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: Press Release--George Mason University
10-3-07
George Mason University has been awarded a five-year $7.5 million contract by the U.S. Department of Education to create a National History Education Clearinghouse. The online project, which will be housed in Mason's Center for History and New Media (CHNM), will focus on historical thinking and learning. It will also help K-12 history teachers become more effective educators and show their students why history is relevant to their daily lives.
The project will be led by Mason histo
Source: Edward Rothstein in the NYT
10-2-07
... “War happens,” [Eric Severeid] explained, “inside a man.”
And that is mostly where Ken Burns decides to look for it in his 15-hour documentary about the Second World War, “The War,” directed with Lynn Novick, now being broadcast on PBS (and to be released on DVD tomorrow). Invoking Mr. Sevareid, Mr. Burns says that his documentary — an “epic poem,” he has called it — is “created in that spirit.” Nearly 50 men and women talk about their wartime experiences, their testimonies pun
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
10-2-07
On September 24, Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) objected to floor consideration of the “Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2007? (H.R. 1255), at least temporarily holding up a vote on the bill. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) sought to have the bill brought up under the Senate’s unanimous consent rule that allows non-controversial bills to be considered on an expedited basis. When she did so, Senator Bunning objected to consideration of the bill.
Senator Bunning did not state the re
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
10-1-07
The typical slave ship began its life as a merchant vessel, and was refitted later for its grim purpose.
The primary remodeling, which often occurred on the outward leg of the voyage, was to build walls below decks to separate men and women, and then build horizontal platforms halfway between the first and second decks on which to stack the slaves.
The height between the first and second deck usually was only about 5 feet before the remodeling, said Marcus Rediker, Univ
Source: Forbes
9-30-07
"The devastating nuclear exchange of August 2007 represented not only the failure of diplomacy, it marked the end of the oil age. Some even said it marked the twilight of the West."
It may read like bad science-fiction, but the above scenario came from the pen of from Harvard professor and historian Niall Ferguson, whose prediction of a chaotic, war-torn future, published in the London Telegraph in 2006, has struck a chord with, of all places, British hedge fund GLG Partn
Source: http://www.northjersey.com
9-30-07
To local historians -- who handle facts and lore of yesteryear with the same fervor as a racecar driver over Porsche parts -- history isn't dusty. It's downright current. Perhaps even sexy.
And definitely debatable.
"I'm going to be going head-to-head with some people from Fort Lee soon," said historian Mark Auerbach as he sat in his book-lined Passaic living room last month.
He said a July article in The Record wrongly asserted that the location
Source: Editorial in the Seattle Times
9-30-07
Is is too hard to imagine saying good-bye to writer and historian Walt Crowley, so let's not. Instead, it would be a far better and more fitting tribute to propagate the broad sweep of thinking with which he approached contemporary issues, and to embrace with renewed vigor his legacy, HistoryLink.org, the online archive of Washington state history.
A memorial service will be held Tuesday for Walt — "Mr. Crowley," as the rules of obituary writing would dictate, seems so ali
Source: Janet Maslin in the NYT
10-1-07
In 1962 the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was able to comment with equal assurance on both of the Monroes within his orbit: Marilyn (as in “Happy Birthday, Mr. President”) and James (as in Monroe Doctrine). What’s more, he made these unrelated remarks closely enough in time for them to appear on the same page of the 894-page new volume of his journals.
This arch, irresistibly revealing book manages to be both showstopping and doorstopping, what with its vast range of subject m
Source: Alexandra M. Lord at the website of the Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
10-1-07
[Alexandra M. Lord is a public historian working in Washington and the cocreator of a Web site, Beyond Academe, designed to educate historians about nonacademic careers.]
... Like most academic historians, I was trained to do archival research. Although I love working in a cold, sterile archive, I have recently come to see that such a narrow approach to history, to almost any academic discipline, has serious limitations.
