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: Financial Times
8-26-07
A few years ago, Robert Bruner and Sean Carr, two American academics at a Virginia business school, decided to write a comprehensive study of a financial market crash that took place on Wall Street back in 1907.
In normal, calmer times, their worthy opus might have attracted only limited attention. After all, the 1907 turmoil has never carried the fame of 1929. But in a happy burst of brilliant timing – and sheer luck – their work is due to be published this autumn, and the two auth
Source: WSJ (Click on SOURCE link to read Winik's summaries of each book)
8-25-07
1. "Thomas Jefferson" by Fawn M. Brodie (Norton, 1974).
2. "The Memoirs and Anecdotes of the Count de Ségur" translated by Gerard Shelley (Scribner, 1928).
3. "The Age of the Democratic Revolution" by R.R. Palmer (Princeton, 1959, vol. 1; 1964, vol. 2).
4. "George Washington" by Douglas Southall Freeman (Scribner, 1948).
5. "The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson" by Bernard Bailyn (Harvard, 1974).
Source: http://www.joplinindependent.com
8-28-07
Missouri Southern State University graduate Dr. Jarod Roll, pictured, originally from Mt. Vernon, MO, has won the 2006 Best Ph.D. Dissertation Prize from the International Association of Labor History Institutions. In recognition of his award, Roll will receive a cash award of 750 GBP, or a little more than $1500 (USD) by today's rate of exchange.
Now teaching at the University of Sussex in England, Roll's dissertation is entitled, "The Road to the Promised Land: Rural Re
Source: Independent (UK)
8-28-07
A 12th-century copper casket that once contained the relics of Thomas Becket, the "troublesome priest" who was murdered on the steps of Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, is just one of hundreds of priceless treasures – some never seen before by the public – unearthed by a team led by TV historian Dr David Starkey for a ground-breaking exhibition which opens next month.
The treasures, including an early Turner painting, a jousting score sheet and a rare celebratory banner from
Source: WaPo
8-27-07
Writing in the Los Angeles Times on Saturday, Boston University professor Andrew J. Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran, accused Bush of being "oblivious to the history that actually matters." In the Houston Chronicle, Robert Buzzanco, a professor at the University of Houston, said Bush missed the point that it was U.S. intervention in Cambodia that caused the rise of the Khmer Roug
Source: Times (UK)
8-23-07
[Professor Norman Cohn, historian, was born on January 12, 1915. He died on July 31, 2007, aged 92]
The historian Professor Norman Cohn achieved great international popularity by linking his profound knowledge of the medieval and earlier past to the most contemporary concerns of his 20th-century audience.
His chief interest, most memorably described in his book The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (1957), w
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) (Click here for embedded links.)
8-28-07
It’s not due out until next week, but Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case is already generating online buzz — and big preorders (as of today, Amazon.com is ranking it 370 in all book orders). Written by the National Journal columnist Stuart Taylor Jr. and the historian K.C. Johnson — and with glowing blurbs from names like the columnist George Will, the ACLU president Nadine Strossen, and even John Grisham — it takes a slam at h
Source: NYT
8-28-07
Peggy Samuels, an amateur art historian who with her husband, Howard, wrote or edited 10 books on art and United States history, including a revealing biography of Frederic Remington, the renowned painter of the American West, died Thursday at her home in East Falmouth, Mass. She was 84.
The death was announced by her daughter Amy Samuels.
Mrs. Samuels and her husband, who died in 2002, were art collectors who roamed from auctions to estate sales in search of Western wo
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education summary of article in Gender & History
8-27-07
Historians need to correct the assumption that women played little part in public debates during the early years of the American republic because society forbade them to do so, writes Carolyn Eastman, an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.
The historical record shows, she says, that in the late 18th century, most young white women in the northeastern United States engaged in public speaking, and she suggests that historians overlook that phenomenon
Source: NYT
8-27-07
Norman Cohn, a historian who influenced a generation of historians and social scientists with his insight that totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century, chiefly Communism and Nazism, were propelled by mythologies associated with medieval apocalyptic movements, died on July 31 in Cambridge, England. He was 92.
The cause was a degenerative heart condition, said his son, Nik Cohn.
