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: Johann Hari in the Independent (UK)
1-15-09
“Hitler appointed me his biographer,” David Irving says. He is not laughing. He is announcing that the Fuhrer – the man he has revered since he was a child – saw him coming. Yes: Hitler prophesied Irving as the man who would clear away the smears and bring The Truth at last to an unwilling world. Irving discovered this prophecy when he was writing a biography of Adolf Hitler, but he is only prepared to disclose it baldly now. “I made a great point of tracking down all Hitler’s surviving doctors,
Source: WZZM13
1-14-09
Presidential historian Richard Norton Smith spoke at Calvin College Wednesday as part of the school's January Series. Smith is the former head of the Ford museum, and many other presidential libraries. As we approach Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday, as well as the inauguration of a new president, Smith reflects on the connections between Lincoln and President-Elect Barack Obama.
Smith quoted Lincoln, saying "In your hands, and not in mine, my dissatisfied countrymen, is the is
Source: Jane Landers in Perspectives, the magazine of the AHA
1-1-09
On behalf of the 2008 Nominating Committee, I am pleased to report the results of the 2008 election for AHA offices. The committee is extremely grateful to all the candidates who agreed to stand for Association elective office and committee positions despite their many other obligations. The Association depends for its continued well-being on the willingness of its members to serve. Elected candidates are indicated in blue boldface....
Source: http://cbs2chicago.com
1-13-09
When Barack Obama is sworn into office one week from today, the world will be watching. CBS 2's Anne State reports that two people who helped advise and support the president-elect will also be there. Chicago historian, activist and Professor Timuel Black says he couldn't miss this moment in history.
Timuel Black says he never thought in his lifetime Americans would elect an African American as president.
"No, I hoped we would, but I didn't think we would,"
Source: Newsbusters
1-12-09
On CBS’s Sunday Morning, correspondent Thalia Assuras examined President Bush’s historical legacy: "On January 20th, 2001, George Walker Bush took the oath of office as the 43rd president of the United States. His presidency and the future, a blank slate...Before the Iraq war. Before Katrina swept ashore. Before the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression."
Assuras cited two historians in her report, both of whom labeled Bush one of the nation’s worst presidents.
Source: NYT
1-12-09
If high-finance types are as hyperactive as Niall Ferguson and his cinematographer show themselves to be in “The Ascent of Money,” it’s no wonder the world’s economy has crashed. Heed the fiscal warning signs? Can’t. Gotta rush headlong into the next investment trend.
Mr. Ferguson, the historian and best-selling author, moves at whirlwind speed in this two-hour documentary based on his recent book of the same title. The program, Tuesday on PBS, is dizzying, and not because it’s full
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
1-11-09
The scholars approached their topic with considerable nervousness, and that was before the Wall Street meltdown, before Bernard L. Madoff.
Would a series of lectures at a premier business school on the history of Jews making money feed negative stereotypes?
In the end, the Wharton School and the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies decided to go ahead and tackle a topic that has gotten short shrift from academics until recently.
The goal, said the c
Source: Guardian (UK) blog
1-8-09
Last year, when Gordon Brown took his ministers on an awayday to Birmingham, he was described as the first prime minister to hold a cabinet meeting outside London since Lloyd George in 1921.
This was widely reported in the papers at the time and Downing Street itself was telling reporters about the meeting, which took place in Inverness because Lloyd George was on holiday in Scotland when Anglo-Irish relations reached a crisis point.
But Brown, who has a doctorate in hi
Source: Vanderbilt Press Release
1-12-09
Vanderbilt University Associate Professor of History Leor Halevi has received the 2008 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society (Columbia University Press).
The $10,000 award by the Phi Beta Kappa Society is the third major book prize for Halevi, who has done extensive research on death rites and everyday social practices at the rise of Islam. Tracing the movement of a corpse from the deathbed to the grave, the book of
Source: Louis P. Masur in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
1-16-09
With Barack Obama's election, the idea of an American national character is back, and it feels more salient than ever. Time and again during the presidential campaign, Obama told us his story: the mixed-race child of a man from Kenya and a woman from Kansas. He graduated from the Ivy League and was elected a U.S. senator. And then the self-described "mutt" became president. "Only in America," he declared.
