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: San Francisco Chronicle
1-14-08
With the heated debate over undocumented workers poised to take center stage in the November election, a historian who researched the ethnic cleansing of Chinese Americans cautions against repeating the dark chapter of the American history.
"The idea of temporary workers has proven to be wrong by the history," said University of Delaware Professor Jean Pfaelzer, who will give several lectures in the Bay Area this week. "The Chinese were perceived as temporary people in this
Source: Liverpool Echo
1-12-08
A TALK by controversial historian and Hitler expert David Irving was scrapped after bosses at the Liverpool venue discovered who he was.
Today Jewish leaders said they were glad tonight’s talk by Irving, jailed last year in Austria after he was convicted of Holocaust denial, an offence in that country, had been cancelled.
Mr Irving, 69, was due to speak at the city centre’s Liner hotel as part of a series of UK talks entitled “Who dug the grave of the British Empire – H
Source: LAT
1-11-08
Dr. Earl Nation, a urologist and medical historian who was also the great-great-nephew of temperance crusader Carry Nation, has died. He was 97.
Nation died Jan. 1 at his home in Sierra Madre after a brief illness, said his son Robert.
Nation was widely known for his research on Sir William Osler, a doctor, scholar and author who wrote extensively about the medical profession before he died in 1919. In 1971, Nation helped found the American Osler Society, which promotes
Source: Palm Beach Post
1-11-08
At 94, Studs Terkel has earned the right to ramble, and his memoir "Touch and Go" -- the title refers both to a Dylan Thomas poem and to the medical reality of being 94 -- does indeed ramble, but in a peculiarly successful way.
It's a ravishingly nostalgic book, encompassing both the legendary and the forgotten, categories that interest Terkel equally.
Terkel opens his book with his hair being tousled by Natasha Rambova, the wife of Rudolph Valentino, a beauti
Source: http://www.missoulian.com
1-6-08
An American professor who teaches Islamic law and the Quran is at the center of a brewing tempest at the University of Montana, which is considering hiring him for an unexpected, unadvertised, unplanned-for job.
Several issues are at play, but they all spring from a single, thorny topic for universities called “spousal accommodation.”
The awkward phrase essentially means this: To get the best person for a job, a university will often help find suitable campus employment
Source: Washington Times
1-10-08
Photos of makeshift memorials. E-mails letting family members know the sender was safe. The New York Fire Department's daily action plan at Ground Zero. These images and items from September 11, 2001, and the aftermath of the terrorist attacks are bits of history that may have been relegated to the bottom of a shoe box, slipped into the pages of a scrapbook or discarded forever. However, with innovations in technology, historians are making large collections of recent history accessible and avai
Source: New York Observer
1-14-08
Nonfiction: Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism, Farrar, Straus; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, Oxford University Press; Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, Doubleday; Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA, Doubleday; Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s.
Biography: Tim Jeal, Stanley
Source: HNN Staff (Click here for the brief)
1-15-08
Can Washington DC legally stop residents from owning a handgun?
That's the question before the US Supreme Court in District of Columbia, et al v. Dick Anthony Heller, which has put the question of the Second Amendment before the court for the first time in more than half a century.
In an amicus brief filed with the Court 15 historians argue that the DC law is consistent with the Amendment's history.
They argue that the Founding Fathers intended to protec
Source: Zachary Krogman
1-10-08
[Mr. Krogman is an HNN intern.]
An illustrious group of American historians have filed an amicus curiae brief at the US Supreme Court in support of an employee who is suing Cracker Barrel under Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Signers of the brief include: David Levering Lewis, Stanley N. Katz, Leon Litwack, James McPherson, and Mary Frances Berry. The case, Hendrick G. Humphries v CBOCS West, Inc. , will be heard by the Supreme Court on February 20, 2008.He
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
1-14-08
The historian Clayborne Carson is author of In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Harvard University Press, 1981), the definitive study of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He directs the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, housed at Stanford University, which produces The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.
***
[Q] When Coretta Scott King asked you to preside over the King Papers Project in 1985, did it give you pause
Source: NYT
1-15-08
Caroline K. Keck, a pioneer of art conservation, died on Dec. 17 at her home in Cooperstown, N.Y. She was 99.
Her death was announced by her son Lawrence Waugh Keck.
