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: NYT
5-20-08
Regina Kellerman, an architectural historian whose research led to the literal unearthing of New York City’s first City Hall, died on May 13 in Mount Vernon, N.Y. She was 84 and lived in Greenwich Village, the neighborhood in Manhattan where much of her work was focused and about whose buildings she may have known more than anyone else.
The cause was pulmonary failure, said David Hennessey, a nephew.
It was in 1970, after five years of work on a doctoral dissertation bo
Source: Andrew Leonard in Salon
5-19-08
For reasons lost to history, my late uncle decided at some point in the early 1970s to purchase, one by one, volume after volume of Joseph Needham's magisterial work, "Science and Civilisation in China." My uncle was no China scholar, never visited Asia, and rarely discussed what he had learned from perusing Needham. I don't even know for sure that he did read the books, though perhaps, like me, the eventual inheritor of the volumes, he dipped in from time to time to dabble in the indu
Source: Jon Wiener blog at the Nation
5-18-08
"Nixonland" – that's Rick Perlstein's term for the political world where candidates win power by mobilizing people's resentments, anxieties and anger, where politics destroys is victims. Perlstein's new book is Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.Do we still live in Nixonland?
Yes we do. I don't mean that the political anxieties and passions today are as great as they were in the late sixties. But the way Richard Nixon used the sixties
Source: Special to HNN
5-18-08
In his account of the 9/11 Commission’s work, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, Philip Shenon claims that the Commission’s Executive Director, Philip Zelikow, pushed the staff to find a link between al Qaeda and Iraq, ostensibly to provide a justification for the Bush Administration’s decision to invade Iraq. This is simply not the case.
First, Shenon cites as evidence Zelikow’s nomination of Laurie Mylroie as an expert witness at the Commission’s Ju
Source: Scott Kleeb campaign website
5-15-08
A fourth generation Nebraskan, Scott Kleeb grew up listening to his grandfather’s homesteading stories –tales of community, patriotism and public service– and learned the values that would come to shape his life. Scott learned the value of hard work and self-reliance, but he also learned something just as important: Nebraskans depend on each other and, in good times and bad, they help each other. This simple idea –born on the hard plains of Nebraska in the nineteenth century and passed down thro
Source: Patricia Nelson Limerick in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
5-9-08
[Patricia Nelson Limerick is a professor of history and the chair of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado at Boulder.]
I am sitting at a desk behind a nameplate that identifies me as "Dr. Patricia Limerick, Marriage Counselor." I am looking earnestly into a camera lens, and from time to time, an attentive person darts in to restore my makeup or tame my hair.
When the sound setting and the camera angle are right, I say my lines as convi
Source: Press Release
5-14-08
A number of members of SHAFR (Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations) are circulating the following petition expressing opposition to John Yoo's legal opinions on torture and executive power. The petition is prompted by SHAFR's invitation to John Yoo to serve as a plenary speaker at the upcoming SHAFR conference in Columbus, Ohio.
Source: Letter sent to the Editor of the Boston Globe
5-13-08
To the Editor,
Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan thinks Barack Obama should become"misty-eyed" about Henry Ford (Globe, 5/13). Does she know that Henry Ford's anti-Semitic publications, such as The International Jew, constituted one of the most most vicious, public hate campaigns in U.S. history? Does she know that Henry Ford refused to build aircraft engines for Britai
Source: Scott Horton IN Harpers
5-1-08
Sidney Blumenthal has written for The New Republic, the Washington Post, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and most recently served as Washington editor to Salon.com and as a contributor to The Guardian. He is one of America’s foremost political commentators, and also has a noteworthy track-record of political engagement. He served as an assistant and senior advisor to President Bill Clinton and is currently a senior advisor to Hillary Clinton. He was also executive producer for the Oscar Award-wi
Source: Neve Gordon in the Nation
5-13-08
[Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University, Israel. Read about his new book and more at www.israelsoccupation.info]
The Jewish celebration of Passover and Israel’s 60th anniversary coincide this year, and seem to be a good time to reflect upon, and perhaps explain, my passionate commitment to Israel. No doubt having been born and raised in Israel makes me feel most at home there. My family and friends live in Israel. I like
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
5-9-08
On May 7, 2008, the House Natural Resources Committee cleared legislation (H.R. 3094) to authorize the National Park Service’s Centennial Initiative proposed last year by the Bush administration. However, the revised bill only authorizes $30 million a year in mandatory spending for the next ten years, far below the $100 million per-year the Administration had initially requested for the program.
