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: Dan W. Butin at the Britannica Blog
10-13-07
A column by Hugo Schwyzer in Inside Higher Ed this week bemoans “educrats” who demand that he do a better job of making sure that his students are actually learning what he is teaching. But no, Schwyzer will have none of it. Instead he’s going to fight the good fight and resist making real accommodations:
But I’m still going to teach — primarily through lecture in an ancient, top-down, one-sided way. I’m going to pour out my enthusiasm and my passion, laboring in a field filled with
Source: Jim Sleeper at tpmcafe (blog)
10-10-07
A former editor at the New York Times Book Review who read my remonstrance here about its war-hawkish bent referred me to something I'd missed: In July, Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus took to the literary section of The New Republic to pen his second elegy to American conservatism in those pages. His meditation on the allure and dangers for writers of
Source: http://www.dailycardinal.com
10-12-07
A UW-Madison historian, who spoke Wednesday night about his recent book “Henry Kissinger and the American Century” at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum, was named a young innovator in a special edition of Smithsonian magazine earlier this month.
Smithsonian magazine recognized Jeremi Suri as one of the top “37 Under 36” young American innovators in its October edition, along with other artists, scientists, scholars and humanitarians.
“We wanted to identify individuals who w
Source: Cinnamon Stillwell at CampusWatch
10-12-07
UC Berkeley Near Eastern studies lecturer and adjunct professor at Boalt Hall School of Law Hatem Bazian is back in the headlines. Campus Watch readers will no doubt recall Bazian's infamous call for an"intifada in this country" at a 2004 anti-war protest in San Francisco, not to mention the numerous e
Source: Daniel Pipes Blog (Click here to see the sidebar)
10-12-07
The editor of Newsweek has added a remarkable erratum to the sidebar to a nasty article by Michael Hirsh about the Giuliani campaign, "Would You Buy a Used Hawk From This Man?...
The subsequent correction warrants a place in Guinness World Records.
Editor's Note: In our print edition, several captions for the photographs accompanying this report were inadvertantly transposed. Martin Kramer's photograph is identified as Norman Podhoretz; Daniel Pipes's photograph is
Source: http://barzuncentennial (Click here to follow links to these articles.)
10-1-07
James Sloan Allen: Jacques Barzun and a Question of Friendship
Christian Bauer: Barzun on Woolrich
Warren Boroson: From Information to Aspiration
Fred Catapano: Jacques Barzun, Customer
Christopher Faille: Jacques Barzun: Words and Acts
Florence (Flo) Grant: My Favorite Memory of Mr. B
Allen J. Hubin: The Armchair Detective
Paul Kellogg: Overheard at Glimmerglass: Jacques Barzun by Percentages
Source: Spiegel
10-11-07
SPIEGEL ONLINE talks to historian and Oxford professor Timothy Garton Ash about the European Union's weak image in the world, the limits to EU expansion and how Europe should tackle Russia and Iran.
Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies at St. Antony's College, Oxford, a senior fellow at the Stanford University-based think tank the Hoover Institution and a founding member of the European Council on Foreign Relations (more...), a new European think tank. He has earned r
Source: CampusWatch
10-12-07
In 1989, former Conservative Party chairman and retired British officer, Lord Aldington, won a libel suit against Count Nikolai Tolstoy for allegations of complicity in war crimes which Tolstoy had made in his 1986 book, The Minister and the Massacres. Following up on his U.K. court victory, Aldington had his lawyers write to "… public libraries throughout Britain threatening further legal action if they continued to make [the book] available …. Even today, the book is virtually unavailable
Source: Laurel T. Ulrich in the Harvard Crimson
10-12-07
[Laurel T. Ulrich, author of ‘Well-behaved Women Seldom Make History,’ is the 300th Anniversary University Professor.]
In the fall of 2001, shortly after she arrived at Harvard as Dean of the newly created Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Drew Gilpin Faust gave a speech to the entering class. She told the story of a young woman named Sarah Pellet who in 1850 had the audacity to ask for admission to Harvard University. In his rejection letter, President Jared Sparks, Class of
Source: Prensa Latina
10-11-07
The world needs to defend the legacy of indigenous peoples, since they were the creators of original civilizations, declared Mexican historian Miguel de Leon Portilla.
