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: Harriet Washington, letter to the editor of the NYT Book Review
3-18-07
In 15 chapters and 501 well-annotated pages, my book “Medical Apartheid” offers a careful, nuanced discussion of trends, cases, problems, ethics and persistent patterns in the disparate treatment of black research subjects. However, Ezekiel Emanuel’s review (Feb. 18) ignores its rich content in order to claim that “Medical Apartheid” fails to place the experience of African-Americans in context. He dramatically misrepresents the work within an untrustworthy review that is rife with distortions,
Source: David Kahn on the op ed page of the NYT
3-19-07
EVERYBODY knows how to use a library. You look up the card catalogue in the computer, type in the subject, find the Dewey Decimal System number, walk to the shelf and get the book.
It’s different with an archive, where unpublished memorandums, reports, notes and letters are organized not by topic but by the agency that created them. You have to know which agency did the work you are interested in, and whether more than one was involved. The complexity of government means first-time
Source: Scott Jaschik at the website of Inside Higher Ed
3-19-07
A week after Ohio University announced that Thelma Wills Foote would become the next chair of African-American studies, with the rank of full professor, the university announced that she wouldn’t be coming to the university after all.
The second announcement followed an investigation into her publication record and the university’s conclusion that she claimed to have co-written a book in which her publicly noted contribution consists of only five paragraphs.
When Foote,
Source: Speech at Tokyo University
3-11-07
I was born in Israel and I had a very conventional, typical Israeli education, and life, until I finished my B.A. studies at Hebrew University, which was many years ago in the mid-1970s. Like all Israeli Jews, I knew very little on the Palestinian side, and met very few Palestinians. And although I was a very keen student of history, already in high-school ? I knew I would be a historian ? I was very loyal to the narrative that I was taught in school. I had very little doubt that what my teacher
Source: www.depauw.edu/news
3-18-07
"It looks like college used to look in the movies," Pulitzer Prize-winning author, historian and television host David McCullough said of his first visit to the campus of DePauw University. "It sort of looks like the college I dreamed I would go to someday," the author of John Adams and Harry Truman added as he wrapped up his day at DePauw, which he called a "rare and very welcome experience," with a Timothy and Sharon Ubben Lecture entitled "First Principles.&
Source: Barbara Yost in the Arizona Republic
3-19-07
Today's technology has proved to be a double-edged sword: There's no dispute that it has improved our lives, but it also has caused us to lose history as fast as we make it.
Correspondence is by e-mail; hit delete and it's wiped out. Thousands of photographs are taken; few are printed. Official records are increasingly digital.
With our fingers poised over the delete button, what will be left of our culture for historians?
Scientists say we have to take ste
Source: Times (of London) in an article titled: "Violence slashed as troop surge hits Baghdad"
3-19-07
Frederick Kagan, a military historian and leading advocate of the surge, said: “It is very early days but I’m very encouraged by what is happening. America only has two brigades out of five there and we haven’t even started our major operations yet. I had not expected this little resistance.”
Source: Jerome Weeks at ArtsJournal
3-15-07
The interview this morning on The Diane Rehm Show on NPR with Elliot Jaspin, author of Buried in the Bitter Waters: The History of Racial Cleansing in America was a little startling because of the general attitude of Mr. Jaspin and guest host Katty Kay of the BBC that the material they were discussing was completely unknown, had been widely and deliberately overlooked.
Mr. Jaspin's book examines the wave of mass extraditions, forced evictions of entire black communities by whites, w
Source: AP
3-16-07
Darrin McMahon still cannot define happiness after spending six years researching and writing a book about it.
While that has been a frustration, the Florida State University history professor said it is also what gives happiness its power and allure.
His book, "Happiness: A History," was recently named by The New York Times as one of the 100 notable books of 2006.
It traces what the great thinkers of Western philosophy have thought about happiness. Th
Source: Hankyoreh (South Korea)
3-17-07
"It is bizarre that Prime Minister Abe only speaks of whether or not the ‘comfort women’ were taken forcefully by the Japanese military. Wasn’t the very system of ‘comfort women’ one based upon sexual slavery?"
"Abe said that there were no violent abductions of women, but in fact there were. The 1994 report released by the Netherlands found such actions took place in at least eight separate locations."
An authority on the issue of the comfort women,
Source: http://www.isi.org/books
3-17-07
[Maxwell Goss is the editor of Right Reason,
the weblog for philosophical conservatism. He interviewed Mr. Nash in comnjunction with the 30th anniversary of the publication of Nash's The Conservative Intellectual
Movement in America Since 1945, which has been updated and re-issued.]