Obama's popular narrative, and the way he has told it, pro
Source: Sandbox, a blog run by Martin Kramer
1-12-09
Last week, I was listening to a podcast of an interview with Professor Rashid Khalidi on a Chicago public radio station. I had downloaded it in great anticipation, and it got off to a great start. Khalidi, a Palestinian-American, is the Edward Said Professor at Columbia, editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, author of a well-regarded book on Palestinian identity, and the man whom Obama
Source: Juan Cole at his blog, Informed Comment
1-12-09
I want to follow up today on my postings over the weekend on how organizing to defend progressive congressional representatives and punish reactionary ones is far superior to street protests as political action on the Israeli-Palestinian issue.
People wrote to defend street protests or minded that I said I was annoyed. I stand by what I said. Street protests have not stopped the US Congress from turning Israel into a massive arms arsenal in the Middle East or from granting it $3 bil
Source: SHAFR Counci
1-12-09
Resolutions passed by the Council of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) on January 4, 2009.
I. The SHAFR Council believes that the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series is crucial to transparency in democratic governance and to informed citizenship. In light of recent problems in the State Department's Office of the Historian (HO) that may affect the future of the FRUS series, SHAFR expresses its strong support for the Secretary of State's
12-31-69
Seventy-five leading Holocaust scholars from around the world have signed a petition criticizing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez for accusing Israel of carrying out “a Holocaust” in Gaza.
The signatories on the petition include three former senior officials of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, chairman Rabbi Dr. Irving Greenberg, Dr. Michael Berenbaum and Dr. Walter Reich; scholars David S. Wyman (author of The Abandonment of the Jews), Deborah Lipstadt, Henry Feingold, and Thane
Source: Independent (UK)
1-12-09
Colin White, Director of the Royal Naval Museum at Portsmouth since June 2006, came to wider public prominence as – almost literally – the leading actor in the Trafalgar bicentenary events of 2005 and their four previous years of preparation.
White's identification with Nelson was by then so close that when his most important book, Nelson – The New Letters, came out that spring, the historian Andrew Roberts, in reviewing it, called him the admiral's "representative on earth&qu
Source: Anthony Grafton in The Nation
1-7-09
[Anthony Grafton teaches European intellectual history at Princeton University. His most recent books include Codex in Crisis (Crumpled Press) and, with Megan Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book (Harvard).]
In 1973, Morton Smith, professor of ancient history at Columbia University, shook the world--or at least the world of scholars who work on early Christianity. Fifteen years before, Smith had found an unknown document in the Mar Saba Greek Orthodox monastery,
Source: Stan Katz in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (blog)
1-6-09
There was ... a good deal of buzz [at the AHA] about the controversy generated by the resignation of the AHA delegate, Roger Louis (the former president of the AHA and a distinguished historian of the British empire), as chairman of the State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee, whose main function is to offer advice to the Secretary of State and the Historian’s Office concerning the ongoing publication of the Department’s formal historical record, Foreign Relations of the United States.
Source: Justin Vogt in the New Yorker
1-12-09
As anyone who has lived through the past eight years can attest, disputes about the foreign relations of the United States frequently deteriorate into shouting matches. Not so with disputes about the “Foreign Relations of the United States”—the official documentary history of America’s dealings with the rest of the world. The series, not so widely known as FRUS, makes public the viscera of officialdom—diplomatic cables, intelligence reports. If you want to read a transcript of President Nixon an
Source: Edge of the American West (blog)
1-8-09
The top, oh, I don’t know, let’s name twelve best jobs, according to the WSJ this week, citing a study that takes into account “environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress”:
1. Mathematician
2. Actuary
3. Statistician
4. Biologist
5. Software Engineer
6. Computer Systems Analyst
Source: Martin Kramer at his blog Sandbox
1-7-09
[Mr. Kramer, the author of Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America, was a full-time tenured academic at Tel Aviv University. He is now an Olin Institute Senior Fellow at Harvard. Click here for his blog.]
Juan Cole is running two campaigns on his blog. One is against Israel—business as usual for Cole. The other is promoting his blog in the 2008 Weblog Awards competitio
