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: Chronicle of Higher Ed
6-12-08
The first appearance in Israel by Stephen M. Walt and John J. Mearsheimer since the publication of their controversial book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, impressed a largely student audience at the Hebrew University, but left some faculty members wondering about their honesty.
A threatened boycott failed to have any effect, and the talk passed off with nothing more dramatic than some lively debate and repeated declarations from the pair that they are neither anti-Semit
Source: Adam Sisman in the Telegraph
6-6-08
The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who died in 2003, was often depicted as hostile to the Scots (or 'Scotch', as he insisted on calling them). Yet, as he would sometimes remark, he had a long association with Scotland and its people.
He was brought up in Northumberland, only 20 miles or so from the border. As a boy he had been cared for by a Scots nanny, before attending a preparatory school in Dunbar.
After an interval, he married a Scots wife, and together they bought a
Source: ProgressiveHistorians (blog)
6-11-08
The argument we're (not quite) having here -- and to which Adam Hochschild in Historically Speaking makes another important contribution -- concerns a series of rich and timeless questions: what exactly is a historian? Should the term be applied only to those who possess doctoral degrees and publishing histories, or are historians a more broad and multifaceted group? Is everyone a historian, as Carl Becker famously argued? And assuming we can define the "wheat" and the "chaff,&quo
Source: WaPo
6-10-08
[Michael Dobbs writes the Fact Checker column for The Post. He is the author of "One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War."]
Giving Americans back their history may not rank with ending the war in Iraq or balancing the budget, but it should be high on the to-do list of the next president. Our declassification system has broken down. Historians are waiting an average of seven years for replies from presidential libraries to their F
Source: Whitney Joiner at Salon.com
6-11-08
The small Texas town where I live, Marfa, is the home base of one of the largest U.S. Border Patrol sectors, covering 165,000 square miles and encompassing 25 percent of the U.S.-Mexico border. From my house, I can hear the Border Patrol headquarters' intercom, alerting agents to calls on line two or line three; their green and white patrol cars are everywhere, around town and throughout far west Texas. It's a daily reminder that we are living on the edge of a line in the desert, a line that Hom
Source: http://www.hometownannapolis.com
6-9-08
Historians are supposed to bring us the truth, as they see it, about the past - and not necessarily the version of events that justifies a historical commemoration into which their listeners have poured time, effort and money.
So even if you don't want to accept the conclusions Dr. C. Ashley Ellefson gave at a recent two-day symposium organized by Annapolis Alive!, you have to respect his professional integrity.
Dr. Ellefson, an expert on Colonial-era legal history, is
Source: http://www.registerguard.com
6-8-08
Activists plan to hold a vigil on Monday to protest a lecture in Eugene by David Irving, a British historian who was jailed in Austria for once saying there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Irving, who specializes in the military history of World War II, has been invited to speak by the Pacifica Forum, a local discussion group founded by retired University of Oregon professor Orval Etter.Related Links
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
6-9-08
Some Israeli academics are not too happy that Stephen M. Walt and John J. Mearsheimer, authors of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, are scheduled to speak on Thursday at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The title of their talk: “Is the ‘Israel lobby’ good for Israel?”
Both men have also courted controversy in the United States with their argument that Israel wields disproportionate influence on the United States’ foreign policy.
Mr. Walt is a professor of in
Source: One of many posts on TPM Cafe concerning Cherny's book. This one is by Lawrence Kaplan
6-6-08
Having gone on for far too long about the perils of extrapolating from historical similarities, what strikes me most about the history recounted in The Candy Bombers are the overwhelming dissimilarities between 1948 and 2008. Not so much on the international scene as simply in the realm of leadership, if that's not too quaint a term to use here. The John McLoys, the Lucius Clays, the James Forrestals--where have they gone? In place of them, we have who? Sandy Berger? Paul Bremer? Today's smarmy
Source: Corey Robin in the Nation
6-23-08
[Corey Robin teaches political science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Fear: The History of a Political Idea and is writing a book about conservatism and counterrevolution.]"The 1960s are rightly remembered as years of cultural dissent and political upheaval, but they are wrongly remembered as years stirred only from the left," writes George Will in the foreword to a recently reissued edition of Barry Goldwater's The Conscien
12-31-69
USC News Announcement May 2008 Dagmar Barnouw, a pre-eminent scholar of the intellectual and cultural
history of modern Germany, has died. She was 72.
