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: Turkish Daily News
4-25-08
Thousands of social facilities, churches and schools that once belonged to Armenians cannot be seen in Anatolia today, providing more convincing evidence than written documents that the World War I-era killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire constitute "genocide," an American historian said yesterday.
“Although there were around two million Armenian people living in Anatolia during the Ottoman Empire before 1915, today it is not possible to find any histo
Source: Press Release
4-22-08
When the Soviets launched the satellite Sputnik in 1957, thousands of people around the world seized the opportunity to become citizen-scientists and take an active part in the dawning space age. Known as Moonwatchers, these teenagers, homemakers, schoolteachers, and otherwise amateur astronomers provided professional astronomers with critical and otherwise unavailable information about the satellite's movement. In a new book published this week titled "Keep Watching the Skies!: The Story o
Source: Andy Guess at the website of Inside Higher Ed
4-24-08
Looking back, it’s as if Cleveland Sellers was preparing his entire life to become president of Voorhees College.
After all, he was born in Denmark, S.C., home of the historically black Episcopal institution, and he even graduated from the college’s affiliated high school in 1962. For the past 15 years, Sellers has driven an hour and 15 minutes — each way, each day — between Denmark, where he still lives, and Columbia, where he is director of the African American studies program at
Source: NYT story about the broken dreams of the Khalil Gibran International Academy in NYC
4-28-08
... “It’s a battle that’s really just begun,” said Daniel Pipes, who directs a conservative research group, the Middle East Forum, and helped lead the charge against Ms. Almontaser and the school.
In the aftermath of Sept. 11, critics of radical Islam focused largely on terrorism, scrutinizing Muslim-American charities or asserting links between Muslim organizations and violent groups like Hamas. But as the authorities have stepped up the war on terror, those critics have shifted th
Source: Statement The Society of American Archivists (SAA) and the Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA) concerning the status of Iraqi archival documents
4-28-08
The Society of American Archivists (SAA) and the Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA) are
deeply concerned about the whereabouts, current custody, and ultimate fate of records captured or
otherwise obtained by the United States of America, and those removed by private parties, during the
first and second Gulf Wars. SAA is the world’s largest organization of archivists, comprising more than
5,100 members from around the globe. ACA represents 600 archivists from Canada and internationally.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
4-28-08
Islamic extremism was the dominant topic this past weekend at the first conference of a new organization for scholars of the Middle East and Africa. The Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, or Asmea, was formed last fall by two conservative academics as a scholarly counterweight to a much-larger group of Middle East scholars.
One of the new group's founders, Bernard Lewis, serves as its chairman. A p
Source: Matt Korade in the Congressional Quarterly
4-27-08
One of the world’s foremost Islamic scholars warned Friday that Middle Eastern studies programs have been distorted by “a degree of thought control and limitations of freedom of expression without parallel in the Western world since the 18th century, and in some areas longer than that.”
Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University, made the remarks in the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of the Middle East an
Source: Bill Moyers Journal
4-25-08
... BILL MOYERS: In 1972, Jeremiah Wright became pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. He inherited a struggling congregation of just 87 members....
BILL MOYERS: So, when you looked out on that handful of worshippers that first Sunday morning, 87 members, I'm sure all of them weren't there--
REVEREND WRIGHT: Oh, yeah. They all knew they heard this new kid was there with a big natural. So, they came to see--
BILL MOYERS: They were there.
Source: English professor Mark Bauerlein in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, commenting on a survey of the historical knowledge possessed by students conducted by Sam Wineburg and Chauncey Monte-Sano
4-24-08
... Wineburg and Monte-Sano asked 11th- and 12th-graders to rank the ten “most famous Americans in history,” and the five most famous women, excluding presidents and presidents’ wives. They reported the findings in the latest issue of Journal of American History.
Here is the first list:
1. Martin Luther King, Jr.
2. Rosa Parks
3. Harriet Tubman
4. Susan B. Anthony
5. Benjamin Franklin
6. Amelia Earhart
7. Oprah Winfrey
Source: Gilbert King in the NYT
4-23-08
[Gilbert King is the author of “The Execution of Willie Francis: Race, Murder and the Search for Justice in the American South.”]
THE Supreme Court concluded last week, in a 7-2 ruling, that Kentucky’s three-drug method of execution by lethal injection does not violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts cited a Supreme Court principle from a ruling in 1890 that defines cruelty as limited to punishme
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
4-24-08
Alan Charles Kors, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania who has been a longtime scourge of political correctness, speech codes, and other issues in higher education, has been awarded a $250,000 prize by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. The citation for the Bradley Prize, to be presented in June, recognizes Mr. Kors as both a scholar of European intellectual history and a defender of free speech.
