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: ThinkProgress
9-8-08
Thirty-two of the nation’s leading historians have sent letters to congressional leaders calling on them to strengthen the Presidential Records Act (PRA). [Text & signers posted below. Click READ MORE.] The effort, led by the Center for American Progress Action Fund and joined by the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the National Coalition for History, notes that while the PRA requires the administration to preserve presidential records, “it fails to
Source: Sunday Herald (Australia)
9-7-08
THE SCOTTISH historian Niall Ferguson has warned that the strategic alliance between China and Russia is more of a threat to the West than the credit crunch.
Ferguson, a best-selling author, broadcaster and professor of history at Harvard University, said that the development of the new Russia-China powerblock was set to put the two economic heavyweights on a path to confrontation with much of the rest of the world.
Speaking at Making Sense Of The Future, a conference o
Source: Christian Science Monitor
9-4-08
Long before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an American Civil War general exposed the horrible power of "total war" as he rampaged across the South. Or did he?
The ever-quotable Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman certainly promised to "make Georgia howl!" and he was hardly gentle during his famous march to the sea in 1864. But an exhaustive new history tells a story of military prowess and remarkable survival, not lawless and rampant destruction.
Union soldiers d
Source: http://www.theithacajournal.com
9-4-08
Speaking in Cornell's Sage Chapel to a crowd of about 40 people as part of the Sage Wednesday Series, Bennett said people have made a hero of a man who doesn't deserve it — Abraham Lincoln.
"To tell the truth, history was not reinvented by Lincoln, but against Lincoln," Bennett said, "not by his acts but by acts he opposed."
Bennett worked for Ebony magazine as an editor for five decades and is the author of 10 books on U.S. racial history. He was bo
Source: Jess Row in the NYT Book Review
9-7-08
Nineteen sixty-eight began as a promising year for William Styron. After six years of intense work, he had published, the previous fall, the novel he thought would cement his reputation: “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” an account of an 1831 slave revolt in Southampton County, Va., narrated in Turner’s voice. It was a risky, even provocative book — he’d always known it would be — but the gamble appeared to have paid off. “The Confessions” got excellent reviews, appeared on the best-seller list,
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
9-2-08
A dispute between Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and the Ulysses S. Grant Association has deepened with the filing of a lawsuit over the association’s collection of papers of the U.S. president and Civil War general — which are held at the university’s library — and a welter of contending accounts of the split in the news media.
According to reports in The Daily Egyptian, the student newspaper at Carbondale, the association has sued the university to seek the release of
Source: Guardian
8-29-08
An American book prize has blacklisted Random House following its "cowardly self-censorship" of Sherry Jones's novel The Jewel of Medina. The Langum Charitable Trust, which awards two yearly $1,000 (£550) prizes, has said that until the novel is published, it "will not consider submissions of any books, for any of our prizes, from Random House or any of its affiliates".
Random House dropped Jones's novel, about the child bride of Muhammad, after it was warned tha
Source: Meena Bose at the CNN website
8-2-08
[Meena Bose is a professor and director of Hofstra University's Kalikow Center for the Study of the American Presidency. She is co-editor of "The Uses and Abuses of Presidential Ratings" and author of "Shaping and Signaling Presidential Policy: The National Security Decision Making of Eisenhower and Kennedy." Bose teaches courses on the presidency and other topics at Hofstra, which is hosting the third and final presidential debate on October 15.]
President Georg
Source: Pete Daniel in the newsletter of the Organization of American Historians (August)
8-1-08
... Before the 1980s, Congress funded most Smithsonian exhibits. Curators conceptualized exhibits and had responsibility for scope and content. Unlike a lone historian writing a monograph, a curator headed a museum exhibit team that consulted with academic historians, chose objects that fit the story, explored how best to present relevant public programs, created a dynamic design, and produced a legible script that neither offended experts nor confused eighth graders. Museum practice demands tha
Source: Andrew Leonard at Salon.com
8-30-08
All in all, [the barbecue] made for a kick-ass party. But after reading Andrew Warnes' "Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America's First Food," I suspect more was going on, beneath the smoke cookery, than I cared to acknowledge.
