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: Brian Anderson in his book, Democratic Capitalism and Its Discontents, excerpted in the NYT
10-7-07
... We begin with the late French historian François Furet, who provides striking insights into the political tensions of democratic capitalism. At the time of his death in 1997, Furet was France's foremost historian and the world's preeminent authority on the French Revolution. Though once a Marxist himself, Furet broke with the Marxist view of the French Revolution-long dominant in French historiography-which saw it as an economically determined bourgeois warm-up for the Russian Revolution of
Source: Maureen Dowd in the NYT Book Review (cover story)
10-7-07
It’s hard not to like a book that expounds on Marilyn Monroe on one page and the Monroe Doctrine on the next. When Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. ruminates on the realm of hemispheric affairs, the transition from one Monroe to the other is seamless, as is the slide from Bosnia to Bianca Jagger and from Alexander Hamilton to Angie Dickinson. His diaries are a Tiffany’s window of name-dropping. This is not history so much as historical trail mix.
The old-school, bow-tied liberal and Kenned
Source: Christopher Benfy in the NYT Book Review
10-7-07
Many years after the traumatic events that cut his long life in two — and which left, as he put it, his “country destroyed, family routed, no home left to go to” — the 17th-century Chinese historian and essayist Zhang Dai had a dream. As Jonathan D. Spence writes in his beautiful new book, dreams of the “accidental discovery of a previously secret and hidden world” had long “lain at the very center of Chinese sensibility.” But Zhang’s imaginary wonderland was not a realm of peace and eternal pea
Source: NYT
10-7-07
THE latest inclusion in the Library of America, that clothbound hall of literary fame, is two big volumes of Edmund Wilson’s critical writings. It’s about time, considering that the Library of America was Wilson’s idea in the first place. He modeled it after the French Pléiade series, insisting back in the 1960s that the texts be readable and accessible, without a forest of footnotes, and it was he who chose the volumes’ pleasingly compact format. Wilson also thought that the library ought to be
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria
10-4-07
Variety reports today that HBO has acquired the rights to Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case by Stuart Taylor, Jr., and our colleague, KC Johnson. Alixandre Witten and Josh Maurer, who produced"The Pentagon Papers" and"Introducing Dorothy Dandridge" for HBO, will be the executive producers of its film on the Duke lacro
Source: Manan Ahmed at HNN blog, Cliopatria
10-5-07
Historians (and historians in training) need to go, immediately, and read the parts one and two (out of three) of Errol Morris' series on the"historical truth" behind two photographs taken by Roger Fenton during the Crimean War : Which Came First? the Chicken or the Egg? (Part One), Which Came First? (Part Two)
Source: Baltimore Sun
9-19-07
[Ms. Spiegel is chair of the history department at Johns Hopkins.]
... A specialist in the history of medieval France, [Gabrielle ] Spiegel received her undergraduate degree in 1964 from Bryn Mawr College and her Hopkins doctorate a decade later. Her appreciation of American history comes in part, she says, from her own experience, having been born into a Belgian family who were refugees from World War II in Europe.
"Although I was born in the United States, I firs
Source: Jonathan Alter in Newsweek
10-8-07
In recent years, keeping political diaries has fallen out of fashion. I blame this on a young Clinton-era Treasury aide named Josh Steiner, whose private journal was subpoenaed in a long-forgotten scandal. Anyone interested in history will suffer for the decline of this art form (and no, blogging is not a substitute). To see what we may be missing in the future, consider the astonishing case of the late Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Shortly before he died earlier this year, he instructed two of his
Source: http://www.iberkshires.com
10-3-07
In his book "Japanese Military Strategy in the Pacific War: Was Defeat Inevitable?" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) historian James Wood challenges the conventional wisdom that Japan's defeat in the Pacific was historically inevitable.
Although the economics of the war in the Pacific were squarely in America's favor, even so, Wood argues, "the defeat of Japan took such a long, arduous, and uncertain road [raising] fundamental questions about the possibility of altern
Source: http://www.prleap.com
10-3-07
On October 10, 2007, at an award ceremony at the Missouri Governor’s Mansion, Dr. J. Frederick Fausz will receive the 2007 Governor’s Humanities Award in Community Heritage from the Missouri Humanities Council. Each year the Governor of Missouri and the Missouri Humanities Council celebrate the accomplishments of people who have made exceptional contributions to our understanding of Missouri, its people, and its stories. The Community Heritage Award recognizes a person who has made a special con
Source: http://www.auburnpub.com
10-4-07
The Cayuga-Owasco Lakes Historical Society has expanded its collection of Millard Fillmore documents, thanks to a gift from an area resident.
