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: John Crace in the Guardian
3-11-08
Just over five years ago, Michael Burleigh did the unthinkable. He walked away from academia. No jumping, no pushing - just walking. With his career on a high after winning the Samuel Johnson prize for The Third Reich: A New History, and after more than two decades teaching at Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cardiff - not forgetting visiting posts at Rutgers and Stanford in the US - he decided to jack it all in.
"The crap had begun to take over," he laughs bleakly. &q
Source: Press Release--National Coalition for History
3-10-08
The Co-Chairs of the Congressional Humanities Caucus, Rep. David Price (D-NC) and Rep. Phil English (R-PA), have prepared a Dear Colleague letter in support of $177 million in funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities in FY 2009, which is currently circulating in the House of Representatives. The deadline for Members of Congress to sign the letter is soon- Monday, March 17, 2008.
ACTION NEEDED
Please call, email, or fax your Representative and ask him/her t
Source: Press Release--Cathy Gorn, executive director of National History Day
3-10-08
It is once more the time of year to voice your support for NHD, and to press your representatives in Congress to appropriate federal funds to one of the longest-running education programs in the country. Phone calls from constituents like you and your friends compelled 31 Representatives and 21 Senators to support NHD in a Dear Colleague letter last year!
For grassroots activism, that is a tremendous result, and I am certain that your energy and concern can bring us even closer to f
Source: Press Release
3-11-08
New York, NY—Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of the New-York Historical Society, announced today that Daniel Walker Howe will receive the third annual New-York Historical Society American History Book Prize for What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford University Press). The award will be presented at a ceremony during the annual Chairman’s Council Weekend With History on April 4, where Howe will also be named American Historian Laureate.
Source: http://www.solidarity-us.org
1-1-08
THE FOLLOWING INTERVIEW was conducted in November, 2007 by Charles Williams on behalf of the ATC editorial board. The paperback edition of Michael Honey’s Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign is released this January 2008.
The Memphis sanitation strike began on February 12, 1968 following the death on February 1 of two sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, who were crushed by a defective garbage compactor. Martin Luther King, Jr
Source: Max Boot at his Commentary blog
3-9-08
The lip-smacking glee with which the resignation of Obama adviser Samantha
Power is being greeted on the right is perhaps an understandable reaction
to the sanctimony (and success) of the Obama campaign. But some of the
comments are simply over the top. For instance, Scott Johnson at Powerline
(a blog which I regularly read and greatly respect) [1] calls Power"self-righteous, high-minded, and utterly unserious — in short, a pompous
phony."
I can only imagine that Johnson has not rea
Source: Stan Katz in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
3-10-08
[Stan Katz teaches public and international affairs and directs the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at the Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. ]
I have been working for the past several years with a group of historians who are trying to create a National History Center in the nation’s capital. This is an idea proposed many years ago by J. Franklin Jameson when he was the Librarian of Congress, and resurrected by my former Princeton colleague James Banner severa
Source: Cinnamon Stillwell at the website of Campus Watch
3-10-08
[Cinnamon Stillwell is the Northern California Representative for Campus Watch. She can be reached atstillwell@meforum.org]
A Santa Clara University course optimistically titled,"The Peaceful Settlement of International Disputes," was the setting for a February 26 academic debate on one of the world's most intractable disputes: T
Source: Gabriel Schoenfeld in the Weekly Standard
3-3-08
[Gabriel Schoenfeld, senior editor of Commentary, writes daily at connectingthedots.us.com.]
How do we explain the bizarre recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran, which stated in its opening sentence that the ayatollahs had halted their nuclear weapons program in 2003, even as, tucked away in a footnote, the same document noted that the most critical component of such a weapons program--uranium enrichment--was proceeding at full tilt?
Even Mike McConnell, t
Source: http://www.sas.upenn.edu
3-10-08
While Tom Sugrue, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of History and Sociology, was researching his award-winning book The Origins of the Urban Crisis, he found the inspiration for yet another untold American story. In Origins, Sugrue offers an important new perspective on the economic decline in Detroit and other industrial cities since World War II. One of the major issues he explores is how residential segregation, economic transformation and discrimination in the workplace constrained opp
Source: Washington Times
3-9-08
... In "The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History," Mr. Wood critiques and analyzes many of the important books of the past 25 years, with a special emphasis on works about the Revolutionary era. It is a collection of his review essays from publications such as the New Republic and the New York Review of Books.
