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: Altercation (blog) (Click on the SOURCE link to see embedded links in this excerpt)
4-30-07
In his Times Select-only column, here, Frank Rich writes of David Halberstam: "He did so despite public ridicule from the dean of that era's Georgetown punditocracy, the now forgotten columnist (and Vietnam War cheerleader) Joseph Alsop. It was Alsop's spirit, not Halberstam's, that could be seen in C-Span's live broadcast of the correspondents' dinner last Saturday, two days before Halberstam's death in a car crash in California. This fete is a crystallization of the press's failures in th
Source: Nation
4-24-07
[James C. Davis, Professor Emeritus of Italian History at the University of Pennsylvania.]
You find it hard to keep them straight? Well, here they are: the candidates.
In ’04 John Edwards ran for Veep. (Instead we got the surly creep.)
We used to say that Gore’s a bore. On warming, though, he knows the score.
The joint will jump if we choose Hill. (First Gent will be the randy Bill.)
Obama warned, “Avoid Iraq!” McCain says, “Beat ‘
Source: Voice of America
4-30-07
... Frederick Kagan, a military historian and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, says al-Qaida insurgents have increased their attacks in an effort to undermine the Baghdad security plan and erode support for the war in the United States.
"The al-Qaida surge is very serious," said Frederick Kagan. "It is very significant. It is altering the situation in Iraq in unpredictable ways. It is clearly further eroding America's will to stay the course her
Source: Juliana Geron Pilon at the website of the National Interest Online
3-1-07
IF MORAL clarity graced our times, the publication of Paul Hollander’s comprehensive compilation of first-hand accounts by former communist victims, From the Gulag to the Killing Fields, would elicit a collective shudder of horror and sorrow.
“Systematic evil at work: evil without conscience.” So does Harvard University professor Harvey Mansfield describe the grotesque crimes the selections illustrate. The book provides “an indispensable experience for the understanding of our times
Source: Daily Star (Beirut)
4-28-07
[Mr. Young is the opinion editor of the paper.]
... Halberstam's work on Vietnam [in a sense] was just an earlier rendition of American writing on Iraq today: a foreign adventure that allows Americans to write mostly about other Americans. Along with "The Best and the Brightest," Neil Sheehan's "A Bright Shining Lie," Michel Herr's "Dispatches," and Frank Snepp's "Decent Interval" are all outstanding books about America in Vietnam - and there
Source: Times (of London)
4-29-07
It was a brutal murder, even by the standards of South Africa. The world-famous historian and storyteller David Rattray, a friend of Prince Charles, is shot at close range in his home. The police, the family and the government insist the motive is robbery — but there is new evidence that much darker forces are at work....
Most white farmers in the region fear that land is the real reason that he was killed. The ANC government, sensing its popularity declining among the poorest black
Source: Gary Shapiro in the New York Sun
4-30-07
Mark Moyar doesn't exactly fit the stereotype of a disappointed job seeker. He is an Eagle Scout who earned a summa cum laude degree from Harvard, graduating first in the history department before earning a doctorate at the University of Cambridge in England. Before he had even begun graduate school, he had published his first book and landed a contract for his second book. Distinguished professors at Harvard and Cambridge wrote stellar letters of recommendation for him.
Yet over fi
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
4-30-07
After hearing a day and a half of testimony, a federal judge on Thursday abruptly dismissed a lawsuit brought against Temple University by a former student who alleged that his professors retaliated against him for his political views.
The student, Christian M. DeJohn, sued the university and two of his professors in February 2006, contending that the professors had thwarted his efforts to finish a master's degree in history after he complained about receiving "antiwar" e-
Source: http://www.nola.com
4-30-07
It's amazing to me that it is taking ThyssenKrupp so long to decide where it will locate its new steel plant. There's only one logical place in the American South for such a plant: Louisiana's "German Coast."
A pair of UNO history professors recently made the connection between our German history and our potential German future and noted that the St. James Parish site the company is considering adjoins the German Coast area.
"Have Governor Blanco and her
Source: Anthony Grafton in the Daily Princetonian
4-30-07
I'm at Cambridge, the one across the pond, spying on a different kind of academic life. It's not the first time I've had the chance to do this. Back in 1983-84, my family and I spent a year in Oxford, where I was a visiting fellow at Pembroke College.
