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: Matt Weiland in Slate
6-30-08
On frozen winter nights in Minneapolis, I used to lie in the dark and listen to the high-school hockey scores. They were read out on the radio—hockey is always news in Minnesota—but I didn't much care who won. I was 10 or 11 years old, a little bit lonely and a little bit bored, and for some reason I found comfort and distraction listening to the names of towns and cities around the state. Hibbing, Cloquet, Eveleth: the pinch and chap of the Iron Range, with traces of the Finns and French who se
Source: Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian
6-28-08
Nigel Hamilton opens his new primer How to Do Biography (Harvard) with the bold boast that we are living in "a golden age" of life writing. Really, he should know better. To anyone who reads, reviews or writes on the subject, such confidence is baffling. (Hamilton, a Briton, lives mainly in the States, which may account for his rosy myopia.) Seen close up, and with an eye to proper detail, biography appears in rather a bad way. "Crisis" would probably be putting it too strong
Source: Cinnamon Stillwell at CampusWatch.org
7-2-08
[Cinnamon Stillwell is the Northern California Representative forCampus Watch, a project of theMiddle East Forum. She can be reached atstillwell@meforum.org.]
While the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) has long dominated the field, its
Source: Haaretz
6-30-08
The former head of the Israel Defense Forces' department of history, Dr. Shaul Shai, was accused of fraud and breach of trust in the Jaffa military court last week. Shai is accused of employing soldiers and officers working under him to do personal work for him from 2003 to 2007, when he served as the head of the history department of the IDF's Torah and Training Division. The jobs included typing and editing, graphic arts jobs, research, photocopying and other office errands for his personal ad
Source: http://newsminer.com
6-30-08
The dedication it takes to master the art of teaching can only come from someone with a heart of gold and a platinum sense of humor.
Mary Mangusso, a historian and longtime faculty member at the University of Alaska Fairbanks holds the Arthur T. Fathauer Chair in History, and is exactly the kind of educator every university aspires to have.
“She was four times as qualified as anyone else who applied for the position,” said Dr. Carol Gold, former chair and the first fem
Source: Telegraph (UK)
6-29-08
Simon Montefiore is well known for his historical writing on Russian subjects. In a letter to his readers at the beginning of his first novel, Sashenka, he explains how, in the course of his research in the Russian state archives, he was moved by the material he discovered that bore testimony to the courage and suffering of Russian women, particularly during the years of Stalin's terror.
The documents he studied were intensely personal - names, intimate details, even photographs of
Source: http://www.styleweekly.com
7-2-08
Edward L. Ayers sits on a plush coffee-shop couch in Shockoe Slip, tugging on a straw cemented in a milkshake, trying to ignore the radio. He recently wrapped up his first year as president of the University of Richmond, and he’s here to talk about his newfound status as its leader. But like a bad dog, Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” bounds from the speakers and begs for attention.
It’s not that Ayers doesn’t like rock. He grew up on Rolling Stone magazine. He even wowed participan
Source: UPI
6-27-08
A historian at Brigham Young University argues that Mormons were persecuted in Missouri in 1838 in a deliberate and successful effort to get their land.Joseph Walker, who is working on the Joseph Smith papers, said documents show the Extermination Order of 1838 -- aimed at the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints -- was timed to prevent Mormons from buying land they had improved, Mormon Times reported.Local laws allowed what was known as pre-emption, Walker says. Settlers had the right to buy government land they had lived on and farmed, but if they were unable to do so, others could buy the improved land at the price of vacant land....
Source: NYT
6-30-08
It is safe to speculate that at some point in his young life, the Scottish historian Niall Ferguson happened upon the documentaries of the art critic Robert Hughes and believed he had found his destiny.
In “The War of the World,” a brash, copious, assured investigation of 20th-century global violence that begins Monday night on PBS, Mr. Ferguson, 44, displays a comparable presence on screen. It is the look and air of a controversial public intellectual who could just as easily have
Source: NYT
7-1-08
In the early days after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Kanan Makiya, a scholar and Iraqi exile based in the United States, stumbled upon a potent trove of documents in Baghdad: Baath Party records reflecting the degrees of loyalty of some two million ordinary Iraqis to Saddam Hussein’s regime during its final years in power.
