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: Alternet
5-15-07
By the time you read this, Studs Terkel will have had a big birthday. On April 16, a month before he turned 95, I visited his stolid brick home in Uptown on Chicago's north lakefront. While he's had his "ups and downs" in recent months, his eyes still twinkle with the promise of more stories to tell.
He waved me over to his customary spot, a rumpled chair in a sun-drenched corner of the living room. Studs was suited up in his trademark red-checked flannel shirt and red soc
Source: AP
5-14-07
The Idaho State Historical Society said Monday it has hired a new executive director, replacing the one who quit last year after auditors found he'd accepted thousands in improper payments and travel reimbursements.
The money was later repaid.
Janet L. Gallimore, who has headed up fundraising and community outreach at the public- and privately funded Confluence Project in Vancouver, Wash., starts next month in Boise. She replaces Steve Guerber, who quit in November afte
Source: PBS NewsHour Interview
5-14-07
Jeffrey Brown provides a Media Unit report on the debate over Ken Burns’ PBS series on World War II. Then, Brown speaks with guests including: Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, director of the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project at the University of Texas at Austin, who is also one of the founders of the Defend the Honor campaign, formed to create greater awareness about the World War II Hispanic community; and, Nancy Buirski, the CEO, founder and artistic director of the Full Frame D
Source: Independent (UK)
5-13-07
When I met Ronald Hutton, Professor of History at the University of Bristol, at the British Library, he had just come from lecturing to a group of sixth formers at the Camden Centre. When I asked what he had been lecturing on, he answered briskly: "Oliver Cromwell." For an author who's just published a book on Druids, and whose earlier work (Triumph of the Moon, The Stations of the Sun, Shamanism) centres on paganism, wicca, ceremonial magic and seasonal rituals, this seemed fairly mil
Source: The Progressive
5-11-07
Michael Baker worked for the Lincoln, Nebraska, public schools since 1981.
But after he showed the documentary “Baghdad ER” to his geography class on April 18, his career there was over.
This, despite the fact that in 2006, Baker was one of only 47 teachers in the state to win National Board Certification, according to the Lincoln Journal Star, which broke the story.
Baker tells The Progressive that he cannot talk freely about what happened because he reach
Source: Press Release -- American GI Forum and HACR
5-10-07
The American GI Forum, the Hispanic
Association of Corporate Responsibility (HACR), and Florentine Films reached an
understanding yesterday that recognizes legitimate Latino concerns about Ken Burns’s
upcoming documentary series, “The War,” and equally recognizes that the artistic
decisions of what appears in his film are his and his alone to make. They announce
today that the narratives and voices of Hispanic World War II veterans will be
incorporated into Ken Burns’s artistic vision for
Source: NYT
5-11-07
... [N]ine prominent professors are leading an effort [at Harvard] to rethink the culture of undergraduate teaching and learning. Headed by Theda Skocpol, a social scientist, the group has issued a report calling for sweeping institutional change, including continuing evaluation and assessment of teaching and learning, and a proposal that teaching be weighed equally with contributions to research in annual salary adjustments....
The report is among the initiatives that Drew Gilpin F
Source: Comedy Central
5-9-07
On May 9 Michael Beschloss appeared on Comedy Central's Daily Show.
He was interviewed by Jon Stewart about his new book, Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789-1989.
Click on the SOURCE link above to watch.
Source: Canadian Jewish News
5-10-07
WINNIPEG — Six years ago, Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta, found herself thrust into the international media spotlight when she was sued for libel by notorious Holocaust denier David Irving.
In a Winnipeg lecture late last month, Lipstadt recalled that her initial reaction to Irving’s libel charge against her was to dismiss it as ridiculous. But then she realized that it could be serious.
“The problem i
Source: AP
5-9-07
An Iranian-American academic who works at a Washington-based institute is being held in a notorious prison after being prohibited from leaving Iran for more than four months, the institute and her husband said Wednesday.
