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: Excerpt from an Open Letter posted on the website of the Long Bow Group, Inc, which is run by GMU historian Carma Hinton
4-15-09
HNN Backgrounder Chai Ling was a leader in the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. She escaped to the United States and reinvented herself as a software company entrepreneur. When Jenzabar, her company, was sued by former executives she complained about the bad publicity, saying it damaged her reputation as an all-American success story. One of her complaints was directed at George Mason University historian Carma Hinton, who leads a small non-profit production company (
Source: http://www.upenn.edu/gazette
4-30-09
The sky on this mid-January day is opaque, the color of gauze, and large snowflakes are falling. From time to time, a wind slashes, but for two hours of walking, Tom Sugrue, the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of History and Sociology, and I have ignored it.
We had met at a buzzing Mount Airy café, InFusion, whose back room was given over to young parents and small children. Sugrue, who lives nearby in a grand, wood-paneled house with a thick garden, is 46. He has a round, bo
Source: Inside Higher Ed
5-4-09
Guenter Lewy, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is a scholar whose work has been praised by Turkey’s government. When the embassy of Turkey in Washington was upset over a PBS documentary on the Armenian genocide during World War I, the ambassador's statement on the program noted the work of "respected scholar Guenter Lewy, whose latest book The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide documents the incomplete historic r
Source: Democracy Now
5-1-09
This week, President Obama said waterboarding is torture but gave no indication he is planning to hold anyone accountable for authorizing it. We speak with University of Wisconsin professor, Alfred McCoy, author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. [includes rush transcript]
AMY GOODMAN: Juan, our final topic today is the issue of torture.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes. Well, sixty-two people were arrested Thursday outside the White
Source: Ben Macintyre (Author of A Foreign Field: A True Story of Love and Betrayal in the Great War) in the Times (UK)
4-29-09
[Ben Macintyre thought he knew who condemned a fugitive British soldier to death in France in 1916, and wrote a book about it. Now, ten years later, an e-mail out of the blue has convinced him that he had the wrong man. Here, he sets the record straight.]
###
History never stands still. Just when we think we understand the past, it moves on. Ten years ago, I set out to try to solve a murder mystery left over from the First World War. Two years later, thinking that I had
Source: William Loren Katz in an email circulating on the Internet
5-2-09
[Mr. Katz, the author of forty U.S. history books, is affiliated with New York University. Click here for his website.] If water boarding is torture and a crime according to U.S. and international laws, shouldn't the United States bring some people to trial? President Obama insists we need to move ahead rather than prosecute, and this week he seemed to downgrade torture from a crime to a “mistake.”
An earlier President had another
Source: LAT
5-3-09
A New York-born and Princeton-educated historian and commentator on Middle East affairs has been chosen Israel's next ambassador to Washington, Israeli news media reported Saturday.
According to the online edition of the newspaper Haaretz, Michael B. Oren’s selection by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman will be submitted to the Cabinet for approval at its meeting today. Oren would replace Sallai Meridor.
Oren is a senior fellow at
Source: Guardian
4-30-09
Schools are producing illiterate and uncommunicative children, he tells conference of private school heads.
The TV historian David Starkey today called for schools to bring back memorising dates, elocution and grammar lessons, and public-speaking competitions.
The 64-year-old expert on the Tudor period said education had been "taken over by bean counters" and schools were producing illiterate and uncommunicative children.
He said that in the early
Source: http://grad-schools.usnews
4-30-09
It's a four-way tie for #1:
Princeton
Stanford
Berkeley
Yale
#5
Harvard
Chicago
Source: Columbia Spectator
4-30-09
One day, Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust missed a call from Columbia Provost Alan Brinkley.
“He said he had good news,” Faust recalled. “I said I could use some good news.” So she e-mailed Brinkley, asking him to call her.
Brinkley telephoned Faust late that night to inform her that she had won a Bancroft Prize for her latest book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, published in 2008.
