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.pittsburghcitypaper
2-21-08
On Jan. 1, 1808, the U.S. government banned the transatlantic importation of people as slaves. By any account, it was landmark legislation. But its 200th anniversary passed with little public acknowledgement -- and certainly with nothing like the commemorations for the 1976 bicentennial, or even, locally, for Pittsburgh's 250th anniversary.
This inattention puzzles Marcus Rediker, the University of Pittsburgh history professor who recently published his groundbreaking The Slave Ship
Source: http://www.roanoke.com
2-22-08
Virginia Tech police released more details Thursday of an incident that led to a misdemeanor hit-and-run charge against a professor.
Peter Wallenstein was driving a 2003 Chrysler PT Cruiser north on West Campus Drive about 8:30 p.m. Tuesday when he turned right onto Perry Street into the path of a bicyclist, Brian Undercoffer.
Undercoffer, a freshman, hit the rear driver's-side tire of the car, and Wallenstein continued driving, according to a police report of the crash
Source: Cinnamon Stillwell at the website of CampusWatch
2-22-08
The proliferation of dubious conferences on"academic freedom" continues unabated. And, in each case, biased and politicized Middle East studies academics are a major component.In October, 2007, the University of Chicago hosted,"In Defense of Academic Freedom," an event whose unifying theme was"the notion that Jewish group
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
2-21-08
Tony Judt is uneasy about our contemporary preoccupation with the Holocaust. Writing in The New York Review of Books, the New York University historian worries that the memory of the Holocaust has been "manipulated to local advantage" and become too closely attached to the cause of defending Israel and is therefore losing its universal moral significance.
"Yes, the problem of evil in the last century, to invoke Aren
Source: Bill Moyers talks with Shelby Steele on PBS
1-11-08
BILL MOYERS: Here's one of the intriguing and lingering questions of the week: how is race shaping politics this year? The polling in Iowa was right on - showing Barack Obama winning there. So what happened in New Hampshire? The polls predicted another big Obama victory - Did they just get it wrong -- all of them -- or was there more to it?
One Obama supporter put it this way in a widely circulated essay on the web: "The exit polls in New Hampshire were accurate for the Republi
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
2-15-08
The UC Berkeley graduate student behind the wheel in the car crash that killed Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam in Menlo Park was sentenced Thursday to five days in the county jail and 200 hours of community service.
Judge Mark Forcum recommended that journalism graduate student Kevin Jones, 27, serve his jail sentence in the San Mateo County sheriff's work program, meaning he will probably pick up trash or do similar work rather than spend any time behind bars.
Source: Peter Read in the Australian
2-18-08
[Peter Read is research professor in the department of history at the University of Sydney.]
LAST week marked a week for which some of the Stolen Generations have waited all their lives. The 1997 Bringing Them Home report polarised the nation. Prime minister John Howard's strong refusal to give an apology continued for the life of his government. An apology, promised first by Kim Beazley, later by Kevin Rudd, finally occurred in the federal Parliament last Wednesday.
Ke
Source: http://thechronicleherald.ca (Canada)
2-17-08
IT WAS A YEAR straight out of a book for Karolyn Smardz Frost.
2007 opened with the release of her critically acclaimed book, I’ve Got A Home In Glory Land: A Lost Tale of The Underground Railroad.
But even she couldn’t have what would happen later in the year. Late last year, she received the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction at a ceremony in Ottawa filled with memorable moments and the chance to make new friends in the Canadian publishing industry, such as Hali
Source: Smithsonian Magazine
2-1-08
You say your book, Day of Empire, is a warning. How so?
I'm suggesting that, ironically, the secret to becoming a world "hyperpower" is tolerance. If you look at history, you see great powers being very tolerant in their rise to global dominance. So there is a sort of warning for today's hyperpower—the United States. The secret to our success for over 200 years has been our ability to attract the best and the brightest from all over the world. We can't just let every immig
Source: http://www.dailycardinal.com
2-19-08
Bud Selig, commissioner of Major League Baseball and a UW-Madison alumnus, told students Monday his history degree helped him achieve success in sports management.
History Department Chair Professor David McDonald introduced Selig as the department’s “most prominent and certainly our most visible alumnus.”
