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: Radio Free Europe
4-23-07
Academics in Turkey, where it is illegal to "offend Turkishness," widely object to the characterization of the mass killings of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey from 1915-18 as "genocide." While it is accepted that killings took place during the relocation of Armenians within the Ottoman Empire during World War I, many Turkish scholars do not believe they were the result of a deliberate campaign. RFE/RL spoke with some prominent Turkish historians and lawmakers to hear their take.
Source: Press Release -- Bowling Green
4-25-07
America has long had a love-hate relationship with the corporation. While a symbol of wealth and capitalism, business has also been viewed as impersonal and greedy, trampling the rights of the common man.
While most historians view corporate power first arising in 19th-century America, a new book by Dr. Andrew Schocket of Bowling Green State University makes the case that the very fabric of American society has been interwoven with corporate involvement from the earliest days of the
Source: Slate
4-24-07
"I've just won the Pulitzer and you're sending me to Buffalo?" David Halberstam said in 1964 to Arthur Gelb, his editor at the New York Times.
Halberstam also crumpled and handed back to Gelb the assignment sheet containing the details for the overnight trip he had written. Only 30 years old, Halberstam found the idea of covering a state Democratic Party "showdown" as beneath him, Gelb writes in his memoir, City Room.
The arrogant reporter made the t
Source: AP
4-24-07
In the pre-dawn hours of Nov. 23, 1963, Associated Press photographer Horst Faas gathered his gear, left his house in Saigon and climbed aboard a U.S. Army helicopter, one of a fleet carrying hundreds of South Vietnamese troops on a combat operation in the Mekong Delta.
He didn’t bother to wake David Halberstam, the tall, rangy New York Times reporter with whom Faas shared the villa, and who was the acknowledged leader of the small foreign press corps covering the early stages of th
Source: http://media.www.nyunews.com
4-23-07
The first American anti-imperialists came far before the Bush administration entered Iraq.
Cultural historian Jackson Lears explained the importance of America's anti-imperialist tradition Thursday night at the Silver Center in a lecture titled "The Anti-Imperial Tradition," sponsored by Steinhardt's Department of Culture and Communication Studies.
Lears is this year's visiting scholar for the Phyllis and Gerald LeBoff Distinguished Visiting Scholar Program, w
Source: http://timesunion.com
4-23-07
Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, presidential historian and rabid Red Sox fan Doris Kearns Goodwin was understandably distracted.
The doorbell had somehow stuck at her Concord, Mass., home, and she was shouting questions to her husband, Richard Goodwin, about the problem and preparing to leave for Fenway Park for a pre-game party before Friday night's start of a home stand against the archrival New York Yankees.
In advance of Tuesday's visit to Albany for a talk about Abrah
Source: CommonDreams.org
4-24-07
[CommonDreams.org] Editor’s Note: This piece was submitted, coincidentally on the day of Mr. Halberstam’s untimely and unfortunate death, by Common Dreams reader Dick Atlee with the following note:
“I thought this might be of interest to you. It appeared in Parade Magazine almost exactly 25 years ago, written by David Halberstam 20 years after he arrived in Vietnam on the way to becoming one of the premier journalists of the time. It was written as a letter to his (at the time) 2-ye
Source: NYT
4-24-07
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was remembered yesterday as a pre-eminent historian, a lifelong liberal and a father who danced with his daughter and watched Sergeant Bilko with a son.
At a memorial service in the Great Hall at Cooper Union, in Lower Manhattan, historians, diplomats and a former president mingled with surviving New Frontiersmen of the Kennedy White House to recall the lasting contributions of Mr. Schlesinger, who died on Feb. 28 at the age of 89. The event filled the 900-
Source: NYT
4-24-07
The current war in Iraq is mentioned only once in Robert Dallek’s engrossing new book, “Nixon and Kissinger,” and yet the reader cannot help regarding his account of the Nixon White House and its handling of the Vietnam War as a kind of parable about the presidency of George W. Bush and its determination to stay the course in Iraq.
Indeed, Mr. Dallek seems to have taken up the much-written-about subject of Richard M. Nixon and his national security adviser (and later secretary of st
Source: NYT
4-24-07
David Halberstam, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and tireless author of books on topics as varied as America’s military failings in Vietnam, the deaths of firefighters at the World Trade Center and the high-pressure world of professional basketball, was killed yesterday in a car crash south of San Francisco. He was 73, and lived in Manhattan.
