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://www.heraldonline.com
7-19-07
Author and historian [Jane] Douglas Summers Brown was so particular about her research and writing that she wrote her own obituary. She gave it to family members who updated it for the Lynchburg (Va.) News & Advance when Brown died Friday.
She was 104.
In 1953, Brown wrote "A City Without Cobwebs," an in-depth history of Rock Hill. The book traces the city's existence from its discovery by European explorers, through the Civil War, Reconstruction and up to the f
Source: Chicago Tribune
7-17-07
Joseph Martin Hernon, a history professor and author of a study of character in the U.S. Senate, has died of cancer in Boston. He was 70.
Mr. Hernon, who died June 29, was a professor of Irish history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for more than 25 years. He attracted attention with the publication of his 1996 book "Profiles in Character: Hubris and Heroism in the U.S. Senate, 1789-1990."
"Too much of our history centers on presidencies,&qu
Source: Letter to the Editor of the NYT
7-20-07
To the Editor:
Re “Who Killed Ashraf Marwan?,” by Howard Blum (Op-Ed, July 13):
In a forthcoming study, we present new evidence confirming the assumption that Ashraf Marwan was deployed by the Egyptian authorities to convey disinformation, to Britain as well as to Israel.
Our study includes a cable from a British military attaché in Cairo dated July 22, 1972, four days after President Anwar el-Sadat announced what became fixated in Western and Israeli perce
Source: WaPo
5-31-07
It was a hard enough day for Shaul Bakhash, as he dealt with the ongoing drama surrounding the imprisonment in Iran of his wife, noted American scholar Haleh Esfandiari. Then he found an express letter on the doorstep of his Potomac home yesterday morning announcing that Citibank had frozen his wife's bank accounts on grounds that she is now a "resident" of Iran.In the letter, Citibank said the accounts had been frozen "in accordance with U.S. Sanctions regula
Source: NYT
6-27-07
[Mr. Bakhash is a professor of history at George Mason University.]
IRAN’S judiciary says it expects to announce a decision this week or next in the case of my wife, Haleh Esfandiari, and two other Iranian-Americans, Kian Tajbakhsh and Ali Shakeri, who have been held in solitary confinement at Tehran’s Evin prison since early May. The fate of these detainees could be resolved by Iran’s government in a number of ways. Only one would be in the best interests of the Islamic Republic: the de
Source: NYT
7-17-07
Two Iranian-Americans detained here on national security charges appeared Monday for the first time on state television, with one saying in a brief video clip that his foundation may have targeted ''the world of Islam.''
The TV images followed Iran's announcement this month that fresh evidence had pushed its judiciary to launch new investigations into the cases of Haleh Esfandiari [wife of George Mason University historian Shaul Bakhash] and Kian Tajbakhsh.
State TV sai
Source: John H. Taylor at the website of the Nixon Library
7-17-07
[John H. Taylor is Executive Director, Nixon Foundation.]
“It’s the opposite of truth” – in other words, a lie – to say that the famous 18 and a half-minute gap on a Watergate tape could have resulted from a mechanical malfunction rather than deliberate erasure.
So claims historian David Greenberg. Not a stretch, mind you; not a controversial -- or even a ridiculous -- assertion. A lie.
In fact, some experts did say that the erasures might have been acciden
Source: Bloomberg News
7-19-07
For most Israelis and much of the world, the 1967 Six-Day War is a simple David and Goliath story.
Syria lobs shells onto the Galilee. Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser orders United Nations troops out of his way, masses his army opposite the border with Israel and vows to drive the Jews into the sea. Israel hesitates but finally strikes, smashing its enemies and conquering territory more than three times its size in the time it took God to create the world.
In "1967: Isr
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
7-19-07
THE commemoration of today's 91st anniversary of Australia's worst 24-hour battle has been described as a sham by the historian Neville Kidd. He says the name of the battle, Fromelles, is not even on the Anzac Memorial where the ceremony is taking place at Hyde Park.
"It is a travesty to the memory of nearly 2000 soldiers killed at Fromelles," said Mr Kidd, of Pymble, whose father fought on the Western Front.
He said it was "such a disgrace that the NSW G
Source: Deutsche Welle
7-18-07
A German historian has called on the Bavarian government to lift a ban on publishing Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf," saying that an annotated edition could expose the book as a badly written hate tirade.
In an interview with Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Horst Möller, director of the Institute of Contemporary History, said that historians should be given a chance to publish an edition of Hitler's 1924 book.
