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: http://www.sabcnews.com
3-7-08
Another man convicted for the murder of historian David Rattray has testified against two other alleged accomplices on trial in the Pietermaritzburg High Court.
Simphiwe Ndlovu and Zibonele Mpanza are being tried for the murder of the world-renowned historian who was killed in January last year. The State says a gang of six armed men went to Rattray's Fugitive Drift Lodge home in northern KwaZulu-Natal to rob him. He was shot three times and died at the scene.
Thembin
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
3-7-08
Last fall, Samantha Power, a professor of public policy at Harvard University, told The Chronicle that advising Sen. Barack Obama on foreign policy was one of the greatest experiences of her professional life. But she added that she was deeply anxious that her blunt style would someday get the campaign into trouble:
[N]ew technologies make the candidate-adviser relationship more perilous than it once was. In theory a student in one of Ms. Power’s Harvard courses might post one
Source: NYT
3-7-08
George M. Fredrickson, a historian who cast new light on the study of race and who helped define the field of comparative history with a penetrating examination of racial relations in the United States and South Africa, died on Feb. 25 at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 73.
The cause was heart failure, his wife, Hélène, said.
Mr. Fredrickson is often credited with breaking ground in the use of comparative history to escape provincialism and suggest broader, more th
Source: NYT
3-7-08
Harriet Washington won the nonfiction prize for “Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present” (Doubleday).
Source: Independent (UK)
3-6-08
John Larner was one of a group of post-war British and American historians who changed our perceptions of Italy during the Renaissance. He then turned to the history of exploration and became an authority on Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus.
The adopted son of a schoolteacher mother and a father who worked as a park-keeper on Hampstead Heath, Larner was a grammar-school boy from suburban London who after National Service gained a place at New College, Oxford in 1951. His mother d
Source: Star Tribune, Minneapolis
3-6-08
On Tuesday evening, Stephen Feinstein was doing what he often did, giving a speech about the Holocaust. This one was at the Sabes Foundation Minneapolis Jewish Film Festival in Hopkins.
Suddenly he was at a loss for words. He was taken to Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, where he later died. He was 64.
An international outpouring of grief has greeted the death of the world-renowned historian of genocide studies.
"Stephen Feinstein was invol
Source: Stanford
3-5-08
David Kennedy, the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, is retiring in July, and Stanford is honoring him with a March 7-8 conference titled "Reflections on the American Condition: A Celebration of the Career of David M. Kennedy."
Bruce Schulman of Boston University will deliver the keynote address, "David Kennedy and the Meaning of America." Kennedy's former doctoral students from around the United States will be speaking at the five conference panels.
Source: Bill Moyers Journal
2-29-08
BILL MOYERS: Populism grew up in America. During the first gilded age - back at the turn of the 19th century huge discrepancies in income and power separated a minority of very rich people who ran the country and everyone else. Then the disparities led to strikes, riots, labor unions, and government regulation of big business.
And today -- Well, that's what I want to put to Nell painter, one of our country's distinguished historians. Her grassroots history of the populist and progre
Source: http://www.infozine.com
3-4-08
Bill Tuttle has taught KU students about recent American history, race relations and the social movements of the 1960s for more than four decades. The first Tuttle Lecture will be delivered by Leon Litwack, a retired professor from the University of California-Berkeley. The lecture, titled "Fight the Power," will take place at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 10, at the Dole Institute.
"Bill Tuttle is an outstanding scholar and teacher, and one of the major reasons I came to K
Source: Mark N. Katz in the Middle East Journal (Vol. 62, #1, Winter 2008)
2-1-08
[Mark N. Katz, Professor of Government and Politics, George Mason University. He has written extensively on Moscow’s foreign policy toward the Middle East.]
Re: Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets’ Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War, by Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez.
Ginor and Remez argue in this book that the Soviet Union played a much larger role in the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War than has been recognized previously. Far from seeking
to avoid the outbreak of this war or being
surpr
Source: Hugo Schwyzer at Cliopatria (HNN Blog)
3-4-08
Blogger Brownfemipower has taken the lead on reporting the story of Andrea Smith's denial of tenure at the University of Michigan. Read here and here, and see the report in the Chronicle of Higher Ed here.
