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: Robert Townsend in Perspectives, the magazine of the AHA
11-1-07
The number of new history bachelor's degrees reached the highest level in 30 years in 2004–05, as the nation's colleges and universities conferred 31,398 degrees. This marked an increase of 5.3 percent over the previous year.
History easily surpassed the average growth among all disciplines, where the number of new undergraduate degrees increased by just 2.8 percent. In relative terms, history degrees now account for 2.18 percent of the baccalaureate degrees conferred (Figure 1). Th
Source: AP
11-15-07
A history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point pleaded guilty to a single count of possession of child pornography Wednesday and had a second charge dismissed.
Michael Foret, 53, was arrested April 17 for uploading sexually explicit photographs of young children onto an image sharing Web site.
Foret, a specialist in the history of southeastern American Indians, told detectives he liked boys and girls of ages 11 to 17 but said he had not "acted on
Source: NYT
11-15-07
In the nonfiction category, Tim Weiner, a reporter at The New York Times, took the [National Book Award] prize for “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the C.I.A.” (Doubleday).
Mr. Weiner, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on national security programs, examined more than 50,000 documents and interviewed hundreds of C.I.A. veterans for his book, a critical history of C.I.A. failures.
Accepting the award, Mr. Weiner said his work was “a testament to the power of the
Source: Network of Concerned Historians (NCH)
11-14-07
Dear Colleagues,
Scholars at Risk (SAR), based at New York University, works to promote academic freedom and to defend the human rights of scholars, in part by arranging temporary placements for scholars who suffer grave threats to their work or their person. SAR is sending us a summary profile of an Iraqi historian working in the field of Modern History/Turkish and Ottoman History whose life may be in danger and who is currently seeking assistance. Perhaps your university could acc
Source: http://www.heraldtribune.com
11-11-07
Before the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Dr. Walid Phares had spent two decades studying the politics and ideologies of the Middle East and feeling like "a voice in the wilderness" with his urgent warnings about the dangers posed to Western societies by the ideology of jihad.
"I was certainly more frustrated and depressed before" Sept. 11, 2001, he said. "That ended because of the drama of 9/11. So from 9/11 on, my frustration has chan
Source: Press Release--National Endowment for the Humanities
11-15-07
Today, President George W. Bush awarded the prestigious National Humanities Medals for 2007 to Victor Davis Hanson, military historian and author, and Richard Pipes, author and historian, during a ceremony held in the White House East Room. In total, nine distinguished Americans and one cultural foundation were honored for their exemplary contributions to the humanities and were recognized for their scholarship, preservation efforts, philanthropy, and literary works. Other winners include Steph
Source: Cinnamon Stillwell at CampusWatch
11-16-07
In the latest issue of City on a Hill Press, the student newspaper for the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), reporter Marc Abizeid spins a bone-chilling tale of silenced professors and a Middle East studies field threatened by a shadowy network of"radical pro-Israel interest groups." At the helm of this nefarious conspiracy is of course Campus Watch, which Abizeid paints as a
Source: Winfield Myers at the website of CampusWatch
11-16-07
In a surprising act of corporate courage, the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) has dismissed an attempt by Philadelphia-based Campus Watch to place an ad in the program for MESA's upcoming annual conference in Montreal.
The text of the rejected ad read:
Campus Watch: Working to Improve Middle East Studies since 2002.The bad news arrived in the form of a terse email from Amy W. Newhall, Ph.D., the executive director of MESA. She wrote from her
Source: NYT
11-15-07
Gerald D. Feldman, an eminent historian of 20th-century German history who concentrated on the intersection of economics and politics to explore subjects like the hyperinflation of the 1920s and the cozy relationships between financial companies and the Nazis, died on Oct. 31 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 70.
The cause was cancer, said Beverly Crawford, associate director of the Institute of European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where Dr. Feldman taugh
Source: AP
11-12-07
David McCullough, whose next book will be a history of Americans in Paris, remembers when he first laid eyes on the French capital. He was a freshman at Yale University — young, in love, "impressionable."
And at the movies.
"I went to see 'An American in Paris,'" McCullough, speaking by telephone Monday with The Associated Press, said of the 1951 classic that won six Academy Awards. "I aspired at that point to be an artist, and there was Gene Ke
Source: Inside Higher Ed
11-14-07
A month after the release of a study hailed by many as a definitive examination of faculty members’ political views, a slew of new research on the topic — some of it updated versions of previous research — will be released today finding (not surprisingly) that professors lean to the left.
Today’s research will be released as part of a day-long conference, “Reforming the Politically Correct University,” being held at the American Enterprise Institute. Two of the papers were released
Source: Times (UK)
11-13-07
Starting out just after the war Frank Cass acquired a reputation as one of Britain's leading scholarly publishers. Even after he sold the bulk of his interests to Taylor and Francis, he started to build anew. “Why should I retire,” he would ask, “when I love what I am doing?” and he was still working right up to his death.
Born in 1930 into a Russian-Polish family, Cass spent his formative years in London where he developed an early love of public libraries. He went to Hackney Downs
Source: HNN Staff
11-13-07
In an article in the spring edition of the Minnesota Review, John H. Summers exposes a series of misrepresentations of
Irving Louis Horowitz, an academic who claimed to be C. Wright Mills's acolyte.
Summers is the of editor of"The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills," to be published in 2008 by Oxford University Press. He lives in Andover, Massachusetts.
Exce
Source: Guardian
11-10-07
Mary Beard vividly remembers a day in her first year at Newnham College, Cambridge, when one of her friends saw a marked essay lying on her desk. He picked it up and read the tutor's comment: "This is very good; I think it would get a first." "You," he spluttered, "get a first?" "Even in the mid-70s," Beard recalls, there were "lots of men who thought that women were destined only to get 2:1s." Besides, she was studying classics, a typically male
Source: Deborah Solomon in the NYT Magazine in her regular weekly feature interview
11-11-07
As a professor of American history at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the chairwoman of the school’s Center of the American West, what do you make of the flurry of new films that revisit Jesse James and the town of Yuma and the empty space of the desert landscape?
Just as we had an upsurge in difficult westerns when we were struggling with Vietnam, now we’re struggling with Iraq, and so we are having the same upsurge.Right. Westernsare useful in wartime be
Source: Tulsa World
11-13-07
Britain's former prime minister was very accomplished but also very human, he tells Tulsans.
It's a odd experience to meet an iconic figure such as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
"It's kind of a shock," explained Chris Collins, Monday's speaker at the Tulsa Press Club, "to see a famous person in the room, real live, actually and really there."
A British historian who edited Thatcher's memoirs, Collins has made i
Source: http://newsinfo.colostate.edu
11-12-07
In celebration of Native American Awareness month, Colorado State University's Department of History and Native American Student Services is hosting renowned scholar and cultural historian, Philip Deloria, as he presents "Crossing the (Indian) Color Line: A Family History." Deloria's presentation is at 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 15, in Room 104 in Yates Hall on the Colorado State campus. The presentation is free and open to the public.
In June 1931, Deloria's grandmother - whi
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
11-11-07
Algis Ratnikas lives in one of the little boxes on a hilltop in Daly City. But he's not like the others in his row. Every day Ratnikas, 60, sits at the computers that have taken over his dining room, entering data into the Timelines of History.
"Timelines of History starts from the Big Bang and continues to the present. It's all on the Web site www.timelines.ws. I get about 8,000 hits per week. There are tens of thousands of entries. The un
Source: Globe & Mail
11-10-07
In 1938, the first volume of A. F. Duguid's planned 11-volume history of the Canadian forces in the First World War dropped like an artillery shell on the desks of Canada's book reviewers. They were appropriately impressed by the detail and the accompanying volume of appendices (which answered such burning questions as "what was the daily beet ration for animals of Lord Strathcona's Horse in December, 1914?"), and one even suggested that Duguid covered the subject so exhaustively that
Source: http://www.pantagraph.com
11-9-07
Racism is alive in the United States, and fighting it is as hard as battling terrorism, said a scholar who spoke Thursday on slavery, its role in Illinois and its aftermath.
“The latest challenge we face as a nation … is the return of overt bigotry and racial hatred,” said Edna Greene Medford, an associate professor at Howard University. “But as a nation we have comforted ourselves by dismissing it as an individual indiscretion, not a national fault.”
The noted historia