The administration’s Centennial Initiative, announced in 2007, proposes $3 billion in ne
Source: Robert Irwin in Times (UK)
5-7-08
[Robert Irwin’s For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their enemies was published in 2006. His book on the Alhambra appeared in 2004 and his most recent novel, Satan Wants Me, in 1999. He is the Middle East editor of the TLS (The Times Literary Supplement).]
So many academics want the arguments presented in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) to be true. It encourages the reading of novels at an oblique angle in order to discover hidden colonialist subtexts. It promotes a hypercrit
Source: scoopo8.com
4-22-08
Alexander Heffner: Of all your investigation into America's past, is today's the most intriguing political climate in our history?
Julian Zelizer: This is one of the most interesting periods to follow. We are at a moment when the conservative movement is struggling. The movement, which had a huge impact on American society, is struggling politically and intellectually. Yet, at the same time, conservatives have deep roots in American politics so their influence won't disappear. As a
Source: http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen
5-10-08
The state of Israel was founded 60 years ago, and its history since has been one of warfare with neighbours, regional strife and, too often, international opprobrium.
Israel has faced five wars in the past six decades -- and in this anniversary year, many have wondered if the future of the beleaguered state promises any more security and safety than its past has delivered.
But Sir Martin Gilbert, one of Britain's premier historians and longtime student of Israeli history, bel
Source: Frontpagemag.com
5-13-08
The UC Irvine Muslim Students' Union Association is currently staging a week long "Nakba" event (May 7-15) which, under the guise of commemorating the "catastrophe" of the founding of the Jewish state, will bring onto campus the genocidal philosophy being promoted by leaders and movements throughout the Middle East.
This preparation for genocide makes headlines every day in the world press. Rejecting the international community's call for negotiation and statecra
Source: BBC
5-13-08
The new London mayor, Boris Johnson, has been accused of lacking experience and political nous, but he has always boasted one qualification for government - a good grasp of Latin, Greek and classical history. So just what lessons can a modern politician learn from antiquity?
The place of classics in the great British education has declined in recent years.
Once upon a time, an Oxbridge classics degree was considered the cream of all qualifications, a gold standard for y
Source: Email to friends
5-13-08
Dear Friends, Family, and Colleagues:
Three weeks after publication, The Candy Bombers continues...to take off. Sales and buzz are continuing to grow. What I've heard back from old and new friends is that some people like it as a history of an exciting and largely unknown moment in our past, others as a story with some very memorable characters, and still others for its contemporary resonance as a reminder of when America was doing the right things as a country and was beloved for
Source: Carlin Romano in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
5-12-08
For Israel, which dates back roughly to 1800 BC as a destination (Abraham heading to Canaan) and about 1020 BC as a kingdom (the ascension of Saul), 60 years amounts to the blink of an eye.
Yet as the country celebrates six decades of reborn existence on May 14 and books about it cascade into stores, the most important among them, Benny Morris's 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War (Yale University Press), reminds us of a revealing bent among Israeli historians: their passion for the &q
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
5-16-08
"I just don't think Shakespeare would have married someone who wasn't smart and didn't have a good sense of humor," Germaine Greer speculates in her contentious biography of Ann Hathaway, who wed William Shakespeare in 1582, when he was 18 and she 26. That is one of Greer's many objections to the tradition among Shakespeare commentators of disparaging Hathaway, even though almost nothing is known about her.
Shakespeare's Wife was published last year in Britain (Bloomsbury)
Source: Boston Globe
5-10-08
A 31-year-old former Medway resident, who was a specialist in the politics and culture of Afghanistan, was killed by a roadside bomb in a remote region of that country along with two US soldiers on Wednesday.
Michael Bhatia, a Brown University graduate and a doctoral candidate at Oxford University in England, had been in Afghanistan since November, helping the Army's 82d Airborne Division to understand the country's tribal customs. He is among a handful of academics who have partner