His thoughts on the views expressed in the books he is reviewing are insightful and rigorously argued. Fortunately, his writings lack the stridenc
Source: Hindustan Times
3-9-08
Pioneer Indian-American historian Tejinder Singh Sibia, who documented the arrival of early Indian migrants to Canada and the US and their struggles, died in Sacramento at the weekend following a brief illness. He was 70.
Popularly known as Ted, he was the first Indian-American to document the history of the Gadar movement in California, the Komagata Maru and early Indian pioneers in America.
After his retirement as a librarian from the University of California at Davis
Source: http://www.rte.ie
3-8-08
An appearance by the controversial historian, David Irving, at a debate in University College Cork next week has been cancelled.
Two years ago, Mr Irving was convicted in Austria of saying that the Holocaust did not happen, which is a criminal offence in that country.
UCC said it had cancelled Mr Irving's appearance over security concerns, but said that Monday's debate would go ahead.
Source: Email to friends
3-8-08
[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.]
Friends,
While I am all for pointing out the many contexts in which being "white" confers enormous advantages, not only historically, but in American society today, I am extremely wary of the concept of "white privilege,"especially the way it is used on college campuses in racial sensitivity sensitivity sessions and diversity training
First of all, the pe
Source: Stefan Collini in the Times Online (UK)
3-5-08
The career of E. H. Carr (1892–1982) provides a singular, and often baffling, illustration of the tensions and paradoxes involved in being one of twentieth-century Britain’s leading intellectuals. Through his little book What Is History?, he probably did as much as any other single figure to shape reflective assumptions in the second half of the century about the nature of historical knowledge, especially among sixth-formers and university students, yet he had not been educated as a historian, n
Source: Wilson Quarterly (autumn issue)
10-1-07
[Max Byrd, a professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Davis, is the author of the historical novels Shooting the Sun (2004), Grant (2000), Jackson (1997), and Jefferson (1993).]
Let me begin with a confession.
For many years, as I liked to tell my friends, I led a life of crime, though part- time only. By day, I taught 18th- century English literature at the University of California, Davis. By night, I wrote somewhat lurid paperback detective novel
Source: Press Release--Middle East Forum
3-5-08
www.Islamist-Watch.org, the website of the Middle East Forum's Islamist Watch project, is open for business.Islamist Watch asserts that nonviolent radical Islam is more likely to alter the makeup of Western society over time than is terrorism. For while it is relatively easy to mobilize public opinion against terrorist groups, no institutions exist to counter the demands of non-violent extremists. Lawful Islamists lobby for legislation, influen
Source: LAT
3-6-08
George Marsh Fredrickson, an authority on the history of racism whose work comparing the histories of South Africa and America helped spawn a new field of study, died Feb. 25 at his home on the Stanford University campus, where he taught for nearly two decades. He was 73.
The cause was heart failure, said his daughter Caroline.
Fredrickson, who was Edgar E. Robinson professor of U.S. history at Stanford when he retired in 2002, wrote several highly regarded books,
Source: P. David Hornik at frontpagemag.com
3-5-08
An appeals court in the Israeli town of Nazareth overturned an earlier lower-court ruling that had awarded a legal victory to Neve Gordon, a far-Left Israeli lecturer in political scientist at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba. Gordon had filed a SLAPP suit in that court against Prof. Steven Plaut, a prominent columnist and academic economist, based on articles Plaut had published denouncing Gordon’s political opinions and public political activities. Plaut is a critic of Israel’
Source: Scotsman
3-7-08
A LEADING historian has criticised BBC Scotland over their choice of presenter for a new ten-part series on Scottish history.
Best-selling Scottish writer Professor Tom Devine has questioned why the BBC picked Neil Oliver to front the show which promises to "explode the myths" of Scotland's romantic past.
Prof Devine, who also said there were few myths left to explode, welcomed the new series, A History of Scotland, and its multi-media package but raised a red
