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: Humanities (magazine of the NEH) March/April
3-1-09
When Thomas Carlyle sat down in 1834 to write The French Revolution: A History, he wanted to do more than chronicle the mere procession of events. He wanted readers to smell the fear in the streets during the Terror, to taste the decadence of the Bourbon monarchy, to observe the sartorial cavalcade when the Estates-General meets for the first time since 1614, to picture blood spilling from guillotines. To accomplish his task he marshaled the same tools used by novelists—shifting point of view, i
Source: National History Center
3-18-09
The National History Center’s Founding Director, Professor Wm. Roger Louis, Kerr Chair of British History at the University of Texas at Austin, is the 2009 recipient of the Professor of the Year Award. The Senate of College Councils, the student governance organization that represents its 50,000 students at the University of Texas in academic affairs, grants the awards to faculty members nominated by UT students who have demonstrated outstanding teaching ability and a continuing dedication to st
Source: Juan Cole at his blog, Informed Comment
3-19-09
The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Source: Conrad Black at National Review Online
3-18-09
Jim Powell has returned to the charge about Franklin D. Roosevelt accusing me of trying to avoid “embarrassing questions” about the New Deal and evade the chastisement I earned by writing a biography of Roosevelt, rather than an anthology of his favorite economists.
We went around this track before, in an exchange in the Wall Street Journal five years ago, which I referred to in my National Review Online piece, to which he replied in his
Source: Bill Moyers Journal on PBS
3-13-09
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL. Karen Armstrong's life, as you will soon learn, was turned around by of all things, a footnote. When this former nun fled the convent and became a scholar of literature at Oxford, she thought she'd put all things theological well behind her. But, as the saying goes, if you want to make God laugh, tell Him, or Her, your plans.
KAREN ARMSTRONG: So can I ask you what you think about the Pope?
BILL MOYERS: Next thing you know, Armstrong
Source: Juan Cole at the website of TPM Cafe, which is conducting a roundtable on his book: Engaging the Muslim World (March 2009)
3-16-09
My new book is a series of case studies in US and NATO relations with a Muslim country or movement, and I feel vindicated that I chose well. I talk about Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, all of which are in the headlines as the book appears in bookstore
Source: James Traug in the NYT Bk Rev
3-12-09
Had the White House aides who scripted Barack Obama’s remarks to Al Arabiya television in January consulted Rashid Khalidi’s latest work beforehand, the president might not have so blithely vowed to restore the “respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago.” In “Sowing Crisis,” Khalidi, who holds the Edward Said chair of Arab studies at Columbia and is a major pro-Palestinian voice in American scholarship, argues that Washington’s drive for heg
Source: NYT
3-15-09
A quarter century ago, a Ukrainian historian named Stanislav Kulchytsky was told by his Soviet overlords to concoct an insidious cover-up. His orders: to depict the famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s as unavoidable, like a natural disaster. Absolve the Communist Party of blame. Uphold the legacy of Stalin.
Professor Kulchytsky, though, would not go along.
The other day, as he stood before a new memorial to the victims of the famine, he recalled
Source: http://www.newswise.com
3-13-09
Economic historian Robert Whaples says he and the “vast, vast majority” of his peers are more optimistic about the future than a recent poll found average Americans to be.
Whaples, who is department chair and professor of economics at Wake Forest University, even says he has come to see the field of economics not as the so-called "dismal science" but rather as the "cheerful science."
With daily headlines focused on unemployment figures, sluggish cons
Source: http://www.international.ucla.edu
3-13-09
Visiting professor Jurgen Kocka, a modern social historian at the Free University of Berlin, gave a lecture that kicks off more than a year of talks, conferences and film screenings organized by the Center for European and Eurasian Studies. An international conference about 1989's events and a film series are set for November.
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BEFORE AN AUDIENCE that included consular officials from six Central and Eastern European countries that threw off Communism in 1989, a visit
Source: NYT op ed by Frederick Kagan, Kimberly Kagan and Max Boot
3-12-09
“DONT worry, we are not going to lose this war.”
