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: Editorial in http://english.chosun.com
2-26-09
In an interview with the Chosun Ilbo, Prof. Lee Tae-jin of Seoul National University, who is retiring from the Department of Korean History, said the account of modern and contemporary history in school texts by Kumsung Publishing went beyond the boundaries of school texts. Revising the words is not enough, he added: Korea’s history texts need to be rewritten. Some historians ended up supporting the left-leaning history text in statements protesting against the government’s calls to revi
Source: News Hounds ("We watch FOX so you don't have to.")
2-24-09
The weekly Larry Schweikart show on Fox&Friends got even loonier last week (February 18th). In addition to presenting a rather confused and confusing “critique” of” liberal lies,” Schweikart and Doocy actually created their own myth – or dare I say, conservative lie. But before I get to the substance of the show, it should be mentioned that University of Dayton’s Professor Larry Schweikart is Rush Limbaugh approved. Rush says, regarding Larry’s book (“48 Liberal Lies”) which is pimped weekly
Source: USA Today
2-24-09
In February, Black History Month, publishers release a flood of books about or by African Americans. USA TODAY recommends a dozen new titles for all ages.
Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $19.95, for ages 12 and up) by Phillip Hoose celebrates a little-known civil-rights pioneer who at 15 defied segregation on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., nearly a year before Rosa Parks would. Colvin, now a retired nurse in New York, gets to tell her own story, and the la
Source: Cynthia Haven at the website of the Stanford News Service
2-25-09
When Freedom Summer was in full swing in 1964, a political cartoon in a Mississippi newspaper showed three Union soldiers from the Civil War era, one holding a noose. "We'll larn them Rebels some Civil Rights," it said.
The circumstances may be particular, but the phenomenon is international: A few years ago, as mass graves of atrocities were discovered, the Serbians said that corpses had been taken from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and reburied in the Balkans to discredi
Source: Email from Megan Friedel, Archivist at the Oregon Historical Society Research Library
2-25-09
It is with great sadness that I write to share the news with you that, due to severe budget reductions, the Oregon Historical Society will be closing its Research Library beginning this Saturday, February 28th. The collections will no longer be open to the public, and all library positions will be eliminated beginning March 13th. A few positions will remain to handle orders for photo and film reproduction. It is not known at this time if or when the library will re-open and at what capacity.
Source: AHA Blog
2-24-09
In 2009, George Mason University and the American Historical Association will offer the first Roy Rosenzweig Fellowship for Innovation in Digital History. This award was developed by friends and colleagues of Roy Rosenzweig (1950–2007), Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of History and New Media at George Mason University, to honor his life and work as a pioneer in the field of digital history.
This nonresidential fellowship will be awarded annually to honor and support work on an inn
Source: Robert J. Norrell in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
2-27-09
[Robert J. Norrell is a professor of history at the University of Tennessee and author of Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Harvard University Press, 2009).]
Any scholar taking on a well-studied topic approaches the existing literature with some trepidation. But anxiety turns into fear when you become convinced that the main line of interpretation is seriously in error — as I discovered while writing a revisionist biography of Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tu
Source: Blogger Ashley Cruseturner (The Bosque Boys blog)
2-22-09
I am back from one of my favorite annual events: the 2009 meeting of the Texas Community College Teachers Association.
The history section featured an outstanding slate of eminent scholars: Eric Foner, David Goldfield, Brian Delay, and H.W. Brands. I hope to offer comment at some point on the incredibly provocative presentations offered by those luminaries.
However, as is my wont, I could not help myself from sneaking into the government section to hear one of my favo
Source: Montreal Gazette
2-21-09
Battle re-enactments similar to the Plains of Abraham event that was cancelled last week generally fail to teach people very much about history, one of Canada's leading historians says.
But a faithful recreation of the battle would at least have had the merit of drawing a sharp distinction between the way the French army fought versus the way the militiamen fought, says Desmond Morton of Montreal.
"The French army took to its heels, but the militia didn't," sa
Source: Leonard Pitts in the Miami Herald
2-21-09
... Occasionally, one is privileged to live through a moment when history doesn't just open wide like a door on a hinge, but you know it for what it is even then, even as it it is happening, so you can fix the details in your mind, rehearse the stories you will tell your grandchildren someday. The night Barack Obama was elected president was one of those moments.
