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: Juan Cole at his blog, Informed Comment
1-8-09
Michael J. Totten has surged way ahead in the voting online for the best Middle East weblog. The way he has done this is very instructive and tells us something about how the Neoconservatives always run rings around the American left and leave them with nothing to do but complain about Neoconservative power.First, Totten demonized me and mobilized rightwingers in general and right-Zionists in particul
Source: http://www.abc2news.com
1-7-09
Organizers of the National History Day competition are announcing a $1.9 million gift and a partnership with the National Museum of American History to expand the program and reach more students.
The program, based in a dorm basement at the University of Maryland, will receive the donation from philanthropist Kenneth Behring. The 80-year-old real estate developer is a major Smithsonian supporter, giving $100 million in recent years to support history programs.
More than
Source: http://verdenews.com
1-6-09
Hal Bridges, 90, of Cottonwood Village has combined his love of journalism and history to write and self-publish a first novel. The novel - "Lincoln and the Single Eye" - is a tale of Abraham Lincoln, mysticism, love and murder in wartime Washington.
"It is a serious religious novel with a background of dramatic Civil War events," Bridges said.
Bridges was born and raised in the small, South Central Texas town of Luling. That's where his connection t
Source: http://www.examiner.com
1-6-09
Inaugurations have become like coronations, according to historian Paul F. Boller, Jr., author of the book "Presidential Inaugurations".
"Sometimes I've gotten the feeling that inaugurations are like crowning a king," Boller told me in an interview. "Inaugural ceremonies have become too elaborate over the years. I could live without all that, making it into such a magnificent ceremony."
But Boller, Professor Emeritus of History, Texas Christian Univer
Source: Rick Shenkman, reporting for HNN.
1-4-09
UPDATE: It's official: AHA will make an issue of gay marriage at its San Diego meeting.
This could be awkward. The AHA is on its way to adopting as official policy a plan to embarrass the owner of the hotel where next year's 2010 convention will take place. The owner of the hotel, Doug Manchester, made a $125,000 contribution in support of California Proposition 8, the recently-passed measure that forbids gay marr
Source: Scott Jaschik at the website of Inside Higher Ed
1-5-09
When Matthew Connelly was looking at graduate schools, he knew that his application wouldn’t land naturally on any one historian’s pile to review. The departments, he said, were made up of “Americanists, Europeanists, and otherists.” Connelly, now an associate professor of history at Columbia University, was none of the above. He wanted to explore ideas related to Algeria’s independence from France, but didn’t want to be called a scholar only of French colonialism or only of North Africa, and he
Source: Scott Jaschik at the website of Inside Higher Ed
1-6-09
“We were more or less raised and professionalized by wolves.”
That line by Ann Fabian, a professor of history and American studies at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, reflected the way coursework in Ph.D. programs used to be focused solely on knowledge and historiography, and was largely disconnected from the future careers of young academics.
Fabian’s comment came in a panel discussion here at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association on how graduat
Source: Stan Katz in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
1-2-09
I am about to head into New York City for the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. So far as I can recall, the first AHA annual meeting I attended was in Chicago in December, 1961. At the time I was completing my Ph.D. dissertation, and having my first (unsuccessful) job interview (with the University of Toronto). The 1961 meeting was “highlighted” by the anti-Semitic presidential address of the early American urban historian from Brown University, Carl Bridenbaugh, who suggest
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed (blog)
1-4-09
In her presidential address to the American Historical Association here Saturday night, Gabrielle M. Spiegel, a professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University, provided a valedictory goodbye to postmodernist theory. Surveying the influence of what Richard Rorty once called “the linguistic turn” in the humanities, Ms. Spiegel, a well-known theorist who has written extensively about how language has shaped the writing of history, noted that “we all sense this profound change has run its cour
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed (blog)
1-5-09
During one session at the American Historical Association meeting, seasoned history professors answered questions about the job market and offered graduate students tips about what to do and what not to do in interviews. Here are some of the suggestions they shared:
Chitchat matters. Whitney A.M. Leeson, an associate professor at Roanoke College, said she telephones job candidates first at home to try to get to know them. It's a chance, she said, for prospective hires to show search
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed (blog)
1-5-09
While the number of jobs in history is down, the number of historians attending the annual meeting of the American Historical Association this weekend isn’t. The group’s convention here attracted more than 5,800 people—primarily faculty members from the United States and abroad, but also graduate students, publishers, and government and museum officials.
