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: LAT
7-15-07
There comes a moment in life when the weight of memory and emotion can lead to action. For Saul Friedlander, that moment arrived when he stumbled upon a misfiled Nazi document in Bonn, during research for a book on U.S.-German relations before World War II.
During 1941, as news of Hitler's atrocities began spreading, Pope Pius XII had warmly invited the Berlin Opera to perform selections from Wagner at the Vatican, according to a formerly secret telegram that Friedlander read. The f
Source: PRNewswire
7-16-07
James M. McPherson, whose outstanding
historical work on the American Civil War has placed him among the top
writers of our time, has been selected to receive the first-ever Pritzker
Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military
Writing. The $100,000 honorarium, citation and medallion, sponsored by the
Chicago-based Tawani Foundation, will be presented at the Library's
black-tie Liberty Gala on October 6th at Chicago's Drake Hotel (140 E.
Walton Place). The announ
Source: http://cities.expressindia.com
7-16-07
Various events have been planned in different parts of the country to celebrate the birth centenary year of eminent Marxist historian Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi. In the city, the centenary celebrations will start on July 31 with a lecture by noted historian Romila Thapar.
A committee of scholars that includes Kosambi’s daughter and well-known sociologist Meera Kosambi, has been formed to plan seminars on the Marxist historian’s work.
The committee has already planned a
Source: Alistair Horne in the Telegraph
7-15-07
... In 1973 I wrote A Savage War of Peace; Algeria 1954-72, urged on by my publisher, ex-prime minister Harold Macmillan.
He liked the result; then, after publication by the family firm, to my utter amazement, I was invited to write his official biography. It was while studying American material in Washingon DC in 1980, through Macmillan, that I first met Henry Kissinger.
Two decades later, to my equal amazement, Dr Kissinger asked me to write his life. I accepted to do
Source: http://naviny.by
7-14-07
Historian Iryna Kashtalyan has filed an appeal with the Minsk City Court against the refusal by a district judge in Minsk to hear her suit against the Supreme Certification Commission, which had rejected her thesis for a doctoral candidate's degree.
The historian's dissertation examined the situation in Belarus shortly after World War II, including social stratification that created the groups of factory workers, farmers, intelligentsia, "traitors," war veterans and "
Source: Independent (UK)
7-16-07
Betty Kemp, historian: born Bowdon, Cheshire 5 November 1916; Lecturer in Modern History, Manchester University 1945-46; Tutor in Modern History, St Hugh's College, Oxford 1946-78, Fellow 1947-78 (Emeritus); died Oxford 28 May 2007.
For many generations of history graduates of St Hugh's College, Oxford, Betty Kemp was an inspiring teacher from whom they learned how to think for themselves and to develop and maintain opinions through rigorous analysis and vigorous debate. She was a k
Source: WILLIAM VOEGELI in the WSJ
7-16-07
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who died in February at the age of 89, spent 60 years being famous as an emblem and arbiter of American liberalism, though his importance waned as liberalism's did. "It's amazing, in retrospect," Nicholas Lemann wrote in The Atlantic Monthly in 1998, "what a long string of Presidents--from Truman all the way to Carter--felt a twinge of terror at the possibility of . . . incurring the disapproval of Arthur Schlesinger." Schlesinger's good opinion was
Source: WSJ
7-14-07
1. "How War Came" by Donald Cameron Watt (Pantheon, 1989).
..
2. "The Road to Stalingrad" by John Erickson (Harper & Row, 1975).
...
3. "Germany and the Second World War," Vol. 6, edited by Horst Boog, Werner Rahn, Reinhard Stumpf and Bernd Wegner (Oxford, 2001).
...
4. "Closing the Ring" by Winston S. Churchill (Houghton Mifflin, 1951).
...
5. "
Source: Jacki Thompson Rand at Common-Place.org
7-1-07
[Jacki Thompson Rand (Choctaw) is associate professor of history at the University of Iowa history department. ]
I am often asked what I think of the National Museum of the American Indian. That I have nothing to say surprises the people who ask the question because usually they know that I worked for the museum for the first four years of its existence. The fact is, I have never visited the National Museum of the American Indian and declined the invitation to attend the opening. In
Source: NYT
7-15-07
During the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War last month, an Israeli friend invited me to hear Tom Segev, the Israeli commentator and historian, discuss his new book on the subject. Once, the occasion might have been a celebration. But no more. My friend, in fact, described it sardonically as a yahrzeit — that is, in Jewish tradition, the date marking the death of a loved one.
