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: China View
4-18-08
Noted Togolese historian Atsutse Agbobli on Thursday condemned recent calls for boycotting the Beijing Olympics and warned against any move to politicize the games.
"I think westerners are poorly placed to push for a boycott of the Olympics," he told Xinhua.
"It is imperative that the Olympic flame remains a symbol of rapprochement between peoples," he said.
Agbobli said he does not understand why Western politicians have tak
Source: Network of Concerned Historians (NCH)
4-19-08
Dear colleagues,
In addition to 62 codes of ethics for historians and others (please see circular of last week), the Network of Concerned Historians website (http://www.concernedhistorians.org) also contains 71 legal cases that for one or another reason are of importance to historians. Most are available in English, some also in French, Spanish, or another language. These cases come from international courts or national supreme court
Source: Laura Wilkinson in the Daily Star
4-18-08
That coalition forces have behaved with such blatant disregard toward these ancient monuments flies in the face of the 1954 UNESCO Resolution outlining the criteria for the protection of cultural sites in the event of armed conflict.
After five years of occupation, these stories have become awfully familiar. At the same time, the weight given to Iraq's ancient artefacts suggests how Orientalist international attitudes toward Iraq's art and cultural production are.
Source: Eric Alterman in the Nation
5-5-08
If you spent your pre-Passover Saturday morning, as I did, in synagogue reading Leviticus 14:1, you may have heard that Midrashic preachers used to enjoy creating puns on the word metzora, which means leper, and motzira, which means gossip or slander. Talmudic sage Rabbi Yosi ben Zimra has God addressing the tongue itself: "What else could I have done to rein you in, O tongue of deceit?" He asks.
One need not look far in our culture to grasp the relevance. In a recent New
Source: OpEdNews
4-17-08
America’s military presence in Iraq represents “a basic violation” of its “historic identity,” that of a nation founded in opposition to imperialism, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph Ellis said.
Americans have neglected an important lesson from their own past, Ellis, an authority on the Revolutionary War period, said. “We have become the imperial power. We have become Great Britain and have succeeded Great Britain as the hegemonic power of the world. I would think we would w
Source: New Yorker abstract
4-14-08
Writer discusses Abu El-Haj’s doctoral dissertation, which was revised and published in 2001 under the title “Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society.” The book looked at the role of archeology in what was essentially a political project: the Biblical validation for Jewish claims to what is now Israel. After teaching at the University of Chicago and spending a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Abu El-Haj moved to New Yo
Source: AP
4-16-08
Historian Robert Caro, humorist Calvin Trillin and poet Paul Muldoon will be among the eight new members inducted next month into the elite American Academy of Arts and Letters, the academy announced Tuesday.
Caro, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, is known for his biography of Robert Moses, "The Power Broker," and for his multivolume series on Lyndon Johnson. Trillin is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker who writes often about food and last year released a best-se
Source: Tom Eblen in the Lexington Herald-Leader
4-16-08
I always think of Thomas D. Clark in the spring.
Perhaps it's because, soon after I returned to Lexington in the spring of 1998, I asked Kentucky's historian laureate to speak to the Herald-Leader staff. He stood and lectured for nearly an hour without notes, putting Kentucky's array of issues, controversies and quirks into the context of history's great sweep.
It was an impressive performance, especially for a man about to turn 95.
While cleaning out files
Source: Steve Weinberg at the website of InsideHigherEd
4-17-08
[Steve Weinberg’s just-published trade book is Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller.]
For all that they are seen as bastions of knowledge and unfettered flow of information, colleges and universities are not typically known for welcoming rigorous scrutiny of themselves. They often have love-hate relationships with the journalists who cover them.
So imagine my surprise in 2002 when R. Dean Mills, dean of the University of Missouri’s
Source: Scott McLemee at the website of Inside Higher Ed
4-16-08
Last week, while rushing to finish up a review of Francois Cusset’s French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (University of Minnesota Press), I heard that Stanley Fish had just published a column about the book for The New York Times. Of course the only sensible thing to do was to ignore this development entirely. The last thing you need when coming to the end of a piece of work is to go off and do some more reading. The inne
Source: Efraim Karsh at the website of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (Spring 2008)
4-16-08
[Efraim Karsh is professor and head of Mediterranean Studies at King's College London and an author, most recently, of Islamic Imperialism: A History. He is a member of the SPME Board of Direcors.]
