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: AP
6-11-09
The late historian John Hope Franklin was "an angry, happy man" whose work as the head of a commission on race helped pull the country together, former President Bill Clinton said Thursday.
Clinton was one of a dozen speakers at a service at Duke Chapel to honor Franklin and his wife, Aurelia, who would have celebrated their 69th wedding anniversary Thursday.
The former president elicited laughter from the crowd when he related a story about Franklin handling
Source: Harper's
6-11-09
T.R.M. Howard was not everyone’s idea of a civil rights hero, and his accomplishments have been widely neglected. But as historian David Beito and sociologist Linda Royster Beito demonstrate in their book Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power, he was in fact one of the most effective black civil rights leaders of his generation and a key figure in bringing civil rights to Mississippi and empowering black voters in Chicago. I put six questions to David Beito ab
Source: NBC17
6-11-09
A local historian credited with creating the field of African-American history was honored Thursday, nearly three months after his death.
Hundreds of people came to Duke's chapel to celebrate the life of John Hope Franklin.
He was widely regarded as the nation's preeminent African-American historian.
Franklin wrote several books on African-American history, including the widely published "From Slavery to Freedom."
"He's still wor
Source: LAT
6-14-09
Him Mark Lai, an engineer by training and historian by avocation whose groundbreaking scholarship and treasure trove of archival documents guided generations of scholars to study the daily lives and struggles of Chinese Americans, died May 21 in San Francisco. He was 83.
The cause was complications of cancer, according to his wife, Laura.
Unassuming but tenacious, Lai was often called the dean of Chinese American studies, a field that did not exist when he taught the fi
Source: NYT
6-10-09
The future of the history profession (as well as the journal’s title) are the subject of a roundtable discussion to be held this month at the annual convention of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Many historians “are on the defensive,” said Thomas W. Zeiler, the executive editor of Diplomatic History and the moderator of the panel. (Mr. Zeiler, who floated the name change, said he did not have a particular replacement in mind.)
The shift in focus began in t
Source: Roger Moorhouse in the Independent
6-14-09
Antony Beevor is the doyen of British popular history. The world's bestselling military historian, with an astonishing four-million sales to his name, he has done more than any other current writer to drag history out of its ivory towers and into the nation's living-rooms.
Beevor came to prominence with two bestselling tomes, Stalingrad and Berlin, both of which deal with the eastern front of the Second World War. Now, however, he has turned his attention to the western theatre to t
Source: Beverly Gage in the NYT Book Review
6-12-09
On March 11, 2003, about a week before President George W. Bush began bombing Iraq, the cultural historian Jackson Lears published an Op-Ed article in The New York Times pleading for sanity. He sensed that it was already too late, and suggested that war opponents might be “fingering a rabbit’s foot from time to time.” As a historian, however, Lears couldn’t help asking when the “regenerative” impulse to seek national glory through war first took root. The result is “Rebirth of a Nation,” a fasci
Source: Tony Judt in the NY Review of Books
7-2-09
I first met Amos Elon in Germany in the 1990s. We were participants in one of a series of meetings generously hosted by the Bertelsmann Foundation, where Germans, Israelis, and Jews gathered to exchange platitudes. Most of those present sought either to proselytize and grandstand (in the case of Israelis and Jews) or else to avoid giving offense (in the case of the Germans). Amos, uniquely, did neither. There, as on every occasion when I heard him speak, he succeeded in being both outspoken and
Source: Inside Higher Ed
6-15-09
A non-traditional and sometimes iconoclastic law school has announced plans to create a new kind of undergraduate college -- one focused on history.
The new college will offer only the junior and senior years of instruction, will operate in a no-frills manner to keep costs down, and will offer the single major of history. The American College of History and Legal Studies will start offering classes in August 2010 and has been licensed to operate in Salem, N.H. -- just seven miles fr
Source: Thomas Sugrue in the summer issue of Democracy
6-15-09
In The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama writes of "the psychodrama of the baby-boom generation" with its "old grudges and revenge plots." A case in point: A generation ago, a group of mostly white, boomer journalists and intellectuals published a series of influential books and articles on the "failure" of civil rights politics. Their accounts began with an idealized story of the Southern civil rights movement, focusing on the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960
Source: Press Release
6-15-09
This year, the Miller Center will fund its 90th Governing America in a Global Era (GAGE) fellow. The GAGE program puts the public in public intellectual. Initiated in 2000, the fellowship provides financial support to students who are completing their Ph.D. dissertation in fields that use history to shed light on contemporary U.S. domestic and foreign policies and politics. Besides identifying and supporting the next generation of cutting edge scholars, the program connects each fellow to a &quo
Source: Informed Comment (Blog run by Juan Cole)
6-14-09
[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.]
