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: http://chronicle.augusta.com
9-8-07
Augusta's best known historian, Dr. Edward J. Cashin, died today, two days after collapsing while working on a book in Atlanta.
Erick Montgomery, executive director of Historic Augusta, confirmed the death. Funeral arrangments have not been announced.
Dr. Cashin, professor emeritus and chair emeritus of the department of history at Augusta State University, authored or co-authored more than two dozen books, including The Story of Augusta and The Brightest Arm of the Sav
Source: Southeast European Times
9-7-07
The latest book by Neagu Djuvara has caused a stir in Romania's academic world. In it, the 91-year-old historian maintains that the founders of Wallachia in the 13th and 14th centuries were not descendants of the Romanised Dacians, but were of Cuman origin.
"For two centuries, our historiography has been obsessed with continuity, permanence and immobility, a narrow and static vision," says the author in his book, Thocomoerius, the Black Ruler: a Voivode of Cuman Origin at
Source: Frederick Kagan in the Weekly Standard (rpt. frontpagemag.com)
9-11-07
[Frederick W. Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Finding the Target: The Transformation of the American Military (Encounter).]
The case for cutting and running from Iraq has become untenable in recent months not just substantively but politically as well. Polls show that Americans increasingly believe not only that the surge is working, but also that permanent success in Iraq is possible. So the more intelligent opponents of the war have s
Source: David Corn in the NYT Book Review
9-9-07
[From a review of Burton Hersh's BOBBY AND J. EDGAR
The Historic Face-Off Between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover That Transformed America.]
“Bobby and J. Edgar” is little more than a recycling of previously published books. Hersh lists 54 people he interviewed, but about a quarter of them are authors and journalists who have tilled the overworked Kennedy field. The rest offer little that is new. Worse, Hersh appears to regard all sources as equal. If an assertion, particula
Source: David Oshinsky in the NYT Book Review
9-9-07
[David Oshinsky holds the Jack S. Blanton chair in history at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent book, “Polio: An American Story,” won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for history.]
In the summer of 1950, Alfred A. Knopf Inc. turned down the English-language rights to a Dutch manuscript after receiving a particularly harsh reader’s report. The work was “very dull,” the reader insisted, “a dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions.” Sales wou
Source: HNN Staff summary. Click here to watch the video. (Scroll down.)
9-10-07
[Editor's Note: Haleh Esfandiari is the wife of George Mason University historian Shaul Bakhash.]
U.S. scholar Haleh Esfandiari says she may never feel safe enough to go back to Iran. She was interviewed by NBC News back home at last after her long ordeal. She said while she was incarcerated she wondered if the world had forgotten about her. She tried hard not to think of her family. She said exercise helped. She'd do dozens of push-ups; keeping track of the count helped keep he
Source: NYT
9-10-07
Cuesta Benberry, one of the leading historians and archivists of American quilting, whose research made it clear that the contribution of black artists to the form reflected more than patterns drawn from their African roots, died on Aug. 23 in St. Louis. She was 83.
Her death was announced by the American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan, to which, in 2004, Ms. Benberry donated her vast collection of research papers, historical books, museum catalogs, periodicals and original patterns t
Source: NYT
9-11-07
[Editor's Note: Haleh Esfandiari is the wife of George Mason University historian Shaul Bakhash.]
Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian-American academic held for four months in solitary confinement in the political wing of Iran’s infamous Evin prison, said in Washington on Monday that she was able to endure by sticking to a rigorous daily exercise regimen and blocking out anything that reminded her of home.
On the three occasions when the prison dinner was an Iranian dish call
Source: NYT
9-9-07
A NEW book out last week reported that President Bush wants to hop on the lecture circuit when he leaves office in 2009 — “replenish the ol’ coffers,” as he put it in Robert Draper’s account of his presidency, “Dead Certain.”
“I don’t know what my dad gets,” the president told Mr. Draper. “But it’s more than 50, 75” thousand dollars a speech. He added, “Clinton’s making a lot of money.”
In recent years, virtually every president has left office and parlayed his experien
Source: NYT
9-9-07
EVERY president comes into office complaining about the 11th-hour judicial appointments and midnight regulations left on the White House doorstep by his predecessor. And every president turns around and does the same to his successor.
