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: NYT
4-24-09
If you wanted a book title to speed the pulse of liberal academics, journalists and politicians, you couldn’t do much better than “The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right.” For many people that’s a title akin to “The Winning Ways of Serial Killers.”
The two leading arguments of the book, written by Jon A. Shields and published last month by Princeton University Press, are no less provocative.
“Many Christian-right organizations,” Mr. Shields writes, “have helped c
Source: NYT
4-24-09
Walter Schneir, whose fascination with the Rosenberg espionage case began with a hotly debated 1965 book arguing that the couple had been framed, and ended with his grim acceptance that Julius, if not Ethel, Rosenberg was indeed a Soviet spy, died April 11 at his home in Pleasantville, N.Y. He was 81.
The cause was thyroid cancer, said his wife, Miriam, who was the co-author of the book....
The picture began to change with the publication in 1983 of “The Rosenberg File:
Source: NYT
4-24-09
Michael Burleigh’s ambitious cultural history of terrorism is indeed suffused with blood and rage. The blood is provided in graphic, detailed, often nauseating descriptions of the vicious brutality of terrorists ranging from the Irish Fenians to Al Qaeda. The rage, on the other hand, is in the pen of the author, and it is equally wide ranging. Burleigh rages against terrorists and all their apologists: “unserious” academics, ineffably polite interrogators, colluding human rights lawyers and thos
Source: AP
4-24-09
North and South, black and white, history buffs like the Doyles and educators - some 2,000 people in all - are expected to attend the daylong gathering at the University of Richmond, where the leading Civil War historians won't exactly rewrite history. But they do promise new scrutiny of a war whose causes have long since been reduced to bumper sticker slogans.
Conference organizers said overwhelming public interest in the conference underscores a national hunger to better grasp the
Source: Deborah Lipstadt blog
4-25-09
Check out this article in today's Varietyand the blog, Cinematical.As the Variety article notes, the producers of the Soloist have teamed up with Participation Media to make the film. Participation, established by
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
4-24-09
It sounds like a scene out of Possession: In the waning hours of a research trip to the British Library, an American scholar stumbles on a cache of letters overlooked for 250 years. It's the stuff of scholarly romance, and it happened to Alan Houston, a professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego, who made what he describes as the find of a lifetime—47 letters written by, to, and about Benjamin Franklin, and never before seen by scholars.
Mr. Houston
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
4-24-09
“While acting on vengeful feelings clearly needs to be discouraged, acknowledging them should be not merely permitted but encouraged,” wrote Jared M. Diamond in an essay in The New Yorker last April.
Now two of the subjects of that essay are acknowledging their own vengeful feelings. This week a lawyer filed a $10-million defamation claim in a New York court on behalf of two Papua New Guinea men whom Mr. Diamond described as active participants in clan warfare during the 1990s.
Source: Op ed in the NYT by Philip Zelikow, a professor of history at the University of Virginia, was the counselor of the State Department from 2005 to 2006 and the executive director of the 9/11 commission.
4-23-09
The C.I.A. program did generate a huge volume of intelligence material. Many of these interrogation reports did contain valuable information. After all, the C.I.A. had exclusive custody of many of the most important Qaeda captives for years. Any of the flow from that river would be theirs. Agency officials thus wrote memos recounting plots prevented and people captured.
Yet the C.I.A.’s claims that its methods produced actionable information can also be misleading. Former Vice Presi
Source: Politico.com
4-21-09
A Hebrew-speaking reader sends over a report in Maariv that the historian Michael Oren is the frontrunner to be that country's ambassador to Washington.
It's an interesting choice -- he's written a couple of histories of the Middle East that were bestsellers in this country, the most recent of which covered ... U.S. involvement in the Middle East.
Source: Martin Kramer at his blog, Sandbox
4-23-09
The New York Post features an article by Jacob Gershman on the Joseph Massad tenure case at Columbia. I highly recommend it. Gershman covered this story for the now-defunct New York Sun, and he knows all the ins and outs.