These were the parting words to us from Brig. Gen. Sher Muhammad Zazai, commander of the 205th Corps of the Afghan National Army in Kandahar. He was echoing the sentiments of a group of village elders we had met days before in Khost Province, who assured us that they would never allow the Taliban to come back.
It is odd that the Afghans felt it necessary to reassure American visitors that all was far from lost. It reflect
Source: Houston Chronicle
3-12-09
Priscilla Benham, a college professor who made Texas history come alive for generations of students, died Monday. She was 70.
“We’d take East Texas trips and stop by all the historical markers and historical houses. Wherever we went, it seemed something had to be historical,” recalled her son David Benham, a Houston golf pro. “I started calling them ‘hysterical markers.’ That was really the wrong thing to do.”
Benham, a descendant of Ulysses S. Grant who grew up in Bayt
Source: HNN Staff summary of a long article in the Chronicle of Higher Education
3-13-09
The Chronicle of Higher Ed reports that historian Norman Golb has confirmed that his son used a pseudonym when defending Golb's Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship.
The son, Raphael H. Golb, has been charged in New York City with impersonation for allegedly assuming the identity of a scholar in order to discredit him. In an email that was widely distributed the scholar supposedly confesses to plagiarism. The scholar is a longtime critic of Norman Golb's theories about the disputed autho
Source: E.J. Dionne in the American Prospect
3-13-09
Last October, after the economy's downward spiral became obvious, I closed an e-mail to a friend with the words: "I never thought my obsession with the 1930s would ever be relevant to my life." That obsession had many roots, not the least being that my hometown of Fall River, Massachusetts, was a '30s kind of place with a '30s kind of culture, a '30s kind of economy, and '30s-style New Deal politics. But if there is a single person who inspired my fascination with an era, it is the his
Source: Michael Honey
3-12-09
[Michael Honey is Haley Professor of Humanities at the University of Washington Tacoma, and author of “Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign.]
One hundred historians have declared their support for the Employee Free Choice Act, introduced into Congress on March 10 by Senator Tom Harkin and Rep. George Miller.
The legislation would make it easier for workers to organize unions and harder for employers to evade them. Wo
Source: Daniel Pipes website
3-8-09
I prepared for this interview on the Fox New Channel armed with quotes expecting to discuss specifics of the coverage of Islam in select U.S. textbook. Only when the program was already underway did I learn that there would be another interviewee with me and that it would be Hussein Ibish.Ibish twice dismissed the Muslims who support terrorism as a"tiny speck." I disputed that on air but, having prepped to discuss textbooks, was not equipped with specific figures and citations.H
Source: Harper's
3-10-09
Juan Cole is one of the nation’s leading historians focusing on the Middle East. Over the past decade he has emerged as a commentator on Middle East policy and a reliable source for new ideas that may enable the United States to pursue its foreign policy objectives more effectively in the region. For millions, his frequent posts at the Informed Comment blog provide a daily update on press accounts from the Islamic world, often including translations from Arabic- and Farsi-language sources in clo
Source: AP
3-10-09
Historian and Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust has won a $50,000 prize from the New York Historical Society for "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War."
Faust, 61, received the fourth annual American History Book Prize, the society announced Tuesday. She has written several other books about the Civil War and the South, including "Mothers of Invention" and "A Sacred Circle."
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Source: AHA Blog
3-10-09
To implement a resolution passed at the 2009 annual meeting, the AHA Council has formed a working group to create a threaded miniconference, which will explore historical perspectives on same-sex marriage at the 2010 meeting in San Diego. The working group includes Kristin Hoganson (Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) representing the 2010 Program Committee, Leisa Meyer (William and Mary Coll.) as co-chair of the AHA’s LGBTQ Task Force, and James Green (Brown Univ.), as well as the AHA vice p
Source: Canadian Press
3-9-09
British historian Lawrence Freedman has won the Lionel Gelber Prize for his book on the Middle East.
Now into its 19th year, the $15,000 prize honours books on international affairs. It was established by Canadian diplomat Lionel Gelber.
Freedman's book is called "A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East" and is published by Doubleday Canada.
"If you were to select only one book to understand the turmoil and confusion of events
