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: Jon Wiener in the Nation
5-21-07
[Jon Wiener started writing for The Nation in 1984. Since then he’s written more than 100 stories and reviews for the magazine, many about American history, university politics, and California life. He’s also professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and a Los Angeles radio host.]
Alan Dershowitz is at it again: First he tried to get California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to stop the University of California Press (UCP) from publishing a book highly critical of him,
Source: Candace de Russy at frontpagemag.com
5-4-07
Nadia Abu El-Haj is an assistant professor at Barnard College who deserves more scrutiny from everyone interested in the degenerate methods by which great universities are destroyed.
The greatness of modern, western-style universities – the thing that separates them from all the academies that went before them – is that facts and theories asserted in universities must be supported by verifiable evidence. At the old academies, an appeal to Aristotle, Confucius, or the Bible was enou
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
5-3-07
America's push for racial integration began stalling in the 1970s and now seems mired in indifference, says UC Berkeley history Professor Leon Litwack.
Litwack, 77, a leading historian of race in America, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and much-admired teacher, ends his 43-year Cal career on Monday in front of 700 undergraduates in his History 7B class at Wheeler Hall. His final lecture on America's racial divide is titled "Fight the Power."
In an interview wit
Source: Partial list of articles in the May issue of AHA's Perspectives
5-1-07
Doing History in the Digital Age
by Barbara Weinstein
News
AHA Launches Online Directory
of History Journals
History and the Changing Landscape
of Information: An Editor’s Note
Zotero: Social and Semantic Computing for Historical Scholarship
by Daniel J. Cohen
The Digital History Reader:
Teaching Resources for U.S.
and European History
by E. Thomas Ewing
and Robert P. Stephens
Source: Inside Higher Ed
5-3-07
... The Dimensions of Culture sequence [freshman comp, in effect] is required for all freshmen at UCSD’s Thurgood Marshall College, which as one of the university’s six undergraduate colleges has a unique mission. Conceived by faculty and students and founded in 1970, the college has been distinguished by a particular commitment to issues of diversity and social justice. The Dimensions of Culture program specifically is supposed to consider the question of “how scholars move from knowledge to ac
Source: Soledad O'Brien, author of the entry on Faust
5-7-07
[O'Brien is special correspondent for CNN: Special Investigations Unit.]
I come from a Harvard family—no, there's no O'Brien Library, but every kid in my family (there are six of us) got a degree from Harvard College or Harvard Law School or Harvard Medical School. As first-generation Americans, we were firmly middle class: good students who aced our SATs and took out loans to pay for the privilege of a first-rate education. But when I was a freshman, my sister, who was in her junio
Source: HNN Staff; bios provided by NYT
5-3-07
In a section of its website behind a subscription wall the NYT is now featuring a historians' blog.
It's called: Campaigning for History: Reflections on the American Presidency in a Political Season.
Bloggers include:
David Greenberg, an assistant professor of history and journalism at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, N.J., is the author of three books, “Nixon’s Shadow,” “Presidential Doodles” and, most recently, “Calvin Coolidge.” He writes the “H
Source: NYT
5-3-07
Robert M. Warner, who built a legislative consensus to wrest the National Archives from political control when he was its director, died on April 24 in Ann Arbor, Mich. He was 79. The cause was a heart attack after a yearlong battle with cancer, his son, Mark Warner, said.
From 1980 to 1985, Dr. Warner, as the sixth Archivist of the United States, ran the archives, the depository for the nation’s historical documents, from the Declaration of Independence to the Nixon tapes.
Source: Press Release -- Maggio & Kattar, P.C. is a Washington, DC based full-service immigration law firm
5-3-07
Washington, DC – Pending for almost two years, an employment visa petition filed by the University of Nebraska – Lincoln (“UNL”) on behalf of Dr. Waskar Ari, a Bolivian historian whom the university seeks to hire as an Assistant Professor of History and Ethnic Studies, was finally approved by the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) after a lawsuit to compel action was filed in federal district court. Dr. Ari now must apply for a visa at the U.S. Consulate in La Paz, Bolivia where visa issua
Source: AP
5-1-07
JOHANNESBURG -- An eminent South African historian believes he has stumbled on the identity of Jack the Ripper.
Charles van Onselen said at first he wasn't sure he wanted to publicize the conclusions he drew when he noticed parallels in the century-old, unsolved Ripper case and the background of Joseph Silver, who terrorized women as "King of the Pimps" in Johannesburg...