Adams did it to Jefferson. Teddy Roosevelt did it to Taft. Carter did it to Reagan. Bush I did it to Clinton. Clinton really did it to Bush II.
And now President Bush has his cabinet and staff busily writing far-reaching rules to keep his
Source: NYT
9-9-07
It used to be that updated editions of world atlases mainly tracked the shifting of borders and changes in the names of cities and countries determined by politics, diplomacy or war.
The surface of the planet itself was a relatively constant template in the background. You could render it in more detail with, say, better satellite data, but the basics didn’t change much.
Now, though, the accelerating and intensifying impact of human activities is visibly altering the pl
Source: NYT
9-10-07
A tenure bid by an assistant professor of anthropology at Barnard College who has critically examined the use of archaeology in Israel has put Columbia University once again at the center of a struggle over scholarship on the Middle East.
The professor, Nadia Abu El-Haj, who is of Palestinian descent, has been at Barnard since 2002 and has won many awards and grants, including a Fulbright scholarship and fellowships at Harvard and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
9-10-07
In the 1940s, the history department at Yale University seemed more like "a gentleman's club" than anything else, writes William G. Palmer, a professor of history at Marshall University. And like most history departments at the time, he says, the Yale faculty was all male, "extremely conservative," and "very WASPish." There were no blacks or Jews, and most faculty members had Yale degrees. The department was also "Anglocentric, with its greatest concentration o
Source: Martin Kramer in the Jerusalem Post
9-6-07
Juan Cole is busy promoting his new book Napoleon's Egypt, the hook being a comparison between Napoleon Bonaparte in Egypt and George W. Bush in Iraq. This could make for an interesting exercise in the hands of a thoughtful and dispassionate historian. In Cole's hands, it just deteriorates into Bush-bashing, from which the American president emerges as a bigger deployer of terror than Napoleon.
One of Cole's angles is to emphasize the brutality of all occupations, which he highlight
Source: David Brooks in the NYT
9-7-07
Few have thought about these matters [national health care] as long or as well as Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation. Butler grew up in Shrewsbury, England, got a doctorate in American economic history in Scotland and became a U.S. citizen in 1996. As a result, he’s acutely aware of what makes American civilization unique, and which policies fit the national character.
As you read his work, you quickly see what priorities the new social contract should embrace. It should offer
Source: Daniel Pipes at FrontpageMag.com
9-7-07
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, North America's foremost Islamist group, bills itself as a"civil rights organization," suggesting it maintains high standards of decency and morality. But, as I personally can attest, it fails abysmally to do so. Its seven-year-long campaign against me has included misappropriation, misrepresentation, misqu
Source: David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin at FrontpageMag.com
9-7-07
Nestled in a redwood glade on cliffs above the Pacific Ocean, the University of California at Santa Cruz is one of the most picturesque campuses in America. Its 15,000 students attend classes in 62 majors at 10 colleges, in an environment that would seem an ideal locale for the contemplative life. In the hard sciences, it can be said that Santa Cruz handsomely fulfills its academic expectations. Its physics program is ranked among the best in the country, while its Department of Astronomy and As
Source: Juan Cole at Informed Comment (blog)
9-7-07
The Committee on Academic Freedom (North America) of the Middle East Studies Association has written a letter protesting the cancellation of a talk by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt scheduled by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
CCGA maintains that the speakers, authors of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, needed to be balanced by an opposing viewpoint. But both have spoken there before without needing to be immediately contradicted by someone else. (Personally, I obje
Source: Benjamin Schwarz in the Atlantic
10-1-07
The Cambridge historian Eamon Duffy has a genius for recovering worlds we have lost. In 1992 he published the revisionist The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400 –1580, a gigantic and subtle work of historical anthropology and a best seller in the U.K., in which he revealed the pull and vitality of pre-Reformation English Catholicism. His meticulous and beguiling reconstruction, along with his exploration of the psychological and spiritual devastation caused by the Tud
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) (Click here for embedded links.)
9-5-07
Norman G. Finkelstein, the controversial political scientist who was denied tenure at DePaul University last spring, had planned to attempt to return to his office here on the campus this morning, even though he had been placed on administrative leave and his courses had been canceled. He had said that he was willing to be arrested if the university stopped him, and that he was even planning to begin a hunger strike.
None of that was necessary.
Mr. Finkelstein and the u
