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: Telegraph (UK)
11-20-06
A Muslim organisation said yesterday that one of its founders had made a "grave mistake" when he sent money and letters of support to the historian David Irving, jailed this year in Austria for Holocaust denial.
Asghar Bukhari, a former chief executive of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC), which describes itself as a civil liberties group, admitted sending a donation to help Irving fight a libel case in 2000.
Mr Bukhari said he now realised that Irvin
Source: David Pryce-Jones in the Literary Review (UK)
11-1-06
Ilan Pappe is an Israeli academic who has made his name by hating Israel and everything it stands for. In his view, expressed with obsession and a degree of paranoia, Jewish nationalism, that is to say Zionism, has been from its outset a deliberate tool for dispossessing the Palestinians; and therefore it is to be condemned root and branch. He reserves the Palestinian term of Nakba, meaning catastrophe, for describing what to Israelis is their war of independence of 1948. To him, Israeli politic
Source: Letters to the Editor of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East
11-12-06
Sir, -
Neve Gordon's "Anti-Israeli? You just don't like what I say" (November 8) was a cut-and-paste of an earlier letter he wrote to the National Catholic Reporter. It was full of lies, as was his op-ed.
Instead of answering why he seeks to stifle the free speech of Prof. Steven Plaut, Gordon turns around again - as he always does - and says I tried to stifle Norman Finkelstein's free speech. I didn't, and, as I
explained in my original op-ed, I've r
Source: Yahoo
11-17-06
Selecting the nation's best Thomas Jefferson impersonator came down to a coin toss — a Jefferson head nickel, of course.
Clay Jenkinson, a Dickinson State University scholar and host of a weekly radio show about Jefferson, was declared the winner Wednesday on "The Colbert Report," a satirical news show on the Comedy Central channel.
Jenkinson appeared with two other Jefferson impersonators, Bill Barker and Steven Edenbo.
Steve Colbert, the show's
Source: Mark Benjamin at Salon.com
11-17-06
In late 2005, three Washington insiders with foreign policy expertise were summoned to a meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice -- a little-known event that may end up changing the course of the war in Iraq. The three men were working to help Rep. Frank Wolf, who wanted to create an independent panel to overhaul the Bush administration's strategy in Iraq, after a recent trip there left the Virginia Republican worried that the war was headed from bad to worse.
The three m
Source: New York Sun
11-16-06
A group of Barnard College alumnae is attempting to stop their alma mater from giving tenure to an assistant professor who minimizes Jews' historical connection to Israel.
In her 2001 book, "Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society," published by the University of Chicago, the professor of anthropology, Nadia Abu El-Haj says Israeli archaeology manipulates evidence to justify a modern Jewish state in the region.
Source: Bruce Craig in the newsletter of the National Coalition for History
11-16-06
During a private awards ceremony held on 9 November in the Oval Office of the White House President George Bush presented the 2006 National Humanities Medals and National Medals of the Arts. Ten of the 20 winners were academics, of which several are historians.
The academics who were awarded humanities medals are: Fouad Ajami, professor and director of the Middle East Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University, James M. Buchanan, a professor emeritus of Economics at George Mason Un
Source: Ethics Daily
11-16-06
Religion historian Mark Noll has been honored with the National Humanities Medal at a White House ceremony.
A prominent scholar in American religious and cultural history, Noll became a history professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana this fall. Noll, who previously taught at Wheaton College in Illinois, is the co-author of The Search for Christian America and the author of other books, including The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, The Rise of Evangelicalism and The Civil War as
Source: Bruce Craig in the newsletter of the National Coalition for History
11-16-06
The Executive Committee of the National Coalition for History is pleased to announce that an "enthusiastic and unanimous agreement" has been reached in the selection of a new Executive Director for the National Coalition for History to replace R. Bruce Craig who is moving to Canada at the end of the year. He is Leland J. White, currently Director of Government Relations for the National Society of Professional Engineers.
Mr. White is an attorney with nearly twenty years ex
Source: Email to HNN by William L. Ramsey, assistant professor of history at the University of Idaho
11-15-06
Fundamentalist Pastor Douglas Wilson of Moscow, Idaho, may have fallen short in his first attempt to overturn the last fifty years of academic scholarship on slavery, which he has described variously as “abolitionist propaganda” and “civil rights propaganda,” but he intends to win the war. A supportive comment from Eugene Genovese on the back cover of Wilson’s new self-published book on slavery, Black and Tan, appears to be the center- piece of the new battle plan.