Harriet Scarry recently donated a collection of papers, documents and other memorabilia collected by her late husband, Robert, a historian who studied the 13th president extensively.
As a Moravia resident and former teacher at Moravia High School, Robert Scarry spent much of his life researching Fillmore, who was born and raised i
Source: AP
10-5-07
Over the past half century, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote more than 20 books and thousands of essays, served in the administration of President John F. Kennedy, consulted numerous leading Democrats and befriended countless artists and fellow historians.
He also kept a journal.
"None of us really knew about it," says the late historian's son, Stephen Schlesinger. "It never really occurred to me that he actually had been doing this for 50 years."
Source: Australian Jewish News
10-3-07
David Irving, the discredited British historian who until recently was serving a three-year jail sentence in Austria for Holocaust denial, will soon undertake a speaking tour of British cities and publish a series of new books.
Irving plans to speak in Halifax and Birmingham as well as at several undisclosed universities as part of his comeback. He was also scheduled to speak in Coventry last Friday, but protesters disrupted the event.
His attempt at a comeback has been
Source: Winfield Myers at the website of Campus Watch, the organization founded by Daniel Pipes
10-5-07
Cambridge University English professor Priyamvada Gopal, writing in today's Guardian, charges Campus Watch with attempting to deny free speech to academics with whom we disagree. Gopal is upset that the University and College Union, a British academic organization, has backed off its proposed debate on whether or not to boycott Israeli universities.She titles her
Source: USA Today
10-2-07
A number of PBS affiliates across the USA, inspired by the release of Ken Burns' The War, are producing mini-documentaries about their own local war stories and encouraging high school and college students to collect oral histories.
The materials they gather are being sent to the Veterans History Project, which was launched in 2000 by the Library of Congress to collect oral histories and original wartime diaries, letters and photographs from U.S. veterans of all wars that are sent i
Source: http://timesofindia
10-3-07
At Vishwajyot High School in Kharghar, Navi Mumbai, students in the sixth grade love their history lessons. Not surprising, given that their study material includes the Amar Chitra Katha comic books.
During history class, students eagerly pore over comic strips of historical periods, enact characters of emperors and tyrants, and have animated discussions on the subject. From being a drudgery history has become fun.
"Kids always find history dull and boring. I was
Source: National Post (Toronto)
10-2-07
A Toronto high school teacher who won a Governor-General’s award for excellence in teaching this week marked it by doing more of the same — challenging his Grade 11 students to change the stereotypes of black culture in Canada.
“If you’re one of these cats that’s just talking smack, saying, ‘I do this’ and ‘I do that,’ for the sake of a buck, you’re part of the problem,” David Watkins told his class at Weston Collegiate Institute during a lecture about rap/hip hop music on Monday.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
10-3-07
Contemporary society, says Gorman Beauchamp, an associate professor of the humanities at the University of Michigan, has a guilty conscience. "Our postmodern ethos," he writes, "seems to hold that if anything can be proved to have happened, then surely someone needs to apologize for it."
According to Mr. Beauchamp, "we live amid a veritable tsunami of apology." In 2005, for instance, the U.S. Senate issued a formal apology for having never made lynching
Source: Cleveland Plain Dealer
10-3-07
A popular history professor at Case Western Reserve University who was stuck in Panama for months because her visa was in limbo will return to Cleveland in January.
Marixa Lasso learned Monday that her visa was renewed after months of unexplained and frustrating delays.
Case colleagues and students last week rallied behind Lasso, launching a letter-writing campaign to keep her from becoming one of a growing number of foreign scholars whose visas have been delayed or de
Source: Rachel Donadio in the NYT Book Review
10-7-07
When it first appeared in 2006, “Alms for Jihad,” an academic book on Islamic charitable networks by two American scholars [historian Robert O. Collins and former State Department officer J. Millard Burr], drew scant attention. It sold a modest 1,500 copies and received few reviews. But in recent weeks the book has become an international cause célèbre, after Cambridge University Press agreed to pulp all unsold copies in a defamation settlement.
Last spring, Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfou
