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: NYT
1-21-08
It was not exactly a welcome mat that greeted the new museum director. When Kevin Gover left his quiet life teaching American Indian law among the cactuses of Arizona to lead the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian here, he arrived during a storm of publicity about spending by his predecessor, W. Richard West Jr.
But in his first in-depth interview since settling into his new office, Mr. Gover, 52, seemed unconcerned about the scrutiny he might now encounter about
Source: Guardian
1-21-08
The long-standing antagonism between Germany and the Church of Scientology escalated over the weekend when a high-profile historian compared Tom Cruise's performance in a Scientology video with the style of the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.
Guido Knopp, who has written a number of books on Hitler and his inner circle, said the video, which surfaced on YouTube last week, "inevitably" recalled Goebbels' speech in a Berlin sports stadium when he asked "Do you want
Source: NYT Book Review
1-20-08
This fall, Elie Wiesel’s “Night” was removed from the New York Times best-seller list, where it had spent an impressive 80 weeks after Oprah Winfrey picked it for her book club. The Times’s news survey department, which compiles the list, decided the Holocaust memoir wasn’t a new best seller but a classic like “Animal Farm” or “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year largely through course adoptions. Indeed, since it appeared in 1960, “Night” has sold an estimat
Source: NYT Book Review
1-20-08
In 2003, the German Remembrance Foundation awarded the historian Götz Aly the Marion Samuel Prize, which commemorates the one million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis. It was named for a young victim whose name was chosen at random from the lists of the dead, a gesture meant to underscore the tragic anonymity of the Holocaust’s casualties. In accepting the tribute, Aly set out on a mission to uncover the life of Marion Samuel, to rescue her at least from obscurity.
The idea was
Source: Press Release--Oxford University Press
1-21-08
Henry Louis Gates, Jr's rescue and recovery project -- the African American National Biography is finally being published in February 2008
Oxford University Press and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute are pleased to announce that after ten years of work, the AFRICAN AMERICAN NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY is complete and will be published on February 4, 2008.
“The AFRICAN AMERICAN NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY is a rescue and recovery project, retrieving the life stories of African Americans tha
Source: David Crist in the NYT
1-20-08
In the 1980s the Navy had to counter a broad effort by Revolutionary Guard forces, then at war with Iraq, to set mines and otherwise hamper and damage American-flagged oil carriers in the gulf. The conflict heated up in the summer of 1987, when an American-flagged tanker hit an Iranian mine. That fall, Army helicopters fired on and Seals boarded an Iranian ship laying mines in international waters. The Seals confirmed the presence of mines, detained the crew and scuttled the ship.
T
Source: Op ed in the WaPo signed by Jack Keane, Frederick W. Kagan and Michael O'Hanlon
1-20-08
Iraq's new de-Baathification bill, which awaits only expected approval by the presidency council before becoming law, is good news. During Saddam Hussein's day, if you wanted a professional job in Iraq, you basically had to join the Baath Party. For most of the 1 million-plus who did so, this hardly implied involvement or even complicity in crimes of the state. Hussein was so paranoid that only his very inner circles were entrusted with information or influence. The Shiite-led gove
Source: Jonathan Schanzer at the website of Campus Watch
1-16-08
[Jonathan Schanzer, an adjunct scholar at www.Campus-Watch.org, is director of policy for the Jewish Policy Center, and editor of inFocus Quarterly.]
When good news arrives from Iraq, most Americans celebrate. But not the Middle East studies professors who are often quoted in the mainstream press. For them, good news is bad news.
Source: Daniel Larison at his blog
1-18-08
[Daniel Larison is a doctoral candidate in Byzantine history at the University of Chicago.]
This is rather amusing. Apparently I have become worthy of being denounced by
Jamie Kirchick at Commentary for my sympathy for the Confederacy. Kirchick’s “discovery” that I have belonged to the League of the South for many years will come, I expect, as no surprise to anyone who has been reading this blog for very
Source: Peter H. Wood at Common-Place.org
1-1-08
[Peter H. Wood has written about colonial slavery, the demography in the early Southeast, the French explorations of LaSalle, the history of North Carolina, and the black images of American artist Winslow Homer. He has served on the boards of the Highlander Center, Harvard University, and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; his most recent book is Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer's Gulf Stream (2004).]
It was early December, the end of the fall s
Source: Franck Salameh at the website of Campus Watch (and Frontpagemag.com)
1-16-08
[Franck Salameh is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Coordinator of the Arabic Studies and Hebrew Program at Boston College. He writes occasionally for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.]
The Middle East Studies Association has finally met its match. In a move long overdue, the doyen of Middle East Studies—Bernard Lewis—and its laureate poet—Fouad Ajami—have just joined forces to launch the
Source: WaPo
1-18-08
Polish prosecutors are considering taking the unusual step of filing criminal charges against an Ivy League professor for allegedly "slandering the Polish nation" in a book that describes how Poles victimized Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in the aftermath of World War II.
Jan T. Gross, a Princeton University historian and native Polish Jew, has raised hackles here with the publication of "Fear," an account of Poland's chaotic postwar years in which Jews who b
Source: Center for hHistory and New Media (CHNM)
1-15-08
The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) and the American Historical Association (AHA) have agreed to institute a joint "Roy Rosenzweig Prize in History and New Media." The Rosenzweig Prize will be awarded annually for an innovative and freely available new media project that reflects thoughtful, critical, and rigorous engagement with technology and the practice of history.
Roy Rosenzweig died from cancer on 11 October 2007. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowsh
Source: SHIMSHON ARAD in the Jerusalem Post
1-15-08
In the recently published Journals: 1952-2000 of the late American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. one finds only a few references to Israel. There are perhaps no more than two or three occasions that the Holocaust is mentioned, and only scant discussion of the Middle East.
In perspective, that picture probably reflected the actual marginal role that those concerns, so close to us, were perceived by Schlesinger and his interlocutors. Yet they are still highly illuminating.
Source: AP
1-15-08
"God's Crucible _ Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215" (W. W. Norton, 475 pages, $29.95), by David Levering Lewis: Though it all happened 1,300 years ago well _ some of it less than 600 years ago _ Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Levering Lewis says a long military-religious campaign bore seeds of troubled 21st century history.
He picked the title of his book _ "God's Crucible" _ as a figure of speech for a solid piece of geography: Spain, Portugal an
Source: Eric Hobsbawm in the London Review of Books
1-24-08
I spent the most formative time of my life, the years 1931-33, as a Gymnasiast and would-be Communist militant, in the dying Weimar Republic. Last autumn I was asked to recall that time in an online German interview under the title ‘Ich bin ein Reiseführer in die Geschichte’ (‘I am a travel guide to history’). Some weeks later, at the annual dinner of the survivors of the school I went to when I came to Britain, the no longer extant St Marylebone Grammar School, I tried to explain the reactions
Source: Email from Stephanie Coontz to HNN
1-17-08
Family scholars from many disciplines --including historians, sociologists, psychogists, therapists, social workers, political scientists, and economists-- meet this spring for the 11th annual conference of the Council on Contemporary Families. The conference, held on April 25-26 at University of Illinois-Chicago, features what organizers have dubbed "Family Issues in Contention." Themes of sex, adoption, cohabitation, and divorce are at the center of the two-day dialogue. The program
Source: RAFAEL MEDOFF, in a letter to the editor of the Weekly Standard
1-14-07
ARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR.'s Journals may indeed reveal him to have been an egoist and name-dropper, as P. J. O'Rourke asserts in "Dear Diary, I Think I'm in Love" (December 31/January 7). But far worse was Schlesinger's willingness to sometimes omit from his history books facts that reflected poorly on his heroes. Consider how Schlesinger handled the question of Franklin D. Roosevelt's response to the Holocaust. In various articles and in his 2000 memoir Schlesinger claimed FDR "did
Source: Renehan Blog
1-14-08
As of January 2nd I have gone public with my diagnosis of bipolar/manic depressive disorder (type 2 bordering on type 1) - a diagnosis I received this past summer. This is an incurable and progressive - but nevertheless treatable - biochemical disorder from which I have evidently suffered for many years, perhaps since childhood. I had previously only written about this on a private section of my blog, but I have now opened up that section to public view, in the hope that by chronicling my proble
Source: Reuters
1-11-08
The author of a book accusing Poles of conducting a campaign against the Jews after the Holocaust could face charges of slandering the Polish nation, prosecutors said on Friday.
Jan Gross has already accused Poles of actively assisting the Nazis in persecuting Jews in World War Two. In his latest book, "Fear", he writes that anti-semitism remained prevalent in the years immediately after the Holocaust.
The book was released in Polish on Friday.
A spokes
