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: Press Release: Duke
12-4-07
Lerner, 78, died Dec. 3. He taught at Duke for 45 and was a leading history of Russia and Eastern Europe, ethnic relations in the region and on the history of socialism and communism.
The Department of History issued the following statements Tuesday:
“Warren Lerner was a distinguished scholar, a superb teacher, and a dedicated leader of the Duke history department, which he served as chair from 1985-1990. Lerner’s scholarship on the communist revolution was widely reco
Source: Cuba News
12-21-07
The Havana City Historian Office received the Reina Sofia International Award in the category of Cultural Heritage Preservation and Restoration. Her Majesty Queen Sofia of Spain presented city historian Eusebio Leal Spengler with the prize in Madrid on December 19th.
The prize, granted annually for the rehabilitation and restoration of historic centers, was a unanimous decision of the jury which, Leal said, was motivated by the social undertaking in the revitalization of the Cuban
Source: Deborah Lipstadt at her blog
12-21-07
The N.Y. Appeals Court has ruled in the Ehrenfeld case. There are many disturbing aspects to this case, as my colleague Michael Broyde and I wrote in our New York Times oped.[Some background: In her book
Source: http://www.thejc.com
12-12-07
Spanish police were this week examining a recording of a speech by revisionist historian David Irving, condemned by a British High Court judge as a Holocaust denier, after the Jewish community failed to have him banned from speaking in Barcelona.
Under Spanish law, justifying genocide or inciting racism and xenophobia can carry a sentence of up to three years. Police were authorised by a judge to examine Irving’s words to see if he had broken the law in his speech at a bookshop last
Source: Inside Higher Ed
12-21-07
The case of Tariq Ramadan has become central to efforts by academic and civil liberties groups to challenge the denial of U.S. visas to foreign scholars. And on Thursday, a federal judge handed those groups a defeat by upholding the right of the government to deny a visa to Ramadan, a prominent Muslim scholar who has been unable to enter the United States to accept a position at the University of Notre Dame.
In a 32-page decision, Judge Paul A. Crotty notes that numerous court rulin
Source: http://www.newsroom.ucr.edu
12-20-07
Just in time for the season of presidential politics, UC Riverside Professor of History Catherine Allgor is featured during a major PBS documentary on the life and legacy of the nation’s seventh president, Andrew Jackson.
“Andrew Jackson: Good, Evil and the Presidency” will first air Wednesday, Jan. 2 on PBS at 9 p.m. (Check local listings for other air dates.) The program, narrated by Emmy Award-winning actor Martin Sheen, brings to life one of the most divisive presidents in our
Source: http://www.dw-world.de/
12-19-07
Christopher Clark's "The Iron Kingdom" is a 750+ page opus about a state that no longer exists. But, that didn't stop the German translation from cracking the 2007 bestseller lists. He talked about Prussia's appeal.
DW-WORLD.DE: Are you surprised that an academic book on Prussia could make the German bestseller lists?
Christopher Clark: I certainly didn't expect success on that level. I think it's a case of timing. The fall of the Berlin Wall and German re-uni
Source: http://www.southeasttexaslive.com
12-18-07
Southeast Texas' most faithful chronicler has entered the history he long made a passion of recording.
W.T. Block, dubbed by a colleague "the dean of Southeast Texas history," died Saturday. He was 87.
Block dedicated his life to researching and recording the region's history, said Robert Schaadt, director/archivist of the Sam Houston Regional Library and Research Center in Liberty.
"Mr. Block, he wrote more Southeast Texas history than anybo
Source: Andrew G. Bostom at FrontpageMag.com
12-19-07
[Andrew G. Bostom, MD, MS is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Brown University Medical School, and regular contributor to Frontpage Magazine. He is the author of "The Legacy of Jihad."]
Speaking at a December 10-11, 2007 Rome Conference entitled, “Fighting for Democracy in the Islamic World,” renowned historian Bernard Lewis intoned,
The authoritarianism present in the Middle East region is not part of the Arab and Muslim tradition, but it has been import
Source: Network of Concerned Historians (NCH)
12-19-07
Dear Colleagues,
Amnesty International is campaigning for two human rights activists in Haiti: Wilson Mesilien, who received death threats in late November, and Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, who was kidnapped last August. Both are coordinators of the 30 September Foundation and probably targeted because they pressed for an end to impunity for past abuses and reparation for victims of the 1991-94 military regime and for the victims of the transitional government of 2004-6. I hope that you
Source: H-Diplo
12-15-07
John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2007. Hardcover, $25.00. ISBN: 978-0-374-17772-0.