Before this fall, though, I enjoyed many pleasant lunches in the Senior Common Room but otherwise kept my head down. I spent long weekdays working in the magnificent Bodleian Library and long weekends having fun with my family, he
Source: http://www.concernedjournalists.org
4-24-07
Like a Tahitian pearl diver, the world of entry level newspaper jobs was his oyster when David Halberstam graduated from Harvard in 1955 after spending his senior year as managing editor of The Harvard Crimson.
But unlike many of his peers who quickly grabbed offers in New York and Washington, David went South, Deep South, to the smallest paper in Mississippi. It was the kind of decision that always set him apart from other journalists.
We all eventually came to recogni
Source: NYT
4-27-07
Emily W. Sunstein, an independent scholar known for writing biographies of an unconventional mother and her unconventional daughter — Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley — died on Saturday in Philadelphia. She was 82 and had lived in Philadelphia for many years.
The cause was complications of autoimmune vasculitis, an inflammation of the blood vessels, her daughter Kay Hymowitz said.
Ms. Sunstein’s first biography, “A Different Face: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft,” w
Source: Nathanael D. Robinson at Cliopartia (HNN Blog)
4-26-07
Bronislaw Geremek, French historian and Polish politician, may lose his seat in the European Parliament: he refuses to sign a statement, per a new Polish law, declaring that he did not collaborate with secret state police during the communist era. He has resisted because, first, he already signed a st
Source: Jon Meacham in Newsweek
4-24-07
It was the spring of 1955, a year after Brown vs. Board of Education, and David Halberstam wanted to be where the action was. Fresh from Harvard College, he set out for the Deep South, for a reporter’s job on the paper in tiny West Point, Miss. The South did not get any deeper, nor newspapers any tinier, than in West Point. But the story did not get any bigger, either. Halberstam, who had grown up in New York, understood that a war was under way in the streets of the South and in the hearts
Source: National Interest
4-26-07
En route to Moscow to serve as Ambassador Averell Harriman’s minister-counselor in June 1944, George F. Kennan spent two miserable days in Baghdad. Musing on America potentially supplanting Britain as the dominant Western power in the region, he wrote in his diary:
“Are we willing to bear this responsibility? I know—and every realistic American knows—that we are not. Our government is technically incapable of conceiving and promulgating a long-term consistent policy toward areas rem
Source: http://www.stuff.co.nz
4-27-07
The $1.6 million spent on the Government's TREATY 2U Treaty of Waitangi roadshow have been largely wasted, Auckland University of Technology (AUT) history professor Paul Moon said yesterday.
Professor Moon said he was concerned that public money was still being poured into the programme even though the public's reaction has been one of almost complete disinterest.
"There is no business case to support this roadshow continuing," Prof Moon said.
"The numbe
Source: http://www.todayszaman.com
4-25-07
Yusuf Halacoglu of the Turkish Historical Society (TTK) and historian David Gaunt of Sodertorns University College in Sweden in a collaborative effort opened a mass grave on Monday in the southeastern town of Nusaybin, which Armenian historians say may contain the remains of victims of the alleged 1915 genocide of Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire.
Nevertheless the endeavor didn't seem to be satisfactory for Gaunt, who refused to collect earth or bone samples from the gra
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
4-26-07
On April 26, 2007, the National Coalition for History, the American Historical Association, and twenty other organizations wrote to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein to express concerns about the possible destruction of records relating to the cases of detainees being held at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A recent federal court Protective Order concerning the case records could possibly be interpreted to authorize or direct t
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
4-27-07
On Tuesday, April 24, 2007, Dr. Robert M. Warner, sixth Archivist of the United States, died after a long battle with cancer.
Dr. Warner served as Archivist of the United States from 1980 through 1985, leading the agency during one of the most important periods in its history: the transformation from a division of the General Services Administration (GSA) to an independent executive agency.
His four-year fight for independence was won on October 19, 1984, when President Ronal
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
4-27-07
The unexpected death this week of David Halberstam left a sudden vacancy at the commencement podium of Brandeis University, where the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer was to have delivered a graduation address on May 20. But Brandeis has quickly come up with a substitute: Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times columnist and the recipient of three Pulitzers, will speak instead, the university announced on Thursday. Mr. Friedman will be a busy man that weekend. On May 19 he will deliver the commencem
