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: AP
12-9-07
Would you like your Civil War history seasoned with baseball trivia? Spritzed up with a winery tour? Do you long to dissect the Battle of Antietam with a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian?
Hire a guide.
As the 150th anniversary of the war between the states approaches, starting with John Brown's 1859 prewar raid at Harpers Ferry, W.Va., customized tours for people fascinated by the conflict are multiplying.
As little as $50 buys a two-hour, private guided to
Source: Boston Globe
12-12-07
Just a few years after becoming a classics professor, Zeph Stewart sent a letter to Harvard's student newspaper in 1957 praising a colleague who would soon retire. It was not a mash note crafted to curry favor with the lords of the academic manor.
"I need not dwell on his years of service in this community, but prefer to speak of the good fortune of the University in having in its janitorial staff a person who has contributed so much to the Harvard education of so many young me
Source: CNN
12-11-07
Hillary Clinton had a question when Tom Brokaw told her he was working on a book on the 1960s.
"Have you cracked the code yet?" she asked.
Such is the legacy of that exuberant, violent, messy decade, a time in which American social and political leaders were shot to death, youth did battle with adults literally and figuratively, and a war 6,000 miles away divided the country in ways that continue to resonate more than 40 years later....
Source: NY Observer
12-12-07
Last week, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller announced in a staff memo that the editor of the paper’s Book Review, Sam Tanenhaus, would also head up the Week in Review section.
Some reacted to the appointment of Mr. Tanenhaus at Week in Review—where he replaces Katherine Roberts, who’ll move to a senior editorial job at NYTimes.com—with concerns that the quality of the Book Review could decline as its top editor is pulled in two directions. The move comes at a time when ma
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria
12-10-07
[O]nly 15 months ago, Trillwing at The Clutter Museum complained that she couldn't find women blogging about history on the net. I thought then that she simply hadn't found them. Now, thanks to Jon Dresner, we have a new category, Women's History, on
Source: NYT
12-11-07
[Black is the author of a biography of FDR.]
In the months since his convictions in July on fraud and obstruction of justice charges, Conrad M. Black, the fallen press baron who once presided over the world’s third-largest newspaper empire, was not above poking fun at himself as he waited to see how long he would spend in prison.
He received his answer Monday as Judge Amy J. St. Eve of United States District Court sentenced Mr. Black to 6 1/2 years in prison on three f
Source: George Galt, Literary Review Of Canada in the National Post
12-11-07
Conrad Black has been sentenced to six-and-a-half years in a U.S. prison. In the wake of his sentence, the talk around the nation's water coolers understandably surrounds the man's life in business -- and the misdeed he committed to earn this jail time. Yet Canadians would do well to remember that the man headed to jail is also an accomplished author. His reputation as such preceded his rise to corporate power -- and it will likewise survive his fall.
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Armed with his
Source: LiveScience
12-11-07
The translation of the Bible into English marked the birth of religious fundamentalism in medieval times, as well as the persecution that often comes with radical adherence in any era, according to a new book.
The 16th-century English Reformation, the historic period during which the Scriptures first became widely available in a common tongue, is often hailed by scholars as a moment of liberation for the general public, as it no longer needed to rely solely on the clergy to interpre
Source: Buffalo News
12-11-07
Andrew J. Smitherman was a crusading newspaperman for the black community in Tulsa, Okla., before he was indicted on charges of inciting a deadly race riot in 1921, and moved to Buffalo.
Only now — 46 years after his death — is Smitherman getting some vindication.
During a ceremonial court hearing scheduled for today in Tulsa, the indictment filed against Smitherman 86 years ago will be dismissed, thanks to an enterprising historian at the University at Buffalo.
Source: WaPo
12-7-07
Silvio A. Bedini, 90, historian emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution and an expert on timekeeping and the history of early American scientific instruments, died of pneumonia Nov. 14 at Suburban Hospital. He lived in Washington.
Mr. Bedini was recruited to the Smithsonian in 1961 and became assistant, then deputy, director of what was then the National Museum of History and Technology.
He wrote more than 20 books, starting with "Early American Scientific Instrume
Source: Independent (UK)
12-10-07
Richard Milne Hogg, historian of the English language: born Edinburgh 20 May 1944; Lecturer in English Language, University of Amsterdam 1969-73; Lecturer in English Language, Lancaster University 1973-80; Smith Professor of English Language and Medieval Literature, Manchester University 1980-2007; General Editor, Cambridge History of the English Language 1992-2001; FBA 1994; married 1969 Margaret White (two sons); died Manchester 6 September 2007.
Richard Hogg, a world-renowned spe
Source: Newark Star-Ledger
12-9-07
The search for the next superintendent of Newark's schools will be led by Clement Price, a Rutgers-Newark history professor and prominent city resident, Gov. John Corzine announced yesterday.
Price will chair a 17-member committee charged with drafting a short list of candidates for the job of taking charge of the state's largest school district, a post that will be vacated by Superintendent Marion Bolden in June.
Source: AP
12-8-07
After 19 books and thousands of articles and other writings over 70-plus years, the question is how many undiscovered nuggets of insight researchers may yet find in the private papers of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
Quite a few, according to the curator of manuscripts at the New York Public Library, which recently acquired from Schlesinger's estate a trove of materials belonging to the noted historian, who died this year at age 89.
"Though Schlesinger drew on his jo
Source: http://www.news-bulletin.com
12-8-07
Rio Communities Richard Melzer has spent a lot of time during the last decade in cemeteries throughout New Mexico, but he's not a morbid man.
He's discovered a marker that goads from the grave: "I told you I was sick."
He's stood at the final resting places of author D.H. Lawrence, historian Fray Angelico Chavez and race car driver Jerry Unser Jr.
A little more than a week ago, Melzer's new book depicting famous gravesites in New Mexico hit the bo
Source: Shelley Gare in the Australian
12-8-07
At four, she wrote her first mystery story. By 23, the Chinese-American journalism student had landed a contract to write her first book, about a Chinese missile scientist deported by the US government during the paranoia of the Cold War 1950s.
Six years later, her second book, a truly harrowing account of a massacre that has been called the Chinese Holocaust, was published. The event had been virtually overlooked by the world at large for 60 years.
In The Rape of Nanki
Source: Bruce Cole, head of the NEH, at the NEH website
12-10-07
Journalist Andrew Ferguson is widely admired as a writer's writer. Over the years, in magazines from The Weekly Standard to Reader's Digest to Time and beyond, he has proven himself to be one of the few genuine stylists in American journalism and one of the wisest, funniest writers around. No less an authority on humor and good prose than Christopher Buckley said Ferguson “just may be the best writer of his generation.” Ferguson's recent book, Land of Lincoln, “a hilarious, offbeat tour of Linco
Source: Edward Rothstein in the NYT
12-10-07
Egypt, Herodotus tells us in “The Histories,” is a land with “more marvels and monuments that defy description than any other.” Not only is the Nile unlike any other river in the world, overflowing its banks in summer not in the early spring, but Egypt’s inhabitants also have “manners and customs” that in most ways are “completely opposite to those of other peoples.” Women go to the marketplace to sell goods, while men stay home to weave cloth; men carry loads on their heads, while women bear th
Source: Jewish Chronicle
12-7-07
HOLOCAUST-denier David Irving claims he is preparing to serve court papers on the American historian he unsuccessfully sued for libel in London’s High Court eight years ago.
This week, the JC learned that the discredited historian, who last year served part of a three-year sentence in an Austrian jail for breaching the country’s Holocaust-denial laws, emailed Deborah Lipstadt informing her he intended to institute unspecified court proceedings against her.
He told the J
Source: Benjamin M. Friedman in the NYT Book Review
12-9-07
[Benjamin M. Friedman is an economics professor at Harvard. His most recent book is “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth.”]
...After decades of banishment to the realm of sociology and other such disciplines, the idea that a society’s “culture” matters has recently reappeared in economics. David Landes, an economic historian and a living national treasure if there ever was one, began this movement nearly 10 years ago when he looked in part to culture to explain “why some are s
Source: Patrick Allitt in the NYT BOok Review
12-9-07
[Patrick Allitt teaches history at Emory University and is the author of “Religion in America Since 1945: A History.”]
Garry Wills, one of America’s best journalists and historians of the last half-century, has always enjoyed taking familiar subjects and staring at them long and hard until they look strange and new. In “Head and Heart” he invites readers to reconsider American religious history, challenging the conventional wisdom on many issues while synthesizing much of the finest
