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: NYT
3-8-07
Winthrop D. Jordan, a National Book Award-winning historian who wrote several influential works on American slavery and race relations, died on Feb. 23 at his home in Oxford, Miss. He was 75.
The cause was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, said his wife, Cora.
At his death, Dr. Jordan was emeritus professor of history and African-American studies at the University of Mississippi, where he taught from 1982 until his retirement in 2004.
Source: Times (UK)
3-8-07
Nobody who met David Rattray, the internationally renowned historian of the Anglo-Zulu war, ever forgot him and nobody who heard his stories ever forgot them either. For the hundreds of Times readers who will have heard him speak, as he so often did, at the Royal Geographical Society in London, or who will have sat at the base of that brooding sphinx-shaped mountain that stands guard at Isandlwana as he unfolded the tale of that long-ago battle, the news of his murder at his farmhouse at Fugitiv
Source: http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/
3-7-07
In 1912, something very bad happened in Forsyth County. But if you live in Atlanta -- and rely on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for information – you may have found out about it just seven weeks ago.
What occurred during the intervening 95 years has a lot to do with the South's collective amnesia over its racial sins. And, according to a new book by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, the AJC has contributed over the years to the memory loss.
The book – Buried in th
Source: NYT
3-8-07
In December 1989, one month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, President George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev met in Malta and, in the words of a Soviet spokesman, “buried the cold war at the bottom of the Mediterranean.”
The Russian transcript of that momentous summit was published in Moscow in 1993. Fourteen years later American historians are still waiting for their own government to release a transcript.
Now lawmakers and scholars are hoping to pry open the gatew
Source: WSJ
3-7-07
"No intellectual phenomenon has been more surprising in recent years than the revival in the United States of conservatism as a respectable social philosophy."
Thus wrote that lion of American liberalism, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., in 1955, long before the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions. Here was a historian whose understanding of the past afforded him remarkable perspective on the future.
Schlesinger's death last week at 89 raises the question of whether the
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
3-7-07
[Norman Birnbaum is a professor emeritus at Georgetown University Law Center and a member of the editorial board of The Nation. His books include After Progress: American Social Reform and European Socialism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2001), and he is at work on a memoir.]
first met Arthur when I came to Harvard as a graduate student in sociology, in 1947, and I had the good fortune to see a lot of him. From 1949 to 1952, I was a resident tutor at Adams Hous
Source: Letter to the Editor of the NYT
3-4-07
In “A Push for Citizenship for Anne Frank” (news article, Feb. 26), I am quoted as contending that granting honorary citizenship to Anne Frank would be a “pointless” gesture.
During the late 1930s and early ’40s, European Jewish refugees, among them the Frank family, who lived in terribly precarious circumstances, found that there were “paper walls” around America’s shores.
They faced horrendous bureaucratic obstacles, some of which were put in place by our government w
Source: http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen
3-6-07
Michael Katz has established himself as one of the United States' pre-eminent historians of social change, delving into education, urbanization, family life, and poverty in a distinguished career at the University of Pennsylvania.
Mr. Katz, who previously taught at York University and the University of Toronto, co-wrote the 2006 book One Nation Indivisible: What America Was and What It Is Becoming. In the book, he and Mark Stern discuss his country's demographic, social and geograph
Source: http://www.journalstar.com
3-6-07
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln has sued the Department of Homeland Security in a ramped-up effort to bring a long-awaited hire to the United States.
UNL filed a lawsuit Friday in U.S. District Court asking a judge demand federal officials to consider the visa petition of Waskar Ari, a Bolivian professor hired by UNL in 2005 to teach courses on Latin American history.
Ari has been stuck at home in La Paz for nearly two years as officials stall approval of his work vi
Source: Jewish Journal
3-6-07
The view from Daniel Pipes' front porch in Malibu is "California Dreamin'" perfect. With the Pacific stretching beyond the horizon, the vista induces a Zen-like calm. If the scholar's striped cotton shirt and khakis betray his Boston roots, Pipes' barely audible voice and gentle demeanor suggest that he has gone native just weeks after his arrival as a visiting professor this semester at Pepperdine University.
