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: Britannica Blog
2-11-09
James McPherson
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
2-13-09
HNN Editor: The NYT Book Review notes that Burlingame's Lincoln biography will be placed online in the spring, allowing it to be continually updated to correct errors and incorporate new information.
... Landmark biographers of Lincoln are many: Carl Sandburg (1926, 1939), James G. Randall (1945-55), and David H. Donald (1995), to name just three. All have been challenged during thi
Source: Newsweek
2-7-09
What made Johnson run? That was the question that, for several months in the late 1970s, drove Robert Caro mad. Never mind that Caro was better equipped to answer it than perhaps any other man, living or dead. For years, he had been at work on a nonfiction chronicle of Lyndon Johnson's early life. He had spent thousands of hours wooing and winning and interviewing Johnson's family members and neighbors. He'd even spent a long night, alone, huddled in a sleeping bag in the remote Texas hill count
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
2-10-09
The Obama administration today named Carole McAlpine Watson as acting chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has filled that role since last month’s departure of Bruce Cole, who had led the endowment since 2001. Today’s announcement may be a sign that the White House does not plan to name a permanent chairman — who would be subject to Senate confirmation — for several weeks or months.
Ms. Watson has served on the endowment’s staff since 1978, most recently as ass
Source: Bill Moyers Journal on PBS
2-6-09
More books are coming during this bicentennial year. Here's my most recent favorite,"Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World." It's a collection of original essays by prize-winning historians, including the book's editor, Eric Foner, who is with me now.
Eric Foner is an acclaimed professor of history at Columbia University here in New York City, and the author of"The Story of American Freedom","Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War" and"Reconstruction: Amer
Source: Bruce Cole in Humanities, magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
1-1-09
Scholar entrepreneur Phil Cantelon has discovered that it is possible to make research and writing pay. In 1980, he and three collegues hung a shingle for their services as historians, building a business whose clients would eventually range from the United States government to a Las Vegas museum devoted to organized crime.
NEH Chairman Bruce Cole: When people think about historians, they usually think of academic historians, or maybe they think of independent historians or people w
Source: Letter posted in the Iraqi Crisis newsletter
2-6-09
[Mr. George formerly ran the Iraq Museum.]
Dear Chuck,
I just got an e-mail from Dr. Amira Edan from Baghdad, she is telling me that they are in
a very bad situation squeezed by the minister of tourism and antiquities to open the
museum, and he wants the museum ready by Feb. 12th, he ordered to put down the solid wall
that was built behind the main door of the museum, and he is sending TV crews to shoot
while the museum people are working and antiquities open on tables in
Source: Ronald Steel in the New Republic
2-6-09
[Ronald Steel is a professor of international relations and history at the University of Southern California.]
... Whereas other historians often plowed the same familiar fields, Diggins's restless mind led him into continually new bypasses of the American political experience. It drew him to an inquiry, in his first book, into the response by Americans to Mussolini's experiment in Italian fascism, and then on to studies of the American left--both New and Old, of the embrace of righ
Source: Note to Peter Klingman from the staff of the American Historical Review in response to his submission
2-6-09
Related Links
HNN Hot Topics: The Watergate Transcript Controversy
NYT News Story:"Journal Rejects Essay About Nixon Tapes"
Summary and comment: This submission is too short (4868 words) for consideration by the AHR. It also covers too particular a historical concern -- an editorial corrective of a prima
Source: New York Times frontpage story
1-31-09
Key Links
Stanley I. Kutler: Response to the NYT
HNN Hot Topics: The Watergate Transcript Controversy
HNN EditorThis news story concerns an article submitted to the American Historical Review by independent historian Peter Klingman that claims historian Stanley Kutler misrepresented Watergate transcripts in such a
Source: Newark Star-Ledger
2-5-09
About a decade ago, imaginations were captured by a tale of African-Americans weaving secret codes into quilt patterns in the 1800s to pass on clues and directions to runaway slaves in their perilous journey to freedom.
Previously considered folklore and once the basis for a children's fiction book, many people began to believe it was fact after the 1999 publication of "Hidden in Plain View," a non-fiction book embraced by celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey. In it, a South
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
2-6-09
Historian Allen Weinstein, most recently ninth Archivist of the United States, has joined the faculty of the University of Maryland, College of Information Studies – Maryland’s iSchool – as a visiting professor. Dr. Weinstein resigned his post as Archivist this past December.
In announcing Weinstein’s appointment Dean Jennifer Preece stated: “We are honored to have Professor Allen Weinstein join the iSchool. He will challenge our students and faculty intellectually and substantially
Source: Jamie Glazov at frontpagemag.com
2-6-09
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Olga Velikanova, an assistant professor at the University of North Texas, where she teaches Soviet history. Dr. Velikanova was among the first scholars to work with declassified Communist Party and secret police archives. Her research about everyday Stalinism, the cult of Lenin and Russian popular opinion has been broadcast by the BBC, Finnish and Russian radio and TV as well as the History Channel in Canada. She is the author of “Making of an Idol: On Uses o
Source: http://www.utsnyc.edu (date uncertain)
2-6-09
The Rev. Dr. Robert T. Handy, Henry Sloane Coffin Professor Emeritus of Church History at Union Theological Seminary, died at Crane’s Mill Retirement Community in West Caldwell, New Jersey, on January 8. He was 90 years old.
During the 36 years he taught at the Seminary, Handy made a name for himself as an impressive scholar of American church history, an exceptional teacher, and a gifted administrator.
"From the very first I knew him to be one of a cluster of facu
Source: http://www.thetelegraph.com
1-28-09
When Principia College came to Elsah in the 1930s and wanted to house its black cooks in the village, local officials would not allow it, apparently adhering to an unwritten rule.
At least one eyewitness, a longtime resident of the village, has confirmed that the alleged tradition was that no black person could remain in the village after dark, let alone overnight.
In connection with this local history, expert and author James Loewen will make an appearance at Principia
Source: Ron Radosh at his blog at pajamasmedia.com
2-6-09
The American intellectual community suffered a great loss last week, when John P. Diggins died suddenly from complications from colon cancer. Jack’s death came as a shock to many of his friends and colleagues, to whom he never mentioned his illness.
Jack Diggins was a unique figure in our polarized times. He was intellectually and politically engaged. Yet unlike so many, it was impossible to predict what he would say and where he would come down on so many issues. He could be sharp
Source: Publishers Weekly
1-19-09
... The most exceptional biographies, says Douglas Brinkley, go beyond outward events to illuminate “the internal clock of a president,” as well as combine analysis with atmospheric details that transport readers back in time.
Which books make the cut? Historians single out Edmund Morris's Pulitzer Prize–winning The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (Random House, 1979) as one they admire. “Morris is very meticulous with his research and somehow brings the young Roosevelt back to life,” sa
Source: Campus Watch
2-5-09
Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies, has been caught in a lie. Khalidi concluded a January 8, 2009, op-ed that appeared in the New York Times and the International Herald
Source: Excerpted from the Washington Monthly
1-2-09
ANDREW J. BACEVICH
Barack Obama has identified Reinhold Niebuhr as "one of my favorite philosophers" and is familiar with the great Protestant theologian’s various writings. Yet as Obama assumes the mantle of Most Powerful Man in the World, Niebuhr’s Irony of American History is one volume that deserves a careful second reading.
Published in 1952, when the Cold War was at its frostiest and Americans were still coming to terms with what it meant to exercise glo
Source: Website of the Council on Foreign Relations
2-3-09
Walter Russell Mead, an award-winning historian, says the backlash against free-market capitalism being embraced in the United States and elsewhere right now endangers America's standing in the world. He says these protectionist fears are most significant in relation to China: "The key political question of the twenty-first century is, 'How does the U.S.-China relationship develop?'" Relations with China have steadily improved, Mead says, but if China thinks the United States is shutti