Some comentators have suggested that the reason Western reporters were shocked when Ahmadinejad won was that they are based in opulent North Tehran, whereas the farmers and workers of Iran, the majority, are enthusiastic for Ahmadinejad. That is, we fell victim once again to upper middle class reporting
Source: http://www.allgov.com
6-9-09
The State Department has decided to replace its top historian, responsible for overseeing the publication of the U.S. government’s official history of American foreign policy, after an investigation turned up allegations that included a “lack of interest” in history.
Marc J. Susser was appointed to the historian job in 2001 by President George W. Bush, and proceeded to take over the task of producing the voluminous “Foreign Relations of the United States” series. Over the next sever
Source: Email to HNN by Hunter College's Dorothy O. Helly
6-5-09
Jo Ann K. McNamara died in New York City May 20, age 78, from complications from shoulder surgery in March. Her most recent book is a translation of Paris in the Middle Ages (2009), written by Simone Roux. Prof. McNamara was a scholar of world-wide renown. Her most widely acclaimed book, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millenia, was published by Harvard University Press in 1996 and reviewed in the New York Times Book Review by Antonia Fraser. She argued that women as nuns have strugg
Source: Niall Ferguson in the Financial Times
6-29-09
On Wednesday last week, yields on 10-year US Treasuries – generally seen as the benchmark for long-term interest rates – rose above 3.73 per cent. Once upon a time that would have been considered rather low. But the financial crisis has changed all that: at the end of last year, the yield on the 10-year fell to 2.06 per cent. In other words, long-term rates have risen by 167 basis points in the space of five months. In relative terms, that represents an 81 per cent jump.
Most commen
Source: AP
6-3-09
Former President Bill Clinton is coming to North Carolina to speak at an event honoring the late historian John Hope Franklin and his wife, Aurelia.
Duke University said Wednesday that the campus will host an event next week to celebrate the Franklins. Clinton will be one of the featured speakers.
During his presidency, Clinton awarded Franklin the Presidential Medal of Freedom and later appointed Franklin in 1997 to chair a national task force on race. Franklin died in
Source: Cabinet (Spring; exact date uncertain)
5-1-09
Anxiety about deception runs deep in the philosophical and religious traditions of Europe, and new techniques for mastering this fear mark episodes in the history of the modern world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, both the playfulness and the peril of deceit came to be distanced from the sphere of rational inquiry: the sciences ceased to have much use for legerdemain; metaphysicians lost interest in the theater. But it was not always so, as the conversation below with Anthony Grafto
Source: Carl A. Zimring in a special report written for HNN
6-4-09
[Carl A. Zimring is Assistant Professor of Social Science in the Professional and Liberal Studies Department at Roosevelt University. Rutgers University Press will publish a paperback edition of his book Cash for Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America this fall. He would like to thank Erik S. Gellman, Michael K. Honey, and Lisa Phillips for assistance with this article.]
At a time when American labor has new hopes (with the possibility of the Employee Free Choice Act b
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
6-3-09
On June 3, 2009, President Barack Obama announced his intent to nominate former Republican Congressman Jim Leach as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
In making the announcement, President Obama said, “I am confident that with Jim as its head, the National Endowment for the Humanities will continue on its vital mission of supporting the humanities and giving the American public access to the rich resources of our culture. Jim is a valued and dedicated publi
Source: Campus Watch
6-4-09
Stanford Middle East history professor Joel Beinin's appearances on the Peninsula Peace and Justice Center (PPJC) Palo Alto cable television program"Other Voices" reliably produce anti-American, anti-Israel invective. In September 2008, Beinin declared,"The American empire is going down," and during a taping for the February 2009 show,"