"All kinds of Nazi incend
Source: Ascribe
7-17-07
Jeffrey Wasserstrom has watched China's history unfold over the last 20 years - witnessing Starbucks gain popularity in Shanghai and photographing a student protester in Beijing wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt.
"Sometimes I get wrapped up in the uniqueness of what I've experienced," said Wasserstrom, a UC Irvine history professor.
With his new book of essays, "China's Brave New World - And Other Tales for Global Times" (Indiana University Pr
Source: NYT
7-18-07
F. Champion Ward, a noted educator and former Ford Foundation executive who helped devise the process by which winners of the MacArthur Foundation's ''genius awards'' are selected each year without their even knowing they have been nominated, died July 2 at his home in North Branford, Conn. He was 96.
The death was confirmed by his son Geoffrey C. Ward, the historian.
Dr. Ward was chancellor of the New School for Social Research in Manhattan from 1980 until 1983. From
Source: Inside Higher Ed (Click on SOURCE for embedded links.)
7-17-07
In an urgent effort to save a critical mass of scholars unlike any initiative undertaken since World War II, the Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund is finalizing plans to rescue hundreds of Iraqi professors beginning in the coming months.
“We consider it to be the first large-scale effort of its kind since the 1930s, when IIE’s Emergency Rescue Committee rescued over 300 senior European scholars and brought them to safety in the United States,” said Jim Mille
Source: New York Post
7-17-07
IN Ken Burns' "The War," historians are missing in action.
It's the most noticeable difference between "The War," Burns' gut-wrenching, 14-hour documentary on World War II, and the most famous of his other films, "The Civil War," in which historians such as the late Shelby Foote played such an important part.
The only talking heads in "The War" are a handful of men and women, now elderly, who lived through it, either overseas in
Source: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Little Rock)
7-17-07
Gov. Mike Beebe expressed support Monday for the state's new public school social studies curriculum, which some Arkansas historians say shortchanges the teaching of state history.
Spokesman Matt DeCample said Monday that Beebe won't back the Arkansas History Education Coalition's call for a one-year moratorium of the new curriculum. The governor also refused to create a special committee to study the revision process.
Beebe believes the new curriculum, which incorporat
Source: Daily Express (UK)
7-13-07
GORDON Brown’s politically correct onslaught intensifed last night as compulsory teaching of the life of Sir Winston Churchill was dropped.
A new school curriculum, unveiled as part of the Prime Minister’s barrage of initiatives, also scrapped the mandatory study of dictators Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. It was instantly branded “madness” by critics.
Instead, secondary school pupils will be taught classes in global warming, healthy eating, Arabic and Urdu. And they w
Source: Max Holland--Letter to Howard Kurtz, media critic of the WaPo
7-17-07
Dear Mr. Kurtz,
I'm writing to bring to your attention some unbecoming behavior at
Slate by one of its columnists, Ron Rosenbaum.
Four months ago, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr wrote an article for
the website I edit, Washington Decoded, about McCarthyite tactics being
employed by Alger Hiss's shrinking band of true believers. The article,"The New McCarthyism," was also linked from the
Source: Sandstorm, the blog of Martin Kramer
7-17-07
Last week, Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign announced the Mayor's team of foreign policy advisors. Charles Hill, a renowned former diplomat who now teaches at Yale, has been named Giuliani's chief foreign policy advisor and head of his foreign policy advisory board. Other senior advisors whom I know personally include my old frien
Source: Houston Chronicle
7-13-07
Ken Burns calls it"a 6 and a half year labor of love." When it is shown beginning Sept. 23 on PBS, many will call it a masterpiece.
The arithmetic alone of The War - seven parts, 15 hours, airing over two weeks - is indicative of the commitment America's premier documentary maker has given to his recount of World War II.
Burns measures the retelling by focusing his film on the personal accounts of 40 men and women living in four American cities: Waterbury, Conn.; Mobile, Ala.; S
Source: Letter to the editor of the NYT Book Review
7-17-07
To the Editor:
As a historian who has written about Andrew Carnegie and Gilded-Age America, and as an ex-journalist, I read your article with great interest.
While you unearthed many telling similarities of our era and that of Carnegie, an important matter was not mentioned: In the 1880s millions of Americans — urban workers and farmers, native-born and immigrant, Southerners and Northerners — launched mass democratic movements out of the belief that something had gone
