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: Ray Raphael in the course of an interview with Allen Barra at the American Heritage Blog
7-4-07
[Berra;] You write, “Founder chic authors depict political leaders as causal agents who are personally responsible for all the major events of the times. . . . Since the importance of their stories is determined in part by the importance of their protagonists, biographies have a vested interest in endowing their subjects with as much historical significance as the record will bear—and sometimes more.” You take particular exception to David McCullough’s view of John Adams: “‘It was John Adams,’ w
Source: Allen Barra at the American Heritage Blog
7-4-07
Paul Revere didn't make that ride-except in
Longfellow's poem. Patrick Henry probably didn't say
'Give me liberty or give me death!' The words were
likely put into his mouth by a biographer several
decades after his death. Washington's winter at Valley
Forge really wasn't that bad compared with other
winters during the Revolution. Molly Pitcher probably
never existed, and the colonies most definitely did not
offer slaves their freedom to fight against the
British.
These are just a
Source: Press Release--Historians Against the War (HAW)
7-4-07
Historians Against War invites proposals for papers, panels, roundtables, workshops, and posters for our upcoming national conference at Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, 11-13 April 2008.
We envision a conference that will attract historically-minded scholars, activists from a variety of social movements, graduate students, educators, artists, and independent researchers and writers. We construe the theme of our conference broadly. We want to fashion a program that gr
Source: Review in the Telegraph (UK) of Hobsbawm's Globalisation, Democracy, and Terrorism
7-1-07
'Our greatest living historian - not only Britain's but the world's', exclaims a puff on the jacket of this book, quoting, of all sources, The Spectator. 'For sheer intelligence, Hobsbawm has no superior in the historical profession', comments The Guardian, a little more cautiously.
Well, Eric Hobsbawm is certainly an eminent historian, and a clever man; and as he passes his 90th birthday, still with his pen in his hand, he deserves our admiration. This collection of his recent essa
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education summary of article in he Common Review
7-3-07
When asked to teach a course called "History Through Film," Kevin Mattson, a professor of contemporary history at Ohio University, was ambivalent at first. "It struck me as the give-them-a-little-history-in-a-fun-sort-of-way type of course," he writes. Then he thought, "Who could deny that watching a film might tell us just as much about the past as reading a history book or presidential speech?"
Films reflect the zeitgeist of the period in which they w
Source: Boston Globe
7-3-07
Harvard University president Drew G. Faust spent her first workday in power yesterday hosting an ice cream social and doing business in a new office that she described as "surrounded with flowers and kind wishes and interesting problems."
Faust, who officially took the reins Sunday, is laying the groundwork for a multibillion-dollar fund-raising campaign, planning for the new Allston campus, and launching an initiative to make the arts more central to Harvard's identity.
Source: Christian Science Monitor
7-3-07
On the morning of June 7, I was just about a hundred vertical feet short of reaching the summit of Kala Patar in Nepal. Colorful Buddhist prayer flags strung along the mountaintop fluttered in a gentle wind against a brilliant, blue sky, perfect climbing weather. Many of my trekking companions had already reached the top. I could see them seated comfortably beneath the flags, as they waved and shouted down encouraging words.
"Come on up, the view's great, only a little more to
Source: NYT
6-27-07
When Philip Nobile reported in 2004 that the assistant principal of the Brooklyn high school where he taught had ordered other teachers to cheat on the scoring of Regents exams, he was embraced by a powerful city investigator as a whistle-blower.
His charges led to a full-blown investigation of the Cobble Hill High School of American Studies by the city’s Department of Education that backed up his story of failing scores being raised to passing. In short order, the assistant princip
Source: Informed Comment (Blog)
7-2-07
Some of us are launching a group blog, Informed Comment: Global Affairs.
Iran expert Farideh Farhi weighs in today on the gasoline station protests in Iran and their real meaning. Many thanks to her for an incisive posting!
The problem with keeping up a successful blog is that one has to do an entry every day or readers forget to come back to you. I found this out through early experiments at IC, where traffic fell off dramatical
Source: http://www.dailyprogress.com
7-2-07
Perfectly at home with the history of politics, David Shreve is trying to make history by unseating an incumbent congressman in a 5th District whose incumbents tend to swat away challengers with canny regularity.
Congressmen Dan Daniel of Danville, L.F. Payne of Nellysford and Virgil H. Goode Jr. of Rocky Mount won the last 21 elections in the sprawling 5th District without defeat.
Shreve, 46, plans to formally announce after this November’s elections that he will chall
Source: New Haven Register
7-2-07
How does "Connecticut Bing am" sound? Less mellifluous than "Indiana Jo es," t
Photo Gallery
Submit your photos from the Indiana Jones shoot in New Haven.
But Hiram Bingham III was a Yale historian and explorer who really did hack through a fetid jungle and scrambled over the Andes to find the "lost city" of Machu Picchu in 1911.
Bingham, a tall, handsome and rich adventurer, historian,
Source: From a survey of 17 academics conducted by the Chronicle of Higher Ed
7-2-07
Theodore Roszak, emeritus professor of history, California State University-East Bay: Maybe it was an advantage that I was 5,000 miles away when the Summer of Love happened. I had taken a leave from my teaching job and was living in London, editing a small pacifist journal and working on a series of articles for The Nation dealing with campus protest. The articles would eventually become a book titled The Making of a Counter Culture. That title emerged in large measure from the reports
Source: WaPo
6-30-07
Frank A. Taylor, 104, the founding director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, which has become the permanent home of such popular treasures as the ruby slippers from "The Wizard of Oz" and Abraham Lincoln's top hat, died of respiratory failure June 14 at Sibley Memorial Hospital.
In 1964, Mr. Taylor, a native Washingtonian, helped launch what has become the institution's third-most popular museum. About 3 million people passed through th
Source: Patrick T. Reardon in the Chicago Tribune
7-1-07
History is a story. We read the story to learn who we are as humans -- to learn how we've acted in the past so that we can better understand how we should act in the future.
But it's not that simple.
Academics routinely complain that popular historians oversimplify the story of history to make it more palatable for a general audience. Do the life stories of a handful of well-to-do, middle-age men really explain the American Revolution? The retort is that university scho
Source: http://canberra.yourguide.com.au
7-1-07
CONTROVERSIAL Turkish roadworks on the Gallipoli peninsula have publicly exposed the Australian Government's lack of care for the Anzac war dead lying there, a leading historian says.
Professor Bill Gammage, of the Australian National University, said Turkey did not have the authority to conduct the roadworks, which had uncovered bones and war relics.
"What I'm essentially arguing is that that area is a cemetery," he told the Sunday Canberra Times.
&quo
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
7-2-07
Does Alan Wolfe know what he is talking about? That is the question posed by Paul Gottfried of Elizabethtown College in a blog post on Taki's Top Drawer. Gottfried is writing in response to an essay by Wolfe in The New Republic in whi
Source: HNN Staff
7-2-07
An HNN intern came across a website that sells coffee mugs, t-shirts etc. that come with cute sayings appealing to historians (or at any rate they are supposed to be cute and they are supposed to appeal to historians).
Our favorite (not pictured):"Historians kick ass."
Hat Tip: HNN Intern Jessica Steinbach
Source: Letter to the editor of the NYT Book Review
7-1-07
To the Editor:
Walter Kirn’s review of my book “A Young People’s History of the United States” (June 17) attributes to me the belief that “telling the truth is not Job 1 for historians.” The reviewer seems to hold to the l9th-century von Ranke idea that there is one truth to be told. Most historians, and most intelligent people, including bright 12-year-olds, understand that there is no such thing as a single “objective” truth, but that there are different truths according to the vi
Source: WaPo
6-30-07
As Cullen Murphy stands on the west side of Capitol Hill, gazing in the direction of the Mall, he sees what the tourists around him see: the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian museums, the Washington Monument and, shining white in the distance, the Lincoln Memorial.
But unlike the tourists, Murphy is imagining these things in ruins. The monument toppled, perhaps. Marble museums cracked and broken. Kudzu engulfing the temple to the Great Emancipator.
And why not
Source: NYT news story
7-1-07
The conventional wisdom about Brown holds that it was more responsible than anything else for the integration of schools. “Brown really did transform society by stopping de jure segregation, and without Brown, schools would look very different,” says David J. Armor, a conservative scholar at George Mason University.
But some liberal scholars have challenged that heroic assessment. In “From Jim Crow to Civil Rights,” Michael J. Klarman argues that it was a political commitment to int