Mr. Kors drew notice in 1998 as a co-author of The Shadow University: Th
Source: Martin Kramer at his blog: Sandbox
4-22-08
You will remember the case of Nadia Abu El-Haj, the anthropologist who last year received tenure at Barnard after a furious controversy over her book, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. Jane Kramer has written a panegyric to her for The New Yorker, simply brushing off serious-minded criticisms of Abu El-Haj's book.
Kramer (no relation to me) also has given the back story to her piece in a radio interview (from minute 21:0
Source: Jay Parini at the website of the Chronicle of Higher Ed
4-25-08
... "Sixties sexual rebels seldom made love," Gerard J. DeGroot notes in The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade, released by Harvard University Press this spring. "They fucked. The word — vulgar, aggressive, rebellious, unfeeling — was the preferred term of the soldiers in the sexual revolution." If you winced at the use of the F-word, as I did, DeGroot's point is confirmed: There was something warlike about making love, 60s-style.
Source: Trudy Kuehner, reporting on a teachers' conference, CHINA'S ENCOUNTER WITH THE WEST, held by the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI)
4-23-08
Andrew Wilson of the U.S. Naval War College explained how
the image of a weak backward China adrift in a modern world,
bullied by Western powers, dominates China's historical
memory and national identity. Its early encounters with the
West are viewed through the prism of the Qing Dynasty's
(1644-1911) nineteenth-century humiliations, exemplified by
a series of Western military victories enshrined in"unequal
treaties." But in China's earliest encounters with the West,
the M
Source: Foreign Policy
4-23-08
They are some of the world’s most introspective philosophers and rabble-rousing clerics. A few write searing works of fiction and uncover the mysteries of the human mind. Others are at the forefront of modern finance, politics, and human rights. In the second Foreign Policy/Prospect list of top public intellectuals, we reveal the thinkers who are shaping the tenor of our time.
[HNN Editor: Among the 100 were these 8 people, each of whom was identified as a historian, though some are
Source: GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT in the NYT Book Review of Judt's new book, REAPPRAISALS: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (Penguin Books)
4-20-08
... “You don’t have to be Jewish to understand the history of Europe in the 20th century, but it helps,” Judt writes, and while it has certainly helped him as a historian, he has also made a very striking personal pilgrimage. In the 1960s he was an ardent young socialist-Zionist, spending time on a kibbutz and flying to Israel in her hour of need when the 1967 war began.
He is now a caustic opponent of Israeli policy, and of American policy toward Israel also, even offering sympathe
Source: http://bishkek.kp.ru
4-19-08
It's difficult to find a bookstore without a shelf dedicated to Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler. Leonid Mlechin's "The Fuehrer's Biggest Secret" is the latest addition. Mlechin, a renowned historian, author and TV host, discusses Hitler and why he remains such a puzzling and prominent historical figure decades after his death.
KP: Don't we already know all there is to know about Hitler?
Mlechin: In world history there are certain personalities responsible for su
Source: UPI
4-19-08
A Scottish historian says the Highland bagpipe and the traditions, history and legend surrounding it were 19th century inventions.
While the bagpipe has ancient origins and a long history in Scotland, pipers did not play as the clansmen went into battle or at the funerals of Scottish chieftains, said Hugh Cheape. His book on the bagpipe is soon to be published by the National Museums of Scotland, The Daily Telegraph reported.
"The written and received history of t
Source: Newsday
4-21-08
Even as the prosecution continues of the former director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association in the theft of historic letters, a surprising revelation has surfaced:
The Oyster Bay organization was ripped off before, but at that time managed to keep it quiet.
Former director Edward Renehan Jr. of Rhode Island, who is accused in the theft of four historic letters, provided information earlier this month that made public secret information about the prior case, according
Source: NYT
4-20-08
In his book “Franklin & Lucy: President Roosevelt, Mrs. Rutherfurd and the Other Remarkable Women in His Life,” which comes out next week, Joseph E. Persico suggests that the affair between Franklin Roosevelt and Lucy Mercer (later Rutherfurd), which was supposed to have ended in 1918, resumed even sooner than most scholars believed — indeed, that it may never have ended at all....
While working on his book, Mr. Persico obtained from Lucy Mercer’s granddaughters a bound copy of
