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: HNN Staff
3-14-07
Kimberly Kagan, Yale Ph.D., has been appointed by the Weekly Standard to provide readers with a fortnightly progress report on"the surge."
Her credentials are stellar. This is how she is described on the website of the Center for Peace and Security Studies, where she is an adjunct:
Kimberly Kagan is an Adjunct Pro
Source: Daily Record
3-8-07
A great book, like "Tess of the d'Urbervilles,"can be read on lots of levels, said professor Jonathan Rose, in his book-filled office at Drew University. In the 1920s some women looked down their noses at Thomas Hardy's 1891 novel about a peasant milkmaid.
"But housemaids bought it. They loved it," Rose said. "They saw it as an emancipating book because the heroine was a working class woman. So, what critics count?"
More readers may be turn
Source: Publisher's Weekly
3-12-07
Nixon and Kissinger:
Partners in Power
Robert Dallek. HarperCollins, $29.95 (752p) ISBN 978-0-06-072230-2
Bestselling author Dallek (An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy) delivers what will quickly become recognized as a classic of modern history: the definitive analysis of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger's complex, often troubled partnership in running American foreign policy from January 1969 through August 1974. Dallek has had unprecedented access to major new resource
Source: http://www.mcall.com/news/local
3-11-07
Award-winning historian Michael Beschloss will be the principal speaker at Lafayette College's 172nd commencement May 19 and will receive an honorary degree.
Beschloss is the author of nine books, including the New York Times best-seller ''The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945.'' His latest book, ''Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789-1989,'' is scheduled to be released in May.
Beschloss se
Source: Ernest W. Lefever in the Weekly Standard
3-19-07
ime magazine's April 20, 1962, cover story on Karl Barth announced that the great Swiss theologian would visit the United States for the first, and what turned out to be the only, time. Given Barth's well-known anti-American stance, the visit caused a stir in the White House. President Kennedy, then in his second year, was grappling daily with Soviet threats and Khrushchev's boasts. JFK had already suffered two serious Cold War reverses--the Bay of Pigs disaster in Cuba and Khrushchev's raising
Source: New Republic
3-12-07
Last year, New York University announced the creation of a new institute, The Center for the United States and the Cold War. There is nothing surprising about a major university establishing a center meant to explore and shed light on one of the defining periods of the past century. Indeed, a few such institutes already exist. Since 1991, the Wilson Center has run a first rate operation, The Cold War International History Project, which has hosted scores of conferences, with panels composed of m
Source: Elisabeth Grant at the AHA blog
3-11-07
Faith Jones, librarian in the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library, has been presented the ABC-CLIO Online History Award for her Yizkor Books Project. Yizkor, or memorial, books originally contained lists of names of Jews killed because of their religion. The first yizkor book dates back to 1296. In the 50’s, 60’s, and early 70’s, postwar yizkor books were produced, and
contained not only lists of names but also biographies, sketches, and essays. The books were written ma
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
3-13-07
After gently digging through a few boxes, and finding only letters and old memoranda, Kevin Anderson settles on Box No. 83 and opens the lid. In a file called "Afghanistan Guerrillas," on the back of a sheet of paper that says "Season's Greetings 1984," he finds what he has been looking for: a sample of his father's enigmatic, idiosyncratic shorthand.
The writing is that of Jack Anderson, author, with Drew Pearson, of the famous Washington Merry-Go-Round column t
Source: AHA Blog
3-11-07
Members of the American Historical Association have ratified the “Resolution on United States Government Practices Inimical to the Values of the Historical Profession.” The vote was 1,550 (75.61%) in favor and 498 (24.29%) opposed. Two persons submitted incomplete ballots. The number of voting members represented 14.67% of the AHA membership.
The
Resolution was originally accepted by the Council at the January 7, 2007 council
Source: cbs11tv.com (Dallas)
3-12-07
They had a date with destiny in Dealey Plaza. Three shots changed the course of history.
More than 43 years after the Kennedy assassination, some folks still wonder whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
Two people who have studied the facts believe a critical piece of evidence remains hidden at the scene.