Published by H-Diplo on 15 December 2007
Complete Roundtable in one file, PDF format [PDF]
Best choice for reading/viewing/printing the entire roundtable. Viewable on a wide variety of operating systems, including many portable devices, with the free Adobe Reader software or Foxit Reade
Source: Eric Alterman at his blog: Altercation
12-18-07
I see the Ralph Nader documentary is being broadcast on PBS tonight. To be honest, I've never actually seen the thing. When it was screened at Sundance two years ago, it was about four hours long and when I got there, I did not think I could stand it, so I went back to my hotel room for two hours and came in for only the presidential races part. I used to admire what Ralph Nader had done for the country during his career as a consumer advocate, but I no longer do. One of the great mistakes liber
Source: Press Release--U. of Wisconsin
12-18-07
Teachers seeking to rejuvenate their history curriculum and reinvigorate student learning within a research-based, standards-linked critical-thinking framework will want to register for the seventh annual Wisconsin Treasures workshop, "Thinking Like a Historian," at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Workshop attendees will be introduced to this methodology and the new accompanying publication, "Thinking Like a Historian: Rethinking History Instruction." In add
Source: Sophie Morris in the Independent
12-18-07
David Starkey, 62, is a historian and television presenter. After a career at Cambridge and the London School of Economics he reinvented himself as a controversial media academic with his television series Elizabeth and, most recently, Monarchy. He grew up in Cumbria and lives with his partner of 14 years, the publisher James Brown, in London and Kent. He was awarded the CBE earlier this year.
What inspired you to embark on a career in the media?
A former student of min
Source: Science Daily
12-16-07
By analyzing some lesser known photographs, taken by world famous documentary photographers, art historian Cecelia Strandroth relates a new history of the Depression Era in the United States. She will publicly defend her dissertation at Uppsala University on December 14.
Can documentary photographs be regarded as credible depictions of events in the world or are they rather staged representations of a special perspective? Do documentary photos take part in the struggle against injus
Source: Dana Parsons in the LAT
12-15-07
Some will see the dispute between the Farnan family of Mission Viejo and high school history teacher James Corbett in stark terms. The forces of light against the forces of darkness.
The problem is, not everyone agrees which side is which....
What makes the Farnan lawsuit intriguing, however, is that the guts of it come from Chad's tape-recording of one of Corbett's Advanced Placement European history classes at Capo Valley High School in October.
I can't v
Source: NYT
12-17-07
Many people know that Conrad M. Black, the media baron who was sentenced last week to six and a half years in prison, is also a serious author, with weighty biographies of Richard M. Nixon and Franklin D. Roosevelt under his belt.
But since his conviction in July on charges of fraud and obstruction of justice, Mr. Black has had to confine his movements to Chicago, the site of his trial, and Palm Beach, where he has a home. Given that his Nixon book, subtitled “A Man in Full,” was pu
Source: American Prospect
12-18-07
Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of several distinguished works on the great progressive presidents, including Team of Rivals, on Lincoln and his Cabinet; No Ordinary Time, on Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and World War II; Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream; and The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. Prospect co-editor Robert Kuttner talked with Goodwin about presidential leadership. They spoke at her home in Concord, Massachusetts, near the spot where the Amer
Source: Michael Kazin in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
12-18-07
A few weeks from now, a good university press will publish the first biography of Alfred Kazin. This should make me, his only son, happier than it does. Not that I have any complaint with the book itself. The author — Richard M. Cook, an English professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis — appraises my father's work with sympathy and insight. Inevitably, he describes the tumultuous relationships my father had with his four wives, several lovers, a few of his students, and many of his f
Source: Christopher Benfey in the New Republic
12-10-07
Edmund Wilson, a man of idiosyncratic temperament and unpredictable taste, has solidified in retrospect into a marmoreal figure, a sort of jowly Supreme Court justice of the literary imagination, issuing measured opinions from the chambers, successively, of The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. In achieving something like the "consecrated authoritative role" that he ascribed to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the culminating chapter of Patriotic Gore, his