The “blurb” has
Source: Scott Jaschik at the website of Inside Higher Ed
11-15-06
The University of Tennessee Press has suspended all sales and recalled all stock of Captain Henry Wirz and Andersonville Prison: A Reappraisal, which was published this fall, after the author acknowledged “grave oversights” in crediting another author for material.
R. Fred Ruhlman, the author of the book that is being pulled, teaches history as an adjunct at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. University officials said they were awaiting a full investigation by the press bef
Source: Email circulating on the Internet
11-15-06
The Democracy Caucus is a group within the new SDS/Movement for a Democratic
Society. Our name itself suggests that something is deeply wrong. MDS Inc.
(no kidding!), a corporation overseen by former Weatherperson Bruce
Rubenstein, has
substituted itself for an actual MDS and is governed, as corporations are,
from the top down, without member input: indeed there are no members. Its
function is to raise money and to surrender all critical s
Source: NYT
11-15-06
Two historians, John Hope Franklin and Yu Ying-shih, will share this year’s $1 million John W. Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanity.
It’s the prize that Alfred Nobel forgot. In 2000 Mr. Kluge, the billionaire, gave $73 million to the Library of Congress for a scholarly center and other projects, which now include the million-dollar prize. The award was specifically intended for areas that the Nobel Prizes do not cover, like history, political science, sociology, philosophy, anthro
Source: Chattanooga Times Free Press
11-13-06
A New Hampshire author is alleging a University of Tennessee at Chattanooga adjunct instructor used plagiarized material in his recently published book.
William Marvel, an author of several Civil War books, said Fred Ruhlman’s book, “Captain Henry Wirz and Andersonville Prison,” contains several instances of unattributed material from his 1994 book, “Andersonville: The Last Depot.”
The University of Tennessee Press has suspended all sales of Dr. Ruhlman’s book because o
Source: NYT
11-14-06
S. Lane Faison Jr., an art historian who cut his teeth cataloging Hitler’s collection of plundered paintings, then, as a Williams College professor, inspired students who went on to head many of America’s leading art institutions, died on Saturday at his home in Williamstown, Mass. He was 98.
Morton Owen Schapiro, the president of Williams, who announced the death, said his “legacy will forever be spread far and wide through the countless students he turned on to art.”
Source: http://www.eveningsun.com
11-12-06
The crowd gathered and waited for the tall, bearded figure to appear.
Town dignitaries clustered near the platform, anxious to hear what President Abraham Lincoln might have to say that November day in 1863.
A cheer went up for the president as he prepared to speak.
"I suppose you have all seen me and according to my past experience, you have not seen as much as you expected to see," Lincoln began.
The joke about his personal appearan
Source: Bruce Craig in Perspectives, the newsmagazine of the AHA
11-1-06
In a meeting with representatives of the research community in September 2006, Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein reported on the progress being made in the effort to implement the National Declassification Initiative (NDI), a new set of policies, declassification practices, procedures, and the organizational structure believed to be needed to create a more reliable executive branch-wide declassification program for federal records. The archivist said, "When we last met in April
Source: Linda Kerber, president of the AHA, in Perspectives
11-1-06
Embracing a recommendation of the recently formed Disability History Association, the AHA Council has added a new category to the checklist of specialties that is part of our membership form. Like African American history and women’s history, which were included in the membership taxonomy formulated in the 1970s, the history of disability is a rapidly growing field that has been embraced by a wide range of historians, including some who are themselves part of the subject they study.
Source: Announcement from the Cold War International History Project/Woodrow Wilson Center about an upcoming lecture by Chris Tudda, author of The Truth is Our Weapon: The Rhetorical Diplomacy of Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. The lecture will take
11-14-06
President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, deployed a tactic Chris Tudda calls "rhetorical diplomacy"-sounding a belligerent note of anti-Communism in speeches, addresses, press conferences, and private meetings with allies and with Moscow. Yet all the while, Tudda discloses, the two were confidentially committed to a contradictory course-the establishment of a strong system of collective security in Western Europe, peaceful accommodation of the Sovi
Source: Middle East Studies Aassociation
11-13-06
Honorable Nouri Kamal al-Maliki
Prime Minister of the Republic of Iraq
c/o The Embassy of Iraq
1801 P Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20036 USA
Fax: (202) 462-5066 Dear Prime Minister al-Maliki: We write to you on behalf of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) and the American
Association of University (AAUP) to express our grave concern over the killing of two of Iraq's
most prominent academics: Isam al-Rawi, a pr
