewood, a black, self-made settlement that perished in a fury of hate more than eight decades ago.
The Rosewood massacre unfolded in a burst of racial violence that stretched through the first week of 1923. By its end, six blacks and two whites were dead -- although scholars and historians insist such numbers are woefully low -- and Rosewood was abandoned in ashes, its wretched, final chap
Source: Press Release
7-25-09
THE UNITED STATES AND THE COLD WAR
July 26-July 31, 2009
Instructors:
• Melvyn P. Leffler, Edward Stettinius Professor of American History, University of Virginia; fellow at The Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia
• Christian F. Ostermann, director, History and Public Policy Program, Woodrow Wilson International Center, Washington, D.C.
Guest Lecturers:
• Thomas Blanton, director, National Security Archive
• Malco
Source: Press Release
7-25-09
U.S.-China Relations
July 26-July 31, 2009
Instructors:
Warren I. Cohen, Emeritus Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Senior Scholar, Asia Program, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington D.C.
Christian Ostermann, Director, History and Public Policy Programs, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C.
Guest Lecturers:
Ambassador
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
7-24-09
The U.S. Department of Education recently awarded 123 grants under the FY 2009 Teaching American History (TAH) program competition. To view the list of 2009 grantees, click here. This year’s awards come at a time when it appears congressional support for the program may be waning.The Labor, Health and Education fiscal year 2
Source: Henry Louis Gates in The Root (edited by Henry Louis Gates)
7-24-09
Statement from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
"It was very kind of the President to phone me today. Vernon Jordan is absolutely correct: my unfortunate experience will only have a larger meaning if we can all use this to diminish racial profiling and to enhance fairness and equity in the criminal justice system for poor people and for people of color.
And to that end, I look forward to studying the history of racial profiling in a new documentary for PBS. I told the Pre
Source: NYT
7-24-09
Lionel Casson, who melded his mastery of classical literature with the findings of underwater archaeology in scholarly but accessible books about the history of ancient seafaring, from the primitive dory to the vast armadas of the Roman Empire, died July 18 in Manhattan. He was 94.
The cause was pneumonia, his daughter Andrea Casson said.
Drawing from an array of sources — the writings of the historian Thucydides and the speeches of Demosthenes; cargo manifests kept by
Source: Inside Higher Ed
7-22-09
HNN Hot Topics: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
For many, it was a startling portrait: the normally reserved Harvard University professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., standing on his front porch in handcuffs, appearing to yell as police officers surrounded him. Yet those were the images that circulated Tuesday, as news of Gates’ controversial arrest – and the subsequent dropping of charges against him – circulated on Web sites a
Source: James Hannaham at Salon.com
7-22-09
HNN Hot Topics: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
[James Hannaham is the author of the novel "God Says No" (McSweeney's, 2009) and a former staff writer at Salon. ]
When I heard that prominent black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested for breaking into his own home in Cambridge, Mass., it made me proud of America. It may seem paradoxical to focus on the positive side of the preeminent s
Source: Henry Louis Gates Jr. in The Root
7-21-09
HNN Hot Topics: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
I’m saying ‘You need to send someone to fix my lock.’ All of a sudden, there was a policeman on my porch. And I thought, ‘This is strange.’ So I went over to the front porch still holding the phone, and I said ‘Officer, can I help you?’ And he said, ‘Would you step outside onto the porch.’ And the way he said it, I knew he wasn’t canvassing for the police benevolent associati
Source: NYT
7-23-09
After keeping it sealed in a steel container for 25 years, the British Library made public on Thursday a 30,000-word memoir in which Anthony Blunt, one of Britain’s most renowned 20th-century art historians, described spying for the Soviet Union, beginning in the mid-1930s, as “the biggest mistake of my life.”
The memoir offers few new insights into the details of Blunt’s spying, about which he said little in public before he died in 1983. Its main interest, according to historians
Source: Barbara Kreiger in Smithsonian Magazine
7-1-09
Shielding my eyes from the glare of the morning sun, I look toward the horizon and the small mountain that is my destination: Herodium, site of the fortified palace of King Herod the Great. I'm about seven miles south of Jerusalem, not far from the birthplace of the biblical prophet Amos, who declared: "Let justice stream forth like water." Herod's reign over Judea from 37 to 4 B.C. is not remembered for justice but for its indiscriminate cruelty. His most notorious act was the murder
Source: Melissa Harris-Lacewell in The Nation
7-21-09
[Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University, is completing her latest book, Sister Citizen: A Text for Colored Girls Who've Considered Politics When Being Strong Isn't Enough. ]
Over the past several days a strange characterization of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has emerged. Many are portraying him as a radical who easily and inappropriately appeals to race as an excuse and explanation. This image of Gates is
Source: Trevor Griffey, PhD Candidate University of Washington, at his blog
7-22-09
Imagine going to a library with no catalog of its books. Each patron's request requires an educated guess about what the library may or may not have. The library will acknowledge receipt of your request within a couple weeks or so, but it will take an untold number of months for the library to let you know if it indeed has the item you've requested.
The search will be based on the kind of request you make. If you don't know their filing system, the odds are they won't bother doing t