Mr. Makiya, who had been writing about Mr. Hussein’s abuses for many years, immediately recognized the value of the archive to Iraqi cultural memory — and its poten
Source: Press Release
6-30-08
The editor of The Biographer’s Craft has published an open letter to American biographers in the July issue calling on them to form a national organization.
“The time has come for biographers to unite. We have nothing to lose but our isolation,” wrote James McGrath Morris.
“The craft of biography, like that of most writing genres, is a solitary one. But we have strong reasons to come together. We need access to resources, such as newspapers or archival documents; we
Source: NYT
6-28-08
Charles Parkhurst, a museum director in Baltimore and Washington and one of the “monuments men,” an Allied Forces team that chased down leads, pried open crates and snooped around museums, salt mines and castles in search of art stolen by the Nazis during World War II, died on Thursday at his home in Amherst, Mass. He was 95.
The death was confirmed by his wife, Carol Clark. As a lieutenant in the Navy and a trained art historian, Mr. Parkhurst was deputy chief of Monuments, Fine Ar
Source: Simon Winchester in the NY Sun
6-25-08
This totally absorbing book [The Black Death] presents the best account ever written about the worst event to have ever befallen the British Isles. In the hands of John Hatcher, an English medievalist of sober and steady reputation who has for decades been squirreled away in one of the smaller, older, and least obtrusive of Cambridge colleges, the extraordinary tragedy of the great plague — which wiped out as much as 60% of the population of 14th-century Europe and killed an estimated 75 million
Source: http://www.eveningsun.com
6-26-08
Standing at the edge of Gettysburg's battlefield, Gabor Boritt once again delivered his classic speech regarding the famous three-day-long battle.
Using plenty of animated gestures, Boritt pointed out troop alignments in the field, showed how the landscape played a decisive role and described deadly mistakes made by both the Confederate and Union sides. It's a story Boritt, a Civil War history professor at Gettysburg College, knows well and is almost always happy to share.
Source: http://www.citypaper.com
6-25-08
ALVIN BRUNSON DIDN'T EVEN WANT the house that broke his leg and then killed him.
He tried to leave it behind in 1994, but the three-story rowhouse across the street from his own home on the 500 block of Wilson Street caught up to him--or anyway, the back taxes did. The city took him to court, and he lost, so he paid them.
And then Brunson's nightmare really began.
The history of 562 Wilson St. and Alvin K. Brunson (friends call him Kirby) is told in a two-i
Source: Jewish Press
6-25-08
Rick Perlstein, an unabashed man of the left, first attracted wide notice seven years ago with the release of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, his engagingly written and fair-minded study of the rise of the American conservative movement in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
Last month brought the much-awaited publication of the second volume of Perlstein’s projected trilogy on American conservatism. Nixonland (Scribner), as should be obv
Source: Susan Jakes at China Beat (blog)
6-25-08
[One member of the China Beat team, Susan Jakes, has had the unusual experience of both taking Jonathan Spence’s famous “History of Modern China” course as a Yale undergraduate, and then later returning to the university as a graduate student and serving as a teaching assistant for a later version of the same class. As a complement to our series on Spence’s Reith Lectures, we asked her to reflect on this experience.]
I first heard Jonathan Spence give a lecture thirty minutes or so
Source: NYT
6-25-08
Richard J. Koke, who as curator of the New-York Historical Society for nearly 40 years organized much of the institution’s transformation from a repository of documents and artworks into a space where visitors come face to face with relics of New York City and its place in American history, died on May 28 in Plattsburgh, N.Y. He was 91 and lived in Peru, N.Y.
His death was confirmed by Linda S. Ferber, the historical society’s museum director.
Mr. Koke was curator of th
Source: Charles W. Hayford at the China Beat blog
6-23-08
[Charles W. Hayford is Visiting Scholar, Department of History, Northwestern University, and Editor of the Journal of American-East Asian Relations.]
In the third lecture of the Chinese Vistas series, “American Dreams,” Jonathan Spence talked about American dreams of China and, more tantalizing, Chinese dreams of America. He sees a series of “paradoxes” from the American Revolution to the present which set Chinese and American dreams at odds.
Source: US News & World Report
6-3-08
The long Iraq war. The bungled Hurricane Katrina response. The credit crunch. A quick look at the newspapers will give many voters reason to doubt the wisdom of America's political leaders. Unfortunately, Americans are doing little to educate themselves about their leaders and their policies, says bestselling author and George Mason Unive