Selig graduated from UW-Madison with a history degree in 1956. As an undergraduate student with a deep love for baseball, Selig said he dreamed of someday becoming a
Source: Francesca Mari in the New Republic
2-18-08
In Philip Roth's latest book, Exit Ghost, Amy Bellette has to be hauled out of the New York Public Library kicking and screaming. Her lover, the fictional writer E.I. Lonoff, isn't represented among a display of America's best authors, and Bellette is furious--not only at his absence, but also at the authors included instead. More than anything, Bellette is enraged by the cost of political correctness. "It started with the colleges," she later says, "and now it's everywhere. Richa
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
2-22-08
How do the five senses affect our experiences, and how have they informed the course of history? Mark M. Smith, a historian at the University of South Carolina at Columbia, explores those questions in his new book, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (University of California Press/Berg Publishers, 2008). Nothing less than an overview of the history of the senses from antiquity to the present, Smith's latest work seeks to deepen our understanding of soci
Source: Boston Globe
2-18-08
"This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War," the roundly acclaimed new book from Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust, is also a fast-rising bestseller.With 35,000 copies sold since early January, the scholarly book has vaulted to seventh on the New York Times nonfiction list and recently climbed to 30th on the Amazon.com bestseller list, mainly populated by works of pop-culture icons John Grisham, James Patterson, Stephen King, and an
Source: Special to HNN
2-18-08
For a new book on the influence of Betty Friedan's 1963 book "The Feminine Mystique," I am trying to get a feel for how men and women in different time periods and situations reacted to this book, or merely to the general idea of a "feminine mystique," whether or not they actually read the book. I have listed some questions below, but feel free to tell me anything you feel would be useful, and in as much detail as you you have time to provide
If you heard the co
Source: Boston Globe
1-27-08
In his vivid and illuminating new book, "God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215" (Norton, $29.95), historian David Levering Lewis re-examines the 400-year era of Muslim rule in Europe, a period during which a sophisticated and tolerant Islamic empire conquered - and profoundly influenced - parts of a West that had fallen into barbaric tribalism following the collapse of the Roman empire.
Lewis, a professor at New York University, received the Pulitzer Pri
Source: Robert Townsend at the AHA blog
2-12-08
The AHA is now offering an Archives Wiki as a free resource for historians and other researchers. This project is described in greater detail in the February issue of Perspectives on History, but in general terms, we hope that by harnessing this (relatively) new technology for collaboration on the web, we can draw on the collective interests of thousands of researchers and archivists to develop a rich resource for anyone venturing into new archives for the first time....
Source: Eric Alterman at the website of the Center for American Progress, followed by a response by Philip Zelikow (appended by Alterman to his own article)
2-15-08
[Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College, and a professor of journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. His blog, “Altercation,” appears at www.mediamatters.org/altercation. His seventh book, Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America, will be published in March.]
President George W. Bush used his address to th
Source: New Republic
2-15-08
Niall Ferguson
I cannot let Amartya Sen's otherwise enjoyable piece ("Imperial Illusions", December 31) pass without a protest at his misuse of me as a straw man. Professor Sen may find Empire"rather didactic". He may even be justified in calling it"a guarded but enthusiastic celebration of British imperialism." But it is a complete misrepresentation to imply, as he does, that I have argued anywhere that"Americans [should] be inspired by ... early British rule in India". On the cont
Source: The Hindu
2-14-08
A French historian writing a book on the ties between his country and the erstwhile kingdom of Kapurthala, today expressed "unhappiness" at the dilapidated condition of several historical buildings.
Jean Marie Lafont, who along with four others, on Thursday visited this town famous for its French architecture, said they were impressed to see the old monuments but "unhappy" over their dilapidated conditions.
Comparing the old monuments, especially the
Source: http://www.artsjournal.com
2-13-08
An architectural historian who taught for 20 years at Columbia University (where she was professor of art history and archaeology), and who was also curator of last year's well received three-part exhibition, Robert Moses and the Modern City, Ballon is now associate vice chancellor for academic programs and campus planning for NYU Abu Dhabi, scheduled to open in 2010.
She co-authored with Westermann the recent report, Art History and Its Publications in the Electronic Age. Westerman