As a professor teaching at a land-grant universit
Source: Independent
9-28-07
Norman Cohn wrote three great histories, each thematically related to the other. His first book, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), showed how apocalyptic beliefs fuelled medieval heresies and, in the 20th century, Nazi and Communist orthodoxies. His second, Warrant for Genocide (1967), exposed that arsenal for anti-Semites The Protocol of the Elders of Zion for the forgery that it was. His third, Europe's Inner Demons (1976), showed how the idea of the satanic pact was at the heart of the Eu
Source: http://www.cdispatch.com
9-28-07
He was invited by “Lady Bird” to meander through the halls of Lyndon B. Johnson's Texas home. He transcribed tapes of personal conversations recorded by the 36th president. And listened as the new president - just hours into his term - tried to comfort John F. Kennedy's mother over the phone as he prepared to run the country.
Michael Beschloss was no personal friend of Johnson's or his family. But for a while he became a little Johnson-like, as he recorded the bits and pieces of the
Source: Press Release--Fordham
9-24-07
For an art historian, there may be no better city in the United States in which to live than New York. The breadth and depth of museum and gallery choices is staggering. For Nina Rowe, Ph.D., assistant professor art history, the fact that Manhattan is her hometown, and that her mother previously taught in Fordham’s English department, where her husband is now a faculty member, is simply icing on the cake.
“It’s so good to be back,” says Rowe, who lives near the Cloisters, a branch
Source: Jim Davila at paleojudaica.blogspot.com
9-27-07
Re: REVIEW OF NADIA ABU EL-HAJ, FACTS ON THE GROUND: Archaeological Practice and Terriorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
... whatever the specific facts, the way Abu El-Haj presents her arguments sometimes fall into patterns that raise concerns.
She has been widely criticized for her use of anonymous sources, and she does cite these an awful lot. In many cases she is telling an anecdote or relating that someone ex
Source: Columbus Dispatch
9-28-07
Colleagues of a slain Ohio University history professor remembered him this week as a genial man who loved his subject and conveyed that passion to his students.
Phillip Bebb, 66, was stabbed to death Monday at his home in Athens. His son, a 32-year-old graduate student, is charged with the killing.
Mark Ellwood, a 30-year teacher at Thomas Worthingto
Source: Alex Kotlowitz in the Chicago Tribune
9-29-07
... He trusted what he saw. He trusted what he heard. He trusted what he felt. He sniffed out incompetence and hypocrisy, and called people on it. When American generals manipulated body counts and stood by South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem's corrupt regime, Halberstam did the only thing he knew how to do: tell the truth.
There's a moment recounted in William Prochnau's book "Once Upon a Distant War," a riveting account of the young war correspondents in the early d
Source: Deborah Lipstadt at her blog
9-30-07
According to the Guardian, David Irving, whom it described in a headline as"Discredited" is planning a" comeback" speaking tour. [The paper also described him as a"Historian"... though I can't say why].What Irving has to say will not make deniers happy.First, of course, he engages in his traditional antisemitism, telling the paper that "the J
Source: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in the NYT
9-30-07
[Chapter from 'Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History.']
Here are the stories of three women making history. One was a poet and scholar attached to a French court, another was an American activist, the third an English novelist. None was a historian in the conventional sense, but all three were determined to give women a history. The settings in which they worked were radically different. The problems they faced were surprisingly-disturbingly-the same....
Source: Michael Kimmelman in the NYT
9-30-07
[HNN Editor: This article features Rick Atkinson, the Washington Post reporter who is the author of a multi-volume history of the liberation o Europe from the Nazis. Volume one won the Pulitzer Prize. Volume two, The Day of Battle, appears this week in bookstores. The article focuses on the seige of the Abbey of Monte Cassino, which th Allies bombed into rubble in 1944 during the invasion of Italy.]
... It is tricky to draw analogies with wars of the past, but sometimes comparison
Source: Daily Show
9-28-07
Click on the MORE link to watch the video.
Source: NYT
9-29-07
Joseph V. Noble, a former director of the Museum of the City of New York who earlier exposed three famous works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as fakes, died last Saturday in West Orange, N.J. He was 87.
The cause was heart failure, according to the Jacob A. Holle Funeral Home in Maplewood, N.J.
In 1967, Mr. Noble, then an administrator at the Metropolitan Museum with a fervent interest in antiquities, discovered that three large, supposedly ancient terra-cotta Etrus
