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: Winfield Myers at the website of CampusWatch
10-24-07
A group of professors, mostly from the humanities and with a large contingent from Middle East studies, have formed the Ad Hoc Committee to Defend the University. They claim that"outside groups" are"seeking to influence what is taught and who can teach."It's the subject of this story in today's issue of Inside Higher Ed.But the professors aren't conc
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria
10-20-07
The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition has just announced that Columbia University's Christopher Leslie Brown is the winner of this year's Frederick Douglass Prize for his book, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. The book has also won the AHA's James A. Rawley Prize.
Joshua Foer,"Remember This
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria
10-23-07
Five years ago, our colleague, Chris Bray, published his blistering review of Victor Davis Hanson's Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power,"Torturing History: A military historian abuses the past," Reason, April 2002. It's time, again, to buckle your seatbelts and pass the popcorn. LTC Bob Bateman's"Bateman on Hanson: An Altercation
Source: AHA Blog
10-21-07
Republican Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota filed an amendment (3364) last Thursday, October 18th, which would provide federal funding for National History Day, an important event we’ve recognized before on AHA Today. National History Day is an annual contest for students in grades 6-12 to create original papers, exhibits, documentaries, and dramatic performances around a changing theme. Coleman’s amendment, joined Friday by Democrat Daniel Akaka of Hawaii, sets aside $2 million for the progra
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
10-23-07
Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein recently announced the appointment of Terri Garner as the new director of the William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas. From 2005 to the present, Ms. Garner has served as Executive Director of the Bangor Museum and Center for History. Garner will assume her duties on November 5, 2007.
Ms. Garner is currently finishing her Ph.D. in history at the University of Maine, Orono. She holds a M.A. in history from the Uni
Source: NYT
10-22-07
... There may be something to be said for avoiding face-to-face encounters with shaggy leftists — the cigarette smoke, for starters, and the jargon, and the complacent moral superiority. But in largely repealing the law on ideological exclusion in 1990, Congress seemed to suggest that Americans could be trusted to make those decisions for themselves.
The spirit of the old law, the McCarran-Walter Act, was revived after the Sept. 11 attacks. The USA Patriot Act of 2001, for instance,
Source: http://media.www.dailytargum.com
10-23-07
An Ivy League education, a list of literary accomplishments and a professorship all contribute to Keith Wailoo's impressive resume. Recently, the National Academy of Sciences decided to add another achievement.
Wailoo, a professor of history at the University, has been elected to the Institute of Medicine.
"I think I know why my work is important," Wailoo said. "It is significant because I'm a historian who deals with and writes about contemporary issues.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
10-23-07
The Queen was left lost for words after a TV historian collecting his CBE told her that she would be the subject of his new programme.
David Starkey, who was being honoured for services to history, reported that the Queen "asked 'Are you doing any more programmes?'
"I said 'Yes Ma'am. On you.'"
He went on to say that the Queen, who is perhaps more used to having subjects than being one, looked a "a bit blank" at the news.
Source: International Herald Tribune
10-22-07
Last week, after this year's Frankfurt Book Fair closed up shop, a reporter called Rowohlt Verlag in Hamburg to find out if a book in its catalogue called "Ich Nicht" had found an English-language publisher.
The answer was no. The woman from the foreign rights department said it was a shame.
Agreed. Published in Germany 13 months ago, "Ich Nicht" is a memoir by the late Joachim Fest, author of the best-known German study of Hitler and a co-publisher
Source: Daily Mail
10-22-07
She seems harmless enough now, the elderly figure in a dressing gown peering round the door to her flat.
Erna Wallisch, an 85-year-old grandmother, rarely ventures out, spending her days drinking coffee and being cared for by her family.
But the image she presents belies a dark past which has put her seventh on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list of most-wanted Nazi war criminals still at large.
As a young woman during the Second World War, Mrs Wallisch insp
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
10-23-07
"No one in the U.S. media ever talks about Zionofascism, and the campus groups who yoke the word 'fascism' to other religions and peoples are most often trying to divert attention from their own authoritarianism and approval of brutality," writes Juan Cole.