The publicity around van Onselen's The Fox and The Flies: The World of Joseph Silver,
Source: Scott McLemee at Inside Higher Ed
5-2-07
Jacques-Alain Miller has delivered unto us his thoughts on Google. In case the name does not signify, Jacques-Alain Miller is the son-in-law of the late Jacques Lacan and editor of his posthumously published works. He is not a Google enthusiast. The search engines follows “a totalitarian maxim,” he says. It is the new Big Brother. “It puts everything in its place,” Miller declares, “turning you into the sum of your clicks until the end of time.”...
For an informed contrast to Jacque
Source: Michael F. Shaughnessy Interviews Will Fitzhugh at Ed Week
4-30-07
[Dr. Shaughnessy is currently Professor in Educational Studies and is a Consulting Editor for Gifted Education International and Educational Psychology Review. In addition, he writes for www.EdNews.org <http://www.EdNews.org> and the International Journal of Theory and Research in Education. He has taught students with mental retardation, learning disabilities and gifted. He is on the Governor's Traumatic Brain Inju
Source: James Traub in the course of a review of a short biography of Kennan by John Lukacs
4-29-07
... George Kennan was not a happy fellow. His mother died when he was an infant, and the stepmother who raised him was “nervous and cold.” His own disposition, from the outset, was solitary and melancholy. The great Protestant virtues — duty, discipline, self-denial — ran deep in him. And his penetrating and lucid intellect operated as a kind of acid bath for received wisdom. He saw Russia, his great subject, free from the dogmas of left and right. As early as 1938, he urged Americans to abandon
Source: Scrapbook in the Weekly Standard
5-7-07
THE SCRAPBOOK was pleased the other morning when two paperback volumes crossed our desk, courtesy of Princeton University Press. It seems that they are the opening editions of something called the James Madison Library in American Politics, which is "devoted to reviving important American political writings of the recent and distant past." Sean Wilentz, Princeton history professor and stalwart defender of the Democratic faith, is general editor. And the two books in question are The Ne
Source: NYT
5-1-07
The gripping black-and-white photographs of civil rights protesters in the South reflect the black-and-white morality tale that generally accompanies them. Hateful, jeering white mobs and attack dogs versus peaceful marchers asking to vote and to walk in the front door.
That story line is true, but so are others. A new generation of historians is exploring some of the untold stories of the civil rights movement and its legacies: the experiences not of heroes or murderous villains, b
Source: http://www.amacad.org
5-1-07
Blackbourn, David Gordon
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Hull, Isabel V.
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
Keller, Evelyn Fox
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts
MacCormack, Sabine G.
University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana
Owen, E. Roger
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Painter, Nell Irvin
Pri
Source: Dennis Lythgoe in the Deseret News (Utah)
4-29-07
Davis Bitton passed away recently after a distinguished, even elegant, career as a historian/professor. He was 77. He grew up in Blackfoot, Idaho, but his super brain decreed that he should be educated at Princeton — where he came away with both a master's and a doctorate.
But for an erudite man, he was very gentle.
Shortly after he joined the University of Utah history faculty, I was assigned to be his graduate research assistant. I think I was the first on
Source: http://www.flyernews.com/
4-27-07
UD professor Dr. Janet Bednarek, an aviation historian, will be a part of the first episode in the second season of “Our Generation,” a show on The History Channel. The episode is set to air June 15.
This segment of the series is investigating the history of aviation, with a focus on the baby boomer generation of the ’60s as a turning point in the history of flight.In the past few years, Bednarek has been receiving recognition for her research and wo
Source: http://www.semissourian.com
4-27-07
America's culture of the Old West was wrapped up in violence, a Yale University professor said Thursday night at Southeast Missouri State University.
Dr. John Mack Faragher, a prominent historian and scholar of the American West, delivered the sixth annual Veryl Riddle Distinguished History Lecture to a crowd of about 70 people at the Show Me Center. The lecture series is named after its benefactor, a prominent Southeast Missouri lawyer.
The 19th-century American fronti
Source: http://www.njjewishnews.com
4-26-07
As residents of a state that is often the butt of comedians' jokes, New Jerseyans need a morale boost now and then.
That is just what they got last Wednesday night at the YM-YWHA of Union County, in a talk that offered a rapid rundown of the accomplishments that set the state apart.
Marc Mappen, executive director of the New Jersey Historical Commission, regaled a gathering of around 50 people at a talk cosponsored by the National Council of Jewish Women's Union County