MG: Why did you choose to begin your history of American conservatism in
1945?
GN: My book was originally a doctoral dissertation in History at Harvard
University. While searching for a di
Source: NYT
3-18-07
oor Nigel Hamilton; he’s having a bad run of luck with big biographical projects. After publishing a respected three-volume biography of the British field marshal Bernard Montgomery, he embarked on the first book of a projected three-volume work on John F. Kennedy. “JFK: Reckless Youth” (1992) was a salacious but well-researched and insightful book about Kennedy’s early years. The experience of writing it, however, was so harrowing for Hamilton (he felt hazed by the “toadies” of the Kennedy fami
Source: Lee White in the newsletter of the National Coalition for History
3-16-07
On March 15, 2007, Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein testified
on the fiscal year (FY) 2008 budget for the National Archives and Records
Administration (NARA) before the House Appropriations’ Subcommittee on
Financial Services and General Government.In his prepared testimony, Dr. Weinstein said that under the President’s FY
2008 request, NARA would receive $312.8 million for operating expenses, an
increase of $33.5 million over FY 2007. The Elec
Source: Adam Hochschild in Mother Jones
3-14-07
Accompanying Henry Louis ("Skip") Gates Jr. across the Harvard
University campus is like following a beloved small-town mayor."Hi
Skip!""How're you doing, Skip?""How's that leg of yours, Skip?"—for
he is on crutches today. And he has a kind word for everybody. A young
woman approaches and greets him warmly; he gives her a friendly kiss
on the cheek; they laugh and chat; we walk on, and he jokes,"Sexual
harassment!" Then, barely missing a beat, exuberantly, with her still
in earshot,"She's
Source: Newswise
3-15-07
Today’s war on drugs is not the first battle America has fought against addiction. In her new book, University of Missouri-Rolla historian Dr. Diana Ahmad examines the opium-smoking epidemic of the mid-19th century and finds that Chinese immigrants weren’t the problem, as is commonly believed.
The book, “The Opium Debate and Chinese Exclusion Laws,” was published this month by the University of Nevada Press.
Ahmad, who is associate professor of history and UMR’s archivi
Source: WaPo
3-15-07
Benis M. Frank, 82, a Marine Corps chief historian who started the military branch's oral history program, died March 10 at Prince George's Hospital Center. He had congestive heart failure.
Mr. Frank, a Bowie resident, was a Marine Corps veteran of World War II and the Korean War and rose to the rank of captain in the Marine Corps Reserve.
After a career in sales and teaching, he joined the Marine Corps as a civilian in 1961. He worked in the History and Museums Divisio
Source: Budapestsun.com
3-14-07
David Irving, the convicted British holocaust denier, arrived in Budapest on Monday, March 12, at the invitation of publishers, Sándor and Tibor Gede, to launch the Hungarian-language version of his book Nurnberg - The Last Battle.
Due to remain in Hungary for one week for book signing events, Irving is expected to speak at the extreme-right Hungarian Justice and Life Party (MIÉP) party rally on March 15. Following an appeal, Irving was released on probation from an Austrian prison
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
3-16-07
A glance at the current issue of The American Interest: "The American Dream Extreme"
The "American dream" today is much different than it was in 1931, when the historian James Truslow Adams coined the term, writes Paul Knox, a professor of urban affairs and planning at Virginia Tech. As the term's meaning has evolved, he says, "suburbia" has transformed into "vulgaria."
The original American dream stressed "individual freedom
Source: Irwin Stelzer in the Weekly Standard
3-12-07
Anyone who thinks President George W. Bush is spending sleepless nights worrying about the machinations of the Democratic Congress, or figuring out how a lame duck president can limp from the political battlefield with honor intact, had better think again. And anyone who likes to regale his friends with references to that illiterate cowboy in the White House is due for some considerable embarrassment when the nonpartisan studies of the Bush years begin to hit the bookshops.
Those ar
Source: BBC
3-14-07
Today, with the spring sun trying to burn through an early morning Belgian mist, it is hard to imagine that this innocuous looking potato field was once the hellish moonscape of the front line.
By the end of World War I life on the surface had become untenable. Tons of steel fell from the sky in a near continuous bombardment.
The Germans retreated into thick concrete pillboxes. The British dug further and further underground.
Today we often pict
