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: Earth Times
1-24-08
Germans have drawn clear lessons relevant to today from the events of 75 years ago that brought Adolf Hitler to power, a prominent German historian said Thursday. "What is decisive is that Germans after 1945 have learnt that rejecting Western democracy leads to catastrophe for them," Heinrich August Winkler told an audience of foreign correspondents in Berlin.
Recalling the events of the so-called "Third Reich" and the moral responsibility carried by Germany as a resul
Source: Inside Higher Ed
1-25-08
For many college students, an introductory survey course may be their only exposure to a discipline — and in many courses, a textbook may serve as the guide. With that in mind, a committee of political scientists set out to see how how black people are portrayed in the introductory textbooks used in their discipline — and the results left them concerned.
The textbooks reviewed do feature discussion of black people and issues that affected them, but the most in-depth coverage is typi
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
1-25-08
Early in September 1862, after a train trip marked by tedious delays, a 25-year-old Union Army private named Willard A. Cutter arrived in Washington as a member of Company K of the newly formed 150th Pennsylvania Volunteers. Luckily for Matthew Pinsker — and anyone else interested in history — Company K was sent to a height of land overlooking the city to guard the Soldiers' Home, where Abraham Lincoln and his family were spending the summer in a cottage on the grounds. There Cutter began writin
Source: News Release--OAH
1-23-08
SPECIAL ISSUE: Through the Eye of Katrina: The Past as Prologue?
Guest Editors: Lawrence N. Powell and Clarence L. Mohr
This special issue grew out of a multidisciplinary conference held in March 2007. The issue and the conference were created in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to examine the history and culture of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Because we are so little removed in time from Katrina's 2005 landfall, the essays cannot, and do not, fully historic
Source: PBS
1-19-08
BILL MOYERS: Back in mid-January of 1980, another race for the Presidency was underway. As it is now, many Americans were worried about the economy and a failed policy in the Middle East. They hungered for change and hope.
Along came a former California governor named Ronald Reagan. He rallied his party at the Republican National Convention with these patriotic words: "We have it in our power to begin the world over again."
Calling for a revolution, Reagan cho
Source: AP
1-23-08
The newly released Polish edition of a book by a Princeton University professor has dredged up painful memories in Poland, forcing the country to confront a difficult chapter in its history: the deaths of Jews at the hands of Poles in the aftermath of World War II.
Jan T. Gross' "Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz" hit bookstores in Poland earlier this month, and has sparked a debate about anti-Semitism in this Eastern European country, which saw its Jewish popu
Source: Chicago Tribune
1-23-08
The Committee on Social Thought, a center of interdisciplinary research at the University of Chicago since 1941, often is associated with such eminent former members as Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Allan Bloom, J.M. Coetzee, T.S. Eliot, Friederich Hayek, Edward Levi and Mark Strand. Now, new recognition is coming to John Nef, the late historian who was the driving force behind the committee's founding and its steadfast financial backer.
U. of C. said it is naming the committee after
Source: Times (UK)
1-24-08
A leading historian of science is to become the new head of the Government’s fertility watchdog.
Lisa Jardine, Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London, will take over as the chairwoman of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) on April 1, the Government’s Appointments Commission announced yesterday. Professor Jardine, whose specialist fields of study include the history of the scientific revolution, succeeds Shirley Harrison, w
Source: Fox News
1-23-08
The Church of Scientology slammed a German tabloid for publishing comments by an esteemed German historian comparing Tom Cruise to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, according to thisislondon.co.uk.
"Bild am Sonntag is grossly irresponsible for publishing horrendous and disgraceful claims about Mr. Cruise," said Karin Pouw, the church's public affairs director, according to thisislondon.co.uk.
World War II historian Guido Knopp was commenting on a video
Source: NYT
1-24-08
Miles Lerman, a Jewish resistance fighter in Nazi-occupied Poland who was a major figure in creating the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and persuading Soviet bloc countries to give it thousands of artifacts of the Holocaust, died on Tuesday at his home in Philadelphia. He was 88.
The death was confirmed by his daughter, Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer.