It's
Source: Guardian
3-4-08
[Dr Dejan Djokic is a lecturer in history at Goldsmiths, University of London; author of Elusive Compromise: A History of Interwar Yugoslavia; and editor of Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea 1918-1992]
agree with Noel Malcolm's rebuttal of Serb demonstrators' slogans stating that "Kosovo is Serbia" (Is Kosovo Serbia? We ask a historian, G2, February 26). However, I must also express reservations regarding some of his arguments. Malcolm does not explain that Kosovo ha
Source: http://www.onenewsnow.com
4-3-08
Yuri Felshtinsky says there's a slight chance the Russian secret service will loosen its control over the country now that it has a new president who never worked for the KGB. And there's about the same chance, says the Russian historian, that U.S.-Russia relations will improve with a new administration in Washington, DC.
Dmitry Medvedev, 42, has been elected Russia's new president and will replace his protégé Vladimir Putin in May. Since 1991, the former lawyer has worked with Puti
Source: http://www.bnd.com
3-2-08
Illinois State Historian Thomas Schwartz says almost all 19th century first ladies lived in the shadows.
But Mary Todd Lincoln was the first lady of controversy.
In looking at Mrs. Lincoln, "people will see many similarities with things we take for granted today as being general characteristics of a modern woman," Schwartz said. "But at the time, they weren't accepted and provoked quite a bit of discussion and comment in private letters, in conversation and in
Source: http://winnipegsun.com/Entertainment
3-1-08
Where the heck was Philippa Gregory when we were all at school learning dusty facts about Henry VIII and his wives?
The historian and novelist breathes new life into the world of the Tudors in The Other Boleyn Girl, a massive bestseller that has become a movie starring Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman. The film, which is in theatres now, concerns the sibling rivalry between Anne and Mary Boleyn, both of whom want the King (Eric Bana) for herself. Sex, intrigue and competition
Source: Middle East Forum
3-3-08
The Muslim Weekly, a London-based publication, issued an apology today to Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, concerning a defamatory article it published in February 2007.That article repeated a false allegation made by Tariq Ramadan that Daniel Pipes had lied to a conference hosted by London mayor Ken Livingstone in January 2007. (For details of what did occur, see the article by Mr. Pipes,"
Source: Conrad Black in the NY Sun
3-3-08
[NY Sun: Conrad Black, a founding director of The New York Sun, is scheduled to report today to federal prison in Florida, to begin serving a six-and-a-half-year sentence for mail fraud and obstruction of justice. At the trial in U.S. District Court in Chicago, he was acquitted of nine of the 13 charges against him; he is appealing the convictions. The following dispatch was sent yesterday.]
* * *
It is a terrible thing to be falsely accused, and wrongly convicted, even
Source: http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pwb
3-3-08
As the presidential campaign focuses attention on America’s future, Princeton’s Julian Zelizer is emerging as a prominent political scholar — known for bringing historical insights to today’s issues with a blend of social and cultural analysis.
Zelizer, who joined the University faculty in July as a professor of history and public affairs, utilizes a broad approach to studying political history, and coming to Princeton has provided him with an opportunity to further his interdiscipl
Source: http://www.interfax-religion.com
2-29-08
Kosovo independence threatens shrines of Ohrid Lake in Macedonia, President of the Historical Prospects Foundation Dr. Natalya Narochnitskaya said.
“Illegitimacy always gives raise to dissident trends both in religion and in politics. It (Kosovo – IF) will be a state that claims for the territories of other countries in compliance with the Great Albania doctrine. It’s not a secret,” the historian said in her interview to the Vesti TV channel.
“Why they (Europe and the
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
2-28-08
Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, who has been vociferous in his support of Hillary Clinton throughout the Democratic primary season, has caused quite a stir with his latest foray into the realm of presidential punditry. In an acerbic essay that appeared on the Web site of The New Republic, Wilentz charges the Obama campaign with cynically exploiting the issue of race by "deliberately, falsely, and successfully" portraying the Clinton campaign as "unscrupulous race-baiters."