Mr. Halberstam was a passenger in a car making a turn in Menlo Park, Calif., when it was hit broadside by another car and knocked into a
Source: NYT/AP
4-23-07
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist David Halberstam was killed in a car crash Monday, a county coroner said. He was 73.
Halberstam, a New Yorker who chronicled the Washington press corps, the Vietnam War generation and baseball, was a passenger in a car broadsided by another vehicle near the Dumbarton Bridge in Menlo Park, south of San Francisco, according to San Mateo County Coroner Robert Foucrault.
The accident occurred around 10:30 a.m. and the driver of t
Source: http://www.rxpgnews.com
4-21-07
The Archaeological Survey of India - has created a park between the main Taj Mahal structure and the Yamuna river to beautify the complex but a prominent Mughal historian says it can endanger the 17th century monument.
D.D. Dayalan, the ASI chief in Agra, says: 'We have beautified the riverfront which was earlier an eyesore, with litter thrown all around. Visitors were always throwing all kinds of things from the main platform of the Taj.'
But noted historian Prof R. N
Source: http://www.pr-inside.com
4-22-07
Eminent Food Historian Caroline Yeldham today encourages the revival of extinct English recipes using English fresh produce and calls on people to learn how to cook them. The comments come as England celebrates St. George's Day, which was declared an English feast day in the 15th Century.
Medieval cookery was the basis of modern European cuisine. However, only a dozen known original medieval recipe texts remain, of which fewer than five are in hard copy print. Only two of the UK's 193 hig
Source: Chicago Maroon (Student newspaper, U. of Chicago)
4-20-07
Dr. Benny Morris, an Israeli historian and professor at Ben Gurio University of the Negev, gave a talk entitled “Nuclear Iran: Second Holocaust?” in the Social Sciences building on Wednesday Morris’s discussion centered on Iran’s purported aim to use nuclea weapons to destroy the state of Israel. Around 100 students attende the event, sponsored by the Chicago Friends of Israel
Morris contended that the situation was a clash of civilizations and that Israel and the West are f
Source: http://www.berkeleydaily.org
4-20-07
Images of a young Jimmy Hendrix setting his guitar ablaze flickered across the screen at the UC Berkeley Wheeler Auditorium on Wednesday. The film Berkeley in the ’60s was not just entertainment for the some hundred students from History 7B (American History since 1865)—it was classwork.
“When I sat on the advisory committee for this movie in 1990, it was History 7B who viewed it for the first time,” said Leon Litwack, the professor who, after teaching the class for decades is teaching it
Source: AP
4-22-07
... Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, whose January report on changing the U.S. military strategy in Iraq was largely adopted as part of Bush's new approach to the war, said in an interview Thursday that it appears the administration believes it will have to sustain the troop buildup much longer.
"They seem to be taking the steps that would make it possible to sustain it for longer, which is good," Kagan said. "But they seem to be reluctant to comm
Source: Steven Plaut at FrontpageMag.com (Note: The original article includes links to the sources cited in the text.)
4-23-07
[Steven Plaut is a professor at the Graduate School of the Business Administration at the University of Haifa and is a columnist for the Jewish Press. A collection of his commentaries on the current events in Israel can be found on his "blog" at www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com.]
Academic hiring and promotion processes are mysterious procedures poorly understood by the public. While supposedly designed to ensure quality contro
Source: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/
4-20-07
The authors of two acclaimed books, a biography chronicling the life of William James and an ecological history of the American South, have won the Bancroft Prize for 2007: Robert D. Richardson for William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Houghton Mifflin) and Jack Temple Kirby for Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South (University of North Carolina).
One of the most coveted honors in the field of history, the Bancroft is awarded annually by the Trustees
Source: NEH website
4-19-07
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) today announced that 182 successful applicants will receive a total of $16.7 million in grants or offers of matching funds for projects designed to advance research in the humanities, provide high quality public programming in museums and libraries, strengthen and enrich humanities education, preserve our most important cultural resources, and provide greater access to them. Fifty-four of the successful grants announced today are design
Source: AP/MSNBC
4-17-07
PBS has hired a Hispanic documentarian to assist filmmaker Ken Burns with his upcoming World War II series, which had drawn complaints for failing to include the contributions of Hispanics.
Hector Galan, a film and television producer from Austin, Texas, will be brought in to assist Burns with the 14-hour series, which has already been produced and is scheduled for release in September.
Burns and PBS President Paula Kerger announced Galan’s hiring during a private meeti