Haleh Esfandiari, the director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, was sent Tuesday to Evin prison after she arrived at Iran's Intelligence Ministry for questioning, the center said.
Iran has not confirmed that it is de
Source: Joseph Puder at frontpagemag.com
5-11-07
At 91, Bernard Lewis, the doyen of Middle Eastern Studies who for more than half a century has been considered one of the West's foremost scholars of Islamic history and culture, is the author of more than two dozen books, most notably The Arabs in History, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, The Political Language of Islam, and The Muslim Discovery of Europe and is the subject of envy because of his remarkably lucid mind and memory. Both qualities were on display on Wednesday evening, May 2, 2007
Source: George Packer in the New Yorker
4-10-07
Note: This article by George Packer only recently was posted online. When it first appeared in the magazine HNN published a short summary
.
Colonel H. R. McMaster, the commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, is forty-three years old, a small man, thick in the middle, with black eyebrows that are the only signs of hair on a pale, shaved head. His feature are deeply furrowed across the brow and along the nose, as if hi
Source: HNN Staff
4-9-07
A few weeks ago Col. H.R. McMaster, who holds a Ph.D. in history and is the author of the highly acclaimed book, Dereliction of Duty, was featured in a 60 Minutes story about his work in freeing Tal Afar of terrorists. This week he was featured in a New Yorker (issue: April 10, 2006) story by George Packer,"The Lesson of Tal Afar."
Source: Campus Watch
5-10-07
Hatem Bazian is a senior lecturer in the department of Near Eastern studies, a member of the faculty advisory board in the religion, politics and globalization program, and an adjunct professor at Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his Ph.D. in Islamic studies.
Along with teaching courses in Islamic law, religious studies and Arabic, Bazian, a Palestinian native, also devotes an inordinate amount of time to pro-Palestinian activism. Unfort
Source: NYT
5-10-07
[Columbia University's Lukas Prize Project Awards for Nonfiction were announced this week.]
... The evening’s third award, the $10,000 Mark Lynton History Prize, was presented to James T. Campbell, an associate professor of American civilization, Africana studies and history at Brown University, for “Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005” (Penguin Press). The prize is named for Mark Lynton, the author of “Accidental Journey: A Cambridge Internee’s Memoir of
Source: http://www.budapestsun.com
5-9-07
A courageous new generation of historians and teachers is looking beyond a fog of denial and evasions imposed for decades by the region's bygone Communist masters.
A new study based on fresh historical evidence describes the awesome atrocities committed by the Hungarian occupation forces in Poland, Ukraine and Byelorussia, often with the connivance of local population groups.
The book does not condone, but places into context, the subsequent organized mass rape and murd
Source: HNN Staff
5-10-07
Alfred Chandler Jr., the longtime professor of business history at the Harvard Business School has passed away.
We will publish an obituary soon.
Source: OAH Newsletter
5-1-07
On March 7-10, 2007 more than twenty scholars from history and related disciplines gathered in Mobile, Alabama, to participate in a conference on the historical meaning of Hurricane Katrina. Sponsored by the Journal of American History in conjunction with the Department of History at the University of South Alabama, the three-day program entitled, “Through the Eye of Katrina: The Past as Prologue?” was part of the ongoing Howard Mahan lecture and symposium series supported by the University of S
Source: Democracy Now
5-9-07
The battle over political science professor Norman Finkelstein to receive tenure at DePaul University is heating up. Finkelstein - one of the country’s foremost critics of Israeli policy - has taught at DePaul for the past six years. His tenure has been overwhelmingly approved at the departmental and college level, but the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has opposed it.
A final decision is expected to be made in the coming weeks. Finkelstein has accused Harvard law profes
Source: NYT
5-9-07
When the historian Dee Brown published “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” in 1971, it became an instant sensation. In an age of rebellion, this nonfiction book told the epic tale of the displacement and decline of the American Indian not from the perspective of the winners, but from that of the Indians.
But the fact that Mr. Brown’s work has been translated into 17 languages and has sold five million copies around the world was not enough to convince HBO that a film version would draw