Cole writes at the outset of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, a David Horowitz-led effort to challenge "what students are taught about the so-called War on Terror both in the classroom and on the quad."
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
10-26-07
On a cool, sun-flecked October morning, Stephen Greenblatt steps up to the podium in a classroom off Harvard Yard and launches into the day's lecture. With a few clicks on a notebook computer, the eminent Shakespearean scholar sets the image of a globe spinning on the screen behind him. It's earth, circa 1633, and across the face of it an imaginary English ship, the Revenge, sails from Ouidah, on the West African coast, to Barbados. In its hold is a cargo of African slaves, bound for the hellish
Source: http://defend.university.googlepages.com
10-22-07
Many concerned individuals, on campuses and beyond, have been monitoring and
condemning the recent attacks on academic freedom, including the ever more aggressive
incursion of partisan politics into universities' hiring and tenure practices.
Today a diverse group of academics and others are joining together to collectively mark
our resistance to the current abrogation of academic freedoms. To begin we are asking
people to sign up so that their name may be added to the petition on our
Source: Inside Higher Ed
10-23-07
Saying that they are fed up with “aggressive incursion of partisan politics into universities’ hiring and tenure practices,” five prominent academics have issued a call to “defend the university” and gathered dozens of backers in what they view as a new way to bolster academic freedom.
The Ad Hoc Committee to Defend the University has issued a statement and is asking professors and others to sign on.
“In recent
Source: Deborah Lipstadt at her blog
10-22-07
David Irving has told the Jewish Chronicle in London that he will NOT accept the Oxford Union invitation to appear in a debate alongside of the leader of the far right British National Party, Nick Griffin.
Even Irving, who seems to me to be someone who thrives on the maxim, "I don't care what they say about me as long as they spell my name right," apparently understands that keeping company with a man like Griffin was not a good career move.
Actually given tha
Source: Duke Press Release
10-22-07
Internationally renowned scholars John Hope Franklin and Romila Thapar will reflect on social change and the role of the historian in an Oct. 27 public conversation at Duke University.
“The Historian in the World: A Conversation with John Hope Franklin and Romila Thapar” will take place at 3 p.m. in the Divinity School’s Goodson Chapel on Duke’s West Campus. It is free and open to the public. Srinivas Aravamudan, director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, will moderat
Source: Boston Globe
10-21-07
Sarah Goldhagen taught architectural history and theory for 10 years at Harvard. She and her husband are now raising two kids in Newton. She writes at home. She's done a classic book on the great architect Louis Kahn, and she's working on another that will try to define, once and for all, the nature of modernism.
At the moment, though, she's obsessed with a less exciting kind of architecture.
Her interest is infrastructure.
Yes, the very word puts people to
Source: Abstract of article published by the New Yorker (article is not available online)
10-22-07
Writer tells about Barzun’s daily routine at his home in San Antonio, Texas, where he retired after spending more than seventy years in New York, most of them on the faculty of Columbia University. Next month, Barzun will turn one hundred. Among his areas of expertise are French and German literature, music, education, ghost stories, detective fiction, language, and etymology. Barzun chooses to think of himself as an “amateur,” someone who takes genuine pleasure in what he learns about. More tha
Source: JC.com
10-19-07
It was in an English courtroom eight years ago that David Irving’s reputation was comprehensively shredded. His attempt to sue American academic Professor Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier ended in spectacular failure with a damning verdict on his character and professional credibility from the judge.
Even then, Irving had come to court claiming that he was no denier but simply a dissident historian who quibbled over minutiae. But under forensic cross-examination f
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
10-22-07
“He gets very emotional. He gets very excited … a lot of spittle around the mouth and so on," says Ian Buruma of Paul Berman, kicking off the latest round of polemical bloodletting between the two liberal intellectuals.
The history of this spat is a bit tedious and more than a bit convoluted, but here it is in a nutshell: In February Buruma, a professor at Bard College, wrote a profile of the Swiss-born Egyptian scholar Tariq Ramadan for The New York Times Magazine. Buruma conc
