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: Deseret News
9-20-08
Bountiful Mayor Joe Johnson hasn't always been a fan of history.
"I took history to pass a test," Johnson admits. "After the test was over, I'd forget all about it."
That attitude changed about six months ago, when he read "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln," by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Johnson picked up a copy of the best-seller to prepare for another test o
Source: Marie Morgan and Edmund S. Morgan in the NYRB in the course of a review of Annette Gordon-Reed's new book, The Hemingses of Monticello
10-9-08
The Hemingses of Monticello is a brilliant book. It marks the author as one of the most astute, insightful, and forthright historians of this generation. Not least of Annette Gordon-Reed’s achievements is her ability to bring fresh perspectives to the life of a man whose personality and character have been scrutinized, explained, and justified by a host of historians and biographers. They have struggled to illuminate, and sometimes to gloss over, the dark places in his life. Like many upright pu
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
9-22-08
It's the stuff of scholarly nightmares.
You spend years working on a book, toiling in archives, poring over sources, examining and re-examining data, only to discover that you're not alone. Someone else is working on more or less the same book.
It happened to Elisabeth Gitter. Ms. Gitter, a professor of English at the City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, spent roughly a decade researching her book on Laura Bridgman. Bridgman was the most-f
Source: Robert Townsend at the AHA blog
9-20-08
This afternoon U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered the office of vice president Dick Cheney to preserve all records related to his office and the performance of his duties as the case proceeds. The order came in a case organized by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, together with the AHA, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society of American Archivists, and historians Stanley Kutler and Martin Sherwin.
In her opinion, Judge Kollar-Kot
Source: Guardian (UK)
9-22-08
Turkey risks a collapse of its secular political system akin to that of the Soviet Union if it bows to international pressure to recognise the 1915-22 Armenian genocide, the head of Armenia's state memorial to the event has told the Guardian.
Hayk Demoyan said Ankara could not acknowledge the systematic killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman troops during the first world war because it would lead to a wholesale re-writing of history and undermine the ideological basis of
Source: Marc J. Rauch in The Auto Channel
9-21-08
If you’ve been watching television, reading newspapers or magazines, or are a regular visitor to automotive and political websites, you’ve heard about T. Boone Picken’s plan to help move America away from its dependency on foreign oil. The Pickens Plan calls for the substitution of foreign oil with domestically produced compressed natural gas and wind power. As much as I admire Boone Pickens and support The Pickens Plan, compared to the proposition laid out by Edwin Black in THE PLAN, it’s merel
Source: NYT
9-21-08
Acknowledging that 20 years and millions of dollars spent loudly and bitterly attacking the liberal leanings of American campuses have failed to make much of a dent in the way undergraduates are educated, some conservatives have decided to try a new strategy.
They are finding like-minded tenured professors and helping them establish academic beachheads for their ideas.
These initiatives, like the Program in Western Civilization and American Institutions at the Universit
Source: http://www.greenevillesun.com
9-21-08
A leading U.S. historian who specializes in the Reconstruction period following the Civil War explained Thursday why he is critical of President Andrew Johnson's racial attitudes and policy positions during that turbulent post-war era.
"Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction" was one of the main topics discussed Thursday during a day-long symposium at Tusculum College that focused on the life and political career of the 17th president.
Dr. Eric Foner, a nationally
Source: American Conservative
9-22-08
Connoisseurs of homicidal book reviews have long treasured the virtuosic evisceration that British immunologist Sir Peter Medawar performed in 1950 on Teilhard de Chardin, that once fashionable Gallic mountebank. Of Teilhard’s The Phenomenon of Man, Medawar remarked, “its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself.”
Sir Peter’s slashing verdict inevitably comes to a mind confronted with the work of
Source: WSJ
9-18-08
Michael Engh, S.J., distinguished historian and current Dean of the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, has been selected the 28th president of Santa Clara University. Fr. Engh will succeed Paul Locatelli, S.J., who announced in March that he would step down after nearly 20 years as president. Fr. Locatelli continues as president of the University until December 31, 2008. For more information visit www.