To this day, writes Warnes, a lecturer in American literature and culture at Leeds University, barbecue "has yet to escape the fraught implications of savagery and cannibalism inbuilt and original to its name." Barbecu
Source: Social Science Research Council
9-1-08
October 3-5, 2008, Columbia University, New York
Charles Tilly was one of the giants of social science and remains through his teaching, writing, and leadership a formative influence on the study of politics, social movements, inequality, states, French and British history, and historical social science in general. In recognition of his extraordinary achievements, Tilly was selected the winner of the 2008 Albert O. Hirschman Prize, awarded by the Social Science Research Coun
Source: NYT
8-31-08
The White House has long touted the “surge” of forces in Iraq as one of President Bush’s proudest achievements. But that decision, one of Mr. Bush’s most consequential as commander in chief, was made only after months of tumultuous debate within the administration, according to still-secret memorandums and interviews with a broad range of current and former officials.
In January 2007, at a time when the situation in Iraq appeared the bleakest, Mr. Bush chose a bold option that was
Source: NYT
8-30-08
Michael Baxandall, whose analysis of the social forces shaping works of art and the way they were seen helped pave the way for the influential movement known as the new art history, died on Aug. 12 in London. He was 74.
The cause was pneumonia associated with Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Kathrin Baxandall.
Mr. Baxandall’s second book, “Painting and Experience in 15th-Century Italy,” published in 1972, announced a program in its first sentence. “A 15th-century pai
Source: Christopher Shea at the Boston Globe "Brainiac" page
8-29-08
Jeremy Adelman, chair of the Princeton history department, responded to my request for a response to the charge that his program's"once great" American-history side has"fallen onto troubled times." The suggestion came from the deliciously named blogger Ambrose Hofstadter Bierce III, who, as I noted this week, is bidding to become the history profession's go-to source for informed, online gossip. Adelman s
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
8-29-08
The American Political Science Association's annual conference opened here on Thursday, and the U.S. presidential campaign is, not surprisingly, on almost everyone's lips. The program includes dozens of panels on voter turnout, presidential rhetoric, campaign advertising, and the politics of race.
But amid the frenzy of election-season chatter, four prominent scholars came together on Thursday afternoon for a grim panel discussion on the health of the subfield known as American poli
Source: NPR
8-28-08
NewsHour presidential historian Richard Norton Smith and Peniel Joseph, associate professor of African-American studies and history at Brandeis University, share their favorite speeches from the history of Democratic Party conventions.
Joseph picked Bill Clinton’s 1992 address in New York when he argued that the party needed a “new covenant” with America.
“What Clinton offers in 1992 in terms of rhetorical eloquence and political genius is this notion that the Democratic Part
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
8-28-08
Denver — Michelle Pearson, a history teacher in Colorado, had a star-studded morning at the Democratic National Convention here yesterday, thanks to her involvement in a university-run, hands-on history program.
She first attended a breakfast with Thomas A. Daschle, where the former majority leader of the U.S. Senate spoke about leadership. Then she heard from Michelle Obama at a meeting of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
For teachers and professors attending the Dem
Source: http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk
8-28-08
... Irving is suing his former lawyers Howard Kennedy, solicitor Peter Laskey, and legal executive Peter Ling in a dispute over his £750,000 Mayfair flat and for the loss of his historical archives.
In court papers, Irving alleges that his lawyers failed to carry out his instructions to deal with a possession order issued against the property in Duke Street following his unsuccessful libel action against the American academic Deborah Lipstadt. Irving had sued her for libel after she accus
Source: http://www.thanhniennews.com
8-28-08
Rare old maps are valuable evidence of long-gone cultures and dynasties. A Ho Chi Minh City historian has collected thousands to help him research for his books on the old Vietnam.
Vietnamese historian Nguyen Dinh Dau has spent more than half a century collecting over 3,000 antique maps.
His small room is packed with rare maps from all over the world and spanning 1,027 years of Vietnamese history, from the Ly, Tran and Le to the Nguyen dynasties.
The largest map
Source: Otago Daily Times (NZ)
8-27-08
The author of a book on cannibalism in Maori history is disappointed a racism complaint has been made about it to the Human Rights Commission.
Historian Paul Moon is defending his book This Horrid Practice and stands by his research.
"I spent several years researching this book, using an enormous body of documentation, and I'm not about to denounce it just because it upsets a few people," he told the New Zealand Herald.
An anonymous complaint said