But Pipes' words are not so laid-back. The 57-year-old Harvard-
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
3-6-07
A historian of the European Middle Ages is among the six winners of the 2007 Dan David Prize, to be presented in Paris on Thursday. The prize honors scientific, technological, and humanistic achievements, and is awarded in three categories for achievements related to the past, present, and future.
Jacques Le Goff will receive the $1-million prize for achievements that benefit understanding of the past, in recognition of contributions to his discipline over the past half century. Mr.
Source: Martin Kramer at his blog, Sandstorm
3-5-07
[Martin Kramer is the Wexler-Fromer fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and the Olin Institute at Harvard. He is the author of Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America.]
The British historian Robert Irwin is the sort of scholar who, in times past, would have been proud to call himself an Orientalist.
The traditional Orientalist was someone who mastered difficult languag
Source: Poughkeepsie Journal
3-3-07
While he is most closely associated with the Kennedys, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who died Wednesday, was also a Roosevelt insider who served in the Office of War Information and Office of Strategic Services and chronicled the life of the Hyde Park president.
"Arthur Schlesinger is kind of unique," said David Woolner, a professor of U.S. history at Marist College in Poughkeepsie and executive director of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute.
"He's
Source: Tartan (Carnegie-Mellon University), "Pillbox"
3-5-07
“When students tell me that women’s history is no longer a valid field, I don’t know whether to weep, cut my throat, or shake them until they wake up,” said Gerda Lerner, who is credited as one of the first pioneers of women’s history. Lerner gave a lecture last Wednesday as the inaugural speaker for the Margaret Morrison Distinguished Lecture in Women’s History Series.
Lerner has not only devoted her life to raising awareness of women’s history in America; she’s lived through harro
Source: BBC
3-5-07
The death has been announced in Paris of one of the greatest figures in modern French literature, the writer Henri Troyat, at the age of 95.
He was the author of more than 100 works of fiction, history and biography - the most recent published a year ago.
Mr Troyat was born into an Armenian family in Moscow, but his businessman father fled the Russian revolution, and the family eventually settled in Paris.
He wrote in French but many of his works dealt
Source: David Glenn in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
3-9-07
Yanek Mieczkowski, an associate professor of history at Dowling College, published his first monograph in 2005 — a study of economic and energy policy during Gerald Ford's administration.
He would like to carry his study forward into the Carter and Reagan eras, but he is daunted by the obstacles that lie ahead. Only 18 percent of the 44 million documents at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library have been processed.
If Mr. Mieczkowski wants to search for material in unp
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
3-9-07
Timothy Naftali talks about his new venture with the kind of on-message enthusiasm one expects from an Internet-age entrepreneur. He's excited about the "edgy and catchy" new logo, the retro 70s colors of the new Web site, and the user-driven experience he hopes to provide. "I want to bombard people with the new," he says. "We're moving fast. We're an entrepreneurial start-up, and we have a lot of energy. It's great, it's great."
Mr. Naftali is not pois
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
3-5-07
Back in July, Stacy Schiff of The New Yorker profiled a Wikipedia administrator called Essjay as part of a sprawling piece on the open-source encyclopedia. To many scholars who read the piece, Essjay was a fascinating figure -- a "tenured professor of religion at a private university" who not only edited articles on penitential rites and transubstantiation but also corrected errors in Wikipedia's write-up of Justin Timberlake.
But as it turns out, Essjay's story was a bit
Source: Independent (UK)
3-5-07
For decades, the female sitter in this 16th-century miniature painting remained unidentified. But after investigating the woman's jewellery, the historian David Starkey is now convinced this is the only known portrait of Lady Jane Grey painted during her lifetime to have survived.
It may have been produced when Lady Jane, the queen who ruled for nine days, was living in royal lodgings at the Tower of London where, instead of being crowned, she was executed in February 1554.
Source: Daniel Pipes at FrontpageMag.com
3-5-07
Tariq Ramadan accuses me of lying, a charge I take seriously. But, as so often is the case with Islamists and other totalitarians, the accuser himself stands accused.Ramadan sat in the audience during my debate with Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, on January 20, 2007, and heard me call on Westerners to help build a moderate Islam. Addressing the mayor, I suggested (as can be read in the transcript,"