Source: http://www.thebulletin.us
9-19-08
John Lukacs (pronounced "Lu-Kosh"), the renowned professor of history formerly at Chestnut Hill College, spends his still prolific years of retirement in a capacious house on a scenic plot alongside Pickering Creek. Comfortable in his home and endeared to - albeit frequently critical of - this country, he lives now far removed from the life he knew in early adulthood.
Born in Budapest in 1924, he experienced what he recalls as a "very good education." His mother,
Source: Andrew Roberts in th Telegraph
9-19-08
It was a wet Friday afternoon last year, and I was about to take the train back to London when it happened. The Churchill Archives in Cambridge were preparing to close, and I had finished working on the files I’d requested for my research on my new book, about the grand strategy of the Second World War.
I’d love to pretend it was archival genius, or undue diligence, that encouraged me to take down the catalogue for the papers of Lawrence Burgis, but to be honest it was sheer serendi
Source: Reuters
9-19-08
A U.S. historian who pleaded guilty to stealing
letters written by former Presidents George Washington and Abraham
Lincoln was sentenced to 18 months in prison on Friday.
Edward Renehan, 52, pleaded guilty in May to one count of interstate
transportation of stolen property and admitted stealing a March 1,
1840, letter by Lincoln and two letters dated August 9, 1791, and
December 29, 1778, by Washington.
The letters, part of the personal collection of former U.S. President
The
Source: Juan Cole at his blog Informed Comment
9-20-08
Fred Kagan has once more been proved wrong. He called the ethnic cleansing of Sunni Arabs in Baghdad a 'myth.' For all their arrogance and academic credentials, the Neoconservatives keep having trouble with that reality-based thing.Satellite imaging that shows Sunni Arab neighborhoods in Baghdad dark gives evidence that the e
Source: Robert Townsend at the AHA blog
9-17-08
A new report from the Department of Education offers a few clues about how many history teachers there are and their qualifications for the classroom. Based on an extensive Department of Education survey in the 2003–04 school year, the authors of the report estimate that 57,200 teachers had history as their main subject assignment. The number of history teachers fell well behind the number of teachers in English (134,900) and mathematics (128,500), but well above 13 other subjects in the report.
Source: Press Release--Middle East Forum
9-17-08
PHILADELPHIA – Irfan Yusuf and the Canberra Times have issued an apology to Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, concerning a defamatory article written by Yusuf.On August 18, 2008, the Canberra Times, an Australian newspaper, published Yusuf's"Justice the remedy required to help Bosnia heal." In it, Yusuf mentioned a speech Mr. Pipes delivered to a dinner hosted by Quadrant magazine earlier this year which was subsequently published as"
Source: U Mass
9-17-08
There’s a reason New York is the “City That Never Sleeps”: from Godzilla to tidal waves, asteroids to zombies, America’s premier metropolis has been ravaged time and time again in films, novels, pulp fiction, television and cartoons.
In a new book, Max Page, associate professor of architecture and history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, explores how visions of New York’s destruction were a part of the country’s collective imagination long before the Sept. 11, 2001 terror
Source: NYT
9-17-08
Georgi Kitov, a Bulgarian archaeologist whose discoveries helped illuminate the culture of ancient Thrace, but whose methods — especially using bulldozers and backhoes — appalled his more meticulous colleagues, died Sunday in Starosel, Bulgaria. He was 65.
The cause was a heart attack, said the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, the Bulgarian state news agency reported.
Mr. Kitov gained fame for making one sensational discovery after another about the ancient people of Thra
Source: AHA's Perspectives on History
9-1-08
Women and minorities remain only a small part of the history profession, despite decades of efforts to increase their relatively modest numbers. Whether one looks at recent snapshots or longer trends, by most measures, it appears the discipline's glass ceiling remains largely intact.
According to the most recent federal survey of faculty, 30.4 percent of the history faculty in American colleges and universities are women and 14.7 percent are minorities.1 In contrast, if one looks at faculty
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
9-19-08
Melvyn C. Goldstein, an anthropologist at Case Western Reserve University, has spent 40 years, off and on, collecting oral histories from Tibet.
Among the storytellers is a teenage girl who repeatedly defied her parents by sneaking out of the house to socialist meetings for young people after the People's Republic of China crushed a rebellion in 1959. When her parents seized her shoes in an effort to stop her, the girl, whose family lived in poverty, attended meetings barefoot. She