Gershman reports that Massad's file has already passed muster with President Lee Bollinger, and will be presented to Columbia's Board of Trustees for a final decision in about a week. Bollinger "buckled," Gershman writes, rather than face down a determin
Source: Barry Rubin at his blog at GLORIA
4-20-09
A friend of mine is an expert on education. We were in his apartment in New York maybe 6-8 years ago. He said: the schools are so bad that I bet my son doesn't even know about George Washington. He called in his 12 year old son and asked what he knew about George Washington. His son said--no kidding, "George Washington Carver?"
In subsequent discussion, he couldn't tell us anything about the American revolution, the Constitution, or the Federalist papers. And he was a smar
Source: National Journal (subscribers only)
4-18-09
An unusual revolt by State Department employees is expected to trigger the ouster of the bureaucrat heading the Office of the Historian, a unique squad of 35 academics charged by statute with impartially chronicling America's foreign relations.
State Department Historian Marc Susser and his aide Douglas Kraft will be removed and offered other civil service positions, based on a recommendation by State's inspector general's office that will be finalized and published in the next two
Source: NYT
4-22-09
Stefan Brecht, whose father was the playwright Bertolt Brecht and who added to the family’s theatrical legacy by fastidiously chronicling the rise of avant-garde theater, died on April 13 in Manhattan. He was 84.
The cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Rena Gill. Her husband had Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disease, she said.
For decades, Mr. Brecht worked on a series of books, collectively known as “The Original Theater of the City of New York: From the
Source: Inside Higher Ed
4-22-09
As digital archives have become more important and more popular, there are varying schools of thought among scholars about how best to guarantee that they will be around for good. Some think that the best possibility is for the creators of the archives -- people generally with some passion for the topic -- to keep control. Others favor acquisition, thinking that larger entities provide more security and resources for the long run.
The fate of"Paper of Record," a digital archive of early n
Source: http://www.pulitzer.org
4-20-09
History - The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed (W.W. Norton & Company)
Biography - American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham (Random House)
General Nonfiction - Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon (Doubleday)
Ralph Luker at HNN Blog Cliopatria
Congrat
Source: John Gray in the Guardian
4-18-09
During the Soviet era it used to be joked that Russia was the only country in which the past was unpredictable. When the secret police chief Lavrenti Beria was shot in 1953, libraries were ordered to cut out the pages of the Soviet encyclopedia that dealt with him and expand the section on the Bering Strait. As far as official Soviet history was concerned Beria had never existed and the events in which he had played a part had to be rewritten.
In the former Soviet Union history was
Source: Press Release
4-21-09
College faculty and administrators are invited to participate in the ninth annual “Reacting to the Past” Institute at Barnard College (New York), June 11-14, 2009. Featured tracks:
“The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 B.C.”
“Greenwich Village, 1913: Suffrage, Labor and the New Woman”
“Charles Darwin, the Copley Medal, and the Rise of Naturalism, 1862-64”
“The Josianic Reform: Deuteronomy, Prophecy, and Israelite Religion, 622 BCE”
“
Source: Politico.com
4-21-09
There aren’t any sex scenes or vampires, and it won’t help you lose weight.
But House Republicans are tearing through the pages of Amity Shlaes’ “The Forgotten Man” like soccer moms before book club night.
Shlaes’ 2007 take on the Great Depression questions the success of the New Deal and takes issue with the value of government intervention in a major economic crisis — red meat for a party hungry for empirical evidence that the Democrats’ spending plans won’t end the c
Source: http://www.pjstar.com
4-18-09
Carl Adams is feeling vindicated these days. As an amateur historian who's followed Abraham Lincoln's career as a lawyer in Illinois since the mid-1990s, Adams has made a point of researching a case that originated in Pekin involving slavery.
But other historians didn't think the little-known case that came before the Illinois Supreme Court in 1841 was all that significant, said Adams, referring to reactions to a presentation he made 10 years ago.
But Adams got a differ
Source: NYT
4-18-09
NOW that colleges have created gender-neutral housing and bathrooms, and gay couples can be married in Iowa and Connecticut, it may be hard to understand the uproar that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work caused when it first appeared in the mid-1980s.
Ms. Sedgwick, who died of breast cancer last week at age 58, found subterranean homoerotic impulses in the work of Henry James, Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Dickens. In the decorous novels of Jane Austen, she unearthed hidden references