But what did that tell us about who we are, what we are, where we are on the road to racial reconciliation? What, indeed,
Source: Clark Hoyt in the NYT
2-22-09
[Clark Hoyt is the Public Editor (ombudsman) of the NYT.]
WITH the movie “Frost/Nixon” reviving memories of Watergate, Times readers on a recent Sunday might have been expecting major revelations when they saw this front-page headline: “John Dean’s Watergate Role At Issue in Nixon Tapes Feud.”
Instead, they got an article reviving a decade-old argument over the editing of widely cited transcripts of the Watergate cover-up, as captured on Richard Nixon’s secret taping system.
Source: Independent (UK)
2-20-09
Victor Kiernan, professor emeritus of Modern History at Edinburgh University, was an erudite Marxist historian with wide-ranging interests that spanned virtually every continent. His passion for history and radical politics, classical languages and world literature was evenly divided.
His interest in languages was developed at home in south Manchester. His father worked for the Manchester Ship Canal as a translator of Spanish and Portuguese and young Victor picked these up even before get
Source: Inside Higher Ed
2-19-09
Joel Kovel — one of the more outspoken professorial critics of Israel on American college campuses — is out of his job at Bard College. This week Kovel sent a letter to all Bard faculty members denouncing the way he has been treated and charging that his politics cost him the position.
Others suggest, however, that Kovel was treated the way many non-tenured professors are being treated these days as colleges retrench — and that mixed student reviews of his organizational skills in t
Source: Press Release--Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
2-20-09
The tenth annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, honoring the best new book on slavery or abolition, was awarded at the Yale Club in New York City on February 19. Stephanie Smallwood of the University of Washington, Seattle, won the prize for her book, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Harvard University Press). The prize is awarded by Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman
Source: Press Release--Washington College (MD)
2-20-09
CHESTERTOWN, FEB. 20, 2009 – In commemoration of George Washington’s birthday, Washington College today announced three finalists for the 2009 George Washington Book Prize.
The books, which were chosen from 78 entries, include an epic history of Thomas Jefferson's African-American relatives, a prodigious exploration of Jefferson's literary and intellectual development, and a tale of investment skullduggery and financial meltdown that eerily foreshadows today’s headlines.
The
Source: Independent (UK)
2-20-09
Victor Kiernan, professor emeritus of Modern History at Edinburgh University, was an erudite Marxist historian with wide-ranging interests that spanned virtually every continent. His passion for history and radical politics, classical languages and world literature was evenly divided.
His interest in languages was developed at home in south Manchester. His father worked for the Manchester Ship Canal as a translator of Spanish and Portuguese and young Victor picked these up even befo
Source: http://www.pantagraph.com
2-19-09
Historian James Horton said Wednesday that Abraham Lincoln’s iconic status as the man who helped save the Union and end slavery doesn’t always convey the complexity of the 16th president’s dilemma.
“In the 21st century, we don’t sometimes understand how difficult it was to even think about bringing slavery to an end,” said Horton, IWU Founders’ Day convocation speaker and a member of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission,
Slavery was institutionalized for more than two c
Source: John Palattella in The Nation
2-18-09
A little over a year ago, Doubleday published a study of the rise of neoconservatism called They Knew They Were Right. The book has the trappings of a serious work of original research, such as extensive endnotes about primary sources, suggesting that its author, Jacob Heilbrunn, had toiled in archives and periodical reading rooms. In a review that appeared in this magazine ("Out of Place," June 23, 2008), Corey Robin argued that in its materials and its method They Knew They Were Righ
Source: Inside Higher Ed
2-19-09
By an overwhelming margin of 87 to 13 percent, members of the American Anthropological Association have approved changes in its code of ethics that are designed to strengthen its protections of people who are studied, and to promote the values of free dissemination of scholarship.
But the degree of consensus among anthropologists may not be reflected by the lopsided outcome: At least some who backed the changes said that they did so because they view them as a step in the right dire
Source: AFP
2-18-09
Boubacar Joseph Ndiaye, the veteran curator of Senegal’s historic House of Slaves, whose famous visitors included Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton, died here on Feb. 6. He was 86.
His death after an illness was announced by Hamady Bocoum, director of cultural heritage at Senegal’s Culture Ministry.
For 40 years, Mr. Ndiaye oversaw the memorial on Gorée Island, off the coast of Senegal at Dakar. The island was used to hold captured Africans before their perilous voyage to