Since Israel's founding in 1948, there have been two Arab-Israeli conflicts. The first one is military in nature. Played out on the battlefield, it has heroes, villains, martyrs, and victims. The second conflict, less bloody but no less incendiary, is the battle over the historical culpab
Source: HNN Staff
4-16-08
The National Council on Public History held its Annual Meeting in Louisville, KY, April 10-13, 2008. Click on the SOURCE link above to read blog comments.
Source: John Leo in the WSJ
4-15-08
In 1994, Home Box Office and Pepsico celebrated Black History Month by producing a poster that was intended to show black achievement: It featured a large picture of the pyramids and many smaller images, including one of the Sphinx. Worse, the companies sent 20,000 copies of the poster to predominantly black schools. Honest teachers in those schools had to explain why a corporate seal of approval had been given to a historical claim that just isn't true.
This "celebration
Source: YIGAL BRONNER and NEVE GORDON at the website of the Chronicle of Higher Ed
4-25-08
"Archaeology has become a weapon of dispossession," Yonathan Mizrachi, an Israeli archaeologist, said in a recent telephone interview with us. He was referring to the way archaeology is being used in Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood in the oldest part of Jerusalem, where, we believe, archaeological digs are being carried out as part of a concerted campaign to expel Palestinians from their ancestral home.
That effort is orchestrated by an Israeli settler organization call
Source: Jerusalem Post
4-6-08
In 1993, half a century after he took to the Lithuanian countryside to fight the Nazi invaders and their local collaborators, Dov Levin received a letter of recognition from Lithuania's first president after independence, Algirdas Brazauskas, for his courage in facing the Nazi menace.
"That was back when they liked Jews," the octogenarian professor emeritus of East European Jewish history joked on Sunday, hours after formally returning the award in a letter to the current
12-31-69
Columbia University has taken the next step in its plan to add new multicultural classes to its core curriculum, the great books undergraduate program.
The university announced it would spend $50 million on a project to enhance the core curriculum's multicultural offerings last fall, shortly after students conducted a week-long hunger strike to protest the weakness of the classes. Now Columbia is assigning a young professor of Western civilization, Roosevelt Montas, 34, to direct th
Source: Stanley Katz in AHA Perspectives (April)
4-1-08
History matters. The incontestable truth encapsulated in this phrase was once again brought home to me quite forcefully by a brilliant and eloquent lecture delivered recently at a Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) meeting in New York by Fritz Stern, university professor emeritus at Columbia University, and a distinguished historian of Germany, whose most recent book is the best-selling autobiographical memoir, Five Germanys I Have Known.
The lecture—the second in a series on foreig
Source: Press Release--ASMEA
4-10-08
Washington, DC—Leading scholars of Middle East studies and African studies are set to gather in the nation's capital for the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa's (ASMEA) annual conference later this month where they will be joined by the preeminent authority in Middle East studies, Professor Bernard Lewis of Princeton University.
Hailed as "the world's foremost Islamic scholar" (Wall Street Journal) and as "the doyen of Middle Eastern studies"
Source: http://abclocal.go.com
4-14-08
Dr. John Hope Franklin endorsed presidential candidate Barack Obama, citing his unique ability to inspire and bring people of all ages, backgrounds and party affiliations together.
"Senator Obama is a truly exceptional leader who understands the struggles of people from all walks of life. As president, he will be the voice of regular people - something that has been missing from the political landscape for so many years. He has shown an ability to bridge the divides in our society and unite
Source: Janet Maslin in the NYT
4-10-08
In “Slavery by Another Name” Douglas A. Blackmon eviscerates one of our schoolchildren’s most basic assumptions: that slavery in America ended with the Civil War. Mr. Blackmon unearths shocking evidence that the practice persisted well into the 20th century. And he is not simply referring to the virtual bondage of black sharecroppers unable to extricate themselves economically from farming.
He describes free men and women forced into industrial servitude, bound by chains, faced with
