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: AHA Blog
8-5-07
Blackpast.org, led by University of Washington Professor and former AHA Council member Quintard Taylor, contains an abundance of resources on African American history. This site features an online encyclopedia containing 800 plus entries, transcripts of speeches from 1789 to 2004, collections of links and info on hundreds of other resources, and so much more.
Peruse the Digital Archives and find links, separated by state, to sites like the Lib
Source: Nicholas Wade in the NYT
8-7-07
For thousands of years, most people on earth lived in abject poverty, first as hunters and gatherers, then as peasants or laborers. But with the Industrial Revolution, some societies traded this ancient poverty for amazing affluence.
Historians and economists have long struggled to understand how this transition occurred and why it took place only in some countries. A scholar who has spent the last 20 years scanning medieval English archives has now emerged with startling answers fo
Source: http://www.stuff.co.nz
8-7-07
Palmerston North can lay claim to one the world's finest war historians with news Massey University associate Professor Glyn Harper has been invited to speak at an international conference in Belgium later this year.
Titled Such Anger, Such Danger: Passchendaele 1917, the prestigious November gathering, featuring the world's foremost World War I authorities, involves three days of lectures and battlefield tours.
"It's an absolute honour to be chosen to go," Dr
Source: http://www.courant.com
8-7-07
In his brilliant overview, "The Cold War: A New History," Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis provides the following account of the escalation of the Korean War:
"On December 2nd [1950], acting under the authority Truman had delegated, MacArthur ordered the United States Air Force to drop five Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs on Chinese columns advancing down the Korean peninsula. Although not as effective as they had been against Japanese cities at the end of World War II,
Source: Legacy Magazine
9-1-07
James Loewen is the best-selling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong and Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong. His most recent book, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, details the practice of American communities that kept out blacks and other groups through intimidation and violence for decades—and some that still do to this day. He has been an expert witness in more than 50 civil rights, voting rights, a
Source: Times (UK)
8-5-07
Norman Stone is Britain’s most idiosyncratic historian, famed for his bibulous tutorials at Oxford, many delivered across a pool table. A natural rebel, he was one of the few academics to speak up for Margaret Thatcher and was the only man on earth to find lunch with Princess Diana a bore.
Although he does not seem like a misanthropist, there are plenty of things about British society that Professor Norman Stone does not like. Let us begin with the big one.
Stone has in
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
8-6-07
Atlanta's history museum has found its new leader from within.
The Atlanta Historical Society has hired Sal Cilella to be its president and chief executive officer, spokeswoman Hillary Hardwick said Monday. The historical society oversees the Atlanta History Center and the Margaret Mitchell House & Museum.
Cilella had served as the society's interim CEO since the March announcement that Jim Bruns, the prior CEO, was leaving to head the New York-based Theodore Roosev
Source: AP
8-6-07
Henri Amouroux, a French historian who testified on behalf of Maurice Papon at his war crimes trial and wrote several books on the Nazi occupation, has died, news reports said Monday. He was 87.
Amouroux died Sunday in Normandy, Le Parisien newspaper and France-Info radio reported. No cause of death was given.
Amouroux, who served as president of the history section of the prestigious Academie Francaise, testified at Papon's 1997 trial for his role in deporting Jews dur
Source: Pine Bluff Commercial
8-4-07
Though she grew up in Little Rock as the city divided itself over the integration of its largest high school, Elizabeth Jacoway said she never thought much about Central High School or the nine black students at the center of the desegregation crisis.
Jacoway's mother's cousin, Virgil Blossom, was the superintendent of the Little Rock School District when the black students were escorted into the school by members of the 101st Airborne, but as a 13-year-old, Jacoway was hardly curio
Source: Amotz Asa-El in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
8-2-07
Seventy years since its publication, Belgian historian Henri Pirenne's "Mahomet et Charlemagne" still boggles the mind. The thought that the Middle Ages dawned not with the decline of Rome in the 5th century, but with the rise of Islam about 200 years later, bewildered scholars in the late 1930s and would excite some decision-makers in today's EU had they heard about it.
Being the holy-war faith it is, Pirenne argued, Islam is intrinsically opposed to foreign trade. As suc
Source: Jon Wiener in Disssent
8-1-07
Saul Friedlander was born in Prague and spent his childhood in Nazi-run France. When he was nine years old, his parents hid him in a Catholic monastery. Orphaned after the war, Friedländer lived a peripatetic life. He joined the Irgun, fought in Israel's War of Independence, studied in Geneva, and eventually became an esteemed historian of the Holocaust at both Tel Aviv University and UCLA. Dissent's Jon Wiener ("The Weatherman Temptation") spoke with Friedländer in Los Angeles abou
Source: NYT
8-6-07
Dr. Raul Hilberg, a renowned Holocaust scholar, died Saturday. He was 81.
Hilberg, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Vermont, died at the Vermont Respite House of lung cancer, although he never smoked, said his wife, Gwen.
Hilberg wrote ''The Destruction of the European Jews,'' published in 1961, a landmark study of the Nazi killings of more than 5 million Jews.
He was honored by the German government for his contributions and t
Source: Ralph Luker at Cliopatria (HNN Blog)
8-2-07
Whatever its flaws, Wikipedia has become a significant influence in history education. Some of our colleagues have determined to improve it with their own contributions. Here are some instances in which they have assumed significant responsibility for their fields:History of Science: Sage Ross and 80 other specialists in the field are contributing.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
8-3-07
PROFESSOR NORMAN COHN, who died on Tuesday aged 92, was a historian, philosopher, linguist, author and expert on persecution, genocide and extermination; his seminal book, The Pursuit of the Millennium: revolutionary millenarians and mystical anarchists of the middle ages (1957), earned cult status.
Translated into 11 languages since its initial publication, The Pursuit of the Millennium became Cohn's best-known work and was acclaimed as one of the most important studies of apocalyp
Source: Rick Perlstein at http://commonsense.ourfuture.org
8-1-07
I've referred here often to my 2005 Princeton speech, and thought I might as well publish it here. It's something of The Big Con project's manifesto—a lesson about why conservative ideology, as it is lived in the real world, is in its way as abominable as Leninism.
The conference included Richard Land, director of the Southern Baptist Convention, New York Times columnist David Brooks, David Keene of the American Conservative Union, Moral Majority founder Paul Weyrich, and William Be
Source: George Wright Society website
8-1-07
[Dwight T. Pitcaithley, chief historian of the National Park Service from 1995 to 2005, has called on Congress to consider tripling the budget of the organization by 2016 to more than $6 billion. He writes:]
A budget of $5–6 billion does not seem unreasonable given the requirements and rising costs of maintaining 20,000 buildings, almost 1,000 campgrounds, 1,600 wastewater systems, 1,300 water systems, 115,000,000 objects, 67,000 archeological sites, and 26,000 historic structu
Source: http://www.townonline.com
8-1-07
Historian Gerald R. Gill died in his home in Cambridge on July 26. A scholar of 20th-century African-American history, Gill was Tufts University’s most honored and distinguished teacher.
Gerald Gill was born in New Rochelle, N.Y., on Nov. 18, 1948, the son of Robert and Etta Gill. He graduated with a major in history from Lafayette College in 1970, and completed his doctorate in United States history at Howard University, Washington, D.C., in 1985. His scholarly interest in history
Source: http://www.abc.net.au
8-1-07
Professor Colin Tatz brings an intimate understanding of life as an outsider to his studies of Indigenous Australia. Born to a Jewish family in South Africa on the eve of WWII, hatred of intolerance is a recurring theme in his life's work as an historian.
During the 1960s many of Colin's university colleagues were imprisoned without trial for up to eight weeks for protesting apartheid. He describes the atmosphere as fraught, "People were saying 'Get your motor car packed, get y
Source: Mark Goldblatt at Intellectual Conservative
7-31-07
SUBHEAD: By intentionally emphasizing facts which support his own deep convictions and suppressing facts which don’t, the historian can, without exactly lying, steer his reader towards an utterly false impression.
Last month, Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, darling of the political Left and arguably America’s most influential living historian, received a literary smackdown in the Sunday Times Book Review by critic Walter Kirn, who panned Zinn’s latest
Source: Press Release
7-31-07
The University of Virginia School of Architecture has named landscape historian Ethan Carr to serve as associate professor of landscape architecture. The appointment, announced by Architecture School dean Karen Van Lengen, will begin this fall.
Carr is a nationally recognized landscape architecture historian and preservationist specializing in the public landscape of the United States. He has redefined the scholarship on American national parks and modern landscape design through hi