The Zapruder Film documents two shots fired hit the president in Dealey Plaza. But eye witnesses heard three shots. Many have presumed it was the third
Source: Time Magazine
3-7-07
Princeton University's Elaine Pagels is about the nearest thing there is to a superstar in the realm of Christian history scholarship. It is largely through her work that many understand the early non-Orthodox Christianity that she at one point dubbed (and later un-dubbed, finding the term imprecise) the Gnostic Gospels. She breaks new ground with the debut of Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity, her collaboration with Harvard Divinity scholar Karen King about the
Source: The Hindu (Chennai, India)
3-13-07
FEROKE, Kerala, India -- The curtain came down on the three-day, 67th session of the Indian History Congress with a call to the Centre to free the Archaeological Survey of India and the National Archives of India from bureaucratic control.
A resolution adopted at the closing plenary here on Monday regretted the continuing tendency to place the administration of such organisations in the hands of government officials and keep professionals out of their helm.
Despite str
Source: NYT
3-12-07
When Conrad M. Black pleaded not guilty to criminal fraud charges in December 2005, a federal court in Chicago granted his request that he be defended by Edward L. Greenspan, one of the most famous criminal defense lawyers in Canada, where he is known by the nickname Fast Eddie.
But the court made Mr. Black sign a waiver acknowledging that he understood that his lawyer, for all his renown in Canada, does not know American law.
If he loses, Mr. Black, who faces more tha
Source: Robin Wilson in the Chronicle of Higher Education
3-12-07
David W. Saxe was mixing potato salad for a Fourth of July picnic last summer when he was interrupted by a telephone call from a Pennsylvania legislator. Lawmakers, Mr. Saxe learned, had just approved $500,000 to help him start a new center on civic education and America's founding.
Mr. Saxe, an associate professor of education at Pennsylvania State University's main campus, was shocked — not just to learn of his good fortune on such a historically important day but because he never
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
2-12-07
A history professor who has written controversially about Islam had an invitation to speak at George Mason University withdrawn, according to news reports, but the talk apparently will be rescheduled.
John D. Lewis, an assistant professor of history at Ashland University, in Ohio, had been scheduled to speak on February 28 on the topic "No Substitute for Victory: The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism."
But some Muslim students protested, according to the Assoc
Source: Fredric Smoler in American Heritage
3-12-07
The new counsel to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talks about the uses of history, in Iraq and everywhere else wars are fought.
Up to a point, Eliot A. Cohen’s curriculum vitae looks like that of many high-flying American academics: a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. at Harvard, academic posts at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, eight books, and so on. But he also was just named counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
He has been the director for Pacific and Atlantic issu
Source: Historian Michael Brooks at his blog
3-12-07
I interviewed Dr. Jacques Pluss last year after he was attacked by neo-Nazi groups. Pluss was once a member of the National Socialist Movement (NSM), and he left the group in a rather public fashion, claiming that he really joined in order to do research on the phenomenon of American neo-Nazism.
I thought at the time that Pluss was just another victim of the propaganda efforts of members and former members of the NSM, and believed him when he denied adhering to National Socialist ph
Source: Scott Wilson in the WaPo
3-11-07
LI-ON, Israel -- The path behind historian Benny Morris's house climbs through a cedar and pine forest, passing stone walls and wine presses dating to the time of the second Jewish Temple two millenniums ago. In the distance, the misty ridges of the Judean hills appear, the spine of the historic Jewish heartland.
Morris, a short, stout man of 58 with a fluff of graying curls, points to a patch of red-roofed houses where the Arab town of Ajjur once stood. Jewish forces destroyed it i
Source: Newsweek
3-12-07
Steve Prothero is the kind of professor who makes you want to go back to college. During an hour lecture of his Boston University course "Death and Immortality," 200 students sat rapt last week as his train of thought led him from the Docetics (early Christians who believed that Jesus was all-God, not flesh), to reincarnation, to Disney World, to Hindu cremation rituals, to Plato's account of Socrates' trial (the day's assigned reading), to "Beauty and the Beast," to a hypoth
Source: Newsweek
3-12-07
On a Saturday evening in Georgetown in late 1946, the columnist Joe Alsop was giving a dinner at his house in the 2700 block of Dumbarton. The guests were predictably drawn from the glamorous and the powerful; Supreme Court justices, ambassadors and influential journalists frequently came to Alsop's table. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., not yet 30 and already a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, was there, as were the Henry Cabot Lodges. Mrs. Lodge, Schlesinger noted in a letter to his parents, was &quo