Last year, in Washington, D.C., 5,300 people attended the meeting.
Arnita A. Jones, the association’s executive direc
Source: Scott Jaschik at the website of Inside Higher Ed
1-5-09
This year’s decline in academic jobs in history may be 15 percent or higher, according to preliminary data presented Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. The figures came as no surprise to the graduate students here seeking jobs. Reports abounded of job searches being called off, or of people in interviews being warned of the strong possibility that the openings might not be filled this year. People leaving the job interview area of the meeting were trading storie
Source: Navy Times
1-6-09
The Navy has a “culture problem” with its past, the service’s top historian says.
Neither sailors nor leaders have enough appreciation for how useful history could be in their day-to-day decision-making, said retired Rear Adm. Jay DeLoach. But he hopes to change that.
DeLoach said he has big plans for the newly renamed Naval History and Heritage Command, formerly known as the Naval Historical Center, at the Washington Navy Yard. It owns more than 1 million historical ar
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed (blog)
1-4-09
For the last eight years, progressive historians have been vocally critical of the Bush-Cheney administration’s war in Iraq, war on terror, stress on free markets, and push to privatize government services like charter schools and social-welfare programs. But at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association here, the collective judgment seems to be that those trends haven’t been all that new — and won’t be easy to change.
In 2007 a group called Historians Against the War
Source: NYT
1-6-09
Christopher Hibbert, whose stylishly written, fast-paced histories and biographies embraced subjects as varied as King George IV, the French Revolution, the emperors of China and the city of Rome, died on Dec. 21 in Henley-on-Thames, England. He was 84 and lived in Henley-on-Thames.
The cause was bronchial pneumonia, said his daughter Kate Hibbert.
Although sometimes regarded askance by academic historians, Mr. Hibbert won a wide readership with his popular approach to
Source: Press Release
1-6-09
Brian LeMay, Executive Director of The Bostonian Society, announced that the Society will honor famed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns with its annual Boston History Award at a benefit gala on January 29 (6 - 9 PM) at the Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel. Robert Gallery, the Massachusetts President of Bank of America, is serving as the title sponsor of the event with Jane and Neil Pappalardo of Boston as co-chairs.
Ken Burns has produced and directed a number of outstanding historical do
Source: Lee Siegel in the NYT
1-3-09
Samuel Huntington, the political theorist who died on Dec. 24 at the age of 81, was a power thinker, one of the breed of “big idea” men whose major works didn’t just explain historical transformation but seemed to crystallize it — in ways that altered how the rest of us looked at the world, for better and also for worse.
In provocative books like “Political Order in Changing Societies” and “The Clash of Civilizations,” Mr. Huntington’s talent — some would say weakness — for the gran
Source: Daniel Franklin at the Britannica Blog
1-6-09
[Daniel Franklin is currently Associate Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia.]
The day before Christmas Professor Samuel P. Huntington died. That name doesn’t mean a lot to most people, but anyone who has had at least a casual exposure to the social sciences has at least run across Huntington’s name. Huntington deserves to be remembered not just for the lives of the students he touched but for the contribution he made and still can make to
Source: Press Release--AHA
1-5-09
At its regular meeting today, the Council of the American Historical Association passed
the following resolution in keeping with the spirit of a resolution adopted by the business
meeting the previous day.
Resolution Regarding the 2010 AHA Annual Meeting
WHEREAS, The AHA is committed to equity in the workplace and equal rights
regardless of race, ethnicity, religious belief, disability, gender, or sexual
orientation;
WHEREAS, It is one aspect of the mission of the
Source: Newsweek
1-3-09
If there is one central, recurring mistake the United States makes when dealing with the rest of the world, it is to assume that creating political stability is easy. We overthrew Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, and then cavalierly dismantled the entire structure of the Iraqi state, sure that we could simply set up a new one. We toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan and were confident that with foreign aid, elections and American know-how, we would build a new, modern Afghan nation. After all, the