The Bancroft Prize, bestowed an
Source: NJ Star-Ledger
4-29-09
If it takes at least 50 years to fully appraise history, as historian and author David McCullough told a classroom of Drew University students this morning, then using the first 100 days of a presidency as a benchmark for performance is futile.
But even as McCullough, speaking on the 100th day of President Barack Obama's term in office, called the 100-day assessment "contrived," he had high praise for the commander-in-chief.
"I think we have an extraordin
Source: David Kaiser at his blog
4-11-09
[David Kaiser, a history professor at the Naval War College, is the author of The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy (2008).]
During the past seven days this blog has had about 1100 hits, which may be a record. I do hope some of my new patrons will return, but the reason for the outburst of interest is quite ironic: the fraudulent attribution to myself of a piece of right-wing hysteria which continues to circulate around the net. Snopes.com, a site which specializes in
Source: http://www.journalism.co.uk
4-29-09
British historian Simon Schama has joined the Financial Times and Financial Times Weekend as contributing editor.
Schama, professor of Art History and History at Columbia University, New York will write for the papers regularly, on a wide range of topics.
"I am delighted that Simon Schama is joining the Financial Times. He is one of the most elegant and versatile writers in the English language, a master historian who can turn his talents to the arts, popular cultu
Source: Oxford University Press blog
4-29-09
It is not everyday you get two Lincoln Prize winners together to ask each other questions, but lucky us, we had that very honor. Below is a conversation between James M. McPherson, most recently the author of
Source: Inside Higher Ed
4-28-09
Larry Kramer returned to Yale University -- the alma mater with which the gay activist and author has had a stormy relationship -- and offered a harsh critique of the university's commitment to gay studies and of the idea that the discipline should be linked to gender and sexuality studies. Because ties of the sort that exist at Yale between gay studies and gender studies are in fact common in academe, the speech -- posted online by The Daily Beast -- is attracting discussion.
Krame
Source: Martin Kramer at Sandbox, his blog
4-26-09
It's now up to Columbia's trustees to say what all the world south of 116th Street knows perfectly well: Joseph Massad does Columbia no credit. (For my past Massad writings, see the right sidebar.) Back in 2005, Columbia's faculty radicals, anticipating this moment, wrote a statement in favor of academic freedom, in which they tried to invalidate the statutory authority of the
Source: Jamie Glazov interviews Hanson at frontpagemag.com
4-27-09
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
FP: Victor Davis Hanson, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
What report card would you give the Obama administration in terms of foreign policy right now? Why?
Hanson: An Incomplete that at the present rate will turn into a D/F if he is not careful.
Obama has confused a number of issues: intractable problems like North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Venezuela, C
Source: HAW website
4-15-09
As historically minded activists, scholars, students, and teachers, we stand opposed to wars of aggression, military occupations of foreign lands, and imperial efforts by the United States and other powerful nations to dominate the internal life of other countries.
In particular, we continue to demand a speedy end to US military involvement in Iraq, and we insist on the withdrawal, not the expansion, of US and NATO military forces in Afghanistan. We also call for a sharp reduction o
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
4-24-09
To Willeke Wenderish, an associate professor of Egyptian archaeology at the University of California at Los Angeles, exploring the ruins of an ancient temple within an air-conditioned computer classroom can be even more useful than visiting the site in person.
Ms. Wenderish recently co-produced a virtual-reality project called “Digital Karnak,” which allows students (and visitors to the project’s Web site) to learn how the Egyptian religious center has evolved over two millennia. Mi
Source: Scotsman
4-25-09
A LEADING historian was under pressure to apologise yesterday after he described Scotland as a "feeble little nation".
David Starkey also hit out at Robert Burns, describing him as a "boring provincial poet", and dismissed bagpipes as "awful" on BBC's Question Time.
The outburst provoked 72 complaints to the BBC and the show's website has been inundated with comments from angry viewers.
Professor Robert Crawford, of St Andrews