Speaking at the eighth meeting of the Association of Latin American and Caribbean Historians on Thursday, De Leon Portilla is considered the most important living historian of the Central American pre-Hispanic peoples and one of the greatest supporters of the Latin American indigenous peoples history.
ADH
Source: Inside Higher Ed
10-12-07
When Andrew Ross was doing research for his latest book, Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade; Lessons from Shanghai, he found himself spending a lot of time at the American Chamber of Commerce in China. The people he met there, he said Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association, generally assumed that he was some kind of investor, looking for a good move for his money.
That Ross — a New York University professor and leader
Source: Rick Shenkman, reporting for HNN
10-12-07
Proposed changes in the constitution of the American Historical Association would limit the ability of activists to push through resolutions at the annual Business Meeting. Under the rule resolutions proposed by members would have to receive the backing of a petition signed by one percent of the membership to be considered. (The AHA currently has more than 14,000 members. One percent would be 140, minimum.) Currently, resolutions can be considered by a vote of the majority in attendance at
Source: Boston Herald
10-21-07
History is being made at Harvard as the Ivy League university officially installs its first female president. Drew Gilpin Faust has actually been on the job for several months after being elected earlier this year by the Harvard Corporation, the school’s governing body.Faust will be formally inaugurated as Harvard’s 28th president Friday during an outdoor ceremony at the Tercentenary Theatre. Scholars and academic leaders from around the world are expected to attend.
Source: Deborah Lipstadt & Michael J. Broyde in an op ed in the NYT
10-11-07
[Michael J. Broyde is a professor of law and Deborah E. Lipstadt a professor of Jewish studies at Emory University. Ms. Lipstadt was sued by David Irving for libel after writing that he was a Holocaust denier. She won after a long fight in British courts.]
THANKS to the Internet, universal access to the printed word and economic globalization, the 21st century is expected to be shaped by the free exchange of ideas. But casting a shadow over this optimistic prediction is the emerging
Source: HNN Staff summary of NYT article
10-11-07
John Swails, a tenured faculty member of Oral Roberts University and chairman of the history department claims in a lawsuit filed earlier this month that he and two others were dismissed after confronting officials of financial and other irregularities.
Joining Swails in the law suit are Paulita Brooker, another historian, and her husband, Tim, a professor in the government department, who accused the school of requiring students to work in a Republican candidate's campaign for may
Source: Press Release--Western Michigan University
10-10-07
A symposium and dinner in late October will honor longtime Western Michigan University historian Dr. Ernst Breisach, professor emeritus of history and distinguished faculty scholar.
Breisach also will be a guest speaker at the Saturday, Oct. 27, event, along with Dr. David E. Barclay, the Margaret and Roger Scholten Professor of International Studies in the Kalamazoo College Department of History. The "Exploring History/Writing History" symposium begins at 1 p.m. in The Li
Source: Adam Tooze, in the course of a review of The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany And The Jews 1939-1945 by Saul Friedlander, in the Telegraph (UK)
10-11-07
... The Germans are not absent from this history of the Holocaust. But by contrast with Friedländer's nuanced portrait of the victims, only his characterisation of Hitler carries any real weight. Friedländer portrays Hitler as what he calls a 'redemptive anti-Semite', who believed that only by the elimination of their racial enemies, above all the Jews, could the German people be saved from their own destruction.
For Friedländer, Hitler's anti-Semitism is an omnipresent motivating f
Source: Stephen Holmes in the Nation
10-29-07
[Stephen Holmes teaches at New York University School of Law. His latest book is The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror.]
Is there anything historically unprecedented about the Bush Administration's military adventurism, intense secrecy and fearmongering? This question is vexing, especially to those historians and political scientists who, however appalled by current US foreign policy, cannot be genuinely surprised by the most recent incarnation of an imperial presiden
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria
10-11-07
There are strange developments at the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Its Board of Directors has approved the sale of its building at 122 E. 58th Street in Manhattan. The sale would also force its tenants -- the Holland Society of America, the Huguenot Society of America, the Society of Mayflower Descen
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria
10-11-07
The National Book Award nominations are out this morning. The nonfiction list:
Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm DyingChristopher Hitchens, God is not Great: How Religion Poisons EverythingWoody Holton, Unruly A