Four decades after their smashing military victory over Egypt, Jordan and Syria, Israelis generally conced
Source: NYT
7-15-07
One of the early acts of President Bush and the former Republican Congress was to allow the Nixon tapes and papers to be transferred to Yorba Linda from the archives’ storage in Washington. Historians who had to sue after Watergate to get at the tapes were properly suspicious (and have hardly been comforted by the Bush administration’s Nixon-class mania for secrecy and document denial).
But Timothy Naftali, respected as an apolitical historian, has taken over at the library, promisi
Source: http://www.bianet.org
7-12-07
Taner Akcam, a professor of history at Minnesota University, in the United States, who had been investigated for his claims of an Armenian genocide, has decided to take Article 301, which has put around 100 academics, journalists and writers on trial, to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to protest against the law’s threat to academic research.
Akcam argues that the investigations Turkey launches into academic research, using Article 301, are contrary to the European Convent
Source: NYT Book Review
7-12-07
There have been angry C.I.A. books before. In the mid-1970s, with the revelation of ugly secrets about death plots, illegal openings of domestic mail and use of drugs for mind control came a rash of volumes decrying the notion that Americans could ever have countenanced “so immoral” an agency.
“Legacy of Ashes,” a deeply researched new chronicle of the Central Intelligence Agency by Tim Weiner, who covered intelligence issues for many years for The New York Times, is impassioned too
Source: Common-Place.org
7-1-07
Common-place asks Peter Mancall, whose Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America was recently published by Yale University Press,"What led you to turn from social history to biography in your study of English encounters in North America?"
At the start of my career I was concerned with the ways Englishmen and other Europeans established control over eastern North America and its indigenous peoples. Few commodities had a more lasting influence on this process t
Source: Robert E. Wright at Common-Place.org
7-1-07
Few policies evoke a more visceral response than gun control, so public discourse concerning firearm ownership generally ranges from anemic to inane. Do guns or people kill people? Obviously, replacing or with the conjunction and or the phrase in conjunction with would settle the question quickly. Even serious scholarly discussion of the meaning of the Second Amendment is rare because partisan feelings run high. Agreement extends to only two issues. First, Michael Bellesiles went too far when he
Source: AP
7-13-07
Fallen media tycoon Conrad Black was convicted Friday of mail fraud and obstruction of justice, but a jury acquitted him of wire fraud, racketeering and several other counts.
Black, the former head of the Hollinger International Inc. newspaper empire [and the author of a biography of Franklin Roosevelt], had been accused of swindling shareholders out of millions of dollars.
A federal court jury of nine men and three women delivered their verdict after deliberating 11 d
Source: Robert Townsend in the AHA Blog (Click on SOURCE for embedded links.)
7-12-07
Happily, the PhDinHistory blog returned to the Internet last night at http://phdinhistory.blogspot.com/, as the previously anonymous author decided to make his identity public: Sterling Fluharty, a doctoral student at the University of Oklahoma. Sterling and I have corresponded a number of times over the past few years, and I’ve always found him a thoughtful and engaging critic of my work and the work of the AHA. As the first few months of PhDinHis
Source: Can West
7-13-07
If it's true that war is about ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances, then it's also true that books, films and television programs about war tend to focus on the extraordinary circumstances and not so much on the ordinary people.
Filmmaker Ken Burns is poised to break from this trend when he unveils his most ambitious project yet - in his words, "a 61/2-year labour of love."
The War, a 15-hour, seven-night look at "the greatest catacl
Source: AP
7-12-07
Ken Burns, criticized for overlooking the role of Hispanic soldiers in his new
World War II documentary, said nearly a half-hour of footage on Hispanic and
American Indian veterans is being added to the film.
Profiles of two Hispanics will conclude the first and sixth episodes of the
roughly 15-hour, seven-part"The War," debuting Sept. 23 on PBS, Burns told a
news conference. An Indian soldier's story will be at the end of episode five,
he said."There's been a hot political battl
Source: University of Buffalo Reporter
7-12-07
A UB historian called the signature phase from John F. Kenney's acclaimed "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech "one of the most famous phrases of political rhetoric ever," during a lecture yesterday about the unique historical climate that brought about a surge in U.S. popularity in Europe in the early 1960s, and the circumstances that caused it to decline later into the Cold War and present.
Andreas Daum, professor in the Department of History, College of Arts and Scie