In highly detailed, laboriously researched studies that depended on his knowledge of many
Source: Letter to the editor of the NYT Book Review
8-26-07
I must confess to a moment of churlishness when, after being lulled by your reviewer’s discussion of my book “Seizing Destiny” (Aug. 12), I was awakened by the artful thrust of the hired assassin’s knife. In the next to last paragraph, Richard Brookhiser wrote: “I cannot recommend this book, however. Kluger’s writing is some of the worst I have ever had to read. ... If I had not agreed to review this book, I would have stopped after five pages. After 600, I felt as if I were inside a bass drum b
Source: Fred Kaplan in the NYT Magazine
8-26-07
[The claim that H.R. McMaster, the historian-soldier, has been passed over for promotion in the army has surfaced in the mainstream media for the first time in an article by Fred Kaplan, the national security reporter for Slate. The claim appears in Kaplan's article in the current issue of the NYT Magazine about Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, author of a devastating critique of the leadership of the army during the Iraq War published in May by the Armed Forces Journal. Yingling argues that generals
Source: WaPo
8-26-07
Over the past two years since Hurricane Katrina, I've seen waves of hardworking volunteers from nonprofits, faith-based groups and college campuses descend on New Orleans, full of compassion and hope.
They arrive in the city's Ninth Ward to painstakingly gut houses one by one. Their jaws drop as they wander around afflicted zones, gazing at the towering mounds of debris and uprooted infrastructure.
After weeks of grueling labor, they realize that they are running in pla
Source: Chicago Tribune
8-26-07
Bessie Louise Pierce, born in 1888, lived life her own way. And Chicago is better for that.
Never married, she devoted herself to scholarship, first in the field of education as an Iowa high school teacher and professor at the University of Iowa. Then, in midlife, she moved to the University of Chicago where she wrote "A History of Chicago," the definitive account of the city's first years.
That magisterial, three-volume history, begun in 1929 and completed in
Source: NYT
8-25-07
Madeleine B. Stern, a prominent rare-book dealer, biographer and literary sleuth who helped bring to print Louisa May Alcott’s long-lost Gothic tales of murder, sexual subjugation, opium dens and other things simply too dreadful to mention, died on Saturday at her home in Manhattan. She was 95.
Ms. Stern’s executor, Richard Koch, confirmed the death.
With her companion and business partner of many years, Leona Rostenberg, Ms. Stern presided over Rostenberg & Stern R
Source: Andrew Sullivan at his blog
8-22-07
In his NRO splutter this morning, military expert Victor Davis Hanson hyperbolized the following:No one necessarily believes anything in once respected magazines, whether the Periscope section of Newsweek or anything published in The New Republic. Let me suggest two articles in The New Republic that no one should have believed at the time, two articles that h
Source: Robert Townsend writing at the website of the AHA blog
8-23-07
As the dustup last fall about the deletion of “psychohistory” from our membership taxonomy indicated, inclusion on the AHA’s list of membership categories can be highly political—serving in many eyes as a mark of standing in the discipline.
Unfortunately, this sets up two competing problems. The taxonomy needs to be open to the emergence of new areas in the discipline, but it also needs to be functional in a variety of contexts—for members trying to identify themselves, historians trying t
Source: SMU newspaper
8-23-07
Ned Blackhawk, an author and historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is this year's recipient of the William P. Clements Prize for the Best Non-Fiction Book on Southwestern America.
Published in 2006, "Blackhawk's Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West" describes the violence and its consequences experienced by the Ute, Paiute and Shoshone residing in what is now Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado and California.
Source: Daily Freeman
8-23-07
The 200th anniversary of one of the most stupendous events in American history was marked on Aug. 17: Robert Fulton's steamship voyage up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany.
Fulton and crew made the 150-mile trip in the astonishing time of 32 hours, "equal to near five miles an hour," the captain observed.
Unfortunately, New York did not have a resident historian to properly commemorate this occasion. In fact, New York hasn't had a state historian s
Source: Politico
8-23-07
A historian quoted by President Bush to help argue that critics of the administration’s Iraq policy echo those who questioned the U.S. effort to bring democracy to Japan after World War II angrily distanced himself from the president’s remarks Thursday.
“They [war supporters] keep on doing this,” said MIT professor John Dower. “They keep on hitting it and hitting it and hitting it and it’s always more and more implausible, strange and in a fantasy world. They’re desperately groping