Mr. Lerman was chairman of the museum’s governing council from the time it opened on the Mall on April
Source: AFP
1-23-08
Controversial Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan said Wednesday that with the backing of civil rights groups he was appealing a decision by the US administration to refuse him a visa.
Ramadan was forced to give up a teaching position at the University of Notre-Dame in Indiana in late 2004 when US authorities revoked his visa at the last minute on the recommendation of the Department of Homeland Security.
The noted scholar, who lives in Britain where he is a senior resea
Source: National Security Archive
1-24-08
The new documentary "Secrecy," made by Harvard professors Peter Galison and Robb Moss, premiered this past week at the Sundance Film Festival, featuring National Security Archive director Tom Blanton in a leading role and on the after-show panels answering questions from Sundance audiences.
Blanton participated in the premiere showing on January 18 in Park City, the follow-up showing on January 19 also in Park City, and the noontime showing on Sunday January 20 at the scr
Source: David Bosco in the American Scholar (winter issue)
2-1-08
During the hot and desperate summer of 1862, a senior American commander found himself consumed with the question of insurgents. Major General Henry Halleck had become general-in-chief of the Union armies in July of that year, and he soon discovered that the army had no laws or regulations to govern its contacts with the bands of irregular Southern forces in the field. A lawyer by training, Halleck found the absence of guidance maddening. Union troops were encountering an array of rebel forces,
Source: Harold Henderson in a profile of Perlstein in the Chicago Reader
1-24-08
In Before the Storm, the 2001 history that made his reputation, Rick Perlstein put his readers inside the skin of a pimply college freshman cast adrift on a sprawling concrete campus in the 1960s. “Wearied from his first soul-crushing run-in with Big Bureaucracy,” the imagined student is buying his required texts in the campus bookstore when he happens on a slim book with big type. He flips it open and “standing, reads fourteen short pages inviting him to join an idealistic struggle to defend th
Source: LAT
1-23-08
Sometimes, when a fine historian ventures outside his specialty, prodigies of fresh insight ensue. More often -- and particularly when the scholar carries into one era the baggage of another -- the results are worse than disappointing.
These days, we so urgently require a better understanding of Islam and its origins that it would be edifying to report that the distinguished historian David Levering Lewis' new book is an example of the former. Unfortunately, "God's Crucible: Is
Source: HNN Staff
1-23-08
This year's OAH annual meeting is in New York City. The OAH reserved rooms at the Hilton at a special convention rate of $202 a night (less than half the regular price).
But rooms sold out so quickly that on Tuesday the organization had to arrange to book more rooms.
As of Wednesday afternoon the Hilton still had rooms to rent, but they're going fast.
Hilton Tel: 1-212-586-7000
Source: Network of Concerned Historians (NCH)
1-23-08
Dear Colleagues,
The Network for Education and Academic Rights (NEAR), London, and several press agencies reported that Mehrnoushe Solouki was released. A 38-year-old graduate student, she was arrested in February 2007 and prevented from leaving Iran for nearly a year after discovering a mass grave of regime opponents summarily executed during the 1988 Iraq-Iran war. Please see the summary below. Many thanks to all of you who campaigned on ms. Solouki’s behalf.
With bes
Source: NYT
1-22-08
Robert Frost wrote some of this country’s most quoted — and in the minds of some, most misunderstood — poetic lines.
Now a recently published compendium of his personal notebooks is coming under attack from two critics who say that the editor of the volume, Robert Faggen, mistranscribed hundreds, if not thousands, of Frost’s words.
Mr. Faggen, a professor and chairman of the department of English at Claremont McKenna College in California, published his book, “The Noteb
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
1-22-08
[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. He is a past president of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for Legal History.]
... I first became aware of the problem when one of my graduate school friends discovered that a more senior scholar had reproduced large sections of his dissertation. Later I
Source: http://www.fredericknewspost.com
1-22-08
The modern civil rights movement did not begin in 1955, according to Frederick County resident Bruce Thompson. It actually started in Maryland about 20 years earlier.
"Martin Luther King Jr. truly was a leader and should be celebrated, but he didn't create the movement. He stepped into it and broadened it."
Thompson earned his doctorate in history from the University of Maryland College Park in 1996.
Thompson teaches history and coordinates the honors p