A professor of German and comparative literature in USC College
since 1988, Barnouw suffered a stroke mid-April and died in the Kaiser
Permanente-Hospital Zion in San Diego on May 14, without having
regained consciousness.
“For me it was love at fight sight,” her husband Jeffrey Barnouw said.
“For her it took some persuadi
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
6-6-08
On June 17, 2008, the House Appropriations Committee’s Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee is scheduled to mark up a funding bill that will decide the fate of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC). For the fourth consecutive year, President Bush has proposed eliminating funding for the NHPRC. We need your help in urging the House appropriators to save the NHPRC!
The National Coalition for History strongly opposes the President’s irresponsible
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
6-6-08
We need your help in securing cosponsors in the House of Representatives for the “Preserving the American Historical Record Act (PAHR)” (H.R. 6056). The PAHR legislation would establish a new federal program of formula grants to the states and territories to support archives and historical records at the state and local level. Please go to the Humanities Advocacy Network and ask your Member of Congress to cosponsor the PAHR bill (H.R. 6056).
Congressmen Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) and Chris Cann
Source: Guardian
6-6-08
The Tate has until the end of July to raise £6m to save an exquisite Peter Paul Rubens sketch. And, according to historian David Starkey, the possibility that the work might leave the country is "absolutely unthinkable".
The sketch is not simply evidence of a great artist's first, questing thoughts, but an integral part of Britain's history, argued Starkey yesterday.
It is the original plan for the magnificent ceiling of the Banqueting House, London, the only remain
Source: News story: Inside Higher Ed
6-6-08
Harvard University’s $34 billion endowment has received much scrutiny in the last year, with critics questioning why the university doesn’t spend more and some lawmakers looking for ways to tax it. Drew Faust, the university’s president, used a commencement speech Thursday to defend the institution’s endowment as necessary and to question those critics. Some see endowments as “vast pots of money for presidents to spend at will,” she said. Others say endowments must be devoted to “educating the m
Source: NYT
6-6-08
Matthew J. Bruccoli, whose biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald and outpouring of scholarly essays and critical editions made him the dean of Fitzgerald studies in the United States, died at his home in Columbia, S.C., on Wednesday. He was 76.
The cause was a glioma, a tumor of the brainstem, said his wife, Arlyn.
Mr. Bruccoli (pronounced BROOK-uhly), who taught at the University of South Carolina for nearly 40 years, wrote more than 50 books on Fitzgerald or Hemingway, not
Source: Rudyard Griffiths in the National Post (Canada)
6-5-08
Last week in Toronto, Samantha Power, the Pulitzer Prize winning author and former adviser to Barack Obama, was uncharacteristically downbeat. In the green room, following the inaugural Munk Debate, the normally plucky Ms. Power crumpled herself up into a lounge chair. Nursing a glass of red wine, she interspersed a flurry of brow-furrowed cellphone calls by beckoning passers-by to explain to her the debate's unexpected outcome.
And, an unexpected outcome it was. Going into the deba
Source: Ronald Radosh in the New York Sun
5-29-08
In "The Age of Reagan" (HarperCollins, 564 pages, $27.95), Mr. Wilentz seeks to assure his readers that he has strived to lay aside his personal views, and to judge "the past scrupulously" by engaging in "a willing suspension of [his] own beliefs." This reader is glad to report that, in this study of the Reagan presidency and its impact on America, Mr. Wilentz achieves this aim, for the most part — although at times, he does drift into the type of anti-Reagan attack
Source: National Post
5-29-08
The weekly seminars on American history at the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex have become so popular, the penitentiary has moved the classes to a larger venue.
It might have something to do with the teacher: Conrad Black.
Sources said the former press baron, who began serving a 6 and a half year prison sentence on March 3 at the prison located 85 Kilometres northwest of Orlando, Fla., is said to be teaching to a "full house," which includes prison staff
Source: Stefan Collini in The Nation
5-22-08
"The past has nothing of interest to teach us." That, fears Tony Judt, is the presiding assumption of the early twenty-first century. The speed of social and economic change, the exhaustion of the twentieth century's dominant ideologies and a desire to put the horrors of that century's carnage behind us all conspire, he believes, to encourage a culture of forgetting. And this belief frames and justifies his sense of his own role; he appoints himself the Reminder-General in contemporary