Mrs. Keck and her husband, Sheldon Keck, were two of the most influential conservators of the modern era. They were instrumental in converting the centuries-old craft of art restoration into a profession based on scientific research, the use of modern technology and adherence to shared methodological standa
Source: Press Release--Stephen Ambrose Tours
1-10-08
In response to
growing requests, Stephen Ambrose Historical Tours
(SAHT) added a World War II in Poland and Germany tour
to its 2008 guided tours. Veteran and historian
General David Zabecki, who was commander of U.S.
forces in Europe, and has a Ph.D. in Military History
from the Royal Military College of Science, Cranfield
University in the United Kingdom, will lead the 14-day
tour to visit historic World War II sites in Gdansk,
Krakow, Warsaw and Berlin from May 16-30, 2008.
Unique
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
1-14-08
Few terms in the American political lexicon have been as simultaneously ubiquitous and misunderstood as "neoconservative." Is it another word for a hawk on foreign policy? Does it refer to a conspiracy of cryptofascists in thrall to the esoteric teachings of the political philosopher Leo Strauss? A Jewish cabal primarily concerned for the survival of Israel? The ideology behind the war in Iraq?
Self-described neoconservatives themselves would differ in response to those qu
Source: Michael Bowen at the website of Inside Higher Ed
1-14-08
[Michael Bowen is assistant director of the Bob Graham Center for Public Service and a visiting lecturer in the history department at the University of Florida.]
As has become the annual tradition, the American Historical Association is out with its report lauding the health of the academic job market in history. The report, culled exclusively from job listings in Perspectives (an AHA publication) and Ph.D. completion statistics reported by history departments, shows that there are
Source: Email from James Loewen
1-14-08
As many of you know, I have been working since 1999 to learn about, write about, and cause social change in sundown towns. Sundown towns are communities that for decades were — and some still are — all white on purpose.
My book, Sundown Towns, debuted in the fall of 2005 and is now available in paperback (Simon & Schuster) and recorded form (Recorded Books). As Sundown Towns shows, a community can be a sundown town even though it has a few African Americans. These people mig
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria
1-8-08
At the 5th Annual Banquet of the Cliopatricians at the American Historical Association convention in Washington, DC, the winners of The Cliopatria Awards for 2007 were announced. Many thanks to Jeremy Boggs of ClioWeb and George Mason University who designed the logo for The Cliopatria Awards. Thanks also to the judges who made the difficult decisions in selectin
Source: Paul Kennedy in the Atlantic in the course of a review of a book by Robert Irving: Indian Summer: Lutyens, Baker, and Imperial Delhi
1-1-08
y first glimpse of the British Empire was an entirely favorable one. At some time during my seven years of purgatory at St. Cuthbert’s Grammar School, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, our history teacher gave us Arthur Grimble’s A Pattern of Islands. Here was a fond reminiscence of a young man who, immediately after his Cambridge education, had been dispatched as an administrative officer to some of Britain’s territories in the Southwest Pacific. His account included no Gandhian protesters, no disgruntled A
Source: Thai Jones in the NYT
1-6-08
[Thai Jones is author of “A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family’s Century of Conscience.” He is pursuing a Ph.D. in U.S. History at Columbia.]
ON a bitter night in November, I watched two protests face off on Columbia University’s central quad. At the sundial, about 100 supporters of a five-student hunger strike, then in its ninth day, gathered close, screening their votives from the cold wind. They were demanding more money for ethnic studie
Source: Editorial written by Ed Black et al. at the website of The Cutting Edge
12-31-07
[Mr. Black is the author of the award-winning IBM and the Holocaust and the recently published Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives.]
As we close 2007 and embark on a new year of possibilities, one of Washington’s most overlooked areas of disappointment has been the leadership at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The complaints include: the shameful mishandling of the transfer of the Holocaust-era archive a
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
1-11-08
In 1993 the Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington wrote an article in Foreign Affairs titled "The Clash of Civilizations?" In that article -- and subsequent book -- Huntington argued that the world was entering a new phase in which cultural differences would become the primary catalysts for conflict. That article provoked fierce debate on a scale perhaps not rivaled until John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt decided to take on the Israel lobby.
As Fouad Ajami notes
